Year: 2018

HOW ABOUT AN AWARDS SHOW FOR THE BEST PROTEST SIGNS?

You’ve got your Oscars and your Emmys — how about the Snarkys?  Or the Firsties?  (Hat tip to everyone’s favorite Amendment.)   Here are some.  Here, too.

Among my favorites:

TRUMPCARE.  IT’S LIKE TRUMP UNIVERSITY BUT YOU DIE.

IF THE PRESIDENT DOESN’T PAY TAXES WHY SHOULD I?

Most signs just emphasize or poke fun at something we already know — WE SHALL OVERCOMB — but some, like this one, make you run to the Google machine: TRUMP HATES PUPPIES.

. . . and then there’s this one:

“SCIENCE IS NOT A LIBERAL CONSPIRACY!”

Which got me thinking.

HOW ABOUT A NATIONAL SCIENTISTS DAY?

There’s a National Science Day (science, not scientists) — but it’s in India.

Maybe there’s one here, too, but when you refine your search to “national science day USA,” you still get India — February 28.  A national holiday, no less.

We have National Secretaries Day (next year: April 24).

But a National Scientists Day? Again, Google tells you it’s in India.

This came to mind because my friend Wipperman (he has a first name, some believe, but to us, he’s just Wipperman), texted from the lab recently on a gorgeous beach day.  He texted me a photo of beakers and computer screens (I texted back a photo of the Atlantic Ocean framed by my toes) and told me to “check out [his] latest paper!”

I did.  You can, too.  It appears in Molecular Cell ($322 a year), titled: Mycobacterial Mutagenesis and Drug Resistance Are Controlled by Phosphorylation- and Cardiolipin-Mediated Inhibition of the RecA Coprotease.

To which I say:

Thank heavens for amazing people like Wipperman, working so hard to create the magic that helps the rest of us live longer, healthier, less scary lives.

National Scientists Day!

Fifty-six days to go:

1. Join Team Blue.
2. CrushTheMidterms.  It even designs an action plan for you.
3. MobilizeAmerica.
4. Watch Active Measures on iTunes.

And if you can — click here.

Run, don’t walk to rent Active Measures on iTunes — just released ($3.95).  Trump really is Putin’s puppet.  He has laundered billions of dollars of Russian oligarch/mafia money, beginning in 1984.  Putin’s attack on our democracy put him in the White House — and is ongoing.  You have to watch this today.  You may find yourself telling everyone you know to watch it, too.

That’s the alarming, desperately important, dark thing.

Now for the reassuring, equally important, hopeful thing.

You’ve doubtless seen clips of President Obama’s recent speech.  But it’s SO good, SO uplifting — SUCH a clear explanation of where we are as a nation and what we need to do as citizens — that I urge you to watch it all (it begins at 5:35 and runs 53 minutes) . . .

. . . or at least to read the transcript.

It concludes:

One election will not fix everything that needs to be fixed, but it will be a start.

And you have to start it.

What’s going to fix our democracy is you.

People ask me, what are you going to do for the election? No, the question is: What are YOU going to do? You’re the antidote. Your participation and your spirit and your determination, not just in this election but in every subsequent election, and in the days between elections.

Because in the end, the threat to our democracy doesn’t just come from Donald Trump or the current batch of Republicans in Congress or the Koch Brothers and their lobbyists, or too much compromise from Democrats, or Russian hacking. The biggest threat to our democracy is indifference. The biggest threat to our democracy is cynicism – a cynicism that’s led too many people to turn away from politics and stay home on Election Day. To all the young people who are here today, there are now more eligible voters in your generation than in any other, which means your generation now has more power than anybody to change things. If you want it, you can make sure America gets out of its current funk. If you actually care about it, you have the power to make sure we seize a brighter future. But to exercise that clout, to exercise that power, you have to show up.

In the last midterms election, in, fewer than one in five young people voted. One in five. Not two in five, or three in five. One in five. Is it any wonder this Congress doesn’t reflect your values and your priorities? Are you surprised by that?

