Pitchforks and Guillotines

And why aren't we on the march with our pitchforks and guillotines?  Why do we let it all happen?  Why don't we do something?

Lots of answers to that one, mostly coalescing around :"There's nothing we can do except pitchforks and guillotines; as long as we continue choose to follow the rule of law."  The Presidency is uniquely free of guardrails (perhaps a topic for another post) and yet the Republic has endured for 249 years - 236 with an actual President - without any of them taking on more power than the people were comfortable with.  Wartime powers were assumed during actual wars, when American boys were leaving home to die, but otherwise, there was, at worst, an uneasy truce among the three branches, and, at its best, an effective and beneficial collaboration.  Not any more.  But there still aren't any guardrails -- even when the President breaks the law, for the Supreme Court has placed the President above the law, while he is President and engaging in official duties (which, according to Trump, is anything he does, including cheating on a drop on the fifth fairway).

But another reason we're not all in the streets and storming the White House is because very little of the villainous madness has had an impact on most of us.  For most, it's all still entertainment.  For others, it's a righteous ass-whupping for them blamed libr'ls.  For us, it's gut-clenching destruction of something we love.  But for all three groups, the actual impacts - and there will be actual impacts for everyone - are still in the future.  Right now, we're living our lives pretty much unchanged.

This post started out as a comment on the actual impact Trump's devastation has had on Abbey and I at this point.  Three things have happened:

• Our investments lost 3% in March.  This isn't world-shaking, and we'll survive, but it's a significant chunk of money.  I'm sure we're not the only ones.
• I write grants for our local community theater.  We received approval in January for a grant which would fund stipends for our artists (mostly actors).  It's not much, but it pays for gas in an organization which rehearses and performs in a wonderful historic theater which is at least twenty miles from where any of us live.  I got an e-mail this week telling recipients that the money may not be available.  No reason was given; the wording was very careful not to point any fingers, but NY Governor Kathy Hochul has cut arts funding in half in her 2025 budget - probably because she sees the Federal pass-through funding, which supports the NY SS Council for the Arts, as drying up. 
• Produce prices have been rising noticeably, at least at our grocery store.

None of these is a really big deal; none will cause the demise of anything, or even really hurt a lot.  This is the place most Americans are in - nothing really noticeable yet.  Nothing to worry about.  Just a lot of craziness until the next election.

But the asteroid is coming.  When exactly is it time for pitchforks and guillotines?

Two Ways of Looking at the Future

'Just wait until 2028 and things will go right back to how they were"

Politics as Entertainment

I saw a headline this morning, on CNN's site, that indicated that a majority of young voters now leaned Republican.  I looked hard but can't find it now; manybe I was still dreaming.  It was early.

This makes no sense at all in the rational world of democracy, since the Republicans are devastating these kids' futures, destroying much or most of what is good about their country and, by extension, their world.  They, and their children, will grow into a world where the environment is plundered, public health is devalued, culture is disappearing, and freedom is a thing of the past.  This is all because Republicans have had power, have more power now, and will have power for a long time into the future.  I can't imagine how they envision the opposition; however they do, it's wrong.

But this is not the rational world of democracy any more, and hasn't been for a long time.  Ever since the long decline of the fact based world in the 1990s, and its disappearance in 2016, politics and political factions have become, in a word, entertainment.  Our culture and our media have taken on the mantle of both-sider-ism, obscuring the different between the forces of empathy and the forces of greed, turning the art and practice of democratic debate and moral judgement into a zero-sum game that can only be won one way:  provide the masses with the most entertainment.  Circuses without the bread.

The Republicans, and especially the Donald, are entertaining.  There's always something new, something outrageous, something to laugh at, something to shock us.  We love it.  We love horror movies and action thrillers and comedies, and we enjoy them without bringing any moral judgement to the death, destruction, fear, shock, and disgust that they evoke.  We laugh, without really thinking of what we're laughing at.  We leave wanting more.

In the same way, we enjoy the Republican and Trumpian hijinks and outrageous capers without worrying about whether that's the way we want to be.  Judgement, truth, value and honesty are lampooned in our culture, and we do not dare bring them to something as peripheral as the way we are governed and, especially, the long-term results of how we are governed.  We're having fun now, so what's your problem?  

This must be what is happening with young voters; why else would they gravitate to the part of the political spectrum which is most dangerous to their future?  "The danger isn't here, isn't now; I don't have to worry about it!  Keep the laughs and the thrills coming!"

How will we look back on this era of American history?  That's worth thinking about.

