Tag: citizens united
These 'Conservative' Grifters Will Be The Death Of Our Republic

These 'Conservative' Grifters Will Be The Death Of Our Republic

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet. This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

Trump just unleashed an unhinged, barely coherent rant about the possibility President Biden might reveal what was going on in the White House on January 6, the day Trump tried to finally end, once and for all, any possibility of governmental oversight of his ongoing criminal career. He believed he could follow in the footsteps of grifters before him who've taken control of and then drained dry countries from Hungary to Russia, Brazil to Turkey and The Philippines.

Thus it surprises nobody to discover that when Donald Trump and the people around him learned, in mid-November of 2020, that there was absolutely no meaningful voter fraud in that month's election, they chose, instead of acknowledging the truth, to go ahead with a plan to raise over $200 million dollars (and counting). That even today "President Trump" is sending out one or two fundraising emails a day, each one with the tiny "make this a recurring donation" box pre-checked.

Grifters occupy a unique niche in the world of criminals: they avoid direct violence, but live and act only to enrich themselves, whether it's with money, sex, power or all three. They're typically high-functioning sociopaths who sneer at the rules of civilized society the rest of us take seriously.

Republican appointees on the US Supreme Court cracked open the door for professional grifters in 1976 when, for the first time in American history, the Court redefined politicians taking money from billionaires away from being "political corruption" and "bribery"—what such behavior had been called since the beginning of the republic—to instead say it was a mere "exercise of free speech" on the part of the morbidly rich.

Two years after the Buckley decision, in 1978, Justice Lewis Powell (author of the infamous 1971 Powell Memo) pushed the door even farther open when he wrote for the Republican majority a decision granting giant corporations the same "free speech right" to own politicians inBoston v Bellotti.

And in 2010, with Citizens United, Republican appointees on the Court didn't just blow the doors open; they tore down the entire building of "good government" in America, reaffirming that any billionaire or corporation that wanted to own their very own pet politician—or, if rich enough, own an entire political party—was totally legal and not at all corrupt.

Which is why Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974, was one of the last Republican politicians who actually believed that politics in America had something to do with governing the nation (even if he did it poorly). Ever since then, the GOP has been composed almost exclusively of professional grifters (which is a somewhat different type of cat from an ordinary criminal like Nixon who just took bribes, blackmailed people and lied about it all).

Grifters occupy a unique niche in the world of criminals: they avoid direct violence, but live and act only to enrich themselves, whether it's with money, sex, power or all three. They're typically high-functioning sociopaths who sneer at the rules of civilized society the rest of us take seriously. They combine the not-uncommon skill set of being charming and great salesmen and storytellers, but have no conscience or respect for the truth.

Grifters believe they're the only "real" people in the world and all the rest of us are here for their entertainment, satisfaction or to pluck clean of whatever we have that they want. They view us as cardboard cutouts; their pains and loves and desires are real while ours are merely background noise.

And the entire Republican Party has become one giant in-crowd of professional grifters, most all of them getting rich, getting famous, and/or getting laid in the process.

Ronald Reagan grew up during the Great Depression, became a Democrat who loved FDR, and once believed in government and that hard work and talent would get him ahead. Then Nancy Davis introduced him to her wealthy father, who let Ronnie in on the grift. Shill for General Electric and the GOP and he could marry Nancy, get rich, and might even have a bright political future. He was the first professional grifter president of the modern era.

Newt Gingrich was primed for the grift, screaming about Bill Clinton having an affair with Monica while porking Calista down the hall and fending off calls from his then-second wife. He got into the grift in a big way when he rolled out his "Contract With America" that was almost entirely tax cuts for giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Hell, he's still in on it; I'm getting an email almost every week from Trump with Gingrich's picture and signature asking for money.

Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia both knew that if any other federal judge were to go quail hunting with a defendant before the Court three weeks before trial or allow his spouse to take hundreds of thousands a year from a think tank with business before the Court, there would be hell to pay. But they were in on the grift and simply exempted themselves from the Federal Code of Judicial Conduct. Hell, they helped write the grift with Citizens United.

Since Citizens United the Republican grift has fully gone party-wide and even picked up a few Democrats along the way.

Some members of Congress get rich with money from Big Pharma, others choose to make their money with Big Oil or Big Coal, others are deeply in the pockets of airlines, telcom companies, the tobacco industry, banks, insurance companies or the food and hospitality monopolies.

