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Nationalism - a discussion (3 Viewers)

Monica Alba‏Verified account @albamonica

Macron just steps away from Trump: “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying our interests first... we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace, and what is essential: its moral values.”

3:22 AM - 11 Nov 2018

 
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Monica Alba‏Verified account @albamonica

Macron just steps away from Trump: “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying our interests first... we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace, and what is essential: its moral values.”
Excellent.

I long for rational moral leadership like someone dehydrated longs for a glass of water.

 
Unfortunately, I fear that  being lectured about the evils of nationalism by the French will only strengthen Trum’s support on this issue over here. 

 
Unfortunately, I fear that  being lectured about the evils of nationalism by the French will only strengthen Trum’s support on this issue over here. 
I think we have to acknowledge that there's not much that can reach Trump supporters.  Either folks have drunk the koolaid and enjoy sticking it to the libs, or they're holding their nose because they're getting conservative judges and a high performing economy, and tax cuts, and other conservative agenda items.

Until the economy shifts, you won't reach the nose-holders.  And you'll never reach the koolaid drinkers.

These kinds of comments though can keep folks like myself sane in a period of American history which I believe will be looked on with scorn for generations.

 
I think we have to acknowledge that there's not much that can reach Trump supporters.
Said exactly this when a thread popped up about "trying to reach the other side" a year ago.   

https://tinyurl.com/ybpezwad

*Fortunately/unfortunately the majority of the Left always sees some type of positive to be found in everyone.  Meanwhile the majority of the right simply hates all the "others" including the left.

 
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I can see nothing wrong with Patriotism, and frankly I don't have a problem with Nationalism depending on the context.  If I believe the US is the greatest country on the planet, that could be construed as Nationalism; if I want to impose our greatness on every other nation on the planet then it is obviously a horrible world view.  In that context is is more akin to Imperialism than Patriotism.

Feeling that our country is the greatest is not a terrible thing, it is when you take that next step that trouble is brewing.

 
I feel our country is the greatest , and I don't want to impose anything on other countries. As a matter of fact, I'd like us to have less to do with other countries, and let them determine their own future.  I am a nationalist, if that is putting American first. 

 
D Baseball said:
I feel our country is the greatest , and I don't want to impose anything on other countries. As a matter of fact, I'd like us to have less to do with other countries, and let them determine their own future.  I am a nationalist, if that is putting American first. 
Agree. We live in the best country in the world. I want the best for Americans over all others. I too guess I’m a Nationalist. 

Scary to think others don’t want their leaders to look out for their people’s needs first and foremost. 

 
Three pro-nationalist posts in a row? All on the 100th anniversary of the end to the great nationalist massacre. Unreal. 

 
I think Tucker Carlson in this interview snip gives a pretty good exemplar of how nationalism differs from conservatism on economic issues.

Here it's obvious that he believes that there is no limit to the amount of government intervention or use of government power to protect economic benefits and entitlements. I don't think there's anyone seriously on the left which even advocates anything close to this right now, and pick any Democratic Socialist, it doesn't matter. You;d have to go to one of the true Socialist parties for this. The only difference here is the advocating for doing it for supposedly nationalist purposes or causes.

 
I think Tucker Carlson in this interview snip gives a pretty good exemplar of how nationalism differs from conservatism on economic issues.

Here it's obvious that he believes that there is no limit to the amount of government intervention or use of government power to protect economic benefits and entitlements. I don't think there's anyone seriously on the left which even advocates anything close to this right now, and pick any Democratic Socialist, it doesn't matter. You;d have to go to one of the true Socialist parties for this. The only difference here is the advocating for doing it for supposedly nationalist purposes or causes.
So it's sort of a nationalist/socialist discussion.  Hmm.  We should like of some kind of portmanteau for that sort of thing.

 
In case anyone is wondering, "Prager University" is not an academic institution. It is a private organization whose primary objective is to upload right-wing YouTube videos.

For a thorough review and rebuttal of this speaker's nationalistic theories, I would suggest reading this article.
Well there goes another business idea.  Crap.

