Friday, January 31, 2020

The Top Reason Why The ILK (Impeached Lyin' King) Hates John Bolton Testifying In Support Of Impeachment Conviction — Bolton Loathes Vladimir Putin (Ptooie!)

It appears the impeachment trail of The ILK (Impeached, But Not Convicted, Lyin' King) will be the first impeachment trial in US history with no witness testimony before the jury (US Senate). It would be grand theater if John Bolton testified and closed with a shout: "Mr. President, You're Fired!" If this is a (fair & balanced) impeachment fantasy, so be it.

[x The Atlantic]
John Bolton Spoke Up When Other Republicans Didn’t
By Peter Beinart


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

created at TagCrowd.com

Give John Bolton his due. By writing a book that apparently corroborates the core argument of those seeking to impeach and remove President Donald Trump, the former national security adviser has shown genuine moral courage. The literature on moral courage helps explain why: It’s because Bolton is an ideological fanatic. His fervent belief in supporting America’s allies and confronting its adversaries led him to speak up against Trump, who violated that principle by delaying aid to Ukraine in order to pressure it into investigating a political rival.

Not everyone agrees that, in speaking up now, Bolton has acted courageously. By not coming forward earlier, my Atlantic colleague Graeme Wood has argued, Bolton “waited until speaking is to his advantage” and thus procured “a huge book deal” and the ability “to command high speaking fees before rapt right-wing audiences.”

But will right-wingers really shell out large sums to hear a man who threatened the president they adore? Since the leak about his book, Bolton has been denounced by Republican Senator Jim Inhofe [R-OK], who is one of his closest friends in the Senate, and Fred Fleitz, who served twice as Bolton’s chief of staff. He’s been castigated on Fox News, where he served as a contributor for 11 years. He’s put at risk his relationship with former benefactors such as the Mercer family. Surely it would have been safer to simply write a book that avoids alienating the president, as the former Trump appointees Nikki Haley and James Mattis did.

Maybe Bolton is betting that Republicans will fall back in love with him once they fall out of love with Trump. But three years into Trump’s presidency, no evidence suggests that is happening. And Bolton is too widely reviled among progressives—and too warlike—to reinvent himself as a Never Trumper with a gig as a contributor at MSNBC. So it’s hard to see how Bolton’s attack on Trump works to his advantage. Even if Bolton did time his truth telling to maximize book sales, the fact remains: He appears to have told the truth about Trump, something few prominent Republicans have had the courage to do.

To defy their bosses, friends, and allies, people need to have faith in something larger. In his 2012 book, Beautiful Souls, the author Eyal Press suggests that people who put themselves at risk to challenge injustice are often true believers who cannot bear to see the institutions they serve violate their ideals. Press tells the story of Paul Grüninger, a Swiss policeman in the late 1930s who lost his job, and became a local pariah, for violating Switzerland’s policy of denying entry to Austrian Jewish refugees. What motivated Grüninger, Press argues, was “his unshakeable conviction” in Switzerland’s self-conception as a “sanctuary whose citizens had always extended a welcome hand to castoffs from more troubled lands.” That self-conception, Press notes, was largely a myth. But because of Grüninger’s obsessive devotion to it, he risked his livelihood and reputation to prove that the legend was true.

Press also recounts the actions of Leyla Wydler, a Houston investment broker who, in 2003, mailed a packet filled with incriminating documents about her employer to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wydler’s action, Press argues, stemmed from her unusual idealism about the American financial system, which she considered “untainted by the corruption that flourished” in her native El Salvador. Whistle-blowers, Press notes, quoting a study by Myron Peretz Glazer and Penina Migdal Glazer, “invariably… believed that they were defending the true mission of their organization”—even when the organization’s actual mission wasn’t nearly as high-minded as they believed.

Bolton fits this pattern. He believes strongly—even recklessly and obtusely—in hyper-aggressive, hyper-nationalist foreign policy. And he’ll defy anyone who deviates from that vision.

Before Trump, Bolton’s presidential patron had been George W. Bush, who endured a bitter battle with congressional Democrats for nominating Bolton to be his ambassador to the United Nations. But after leaving the job, Bolton turned on Bush for being too dovish. “Nothing can erase the ineffable sadness of an American presidency, like this one, in total intellectual collapse,” he wrote in a 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed castigating Bush’s diplomacy with North Korea. In his 2007 memoir of his time in the Bush administration, Surrender Is Not an Option, Bolton trashed influential former colleagues for straying from his hard-line views. The criticism infuriated Bush. Key Bush advisers such as Condoleezza Rice, Robert M. Gates, and Stephen J. Hadley subsequently got their revenge by lobbying the nascent Trump administration to deny Bolton a job.

Bolton’s impolitic candor continued during the Obama years. Most hawks opposed Barack Obama’s diplomacy with Iran and urged ever harsher sanctions against Tehran. But they strenuously denied wanting war. Bolton was more honest. He wrote a 2015 New York Times op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” thus making him a far easier target for liberals. In early 2018, he wrote a column advocating a preemptive strike on North Korea—which was unlikely to ingratiate himself with Trump, who had taken office promising to end America’s wars.

This isn’t to say Bolton never trims his views to suit his interests. But he does so less than government officials who are less ideologically devout. After entering the Trump administration, Bolton alienated Trump by battling ferociously against the president’s penchant for big, headline-grabbing deals with adversaries such as North Korea and the Taliban. Rivals within the government accused Bolton of disloyalty for allegedly refusing to go on television to defend administration policies he opposed. When Bolton left, Trump replaced him with the sycophantic Robert O’Brien, who has called the president “the greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States.”

