v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

The Coming Regime

From Robert Kagan in this weekends Washington Post:

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.

The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.

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Dehumanization

 

From The Atlantic:

In a September 20 speech in Dubuque, Iowa, Trump said, “What they’re doing to our country, they’re destroying it. It’s the blood of our country. What they’re doing is destroying our country.”

Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply.

Dehumanizers view their targets as having “a human appearance but a subhuman essence,” according to David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor who has written on the history and complicated psychological roots of dehumanization. “It is the dehumanizer’s nagging awareness of the other’s humanity that gives dehumanization its distinctive psychological flavor,” he writes. “Ironically, it is our inability to regard other people as nothing but animals that leads to unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness.” Dehumanized people can be turned into something worse than animals; they can be turned into monsters. They aren’t just dangerous; they are metaphysically threatening. They are not just subhuman; they are irredeemably destructive.

THAT IS THE WICKEDLY SHREWD rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.

Trump’s opponents, including the press, are “truly the enemy of the people.” He demanded that the parent company of MSNBC and NBC be investigated for “treason” over what he described as “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” He insinuated on his social network, Truth Social, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for committing treason. At a Trump event in Iowa, days after that post, one Trump supporter asked why Milley wasn’t “in there before a firing squad within a month.” Another told NBC News, “Treason is treason. There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death.”

Trump has taken to mocking the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which left him with a fractured skull that required surgery and other serious injuries. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has brought two indictments against the former president, is a “Trump-hating prosecutor” who is “deranged” and a “disgrace to America”—and whose wife and family “despise me much more than he does.” The former president posted the name, photo, and private Instagram account of a law clerk serving Judge Arthur Engoron, who is currently presiding over Trump’s civil fraud trial and whom Trump despises and has repeatedly attacked, describing him as “CRAZY” and “CRAZED in his hatred of me.” (Trump later deleted the Truth Social post targeting the law clerk, whom he called a “Trump Hating Clerk,” but not until after it had been widely disseminated.)

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The Reality Unseen by the American Public

 

A clearer perspective from Dalia Hatuqa in today's NYT:

To many inside and outside this war, the brutality of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks was unthinkable, as has been the scale and ferocity of Israel’s reprisal. But Palestinians have been subject to a steady stream of unfathomable violence — as well as the creeping annexation of their land by Israel and Israeli settlers — for generations.

If people are going to understand this latest conflict and see a path forward for everyone, we need to be more honest, nuanced and comprehensive about the recent decades of history in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, particularly the impact of occupation and violence on the Palestinians. This story is measured in decades, not weeks; it is not one war, but a continuum of destruction, revenge and trauma.

Since the 1948 Nakba — in which entire Palestinian villages were wiped off the map and the modern state of Israel was established — Palestinians have endured a subjugation that has defined their daily lives. For decades, we have been reeling from Israel’s military occupation, as well as a succession of deadly invasions and wars. The wars of 1967 and 1973 helped shape the modern geography and geopolitics of the area, with millions of largely stateless Palestinians split between Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, often referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, Palestinians are prohibited from entering or leaving, except in incredibly rare circumstances.

This history has been absent from much of the discourse surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, as though the attacks of Oct. 7 were completely arbitrary. The truth is, even in times of relative peace, Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel — if they are deemed citizens at all. According to Israeli law, Palestinians do not have the right to national self-determination, which is reserved for Jewish citizens of the state. A variety of laws restrict Palestinians’ right to movement, governing everything from where they can live to what personal identifications they can hold to whether or not they can visit family members elsewhere.

The “right of return” — the right of Palestinians and their descendants to return to villages they were ethnically cleansed from during the 1948 war — is central to many Palestinians’ political perspective because so many are still, legally, refugees. In Gaza, for instance, roughly two-thirds of the population consists of refugees. This status is not some abstraction; it dictates everything from where people live to what schools they go to or doctors they see.

