Owning Milton Friedman with Facts and Logic (Part Two)

Welcome to part two of my rebuttal to Milton Friedman's argument against socialism. For those not aware, for this post and the previous one, I'm responding to the first chapter of economist Milton Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom (the entirety of the chapter can be read here). If you haven't yet read part one, make sure to do that before starting on this installment.

With that out of the way, let's get going. When we last left off, our pal Milton was giving us a wildly inaccurate description of capitalism and had just argued that capitalism is actually great for employees because if their boss underpays them or mistreats them, no problem! They can just quit. From there
we move on to a new line of argument: "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." Friedman elaborates:

The characteristic feature of action through political channels is that it tends to require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage of the market, on the other hand, is that it permits wide diversity. It is, in political terms, a system of proportional representation. Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit.

Milton Friedman, economist and expert on screwing over poor people
(Chuck Nacke/Alamy, taken from Encyclopedia Britannica)

You just have to love the conception of freedom throughout this whole chapter: overseas vacations, practicing medicine without a license, tie colors--all the big stuff is covered. To address Milton's point here, it's worth noting that markets inherently skew toward valuing the desires of the rich over the poor (who has more money, after all?), which I guess is what he means by "proportional representation." And, rest assured, I don't think any socialists want to limit the country to a single tie color, for those who were concerned about that. But let's hear a little more about freedom:

The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated...By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.

Economic power can be widely dispersed.

How has that dispersal of economic power been working out since the Friedman-backed deregulation under Reagan, again? It kinda seems like we've been moving more toward the economy being run by a smaller and smaller number of people. But that's okay as long as those people aren't in the government, I guess, because "if economic power is joined to political power, concentration [of power] seems almost inevitable." Some would say that concentrating power in the hands of the people (rather than, say, in the hands of a wealthy elite) is a good thing, but I guess we wouldn't want to "count noses."

[I]f economic power is kept in separate hands from political power, it can serve as a check and a counter to political power.

The force of this abstract argument can perhaps best be demonstrated by example. Let us consider first, a hypothetical example that may help to bring out the principles involved, and then some actual examples from recent experience that illustrate the way in which the market works to preserve political freedom.

One feature of a free society is surely the freedom of individuals to advocate and propagandize openly for a radical change in the structure of the society--so long as the advocacy is restricted to persuasion and does not include force or other forms of coercion. It is a mark of the political freedom of a capitalist society that men can openly advocate and work for socialism. Equally, political freedom in a socialist society would require that men be free to advocate the introduction of capitalism. How could the freedom to advocate capitalism be preserved and protected in a socialist society?

In order for men to advocate anything, they must in the first place be able to earn a living.

Yeah--good thing no one has to worry about earning a living under capitalism, as we all know from experience. "It would take an act of self-denial," Friedman continues, "whose difficulty is underlined by experience in the United States after World War II with the problem of 'security' among Federal employees, for a socialist government to permit its employees to advocate policies directly contrary to official doctrine." Yeah, it would really suck if you could get fired for activism--like for instance for supporting unionization in your workplace, which gets people (illegally) fired all the time. Worth noting also that the rate of illegal firings of pro-union employees during union election campaigns shot up dramatically under--guess who!--Ronald Reagan. Also, Milton either doesn't understand or is being deliberately dishonest about the fact that in a genuine socialist society, the "official doctrine" would be decided democratically and put up for debate; as opposed to, say, being decided by corporate elites who then intimidate employees into voting the right way by threatening to fire people if the wrong candidate wins.

Believe it or not, things are about to get stupider:

But let us suppose this act of self-denial to be achieved. For advocacy of capitalism to mean anything, the proponents must be able to finance their cause--to hold public meetings, publish pamphlets, buy radio time, issue newspapers and magazines, and so on. How could they raise the funds ? There might and probably would be men in the socialist society with large incomes, perhaps even large capital sums in the form of government bonds and the like, but these would of necessity be high public officials.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, Milton Friedman really doesn't understand how socialism works. Yes, in communist dictatorships the leaders have enjoyed a great deal of material wealth not afforded to the average person, but again that's because these countries aren't actually democratic but rather run by dictators and party bureaucracies. In an actually democratic system, why would "high government officials" be richer than the average person? That is literally the opposite of what Marx advocated.

Continuing on this blindingly stupid train of thought, Friedman writes: "The only recourse for funds would be to raise small amounts from a large number of minor officials. But this is no real answer. To tap these sources, many people would already have to be persuaded, and our whole problem is how to initiate and finance a campaign to do so." I guess we shouldn't be surprised, but apparently Milton Friedman not only doesn't understand socialism, he also doesn't understand how mass movements work at all. For one thing, they usually don't start with any idea held by one person or some tiny group of people that they have to spend money to persuade other people to support. For a movement to get off the ground, there generally has to be a lot of people who are already sympathetic to the cause or can be easily persuaded by word of mouth.

For instance, no one had to spend a bunch of money to convince people to support the Civil Rights movement. Given that African-Americans were systematically oppressed and mistreated throughout the country, no one had to put up billboards or print magazines to convince many of them (and those sympathetic to their plight) to support civil rights legislation and desegregation. These were views a lot of people already held, the question was just how to organize them into an effective movement--which, yes, may require some amount of money, but if you have a lot of people who are already sympathetic to your ideas, you can usually find ways to raise funds and get the message out, which helps you raise more funds and get the message out further, etc. But Milton has quite a different explanation for how political movements work:

Radical movements in capitalist societies...have typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals who have become persuaded--by a Frederick Vanderbilt Field, or an Anita McCormick Blaine, or a Corliss Lamont, to mention a few names recently prominent, or by a Friedrich Engels, to go farther back.

Wow, now there is an alternative history for you! The labor movement didn't succeed because of the organization and efforts of the masses, it succeeded because it was bankrolled by Friedrich Engels a la George Soros supposedly funding left-wing protests (as every far-right lunatic, including the president, believes he does). Milton Friedman literally thinks that radical movements succeed because they're astroturfed by rich people. There are no words for this. But wait--there's more!

In a capitalist society, it is only necessary to convince a few wealthy people to get funds to launch any idea, however strange, and there are many such persons, many independent foci of support. And, indeed, it is not even necessary to persuade people or financial institutions with available funds of the soundness of the ideas to be propagated. It is only necessary to persuade them that the propagation can he financially successful[.]

Wow, what a great thing! Isn't it wonderful that in a capitalist society you just have to convince some idiot with enough money to fund even the stupidest venture as long as you're sly enough to make them believe it'll make them more money? Wouldn't it be awful if the world's finite resources were under democratic control and we stupidly devoted more money toward, say, feeding the poor and curing diseases, rather than making reality shows about mentally unstable businessmen who then get elected president? Perish the thought!

"Let us stretch our imagination and suppose that a socialist government is aware of this problem and is composed of people anxious to preserve freedom," Milton the socialism expert proposes, continuing:

Could it provide the funds? Perhaps, but it is difficult to see how. It could establish a bureau for subsidizing subversive propaganda. But how could it choose whom to support? If it gave to all who asked, it would shortly find itself out of funds, for socialism cannot repeal the elementary economic law that a sufficiently high price will call forth a large supply.

