#its not pure ignorance i do believe that to her its All Russia Anyway

[natandacat]

@claudia-de-lioncourt No no speak up, you're right and you should say it. Gabrielle de lioncourt is in the room with us right now and she might have some words too lol

@black-market-wd4o ah but dont forget... Marius thinks of himself as "sharing the wealth"! He's just helping civilization and art along by harnessing the talent of wasted youth! Amadeo is once again not very impressed.

@platoapproved You're 100% correct and let us not forget why Marius (cough Anne Rice cough) is so racist towards Armand! Let's see why ukraine keeps being depicted as less european and more backward than the rest of eastern europe throughout the book -Marius tells us right here, dimissing Amadeo's all in all quite reasonable lack of faith in the society that enslaved and abused him:

Ah. The Mongol invasions. Right. Thats when it became a dark and savage land. Gotcha. Hey quickly Marius what are your opinions on Fortress Europe.

Like look at this

"See Amadeo I care about REAL working men... bankers and merchants" bdjwjdkfbfjf

Also the absolute clownery of saying that last line to the boy he bought from a brothel. I don't care that he ends up wanting to send him to university or whatever, he admits himself that amadeo was not supposed to have any options but to be his to mold. No shit Armand feels discouraged.

[willymywonkers]

Pure Imagination

Summary: We get introduced into the world of Maude Figgle, and how one of her students, Charlie Bucket, reunites her with an old friend.

A/N: This too longer than I'd like to admit lmaoooo. This is my first time writing a willy wonka fic, so constructive criticism is greatly appreciated!!

The chocolate factory at the edge of town was always a mystery to people. Its large tunnels stood tall casing a shadow over people. All of Willy Wonka's delectable goods were protected behind hundreds of walls of steel and black bricks that were absolutely impenetrable.

Maude had seen the factory about a dozen times, and each time, she wondered what would it be like to go inside. She had always admired the elusive chocolatier from a far, but she was so nervous to actually talk with him.

Maude had remembered a time when Willy Wonka wasn't famous, and was just a boy that lived two blocks down from her. Of all people, Will was the nicest boy she'd ever met. When they were younger, Maude would enjoy spending her time with Will, encouraging him to take risks, and be a little impulsive. Will knew she was a bit wild, but that's what he liked about her. Someone who wasn't afraid of any consequences and just went with the heart told them.

However, things began to get rough for Maude. She wasn't the little girl that pushed the boundaries anymore. She was Will's partner, and she was the main It happened when Maude met her ex husband, Ronald. Ron was extremely jealous of Will. It was apparent that Will liked Maude more than anyone else. Will didn't like touching other workers. That was the main reason he wore gloves.

However, he acted differently around Maude. He seemed to be more comfortable with touching her, and letting her touch him. Ron caught sight of this. He deemed that Maude belonged to him.

Eventually, Ron made Maude cut all contact from Will. This happened when Willy was going through a sharp decrease in candy sales. With people all over the world after his secrets, Will didn't really have anybody he could trust. Other than Maude.

Maude didn't want to quit working with Will, but Ron didn't give her much of a choice. Ron had gotten more and more controlling towards her, thus affecting her mental health greatly.

Then, she snapped at Ron, telling him that this was wrong. Ron slapped her across the face. The next day, Maude resigned.

The news crushed Willy, causing him to close the factory for good.

Years later, Maude divorced Ron, taking her own independence back. Maude often would walk by the factory, but it was a painful reminder to her, and how she treated her best friend.

Maude became a chemistry teacher, so that she could be close with children, and help their young minds grow. Of course, there were students that would barely pay attention, and would ignore what she said altogether. However, there was one student in her class that she was very fond of. A young boy named Charlie Bucket.

He was quite clever for his age, and he would always be interested whatever experiments she was conducting.

"Good morning, Ms. Figgle," Charlie said, walking into the classroom.

Maude smiled at the boy. Her glasses hung from the bridge of her nose. "Good morning, Charlie. Did you enjoy winter break?"

He nodded. "But, I didn't get anything this year."

"Oh, I'm sorry, dear." Maude knew about Charlie's financial situation. She always tried to make things a little more lenient on him, unlike his other teachers.

