The Mer A Lago Indictment

There was already last night remarks from cable commentators on the Trump indictment regarding purloined secret documents. MSNBC pundits agree of the enormity of having an ex-President indicted for violations, among other things, of the Espionage Act, no other President ever having been accused of subverting the nation. It is a sad day that we've found ourselves in this situation, distasteful to think of anything similar to the authoritarian regimes that regularly throw in jail their defeated political opponents, which was the case in Russia and recently in Pakistan. Here is a response and a few comments on what has been said in the past day since the event of the indictment.

Lawrence O’Donnell said last night on MSNBC  that the indictment would have been less unsettling if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Nixon, allowing Nixon instead to have been indicted, and so a precedent for the idea that no one was above the law. But that context was very different. Nixon was disgraced and sorrowful of his own misdeeds. He said that he did wrong things even if his opponents had piled up on him. That was a lame excuse. Trump is unremorseful and running again for President and many of his supporters don’t care or disregard whatever he does. Commentators can find a number of people to blame for the present predicament but demur from blaming the electorate for having elected the scoundrel in the first place.  

Which leads to my own observation. The electorate for the 2024 election are not subject to the rule of law, including that Trump is innocent until convicted as guilty, when they make up their minds as to whether to nominate him again as President. They can use whatever evidence they want to use for judging a candidate, just a rumor or a bit of charm or a political disposition, or thinking that Hillary was haughty. And so there is enough evidence that Trump is a bad dude without waiting for the trial to proceed. Noone is entitled to be President even if everyone is entitled to a fair trial. So a public judgment can be made before the trial takes place. It is all up to the people again, they  having the final verdict on Trump’s political  fate.

The details of the indictment today also reveals the motive for the outrageous affronts committed by Trump to the nation. It was a simple and petty case of vanity. You would think that people who had been President were beyond this, but Trump, ever a petty man, wanted to show secret documents to political operatives only so he could show them off as in his own possession, which would have made him merely venal and amoral. Maybe he wasn’t planning to sell them to the highest bidder. How superficial can Trump be? That explains a lot of him.

The Republican leaders, for their part, are liars about the facts and, worse, unpatriotic in that they are craven to their constituents, unwilling to tell their constituents the truth, that being a higher calling than merely remaining electable, their higher calling being to lead a crisis through rather than obfuscate. It was ignoble for Trump as President to avoid what was happening with Covid, his excuse that he was shielding the people, when his duty was to speak the painful truth and many of his Republicans avoid the enormity of what Trump has done and claim, as did Nixon supporters, that everyone in politics did such shenanigans, which was not true, and as in presently the case where important Republican Trump defenders, do the same thing by conflating Trump’s appropriation of secret documents with Pence and Biden cooperating when documents were found inadvertently to have been sent to their homes.  Shame on the Republicans and don’t trust whatever they say about anything. This is the litmus test.

Bob Woodward on CNN today echoed Ben Bradley’s instruction after Nixon resigned of no gloating, and applied it to Trump. He is right in that even a Trump conviction would be just a recognition of a tragedy rather than  revenge satisfied. But don’t anticipate. Trump has weaseled out before from a lot of things managing just fines for Trump University and E. Jean Carroll. There is a long way before a  conviction much less a sentencing which I hope leaves him out of jail to live out his life without the remorse Nixon felt. That absence of humanity is on Trump.

Another observation of mine. In my generation, we turned on the television set to see if some additional major political figure had just been assassinated. Now, we await breaking news as to when Trump will be indicted in a different inquiry. Is this not progress rather than devolution?

Chris Christie

The moral thing is to vote for the one you believe in.

Chris Christie has announced that he is running for :President and the cable and New York Times commentators immediately opined whether he had “a lane” whereby he could become President, that meaning a combination of constituencies that could add up to a majority of convention delegates and decided that he couldn’t because he could never break into the Trump supporters but could only serve to unseat Trump and letting someone else inherit his following. That was the same reasoning that led none of the Republican candidates in 2016 to refuse to oppose Trump, making nice so as to inherit the booty when Trump would inevitably falter. Well, maybe there is no such  thing as a lane, only an opportunity whereby someone manages to catch fire, to capture attention. Both Obama and Trump made their own lanes when so many constituencies turned out in favor of them while Jeb Bush, with the money and the name, was never able to become a taste treat. The commentators are just trying to be objective and so all they can talk about is the horse race or, to use a different metaphor, all the carrom shots needed to get anointed a nominee, but all they do is show their preferences, Christie just a bully and not a serious person, given his poor performance as Governor of New Jersey and a whiff of the Bridgegate scandal, Underlying their political analyses is an assessment of the worth of the candidates.

