What do Trump's promises reveal about his motives?

If there's one thing I've learned from the rise of Donald Trump, it's to trust my instincts more. I had a dream about a year ago that Trump would be the Republican nominee in 2016; after I woke up, I shrugged it off as a laughable fantasy. In early December (though the scenario had been in my head for a while) I wrote this post, where I mused about the possibility of Trump winning the nomination then suddenly announcing at the convention that it was all a giant practical joke. Even then, I was quick to add that I still saw his nomination as "unlikely."

A lot has already been written on how Trump managed to win the nomination, less about why pundits and others considered it so unlikely in the first place. Partly it was his lack of experience in political office, partly his extreme positions, partly his bucking of party orthodoxy, and partly his utter lack of support from the GOP establishment. All those are important factors, but there's another that especially had an effect on me. It goes back to my memories of an earlier presidential candidate you have probably never heard of: Mike Gravel.

Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator from Alaska who unsuccessfully sought both the Democratic and Libertarian Party nominations in 2008, nearly 30 years after the last time he held office. There are two things I remember most about him. One was his involvement in what has got to be the weirdest political ad of all time. The other was an interview he gave with a Jewish publication, where he declared that, if elected president, "I will bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and thereby diffuse the entire confrontation between the Islamic world and the West."

What struck me about this remark was its complete lack of qualification. He didn't say he was going to try to bring peace in the region, he said he was going to do it, full stop. And he assured us that not only would he singlehandedly solve this immensely complicated problem that has eluded generations of past presidents, but that doing so would all by itself diffuse "the entire confrontation between the Islamic world and the West." Did he also say something about giving everyone a pony?

In other words, it was a proto-Trumpian statement.

Why would he make a statement like this? At the time my thought was that it reflected his own cynical self-awareness of his marginal status. He could make the boldest and most far-reaching promises of what he'd achieve as president, secure in the knowledge he'd never be held to a single one of them. Candidates with a realistic path to the White House never talk that way. Despite the stereotype of politicians promising the moon before they're actually elected, serious candidates usually exercise at least some caution in their campaign pledges, because they know that when they don't ("Read my lips: no new taxes"), it can actually get them into trouble.

Donald Trump, alas, has blown that theory out of the water. In 2013, he said, "I don't think I'd be cutting Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. I think what I do is make the country so rich, you wouldn't have to bother." He began his 2015 campaign promising not only that he'd build a wall across the US-Mexico border, but that Mexico would pay for it. In December one of his spokesman told the press that Trump was going to win 100%--yes, 100%--of the black vote. He has more recently downgraded that goal slightly: "And at the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African-American vote."

You'd think a candidate with his eyes set on the White House would avoid the sorts of statements that are very, very, very, very likely never to happen. That was a major reason why I didn't take Trump seriously when he first began running. It all struck me as a game--an exercise in provocation.

And what would be the purpose of the game? One popular conspiracy theory holds that he's a "Clinton plant," a candidate who got in the race with the secret intention of helping Clinton win. This theory provides a neat explanation for all his past heresies, not the least of which is his apparent support for Bill and Hillary Clinton in the past. In some versions of this theory, his run was part of some private deal he made with the Clintons, though what they could possibly have had to offer him is a deep mystery. In other versions, the Clintons aren't involved and it's just Trump's own personal attempt to screw with the populace. According to one Internet hoax, he told People magazine in 1998, "If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country...I could lie and they'd still eat it up."

I have to admit that my (mostly facetious) post from December was expressing a variant on this theory. I never bought the notion that the Clintons were in on it, but I did at least flirt with the idea that he deliberately wanted to hurt the Republicans. And it's weird, because I'm not the sort of person usually tempted by conspiracy theories of any kind, least of all ones popular on the right. Yet there's just something about Trump that makes me think--makes a lot of people think--that he's somehow putting us all on, that it's all some kind of elaborate gag.

In the end, I do still believe he didn't enter the race with any intention of getting this far, that it was some kind of publicity stunt aimed at drumming up media attention he could use to funnel into some other venture. But now that he's here, there's no turning back, and whether he actually wants to be president or not, he definitely doesn't like the thought of being a looooooooooooooser. That we don't even need to speculate about.

The gazillion Trumps

HuffPost ran an intriguing article the other day entitled "Trump’s Neo-Nazi And Jewish Backers Are Both Convinced He’s Secretly On Their Side." Specifically:

Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg, the founder of the Facebook group Rabbis for Trump, argues that Trump’s daughter’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism is proof enough that he harbors no ill-will toward Jews. “You’ve got two Trumps — The Trump that’s trying to get the vote, and the Trump in real life,” said Rosenberg, who renamed his group “Rabbi for Trump” after failing to attract support from other Jewish clergy members.

[Neo-Nazi Andrew] Anglin agrees that there are two Trumps, and he isn’t worried that Trump has Jewish supporters and family members. Trump, he said, is too savvy to openly announce his views on Jews, and only allowed his daughter to convert to Judaism to trick Jews into supporting him. “He couldn’t simply say it straight,” Anglin wrote. “That just wouldn’t fly in America.”