Bolton’s departure is probably healthy for world peace. His ideological zeal—which led him to continue to defend the wisdom of invading Iraq long after many others had admitted their mistake, and to propose new wars in North Korea and Iran—made him one of the most dangerous national security advisers in American history. But that very obstinacy—Bolton’s unyielding devotion to an ultra-hawkish foreign policy—may be the same quality that has now led him to challenge the GOP impeachment narrative. Bolton appears to loathe Vladimir Putin. And he’s incapable of whitewashing America’s betrayal of Ukraine, an ally under Russian threat. Dov Zakheim, a former undersecretary of defense who has known Bolton for decades, told me that Bolton would “take on the world if necessary, as long as he believes in what he believes in.” Luckily for the republic, taking on the world includes taking on Donald Trump. ###

[Peter Beinart is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. A former editor of The New Republic, he has written for Time, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books among other periodicals. Beinart also is a contributor to National Journal as well as programs on CNN. He has written three books — the most recent being The Crisis of Zionism (2012). He received an AB (history and political science) from Yale University (CT) and, as a Rhodes Scholar, received an MPhil (international relations) from Oxford University (UK).]

Copyright © 2018 The Atlantic Monthly Group



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Thursday, January 30, 2020

From The Change Of Pace Department — The Planters Peanut Company Killed Off "Mr Peanut" In Its Upcoming Super Bowl Commercial

This blog got darker and darker in late January. In an attempted change of pace, this essay by the DC Fishwrap's Molly Roberts has a serious message about cold-blooded business decisions that is sprinkled with a good bit of humor.. On top of that, Roberts analyzes a commercial that will run during Super Bowl LIV (damnably pretentious Roman numerals) on Sunday, February 7, 2020. Running at this moment in social media are video clips that shamelessly "tease" viewers to watch that commerical on Super Sunday. In fact, Dallas Cowboys running back DuaneThomas, in the hoopla week before Super Bowl VI (1972), asked during an interview: "If the Super Bowl is really the ultimate game, why do they play it again next year?" Probably the best question ever asked in conjuection with Super Bowl (Roman numveral). If this has been a (fair & balanced) backstory of a Super Bowl commerical, so be it.

[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Mr. Peanut Had To Die
By Molly Roberts


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

created at TagCrowd.com

Mr. Peanut is dead; long live Mr. Peanut.

Planters has killed off the beloved branding device, or rather the anthropomorphic legume has “sacrificed himself” in a humanlike act of selflessness. The tragedy occurred in a 30-second pre-Super-Bowl spot that features Mr. Peanut and his friends (Matt Walsh and Wesley Snipes, for some reason) swerving off a cliff to avoid hitting an armadillo with their Nutmobile (exactly what it sounds like).

The branch the trio cling to threatens to snap, so Mr. Peanut lets go — and good night, sweet snack.

The unexpected demise of Mr. Peanut is a marketing gimmick, of course, and boy, does it work. The very existence of this column is a sign of complete surrender to the corporate geniuses who dispatched, at the age of 104, a mascot who was basically a protein-packed brother to Mr. Monopoly.

Humanity’s first white flag to this arrived in the form of tweets. Many came from real, live, non-peanut people: “Will his body be … planted or roasted?” one mused. Many others, though, came from Mr. Peanut’s band of brothers — or is it brand?

“Always classy, always crunchy, always cleaned up nicely!” Mr. Clean offered mournfully.

“What? NO! We’re dropping a Reverse Card on this,” UNO, the card game, cried out.

Even PETA laid down a virtual rose for what it called “a splendid source of protein to vegans everywhere. ”

This was like “Toy Story,” only for corporate Twitter — the accounts assembled as a cast of characters, each one more powerful when surrounded by others than they could ever be alone. (A Mr. Potato Head solo movie? Pass. Put him next to Woody, Buzz Lightyear and Bo Peep, and you’ve got a blockbuster.)Mr. Peanut might have perished alone as a sales ploy, but his buddies leaped in to save him — and now everyone, including the deceased, looks more vital than ever.

This week’s spot is a teaser for a “funeral” to take place during the Super Bowl proper, and Planters is urging everyone to attend. Imagine the Geico Gecko weeping over his fallen comrade’s grave just after the first quarter, when up from the ground springs the first sprout of Mr. Next-Gen Peanut.

The brands have created their own little world, and the rest of us just live in it.

This isn’t the world Mr. Peanut was made for.

At first he was a businessman, just like those who birthed him. Apparently his name is (alas, was!) Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe, which, well, just look at him. “The man, the monocle, the spats, the top hat,” proclaims the Planters website. A schoolboy’s original sketch of just, well, a peanut guy wasn’t enough. This nut-man was at the moment of his creation furnished — or garnished — with the trappings of a bona fide mini-magnate.

But here’s the thing: Even as the phrase “late-stage capitalism” has become a cliché to describe our experience of everyday life — and even as brands seep their sneaky way into all we see, do and eat — the experience is supposed to be seamless. This is the age of ambient corporatism, and the hope for any brand is that we’re so far gone we don’t even notice when it tries to close a sale.

The trick to self-promotion without self-immolation, at least on Twitter, is to play human — to make clear, for example, that there’s someone behind the MoonPie handle, riffing with company accounts that have similarly large followings, but also perhaps going a little crazy from spending his days selling a soft cookie sandwich. Brands: They’re just like you! Of course, it’s all dressing in a window to soullessness, but the point is not to be so obvious about it. And there’s nothing more obvious than Mr. Peanut.

The folks at Planters tried to humanize Mr. Peanut before they stopped his beating heart, back in 2010 — to make him out as a friend instead of a firm embodied. They called him, inexplicably, a “WingNut.” They gave him, somewhat more explicably, Robert Downey Jr.’s voice. They gave him also a diminutive buddy nut named Benson who idolized Mr. Peanut but did “not live in Mr. Peanut’s house.” This probably taught the Planters folks they could only go so far to convince the modern Everyman to identify with a legume decked out in a monocle, spats and top hat.

