Year: 2018

There’s a line in L’il Abner (the most underrated Broadway musical ever) — in the song, “Progress Is The Root Of All Evil” with the refrain, “bring back the good old days!” — in which the rich guy complains “I went to see the President / They asked me to wait / And though I knew that he was swamped / With matters of state / A fella named Ben Hogan / Walked right through the front gate! Bring back the good old days!”  Eisenhower liked to golf.  (Ben Hogan was the Tiger Woods of his day.)

I thought of this during Chris Hayes’ Thing One, Thing Two segment Friday night.  You gotta love these two minutes.

Billionaire Nick Hanauer summarizes:

Paul Ryan and Donald Trump promised you a $4,000 raise. They said the rich and corporations would give it you after they got giant tax cuts. But guess what? It’s not coming. That’s because their entire economic theory of growth is a scam.

Here’s the reality: If Trump wanted to give you a raise, he wouldn’t rely on trickle-down lies to do it. A mere $2 increase in the minimum wage would give millions of hard-working Americans a $4,000 raise. A modest updating of our overtime regulations would give a $4,000 raise to tens of millions more.

Let’s hold these trickle-down clowns accountable. We can, and we will, vote them out of office this November.

If you can, chip in a few dollars so we can drive more action and hold these scam artists accountable.

Chip in $5 to fight trickle-down BS.

So I did.

And read his full piece in USA Today.

And re-viewed his seminal 6-minute TED talk — “the rich are not the job creators.”

Have a great weekend!

But first: discriminating against babies on religious grounds?  Really?  Watch this just-released 60-second PSA from the Ad Council.

And now:

This Isn’t About Trump.  (But of course it is.)

It’s a note to the writer’s Trump-supporting friends.  If you have some (I have one!), pass it on.

I did — to an older gay friend, Princeton grad, from a liberal neck of the woods, who still supports Trump (go figure).

I sent the link and asked for his thoughts.  He responded:

“This is whiny nonsense. Trump is (a) addressing national problems for far too long ignored or downplayed by admins of both parties (e.g.: NorKorea), (b) advancing the national interest on multiple fronts, and (c), to general astonishment, trying hard to fulfill his election promises. This is understandably unsettling to many folks. Among the very few commentators who have a clue are Selena Zito and Conrad Black. I commend to you this assessment from the National Review, which I think is likely substantially correct.  Cheers!”

Needless to say, I see it differently.

Roger Cohen, in the indispensable New York Times:

Tethered to a Raging Buffoon Called Trump

We are tethered to a buffoon. He rages and veers, spreading ugliness, like an oil slick smothering everything in its viscous mantle. He’s about to bomb Syria. He’s not about to bomb Syria. His attention span is nonexistent. He attacks the foundations of our Republic: an independent judiciary, a free press, truth itself. His cabinet looks terrorized, the way Saddam Hussein’s once did.

President Donald Trump is dangerous. The main things mitigating the danger are his incompetence and cowardice. We live in a time that teaches how outrage can turn to a shrug, how the unthinkable repeated over and over can induce moral numbness, how a madman’s manic certainties can overwhelm reason. He is very busy; people resist; he opens another front; people shake their heads. It’s hard to remember on Friday what happened on Monday. Trump’s is the unbearable lightness of the charlatan.

Disorientation spreads. Trump’s main war, beyond all the military bluster, is on truth. This reflects his instinct for the jugular: Once the distinction between truth and falsehood disappears, anything is possible. There are plenty of examples these days, from Moscow to Budapest, of how “democracies” can be manipulated to the point where they can yield only one result. This is Trump’s objective, and for it he needs a weakened Justice Department, a weakened press and an American public that will believe anything. He has had setbacks but is stubborn.

In the mid-1930s, when the world was hurtling toward disaster, Robert Musil, the Austrian author of “The Man Without Qualities,” wrote this on the nature of civilization: “That which we call culture presumably does not directly have the concept of truth as a criterion, but no culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.”

This passage is cited by Olaf Peters, the curator of a wonderful exhibition called “Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930’s” at New York’s Neue Galerie. Peters writes of Hitler and the Nazis that they “ultimately came to power above all because they were against something and wanted to make Germany great again at the expense of others; they were against liberal democracy, against cultural modernism,” and hated both Marxism and Judaism, which they blamed for German humiliation.