The notion that "there are two Trumps" is one I have seen expressed by a number of supporters. Here, for example, is former rival Ben Carson explaining his endorsement of Trump:

"There are two different Donald Trumps," Carson said at the billionaire's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. "There's the one you see on the stage and there's the one who is very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully. You can have a very good conversation with him. That's the Donald Trump that you're going to start seeing more and more of."

In a similar vein, Rush Limbaugh describes Trump's heresies as proof of his brilliance:

Will we finally now admit how brilliant Trump is? Can we all finally admit that he’s been setting these people up for years? He’s been out there praising the Clintons. He’s been fooling them. He’s been making the Clintons think he loves them, he supports them, he’s in their camp, he’s got them tamed, they’re not even thinking about Trump, even looking about Trump, and Trump is just icing them.

I could go on with further examples, but you get the idea. In my last post on Trump, written in December, I wrote that I didn't think he was going to win the nomination, but I also imagined that if he did I'd be half-expecting him to suddenly announce it was all one big joke. What I failed to grasp was the extent to which his supporters have embraced his aura of profound unseriousness, to the point that it's become their main rationalization for dismissing any areas of disagreement they have with him. If you like his border wall idea but don't like his past support for the Clintons, you say he wasn't serious about the latter but is serious about the former. If you have doubts about the border wall but like other things about him, you call it a "virtual wall," as Rep. Chris Collins did a couple of weeks ago.

Politicians have always found ways to attract disparate groups, like FDR being able to garner support from both blacks and segregationists. But I don't know that it's ever been accomplished by having the different groups assuming he's telling boldfaced lies for the things they're against and the unvarnished truth for the things they're for. I'm not sure if that makes his supporters incredibly cynical or incredibly naive--or some bizarre combination of the two.

The troll primary

For some reason I've been having the following fantasy lately:

Donald J. Trump sweeps the Republican primaries, easily collecting enough delegates to nab the nomination. The mainstream GOP press starts to panic. After a few stray comments by a couple of pundits and operatives hinting at the idea that the convention should ignore the results and pick a more conventional candidate, the right goes berserk. Erick Erickson accuses the RINO establishment of attempting a coup d'etat, and Michelle Bachmann says they're working in cahoots with ACORN and the IRS. After a few days of this, most mainstream Republicans start to make peace with the idea of a Trump nomination. They note that it's really not so bad: they won't have to worry about turning out "the base," and they're relieved to see that some polls show Trump trailing Hillary by only 10 percentage points, well within striking distance. The convention is set up in Cleveland. A slot of speakers is introduced including Rubio, Kasich, Jindal, and a host of other figures who had once bashed and ridiculed Trump, but who now tout Trump's business acumen and talk about how he's going to bring back greatness and to save America from the horrors of the Obama years and "the Clinton machine." Several days pass until finally Trump is introduced to speak. He walks triumphantly across the aisle, chin set, bird's nest on head, and he steps up to the podium. After a lengthy pause, he opens his mouth and speaks, in front of America and in front of the entire world:

"Fooled ya! This whole candidacy has been a joke, and you fell for it! I just did this to prove once and for all how dumb Republican voters are, and to destroy their chances of winning. Which I just have, ha ha ha! Of course Mexicans aren't rapists and Muslims didn't cheer on 9/11, but by giving me your support you just proved beyond any doubt you're all a bunch of racist, backwards lunatics who are so moronically predictable you'll believe someone who's totally faking it! What a sad, pathetic bunch of assholes you all are, and don't blame me: you brought this on yourself. And oh, one more thing: God bless America."

He steps to the side of the podium and makes an up-yours sign straight at the camera. He then turns around and walks back down the aisle, leaving everyone in stunned silence.

**********

Is this really as far-fetched as it sounds? Well, for the record, I don't think Trump is going to win the nomination--I don't even think he wants it--and in the unlikely event that he does win it, I doubt he'd have the balls to pull off something like the above scenario. But I do seriously believe there's a decent chance this hypothetical speech represents what he truly thinks about the GOP.

After all, his public persona as an unreconstructed wingnut basically goes back to 2011, the first time he flirted with a run for the Republican nomination--there's no record of him ever holding such views prior to that year. Some of this has already gotten a lot of press, such as his defense of single-payer health care or his donations to Democrats. Other past statements of his have been surprisingly overlooked, as when he praised President Obama to high heaven in 2009. Now, I'm well aware there are people who soured on Obama in the course of his first term. Still, it's really hard to reconcile these statements with the birther stuff he got into in 2011. Not only did Trump never sound this right-wing, he simply has no history of embracing lunatic conspiracy theories of any sort, and it's not as if the stuff he complains about now weren't part of Obama's agenda from the start.

I'm not saying his candidacy is necessarily some Borat-like social experiment to expose the GOP base's stupidity and bigotry. But I do strongly believe it's an act of some kind. I agree with those (like Nate Silver) who have described Trump as basically an Internet troll. (That's actually one of the reasons I think it's quite likely he will go third party in the end; it will enable him to milk this thing for as long as he can without having to worry about actually winning.)

