Donald Trump rose to prominence and the presidency on the strength of his self-proclaimed mastery of “The Art of the Deal.” It was that business acumen, Trump claimed, that allowed him to turn a paltry loan from his father into a vast empire. But last week, The New York Times revealed that Trump was not the self-made billionaire he had claimed to be but rather the recipient of at least $413 million from his father, in part through tax schemes the paper described as “outright fraud.”
The painstaking investigation by Times reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner is not just a skillful demolition of the origin story Trump told. It’s also a rebuke to generations of journalists who bolstered Trump’s tale. Trump provided the myth, but he needed the press to trumpet it out to the public.
Boys to Men: With the GOP stamp of approval, the Proud Boys go mainstream →
The Republican Party is increasingly flirting with fascism. The GOP now has its own ready-made Brownshirts, and at least some state Republican Parties are embracing them.
Every organization needs to police its own, and the Proud Boys are violent extremists which should be rejected swiftly and totally. That the GOP hasn’t yet, is a bad sign. It’ll be important to watch carefully if and what Trump does about the new would-be thug wing of the Republican Party, besides issue empty denunciations.
On Friday, members of the Proud Boys assaulted leftist protesters outside New York City’s Metropolitan Republican Club, the state GOP’s home base in the city and a center of Trumpism in Manhattan, following an appearance by their leader, VICE co-founder Gavin McInnes. Joined by prominent members of the city’s racist skinhead scene, they screamed slurs as they stomped on heads; afterwards, they posed for group photographs. Not to be outdone, their compatriots on the West Coast repeated the performance on Saturday, attacking an anti-police violence vigil in Portland. A week earlier, Proud Boys had attacked counter-protesters at a “Resist Marxism” demonstration in Providence, Rhode Island.
The past three years have seen a proliferation of such groups: organized reactionaries of various political tendencies seeking out ideological enemies (mostly, but not exclusively, on the anti-capitalist left) to beat to a bloody pulp. The more hardcore elements of the so-called alt-right—the Nazis, the neo-Confederate KKK affiliates, the esoteric fascists and white separatists—sneer at the Proud Boys as insufficiently radical. In a sense, they’re not wrong: the Proud Boys are closer to the mainstream of American conservatism than Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer. That, however, is what makes them so dangerous. The Proud Boys aren’t just a less overtly racist branch of the alt-right; they’ve become a militant wing of the Republican Party. Anglin and Spencer aren’t getting invited to speak at GOP events, but McInnes is; Atomwaffen Division isn’t running security for Republican candidates for Senate, but the Proud Boys are. McInnes “is part of the right,” Ian Reilly, Executive Committee Chair of the Metropolitan Republican Club, told Gothamist, comparing him to previous guests Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter.“We promote people and ideas of all kinds from the right.” Reilly continued:“We would never invite anyone who would incite violence.”
Except, this is exactly what they had done: McInnes was at the Metropolitan Club to celebrate the fifty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, leader of the Japan Socialist Party, by the ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi, on live television in 1960—an “inspiring moment,” McInnes wrote on Instagram, which he re-enacted with his employee (and fellow Proud Boy) Ryan Katsu Rivera …
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New York Republicans, meanwhile, are doubling down on their decision to welcome McInnes into the fold.“We want to foster civil discussion, but never endorse violence,” Metropolitan Club officials said in a statement on Sunday night. “Gavin’s talk on Friday night, while at times was politically incorrect and a bit edgy, was certainly not inciting violence.” It bears repeating: McInnes was invited to the state party’s headquarters in New York City to celebrate the televised murder of an ideological enemy.
For all the scorn heaped on the Proud Boys by the leading lights of the white nationalist movement, they appear to be doing what people like Andrew Anglin, Richard Spencer, and Matthew Heimbach could not: creeping closer to formal, state power in the form of a political alliance with the GOP. They receive sympathetic media coverage from Fox News while actively recruiting new members not only from the alt-right, but from racist skinhead scenes across the country. A violently reactionary subculture that, left to its own devices, had in recent years remained relatively self-contained, racist skinheads (“boneheads” to leftist skins) under the leadership of charismatic demagogues like McInnes on the East Coast and Joey Gibson of Patriot Prayer on the West Coast are now spilling into the streets of America’s most liberal urban centers.
