The Dinosaur’s Lament

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This week the Republican Congress blocked votes to protect future elections and to subpoena the notes of a translator in order to find out what a reckless or criminal president and a predatory adversary agreed in a private tete a tete.

On “Morning Joe,” the title blowhard bemoans the capture of a once great institution by know-nothings. What has become of his party, he cries. He is not alone. Eminent Democrats ponderously consider how to return their party to preeminence. Pundits in the newspapers compare Helsinki to Munich and Yalta. Yet no one cares. Why?

Possibly because the majority of he electorate has no idea what any of them are talking about. The parties, the world, the issues, the history they are all talking about might as well be the Dark Ages as far as most of the electorate is concerned.

As of 2018, 59% of eligible voters are GenXers, Millennials, and Post-Millennials. That is, they are under 50, many a decade or two or three under 50. Whereas, Scarborough is 55, Chuck Schumer is 67, Bill Maher is 62, George Will is 77, and I’m not feeling all that spry myself.

The oldsters grew up with fathers who served in World War II and relied on the G.I Bill. We spent our formative years in the Cold War with its mutual assured destruction. We remember the assassinations, the Great Society, Vietnam, Watergate, Reagan, The Berlin Wall going up and coming down. And some of us remember the importance of NATO and free trade among capitalist democracies. Our idea of disruptive media were color TV and transistor radios.

The formative experiences for a lot of the under 50 majority are the Twin Towers falling, the folly of Iraq, ten years of recession, China rising, social media, tweets, YouTube, selfies. A 40-year-old GenXer was ten when Reagan left office, twenty when Clinton was impeached, 23 on 9/11, and 30 when the Great Recession stunted his or her economic future.

When Trump says, “America First,” my generation thinks — Lindbergh, isolationism, American fascism. The under 30s think – happy face emoji or Fourth of July GIF. When Trump says he and Putin are going to deliver “peace in our time,” we think– Chamberlain, appeasement, Blitzkrieg. They think, “Good, we’re tired of hearing about Syria, or wherever it is that Putin is from.”
When oldsters say, what happened to my Republican or Democratic Party, the answer is, “Like you, they got old and while they were napping got hijacked.” And along the way, to our shame we let two generations, on whom we would be destined to depend onin the future, grow up ignorant of history.

Thirty-seven percent of Americans can’t name one right enumerated in the Frist Amendment. Only 20 percent can name all three branches of government. Hardly surprising since less than 25 percent of High School seniors can pass a basic proficiency test in Civics. Only 18% of 1,000 liberal-arts colleges require a U.S. History of Government course. The result? If most of our fellow Americans were forced to take the test required of foreigners seeking to become citizens, they’d fail.

When Pundits liken Trump to Quisling, Millennials suspect that’s some character from Harry Potter they’ve lost track of, rather than a famous Scandinavian traitor who collaborated with a hostile power. But they actually think nothing because they don’t read newspapers or watch The PBS NewsHour or MSNBC or Fox News, all of whose demographics skew ancient. They get their disinformation online. American oligarchs or Putin’s GRU, Wikileaks, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter and Facebook are feeding it to them.

It isn’t fair to blame the 59% of voters under 50 for Trump, entirely. He won because he got a majority of the votes of conservatives, of white men, of those over 40, of those with less than a college degree, of those who live in rural counties or cities of 50,000 people or less.

But younger voters are at fault for not taking their civic responsibility seriously in 2016. Only 17% of those 30 to 40 bothered to vote, and only 10 percent of those 18 to 30. If they don’t like the hash the old fools have made of the world, or the absurd president they elected, they need to turn out in large numbers, and take charge. Otherwise, another helping of hash is in their future. Clearly if the people at the helm are left in control they will steer the ship of state onto the rocks

The Monster Meets The Moron

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I thought a remark in “Esquire,” that Trump was going to see Putin for his annual performance review, was funny, until the event. Now, I think it was more like a meeting of Sgt. Raymond Shaw and Dr. Yen Lo to make sure the linkages of the brainwashed Manchurian Candidate were still functioning.

If Trump were the hypnotized or conditioned tool of Putin, he could not have performed more to his master’s liking. Trump found nothing objectionable about Putin’s poisoning of critics, stealing of elections at home and abroad, invading his neighbors, abetting the genocide of Assad or undermining of NATO and Western democracies.

Democrats, a few retiring Republicans, the mainstream press, and even a brace of Fox News stooges were agog. What could explain such aberrant behavior by an American president? But surely this was nothing new. Didn’t we already know that Trump prefers Russia to NATO allies, takes Putin’s word over that of his intelligence services, rambles at every opportunity about obsessions like Hillary’s server and Mueller’s witch hunt?

