“Beyond Trump; The Politics Of Courage”: Cracking Open The Locked Vault Of American Politics
If Donald Trump can thrive politically by throwing meat to the American id, what else is possible? How about the opposite?
Trump’s most recent attempt to reclaim poll supremacy — his call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our representatives can figure out what’s going on” — is not simply reckless and dangerous, but also starkly clarifying. America’s bully billionaire, so rich he doesn’t have to heed the niceties of political correctness, is channeling old-time American racism, as mean and ugly and self-righteous as it’s ever been. Jim Crow is still with us. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” is still with us.
Americans — at least a certain percentage of them — like their racism straight up, untampered with code language, unmodified by counter-values. Come on! An enemy’s an enemy. A scapegoat’s a scapegoat. Don’t we have the freedom in this country to dehumanize and persecute whomever we want?
The unfolding Trump phenomenon is stunning to behold because there’s no telling how far — or where — it will go. Following his latest reckless “proposals,” which include mandatory IDs for Muslims, he’s being compared with Adolf Hitler. He’s also being called the best friend ISIS could have, as he spreads outrage and hatred across the globe and, in the process, helps foment the same war they’re attempting to engage.
Fascinatingly, some of Trump’s biggest critics are neocons and fellow Republicans, who, though not that far away from him politically, feel threatened by his reckless candor. The conservative strategy, at least since the Nixon era, has been to use and manipulate American racism rather than directly rouse it to a fever pitch. That sort of volatility isn’t so easy to control and could be counterproductive to the economic and geopolitical interests of the stewards of American empire.
For all the baseness of Trump’s scapegoat politics, he’s doing, it seems, one thing right, which is what makes him unacceptable as the Republican presidential nominee. He’s speechifying as though values matter, as though they supersede market and strategic interests. The danger Trump represents cuts in multiple directions.
All of which makes me wonder whether American democracy is, in spite of itself, at a transition point. I mean, it’s been decades, from my point of view, since real, society-changing values have been on the line in a presidential election. Questions of war and peace, among much else, have been utterly off the table, with any serious questioning of U.S. militarism ignored and belittled by the mainstream media and completely excluded from the corridors of national decision-making.
The Republicrats rule and war is no longer merely inevitable but eternal. At the same time, the security state has grown like cancer and the prison-industrial complex has expanded exponentially. America in its exceptionalism is the world’s largest arms dealer, snoop, jailer and hell raiser. We destabilize the planet in the interests of the corporate few and call it exporting democracy.
And none of this is Donald Trump’s doing.
But the fact that he’s a threat to this status quo raises some interesting questions. Trump is a dangerous idiot, but perhaps as he pursues his own interests he is also, unintentionally, helping to crack open the locked vault of American politics.
“He’s essentially the American id,” writes Glenn Greenwald, “simply channeling pervasive sentiments unadorned with the typical diplomatic and PR niceties designed to prettify the prevailing mentality.”
The challenge Trump poses, it seems to me, is this: If the basest of human instincts — fear and revenge and the hunger to blame our troubles on a scapegoat — can enter, or re-enter, American politics, can the best of human nature enter as well and, in the process, challenge the prevailing status quo more deeply and profoundly than Trump could ever imagine?
Let me put it another way. “In the practice of tolerance,” said the Dalai Lama, “one’s enemy is the best teacher.”
Such a statement poses a serious challenge, of course, on the order of a quote I heard several years ago from a seatmate on a transatlantic airplane flight: You’re as close to God as you are to the person you like the least.
What if such ideas had political resonance? What if — even in the face of tragedy, even in the face of murder — we lived within a social and political structure that was committed not to dehumanizing and destroying a designated enemy but to understanding that enemy and, my God, looking inward for the cause of problems, not simply flailing outward with high-tech weaponry? What if human compassion, soul deep and without strings attached, played a role in international relations?
Believe me, I’m not asking these questions simplistically, with some pat belief that the answers are obvious. Rather, I’m pressing forward into a dark unknown, or so it seems.
“It is terrifying that on the one hand there is more and more impunity for those starting conflicts, and on the other there is seeming utter inability of the international community to work together to stop wars and build and preserve peace,” Antonio Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said earlier this year, in the context of a global refugee crisis staggering beyond belief.
To grow spiritually is to begin to realize how little one knows and practice reaching out not with aggression but with humility. This is what takes courage. Can we begin creating nations with this kind of courage, whose “interests” embrace the welfare of the whole planet?