A big part of the idea behind socialism is that everyone will have the resources to devote some of their time to leisure (or activism, if they so choose). Which democratic socialist is it that's proposing we don't give anyone more than they need to survive unless a government committee approves their request? Does Friedman also think that in a socialist society you have to ask the government for the money to go see a movie or buy a book or do anything other than survive? I know right-wing dolts like to say that socialism is all about turning the government into everybody's daddy or whatever, but I didn't think they believed it this literally.

"But we are not yet through," Friedman informs us (I had a bad feeling we weren't).

In a free market society, it is enough to have the funds. The suppliers of paper are as willing to sell it to the Daily Worker as to the Wall Street Journal. In a socialist society, it would not be enough to have the funds. The hypothetical supporter of capitalism would have to persuade a government factory making paper to sell to him, the government printing press to print his pamphlets, a government post office to distribute them among the people, a government agency to rent him a hall in which to talk, and so on.

So in Milton Friedman's imagined socialist society, when you go to Socialist Staples to buy a ream of paper do the clerks have to interrogate you about what you're going to print on it? And again, we have to substitute the word "government" with "worker-owned" every time it crops up in this paragraph, since socialism is about worker control of the means of production, not control by some government bureaucracy. The answer to this whole conundrum is really pretty simple: since in socialism the economy is managed democratically, a socialist society could just pass a law saying that everyone can have equal access to its resources regardless of political views, religion, race, etc. Nondiscrimination laws are already pretty common (even though Milton Friedman opposed them, it's worth noting) so there's no reason to think the same sort of thing couldn't be adopted in a socialist society.

The never-ending chapter continues:

A striking practical example of these abstract principles is the experience of Winston Churchill. From 1933 to the outbreak of World War II, Churchill was not permitted to talk over the British radio, which was, of course, a government monopoly administered by the British Broadcasting Corporation.  Here was a leading citizen of his country, a Member of Parliament, a former cabinet minister, a man who was desperately trying by every device possible to persuade his countrymen to take steps to ward off the menace of Hitler's Germany. He was not permitted to talk over the radio to the British people because the BBC was a government monopoly and his position was too "controversial".

Oh man, that would be rough to live in a society where people with controversial political views are marginalized by the media. So, in our capitalist society where the media is privately owned, let me ask this: how often do you see, say Noam Chomsky--one of the most prominent leftists in the world and a renowned academic--on CNN or MSNBC or any other major outlet like that? How many socialist opinion writers are there at the New York Times? It kinda feels like maybe capitalist media institutions also like to marginalize "controversial" opinions. Speaking of media monopolies, it's maybe worth noting that the ownership of media in the US has become increasingly concentrated over the last 20 years thanks to--you guessed it!--deregulation.

Friedman contrasts Churchill's treatment with the Hollywood blacklist, since Dalton Trumbo was still able to get employment by using a pseudonym and being a good writer; once it was discovered that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning story for the film The Brave One, Friedman says, the blacklist fell apart since it wasn't profitable to blacklist talented people because of their political views. From this he concludes,

If Hollywood and the movie industry had been government enterprises or if in England it had been a question of employment by the British Broadcasting Corporation it is difficult to believe that the "Hollywood Ten" or their equivalent would have found employment. Equally, it is difficult to believe that under those circumstances, strong proponents of individualism and private enterprise--or indeed strong proponents of any view other than the status quo--would be able to get employment.

Yeah, it is hard to imagine a government-funded media entity--say, PBS--broadcasting, for instance, a show hosted by Milton Friedman, where he advocates for free market positions. It's highly unlikely that an entity funded by the government would give a platform to someone whose whole ideology is based on shrinking the government and cutting "unnecessary" government programs. Just kidding! Friedman got a ten-part series in 1980, broadcast by none other than, yes, PBS, where he "focuses on basic principles" such as "How do markets work? Why has socialism failed? Can government help economic development?" and discusses how the United States' success has been "threatened by the tendency in the last few decades to assume that government intervention is the answer to all problems" (according to a website that bears the same name as the program). This speaks for itself.

As we mercifully approach the end of this first chapter (and I swear to you that this really has just been one chapter of the entire book), we get a few more doozies, like this one:

[A]n impersonal market separates economic activities from political views and protects men from being discriminated against in their economic activities for reasons that are irrelevant to their productivity--whether these reasons are associated with their views or their color.

That's right, capitalism cures racism now! Forget everything you've heard about that persistent racial wealth gap or the many verifiable instances of employment discrimination based on race, sexuality, gender identity, etc. (and also forget the fact that Friedman opposed any laws against such discrimination); forget that whole thing about black people not being allowed to sit at lunch counters up until the 1960s; forget everything you thought you knew, because it turns out that the free market is the answer to all of it. This book is melting my brain. And to wrap this chapter up, Milton leaves us with this tidbit:

Yet, paradoxically enough, the enemies of the free market--the Socialists and Communists--have been recruited in  disproportionate measure from these groups [African-Americans, Jews and immigrants].  Instead of recognizing that the existence of the market has protected them from the attitudes of their fellow countrymen, they mistakenly attribute the residual discrimination to the market. 

If the market really protected these groups from discrimination, then let's just say I would really, really hate to imagine what they would have gone through with no protection at all. Now please excuse me as I go treat the third-degree burns I have from this scorching hot take.

Now that we've made it to the end of that one chapter, allow me to remind you that this wasn't written by Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or some other such loudmouth imbecile, but by one of the great gurus and intellectuals behind deregulation and Reaganomics. To this day, a lot of people who support these policies view him as one of the best and smartest spokespeople their ideology has. And the sad thing is, they're probably right about that.

Owning Milton Friedman with Facts and Logic (Part One)

Socialism is making a major comeback in the U.S., as plenty of people will tell you. We've seen a surge in the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America since the 2016 election, a high-ranking Democratic incumbent toppled by a socialist challenger, and according to a Gallup poll released this August, Democrats prefer socialism to capitalism by a clear margin. But not everyone's happy--indeed, there are plenty of people armed with Margaret Thatcher quotes and "pictures of Venezuelan supermarkets" (that are actually pictures of American supermarkets) who are ready to tell you that socialism is not cool and that socialists are dumb idiots who would turn our country into the next Soviet Union.

But of course, those people are only pallid imitations of the real masters of the genre--guys like F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and, of course, Milton Friedman. For anyone unfamiliar, Milton Friedman was a champion of deregulation who served as one of Ronald Reagan's top economic advisers and helped bring us the global economic crisis we had about a decade ago. He also inspired the economic policies of the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, which were such a disaster that Pinochet ended up firing his Friedmanite economic advisers (the "Chicago boys") and nationalizing Chile's financial institutions. So you know his economic arguments have got to be good stuff.

With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to go back and look over Friedman's truly dazzling argument against socialism as expressed in the first chapter of his book Capitalism and Freedom (the full chapter can be read here). Full disclosure: I have not read the rest of this book, but I can only imagine what it's like based on this killer first chapter.

Milton Friedman, deep in thought about how to further screw up
the world economy (Picture from Wikimedia Commons)

Because there is a whole lot to unpack and all of our attention spans are only so long, I have decided to make this a two-part series rather than one single, extra-long post. Part two should be up within a few days after this post is published, so make sure to check my blog's front page for it.