. . . So if you don’t like what’s going on right now — and you shouldn’t — do not complain. Don’t hashtag. Don’t get anxious. Don’t retreat. Don’t binge on whatever it is you’re bingeing on. Don’t lose yourself in ironic detachment. Don’t put your head in the sand. Don’t boo. Vote.

Vote.

If you are really concerned about how the criminal justice system treats African-Americans, the best way to protest is to vote – not just for Senators and Representatives, but for mayors and sheriffs and state legislators. Do what they just did in Philadelphia and Boston, and elect state’s attorneys and district attorneys who are looking at issues in a new light, who realize that the vast majority of law enforcement do the right thing in a really hard job, and we just need to make sure that all of them do.

If you’re tired of politicians who offer nothing but “thoughts and prayers” after amass shooting, you’ve got to do what the Parkland kids are doing. Some of them aren’t even eligible to vote, yet they’re out there working to change minds and registering people, and they’re not giving up until we have a Congress that sees your lives as more important than a campaign check from the NRA.

You’ve got to vote.

If you support the MeToo movement, you’re outraged by stories of sexual harassment and assault inspired by the women who shared them, you’ve got to do more than retweet a hashtag. You’ve got to vote.

Part of the reason women are more vulnerable in the workplace is because not enough women are bosses in the workplace which is why we need to strengthen and enforce laws that protect women in the workplace not just from harassment but from discrimination in hiring and promotion, and not getting paid the same amount for doing the same work. That requires laws. Laws get passed by legislators.

You’ve got to vote.

When you vote, you’ve got the power to make it easier to afford college, and harder to shoot up a school.

When you vote, you’ve got the power to make sure a family keeps its health insurance; you could save somebody’s life.

When you vote, you’ve got the power to make sure white nationalists don’t feel emboldened to march with their hoods off or their hoods on in Charlottesville in the middle of the day.

Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of your time. Is democracy worth that?

We have been through much darker times than these, and somehow each generation of Americans carried us through to the other side. Not by sitting around and waiting for something to happen, not by leaving it to others to do something, but by leading that movement for change themselves. And if you do that, if you get involved, and you get engaged, and you knock on some doors, and you talk with your friends, and you argue with your family members, and you change some minds, and you vote, something powerful happens.

Change happens. Hope happens. Not perfection. Not every bit of cruelty and sadness and poverty and disease suddenly stricken from the earth. There will still be problems. But with each new candidate that surprises you with a victory that you supported, a spark of hope happens. With each new law that helps a kid read or helps a homeless family find shelter or helps a veteran get the support he or she has earned, each time that happens, hope happens. With each new step we take in the direction of fairness and justice and equality and opportunity, hope spreads.

And that can be the legacy of your generation. You can be the generation that at a critical moment stood up and reminded us just how precious this experiment in democracy really is, just how powerful it can be when we fight for it, when we believe in it. I believe in you. I believe you will help lead us in the right direction. And I will be right there with you every step of the way. Thank you, Illinois. God bless. God bless this country we love. Thank you.

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Imagine if we could get turnout among young people up from fewer than one in five to more than two in five.  We win everything.

Try to find time to read the whole speech.  I think you’ll be glad you did.  

Better still, watch it all.

And then . . .

But first . . .

Here’s an idea: why don’t Bob Corker, Ben Sasse, and Jeff Flake switch parties for the final three months of their Senate service, and save their country?

“We’re so proud of the Republican ideals we’ve long espoused, but one of those ideals is fairness.  It’s not fair to have denied the last president, twice elected by a majority of the vote, his Constitutional right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy; and it’s not fair to allow this president, under numerous legal clouds, to select his own judge for reasons pertaining to his potential personal liability rather than the best interests of hundreds of millions Americans, present and future.  So for three months, we will caucus with the Democrats.  That tiny red states like Idaho and Wyoming have as many senators as California and New York has already tilted the playing field dramatically in our party’s favor — and we’re very glad of it.  But in the cases of Merrick Garland and Brett Kavanaugh, we believe the unfairness has gone too far.”

