Misconceptions

Let's clear up some misconceptions about the election.

First, this wasn't a great Republican victory.  Yes, the party may have won the election, but that was a byproduct of Trump winning it, and he's not a Republican no matter what label he was running under.  Trump shares few if any of the values the GOP has championed in the past thirty years - he's a sleazebag, not a religious conservative; he's a populist protectionist who wants to "renegotiate" or get rid of NAFTA, not a proponent of free trade; he's... well his foreign policy is dangerously incoherent, but he's pro-Putin and anti-NATO, instead of someone who wants to stand with our democratic allies.

At any rate, Trump won without the support of Republican bigwigs.  Former presidents couldn't bring themselves to vote for him - something you might want to pay better attention to next time, voters - and even House leader Ryan ended up cutting Trump lose and avoided even mentioning the candidate while campaigning for Congressional seats, because the man who is unfortunately our president-elect is absolutely toxic.  After Trump bombed the final debate, the GOP was in "check Hillary" mode, not "we're gonna win in a landside."

So the Republican win was a byproduct of Trump's win, when enough voters jumped ship from the Democrats, or independent moderates, or sane individuals, to gamble on a gibbering idiot because they felt he best represented a chance for change.  And to give that idiot the best chance of getting his policies through, they voted for the other people with little (R)s next to their name.  Which means that after eight years of obstructing the president and crippling Congress' ability to function, the GOP was rewarded for its behavior by voters who were tired of Congressional deadlock.  This country.

And let's not pretend this is the map flipping red, Fox News.  Trump lost the popular vote.  He only won the electoral vote thanks to razor-thin majorities in key states that are given artificial importance thanks to our stupid electoral system.  If we say Michigan or Florida or the like is now a red state because the Republicans barely won them, we should say the USA as a whole is a blue country because more people in it voted for Hillary.

Second, let's not pretend Trump is, despite all appearances, some sort of political genius for tapping into something nobody else saw.  Because while the pollsters may have made some extremely misleading assumptions about the loyalty of blue-collar workers in previously-Democratic states, and said workers were what gave Trump his win, they were not his target audience.

Yes, Trump made "you'll have so many jobs, you won't believe it" all part of his platform, but this was because he didn't have any other qualifications.  This is a candidate with absolutely zero political experience, who only joined his party right before the election he participated in.  The only argument Trump could make to show that he was even capable of running a country was claiming that his status as a yugely successful businessman  - but no, you can't look at his tax returns - meant he had the organizational skills and savvy to be president.  And only him, because all those other economic "experts" in Washington, they're all corrupt!  They passed NAFTA even though they knew it would suck jobs out of the country!  Only he has the patented negotiating skills to re-do NAFTA and take out the "export jobs" clause, or however it's supposed to work.  And that's what won over enough people to elect him, because - after the defeat of Bernie in the Democratic primaries - he was the candidate most paying attention to the blue collar worker's woes.

But no, these desperate uneducated workers are not the core of Trump's campaign.  Because he didn't get interested in politics after NAFTA was passed.  He didn't run for president to fix the economy after the Great Recession.  What started this sad tale is the election of President Obama, and Donald Trump simply could not believe or tolerate that.

So Trump started ranting about fake birth certificates and stolen elections, and other people who thought there was something wrong with the country if a black man could lead it took notice.  And when Trump barged onto the stage at the GOP primaries, bullying his rivals and frothing about what a terrible president Obama was, he won over some equally vocal supporters who felt that the other candidates were just too moderate for their alt-right tastes.  And these are the guys Trump spent his campaign pandering to, the people who feel threatened when their neighbors don't look like them, who feel like they've lost if minorities are making gains, who feel like the economic is rigged not to favor the rich but people of color, who will believe it when he talks about Mexican rapists infiltrating our country to steal our jobs or Muslim terrorists disguising themselves as refugees fleeing Syria, who are also nostalgic when Trump talks about police putting black protesters in the hospital. 

A lot of the people who voted for Trump don't like him, and are in fact alarmed when he talks like that.  But they voted for him anyway because they felt he had the best chance of changing the status quo and improving their condition, and were willing to gamble that our government's checks and balances could keep Trump from acting on all the hate and stupidity he was spewing on the campaign trail to placate his most fervent supporters.