Truth be told, I've had similar feelings about other figures on the right--Ann Coulter especially, though it's a style that goes back at least to Rush Limbaugh. I'm not saying any of those people are closet liberals, but they do very often give the impression that they’re engaged in some bizarre type of trolling. When Coulter says that women should be denied the right to vote, does she really mean it? Or is she simply reveling in the reaction this statement provokes among liberals and the media? Whatever the reason, I've never been able to bring myself to be actually outraged by anything Coulter says, because I get the sneaky feeling I'd be reacting exactly the way she wants me to. I'm reminded of something Roger Ebert once wrote about a Monty Python film: "This movie is so far beyond good taste, and so cheerfully beyond, that we almost feel we're being One-Upped if we allow ourselves to be offended." So whenever I hear someone react to a Coulter remark by exclaiming "That's terrible!" I'm almost tempted to roll my eyes and say, "Whatever." Coulter has another thing in common with Trump: she has never publicly apologized for anything, ever. Their consistent response to criticism is to double down on their controversial remarks.

This places him in a different category from demagogues of the past he's often been compared with, such as Charles Coughlin or George Wallace. If you've ever read any of Coughlin's monologues (I have), he sounds almost intellectual. And while Wallace was somewhat of an opportunist ("I will never be outniggered again"), I wouldn't describe him as trollish. True believers or not, these men were either extremists or pandering to extremists for political gain. People who think that's all what Trump is about are missing something, in my view.

The point isn't to make excuses for Trump, whose rhetoric is deeply dangerous regardless of his motives for engaging in it. The real lesson of his candidacy is what it says about a large segment of the Republican Party. It's like an experiment I read about years ago in which scientists designed a robotic honeybee that real honeybees ended up accepting as one of their own. The fact that it was fake didn't take away from the fact that it did a good enough impression of the real thing.

Why liberals became progressives--and why they'll stay that way

One of the most striking changes in political terminology to happen in my lifetime was the adoption of progressive as a substitute for liberal. What's weird about it is that most of the time people talk as though they've always used the word progressive this way, yet I can't remember hearing it until the 2000s. (Checking the archives for Google News and Google Books seems to confirm my suspicions.) When the topic is brought up, the commonest explanation (which even I have made) is that it was an attempt to escape the negative connotations of the word liberal, which had suffered from decades of abuse by conservative commentators. But that raises some questions. Since the negative use of liberal goes back at least to the 1970s, what took progressives so long to come up with their new name? Furthermore, why didn't they stick with liberal in a spirit of defiance against those who treat it as a dirty word? Doesn't abandoning it suggest that there really is something wrong with being a liberal, and that so-called progressives are simply doing a linguistic makeover to hide their flaws?

The answer to these questions lies partly in recent political history, partly in the difficulty in consciously making changes to the language. For several decades liberals did in fact try to wear the word liberal proudly, in spite of those who used it disparagingly. Progressive already existed in political parlance, but it had a broader, vaguer meaning than it does today and didn't necessarily imply an affinity for the left. In the 1980s, for example, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council called its think tank the Progressive Policy Institute. My guess is that the DLC aimed to evoke something along the lines of Teddy Roosevelt's bipartisan, reform-oriented "progressivism."

The degradation of the word liberal was gradual and, contrary to the oft-heard claim, not entirely due to the right's efforts. I think the process began in the late 1960s in reaction to the disillusionment and shattered dreams of the left. Around that time the term was undergoing a shift in meaning similar to what happened to a word like pious, where a formerly positive adjective comes to be used as a sneering description of those who fall short of the ideals they preach. Look, for instance, how Roger Ebert used it in his 1972 review of Sounder, a movie he defended against charges of liberalism:

It is, I suppose, a "liberal" film, and that has come to be a bad word in these times when liberalism is supposed to stand for compromise--for good intentions but no action. This movie stands for a lot more than that, and we live in such illiberal times that Sounder comes as a reminder of former dreams.

By the 1970s, liberal was starting to be treated less like a political orientation than like a character type, describing an overzealous do-gooder who may even be a hypocrite and patronizing snob--someone much like the character of Meathead from All in the Family. When the right began using the word pejoratively, they were in part seizing on that stereotype. Of course there is a difference between the trait of "good intentions but no action" and the right's more malevolent view of liberals. But the image of the excessive do-gooder--and above all the connotation of weakness--prevailed.

For a long time, Democratic politicians were unsure whether to embrace the liberal label or run away from it. In 1988 Dukakis resisted it before finally admitting, late in his campaign, that "I'm a liberal in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy." This comment was practically an apology, seeming to imply that liberalism had fallen from its lofty position in the ensuing decades. It was as if he was assuring the public, "I'm a liberal, but one of the good ones."

Indeed, when it came to presidential elections in the post-Vietnam era, it often seemed that the Democrats' victories rested on how successfully their candidates escaped the liberal label. This perception was probably delusional (Mondale and Dukakis were running against a popular administration, whereas Carter and Clinton were running against unpopular ones, and so their ideological character was probably not the determining factor in the outcome of those races), but it was a lesson the Democratic establishment took to heart.