Many Gazans have parents and grandparents who grew up only a few miles from where they live now, in areas they are now, of course, forbidden to enter. They still invoke rich memories from their childhood or adolescence, when they walked through citrus groves in Yaffa or olive fields in Qumya — the latter of which, like many villages whose people were expelled into Gaza during the 1948 war, was later transformed into a kibbutz.

There have been periods of increased cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians over the past 75 years. But these were usually preceded by times of increased conflict, such as the first and second intifadas, or popular uprisings. The intifadas, in which Palestinians participated in large-scale resistance, sometimes civil and sometimes violent, are often presented by Western media as random or indiscriminate bursts of murderous savagery — as has been the case with the Oct. 7 attacks. But that violence did not happen in a vacuum.

Stark conditions in Palestinian communities — including the ever-tightening control of daily life through violent night raids, arrests, military checkpoints and the building of illegal Israeli settlements — were the backdrop to these outbursts. Unfortunately, from a historical standpoint, these acts of violence seem to be the only things that have moved the needle politically for Palestinians.

 

 

Bad Guys

 

From Ettingermentum Newsletter:

It’s hard to defend the indefensible. It’s a little easier if you pretend it’s something other than what it is.

Over the past few days, there have been a number of people who have looked at everything going on in the world and decided that the most productive thing to do is scold supporters of Palestine over the language they use to describe the actions of the Israeli government. Their contention is that it is improper to even insinuate that Netanyahu and his war cabinet are engaging in anything other than warfare and warfare alone. There can be disagreements over tactics, strategy, and Jewish Israeli politics, of course—hardly any of these bellyachers would call themselves Likudniks. But larger questions about what the Israeli government is engaged in, and what its ultimate intentions may be, are out of the question. We must simply assume that everything they are doing comes from a pure-hearted desire for safety and leave it at that.

This is a very curious presumption. You can only really believe in it if you also believe that history started sometime earlier this month, and that all of the figures currently running the country burst out of thin air around then. In such a world, it might be reasonable to give the Israeli government the benefit of the doubt. However, we do not live in such a world. The people making up the Israeli government are real human beings, with long careers in politics, and many, many, many statements on Palestine. So, to help, I have gone over the political backgrounds and beliefs of the current top members and parties of the Israeli government. All of the information comes from their own statements, past actions, and Israeli political reporting. I hope it proves useful for you if you find yourself in a discussion with those who are acting as if we have no frame of reference for what the country is currently doing.

To start, we have the single most unfortunate fact for hasbarists assigned with selling Zionism to the world’s many progressive Jews. This fact is the existence and relevance of Itamar Ben-Gvir, current Israeli Minister of National Security and head of Otzma Yehudit (lit. “Jewish Power”). 

If Ben-Gvir did not actually exist, any description would come across as a crude, over-the-top parody of extremist Zionism. Currently running the ministry that once singled him out as a “good candidate for detention,” Ben-Gvir has dedicated his entire life to anti-Arab racism. Starting as a teenager, he moved around between several organizations that advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs until settling on Kach, a fascist political party led by the convicted Israeli-American terrorist Meir Kahane. Kach, which was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union, and Israel itself, disavowed democracy and called for Israel to turn into a theocratic ethnostate. In their world, all of Palestine and Jordan, along with parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, were to be annexed by the Jewish state. Arabs who came under Israeli control would either flee or be enslaved. All territory under Israeli control would be opened up for Jewish settlement. Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews would be banned. The army would be given shoot-to-kill orders against anyone who attempted to resist this regime.

Because of how extreme this all is, you may be wondering if I’m exaggerating things. I’m not. All you have to do to see where Kahane and his followers stood is to look at the laws he proposed while in the Israeli parliament, such as:

• “Non-Jews in the State of Israel will be without any national rights and without any part in political proceedings in the State of Israel. A non-Jew will not be able to be appointed to any position of authority and will not be able to vote in elections to the Knesset or to any other state and public body.”

• “Non-Jews will be obliged to assume duties, taxes and slavery. If he does not agree to slavery and taxes, he will be forcibly deported.”

• “A non-Jew will not live within the jurisdiction of the city of Jerusalem.”