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Bound together by violent misogyny and ultranationalism, these groups stand for nothing resembling a conventional political program or platform—but that does not mean they are apolitical. Pragmatically sidestepping the question of race, they now make their proto-fascist appeal in the language of patriotic individualism: pro-America, pro-capitalism, and pro-Trump. (Its effectiveness should not be understated: for years, antifascists in New York City’s soccer supporter scene have been working to alienate Antillon, a frequent attendee of New York City Football Club matches at Yankee Stadium, from friends and fellow fans who don’t have Nazi tattoos—with little success.) Around the country, the Proud Boys have replicated this strategy, appealing primarily to people’s class interests—as small business owners, for example, or as the children of families who fled socialist revolutions—as well as traditionalist gender politics, temporarily deferring the white nationalist project in the interest of swelling their ranks. As it happens, this is the strategy that has also allowed them entry into the Republican mainstream.
When ‘Conservatives’ Turned Into Radicals
Jane Coaston, in the New York Times:
What my time at that student paper taught me is that conservatism has long had two faces — one for its ideological elites and another for its voters. Its intellectual class debates free markets and constitutional law, but the message for voters is consistently different, full of sinister socialist plots and black welfare recipients soaking up tax money…
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But this dynamic had been clear for at least a decade. From my first year of college to the weeks in which, as editor in chief, I closed my final edition of the paper, I came to a realization: Whatever conservatism told me it was intellectually — whatever ideas we discussed, whatever policy papers I read — could never compete with what conservatism was in practice. At the conferences the Collegiate Network sent me to, no one was discussing tax policy or the nature of effective governance; they were debating whether Barack Obama was a “real” American and whether Sarah Palin could unseat him in 2012, based on pure and unfettered loathing. Nothing was being conserved.
Conservative voters have known this for some time. This is why they voted last year for a president who swore not to preserve but to upend. Since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency, Republicans have worked to maintain a two-tiered party — one for the ideologues who believed in Burke and Buckley, free markets and free minds, and one for the voters, who are often moved less by a system of ideas than by id and grievance. It was always the voters, though, who really mattered. And it was the voters who won.
The “Southern Strategy” that Nixon ran on led to a massive constituent shift, with the substantial bulk of white racists (of varying degrees) fleeing the Democratic Party. Reagan, and every GOP president since, has used racially-coded white-identitarian appeals during campaign season in order to keep its shaky coalition of conservative ideologues and paranoid white middle class members voting together, only to ease up on the extremism after getting into office, which no doubt explains some of the anti-elite backlash.
But whether the racism of the GOP could have been slowly undone, the concurrent rise of the jingoist, reactionary “right-wing” media echo chamber, along with decades of failure of elites (on both sides) to argue for and provide adequate economic opportunity, made Trump inevitable. So for the time being, we’re stuck with a Republican Party that’s been radicalized and is increasingly cozying up to its violent extremists. The real conservatives need to take the party back, but that’s going to take time because there are so few moderate voices left, and they may not be able to make enough of a difference without addressing the lingering racism in the party, or taking on the worst of the fake news industry which has a stranglehold on truth among a large proportion of the GOP base. The Democratic Party is deplorable, too, but for now, the GOP is so extreme that it simply needs to be voted out of office, at least at the federal level.
Trump creates space for white supremacists to be violent
Through Trump, the Republican Party has finally embraced (if only implicitly) violent white supremacy. Trump flirts with violent white supremacist groups through his speeches, and he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. Various radical “right” fringe groups (neo-Nazi organizations, “Oath Keeper” and similar paramilitary groups, Proud Boys, etc.) are growing larger and more violent because Trump’s created and sustaining a rhetorical smoke screen for them. At his rallies and on Twitter, he “jokes” about how he wishes people would beat up protestors and the press. And at the same time he lies about the violence on the “left,” to distract from the current near-monopoly that the “alt-right”/far right has on political violence. The largest source of domestic terrorism are far-right white supremacist groups, and the vast majority of headline-worthy, politically-motivated violent events are perpetrated by the white men who make up 90% of their membership. The Republican Party so far has either ignored or embraced the turn to violence, and if it (and the country) is going to survive with a minimum of violence, we need to vote it out of the government until it purges its violent streak.