I’d work harder at getting the words right if there were any point to it.

On the truly remote chance these decent, serious senators actually do the right thing — or some version of it — they’ll know what to say.

FLORIDA

Eighteen months ago I posted this:

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We’re almost twins, Andrew Gillum and I — except for his being young, black and straight; his mom having driven a school bus; his becoming Tallahassee’s youngest city commissioner at 23 and mayor at 35 (now running for governor), my last election having been for high school class treasurer.

If you have 5 minutes, watch Andrew’s story.

I don’t take sides in Democratic primaries; but if Andrew wins, I’ll be with him all the way.

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Well . . . Andrew did!

My focus is on flipping the House and Senate.  But governors matter, too — most obviously in Florida. Florida Governor Jeb Bush flipped the Electoral College from Gore to his brother in 2000, which gave us the Iraq war, wrecked our national balance sheet, and skewed the Court to the right in ways (like Citizens United and gutting the Voting Rights Act) that gave us Trump.

So I really hope Andrew wins.

He was well polling well behind the top two Democrats in the primary — no one expected him to win — but Democratic turnout reached 31% compared to 18% and 10% percent in the previous two mid-term primaries. Andrew’s candidacy wasn’t the only reason for that, of course, but it doubtless helped — and will help Bill Nelson retain his Senate seat if it carries over to November 6.

What’s more, Andrew’s win drives home a point I try to make over and over: this election is not about persuasion (getting their folks to switch tribes), it’s about turn-out (getting ours to show up).  Thus: organizing, not advertising.   And guess what?  Of a reported $71.5 million (!!!) spent on TV ads in the Florida Democratic primary, Andrew — who won — and his allies spent just $3.7 million.  He won because of organizing.

I have so many posts backed up, but it’s all just kind of overwhelming.

Obviously, you’ve by now read the Anonymous Op-Ed; read excerpts from Fear; and perhaps ordered your first pair of Nikes (I bought these).

1. Join Team Blue.
2. CrushTheMidterms.  It even designs an action plan for you.
3. MobilizeAmerica.

No need to choose: sign up with all three.

And if you can — click here.

Ted Cruz made me crazy yesterday.

He said Trump made it very clear what sort of Justices he would appoint — he even submitted the list from which he’d choose! — and Hillary told the nation what sort of Justices she would appoint, and then the American people spoke: they chose Trump’s slate.

Well, yeah, Ted, except . . .

(a) Kavanaugh wasn’t on Trump’s list; he had to look beyond the list to find someone who felt most strongly that a president can’t be investigated/indicted while in office; and

(b) nearly 3 million more Americans chose Hillary.

☞ Beto could beat Cruz!  Help him here!

I’m happy to stipulate Kavanaugh is a brilliant, decent, charming guy.  So was Scalia.  But this isn’t whom you’d like to have a beer with or whose intellect you admire.

Sheldon Whitehouse was one of several who laid out what’s at stake.  Listen to his compelling opening statement, which might have been titled “five to four.”

It’s amazing what damage well-intentioned Nader voters did in 2000.  Gore won more votes, but because Nader narrowed his margin, the loser of the popular vote skewed the Court to the right with Roberts and Alito, who then skewed the election process to the right with Citizens United and McCutcheon and by gutting the Voting Rights Act . . . which gave us Trump and Gorsuch and now, possibly, Kavanaugh.

Why wouldn’t Susan Collins and Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse switch parties on this one?

Is it fair to have denied Obama HIS nominee (a moderate) — after Obama was twice elected by a majority of the people — but to rush to confirm the Justice most likely to protect Trump if he is indicted when Trump was elected with a MINORITY of the vote . . . with the extensive assistance of Russia, our principal adversary since 1946?  Fair for the likely defendant to choose his own judge?

Two other pieces for your consideration:

• Conservative Max Boot provides interesting context for the “judicial philosophy” discussions we’re likely to hear over the next few days.