Same As it Ever Was

 ...and right after I finished the last two posts, this popped up on NBC:

Judge [Boasberg] finds cause to hold Trump administration in criminal contempt over deportation flights

This is the judge that ordered the Administration to return the planes carrying "suspected" gang members to El Salvador to US soil so he could apply, y'know, due process and the rule of law.  If I remember, the Administration said, "Oops... they've left US airspace... nothing we can do... how about that.  And no, we're not bringing them back."

Meanwhile, on the Lawfare podcast*, this, in the words of Heather Cox Richardson, happened:

Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Ben Wittes of Lawfare watched the hearing and explained that Judge Xinis is now building the evidence to determine whether individuals in the administration have acted in contempt of court.

This is concerning the Abrego Garcia case, which is, in turn, what the cartoon in the previous post is about.

Don't get your hopes up.  In both cases, what the Administration is accused of is verifiably true, and proving it in court should be simple.  However, it will all be a waste of time, because the Supreme Court ruled on July 1 of last year:

The Court thus concludes that the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority. Pp. 6–9. (2) Not all of the President's official acts fall within his “conclusive and preclusive” authority.

In the words of the ACLU National Legal Director David Cole, "...the Supreme Court today for the first time in history places presidents** substantially above the law."

So:  same as it ever was.  Trump knows he's immune, and that's why he's breaking laws left and right.  Get used to it.

* - And it was on this podcast that we learned how to pronounce U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis' surname:  "Eye-knees."  Now you know.

** - But maybe they can get Lil' Marco on this.  One can only hope.

SCOTUS Update

 Another look at the Abrego Garcia case, from today's New Yorker:

“Today, the Supreme Court is expected to rule in the case of People v. Guy Who Will Ignore the Ruling.”                                                                                

I wish it were a funny cartoon.

TIme To Use the Word

I'm sure by now we've all heard the various versions of the Hypocrisy Circus that is the story of the Trump Administration's handling of the case of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national living legally in the US and holding down a union job.  He is a husband and father and lived in Maryland before being deported to an El Salvadoran maximum security prison for terrorists - with, of course, no evidence, no facts, and no due process.  And now the man who thinks he can annex Canada as the 51st state says he has no power to return Garcia to the US, even though the Supreme Court - his Supreme Court - told him to. 

I just can't fully embrace this story.  The repulsion is too strong.  And I am using 'repulsion' in both senses; the feeling of disgust and horror, and the almost physical inability to approach it; it is literally repelling me.  I can't get near it.  I feel like it will do some sort of damage to me just by taking a thorough look at it, so I shield myself, retreat.  

More and more stories of the Trump Administration evoke this response in me, especially those stories that involve real people being damaged and, in some cases, losing their lives.  It is, in part, my response to the serial bullying and abuse of power that reaches into lives every day; being bullied touches on childhood trauma that I think many of us share, and here it is again.  Part of it is outrage at the damage done to the institutions that have kept America great when it was great, and helped heal it when it was not.  Part of it is partisan.  Part is the cognitive dissonance created by an environment constructed of lies and hypocrisy.  And part of it is the devaluing and invalidation of a human response, a human feeling:  empathy.  Which is worth an entire post of its own.

But part of it - big enough to keep me at bay - is the fact that we are in the power of those who have no use for truth or empathy, whose only motive is to fulfil their base desires.  They are like the boy in "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby, who could put you under the cornfield if you said the wrong thing.  They are evil, but not innocently evil, like the boy in the story.  They are evil on purpose.

I use that word - evil - carefully, thoughtfully.  It's not a word to be trifled with.  But I recently read a comment by H. M. Gilbert*, a psychologist who interviewed and translated for Nazi war criminals at the Nuremburg Trials.  He noted, of his experiences:

I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Is this the case?  At least one guy who knew what he was talking about thinks that it is.  At any rate, it is this same evil that we face today, and it repels us.  Do you feel it?  

* - Interestingly enough, Gilbert later wrote a book called "The Psychology of Dictatorship," which we should all read if we want to understand, from the leaders of the Third Reich, what is going on in America right now.  A chilling exchange between Gilbert and Hermann Goring:

Göring: ...after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Bite the Apple

If you have whiplash because you're trying to keep track of US tariffs on foreign goods, you're in good company.  It's probably best to wait until the Trump Administration is finds another distraction or two, and forgets about tariffs for a while, which is something that will happen.

Interesting observation by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo about the actual effect of the tariffs:

Good way to see the current tariffs, as of literally today, is no tariffs on high value add manufactured goods marketed to middle and upper middle classes. Massive tariffs for cheap consumer items which amount to the biggest economic privilege of working class/middle class life in US.

Or, in other words, the privileged are safe from the effects of the tariffs (as they stand at this moment, which was yesterday), and the not-so-privileged get - well, it's an old story, isn't it?

One of the comments on Marshall's post was "Wait til the next MAGA trip to Walmart..."

In other words: