OpEd: Prophetic Moral Challenge After the National Prayer Breakfast →

Trump's need to praise himself at a prayer breakfast might have passed as an awkward moment in civil religion if the actions of his first two weeks in office had not already inspired mass protests. But in the face of the moral outrage that millions of Americans feel, the awkward silence of so-called faith leaders as they listened to a braggart drone on about himself was revelatory. The President went on to say, essentially: the world is a mess. I'm here to fix it. The Bible has a name for this political position: idolatry. 

The emperor had no clothes, but there wasn't a prophet in the house who was prepared, like the boy in the story, to point out the obvious.

But outside the Washington Hilton, on DC's streets, moral witnesses stood vigil in solidarity with the millions who've gathered across this nation, in our airports and on our streets, to challenge President Trump in the prophetic tradition of Frederick Douglass. Many well-intentioned Christians objected. "Even if we disagree with some of his actions," they asked, "doesn't the Bible still instruct us to pray for our leaders?" 

Not the Book of Jeremiah. "Don't waste your time praying for this people," God says to the prophet. "Don't offer to make petitions or intercessions. Don't bother me with them. I'm not listening." Scripture is clear that there comes a time when religion that simply blesses injustice is heretical—an offense to the God who has made clear what true religion requires: to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly.

10 Ways to Take on Trump →

Seyla Benhabib of Yale, writing one of several excellent analysis for this article:

We have to be careful, however, about throwing around the language of fascism. Yes, Hitler was also elected. But Trump does not represent a strong fascist movement. We are not living in a dictatorship—not yet! It’s going to be a rough ride, but let’s avoid the exaggerated examples. Trump is sui generis.

I prefer to call what Trump is engaged in “autocratic presidentialism,” meaning I’m the one who lays down the rule of law. To what extent is he going to respect the division of power laid out in the Constitution? Are our public institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court—going to be strong enough to prevent the country from sliding toward a kind of presidential dictatorship? To oppose these tendencies, we need as many moments of resistance as possible. We need to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.

There’s another way in which Trump differs from authoritarian leaders of the past. He has tried to use the language of nationalism: triumphal whiteness, “Make America Great Again.” But what we are really hearing from Trump is the corporate language of business success—­the language of “making deals.” He and the Republicans are likely going to move toward privatizing everything. That is not something you can say about past authoritarian movements. Most authoritarian leaders believe in a strong state. Trump doesn’t. For Trump, the state is a corporation—and he is going to treat it as such. In that sense, he’s almost more dangerous than previous authoritarian leaders. If the government is like a big corporation, we are clients, not citizens.

How are we to oppose this? We need a new, constructive vocabulary. It’s not enough just to call him “fascist,” “patriarchal,” “white,” “reactionary.” He is all that. But to mobilize people against him—especially people who might not necessarily agree with a progressive, left agenda—you have to create a language of caring for civic institutions, caring for the Constitution, caring for making democracy better. You have to instill a sense that this may really be the end of a certain kind of republicanism, with a small r. The art of the deal has to be opposed by a language of civic commitment and solidarity.

We have to be careful, however, about throwing around the language of fascism. Yes, Hitler was also elected. But Trump does not represent a strong fascist movement. We are not living in a dictatorship—not yet! It’s going to be a rough ride, but let’s avoid the exaggerated examples. Trump is sui generis.

I prefer to call what Trump is engaged in “autocratic presidentialism,” meaning I’m the one who lays down the rule of law. To what extent is he going to respect the division of power laid out in the Constitution? Are our public institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court—going to be strong enough to prevent the country from sliding toward a kind of presidential dictatorship? To oppose these tendencies, we need as many moments of resistance as possible. We need to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.

There’s another way in which Trump differs from authoritarian leaders of the past. He has tried to use the language of nationalism: triumphal whiteness, “Make America Great Again.” But what we are really hearing from Trump is the corporate language of business success—­the language of “making deals.” He and the Republicans are likely going to move toward privatizing everything. That is not something you can say about past authoritarian movements. Most authoritarian leaders believe in a strong state. Trump doesn’t. For Trump, the state is a corporation—and he is going to treat it as such. In that sense, he’s almost more dangerous than previous authoritarian leaders. If the government is like a big corporation, we are clients, not citizens.

