Here are the Senators who voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 — all of them Republicans, of course.

And here are the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who will vote to decide whether Judge Kavanaugh is telling the truth.

See any overlap?

I notice Chuck Grassley, the committee chair . . . Ted Cruz and John Cornyn from Texas . . . Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee from Utah (really? Utah represents 1% of the US population but 10% of the Judiciary Committee?) . . . and Lindsey Graham, who says that if the Ford allegation is all there is, he can’t see “ruining Kavanaugh’s life” over it.

(If being relegated to a lifetime of comfort and prestige as an appellate court judge is to have one’s life ruined, one wonders how Lindsay would describe the consequences of violence against women?  Or of being denied health insurance because of a preexisting condition?)

Only one Republican on the Committee — Jeff Flake — voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act in 2013.  The remaining four were not yet senators, so we don’t know how they would have voted.

It seems to me there are two questions before the committee, if in fact Kavanaugh did what he is accused of (which, absent the equivalent of a blue dress, none of us can know for sure):

First . . . is such behavior in high school disqualifying 36 years later?

Second . . . is lying about it under oath this week disqualifying?

Just how high should the standard to be a Supreme Court Justice be? 

When something is really embarrassing, and perhaps in and of itself not disqualifying, is lying about it under oath okay?

Should anyone nominated to the Supreme Court be presumed qualified until proven to have lied?  Or is “reasonable doubt” a better standard?

Looking to volunteer?  Join Team Blue.  And (as always) if you have any more fuel to throw on our brightly burning fire, click here.

LOSE WEIGHT: A hedge fund guy I know — who never struck me as fat — spent $13 million of his own cash to develop SweetDefeat, which you can try out for quite a bit less.*  It’s a tiny plant-based lozenge you dissolve on your tongue that blocks your ability to taste sweetness.  This reviewer tells the story.  (And — FREE BONUS! — note her link to a separate study, of a separate weight-loss idea, showing that if you take a whiff of peppermint every two hours, you’ll consume 2,800 fewer calories a week.)

You’re welcome.

QUIT SMOKING: Here’s how Garrison Keillor kicked a three-pack-a-day habit.  A really nice read.  And here’s the book I’ve plugged before that’s help literally millions of people quit — including Ellen DeGeneres and at least one of you (who wrote to tell me).  Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking.  (Or as I put it in my book: one way, when you get to be my age, you have an extra $1 million in your Roth IRA; the other way, you’re broke and have lung cancer.  Stark, yes — but our young friends really need to know this.)

You’re welcome.

SAVE THE WORLD:  It’s not about advertising — persuading Trump supporters to vote Democrat — it’s about ORGANIZING — getting those literally tens of millions who reliably vote Democrat every four years but not in midterms to vote in this mid-term.  So . . . send folks to iwillvote.com and to Join Team Blue and here!  And if you’ve done well on FANH or HD (and can forget the others), here!  I’ll see whatever you do and jump through the screen to say . . .

Thank you.

*Indeed, they tell me, “customers who check out with the code AndrewTobias will get 50% off.”

Take 60 seconds to enjoy this ad for gerrymandered jewelry. “You select your legislators every two years, but every ten years they select you.”

Know folks unsure whether they’re registered?  Send them to iwillvote.com.

Know folks looking to volunteer?  Send them to Join Team Blue.

Know kids who relate to the world via Instagram?  Here.

Have more fuel to throw on our brightly burning fire? Here.

Read Fear. 

Watch Active Measures.

We are losing the Second Cold War. Just as the colonists defeated the British with asymmetrical warfare, so Putin’s Russia is defeating us.

As Trump, unchecked by the Republican Congress, tells the world he trusts and admires Putin, who murders and poisons his opponents.

And speaking of asymmetrical warfare, there’s China.  Here is David Ignatius last month in the Washington Post.  (Thanks, Glenn.)

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. . . “It is not that we lack money. It is that we are playing a losing game,” Brose contended in a paper presented to the group. “Our competitors are now using advanced technologies to erode our military edge. This situation is becoming increasingly dire.”

Future needs are being drowned out by past practices, because of what Brose’s boss, Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), has called the “military-industrial-congressional complex.” Brose calculates that in the Pentagon’s initial request for $74 billion in new defense spending in fiscal 2019, only 0.006 percent was targeted for science and technology. . . .