 
I'm not sure this guy Yoram Hazony says what you might think he is saying:
 

American nationalists used to think of their nation in just this way: Neither as a race, nor as an abstract “idea” — but rather as a diversity of tribes sharing a heritage and a mutual loyalty born of a joint history. The original American states, while internally diverse, nonetheless largely shared the English language, Protestant religion and the common law, and had fought Britain together. The nation reflected in these characteristics was so strong that Americans were gradually able to adopt other “tribes” into the mix: Catholics, Jews and — with time — the African-Americans who had lived through the evils of enslavement and segregation.

But American nationalists sought to counterbalance increasing diversity with a carefully protected common cultural inheritance: New territories were admitted as American states only once they had an English-speaking majority and adopted the common law. The eradication of slavery in the South and polygamy among the Mormons was likewise the result of a common cultural inheritance, descended from English Puritanism, which Americans insisted on maintaining even at the price of coercion.

It was not until after World War II that these core institutions at the heart of classical American nationalism — Biblical religion, the Anglo-American legal inheritance, and the English language — began to fade. The disintegration of classical American nationalism, and the consequent loosening of the bonds of mutual loyalty that had held Americans together, has created a vacuum at the heart of American national identity. It is this vacuum that revolutionary new theories such as “white nationalism” hope to fill.

As Americans have stopped reading the Bible, they have also lost an intuitive sense of what a “nation” is, and of what must be done to maintain it. At a time when large-scale immigration is at the forefront of U.S. politics, a biblically-rooted American nationalism — one that recognizes the nation as a diversity of tribes bound together by a common heritage and mutual loyalty — is sorely lacking from American public debate.
This seems like the sort of intellectual 'nationalism' that Marco Rubio tried to couch recently. One where our cultural identity is about democracy and global commitment to our American mission of liberty.

I really don't see this nationalism being extent as nationalism anywhere today in the US though. It may exist as a concept, but it is not the nationalism being promoted by the America First or Trump followers.

 
Most Americans find these attempts to reduce nationality to race repugnant. This is because race politics brought about the murder of millions in Europe, while in America it produced slavery, civil war and a legacy of domestic unease — and occasional violence — that hasn’t died down to this day.
This guy Hazony is being slippery here too. In the video he refers to "pursuing their interests without interference." He's misdescribing the national order today as interference for one thing. For another he's misrepresenting what happened as a practical matter. That concept of "national interest" led to WW1 and that led to WW2, they are in fact historically on big ball of consequences of early 20th century nationalism.

 
“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.” — Orwell

 
The Series of Historical Mistakes That Led to Trump

IF WE CAN KEEP IT
How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved
By Michael Tomasky

You can say this for the presidency of Donald J. Trump: It has familiarized Americans with a number of heretofore obscure facets of their country’s governmental system. The emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — once upon a time, discussions of the dangers of a president taking money from a foreign state or the prospect of his cabinet removing him from office were the stuff of fiction; the ins and outs of how to get a wiretap on an American citizen were confined to law review articles. Today, they’re the subject of front-page newspaper articles and cable news updates.

But there’s even more arcana we need to learn in order to understand this moment. Enter the veteran liberal political writer Michael Tomasky and “If We Can Keep It,” his sweeping, rollicking, sometimes breezy political and cultural back story to our current moment, one that demands we become informed, among other things, about the Connecticut Compromise, the career of Martin Van Buren and the Supreme Court decision in the Marquette National Bank case. Add it all up and Tomasky hopes to answer a fundamental question: how “our system became so broken” as to elect someone like Trump.

Tomasky begins at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. (His book’s title comes from the perhaps apocryphal answer Benjamin Franklin gave to a question about what kind of government he and his fellow delegates had created: “A republic, if you can keep it.”) He contends that the founders, with the Connecticut Compromise, designed a fatally flawed system for our federal legislature. By mandating that the Senate be made up of two representatives from each state, they gave outsize influence to sparsely populated states. As for the House of Representatives, a blasé attitude about maintaining districts of equal size led to inequality, with rural areas of 10,000 constituents having the same representation as urban ones with 50,000 constituents. This situation only changed with a 1964 Supreme Court decision mandating “one person, one vote.” “The founders were visionaries,” Tomasky writes. “But they were human. They made some mistakes.”

