A New Low, or Just Another Week for Donald Trump?

Trump at his Greenville, N.C. rally, where the crowd called for the deportation of Ilhan Omar. (Madeline Gray/Bloomberg)

Everyone already knows about the Tweets, and probably the press conference and the rally too at this point, so I won't waste any time rehashing the grisly details. And if you've somehow avoided it all, allow me to say that I envy the degree of insulation you have from the nightmare that passes as American politics. Your mental health is probably the better for it, even though ignorance of current events is not a luxury many of us can afford in the long run. So what is there to say about it all? It speaks for itself. But on the other hand, who can stay silent in times like these?

You will see—and probably already have seen—people say that this was a New Low for the president, his most racist moment yet, truly a record-setting show of depravity, even for the grotesque swamp creature infesting the White House. I am not so sure. Perhaps our collective national memory has shrunk over the past few years—shrunk so drastically that we have little more than an awareness of the present and a vague sense that something must have happened to get us here. Is telling a few women of color to go "home" really such a shocking new twist or escalation for the man who proposed banning all Muslims from entering the country? Or who still maintains the Central Park Five should be in prison? Or who explicitly said a judge's Hispanic descent should disqualify him from ruling on a case? To call him a racist is just to state what's long been obvious, and to do so in the mildest form possible. He has the soul of a Nazi and the wits of a hammerhead shark. He is defective on every level as a human—moral, intellectual, spiritual, emotional. To call him evil is almost to give him too much credit; in the jungle, the concept of evil has no place, and Trump operates by the laws of the jungle. He is a big, dumb beast, barely able to form a sentence or a coherent thought, constantly on the prowl for something small and vulnerable to pounce on and rip to shreds. He has no concept of truth or falsehood, good or evil, right or wrong—his only concern is what satisfies his appetites. In a sane society he would have been locked up a long time ago or banished to the wilderness of Siberia.

Our halfwit commander-in-chief is not the most worrisome part of this whole thing, in any case. To paraphrase Edward Everett Hale, he is only one, and even his daddy's fortune could only carry him so far. No, the infection runs both deeper and wider than its ugliest, most prominent boil, as we have known for some time. The real horror of the recent geek show is just how deep and how wide it really goes. Lindsey Graham, the vile little tapeworm who once pretended to care about Trump's racism, followed Master's lead by piling on and slandering "The Squad" as a bunch of antisemitic communists who hate America. Yes, if there's one lesson to take from the past few years it's to hold onto your political grudges: I never forgave this nasty little bitch for his deranged militarism, even as he posed as some kind of Principled Conservative who was Truly Shocked by Trump's racism. And I was right. Between the two of them I'll the dumb ape-man over the worm any day of the week.

Few of Lindsey's esteemed colleagues have performed any better than he did. Mitch McConnell, Trump's loyal accomplice and a bloodless mutant who's devoted his life to harming others, quickly rushed to defend Trump's honor as soon as the accusations of racism started up, and has now said he thinks "The President is on to something" with his slurs against the four Congresswomen. When House Democrats brought forth a resolution to condemn the Tweets that Trump had shat out for the world to see, it won the votes of just four Republicans, along with Justin Amash, who recently (and rightly) abandoned his former political party.

And who can be surprised? The party that chose as its patron saint a senile Apartheid-supporter can only go so long before it comes out and embraces explicit white nationalism. The racism in the modern conservative movement goes back far before most people would like to admit, from the attacks on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement in William F. Buckley's vile rag the National Review through Richard Nixon, who publicly ran on "law and order" and privately mused about the necessity of aborting mixed-race pregnancies, onto Reagan's anti-welfare race-baiting and Bush Sr.'s Willie Horton ad, finally achieving its sickening climax with Donald Trump. Today's Republican Party is a party of racism, rapists and reactionaries, and it's been a long time coming. 

And when The Thing From the White House held one of his deranged rallies and provoked chants of "send her back" at the mention of Ilhan Omar—chants which he has now pathetically said he disagreed with and tried to stop, despite showing no signs of discomfort in the moment—the conservative voices that spoke out in condemnation were no less loathsome than those who had defended Trump's tweets. Arch-shithead Ben Shapiro bleated that the chants were "Vile," then immediately followed it up by affirming that "Omar is awful. She is a radical anti-Semite with terrible views" before limply concluding that she shouldn't be deported for those "terrible views." His disgusting minion Ryan Saavedra also lamely objected that the chants were "not good" while affirming that he's "one of her harshest critics." These nematodes and their ilk have maliciously smeared the country's first black Muslim congresswoman as an antisemite for her (valid) criticisms of Israel, relying on racism and Islamophobia to help the medicine go down. Now that their cynical efforts have borne fruit, they want to wash their hands of it like some modern-day Pontius Pilate. Fuck them and fuck their toothless disavowals of what they helped give birth to. If anything happens to Omar, the blame is at their feet as much as it is at Trump's. 

But these weasels do have one thing right, which is that the chants are the most disturbing aspect of this all—though for reasons they fail to comprehend. The swine-faced reprobates demanding the exile of their political opponents show that the sick, monstrous side of the American soul is still alive and kicking. These are the spiritual progeny of moral bottom-feeders throughout American history: of slaveholders who decided to break away from the Union and form their own White Man's Republic, and settled for terrorizing the newly freed black Americans after their stupid plan went sideways; of the Klansmen who ruled the South through brute force and routinely murdered anyone with the "wrong" skin color; of the soulless jackals who screamed and hurled insults at the first black children to attend integrated schools. Even to call them Nazis obscures the fact they're as American as apple pie and weekly school shootings. Yes, for all the things Trump's statements were, they were decidedly not un-American—a term that's frankly bullshit no matter who uses it or how they use it. 

And the old truism about the body dying after the head's cut off hardly applies here. Donald Trump has played his role in energizing and mobilizing these termites, but they were there long before he came along and they won't disappear just because he leaves the presidency, regardless of when that happens. These people are a long-term problem, and they have to be defeated—by any means necessary, to borrow a phrase from another black Muslim they would have wanted deported. Every attempt at unity or compromise with this sort of scum has only served as a setback for the country, whether it took the form of attempts to accommodate them before the Civil War, the end of Reconstruction that gave them unbridled reign over the Jim Crow South, or the tacit liberal acceptance of de facto segregation. The only hope for permanent change is a final, crushing defeat for these savages—which may be made easier by the fact that they're disproportionately old and often look like they're on the road to an inevitable heart attack. 

Since I started writing this post, it seems that Trump has been continually doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on his original remarks. There are certainly those who will try to spin this as some devious ploy to make "The Squad" into the face of the Democratic Party by forcing the party leadership to defend them. That sort of analysis is like looking for some sort of cunning rationale behind the actions of a rabid dog. There is no brilliant (or even average) political strategizing going on here—just an angry gorilla slamming his fists into anything that he doesn't like. It's far too early to say with any certainty whether Trump will win in 2020, but if he does it won't be because he ingeniously goaded the Democrats into going too far left, it will be his ability to turn out the chuds I mentioned above, simply because he is one of them. 

Having mentioned the Democratic Party leadership I might as well acknowledge their typically sordid role in attacking and belittling the four Congresswomen in question, but I think I've talked enough about their motives elsewhere and I'm not inclined to spill any more bile for this blog post given how it currently stands. The note that I'll close on is just that the problem at hand goes far beyond Trump and it's nothing short of delusional to think it will go away once he does—something that Joe Biden and the other appeasers in the Democratic field would do well to acknowledge, and the rest of us would do equally well to keep in mind when deciding who to vote for.