The moderate, Third Way politics of the Clinton years disappointed many liberals at the time, but this was overshadowed somewhat by their disgust at the GOP's scandal-mongering against the president. By the end of the decade, when Clinton enjoyed sky-high approval ratings while the GOP ended up defeated and humiliated in its attempts to bring him down, there was a triumphant feeling among Democrats which, I believe, made many of them willing to forget (if not forgive) his policy betrayals.

This truce ended with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an event that drove a wedge between the Democratic establishment and the left unlike anything seen in over a generation. As the left's antiwar position, dismissed at first as radical, eventually became the consensus not just within the Democratic Party but in the country as a whole, it damaged the establishment's credibility and made the left's early criticisms of the invasion seem prescient. I personally believe (but have rarely seen it expressed) that this factor was a large part of the reason for the DLC's demise. And of course it led to the rise of Obama, whose early opposition to the war may have been singlehandedly responsible for his narrow defeat of Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Despite GOP talking points about how he was the "most liberal Senator," the L-word commanded surprisingly little attention in the 2008 election, when compared with past races. Obama did, however, eagerly identify as "progressive," the first modern Democratic nominee to do so.

This new use of progressive arose during the boom in Internet political culture that came to be called the "netroots," dominated by activists who now had the tools to make their voice heard in a way that wasn't possible in earlier times. That was the main setting from which today's progressive movement emerged. Though they rarely explained why they preferred the term progressive, I believe there were two primary reasons: they associated liberal with compromise and moderation in the hated establishment, and they wanted to free themselves from the influence of conservative frames they felt had governed mainstream political discourse for too long. Creating a new word for themselves (or, rather, refashioning an old, nearly forgotten one) was a way of achieving that goal.

Naturally, the new progressives tended to be fairly young--people in their twenties when the millennium rolled around (basically my generation). Older figures who have come to be associated with the movement have had to adapt their language to the times. When I searched Paul Krugman's columns and books for the word progressive, all I found were some references to progressive taxation--until his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, where he explains the difference between liberals and progressives:

The real distinction between the terms, at least as I and many others use them, is between philosophy and action. Liberals are those who believe in institutions that limit inequality and injustice. Progressives are those who participate, explicitly or implicitly, in a political coalition that defends and tries to enlarge those institutions. You're a liberal, whether you know it or not, if you believe that the United States should have universal health care. You're a progressive if you participate in the effort to bring universal health care into being. (p. 268)

Although Krugman isn't defining the two terms as mutually exclusive, there is an echo of Ebert's association of liberalism with "good intentions but no action." Progressives, Krugman maintains, are liberals who put their beliefs into action. While that's an inspiring thought, I'm not sure it fits the way most people use these words. I assume Krugman bases his definition on the activist roots of the progressive movement, but by now (at least in my experience) there are plenty of self-identifying progressives not actively involved in the fight for liberal causes.

The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg rounds up various pundit theories on the progressive/liberal distinction before observing, "none of them has much to do with with how the labels are actually used." One problem I have with most of these theories is that they treat the categories as fixed and static. In reality, these words have had greatly varied meanings over time, and even within the same time have meant different things to different people. The fact that TR referred to himself as a Progressive while FDR considered himself a liberal doesn't shed much light on the differences between Clinton and Obama. With these caveats in mind, Nunberg offers his thoughts on what the progressive label is intended to signal today:

Far more than liberals, progressives see themselves in the line of the historical left. Not that America has much of a left to speak of anymore, at least by the standards of the leftists of the Vietnam era, who were a lot less eager than most modern-day progressives to identify themselves with the Democratic Party. But if modern progressives haven't inherited the radicalism or ferocity of the movement left of the 60's, they're doing what they can to keep its tone and attitude alive.

I tend to agree. I just wonder how long this situation will last. As the new progressives grow older and the word progressive becomes more ingrained, its anti-establishment overtones may well fade. Eventually it may come to be a simple descriptor of the average left-leaning Democrat, occupying more or less the same place that liberal used to--before it was turned into an epithet.

Perhaps sensing this possibility, some conservatives in recent years have been trying to do to progressive what they once did to liberal. Glenn Beck attempted something of the sort in his 2010 speech to CPAC, where he linked today's progressives with the alleged evils of the early-20th century Progressive Movement. I doubt this strategy will work. These conservatives have grown too insulated from the mainstream to reach beyond their narrow audience (somehow I don't think most Americans would share Beck's outrage at TR's support for universal health care or Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Federal Reserve), and in any case the word progressive just doesn't carry the negative connotations that helped the right tarnish liberal. Whether conservatives or older liberals like it or not, progressive as a self-respecting term is here to stay.

Crazy professors

Just about everyone who has been through college has stories about crazy professors. I'll tell you a couple of mine.