Van Buren is similarly flawed in Tomasky’s telling. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is as a little-known former president. But Tomasky argues that Van Buren’s more important role was as the mastermind of Andrew Jackson’s 1828 presidential campaign. Unlike the founders, who disdained political parties, Van Buren was a firm believer in them. In laying the groundwork for Jackson’s ascendance, he traveled the country trying to revive the two-party system, which had ended with the demise of the Federalists in 1816. He succeeded and Jackson’s election gave birth to today’s Democratic Party. Van Buren, Tomasky writes, “is the father of the modern political party, and therefore in some sense the man we might call the godfather of polarization.”

Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp. (1978) was “a pulverizingly dull case,” which ruled that banks should abide by the usury laws of the state in which they were chartered, not where their customers lived. By making this change, the court drove banks to move to states with the lowest, or even no, interest rate regulations, leading to an explosion in the credit card business and, as a result, an explosion in consumer debt. Where Americans had once cherished “thrift, discipline, doing without,” Tomasky writes, “in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans started to become a different people than they had been.” He adds: “Our consumer selves have overwhelmed our citizen selves.”

Tomasky excavates these and other bits of largely forgotten history in the service of making two main points about our current predicament. The first is that American politics have always been polarized but that the polarization of today is qualitatively different — and more debilitating — than the norm. For much of the nation’s history, Tomasky argues, there was a significant amount of “intraparty polarization” with the divisions among Democrats and Republicans “over slavery, Reconstruction, civil service, gold and populism” often being deeper than those between parties. Today, by contrast, Democrats and Republicans are more “ideologically coherent” and we have such extreme “party tribalism” that “the members of Team A think it’s an existential crisis if Team B wins.” “The Democrats of the 1800s were arguing about whether slavery should exist,” he notes. “Hillary and Bernie, for all the sturm und drang, were arguing about whether the minimum wage should be $12 or $15, and whether college should be affordable or free.”

His second point is that will is “the most overrated commodity in politics.” “It’s useless to hope that politicians can just go back to getting along the way they once did,” Tomasky writes. “They didn’t get along better in the old days because they were nicer people, or because they had the will to do so. They got along better because a particular set of historical forces and circumstances produced a degree of social cohesion that called on them to cooperate more. Today, a totally different set of historical forces and circumstances exist.”

Tomasky proposes a raft of reforms to get us out of the polarized mess we find ourselves in. Some, like ending partisan gerrymandering and getting rid of the Senate filibuster, are familiar. Others, like reviving “moderate Republicanism,” are probably futile. But some of his proposals — including starting “foreign” exchange programs within the United States so students from rural areas spend a semester at a high school in a city, and vice versa — are both realistic and novel.

Indeed, the most helpful — if sobering — point Tomasky makes is that while our current troubles created the conditions that brought us a President Trump, those troubles would exist no matter who was in the White House. And it will take much more than a new occupant to fix them.

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Hm, winning isn’t an ideology. Charlie Sheen thinks it is. TC is describing socialism melded with nationalism.
Pretty sure Sheens Tigers blood! was an inspiration for the Tiger tank used by the Nazis.

 
***

"The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.

Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality47 of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

It has aptly been observed that Cato was the Tory-Cæsar the whig of his day. The former frequently resisted—the latter always flattered the follies of the people. Yet the former perished with the Republic the latter destroyed it.

No popular Government was ever without its Catalines & its Cæsars. These are its true enemies."

***

- Alexander, Hamilton, 1792: Objections and Answers respecting the Administration of the Government

 
What Americans Do Now Will Define Us Forever

If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere.

The conservative intelligentsia flocked to the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., this week for the National Conservatism Conference, an opportunity for people who may never have punched a time clock to declare their eternal enmity toward elites and to attempt to offer contemporary conservative nationalism the intellectual framework that has so far proved elusive.

Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar who organized the conference, explicitly rejected white nationalism, barring several well-known adherents from attending, my colleague Emma Green reported. But despite Hazony’s efforts, the insistence that “nationalism” is, at its core, about defending borders, eschewing military interventions, and promoting a shared American identity did not prevent attendees from explicitly declaring that American laws should favor white immigrants.

Some other attendees, such as National Review’s Rich Lowry, took pains to distance themselves from the president’s brand of nationalism. “We have to push back against Donald Trump when he does things to increase that breach between the right and African Americans,” Lowry said. But in the fall of 2017, when Trump attempted to silence black athletes protesting police brutality, Lowry praised his “gut-level political savvy,” writing, “This kind of thing is why he’s president.”

The conference stood solidly within the conservative intellectual tradition, as a retroactive attempt by the right-wing intelligentsia to provide cover for what the great mass of Republican voters actually want. Barry Goldwater did not break the Solid South in 1964 because the once Democratic voters of the Jim Crow states had suddenly become principled small-government libertarians; voters who backed Donald Trump in 2016 did not do so because they believed a nonracial civic nationalism had been eroded by liberal cosmopolitanism.

The consensus that American civic nationalism recognizes all citizens regardless of race, creed, color, or religion was already fragile before Trump took office. That principle has been lauded, with varying degrees of sincerity, by presidents from both parties, and in particular by the first black president, who reveled in reminding audiences that “in no other country in the world is my story even possible.” The nationalism that conservatives say they wish to build in fact already existed, but it was championed by a president whose persona was so deformed by right-wing caricature that they could not perceive it. Instead, they embraced the nationalism that emerged as a backlash to his very existence and all it represented.

Trump’s nationalist innovation is not taking pride in his country, supporting a principled non-interventionism, or even advocating strict enforcement of immigration laws. The only thing new Trump brings to the American nationalism of recent decades is a restoration of its old ethnic-chauvinist tradition. Conservative intellectuals cannot rescue nationalism from Trump, any more than they could rescue Goldwater from Jim Crow, because Trump’s explicit appeals to racial and religious traditionalism, and his authoritarian approach to enforcing those hierarchies, are the things that have bound conservative voters so closely to him. The failure of the conservative intelligentsia to recognize this is why it was caught so off-guard by Trump’s rise to begin with.

At a rally last night in North Carolina, Trump was reminding the country of this truth. Last week, the president told four Democratic congresswomen—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—to “go back” to their countries, even though all of them are American citizens. This is literally textbook racism. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offers “Go back to where you came from” as its example of potentially unlawful harassment on the basis of national origin.

Trump’s demand is less a factual assertion than a moral one, an affirmation of the president’s belief that American citizenship is conditional for people of color, who should be grateful we are even allowed to be here. Some elected Republicans offered gentle rebukes; others defended the president’s remarks. But at his rally in North Carolina, Trump showed them all that the base is with him. The crowd erupted into chants of “Send her back” when the president mentioned Omar, the Minnesota representative who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia.

Republicans, in the week since Trump’s initial tweet attacking the four representatives, have tried to argue that the president was criticizing their left-wing views and “hatred for America,” or that the attacks on Omar were justified because of her past remarks about Israel. This is belied by the nature of the attack itself—not only did Trump say “countries” in his tweet telling the representatives to “go back,” but much of the bill of particulars against Omarthat his supporters use to justify calling for her banishment also applies to the president, long a hyperbolic critic of the American political establishment.

Some of Omar’s remarks in the past (for which she has apologized) have echoed anti-Semitic language about Jewish conspiracies and dual loyalty, but the president has described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister” to American Jewish audiences, and is a proponent of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories around immigration that terrorists have used to justify killing American Jews. No apology from the president on these matters is forthcoming, and the right will not demand one. The ancient anti-Semitic charge of dual loyalty does not somehow become more justifiable when applied to Muslims. As James Kirchick wrote for The Atlantic, “Trump’s invocation of Israel to attack four ethnic-minority women is breathtakingly cynical, effectively working to pit Jews and people of color against each other.”