Perhaps it was a new level of kowtowing to believe it was a dandy idea for Putin to trade help with Mueller’s investigation for a chance for his goons to interrogate American critics of the regime, but a difference of degree, rather than kind. Trump Making America Grovel Again looked a lot like an average day at the office. UnAmerican activities are the new normal for this president.

Still, all the critics of the Helsinki Sell-out ask a good question. What was he thinking? Creative explanations are possible. That he was engaging in a bit of surrealist performance art, or that, if he didn’t play along, he’d be the next nerve gas victim. Maybe that also explains the timorous Republican Congress, but such notions seem too clever by half. Unfortunately, the answers to the Trump conundrum boil down to the familiar, in three large categories.

First, Trump really is a Russian asset. Either he has chosen willingly the side of autocracy over that of democracy. Or, he is an unwilling tool of Putin because the Russians really do have dirt on him — financial chicanery that could put him or his children in prison, embarrassing sexual conduct in living color as alleged in the Steele dossier, or the collusion in stealing the election that he keeps denying so unconvincingly. Any of the above really would qualify as traitorous conduct, if not technically treasonous.

Second, and not mutually exclusive, explanations based on psychological character disorders. These are not out of the question since over two dozen psychiatrists worried that candidate Trump was mentally unfit for office. As we see daily, he is a narcissistic egomaniac who cares only about himself. This makes him uninterested in anything larger, such as duty, honor, country, morality, legality, or his oath of office. His business and amatory careers are full of transgressions of any norm, so long as they served his whim.

Trump’s pathology also requires constant praise and admiration. Despots like Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un have used his neediness to play him like a fiddle. Western leaders like Angela Merkel have been unwilling to join this game, both because it is personally demeaning and because it is politically poisonous. They answer to a democratic electorate liable to be nauseated by their leader bowing to such a creature.

Trump’s short attention span and inability to process data, except emotionally, has also made him an easy mark for fake news, conspiracy theories, and other self-serving fictions, and therefore easily manipulated by Putin or Rupert Murdock or Steve Bannon.

Trump’s horror of being deemed inferior — a loser, weak, impotent — make the idea that he didn’t win a huge victory over Hillary Clinton or that his presidency was tainted by Russian meddling intolerable, literally unthinkable. So he rejects it, and all who suggest it, and any evidence that proves it.

We now know he was briefed days before his inaugural on the full enormity of the plot to subvert our electoral processes. A patriotic American would have surely addressed the American people at once, told them the situation, and outlined the steps he would take to punish the perpetrators and defend the country from further assault.

As we know, Trump has done nothing of the sort for 18 months. Rather he has denied, obfuscated, obstructed, fired investigators, threatened others, and cried “no collusion” and “witch hunt” ad nauseam. If he’s not a guilty party, he certainly gives a world-class imitation of one.

Third, and not incompatible with the first two explanations, is that Trump is a moron. The pundit class doesn’t care for such simplistic explanations. They are always looking for some clever strategy, dark plot, intellectual twist to account for Trump. But Occam’s Razor is still a good place to start. Maybe the simplest explanation is the most likely. in this case, that Trump is a simpleton. Though it may seem impolite to say so, history is littered with men with august titles — President, King, Czar, Caesar, Emperor — who were brainless incompetents.

And in Trump’s case, this has been the private opinion of many of the public servants who have gotten to watch him operate up close. Secretary of State Tillerson was famously quoted as calling his boss “a moron.” Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said Trump was “deplorable.” National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster regarded Trump as “an idiot” and “a dope.” Ditto for General Kelly.

Tom Barrack, close advisor, long-time confidante and fellow billionaire, called Trump “not only crazy-he’s stupid.” Sen. Bob Corker concluded that Trump’s White House was “adult day-care.” National Economic Council director Gary Cohn said this administration was “an idiot surrounded by clowns.” And Steve Bannon said Trump is “like an 11-year-old child.”

So, now that we have several plausible diagnoses for the problem, what do we do about it? Impeachment? Invocation of the 25th Amendment? Replacing a supine Congress with a more active body, if Putin would keep his hands off the next election? Relying on the courts Trump is packing?

Whatever we do, it had better be soon, before Trump can do something worse. He may already have stolen an election, and has begun to shatter our alliances, engage in economic warfare with trading partners, to deny equal justice under law, and to play patty-cake with the world’s tyrants. Still, to paraphrase a Cy Coleman tune, it’s a real good bet, the worst is yet to come.

No Adjudication Without Representation

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Diane Feinstein got a lot of guff for suggesting in 2017 that appeals court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, an outspokenly conservative Catholic, felt about Church dogma the way most lawyers are trained to think about precedent. Cries of discrimination were heard, and the Constitutional prohibition on a religious test for office invoked. Unspoken, but implied, was that the Jewish Feinstein might have a religious bias of her own.

