When Will It Stop? August 3, 2017August 2, 2017 But first . . . . . . two unrelated stats: 1. Hillary Clinton won more votes than any Republican nominee in history, including Donald Trump. (And just a tenth of one percent fewer than Barack Obama in 2012.) 2. Between the dawn of civilization and this week’s editing of our own genes, there have been just 400 human generations. It took us barely a speck of time, really, to figure it all out. (If we were fruit flies, reaching reproductive age in about a week, those 400 generations would have taken 8 years.) And now . . . . . . nearly as eye-catching as either of those stats is this admission/admonition in Politico from Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ): My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump We created him, and now we’re rationalizing him. When will it stop? . . . we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president . . . It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us. It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial. . . . Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. As the first branch of government (Article I), the Congress was designed expressly to assert itself at just such moments. . . . Too often, we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, “Someone should do something!” without seeming to realize that that someone is us. . . . [When] the period of collapse and dysfunction set in, amplified by the internet and our growing sense of alienation from each other, and we lost our way and began to rationalize away our principles in the process. But where does such capitulation take us? . . . [T]he strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians created such a cognitive dissonance among my generation of conservatives—who had come of age under existential threat from the Soviet Union—that it was almost impossible to believe. Even as our own government was documenting a concerted attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck. It was then that I was compelled back to Senator Goldwater’s book, to a chapter entitled “The Soviet Menace.” . . . Our forebears knew that “keeping a Republic” meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors; they knew that a people cannot live and work freely, and develop national institutions conducive to freedom, except in peace and with independence. . . . We have taken our “institutions conducive to freedom,” as Goldwater put it, for granted as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are. Congress gets to set its own definition of high crimes and misdemeanors. At what point does destroying the country’s standing in the world and lying about everything to everyone not rise to the level of a misdemeanor? Without truly wise, competent leadership, will we make it to 500 generations? Or even 410?
Do The Math August 2, 2017August 1, 2017 The American Century ended in the early hours of November 9, 2016. Consider this clip from CNN’s must-watch-every-Sunday-morning Fareed Zakaria, transcribed here: In London last week, I met a Nigerian man who succinctly expressed the reaction of much of the world to America these days. “Your country has gone crazy,” he said, with a mixture of outrage and amusement. “I’m from Africa. I know crazy, but I didn’t ever think I would see this in America.” The world has gone through bouts of anti-Americanism before, but this one feels very different. First, there is the sheer shock at what is going on. The bizarre candidacy of Donald Trump, which has been followed by utterly chaotic presidency. The chaos is at such a fever pitch that one stalwart Republican, Karl Rove, described the president this week as vindictive, impulsive and shortsighted and his public shaming of the attorney general as unfair, unjustified, unseemly and stupid. Another Republican, Kenneth Starr, the one-time grand inquisitor of Bill Clinton, went further, calling Trump’s treatment of Jeff Sessions one of the most outrageous and profoundly misguided courses of presidential conduct I have witnessed in five decades in and around the nation’s capital. But there’s a larger aspect of the fall in respect for America. According to a recent Pew Research Center study of 37 countries, people around the world increasingly believe that they can make do without America. Trump’s presidency has made the US something worse than we feared or derided. It is becoming irrelevant. The most fascinating finding of the Pew Survey was not that Trump is deeply unpopular, 22 percent approval compared to Obama’s 64 percent at the end of his presidency. That was to be expected, but that there are now alternatives. On the question of confidence in various leaders to do the right thing regarding world affairs, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin got slightly higher marks than Trump, but Angela Merkel got almost twice as much support as Trump. Even in the United States, more respondents expressed confidence in the German Chancellor than Trump. This says a lot about Trump, but it says as much about Merkel’s reputation and how far Germany has come since 1945. Trump has managed to do something that fear of Putin could not. He has unified Europe. Facing the challenges of Trump, Brexit, populism, a funny thing has happened on the continent. Support for Europe among its residents has risen and plans for deeper European integration are underway. If the Trump administration perceives as it has promised and initiates protectionist measures against Europe, the continent’s resolve will only strengthen. Under the combined leadership of Merkel and the new French President Emmanuel Macron, Europe will adopt a more activist foreign policy. Its economy has rebounded and is now growing as fast as that of the United States. Countries from Canada to China have in various ways announced that since Washington cannot be relied on to shape the global agenda anymore, others will step in its place. The most dismaying aspect of Pew’s findings is that the drop in regard for America goes well beyond Trump. Sixty-four percent of the people surveyed expressed a favorable view of America at the end of the Obama presidency. That has now fallen to 49 percent. Even when American foreign policy was unpopular, people around the world still believed in America, the place, the idea. This is less true today. In 2008, I wrote a book about the emerging post-American world, which was – I noted at the start – not about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of the rest. Amidst the parochialism, ineptitude and sheer disarray of the Trump presidency, the post-American world is coming to fruition much faster than I ever expected. [See also: CNN.com/Fareed and Fareed’s Washington Post columns.] There’s no reason, of course, why our country has to lead the world — other than that it comes with huge advantages to us (like being able to print money out of thin air that the rest of the world accepts in return for its hard work and resources) . . . and that the world needs strong, principled, democratic, progressive, compassionate, progressive, rational leadership (which in the Clinton and Obama years, I would argue, we came as close to providing as any nation ever has). And it’s not impossible that if and when we regain our footing, we will be looked to once again. That’s certainly the hope. But if one chose to mark America’s 1917 entry into World War I as the beginning of “The American Century” . . . well, do the math.
Now Playing: An Inconvenient Sequel August 1, 2017July 28, 2017 When your grandkids ask “what did you do in the war [to save the habitability of our planet],” you may be able to tell them about your carbon footprint (“I used a solar pool blanket!” “I ate less meat!”) — but now you can also tell them, “I went to the movies.” Seriously! Go see it. Or at least watch the trailer.