For the sake of our country, let's hope that they're right.

This Fucking Country

And so we can set aside the frightened speculation over whether Trump might have a chance, no matter how small, at winning the presidency, and now embrace the dawning horror that, barring some end-of-year surprise or act of God, Donald "Grab Them by the Pussy" Trump will be the next President of the United States of America. 

Donald Trump is Killing Me

I haven't slept properly for over a week, not since an FBI director's decision to break protocol and possibly the Hatch Act unleashed a storm of speculation over what terrible discoveries may or may not be in a new batch of Clinton-related e-mails.  He's since declared that it was a false alarm and there's nothing new to talk about, but the damage has been done - suddenly Clinton's victory has changed from a sure thing to a merely probable thing, which in turn meant that Trump's odds of victory shot up from "nil" to "unlikely."

And it's a strange thing to admit, that your favored candidate being just "unlikely" to lose is so terrifying.  But, as we've heard repeatedly over the past year, this is not a normal election.

My political awakening was during the 2000 election, when I had my assumptions that the system worked and the electorate was rational torn to pieces.  When 2004 rolled around I thought that surely, after Iraq, after the torture, people would wake up and make the right decision at the polls.  I stayed up all night watching the election results come in and skipped class the next day partly from exhaustion, partly from depression.

The thing with George W. Bush, though - it was easy to hate what he was doing as president, but hard to hate the man himself.  He was the doofus who couldn't pronounce "nuclear" and introduced us to "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the "Axis of Evil," but for all the disasters he caused, he wasn't malicious.  There was something oddly endearing about the way he'd carefully deliver a patriotic speech from a teleprompter, ease back once the applause started, and seem vaguely surprised in a "I did good?" sort of way.  He was just someone who never should have gone into politics and got in way over his head, but never meant to cause any harm, and thought he was doing the right thing.  A fool, but an honest fool, to quote Tolkien.  Shame he spent his whole term listening to Wormtongue.

Dubya's successors were a lot better than him, and I never had any real problems with them.  I liked John McCain a lot more when he was a sensible maverick instead of someone who had to toe the party line to win the primary and picked a terrible vice president, but he would have been an okay president.  Romney was... forgettable, I suppose, but again, when I was watching the 2012 election, I wasn't losing sleep during the last week.  Either Obama would win and do things I supported (and some things I didn't), or the other guy would take over and do things differently.  I would prefer that my guy won, but there wasn't a sense of catastrophe if he didn't win.

Donald Trump, though...

It's not just that I disagree with his policies, though they are profoundly stupid.  Bully our neighbor into building a wall across the southern border, through some terrain so inhospitable that illegal immigrants don't even try to cross it, at a time when Mexican immigration is going the other way.  Ban any Muslims from entering the country, including refugees fleeing the disaster in Syria, to protect us from terrorism even though all the attacks on our soil have been committed by home-grown terrorists radicalized over the internet.  Repeal Obamacare and replace it with... well, I'm sure he'll come up with something, hmm?  And renegotiate all those terrible trade deals that sent US jobs overseas, like the section in NAFTA that... well, he must know what he's talking about, right?

In a worst-case scenario, in the event the electorate once again proves that democracy is only as good as the dumbest voters in it, none of that is going to be too crippling.  Congress is a check on the President's ability to enact domestic policy, and between the Democrats and the Republicans who are either sane or vengeful following all that Trump's done to the party, I'm sure he'd have obstacles when he tried to ruin this country.

This isn't to say that he needs to get legislation passed to make things worse, Trump's already causing a stock market panic from the thought that he could actually win - stocks have been sliding ever since Clinton's poll numbers began their plunge, and I've heard economists talk about stocks being worth 10% less than they'd be under a President Hillary Clinton.  I wonder if that makes a successful businessman like Trump start to wonder about his own campaign?  But I digress.