By: Robert Koehler, an Award-Winning, Chicago-based Journalist and nationally syndicated writer; The National Memo, December 13, 2015
“The Imposter Syndrome”: The Profound Insecurity Of Donald Trump
It is a mistake of historians and biographers to ascribe to a person one particular motive force, and then attribute every subsequent action of theirs to that personality trait. In politics, we compound this error by insisting that politicians act only or primarily because they want to get re-elected.
But boy, if persistent and deep insecurity doesn’t push Donald Trump towards those microphones, I don’t know what does. I don’t think it’s narcissism.
Now, of course we all suffer from imposter syndrome, which is the fear that our true level of capability will be exposed and our ability to BS our way out of tough situations will only get us so far.
But Trump has got it really bad.
1. He regularly and repeatedly insists that he is the most brilliant person, has the best memory, the greatest ideas; people who are relatively secure do not need to tell others that they are great, but people who are not secure have to cover a 10-foot gap with a 100-foot bridge, so afraid are they that what they actually have to say is exposing some fundamental flaw. Trump’s use of superlatives belies a rather profound sadness. He desperately NEEDS you to know that he is right.
2. Forget about the financial braggadocio; Trump insists he’s smart because he went to Wharton. He says this whenever someone questions his judgment. “I went to the Wharton School of Business. I’m, like, a really smart person,” is one common formulation.
It’s an axiom: When you have to cite your credentials, you’re afraid that people are discounting them. Wharton is an Ivy; Trump earned his way into the school, at least partly; if he was truly stupid, even his father’s reputation wouldn’t have gotten him in all the way. So getting into Wharton represents something real that Trump accomplished (more or less) by himself. That’s his first line of defense, mind you, when someone questions his ideas.
3. Sudden bursts of brashness. I get that Trump likes attention — we all do — and wants to be the loudest voice in the room — again, that’s not abnormal — and that he understands how to manipulate news cycles. But there’s a deeper reason for his instant recipe policies: He needs the approval of his crowds. It fortifies him against charges that he is empty, dumb, lucky, or a daddy’s boy.
Very fortunately for Trump, a large number of his supporters validate him because they are hypersensitive to sleights against their own status and position in society right now. They’re Christians under attack from secularists; Americans under attack from Muslims; conservatives under attack from their leadership in Congress; white people under attack from minorities; middle-class people under attack from poor people who are slurping up government services at their expense. Like Richard Nixon’s “bundle of resentments” (Rick Perlstein’s phrase), Trump’s bundle of insecurities serve the interests of his potential voters right now.
These are just the macronutrients in Trump’s brew. His penchant for insults — particularly physical insults — is not something that secure people do. Even mean, secure people do not gratuitously insult someone’s appearance because they disagree with them. Mean, insecure people do because they instinctively know how powerful those insults can be, and how they can deflect attention from the flaws of the person who makes them.
Let me list a few other traits of powerful, insecure people:
1. They blurt out things told in confidence.
2. They constantly complain about being treated fairly.
3. They cannot account for anyone else’s successes.
4. They surround themselves with sycophants who pantomime their method of relating to other people.
Donald Trump is just not very comfortable with being Donald Trump. His insecurity is not universal; he does not seem to be terribly obsessed with his hair, or his looks; he doesn’t seem to care about being labeled a bigot or a racist. What he cares about is being seen as smart enough, as someone who worked hard to make it where he has made it.
And hey — he did go to Wharton.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, December 11, 2015
“A Profound Test Of Their Principles”: Republican Candidates’ Despicably Lukewarm Criticism Of Donald Trump
You may remember that a year ago, Jeb Bush was musing on the Republican primary when he said that a winning GOP candidate would have “to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more willing to… lose the primary to win the general [election] without violating your principles.” While the assumption at the time was that Bush was thinking mostly about immigration, it turns out that what we might call Bush’s Paradox applies to a whole range of issues.
Right now, the candidates are facing that paradox, in a profound test of their principles. And they’re failing.
The proximate cause is Donald Trump, who has moved from being a comical if repellent figure to being truly ghastly and sinister. As Trump has taken his xenophobia and outright hate-mongering to ever-increasing heights, the most stinging rebuke most of his opponents can offer in response is, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”
You might think I’m misrepresenting their statements, downplaying the degree to which they’ve condemned Trump for his ugly Islamophobic remarks. But if we look closely at what they’ve said, it’s clear that they’re being careful not to criticize him too harshly, lest they offend the voters who seem to be flocking to him precisely because he’s the one giving fullest expression to their hatred and fear.