Friedman starts off:

It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem; and that any kind of political arrangements can be combined with any kind of economic
arrangements. The chief contemporary manifestation of this idea is the advocacy of "democratic socialism" by many who condemn out of hand the restrictions on individual freedom imposed by "totalitarian socialism" in Russia, and who are persuaded that it is possible for a country to adopt the essential features of Russian economic arrangements and yet to ensure individual freedom through political arrangements.

I'm willing to bet that very few democratic socialist would agree that they're advocating "for a country to adopt the essential features of [Soviet] economic arrangements." Democratic socialism's entire point is democratic control of the economy, whereas in the USSR the economy was managed by a party bureaucracy with no meaningful democratic control. Lenin actually undermined workers' control of the economy (which he basically acknowledged) and strikes were illegal under Soviet law, so the differences between say, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg were definitely not just based on questions of "individual freedom."

In literally the next sentence, we get this gem: "The thesis of this chapter is that such a view is a delusion, that there is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain combinations of political and economic arrangements are  possible, and that in particular, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom." So the ideology that supports workers controlling the economy through--wait for it--democracy, is not democratic, because it doesn't support "individual freedom." As Friedman probably knew, democracy isn't about individual freedom, it's about rule of the people, but given that his ideology is extremely antidemocratic it's not surprising he would change the definition of the word "democracy".

Things start to get really good when we begin to delve into Friedman's idea of individual liberty, though. He writes:

The citizen of Great Britain, who after World War II was not permitted to spend his vacation in the United States because of exchange control, was being deprived of an essential freedom no less than the citizen of the United States, who was denied the opportunity to spend his vacation in Russia because of his political views. The one was ostensibly an economic limitation on freedom and the other a political limitation, yet there is no essential difference between the two. 

Yes, that crucial liberty to take a vacation overseas--good thing everyone can afford to do that under capitalism! I also seem to remember a certain capitalist country not letting people vacation in Cuba, but somehow that doesn't seem to come up here.

Let's learn more about freedom from Uncle Milty:

The citizen of the United States who is compelled by law to devote something like 10 per cent of his income to the purchase of a particular kind of retirement contract, administered by the government, is being deprived of a corresponding part of his personal freedom...True, the number of citizens who regard compulsory old age insurance as a deprivation of  freedom may be few, but the believer in freedom has never counted noses. 

Yeah, since when do the beliefs of a majority of the people matter for democracy? And again, somehow all the people living in poverty and being paid starvation wages under capitalism don't come up as infringements on freedom anywhere in this chapter--we're too busy focusing on the real issues like government retirement contracts and international vacations. But believe it or not, things are about to get even better.

A citizen of the United States who under the laws of various states is not free to follow the occupation of his own choosing unless he can get a license for it, is likewise being deprived of an essential part of his freedom. So is the man who would like to exchange some of his goods with, say, a Swiss for a watch but is prevented from doing so by a quota. So also is the Californian who was thrown into jail for selling Alka Seltzer at a price below that set by the manufacturer under so-called "fair trade" laws. So also is the farmer who cannot grow the amount of wheat he wants. 

So because I can't just be, say, a heart surgeon without a medical license, I'm being deprived of "an essential part of [my] freedom." Milton Friedman's vision of society is apparently a world where there are just Lucy van Pelt-style booths on every sidewalk for if you need a psychiatrist, or a lawyer, or a pharmacist, because why wouldn't we want just anybody to be able to market their skills in one of those fields? How about driver's licenses, one has to wonder--are those another infringement on essential liberty? As for the Alka Seltzer seller he mentions, not being able to sell a product at a price lower than a limit set by a manufacturer seems like it has more to do with capitalism than socialism. But Milton Friedman believes in that mythical form of capitalism where the market stays free and unregulated, not that awful crony capitalism, which just happens to be the real-life result of his ideas. And on that topic:

The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.

Don't you love living under capitalism, where rich people and big business have absolutely no influence on politics? It's a good thing we don't live in a system where the average person's political opinions have basically no influence on public policy or anything like that--good job, capitalism!

"I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity," Friedman wisely tells us right afterward. Funny how the freest countries now seem to have highly regulated economies and generous social services--not exactly what's being promoted here. That's not even to get into libertarian socialist societies like revolutionary Catalonia, Makhnovia, and modern-day Rojava, which are also a pretty strong rebuttal.

From here, our friend Milton starts to explore the history of freedom and the free market, with results that are just fascinating.

History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. Fascist Italy and Fascist Spain, Germany at various times in the last seventy years, Japan before World Wars I and II, tzarist Russia in the decades before World War I--are all societies that cannot conceivably be described as politically free. Yet, in each, private enterprise was the dominant form of economic organization. It is therefore clearly possible to have economic arrangements that are fundamentally capitalist and political arrangements that are not free.

Even in those societies, the citizenry had a good deal more freedom than citizens of a modern totalitarian state like Russia or Nazi Germany, in which economic totalitarianism is combined with political totalitarianism. Even in Russia under the Tzars, it was possible for some citizens, under some circumstances, to change their jobs without getting permission from political authority because capitalism and the existence of private property provided some check to the centralized power of the state.

Imperial Russia might have had a life expectancy of somewhere between 20 and 35 and a literacy rate of about one in four, but things weren't all bad, I guess. He continues, "The relation between political and economic freedom is complex and by no means unilateral. In the early nineteenth century...There was a large measure of political reform that was accompanied by economic reform in the direction of a great deal of laissez faire. An enormous increase in the well-being of the masses followed this change in economic arrangements." Nice of Friedman to at least pretend to care about the well-being of "the masses" even if his economic ideas have actually been terrible for them.

"The triumph of Benthamite liberalism in nineteenth-century England was followed by a reaction toward increasing intervention by government in economic affairs. This tendency to collectivism was greatly accelerated, both in England and elsewhere, by the two World Wars. Welfare rather than freedom became the dominant note in democratic countries," our champion of the masses continues. What an awful thought, that people might value the right to not die from treatable diseases or languish in poverty over such crucial freedoms as the right to take an overseas vacation or practice medicine without a license. "Recognizing the implicit threat to individualism, the intellectual descendants of the Philosophical Radicals--Dicey, Mises, Hayek, and Simons, to mention only a few--feared that a continued movement toward centralized control of economic activity would prove The Road to Serfdom, as Hayek entitled his penetrating analysis of the process." For anyone curious, Hayek also happened to be a notable stan of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship. Funny how that works.

Skipping ahead a bit, we come to this passage:

Even in relatively backward societies, extensive division of labor and specialization of function is required to make effective use of available resources. In advanced societies, the scale on which coordination is needed, to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by modern science and technology, is enormously greater. Literally millions of people are involved in providing one another with their daily bread, let alone with their yearly automobiles. The challenge to the believer in liberty is to reconcile this widespread interdependence with individual freedom.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion--the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals--the technique of the market place.

The possibility of co-ordination through voluntary co-operation rests on the elementary--yet frequently denied--proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the transaction is bi-laterally voluntary and informed. [Italics in this passage and all others from the book are in the the original text.]