Jonathan Chait, in New York magazine online:
…In the closing weeks of the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans have taken this message national. Democrats are an “angry mob,” charges President Trump. “You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry, left-wing mob. And that’s what the Democrats have become.”
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One difference between anti-Trump protests and anti-Obama protests is a handful of episodes where left-wing protesters have confronted high-ranking Republicans in restaurants. I don’t think that tactic makes much sense, unless you’re prepared to defend conservative protesters doing the same thing to Democratic officials in restaurants next time around, which I am not. It’s worth noting that the restaurant screamers have been organized by Democratic Socialists of America, a group outside of and usually hostile to the Democratic party. Either way, the debate around protesters is almost entirely partisan special pleading over low-stakes tactical disputes.
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What actually is new to American politics is Trump’s assault on democratic norms. French dismisses the “lock her up” chants as empty rally talk. In fact, the chant, which began in the campaign, prefigured Trump’s deadly serious ambition to turn the Department of Justice into a weapon of personal control, that would harass Trump’s enemies while simultaneously quashing any wrongdoing by him and his allies…
What’s more, defining “lock her up” as the Republican offense erases from the equation the entire authoritarian spirit that has infused Trump’s political style. He offered to pay legal bills to supporters who beat up protesters at his rallies. This is a president who has repeatedly attacked the news media as “the enemy of the people,” an epithet used by communist dictators, and has at least gestured at using his power to punish them. (Trump has mused about challenging licenses for television stations that report independently, and instructed the post office to raise rates on Amazon as retribution for critical coverage in the Washington Post.)
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The method on display is familiar if you study any historical episode of democratic backsliding. One party, either from the far left or the far right, sets out to attack and weaken democratic norms. The small-d democrats resist, trying to maintain democratic norms. But they’re fighting at a disadvantage against a ruthless foe that does not observe their limits, and at least some of the opposition undertakes a more drastic action. Any offense becomes a pretext for the authoritarians, who exaggerate the threat of violence and chaos by their enemies to justify the antidemocratic measures they were planning all along.
The threat Trump poses does not excuse the left from upholding democratic standards. (I have made this case repeatedly, in fact.) That said, Trump’s illiberalism only works because respectable conservatives cooperate with his fiction that he is more victim than aggressor. French writes, “It’s time to stop excusing, rationalizing, and minimizing behavior that is dangerous, menacing, and threatening.” Indeed it is.
The GOP has been taken over by its most radical elements which it fed for decades. And only sustained electoral losses may keep the country from descending into widespread political violence
For decades, Republican politicians have cynically campaigned using aggressive, identitarian language, stoking the fears and outrage of the dwindling core of the party fed lies by “right-wing” media grifters. And the continuous failure to live up to their harsh campaign rhetoric bore fruit in the Tea Party insurrection, which itself never delivered on its promises, further radicalizing the most insular, paranoid portion of the Republican base. So now we have Trump, the most corrupt of them all, who’s willing to pander to any fear, using extremely violent, dehumanizing language to describe mere political opponents, emboldening violent extremists.
We’re at a very dangerous point in American politics; a small but significant portion the Republican Party base has a near monopoly on political violence, while the Democratic Party still pretends that the GOP is a rational party that can be compromised with. And while the larger problem is the licentious profit-over-truth media industry (for which, what? maybe better-enforced and/or stricter libel laws may be necessary?), right now we need to use every political avenue we still have to forcefully but peacefully take power away from the growing violent “alt-right” movements which have taken over the Republican Party through Trump.
The Republican Party needs to reckon with the monster it’s created, and the least harmful way to do that will be at the polls. The Republican Party needs to suffer dramatic election losses this year and in 2020. So make sure you vote, at the very least. This is what we’re dealing with already:
2) 'You don't hand matches to an arsonist and you don't give power to an angry left-wing mob, and that's what they've become. Democrats have become too extreme and too dangerous to govern. Republicans believe in the rule of law, not the rule of the mob.'