So, Hitler wanted to make Germany great again. Sure worked out. Trump, of course, also hates “cultural modernism.” He is about a Restoration he equates with restored greatness. Once upon a time the United States won wars, white men ruled, a factory worker in Michigan could afford a couple of quad bikes, and marriage was between a man and a woman. President Trump is about resisting economic, cultural, technological, gender and demographic change. He can’t think, read or reflect; he compensates with urges.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as tweet. No, the United States is not Weimar, but then Weimar was not the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1914, nor the French monarchy of 1789. It is not quite true that, as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa observed, if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. Sometimes one gunshot ushers in the obliteration of empire and sumptuous palaces are left to attend to memories.

In the best case, it will take a long time to recover from Trump. America’s word is near worthless today. It’s on America’s word that global security has rested since 1945.

All the dumb noise Trump makes should not mask the fact that he is a symptom, not a cause. He reflects, and reinforces, a global counterrevolutionary moment, a reaction to the cry of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany that she was “alternativlos”— without alternative.

The resurgent nationalists and nativists insist there are alternatives — alternatives to openness, to mass migration, to free trade, to secularism, to Europe’s ever closer union, to the legalization of same-sex marriage, to gender as a spectrum, to diversity, to human rights. They seek the homogeneous, a quest that exacted a terrible 20th century price.

This is no time for bystanders. “Before the Fall” reminds us to be vigilant. On April 11, 1939, the future historian Fritz Stern, then age 13, wrote to Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York, who had been outspoken in denouncing Hitler:

“When I heard a few minutes ago over the radio that you, Honorable Mayor, don’t want to run once more as Mayor, I was deeply depressed. Although I am a refugee, coming from Germany only months ago, and only a schoolboy, I beseech you to run again. I am quite sure that 80% of all New Yorkers will elect you (and this without concentration camps and Gestapo!). You must stay in City Hall for the sake of this wonderful city and country. If you are no longer Mayor that ‘international gangster in the brown shirt’ will be all too glad.”

I am grateful to Elisabeth Sifton, the editor and publisher, for passing along her late husband’s letter. The indignant voices of 13-year-olds are needed today on Trump. Stern would go on to write: “The fragility of freedom is the simplest and deepest lesson of my life and work.”

So what specifically to do?

I think the best way to help is NOT direct to candidates — though I give to them, too — because so much of that money gets saved up for advertising in the Fall.

I don’t think advertising inspires people to register or motivates them to turn out to the polls – let alone to switch political leanings.

It’s organizing – particularly in a mid-term – that has all the leverage.  And that’s what the DNC exists to facilitate.  It’s all about hiring organizers who recruit volunteers – now – who have time to recruit sub-volunteers – who have time to do the one-on-one work of registration and, ultimately, to drive people to the polls (sometimes literally).

The organizing snowball grows biggest if it starts rolling from near the top of the hill (April) rather than the bottom (October).

With the clock ticking, please don’t hesitate to dazzle MasterCard with your patriotism.  I’ll see whatever you do –as many of you already have — to say thanks.

I just have to think Washington and Jefferson and Adams (and Franklin and Hamilton and Lincoln) (and Eisenhower and Nixon!) are counting on us to do this.

Meanwhile, the beat goes on.  Adam Davidson concludes this remarkable piece in the New Yorker: “We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.”

No time for bystanders, indeed.

WheelTug signed its third airline of the year.  To my mind, BOREF remains a spectaculation.

Taxes are due today — click here to file for an automatic extension. Also due: your first estimated 2018 payment — for which there is no extension.

I’m guessing you’ve seen Sunday’s lead New York Times editorial.  If not:

“This great nation can tolerate a president who makes mistakes,” declared Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican. “But it cannot tolerate one who makes a mistake and then breaks the law to cover it up.”

No, Mr. Hatch wasn’t talking about Donald Trump. It was 1999, and he was talking about Bill Clinton.

At that time, the American system — and the flawed yet sometimes heroic people their fellow Americans choose to lead them — underwent, and passed, a hard test: The president, his financial dealings and his personal relationships were painstakingly investigated for years. Prosecutors ultimately accused Mr. Clinton of lying under oath, to cover up a sexual affair. The House of Representatives impeached him, but the Senate declined to convict, and Mr. Clinton stayed in office.

The public, which learned in detail about everything investigators believed Mr. Clinton had done wrong, overwhelmingly agreed with the judgment of the Senate. It was a sad and sordid and at times distracting business, but the system worked.

Now Mr. Hatch and his fellow lawmakers may be approaching a harsher and more consequential test. We quote his words not to level some sort of accusation of hypocrisy, but to remind us all of what is at stake.

News reports point to a growing possibility that President Trump may act to cripple or shut down an investigation by the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies into his campaign and administration. Lawmakers need to be preparing now for that possibility because if and when it comes to pass, they will suddenly find themselves on the edge of an abyss, with the Constitution in their hands.

Make no mistake: If Mr. Trump takes such drastic action, he will be striking at the foundation of the American government, attempting to set a precedent that a president, alone among American citizens, is above the law. What can seem now like a political sideshow will instantly become a constitutional crisis, and history will come calling for Mr. Hatch and his colleagues.

For months, investigators have been examining whether Mr. Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russian government to undermine American democracy, and whether the president misused his power by obstructing justice in an effort to end that investigation.

Until the last few weeks, Mr. Trump had shown restraint, by his standards, anyway. He and his lawyers cooperated with investigators. Mr. Trump never tweeted directly about Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and spoke about him publicly only when asked.

Alas, that whiff of higher executive function is gone. Mr. Trump is openly attacking both Mr. Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, appointed by Mr. Trump himself. Mr. Rosenstein is overseeing the Russia investigation and signing off on Mr. Mueller’s actions.

Of course, this president has been known to huff and puff, to bluff and bluster, and he may be doing no more than that now. He may choose not to fire either man. We know he has already twice told his aides he wanted Mr. Mueller fired, only to be talked out of such rash action.

But if the president does move against the investigators, it will be up to Congress to affirm the rule of law, the separation of powers and the American constitutional order. The miserable polarization and partisan anger that have been rising in American life for decades will hit a new crescendo, and that will present congressional Republicans with a heavy burden indeed.

Many of them are not fans of this president. Republicans used to warn the nation about Mr. Trump openly, back when they thought they could still protect their party from him. Here’s a short sampling: “malignant clown,” “national disgrace,” “complete idiot,” “a sociopath, without a conscience or feelings of guilt, shame or remorse,” “graceless and divisive,” “predatory and reprehensible,” flawed “beyond mere moral shortcomings,” “unsound, uninformed, unhinged and unfit,” “a character and temperament unfit for the leader of the free world,” “A bigot. A misogynist. A fraud. A bully.” Some still say these sorts of things, albeit anonymously. Just last week, one of the president’s defenders in Congress told a conservative columnist, “It’s like Forrest Gump won the presidency, but an evil, really [expletive] stupid Forrest Gump.”

Yet if Mr. Trump goes after Mr. Mueller or Mr. Rosenstein, even Republicans who have misgivings about the president might be inclined to fall into line. They may resent what feels like an endless investigation, one that is endangering their agenda; or they may resent partisan attacks on Mr. Trump. Such frustrations — like ones Democrats vented when Mr. Clinton was in investigators’ sights — are certainly understandable. Republicans may also find themselves tempted by the political running room they would have with the investigation ended and the three branches of government under their control.

Maybe — and this is the scariest contingency to contemplate — Republican leaders would calculate that with their support, or mere acquiescence, Mr. Trump could get away with it. The overwhelming majority of Americans, including most Republicans, want Mr. Mueller to keep his job, and perhaps a groundswell of revulsion at unchecked presidential power would follow any action against the special counsel. But many Americans, weary of the shouting in Washington, might dismiss the whole thing as another food fight. We can be fairly certain that the pressure on Republican lawmakers from the minority of Americans who support Mr. Trump, as well as from the likes of Fox News and Sinclair, would be intense.

Of course, it’s when overriding your principles is the easy thing to do that you have an urgent responsibility, and opportunity, to demonstrate that you have some.

Look at what’s happening in Missouri right now. The state’s Republican governor, Eric Greitens, has been accused of sexual assault and coercion, and is scheduled to face trial next month on a felony charge of invasion of privacy. It’s a scandal of Trumpian proportions, and Mr. Greitens is responding with Trumpian bravado, calling the investigation and prosecution a “political witch hunt.”