Mr. Peanut drips with plenty to which the woke vanguard of society today has grown allergic: maleness, dandyism and money, money, money.

The only solution that remained? Premeditated murder.

This is a coup for admen and -women everywhere. Even as Planters gives up on Mr. Peanut for not being human enough, they’ve managed to make him more human than ever before: forgoing the dreaded “rebranding” that trades out one old, disposable marketing symbol for another, and deciding instead on death — an end reserved only for the living.

The company has snatched victory from the nut-cracking jaws of defeat. ###
;
[Molly Roberts writes about technology and society for The Post's Opinions section. She joined the newspaper after she received a BA (English) from Harvard University (MA) and was a columnist, Op-Ed Chair, and ultimately, the Editorial Chair of The Harvard Crimson (campus newspaper).]

Copyright © 2019 The Washington Post



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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Roll Over, E. B. White — The Jillster (Jill Lepore) Has Graced The New Yorker With An Updated Essay On "The Meaning Of Democracy"

This blog has been deemed "the Reserve Room" where the blogger curates a collection of the best writing on the Internet. One of the founders of the Internet called it "the world's largest library — with all of the published works lying scattered on the virtual floor." Since 2003, this blog has featured an essay that — in the blogger's humble assertion that the day's post represented good (and sometimes great) writing. Today, this blogger has posted an essay by a writer (clumsily dubbed "The Jillster") Jill Lepore, whose day job is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. This essay is the final word (for some time to come) about the death or survivla of democarcy in the United States of America. If this is (fiar & balanced) historical writing that achieves escellence, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
In Every Dark Hour — The Last Time Democracy Almost Died
By The Jillster (Jill Lepore)


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

created at TagCrowd.com

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued.

“Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.” When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” FDR said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on “The Future of Democracy in the United States,” predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because “there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on.” Some Americans turned to Communism. Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

“It’s not too late,” Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in 1939. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.” It wasn’t too late. It’s still not too late.

There’s a kind of likeness you see in family photographs, generation after generation. The same ears, the same funny nose. Sometimes now looks a lot like then. Still, it can be hard to tell whether the likeness is more than skin deep.

In the nineteen-nineties, with the end of the Cold War, democracies grew more plentiful, much as they had after the end of the First World War. As ever, the infant-mortality rate for democracies was high: baby democracies tend to die in their cradles. Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.

“American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.

Nothing so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today,” and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a “beautiful democracy,” prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, “If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want.” In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn’t find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, “Be sure you know what you prepare to defend.”

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. American democracy in the nineteen-thirties had plenty of critics, left and right, from Mexican-Americans who objected to a brutal regime of forced deportations to businessmen who believed the New Deal to be unconstitutional. W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that, unless the United States met its obligations to the dignity and equality of all its citizens and ended its enthrallment to corporations, American democracy would fail: “If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire.”

The historian Mary Ritter Beard warned that American democracy would make no headway against its “ruthless enemies—war, fascism, ignorance, poverty, scarcity, unemployment, sadistic criminality, racial persecution, man’s lust for power and woman’s miserable trailing in the shadow of his frightful ways”—unless Americans could imagine a future democracy in which women would no longer be barred from positions of leadership: “If we will not so envisage our future, no Bill of Rights, man’s or woman’s, is worth the paper on which it is printed.”

If the United States hasn’t gone the way of the Roman Empire and the Bill of Rights is still worth more than the paper on which it’s printed, that’s because so many people have been, ever since, fighting the fights Du Bois and Ritter Beard fought. There have been wins and losses. The fight goes on.

Could no system of rule but extremism hold back the chaos of economic decline? In the nineteen-thirties, people all over the world, liberals, hoped that the United States would be able to find a middle road, somewhere between the malignity of a state-run economy and the mercilessness of laissez-faire capitalism. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on the promise to rescue American democracy by way of a “new deal for the American people,” his version of that third way: relief, recovery, and reform. He won forty-two of forty-eight states, and trounced the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in the Electoral College 472 to 59. Given the national emergency in which Roosevelt took office, Congress granted him an almost entirely free hand, even as critics raised concerns that the powers he assumed were barely short of dictatorial.

New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. They built a new America; they told a new American story. On New Deal projects, people from different parts of the country labored side by side, constructing roads and bridges and dams, everything from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Hoover Dam, joining together in a common endeavor, shoulder to the wheel, hand to the forge. Many of those public-works projects, like better transportation and better electrification, also brought far-flung communities, down to the littlest town or the remotest farm, into a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.

This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together. Beginning in 1938, for instance, FDR’s Works Progress Administration [WPA] produced a twenty-six-week radio-drama series for CBS called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” written by Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial. “What brought people to this country from the four corners of the earth?” a pamphlet distributed to schoolteachers explaining the series asked. “What gifts did they bear? What were their problems? What problems remain unsolved?” The finale celebrated the American experiment: “The story of magnificent adventure! The record of an unparalleled event in the history of mankind!”

There is no twenty-first-century equivalent of Seldes’s “Americans All, Immigrants All,” because it is no longer acceptable for a serious artist to write in this vein, and for this audience, and for this purpose. (In some quarters, it was barely acceptable even then.) Love of the ordinary, affection for the common people, concern for the commonweal: these were features of the best writing and art of the nineteen-thirties. They are not so often features lately.