3) This is a remarkable moment in American politics: The President of the United States just declared an entire political party fundamentally illegitimate. And the media are treating it as just another of Trump’s crazy things.
4) I’m almost surprised that, after the remark about the rule of the mob, Trump didn’t then lead the crowd in a chant of “Lock her up!” That’s how brazen they have become.
5) But this is the state we are at now. One side of the political aisle, and only one, appears intent on provoking a violent civil war in America. And it is the party currently in power.
6) Sure, they like to claim that the Left is planning to provoke a civil war. You can find all kinds of people saying that, including Tucker Carlson. https://youtu.be/ezYsm9L4f_k
7) But no one on the left actually talks about it or, for that matter, really even thinks about it much. There are no left-wing pundits talking about civil war. But you can find dozens of right-wing pundits doing so.
8) They pay lip service to denying that they hope for it, but their constant obsessing and chatter about it tells us otherwise. Especially when they fantasize about the better world that would emerge afterward.
9) Of course, the most prolific promoter of the “civil war” idea is Alex Jones and his Infowars operation:
Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis Breaking news and analysis on politics, business, world national news, entertainment more. In-depth DC, Virginia, Maryland news coverage including traffic, weather, crime, education, restaurant revie… https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/07/03/a-short-history-of-alex-jones-claiming-that-the-left-is-about-to-start-a-second-civil-war/10) But it has spread everywhere on the right, including to Fox News (see Carlson above) and to Rush Limbaugh: https://youtu.be/ecUQr21uPiY
11) Mind you, this is nothing new for Limbaugh. He made nearly an identical claim back in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing occurred:
12) Indeed, as I explain in some detail in _Alt-America_, the militia/Patriot movement is where the whole “modern civil war” idea originated, and it has remained largely alive in the same sector in the intervening years.
13) It gained real life in the Tea Party movement, which hosted organizations like the Oath Keepers that openly discussed preparations for a civil war. This is also where we saw it become common for people to talk among themselves about killing liberals.
14) Let’s also not forget radio host Michael Savage, an early and prominent Trump supporter. He published an entire book dedicated to essentially fomenting a civil war (under the guise of preventing one):15) In the runup to the 2016 election, this kind of talk intensified. Militias especially were planning a violent resistance to a Clinton administration.
16) Recall especially the Kansas militia gang that planned a McVeigh-style truck bombing of a community of Somali Muslims in Garden City. Their plans called for the attack to take place the day after the election.
17) This kind of talk became common among not just militia types, but spread to rank-and-file Trump supporters as well.
18) After Trump won, it only took a week or two for them all to shift gears and begin preparing to act violently in Trump’s defense. They ginned up the whole "violent radical left" storyline in the runup to Trump's inauguration.
19) Now when you hear talk about a civil war, it is most common in the context of preventing his impeachment.
20) And now we have gangs of heavily armed right-wing thugs, largely outsiders from rural and exurban areas, invading liberal urban centers with the full intent of provoking violence so that they can portray the American left as innately violent.
21) I’ve covered about a dozen of these events. I hang out among the alt-righters and militiamen who populate that side and listen to them. They all are brimming with eagerness to beat the shit out of liberals, and they’re prepared to kill if they deem it necessary.
22) The Proud Boys are a classic proto-Brownshirt operation in the formative stages. Look at the shirts their members have been wearing to the “free speech” events they organize with the intent of provoking a violent response.
23) What does that mean? Well, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet murdered thousands of his own citizens in the 1970s simply for opposing him politically. He had right-wing death squads do most of the dirty work:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation…24) A number of these murders occurred when the death squads would drop political dissidents from great heights out of helicopters. Thus the back of the T-shirt. Which is now sold as official Proud Boys gear.
25) Moreover, all these shirts are being printed with a logo calling them “Right Wing Death Squads.” There’s even a webpage devoted to their apparel. Google it. Here's their logo.
