GIN AND TACOS

If you've read about, or are old enough to remember living through, Watergate one of the interesting aspects of it is that even in less hyperpartisan times Republican support for Nixon was pretty firm. At least it was right up until it wasn't.
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It's not surprising that Democrats were howling for blood from the moment the scandal became a radar blip. Nixon was something akin to a monster in the eyes of liberals (which is pretty amusing in hindsight). Republicans, some of whom were quite a bit more liberal than any Republican you'll find in Congress today, took a more measured approach. Most weren't exactly wild about Nixon themselves. He was not a very easy man to get along with. But they expressed measured support for him throughout the scandal. Few of them gushed into the cameras of their burning love for Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. Most, however, took a "Let's not have this wild-eyed talk of impeachment before we even see any evidence of wrongdoing."

Then the audio tapes came out and the indictments were handed down. Tape transcripts circulated widely. The Republicans around the Capitol didn't waste time looking for the exits.

enate Republican Leader Hugh Scott said the transcripts revealed a "deplorable, disgusting, shabby, and immoral" performance on the part of the President and his former aides. The House Republican Leader John Jacob Rhodes agreed with Scott, and Rhodes recommended that if Nixon's position continued to deteriorate, he "ought to consider resigning as a possible option."

There was a sense throughout that Republicans were trying to be supportive of Nixon without really sticking their necks out for him. Lots of "Wait until all the facts are in" stuff. No doubt they would have liked to rid themselves of the scandal sooner and more emphatically, but politicians have (not surprisingly) good instincts for these things.

You could sense the mental calculations taking place. A strong note of support for Nixon would have been a bet on the scandal getting better rather than worse. And Republicans in Congress at the time were pretty damn sure that getting worse was more likely. A legislator's #1 goal is reelection. They might care about helping Nixon and strengthening the Republican brand. When the chips are down, they care about protecting themselves a lot more.

Since it was assembled as opposition research we should assume that not every bit of this new dossier on Trump's Russian ties is true. But it's not all false, either. And you can bet that people in Washington with insider knowledge are feeling like an uncomfortably significant amount of it could be true.

The instinct of every Congressional Republican will be to downplay this, to defend him without sticking their necks out too far. But if you're a GOP in Congress right now you're also asking yourself two pertinent questions right now.

1. How much am I willing to risk to help this guy I don't like?
2. How likely is it that this is the worst news that's going to come out about Trump and the Russians?

Your answers right now are 1. Not much, since most of them didn't want this guy winning the nomination in the first place and 2. It depends on how much of an optimist one is.
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They hear the whispers. They know what potential exists for this to get worse. And they also don't believe or trust Trump any farther than they can throw him. They're not quite ready to throw him under the bus, but they have to be getting a little nervous. Not heading for the exits, but at least scoping out a path should the exit become necessary.

I don't think Republicans are going to defect en masse anytime soon, but it's clear that there is more information coming out and more is probably going to continue to come out in the next weeks and months. They will make gestures of support with sweaty palms and weak praise for now. The point of the Watergate analogy is that when the end comes and they abandon him, it is likely to happen with stunning quickness. No one can say with certainty right now that more damaging information is on the way. If you had to wager your political career on it, though, how confident could you be at this moment that we've already seen the worst of it?

Yeah. Me neither.

One of the most well known contemporary political scientists attempted to provide a practical guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party on Vox over the weekend. As these Vox-style wank pieces go it's not bad, and does indeed deliver on what the title promises – a guide with some specific recommendations for action.

For that reason alone it's a useful piece, since the liberal tendency is to make an argument and assume that its logic or fundamental correctness will win over hearts and minds if repeated enough. The author correctly points out that a big part of the success that groups like the Tea Party have had is the less glamorous stuff. Here's a spoiler: it involves showing up to a lot of meetings.

Does that paragraph read like a setup for a "But,"? I guess I hide my cards poorly.

Two statements in the article, when taken together, point to a flaw in the underlying logic.

Compared with previous presidential contests, the partisan gap between big-city and non-big-city voting patterns widened. Trump won because he rang up unusually high margins (although not unusually high turnouts) among voters across all social strata in suburban, small-city, and semi-rural counties, especially in the Midwest. In many of those places, Democrats are not an organized presence at all.

And:

On the left, labor unions used to be the most far-reaching federated organizations cooperating with and bolstering the Democratic Party. But both private and public sector unions are now in sharp decline after years of conservative attacks — and their current dues-collecting arrangements face legal deathblows under the incoming regime. Unions aside, most center-left organizations are professionally run advocacy groups headquartered in New York, DC, or California and devoted to many separate causes and constituencies. Democrats tend to organize across the entire country only temporarily for presidential campaigns.

Neither statement is false, but the problem of the second is embedded in the first.