. . . The Chinese are happy for the United States to keep building carriers and bombers, so long as they deploy the more advanced technologies that can disable these systems. . . .

America’s vulnerability to information warfare was a special topic of concern. One participant recalled a conversation several years ago with a Russian general who taunted him: “You have a cybercommand but no information operations. Don’t you know that information operations are how you take countries down?”

The Aspen Strategy Group is a devoutly bipartisan forum. But there was an intense discussion here of the issue that’s vexing America this summer: the growing political polarization that’s creating so much discord that it’s becoming a national security problem.

As the gathering concluded Monday, Republicans and Democrats were equally passionate about spreading the message that this is a Sputnik moment for modernizing our military. Competing with a rising China begins at home, with a more nimble Pentagon and a country that’s more united to face the big problems ahead.

Finally . . .

WhoWhatWhy contrasts the penalty for casting one illegal vote — accidentally, and only on a technicality — with the penalty for intentionally rigging an election:

. . . In 2016, Crystal Mason sought to vote in the presidential election in Tarrant County, TX. Her name wasn’t on the voter roll so, after being assisted by a poll worker, she signed an affidavit in her name — presenting her ID — and declared that she was eligible to vote. She was given a provisional ballot and filled it out.

What Mason did not do, however, was read the fine print at the top of the document. Had she done so, she would have realized that she was not eligible to vote because she had not completed the community-supervision portion of a tax fraud conviction. In her case, “community supervision” meant periodically logging onto a website to confirm her address and affirming that she had not been arrested.

She should have read the fine print and that was clearly her mistake. This isn’t a defense of people who vote but should not. However, it seems clear that Mason didn’t mean to cast a fraudulent vote. . . . It was an honest mistake . . . [and yet she] was sentenced to five years in state prison for voter fraud and last week she got an additional 10 months in federal prison for release violations.

Also last week, a North Carolina court ruled that, once again, Republicans had illegally gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts. As the court’s decision shows, this was not an honest mistake. It was a premeditated attempt to continue to allow the GOP to win a supermajority of the Tar Heel State’s congressional seats even if the popular vote did not reflect such a distribution.

The ruling means that, since Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2010, there hasn’t been a single congressional election held using a map that has not been deemed to be unconstitutional.

In effect, North Carolinians, especially African Americans, have been denied the right to participate in a fair congressional election for the better part of a decade.

Nobody has been punished for silencing the voices of hundreds of thousands of voters in North Carolina, and the illegal map will be used again in the midterms, because the court thinks there is no time to draw one that isn’t unconstitutional. Once again, Republican legislators got away with it.

In a nutshell, these two cases illustrate why widespread in-person voter fraud is so rare while voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other crimes against democracy are so widespread: The former has a very low upside and a major downside; the latter has a major upside and no downside whatsoever. . . .

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One more reason to  buy gerrymandered jewelry.

Have a great weekend.

Know folks who are not sure how to register — or whether they’re registered?  Send them to iwillvote.com.

Know folks looking to volunteer?  Send them to Join Team Blue.

Know kids who relate to the world via Instagram, not MSNBC?  Send them here.

And, as always, if you have more fuel to throw on our brightly burning fire, click here.

Meanwhile, to read about Brett Kavanaugh growing up on the crime-ridden streets of Bethesda, Maryland, click here.

And to get 4% back on all your dining and entertainment, plus $500 after you spend $3,000, and the first year’s $95 fee waived, click here.  (Thanks, Brian!)

Here are 9 apps to try if you want to learn something new every day.  (Thanks, Evy!)  I signed up for the second, Blinkist, where you can read or listen to thousands of 15-minute non-fiction book digests ($6.67/month after free trial);  and the ninth, Duolingo, where I’m already having fun with Russian and Spanish (free).

‘It’s OK to be scared’ and 9 other messages we all probably need to hear right now. . . . ”

From Upworthy.

I particularly liked Dan Rather’s message . . . “Take a deep breath and feel the cool air of hope and justice in your lungs, and then march forward.” . . . excerpted from his post:

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For decades, Republicans have been able to have it all ways. Promise a radical reactionary rethink of American democracy to their rabid base, and hide behind a court that protected them from what would be a very unpopular set of policies with the general public. Well no longer.