Uh-huh, and how voluntary is it when people accept badly paying jobs because the alternative is to be homeless? The idea that an agreement is truly voluntary when it's between a rich corporation and someone whose only alternative is to beg for a living is a bad joke, but also one that libertarianism is based on, so no surprises here.

Exchange can therefore bring about co-ordination without coercion. [Again, only if we accept that someone who takes a low-paying job to avoid starving to death isn't being coerced.] A working model of a society organized through voluntary exchange is a free private enterprise exchange economy--what we have been calling competitive capitalism.

In its simplest form, such a society consists of a number of independent households--a collection of Robinson Crusoes, as it were. Each household uses the resources it controls to produce goods and services that it exchanges for goods and services produced by other households, on terms mutually acceptable to the two parties to the bargain. It is thereby enabled to satisfy its wants indirectly by producing goods and services for others, rather than directly by producing goods for its own immediate use. The incentive for adopting this indirect route is, of course, the increased product made possible by division of labor and specialization of function. Since the household always has the alternative of producing directly for itself, it need not enter into any exchange unless it benefits from it. Hence, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit from it. Co-operation is thereby achieved without coercion.

This isn't a description of capitalism. Capitalism is based on wage labor, meaning that the owners of the means of production hire workers to do the actual labor and then the owners sell their goods or services at a profit--so the workers don't get to keep the full fruits of their labor, which is exactly why it's been criticized over and over again by socialists. Everyone is this situation Friedman laid out owns the product they produce and gets to decide what to do with it, and the workers (the households) own and manage the means of production--meaning that Friedman has actually just described a primitive form of socialism. Whatever you think about free markets and free exchange, they're not the same thing as capitalism--but because it would be a lot harder to justify the actual defining characteristic of capitalism (exploitation of labor), Friedman has invented a scenario that has pretty much nothing in common with how capitalism works in the real world.

Friedman's weak attempt to justify the realities of capitalism comes next: "Specialization of function and division of labor would not go far if the ultimate productive unit were the household. In a modern society, we have gone much farther. We have introduced enterprises which are intermediaries between individuals in their capacities as suppliers of service and as purchasers of goods." Thank God for those handy "intermediaries" that let investors and business owners get rich as their employees rely on food stamps to survive. What would we do without them?

Don't worry, though--Uncle Milty has the perfect Free Market solution for beleaguered employees: "The employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work[.]" So if your employer has you working in unsafe conditions for starvation wages, no problem--just quit your job! Checkmate, socialists.

This seems like as good a point as any to wrap up this first installment. Make sure to check back soon for the next one, where Friedman's arguments get a lot more ridiculous than anything we've seen so far. Don't miss it!

Midterm Mania

November 7, 2018

The great midterm battle-pageant of 2018 is coming to a close, but not without gruesome casualty figures on all sides involved. It has been a long and ugly affair, with no one able to claim a Total Victory now that it is (almost) all said and done. So it's on to the next big rumble as the media turns its sights to 2020, and an election that's looking sure to be a bruiser, not to mention one of the most surreal and weirdest spectacles in modern American history. But we'll save that for later.

Election day got off to a weird start for me, as I stumbled on a story about Harvard astronomers speculating that an "interstellar object" detected last year could actually be some kind of alien spacecraft. "Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that 'Oumuamua is a light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment," the astronomers wrote. It's weird to see something like that in a CNN article and not in some big-budget sci-fi flick, but then again nothing seems that weird anymore. If some advanced alien race were to stumble upon Earth, I suppose it's an open question whether they would even bother to make contact or just obliterate it at first sight to preemptively eliminate any threat its dumb, hairless monkey inhabitants might pose, either through malice or sheer stupidity. And if they chose to enslave us instead, it could well be an improvement.

Enough with that. We're here to talk about midterms. Starting next year, the Democrats are in charge of the House, which they won fair and square despite merciless gerrymandering by their opponents. So the next two years will almost certainly make the last two look dull and tepid and comparison. It will be a constant circus, like some manic combination of the Watergate years and a Tom and Jerry cartoon, as the Democrats launch investigations on multiple fronts and issue subpoena after subpoena and the slobbering orangutan president shrieks about voter fraud and "illegals." He's already started with it, accusing CNN of "voter suppression" at a press conference today. He's like a child that hears a word used and knows it's bad but doesn't quite grasp what it means, and then turns around and uses it anyway.

Nancy Pelosi took the Democratic victory as an opportunity to prattle on about a "bipartisan market of ideas that makes our democracy strong," a phrase so hacky it could have been spat out by a computer program designed to string the most tired political cliches into quasi-coherent sentences. The idea of Nancy Pelosi as speaker once more is a bad side-effect of this otherwise good news, like waking up after a night of heavy drinking to find you've mysteriously traveled back in time by about ten years or so. There could hardly be a weirder or more off-putting anachronism as Speaker of the House if the Democrats elected a fax machine or a Civil War musket--and no, that is not a comment on her age, merely her brand of politics. But it seems all but sure she's got the job, and the Democratic leadership is not exactly full of appealing alternatives.

Meanwhile, the Republicans managed to expand their majority in the Senate--the house of Congress devoted to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," in James Madison's words. To give the wealthy elite greater representation in the government than a truly democratic system would allow. This is the second consecutive election where Republicans' asses have been saved by a ridiculous and antiquated element of the government--last time it was the Electoral College, as we all remember. The GOP managed to stomp several Democratic incumbents in red-leaning states, though I'm not sorry to see many of them go--border wall-supporter Joe Donnelly in Indiana, for instance, or Claire McCaskill, who recently went after "crazy Democrats" in a sad attempt to pander to the right. Their fate is well-deserved and they will not be missed by anyone. Let their tales be a reminder of the futility of Democrats tacking right--though the reelection of arch-scumbag Joe Manchin is a rude defiance of that rule.

The loss of Andrew Gillum in Florida was much more disheartening, despite some of his unimpressive pandering in the general election season. Gillum was a genuine progressive, if a flawed one, and Ron DeSantis is a vile little creep. Somewhat mystifyingly, despite electing Republicans for governor and senator, though, the voters of Florida approved an amendment to give voting rights to felons, which is a welcome repeal of a Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement tactic--and one of the other assorted pieces of good news.

There were quite a few of those--Colorado banned prison slavery and elected an openly gay governor, two Muslim women and a Native American lesbian woman were elected to Congress, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Indeed, a record number of women were elected to the House--and a crypto-Nazi punk named Kris Kobach went down in flames in Kansas. Not to get sappy or start claiming that Trump doesn't represent "America's Values"--he represents the values of a many Americans, and values with a long and ugly history in America--but it seems clear that despite the political power the ultra-reactionary right wields, the American population is continuing to progress when it comes to marginalized groups like women, people of color and LGBT+ people. The left is still winning the Culture War, and it does occasionally translate into meaningful political successes.