• “A non-Jew who has a marital relationship with a Jew is liable to 50 years in prison. A Jewish prostitute or a Jewish male who has an affair with a non-Jewish male is sentenced to five years in prison.”

Ben-Gvir served as this party’s youth coordinator.

Today, Kach no longer exists. The party faced a mortal blow with Kahane’s 1990 assassination and was officially banned in Israel in 1994 after party supporter Baruch Goldstein went on a shooting spree and murdered 29 people in a Hebron mosque. But Itamar Ben-Gvir has carried on its legacy ever since, both in word and deed. According to The New Yorker, he has been convicted of criminal charges at least eight times, including but not limited to support for a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. His criminal record is reportedly so long that a court once had to change the ink in their Xerox when printing it out. In his speeches, Ben-Gvir refers Kahane as nothing less than a saint; as for Goldstein, the terrorist mass murderer, Ben-Gvir hung a gigantic mural of him in his living room for almost the entirety of his adult life, only taking it down recently when fellow ultra-right settlers said it was bad optics. He still refers to both as “martyrs” to this day, even in speeches given in his capacity as National Security Minister.

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Young vs. Old

 

From How Things Work:

But here is what many professional commentators have chosen to spend their time and energy drawing our attention to instead: The annoying things that young people are saying and doing. Many people who hold prestigious and well-paid media jobs, and who control an influential megaphone at a time when that is of incredible importance, squander their time and ours with wheedling complaints about bullshit. Bret Stephens spends his column grinding familiar axes about campus protests and local DSA rallies; Pamela Paul complains about how stuff is being debated on campus at Stanford; Ross Douthat takes this opportunity to unleash some zingers against “woke-speak” among student groups about decolonization; even Michelle Goldberg, who is supposed to represent the left, focuses her column on… campus protests and local DSA rallies and how the angry kids on the left are not protesting in the proper way. These are the voices that dominate the opinion section of the most influential news organization in the English-speaking world. You will never find a more pathetic failure to rise to the occasion than this collection of navel-gazing cranks, the journalistic equivalent of suburbanites complaining about the annoying smell of smoke ruining their weekend dinner party as the city burns down around them.

Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets? Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the fuck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.

Young people have a voice, but no power. Old people have a bigger voice, and all of the power. Guess which group has a greater responsibility not to waste the current moment moaning about petty bullshit? An inability to ignore the small annoyances of youth in order to welcome the indispensable purity of morality that young people give to us is not a mark of wisdom. It is evidence that one has maintained immaturity even as they have gotten older. It is proof that you have allowed age to shrink your moral universe, rather than expand and deepen it. It is, above all, a reason to think that you should stop talking for a minute and listen to what the angry young people are saying.

Yesterday, I was in Times Square for a rally in support of the endangered citizens of Palestine. Most of the people there were young. But there were also quite a few elderly people, some hobbling on canes, who had painfully dragged themselves out to stand and be a part off the supportive crowd. Because they knew it was important. Because they understood what is at stake. They were not there to compete with the young, to mutter snide takedowns of the speakers, to talk about why the rally should have been framed differently in order to attract the support of more moderate figures in Washington. They were there because people are dying. They had perspective. They had wisdom. I hope that we can all get there, one day.

Enough!

From The Atlantic again! It's alarming that no one is calling this out in a forceful way:

Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death.

That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.) Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic’s publication of a profile of Milley, by this magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the ways in which Milley attempted to protect the Constitution from Trump.

And yet, none of the nation’s front pages blared “Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution” or “Former President Accuses General of Treason.” Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.

Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.

Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. If a mob boss were to say, “In times gone by, people like you would have had their legs broken,” nobody would mistake that for a historical observation. The suggestion is clear, and it comes from a man who has one of America’s loudest megaphones—one that is directed squarely at millions of extremists who are well armed, who insist that the government is illegitimate, and who believe that people like Milley are part of a “deep state” plot against the country.