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. . .  I now realize there is no Platonic ideal of interpretation that allows judges to unerringly discern the original meaning of the Constitution or the correct interpretation of often vaguely worded statues. All sorts of difficulties arise: What if, as was often the case, one Founding Father disagreed with another? What if, as is also frequently the case, the court has to rule on matters that, because of technological or social developments, were unforeseen by the founders? And what if a justice’s interpretation of “original intent” is at odds with decades of precedents — is it “conservative” to overturn the prevailing line of cases? . . .

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• Adam Serwer provides horrifying context, beginning with the story of 100 Negroes whose undisputed murder the Supreme Court allowed to go unpunished.

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. . . The Roberts Court is poised to shape American society in Trump’s image for decades to come. All three branches of the federal government are now committed to the Trump agenda: the restoration of America’s traditional racial, religious, and gender hierarchies; the enrichment of party patrons; the unencumbered pursuit of corporate profit; the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the rival party’s constituencies; and the protection of the president and his allies from prosecution by any means available. Not since the end of Reconstruction has the U.S. government been so firmly committed to a single, coherent program uniting a politics of ethnonationalism with unfettered corporate power. As with Redemption, as the end of Reconstruction is known, the consequences could last for generations. . . .

. . . Even if Democrats win the next election cycle, and the one after that, an enduring conservative majority on the Supreme Court will have the power to shatter any hard-won liberal legislative victory on the anvil of judicial review. It will be able to reverse decades-old precedents that secure fundamental rights. It will further entrench the rules of a society in which justice skews toward the wealthy, and the lives of those without means can be destroyed by a chance encounter with law enforcement. It will do all these things and more in the name of a purely theoretical freedom, which most Americans will never be able to afford to experience.

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America deserves a centrist Justice to replace the centrist Anthony Kennedy, much like the centrist — Merrick Garland — that Obama nominated.

This piece by Ronald Dworkin in The American Interest struck me as exceptionally thoughtful and worth sharing. (Thanks Glenn!)

It begins with a story:

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When I was growing up, my extended Jewish family held an annual party. On one occasion, a visiting college student majoring in philosophy lectured us on his theory of justice. He explained why all trace of Christmas should be banned in public spaces, and not just nativity scenes, since the very notion of Christmas was an affront to both Jews and secularists. My family stood dumbfounded and aghast. My mother dismissed the young man as a fool, shouting at him, “Are you crazy? Let the goyim have their holiday!”

This young man is the only Jew I ever met who wanted to ban Christmas. Most other Jews I know share my mother’s attitude, more or less, not out of any particular philosophy, but because they see no reason to pick a fight with their far more numerous Christian neighbors. To their minds, Jews have rights and freedoms, life is good, and so why unnecessarily antagonize all those nice Christians by sanitizing the public square of Christmas trees, reindeer figures, and peppermint sticks?

This squabble between a young idealist and my more prudent mother is a small version of the larger, age-old question over how far to push social change. That question is especially relevant now in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which involved a devout Christian baker who refused to make a custom cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding. The Supreme Court narrowly ruled for the baker because the commission showed signs of “religious hostility,” but it left open the question of whether a religious person can be compelled to make a custom wedding cake with a personalized pro-gay marriage message. In theory, according to the Platonic ideal of leftist social justice, a religious person should be compelled, and some in the LGBT “community” demand this. Yet this represents an unwise change in tactics for a movement that until now has practiced an almost pitch-perfect strategy for furthering gay rights.

The debate between idealism and prudence can be traced back to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution and the philosopher Rousseau, who died shortly before the Revolution but whose writings inspired it. . . .

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By all means read the whole piece — which ranges from the American Revolution to abortion — but you’ve already got the gist, and won’t be surprised that it concludes:

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. . . After marriage equality passed nationally, some gay rights organizations shrewdly disbanded, having achieved their goal. There would be no “permanent revolution,” as some theoreticians call for. For many gays and lesbians it was time to go from being a new and exciting bud on society’s tree to blending in with all the other boring branches that give the tree its vital structure. In other words, it was time to assimilate, as Jews and other minorities had prudently done in their day after achieving their goals.

