Don’t Ever Take Sides Against The Family

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On a single day in August, the conviction on eight counts each of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen marked a watershed moment for the Trump administration. As Winston Churchill said in another fraught time for democratic government, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Cohen’s conviction on two counts of campaign finance violations was for paying hush money to Trump sexual partners. And in confessing to the crime Cohen said he had been directed to do it by Trump. That means they were acting in order to illegally influence a presidential election, and that makes the President an unindicted co-conspirator. Cohen has also offered to cooperate with the Mueller probe in detailing other presidential crimes to which he was a witness.

A very interesting question now is what is preventing Manafort, and all the other shady characters in Trump’s orbit with similar knowledge of presidential crimes and the hijacking of an American election, from cooperating fully with the Special Counsel in hopes of a reduced sentence.

Among the explanations offered are loyalty to a man not known for returning the favor. Alternatively, some believe Manafort and others may be holding out for pardons, but that also relies on Trump acting in a way that might put him in greater jeopardy, not less. He is already at risk of being charged with obstructing justice for impeding the investigation into Russian meddling. Pardons could be viewed as unpardonable, even by some of his slavish supporters in Congress.

I want to offer a modest proposal for an alternative reason why Manafort and some others may be reluctant to tell all they know. Some have argued that those with dirt on Trump may fear the President’s vengeance, but it isn’t clear that enduring Trump’s wrath would be worse than serving a long prison sentence.

However, it is possible that spilling the beans on Trump could also implicate people far scarier than Trump. It may be far-fetched, but Manafort and others could fear the consequences of ratting out and exposing to legal or governmental attention not Trump so much as Russian oligarchs, Russian mobsters, and even the Russian capo di tutti capi, boss of all the bosses, Vladimir Putin.

Manafort moved in dark and dangerous circles, and the criminal attempt to steal an election for Trump, as has been amply shown by the intelligence community and Mueller’s indictments, can be traced back to Putin’s Russia, his cybercrimes apparatus, and his oligarchic henchmen.

If Manafort or others witting of the details of the plot began to sing, Trump might tweet angrily. But those who offend Putin experience more unpleasant chastisement. What do these people do when crossed? Well, being poisoned with a nerve agent comes to mind. Other critics have simply disappeared.

Putin’s thugs have even shot down a commercial airliner killing 298 persons by accident. They thought it was an enemy plane. But they were unrepentant. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” Lenin is said to have remarked concerning the Red Terror that killed an estimated 500,000.

This in nastiness on a whole different scale from the chicanery of a crooked New York landlord, philanderer, and fake TV businessman. If you were Manafort, or Trump, you too might prefer some restful jail time or impeachment to angering these particular partners in crime. As Fredo learned the hard way, don’t ever take sides against the family.

Maybe it isn’t the American public or his base Trump’s talking to when he keeps braying, “No collusion. No collusion.” He may really be saying, “ I won’t tell. Don’t nerve gas me, please.”

Fragility

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Many years ago, at the peak of the Cold War standoff, I read “Alas, Babylon” which begins with World War III and ends as a Fenimore Cooper tale of frontier survival in a small river town in Florida. It is, in effect, an apocalyptic pastoral.

At the end of the first day of the war, which is effectively the last day as well, a thermonuclear weapon obliterates the nearest large city, Orlando, which is the source of the town’s power. I have never forgotten this sentence. “Thus, the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.

We all imagine we are self-sufficient and relatively safe day by day, but in fact we survive due to an elaborate web of connections and systems that have to keep working and may not be as robust as we imagine.

Every once in a while we are awaked to the gossamer nature of the web we depend on and the fragility of our reality. When a bridge collapses, when a hurricane turns ot the lights, the refrigeration, the heat and air conditioning, the communications we rely on.

On a personal scale, when the water doesn’t come out of the tap, the sewage doesn’t disappear down the pipe, the computers are down at the bank, the lights go out, the fuel trucks don’t arrive or the shipments of produce, we find we are not self-sufficient, but dependent from one moment to the next — if not on the kindness of strangers, then surely on their competency.

The supply chain that brings us food, clothing, fuel, medicine, soap, toilet paper is global. We communicate thanks to cables, cell towers, satellites. We survive thanks to roads, ports, bridges, engineers, technicians, utility and public service employees.