What really worries me about a Trump presidency is what he'd do to our foreign policy.  That's the prerogative of the president, something Congress has a much more limited ability to control, and Trump's proposals on that front are even worse than his domestic proposals.  "Bomb the shit out of" ISIS when they're rounding up human shields by the truckload, work with Syria and Russia to fight terrorism at a time when they're busy killing anyone who dared to oppose the Assad regime.  Reject NATO as a bunch of freeloaders at a time when Putin is doing everything short of open warfare to push against Russia's neighbors, then cozy up to the autocrat responsible for the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine and the slaughter of civilians in Syria.  Consider giving Japan nukes to balance out North Korea.  Make our allies wonder whether we're going to support them - this of course comes right after ripping Obama for abandoning Egypt's leader during the Arab Spring.

There's no guiding political theory there, no philosophy to back a coherent foreign policy.  Clinton's a pretty clear liberal institutionalist who likes to use treaties, trade and governance to promote America's interests and keep the world stable, but Trump seems to be envisioning a world where no one can be sure what America is going to do next, where traditional alliances are abandoned and America's espoused values can be cast aside as it pursues its objectives.  A world where America isn't leading, but leaving everyone in suspense over what it will do next - Trump likes that, he likes the attention and speculation he gets from stuff like refusing to say whether he'd accept the results of the election.

But that is dangerous on the world stage.  The key to conflict is uncertainty - if I know that you're stronger than me, I'm not going to pick a fight.  But if I'm not sure about your strength, or whether you're going to push back or retreat if I do something, or even what your interest in a given region is, that is where miscalculations happen that cost lives and destroy countries.  This is why delusional autocrats like the rulers of North Korea - which Trump so worryingly resembles - are so dangerous, because they're unpredictable.  And in a world with this many crisis zones, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Southeast Asia, we don't need more unpredictability.

I suppose Pence could try to temper this somewhat, or maybe that Trump would listen to a band of expert foreign advisors more than he listened to anyone on the campaign trail.  But I guess the fundamental problem I have with Trump is that when I imagine him in the Oval Office, my cheeks flush and acid rises in the back of my throat.

Look, I'm not going to pretend that the presidency is sacred and everyone who's occupied the office has been an exemplar of morality.  We've had adulterers, racists, genocidal tyrants, murderers, the works.  But when we have a candidate who has boasted about being able to sexually assault women, who cheers when black protestors are beaten at his rallies and reminisces about the good old days when the police would take such malcontents out in stretchers,  who "jokes" about 2nd Amendment fanatics "doing something" to deal with the rival candidate, who threatened to jail his political opponent, who refused to say whether he'd accept the results of the election before deciding he would if he won it, who has constantly denounced the election as rigged ever since he started sliding in the polls and without a shred of evidence, someone who has urged his supporters to go out and "monitor" polling stations in minority neighborhoods...

Someone who feels entitled to good press because his interviews get such good ratings, someone who can't give a solid answer on his policy positions but can gush about how many attendance and fundraising records his rallies are breaking, someone who will lie repeatedly and blatantly about what he said even when there's recorded evidence of him contradicting himself, someone who will ignore any poll results or studies he dislikes and cite conspiracy theories or unscientific surveys to support his statements, someone who's earned the support of Neo-Nazis and the KKK and foreign hackers who have led a constant campaign to embarrass his opponent through leaked emails...

Someone who built his financial empire with other people's money and turned billion-dollar losses into personal tax write-offs, someone who'd rather take his workers to court over unpaid wages than give them what they've earned, someone whose response to any criticism is an insult or lawsuit, someone who will rant on Twitter at three in the morning, someone who still refuses to release his tax returns when every presidential candidate in recent history has been willing to make that effort at transparency, someone who loses his temper and acts erratically if you call him by his first name too much...

I'm not crazy, am I?  I'm not the only one who's horrified at the thought of someone like that becoming president, right?  I'm not the only one who can see the very scary places this story could go?

I guess we'll see in a few days.  I can hope that sanity will prevail, that the system works, that this hysterical reaction to the mere potential of another Clinton email scandal will fade and her polls will bounce back at the very end of the election.  I can certainly have more hope that she'll win now than I could this past week.  And the odds are still in her favor, they have been this entire election.

But that does still mean that there is still a chance that Trump could win.  And I have been sorely disappointed by the American electorate before.  And after the last week or so, I'm so used to being afraid that it's hard to give up.