Moderates' Story is Bad, and So is David Brooks' Column

David Brooks: columnist, weed expert and Iraq War genius (Getty Images via TheWrap)

The first set of Democratic Party debates are over, and we're already just about drowning in bad-faith concern-trolling from anti-Trump conservatives and "moderates" about how the Democratic Party is at risk of moving too far left. And now one of the weirdest of the #NeverTrump-ers, David Brooks, has offered a creative new take: not just that "moderation" is smarter and safer from an electoral perspective or even a practical perspective, but that it's actually more exciting.

David Brooks, for anyone unaware, is a distinguished conservative mind who has gifted us with articles like "The Collapse of the Dream Palaces" (in which he memorably writes, in the Year of Our Lord 2003, that "the war in Iraq is over") and "Weed: Been There. Done That." Naturally, with talents and insight like that, he's had a long tenure at the nation's Paper Of Record, the New York Times, where the piece in question comes from. But I do think the issues worth discussing go beyond this one piece, and David Brooks, and the Times, which is a point I'll come back to toward the end of this post. For now, let's start with Brooks' new gem.

"American progressives have a story to tell," Brooks begins,

and they are not afraid to tell it. In this story global capitalism is a war zone. Free trade is a racket. Big business and big pharma are rapacious villains that crush the common man.

Ok. Fair enough, so far.

In this context you need a government prepared for war. You need a government fired by economic nationalism, willing to play trade hardball against our foes.

Aaand we've already gone of the rails. No, progressives do not want "economic nationalism" that "play[s] hardball against our foes." While neocons like Brooks might not be able to think outside the framework of "America and her enemies," any good progressive is. The reason trade deals like NAFTA and the (proposed but never ratified) Trans-Pacific Partnership are bad is not because they benefit China, or Mexico, or any other country; that's the Donald Trump narrative of why they're bad. The reality is not that they are designed to benefit one country, but that they're designed to benefit an international investor class at the expense of everybody else. Just look at who pushes for them and helps influence them (even while the proposed agreements are still kept secret from the public): corporate lobbyists! The problem with these "free trade" agreements is not that they put America under the power of other countries (they don't) but that they put average, working people in all the countries involved at the mercy of corporate behemoths by, for instance, restricting the governments' ability to enact environmental and labor regulations. The solution isn't protectionism or "economic nationalism," it's new trade agreements that are designed to benefit regular people and not giant corporations. But we're not even two paragraphs in with Brooks' piece, so we won't get too hung up on this point.

You need a centralized industrial policy to shift investment where it’s needed. You need a government that will protect you, control you and give you things: free college, free child care. As in any war, you want government that is centralized and paternalistic.

Again, no. The point of progressivism and leftism in general isn't to put everything under the power of some centralized government bureaucracy, it's to take power away from corporate bureaucracy and put it in the hands of the people. The fact that Brooks has already this badly misrepresented the ideology he's writing in opposition to should tell you how good the rest of this piece will be.

Moderates have a different story to tell, but in both parties moderates are afraid to tell it. Moderates are afraid to break from the gloom and carnage mind-set that populists like Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders insist on.

No they aren't! Does Joe Biden, perhaps the most "moderate" (read: right-wing) candidate in the Democratic field, seem afraid to promote his view of the world? And the conflation of Trump, Warren and Sanders under the label "populist" (as if there's some moral equivalence between demonizing immigrants on the one hand and calling for a higher top marginal tax rate on the other) is obscene, but also extremely typical.

But hope is warranted and must be displayed. In the moderate story, global capitalism is a challenge but also an opportunity field. Over the past genration more people have been lifted out of poverty than ever before. For the first time we have a mass global middle class. This opens up new opportunities, liberates masses of talent and leads to more creativity than ever before.

Brooks cites nothing to back up his sunny, optimistic view of global capitalism (which is currently plagued by increasing inequality and, oh right, the threat of the total collapse of human civilization because of climate change) so this doesn't merit too much response.

In the moderate story, government has a bigger role than before, but it is not a fighting, combative role. It is a booster rocket role. It is to give people the skills needed to compete and flourish in this open, pluralistic world. It is to give people a secure base, so they can go off and live daring adventures. It is to mitigate the downsides of change, and so people can realize the unprecedented opportunities. Statecraft is soul craft. Through the policies they choose, governments can encourage their citizens to become one sort of person or another. Progressives want to create a government caste that is powerful and a population that is safe but dependent. Moderates, by contrast, are trying to create a citizenry that possesses the vigorous virtues — daring, empowered, always learning, always brave.

As noted, Brooks isn't about to stop misrepresenting progressivism, but it's revealing how much he feels compelled to lie. What does it say that he thinks it necessary to imply progressives want to turn us all into weaklings suckling from the government teat, and that he doesn't acknowledge the role that unions, universal healthcare and free higher education could play in making people "daring, empowered, always learning, always brave"? I'll leave it to the reader to answer that question for themselves.

How to do that? First, learn from the Nordic countries. American progressives sometimes imagine that the Nordic countries are socialist wonderlands. They are not. The Nordic countries have strong social supports and also open free-market economies. In fact, they can afford to have strong welfare policies only because they have dynamic free-market economies.

True enough, which might be why they still have much more inequitable distributions of wealth than the average American thinks is fair, and why they haven't been immune from the problem of increasing inequality.

No Nordic country has a minimum wage law. According to a JPMorgan Chase report, Nordic countries are more open to free trade than the U.S. They have fewer regulations on business creation, fewer licensing regulations.

Yeah they don't have minimum wage laws because they're so highly unionized they don't need them. Union density in Denmark, for instance, is about two-thirds; in the US it's 11%. What's David Brooks' proposal to increase our union density by a factor of six? And whatever Brooks means by "fewer regulations," the fact remains that in Sweden, for example, employers are required to negotiate with unions before making personnel changes, organizational changes, etc.—and that unions typically choose one-third of the members of their companies' boards of directors. You know who proposed a law to implement a similar concept here, in the United States? Elizabeth Warren, one of the dirty populist progressives that Brooks is warning us against.

As Charles Lane pointed out recently in The Washington Post, most Nordic countries have zero estate tax. Nordic health plans require patient co-payments and high deductibles, in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders’s plan. The Nordic countries tried wealth taxes of the sort Elizabeth Warren is proposing, and all except Norway abandoned them because they were unworkable.

Yeah and Nordic countries also have some of the highest income tax rates in the world, which Brooks, again, conveniently leaves out. Also, while I guess it's a good sign in terms of the shifting Overton window when even David Brooks is saying we should emulate the Nordic countries' healthcare systems, he's once again leaving out some rather significant details. In Norway, for instance, hospital admissions and in-patient treatment are completely free; however, if you're having out-patient care you have a copayment—of about 15 dollars. And you'll really have to save up to afford the 35-dollar copayment for same-day surgery from a GP or a specialist. But I'm glad to see David coming out in favor of government-owned hospitals, which are a hallmark of Nordic healthcare systems.

The Nordic countries show that social solidarity and economic freedom are not opposite, but go hand in hand. That’s the general approach we want here.

Guess it's time to start raising taxes and rejuvenating the labor movement, then!

