“Kakistocracy”: Government By The Worst Politicians Who Say They Love America, But Hate The American Government
We can see a troubling future looming for America in two seemingly unrelated events — the water crisis in Flint and the Republican presidential primaries.
Both suggest that America is moving away from the high ideals of President Kennedy’s inaugural address — “Ask not what your country do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Instead we see politicians who say they love America, but hate the American government.
There is a word to describe the kind of government Michigan has and America is at risk of developing. It’s called kakistocracy.
It means government by the worst men, from the ancient Greek words kákistos, meaning worst, and kratia, meaning to rule.
Think of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, Governor Paul LePage of Maine and others notorious for abuse of power and utter contempt for those who disagree with them.
We can see one of the worst in Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder persuaded the legislature to grant him imperial powers to take over local elected governments. Soon a whole city was poisoned.
Snyder, like all leaders seeking to replace self-governance with dictatorship, claims that he acted solely in the best interests of the people. Snyder’s administration did not just fail to forcefully correct the evil it had wrought; it actively tried to hide the awful truth, another badge of dictators.
When the official secret was finally exposed, Snyder showed himself to be at best a slothful minimalist in fixing his mess. He also made what he claimed as a full disclosure, while withholding the most important documents about his toxic administration.
On television you may have seen National Guard troops, called up by Snyder, handing out bottled water. It was a cynical PR stunt: Seven Guardsmen at one location in a city of 99,000 people.
An accountant by profession, who calls himself a tough nerd, Snyder fields mass phone calls rather than take charge in Flint, the once prosperous home of Buick made famous in Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me.
Snyder tries to shift blame to people he appointed. And he remains focused on corporate tax favors, not the people of Flint, a city with a slight black majority.
To those who insist racism is in the past, Snyder’s behavior shows that racialized politics endure.
Bad as poisoning an entire city is, that’s nothing compared to what the Republican candidates for the White House propose – more war, more tax cuts for the rich, massive surveillance and a host of other policies fit not for a land of liberty, but a police state.
Think about Chris Christie, the New Jersey fabulist who misleads about his appointment as U.S. Attorney for the Garden State and who mocks people who say he should be doing more to address shore flooding since Hurricane Sandy in 2012. There’s his false justification for stopping a replacement for the century-old rail tunnel between his state and Manhattan, and his aggressively hiding of the facts about the dangerous George Washington bridge lane closures by his aides.
But the monstrous wrongdoing of Snyder and the incompetency and mendaciousness of Christie pale next to some other GOP presidential wannabes. Many of them love war, especially now that, having avoided military service in their youth, they’re too old to face enemy fire on the battlefield.
Senator Ted Cruz wants to “carpet bomb ISIS into oblivion” until the sand “glows in the dark.” Asked about the legality of this, Cruz doubled down during the Fox News debate last month. The Texas senator thinks this is a brilliant military strategy, even though actual experts think it is a terrible idea and so does America’s top general in Iraq.
By the way, indiscriminately bombing civilians is a war crime.
Donald Trump favors the policies of Mexican drug cartels and the most vicious Mafia bosses. He doesn’t just want to wipe out those seeking to create the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant. Trump vows to kill their families, too. Challenged by a college student on this, Trump too doubled down.
It was fellow candidate-at-the-time Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky, who pointed out that killing the families of combatants is a war crime.
Of course killing families would only stir hatred of America and lead to more violence. Sending Americans once again into Middle East combat would only enrage more young Muslim men, which is why I earlier described Trump as ISIS’ chief recruitment officer.
Trump would also break up families by arresting 11 million or so immigrants who are here illegally; bar any Muslim from entering the country; spy on mosques; impose tariffs; punish corporations that make investments he dislikes, among his long list of promised extra-Constitutional actions.
Asked about what laws authorize his proposals, Trump claims unnamed experts are on his side.
Trump’s proposal is not so much for a term or two as president, but for a Trump dictatorship. (see Snyder, Rick; imperial powers).
Then there’s the vile language Trump uses, claiming variously that he was just repeating what someone else said or that he will not be forced into political correctness. Evidently Trump’s mother failed at teaching him any manners. The Presbyterian Church, which Trump recently made a public show of attending, also failed at teaching him about asking God for forgiveness, about the sacraments, the names of Biblical chapters, and the last five of the Ten Commandments.
Except for the now-departed Rand Paul, the Republican presidential candidates talk easily of war, almost as if they were proposing a picnic. And they all insist we need a bigger military, even though more than 40 percent of all military spending worldwide is American.