Americans reëlected FDR in 1936 by one of the widest margins in the country’s history. American magazines continued the trend from the twenties, in which hardly a month went by without their taking stock: “Is Democracy Doomed?” “Can Democracy Survive?” (Those were the past century’s versions of more recent titles, such as How Democracy Ends, Why Liberalism Failed, How the Right Lost Its Mind, and How Democracies Die. The same ears, that same funny nose.) In 1934, the Christian Science Monitor published a debate called “Whither Democracy?,” addressed “to everyone who has been thinking about the future of democracy—and who hasn’t.” It staked, as adversaries, two British scholars: Alfred Zimmern, a historian from Oxford, on the right, and Harold Laski, a political theorist from the London School of Economics, on the left. “Dr. Zimmern says in effect that where democracy has failed it has not been really tried,” the editors explained. “Professor Laski sees an irrepressible conflict between the idea of political equality in democracy and the fact of economic inequality in capitalism, and expects at least a temporary resort to Fascism or a capitalistic dictatorship.” On the one hand, American democracy is safe; on the other hand, American democracy is not safe.

Zimmern and Laski went on speaking tours of the United States, part of a long parade of visiting professors brought here to prognosticate on the future of democracy. Laski spoke to a crowd three thousand strong, in Washington’s Constitution Hall. “LASKI TELLS HOW TO SAVE DEMOCRACY,” the Washington Post reported. Zimmern delivered a series of lectures titled “The Future of Democracy,” at the University of Buffalo, in which he warned that democracy had been undermined by a new aristocracy of self-professed experts. “I am no more ready to be governed by experts than I am to be governed by the ex-Kaiser,” he professed, expertly.

The year 1935 happened to mark the centennial of the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s [classis]Democracy in America, an occasion that elicited still more lectures from European intellectuals coming to the United States to remark on its system of government and the character of its people, close on Tocqueville’s heels. Heinrich Brüning, a scholar and a former Chancellor of Germany, lectured at Princeton on “The Crisis of Democracy”; the Swiss political theorist William Rappard gave the same title to a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago. In “The Prospects for Democracy,” the Scottish historian and later BBC radio quiz-show panelist Denis W. Brogan offered little but gloom: “The defenders of democracy, the thinkers and writers who still believe in its merits, are in danger of suffering the fate of Aristotle, who kept his eyes fixedly on the city-state at a time when that form of government was being reduced to a shadow by the rise of Alexander’s world empire.” Brogan hedged his bets by predicting the worst. It’s an old trick.

The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation’s growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic, arguing that “at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today,” ran a series on “The Future of Democracy,” featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. “Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?” the editors asked each writer. The series’ lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. “I call this kind of question ‘meteorological,’ ” he grumbled. “It is like asking, ‘Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?’ ” The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”

Don’t ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.

Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter’s husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. “The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard,” said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of “Democracy and the Future,” and warning against reading Beard’s books—at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning “un-German” books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those US history textbooks which “omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government.” Beard’s books, God bless them, raised doubts.

Beard didn’t back down. Nor did WPA muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack. Instead, Beard took pains to point out that Americans liked to think of themselves as good talkers and good arguers, people with a particular kind of smarts. Not necessarily book learning, but street smarts—reasonableness, open-mindedness, level-headedness. “The kind of universal intellectual prostration required by Bolshevism and Fascism is decidedly foreign to American ‘intelligence,’ ” Beard wrote. Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. “Whatever the interpretation, our wisdom or ignorance stands in the way of our accepting the totalitarian assumption of Omniscience,” he insisted. “And to this extent it contributes to the continuance of the arguing, debating, never-settling-anything-finally methods of political democracy.” Maybe that was whistling in the dark, but sometimes a whistle is all you’ve got.

The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr., was banking on, anyway, after a neighbor of his, in Scarsdale, declared that he so strongly disagreed with FDR that he never listened to him. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. In 1935, he launched “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” an hour-long debate program, broadcast nationally on NBC’s Blue Network [currently ABC]. Each episode opened with a town crier ringing a bell and hollering, “Town meeting tonight! Town meeting tonight!” Then Denny moderated a debate, usually among three or four panelists, on a controversial subject (Does the US have a truly free press? Should schools teach politics?), before opening the discussion up to questions from an audience of more than a thousand people. The debates were conducted at a lecture hall, usually in New York, and broadcast to listeners gathered in public libraries all over the country, so that they could hold their own debates once the show ended. “We are living today on the thin edge of history,” Max Lerner, the editor of The Nation, said in 1938, during a “Town Meeting of the Air” debate on the meaning of democracy. His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. “We didn’t expect to settle anything, and therefore we succeeded,” the Spanish exile said at the end of the hour, offering this definition: “A democracy is a place where a ‘Town Meeting of the Air’ can take place.”

No one expected anyone to come up with an undisputable definition of democracy, since the point was disputation. Asking people about the meaning and the future of democracy and listening to them argue it out was really only a way to get people to stretch their civic muscles. “Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women,” Dorothy Thompson once said. “The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart. If the democratic temper be exacerbated into wanton unreasonableness, which is the essence of the evil, then a victory has been won for the evil we despise and prepare to defend ourselves against, even though it’s 3,000 miles away and has never moved.”

The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who had become the superintendent of the city’s schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the GI Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.

The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that “the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely.” When Senator Guy Gillette, a Democrat from Iowa, talked about “Why I Support the New Deal,” Senator Lester Dickinson, a Republican from Iowa, talked about “Why I Oppose the New Deal.” Speakers defended Fascism. They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism. Within the first nine months of the program, thirteen thousand of Des Moines’s seventy-six thousand adults had attended a forum. The program got so popular that in 1934 FDR appointed Studebaker the US Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. The federal forum program started out in ten test sites—from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. “It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States,” Du Bois wrote, in 1937.

The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to YMCAs and YWCAs, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things

Should the Power of the Supreme Court Be Altered?

Do Company Unions Help Labor?

Do Machines Oust Men?

Must the West Get Out of the East?

Can We Conquer Poverty?

Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished?

Is Propaganda a Menace?

Do We Need a New Constitution?

Should Women Work?

Is America a Good Neighbor?

Can It Happen Here?

These efforts don’t always work. Still, trying them is better than talking about the weather, and waiting for someone to hand you an umbrella.

When a terrible hurricane hit New England in 1938, Dr. Lorine Pruette, a Tennessee-born psychologist who had written an essay called “Why Women Fail,” and who had urged FDR to name only women to his Cabinet, found herself marooned at a farm in New Hampshire with a young neighbor, sixteen-year-old Alice Hooper, a high-school sophomore. Waiting out the storm, they had nothing to do except listen to the news, which, needless to say, concerned the future of democracy. Alice asked Pruette a question: “What is it everyone on the radio is talking about—what is this democracy—what does it mean?” Somehow, in the end, NBC arranged a coast-to-coast broadcast, in which eight prominent thinkers—two ministers, three professors, a former ambassador, a poet, and a journalist—tried to explain to Alice the meaning of democracy. American democracy had found its “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” moment, except that it was messier, and more interesting, because those eight people didn’t agree on the answer. Democracy, Alice, is the darnedest thing.

That broadcast was made possible by the workers who brought electricity to rural New Hampshire; the legislators who signed the 1934 federal Communications Act, mandating public-interest broadcasting; the executives at NBC who decided that it was important to run this program; the two ministers, the three professors, the former ambassador, the poet, and the journalist who gave their time, for free, to a public forum, and agreed to disagree without acting like asses; and a whole lot of Americans who took the time to listen, carefully, even though they had plenty of other things to do. Getting out of our current jam will likely require something different, but not entirely different. And it will be worth doing.

A decade-long debate about the future of democracy came to a close at the end of the nineteen-thirties—but not because it had been settled. In 1939, the World’s Fair opened in Queens, with a main exhibit featuring the saga of democracy and a chipper motto: “The World of Tomorrow.” The fairgrounds included a Court of Peace, with pavilions for every nation. By the time the fair opened, Czechoslovakia had fallen to Germany, though, and its pavilion couldn’t open. Shortly afterward, Edvard Beneš, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on, yes, the future of democracy, though he spoke less about the future than about the past, and especially about the terrible present, a time of violently unmoored traditions and laws and agreements, a time “of moral and intellectual crisis and chaos.” Soon, more funereal bunting was brought to the World’s Fair, to cover Poland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. By the time the World of Tomorrow closed, in 1940, half the European hall lay under a shroud of black.

The federal government stopped funding the forum program in 1941. Americans would take up their debate about the future of democracy, in a different form, only after the defeat of the Axis. For now, there was a war to fight. And there were still essays to publish, if not about the future, then about the present. In 1943, E. B. White got a letter in the mail, from the Writers’ War Board, asking him to write a statement about “The Meaning of Democracy.” He was a little weary of these pieces, but he knew how much they mattered. He wrote back, “Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” It meant something once. And, the thing is, it still does. # # #

[Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University as well as the chair of its History and Literature Program. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2005. Her most recent book is These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). See other books by Lepore here. She earned a BA (English) from Tufts University (MA), an MA (American culture) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and a PhD (American studies) from Yale University (CT).]

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Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Roll Over, Francis Fukuyama — We Now Face The End Of -History- The United States Of America

We have observed the effects of polarization on the US Congress with thecurrent impeachment trial of The ILK (Impeached Lyin' King) is deeply troubling. The chasm separating the participants who support The ILK and those who opposed The ILK seems wider than the Grand Canyon. Perhaps we are witnessing the end of the United States of America. The words for end (English) are: fin (Frnech and Spanish), ende (German), конец [pronounced Konets] (Russian), or кінець [pronounced kinets'] (Ukrainian). If this is the (fair & balanced) consideration of the end of a nation, so be it.

[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Why Red And Blue America Can’t Hear Each Other Anymore
By Francis Fukuyama

[This essay is a review of Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized (2020.]

TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

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As the third decade of the 21st century opens, the United States finds itself in a paradoxical situation: The economy is booming, unemployment is historically low, the nation is not involved in any major wars, and the international situation is (for the moment) reasonably stable. Yet voters do not feel stable or happy: On the right, many believe that the country they knew is being taken away from them by immigrants and shadowy elites, while for the left, democracy itself is being challenged by a Republican Party that has turned into a cult of personality. In 2016, America elected a president whose personal characteristics — narcissism, ignorance and barely disguised racism — should have immediately disqualified him. Yet Donald Trump became president and remains an object of adulation for at least a third of the country.

This polarization is perhaps the single greatest weakness of the American political system today, a weakness that authoritarian rivals like Vladimir Putin’s Russia have gleefully exploited. It is the subject of a superbly researched and written book by the journalist and commentator Ezra Klein, founder of Vox and host of a popular podcast. Klein argues that polarization exists for structural reasons having to do with the incentives created by US institutions, and that our current predicament is not the result of individual leaders and the choices they make: It existed long before Trump took his famous ride down the escalator in Trump Tower and will unfortunately survive regardless of who is elected in November.

The bottom line of Klein’s argument is that polarization was driven fundamentally by race. The Republican Party has become the home of angry white voters anxious that the United States is turning into a “majority minority” society, as California already has, a reality epitomized by the election of Barack Obama.

There is no question that race played an important part in the 2016 election and that for many Trump voters, cultural identity was a more significant factor than economic self-interest. It is otherwise impossible to explain why so many working-class whites supported Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, a policy that benefited them above all.

But cultural identity is fed by many factors besides race, and understanding this complexity is very important if the Democrats hope to win back the Oval Office and Congress. Failure to appreciate the legitimate grounds for resentment by populist voters is a general failure of liberals everywhere, from Turkey and Hungary to Britain and the United States, and one of the reasons they keep losing elections.