"It's alright. Christmas is about spending time with your family, anyways."

Maude nodded. "Well, I've got a present for you, Charlie."

She got out a medium sized box wrapped in newspaper, and handed it to him.

"What is it?" He asked.

"You're just gonna have to open it to find out."

It was a brown sweater with a black stripe in the front.

Charlie smiled at the present, though he seemed taken aback by the gesture.

"I can't accept this." Charlie said, putting the sweater back in the box.

"But, it's frigid out there. You'll need it." Maude handed Charlie back the sweater.

He smiled up at Maude. "You're right. I really appreciate it, Ms. Figgle."

The kids all plied into the class at once. Excitement from being back from break made all the kids rambley and quite loud.

"Have you heard about the golden tickets?"

"I'm gonna get the first one."

All the kids seemed to be chattering all about these golden tickets. Maude hadn't a clue about what they were.

"Golden tickets?" Maude asked, looking slightly confused.

"There was an announcement about it last night. Mr. Wonka is going to be opening up his factory for 5 children all over the world." Charlie said, clearing up her confusion.

Maude's eyes lit up. "Really? That's incredible!"

Charlie agreed.

This fact made Maude's heart jump. She really wanted to see Will again, but she knew she barely had a chance. 5 golden tickets in the whole world, and there was only one of her. She tossed her excitement aside in hopes that a kid truly worthy of the ticket takes it.

A few weeks go by and the first ticket is found. Maude was sitting in front of her television when it was announced. She wasn't surprised that the first ticket was found by some kid who ate chocolate all the time, but it was how quickly he found it.

After that, each kid was worst than the last. It really pained her to see such rotten kids get all the spotlight, when kids like, Charlie, were barely making ends meet.

Maude found herself back at the factory, wondering what was going on inside.

"Hello, Ms. Figgle!" Charlie called from behind.

Maude turned around, snapping out of her thoughts. "Oh, hello, Charlie. What are you doing here?"

"Why are you always staring at the factory?" Charlie countered.

Maude gulped. "Well, you see, a long time ago, I actually knew Mr. Wonka."

"You did? I think my grandpa told me about it."

"Right, but I didn't just work for him. I was his partner in it all. I did all the experiments. I created new kinds of candy every day."

Maude and Charlie began walking down the snowy street, as Maude told Charlie the many adventures her and Mr. Wonka shared.

"Were you ever in love with Mr. Wonka?" Charlie asked, jokingly.

Maude chuckled. "Of course not."

Of course, she was lying to herself. She couldn't see herself standing beside him. Maude felt that Willy deserved someone better, especially when all she did was burn him.

Maude's smile faltered. She felt an ache in her heart.

"Ms. Figgle, are you alright?"

Maude turned her head towards Charlie. "Huh?"

"I was asking if you were alright."

"Oh yeah. I'm fine."

The two continued walking down the street, passing by a candy shop.

"Do you think I could ever win a golden ticket?" Charlie seemed a bit down. "I only get one wonka bar a year for my birthday, and my grandpa spend his last shilling."

"Let me tell you this, Charlie, you're a bright young man." Maude kneeled down to his level, putting a hand on his shoulder. "I believe in you. You are worthy of a golden ticket. All those other kids don't have the kindness you share with others. And, as someone who's personally worked for Wonka, I'd save the best for last."

Charlie's spirits picked up. He smiled brightly, thanking Maude before heading home.

The next day, rumors speculated that some kid in Russia had found the last ticket, but it was later proven to be false. This rose to more anticipation to who would be the last ticket holder.

While reading through the newspaper, Maude found out that Charlie had found the very last golden ticket. Maude smiled widely. One of her students found the last golden ticket. She couldn't be more proud of him.

She stood amongst the crowd outside. She couldn't stay for long, but she wanted just a glimpse of Wonka, however, there was too many people in her way.

A few weeks later, it seemed that more and more people were curious about the factory. Charlie had told her some of the things that happened during his trip. Things that were completely outlandish, and weird. A girl turning into a blueberry? And, a boy nearly drowning into a chocolate river?