ISIS is a pipsqueak threat, nothing like the Soviet Union during the Cold War or the Axis powers of World War II. Yet the Republicans encourage us to live in fear. ISIS is failing and can do no more than harry us, but Trump, Cruz, and some of the other candidates would have us give up our liberties and grant them powers that the framers of our Constitution explicitly denied the executive branch.
Other Republicans have shown their lack of knowledge to be almost Trumpian in its vacuity, especially Senator Marco Rubio and Dr. Ben Carson. The one woman who was running on the GOP side, Carly Fiorina, has a track record in business (and veracity) that deserves boos, not applause.
On top of this the Republicans, everywhere, continue marketing the economic snake oil that what ails our economy is that the rich do not have enough and are in dire need of more tax cuts.
We should not be surprised that in so many places our governments are under the control of men and women who are careless, destructive, incompetent, and passive-aggressive.
Since Ronald Reagan declared in his 1981 inaugural address “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” we have seen more and more people who hate government going into government.
A government run by people who believe it is bad will, of course, make it fail. They are dedicated not to making our government work for us, but to making their own worst beliefs about government come true. We see this at every level from Uncle Sam down to the local school boards that try to replace biological science with religious beliefs.
Big business has learned to take advantage of government run by those who despite it. With cronies in high places big companies find it much easier to mine gold from the Treasury than the market, the subject of my book Free Lunch.
Our Constitution makes the federal government ours. We choose our leaders. We decide what powers they can exercise. And if we elect people who are nasty, brutish, or megalomaniacal we have no one to blame but ourselves.
That anyone in America would think that any of the Republican candidates, save Governor John Kasich of Ohio, is competent to hold office shows how easily politics can drift from ideals to the basest attitudes. (More than three dozen progressive members of Congress told me this month that while they don’t agree with Kasich on most issues, he is unquestionably competent.)
The Founders warned us to beware of those who lust for power.
Now we see on full display those who lust not just for the authority our Constitution conveys on the Office of President, but who seek to do as they please without regard for the checks and balances of our Constitution, without regard for thoughtful strategies in dealing with foreign powers and would-be powers, and without regard for human life, not just among the wives and children of ISIS combatants, but among those American citizens who are poor, black, Latino, Muslim — or happen to live in Flint.
Kakistocracy. Use that word. Get others talking about what it means.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, February 13, 2016
“Fringe Appeal”: Sanders’ And Trump’s ‘Us vs. Them’ Mentality Won’t Win Over America
If you want a window into the state of U.S. politics, the speeches given by the first- and second-place finishers in New Hampshire’s presidential primary were revealing. But what was striking was that the commonalities among the candidates did not follow party lines as much as they related to the candidates’ “outsider” or “establishment” status.
The outsiders won last night, of course: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, while having been elected to the U.S. House and Senate, did so as an independent and considers himself a democratic socialist. Donald Trump, a real estate developer and reality television personality, has held a variety of positions on political issues and contributed to both parties, but has never before held political office.
The runners up, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John Kasich, embody their parties’ establishments: Clinton was a first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state. Kasich served as U.S. congressman, chairman of the House Budget Committee and is the popular two-term governor of Ohio.
But in their victory speeches, the outsiders sounded more like each other than they did their partisan colleagues. Sanders and Trump piqued the frustrations and angst of their respective parties’ primary voters.
For Sanders, it was American versus American: Wall Street, the billionaire class and Super PACs versus the victims of the “rigged economy.” His solution: a “political revolution” to make the rich pay their “fair share” so the rest of us can have free college, health care and retirement.
For Trump, it was Americans versus non-Americans: China, Mexico, immigrants and terrorists. His plan is to “earn world respect” and “make American great again” by constructing a border wall and rebuilding the military to “knock the hell out of” the Islamic State group. Unlike Sanders, Trump at least tempered his typical campaign demeanor and rhetoric during his victory speech in an apparent combination of glee and recognition of the fact that he had a national audience in prime time.
Clinton and Kasich, on the other hand, acknowledged and assuaged the insecurities of their parties’ bases by invoking core American values and desires.
Clinton, always politically calculating and often poorly advised, made a somewhat brief attempt to sound the Sanders theme, vowing to “fight Wall Street,” before falling back on her natural strengths. She promised to “work harder than anyone,” and reminded voters of her lifelong commitment to public service (which has proved that she does, indeed, work harder than anyone). She described a “growth and fairness economy” and vowed to support human rights for “every single American.”