26) So now the faction that has long fantasized about civil wars is openly fantasizing about murdering their fellow Americans by various means, most of them as cruel as a good psychopath can dream up. These folks are fanatical authoritarians.
27) And they are entirely right-wing. There is no counterpart to this on the left. Even the most rabid anarchist/communist/whatever group doesn’t direct this kind of rhetoric at its opponents. Moreover, the far left is a tiny and powerless faction. Unlike the alt-right.
28) Moreover, it is the far right that now controls all three houses of government in the United States. And the most powerful of all, the president, has a long habit of using eliminationist rhetoric to attack his opponents: “Lock Her Up!” was just one of many such.
29) Now he is describing half of America – the larger half that did not vote for him, and which now opposes his agenda at every turn – in such terms. Dismissing them as a “mob” and suggesting that they not only cannot govern but cannot BE governed is lethally dangerous.
30) Yet to hear the centrist media figures and their favorite subjects, centrist politicians, discuss all this ferment, you would think that both sides are engaging in this kind of prewar rhetoric. It’s absurd.
31) So, listen up, Chuck Todd, Evan McMullin, Susan Collins, and every other hand-wringing centrist wannabe: IT’S NOT BOTH SIDES. Only one side is trying to gin up a civil war in this country.
32) Only one side talks about it. Only one side buys caches of guns to prepare for it. Only one side is sending clusters of activists into politically opposing communities with the intent of stirring up violence. Only one side makes up memes celebrating the murder of the other.
33) So when we talk about the lack of civility in our common discourse, it’s important first to understand that that particular horse fled the burning barn many many moons ago. And again, it was not the left that lit the match.
34) More to the point, their concern presupposes that both sides remain interested in democracy and normative political discourse. That is only true of one side in all this. The right has made clear that it has no such interest.
35) It is their authoritarian way, or the highway. Or given enough time and enough destruction of democratic norms at their proto-fascist hands, it will be their way or the helicopter.
All of this is being normalized by hand-wringing centrists and their "bothsiderism."36) So it would be nice if centrists recognized that their ideology (built around a logical fallacy – the Fallacy of the Middle – in any event) has failed them. It would be nice if they awoke to the reality that the radical right intends to target them just like the left.
37) Or haven’t they yet noticed that simply disagreeing with the radical right gets you labeled a “leftist”? Centrists may not be first in line, but they too eventually will become targets of right-wing authoritarians, especially those in power.
38) Unless, of course, they all just bow their heads and fall in line. Which is what, eventually, they all seem to do anyway.
The politicization of the Supreme Court undermines the trust necessary for the rule of law to function
Nills Gilman, in The American Interest:
I went into this past Thursday’s hearing truly attempting an open mind. I expected Professor Blasey Ford to perform as she did—in a manner that induced empathy if not, of course, providing definitive proof of what may have occurred in that room in Maryland 36 summers ago. But what I had hoped Kavanaugh might have done would be to deliver opening remarks along these lines:
“Sexual assault is one of the worst crimes human beings can commit. It damages its victims and their families incalculably, sometimes for generations to come. I stand in solidarity with the #MeToo movement and its valiant effort to banish such behavior. What Ms. Blasey Ford says happened to her is horrifying, and whoever did this to her has no place on the federal bench, but more probably in jail. However, I truly believe this is a case of mistaken identity; not only do I have no recollection of such an event, but I find it inconceivable that I could have committed such an odious act.”
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But this was not the speech we got. Instead we were greeted by a man barely able to contain his emotions, claiming partisan victimhood, and all but explicitly vowing revenge. This show may have appealed to the Audience of One, but it was simply an unacceptable moral posture for anyone seeking a Supreme Court appointment, regardless of the underlying truth of the charges leveled against him. What Kavanaugh’s speech indicated—what it in fact performed—was a traducing of the moral values we expect a Supreme Court justice to embody: solemnity, equanimity, maturity, forbearance, and yes, sobriety (in the moral sense). Even if he was a man wronged, Kavanaugh’s conduct was, to use a moral concept often deployed in the military, “unbecoming” of a Supreme Court Justice. So forget about what may have happened 36 years ago: No one who behaves the way Kavanaugh did on that Thursday belongs on the Supreme Court.
This underscores the final, deepest issue: Kavanaugh’s apparent inability to recognize that the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court is bigger than justice for him as an individual. At the end of the day, like his fellow Republican partisans, Kavanaugh seems unable to see that his assassinated character, whether just or not, has disqualified him from the job; and that failure of recognition is itself disqualifying. This may seem like a Catch-22 for Kavanaugh himself, and it is. But the Court is bigger than the man, and everyone involved, if they care about the Court, should recognize this.
Grassroot influence in our country has eroded for decades, and if we all don’t get more involved and demand aggressive reforms to the influence of money in politics (campaign finance, lobbying, corporate welfare, etc.), we may stop functioning as a democracy (or democratic republic, if you will) and effectively be an oligarchy. This Supreme Court spat shows how corrupt the GOP has become, damn the consequences to the country at large. The Republican Party has thoroughly politicized the Court, undermining any trust we might have had in its ability to rule fairly. Any contentious rulings can now be written off by a majority of the country as simple partisan bias, where at least before there was a veneer of neutrality we could build a foundation of trust on.
From Zack Beauchamp, in Vox, “The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Crisis is here”:
The Supreme Court’s legitimacy depends on most Americans viewing it as above the partisan fray, an institution whose decisions are driven by legal reasoning, not by the justices’ partisan leanings.
In confirming Kavanaugh, with a razor-thin partisan majority no less, the Republican Senate may well end up eroding that public faith. Kavanaugh’s fiery and nakedly partisan testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the September 27 hearing revealed a justice who was less an “impartial arbiter” of the law and more a partisan creature who would take his political grudges to the Supreme Court.
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His performance was so alarming that the American Bar Association, which had given him its stamp of approval, on Friday announced that it was reopening its evaluation of Kavanaugh in light of his “temperament.” Retired Justice John Paul Stevens was also taken aback, saying Kavanaugh’s performance revealed a “potential bias” that could be a problem. And more than 2,400 law professors signed a letter expressing their view that Kavanaugh “did not display the impartiality and judicial temperament” to sit on the Court.
Kavanaugh's confirmation could have been worse: we might never have known his history, or the extent of current GOP extremism
Henry Farrell, in a thread on Twitter, makes the case that Kavanaugh’s confirmation could have been worse: he might never have been exposed as a radical partisan hack who abuses his power for sex. And now we’ve seen how extreme the Republican Party has become. They could have withdrawn his nomination after Kavanaugh demonstrably lied multiple times under oath, and refused to even answer whether he’d support an investigation; then they could have proffered someone more professional and experienced. Instead, they’ve shown they’ll put party before country, literally just to “own the libs.” We now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the national-level Republican Party has lost control of itself, and for the sake of the country must also lose control of at least the House in November. If people really want to “drain the swamp,” we need to start with the GOP in Congress.
Continued:
2. The background: Supreme Court judgments have been undermining democracy in stealth mode. A series of judgments have chipped away at the ability to regulate money in politics, while stripping unions of their ability to politically represent the interests of their members.
3. The result has been an increasingly unbalanced political system, in which economic inequality and political inequality reinforce each other, slowly strangling democracy. However, these judgments have not been nearly as controversial as they ought to be.
4. The survey evidence is clear - people on the left do not see the court as conservative (political scientists disagree over whether this is because they don't understand what the court is doing, or they focus on salient cases that have liberal outcomes - e.g. marriage equality)
5. Kennedy's retirement and replacement by a Trump nominee means that the median justice on the left-right spectrum is going to be Roberts - a very substantial shift to the right. But liberals and people on the left mostly haven't paid attention.
6. This is reinforced by patterns in the legal academy. The Federalist Society combines many functions. It depicts itself as a "society of ideas," but also serves as a hiring network for conservative clerks, cheering section for crazy ideas and vetter of judicial nominees.