The aftermath of the midterms has already begun, with Trump lashing out at Jim Acosta and firing Jeff Sessions, his elfen-faced white supremacist Attorney General, and replacing him with some stooge named Matthew Whitaker. And Whitaker is now taking control of the Russia investigation from Rod Rosenstein, another target of Trump's contempt. Well, Sessions got exactly the exit he deserved, and I will never stop taking joy in it when Trump turns on his erstwhile supporters with all his rabid, apelike fury. But firing Sessions may have just been a prelude to eliminating his archnemesis Robert Mueller, which would make things very interesting, particularly with an incoming Democratic House.

And so the soap opera goes on.

Free Speech Revisited

The infamous Antifa--bane of the existence of New York Times opinion writers everywhere (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Last year, I published a post on free speech that I recently reread. Not surprisingly, I found that certain parts of it seem less convincing to me than they did back then, because over the course of the last year or so my thinking about freedom of speech has honestly shifted a lot. In my post last year, I took a pretty strong stance in favor of freedom of speech, and made a lot of arguments that are pretty typical in terms of what you'll hear from people who oppose restrictions on speech--some of them I still think hold up, some not so much. So I wanted to reexamine the issue here and talk about how my thinking has changed, and how it hasn't.

Let's start with how it's changed. In my original post I wrote the following:

There is...a moral question to address: is responding to words with force really justified? The rhyme we always use on children, "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me," is an oversimplification, of course, but it isn't without a great deal of truth. Fining or imprisoning a person damages them in a tangible way; words do not. Again, I am fully aware of the emotional distress words can cause, but trying to create a world in which no one is ever upset by anything anyone else says is neither practical nor desirable.

This is definitely one of the points I was least impressed with when I recently reread the post. Being exposed to hate speech does, indeed, lead to harms as tangible as any. In fact, earlier in the same piece I even quoted this from an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times:

Racist hate speech has been linked to cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and requires complex coping strategies. Exposure to racial slurs also diminishes academic performance. Women subjected to sexualized speech may develop a phenomenon of “self-objectification,” which is associated with eating disorders. 

These negative physical and mental health outcomes — which embody the historical roots of race and gender oppression — mean that hate speech is not “just speech.” Hate speech is doing something. It results in tangible harms that are serious in and of themselves and that collectively amount to the harm of subordination. The harm of perpetuating discrimination. The harm of creating inequality.

The idea that hate speech causes no "tangible harm" is absurd and I was obviously trying to overlook evidence that contradicted what I wanted to believe, relying on the dumb and weak argument that because being exposed to hateful speech doesn't leave a bruise or reduce the amount of money in your bank account, that means the harm it causes doesn't really count. Even though I made an attempt to be sensitive, I ultimately ended up reducing the real negative effects on mental and even physical health that hate speech has to "hurt feelings," which is particularly indefensible. It's the same argument that far-right shitheads like Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos make, fundamentally.

It also overlooks the very real role of propaganda in helping extremely destructive movements gain political power. Certainly the right to freedom of speech--and the closely related right to freedom of assembly--are important for fascist and other far-right parties and organizations to build support and work their way up to the highest levels of government. These political factions can end up killing large numbers of people when they attain power, and the role of propaganda, rallies, marches etc. in that rise to power is far from negligible. Even if the connection between cause and effect isn't as readily obvious or immediate as, say, the connection between someone punching another person in the face and the second person getting a black eye, it's still very real. So, like a lot of stuff we tell kids, "sticks and stones..." is just another nugget of bullshit that should be disregarded by anyone over the age of sixteen or so.

The next paragraph has not held up much better in my view:

Facing offensive speech head-on offers a clarity that censorship cannot: it allows us to figure out why these utterances are so repulsive to us, rather than simply attacking those who make them. Further, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example." If the government punishes people for their speech, does it not encourage intolerance and force over rational debate?

Nobody needs to hear racial slurs or Nazi propaganda to know they're opposed to it and understand why they're opposed to it, and the idea that banning genuine hate speech would push us toward some point where we're unable to have a discussion that doesn't break out into a fistfight is beyond stupid--not to mention disproven by the countries that actually have hate speech laws and still manage to have intelligent discussions free of violence or irrational intolerance.

In general, a lot of my argument in favor of free speech is premised on the idea that Saner Heads Will Prevail--that the most intelligent and rational arguments will win out when all perspectives are given a fair hearing. History has shown over and over again that this is not how things work, and it's delusional to cling to that idea when Donald Trump managed to get elected president. And rational arguments do nothing to alleviate the real damage done to people who are exposed to hate speech.

As the first paragraph I quoted indicates, I also clung to the idea that people have a moral right to say what they want--that it is inherently Wrong and Bad to try to shut down any speech, regardless of how reprehensible it is. I no longer stand by this at all. Speech that is designed to dehumanize other people is in no way deserving of tolerance of any sort, and political propaganda that furthers the goals of destructive movements isn't either. We are not morally obligated to allow people to utter or publish speech that falls into these categories, and there's nothing inherently immoral, in my opinion, in preventing them from doing so or punishing them for doing so (depending on how these things are done, of course).

I also fell into the trap of seeing free speech as a good in and of itself--an approach that's pushed heavily in the United States. We are told that it is taking the moral high ground to let Nazis march in a Jewish neighborhood and allow the Klan to hold rallies (and even provide police protection for such assemblies, lest anyone try to disrupt them with violence). That's how I used to think, for sure, but not anymore. The idea that giving fascists and racists the right to spread their propaganda and organize to further their cause is somehow noble or good is widely held, but I can't see any reason we should continue to believe it. Are we supposed to think that we're not entitled to express our own views unless we give that same right to people whose goal is to terrorize racial and ethnic minorities? I'm pretty comfortable with the principle that people who want to commit genocides, and hope to use speech to further that cause, are no longer entitled to freedom of speech.

So, that's how my opinion has changed: I no longer believe that we have any moral imperative to respect others' right to free speech, when those others are racists, Nazis, Klansmen, etc., who are using that right to further their evil causes or insult and dehumanize vulnerable groups--and I no longer think that allowing these voices to be heard is in and of itself a valuable thing. No--when bigots are prevented from making their bigotry heard, that is a good thing, in my opinion. And, to the extent that hate speech laws actually discourage real hate speech (i.e. speech designed to dehumanize and attack vulnerable groups) and political propaganda for destructive ideologies such as Nazism and racism, hate speech laws are good. Obviously, these views are a radical departure from the ones I expressed in July of last year, which is the result of a lot of contemplation and internal debate on my part.

So, how have my views stayed the same? Well, obviously on a moral and theoretical level they have changed completely--but when it comes to the practical arguments my old blog post makes, I think they largely hold up. For instance:

If nothing else, pure self-interest should be a motivating factor for the support of freedom of speech...Some leftists may be thrilled with France's anti-hate speech laws, but they may be less thrilled with France's crackdown on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement under the pretense that it is hate speech. Not surprisingly, giving those in power permission to censor certain viewpoints means they are likely to use that power to censor the viewpoints they dislike...As a leftist, I have to note that it is stunningly shortsighted of my fellow leftists to support giving the government the power of censorship while expecting it not to be used against us.