Some Republicans even ran day-trading operations on insider information out of their offices until then-Democratic Congressman Brian Baird tipped off the world on my show and Air America's Majority Report 14 years ago.Paul Ryan pimped tax cuts for the obscenely rich his entire career, knowing when he left office there's be massive paychecks waiting for him the rest of his life.

Dick Cheney knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein not only had nothing to do with 9/11 but actively hated and hunted down Bin Laden's Al Qaeda operatives so he could imprison or kill them. But Cheney had run Halliburton into trouble, betting that if he picked up Dresser Industries on the cheap that the Clinton administration would cover their asbestos liability. When he lost that bet and Halliburton was in trouble, a nice war with billions in no-bid contracts for the oil-company-turned-defense-contractor was just the grift he needed to both bail him out and make him fabulously rich.

They all believe, as Bob Dylan famously sang, "You've gotta serve somebody." And the "somebody" they all choose to serve are always the ones who pay the most.

Which is why it only makes sense that the Republican Party would put up a lifelong grifter as their nominee for president in 2016. And that he'd surround himself with grifters like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who Forbes magazine said would, by any measure, "rank among the biggest grifters in American history," having scammed business partners out of at least $120 million.

Everybody in the GOP is either stuffing their "Leadership PACs" with money they can dip into after they leave office, living high on the hog, using their position to become famous or get into the pants of underage girls, or preparing for their well-feathered-nest after leaving politics.

I've been running a contest on my radio show since it started in 2003 offering a prize to anybody who can identify even one single piece of legislation that was originally sponsored by a Republican, passed Congress with a Republican majority, and was signed into law by a Republican president that primarily helped average working people or poor people instead of the rich or giant corporations.

Nobody has ever won the prize, and I'm betting nobody ever will.

This is not to say the Democratic Party doesn't have its share of grifters (two publicity-hungry senators come to mind). After all, when the Supreme Court legalized political grifting they didn't limit it to one party or the other.

But the single largest caucus in the Democratic Party is the Congressional Progressive Caucus (co-founded by Bernie Sanders) and its members generally refuse corporate PAC money and don't usually hang out with lobbyists. Former co-chair of the Caucus, Representative Mark Pocan, has joked on my show that "they say there are three Big Pharma lobbyists for every member of Congress, but I have no idea who mine are."

While Democrats are trying to legislate around the corrupting landmines laid by conservatives on the Supreme Court, Republicans are expanding on Donald Trump's "voter fraud" and "antifa" grifts to raise money and consolidate their own power in the face of an American electorate that's starting to figure out their game.

Trump and a handful of his grifter buddies who were up for full-out treason thought they could pull off the ultimate grift and seize the trillions in assets of the entire country. They only failed, we're learning, by a whisker.

Next time we may not be so lucky. Congress must grift-proof our politics by getting billionaire and corporate money out of politics, as Democrats tried to do when the House of Representatives passed the For The People Actthat arguably Democratic grifters Manchin and Sinema are blocking in the Senate.

Perhaps the 2022 election will bring Democrats a large enough progressive majority that they can work around their own grifters. Or maybe it'll signal the death knell of the republic.

To an extent largely unprecedented in American history, that decision will be in the hands of activists and voters like you and me. We have a big job ahead of us.

Bernie Sanders Exposes Glaring Falsehoods In Trump’s ‘Unifying’ Address

Bernie Sanders Exposes Glaring Falsehoods In Trump’s ‘Unifying’ Address

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

Former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear issued a formal Democratic response to Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday. But the most blistering reply may have belonged to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), who took to Facebook shortly thereafter. “I wanted to say a few words about what [Trump] didn’t say, because when you analyze the speech sometimes what is more important is what somebody does not say as opposed to what they actually say,” he began.

Below are 12 glaring omissions, contradictions, and lies Sanders spotted in Trump’s address:

1. Social Security and Medicare

“At at a time when all over half of older Americans have no retirement savings, I did not hear President Trump say one word not one word about Social Security or Medicare,” Sanders pointed out.

“During the campaign, as we all remember, President Trump promised over and over and over again that he would not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid,” he explained. “But in his first address [to Congress], he didn’t even mention Social Security or Medicare once, not a single time.”

While Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin insisted the programs would not be touched in an interview this past weekend, President Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, has defended such cuts.

“I urge President Trump, keep your promises tell the American people tweet to the American people that you will not cut Social Security Medicare and Medicaid,” Sanders said.

2. Income and Wealth Inequality

Trump’s speech to Congress briefly touched on poverty in America. However, Sanders “did not hear President Trump mention the words ‘income and wealth inequality’ or the fact that we now have the widest gap between the very rich and everyone else since the 1920’s.”

3. Campaign Finance

“I did not hear President Trump mention the fact that as a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, a five-to-four decision. We now have a corrupt campaign finance system that is allowing billionaires to buy elections and undermine American democracy,” Sanders was eager to point out.

To the first-time politician who has repeatedly boasted about funding his own campaign, Sanders asked, “How could you give a speech to the nation and not talk about that enormously important issue?”

4. Voter Suppression

In his speech, President Trump used the phrase “guided by the well-being of American citizens.”

“[But] not only did President Trump not mention the issue of voter suppression, what Republican governors are doing all over this country to make it harder for people to participate in our democracy, but the truth of the matter is his administration is now working, working overtime, with Republican governors to make it harder for young people, low-income people, senior citizens, and people of color to vote,” Sanders explained. “That is an outrage.”

5. Climate Change

“Perhaps most astoundingly, and a time when the scientific community is virtually unanimous in telling us that climate change is real, that it is caused by human activity, that it is already causing devastating problems in our country and all over the world, I did not hear President Trump say one word, not one word, about the need to combat climate change, the greatest environmental threat facing our planet,” Sanders hammered.

Not only did Trump not mention climate change, “he pledged to increase our dependency on fossil fuels,” Sanders added.

6. Criminal Justice

“At a time when we have more people in jail than any other country on Earth, disproportionately African-American, Latino, Native American, I did not hear President Trump say one word about how he was going to fix a broken criminal justice system,” Sanders pointed out.

“Yes, we must support the hard work of men and women in the police departments, in the sheriff’s departments all over this country, but we must also end the disgrace of having more people in jail than any other country on Earth,” he added.

7. Higher Education

“At a time when we need the best-educated workforce in the world to compete in a highly competitive global economy, I did not hear President Trump say one word, not one word, about the need to lower the cost of college and to do what countries all over the world are doing, and that is to make public colleges and universities tuition free,” Sanders said.

8. “Drain the Swamp”

“During his campaign, President Trump told us that he was going to take on Wall Street and ‘drain the swamp’,” Sanders reminded viewers. “Well, the swamp, big time, is now in his administration, which has more millionaires and billionaires than any presidential administration in history.”

“Amazingly enough, for somebody who was going to ‘drain the swap’, who’s going to take on Wall Street, his chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, is the former president of Goldman Sachs, one of the major financial institutions that take billions of dollars in fines for their illegal activity,” Sanders added.

9. Glass-Steagall Act

“I did not hear President Trump say one word about another campaign promise that he made to the American people, and that was to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act,”

In his speech, President Trump proposed a $1 trillion investment in American infrastructure, “but the specifics of the financing plan that he has provided us with so far are absolutely wrong,” Sanders concluded. “We cannot rebuild our infrastructure by providing billions of dollars in tax breaks to Wall Street and large corporations.”

10. Clean Water Rules

“Donald Trump said tonight that we need to ‘promote clean air and clean water’… I had a difficult time not laughing out loud when he said that,” Sanders admitted, since “On this very, very day, he signed an executive order rolling back President Obama’s clean water rules and has appointed the most anti-environmental EPA administrator in our nation’s history.”

11. Military Spending

“President Trump said [Tuesday night] that he wants to substantially increase funding for the Pentagon,” Sanders recalled. “What he didn’t say tonight is that he will come up with that $84 billion dollars in increased funding for the Pentagon by slashing programs that benefit the working people of this country, that benefit the elderly, that benefit the children, the sick and the poor.”

12. Prescription Drug Costs

“As he did during his campaign, Donald Trump claimed that he would bring down the cost of prescription drugs,” Sanders told viewers. “A few weeks ago, he even said that the pharmaceutical industry was ‘getting away with murder’, but if Donald Trump really wanted to take on the pharmaceutical industry, he would have told his Republican friends in the House and the Senate to pass legislation, which I [re]introduced today with 20 senators allowing Americans to import safe low-cost medicine from Canada.”

Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.

IMAGE: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivers a speech on “Democratic Socialism in America,” to students at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall in Washington. November 19, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

What’s Driving Trump’s Derangement Of Democratic Discourse?

What’s Driving Trump’s Derangement Of Democratic Discourse?

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

To understand why Lyin’ Donald is perpetrating such an unprecedented crisis upon the American republic, let’s consider the difference between what children say and do on playgrounds, where they rough out rules for cooperation and competition, and what grownups learn and uphold in order to make a society work.

As the columnist Walter Lippmann put it almost a century ago, adults learn to practice “social control, not by authority from above… but by a common law which defines the reciprocal rights and duties of persons. Thus in a free society the state… administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.”

Trump’s notions of freedom and control—so childish, so thuggish, so corrosive of an adult freedom that sustains freedom itself—aren’t merely a personal, clinical problem; they reflect what’s happened to a broad swath of the American people and political culture. Deposing Trump is an urgent necessity, but it won’t save the democratic way of life we’ve relied on more than we seem to have realized. We may have to jump-start that way of life in order to depose him.

Adults understand that what a Constitution rightly protects in our freedoms of speech, a strong civil society rightly moderates in its everyday life: Not every insult and vulgarity may be uttered just because it’s legally protected. Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau explained this in 2015 when he criticized (instead of canonizing) the slain writers for Charlie Hebdo, who, he rightly noted, had repeatedly “punched down” poor, pious Muslim immigrants by lampooning their prophet, thereby handing their terrorist murderers a gratuitous provocation and excuse.

What does a strong society need instead of a verbal free-for-all that collapses into a free-for-none?

“It’s not self-censorship, it’s emotional intelligence. Society has to decide collectively what’s untouchable,” as Trudeau put it. Neither law nor autocratic diktats can substitute for that spirit of deliberative decision-making in daily life. Conservatives once understood this, and indeed, insisted on it. So did most Americans and liberals. There were times to break taboos, of course, and there were times to exercise restraint. Free-marketeering has corrupted that understanding.

Trump’s cooptation of the Republican Party and much of the conservative movement is Exhibit A of that corruption. By lowering adult public conversation to the level of a playground he’s dragged us all down to the often-juvenile Hebdo of yore.

When Trump boasted that he could shoot someone without losing public support, and that “Second Amendment people” should go after Hillary Clinton, he excited a roiling horde of “militia” members, authoritarian police, “Stand your ground” and “concealed carry” enthusiasts, and so on. By now he has alarmed even the decorously well-organized, conservative rich and their more “liberal minded” counterparts.

We need to understand why a ranter like Trump “cares nothing for reproaches that he is a criminal or a guttersnipe…. Where [he] knifes his opponents is by disarming them with a cynicism and stabbing them with a morality, [H]e twists and turns, flatters and gibes, lulls and murders. ….He raves about ‘the brutal and rude unscrupulousness of the parliamentary panders.’ He calls them job-hunters, scoundrels, villains, rascals, and criminals. He screams that ‘in comparison with these traitors to the nation, every pimp is a gentleman.” We need to understand why “he boasts of his tricks: ‘Take me or leave me, my object, the resurrection of the … people, is so much more superb than any contrary principle that to bridle me with morals or sentiment is to lose…”

This plausible elaboration of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” wasn’t written by George Will or Tom Friedman, but by a literary editor of the New Republic, Francis Hackett, in April 1941, in his now-forgotten book, What Mein Kampf Means to America.

When Hackett wrote this, many Americans were still excusing der Fuhrer’s demagogic vitality, vulgarity, and brutality. American as well as German businessmen still thought they could make deals with him. After all, Herr Hitler was shaking up the corrupt conceits and arrangements that had survived even after causing the Great War and the Great Depression. Not only that, he was keeping bolshevism at bay.

If Trump were more grandiloquent, he might justify his own demagoguery by adding that “all great movements are movements of the people, are volcanic eruptions of human passions and spiritual sensations, stirred [by] the torch of the word thrown into the masses, and are not the lemonade-like outpourings of aestheticizing literati and drawing room heroes.”

Those words were written by Adolf Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf, in 1926. When Trump commingles racist nationalism with what sounds like socialism by promising both a wall to keep out Mexican rapists and a cornucopia of “jobs, jobs, jobs” and full healthcare for Americans, we might recall that “Nazi” was an acronym for National Socialism.