But before we get to that, a brief review. Trump’s latest bit of demagoguery is a proposal (though I use the term loosely) to prohibit any Muslim from entering the United States — as an immigrant, as a businessperson, even as a tourist. Trump would even apply that to American citizens who had traveled out of the country and want to return. This follows on his extended insistence that “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims celebrated the fall of the World Trade Center, which was notable not just for the fact that it’s false, but for its purpose. In harping on this myth, Trump was trying to convince people that other Americans are untrustworthy, suspect, each one a terrorist sympathizer if not an outright terrorist. Add that to his assertion that mosques should be under surveillance and his toying with the idea of the government keeping a list of all Muslims for regular monitoring.
And it isn’t like Trump’s Islamophobia is unique to him. After the Paris attacks, all the Republican candidates seized on the issue of Syrian refugees to stoke fear of terrorism in the hearts of voters (even though going through the lengthy process of obtaining refugee status is about the most cumbersome and time-consuming way to reach the United States; if the attackers in Paris had wanted to come here, all they would have had to do is buy a plane ticket). Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz both said that we should accept Christian refugees, but not Muslim ones. Ben Carson said that no Muslim should be allowed to be president unless they disavowed their religion.
And how have Trump’s opponents reacted to the river of hate that gushes forth every time he steps up to a microphone? With the utmost care. “I disagree with that proposal,” Ted Cruz said about excluding Muslims from the United States. “Donald Trump is unhinged. His ‘policy’ proposals are not serious,” said Jeb Bush. “I disagree with Donald Trump’s latest proposal,” said Marco Rubio. “His habit of making offensive and outlandish statements will not bring Americans together.” Chris Christie said that the remarks showed that Trump didn’t have enough experience to deal with terrorism. “Unfortunately I think Donald Trump’s over reaction is as dangerous as Obama’s under reaction,” said Carly Fiorina. John Kasich called it “outrageous divisiveness,” mustering the strongest condemnation.
What we have there are varying degrees of disagreement, but about the worst any of them can bring themselves to say is that Trump’s ideas are nutty. Not that he’s a bigot, not that he’s using the politics of hate, not that he’s falling in line with a sordid history of racism. And certainly none of them are speaking directly to American Muslims — just imagine if they pandered to that community the way they pander to a dozen others whose votes they want.
There is one exception, who should be given all the credit he deserves: Lindsey Graham. Trump, Graham said in a recent appearance on CNN, is “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.”
Perhaps it’s because Graham barely registers in the polls that he feels free to speak plainly about Trump, because those polls also show that there’s a substantial audience for what Trump is offering. Republicans give Muslims lower favorability ratings than any other group. One recent poll found that only 49 percent of Iowa Republicans thought Islam should be legal. And ugly anti-Muslim incidents, ranging from harassment to outright hate-crimes, are cropping up all over.
While Trump may not have much support for his specific ideas from other Republicans, the conservative media reinforces the mindset that produces them each and every day. Josh Marshall recently described the discussion of these issues on Fox News as “a whole tapestry of falsehoods, that combined with incitement and hysteria create a mental world in which Donald Trump’s mounting volume of racist incitement is just not at all surprising.” Fox regularly gives airtime to bigots and xenophobes to spout off about the threat not only from abroad but from American Muslims (though a lot of that shows up on other cable networks as well), rhetoric that is echoed on one conservative talk radio show after another. And don’t think Republican politicians don’t know who’s watching and listening.
So is anyone going to be surprised if next week some heavily armed right-wing terrorist walks into a mosque or a Muslim community center and starts killing as many innocent men, women, and children as he can? After all, he keeps hearing about how they’re terrorist sympathizers, how they need to be watched, how they need to be kept out, how they need to suspected and feared and hated.
I don’t know how long this ugly period will last, but I do know that history is going to judge those who created it harshly. And those who stepped carefully around a demagogue like Trump, always worried that they might offend his followers? Their cowardice will be remembered too.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, December 9, 2015
“A Walking, Talking Outrage”: Why Even People Who Agree With Him Hate Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz is now ahead of Donald Trump in a GOP presidential poll of Iowa, where the Texas senator is campaigning hard. That leap-frogging is the likely reason that Trump insanely, desperately, and dangerously called Monday for a “complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the U.S.
But let’s move beyond the proto-fascist in the GOP ranks and talk about Ted Cruz. Like Mike Huckabee before him, Cruz has a political style that resonates with Iowa’s conservatives: emotional, low-church, slightly rebellious. Still, it is hard to predict Cruz’s path forward, because it is difficult to think of a major party candidate more hated by his own party, Donald Trump notwithstanding.