Yet the legislative report detailing his misbehavior was bipartisan, and top state Republicans have spoken out forcefully. They recognize that Mr. Greitens is unfit. (They also see a threat to their political interests, but the two can go hand in hand.)

Or look at Watergate. We may think of it now as a two-year drama with an inevitable end, the takedown of a president who tried to cover up a criminal conspiracy. But many people forget how close President Richard Nixon came to surviving the affair. He was forced from office only because enough Republican leaders recognized the legitimacy of the investigation and stood up to him. And even then, it took the revelation of incriminating recordings. No recordings have come out this time — yet.

A few senior Republicans have been saying the right things — including Mr. Hatch. He tweeted that anyone telling the president to fire Mr. Mueller “does not have the President or the nation’s best interest at heart.” Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, warned Mr. Trump that firing Mr. Mueller would be “the beginning of the end of his presidency.”

That’s all necessary and good. But it’s not enough. More Republicans need to make it clear that they won’t tolerate any action against either man, and that firing Mr. Mueller would be, as Senator Charles Grassley said, “suicide.”

Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already yielded great benefit to the country, including the indictments of 13 Russians and three companies for trying to undermine the presidential election. None of us can know if prosecutors will eventually point the finger at the president himself. But should Mr. Trump move to hobble or kill the investigation, he would darken rather than dispel the cloud of suspicion around him. Far worse, he would free future presidents to politicize American justice. That would be a danger to every American, of whatever political leaning.

The president is not a king but a citizen, deserving of the presumption of innocence and other protections, yet also vulnerable to lawful scrutiny. We hope Mr. Trump recognizes this. If he doesn’t, how Republican lawmakers respond will shape the future not only of this presidency and of one of the country’s great political parties, but of the American experiment itself.

Embedded in the Times editorial are a box of Trump tweets and another of Republican quotes.  So it’s better to read the Times directly.  The tweets, especially: can this really be happening?

Better still, have links to all the Times opinions delivered to your inbox daily.

Still with me?  [Spectaculation: noun, a spectacular speculation.]

Still with me?  It will be organizing, not advertising, that produces the turn-out we need to win big in November . . . and the organizing snowball grows biggest if it starts rolling from the top of the hill (April) rather than the bottom (October).  Click here to leverage your resources and get the ball rolling.

Wow.

Let’s start with this — 80 minutes with Ray Kurzweil, who told us 10 years ago that, on average, by 2022 — though you could still be hit by a bus — adult life expectancy would be increasing by more than one year per year.  So we’d be getting a little further from the end, not closer to it.  I liked that very much.

Friday, he told us he had been a little optimistic.  “Longevity escape velocity,” he said, will be reached in 2029.  But with autonomous vehicles, the chances of getting hit by a bus will nearly vanish.

It pays to heed Kurzweil.  “Of the 147 predictions he’s made since the early 1990s, 115 have proved to be correct and another 12 essentially correct (off by only a year or two)” — so 86% right.  This piece explains how.

Friday he said developed countries would all have adopted systems of Universal Basic Income by the early 2030s — and all countries would have it by the end of that decade — so that people’s main worry would not be finding jobs to meet their family’s basic needs, but finding meaning, to meet their psychic needs.

We will expand out intelligence a billionfold by 2045 — Google will essentially be in your brain.  And by then or shortly after we’ll have multiple bodies, and backup bodies.

One thing Kurzweil’s Google team is working on that you can try right now is Talk To Books. Ask a question; TTB takes half a second (literally) to read 120,000 books and suggest answers, displaying the books they came from.  It’s clunky: many of the searches you try will produce super dumb results.   And they chose to read only 120,000 books instead of a million, because, Kurzweil told us, they knew people wouldn’t put up with waiting six seconds.  But they’re just getting started.  It will get better.

I may have a little of this wrong (as may Kurzweil), but this was the gist.

Half the talks we heard were unbelievably hopeful.

Not only will there by cyborgs — one of them joined us at TED.

And imagine:

> Vaccines produced in days rather than six months.

> “MRIs” that are small and cheap and emit no radiation.  (The woman developing this shone red lights through her hands and then other light through a chicken breast to which she added a tumor — don’t ask me to explain, just hang in there for a decade until this stuff is widely available.)