This I still wholeheartedly believe. Indeed, any leftist wanting to give the US government greater power to punish speech it doesn't like must be insane, if not downright suicidal. The example I cited about BDS in France is just one illustration of how hate speech laws are likely to backfire against the left. And, as I noted earlier in the post, "in point of fact, hate speech restrictions do not seem to have been especially effective at squelching out fascism and racism, given the rise of far-right parties across Europe." For this reason, hate speech laws still strike me as a bad idea--while they surely have some positive effects, the potential for abuse is high, and ultimately they don't seem to be all that effective in actually eliminating hate. Or even keeping it from becoming a major political force, for that matter. The cons seem to outweigh the pros, in my opinion, particularly in a country like the US where the government has a long history of attacking left-wing movements. None of the rebuttals to this argument that I've heard or seen have come close to being convincing.

It also still strikes me as generally a bad idea to try to chase objectionable speakers off of college campuses or prevent them from speaking. It always seems to fuel the anti-PC hysteria and result in more tedious articles from Jonathan Chait and Bari Weiss about the dangers of the illiberal left--and, given the media attention it draws, it's hardly effective in actually denying the speaker themselves a platform. Of course, there are considerations that should come into account when deciding whether someone should be allowed to speak on campus--if they're likely to use their platform to make students less safe, for instance by targeting and harassing a transgender students like Milo Yiannopoulos did; or if they're likely attract dangerous and violent people to the campus and the area around it, like Richard Spencer did. But when it comes to a more "academically" racist old coot like Charles Murray, or some idiot troll like Christina Hoff Sommers, it's probably best to just ignore them, or to show up and protest but keep it "civil." It's not that they deserve it, it's just a matter of optics.

So, what about antifa, and black bloc-style tactics against far-right marches and rallies? I spoke out against them in my previous post. I guess you could say my feelings are pretty mixed. I absolutely value antifa, and I don't think it's fair to reduce their movement to just punching Nazis. It's important to show up and confront racists and fascists--and given that their ideologies are based on violence, it's important to be ready to respond in kind if violence breaks out. And I think that being an active Nazi, or a white nationalist, or whatever, absolutely means you deserve to get beaten up. But, yeah, black-masked anarchists crashing through police barricades and beating people with clubs or whatever probably is not great optics for the left. And while it might make those on the far right less likely to hold assemblies (a good thing), I'm not sure how much it does to actually defeat the far right politically given that we live in the age of the Internet--which makes it pretty easy to spread ideas with no marches or rallies necessary--and that the people who faithfully vote Republican in every election are frankly a much bigger threat to the world than the dorks who show up for alt-right rallies. But I've already changed my mind on a lot of things, and maybe my mind will change about this too.

So I guess from a practical standpoint, my thinking on free speech hasn't changed much. As distasteful as it is to me, even the ACLU's practice of defending Nazis' right to free speech may be valuable in that it helps discourage and prevent any attempts by the government to restrict speech--and it's no secret that if the government got free rein to crack down on speech they don't like, they'd be using that power against the left and not just the far right. But a lot of the more theoretical or moral arguments in favor of free speech ring completely hollow to me--including the ones I made just last year. It was a lot easier, to be frank, when I could wholeheartedly embrace the cause of free speech--and it would probably be easier now if I could believe that hate speech laws and beating up Nazis were completely productive approaches. But I can at least know that my beliefs now are the result of a more honest examination than the ones I held when I wrote my blog post last year, and for that reason I wanted to put them out there.

Dear Liberals: Republicans Aren't Your Friends

By the time I've published this, Brett Kavanaugh will probably have been confirmed to the Supreme Court. This is bad news for many women, labor unions and a lot of other people, but pretty good news for Clarence Thomas, who's now only the second-biggest sex creep out of the nine justices. The final vote hasn't happened yet as of my writing these words, but every Republican senator except Lisa Murkowski has come out in support of Bart O'Kavanaugh, and all of them (again except Murkowksi) voted to proceed with his nomination. This is after Jeff Flake and Susan Collins both made a big show out of being undecided and supporting an FBI investigation. Once the FBI had completed an extremely half-assed investigation, they both decided that was good enough and they could now support the Kav without shattering their image as independent-minded, post-partisan American Heroes.

Which leads me to the main thrust of this blog post. I want to address a misconception that I see among a lot of liberals. In particular, older liberals seem to cling to it. So to any liberals who are reading this, let me say something extremely simple, but equally important, which is this: Republicans are not your friends. I don't mean that you shouldn't be friends with regular people who happen to be registered Republicans, I mean the Republicans in Congress and in the media. They are not your friends. They are your enemies, and the enemies of any positive future for the country and the world.

Sen. Jeff Flake (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Now--if you're a liberal--this might seem obvious. You're probably thinking of guys like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and other such walking piles of trash. That's not who I'm talking about. Of course, everything I said above applies to them, but they're not the ones I'm writing this post about. I'm talking about the assholes like to pretend they're Very Upset about Trump's lack of decor when he tweets something stupid but then turn around and help him actively screw over millions of people. These are people like Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, the late John McCain (as previously discussed) and of course the aptly named Jeff Flake.

Let us keep in mind, for starters, that every Republican senator except Lisa Murkowski supports Brett Kavanaugh even after multiple women have very credibly accused him of sexual assault. And while, yes, Murkowksi deserves a very small amount of credit for coming out against the Kavster, let's not forget she voted to put Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, and that his vote was crucial in the Janus decision (which said public sector employees can't be required to contribute to the unions that represent their interests), the decision to uphold Trump's travel ban, and doubtless will also be a deciding vote for many other horrible decisions that make life worse for large numbers of people.

Yes, some of the "moderate" Republicans have defected from the party line at crucial moments, such as during the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but they don't deserve brownie points for doing the right thing every once in a while when the rest of the time they do things that make life harder and more miserable for vast numbers of people. If they really wanted to act as a check against Trump, they could become independents, or Democrats, or at least stop supporting the worst and most destructive things he does.

The point of this, by the way, isn't about how they are as people--whether they're doing what they think is right, and mean well, and are sincere. There's a strong case to be made that Jeff Flake and Susan Collins are grandstanding frauds who want to be lauded by the media and by Democrats while quietly enabling Trump's agenda, but that's not the point. Even if they and the other Trump-critical Republicans are completely sincere and well-intentioned, it only shows their view of the world is dangerous and delusional in the extreme and that they are in no way useful allies.

While we're at it, all of this also applies to #Resistance heroes like David Frum and Bill Kristol, who have won plaudits by reinventing themselves as anti-Trump Republicans. These guys, granted, might be more genuinely anti-Trump than Flake et al., but their ideas are still absolutely awful. Both Kristol and Frum continue to defend the Iraq War, the worst war crime of the twenty-first century so far and an atrocity that killed an estimated several hundred thousand people. Even Trump has said the Iraq War was a terrible idea.

You might be tempted to respond at this point by quoting Frederick Douglass: "I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong." Or to point out that Hitler was able to rise to power partially because of how divided the opposition was. To which I say: yeah, if any of these jerks actually offer some useful form of resistance to Trump, support them in that particular instance. If they're actually doing something that might make the world a better place, join them in that particular endeavor. But supporting them when they actually do something good doesn't mean you have to heap praise on them for their courageous opposition to Trump, and their condemnations of Trump are cheap and useless. No one cares when Jeff Flake whines about Trump saying a mean thing or David Frum writes a piece saying that he's just like Fredo Corleone. These things change exactly zero people's minds and effect no change whatsoever. Neither deserves praise when their authors are so completely awful in every other respect.