Kasich vowed to “re-shine” America. He discussed the importance of the opportunity to work, the desire in each of us to help our families and neighbors and the preference to look to government as a last resort. Kasich promised to heal divisions, “leave no one behind,” and solve problems not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.
Unfortunately for Sanders and Trump, most Americans still reject the “us versus them” mindset, whether internally or externally focused, espoused by Democrat or Republican. This approach is not just “outsider,” it is “fringe.” That fringe appeal proved to be a successful primary strategy in New Hampshire, but it is neither a viable general election strategy nor a way to govern an already insecure and divided nation.
In contrast, during their New Hampshire primary night speeches, both Clinton and Kasich appeared to have adequately addressed the concerns of their partisan voters while simultaneously appealing to the national electorate that they hope to face in November. To the extent that the term “establishment” correlates with judgment of the sort that Clinton and Kasich demonstrated on primary night in New Hampshire, we might just want to consider using the more appropriate term “qualified.”
By: Michael C. Barnes, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, February 10, 2016
“Struck Just The Right Note”: At Baltimore Mosque, Obama Crushes The Muslim Haters
The two most powerful moments during President Obama’s first visit to an American mosque on Wednesday didn’t happen during his speech. Rather, they occurred in the moments before the president took the podium.
The first came when a color guard made up of young Muslim American Boy and Girl Scouts entered the venue. One of the older scouts told the flag bearer: “Proudly present the flag of the United States of America.” The audience, ranging from community leaders to Muslim-American military veterans to the two Muslim members of Congress, stood in unison to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
The words of this pledge never seem to resonate as much. Here we were waiting for the President of the United States to speak to us because the spike in anti-Muslim hate had so skyrocketed that he felt compelled to address the issue. I had to fight back tears as we got to the last line of the pledge: “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
You see, that last line is the promise that brought my Muslim immigrant father as well as the parents, grandparents, and even some of the people in that room to come to America. They came here for the promise of being treated equally regardless of faith, ethnicity, or race. But that promise has been in peril as of late.
And the second moment that emotionally stood out was when the young African-American-Muslim woman, Sabah, introduced the president. Sabah spoke of the challenges of wearing a hijab—some had called her a terrorist. Yet she noted that far more of her fellow Americans of all backgrounds had been supportive. And then she delivered a passionate line that elicited huge applause from the crowd: “I’m proud to be American, I’m proud to be black, and I’m proud to be Muslim.”
That is what America is truly about. We can be hyphenated Americans and be just as American as anyone else.
President Obama even touched on Sabah’s very point in his speech when he said, “You aren’t Muslim or American. You are Muslim and American.” That was a theme that came up often in his speech at the Islamic Center of Baltimore, which was part pep talk for Muslims, part calling out the haters and also part calling on Muslims to play a role in countering radicalization.
But the heart of the President’s speech was trying to educate our fellow Americans about Islam to counter the anti-Muslim climate we live in today. One that has seen close to 100 anti-Muslim hate crimes in the last two months according to a Department of Justice official I spoke to at the event, which is far higher than we see reported in the media.
Obama began by countering the concept that some on the right peddle that Islam is foreign to America. The president declared, “Islam has always been part of America.” Adding, “Starting in colonial times, many of the slaves brought here from Africa were Muslim.”
The president also spoke of how Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia statute for religious freedom expressly included Islam as one of the protected faiths (“the Mahometan” was TJ’s word for a Muslim). Obama also added something I had never heard before: Some had accused Jefferson of being a closeted Muslim. (I wonder who was the Donald Trump of the 1700s who did that?!)
Obama then traced the contributions of Muslims in America as well as noting that Muslim Americans keep us safe. “They’re our police and our firefighters…They serve honorably in our armed forces—meaning they fight and bleed and die for our freedom. And some rest in Arlington National Cemetery. “
And the president recognized the extraordinary Muslims he had met at the mosque that day, from educators to business people to the first hijab-wearing Muslim to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team. But he added that despite the accomplishments of so many Muslims, he “could not help but be heartbroken to hear their worries and their anxieties.”
Obama relayed how he had received letters from Muslim-American parents who shared disturbing questions their young children were asking, like, “Are we going to be forced out of the country? Are we going to be rounded up?” Another Muslim American child wrote to him to say, “I’m scared.” The president responded forcefully that these are “conversations that you shouldn’t have to have with children—not in this country.”
The reality though is that’s where we are today as a community. There are young Muslim Americans who have been made to feel less than fully American simply because of their faith. We are seeing Muslim-American students bullied and taunted for wearing a hijab or having a first name like Mohammed.