> Flying cars, of course.  (You’ll Lyft to the nearest vertical-car hub; hop over to a hub near your destination; then Lyft or Uber to your destination.  Target cost: forty bucks.)

> And — per the woman running SpaceX for Elon Musk — rocket-based flights from New York to Shanghai in an hour.  Within 10 years.  Mars colonized not long afterward.

Stephen Pinker gave his wonderfully upbeat perspective.  We only think things are awful, because if it’s not bad, it doesn’t make the news.  Even deaths due to lightning strikes have fallen dramatically!  (Page 189.)

Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project lunch was out of the ballpark (again).  The impending disasters are real; but so is the progress, if we keep at it.  Solar is rapidly becoming cheaper than coal.  And there are so many other ways we can live smarter and save ourselves.  (Eat less meat!)  Here was his 2017 TED talk.  We got a sobering (we still spew 110 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere everyday, using our atmosphere like a sewer) but inspiring update (China and others are beating their Paris Accord goals; wind power is blowing away past projections).

It was scary to think how badly all this could go.

For example: if even a few of the million “DNA printers” we saw that will eventually be installed by hospital bedsides are hijacked to print . . . oh, say, smallpox.

Or if, more prosaically, nuclear war.

After all, as Charles Mann noted, we are a “breakout species.”  Which sounds good but “Here’s the thing about successful species: Eventually, they all wipe themselves out.”  Imagine some bacterium put in the center of a petri dish filled with nutrient, instead of struggling to survive in topsoil.  No predators; a sea of food.  It multiplies like mad until it reaches the edge of the petri dish and then goes extinct, nothing left to eat, drowning in its own poop.

There are so many ways this could go wrong.

Exhibits A-F: Trump/Pruitt/Putin/McConnell/Nunez/ISIS . . . and on and on.

But what a time to be alive.

And what amazing people all over the planet looking for creative, just ways to solve our problems, large and small.

Not to mention the guy we met who can hold his breath for five minutes and ten seconds as he dives 100 feet under water.  Or Alex Honnold, who climbed El Capitan with no rope or tools.  Or Chetna Sinha, the poor-but-determined illiterate Indian woman who went on to found a bank that now has 90,000 account holders.

Here’s just one of the many talks I loved: The Bail Project: a plan to meaningfully increase justice while lowering taxpayer costs.

On any given night, more than 450,000 people in the US are locked up simply because they can’t make bail. The sums in question are often around $500: easy for some to pay, impossible for others.

Give this talk 14 minutes.  You’ll never forget it.

Have a great week.

If only we had listened to Trump.  Watch his candid appraisal of the Clintons here and here.  One minute each.

Spilt milk — but still.

Watching “The Death of Stalin,” newly released in American theaters and banned in Russia — gripping and funny and wonderfully done — one is reminded that at the end of the day, countries are governed by people.

Petty, selfish, small, easily frightened, easily misled, quick to take offense — and all the other things people are.  (In the category of “people” I reluctantly include myself.)

Most of us rise above our worst instincts most of the time and deserve a largely favorable assessment, as Trump assessed the Clintons in the two clips above.

Yet given some power or faced with stress — well, “The Death of Stalin” takes place in 1953, but sharp-eyed viewers may see some relevance to today.

Picture Trump and Mnuchin and Sara Huckabee Sanders and, now, John Bolton, in a movie of their own.  Zinke riding in on his horse.  Pruitt flying with 20 security guards to Morocco at taxpayer expense to help Carl Icahn make more money with liquefied natural gas (isn’t that what the EPA administrator is supposed to do)?  And Pence!  Shouldn’t he be in here someplace?  Scaramucci?  The President’s doctor?  Stephen (“the President’s power will not be questioned”) Miller?

Instead of Vasily and Svetlana, you’d have Ivanka, Eric, and Donald, Jr.

If only we weren’t being forced to watch.

One might think history is all about huge institutional forces.  Nations versus nations.  But how much of it is just individuals feeling disrespected and lashing out to get even?

If Obama had not so publicly humiliated Trump at the White House correspondents’ dinner, would Trump even have run?  If Hillary had not called out Putin as she did, would Trump have won?  Would Putin have worked so hard to defeat her?