"You know, Mr. Wonka wasn't as nice as I thought he was." Charlie said.

"What do you mean?" Maude asked.

"Well, he was nice at first. He was going to offer me his entire factory. On the condition that I wouldn't ever see my family again."

Maude sighed. "Right."

This was quite like Will. Family wasn't at the forefront of his mind. Trusting people was also a big issue with him, considering in the past most of his workers turned against him.

"Have you ever thought about seeing Mr. Wonka again?" Charlie asked.

Maude looked at Charlie, with a wishful smile on her face. "All the time."

Another few weeks ago by, and Maude hadn't seen much of Charlie. She began to worry about him.

One day, she heard a knock on her door.

"Hello?" She answered.

Charlie was standing at the door, smiling up at her. "Good morning, Ms. Figgle."

"It's quite early, Charlie." She chuckled. "What is it?"

"I wanted you to meet someone."

Maude opened the door to see a man in a top hat, smiling nervously at her.

"Will?" Maude said, as tears were pricking from her eyes. Her heart was jumping out of her chest.

"Hey Maude." Willy smiled.

She pulled him into a hug, wrapping her arms around his neck.

Will was taken aback by the hug, but awkwardly caved in. He could hear soft sobbing coming from her, but he didn't mind.

Charlie smiled at the two.

In this one moment, Maude truly felt the pure happiness and joy as she felt when she was a child.

[jyndor]

Cop-thing-anon here:

(I don't believe in the blue lives matter thing by the way)

I do get where you're coming from. I guess I see the thing about cops and cop AUs differently because the police is different and not as fucked up in my country. The thing about the fanart is just..I think you're reading too much into it. I don't think the artist really focused on the skin colour of Sokka, I mean, it's a kids show. Skin colour was never really mentioned or important in atla. But Sokka's personality is most likely why the artist was inspired to draw him as a "gangster", with azula (the villain) being a cop. It is kind of insensitive to draw that with the events going on, but I think that a lot of people in the fandom take some things way too seriously, for a kids show back in the late 2000's anyway.

hey anon, I say this with love and I am being sincere. I'm gonna need you to rewatch the show if you think skin color didn't matter. and it doesn't matter where you live because there is no part of the world, no culture, that isn't shaped by colonialism. I don't mean to be condescending so please bear with me, I truly believe in educating people as a part of allyship and anti-racism.

Anon, please know that I am not angry or anything but sincere in what I’m about to say. Just bear with me because I know that unlearning shit is difficult and can be painful, but we’ve gotta do it. I do appreciate you wanting to have this conversation at all. And I’m not writing this just for your benefit - this is for anyone who wants to learn about why A) race is a part of ATLA’s narrative and B) why critical analysis of mass media is actually important. So I’m not assuming you don’t know basic things about this stuff, I’m not trying to be condescending.

Now we’re gonna fix colonialism and imperialism XD wee okay here we go.

No matter where you live in the world you have some awareness of skin color. Your understanding of race might be different than mine, in fact it probably is. Race as we know it today is a social construct that stems from many things (and I wrote several hundred words on it but it was too much and too far removed from the point I’m trying to make so I edited all of that out. Yay.)

You don’t usually see imperialism, one of the major themes in Avatar, without colonialism. Imperialism is slightly different than colonialism - you can think of it like the ideology behind the practice of colonialism.* Imperialism can be used to describe expansionism in general - which has been going on since the bronze age lol humans, I stg - but usually when people today refer to colonialism and imperialism they’re talking about imperialism starting in the 17th century.

Now imperialism is not just a European concept. ATLA is set in a world that we know is supposed to be like a combination of different Asian cultures (with some influences from the Americas). And the Fire Nation is clearly influenced by Imperial Japan. So briefly:

Japan had a policy of sakoku (chained or closed country) which kept it mostly isolated (out of concerns that Japan would fall victim to something like the Opium Wars in China, among other things) from the rest of the world for a couple hundred years until the 1850s when a US Naval commander named Matthew Perry (I am not kidding) forced Japan to open its borders for trade to the United States by gunboat diplomacy, an oxymoron if I have ever seen one before.