So, please: stop praising these people. Stop treating them as some kind of antidote to Trump. Their ideology helped lead to Trump and they have absolutely nothing to offer. They are not useful as allies. One of the problems Hillary Clinton experienced in 2016 was a major decline in minority turnout. Is allying with "moderate" Republicans the key to bringing black and Hispanic voters back to the polls? Will it help turn out young voters, do you think? These people are clinging to some pre-Trump conservatism that has been soundly defeated in their own party--Republicans overwhelmingly approve of Trump's performance as president. There is no actual base for their ideas.

On the other hand, there is a real surge that we're seeing on the left, with incumbent Democrats being unseated by upstart progressive challengers, widespread support for Medicare-for-All, and a surge in membership for the Democratic Socialists of America. These are the people to pay attention to if you care about bringing down Trump. Maybe you don't agree with all the ideas that some of the more left-leaning segments of the population hold, but you have no excuse for refusing to ally with them if you've been drooling over every Republican that coughs up some lame criticism of Trump.

On McCain's Legacy

John McCain is dead. The fawning commentary--that he was a war hero, a patriot, a statesman--has already begun as I start to write this post, on the day of his death. I have no desire to dance on the man's grave, but when many obituaries will be falling over themselves to praise him, or at least portray him on his own terms, I think it's important to try to take a more sober look at his legacy, which is what I intend to do here. And while I'm in no mood to celebrate McCain's ugly death from aggressive brain cancer, that doesn't change the fact that he leaves behind a legacy that's, on the whole, nothing to laud.

John McCain (photo credit Dan Raustadt)

Let's start with his time in the military, which has gotten him almost unanimously praised as a hero. McCain volunteered to take part in that Vietnam War, an enormously destructive conflict that was waged to prop up US-backed regimes in South Vietnam and keep the country from unifying under a Communist government, as many people on both sides of the border wanted (and as ultimately happened). He served as a bomber pilot and took part in Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombardment campaign against North Vietnam that killed tens of thousands of civilians, aiming, among other things, to "[impair] North Vietnam’s capacity to continue as an industrially viable state." Accordingly, when he was shot down McCain was on his way to bomb a power plant in "a heavily populated part of Hanoi," to use his own words. McCain also notes that he had been disenchanted that his civilian commanders were so restrictive about what targets they would allow him and his fellow pilots to bomb.

After being shot down, McCain was held captive for years and tortured, going through suffering that no human being should have to endure. At one point he understandably broke and made a forced confession, which the North Vietnamese used in a propaganda broadcast, but he often refused to cooperate with his captors. I suppose perhaps if you view the Vietnam War as some noble struggle on behalf of the freedom of the Vietnamese people, all of this is heroic enough. I personally don't, and McCain's decision to fight in the Vietnam War and enthusiasm for bombing North Vietnam seem lamentable, not heroic, to me. Noam Chomsky addressed the point in 2008, when McCain was running for president:

Let’s imagine that, say, in Russia now someone is running for office who was a pilot in the invasion of Afghanistan and was shot down while he was bombing heavily populated urban areas in Kabul, civilian areas, and was then tortured by Reagan’s freedom fighters. We should sympathize with him for his fate at the hands of the people who tortured him. But would we call him a war hero and a specialist on national security? How does that make you a hero and a specialist on national security? On the other hand, that’s exactly what’s being done with McCain. His expertise in national security is precisely that. But you can’t raise that matter here, because the jingoism and the commitment to the nobility of our military efforts is so high across the spectrum that you can’t bring it up.

Decades after his imprisonment, as he ran for president in 2000, McCain said of his captors that "I hate the gooks," using an anti-Asian ethnic slur that's long been popular in the military as a way to dehumanize the natives of countries that are being targeted. When challenged on it he stated that "I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people" before backing down and apologizing in the face of strong, and warranted, criticism.

It is worth noting that McCain refused early release during his time as POW because he didn't want to be allowed to go home before the other POWs who had been there longer had the same opportunity
(and because he didn't want to give the North Vietnamese a PR coup). Noble, and certainly the strongest argument for McCain to be considered a hero. Would I do the same? Would you? I don't know. These are fair questions. But for me and many others, the reality of McCain's military career and the war he chose to be part of are far too complex for the words "war hero" to accurately convey.

While it hasn't earned him the same acclamation as his time in the military, McCain's political career has also been widely praised, even by those who disagree with him--he was a maverick, they say, a man who stood for principles over party. That's how he presented himself for sure--he was willing to speak when many other members of his party stayed silent or even openly disagreed with what he said. But as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words, and unfortunately McCain's actions often fell short of his high-flung rhetoric.

Let's take the issue of torture. Unlike many other Republicans, McCain decried waterboarding as torture and called for an end to its use. Admirable enough. But when push came to shove, he abandoned what he'd said and backed down from doing anything that would actually stop the CIA's use of torture, ultimately only supporting an amendment that said the military couldn't use interrogation techniques that weren't in the Army Field Manual. When a later bill was put forward that would have applied the same rules to the CIA, McCain voted against it and called on Bush to veto it. Further, he helped pass legislation that protected torturers from prosecution, despite his pronouncement that waterboarding was illegal. Years later he would urge the Senate to reject Gina Haspel for the position of CIA director given her involvement in the use of torture, but as Vox correctly notes, by then it was too little, too late.

This behavior is a pattern for him. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair note a similar example in a 1999 article for Counterpunch:

McCain drew enthusiastic plaudits...when he rose in the Senate chamber to denounce the[ ]insertion of $200 million worth of pork in the military construction portion of the defense authorisation bill. Eloquently, he spoke of the 11,200 service families on food stamps, the lack of modern weapons supplied to the military, the declining levels of readiness in the armed forces. Bravely, he laid the blame at the doors of his colleagues: “I could find only one commonality to these projects, and that is that 90 percent of them happened to be in the state or districts of members of the Appropriations Committees.” Sternly, in tones befitting a Cato or a Cicero, the senator urged his colleagues to ponder their sacred duty to uphold the defense of the Republic rather than frittering away the public purse on such frivolous expenditure: “We live in a[ ]very dangerous world. We will have some serious foreign policy crises. I am not sure we have the military that is capable of meeting some of these foreseeable threats, but I know that what we are doing with this $200 million will not do a single thing to improve our ability to meet that threat.” 

In the gallery, partisans of pork-free spending silently cheered while those who hoped to profit from portions of the $200 million gnashed their teeth in chagrin. Yet, such emotions were misplaced on either side. This was vintage McCain. Had he wished to follow words with deeds, he could have called for a roll-call on the items he had just denounced so fervently. That way the looters and gougers would have had to place their infamy on the record. But, no, McCain simply sat down and allowed the offending expenditure to be authorised in the anonymous babble of a voice vote (“All those in favor say Aye”). Had McCain really had the courage of his alleged convictions he could have filibustered the entire $250 billion authorisation bill, but, inevitably, no such bravery was in evidence. Instead, when the $250 billion finally came to a vote, he...voted for it.