My first encounter with one came in my second year of community college, in a required course focusing on several thinkers who shaped the modern world including Darwin, Marx, Toynbee, and Einstein. The teacher was an African Sorbonne graduate who wore his watch on the pulse side of his wrist. I had an inkling of his ideological leanings when he criticized our assigned textbook as "too Eurocentric."

There are times when even I question Eurocentrism in traditional histories. As I suspected, however, this professor was merely replacing one "centrism" with another. I could feel his frustration as he looked for openings in the assigned material to tell us about his beliefs, which included the idea that much of Ancient Greek civilization was "stolen" from black Egyptians. It wasn't easy for him, since he was assigned to be teaching us about DWEMs (Dead White European Males). I was immune to his digressions because on the first day, I had gone to the library and borrowed a copy of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa, which debunks Afrocentrist claims about history. I learned more from that book than I did from the entire course.

He was only a moderate Afrocentrist. At the extremes is Professor Leonard Jeffries of City College in New York, who holds that mankind is divided into "ice people," comprising those of European descent, and "sun people," comprising everyone else. Ice people are violent, materialistic exploiters, while sun people are kind, compassionate peacemakers. Dr. Jeffries also maintains that Jews financed the slave trade and continue to use Hollywood to promote black subservience. It's like he took the Nazis' master-race theory and flipped it around. Around the Jews, that is.

Later on, I got an American history professor who was almost as weird as the Afrocentrist guy, though in a different way. He looked like a character out of Roald Dahl: slight build, pointy nose, pencil-thin mustache. The oddest thing about his appearance was his hair. "Never trust a professor with strange hair" should be my motto. He looked like he would have been an ordinary bald man except that he had a big clump of hair resting on top, almost like a cockatoo. Bad use of monoxodil, I thought.

On the first day, he mentioned that previous students had complained he hadn't made his teaching relevant to the current times. He promised not to make that mistake with us. He kept his promise. For one thing, he had a relentless obsession with Bill Clinton, whom he considered the most corrupt president since Nixon. (This was a while before the Lewinsky scandal.) Throughout his lectures, he kept throwing in comments about how "Slick Willy" and his wife were letting the country go to waste.

He didn't seem to recognize any boundary between fact and opinion. FDR, he taught us, was a great president, though not because of his liberalism. Truman was overrated, Eisenhower was underrated, and Vietnam was unwinnable. The prof's most fervent belief was that there was a conspiracy behind JFK's assassination. He wasn't sure of the nature of the conspiracy, he just knew beyond any doubt that there was one. And he let us argue our favored conspiracy theory on the final exam for extra credit. Accepting the findings of the Warren Commission wasn't an option.

For several years afterward, I went mad trying to read up as much as I could on the stuff we had covered, which I felt had been tainted by the guy's political and ideological proclivities. I eventually concluded that apart from his hangups about Clinton and JFK, he was reasonably fair and accurate most of the time.

I'm not implying these two professors were in any way representative of my overall college experience. After I transferred to U. of Maryland, I no longer met any ideological fruitcakes. A few of my professors there articulated liberal political views in front of the whole class, a practice I considered unprofessional (at least in non-political courses). But there was relatively little weirdness and flakiness. Yet the fact I encountered this sort of thing at all is significant. These are the kinds of experiences you hear and read about, and can't believe when they're actually happening to you.

P.S. For those who may not be aware, the picture at the start of this post is of the late comedian Sam Kinison playing a crazy professor in this scene from the 1986 movie Back to School.

The corporatists

Though a proud and lifelong Democrat, there's a point where I begin to feel just as out of step with the left as I do with the right. That point occurs when people start using the word corporate with a conspiratorial tone.

For example, I was recently in the library and saw a book on Barack Obama that didn't seem to be either attacking or praising him. I assumed it was a detached journalistic analysis, an approach I haven't seen much of these days. My interest piqued, I took it out.

I should have noticed the back-cover endorsement by Noam Chomsky.

The book was called Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. I didn't read the whole thing, but I did happen to glance at an appendix in which the author referred to Obama's "corporate- and Empire-friendly" views on capital punishment, gun control, and civil liberties, as well as his "conservative and imperial positions on Iraq, Iran, or Israel."

These characterizations may raise the eyebrows of those who think of Obama as the latest incarnation of Karl Marx, but they are frequent in hard-left publications such as The Nation, where the U.S. Democratic Party is considered "center-right." That isn't as absurd as it sounds if you take an international perspective. As Nation writer Eric Alterman argues in his 2003 book What Liberal Media?,

The entire context of American politics exists on a spectrum that is itself well to the right of that in most industrialized democracies. During the 1990s, Bill Clinton was probably further to the right than most ruling West European conservatives, such as Germany's Helmut Kohl and France's Jacques Chirac. Indeed, virtually the entire axis of political conversation in the United States takes place on ideological ground that would be considered conservative in just about every nation in democratic Western Europe.