Orlando, Counterterrorism, Drama, and Elections

I don't usually watch the Today show - I like my journalism a little more sophisticated than Matt Lauer watching FBI agents marking shell casings and concluding that "the investigation is ongoing" - but it happened to be on this morning, magnifying the impact of the Orlando shootings with pictures of the victims and a tragic violin rendition of the show's theme music.  I didn't learn much about the massacre that I couldn't get from better news outlets, but I did catch the interview with Hillary Clinton, and heard the question: what kind of "dramatically different" actions would she take to make sure such an attack didn't happen again?

Not "effective" actions, or "sensible" actions, but "dramatic" actions.  Just by hearing the question asked, it's evident that Mrs. Clinton is at a disadvantage when it comes to addressing this situation.

Back in grad school I read a paper by Bueno de Mesquita, "Politics and the Suboptimal Provision of Counterterror."  As the author puts it, "when there is divergence between voters and government preferences, strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy."  This can be drastically shortened to "voters like style over substance."

When something like Orlando happens, we want our government to take action, to take the steps that will ensure that it can't happen again.  Unfortunately, we can only see some of the steps the government can take in response to this threat, such as beefing up the number of security forces out patrolling.  Other tactics such as infiltration of terrorist groups or freezing their financial assets, that's all undercover and out of sight.  Even more unfortunately, these latter steps are the more successful means of stopping terrorists, because if we can see those extra security guards, so can the terrorists, so they know to hit a different target.

But, since voters want to feel safe, they put more emphasis on these showy, less-effective attempts to stop terrorists than trusting that the government is doing all that it can in some covert struggle happening out of sight.  And since government officials want to get reelected, they might feel tempted to focus their resources on the tactics that will appease the voters.  And thus voters demand bad strategies because they're the most visible strategies. 

So this morning Mrs. Hillary Clinton got to answer some questions in what was mostly a forgettable interview.  She refused to "declare war on a religion," talked about government and non-government entities working together to combat the threat of lone wolf, self-radicalized killers, and called for restrictions on gun sales to people being investigated by the FBI.  Sensible steps.  Boring steps.

And in contrast, we have Trump, who even after learning that the shooter was a self-radicalized, American-born terrorist, still stuck by his campaign plank of banning Muslims from entering the country.  He's fighting for this policy that would have had absolutely no effect on the shooting, but boy, it sure is dramatic, huh?  It certainly seems to fire up a regrettable number of voters.  So what if it feeds the terrorists' rhetoric and gives American Muslims less reason to believe in the United States?

I guess you could compare terrorist attacks to a Twitter war.  It's not a perfect comparison, of course - when someone spews hate at you online, it's best to ignore it, while if someone murders your citizens, you bring them to justice.  But in both cases it's better to react with restraint than flip your lid and get drawn into a vitriolic shouting match.  You don't let some attention-seeking internet tough guys change who you are.

And this is why the current election, and how it's playing out in social media, is so troubling.  One of our candidates is attempting to stay above online mud-slinging, and her biggest foray into this war of words was the suggestion "Delete your account."  The other candidate thrives in such a domain, built his campaign on inflammatory rhetoric and outrageous accusations.

So, when - not if - another terrorist attack happens, who do you want in the White House?  Someone who wants a boring but practical approach to combating this violence?  Or someone advocating dramatic action, action that goes against America's principles, action that wouldn't prevent violence, action that gives people another reason to hate our country?

Interesting Times

This is simultaneously an interesting election year, because of how unpredictable it's been, and a troubling election year, because what this unexpected developments say about our country.

The Republican primaries were a jumbled mess, with candidates rising into the spotlight as potential winners before saying something stupid or tanking at the polls, until the most divisive and least Republican candidate in the race managed to surge to victory by railing against the GOP establishment.  On the other side of the aisle, Hillary Clinton seemed sure to coast her way to the nomination, only to be met with the surprising grass-roots success of Bernie Sanders, who is similarly lambasting the party's elites.

There's a lot of things going on here, the biggest of which may be the self-destruction of the Republican Party.  Not long ago, the GOP enjoyed a time where it had more or less total control of the government, when a national tragedy resulted in enormous popular support for the party's policies.  The result was the disaster known as the George W. Bush Administration, where we saw what happened when those policies were put into action.  The backlash to this helped propel Obama to the White House, and Republicans immediately dedicated themselves to opposing him at every turn.  I'm still not sure how they ended up passing Obamacare, though I'm starting to wonder whether they did it just to have something specific to rail against.