Japan ended up signing unequal treaties with a lot of Western countries, and this bred xenophobia and hostility in Japan. The Emperor who signed these treaties died of smallpox, and after some internal conflict his son decided try to renegotiate these treaties. The US and European countries were not interested in renegotiating dick but the mission wasn’t unsuccessful because the diplomats A) exchanged some islands with Russia and B) were inspired by western economic policy and society to “modernize” Japan. Japan began industrialization and it converted to a market economy with the help of the US and other western powers.

So over many years, Japan went to war with China, Korea, Russia (and took back some of the land they exchanged with them), and others. From wikipedia:

Using its superior technological advances in naval aviation and its modern doctrines of amphibious and naval warfare, Japan achieved one of the fastest maritime expansions in history. By 1942 Japan had conquered much of East Asia and the Pacific, including the east of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, part of New Guinea and many islands of the Pacific Ocean.

But ATLA is not a Japanese story. The Fire Nation is not Imperial Japan. The Earth Kingdom is not China or Korea, the Air Nomads are not Tibetan monks, and the Water Tribes are not Inuit. The creators definitely drew heavy inspiration from all of these places and others, but ATLA is a story written by American people in the United States for American kids. It is an American story.

And it was created at a time when the United States was victimizing people in Afghanistan and Iraq (and other places) in many similar ways to how the Fire Nation victimized people. In fact, the show starts in the Southern Water Tribe, which represent Inuit people, indigenous people in Alaska, Canada and Greenland, I think it’s safe to assume that the genocide being referenced here is not one by Japan but rather by European colonizers and later by the United States and Canada.

Imperialism is in the show’s DNA. 

And so is racism. In our world they are inherently connected. And visual cues from the show along with things the characters say suggest that we are meant to make the comparison between our world and the ATLA world. Every story has a purpose - it doesn’t have to be political, but for Avatar it is political, it is anti-imperialist.

In this article about how ATLA resonates with us in 2020, Aina Khan of the Guardian interviews Professor Ali A Olomi about using ATLA to teach at Penn State. “One of the things we see with the Fire Nation is the ideological justification for what they’re doing. We are a glorious civilization. We have abundance, we have wealth, we have technological advancement; we need to share it with the rest of the world. That’s almost word for word European colonisation.”

Zuko and Azula both call Katara a peasant. In fact, Azula calls her a dirty peasant. This is one step away from calling her a s*vage I mean come on. While peasant might just be purely classist (lol no) because Zuko and Azula are royalty, um it’s clearly racialized classism because of real life context. There is real history with colonizers calling indigenous people this, dismissing their cultures as primitive and barbaric.

Add into the mix colorism, which is bias against darker skin and privileges fair skin (which is a byproduct of imperialism) and you have clear race shit happening in Avatar.

When I saw that fanart, I was immediately reminded of black lives matter of course, but mainly of the fact that indigenous peoples are also at high risk of being victimized by police. Not just in the US. And how gross it is to depict a colonizer like Azula as an angry cop (representing the state) turning her gun on an indigenous man who is dressed like a gangster which... yike.

Mass media influence everything we do. The messaging we get, our politics, what we want to eat for dinner because we’re hungry and have been writing this stupid essay for three hours LOL. It’s important that people think critically about what they consume. Otherwise you get the goddamn United States with half of our population stanning a racist fraud. You want to know why US Americans are so ignorant? Because our education system sucks, because we don’t have any real media literacy. But apparently the rest of the world has some fucking nerve making fun of Americans** because all of us suck at it. No one is thinking critically about media.

A really terrifying thing about people is our ability to take whatever message we want from stories, even if it is in direct contradiction with the narrative of a story. There’s a movie called American History X which is explicitly anti-fascist, but because it’s a drama and Ed Norton is cut and looks badass and uncucked or whatever LOL, the iconography in that movie is fairly popular with neo-nazis. Yike. This is not at that level of course, this is some random niche fanart for a rare pairing.