Second, never coddle. Progressives are always trying to give away free stuff. They reduce citizens to children on Christmas morning. For example, Warren and Sanders want to make public college free. But as common sense and recent research tells us, when you give people something free, they value it less. They are more likely to drop out when times get hard.

Hey, David, you know what else the Nordic countries all have? Free college. So much for emulating them. I knew that idea wouldn't last long in this column.

Moderates want to help but not infantilize. They want to help students finish college, but they want them to at least partly earn their way, to have skin in the game. They want to produce a country that is not full of passive recipients but audacious pioneers.

You know, some people might say that students who actually work to maintain good grades and graduate college are "earning their way" and shouldn't be asked to fork over money, on top of their hard academic work, to get a diploma. Good thing David Brooks and the Sensible Moderates know better than those clowns.

Third, drive decision-making downward. People become energetic, responsible adults by making decisions for themselves, their families and their communities. Moderates are always aiming to make responsibility, agency and choice as local as possible.

For example, moderates support child care tax credits so parents can decide if they want a day-care model or a parent-stays-home model. But Warren wants to make it hard for families to have choice. She supports only federally funded day care, effectively forcing families into federally funded programs, limiting their choice and making them wards of the system.

Oh boy, tax credits? I knew this was gonna be exciting but I might just explode! Also, you know who else has government-funded childcare? The frigging Nordic countries that David Brooks was saying we should emulate four paragraphs ago.

Fourth, bring on the world. International competition is more rigorous than national competition. Moderates think Americans can meet that test. Warren’s Green Manufacturing Plan would shield American companies from that competition when competing for government contracts. They wouldn’t have to be excellent, just American.

Yes, heaven forbid that the US government turn to American companies for contracts. The American working class is just doing so well already there's no need for their government to try to help make sure they have jobs or anything.

Fifth, ignite from below. Warren wants to centralize economic decisions, creating a Department of Economic Development — a top-down council of government dirigistes. Moderates emphasize tools that regular people can choose to build their own lives and maximize their own opportunities: wage subsidies, subsidies to help people move to opportunities, charter schools.

Newsflash, David: economic decision are already centralized, they just happen to be centralized in the boardrooms of the powerful companies that run the economy. And that's a problem that's only going to get worse as economic inequality increases, as it's been doing for decades. Oh, and charter schools and wage subsidies? Like I said, the excitement just never ends!

These are stark differences, different worldviews. So far in this campaign you’ve heard only one. But moderates have another story, and it is the better one.

Really? Because, based on this article, it actually sounds like it sucks. In fact, it doesn't seem like much of a story at all. And the idea that we've been deprived of our precious moderate voices even as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination is Joe Biden, a guy who's been bragging about his great working relationship with segregationists, is so absurd that only a New York Times columnist could actually believe it.

And that's the article. Another bunch of vapid drivel from a guy who's made a successful career out of being wrong all the time and who represents the views of about five rich, white Ivy League- or University of Chicago-educated dorks who have successfully rebranded themselves as the Principled Conservative Opposition to Donald Trump. Fire them all and give their columns to the first Trump-supporters you can pick off the street, I say, if you're so insistent on having "conservative voices" represented in media. At least that way we'd be hearing the perspective of a significant chunk of the country, and we wouldn't have to deal with gullible liberals thinking these concern-trolling grifters deserve any more attention than they've already gotten.

So what do we take from all of this? That David Brooks and those like him are just a bunch of idiots? Hardly. No, he knows what he's doing. Columns like this one aren't designed to actually engage with the arguments of progressivism or present a well-developed alternative. They're designed to let the people who get uncomfortable listening to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders nod their heads and smile in agreement as they read their copy of the Times, feeling righteous, as they cling to an economic and political system that's careening toward utter disaster, and pooh-pooh any proposals to seriously reform it.

That is, of course, the social function of the Times and other outlets like it: to manufacture consent for the status quo among their elite audiences. So, coming to the broader point that I promised you at the beginning of this piece: as we go into this election, please, please do not let these people impact your vote. Whoever you vote for, at the very least, for the love of all things decent, don't be persuaded by these professional whiners no matter how much they bleat about "electability" or alienating swing voters or hilariously try, as in the column discussed here, to make their ideology seem inspiring or cool. They represent the broken status quo that gave us Trump, and Trump himself is a minor hiccup compared to the horrors we can look forward to if we follow David Brooks' advice and shun any "radical" change. To be blunt, we are running out of time, and we're as good as screwed if we don't act fast.

Why I Support Sanders Over Warren (And Think You Should, Too)

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters via Newsweek)

Elizabeth Warren, the liberal senator from Massachusetts and Democratic candidate for president, seems to be enjoying something of a surge at the moment; indeed, one recent Economist/YouGov poll put her in second place nationally to Joe Biden, ahead of Bernie Sanders by more than the margin of error for the first time. While it's still quite early and too soon to say anything very definitely, a number of media outlets have begun to promote the idea Warren may be taking over as Biden's main opponent from the left and knocking Sanders out of the spot he's held for months. Although this framing is ultimately questionable, as Matt Taibbi argues in Rolling Stone, I thought it might still be worth offering up my reasons for continuing to support Bernie Sanders even in the face of Warren's newfound popularity.

Don't get me wrong: if Warren's surging in the polls, that a good thing from my perspective as long as she's not simply converting Sanders supporters to her side—and based on RealClearPolitics' polling average, it looks like her rise is, indeed, larger than any decline Sanders has seen in the meantime; both Warren and Sanders are, on average, polling better than they had been in the middle of last month, after Biden entered the race officially and enjoyed an impressive increase in his support (which has now mostly faded). And if Warren does end up being the nominee, I'll ultimately be very heartened by that; she would be, in terms of policy, easily the best nominee the Democratic Party has had in my lifetime (in fact, the best in close to half a century at least). Not to mention that my main concern really is that the nomination doesn't go to Biden or some other centrist-y establishment candidate (which is to say pretty much every candidate, aside from Warren and Sanders, that's currently polling above one percent). The difference between Warren and Biden is much greater—and more frightening—than that between Sanders and Warren. But still, between Sanders and Warren the choice is pretty clear from my perspective, and I want to lay out why.

My answer, in short, is that I think Sanders is more consistently left-wing—or "progressive" if you prefer a more innocuous label—than Warren. There have, of course, been plenty of attempts to deny this, but all the counterarguments fall flat, in my opinion. Let's start out just on a rhetorical level: Sanders openly calls himself a (democratic) socialist; Warren has described herself as "capitalist to my bones." It's pretty clear which of those labels is more leftist. Now, Sanders' platform is hardly anti-capitalist—or even all that much to the left of Warren's—but words do matter, to an extent. The fact is that exploitation of labor is baked into capitalism; profits are made because workers are not given the full fruits of their labor. There are plenty of good things you can point to that have come about as a result of capitalism (and plenty of bad ones, too), and there's a case to be made that it represents a necessary stage in global economic development (which was Karl Marx's position, for those unaware); but the idea that we should cling to capitalism, with its undemocratic and often short-sighted allocation of resources, as we face major crises of inequality and pending climate catastrophe, is ultimately a bad one. Capitalism has proven a lot more flexible and resilient than Marx expected, and maybe it's possible for some form of capitalism (depending on how you define the term) to continue existing even as we overhaul our economic system to deal with climate change, poverty, and rampant inequality; but major, major changes really will be necessary to deal with those things, and now is the time to open people's minds to the idea that capitalism should not be a sacred cow—not to proclaim one's fealty to that failing system.