Have a great weekend.

Following up on Madeleine Albright’s op-ed Sunday, worrying we are on the path to fascism, I offer this collection of essays — Can It Happen Here? — worrying the same thing.

My friend Charles Kaiser’s review for the Guardian:

The 17 thinkers who have contributed to this new collection of essays come down firmly on all sides of its central question . . . But whether you are an optimist, a pessimist or an idealist without illusions (John F. Kennedy’s self-reverential description), this book bombards you with all the reasons that anyone who treasures democracy needs to be terrified by the current state of our republic.

It is, of course, the presence of Donald Trump in the White House that gives so many a sense of a state of emergency. But like many other recent books, this one argues that the Trump catastrophe is really just the culmination of 50 years of constitutional decay, rather than some sudden, unpredictable event.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin calls Trump a demagogue out of central casting, “unruly, uncouth, mendacious, dishonest and cunning”, his presidency a “symptom of constitutional rot and … dysfunction”. Balkin argues that the rise of American oligarchy is central to the steady decline of democracy.

He attributes the rise of oligarchy to changes in how political campaigns are financed (allowing gigantic amounts of dark money); basic changes in the structure of mass media which have “encouraged political distrust”; and the merger of “politics with entertainment”.

“The central goal of the Republican agenda,” Balkin writes, “…is to deliver benefits to the donor class”. Republicans have “no scruples about acting in an entirely shameless manner, as long as the interests of its masters are well served”. Trump’s populism is just a shameless “Potemkin village”.

Whether or not fascism is coming to America, it is undeniable that the internet has put more in place to make it possible than there has ever been before. Its infrastructure has enabled an almost complete (and barely protested) disappearance of privacy, and the near-disappearance of the very concept of truth.

In a particularly well-focused essay about how Russia is contributing to the rise of fascism, former ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power – Sunstein’s wife – says the current “media environment” gives “propaganda and falsehoods” unprecedented power.

Power provides extremely useful history on Russian efforts to interfere with US elections, which go back at least to 1984, when the KGB secretly campaigned against Ronald Reagan’s re-election. Just as they did during the 2016 election, the Russians spread all kinds of false stories, including the idea the CIA was plotting to give nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa.

Then Power pinpoints why the Russians were so much less effective back then: “During the Cold War the vast majority of Americans received their news … via mediated platforms.” This meant that what they read or saw on television “had to get by professional gatekeepers”.

As far as the dissemination of news is concerned, that is the crucial difference between the pre and post-internet worlds: the gatekeepers have disappeared.

Add to that the fact that bots accounted for 3.8 million tweets in the final weeks of the 2016 election and that 38 million false stories were shared on Facebook in the last three months of the campaign, and you get some idea of the damage the internet has inflicted on American democracy.

Fox News routinely “amplified falsehoods” that discredited Hillary Clinton. All in all it’s no surprise, as Power points out, that “large numbers of Americans now view as opinion what were once seen as verifiable facts” – everything from global warming to the utility of vaccinating children.

Several contributors focus on the potentially catastrophic reaction Trump could orchestrate in the wake of a large-scale terrorist attack. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman argues that the prospect of a “draconian response” by Trump “should jolt serious Democrats and Republicans” into passing a new statutory framework that would explicitly reject the claim made by Jay Bybee and John Yoo for the Bush administration “that the commander in chief has the unilateral power to make never-ending war on the home front”. Unfortunately, with spineless Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, there is zero chance of such an initiative now.

. . .

Right now there are really only two things that can restore our faith in the rule of law and beat back lethal tendencies toward fascism. The first is a successful conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the alleged misdeeds of Trump and his dubious minions. The other is a new wave of energy from the progressive majority in the November elections, which could replace Trump’s Republican supplicants with Democrats who would actually impose serious limits on this White House.

As New York University law professor Stephen Holmes puts it towards the end of the book, even if our system doesn’t “guarantee good governance”, a change in the team in power can still produce “a sense of buoyant expectancy” and “social energy throughout the community”.

The main reason for optimism about such new energy did not exist when this book was printed: the teenaged Americans now fighting to bring sanity to the nation’s gun laws. These magnificent young people must become the vanguard of a mass movement to rescue America from the Republican donor class – and to return it, finally, to its senses.