But the gay wedding cake issue in Masterpiece has thrown a monkey wrench into the plan. It signifies the ascent of theory over prudence.

. . .

When writing this essay, I asked several legal scholars about analogous precedents in American law. I asked what happened in the past when a Jew went to a devout Christian baker and asked that baker to make a special holiday cake topped with a religious message slighting Christianity—for example, “We await the first coming of the Messiah.” The scholars told me they were not familiar with such a case. Some of them mused over how the case would be judged in light of Masterpiece. One of them said, “Obviously, such a case would never happen.” I think the last scholar had it right, yet it is the non-event that makes this imaginary case so relevant. The case has never happened because in the history of America no Jew has ever been stupid enough to ask a devout Christian baker to make such a cake, just as no Jew (except the one young man I met at my family’s holiday party) has been stupid enough to call for a ban on Christmas. There is no theory accounting for such a non-event. It is simply prudence on the part of Jews—and Jews have done well by such prudence.

Masterpiece did not decide the conflict between two conflicting theories. The justices seem to be as flummoxed as everyone else over how to resolve a contest between absolutes when prudence has been thrown by the wayside. The problem is that Masterpiece should never have occurred in the first place. The logical trajectory for gays and lesbians after the marriage equality triumph was to go forward in life happily but prudently, as all people in the United States do, given the diversity of cultures and the need for all of us to get along. Every baker in America must sell a generic wedding cake to a gay couple; most bakers are happy to sell them a special wedding cake. Why purposely poke the eye of the one baker in town who isn’t? Such behavior may be theoretically correct, but it is also crazy, as my mother would say.

To some degree, the LGBT activists who pushed Masterpiece are not to blame. The juggernaut of cultural change that has catapulted the theory of individual self-expression to the status of inviolate principle has caught them up, too. Already in the 1970s, writers such as Christopher Lasch in his Culture of Narcissism were commenting on the phenomenon. The theory of individual self-expression demands absolute autonomy, perfect self-esteem, unassailable safe space, and unbridled freedom of behavior in private life. It declares that we need not suffer even the slightest emotional inconvenience at the hands of others. But the theorists leading the movement forgot one important thing: We have to live with others. That leaves us with a stark choice. Either we destroy those who stand in our way, in the spirit of Rousseau, or we defuse the tension through prudence and try to get along with them, in the spirit of Burke.

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Where do you lean?  Toward Rousseau or toward Burke?

Lotta tidbits for the weekend.  If you don’t care about stocks — or ancient cheese — skip to the end.

Otherwise . . .

If you’re a WheelTug devotee, John Grund thought you might find this clip interesting. “It highlights some of the safety risks of the conventional pushback procedure.”  It does indeed.  It also shows a large man pulling a 737 all by himself.  I contacted “the Mentour Pilot” to ask if he had heard of WheelTug.  He had not.  I sent him to the website.  He was impressed — as have been the two dozen airlines in queue to lease systems once FAA approval is secured.  Don’t sell your BOREF.

If you bought SODA when I did and held on, you probably noticed that Pepsi is buying it for  more than triple what you paid.  I can’t take credit for your profit, because I certainly didn’t push it hard — I touted it more for reasons of mid-east peace and environmental protection than financial gain — let alone recommend that you double up when, for a while, it had fallen by 50%.  (If you bought then, you’re up sevenfold.)

Still, craving your love anywhere I can find it, I thought I’d pat you on the back for having had the patience to hold on and reap your reward.

Not least because of how bad I feel about your having bought PRKR at $1 or so in January.  I bought a little more a couple of weeks ago at 30 cents — with money, I cannot too strongly stress, that I can truly afford to lose. The company is currently valued at $12 million and may prove worthless.  But if the patents that it alleges deep pockets have infringed ever yield a $100 million surprise (say), well, we could get the last laugh.

You’ve done better with FANH, up from the $5.40 we paid (when the symbol was still CISG) to over $35 in June.  We’ve taken some profits along the way, but I, for one, still own a lot, and was thus dismayed to read this analysis, calling the company a potentially worthless fraud.  That knocked the stock back to $23 this week and led me to check in with my smart friend for comment.