How are we to oppose this? We need a new, constructive vocabulary. It’s not enough just to call him “fascist,” “patriarchal,” “white,” “reactionary.” He is all that. But to mobilize people against him—especially people who might not necessarily agree with a progressive, left agenda—you have to create a language of caring for civic institutions, caring for the Constitution, caring for making democracy better. You have to instill a sense that this may really be the end of a certain kind of republicanism, with a small r. The art of the deal has to be opposed by a language of civic commitment and solidarity.

Democrats can’t win until they recognize how bad Obama’s financial policies were

Something that will be extremely hard to do is both resist the current administration's extremism and deal with the sins of the past. And not just because it's good politics, but because it's right.

There’s history here: In the 1970s, a wave of young liberals, Bill Clinton among them, destroyed the populist Democratic Party they had inherited from the New Dealers of the 1930s. The contours of this ideological fight were complex, but the gist was: Before the ’70s, Democrats were suspicious of big business. They used anti-monopoly policies to fight oligarchy and financial manipulation. Creating competition in open markets, breaking up concentrations of private power, and protecting labor and farmer rights were understood as the essence of ensuring that our commercial society was democratic and protected from big money.

Bill Clinton’s generation, however, believed that concentration of financial power could be virtuous, as long as that power was in the hands of experts. They largely dismissed the white working class as a bastion of reactionary racism. Fred Dutton, who served on the McGovern-Fraser Commission in 1970 , saw the white working class as “a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote.” This paved the way for the creation of the modern Democratic coalition. Obama is simply the latest in a long line of party leaders who have bought into the ideology of these “new” Democrats, and he has governed likewise, with commercial policies that ravaged the heartland.

As a result, while our culture has become more tolerant over the past 40 years, power in our society has once again been concentrated in the hands of a small group of billionaires. You can see this everywhere, if you look. Warren Buffett, who campaigned with Hillary Clinton, recently purchased chunks of the remaining consolidated airlines, which have the power not only to charge you to use the overhead bin but also to kill cities simply by choosing to fly elsewhere. Internet monopolies increasingly control the flow of news and media revenue. Meatpackers have re-created a brutal sharecropper-type system of commercial exploitation. And health insurers, drugstores and hospitals continue to consolidate, partially as a response to Obamacare and its lack of a public option for health coverage.

Many Democrats ascribe problems with Obama’s policies to Republican opposition. The president himself does not. “Our policies are so awesome,” he once told staffers. “Why can’t you guys do a better job selling them?” The problem, in other words, is ideological.

Why comparing Trump's and Obama's immigration restrictions is flawed →

To refresh, Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 27 barring citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya from entering the United States for 90 days. It also puts Syrian refugee admissions on hold indefinitely. (We go over some of the key issues in this explainer.)

In 2011, Obama’s state department stopped processing Iraqi refugee requests for six months, though it didn’t disclose the policy like Trump did, ABC reported in 2013.

So, are the policies similar as Trump claimed?

In the most superficial of ways, yes. They both limit immigration into the United States on a temporary basis. But there are two significant differences that Trump omits.

First, Obama’s suspension was in direct response to a failed plot by Iraqi nationals living in Bowling Green, Ky., to send money, explosives and weapons to al-Qaida. The two men were arrested by the FBI in May 2011 for actions committed in Iraq and trying to assist overseas terrorist groups...

Second, the scope of the two policies is slightly different. Obama’s 2011 order put a pause on refugee processing, whereas Trump’s halt in entries applies to all non-U.S. visitors...

Immigration Orders and Odd Tenders →

I'm not keen on the article as a whole, but this is worth pondering:

More than that, though. One upshot of Trump's executive order is that United States lawful permanent residents, who have jumped through years of hoops to comply with the intricate immigration rules enshrined in U.S. law, are no longer protected by that law. They can be deported at the whim of the President, or his advisers, or a Border Patrol agent. (The order originally barred lawful permanent residents, though after some confusion, now it will not, unless the Secretary of Homeland Security wants it to. On the other hand, soon it may apply to citizens.) The nation of laws that they immigrated to is gone, replaced by a nation of arbitrary rule. 