Do we really want to outlaw abortion? We may soon know. Do we really believe we can attack gay rights and other rights at unprecedented levels? We may soon know. Do we really believe that our corporations should have unfettered power and workers have relatively none? Here again, the movement is already afoot.

The farce is shattered, the fig leaf has disappeared, the obfuscations have been replaced by clarity. And what is in its place is a very unpopular President stoking the flames of a massive backlash.

I do not say this to be Pollyannish. The president and his supporters have a lot of power, and tens of millions of fervent members in their base. But we have seen a growing realization from not only moderates but conservatives who still care about the Constitution and recognize how perilous is the threat of the modern GOP. Look at Michael Bloomberg pledging tens of millions of dollars to elect Democrats. Look at opinion writers who have preached for the GOP in the past say now is a time to elect Democrats. Look at men and women of power and fame who are arguing that this cannot stand.

I know there is a feeling among many progressives that they have lost, that the future is a foregone conclusion. They see the forces arrayed against them on the battlefield of justice and feel the doom of certain and impending defeat. But turn to your left and right and see the long lines of fellow citizens. Look behind you and see the formidable artillery of wealth and power that is on YOUR side. Take a deep breath and feel the cool air of hope and justice in your lungs, and then march forward. #steady #courage

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It is NOT symmetrical, as I’ve long argued . . . and as David Leonhardt again makes clear (subscribe!):

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Conventional wisdom says that the middle is disappearing from American politics: The Republicans have moved far to the right, the Democrats far to the left, and woe to any moderate voters looking for politicians to represent their views.

Well, the conventional wisdom is wrong. The Democrats have not actually become radical leftists, or anything close to it.

You keep hearing this story partly because Republicans have an obvious interest in promoting it and partly because large parts of the news media find it irresistible. It’s a “both side do it” angle that allows us journalists to appear tough, knowing and above the partisan scrum. We love that image. But the facts don’t support the story in this case.

For starters, look at this year’s primaries, which finished last week. Across the country, a grand total of two Democratic incumbents in the House lost a primary. Zero Senate candidates did. In conservative states with moderate Democratic senators — like Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia — not one of those moderates even faced a serious primary challenge.

The situation was very different in 2010 with the Tea Party, which pushed the Republican Party to the right. Multiple incumbents lost that year, as Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report noted last week. “Please stop with the ‘revolution’ in the Democratic Party narrative,” she said. This year’s real story is the one that the political scholars Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol have tried to tell: Anti-Trump activists have taken a strategic approach, backing either moderate or more progressive candidates, depending on the district.

It’s true that a few proudly left-leaning Democrats won gubernatorial primaries, like Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida. But I encourage you to watch a few of their speeches. For one thing, both are strong candidates. For another, they are hardly socialists.

[And by the way?  If we are ALL socialists to some degree, if we support public schools or public highways or Medicare or public fire departments. — A.T.]

And the list of progressive insurgents who got thumped is much longer. In New York, Cynthia Nixon didn’t crack 35 percent.

Meanwhile, in Congress, the party’s reaction to President Trump tells a similar story. Political pundits sometimes talk about “Trump derangement syndrome” — a condition, supposedly, in which his presidency has made Democrats go crazy. Except that it hasn’t.

To take just one example: There is strong evidence that Trump has broken the law, both by obstructing justice and by using the presidency to enrich himself. Still, Democratic leaders refuse to push for impeachment. They say the country should wait for Robert Mueller’s investigation to finish. I think that’s wise. Either way, it’s certainly not deranged.

Finally, there is policy. Democrats have indeed moved somewhat to the left over the last few decades, on both social and economic issues. As Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary (and no lefty revolutionary), likes to say, the last 15 years should have nudged open-minded people to the political left: The free market isn’t delivering healthy increases in living standards for most Americans. In response, Democrats are focusing less on Bill Clinton’s old themes, like personal and fiscal responsibility, and more on using the government to help people.

But think about what a truly left-wing agenda would look like: Top tax rates of 70 percent (which we had as recently as 1980) or higher. A generous “universal basic income.” The elimination of employer-provided health insurance, with a system more like Britain’s. These ideas remain limited to the margins. None is likely to happen even if Democrats sweep the elections of 2020.