 I want to pose the same question in a different vocabulary: who should someone vote for, given the dynamics on the ground, and my answer is that people should vote for the one who would make the best president regardless of the dynamics and so not a calculation of handicapping a winner however sophisticated they might think by second guessing who will emerge triumphant, Christie being intelligent and willing to work  across the two parties and sensing he would not take down the temple, whether through an insurrection or Pence’s evangelicalism, however sincere that belief might be, should be the same issue. My ideal is that both general nominees will be reputable enough that a voter can rest easy whichever one is  elected in that they both would manage respectably, aware of the stakes foreign policy and appreciating various ethnic and other status communities, even if, inevitably, a Republican president will cut taxes for the rich and cut services from the poor.

My mandate to support the candidate you believe in rather than play the horserace of who might win and how to strategically interpose in the process is moral rather than prudential because you can feel satisfied if you voted the way you believed in even if you lost. You had fought the good fight but might rue the day if you had miscalculated what your influence might inadvertently cause. That moral principle even applies in  spirit to those people who think that a Democrat should want Trump to be nominated because he was more likely to be defeated by Biden, my favorite, however much that mental experiment is ineffectual in that I do not vote in a Republican primary though people do switch allegiances in  political parties so as to make the worst candidate the nominee. I want the better person to win and I don’t want to bring into the tent a monster who might perchance prevail. Worry what you wish for. Look what happened in 2016 when people voted for Trump as a protest vote or Britishers had second thoughts about voting for Brexit as also a protest vote, not really expecting it would win. 

My view of being honest rather than scheming is very different from the usual Conservative patter, which is to say that Trump is unelectable, a three time loser and so people should move beyond his baggage. That is  too much of a calculation which is different from recognizing him for what he is, which is a fomenter of rebellion and people honest enough to admit that even if they prefer him still because they claim the election in 2020 was stolen. Be honest rather than obfuscate. Marjorie Taylor Green says what she thinks, which is to free the insurrectionists rather than just avoid that unpleasant issue. It may be that it does not bring peace to the dinner table to confront the Trump supporters but that at is not the goal of the political market, to hash things out, even if it results in having a wishy-washy moderate so as to avoid absolute opposition which is not an admirable or long term solution, as was clearly the case when the last few pre civil war presidents  obfuscated. Rather than dismiss Trumpites as mean spirited and largely ignorant, as mostly they are, tell them to tell the truth about why they like him, and clips of film interviews show them to tell the truth and want to go back before women got the vote or maybe to the Fifties except that segregation was indeed bad, though transgender people are now bad, Mega voters against any new ideas or practices as being unnatural. In that case, Trumpists are honest even if reactionary in that they posit a golden age of an ancient regime and so expound what Karl Mannheim said in 1929 was an ideology rather than a utopia, and I prefer otherwise, society becoming in the future increasingly enlightened as that is demonstrated in legislation and an increasingly humane spirit.

Here is what seems to be an exception to my rule to vote for the candidate you most prefer, offering yourself to the honest truth. What if there is a three contest race and you prefer the small third party candidate who is bound to lose. That is what happened when people voted for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore and Nader’s absence in the race would have given Gore the election. Should you have held your nose and voted for Gore as the lesser of the two devils? My answer is “no” and vote for Nader anyway but only if you are really sure that there is no difference between the two major candidates, both unacceptable, rather than just claiming that is the case. Really no different? Really and honestly?  In that case, go with Nader but the case seems to me a stretch. 

Democrats also face the problem of being honest with themselves. What about Biden? The Times said a few days ago that although he is showing his age, he still remains alert, clear on the issues, still mastering the details, and in charge of his administration, and I also think articulate even if his voice is weaker, and that his administration is the furthest left one since FDR, Biden having managed to turn narrow majorities and recently a minority in the House to major achievements though not all of them as I had hoped. But what happens if he starts drooling, which is a shorthand for significantly diminished powers that remain short of the requirements that could occur so as to evoke the 25th Amendment? Will Democrats just cover it up? It would be their turn to deal with a presidential embarrassment, something they have carried with Trump ever since he announced his candidacy and found themselves not able to unhorse him, or worse, find themselves unable to become unamored with him.