For better or for worse, US media and entertainment gets a lot of attention and people around the world eat it up. Maybe you don’t need to know every little detail about US American shit, and I know we tend to dominate media, but black lives matter is not just a 2020 thing. People have known about it for years, since it started. If that fanart was created in 2019, which I think it was, the BLM movement had already existed for six years. If you’re watching an American show like Avatar and you’re making fanart on social media but you don’t know what BLM is in 2019... well educate yourself lmao.

Considering that Black fans have expressed frustration and discomfort in fandoms over and over again, and I am sure indigenous fans have too because fandoms are racist sometimes, it’s important that white fans help make fandoms better. And I am a white fan, and I consider myself an anti-racist. Which means I have to be active about racism when I see it.

btw I found this great essay by @cobra-diamond which you should read if you want more details about the similarities between Japan and the Fire Nation.

* that is very reductive but it’s fine lol

** I am kidding, unless you are english feel free to make fun of americans for non-gun, non-trauma related things pls

[bountyofbeads]

The King Lear Era of Donald Trump’s Presidency

Unconstrained by the law, enabled by his staff, the unitary executive is raging.

By DAHLIA LITHWICK | Published FEB 21, 2020 2:30 PM ET | Slate |

On Thursday, President Donald Trump railed at the Oscars for awarding its highest honors to a foreign film. He then installed an acclaimed insult comic with no national intelligence experience as his acting director of national intelligence, because he prefers hearing from intelligence directors who tell him what he wants to believe as opposed to what is happening. He also indicated that when he threatens judges and jurors involved in federal criminal cases it’s OK because he has First Amendment needs that transcend the demands of rule of law. In other words, in the span of a few days, we’ve moved from unitary executive to peak Lear-wandering-on-the-heath executive. The only remaining operative question is: Who will be rewarded for loving the king as much as the king demands?

The American constitutional order is comprised of two camps in this moment: the president’s enemies and the president’s staffers. Having asserted this week that he is the “chief law enforcement officer of the United States,” and having previously concluded that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want,” the president has carved the world into the only two categories he comprehends: his interchangeable fixers and his mortal enemies. Attorney General Bill Barr, who auditioned for his position by offering himself up specifically as a fixer, has tried as valiantly as possible to get the president to stop tweeting about ongoing criminal matters. He even said he might quit if the president didn’t stop treating him like the president’s pool boy. Needless to say, he didn’t quit, and is, as a formal matter now, the president’s pool boy.

Even when they depart, nobody ever stops being on the president’s roster of lifelong staffers. Not Don McGahn, not John Bolton, not John Kelly, and not Hope Hicks. Some of them leave the White House and then some drift back to the White House, emptying ashtrays and hampering attempts at obstruction, but they’re forever on staff, lashed to the president by way of elaborate (unenforceable) NDAs, or legal claims of absolute privilege, or by their own paradoxical beliefs that they are not in fact essential to the plot, but also that you should definitely preorder their book about the experience on Amazon.

Staffers are frequently upbraided when they are not appropriately servile. Jeff Sessions is not sufficiently loyal and so is replaced by a Bill Barr. Former acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who helped cover up the Ukraine scandal, is not sufficiently loyal and is to be replaced by an internet troll who will be a part-time ambassador to Germany. Because offering truthful information about Russian threats to the 2020 election indicates disloyalty, the only staffers who can remain on the payroll are those who remember to tell the emperor that his waistcoat is superb. This is pretty standard King George III territory, all bowing and scraping and insisting that the sovereign simply cannot be made to understand that there are rules and procedures, until the rules and procedures stop mattering at all.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson deserves immense credit for taking 45 minutes in her sentencing of Roger Stone on Thursday to remind the president that she actually isn’t on his staff. In her insistence that words have consequences and truth still matters and undermining institutions threatens to topple liberal democracy itself, she was uncompromising about the need for law, neutral arbiters, congressional oversight, and proportionality. The president didn’t understand any of this. Instead, he reminded her that he has limitless pardon power that he will deploy when the time is right. Time and again, we are given to understand that Donald Trump simply does not grasp the fact that the Department of Justice isn’t his personal law firm. It seems everyone’s just given up on attempting to change his mind. We are all in agreement: He’s the only arbiter of his constraints. Spoiler: He doesn’t believe in constraints.