Past enfant terrible candidates are rarely hated in this way. Ron Paul was treated as a funny curio. Pat Buchanan’s revolt was partly mourned, as if he couldn’t help it. Trump’s has been greeted with consternation and some fear. But Cruz is greeted as a walking, talking outrage. He’s treated as an offense in himself. And, it should be said, he seems to relish it. “I welcome their hatred,” Franklin Roosevelt once said after being labeled a class traitor. It’s easy to imagine Cruz feeling the same way about his political enemies.
Cruz has chutzpah. At a recent Republican debate, he got applause for castigating the debate moderators for trying to divide Republicans. Republican senators on that stage must have gagged; Cruz’s whole career has been about dividing Republicans. He has spent the last several years trying to create a caucus in the House that is loyal to his school of high-risk, no-reward brinksmanship. He promises to defund ObamaCare when the Senate can do no such thing. Or argues that the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide did not really apply to the whole nation. This strategy burnishes Cruz’s reputation among the Republican base, but it creates headaches for senators and for the Republican House leadership.
The distaste for Cruz goes far beyond just his divisive political strategy, or the perception that he says nothing, true or untrue, unless it is maximally self-serving. It goes to his oleaginous, hyper-moralizing personality, even the repulsively sentimentalized way he talks about the “Children of Reagan” who are taking over the Republican Party. Frank Bruni related in a column that veterans of the 2000 George W. Bush campaign learned to loathe Cruz, and that many of them would, under truth serum, admit to preferring Trump to him. Cruz’s college roommate Craig Mazin is dragged before media to give amusingly nasty assessments of Cruz’s character. “I did not like him at all in college,” Mazin said, “…And, you know, I want to be clear, because Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics, but truthfully his personality is so awful that 99 percent of why I hate him is just his personality.”
Giving GOP leadership trouble normally doesn’t trouble me. And I’m tempted to agree with Cruz on some things, like the perfidy of the Republican donor class. But last fall, Cruz was invited to speak at an ecumenical gathering of Middle Eastern Christians who were lobbying for support from Washington to help their embattled flocks (some of which face genocidal violence.) For reasons I still can’t comprehend, Cruz decided to offer this tiny effort a political decapitation. He goaded the audience about its lack of support for the state of Israel and then accused them of being anti-Semites. And it is only more galling in that Ted Cruz knows the relevant history. And he knows that his evangelical audience in America is mostly ignorant of it. He knew how to get a rise out of both audiences, and raised his own profile doing it.
It was a moment so cynical and underhanded, I joined the unofficial anyone-but-Cruz caucus.
Still, as a pundit, I have to admit I’m intrigued by the premise of Ted Cruz. He is the embodiment of the GOP’s on-again, off-again populist rhetoric. He seems to be running his campaign on the false wisdom about 2012, that there were millions of voters who stayed home because Mitt Romney wasn’t conservative enough for them. This is a campaign that is aiming for glory or ignominy and won’t settle for anything in between.
For any conservative who has wanted to see the leadership of the Republican Party horse-whipped, Ted Cruz looks like a gnarly weapon at hand. He is the revenge they deserve.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, December 8, 2015
“Reawakening To Save The White Race”: White Supremacists Or Donald Trump: ‘The Positions Made Me A Convert’
William Daniel Johnson is a practicing lawyer in Los Angeles.
He’s 54 years old with neatly styled silver hair and a kind of authoritatively quiet voice. He also serves as chairman of the American Freedom Party, a white nationalist group he co-founded. And he absolutely loves Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump isn’t governed by handlers,” Johnson told me over the phone from his law office. “He shoots from the hip and he speaks forthrightly. He does not care what public opinion is.”
Johnson, who requested that he not be referred to as a neo-Nazi in this article, is listed under the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Extremist Files,” notably for proposing a 1985 constitutional amendment that would have revoked the American citizenship of every non-white inhabitant of the United States
“No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race,” the language of the amendment read. “Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.”
In Johnson’s words, the United States is facing a threat to “the continued existence of Western civilization,” with immigrants displacing whites throughout the world. The only person who seems equipped to ensure that the white race can thrive at the top once again is a golden-haired real estate magnate by the name of Trump.
“I was not a supporter of the man until the positions made me a convert,” Johnson said, describing how he was swayed by Trump’s promises of a wall separating the United States and Mexico and a new plan to ban all Muslims from entering the country. For the quarter of a century during which Johnson was aware of Trump before these proposals, he wasn’t a huge fan. Now, he said, “I admire what he’s doing very much.”
Still, Johnson doesn’t want to hear Trump—despite his strong leadership skills and penchant for xenophobia—compared to Adolf Hitler. “We eschew any reference to Adolf Hitler,” he said.