Klein has done his homework in reviewing the extensive academic literature on the subject and interviewing scores of actors immersed in practical politics. The fact of polarization is not in question and it stems from the momentous political realignment that took place after the 1960s. Klein cites a famous study by the American Political Science Association from the 1950s complaining that the Republican and Democratic parties were too similar and didn’t offer voters real ideological choices. In those days, the two parties were large coalitions of heterogeneous interest groups. The Democratic Party, in particular, brought together an odd alliance of Northern liberals, working-class trade unionists and Southern segregationists. This changed in the 1960s when the Democrats embraced the civil rights movement, which led to a multigenerational shift by the South toward the Republican Party. The two parties became much more ideological and homogeneous by the early 21st century, such that the most liberal Republican lay to the right of the most conservative Democrat.

This part of the story has been well understood for many years; what has puzzled observers is why polarization has more recently intensified into what political scientists label “affective polarization,” a highly emotional attachment to one’s side that defies considerations of rational self-interest. Here Klein, like many others, reaches into the realm of social psychology and notes a basic human propensity to form powerful group attachments: Being red or blue has come to constitute an identity rather than an ideology. He cites a large literature suggesting that human cognition does not begin with facts and work its way to interpretations; rather, humans start with preexisting identities and use their considerable cognitive skills to justify positions they somehow know in advance to be right. Under these conditions, having more facts and information does not necessarily lead to better decisions. Klein cites one rather depressing study in which better-informed partisans were more attached to their incorrect opinions than people who were more ignorant.

These two phenomena — the Southern realignment and the human propensity to bond with groups — bring us to Klein’s central conclusion about the centrality of race for Trump voters and Republicans who believe their white identity is under threat.

The remainder of Why We’re Polarized catalogues the many other institutional sources of the underlying divide. The media, and especially social media, thrives on virality; it no longer reports news but creates news based on what sells. Changes in our campaign finance laws have weakened the political parties; this plus the spread of popular primaries has opened both parties to more extreme positions, since activists on left and right are the ones who donate money and vote in primaries. The fact that the United States has a presidential system and winner-take-all elections raises the stakes in contests and promotes extremist behavior, like Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s sidelining of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland during the final year of Obama’s presidency. Finally, local politics, which used to be resistant to larger national trends, have also become polarized because of outside money and national media.

Why We Are Polarized provides a highly useful guide to this most central of political puzzles, digesting mountains of social science research and presenting it in an engaging form. There are two areas of weakness, however, in an overall outstanding volume.

The first has to do with the central contention that our current polarization is fundamentally about race. Klein dismisses economic drivers of populism like globalization and the loss of working-class jobs, noting that if those were the fundamental issues, then left-wing populism rather than the nativist variety should have seen a big upsurge in support.

There is no question that race has resurfaced in an ugly manner in American politics, driven by an overtly racist president. But culture and identity are much broader than race. Gender is at least as important: Men have been losing status and economic power to women in workplaces and families steadily for the past generation. Many people in 2016 didn’t so much support Trump as vote against Hillary Clinton, who represented to them a certain kind of self-satisfied feminism and came into the election with very low trust and favorability ratings.

The urban-rural divide that Klein correctly notes as central to the red-blue division encompasses a host of cultural values beyond race, related to religion, patriotism, respect for traditional sources of authority and other lifestyle issues. Working-class whites in rural areas have undergone a social decline epitomized by the opioid crisis, which has led to a drop in male life expectancy in the United States. As Angus Deaton and Anne Case have argued, this is a result of despair engendered by job loss and social isolation.

Opposition to our current immigration system does not necessarily have to stem from xenophobia and racism: Polls from Gallup and Pew show that more than 60 percent of Americans have positive views of immigration but more than 50 percent worry that so much of it is illegal. High culture today is produced in liberal agglomerations like New York, Los Angeles and London, and it has created a kind of intellectual snobbery that is bitterly resented by people who don’t like being dismissed as ignorant racists.

The book’s second weakness lies in suggested solutions, which Klein admits are not his strong point. Normatively and as a matter of practical politics, no reform is conceivable that disproportionately benefits one party over the other: His suggestions of congressional representation for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, or abolition of the electoral college, may be desirable in themselves but will never pass until the Democrats take over all three branches of government (in which case our polarization problem will have been largely solved). There are other reforms, however, like ranked-choice voting, term limits for Supreme Court justices or the elimination of the filibuster, that do not have clear implications for long-term electoral outcomes. Ranked-choice voting, in particular, may attract Republican support and is my leading candidate for reform.

Klein opens his book by dismissing individuals and leadership as explanations for polarization, in favor of structural or institutional factors. That may be a proper analytical stance, but often structural change can come about only as a result of external crises combined with the proper visionary leadership. Democrats will not win back swing voters by writing off their opponents as simple racists and xenophobes; they need to show empathy for the legitimate concerns of a working class that is in serious trouble. Identity is an inherently flexible concept that can be deliberately shaped in broader or narrower ways. Liberals around the world have lost ground to populists by ignoring the broad moral appeal of national identity, which in a diverse contemporary society needs to be built around liberal and democratic values. Klein dismisses complaints about political correctness and identity politics on the left, but a politics built on the grievances of ever narrower identity groups breeds similar thinking on the right, and it cannot be the basis for a broader democratic, civic identity that is the ultimate answer to polarization.###

[Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of Stanford University. Fukuyama received a BA (classics) from Cornell University (NY) and a PhD (government) from Harvard University (MA). Fukuyama is best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992) that foresaw the triumph of liberal democracy in the world after the Cold War See his other books here.]