Academics have a formal term for exactly this type of incitement: stochastic terrorism. An influential figure with a large following demonizes a person or a group of people. The likelihood is strong that some small number of followers will take those words literally—when Trump implies that Milley deserves to be put to death, some of his disciples might take it as a marching order. The number of those who take action does not have to be large for the result to be horrific.

Already, one of Trump’s minions in Congress has echoed the incitement to violence. The Republican Paul Gosar of Arizona wrote—in his taxpayer-funded newsletter, no less—that “in a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.” The meaning is not ambiguous: Gosar is explicitly saying that killing Milley would be desirable.

Trump is Responsible

 

From Adam Serwer at The Atlantic:

If you cannot get an abortion, if you fear leaving your state to get an abortion, if you are afraid to text your loved ones or type abortion into a search bar, if you are scared to ask a friend or loved one to help you get an abortion, if you know someone coerced into remaining in an abusive relationship because they fear prosecution, if you cannot find an obstetrician in your state, if you have a relative who was left at the edge of death by doctors afraid to risk prosecution by violating an abortion ban—you have Donald Trump to thank.

And yet, if you skim the headlines, you might come away with the impression that Trump is a moderate on abortion. In an interview Sunday, Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he thought a Republican-primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had made a “terrible mistake” by signing a law that bans abortion at six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant. His rambling remarks also suggested support for a federal ban on abortion: “What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months. You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy … I would sit down with both sides and I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”

A federal ban, of course, would make the current encroachments of the abortion surveillance state even worse, by committing the resources of the federal government to controlling women’s reproductive choices. Federalism currently limits the power of Republican-run states to impose themselves on people’s private lives. The federal government has fewer such limitations.

Trump’s remarks provoked headlines that suggested—with caveats and debunkings coming only lower down—that he was somehow moderating on the issue of abortion. Some articles left out the crucial fact that DeSantis’s six-week ban was only possible because of Trump himself. The justices he chose reversed decades of legal precedents that had established standards—few restrictions before the third trimester, few exceptions after—that were roughly consistent with public opinion, more so than those that followed Roe’s demise.

During the 2022 midterms, Trump urged Republicans to “talk differently” about abortion. Not govern differently, but talk differently. That is all he is doing here: If Trump now wants to give the impression that he opposes abortion bans, it is because he senses that in a world where such bans are no longer hypothetical but a threat to fundamental civil liberties, this is a way to earn positive headlines. But he has an actual record to be judged on. This is not 2016, when a Trump administration was an abstraction and no one had any idea what he would do in office.

Trump appointed the justices who overturned Roe. He appointed the right-wing apparatchiks to the federal bench who are rewriting the law out of whole cloth to conform to right-wing preferences. He made it possible for red-state governors like DeSantis to ban abortion and then use that as an excuse to thrust the power of the state into the private lives of Americans and control what they say and do, and even where they move. This is Donald Trump’s legacy.

On Today's House of Reps

 

Here is what a reader posted on NYT editorial discussing the state of the Republican led House of Reps:

No budget, no hearings, no regular order, no international leadership, no fiscal responsibility, no respect for law enforcement, no respect for military leadership, no military promotions, no stability for military families, no climate change action, no clean energy jobs, no clean air or water, no infrastructure jobs, no immigration reform, no trade legislation, no help for farmers, no help for criminal justice, no affordable health insurance, no affordable higher education, no help with childcare, no respect for women's personal decisions, no increase to the federal minimum wage, no help for Medicare or Social Security but brave demands to extend tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Amazing.

Lock Him Up

From The Atlantic:

For a free society wishing to preserve its governmental system, the prosecutions of Donald Trump for trying to overturn our democracy and willfully mishandling national secrets is not optional. They are the essential step that must be taken if America’s rule of law is going to survive, and be worthy of the trust that is essential to that survival. More hopefully, they offer the nation its single best chance of escaping from the appalling thrall of Trump’s lies and insults since he came down that escalator eight years ago.