The government that survivalists and libertarians love to hate keeps us from being invaded by foreign enemies, comes when we call to stop a thief, put out a fire, or rush a child or grandmother to the hospital, provides water and sewer service and protects us from being poisoned by our food, medicines, water and air.

None of he overlapping systems we rely on are infallible or foolproof. The lights do go out, as in Puerto Rico. The water can be made toxic as in Flint, Michigan. Insufficiently vetted foods and medicines can kill us. Rules governing markets and banking can be too weak to prevent the rapacious from crashing the economy. Insufficient attention may allow elections to be hacked or terrorists to attack. And when that happens we don’t say “C’est la vie, I guess we aren’t as safe as we suppose.” Instead, we feel betrayed.

Free market economists argue that individual self-interest makes the world go ‘round, but even Adam Smith knew there had to be rules of the road and that the good enlightenment virtues of caution, care, probity, cooperation, law and order were needed to curb the worst excesses of the selfish, the vicious and the unscrupulous.

The vast majestic clockwork that makes modern life possible can be disrupted by sand in the gears. Around the world can be seen the results of insufficient appreciation of the virtues embodied in the old-fashioned but not out of fashion idea of the commonweal. In places where the few exploit the many and the machine of civilization no longer functions — failed states, kleptocracies, tyrannies, banana republics — life is poor, nasty, brutish short, and man is a wolf to man.

It can happen here. It is happening here, Detention camps. Public and private debt out of control. Government services financed by borrowing rather than taxing. Great corporations profiting from stealing our identify or corrupting our elections, Congressmen and cabinet offices casually engaging in insider trading, instead of making economic crimes harder to pull off. Billionaires who imperil their own freedom, the country’s security and the stability of the system that enriched them only to pile their loot a little higher.

An international system of trade, treaties, defense and environmental protection is blithely abandoned. Regulations to protect the citizenry scuttled in favor of self-aggrandizement for campaign donors. Life-saving medical care and pharmaceuticals priced out of reach for many. Education dumbed down or made unaffordable. Guardrails to prevent another market catastrophe dismantled. Norms violated. The Constitution gamed. The courts subverted. The government sold to the highest bidder.

None of this is done as a result of careful analysis, cautious long-range planning, a calculation of the consequences, or a regard for the public interest. It is done out of self-interest, to curry favor, to pick winners, to cash in, to get even, to satisfy a whim, to engineer a self-fulfilling prophecy, to conform with an ideological doctrine, or to win the next election.

Increasingly, it appears that those in positions of power are not statesmen, patriots, or public servants. They are con artists, cranks, and egomaniacs. Some are akin to the barbarians who let Rome descend into ruin because they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to maintain the aqueducts, the roads, the intellectual and physical infrastructure on which the empire depended. This institutional knowledge is what the mockers now scorn as the deep state or the bureaucracy.

Closer to home than Rome, those in charge also recall Tom and Daisy from the Roaring Twenties that ended in a crash not a whimper, “careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other people clean up the mess they made.”

But some things took so long to build, are so intricately made, and run in part on expertise and trust, that once broken they can not easily be mended. And when our civilization is broken, will our heirs stand amid the ruins and lament our letting it happen in words like these from two millennia ago? “Alas, alas, that great city of Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.”

The Siren Song

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The latest act in the American soap opera is the Omarosa-Trump spat. An untrustworthy graduate of the Reality TV school of Trump writes a tell-all book and appears on TV to promote it with surreptitiously recorded White House tapes. Her mentor responds with the usual angry tweets. That is, the liar who hired and fired a liar gets lied about and lies back.

Despite the usefulness as grist for the ratings race and as click bait, this sort of nonsense is no joke. It’s what happens when the highest office in the land is entrusted to a populist demagogue. The appeal of populism is eternal because the tropism of the powerful to self-aggrandizement is inevitable. Unchecked, the haves consolidate their position and close the door to everyone else.

The trouble with the populist response is that it throws out the brains of the people with the dirty bathwater. Instead of embracing reforms that limit the ability of the rapacious to abuse their power or to enable the downtrodden to rise, populism tends to demonize the skills, attitudes and attitudes that empowered the powerful and to celebrate instead the traits that disadvantage them.