Amen.  To help fuel that movement, click here.

I’m at TED this week.  You can save all that travel and expense and watch thousands of past TED talks for free . . . organized by topic, to help you choose (autism? asteroids? agriculture?) or by playlist (25 most popular of all time? talks by brilliants kids and teens?)

So in case I miss a day or two, I leave you in brilliant hands.  And will be looking for new talks worthy of your attention in the weeks to come.

That said, I may not miss any days because — as we teeter between fascism-chaos-and-possible-extinction on the one hand and all-but-unimaginable-well-being on the other — there’s so much going on that I burst to share.

So today I offer this segment on Scott Pruitt from last Friday’s Rachel Maddow . . . knowing full well that by the time you watch, he may have resigned or been fired.

But there are two reasons I offer it, both big.

BIG REASON NUMBER ONE.  There’s so much here I didn’t know.  I knew Pruitt was working hard to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency — a horrible Republican agenda for the air we breathe, the water we drink, and, yes, the habitable climate our species relies on.

And I knew he was renting a DC condo for $50 a night (but only on the nights he and his daughter used it) from a lobbyist with matters before the EPA.

But wait til you watch the rest.  And the Carl Icahn connection.

Astonishing.

BIG REASON NUMBER TWO.  How come I didn’t know this stuff before Friday?  Why didn’t I know it just as a regular viewer of CBS, NBC, and ABC news?

Our nation and many of our allies are under attack by the Russians.  Faith in our fundamental institutions is under attack by our President: our free press, independent judiciary and intelligence community.  Our norms of honesty and decency and dignity are being flouted and corroded.

Aren’t these all things that require bold face exclamation marks of alarm?

You hear them on MSNBC but not so much elsewhere.  (From FOX the alarm you hear  is that we are under attack by caravans of Mexican rapists.)

Did you know how deep the ties run between the NRA and the Kremlin?

I didn’t either.  Watch it here.  From the same Rachel Maddow show Friday.  Or read the Rolling Stone report.

Which goes without saying — no?

And yet, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright makes clear in the New York Times, and in her new book, Fascism: A Warning, we’re taking the first steps in that direction.

On April 28, 1945 — 73 years ago — Italians hung the corpse of their former dictator Benito Mussolini upside down next to a gas station in Milan. Two days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath the streets of war-ravaged Berlin. Fascism, it appeared, was dead.

To guard against a recurrence, the survivors of war and the Holocaust joined forces to create the United Nations, forge global financial institutions and — through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — strengthen the rule of law. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the honor roll of elected governments swelled not only in Central Europe, but also Latin America, Africa and Asia. Almost everywhere, it seemed, dictators were out and democrats were in. Freedom was ascendant.

Today, we are in a new era, testing whether the democratic banner can remain aloft amid terrorism, sectarian conflicts, vulnerable borders, rogue social media and the cynical schemes of ambitious men. The answer is not self-evident. We may be encouraged that most people in most countries still want to live freely and in peace, but there is no ignoring the storm clouds that have gathered. In fact, fascism — and the tendencies that lead toward fascism — pose a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II.

Warning signs include the relentless grab for more authority by governing parties in Hungary, the Philippines, Poland and Turkey — all United States allies. The raw anger that feeds fascism is evident across the Atlantic in the growth of nativist movements opposed to the idea of a united Europe, including in Germany, where the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland has emerged as the principal opposition party. The danger of despotism is on display in the Russia of Vladimir Putin — invader of Ukraine, meddler in foreign democracies, accused political assassin, brazen liar and proud son of the K.G.B. Putin has just been re-elected to a new six-year term, while in Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, a ruthless ideologue, is poised to triumph in sham balloting next month. In China, Xi Jinping has persuaded a docile National People’s Congress to lift the constitutional limit on his tenure in power.

Around the Mediterranean, the once bright promise of the Arab Spring has been betrayed by autocratic leaders, such as Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt (also just re-elected), who use security to justify the jailing of reporters and political opponents. Thanks to allies in Moscow and Tehran, the tyrant Bashar al-Assad retains his stranglehold over much of Syria. In Africa, the presidents who serve longest are often the most corrupt, multiplying the harm they inflict with each passing year. Meanwhile, the possibility that fascism will be accorded a fresh chance to strut around the world stage is enhanced by the volatile presidency of Donald Trump.