Nightmares of the Elites

Stunned by the sheer audacity of hopelessness in Trump’s insults and boasts, political and business leaders became alarmed on the eve of the election. Fashionable though it was to disparage his early victories by remarking that no one had ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, Republican and Democratic elites went broke by underestimating the angry, embittered intelligence of millions of Americans who were backing Trump. Millions of them have been deserting both parties’ establishments and the airless ideologies of the think tanks and their journals.

But Trump’s detractors, from Tea Partiers such as Ted Cruz and neoconservatives such as David Frum and Robert Kagan to neoliberal Democrats such as Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, can’t face their own long complicity in the omnivorous marketing and other modulations of greed that have made his demagoguery alluring by pumping so much distress and heartbreak into American life.

Trump has shredded the credibility of not only conservatives who’ve fantasized about restoring the capitalism of William McKinley and even John Locke, but also leftists who’ve fantasized that a precariat-proletariat will rise again. But he’s no Hamilton or Madison, struggling to devise an order capable of balancing conservative wealth-making with republican power-wielding and democratic, pluralist truth-seeking. He’s no Lincoln, envisioning a new birth of freedom; no Teddy Roosevelt birthing a “new nationalism” more ecumenical and progressive than Europe’s at the time; no FDR, cobbling together a New Deal.

None of today’s claimants to any of these legacies seems prepared to dive into the abyss Trump has opened. Like Czarist generals desperately flogging serfs to war against the Kaiser in 1917, today’s would-be champions of American democracy are pirouetting at the edge of the abyss their own policies have opened, shrieking and waving their arms while admonishing a bereft, bedraggled citizenry to rise to its duties.

Instead they’re confronting the popular rage against all would-be Good Shepherds and their consultants and scribbling minions.

“Right before our eyes, like something on the screen, the vast social fabric [of the republic] has crumbled…. On its ruins, with the speed of a world’s fair, [he] and his confederates have run up a political front of startling and provocative modernity… [His movement’s] hand has been so much quicker than the democratic eye, and for his violence we have so little precedent.”

Again, this is Hackett in 1941, but today’s elites have been unwittingly clearing the ground for Trump’s great encampment, as Mitt Romney revealed by calling millions of Americans “takers” in 2012 and as Hillary Clinton did by calling others “deplorables.” Takers and deplorables they may be, but some of them are also shrewd, angry, bitter, and desperate. Although Romney was right enough to call Trump a fraud, he and his cohort would have to be a lot less fraudulent themselves to discredit him.

Trump is only the match lighting the tinder that others have prepared—the Clintons and the Schumers among us as much as the Bushes and Mitch McConnells, the “lemonade literati” of the prestige magazines and the David Frums, Robert Kagans, David Brookses, William Kristols, and Pat Buchanans. They’re part of the reason why so many of millions of citizens are willing to gamble so pathetically that Trump will deflect the aggressively marketed civic mindlessness and malevolence that, with these people’s encouragement, have been groping us, goosing us, intimidating us, bamboozling us, indebting us, tracking us, and in so doing, imprisoning us.

Trump’s Troops

The armed racist goons and drooling fools (some in uniform) circling America’s proverbial town meeting democracy weren’t born to do what they’re doing. Nor were they all disposed to do it back on the playground. The quiet little stabs of heartbreak and self-doubt that accumulated in tiny increments in their young lives as their parents lost jobs, pensions, homes, mutual respect, and public moral standing have blossomed into open resentment seeking the right target.

Their losses had many causes. One is that too many of us writers (and some of you who are reading this now) have ignored or dismissed or disdained Trump’s supporters, compounding their distress with turns of a phrase, clicks of our brokers’ mouses, arching our eyebrows in faint disdain, or simple civic inattention that we excuse with genteel stereotypes and solicitous sighs over depictions of Bubba’s distress. Hedge-fund wunderkinds who’ve turned to philanthropy haven’t yet faced the truth that the legal premises, protocols, and practices under which they grew wealthy have done far more damage to the citizenry than their philanthropic ventures can offset or repair.