We've talked to death the fact that America's rural areas have been emptying out and filling up the big urban areas across the country.
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Within those urban areas, liberals are not well represented in the suburbs in most cases; voters there tend to be older, married, white homeowners of a distinctly reactionary bent. In other words, the author is right that there is little organized liberal presence in a lot of these places…because most of the liberals are gone.

Where, then, are these liberal ground-up organizations supposed to come from? As the second quote reveals, Democratic campaigns have a kind of "surge and recede" dynamic; they fan out across the country for election years and then pack up and return to California and the East Coast until the next election. That's ineffective. The problem is that there's a reason all of those people live in California, New York, Boston, and DC – they're probably from the Muncies and Rockfords of the world and they got out the second they could. Going back simply reminds them of why they left.

Not to make the author personally responsible for solving this problem, but there must be some reason she's at Harvard. Certainly University of Illinois would be equally happy to have her. Oh, right, I forgot: central Illinois sucks. That's why she's not there.

Who's left on the liberal side of the spectrum in these unorganized places where the Democratic presence has atrophied? You've got younger people who are itching to get out and generally do so at the earliest opportunity. Then you have the 30-55 aged liberals who are living in a sea of red for job-related or personal reasons.
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Most of them are pretty tired of showing up to school board meetings in Keokuk, being outnumbered 25 to 1 and ostracized for suggesting that maybe the Bible isn't a science textbook. If you've never had the experience of being in a small town and being one of a small percentage of educated liberals, you very well might believe that it's possible to rally these people into action. But if you've had that experience, you're probably not eager for more of it.

In short, none of the logic of this argument can deal with the fact that the problem of the collapse of Democratic ground organization in the rural and suburban South and Midwest is a natural outgrowth of the lack of liberals living there in critical masses. Democratic campaigns function as temporary affairs manned by staffers who fan out from the Beltway and Bay Area and Chicago and Brooklyn and then retreat to their safe spaces because that's where Democratic campaign and liberal group operatives live. It makes sense for political groups to headquarter in DC, but when they try to establish a nationwide network of local orgs FreedomWorks is a going to have a vastly easier time than (insert liberal org here) setting up the local chapter in Paducah. The reasons for that reality are not necessarily a failure of liberal / Democratic organization. It's hard to build a base of support in a place your most likely supporters want nothing to do with for good reason.

An internet friend recently posted an article from November on the rise of a far-right government in Poland. Being descended from four grandparents born in Poland I make a passing effort to stay abreast of its politics, although in practice I usually find that my attention-hands are full with everything the American system throws at us.

For two years now, astute Americans have seen the rise of Trump on our side of the Atlantic as the American version of something that has been an undercurrent in Europe since the fall of the USSR. Every European democracy has its ultra-right parties defined by enthnocentrism and extreme nationalism. In the U.S., because the rules of our system default us to two very large parties, we have seen this only as a part of the Republican coalition. In the 1980s and 1990s, someone like Pat Buchanan was an aberration.
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He was part of the Big Tent of the GOP but considered even among his compatriots as the Crazy Uncle. After the Great Recession began in 2007, it started to become apparent that lower-class white nationalism in the form of the Tea Party was not the small component of the American Right that mainstream GOPers wanted everyone to believe. What was once the fringe was clearly on its way to becoming the majority within the GOP, and the appeals they used to gain popularity in the increasingly old, increasingly white, and increasingly socially and economically marginalized Republican masses seemed novel to Americans but were no doubt quite familiar to any European used to the antics of their nation's own far right. Nationalism. Conspiracies. Cries of traitorous intentions. Rejection of anything originating from Liberal institutions like universities, the media, expertise, or reality out of hand. Division of the world into a We and a Them.

One striking difference, though – and the idea that caused my friend to post this article and raise the question – is the heavy emphasis in the European far right on distributive policies that is totally absent in the United States. In Europe they do as all populist parties, left and right, have always done to solidify and build support: they promise to give people things. They use the resources of the state and of power in an exchange theory of politics; vote for us and you will get X, Y, and Z in return. Sometimes those variables would be intangible things like national pride or increased social status relative to other groups.

But they always, as in Poland today, include economic handouts in the mix as well.

Why is the American right such a stark exception to this pattern around the world? Populism and the distribution of government largesse go hand in hand everywhere but here. Part of the answer is that anti-government, pro-individualism ideology is much more prominent in the U.S. than it is elsewhere. The other, bigger problem is that American society is not nearly as homogeneous as most countries in Europe. And that's a problem because the American nationalists can't figure out a way to shower the poor with money without letting people who aren't white get some of it. Donald Trump would have done what every nationalist-right figure in Europe does, which is campaign with promises of restoring the correct order of things in society (check) and appealing to the economically adrift by promising them money (strike) – if only he could have found a way to give it exclusively to white people.