Anyway, for the past eight years the GOP has been the Party of "NO!"  The party of government shutdowns, the party that refuses to pay old debts unless Democrats repeal a law the Republicans don't have the votes to take down, the party that shoots down bipartisan attempts at immigration reform and then screams when Obama takes executive action.  It is the anti-party, a political group with nothing to offer beyond principled opposition.  Republicans want to repeal Obamacare and take health insurance away from millions of Americans, but have no alternative plan.  They froth in rage that Obama betrayed his country by signing a nuclear deal with Iran and normalizing relations with Cuba, and want to go back to the old tactic of sanctions that didn't stop those countries from doing what we didn't want them to.  They criticize Obama's actions in Iraq and Syria against ISIS, but when it comes to coming up with an alternative plan by drafting an updated authorization for the use of military force, they're strangely silent.

Voters seem to have noticed.  It's hard to get fired up for a conventional Republican candidate when all they can offer are old party planks about a strong military, tax cuts, and so forth, especially when a Republican-controled Congress hasn't been able to deliver on them.  So Trump can come in and court all those people who are sick of this dysfunctional, deadlocked legislature but aren't willing to vote for anyone with a (D) after their names.  Thus, the Republican nomination seems destined to go to someone who shares the party's values only in the sense that he's even less subtle than mainstream Republican candidates when it comes to using sexist, Islamophobic or xenophobic language in his campaigning.

So this talk about Trump trying to "make peace" with establishment Republicans in Congress or his former rivals for the candidacy is a bit strange.  It'd be odd for him to suddenly start palling it up with them, because again his campaign is against the political status quo, while Congressional Republicans are the ones most responsible for our broken, ineffective legislature.  He's shown that he doesn't actually need this establishment's support to get this far.  It might be that mainstream Republicans are hoping to ride Trump's coattails and raise some money and votes for their own campaigns this November.  Which would mean, if both are successful,that we'd end up with this unconventional Republican in the White House, facing down dogmatic and unresponsive hard-line conservatives, thus continuing our political stalemate even in the event that the same party controls the whole government.

The weird thing is that, as I was taught back in the days of my undergrad American Politics courses, the modern Republican party is an alliance between free-market fiscal conservatives, who want as little interference in their business as possible and aren't concerned with things like the environment or a living wage, and social conservatives, who are willing to support the aforementioned fiscal policies even if they end up being hurt by them, just so long as their representatives wave Bibles around and froth against gay marriage.  Except Trump supporters don't seem to be coming from either camp - the guy's as socially conservative as most liberal candidates, while his talk about economics centers more on his ability to make great deals than financial dogma, and in fact goes against what previous Republicans have pushed for.  So where did the old Republican base go?  Are they abandoning traditional candidates and backing Trump because they think he has the best chance of making a difference in this time of deadlock?  Has this base shrunk over the years due to disillusionment?  Or has it been shouldered aside by Trump's followers, who threaten to hijack the Republican Party?

There's something similar, if not as dramatic, going on in the Democratic camp.  A political heavyweight, former Secretary of State, and former presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton should not have any trouble clinching her party's nomination, yet here we have her some unexpected defeats in the last couple of primaries.  She'll probably still win, sorry Bernie fans, but the fact that it's even a race at this point just goes to show that Mrs. Clinton has some very specific weakness and not many specific strengths beyond the novelty of potentially being the first female President of the United States.  For his part, Senator Sanders is capturing some of the angry exasperation that has seen Trump come so far, a feeling that the party establishment isn't doing enough, is corrupt, is out of touch.  It's not quite as bad as the rift within the Republican Party, and at least Hillary and Bernie supporters agree on most issues, if not which are the most important and what's the best way to address them, and the two candidates haven't been flinging the sort of vitriol seen in the Republican race.  But there have been ugly incidents like that near-riot at the end of the Nevada primary, so while the Democrats aren't in as bad a shape as the Republican Party is, there is the potential for a schism if the rift grows too wide. 

What's surreal about this election is the overlap between some Sanders and Trump supporters, to the extend that some backing the former are threatening to vote for the latter if Clinton "steals" the nomination.  Because there's more than just a backlash against an ineffectual government happening right now, some notions that were taken for granted for decades are now being viewed with suspicion.