The slight problem for Johnson, in his political capacity, is that the American Freedom Party has its own presidential candidate. The portly, blue-eyed Bob Whitaker is the party’s man. He campaigns with the catchy slogan “Diversity Is a Codeword for Genocide.” Yet as Johnson laughingly told The Daily Beast, Whitaker himself supports what Trump is doing, as do many members of the party.
Indeed, interest in the American Freedom Party has surged along with Trump’s rise, Johnson said.
“We have seen a dramatic uptick in support,” he crowed. “In fact, sometimes I can hardly manage because of this Trump phenomenon.”
He thinks this is a major turning point in American history, that white men are experiencing a reawakening upon finding a candidate who is not as effeminate and fearful as the country’s previous leaders.
“The white men in America have been beaten down over the last 50 years by anti-white propaganda,” Johnson explained. Referring to Trump’s recent proposition to ban Muslim entry to the United States, Johnson said, “That will go down in history as a major turning point. When I was a teenager and saw the antiwar movement, I think we are seeing an equal turning point right now.”
Trump’s political message has rung true with a number of white nationalists, who feel that immigration and the influence of Islam are curtailing their freedom and economic opportunity. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, they say, are leaving the country unsafe with a leader who is not fit to protect Americans.
Former KKK leader David Duke spoke highly of Trump’s immigration plans in August. Forums on Stormfront, a white supremacist organization, lit up like the phone lines of a radio station giving out free concert tickets after Trump proposed his recent idea.
“Seeing all the top politicians in Britain come out in full fury in defense of the enemy is sickening,” one user wrote of foreign politicians’ disdain for Trump’s rhetoric. “Islam and Europe are mortal enemies and have been for 1400 years during which they have tried and almost succeeded in conquering us many times but were beaten back at the last minute!”
“Yuuup, The Don is on a roll,” another chimed in, referring to their red hat-wearing hero. “More whites will wake up.”
Johnson seems to think, and hope for, the same thing. For his group, which requires all members to be heterosexuals of “complete European Christian ancestry,” Trump is a mainstream mouthpiece for what are often deemed publicly unsavory ideas.
The GOP frontrunner, after all, retweeted a racially biased false crime statistic generated by an individual who identifies as a neo-Nazi. People of color have been kicked out of his rallies—called the n-word and “monkeys” when they have spoken up against Trump’s racially hostile language.
And he’s awoken a sleeping giant, according to Johnson.
“A few years ago, the people that would come out and be forthright about supporting the white race and the Western civilization, they would just be beaten down,” he said. Now, he claims, he gets calls from the white student union at an Ivy League university, asking him for a way to get their message out there effectively.
“The fact is that this has started only since Trump has taken his position that he’s not backing off from,” Johnson said.
Still, the American Freedom Party chairman describes his relationship with Trump as “unrequited love.” He said he has contributed financially to the campaign, created a super PAC to support him, and tries to get the message out about Trump’s near sainthood on the party’s daily radio shows.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to The Daily Beast when asked if he would consider giving Johnson a position in a future Trump administration. At this point, Johnson said the idea of playing any official role for his future president would just be “wishful thinking.”
“I would do it, but it would be unlikely that I would be approved by the Senate,” he said. But he’s not actively courting any kind of role. “We’re doing this because we want to save Western civilization and the white race.”
Johnson made it seem like a great majority of the American Freedom Party—which he founded alongside Kevin McDonald, an anti-Semitic professor who thinks Jews are genetically programmed to try to out-compete others for resources—is on board with supporting Trump. But the party itself will not allow me to attend its meetings.
“Sorry, but most meetings are not open to the public, and members don’t want to be demeaned by curious media,” an unnamed representative of the party said.
Somewhat in jest, he told me to wait six months before I try to get into one of the group’s get-togethers. Its New York office is nothing but a P.O. box, according to Johnson, as many members of the party work out of their homes. But given Trump’s steady climb over the past six months, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to suggest he’ll still be around in the next six.
Some 65 percent of likely Republican primary voters said in a recent Bloomberg poll that they supported Trump’s Muslim ban. Just 24 percent of his supporters in North Carolina think Islam should be legal in the United States. And from the rallies to Stormfront forums to the mouth of Johnson, the sentiment is not that Trump is doing too much. It’s that he’s not doing enough.
“I’d want him to focus on all immigration, whether it’s illegal or legal,” Johnson said.
Upon hearing that under President Trump, no Muslims, legal or otherwise, would be allowed entry, he replied, “OK, good.”
By: Gideon Resnick, The Dailly Beast, Decembet 10, 2015
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