But actions, as they say, speak louder than words; and I think there are a number of actions that show, more clearly than their own self-descriptions do, the meaningful differences between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. For one thing, there was a significant outcry from progressives for Warren to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016, when it looked like Clinton might have no meaningful opposition; Warren wouldn't do so, but Sanders would. Keep in mind, absolutely no one thought he had any chance of winning the nomination when he declared. His campaign was designed to attract attention to the issue of economic inequality, and started out as symbolic rather than "serious." Of course, you can offer up any number of decent reasons that Warren may not have wanted to run in 2016—she was a freshman senator, and presidential campaigns, even symbolic ones, do take a great deal of time and energy—but she wouldn't even offer an endorsement of Sanders' campaign and, in her position as a superdelegate, she ultimately supported Clinton.

And what was the benefit of all of that in the end? Clinton lost to Trump, as we know, so even as a pragmatic move Warren's strategy was a failure. This was hardly a one-off, either; in my home state of Ohio, there was a similar battle between center and left in the Democratic primary for governor last year. On the one hand, you had Richard Cordray, a relatively bland establishment candidate who could boast an A rating from the NRA; on the other, you had Dennis Kucinich, a long-time progressive who, while perhaps guilty of saying and doing some questionable things in recent years, had supported Medicare for All long before that became an even remotely mainstream position, had consistently stood against imperalistic wars and "interventions" in other countries, and had outspokenly supported LGBT+ rights back when even Jon Stewart thought it was acceptable to mock trans women as "chick[s] with dick[s]." Bernie Sanders stayed out of the race, which was understandable given some of the controversial things Kucinich had done and said in recent years; but Warren, on the other hand, threw her wholehearted support behind Cordray, who would win the primary—and then lose the general election to Republican lizard-man Mike DeWine.

Warren's squishiness—at least in comparison to Sanders—is evident in this campaign already when you compare their stances on Medicare for All. Everyone knows where Sanders stands; he's been championing the idea for years and years and is outspokenly in favor of it. That hasn't changed.  Warren, on the other hand, is less definite. As Axios notes,

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) supports Medicare for all, but has been vague about how to achieve it. Her campaign website calls for a "down payment." And at a CNN town hall in March, she said she would "get everybody at the table" to "figure out how to do Medicare for all," which could include a "temporary role" for private insurance companies.

This is another attempt by Warren to water down progressive principles with centrist-ish "pragmatism," and we know just how well some of her previous efforts have worked.

On foreign policy and the military, the differences are even more striking. Let's take the ever-contentious issue of Israel-Palestine for starters. In 2014, when Israel had killed over 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza (overwhelmingly civilians), Warren said she believed civilian casualties were "last thing Israel wants" and blamed the casualties on "Hamas put[ting] its rocket launchers next to hospitals, next to schools." She then demurred at the suggestion that aid to Israel be made contingent on an end to the building of new (illegal) settlements in the West Bank.

Sanders, on the other hand, has a long (if imperfect) history of criticizing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and even voted to withhold over $80 million in aid to Israel unless it put an end to settlement activity, all the way back in 1991. He offered significant, if measured, criticism of Israel and defense of the Palestinians in his 2016 presidential campaign. Later that year, 88 senators signed a letter to then-president Obama, urging his administration to veto any "one-sided" UN Security Council resolution about Israel and Palestine and approvingly quoting Samantha Powers' disgusting speech from when she had vetoed a 2011 resolution that condemned Israel's settlements. Elizabeth Warren signed it; Bernie Sanders didn't.

Not surprisingly, the two candidates' positions on Israel mirror their positions on Iran, Israel's notorious foe; as Warren ran for senate in 2012, her campaign website falsely claimed Iran was "pursuing nuclear weapons" and stated that "[t]he United States must take the necessary steps to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon." Sanders, on the other hand, came under fire in 2016 for saying that the US should "move as aggressively as we can to normalize relations with Iran." In 2017, Sanders (along with Rand Paul) was one of only two senators to vote against authorizing additional sanctions against Iran; Warren voted in favor.

Similarly, last year Sanders was one of only seven Senators (Warren not being among them) to vote against a $17 billion increase in the military budget; at the time, Jeff Stein of The Washington Post noted that "[t]his appears to be the biggest military budget outside height of the Iraq War." When it comes to issues regarding the military and foreign affairs, there's no doubt that Warren is closer to the mainstream than Sanders, and that's not a good thing.

I remember back in 2013, Warren's first year in the senate, when Obama nominated John Brennan to be director of the CIA; Brennan had previously lied about civilian casualties from the administration's drone strike program, and I was disgusted at the idea that he might be put in charge of a powerful intelligence agency after so blatantly misleading people. Bernie Sanders voted against his confirmation—and Elizabeth Warren voted for it. That may have been my first real disenchantment with Warren, whom I'd been very enthusiastic about as she was running for the senate in 2012. Brennan went on to preside over the CIA's spying on Congress and to make excuses for the agency's past torture program before ascending to the level of #Resistance hero after Trump came to power. 

Sanders' stubborn insistence on remaining an Independent—even as he caucused with the Democrats in Congress and supported the party's presidential nominees—while a cause of resentment for many, is actually a good symbol of the quality in him that makes him a preferable candidate from my point of view. While I would by no means call his record perfect (or even close), he has been willing to vote as an Independent in a number of cases, such as on the military budget and sanctions bills I mentioned above. While I certainly don't begrudge Warren her decision to identify herself as a Democrat, it's simply true that she's closer to the party's establishment line than Sanders and, as I said, that's not a good thing.

There's also, I think, some legitimate reason to worry about her abilities as a politician. Her DNA test debacle is one instance of that, resulting in widespread mockery from the Right and condemnation from actual Native Americans. Her recent decision to frame climate change as a question of "military readiness" is another example of her ability to be rather tone-deaf. She has an unfortunate tendency to leave people toward the Left disenchanted in her attempts to appease the Right—attempts that it's easy to see from the start are unlikely to succeed. While Sanders has had his failings, he managed to become, for at least a time, the most popular political figure in the country despite openly identifying as a socialist, and seems able to connect with many different people in a way that I'm not convinced Warren is.

Despite my very real issues with Warren, I really don't want this to come off as a hit piece of any sort. She is still easily better than almost all of her opponents, and vastly better than the guy who's currently at the top of every national poll. She has also put out some genuinely laudable proposals lately. Certainly, no one should lose sight of that, nor do I want there to be some split in the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But it seems equally clear to me that Sanders is genuinely better than Warren pretty much across the board; on some issues, the differences are small, but they are pretty consistently in Sanders' favor. And I hope that discussions about the two candidates personally don't overshadow the real, and meaningful, differences in their politics.

Where Have All the Libertarians Gone?

Then-presidential candidate Ron Paul, addressing the Congressional Health Care Caucus (via CNN)

Let's take a journey back to the distant year of 2007. The campaign to decide who will replace the unpopular incumbent, George W. Bush, is well underway. One the Republican side options are plentiful, but one particular candidate boasts a unique status; that man's name is Ron Paul. He's managed to attract support on college campuses, bring in impressive fundraising hauls, and achieve a loyal following on the web. While he's a long-shot for the nomination, the ideology he represents—libertarianism—looks as if it may become a force to be reckoned with. Four years later, Paul runs for president again, and while he's a long-shot this time as well, he attracts impressive support from young voters in states like New Hampshire. It looks as if libertarianism may really be gaining traction.