Free trade was something viewed as an economic ideal, despite some anger over things like NAFTA hurting American workers, and even though some Democrats opposed such treaties as unfair or harmful, even President Obama has been pushing for things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  But now both Sanders and Trump are railing against such deals and promising to bring jobs home.  It's an empty promise - these deals facilitate trade but don't cause it, and many of the jobs lost over the past few decades were due to technological innovation rather than overseas factories - but if you're hurting and desperate, it's the sort of thing you'd want to believe in.

America's international alliances have been the cause of some debate, in that they're largely relics of the Cold War, and depending on the international climate it can be hard to argue for the necessity of an American troop presence in Europe and Asia.  It's mostly been liberals who have talked about pulling back and focusing on America's internal affairs, but here we have Trump running for the Repulbican ticket and talking about reassessing or even terminating old pacts with NATO or Japan if he doesn't deem them profitable.  It looks like American isolationism may be making a comeback.

There's another backlash as well, though this one at least is confined to the Republican camp.  Over the past eight years, we've seen some major advances in civil rights.  Gay marriage has been legalized, alternative lifestyles are becoming more accepted, and while racism in the country hasn't been ended by any means, it's at least being acknowledged as a problem we still need to work on.  But some people aren't happy about these developments, leading to the "alt-right" movement that can be viewed as a counter-revolution of sorts opposing feminism and "Black Lives Matter," while more conventional conservatives are trying to regulate which bathrooms trasngender people can use. 

In short, this is what happens when people don't like where they are now but see nothing but gridlock ahead of them - they turn around and go backwards.

I'd like to be optimistic about the future, but there isn't a single candidate out there who can fix things.  Because the biggest problem in this country isn't who's in charge of it, but the people who are supposed to be crafting its laws.  If voters don't toss out the obstructionists and hard-liners and bring in some people willing to work together, compromise some of their values, and get things done, it's not going to matter if it's Trump or Clinton or Sanders in the White House. 

And voters... well.  They're feeling betrayed and angry right now because Congress isn't doing anything, but what were they expecting?  It's not like these Senators and Representatives ran on a platform of teamwork and betrayed it, they went to Washington vowing to oppose the President.  This is exactly the sort of "leadership" the electorate chose.

And call me a cynic, but I think a lot of the people who like Trump for his anti-establishment message are still going to vote for those establishment Republicans come this fall.  I would love to be wrong, though.

Where We Are Now and Where I Hope We're Not Going Next

State of the Union?  Not doin' so good.

The economy, well, people say it's getting better, and can dig up several indicators to prove it, but it still feels like we're in a recession.  Less people may be unemployed, but they might not have a good job either, and there's a sense that even that could be taken away in an instant.  The downside of this glorious global economy we've spent the last half century building is that you can get fired not because of any fault of your own, but because it's cheaper for your boss to pay someone on the other side of the planet to do your job.  Or your investments could take a hit because of what the Chinese or whoever is doing with their currency.  It's a time when it's hard to feel in control of your money.

The president's health care plan didn't work out like it was supposed to.  A lot of people have insurance now who didn't have any before, which is good, but everyone's paying more for their insurance too.  Something about not enough young, healthy folks buying into the system, only older people with big hospital bills.  Or so say the insurance companies.  It's not like they'd use an attempt at reform as an excuse to jack up prices so that either they make more money or public outcry convinces the politicians to repeal the reforms, right?

College is probably too expensive.  Start with a captive audience forced to buy overpriced textbooks, tack on tuition hikes to cover new student centers and sports stadiums, require them to pay for classes that have nothing to do with their major, and the end result is a degree which may or may not be entirely useless in the modern economy.  Though if you had to work a part-time job to support yourself during college, at least you have something to put on your résumé.

It feels like things are unfair, like the country isn't working the way it's supposed to.  It's a time when you'd want your elected officials to do something, to fix things, make things better.

Unfortunately, the government just doesn't function these days.  It's now an accomplishment not to pass a balanced budget, but any budget without some rogue faction shutting down the government over some grievance.  The party that pledged to oppose anything the current president tried to do is now in control of the legislature, and is unable to take action on the immigration crisis or the latest mass shooting because it would go against their conservative values.  Then they flip out when the president tries to do things with executive orders.