In 2015, the columnist Thomas Edsall wrote in a column titled, “Why Trump Now,” that “the share of the gross national product going to labor as opposed to… capital fell from 68.8 percent in 1970 to 60.7 percent by 2013” and that the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 36 percent, from 19.3 million in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2015, while the population increased by 43 percent, from 225 million to 321 million.

“In other words, the economic basis for voter anger has been building over forty years,” including the stagnation of net upward mobility after 2000 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which has “imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated.”

Then came the financial collapse of 2008, “which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street” and which left those who’d not “benefited from the previous boom years” to become “easy pickings for populist rhetoric” because “trust in government was destroyed” by a “widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses.”

In 2010, the Citizens United ruling invited the miscreants to inundate public decision-making processes and institutions through which citizens are supposed to decide how to license and regulate and channel the very forces that are enslaving us. The excuse for Citizens United was that, as Romney would put it in 2012, “Corporations are people, too,” entitled to the same freedoms of speech that citizens enjoy. “If dancing nude and burning the flag are protected by the First Amendment, why would it not protect robust speech about the people who are running for office?’’ asked Theodore Olson, counsel for Citizens United, the corporation that produced the movie to swift-boat Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The subtext: Let people rant, as long as we can drown them out with expensive megaphones and words that titillate or intimidate while they get laryngitis from straining to be heard, and while we buy off or intimidate their public officials at election time.

No wonder that, by September 2015, as Edsall noted, a survey “asked voters if they agreed or disagreed with the statement that ‘More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.’ 72 percent of surveyed Republicans concurred, compared to 58 percent of independents and 45 percent of Democrats.’”

The Volcano Rumbles

Some of us saw this coming in 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry. What worried us wasn’t only that, in the name of fighting terrorism and advancing democracy around the world, Bush and his neoconservative operatives and Vulcan advisers were spending the country into crushing debt that would drive the social compact back to the 1890s.

Nor were we wrought up only because the Republican ticket, led by two draft-dodgers (as defined by every conservative Republican since the late 1960s, when both Bush and Dick Cheney did their dodging), was now “swift-boating” Vietnam veterans such as senators John McCain, Max Cleland and Kerry himself. The republic had survived excesses like that before, if barely.

What really worried some of us in 2004 was a foreboding that the republic couldn’t outlast the eerily disembodied swooning and cheering we were seeing at Bush’s election rallies, where the candidate sometimes campaigned in a baseball cap, the kind of guy other guys thought they’d like to have a beer with.

Two veteran conservative diplomats, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, assessed these scary developments in America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order, in which they compared the American people to “a frog placed in a bowl of cool water as it is slowly heated over a fire. At the point the frog realizes the danger it is in, it is already too weakened to get out. It is boiled alive. Americans today find themselves in water with the temperature rising. To date, the political discourse, impregnated as it is with neoconservative formulations, has led them to acquiesce in the demands of those who are stoking the fire.”

The analogy wasn’t wholly accurate. Frogs are more acutely sensitive than humans are to encroaching danger. But by 2008, some people were jumping around as the water approached full boil on the floor of the Republican National Convention.

Although the party was nominating a decent if limited man (whom Trump would mock eight years later for having been captured in Vietnam), John McCain found himself facing an unnervingly large contingent of young white men whose repertoire of political expression on the floor consisted solely of shouting “USA USA USA!”

They dominated the convention’s reactions as McCain delivered his nomination acceptance speech, bellowing “USA!” even when the nominee was trying to say something thoughtful or poignant. These guys were desperately seeking moral clarity in the fog of ongoing, unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

They hadn’t all curdled into fascists or even racists. A thwarted decency and clueless love in them, a yearning for something slipping away, was struggling to find some political defense against the affronts and distortions their love had suffered. Countless encroachments on their freedom and dignity had generated not only family breakdown and drug abuse but also stresses and humiliations that erupted in road rage, lethal rampages at store openings on sale days; extreme fighting or cage fighting, the gladiatorialization of college and professional sports, and escapist, demoralizing entertainments, including reality TV and Trump’s own The Apprentice. Americans who still think that he’ll avenge them are headed for a let-down too wrenching and violent for the American republic to bear.

How Resentment Politics Works

“Trump’s brand of resentment politics,” as New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns called it during the campaign, rides ressentiment (pronounced ruh-sohn-tee-mohn), a public psychopathology in which gnawing insecurities, envy, and hatreds nursed by many people in private converge in public in scary social eruptions that present themselves as noble crusades but that diminish their participants even in seeming to make them big.