One cannot imagine a more serious set of offenses by a sitting president against the nation than working deliberately to overturn the result of a democratic election—one that he clearly knew from his closest advisers he had lost—or illegally squirreling away and refusing to return some of the country’s most sensitive secrets. The seriousness is greatly magnified in the first instance by the extent and persistence of the conduct at issue, spanning many months and transcending multiple states and means used to change the electoral outcome. In the documents case, again, the amount of classified material and the persistence of evasive efforts to avoid returning the materials is breathtaking.

The extent and quality of the evidence of wrongdoing in both cases, including audio and video tapes, is also extraordinary, and reveals in countless ways that Trump was the primary driving force behind virtually all of the key misdeeds in both cases. In any situation where so much evidence exists, there will be complexities associated with prosecuting. And yes, a jury could nevertheless acquit or hang. But that risk is present in every criminal case, and is no reason to decline to prosecute.

To do so in these cases—featuring truly egregious wrongs personally committed by someone in a position of the highest trust—would be a failure of our vaunted system of equal justice at the most fundamental level. The planners and perpetrators of the January 6 events that Trump inspired and refused to stop are now receiving sentences of roughly 20 years; giving a pass to the person who unquestionably caused it all by violating his most sacred obligations to the nation would be unthinkable.But it is not just an abstract commitment to justice—and to the idea that no person should be above the law—that urgently necessitates prosecution here. It is also the need to deter the worst forms of conduct that Trump has persisted in as we look forward to future elections, including those happening next fall. Although he failed to achieve his goal by illegal means in the election of 2020, he and many of his Republican allies are working hard not only to delegitimize the last election, but to see that the next election will go his way regardless of the votes actually cast. If very strong evidence of such wrongdoing does not merit criminal enforcement, what is to deter Trump or anyone from trying to steal elections in the future?

Mr. Prolific Corruption

From The Atlantic, another strike against DeSantis:

By this stage in the presidential campaign, much has been made of the severely conservative politics of Ron DeSantis. Voters have also become well acquainted with what a clumsy campaigner he is. But those two facts have perhaps eclipsed a third essential characteristic of the Florida governor: the astonishing sweep of his (apparently legal) corruption. DeSantis has demonstrated a prolific ability to use the power of government to raise money and reap other perks while working to shield that behavior from public view.

“I could sell golf for $50k this morning,” one DeSantis aide wrote to others in 2019, in an email obtained by The Washington Post and published over the weekend. It was part of a broader strategy: Once DeSantis took office, his aides made a list of 40 lobbyists with a goal of raising millions for the governor’s political-action committee and other funds. For the golf scheme, the idea was to get a lobbyist to shell out, using his client’s cash, to play a round with DeSantis and his wife, Casey. Experts told the Post that the arrangement was legal under Florida law. DeSantis was aware of the plan and updated on its progress.

“It’s about getting your phone calls returned and having the ability to make asks,” one lobbyist told the Post. “You want to engender access and goodwill with the governor.” A DeSantis campaign spokesperson, meanwhile, told the paper that “donors never have and never will dictate policy for Ron DeSantis—just ask Disney.”

But everyone already understood that most big donations are about buying access, even if it’s admirably blunt for one of the participants to say so on the record, albeit anonymously. During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Donald Trump was even more transparent, explaining his past donations to Democrats including Hillary Clinton. “Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding,” he said at one debate. “She had no choice, because I gave to a foundation.” This frankness gave Trump credibility with some voters when he promised to “drain the swamp” of unethical behavior in Washington, though it should really have served as a warning about how he would operate in office.

DeSantis has promised to be a president like Trump but without the drama, and he has apparently learned from the former president how to use his office for personal benefit. As NBC News uncovered this spring, some members of the state administration hit up lobbyists for donations to DeSantis’s presidential campaign. Once again, this is probably legal—as long as the staffers weren’t using state resources or time on the clock to make the requests. Yet it’s also extremely sketchy. As one lobbyist pointed out, DeSantis will remain governor even if he doesn’t become president, so lobbyists have to maintain their access, especially because DeSantis has proved he’s willing to punish any perceived disloyalty.

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