So why is it that now it seems the libertarian movement (as it were) has all but totally dissolved? Well, some of the young voters who were taken with Ron Paul in his 2008 and 2012 runs have surely gone on to become Bernie supporters in 2016; other former libertarians have gone on to join the alt-right and/or support Donald Trump. Ron Paul's own son, Rand, ran in the 2016 Republican contest and failed to even achieve his father's cult following. Why was the seemingly widespread, if underground, support for libertarianism so fragile? 

To answer this question, we have to look at a few intertwining factors, as I will do here. Admittedly, a lot of what I'm about to write is conjecture, so take it with a grain of salt; but keep in mind, I am basing this off of what I've seen, even if it's not strictly scientific. The factors behind libertarianism's decline, in my estimation, are as follows: that two very different groups of people tend to be initially attracted to libertarianism; that many people in each group, for specific reasons which I'll explain, also have a tendency to end up drifting away from libertarianism after a while; and that libertarianism is an ideology that is ultimately really attractive in its own right to only a small number of people, again for reasons I'll lay out.

Let's start with an exploration of the two groups of people I mentioned. The first group is people who are more or less leftist in their sympathies, which is to say they have a genuine concern with systemic injustice and the rights of oppressed people around the world. These people are attracted to libertarianism because it opposes imperialism and needless wars, mass incarceration, the War on Drugs and other policies that negatively impact vulnerable people around the world. Many of the college students who were supportive of Ron Paul's candidacy in 2008 and 2012 surely fall into this group. It wasn't his free market economic policies that appealed to them; it wast that he wanted to end the War on Terror, legalize drugs, and end intrusive provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

So where does the problem arise? Well, the people in this group—whom we might refer to as "confused leftists"—are fundamentally collectivist in their outlook, in some sense. They think that we should care about more than just ourselves and our friends and the people in our particular in-groups; rather, we should care about the welfare of people around the world. This fundamentally collectivist impulse is, on its face, in contradiction with libertarianism's hyper-individualistic economic ideology: that the economy should be based on private property rights and each individual's pursuit of their own gain, and that we should privatize what common property presently exists. The only way to reconcile this collectivist, humanitarian impulse that we should care about the welfare of everyone with this atomistic free market ideology is to claim that a free market really will allow for the greatest possible freedom and well-being for everyone.

The thing is, this is a pretty difficult view to maintain. It's hard to see how abolishing all aid programs could possibly be to the benefit single parents, the physically and mentally handicapped, and other people who are at a disadvantage when it comes to competing in a market economy. It requires a great amount of faith to think that private charity would simply swoop in and save these people from destitution. And, furthermore, just about every proposal for helping poor and working-class people—Medicare for All, free college, etc.—is coming from the left, and demands that we expand, rather than reduce, the government's role in some respects. For many of these "confused leftists," economics may not have had much to do at all with what attracted them to libertarianism to begin with, and they may have never bought into the whole let's-deregulate-everything approach even as they appreciated Ron Paul's tirades against imperialism and the War on Drugs. So it's easy for many to drift away from libertarianism and towards, well, actual leftism, especially when a figure like Bernie Sanders comes along. Sanders, after all, has a good bit in common with Ron Paul—he, too, is a critic of the drug war, of the War on Terror, of NSA spying and the like—and his views on economics intuitively make a lot more sense, if you want to help the disadvantaged, than, say, converting Medicaid into a block-grant program.

The second group of people who are initially attracted to libertarianism is radically different from the first. These are people for whom the hyper-individualist, "survival of the fittest" nature of an unbridled free market is very appealing, and is, in fact, what attracts them to libertarianism. They have a burning hatred of socialism and collectivism in any form (and they define the terms very, very loosely), and the idea of an economy where the successful are free to hoard their money and spend it as they see fit is a very attractive one to them. For these people, the libertarian's worst enemy is not the neocon or the establishment politician (though they certainly dislike both), but the socialist. Sure, they have some views in common with leftists (at least until they abandon libertarianism altogether)—anti-imperialism, pro-legalization views on drugs—but the reason this sort of libertarian opposes mass incarceration or wars in the Middle East has little to do with a concern for the well-being of others. It's because unjust wars and restrictive laws violate property rights, and for this brand of libertarian—whom we might call a "nascent reactionary"—property rights are supreme because they justify selfishness. It's worth noting that a good number of these libertarians are anti-immigrant (unlike most of their "confused leftist" counterparts, I would venture to say), ostensibly on the grounds that immigrants are taking advantage of the welfare state and that immigration under a non-libertarian system amounts to "forced integration."

It's not hard to see why many of these nascent reactionaries either don't last as libertarians or continue to claim that they're libertarians while embracing right-wing "populists" like Donald Trump. When someone like Trump comes along, presenting himself as a bulwark against both the neoconservative Republican establishment and leftist "political correctness" (which the nascent reactionary opposes because it demands they make some sacrifice on behalf of the marginalized), they quickly overcome any concerns—real or pretended—about his authoritarian tendencies. Plus, their general selfishness slides easily into tribalism—an embrace not of their individuality, but of their "cultural identity," and accordingly a desire to protect "western culture" from all threats, inside and out. Right-wing authoritarians only propose to trample on the "property rights" of the Other: Muslims, immigrants, leftists, women (it's a safe bet that nascent reactionary libertarians are overwhelmingly male), LBGTQ+ people, etc. With manufactured panics about Political Correctness running amok on college campuses and Islam threatening western civilization, it's easy for the nascent reactionary to convince themselves that it's "us or them" and to stop caring at all about the rights of the Other. At that point they become full-blown reactionaries, no longer nascent.

I am not proposing that every libertarian falls into one of these two categories—and even those who do may very well continue to be (more than nominal) libertarians until the day they die, by successfully walking the tightrope and maintaining the challenging view that's essential to their libertarianism (for the "confused leftist," that a free market really will create a better world for all; for the "nascent reactionary," that one must truly respect the rights even of Muslims, feminists and communists). But the fact that so many people who are initially attracted to libertarianism end up treating it as simply a gateway drug to either leftism or reactionaryism highlights an interesting point.

I have certainly seen libertarians argue that their ideology is more consistent that liberalism or conservatism, and in a sense, they are correct; both liberals and conservatives do, in some cases, support government restrictions on "property rights" in the libertarian sense of the phrase, and in other cases, oppose such restrictions (conservatives seek to preserve the property rights of the rich by lowering their tax rate but support laws against drugs and abortions; liberals support greater personal freedom than conservatives but also support higher taxes on the rich and more regulations on big business). Libertarianism, on the other hand, consistently upholds property rights, whether it be your right to have an abortion or smoke marijuana or a CEO's right to pay their employees starvation wages. So on a theoretical plane, looking at everything through the lens of property rights, libertarianism is more consistent than its main competitors.