The questions I find myself asking are: Will it get worse? Will the extreme voices win out? Will the good people simply be “bystanders to bigotry,” as Obama put it? Or will the voices of reason prevail?
I’m sure many Muslims at the event had similar question in mind. Perhaps sensing that, Obama told the audience: “I believe that, ultimately, our best voices will win out. And that gives me confidence and faith in the future.”
With of every fiber of my being I believe the president is correct. And despite the Trumps, Ben Carsons, or others on the right who believe that demonizing Muslims will make us cower in fear or even consider leaving this country, they are wrong. Our community, like every other minority community, will grow and prosper. I say that because our nation’s history tells us so. And because of our nation’s eternal promise that liberty and justice are not reserved only for one select religion or race, but “for all.”
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, February 4, 2016
“A Shorthand For Progressivity”: New York Values Are At The Heart Of The American Political Divide
New York City is playing an unexpectedly outsized role in the presidential race, with both of the two major parties being sharply divided by candidates who embody very different sides of the city. It’s perhaps not surprising in an age of economic inequality that New York, itself a city where the enormous gap between the 1 percent and the working class is greater than that found in Brazil, would produce two such starkly contrasting figures as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Trump, the boastful, putative billionaire with his gaudy skyscrapers, is the perfect representative of the Manhattan uber-rich, just as Sanders is the voice of the New York of the trade-union movement and the once-thriving Jewish socialist culture that Irving Howe captured in his 1976 book, World of Our Fathers.
The two men both have husky outer-borough accents, leading them to pronounce words like huge (“yuge”) alike even as they shout starkly different messages. Yet as the results from the Iowa caucuses make clear, the two parties have responded quite differently to the rival versions of New York being offered. Trump’s undeniable saturation in New York values is turning out to be a liability among Republicans, even as midwestern Democrats have shown a surprising affinity for Sanders’s version of New York socialism.
Speaking to ABC News last night, Ted Cruz credited his win in Iowa to how he successfully stuck the label of “New York values” on Donald Trump. “As I travel the country here in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, everyone knows what New York values are,” Cruz said.
When Cruz first attacked “New York values,” many pundits thought he’d made a mistake, especially after Trump delivered a moving invocation to the city’s heroic response to 9/11 in the Republican debate in mid-January. But there is every reason to think that the attack was key to Cruz’s success. Forty-two percent of Iowa Republicans told entrance pollsters at the caucuses that the most important quality in a candidate was that he or she “shares my values.” Of that large block, 38 percent supported Ted Cruz, and 5 percent were for Trump. Simply put, Iowa Republicans accepted the idea that Trump was a cultural alien. Meanwhile, Trump’s own attempts to portray Cruz as an alien—by calling attention to his Canadian birth and loans from Goldman Sachs—fell flat.
Trump is not the first New York Republican to find that voters in his party just can’t stomach his origins in a city that many conservatives see as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. In 2008, Rudy Giuliani looked on paper like a great candidate, widely admired in the GOP as a hero of 9/11. Yet Giuliani’s campaign floundered in the fields of Iowa, where his cultural liberalism, including a record of supporting reproductive freedom and LGBT rights, hurt him. In Iowa in 2008, came in 6th with 3 percent of the vote. (Admittedly, Giuliani avoided campaigning there because he knew he would do so poorly, but his campaign never picked up steam afterward). Given the track record of Trump and Giuliani, it seems unlikely that a strong New York personality, even one tied to foreign-policy hawkishness or hostility towards immigrants, can win over heartland conservatives.
The opposite is true of the Democrats. Sanders finished a very close second in Iowa, within a hair’s breadth of winning—an impressive achievement won against long odds given Clinton’s advantages in funding, name recognition, and endorsements. It’s notable that Clinton did not attack Sanders for his New York values, or even for his professed socialism. Her line of attack was that his policies, like universal healthcare, were politically infeasible—not that they were undesirable.
Instead, in her speech expressing “relief” over the Iowa results (which weren’t yet final), Clinton adopted a conciliatory stance and tried to appropriate Sanders’s politics by claiming to be “a progressive who gets things done for people.” Clinton sounded positively Sanders-esque in declaring that, as president, she would “protect our rights, women’s rights, gay rights, voting rights, immigrant rights, workers’ rights.”
Among the Republicans, association with New York is a political millstone around the neck that can sink a candidate. But if the New York values that Republicans dread are cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism, then among the Democrats, there’s no controversy around them, only disagreement as to how best to achieve them. In American politics, New York values has now become a shorthand for progressivity. That’s something both parties agree on, even as New York values lie at the fault lines of American politics.