It'd be nice to get a better government, maybe elect leaders willing to pull the party plank out of their backsides, but there's three problems with that.  First, our electoral system sucks, it lets politicians stay in office indefinitely so long as their districts are drawn to marginalize the opposition party.  Second, the politicians suck, because again party planks, backsides.  And third, our electorate sucks because it's willing to vote those sucky politicians into office in the first place.  My district keeps reelecting the "pro-life conservative" who talked his wife and girlfriend into getting multiple abortions.

Democracy is the struggle to reconcile the idea that people should be able to rule themselves and control their own government with the creeping realization that people can be kind of stupid.

So take all this dissatisfaction, add the recurring bogeyman of terrorism, throw in concerns that Team America, World Police is losing control of global affairs, and you have a very dangerous situation.  People are scared, they're angry, and the normal means for dealing with these problems are breaking down.  When President Obama addresses gun control by executive action, a lot of people are furious with the abuse of power, but others shrug and say "well, if that's what it takes to actually do something..."  When Candidate Trump talks about banning Muslims from entering the country "until we figure out what's going on" - and it is terrifying to have a serious presidential candidate use those words as a campaign plank - many people are horrified at the betrayal of American values.  But others shrug and say "well, if that's what it takes for us to be safe..."

This is how democracy dies.

America is pretty special because, compared to a lot of presidential democracies, we've been both stable and liberal.  We had a civil war over slavery states' rights, but that was a way to resolve a divisive issue that had been festering since our country's creation.  Even the secessionists wanted to keep a democratic form of government, albeit a weak and ineffective one.  Other than that traumatic episode, there hasn't been a problem that we couldn't solve with our democratic system.  If one set of leaders couldn't handle things to our satisfaction, we voted in some who could.  That's the great strength of democracies, they schedule regular revolutions that allow citizens to change the government without tearing everything down.

But now, things aren't changing.  Our current government is demonstrating that it can't solve the problems facing the country, an election or two after the previous government proved the same thing.  So when the regular methods aren't working, other methods start to look more attractive, like an executive who goes beyond an "imperial presidency" to rule by decree.

And people are afraid.  The "war on terror" (another idiotic concept) has gone on for over a decade, and Americans are still dying in terror attacks, in our own country, even!  The economy is supposedly improving, but people are still afraid for their futures.  And since nothing our current government does seems to remove these sources of anxiety, some people need something to blame, a scapegoat whose removal will make everything better.  And so such people flock to candidates who promise to deport millions of Mexicans and forbid Muslims from entering the country.

Now, we haven't ever had a real tyrant in charge of America.  George W. Bush may have taken the first steps down the path to becoming a police state as he waged war on a tactic, but his heart was as empty of malice as his head was empty of wisdom.  Obama has been using his executive power in worrisome ways, but only when he can't get results from working with the legislature.  Trump... we'll see.

The point I'm making, and the good news, is that while we've had the components of a proper dictator, they haven't all been present in the same person.  We've had leaders willing to use disgusting methods in the name of security, a leader with a borderline personality cult and a willingness to take executive action when Congress won't respond, and now a candidate appealing to xenophobia by promising that by going after the right minorities everything can be made better.  We haven't had someone in the Oval Office willing to use torture and spy on American citizens, and rule by decree, and persecute a minority population to gain support from the majority.

The reason I'm worried, and the bad news, is that all those things have happened in sequence.  The precedent has been made.  A president can torture detainees, ship suspected terrorists to out-of-country black sites for even worse torture, imprison people without trial, all in the name of security, and as we've seen, that president can win reelection.  A president can try to reform by executive order when he feels Congress isn't doing enough, and as we're seeing, people will support him.  And now we have Trump, who is tapping into some of the worst sentiments in this country to fuel his campaign.

I'm not saying Trump is the next Hitler.  I'm saying that, if he's elected, he'll have all the pieces he needs to become one, if he chooses to assemble them.  So maybe now's the time to think real carefully about who to vote for.

Stimulus, Response

Thanks, ISIS, I really wanted my birthday to be forever associated with an atrocity.