I’m not suggesting that the party has completely avoided Trump overreaction. In our polarized era, Democrats do sometimes confuse its progressive base with the country as a whole. They are to the left of the American public on immigration policy, for instance.

For the most part, though, the Democratic agenda remains decidedly center-left: Raise taxes on the rich, and use the money to help the middle class and poor. Protect civil rights. Expand educational access. Regulate Wall Street, and fight climate change. Expand health insurance using the current system. And compromise with Republicans when necessary.

The radical agenda is the Republican agenda: Make climate change worse, unlike almost every other conservative party in the world. Aggravate inequality. Sabotage health-insurance markets. Run up the deficit. Steal a Supreme Court seat. Keep dark-skinned citizens from voting. Protect Trump’s lawlessness.

If you consider yourself a moderate — whether you lean slightly right or slightly left — your choice in this year’s midterms is clear.

And if you consider yourself a leftist, I understand you are probably frustrated that the Democrats won’t go further. But look at the big picture. The Democratic Party may not have moved nearly as much as you would like, but the party has moved. It has adjusted its agenda in response to soaring inequality and stagnant living standards.

The one mistake no voter should make is pretending that the two parties are just different versions of the same thing.

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[THIRD ESTIMATED QUARTERLY TAX PAYMENT DUE TODAY]

Thank heavens for the indispensable New York Times.  (Subscribe!)

‘Anonymous’ Is Hiding in Plain Sight

The G.O.P. crowd who accepted the devil’s bargain is huge.

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

• Sept. 11, 2018

More and more, I wonder if the disgruntled senior Trump administration official who wrote the anonymous Op-Ed in The Times was actually representing a group — like a “Murder on the Orient Express” plotline where every senior Trump adviser was in on it. Why? Because the article so perfectly captured the devil’s bargain they’ve all struck with this president: Donald Trump is amoral, dishonest and disturbed, a man totally unfit to be president, but, as the anonymous author self-servingly wrote, “There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”

That’s the anonymous-G.O.P. credo today: We know Trump is a jerk, but you’ve gotta love the good stuff — you’ve got to admit that his tax cuts, deregulation, destruction of Obamacare and military buildup have fueled so much growth, defense spending and record stock market highs that we’re wealthier and more secure as a country, even if Trump is nuts. So our consciences are clear.

This view is not without foundation. Economic growth and employment have clearly been on a tear since Trump took office. I’m glad about that.

But what if Trump is actually heating up our economy by burning all the furniture in the house? It’s going to be nice and toasty for us — at least for a while — but where will our kids sleep?

What if Trump’s tax cuts, deregulation, scrapping of Obamacare without any alternative and military spending surge were actually ill-thought-through, short-term-focused initiatives that all ignored expert opinion — because they mostly emerged from off-the-cuff remarks at Trump pep rallies — and collectively amount to a sugar high that not only will be unsustainable but will leave our economy far more vulnerable in the long term?

Let’s take that view for a spin: I favor corporate tax cuts — big ones. But I would have offset them with a carbon tax, a tax on sugar and a small financial transaction tax. That way, we’d unleash the energy of our corporations while mitigating climate change, spurring the next great global industry — clean power — curbing childhood asthma and diabetes and not adding to our national debt, thereby making ourselves more resilient as a country.

When Trump simultaneously cuts corporate taxes and withdraws America from the Paris climate accord, tries to revive the coal industry by lowering pollution standards and weakens fuel economy standards for U.S.-made cars and trucks, he is vastly adding to the financial debts and carbon debts that will burden our children.

And he is doing this despite many economists warning that increasing the deficit when your economy is already growing nicely is really, really reckless — because you may need that money to stimulate your way out of the next recession.

And he is doing this at a time when virtually every climate scientist has warned that global-warming-driven extreme weather events — droughts, floods and wildfires — are sharply on the rise and we are staring through the last window of time to mitigate climate change so that we can manage the impacts that are already unavoidable and avoid the impacts that will be terrifyingly unmanageable.