Trump has falsely accused Omar of supporting al-Qaeda, of betraying her country. But when a foreign power attacked American elections, it was the president who first sought to profit from that attack, and then to obstruct the investigation into it, and finally to offer a vocal defense of the perpetrators.

The argument that Omar’s criticisms of her adopted country for failing to live up to its stated ideals justify revoking her citizenship substantiates the very criticism she lodged. Trump has said, “If you hate our country, or if you are not happy here, you can leave!” but his entire 2016 campaign was premised on the idea that many Americans not only are deeply unhappy, but also have every right to demand that things be better. That Trump’s supporters believe Omar’s sins justify her banishment, and Trump’s similar transgressions justify his presence in the White House, helps illustrate exactly what is going on here. Under Trumpism, no defense of the volk is a betrayal, even if it undermines the republic, and no attack on the volk’s hegemony can be legitimate, even if it is a defense of democracy.

Faced with the president’s baldly expressed bigotry toward four women of color in Congress, Republicans turned to reporters to argue that his attacks are part of a clever political strategy, elevating four left-wing women of color into the faces of his opposition. I suspect these Republicans, and some political reporters, believe that this somehow exonerates Trump from the charge of bigotry, as though prejudice ceases to be prejudice if it becomes instrumental. In fact, the admission that fomenting racism and division is central to Trump’s strategy is a stunning rebuke to those political reporters and pundits who, for four years, have insisted that the rise of Trump is about anything else. Trump and his most ardent liberal critics are in full agreement about the nature of his appeal, even as they differ on its morality. Only the Trumpists, and those who wish to earn their respect, fail to see it.

It also speaks to the futility of trying to somehow rescue a Trumpian nationalism from Trump. Racism is at the core of Trumpism. The movement cannot be rescued from its bigotry, and those at the National Conservatism Conference who believe it can are in denial. Conservatives can make their case for limited government, or for religious traditionalism, but as long as it is tied to Trump or Trumpism, it will be tainted. Trump is not a champion of the civic nationalism Hazony and others claim they want to see. He is a mortal threat to it.

I often open my articles on Trumpism with explorations of American history. I’ve spent much of the past four years trying to illuminate the historical and ideological antecedents to Donald Trump, to show how America got to this point.

So I want to be very clear about what the country saw last night, as an American president incited a chant of “Send her back!” aimed at a Somali-born member of Congress: America has not been here before.

White nationalism was a formal or informal governing doctrine of the United States until 1965, or for most of its existence as a country. Racist demagogues, from Andrew Johnson to Woodrow Wilson, have occupied the White House. Trump has predecessors, such as Calvin Coolidge, who imposed racist immigration restrictions designed to preserve a white demographic majority. Prior presidents, such as Richard Nixon, have exploited racial division for political gain. But we have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits. Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail.

Nevertheless, most of Trump’s predecessors had something he does not yet have: the support of a majority of the electorate. Ilhan Omar’s prominence as a Republican target comes not, as conservatives might argue, simply because her policy views are left-wing. Neither is it because, as some liberals have supposed, she is an unmatched political talent. She has emerged as an Emmanuel Goldstein for the Trumpist right because as a black woman, a Muslim, an immigrant, and a progressive member of Congress, she represents in vivid terms a threat to the nation Trumpists fear they are losing.

To attack Omar is to attack a symbol of the demographic change that is eroding white cultural and political hegemony, the defense of which is Trumpism’s only sincere political purpose. Many of the president’s most outrageous comments have been delivered extemporaneously, when he departs from his prepared remarks. Last night, though, his attacks on Omar were carefully scripted, written out by his staff and then read off a teleprompter. To defend the remarks as politically shrewd is to confess that the president is deliberately campaigning on the claim that only white people can truly, irrevocably be American.

Still, a plurality of Americans in 2016 and 2018 voted against defining American citizenship in racial terms, something that has perhaps never happened before in the history of the United States. There was no anti-racist majority at the dawn of Reconstruction, during the heyday of immigration restriction, or in the twilight of the civil-rights movement. The voters of this coalition may yet defeat Trumpism, if they can find leaders who are willing and able to confront it.