The people who respond to Trump's appeals understand this implicitly. Many of them are poor and not the slightest bit opposed to welfare in practice no matter how much they decry it in theory. What they oppose is other people – the wrong people, the not-one-of-us people, the brown people – getting any of what they see as their entitlement. They want the disability and SSI checks, the make-work jobs, the Medicaid, the state-run treatment programs, the school funding, and all the other handouts that Republicans claim they oppose on principle. Trump's appeal to poorer whites has been beaten to death, and they are a demographic that has no problem taking any of these things.

The problem is finding a way to promise them more of it without letting any of it fall into the hands of The Other – the immigrants, the blacks and Hispanics, the people in big cities, and so on.

In a country like Poland this is easier to do because the society is, at least compared to the U.S., sorely lacking in diversity. It's a very white, very Catholic, very ethnically unified country for the most part due to, uh, some stuff that happened between 1940 and 1945. So targeting voters requires only targeting them by economic and social class.
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Here, where African-Americans, Hispanics, and recent immigrants are overrepresented in the part of the population broadly labeled Poor, railing against The Other and The Outsider is complicated.

What happens when The Outsiders are not an amorphous mass outside the borders, but other citizens to whom you are equal in theory but need to feel superior to in practice?

Well. What happens is, things get tricky. You end up with a president trying to gut the welfare state while somehow preserving it for Certain People, the Right People, wink wink. You end up with a president who preaches the free market but engages in crony capitalism to save, temporarily, the jobs of the Right People. You have a set of policies and actions that conform to no ideology because the ideology underlying it is white nationalism and, well, you can't just say that's the ideology.

The barbarians outside the gate have always been an effective foil for political rhetoric and populism in particular. In Poland today, the (Muslim) horde at the gate of Europe drives the far right's recent rise. In the United States, the barbarians are not at the gate. They're already inside it. The challenge is not distinguishing Americans from Others, but Real Americans from the Not Real ones. The system for telling which one is which, to the American nationalist, is as uncomplicated as it is unspoken.

If someone running for office insists that government is bad you can rest assured that if they get elected the government that follows will in fact be very bad. Anything else would undermine the premise upon which he won support. When we are critical of the government we get from such people we are speaking past one another.
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A necessary part of proving that private enterprise or the free market or Jesus or rugged individualism or whatever can do something better than the state is setting the bar so low that crony capitalism can't help but trip and fall over it. To tell a modern conservative that what they advocate is bad public policy offers no new information to anyone involved in the conversation; the whole point is to make it as bad as possible.

The same is true of the consequences of policy changes, which liberals often interpret as bugs when they are in fact the main feature. Repealing Obamacare will cost many people who cannot otherwise afford it their health insurance? Yes, that's the whole point to right wingers.

More poor people getting sick and dying is something close to an autoerotic fantasy for conservatives. They lie, including to themselves, and pretend that what they advocate is some kind of solution, but they're not very good at convincing anyone.
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They know that tax cuts for the wealthy aren't going to Trickle Down and create anything for the rest of the country, but they know they need something better than "Look, we just really want the tax cuts and couldn't give half a shit what happens to working people" when they're on camera.

The mistake Our Side makes so often (see Obama's first couple years in office) is assuming that the right is acting In Good Faith and earnestly desires the best policy and the best government. This is a poor assumption. They just want to get what is best for themselves, and they believe that their political opponents have the same motivation – i.e., that poor people vote for left wing candidates just to get free stuff from the rich taxpayers and the noise about improving society as a whole is a smokescreen. In this way, politics to the current American conservative is a zero sum game of resource competition. The talk about policy objectives and grand strategies for a better society is a shiny coat of paint over everyone's true motives.

Keep this in mind as the Secretary-to-be of the Department of Education, Betsey Devos, is approved by the Senate in the coming weeks. Her selection in November brought the moribund issue of charter schools back into the national conversation, if briefly, and will do so moving forward. Since I get a paycheck in higher education, this issue does not affect me directly but I do have an awful lot of K-12 educators in my social circle. I see people argue in circles about charter schools regularly and to no effect. Right wingers chant School Choice like it is the prayer that will get them into heaven; liberals fire back statistics proving that at their top-dollar best, charter schools are roughly as good as public schools once we account for their power to take only those students they choose to take. Again, these two viewpoints are at cross purposes. The left assumes that charter school advocates 1) believe that charter schools are better and 2) are interested in "better schools" as the ultimate goal.

A full summary of the conservative movement's support for things like vouchers and charter schools is as follows: it's cheaper.