But most people don't really operate in the realm of abstract concepts like property rights, and it's difficult for them to truly attach much emotional significance to a notion that academic and legalistic. And, on this more common, human level, libertarianism is actually a radically inconsistent ideology, because it asks us to care deeply about the property rights of everyone around the world but to care little about their actual well-being. It's very difficult for most people to, at the same time, fervently support someone's right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion while simply shrugging it off as a necessary evil if they die of exposure because they were too poor to afford a place to live. For better or worse, the ideologies that have gained the most widespread support throughout history tend to lay their emphasis on people, in one way or another—either on the working people, or the "master race," or the citizens of Our Nation (whichever one it may be), or the adherents or Our Religion, or simply on all people, everywhere. Libertarianism, at least in its doctrinaire form (which is the form represented by figures like Ron Paul and, before him, Murray Rothbard) does not lay its emphasis on people; rather, it lays its emphasis on the notion of property and the right thereto. As different as they are, the confused leftist and nascent reactionary have in common that they see libertarianism as the path to the well-being of some group of people—for the leftist, humanity in general, and in particular the oppressed and marginalized; for the reactionary, themselves, and the people most like them. And both grow disenchanted when they begin to feel this isn't the case.

That is why, as a mass movement, libertarianism is almost certainly doomed to failure. Its concept of freedom is far too divorced from the actual well-being of any group that offers some strong sense of identity for a large number of people. One can feel a kinship with people around the world on the basis that we are all human beings, or one can feel a tribalistic kinship with the members of one's own race, religion, national group, etc.; but libertarianism would primarily benefit those who are able to do well in a free market economy, and even predicting with any certainty how one would fare in such a setup takes a reasonable amount of guesswork, meaning it's simply not a group that offers any strong sense of fellowship. The fact is that relatively few people feel personally aggrieved that the government involves itself in the economy to some extent, so it's rather more difficult to create widespread pro-free market solidarity than it is to create unity among the working class, or among marginalized groups in society—or, for that matter, to stir up animosity toward ethnic minorities and immigrants by appealing to notions of a shared culture or religion. In this respect, libertarianism's hyper-individualism is its downfall; for, whatever one thinks of individualism, it can hardly serve as a doctrine that unites the masses of humanity for the purpose of collective action.

It's Time To Move on from Russia

Robert Mueller (Alex Wong/Getty Images via Teen Vogue)

The Friday before last, as most of my readers surely know, Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his much-anticipated report (on Russian interference in the 2016 election, the allegations of the Trump campaign's collusion in said interference, and possible obstruction of justice) to the Attorney General, Bill Barr. The following Sunday, Barr released a letter that summarized the report, quoting it as saying: "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." On obstruction of justice, the report seems to be more ambiguous; Barr quotes it as stating that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." Barr further explains that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have decided not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.

We don't have access to the report itself, and many are understandably eager to find out what it says—for my part, I strongly support its release in as complete a form as possible, taking into account any legal restrictions or concerns about sensitive information. If we do get access to the rest of the report (a redacted version is reportedly on track for release later this month), it may well contain damaging information on Trump; perhaps about business ties to Russia that, if not illegal, are potentially shady—a prospect that seems entirely believable in light of the reports of an aborted Trump Tower Moscow project that was in the works even as Trump was running for president. If so, these revelations may deserve to be part of a larger conversation, for instance, one about why a businessman who's been involved in projects across the globe is a wildly inappropriate choice for President of the United States. And, certainly, the fact that Mueller could only offer an ambivalent answer to the question "Did the president engage in obstruction of justice?" is damning enough. But it looks like Trump's "NO COLLUSION" mantra may be one of the few true things he's ever said in his life, as bitter a pill as that may be for much of the #Resistance crowd.*

I've been a "Russiagate" skeptic from the start, so I can't pretend I don't feel a little vindicated—and that's not the only reason part of me is relieved by Mueller's finding. Even if Mueller had found collusion and the Democratic-controlled House had impeached Trump, I doubt enough Republicans in the Senate would turn on him to give the two-thirds majority necessary for conviction. And even if they had, what then? President Mike Pence? The idea they'd let him be removed from office, too, and Nancy Pelosi ascend to the presidency, is practically unthinkable. Granted, a finding of collusion would almost certainly damage Trump's odds for reelection, but those have never struck me as all that good to begin with and I'd prefer the 2020 campaign not turn into some anti-Russia hatefest on the Democratic side.

Trump's partial exoneration does leave me a little worried, in terms of what it might do for his approval rating and his chances in 2020. But Corey Robin lays out a decent case for why it might not matter all that much, and Democrats wisely chose not make Russia a focal point in the 2018 midterms, nor has it gotten too much attention in the nascent 2020 campaign season. Russiagate, as Robin notes, "has always been a media and social media obsession[.]" And what a media obsession it's been! Matt Taibbi's recently released piece reveals just how shocking and dangerous the media's failures and gullibility have been over the past few years when it comes to Trump-Russia, in far too much detail to rehash here, and stands as a must-read on this topic.

But I'm not here to re-litigate the failures and delusions of the past few years, though they do deserve to be re-litigated and no doubt will be. My purpose here is much more magnanimous, a simple request to all who have spent the years since 2016 focusing on Russia and Trump's real or imagined relationship with its government, in the hopes that it could bring down his presidency: please, for the love of all things good, move on. I've written before about how unhinged the discourse on Russia has been in the aftermath of Trump's election, and certainly I stand by that now. But, before Mueller had ended his investigation and submitted his report, there was at least some rationale, no matter how far-fetched, in hoping that revelations about Trump's relationship with Russia would spell the end of his presidency. Now, regardless of what you choose to believe about Trump's relationship with Russia and Putin, it should be obvious that this isn't going to happen. The walls are not closing in. They are not going anywhere, and neither is Trump, for the time being.

While certain aspects of Trump's relationship with Russia (like those hypothetical shady business ties) may warrant mention as part of some greater discussion, the focus on Russia patently makes absolutely no sense now that, after almost two years of investigation, Robert Mueller—a man who has literally been elevated to the level of a superhero and a secular saint by some liberals—found no evidence of collusion. That was always supposed to be the linchpin of the whole Trump-Russia conspiracy theory: Trump conspired with Russia to interfere with our elections so he could become president. Mueller's inability, after 20+ months of investigation, to substantiate that notion serves as the final nail in the coffin of the conspiracy theory. There is no longer any reason to lend any particular focus to Trump's relationship with Russia.

But how can I say that when we don't have the rest of the report? When I've already admitted it might reveal Trump does have ties of some sort to Russia? Well, because whatever those ties may be, they clearly haven't done much to shape Trump's foreign policy and behavior toward Russia. Trump is not a Russian asset, agent, puppet or anything like it, despite what Russiagaters might have said over the past couple years. He's bombed a Russian client state (Syria), given lethal arms to Ukraine, which is openly hostile to Russia, and now he's trying to overthrow another government allied with Russia, in Venezuela. Yes, he has praised Vladimir Putin, but Trump has also had kind words for Saddam Hussein, Rodrigo Duterte, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, and other authoritarian leaders from countries whom he is not an agent of.

Of course, the people who are attached to the Russiagate narrative have already gone about rationalizing this new setback. Amanda Marcotte has already decided that Trump has simply been "extremely successful, far more than Nixon, at conducting a cover-up," commenting: "This is why I’ve been such a fun-killer, expressing my skepticism both of 'Trump has dementia' and 'Trump is stupid'." Yes, that's a good sign for your argument: when you start insisting that the president who tweeted about "hamberders" earlier this year is actually more shrewd and competent than a career ratfucker like Richard Nixon. In an article for Salon, Marcotte writes:

Much has been made of the fact that Barr and Mueller are longtime friends outside of work, which most people in the media have assumed means that Barr is unlikely to interfere with Mueller's work. But one could turn that around: Maybe Mueller's personal affection for Barr made him reluctant to interfere with the job the new attorney general was obviously hired to do, which is to squelch the investigation as thoroughly as possible.

So Robert Mueller, who, again, has been venerated as an American hero by large segments of Russiagate liberals over the past 22 months, is now just another stooge who would curb his own investigation just to appease an old pal. Quite a convenient narrative.

Our old friend Jonathan Chait tries to minimize the significance of the Mueller investigation, tweeting: "No criminal conspiracy I believe. No collusion? That absurd." In an article for New York magazine he elaborates:

Of course Trump colluded with Russia. He literally went on camera and asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, promising that Russia would be rewarded by the American media, and Russia responded to this request by attempting a hack to steal Clinton’s emails that very day. Trump’s campaign aides repeatedly welcomed and sought out Russian assistance. His campaign manager passed on 75 pages of intricate polling data to a Russian operative during the campaign. And he did all this while secretly pursuing a lucrative business deal with Russia.

To define this nexus of communication and shared mission as something other than “collusion” is to define the term in a way that nobody would have accepted before this scandal began. 

As I wrote recently, "The unanswered questions here center on how much deeper this cooperation goes, and what laws might have been tripped." Apparently, the answer is none. [emphasis in original] 

Chait writes all of this completely ignoring the fact that Mueller was aware of it and reported not only that no laws were broken but that "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." So whatever one may think of the ethics of the actions Chait mentions, clearly none of them amounted to conspiracy or coordination "with the Russian government in its election interference activities." This is what has always been meant by "collusion"; trying to define it any other way now is blatant goalpost-shifting.

And then we come to David Corn, who bears significant responsibility for getting the Russiagate hysteria going, and just put out a Mother Jones article stating that "No matter what Mueller report contains, a harsh verdict remains: Trump and his gang betrayed the United States in the greatest scandal in American history." Really, David? The greatest scandal in American history? Is it worse than Watergate? Worse than COINTELPRO? Worse than Nixon sabotaging peace negotiations and possibly prolonging the Vietnam War to get elected president?

To back up this bold claim, Corn cites a number of vague ways in which Trump and his team "encouraged" Russia's meddling. To wit:

The betrayal continued after Trump became the de facto presidential nominee of the Republican Party. On June 9, 2016, Trump’s three most senior advisers—Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner—met with a Russian emissary in the Trump Tower in New York City. They had been informed that she would deliver them dirt on Hillary Clinton and that this was part of a secret Kremlin initiative to assist the Trump campaign. 

The meeting, the Trump team has claimed, was a bust. There was no useful derogatory information. But by this point, the Russians had already stolen tens of thousands of emails and documents from Democratic targets and were, no doubt, pondering what to do with the swiped material. This meeting was another signal conveyed to Moscow: the Trump crew didn’t mind Russian meddling in the election and was even willing to covertly collaborate with Russia on dirty tricks.

Again, not that there's any evidence they did "covertly collaborate with Russia on dirty tricks"—were there, Mueller could hardly have reported that "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Of course, one can certainly challenge the ethics of Trump and Co.'s behavior w/r/t Russia in the 2016 election (and indeed Trump has clearly proven over and over that he is one of the least ethical people to ever be president), but that is not what the Russiagate narrative alleged, nor does unethical behavior come close to being "probably the most significant political misdeed in American history" as Corn claims.

The reason I bring these examples up is to urge you, the reader, not to fall for them. There will probably be many, many attempts to reframe Russiagate and/or explain away the inconvenient fact that Mueller's report fails to substantiate its key accusation. They are bullshit, and deserve to be ignored. Whatever sketchy business ties or unethical behavior Trump et al. may have or have engaged in with regards to Russia, it pales in comparison to the things that have happened since and that are going on right now. That's why Trump/Russia no longer has any justification for being its own discussion: certainly we can discuss whatever else the Mueller report may reveal, but allowing the focus on Russia to crowd out other issues like Trump's destructive bombing of the so-called Greater Middle East, enabling of Saudi Arabia's borderline genocide in Yemen, disastrous climate policy and other deadly and horrific actions—as it all too often has in his presidency thus far—is especially obscene now that the Mueller probe is over and the central claim of the Russiagate allegations has failed to be substantiated.

And, for that matter, let's drop the focus on Russia and its interference and US politics altogether. Sorry, but a bunch of clumsily worded Facebook ads and a third-rate spear-phishing scam don't constitute an existential threat to our democracy. If you want to focus on foreign influence in American politics, maybe we can start with the country that enjoys its own highly influential lobby that you can't even criticize if you don't want to be labeled an antisemite. Or Saudi Arabia, which maintains an impressive network of influence that includes bankrolling tech companies, universities and think tanks. Or the United Arab Emirates, which was, until recently, funding a major "progressive" think tank. Again, I'm not saying we ignore what Russia did, but screaming about the evil Russkies corrupting our political process starts to feel a little absurd when you look at it all in context.

So, please: let's move on from the focus on Russia. I don't have any hope that the Russiagate obsessives will do this, but I realize that a lot of people who aren't crazy and aren't married to the idea of reigniting the Cold War have had some degree of investment in the Trump-Russia scandal. Much of the media has spent the last few years fanning the flames and already we're seeing attempts to explain away the Mueller probe's anticlimactic finale. Don't fall for them. There are many, many valid reasons to hate Donald Trump and his administration. The full Mueller report may well give a few more. But the idea that Trump has some sort of unique and particularly damning relationship with Russia should be well and truly dead now that the centerpiece of the whole narrative—the allegations of collusion—have fallen through. Refusing to reckon with that reality is not just wrongheaded, it's downright dangerous.

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*The common rebuttal to this (coming not just from liberals but even some further to the left) seems to be that we only have a four-page summary of the report from a Trump lackey. That may be true, but the excerpt "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities" is quoted directly from the report and so far no one has come forward to say that Barr fabricated this quote or took it out of context. 

We Can't Afford to be Moderate in 2020

Beto O'Rourke, a moderate Democrat, raised over $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his presidential campaign
 (Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via Politico)

Last year, as you may have heard, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report authored by some of the world's leading climate scientists. The report concludes that "[l]imiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," per the IPCC's website, and that, specifically, "[g]lobal net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching 'net zero' around 2050." Jonathan Watts in The Guardian summarizes the significance of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in an article about the IPCC's report: 

At 1.5C the proportion of the global population exposed to water stress could be 50% lower than at 2C, [the report] notes. Food scarcity would be less of a problem and hundreds of millions fewer people, particularly in poor countries, would be at risk of climate-related poverty.

At 2C extremely hot days, such as those experienced in the northern hemisphere this summer, would become more severe and common, increasing heat-related deaths and causing more forest fires. 

But the greatest difference would be to nature. Insects, which are vital for pollination of crops, and plants are almost twice as likely to lose half their habitat at 2C compared with 1.5C. Corals would be 99% lost at the higher of the two temperatures, but more than 10% have a chance of surviving if the lower target is reached.

Sea-level rise would affect 10 million more people by 2100 if the half-degree extra warming brought a forecast 10cm additional pressure on coastlines. The number affected would increase substantially in the following centuries due to locked-in ice melt. 

Oceans are already suffering from elevated acidity and lower levels of oxygen as a result of climate change. One model shows marine fisheries would lose 3m tonnes at 2C, twice the decline at 1.5C. 

Sea ice-free summers in the Arctic, which is warming two to three times faster than the world average, would come once every 100 years at 1.5C, but every 10 years with half a degree more of global warming.  

In a nutshell: between now and 2030, we must take "unprecedented" action in order reduce global CO2 emissions and limit climate change, with extremely dire consequences if we fail to do so. Even if we are to abandon the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal and to aim for no more than two degrees of global warming—which would mean accepting all of the potentially disastrous effects mentioned above—the IPCC report projects this would require a 20% reduction in carbon pollution by the year 2030. Currently, Watts notes, "the world is on course for a disastrous 3C of warming."

Obviously, global warming is a problem that must be addressed on a global level. However, given that, according to the Global Carbon Project's 2017 numbers, the United States is the world's second-largest carbon dioxide emitter (behind only China, the single most populous country in the world) and its carbon emissions per capita are significantly higher than those of other advanced countries like Germany, Japan, the Czech Republic and Norway, it's more than fair to say that dealing with the impending climate crisis will require especially major action on the part of the US.

This is not the only crisis we may be facing in the near feature. A 2017 report by the McKinsey Global Institute projects that automation may displace as much as one-third of the American workforce by 2030 and further exacerbate income inequality, already a serious problem. It's fair, even advisable, to take these numbers with a grain of salt. But the fact that robots have taken over jobs once done by human beings is indisputable, and there's little reason to think that it won't continue.

There's a common thread connecting these problems (and many others): capitalism. It's because of the capitalist economic system—the private ownership and management of businesses—that automation looms over us as a threat rather than promising us freedom from having to do jobs that few people actually want to do, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently noted. A future where all of the world's dirty, boring and unrewarding jobs are done by machines should be an appealing one: then we're free to enjoy the goods and services those jobs create and, since nobody has to do those ugly but once-necessary tasks anymore, we're all free to spend our time on things we actually enjoy. But, because these labor-saving machines and the companies that own them are themselves owned and managed by a relative few, that small elite enjoys the benefits of automation (higher profits as they save money on labor) while the displaced workers have to search for some other job that hasn't (yet) been automated out of existence.

Climate change, too, has a lot to do with capitalism. Certainly, socialism isn't inherently environmentally friendly; it's entirely possible to have worker-owned enterprises that pollute the atmosphere just as much as privately owned companies. But capitalism in its current form makes it especially challenging to deal with climate change. Even as public concern about the impact of climate change grows, the sort of radical action that needs to be taken is unlikely to happen because of fossil fuel lobby's influence over public policy. Many of the measures that need to be taken to adequately address our environmental crisis threaten the profits of major corporations, and would require a bold defiance of these powerful entities.

Even if we don't choose to move past capitalism altogether and replace it with a democratically managed economy (which, in my opinion, is desirable for these and many other reasons), it's clear the system as it currently stands will need to be dramatically altered if humankind is to have any sort of decent future. Changes will have to be radical, even unprecedented, and come soon if we're to avoid catastrophe. We are not in a situation were we can continue on our current path, or make a few minor tweaks, or even just a number of moderately significant alterations: if we're to effectively handle the threats facing us, our whole socioeconomic system needs to be straight-up revolutionized.

It's in this context that the 2020 presidential election must be seen. We need someone who can help to bring truly extreme and fundamental change to the country and the world if we're to avoid the sort of future that looks like more like a work of dystopian fiction than it does the world we have today (as ugly and radically imperfect as that world already is). The current Democratic field does not inspire a great deal of hope in that respect. The American political system is so corrupt and rancid that the person we really need as president is some wild-eyed radical who'd readily take a sledgehammer to the whole thing and call a new constitutional convention on Day 1—or who'd at least serve as the ringleader of a nationwide mob so wild and unruly that they could mercilessly terrify Congress into passing policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. No one in the field, as far as I'm aware, fits this description.

So we're forced to look at the options we do have. Unlike last time, there are actually quite a few options on the Democratic side this time around and I won't pretend I've thoroughly looked over each and every one. I can only speak to the ones that I do know about—rest assured, if Pete Buttigieg or Jay Inslee surges to the top of the polls, I'll be sure to learn more about them and share my thoughts. But out of the candidates currently polling above the low single digits—Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker—Sanders is the one who's the the most willing to challenge (and propose alterations to) the capitalist system. Warren is similar in terms of economic policies but has loudly declared her allegiance to capitalism in a way Sanders hasn't. Realistically, they'd probably be very similar presidents on the economic front (my preference for Sanders relates more to foreign policy, where he's challenged America's support for Israel in ways that Warren often hasn't). But still, Sanders is the only one of them who calls himself a socialist.

The point of this post, however, is not specifically to argue in favor of Bernie Sanders—it's more fundamental than that. Sanders' and Warren's supposed radicalism has often been used as an argument against them (even though many of their proposed policies are actually pretty unexceptional when we look at other highly developed countries). We can debate whether either of the two are actually radicals (they aren't, for the record), but the idea that radicalism is undesirable is not only wrong but profoundly dangerous at this point. Rather, we should be demanding radicalism from the Democratic candidates, because we are in a situation where, because of climate change, automation, economic inequality and other issues, radical change is an absolute necessity—not just if we want a better world (though we should, of course, aim for that), but if we want to keep things from getting dramatically, horrifically worse.

If the Democratic candidate for president wins the 2020 election, they will take office in 2021 and (unless they die, resign or are removed from office) serve at least until 2025. That leaves just five years before 2030—the IPCC's deadline for reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent, and the year by which McKinsey Global Institute estimates up to a third of the workforce may have been displaced by automation. If radical change isn't under way at that point, it's a safe bet that we are in some serious trouble.

Furthermore, there's a good chance that if the Democrat wins in 2020, that same Democrat (whoever it turns out to be) will be the party's candidate in 2024 (in all likelihood, if they choose to run for reelection they will get their party's nomination). So if we elect, say, President Beto O'Rourke in 2020, our choice in 2024 will in all likelihood be between Beto and whatever lunatic the Republicans nominate, and whoever wins that election will be in power at least until 2029—just one year before our big deadline. Eight years of moderate Democratic rule will not bring the changes that we need to avert catastrophe, and four years of moderate Democratic rule followed by four years of Republican rule would be even worse. And if major changes aren't underway by 2029, it's pretty much game over.

We're facing steep odds even if we elect a Sanders or a Warren in 2020, given that Congress will still be full of Republicans and establishment Democrats who balk at the sort of "extremist" policies that are desperately needed. But those odds shrink even further if we elect a "moderate" (or re-elect Trump). Beto O'Rourke, who just entered the race and boasts the biggest first-day fundraising haul of any candidate so far, is at least doing us the favor of being openly moderate (and his voting record in Congress confirms that, despite being from a reasonably liberal district, he has often been to the right of the even the majority of his fellow House Democrats). While Joe Biden has (ludicrously) claimed he has "the most progressive voting record of...anybody who would run," this is plainly false and he is perhaps the single most conservative (potential) candidate for president on the Democratic side. Others in the field—Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand—have offered some (largely symbolic or rhetorical) support for policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, but there are real reasons to doubt this would actually translate meaningfully into policy if one of them won the presidency.

It's understandable why, after a few years of the deranged Trump spectacle, left-leaning people might just want some kind of return to the status quo ante Trump. It's also extremely dangerous, given the circumstances. This is not an election where we can afford to vote for candidates on the basis that they're unifying or inspiring or cool or "presidential." The only sane criteria is who will be most willing and able to implement fundamental changes to try to avoid the worst.