In June, The Associated Press reported on the latest International Monetary Fund survey of the U.S. economy, which concluded that as a result of Trump’s “tax cuts and expected increases in defense and domestic programs, the federal budget deficit as a percentage of the total economy will exceed 4.5 percent of G.D.P. by next year — nearly double what it was just three years ago.” Such a “big boost … has not been seen in the United States since President Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s boosted spending on the Vietnam War at the same time it was adopting Johnson’s Great Society programs.

Faced with so much debt, which the country will not be able to grow out of, The A.P. story continued, paraphrasing the I.M.F. report, the U.S. “may need to take politically painful steps,” such as cutting Social Security benefits and imposing higher taxes on consumers. (We’ll probably also have to limit spending on new roads, bridges and research.)

You might want to let your kids know that.

You might also want to share with your kids the recent study from a group of Australian climate scientists who modeled the damage to different economies if we don’t work together to achieve the Paris climate accord’s goal of limiting the increase in global average temperature by 2100 to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The rise in sea level will require massive movements of people and cities, and the soaring heat levels will cause losses in agricultural productivity and declines in human health across the globe. As a result, the study found, the economic impacts of ignoring the Paris limits will be “comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s, with its global fall in G.D.P. of 15 percent, except these will occur year after year, with no way for effective redress. … Many governments around the globe won’t be able to cope and will, to put it simply, fail.”

There were responsible ways to cut taxes on things we want more of — like corporate investment — while boosting them on things we want less of — like carbon, reckless financial speculation and diabetes — that could have stimulated jobs and growth but also left us more financially and environmentally resilient. But both Trump and the anonymous-G.O.P. crowd rejected them, just as they rejected smart improvements to Obamacare, preferring a total scrapping.

So when Republicans say they’re disgusted by Trump’s ignorance and indecency but love his “deregulations” and “tax reforms” — those very sanitized words — this is what they love: taking huge fiscal and environmental risks — effectively throwing away our bumpers and spare tires that we may soon need to drive through the next financial or climate storm — for a short-term economic and political high.

How different is that from Trump’s indecency? Let’s be clear, Trump cheated on his wife, but his party’s now cheating on their kids. You tell me who’s worse.

And don’t get me started on the recently signed $716 billion defense budget for the 2019 fiscal year — a spending hike so dramatic, as defense analyst Lawrence Korb pointed out, that it means since Trump took office under two years ago, “the defense budget will have grown by $133 billion, or 23 percent.” And there’s no major war going on.

Here again, the anonymous-Republicans equate a bigger defense budget and more weapons with strategy and strength. Thus, by definition, if Trump increased defense spending, he did something right. Did I miss the series of congressional hearings with independent military experts that addressed the question: What are the new (and old) threats we’re facing today, and how will these new and vastly expensive weapons systems enable us to better address them?

Some of the smartest military analysts I know think that investing in so many big, new weapons systems is the equivalent of taking sledgehammers to droplets of quicksilver, considering that so many enemies we face today are super-empowered individuals or nations that have opted to hurt us with cheap cyberweapons and cheap but massive swarming tactics.

Did any of these Republican lawmakers take note of the Iranian naval exercise in the gulf in August? The Iranians took some big old ships from the shah’s days and said “you will be the American Navy.” And then they used swarming tactics to ravage those big ships — deploying scores of very small, cheap speedboats and kamikaze coastal craft, armed with light missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.

John Arquilla, a senior strategist at the Naval Postgraduate School, likes to say that in today’s networked world — where ISIS was buying drones from online shopping sites and turning them into aerial grenade launchers — “many and small can beat few and large.”

The Chinese, he notes, “are building sea power without a traditional navy,” focusing on building hundreds of cheap, small missile and torpedo boats to take on our multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers and flotillas. Moreover, Arquilla notes, “when you have such a massive defense budget, you don’t have to ask yourself hard questions” such as: What the hell are we still doing in Afghanistan after 17 years of “failing to reroute the currents of history and culture there and make the place into a democracy by armed force?”

In sum, I believe in a robust military and U.S. global engagement. But this does not automatically translate into support for a radically higher defense budget.