“Certainly a damning report,” he replied.  “The company formally responded by announcing a stock buyback and hosting a conference call you can listen to here.  It was essentially a 90-minute point-by-point rebuttal.  I’d say their responses ranged from adequate to convincing, depending on the topic.  Management has made some questionable decisions, but there is a difference between suboptimal business judgement and fraud.”

Now you know as much as I do.  Like my friend, I’m not selling.  But who knows?

Did you see they discovered 3,200-year-old cheese?  Given my hobby of eating expired food, I was all set to see if I could somehow acquire a cracker’s worth — until I read the last line:  “Analysis found evidence of of a bacteria that causes brucellosis, an infectious disease that [may] never go away.”  If Kaopectate cured brucellosis, that would be one thing.  I have an unopened bottle “exp 3/95” just in case someday I, or a guest, ever has an issue.  But brucellosis sounds serious. Count me out.

NULLIFYING CITIZENS UNITED.  Here’s 90 seconds from the founder of Goods Unite Us explaining why and how.  It’s compelling — I was surprised to learn that by buying New Balance instead of Adidas all these years I’ve been helping Republicans.  And it led me to this page, where I could see which beverage brands (for example) share my politics . . . this page to peruse ratings in any category . . . and this page to look up any brand.  There’s even a page that lets you rate the political impact of your brand choices (though to see the results you have to share your email, which they promise not to use for any other purpose).

At first you think this is all about electing Democrats, but that in fact is not their mission — right wingers can use the site to realize they should be buying New Balance rather than Adidas.

Rather, “at Goods Unite Us, our mission is to empower people to become political consumers so we can end — or at least slow down — corporate political donations.”

They want all companies to get freaked out by the consequences of their big-footing the political process — whatever side their on — and dial it back.  Which would give those companies a more neutral rating, and thus alienate fewer customers.

I have mixed feelings about this endeavor.  I’m 100% behind campaign finance reform, of course.  And I also know that Democratic legislators are more likely to enact it than Republicans (because big business skews Republican).  So this is one more reason I’m for electing Democrats.

But I’m leery of polarizing the country even further — into blue brands and red brands.  I love my New Balance sneakers; and I expect I’d like most of the people who make them and most of the people who run the company.  As Trump and Putin work to divide us, should we start shunning friends who wear politically “red” sneakers or work for politically “red” companies?  And vice versa?

And there could be a subtler unintended consequence:  To the extent Goods For Us succeeded in getting consumer-facing companies to dial back their political giving, it would shift more power to companies consumers don’t buy from — defense contractors and oil pipelines, for example.

Or what about this complication?  They show a photo of Obama with a Spalding basketball — ironic because Spalding is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, which they say skews Republican.  Yet Warren Buffett, who runs Berkshire Hathaway, helped raise money for both Obama and Hillary and is himself a Democrat.  So (a) hmmm.  And (b) what if Berkshire were to acquire Ben & Jerry’s?  Would that make it an ice cream brand progressives should avoid?

All that said, hooray for the founders of Goods Unite Us, a well-intentioned and intriguing effort.  It just might help discourage corporations from exploiting the Citizens United ruling.  Which, after all, is unlikely to be overturned by this Supreme Court any time soon.

Have a great weekend.

And note that one of the reasons we have weekends at all is: unions.

And that the party on the side of unions — and on the side of unemployment insurance and workplace safety regulations and overtime pay regulations and a higher minimum wage and the Family and Medical Leave Act — all that — is the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party has fought those important middle class advances every step of the way.

Mike Pence: The President must be impeached.  I assume you’ve already heard this; but if not, listen.

So guess who’s having a Synod on Young People?  That’s right!  And you don’t have to be Catholic — or LGBT — to sign this pledge “never to give a child or young person the feeling that being LGBT would be a misfortune or a disappointment.”