That is not a given. In the face of a corrupt authoritarian president who believes that he and his allies are above the law, the American people are represented by two parties equally incapable of discharging their constitutional responsibilities. The Republican Party is incapable of fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities because it has become a cult of personality whose members cannot deviate from their sycophantic devotion to the president, lest they be ejected from office by Trump’s fanatically loyal base. The Democratic Party cannot fulfill its constitutional responsibilities because its leadership lives in abject terror of being ejected from office by alienating the voters to whom Trump’s nationalism appeals. In effect, the majority of the American electorate, which voted against Trump in 2016 and then gave the Democrats a House majority in 2018, has no representation.

The electoral coalition that gave Democrats the House represents perhaps the strongest resistance to the rising tide of right-wing ethnonationalism in the West, yet observe what the party has done with that mandate. The great victory of the House Democrats has been to halt the Republican legislative effort to deprive millions of health-care coverage, a feat they accomplished simply by being elected. But over the past seven months, Democrats have proved unableto complete a single significant investigation, hold many memorable hearings, or pass a single piece of meaningful legislation that curtails Trump’s abuses of authority. Instead, they held their breath waiting for Robert Mueller to save them, and when he did not, they, like their Republican predecessors, took to issuing sternly worded statements, tepid pleas for civility, and concerned tweets as their primary methods of imposing accountability.

As the president’s declarations of immunity from oversight have grown more broad and lawless, the Democrats have slow-walked investigations, retreated from court battles, and unilaterally surrendered the sword of impeachment. They have only just begun to call witnesses from the Mueller inquiry, they have only just begun to challenge the president’s lawlessness in court, they have only just begun to hold Trump officials in contempt for their defiance of Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. This foot-dragging will leave them with little time to actually look into presidential abuses before campaign season begins, effectively forfeiting a massive political advantage, to say nothing of abdicating their constitutional duties. The leadership of the Democratic Party has shown more appetite for confronting and rebuking legislators representing the vulnerable communities Trump has targeted most often than it has for making the president mildly uncomfortable.

Although two prior presidents, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, faced articles of impeachment over obstruction of justice, Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered the gibberish analysis that the president was “self-impeaching,” so no actual impeachment was necessary. When confronted with yet another woman accusing the president of sexual assault, Pelosi said, “I haven’t paid much attention to it.” When the politically connected financier Jeffrey Epstein was indicted again on charges of sex-trafficking minors, and Pelosi was asked what she would do about now-ousted Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who negotiated a previous sweetheart deal with Epstein, she said, “It’s up to the president. It’s his Cabinet,” a position indistinguishable from that of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is a member of the president’s party.

“If you start endangering children, I become a lioness,” Pelosi declared, before caving on a funding bill for border security that will do nothing to relieve the systematic abuse of migrants at the border, and whose restrictions the Department of Homeland Security is already ignoring. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, took the occasion of federal prosecutors in New York mysteriously closing their investigation into the president’s hush-money payments to former girlfriends to ask the FBI to look into a popular app that ages pictures of people’s faces. The president’s racist attacks on Omar and her colleagues were precipitated by Democrats leaking a poll of “white, non-college voters” supposedly showing that they might cost the party the House and the presidency. Having publicly told the school bully where and how to take their lunch money, the Democrats were surprised when he showed up.

One could protest that the Democrats’ timidity is a cold, calculated strategy. Republicans hold the Senate, the argument goes, so an impeachment inquiry would only lead to the president’s acquittal. The whiter, more conservative voters who form much of Trump’s base are geographically distributed in a way that maximizes their political power. Democrats may need to win over some of these voters, who would be alienated by impeachment, to take the White House. If the Democrats cannot hold the House, they cannot hold back Trump.

But Democrats now hold the House, and they are not holding Trump back. The president has abetted a foreign attack on American democracy, he has obstructed justice, he has vowed to turn federal law enforcement on his political enemies. There are squalid camps at the border where families are being separated, and children are being sexually assaulted, their existence justified as a necessary response to a foreign “invasion.” Trump has sought to rig American democracy in favor of white voters and refused to recognize the oversight authority of Congress, and now assails the cornerstone principle of multiracial democracy that none of us is more American than any other. What, exactly, would be enough to rouse Democrats to action?