If freedom is to prevail over the many challenges to it, American leadership is urgently required. This was among the indelible lessons of the 20th century. But by what he has said, done and failed to do, Mr. Trump has steadily diminished America’s positive clout in global councils.

Instead of mobilizing international coalitions to take on world problems, he touts the doctrine of “every nation for itself” and has led America into isolated positions on trade, climate change and Middle East peace. Instead of engaging in creative diplomacy, he has insulted United States neighbors and allies, walked away from key international agreements, mocked multilateral organizations and stripped the State Department of its resources and role. Instead of standing up for the values of a free society, Mr. Trump, with his oft-vented scorn for democracy’s building blocks, has strengthened the hands of dictators. No longer need they fear United States criticism regarding human rights or civil liberties. On the contrary, they can and do point to Mr. Trump’s own words to justify their repressive actions.

At one time or another, Mr. Trump has attacked the judiciary, ridiculed the media, defended torture, condoned police brutality, urged supporters to rough up hecklers and — jokingly or not — equated mere policy disagreements with treason. He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity. He routinely vilifies federal law enforcement institutions. He libels immigrants and the countries from which they come. His words are so often at odds with the truth that they can appear ignorant, yet are in fact calculated to exacerbate religious, social and racial divisions. Overseas, rather than stand up to bullies, Mr. Trump appears to like bullies, and they are delighted to have him represent the American brand. If one were to draft a script chronicling fascism’s resurrection, the abdication of America’s moral leadership would make a credible first scene.

Equally alarming is the chance that Mr. Trump will set in motion events that neither he nor anyone else can control.

His policy toward North Korea changes by the day and might quickly return to saber-rattling should Pyongyang prove stubborn before or during talks. His threat to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement could unravel a pact that has made the world safer and could undermine America’s reputation for trustworthiness at a critical moment. His support of protectionist tariffs invites retaliation from major trading partners — creating unnecessary conflicts and putting at risk millions of export-dependent jobs. The recent purge of his national security team raises new questions about the quality of advice he will receive. John Bolton starts work in the White House on Monday.

What is to be done? First, defend the truth. A free press, for example, is not the enemy of the American people; it is the protector of the American people. Second, we must reinforce the principle that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Third, we should each do our part to energize the democratic process by registering new voters, listening respectfully to those with whom we disagree, knocking on doors for favored candidates, and ignoring the cynical counsel: “There’s nothing to be done.”

I’m 80 years old, but I can still be inspired when I see young people coming together to demand the right to study without having to wear a flak jacket.

We should also reflect on the definition of greatness. Can a nation merit that label by aligning itself with dictators and autocrats, ignoring human rights, declaring open season on the environment, and disdaining the use of diplomacy at a time when virtually every serious problem requires international cooperation?

To me, greatness goes a little deeper than how much marble we put in our hotel lobbies and whether we have a Soviet-style military parade. America at its best is a place where people from a multitude of backgrounds work together to safeguard the rights and enrich the lives of all. That’s the example we have always aspired to set and the model people around the world hunger to see. And no politician, not even one in the Oval Office, should be allowed to tarnish that dream.

Organizing a huge midterm turn-out is the first step toward reversing course.

In my view — $100 million of on-the-ground organizing will do more to produce that huge turn-out than $1 billion in TV ads.

Only about 37% of our voters (or theirs) voted in the 2010 and 2014 mid-term elections.  Imagine if Democrats could get that up to (say) even just 45%.  If we all pitch in, I think we will . . . and, thus, despite all the gerrymandering, and despite the good people of Wyoming having as many senators as the equally good but 65-fold more numerous people of California, flip Congress and many state legislative chambers blue.

The “organizing snowball” that the DNC facilitates, directly and through its support of the 50 state parties . . . hiring organizers now to recruit and train volunteers to recruit and train more volunteers to register voters this summer and drive voters to the polls this fall (sometimes literally drive them, if they need a lift) . . . grows biggest if it starts rolling from near the top of the hill (April) rather than the bottom (October).  That’s how snowballs work.  Click here to get ours rolling.  (Or me-mail me directly if you’re slightly vaguely “well off.”  Or have questions.)