Equal Future 2018 is the ad hoc group behind it.  It’s tiny, but headed by Tiernan Brady, who brought marriage to Ireland and Australia via popular majority, and they’ve stitched together a global partnership of larger groups, including the Human Rights Campaign here in the U.S., basically for two purposes:

1. To get LGBT youth on the agenda of the upcoming Vatican Synod On Young People and respectfully advocate for modernization.

But even assuming they make little or no progress on that score (and who knows? they might!) . . .

2. Seize a global “teaching moment” to get tens or hundreds of millions of Catholics around the world (and some non-Catholics) to consider this issue, almost entirely through what could well be tens of millions of dollars of enlightened “earned” media.  (Like this.)

Sign the pledge?

We’re losing the Second Cold War to Vladimir Putin — a man whom our sociopath leader deeply admires and under whose control he seems somehow to be.

As if that weren’t enough, we could lose our democracy if “checks and balances” are not restored — vigorously, I hope — November 6.

Paul Krugman makes that urgent case:

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Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend of mine — an expert on international relations — made a joke: “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path — fascism.” Even at the time, his quip had a real edge.

And as of 2018 it hardly seems like a joke at all. What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe. This includes Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead.

In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.

And it could all too easily happen here. There was a time, not long ago, when people used to say that our democratic norms, our proud history of freedom, would protect us from such a slide into tyranny. In fact, some people still say that. But believing such a thing today requires willful blindness. The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule.

Just look at what has been happening at the state level.

In North Carolina, after a Democrat won the governorship, Republicans used the incumbent’s final days to pass legislation stripping the governor’s office of much of its power.

In Georgia, Republicans tried to use transparently phony concerns about access for disabled voters to close most of the polling places in a mainly black district.

In West Virginia, Republican legislators exploited complaints about excessive spending to impeach the entire State Supreme Court and replace it with party loyalists.

And these are just the cases that have received national attention. There are surely scores if not hundreds of similar stories across the nation. What all of them reflect is the reality that the modern G.O.P. feels no allegiance to democratic ideals; it will do whatever it thinks it can get away with to entrench its power.

What about developments at the national level? That’s where things get really scary. We’re currently sitting on a knife edge. If we fall off it in the wrong direction — specifically, if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November — we will become another Poland or Hungary faster than you can imagine.

This week Axios created a bit of a stir with a scoop about a spreadsheet circulating among Republicans in Congress, listing investigations they think Democrats are likely to carry out if they take the House. The thing about the list is that every item on it — starting with Donald Trump’s tax returns — is something that obviously should be investigated, and would have been investigated under any other president. But the people circulating the document simply take it for granted that Republicans won’t address any of these issues: Party loyalty will prevail over constitutional responsibility.

Many Trump critics celebrated last week’s legal developments, taking the Manafort conviction and the Cohen guilty plea as signs that the walls may finally be closing in on the lawbreaker in chief. But I felt a sense of deepened dread as I watched the Republican reaction: Faced with undeniable evidence of Trump’s thuggishness, his party closed ranks around him more tightly than ever.

A year ago it seemed possible that there might be limits to the party’s complicity, that there would come a point where at least a few representatives or senators would say, no more. Now it’s clear that there are no limits: They’ll do whatever it takes to defend Trump and consolidate power.

This goes even for politicians who once seemed to have some principles. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was a voice of independence in the health care debate; now she sees no problem with having a president who’s an unindicted co-conspirator appoint a Supreme Court justice who believes that presidents are immune from prosecution. Senator Lindsey Graham denounced Trump in 2016, and until recently seemed to be standing up against the idea of firing the attorney general to kill the Mueller investigation; now he’s signaled that he’s O.K. with such a firing.

But why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it?

Don’t tell me about “economic anxiety.” That’s not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. And it’s not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.

The point is that we’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.

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This nails it, no?  By conservative Republican  Peter Wehner, who served in the Reagan and both Bush administrations:

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The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump
Everyone and everything he touches rots.

There’s never been any confusion about the character defects of Donald Trump. The question has always been just how far he would go and whether other individuals and institutions would stand up to him or become complicit in his corruption.