So the next time anonymous-G.O.P. lawmakers tell you that while Trump is a moral wreck — and they are saving the nation from his wretchedness — they love his tax cuts, deregulation and military budget, ask them to describe the strategic vision behind that defense budget. Ask them if they really are unbothered by massively increasing the deficit at a time when our economy was already growing — just when we should be saving cash to soften our next recession. Ask them if they really think it is smart to roll back our auto mileage standards, when the last time we did that the more fuel-efficient Japanese and Korean auto industries nearly killed Detroit.

Lastly, ask them if they have kids — and how they think all these Trumpian policies that they like, even if they don’t like Trump, will serve the next generation.

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Sign up for the New York Times Opinion Today newsletter.

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Ummm . . . yes?  Which is why you might consider:

1. America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare. “The Founders,” Jeffrey Rosen writes, “designed a government that would resist mob rule. They didn’t anticipate how strong the mob could become.”  Is our democracy dying?

2. How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.  (See the Amazon review I’ve appended below.)

3. Joining Team Blue.  (And if you can, clicking here.)

I have high hopes for November 6.  I think much of the country is horrified.  I think we can win Senate seats in Tennessee and Mississippi and Texas — seats you don’t normally expect Democrats to win.  I think the excitement Andrew Gillum is generating in Florida, as he runs for governor, will help produce the turn-out needed to hold Bill Nelson’s Senate seat.  I think we can flip the Senate seat Jeff Flake is vacating in Arizona.  I think we will flip a great many seats in the House.  And in a state legislative chambers.

Or not.

We’ll see.

But this is our moment.

If you know folks who share your angst but have not stretched as you have, try to remind them: We’re running out of second chances.  “The whole world is watching.”

Our hearts go out to those deluged by Florence.

Not just preaching to the choir

By A. J. Sutteron January 20, 2018

This book is better than I expected. I teach in Japan about comparative constitutional law and politics, and bought this out of a sense of professional duty: I figured it would just be some Ivy League liberal professors using a few historical examples to explain (again) why Trump is dangerous. There already are a number of books with that message, such as Jan Werner Müller’s excellent “What is Populism?” (2016). Yes, this book does have that message too, and it uses some of the same examples as Müller, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. But it also goes beyond partisan diatribe in a couple of valuable ways.

The first is to illuminate the role of “norms” in a constitutional system. In this context, a “norm” is an unwritten standard of behavior that is followed for an extended period of time — you might think of it as describing some type of behavior that’s “normal.” US law school profs are prone to point out several such norms, none of which are in the US Constitution as written: such as that US Supreme Court justices are lawyers, that members of the military retire from active duty before joining the Cabinet, and, prior to FDR in 1940, that Presidents not run for a third term. (These sorts of norm are often called “constitutional conventions” by political scientists — not to be confused with the event in Philadelphia mentioned in the musical “Hamilton.”) Individually, though, the loss of any of these highly specific norms wouldn’t necessarily have a huge impact on the functioning of the government.

Levitsky & Ziblatt (L&Z) instead focus on some norms that are more abstract, but also more vital to the fabric of democracy. The norms of interest to them are “shared codes of conduct that become common knowledge within a particular community or society — accepted, respected and enforced by its members” (@101). Two of the most important are (i) mutual toleration, i.e. the belief that political opponents are not enemies, and (ii) institutional forbearance, i.e. “avoiding actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit” (@106). In more specific contexts several other such norms also come up, e.g. that presidents shouldn’t undermine another coequal branch (such as the court system). Calling such norms the “guardrails of democracy,” L&Z provide one of the clearest and most convincing expositions of them that I’ve read. Many presidents challenge norms — such as when Teddy Roosevelt had dinner in the White House with a black man (Booker T. Washington), or Jimmy Carter and his wife walked part of the route to his inauguration — but Pres. Trump stands out, they say, stands out “in his willingness to challenge unwritten rules of greater consequence” (@195). So far, some of his assaults on mutual toleration and institutional forbearance have been more rhetorical than actual: as I write this, he continues to revile Hilary Clinton but hasn’t actually “locked her up.” Unfortunately, the fact that in his first year Pres. Trump has only bumped into, but not yet broken through, such “guardrails” doesn’t necessarily signify much about the future: see Table 3 @108, which shows that the now-authoritarian Erdoğan was at about the same place as Trump at the end of his first year.