By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, February 2, 2016
“No Recipe For Addressing Economic Inequality”: The Republican Candidates Can’t Say How Obama Wrecked The Economy
One of the most striking and mystifying aspects of the Republican presidential primary has been the candidates’ inability—or unwillingness—to offer up any kind of coherent economic prescription for the country. That didn’t change on Thursday night. On the Fox Business debate stage in South Carolina, the remaining GOP field had the floor to rebut President Barack Obama’s rosy picture of the American economy during this week’s State of the Union.
Instead, they pivoted to fear-mongering on foreign policy.
The tone was set with the debate’s very first question, posed to Senator Ted Cruz. Fox Business moderator Maria Bartiromo asked him to respond to Obama’s declaration earlier this week: “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.”
That should have been a softball, ready for the surging candidate to hit out of the park. Instead, Cruz launched into a prepared digression on the American soldiers captured and released by Iran before addressing the actual question—with another digression. “The president tried to paint a rosy picture of jobs,” he said. “And you know, he’s right. If you’re a Washington lobbyist, if you make your money in and around Washington, things are doing great. The millionaires and billionaires are doing great under Obama.”
Cruz played on Obama’s own words on the sources of inequality in his State of the Union. “Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did,” Obama said on Tuesday. “Immigrants aren’t the reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns. It’s sure not the average family watching tonight that avoids paying taxes through offshore accounts.”
Cruz turned that around, pinning the blame exclusively on the president for rising inequality—not on the wealthy. “Median wages have stagnated. And the Obama-Clinton economy has left behind the working men and women of this country,” he said.
It was like that all night: The candidates never took the bait Obama set up for them, to disprove they are doing anything but “peddling fiction” that his agenda—addressing economic inequality, immigration reform, and energy regulations—has left Americans worse off. Instead, the Republicans beat the drum on fear of ISIS and terrorism abroad, but never provided a counter to Obama’s economic claims.
If the GOP debate revealed one thing about these candidates’ views of rising inequality—a hot topic in the Democratic primary—it’s that they can’t quite bring themselves to cast the wealthy in a bad light.
Ohio Governor John Kasich said that Americans shouldn’t hate the rich—that’s just not American. People are “very concerned about” the economy, he said. “And they wonder whether somebody is getting something to—keeping them from getting it. That’s not the America that I’ve ever known. My father used to say, “Johnny, we never—we don’t hate the rich. We just want to be the rich.”’
Ben Carson shot back at Bernie Sanders and Clinton, who he claimed “would say it’s those evil rich people” who are to blame for inequality. Carson said they’re the wrong target; it’s “the evil government that’s putting all these regulations on us.”
Throughout the night, Republicans proved more comfortable playing to their base’s fear of terrorism than directly rebutting the president’s economic victory lap. Maybe that’s because they can’t muster the same strong descriptive language for how Obama has set fire to the economic world as they have for his foreign policy. So much easier to berate the president on his approach to ISIS all night, as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did: “If you’re worried about the world being on fire, you’re worried about how we’re going to use our military, you’re worried about strengthening our military and you’re worried most of all about keeping your homes and your families safe and secure, you cannot give Hillary Clinton a third term of Barack Obama’s leadership,” he said.
But what about Obama’s leadership on the economy? The answers were more timid—with the exception, not surprisingly, of Donald Trump, who in his usual style promised he’d “make America rich again and make America great again.”
Why were the candidates so quiet about the economy on Thursday night? Simple. The Republicans don’t have a recipe for addressing economic inequality, instead focusing exclusively on tax breaks or highly regressive flat taxes that help the top earners. As my colleague Suzy Khimm has explained, “Bush, Marco Rubio, and Trump have all released tax plans that they are trying to sell as a boon for ordinary families.” That’s a hard sell, to say the least. A conservative estimate of Trump’s plan, for example, would lower the middle 40 to 50 percent of American wage earners’ taxes by 5.3 percent, but the wealthiest would see almost a 22 percent decrease. Carson and Cruz have called for flat taxes—a highly regressive policy.
Because they have such shallow policies to draw on, the GOP finds it easier to play on fears of an uncertain international landscape. That works just fine when they’re pitching themselves to an anxious, unhappy Republican base. But when one of these candidates faces Clinton or Sanders in the general election, the Democratic nominee will easily poke holes through his paper-thin economic message.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, January 15, 2015
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