7. The Federalist Society's Leonard Leo has played a crucial role in both Gorsuch's and Kavanaugh's nomination. While Federalists quietly fret at Trump's uncouthness, they're willing to hold their noses given the gains at stake. See Amanda Hollis-Brusky: Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis Breaking news and analysis on politics, business, world national news, entertainment more. In-depth DC, Virginia, Maryland news coverage including traffic, weather, crime, education, restaurant revie… https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/05/17/trumps-values-are-abhorrent-to-the-federalist-society-of-conservative-lawyers-that-doesnt-stop-them-from-helping-him/?utm_term=.7eb43b4309b1
8. That's the background. And that is why what seemed likely to happen a few weeks ago - the confirmation of soft spoken and charming-seeming basketball-coaching dad Brett Kavanaugh - would have been the worst outcome. His vile behavior towards women would have stayed invisible
9. And his jurisprudence - undercutting the rights of ordinary people, weaponizing the First Amendment, and further reducing American democracy into an effective oligarchy would have not seemed political, consisting instead of a series of technical-seeming decisions.
10. Now that's not going to happen. He is almost certainly guilty of two attempted sexual assaults. He has demonstrably perjured himself in testimony. He has revealed the true ugly face of American Republicanism. And he can be hung like a rotting albatross around his party's neck
11. His distorted, shouting face is the most concrete metaphor possible of what the Republican party has become. And it is something that people can - and will - organize around. The difference to Anita Hill is that there is _already_ a mobilized social movement around Trump's
12. wretched treatment of women. Now they have something concrete, specific and political - beyond Trump himself - to build against. In the language of social movements, Brett Kavanaugh is going to become a frame - an organizing symbol
13. depicting the angry white conservative elite that is trying to cripple American democracy because it knows that the democratic trends are not on its side. A quiet judicial revolution that was invisible to most people is now becoming visible in its harshest and ugliest form.
14. And this gives the movement a set of concrete problems that it can organize around apart from Trump. Movements in US politics are often the prisoners of electoral politics, and can fall asunder once a short term victory has been achieved.
15. Lindsay Graham and Donald Trump may inadvertently have crystallized a new Democratic party that is based far more than before in a mobilized and effective social movement with a long term vision and specific demands for reform.
14. The Federalist Society three-card monte, shuffling back and forth between the public story of intellectual inquiry and the private story of political machinery is highly vulnerable. If the Democrats take Congress, they need to investigate Leo's role in the nomination
15. With particular attention to the question of how or whether Leo provided a cutout between the political and nominally independent parts of the pro-Kavanaugh campaign, including the Whelan doppelganger propaganda.
16. The enormous movement of women which has coalesced across the country needs to keep pressure on elected Democrats on both judicial nominations and investigations, as well as continuing to nominate and elect its own people.
17. Pro-democracy groups need to plaster Kavanaugh's ugly, shouting face over every shitty and toxic decision made by what is now the Trump Supreme Court and the Republican Supreme Court, haranguing and hounding the politicians who got him through.
18. The Supreme Court is political. Everyone from the lightly-liberal center to the left needs to recognize this, and what it means for their own politics and activism.
19. Legal academics need to systematically dissociate themselves from the Kavanaughs of this world, and refuse to provide window dressing to Federalist Society events. There should be room for conservative scholars in the legal academy. But Kavanaugh
19. demonstrates how problematic the pseudo-meritocratic class solidarity of the legal academy has become. Again, the Supreme Court is a political body. One might reasonably prefer a world where it was genuinely deliberative but that is obviously not the world that we live in.
20. Professors may of course need to be strongly reminded of this by their students, as has been happening in Yale, since not only their values but their incentives point towards playing nice with conservative judges who can hire their students etc.
21. And scholars need to build a strongly pro-democratic jurisprudence of the kind that @JedediahSPurdy and @ksabeelrahman have been working on (which would ideally involve not just left-wing but also centrist and right leaning scholars, as Law and Economics did the other way)
22. All this - of course - is making lemonade from lemons. We shouldn't be in this situation to start with. There are many things that can and will go wrong. But the sheer grossness of what is happening makes the Kavanaugh nomination into an inadvertent organizing technology. End