But it’s not only the president who is capable of breaking the norms — Congress can as well. L&Z point out how the era of “constitutional hardball,” emphasizing the letter over the spirit of the document, has roots as early as in the 1970s, when Newt Gingrich was a Congressional aspirant. It really came into its own after the 1994 mid-term elections, when Gingrich was elected Speaker. Although the Republicans seem to have begun this cycle of escalation, Democrats also participated, such as in removing the ability to filibuster most judicial nominations. L&Z use historical narratives to show how the disappearance (or nonexistence) of such norms in other countries allowed society to slide down the slope into authoritarianism.

The second and more surprising point of L&Z’s historical study is that in the US the erosion of these two central norms is linked to matters of race. During most of the 20th Century conservative Republicans could cooperate with conservative Democrats, and liberal Democrats could cooperate with liberal Republicans. The stability of this bipartisanship rested to a great degree on the fact that political participation of racial minorities could be limited in a variety of ways, such as via a poll tax. As the civil rights movement picked up steam, and as the Hispanic population started to increase, it became clear that the Democratic party was minorities’ preference. Around the first Reagan election in 1980 the previously traditional party alignments started to break down, and polarization set in. White voters in Southern states shifted to the Republican party. Concurrently, the divisiveness of the abortion issue following the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was driving many religious voters toward the Republicans as well.

This is actually the most depressing aspect of the book. Unless he perpetrates a coup, Trump will pass; but the racial and religious source of hardball attitudes augurs ill for American politics into the indefinite future. The US is a multi-ethnic society in which no ethnicity is in the majority. L&Z point out that to date they haven’t been able to identify any society like that which is both (i) a democracy and (ii) a society where all ethnicities are empowered politically, socially and economically.

In short, this isn’t a “Chicken Little” book screaming hysterically to the already-persuaded about how terrible Donald Trump is. Rather, while pointing out some of the dangers posed acutely by Trump’s handling of the presidency, it also identifies some much more long-term problems. The solutions proposed by L&Z, such as that Democrats shouldn’t behave like the hardball Republican politicians, may strike some readers as weak and overly optimistic. But no solutions will eventuate if people aren’t aware of how deep the problem really is, and for that reason this book deserves to be read widely.

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I find myself at TeaParty.org from time to time — I get a lot of mail from Steve Scalise worried that the Democrats will take back the House (and cost him his possible speakership), and from right-wing groups (unless they’re KGB sites — who knows?) like Prepared Patriots and The Daily Conspiracy with headlines like . . . “How To Use Bedsheets To Make Your Escape.  Seriously.”  . . . “The Deep State Revealed In The Bible: Nothing New Under The Sun” . . . “Ten-Year-Old German Muslim Violates Classmate” . . . “Bombshell Revelation from Egyptian Media: John McCain Was ‘Godfather’ of Muslim Brotherhood.”

Some of these have ads imbedded.  My favorite, which appeared in a pro-gun Teaparty.org story: “Can This Free Brain Pill Instantly Double Your IQ?”

To which I found myself silently responding: “Yours, maybe.”

Sorry.  But one reads Bob Woodward’s Fear, on one’s smartphone (Kindle edition), and one just has to cry and marvel and vent at the insane turn the world has taken — and dip deeper into one’s home equity line.

Like Michael Cohen.

Except he did it to hush a porn star; I did it to fund organizers.

(If you’re plumb out of dough, click here to help, instead.)

(Thanks, Mel!)

And if you have 3 minutes for the Rattlesnakes Bluegrass Band, you may enjoy this (not to offend anyone who thinks it’s okay Putin is someone Trump likes and admires).

Yesterday, I promoted some great protest signs.  Here are some great chalkboard quotes, from a gas station in South Africa.  (And only a couple concern alcohol:  “Stop trying to make everybody happy — you’re not tequila.”  “If you have to choose between drinking wine every day or being skinny, which would you choose?  Red or white?”)

Monday, I urged you to watch Active Measures on iTunes.  I’m urging again. Sure, I knew some of this.  But to see much that I did not know — and to see how all the pieces fit together?  Mind-blowing.  You may find yourself telling everyone you know to watch it, too.

And have you watched or read Obama’s speech, also posted Monday?

Or David Brock on who Brett Kavanaugh really is?  His remembrance of their years together?  It’s worse than you thought.