When I first took to these pages three summers ago to write about Mr. Trump, I warned my fellow Republicans to just say no both to him and his candidacy. One of my concerns was that if Mr. Trump were to succeed, he would redefine the Republican Party in his image. That’s already happened in areas like free trade, free markets and the size of government; in attitudes toward ethnic nationalism and white identity politics; in America’s commitment to its traditional allies, in how Republicans view Russia and in their willingness to call out leaders of evil governments like North Korea rather than lavish praise on them. But in no area has Mr. Trump more fundamentally changed the Republican Party than in its attitude toward ethics and political leadership.

For decades, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, insisted that character counted in public life. They were particularly vocal about this during the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing against “compartmentalization” — by which they meant overlooking moral turpitude in the Oval Office because you agree with the president’s policy agenda or because the economy is strong.

Senator Lindsey Graham, then in the House, went so far as to argue that “impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”

All that has changed with Mr. Trump as president. For Republicans, honor and integrity are now passé. We saw it again last week when the president’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen — standing in court before a judge, under oath — implicated Mr. Trump in criminal activity, while his former campaign chairman was convicted in another courtroom on financial fraud charges. Most Republicans in Congress were either silent or came to Mr. Trump’s defense, which is how this tiresome drama now plays itself out.

It is a stunning turnabout. A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas — infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds — but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.

For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. (Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, refers to the president’s race-based comments as a “base stimulator.”) Mr. Trump’s corruptions are ingrained, the result of a lifetime of habits. It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president.

Some of us who have been lifelong Republicans and previously served in Republican administrations held out a faint hope that our party would at some point say “Enough!”; that there would be some line Mr. Trump would cross, some boundary he would transgress, some norm he would shatter, some civic guardrail he would uproot, some action he would take, some scheme or scandal he would be involved in that would cause large numbers of Republicans to break with the president. No such luck. Mr. Trump’s corruptions have therefore become theirs. So far there’s been no bottom, and there may never be. It’s quite possible this should have been obvious to me much sooner than it was, that I was blinded to certain realities I should have recognized.

In any case, the Republican Party’s as-yet unbreakable attachment to Mr. Trump is coming at quite a cost. There is the rank hypocrisy, the squandered ability to venerate public character or criticize Democrats who lack it, and the damage to the white Evangelical movement, which has for the most part enthusiastically rallied to Mr. Trump and as a result has been largely discredited. There is also likely to be an electoral price to pay in November.

But the greatest damage is being done to our civic culture and our politics. Mr. Trump and the Republican Party are right now the chief emblem of corruption and cynicism in American political life, of an ethic of might makes right. Dehumanizing others is fashionable and truth is relative. (“Truth isn’t truth,” in the infamous words of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.) They are stripping politics of its high purpose and nobility.

That’s not all politics is; self-interest is always a factor. But if politics is only about power unbounded by morality — if it’s simply about rulers governing by the law of the jungle, about a prince acting like a beast, in the words of Machiavelli — then the whole enterprise will collapse. We have to distinguish between imperfect leaders and corrupt ones, and we need the vocabulary to do so.

A warning to my Republican friends: The worst is yet to come. Thanks to the work of Robert Mueller — a distinguished public servant, not the leader of a “group of Angry Democrat Thugs” — we are going to discover deeper and deeper layers to Mr. Trump’s corruption. When we do, I expect Mr. Trump will unravel further as he feels more cornered, more desperate, more enraged; his behavior will become ever more erratic, disordered and crazed.

Most Republicans, having thrown their MAGA hats over the Trump wall, will stay with him until the end. Was a tax cut, deregulation and court appointments really worth all this?

Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the previous three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

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To which I would add: (1) Subscribe to the New York Times, whence this comes.  (2) The Lindsey Graham quote reminds me of this Mike Pence quote just before the election: “Character matters to the presidency and Donald Trump will bring the highest level of integrity to the highest office in the land. You can count on it.”  Perhaps Pence should resign on principle?  He certainly thought Clinton should.