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Monday, January 27, 2020

Dear Tom/Dan — There's Not Much To Say About A Sham "Trial" Without Witnesses Or Documentary Evidence

The e-mail that brought today's 'toon also contained a brief message from Tom/Dan:

This one probably speaks for itself. I know the House managers have been the face of the Democratic Party this week, but as this cartoon rolls out next week, their role in this will be ending, which is why I chose not to portray Schiff or any of the others.

Dan/Tom

The Sham "Trial" without witnesses or evidence was a stain upon this nation's heritage that will accompany the IMPEACHMENT of The ILK (Impeached Lyin' King) in the history books yet to be wrtitten. If this is (fair & balanced) hatred of The ILKand his enablers, so be it.

[x TMW]
IMPEACHMENT RULES
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)



[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2020 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)



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Sunday, January 26, 2020

Welcome To The Kabuki Theater Show In The US Senate Chamber (Or, If It's Not Kabuki — The Faux Trial Show)

The New Yorker sent its first-team political reporter to the US Senate as a theater critic. In fact, she becomes the "Butcher on East Capitol Street NE" with an incisive vivisection of the creatures who make up the majority in the US Senate. Glasser cuts through the pettifoggery uttered by the majority party in the Senate. If the Emperor has no clothes, his followers have no rational thoughts. The Senate majority has drunk its fill of the Kool-Aid freely dispensed by The ILK (Impeached Lyin' King). If this is a (fair & balanced) diagnosis of the obstruction of both houses of the Legislative Branch of the US government, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
The Closing Of The Senatorial Mind
By Susan B. Glasser


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

created at TagCrowd.com

Each day this week, when the Senate impeachment trial of Donald John Trump has convened at 1 PM, the proceedings have opened with a prayer by the Senate chaplain, Barry Black, pitched to the tenor of the day. On Wednesday, responding to the ill-tempered partisan exchanges that marked the trial’s contentious first afternoon and evening, Black urged senators to “remember that patriots reside on both sides of the aisle.” On Thursday, he practically begged senators to take their role seriously, cautioning them against “fatigue or cynicism,” and insisting that “listening is often more than hearing.” Black warned against jeopardizing friendships of many years in the heat of the impeachment moment, and, on Friday, he returned to the theme of “civility and respect” and implored senators to maintain their ability to “distinguish between facts and opinions without lambasting the messengers.”

I came to look forward to these homilies, but only because they seemed like pleas to a country and a Senate that no longer exist. If anything, the chaplain was pleading with senators to do the exact opposite of what we all know they are doing. In Trump’s exhausted, jaded capital, there is some listening, but certainly no hearing. Civility is as often as not a dirty word, a synonym for moral compromise and not a prescription for practical politics. In days of watching the trial, I have observed only a handful of instances of Republicans and Democrats interacting with each other in any way. The Senate of the United States in 2020 is not a place where meaningful talking across the aisle is possible. It is not a place where facts are mutually accepted and individuals of good will can look at them and come to opposite but equally valid conclusions. The distance is too vast, the gulf unbridgeable.

We already knew this, of course, before Trump was impeached by the Democratic House of Representatives and put on trial by the Republican Senate, a trial that has been fast-tracked toward his inevitable acquittal. But what a sad and powerful demonstration of the phenomenon we are witnessing. On Thursday night, at the start of one of his most passionate—and ultimately partisan—speeches, the lead House manager, Adam Schiff (D-CA), began by making an overture to the senators, going on at great length about their fairness and thanking them for keeping “an open mind.” To say this was aspirational would be a stretch. Schiff knew there were few, if any, open minds in the Senate, where, in the course of twenty-four hours spread across three days, he and his fellow House managers made their opening arguments.

The House team’s approach to the problem of having an essentially unpersuadable audience was to veer between lengthy and at times repetitive PowerPoint-enabled recitations of the evidence against Trump—which was plentiful—and impassioned appeals to the Senate to do something about it. As the week built toward the House managers’ Friday-evening close, the level of passion seemed to rise, along with every senatorial tweet and TV interview confirming that their eloquence was largely lost on their audience.

On Friday afternoon, Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) , offered an impressive recap of the lengths to which the White House went to keep Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign secret. He cited names and dates for the cover-up. At the end of his presentation, his tone changed. “There’s a toxic mess at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Jeffries, who is often pegged as a future Speaker of the House, said. “I humbly suggest that it’s our collective job on behalf of the American people to try to clean it up.” A few hours later, Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the House Judiciary Committee chairman and another of the managers, went further. After outlining Trump’s assertion of essentially unlimited executive privilege and pointing out that Trump is the first President to categorically refuse to provide a single witness or document in response to a congressional impeachment inquiry, Nadler compared Trump to a would-be king. Trump is “the first and only President ever to declare himself unaccountable,” Nadler said. If he is left unchecked by Congress, Nadler concluded, “He is a dictator. This must not stand.”

In his own closing, Schiff hit many of the same themes. He ran through a litany of Trump’s obstructive acts. “That has been proved,” he said, over and over again, as he checked off each item on his list. His disdain for the President was palpable. (“For a man who loves to mock others, he does not like to be mocked,” Schiff, a frequent target of Trump’s attacks, said.) And then he ended with an homage to “moral courage” and the real political bravery needed in “disagreeing with our friends—and our party.” It was a moving speech, as Schiff’s usually are, and it sought to acknowledge that Republicans would have to do something very brave indeed: listen to his case and truly hear it. He even proposed that Republicans merely punt the remaining question of whether to call witnesses in the trial to Chief Justice John Roberts, who is presiding over the Senate proceeding. “Give America a fair trial,” he implored. “She’s worth it.” But, of course, it was not to be. Indeed, a riff in Schiff’s speech citing a CBS story that Trump associates had reportedly threatened that any Republican who dared to vote against Trump would end up with his or her “head on a pike” soon had GOP senators claiming to be offended and outraged by Schiff’s words. As Schiff was speaking, the Associated Press tweeted out a news story that captured the moment. It said, “Democrats do not appear close to getting the 4 GOP votes needed for witnesses to appear in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.” The game is all but over.

