GIN AND TACOS

Life isn't fair. To prove it, compare the amount of time it takes to build something with the time required to destroy it.
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Spend a few hours on a sand castle and someone can knock it down in about ten seconds.

Pick any kind of organization – a family, a corporation, a sports team, a social circle, a volunteer group – and the amount of time and effort required to make it functional and successful is vastly disproportional to the ease with which everything falls apart. One person or one bad decision is all that it takes in some cases to ruin something that was the product of thousands of people and an equal number of good decisions.

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy states that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It emphasizes that in order to make something successful it's often necessary to avoid dozens of potential mistakes but any one of a large number of potential mistakes will result in failure. This is why, for better or worse, most organizations succeed or fail based on decisions made at the top.
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Leadership is important – overly so, in many cases – because it alone has the power to make the kinds of mistakes that can be fatal.
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This is important to remember as we watch the painfully long roll-out of an impending Trump administration that all but promises to set the country back a few decades in a matter of months.
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Governing for people of these ideological stripes is easy in the same way that dynamiting a skyscraper is easier than building one. Liberals and centrists are at the constant disadvantage of trying to create things that require a dozen different things to be executed nearly flawlessly, while anti-government conservatives can dismantle it or render it useless in no time at all.

The really troubling part of this clown car of losers getting to sit at the controls is not that they will do damage to the economy, national security, civil rights, and the environment. What is alarming is the years it will take to undo. We could suck it up and live with a couple of bad years, but the consequences of those bad years will linger long after the people responsible for it have returned to obscurity where they belong.

Progress is incremental. Regression is precipitous. This is going to be bad.

Sometimes I get lucky and by the time I can make words about something it turns out that other people already said what needs to be said.

I found the widely circulated appearance of neo-fascist Barbie Tomi Lahren on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah deeply disturbing.

Their exchange was not interesting and it went about as one might expect – imagine an internet comment section where someone tries over and over to get the head cheerleader from your high school to understand that maybe black and white people are not treated equally by society, without success, and you've seen everything the footage has to offer. Add in the predictably heavy emphasis on "dialogue" and "civility" and lots of laughs and smiles to show that we can all get along even if one of us thinks the other is subhuman and you end up with something out of a mushy centrist's wet dreams.
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This is not OK. You can't have a civil Agree to Disagree conversation in that format with hardcore racists, or people who make their living making excuses for hardcore racism. Taking someone like Lahren, a troll from deep within the dark right wing internet thrust into the public eye because she's conventionally attractive, and presenting her in this way normalizes extreme beliefs in a way that is flatly dangerous.
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All this appearance did was offer free publicity to the smiley, perky face of white nationalism. This was a dream come true for Lahren, to be taken seriously and presented as a serious person with something useful to say. Neo-fascist cliques have been trying to find a way to attain that kind of mainstream legitimacy for decades, going to ridiculous extremes like trying to lure in kids with Nazi pop music. And now the mainstream media are doing it for them, for free, under false pretenses of objectivity. All Opinions Matter, right?

Here's Damon Young on why people need to stop playing along and giving right wing demagogues something they badly want – a black sidekick to legitimize how Not Racist they are. The title "It's time to stop allowing ourselves to be seduced by shitty white women" is my kind of title, too. Some random college undergrad, believe it or not, offers a great long take on the white liberal discourse fetish on, believe it or not, Huffington Post. And Vann Newkirk offers a similar but equally worth reading take on reordering our priorities and values so that we recognize that some things are more important than civility and Playing Nice, especially when doing so is exactly what the other side wants as they prepare to walk all over you.

All worth reading. Everything I have to add would be redundant on that.

As an obsessive consumer of books, movies, and TV from the Cold War era about living under the threat of nuclear annihilation, one thing that becomes apparent is that the fear of accidental apocalypse was easily as prominent (or, in the view of some scholars, more prominent than) as the fear that some madman bent on destroying the world would gain access to the Big Red Button. It was broadly recognized, particularly once the hydrogen bomb and the ICBM entered the picture in the early 1960s, that a nuclear war was not "winnable" and that even the evil, bloodthirsty Commie understood that well enough that no sane man would initiate one. Ivan knew that Uncle Sam was ready to hit him back hard enough to return the planet to the Stone Age, and both Eastern and Western political systems were robust enough (in their own very different ways) to prevent the elevation of the kind of lunatic who would say "Screw it, let's all die!" into a position of authority.

The biggest fear, then, was that once a massive apparatus of global annihilation was created humans would somehow lose control of it – that like a careless child who finds dad's gun, we would blow the planet up without intending to do so. On the American side, the heavy reliance on automation and seemingly half-crazed SAC Generals combined with the sheer size of the nuclear arsenal strained the ability of the civilian leadership to ensure that nothing happened that was not supposed to happen. For the Soviets, perversely, it was the lack of effective command and control, combined with the doddering character of their political leadership after Kruschchev, that raised the red flags (pun intended). That the world could come to an end because an American computer or a Soviet radio hookup from the 1930s malfunctioned was more plausible to most people than a cartoon villain President or General launching the missiles with a bloodthirsty laugh.

The most popular and in many ways best depiction of this fear in the arts is, of course, Dr. Strangelove:

Muffley: Well I assume then, that the planes will return automatically once they reach their failsafe points.

Turgidson: Well, sir, I'm afraid not. You see the planes were holding at their failsafe points when the go code was issued. Now, once they fly beyond failsafe they do not require a second order to proceed. They will fly until they reach their targets.

Muffley: Then why haven't you radioed the planes countermanding the go code?