If the president can, without consulting the courts or Congress, banish U.S. lawful permanent residents, then he can do anything. If there is no rule of law for some people, there is no rule of law for anyone. The reason the U.S. is a good place to do business is that, for the last 228 years, it has built a firm foundation on the rule of law. It almost undid that in a weekend. That's bad for business.

Trial Balloon for a Coup? →

I'll start by saying take this article (especially the title and conclusion) with a grain of salt. It's written by an engineer at Google, not a journalist, or intelligence analyst, or social scientist whose job is carefully thinking through this kind of stuff, and vetting the different pieces for authenticity (although perhaps that's his main hobby). Nevertheless, what's mentioned in this article is... dangerous. These kinds of actions go straight to trust in civil and legal society. The Trump administration is opening the door on coup--whether a self-coup as the author surmises, or a regular coup where another faction seizes power (and, as to the latter, why now, and not under any previous administration, many of which took actions just as rash or extreme? my answer: large, frequent, visible protests; high government or military factions tend not to commit coups unless there's a plausible public demand). However, the framing of this article assumes a pretty high level of careful thought as to what the Trump administration is doing and why, regardless of the potential outcome. Instead, it could simply be as chaotic and bumbling as it appears at a quick glance. Or some combination of both.

Please take the time to read the numbered list of recent actions (not least of which is the most interesting note on possible Russian collusion I've seen, though it's as tenuous as anything else). And again, remain skeptical and openminded.

Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday, and the various links there, for details) Significant in today’s updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a role in the decision.

That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.

How the Media Influences Our Fear of Terrorism →

Good article that crunches the data and shows that the press's coverage of terrorism is disproportional to its comparative risk.

This isn't new. I've written about it before, and wrote about it more generally when I wrote about the psychology of risk, fear, and security. Basically, the issue is the availability heuristic. We tend to infer the probability of something by how easy it is to bring examples of the thing to mind. So if we can think of a lot of tiger attacks in our community, we infer that the risk is high. If we can't think of many lion attacks, we infer that the risk is low. But while this is a perfectly reasonable heuristic when living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 BC, it fails in the face of modern media. The media makes the rare seem more common by spending a lot of time talking about it. It's not the media's fault. By definition, news is "something that hardly ever happens." But when the coverage of terrorist deaths exceeds the coverage of homicides, we have a tendency to mistakenly inflate the risk of the former while discount the risk of the latter...

Divining Trump’s Military Strategies →

Anticipation of the direction of policy ordinarily can be discussed in terms of grand strategies and schools of thought, but not so with Trump. With most presidents, attracting crowds and support and votes in a campaign is a gauntlet that must be run to serve the nation in its highest office. With Trump, attracting the crowds and support is what it’s all about.

A good take on what makes the new president tick, and what this does or does not mean for protecting the nation’s interests during the next four years, is an interview with three Trump biographers (Gwenda Blair, Michael D’Antonio and Tim O’Brien) in Politico. The biographers agreed that there has been no indication Trump can separate the interests of the country from personal pique.

...

There is a long history of political leaders, especially demagogic ones, who face weakening domestic support looking to foreign adventures to divert attention from problems at home, to rally nationalist sentiment, and to reap the benefits of popularity for the leader who is doing the rallying...

Similar dynamics could come into play with a domestically beleaguered Donald Trump. Trump’s comments during the campaign suggesting a less interventionist orientation than previous administrations were just like many other of his campaign comments in appealing to discontents of the moment. He was especially trying to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the disastrous Iraq War, going so far as to lie about his own purported opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

...

Right now all of this is speculation. But so has been projection of a less interventionist future based on the tweets and blurts and campaign speeches. What actually transpires will depend not only on the vicissitudes of presidential narcissism but also on interplay yet to develop between the President and his most influential subordinates.