Here is a different scenario. One thing that might happen if Biden’s capacity diminished was to become a figurehead for the Presidency whereby the president reigned but did not rule, Biden heavily relying on a strong and able White House and cabinet. He might remain affable and give set speeches and smooch with the crowd and that would be all, his basic point of view continuing on. In fact that is the way Republican administrations often do their business, picking a candidate for name recognition, Reagan and George W. Bush clear examples, who delegated powers to a strong cabinet with Reagan and a strong vice president with George  W. The alternative party, the Democrats, had followed a very different course in that the candidates duked it out between  one another on different policies and personalities and if the Democratic nominee became the winner of the Presidency took over kit and caboodle and set up his own administration.  That is the substance of saying that Democrats  make “strong” Presidencies. It isn’t that Democratic administrations are more intrusive in society than are Republican administrations. Trump got three Supreme Court justices who would overthrow Roe v. Wade and that is plenty intrusive. But Democratic Presidents are strong in that they run their own administrations. Having a Democrat resign himself to doing what Republicans do would be a loss because Democratic Presidential leadership is less elusive but the alternative is nonetheless legitimate.

We don't have to consider this succession or rather “de-cession" for very long because what will happen if Biden falters all depends on when and how he deteriorates. If it happens early enough, there will be a scramble for who will replace him as the party nomination. If he falters close to Election Day then the focus will be on the Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harrris who I hope will be up to the task. If Biden is elected and then deteriorates, the American government can change over into the Republican model, a good question about who in the Biden circle would come to significant  power. Biden, however, might also deteriorate slowly and so last longer than he should have and become like Hindenburg or Biden might know enough and be brave enough to do what De Gaulle did, which was to resign over a minor matter because he knew he was failing because he could no longer memorize the long speeches he delivered and decided on his own that it was time to go.

Democrats will have to watch these developments carefully, deciding honestly when it is time for pressure to invoke the 25th Amendment, and disregarding the Republicans who already claim that Biden is on drugs that keep him barely functioning. As usual, there is a heavy duty on the citizenry to use their moral honesty to keep the nation afloat.

Re-release: Why Noam Chomsky Is Wrong

Right wing Americans explain themselves with either the primitive thought of conspiracy theories such as Qanon or the more sophisticated ideologies of Nazi style racial warfare. Left wing Americans invoke the warfare between the rich and the poor. One of the most prominent of the Leftists for many years has been Noam Chomsky whose ideas sum up most of the memes used by the left and are therefore quite distinct from what was considered the Liberal and now the Centrist Democratic view that is ideo;ogically based  on democratic constitutionalism and on the concepts of  rights and a policy of ever extended entitlements and the structures that are within the U. S. Constitution. I have therefore re-released my post about Noam Chomsky so as to provide a challenge against the leftist shibboleths.

RE-RELEASE: WHY NOAM CHOMSKY IS WRONG

June 12, 2017

Noam Chomsky, so I am told, is much admired as a truth-teller among young people looking for accurate explanations of what is going on in America politically and economically. His basic thesis is that the small number of people who are in power in this country exert their interest in enriching themselves by pursuing imperialist policies abroad and oppressive policies at home. They keep down poor and even middle class people both foreign and domestic. I think this view is mistaken. Rather, Chomsky is just repeating shibboleths that were inaccurate when they were first enunciated by Lenin and then, for a later generation, by C. Wright Mills, who wrote in “The Power Elite”, in the Fifties, that militarists dominated the United States government and fomented wars so that they could increase the defense budget as well as keep America in control of third world countries, the natural resources and domestic labor of these countries that fell into the American sphere of influence thereby available for exploitation. Let us deaggregate this point of view into distinct propositions and hold them up for examination.

First is the idea that the United States turns underdeveloped countries into colonies so that it can steal their natural resources and employ their work forces at very low wages.  Chomsky, in “Who Rules the World?”, applies his brush of derision for United States foreign policy very broadly and very thinly, to Haiti, to Cuba, to Palestine, and even to the springboards for 9/11. The United States just can’t do anything right. But foreign policy is more complicated than that. Barrington Moore, Jr. showed long ago that homelands spent more on their colonies than the wealth they brought in from them (with the possible exception of Belgium’s grim rule of the Congo, which much enriched the royal family). For the most part, colonies were ways of increasing national pride, especially among the newly enfranchised working classes which would therefore vote for jingoistic politicians. As far as the United States is concerned, it acquired from Spain its Caribbean and Pacific empire at the end of the nineteenth century because some nation was going to take it away from Spain and it might as well be us, we not wanting Europeans to be involved in the Americas and when it was clear that Japan was the rising power in Asia and we did not want the Philippines to fall to them. As usual, the explanation for American foreign policy is geo-political, a calculation of realpolitik, which means what is in our national interest, whatever the claims of morality or of economics. The United States has been bailing out Puerto Rico ever since it took over the island.