In ressentiment, the little-big man seeks enemies on whom to wreak vengeance for frustrations that are only half-acknowledged because they come from his sense of exploitation by powers he’s afraid to challenge head on. Ressentiment warps the little-big man’s assessments of his hardships and opportunities. It stokes and misdirects his frustrations.

Whether ressentiment erupts in a medieval inquisition, a Puritan or McCarthyite witch hunt, a Maoist Cultural Revolution, nihilist extremes of “people’s liberation movements” such as the Khmer Rouge, or a strain of political correctness that grips a particular community, ressentiment’s most telling symptoms are always paranoia, scapegoating, and bursts of hysteria and violence.

That syndrome was described more recently by George Soros in an assessment of “the power of Orwell’s Newspeak” and “the aversion of the public to facing harsh realities” in America today.

“On the one hand,” Soros writes, “Newspeak is extremely difficult to contradict because it incorporates and thereby preempts its own contradiction, as when Fox News calls itself fair and balanced. Another trick is to accuse your opponent of the behavior of which you are guilty, like Fox News accusing me of being the puppet master of a media empire. Skillful practitioners always attack the strongest point of their opponent, like the Swiftboat ads attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. Facts do not provide any protection, and rejecting an accusation may serve to have it repeated; but ignoring it can be very costly, as John Kerry discovered in the 2004 election.”

“On the other hand,” Soros notes, “the pursuit of truth has lost much of its appeal.”

But why? In 1941, Hackett noted that people who are stressed, humiliated, and dispossessed become easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”

Ressentiment’s gusts of collective passion touch raw nerves under the ministrations of demagogues and an increasingly surreal, Murdoch-inflected journalism that prepares the way for them by brutalizing public discourse. In the 1976 movie Network, which depicts the profit-driven derangement of television news reporting, manager Diana Christiansen tells her staff, “I want angry shows” because Americans want “a mad prophet, denouncing the hypocrisies of our time.” A demagogic network anchor rouses his viewers to shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” even as he herds them like sheep.

When ressentiment is only starting to gather strength, it assumes disguises of civility at first, so as not to incur decisive reproach from a public that isn’t yet too weakened to ward off the disease. Soros cites Fox News’ winking assurance, in ads it posted 10 years ago, that it was “fair and balanced”—a dog-whistle to the little-big man that, “Together we’re going to crush those pious, hypocritical liberal journalists who prattle on about objectivity and fairness.”

Drip, drip, drip: Story after story teaches viewers and readers to fear and mistrust one another, souring the spirit of trust and curiosity that sustain democratic dialogue into the cynicism and defensiveness that clear the way for the strongman. Ressentiment’s gloves really come off once there are enough angry little-big men (and little-big women) to step out together en masse, with a Sarah Palin or a Glenn Beck. Now Trump is leading little-big men across the Rubicon, declaring that he’ll mow down anyone and anything in his way.

Until this moment in American history, the legitimate grievances that fuel ressentiment have sometimes driven its eruptions to a fleeting brilliance, as when Sarah Palin tapped deeply into currents of thwarted love and hope in her speech to the shouters at the 2008 Republican convention. Like her public persona, such gestures always curdled and collapsed, tragicomically or catastrophically, into their own cowardice, ignorance, and lies.

But now? “The kind of self-education which a self-governing people must obtain can be had only through its daily experience,” wrote Walter Lippmann, who was Francis Hackett’s colleague at the New Republic. “In other words, a democracy must have a way of life which educates the people for the democratic way of life.” Is there any way to re-weave such a way of life? In America it has always involved a rickety balancing of wealth-making, power-wielding and truth-seeking. What new balance might achieve a liberal-democratic revival?

The late Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World recounts how ordinary, unarmed people and inspired leaders have made it happen time and again, against terribly daunting odds, in British India, apartheid South Africa, Soviet Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself. But that revival hasn’t always lasted, and it has always needed rediscovery and rejuvenation, often at some individuals’ heroic sacrifice.

You can read a lot about its twists, turns and demands in the face of demagogues even worse than Trump, in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters With Hannah Arendt, a collection of essays by Schell, Arendt, and others. Every year I tell my undergraduates that liberal democracy often seems implausible but that it equally often proves irrepressible. Part of the reason lies ineradicably in the human heart, which is always divided against itself and the world in ways that a good liberal education illuminates but can’t eliminate.