Turgidson: Well, I'm afraid we're unable to communicate with any of the aircraft.

Muffley: Why?

Turgidson: As you may recall, sir, one of the provisions of plan R provides that once the go code is received the normal SSB radios in the aircraft are switched into a special coded device, which I believe is designated as CRM114. Now, in order to prevent the enemy from issuing fake or confusing orders, CRM114 is designed not to receive at all, unless the message is preceded by the correct three letter code group prefix.

Muffley: Then do you mean to tell me, General Turgidson, that you will be unable to recall the aircraft?

Turgidson: That's about the size of it. However, we are plowing through every possible three letter combination of the code.

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But since there are seventeen thousand permutations it's going to take us about two and a half days to transmit them all.

Muffley: How soon did you say the planes would penetrate Russian radar cover?

Turgidson: About eighteen minutes from now, sir.
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This is, as we have already been reminded with the Taiwan Phone Call Crisis, the fear we once again have to live with as a nation. If for no other reason than self-interest, we can safely assume that Donald Trump does not actually want to get us all killed. The problem is that he's exactly the kind of person who would blunder into it. Shoot first – from the hip, naturally – and ask questions later. Act with an open disdain for forethought. Be "disruptive" and then let others rush in to clean up the mess you just made. This is, as the well worn saying goes, precisely how accidents happen. I'm not worried that Donald Trump wants to start a war. I'm worried that Donald Trump will start a war, at which point his intent will be irrelevant. That refusal to think about things he says and does that was pointed out throughout the campaign is not a bug. It's a feature. He states explicitly that he wants to be "unpredictable" in foreign policy. It doesn't take much imagination to envision how the infamously irony-deficient Chinese or Russian leadership are going to react to Diplomacy by Coked Up 3 AM Twitter Zinger.

"He wouldn't do that" is only reassuring inasmuch as the "he" in question is conscious of the potential consequences of his words and actions.
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Your dog doesn't want to knock over the glass perched on the edge of the kitchen table, but dammit if he doesn't do it every time he gets excited.

It has been more than 15 years since I gave up on American conservatism, but since it represented a big change in my (at that time young) life I still remember much of the process quite clearly.
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Two things in particular were the deciding factors for me. One, I watched the Southern wing of the party slowly become dominant and it made no sense to me why anyone would take policy cues from and submit to the leadership of people representing the absolute worst parts of the country.
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"Do we really want to make the country more like Mississippi? Why?" was a question I asked a lot and never got a satisfactory answer. The second tipping point (Is it possible to have two of those?) was the realization that the American definition of conservatism is like the American definition of mayonnaise – it would not be recognized as such anywhere else in the world. American conservatives are not conservatives. Their ideology is better described as either nationalism, anti-government-ism, or some combination of the two.
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The fundamental principle of conservatism in political history is, in my view, the defense of the institutions of government (or, as some people argue more expansively, society as a whole). This implies the utmost respect for the rule of law and the constitutional process. Republicans, however, gave up any pretense of that during the 80s and 90s. While I would never describe myself as a conservative (because people would interpret that incorrectly), I still believe that adherence to the power-sharing arrangements of our system of government takes precedence over anything else in the political arena. Without that foundation, we have a system of majority rule that is wide open to manipulation and abuse of power.

Defense of political institutions is necessary because without it, people lose sight of the necessity of the same.
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When faith in the institutions of government disappears, people are seduced by all manner of nonsense in its place. They might even, hypothetically, react favorably to authoritarian appeals to give one individual the power to act as he pleases without the constraints of any rules or institutional checks and balances. What we see today is nothing more than the logical end result of forty years of telling people that government is evil, rotten, and the obstacle between America and Greatness. How many times can people be told that government is the problem in their lives before they conclude that it serves no purpose that they can see?

American conservatives gave up long ago on defending our institutions. If the Supreme Court makes a decision they don't like, they shit all over the Supreme Court. If the president is not a Republican, they slander him as illegitimate. Any law they do not author is a direct attack on the Republic and its humble, freedom-loving citizens. If they do not win an election, then the election was rigged. Is any of this sounding familiar? Somehow the American left became better at the traditional role of conservatives than conservatives themselves. Al Gore had to be the one to go on TV in 2000 and tell the country that we are obligated to respect decisions of our institutions even when they are obviously riddled with problems.

The Republicans have been living dangerously with their new, nihilistic take on the role of government for years. Despite constant references to their love of the Constitution, they've encouraged Americans to look the other way for the sake of advancing their own agenda. But now it appears that the mood they cultivated has gotten out of their control and they've no longer control their own party. They've been taken over by a con man / publicity hound who doesn't even want to do the job he was elected for. Republicans needed to hawk the importance of the rule of law just enough to maintain control of the institutions they used to acquire or maintain power. But they pushed it too far, like the thief who keeps coming back for one last big heist over and over until he ends up in cuffs. "I should have walked away when I had the chance" summarizes what a lot of Republicans must be feeling today, even if they don't verbalize it and on paper they control all of the levers of governing. They know now that what they have are majorities, not control.

Now the Republican Party is under the control of someone who doesn't even pay lip service to institutions and the rule of law, which is the final nail in the coffin of any meaningful claim to the term "conservative." Token shows of backbone during the election have been replaced by a parade of Republicans into audiences with their new master, groveling for favor and a whiff of the spoils. It isn't the racism and nationalism that means that the GOP is now officially an authoritarian movement; the giveaway is the eagerness with which they embrace government by Big Man, not to be inconvenienced by anything as insignificant as the rule of law getting between America and greatness.