So, being poorly educated becomes a badge of honor and authenticity, just as the sweaty toil of the peasantry was once celebrated in preference to the perfumed effeminacy of the aristocrat. But it didn’t improve their lot or change a rigged system. Thus, the populist impulse tends to call forth the demagogue, literally the voice of masses. He promises sweeping change he can’t deliver. And usually helps himself while doing nothing for his followers. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

It is a familiar type that includes Cleon and Catiline from antiquity, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, Father Coughlin, Ross Perot, and many more, including our own Donald J. Trump, not to mention fictional incarnations like Willie Stark in “All the King’s Men,” Lonesome Rhodes from “A Face in the Crowd,” and Johnny Iselin in “The Manchurian Candidate.” Here’s Stark describing his technique.

“Hell, make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak, erring pal, or make ‘em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make”em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ‘em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years…so it’s up to you to give ‘em something to stir ‘em up and make ‘em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”

Here’s a character from “The Manchurian Candidate” describing its demagogue’s method.“Iselinism has developed a process for compounding a lie, then squaring it…He has bellowed out so many accusations about so many different people…that no one can keep the records of these horrendous charges straight. Iselin is a man who shall forever stand guard at the door of the mind to protect the people of this great nation from facts.”

And here’s Lonesome Rhodes boasting of his power. “The whole country’s just like my flock of sheep…Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea pickers — everybody that’s gotta jump when somebody else blows the whistle…They’re mine! I own ’em! They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ‘em.”

And here’s a catalogue from Wikipedia of the methods employed by such people to “shut down reasoned deliberation by strring up mindless passions.”

“Scapegoating.” Blame some group for the troubles of your followers. People of a different race, religion, social class, ethnicity. Pointy-headed intellectuals, eggheads, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, Wall Street, MS-13.

“Fear mongering.” A spur to action that bypasses rational analysis. Trump’s Mexican rapists streaming over the border are the cousins of the imaginary black men raping white women described so vividly by “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman that he was repeatedly re-elected Governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1918.

“Lying.” The demagogue’s stock in trade. He lies to promote himself and attack his foes, and to play on his listeners emotions. And if one doesn’t work, “the demagogue quickly moves on to more lies.” You’d think Trump’s evangelical followers would be wary of this, since such a character is described in John 8:44—“You belong to your father, the devil…there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

“Emotional oratory and personal charisma.” The demagogue excites passions and counterfeits a connection to the crowd. Instead of governing, he conducts a perpetual campaign, a road show with frequent rallies, endless tweets and the overheated atmosphere of the revival tent.

“Accusing opponents of weakness and disloyalty.” Once it was abolitionists or the communist menace. For Trump their name is legion. Democrats. Critics from his own party. Kneeling athletes. Refugees. Women he has harassed. Former, fired, or out of favor employees — James Comey, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Tom Price, Jeff Sessions, Omarosa. Uncooperative allies.
The Elite. The intelligence services.

“Promising the impossible.” Disarm North Korea. Make peace in the Middle East. Easily win a trade war. Achieve immigration reform. Provide healthcare for all at low prices. Guarantee cheap prescription drugs. Rebuild infrastructure. Bring back jobs in coal and steel. Lower taxes and cut the deficit.

“Encouraging supporters to violently intimidate opponents.” Knock the crap out of him. Punch him in the face. Rough him up.

“Using personal insult and ridicule.” Lyin’ Ted. Crooked Hilary. Little Marco. Crazed, Crying, Lowlife, Dog Omarosa, Low IQ Maxine Waters.

“Vulgarity and outrageous behavior.” Make your own daily top ten list.

“Folksy posturing” The Ivy League billionaire with the private jets, golf resorts, and monogrammed tower who inherited millions pretends to be a self-made man of the people.

“Gross oversimplification.” It’ll be easy to Build the Wall, to make a better deal with Iran, North Korea, China, NAFTA, to fix healthcare.

“Attacking the news media.” Fake news. Enemy of the people. Slime. Scum, Disgusting people. Attempts to blacklist or ban perceived critics. Calls for changes in libel laws to allow unfavorable reports to be sued.

Demagogues wouldn’t behave this way if their siren song didn’t work — for them. But, as those who have read the Odyssey or have seen various film incarnations of Ulysses will recall, the fatal attraction of the siren’s song lured the sailors who heard them to wreck their ship on the rocky shore. The demagogue’s followers soon find the ship of state headed to a similar fate.