The way they see it, half the kids coming out of public schools today are basically illiterate. To them, this is fine. We have enough competition for the kinds of jobs a college degree is supposed to qualify one for as it is. Our options are to pump a ton of money into public schools and maybe see some incremental improvement in outcomes, or we can just create a system that selects out the half-decent students for a real education and future and then warehouse the rest until they're no longer minors and they're ready for the prison-poverty-violence cycle to Hoover them up. Vouchers and Charter Schools are not, to the conservative mind, a better way to educate kids well. They are a cheaper way to educate them poorly. What matters is that it costs less to people like six-figure income earners and home owners. Those people can afford to send their kids to a decent school anyway. Public education, to their way of thinking, used to be about educating people just enough that they could provide blue collar or service industry labor. Now that we have too much of that, a public high school is just a waiting room for prison. So why throw money into it? They don't think education "works" anyway; people are born Good or Bad, Talented or Useless.

So it only makes sense to find the cheapest possible way to process the students who were written off before they reached middle school. If charter schools manage to save 1% of them, great. If not, well, then they're no worse than public schools. And they're cheaper! Did I mention that they're cheaper?

When two people are trying to put together a puzzle, it's not going to go very well if one person is pointing at the box and saying, "Look, we're trying to put together a sailboat" and the other is off trying to rearrange the pieces to make a dinosaur. Both will fail, but at least in this case they'd understand that they failed because they had radically different goals. The big difference in our political system is that the dinosaur guy smiles real big and swears he's trying to help you make a sailboat, then resumes his task as soon as he gets his hands on the pieces.

It was not the closest the US and USSR came to blows during the Cold War, but the Turkish Straits crisis of 1946 was both the first and easily the most thoroughly forgotten brush with World War III.

Briefly, at the end of World War II the Soviets under Stalin made a laudably ballsy attempt to solve one of its oldest strategic, economic, and political handicaps. For all its globe-spanning size, neither today's Russia or the former USSR lacks one very basic and crucial feature: a year-around ice free shipping port. Its eastern ports are not economically and militarily useful because they are thousands of miles from European Russia, and its northern ports like Murmansk and Leningrad / St. Petersburg (Not to be confused with the one in Florida, aka "America's Strip Club") freeze over during the winter.

Of course the country has port access in other places, but all involve a second country. Most prominently, the Black Sea provides year-around access to the Mediterranean (and thus the world) but requires passage through two narrow straits that pass through Turkey – the Bosphorous and the ones I have never once spelled correctly on the first try, the Dardanelles.
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If you recall, two years ago we refreshed our memories about how important this Black Sea outlet to the world is to the Russians when they moved aggressively into Ukraine to secure access via the Crimea. There was also a thing called the Crimean War a while back. It's safe to say this is kind of a big thing to Russia. (As a side note, Soviet Georgia had territorial claims on part of Turkey, which the Russian government includes today in their territorial claim over, well, all of its former republics)

In the period of exhaustion and confusion that followed WWII, the Soviets formally demanded that Turkey allow it to place bases on the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. Later the demand evolved to joint Soviet-Turkish administration of the straits, effectively giving the USSR not only access to but sovereignty over the seaway. Harry Truman, always one for subtlety, used the pretense of needing to repatriate the remains of the recently deceased Turkish ambassador to the US to send the battleship USS Missouri and a half-dozen other Big Stick vessels to Turkey to sail around and look really impressive. The Soviets responded by conducting "exercises" in the Black Sea within spitting distance of the Turkish shores. In a then-classified telegram, American diplomat Dean Acheson described the situation in a way that would come to define the Cold War:

In our opinion the primary objective of the Soviet Union is to obtain control over Turkey. We believe that if the Soviet Union succeeds in introducing into Turkey armed forces with the ostensible purpose of enforcing the joint control of the Straits, the Soviet Union will use these forces in order to obtain control over Turkey…. In our opinion, therefore, the time has come when we must decide that we shall resist with all means at our disposal any Soviet aggression and in particular, because the case of Turkey would be so clear, any Soviet aggression against Turkey. In carrying this policy our words and acts will only carry conviction to the Soviet Union if they are formulated against the background of an inner conviction and determination on our part that we cannot permit Turkey to become the object of Soviet aggression.

Even Stalin, as belligerent as they come, recognized that the Russians were not actually prepared to fight over the straits or anything else in the Summer of 1946. The USSR dropped its formal request to take possession of the two straits but, for face-saving purposes, maintained its "opinion" that the Soviets should have sovereignty over them. When Stalin died they abandoned the issue altogether. By then it was too late, though.
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The acquisitive stares and saber-rattlings of the Soviet Union sent Turkey running for the sweet protective embrace of NATO and 0,000,000 in economic aid in 1952.
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As the story of the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey unfolds, it's worth keeping in mind that successive Russian governments have been searching for a reason to fight this fight for a couple of centuries. It's a good thing we have such a strong visionary leader ready to stand up against Russian aggression. A modern day Harry Truman.