The 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate was a paranoid right-wing thriller about communist takeover. The 2004 remake is a paranoid left-wing thriller about corporate takeover. In the new version, Meryl Streep plays a senator and Hillary lookalike who, aided by a Halliburton-esque corporation with family connections, instigates a plot to make her son president through blackmail, murder, and brainwashing, in which a Gulf War platoon have devices implanted in their bodies making them "remember" her son as a war hero. Throughout the movie, a sinister cable news network is seen in the background in various public places (and the anchor is played by Al Franken, no less).

Hey, I'm not saying critics like Ralph Nader don't have a point about corporate influence in society. But when they start to sound like left-wing versions of the old John Birchers seeing communist infiltration in every corner, I have to jump ship. The nice thing about being a non-ideological Democrat, by far the most common variety, is the relative freedom from paranoia. You can just sit comfortably on the left of the good old fuzzy middle.

A virtue worth defending

Previously, I mentioned James Carville's notorious "Judas" remark. ("Mr. Richardson's endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.") A commenter named Jimmy got on my case for dismissing the remark, and I would like to clarify my views. I first thought Carville's remark deserved only ridicule, but now I believe it's a good starting point for a larger discussion.

I've never heard anyone defend Carville's remark before. Other members of the Clinton team backed away from it, probably figuring that for a campaign that has presented its candidate as the experienced Washington insider and policy wonk, fire-and-brimstone imagery might give the wrong impression. Obama supporters were predictably unimpressed, and as for Republicans...well, they could just sit back and enjoy the spectacle from afar, content at the comparatively dignified fight happening on the Republican side, like Huckabee seeming to insinuate that Romney was a shade away from Devil worshipper.

Carville, however, wrote an entire op-ed defending his remark, and the column must set some kind of record for its utter absence of anything remotely resembling a logical argument. He went on and on about the importance of loyalty, but he didn't bother to define the concept, nor did he explain why calling the wife of your former boss the second-best candidate in the race is a prime example of disloyalty, much less why it merits comparison to a Biblical villain. His column could be summed up in two short sentences: "It's an old-politics thing. You wouldn't understand."

As it stands, Carville's definition of "loyalty" is as vague and slippery as Bush's definition of "the enemy." Just because you worked for a president doesn't chain you to him for life. And what's even more ridiculous is the idea you're also chained to his wife. That's what was so unsettling about Carville's logic: it reinforced many people's uneasy feeling that Bill Clinton was seeking a third term.

Judas's real crime wasn't disloyalty; it was aiding and abetting murder. I struggle to understand how that applies to the current election. "Murdering" a candidacy--which Richardson's endorsement was far too late to do--isn't a crime but a civic duty, one we practice every time we go to the polls. Of course, the term "murder" is absurd in this context. Hillary didn't have a "right" to the nomination the way people have a right to life. No candidate does. Being nominated isn't a right but a privilege. What is a right, and an absolute one at that, is the right of all citizens in a democracy to choose any candidate they please. The notion that anyone "owes" anyone a vote or an endorsement is fundamentally undemocratic.

I can predict one possible response. "Get real. Richardson wasn't honestly expressing his preferences. He was kissing up to the Obama team, perhaps anticipating a vp slot or some cabinet position." I would disagree, but I'm not interested in debating the point, which would be impossible to prove one way or the other. What's clear is that Carville implied that Richardson's preferences were irrelevant. Hillary could be the most dreadful candidate imaginable and Richardson would still be obligated to endorse her (or to endorse no one), according to Carville's way of looking at things.

Of course, if we accept that logic, how can we be sure even Carville likes the Clintons? Maybe he secretly despises them but feels obligated to continue supporting them. That's what happens from this brand of "loyalty": you can no longer tell who your real friends are. How ironic.

Loyalty has never been an absolute virtue that trumps all else. (Compare, for example, the loyalty of the Nazis who claimed to be just following orders, with the disloyalty of the Founders who waged war against the country that nurtured them.) The loyalty that deserves our admiration is the kind tempered by honesty and integrity. A friend who never criticizes you, who never says what he thinks of you, who just blindly follows you wherever you go, is no friend at all.

A lot of people who were once big supporters of Bill Clinton now believe that Obama is the best candidate to bring America forward. These people haven't necessarily changed their minds about the Clintons; they have simply moved on, as our nation must always do. Carville is entitled to disagree. We can respect his beliefs without calling him names--and that, not his twisted understanding of "loyalty," is a virtue worth defending.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and yours is wrong

In the season finale of Boston Legal, a show I've never seen before, a judge files a motion to have the town of Concord, Massachusetts secede from the Union. Alan Shore (James Spader) argues for the defense. Denny Crane (William Shatner) takes the opposing side. Their arguments get so heated (at one point Alan tells Denny to "just shut up") it threatens their friendship.

The case centers on questions we've all encountered over the past several years. Has Bush put our country on a road to tyranny unlike any previous president? Do we face a uniquely dangerous enemy that justifies Bush's actions? Is attacking the president wise in a time of war? Can dissent be patriotic?

Denny privately tells Alan why the case bothers him so much. His explanation is so heartfelt we realize their differences go beyond mere politics. Whereas Alan views the case as an intellectual exercise, for Denny it runs much deeper.

Denny: Something I thought you understood but you clearly don't understand: for people of my generation, being an American is personal.

Alan: I realize....

Denny: No, you don't. You don't. In your life, growing up, you just took for granted that America would always be. Why not? It's a superpower, strongest country in the world. In my lifetime, with Hitler trying to take over the world and having the means to do so, we went to bed scared at night that America would end. Imagine that feeling. The tragedy for me here is, you have no idea how deeply offended I am by the idea of a town wanting to secede...which means you don't know me, Alan. Not really. Our friendship has all the depth of a jigger of scotch.

I wondered why the show wanted to explore how two people of very different political persuasions navigate a friendship with each other. Some in the audience will relate to the situation, others will marvel that the feat is even possible. I'm sure there are Americans who go through life without ever having a close relationship with someone with a different political outlook. How frequent this is, I don't know. It sure doesn't describe me, a lifelong liberal from a conservative community, Orthodox Jews.

I think that political diversity among friends is healthy. It helps prevent people from dehumanizing the other side. Let's say your friend seems like the most decent and reasonable guy you know until he starts talking about politics, and suddenly he sounds to you like an ogre with asinine ideas. You may never come to respect his opinions, but at least you realize that a person you respect can hold them.

Political differences mean a lot to some people. Sean Hannity actually runs a dating site for conservatives. I can't judge that choice--after all, some people cannot understand my decision to date only Jews--but it still seems odd to me.

One couple who'd agree is James Carville and Mary Matalin, who not only belong to different parties but have worked for opposing candidates. They claim not to talk politics at home, though sometimes you wonder at his motivations. When Bill Richardson, a former member of the Clinton Administration, endorsed Obama instead of Hillary, Carville said, "Mr. Richardson's endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic." Carville subsequently wrote an entire op-ed piece defending this idiotic remark, but nowhere in the column did he explain what we all wanted to know: if Richardson is Judas, then who's Christ? Bill or Hillary? Or is that Billary? I must have missed the rule which states that political loyalty must be extended to the person's spouse--unless, of course, your name is Carville.

The last person you'd think of as a poster child for inter-political romance, Ann Coulter, has had a series of them. You begin to wonder about her statement that liberals have "joyless sex." Either she's no selfish hedonist, or we've been right in suspecting that her venomous persona is some kind of act, though if so, I have no idea what it means. Ask her suitors.

I have little patience for villain-style politics because I see most issues as complex. I didn't always feel that way. As a kid, I perceived my own views as nothing more than common sense. But I gradually discovered that views I considered indefensible turned out to be quite defensible once I listened to the other side. This happened to me over and over again. That's why I'm amazed at the number of people who maintain a black-and-white outlook into their old age.

Not that I'm a moderate. I opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, and I'm annoyed by politicians from both parties who started criticizing the war only after it became fashionable to do so. At the same time, I understand why good and reasonable people were led to support it. The decision to take out Saddam is not something I can just dismiss as evil, no matter how unjustified I believe it was.

On the other hand, I may be guilty of over-intellectualizing. I don't have loved ones stationed in Iraq. I haven't been personally screwed by Bush's policies. Thus, it's a bit too easy for me to think of the debates as an intellectual exercise rather than something serious that impacts lives.

The Macho Right

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In his book The Conservative Soul, bleeding-heart conservative Andrew Sullivan writes, "Even the most passionate of the [Bush] Administration's defenders cannot argue that [waterboarding] is not 'cruel, degrading and inhuman' treatment.... The notion that 'waterboarding' is not torture under the plain meaning of the word as well as its legal meaning is preposterous" (p. 169).

I contrast that with Rudy Giuliani's statement about being unsure whether waterboarding is torture. How do you possibly resolve a disagreement like this? Unless you go to the extreme of testing waterboarding on yourself, as Daniel Levin did, it's basically one person's opinion against another's. Frankly, I doubt the former New York mayor, who built his reputation on dogged machismo, is likely to be swayed by, let's face it, a prissy gay Englishman.

Sullivan attributes the Bush view of torture to "the fundamentalist psyche," which holds that "what matters is his intent, not the empirical analysis" (p. 170). This forms part of Sullivan's larger theory that the world is divided into two types of people, fundamentalists and...well, everyone else, I guess. Into the first category he includes various Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Zionists, Islamists, Nazis, and Communists. He characterizes fundamentalism as hostile toward reason, and among the unreasonable qualities he lists are, oh, a black-and-white "us vs. them" mentality. Hmmmmmmm.

The chip in his theory is that Giuliani is no fundamentalist, by the plain meaning of the word as well as its legal meaning. I therefore propose an alternative theory that is equally simplistic, but at least it knows it is. The assault on reason here is coming not from the Religious Right, but from the Macho Right.

Contrary to popular belief, members of the Religious Right are quite capable of reasoned thought, at least when it suits their purposes. Reason is absolutely irrelevant to members of the Macho Right, who are driven not by reason, but by testosterone.