That insight applies to our Cuban policy, much chastised by Chomsky for having turned against Castro because he was going to distribute land to the peasants. Batista, whom Castro overthrew, had served the interests of the United Fruit Company, the Bell Telephone Company, and American sugar interests. But those corporations had made use of the opportunity to invest in Cuba rather than were the cause of our engagement with Cuba. Yes, one issue that led to a severing of relations with Cuba after Castro took over the government (not mentioned by Chomsky perhaps because he was not familiar with the fact) was that Castro did not want to honor the sugar quota that had limited exports of Cuban sugar to the United States so as to protect the American domestic sugar industry. But protectionism is not imperialism. Moreover, the break with Cuba was over political matters. Liberals like myself, who were reluctant to regard Castro as a menace or see him as a Communist until he declared himself to be one (and even then wondered whether he was saying that just to curry favor with his new masters in the Kremlin) were appalled by the show trials Castro staged immediately after taking power. Batista officials were tried in football stadiums, rapidly convicted and quickly thereafter executed. Castro also clamped down on the press and began a persecution of gays. Castro showed himself not to be a small “d” democrat, but just another Latin American strong man, this time the client of our arch enemy, the Soviet Union, and it made no sense for the United States to allow Soviet penetration into the Caribbean, the Cold War waging all around the globe, from the Caribbean to Europe to Afghanistan, to Vietnam and Korea and the Horn of Africa. There was more at stake than the price of sugar.

If there is imperialism in the world today, it does not involve the developed world exploiting Latin America and Africa;  it is in Europe. The North of the continent exploits the South of the continent by offering it loans that it knows can not be paid back and then, like American bankers, foreclosing or threatening to foreclose on the Greek or the Spanish economy unless those countries engage in painful austerity measures to allow them to repay their debts at least in part. But the more important message is that the European Union never learned the lesson demonstrated by Alexander Hamilton when he helped to further the cause of the new union of American states by having the federal government assume the debts of the states, thereby making the federal government the center of economic power and stabilizing the currency and increasing commerce. Rather, Brussels was too hesitant to federalize economic policy and so keep Southern member states from borrowing more than they could afford. As with the American mortgage crisis, don’t blame the people who take out loans but those who offer them to borrowers they know cannot pay them back.

The second and conjoined idea is that the rich people get richer by making poor and middle class people poorer right back here in the United States. That is certainly what Republican tax policy adds up to. Chomsky makes the idea that the rich rule the country for their own benefit by blaming it, in his book “Requiem for the American Dream” (2017), on the shift in power from the industrialists to the money managers, those same people responsible for the Great Recession. But both Chomsky and Bernie Sanders are wrong to think that the extravagant salaries and bonuses the rich bestow on themselves is what makes everybody else worse off and that thereby the incomes of the rich need to be curtailed except to the extent that they can provide the wealth, through taxation, to build infrastructure, fund entitlement programs, and improve the lives of the poor and middle class. Rather, Hillary Clinton, however flawed as an explicator of her own policies, was closer to the mark. What the poor and middle class need are higher basic standards of living and a promotion ladder that allows them to improve their condition of life over the course of a work life. That is why a much higher minimum wage, expanded healthcare coverage, and scholarships to community colleges where people can learn a trade, are more important than reducing the wealth of those on top. How does making the rich suffer help the poor and middle class except, as I say, by providing more taxes to support programs that help the poor and middle class? Punitive taxes don’t accomplish anything except to make radicals like Chomsky feel satisfied that they are creating a more just system simply by making rich people suffer. Rather, look at what the poor and middle class need and go from there.

So, in short, Chomsky supplies neither a detailed study of particular issues or a sustained exercise in creating an analytic framework within which to place these issues, even if any number of social commentators on both sides of the political aisle, such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen and William Graham Sumner have done just that. Rather, Chomsky is doing on the left what William Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater did two generations ago on the right. He is just pushing out platitudes that those who are already convinced that there is something rotten in Denmark can glom onto without needing to think through. Let us hope he is not as successful as they were in providing the rhetoric that would get Presidents elected.