Terrorism is violence with a political agenda, where the actual victims don't matter so long as the attack provokes the desired response.  Klansmen lynch an African-American to cow the rest of a town's black population, the Soviet Union puts on show trials to create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia even within the party leadership, al-Qaeda blows up a symbol of America's wealth and global prominence to simultaneously make America look weak and it look strong, and so forth.

But the attacks in France - well, they're only the latest attacks in France, and they're different from the ones that came before.  The attack on Charlie Hebdo, that was retaliation for satire, because when someone mocks your religion the only logical answer is to travel across the planet and kill them.  The attack on a kosher supermarket, you can link that to French support for Israel, and I guess ISIS was hoping that killing Jews would make the French less inclined to protecting the rest.  But the attacks in Paris on Friday, they weren't that specific.  A concert, a football game, even random people enjoying the weekend - this wasn't an attack on a symbolic target, this was more like an attack on the French themselves.

It's still terrorism, of course.  But it's an imprecise, unpredictable terrorism, like a white supremacist who doesn't target "uppity" African-Americans but instead picks a dark-skinned target at random.  You're not safe even if you keep your head down, you're in danger simply for being black.  Or in this case, French.

The other alarming thing is that, as I said, terrorism is meant to bring about a certain response, and the French response may be going according to ISIS' plan.  The French president is talking about being at "war," apparently having learned nothing from the presidency of George W. Bush.  French police are being given expanded powers to defend against terrorist threats, and the idiots at Fox News were positively excited about this, citing the French experience in Algeria aas proof that the country can crack down on malcontents.  No mention of "enhanced interrogation techniques," oddly enough, but like I said - morons.  And France is also launching air strikes in Syria now, because the ones the US have been doing for the past year have accomplished so much.

Or in other words, France has now bought into the ISIS narrative of a war between Islam and the West, even though President Hollande tried to explain that he didn't consider it a war between "civilizations" - I don't think that's going to do him much good when ISIS' PR machine spins his comments.  France will now be cracking down on its Muslim minority population, at a time when many are already feeling alienated as they try to reconcile their beliefs with modern Western society, thus giving them even more incentive to turn to ISIS and similar extremist groups.  And France is now militarily engaged in the Middle East, so ISIS can highlight how it's fighting with those "crusaders" to distract from how often it kills Muslims for not being Arab enough or Arabs for not being Muslim enough.  Just by launching the attacks in Paris, ISIS was able to display its power to potential recruits, and the magnitude of the French retaliation only makes them look like more of a credible threat.

So if France is doing everything wrong, what's the proper response to something like the 11/13 attacks?  You can't not respond, can you?

It's the dilemma of a kid seeking negative attention - if you respond you give him what he wants, but if you don't discourage him to continue he'll keep causing trouble.  But it's useful to have a sense of perspective about these things.  As tragic and horrible any terrorist attack is, you have to remember that they're rare, especially when compared to the more mundane dangers of modern life.  For instance, between 2001 and 2013, a total of 3,380 Americans died from acts of terror, a statistic which includes the extraordinarily lethal World Trade Center attacks.  In the same period, firearms killed 406,496 people on American soil.  So which is the bigger problem, the global specter of Islamic terror, or the fact that America is a trigger-happy society armed to the teeth?

Terrorism gets our attention because it's intended to get our attention - it's about creating a spectacle, building an atmosphere of fear, proving your might when in reality the fact that a group needs to resort to terrorism in the first place shows that they don't have the power to get what they want through conventional means.  Treating it as something more than violent crime, or heaven forbid casting aside your liberal values and transforming your society to wage "war" on it, is a way of conceding defeat. 

You fight spectacular, fearsome terrorism through inconspicuous, boring methods, the same you would use to deal with any other criminal organization.  And you don't expect to "win" against terrorism at any point, it's a tactic, not an enemy that can be defeated.  You can close your borders, but you'll still be in danger from home-grown extremists.  You can bomb ISIS out of Syria, but some other group will eventually take their place.  You can brutally crack down on potential converts within your borders, and now you have replaced the potential threat of insurgent terror with the more certain danger of state terror.

And you'll still lose more citizens due to traffic accidents, illness, or violent neighbors than to what you devoted so much time and energy to combating.