Even if you've never heard the term, you surely are familiar with the right-wingers who seem to build their whole outlook on machismo. "We gotta be tough on crime. We gotta bomb the commies/Muslims/insert-your-own-enemy back to the Stone Age. We gotta stop the liberals who want to take guns away from the real men who own them."

It's no wonder all those tough-guy movie stars, at least the ones who aren't into martial arts, vote Republican: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Eastwood, and Willis.

Schwarzenegger, who has never clearly explained why he's a Republican, is a perfect example. You remember when he characterized his Democratic opponents as "economic girlie men" (never mind that he supports universal health care). Then some gay rights organizations, eager to play Charlie Brown to Lucy's football, complained that his remarks were insulting to homosexuals. Uh-huh.

To qualify for the Macho Right, you don't have to be religious. You don't even have to be conservative in a traditional sense. You certainly don't have to be genuinely tough. As we have seen, right-wingers are more than willing to paint true American heroes like John McCain and John Kerry as spineless sissies.

Some notable examples of Macho Rightists in the media are Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly. You remember Savage. He's the guy who got kicked off of MSNBC because he referred to a caller as a "sodomite" and told him to "get AIDS and die."

Savage, an irreligious Jew, can hardly be accused of Bible-thumping. Macho Rightists aren't fueled by the Bible, which may even provide them with some distractions, such as the admonition to love the sinner. They're the types of people who are given to saying things like, "Get your hands off me, you faggot!!!!"

When Hillary Clinton called Ann Coulter "heartless," referencing her book Godless, Coulter replied, "Oh, lighten up, girl." Apparently realizing the flaw in Hillary's approach, Joe Maguire titled his anti-Coulter book Brainless. That of course has more bite, but it still misses the point. Macho Rightists don't care about brains. They care about cojones.

After all, who else is the emblem of the Macho Right today than President George W. Bush, that tough, macho cowboy who's just like...well, certainly not like the folks from Brokeback Mountain. Those are just sissies who herd cows.

I was once listening to a Macho Right acquaintance of mine rail against bicycle helmets. He wasn't talking about government regulation. He simply hated seeing kids wear them, claiming that today's parents are raising a generation of wimps who can't handle the world.

I had a nasty bicycle spill when I was fifteen. I was wearing no helmet or kneepads. Luckily, I didn't land on my head, but what if I had? I might not be here now to talk about the incident.

The experience gives me a slight advantage when arguing with Macho Rightists. I wouldn't stand a chance against them if all I had were statistics and reasoned arguments. When a Macho Rightist talks, there is absolutely nothing you say, no reasoned argument, that can possibly sway them. On the contrary, the slightest appeal to reason makes you sound like the wuss they know you are. The only way to combat their rhetoric is through more macho rhetoric.

Bill O'Reilly has actually used Macho Right logic to argue against the death penalty. He says that we should give the convicts life in prison so that they can suffer more.

It's hard to say how many Macho Rightists there are, but you know them when you hear them. If you ask any of them whether they belong to the Macho Right, they aren't likely to admit it. The term probably reminds them too much of the Village People.

The U.S. royal family

Many years ago, I read a thin, richly illustrated book called Motel of the Mysteries, about a future archaeologist who unearths the remains of a hotel room from our time. He thinks it is a burial site of the ancient Usa people. Among the artifacts he discovers there are a Sacred Seal (a "do not disturb" sign), a Portable Shrine (credit card), a Great Altar (television set), and a Sacred Urn (toilet).

I believe that when anthropologists of the future look back at our society, they might conclude we live in a monarchy. Sure, we think we've moved past Great Britain's antiquated system. We laugh at them for still having kings, queens, and princesses, even if the positions are only ceremonial. We don't put up with such nonsense as the divine right of kings, the royal family, right? In America, we like to say, anyone can become president.

Uh-huh. Some facts should sober us up. The majority of U.S. presidents have been related to other U.S. presidents, and a large number have been related to British royalty. (See here for the details.) If you think about it, we're presently nearing the end of the reign of King George II.

If Hilary gets elected this fall and goes on to serve two terms, our nation will have experienced nearly 30 consecutive years in which the president was either a Bush or a Clinton. (And then maybe Jeb, and George P. Bush, and later Chelsea and the Bush twins, can continue the cycle.... Scary, isn't it?)

Everyone knows that the U.S. presidents have mostly been White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. We haven't even had much in the way of European ethnicities. Imagine there being presidents of primarily Polish or Swedish or Belgian extraction. Even that seems off most people's radar.

I'm not saying we haven't had minorities. WASPs are a minority!

What is wrong with us? We're supposed to be this diverse, multicultural nation, and the presidency still operates like an old country club. (No wonder they all play golf!)

Now you're saying, "But wait, this year is different. Look who's been running: a woman, a black, a Latino, an Italian-American, and a Mormon!"

Yeah, sure. I'm reminded of the old quip about Barry Goldwater: "I always knew the first Jew on a U.S. presidential ticket would be an Episcopalian." If Obama gets the Democratic nomination, we can say, "I always knew the first black on a U.S. presidential ticket would be a cousin of Dick Cheney."