Who, in the end, were they speaking to? And to what end? Jeffries and Nadler and Schiff spoke of Trump as a liar running a dangerously dysfunctional Administration—which counts as an incontrovertible truth in their world but clearly does not in that of the Republican senators. Those senators, after all, have been Trump’s enablers and supporters for three years now, no matter how initially reluctant they were to back him. They have voted almost entirely in lockstep with his priorities, even those that diverged from the Party’s previously held orthodoxies or the senators’ own longstanding beliefs. If Trump’s Washington is the toxic hot mess that Jeffries spoke of, these folks cannot conduct the cleanup. They voted for the pollution.

There are two observations from the Senate floor that stick with me after three long days of hearing the House present its case. These observations speak to how essentially impossible the task of addressing the jury was for Schiff and his fellow-prosecutors. The Republican John Kennedy, a canny Rhodes Scholar from Louisiana who is nonetheless known for his folksy observations, told a reporter, as he headed into the arguments on Friday morning, that the managers had made a mistake in reading their audience. “Very few souls are saved after the first twenty minutes of the sermon,” he said. Less charitable was the view of Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, who said that she had been watching her Republican colleagues squirm in their chairs and understood that nobody likes to be forced to listen to something that they disagree with. “Most of us get restless when we are presented with information we don’t want to hear,” Hirono said, and of course she was right. Imagine doing that for twelve hours or more a day, confined to a hard wooden seat, with no food and every bathroom break you take scrutinized by reporters as proof that you are not taking your job seriously. That, roughly, is the predicament in which the Senate Republican members found themselves this week. It is no surprise that they looked unhappy.

But, still, if the goal of the House managers was to sway any votes, then it is hard not to see their presentation of the case as a failure. On Thursday night, the Republican Rob Portman, of Ohio, spoke to CNN’s Manu Raju outside the chamber and made what counts these days as a concession of sorts to the Democrats. Portman acknowledged that Trump’s withholding of millions in military aid and a White House meeting from Ukraine, as he sought politically motivated investigations, was problematic behavior. “Some of the things that were done were not appropriate,” Portman said. “I’ve used the word ‘wrong’ and ‘inappropriate.’ That’s a very different question than removing someone from office who was duly elected, in the middle of a Presidential election.”

This, in effect, is what I would have expected Republican senators to say in defense of Trump in a previous, less polarized era. It is a modified, updated, Trumpified version of the defense that Democratic senators used twenty-one years ago in voting to acquit Bill Clinton on charges of lying under oath about an extramarital affair: Wrong, bad, inexcusable, but does not rise to the level of impeachment and removal from office.

Had Senate Republicans adopted this argument en masse, the trial would still have the same partisan outcome, but at least it would have taken place in the world of shared facts and expectations. But Portman is no longer the mainstream of the GOP; the center has not held. On Friday afternoon, Judy Woodruff, of PBS, asked Portman’s colleague Deb Fischer, of Nebraska, whether she at least accepted “their premise” that Trump had asked Ukraine to investigate his 2020 political rival, former Vice-President Joe Biden. “I don’t,” Fischer said. This is remarkable stuff. What must the Senate chaplain make of such willful defiance of the facts? The demand from Trump to investigate Biden—by name, no less!—is right in the summary of his July 25th call with the Ukrainian President—the “perfect” phone call, as Trump calls it. The President has tweeted dozens of times since September urging Americans to “READ THE TRANSCRIPT!” How is it possible that one of the hundred senators is so disdainful of her duty that she has not bothered to do so or, if she has, is so willing to ignore what it so plainly says?

This is not a serious defense of Trump, of course, but it is amazingly revealing. The Senate trial of twenty-one years ago was for the Rob Portmans; the Senate trial of today is for the Deb Fischers. There is no audience for Adam Schiff, or if there is it has shrunk to a small handful of Republicans who may or may not vote next week to keep the trial going with witnesses and further evidence. For the rest of the Republicans and the forty per cent or so of America that has unflinchingly supported Trump through his Presidency, there will be another show, produced personally by the showman-in-chief.

That starts on Saturday, when the Trump legal team begins its opening arguments. Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, a Harvard Law School graduate who was the solicitor general of Texas before he became a senator, told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, in an interview on Friday morning, that he was actively advising the Trump legal team after hours of sitting on the Senate floor each day. He said that he told the President’s lawyers, “No. 1, focus on substance more and process less.”

Don’t expect much substance. On Thursday morning, Trump gave a clear indication of the kind of defense he wants and where his mind is as he directs his lawyers. After “having to endure hour after hour of lies, fraud & deception by Shifty Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer & their crew,” Trump tweeted, “looks like my lawyers will be forced to start on Saturday, which is called Death Valley in TV.” Later, Trump’s private lawyer for the impeachment, Jay Sekulow, elaborated, in the language of show business preferred by the reality-TV star in the White House. Saturday’s presentation by the Trump legal team will be like a “trailer,” Sekulow told reporters, during a break on Friday—a preview of “coming attractions.” The show, for a few more days at least, will go on. ###

[Susan B. Glasser is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, where she writes a twice-monthly column on life in Trump’s Washington. She is Politico’s chief international-affairs columnist and the host of its weekly podcast, “The Global Politico.” Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications; most recently, she founded the award-winning Politico magazine and went on to become the editor of Politico throughout the 2016 election cycle. She previously served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of "Outlook" and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin and the End of Revolution (2005), which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker. Glasser received a BA cum laude (government) from Harvard University (MA).]

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