But Feinstein was clearly concerned about whether the nominee’s faith might color her decisions on issues on which the Church has well-known, inflexible doctrine — birth control, abortion, homosexuality, divorce, premarital sex, and so on. Judges are expected to be objective, not already committed to a position.

The very Catholic Barrett, who won the appellate seat, was also last week one of the finalists for the Supreme Court seat of Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic, but the three other nominees — Kethledge, Hardiman, and the selectee, Kavanaugh, were also Catholic. You could argue that the whole process reflected no change in the composition of the Court, but the composition is historically highly unusual.

For the first half of Supreme Court’s 228 years, it was comprised exclusive of white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant males. The Anglo-Saxon protestant part reflected the nature of the populous during much of that period. The white and male parts surely did not. And as waves of immigration changed the country, beginning in the second half of the 19th Century, politicians began to make token efforts to have the Supreme Court reflect the electorate, to be a representative body.

Still, the first black Justice, Thurgood Marshall didn’t join the Court until 1967, the first woman until 1981, and the first Hispanic until 2005. Religious change came sooner. Roger Taney, arguably the worst Justice in Supreme Court history, was appointed in 1836, but it took until 1894 for the second to be named. Given the influx of Irish, Italians and other European Catholics it was inevitable. Thereafter, there was a de facto Catholic seat, as there is now, in effect, a black seat. The first Jew was appointed in 1916. Thereafter, there was also a Jewish seat.

This dispensation persisted until late in the 20th century, but then a remarkable change took place. Today the Court is made up of 6 Catholics and 3 Jews, hardly representative since the country is 2 percent Jewish not 33 percent, and is 20 percent Catholic, not 66 percent. Indeed, there are now more Americans of no professed faith (24 percent) than Catholics, Jews, Hispanics, or blacks. Where’s their Supreme Court seat?

Obviously that isn’t going to happen, since unbelief is the predilection that dare not speak its name, if you are a politician. But what gives regarding the proportional Supreme Court representation of other groups? Why are the percentages so skewed, and where did all the Wasps go? One hundred percent was absurd, but zero percent?

Once you could argue that women weren’t on the Court in greater numbers because women lawyers were in short supply, but they now make up about a third of lawyers. Jews have historically been over-represented in the academy and the professions, my son the doctor and all that. But, 33 percent of Supreme Court seats looks like extreme overachievement. Jews do not make up a third of lawyers. But the most obvious mismatch between the number of people in the population and the number on the Supreme Court is the 66 percent representation of Catholics on the Court.

Catholics aren’t equally over represented in the legal profession as a whole. In fact, the reason for their dominance is obvious, and it vindicates Feinstein’s concern for the objectivity of Judge Barrett. Ever since the Republican Party began to pin its electoral hopes on a culture war against liberalism and modernity, Republican presidents have run on the promise to appoint legal warriors predisposed to decide cases on hot button issues like abortion or gay rights in a preordained way.

They put their faith in culturally conservative candidates to the appellate and Supreme Courts, believing this would please their constituents and give them an edge over Democrats who stuck to the old tradition of appointing well-qualified, objective jurists. The question was, where could Republican presidents find a pool of surefire, cultural conservative nominees?

As we have seen in the most recent cases, there is now an entrenched ideological infrastructure whose function is to cultivate a crop of potential nominees, beginning in law school. The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation supplied the list from which Trump chose both of his nominees.

They were, in effect, pre-approved and like-minded. They subscribe to the new dogma of originalism or textualism which seeks to ban any reading of the Constitution that wouldn’t have pleased an 18th Century Tory or perhaps 16th Century Jesuit.

But when the culture wars began under Reagan, the new orthodoxy was in its infancy. Reagan had also run on the promise to put the first woman on the Supreme Court, so that took care of his first nominee. For his second, he tried to replace the retiring, moderate Republican, Lewis Powell, with the original originalist, Robert Bork. His views were then seen as too extreme and he was rejected. Anthony Kennedy, a safer pick, took the seat. The Bork rejection, however, inflamed the culture warriors.

Thereafter, Republican presidents haven’t dared to nominate anything but a string of conservative, “originalist” Catholics — with one exception, David Souter, who the zealot wing of the party repudiated when he failed to decide cases in a far-right enough manner. He proved to be, in their minds, unreliable, or as we would say, open-minded. That was no longer acceptable.

No one has accused thirty years of Catholic originalists — Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, and Trump’s four Catholic finalists for the Kennedy seat — of being anything but religiously dogmatic in judicial philosophy. Their faith in the cult of originalism is of a piece with their personal faith — unquestioned and unquestionable.

But it is hardly representative of the views of the people whose business they are supposed to be serving. We all live in the 21st Century and many of us think our jurisprudence ought to do the same.