One thing it teaches is that neoliberal claims that the world is flat can’t be reconciled with the deeper claims of America’s founders, both Puritan and Constitutional, that the world has abysses that open unpredictably beneath our feet and in our hearts. A good society needs coordinates and commandments strong enough to plumb those abysses, confront the demons in them and in ourselves, and affirm our capacity to live in truth and love against our tendency to worship the self and the Golden Calf.

Trump is at once the embodiment and a parody of a society that’s lost that balance. Removing him will require re-weaving and affirming civic myths and coordinates “that people cannot help but love,” as Schell puts it. Who can summon the courage and talent for that? All of us and each of us, some by inspiring and leading others, as Schell and Arendt have described. That won’t happen without some elites’ agreement to reconfigure a Trumpian, soulless capitalism so thoroughly that Adam Smith, who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as The Wealth of Nations, could recognize it.

Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.

IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order rolling back regulations from the 2010 Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street reform at the White House in Washington February 3, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

A Political Party Worth Joining

A Political Party Worth Joining

The best political party in America is not the Dems nor the Repubs. By far, the best political party is a real party named “Fighting Bob Fest.”

It’s a daylong, outdoor political festival run by a coalition of Wisconsin progressives who believe in “putting the party back in politics.” Held in Madison every September, Bob Fest is like a “state fair” of politics, not only featuring give-’em-hell speechifying and hot populist issues — but also terrific edibles from a dozen food trucks, bottomless kegs of great local beers, lively music, dozens of activist booths, games, political humor, a farmers market and… well, fun!

The idea behind Bob Fest is to have a political event that people actually want to come to. Plus, not only is admission free, but Bob Fest is also proud to be corporate-free, rejecting any funding or ads by corporate interests. It’s a volunteer-run festival of, by and for regular people, and it pays for itself each year by passing the bucket and getting staff support from The Progressive, the feisty, populist-spirited magazine founded 107 years ago by Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette.

Yes, Fighting Bob Fest is named for La Follette, a truly great U.S. Senator who was renowned for battling the corruption of American politics by corporate money. In fact, when he was Wisconsin’s governor a century ago, La Follette passed a law banning corporations from making donations to political candidates — a law that is still in effect.

However, corporate interests today use front groups in a political ploy to bypass such bans and dump millions of dollars into their chosen candidates — including Wisconsin’s current governor.

Some magicians perform mind boggling magic tricks, such as levitating themselves, apparently with no hidden force lifting them up. But remember, the key word in “magic trick” — is trick. Scott Walker, for example, is quite the political trickster. This right-wing extremist became so unpopular in his first term as Wisconsin’s governor that he faced a recall election in 2012. Yet he seemed to rise in front of our very eyes, magically lifting himself above the public’s anger to avoid defeat. How’d he do that?

As reported by The Guardian newspaper, some 1,500 secret emails, court testimonies, and financial records were uncovered, revealing that Walker had a hidden lifeline of corporate cash hoisting him up. Despite a Wisconsin law specifically prohibiting corporations from funding political candidates, millions of those banned dollars were pumped into Walker’s campaign.

The trick is that the corporate checks were sent to supposedly-independent political outfits that, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ridiculous Citizens United decree, are allowed to take unlimited campaign funds without disclosing the names of the corporate donors — provided that the independent groups do not in any way coordinate their electoral efforts with the campaign of the candidates they want to elect.

Even if obeyed, this farcical rule essentially sanctions organized corporate corruption, but Walker & Company didn’t even try to obey it. Rather the governor asked everyone from the Koch brothers to Home Depot to Donnie Trump to funnel checks to the “independent” political groups backing him. He wrote personal thank-you notes to the donors, and even had his media strategist handle the ads for both his campaign and the groups.

Scott Walker, his front groups, and his corporate donors aren’t a magic act – they’re debouched thieves, stealing our democracy to impose their plutocracy over us. They’re mocking the law and the people. That’s the importance of bringing us mockees together in big events like Bob Fest — where 10,000 Wisconsinites gathered last year in the fighting spirit of La Follette, determined to stop the corporate governor’s cynical end run.

To learn more about Fighting Bob Fest, go to www.FightingBobFest.org.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World