In the face of such a challenge to the American idea, tactics become intertwined with morality. If the Democrats convince themselves that anything they do to attack the president risks alienating white voters who believe the country belongs only to them, then they will be partially responsible for the path the country is taking, and the standard it is upholding. The Democrats’ weakness has not appeased the president. Instead, it has only invited bolder challenges to democracy and the rule of law. This will not change. If congressional Democrats cannot or will not defend the principle that America belongs to all of its citizens, regardless of race, creed, color, or religion, their oaths to defend the Constitution are meaningless.

Omar must be defended, but not because of her views on Israel, gay rights, or progressive taxation. You needn’t agree with her on any of those things; in fact, you needn’t like her at all. But she must be defended, because the nature of the president’s attack on her is a threat to all Americans—black or white, Jew or Gentile—whose citizenship, whose belonging, might similarly be questioned. This is not about Omar anymore, or the other women of color who have been told by this president to “go back” to their supposed countries of origin. It is about defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people. If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere. What Americans do now, in the face of this, will define us forever.

 
Attorney General William Barr lays out a manifesto of nationalism in personal defense of the President.

Barr Suggests Impeachment Inquiry Undermines Voters’ Intent

The attorney general strongly defended President Trump’s assertions of executive power.

...“While the president has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook and punctilio, he was up front about what he wanted to do and the people decided they wanted him to serve as president,” Mr. Barr said in a speech at a conference hosted by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group influential in Republican politics.

Mr. Trump’s opponents “essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple by any means necessary a duly elected government,” Mr. Barr added.

...

His forceful defense of the president came after some of Mr. Trump’s allies have in recent weeks accused Mr. Barr of failing to vociferously back the president. Mr. Trump was said to be frustrated that Mr. Barr urged him to release a reconstructed transcript of the July call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at the center of the impeachment case. The president also wanted Mr. Barr to hold a news conference to say the president had violated no laws, only to have Mr. Barr rebuff the request. Mr. Trump has denied that account.

Speaking for an hour at the upscale Mayflower Hotel a few blocks from the White House, Mr. Barr hit back at the president’s critics on an array of fronts as he argued that Mr. Trump, in his capacity as president, has not overstepped his authority.

While Mr. Barr never uttered the word impeachment, he castigated those he sees as stalling Mr. Trump’s agenda. He defended the president’s right to set policies, steer the country’s diplomatic and military relations and keep executive branch conversations confidential from congressional oversight.

“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law,” Mr. Barr said.

He noted that opponents labeled themselves “the resistance” immediately after Mr. Trump was elected and accused them of “using every tool and maneuver to sabotage the functioning of the executive branch and his administration.

“Resistance is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power,” Mr. Barr said. He added that it connotes that the government is not legitimate. “This is a very dangerous and indeed incendiary notion.”

...

In his address, Mr. Barr suggested the president has acted within his powers and that his opponents were willing to bend the law to stop him.

Mr. Barr is known as an executive power maximalist and a believer in the unitary executive theory, which posits that the Constitution imbues the presidency with broad powers that are subject to relatively little oversight.

He has argued, for example, that Congress cannot make it a crime for a president to exercise executive powers corruptly; and that presidents have authority over law enforcement investigations even when investigators are scrutinizing their activity.

On Friday, Mr. Barr hit back against criticisms of his view of executive authority.

“Some of you may recall when I was up for confirmation, all these Democratic senators saying how concerned they were about my adherence to the unitary executive theory,” Mr. Barr said.

“This is not new and it’s not a theory,” Mr. Barr said, calling his viewpoint a straightforward description of the powers that the Constitution gives the president. “Whatever the executive power may be, those powers must be exercised under the president’s supervision,” he said. ...

 
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The irony, of course, is that the majority of the country did not want Trump, does not want Trump, and will not want Trump.

And yet, here we are.

 

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