And, despite his reputation for being independent-minded, McCain played the role of an accomplice in the Republican Party's shift toward barely disguised fascism. His choice of Sarah Palin helped pave the way for Donald Trump's presidency, and his campaign cranked out dishonest attacks on Obama--that he had been closely associated with "terrorist" Bill Ayers--that helped set a tone for the deranged cries of "socialism!" and "communism!" from Tea Party chuds in the years to follow. Even the milquetoast centrist "fact-checker" organization PolitiFact denounced the McCain campaign's allegation that Obama and Ayers "ran a radical education foundation together:"

This attack is false, but it's more than that – it's malicious. It unfairly tars not just Obama, but all the other prominent, well-respected Chicagoans who also volunteered their time to the foundation. They came from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, and there's ample evidence their mission was nothing more than improving ailing public schools in Chicago. Yet in the heat of a political campaign they have been accused of financing radicalism.

And lest we forget--it was over two years ago, which might as well be two hundred years given how politics has been recently--McCain endorsed Trump for president in May of 2016, after Trump had called Mexicans rapists, proposed banning Muslims from entering the US, said we should kill the entire families of terrorists, and, of course, made derogatory comments about John McCain himself. He only revoked his endorsement after the Access Hollywood tape came to light--once again, too little, too late.

Accordingly, despite (as always) having plenty to say in criticism of Donald Trump, McCain has done little to actually oppose him. He voted with him over 80% of the time, supporting his awful nominees such as Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, and Kirstjen Nielsen. He also voted to support the Senate version of the disastrous tax "reform" passed last year (he ultimately missed the vote on the final version of the bill due to his illness). Of Trump's early cabinet selections McCain remarked "I couldn't have picked a better team.

And I would be remiss not to mention McCain's role as one of the Senate's biggest warmongers, from joking about "that old Beach Boys song, 'Bomb Iran'" on the campaign trail during his 2008 run for president, to his call last year to send more troops to Afghanistan after over a decade and a half of war, to his years-long advocacy of major intervention in Syria, it's largely accurate to say he never met a war he didn't like. His admission in a recently released memoir that the Iraq War was "a mistake" after steadfastly defending it for years is--yet again--too little, too late.

Such is the legacy of John McCain. He had his moments, one might say, if one was feeling particularly generous--his support for campaign finance reform, his vote against the "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act, his opposition to Gina Haspel's nomination. But on the whole he hardly showcased the degree of heroism and integrity he's been so widely credited with. After traveling with the McCain campaign in 2000, the writer David Foster Wallace remarked that "It feels impossible, in February 2000, to tell whether John McCain is a real leader or merely a very talented political salesman, an entrepreneur who’s seen a new market-niche and devised a way to fill it." Some eighteen and a half years later, the answer is somewhat less elusive.

The Brain Is Much More Important

They say the infamous gangster Al Capone had the mind of a seven-year-old child when he was paroled. Syphilis had eaten away his mental capacities to the point where he spent the last years obsessed with imagined menaces--Communists, as well as his old rival Bugs Moran, who he became convinced was trying to kill him--even though Moran was holed up in some Ohio prison by that point. Yes, the deterioration of the human mind can be a fascinating thing to behold. Instead of quietly burning out like a dying fire, it can spin out of control before one final, irreversible implosion. There is a reason that madness has fascinated playwrights, philosophers and other thinkers for many generations.

Mark Wilson/Zuma Press

So now we come to the president. Speculation about his mental state is certainly nothing new, and we have no need to try to figure out the causes. Dementia? Alzheimer's, like Reagan before him? Just stress from being the most powerful man on the planet? Leave it to the experts to try to figure that out, but the point is something is up with the man. He has always been a sickening boil on the American Dream, a man who represents everything twisted and evil in the national spirit. But now he's a bloated self-parody, so lacking in awareness of his own stupidity that he's more comical than diabolical. And it's only been getting worse and worse. At one of his rallies last month, he started talking about Elton John and got sidetracked, vomiting up this word salad:

I have broken more Elton John records. He seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really, we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical – the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth, right? The brain. More important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.

Yes, the brain is much more important. It reads more like a passage from some long-lost James Joyce work than it does the product of a normal human mind. Even Trump's Neanderthal supporters must have been wondering if he was having a stroke onstage, right in front of their eyes.

Around the same time that that rally was held, we got a new report that was startling even by Trump standards: he'd wanted to invade Venezuela last year. He clung onto the idea even after his own advisors tried to dissuade him. He even mentioned it to other Latin American leaders. I don't know if even a dumb frat boy like George W. Bush would cling to such a Gen. Jack D. Ripper-esque notion so tenaciously. A full-on invasion of a major country in our own hemisphere, with no remotely justifiable cause--not even so much as a phony pretense about Weapons of Mass Destruction--just some deranged notion of taking out Our Enemies.

And we can't forget the Mueller investigation. So far, it's unearthed nothing too damaging for Trump--maybe it never will. And certainly his supporters won't care if he colluded with Russia. The congressional Republicans are sure to protect him against removal from office even if the wildest allegations turn out to be true. But that hasn't kept Trump from focusing on the investigation compulsively, barely ever going a week without tweeting about the "Witch Hunt" since the beginning of the year. Sometimes he's barely comprehensible. Take this from July 7: "The Rigged Witch Hunt, originally headed by FBI lover boy Peter S (for one year) & now, 13 Angry Democrats, should look into the missing DNC Server, Crooked Hillary’s illegally deleted Emails, the Pakistani Fraudster, Uranium One, Podesta & so much more. It’s a Democrat Con Job!" The output of a late-stage syphilitic brain if I've ever seen it.

And of course there was last month's press conference with Putin. We don't have to agree with the more hysterical accusations--that it constituted treason, that it shows he's Putin's puppet, etc.--to recognize it was a bizarre performance. He babbled about the Democrats, the investigation, and the DNC server, while seeming to put his trust in the Russian president. It's the sort of behavior that's hard to imagine even from Trump's nauseating predecessors--Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes. You could pull someone off the street and make them president for a day and anyone with half a brain would put on a better performance than that.

And now he's admitted on Twitter that Don Jr.'s meeting with Russians was intended to dig up dirt on Clinton--contradicting the earlier claim that it was about adoption laws, for no apparent reason. This comes after he attacked LeBron James for daring to utter mild criticisms of the Dealmaker-In-Chief. Even a fiend like Nixon had better self-control than this--and he really did have something to hide. We have yet to figure out if Trump does. It may be that Mueller is his Bugs Moran--someone his decaying brain has unshakably decided poses a threat and has it in for him.

Yes, it may be that on some level Trump believes his own talk of Witch Hunts. And maybe he's also deluded enough to believe there's a "red wave" coming this November, as he keeps insisting. One thing is clear: he is unstable and it is only getting worse, if anything. The idea of our billionaire president being deranged and stupid enough to start World War Three has become decidedly less hypothetical with the news about Venezuela. He is a literal madman with his Finger On The Button, and we can only hope that the depraved goons surrounding him have the marginal amount of sanity, and the power of persuasion, required to keep him from doing something catastrophic. We will be lucky to make it to the end of his tenure without things getting much worse than they already are.