It is ironic, one supposes, that the man who believes himself to be unconditionally empowered has somehow allowed himself to be a purely transactional bit player in a larger Russian scheme to foment mistrust of U.S. election systems. It would demand a smaller ego for Donald Trump to recognize that he was already a pawn in 2016 and is still a useful pawn in 2020. But, having surrounded himself with those who see their role as limiting the flow of unhappy news to him, the fact that he cannot understand how little he understands has become the central feature of his presidency. As the New York Times’ push alert for its news story on Russian interference put it yesterday, “Russia is aiding President Trump in the 2020 election, intelligence officials told lawmakers. Mr. Trump complained Democrats might exploit the news.” That extraordinary pairing of sentences now feels rather normal. The constitutional universe is finally shrunk down to the size of one man’s ability to understand the constitutional universe.

Donald Trump is very dissatisfied with Brad Pitt, bad cops, his intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence briefings, a Roger Stone juror, and the fact that they just don’t make films like Gone With the Wind anymore. Because this is the scope of his constitutional aperture, the world is formally split into friends and enemies, loyalists and spies, the underlings and the other, fired underlings. In this one sense only, Donald Trump was wrong about the limitless reach of his own Article II powers: Yes, they are seemingly infinite, but the rest of us occupy a world that is ever more tragically constrained by the failures of his imagination.

*********

The First Days of the Trump Regime

The president has interpreted the Republican-controlled Senate’s vote to acquit as a writ of absolute power.

By Adam Serwer | Published February 19, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

There are two kinds of Republican senators who voted to acquit Donald Trump in his impeachment trial two weeks ago: those who acknowledged he was guilty and voted to acquit anyway, and those who pretended the president had done nothing wrong.

“It was wrong for President Trump to mention former Vice President Biden on that phone call, and it was wrong for him to ask a foreign country to investigate a political rival,” Senator  Susan Collins of Maine declared, but added that removing him “could have unpredictable and potentially adverse consequences for public confidence in our electoral process.”

But Collins, like her Republican colleagues Lisa Murkowski of Alaska  and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, was an outlier in admitting the president’s conduct was wrong. Most others in the caucus, like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, deliberately missed the point, insisting that Democrats wanted the president removed for “pausing aid to Ukraine for a few weeks.”

Peter Wehner: The downfall of the Republican Party

What all these senators share is a willingness to ignore the nature of the offense. Both Collins, who has worked in government in some capacity since the 1970s, and Cotton, a Harvard-educated attorney, understood the basic constitutional arguments for removing a president who attempts to rig a reelection campaign in his favor, which is why they simply ignored them. Collins insisted that the matter be decided by the forthcoming election, disregarding the fact that Trump was impeached because he tried to use his official powers to manipulate that election, while Cotton simply pretended to be clueless about what was at issue.

The ambiguity of these two positions obscures the clarity with which the president and his attorney general, William Barr, have interpreted the acquittal vote. The Senate’s vote to acquit Trump of the impeachment charges he faced, despite the incontrovertible proof that he sought to use his official powers to force a foreign country to falsely implicate a political rival, was not simply a vote to keep him in office until the electorate can render its verdict. Republican senators affirmatively voted to allow the president to use his official powers to suppress the opposition party, to purge government employees who proved more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump, and to potentially prosecute or otherwise criminally implicate his political enemies without lawful cause, while shielding Trump allies from legal sanction. The acquittal vote ratified the authoritarian instincts of the president and the ideological convictions of his attorney general.

The most generous interpretation of the votes of Collins, Murkowski, and Alexander is that the senators believed they were staving off a greater crisis of democracy. But in the eyes of the president, their votes for acquittal were cast to install him as a strongman.

Authoritarian nations come in many different stripes, but they all share a fundamental characteristic: The people who live in them are not allowed to freely choose their own leaders. This is why Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, in his speech announcing his vote to convict on the first article of impeachment, said that “corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”

Democracies are sustained through the formal process by which power is contested and exchanged. Once that process is corrupted, you have merely the trappings of democracy within an authoritarian regime. Such governments may retain elections and courts and legislatures, but those institutions have no power to enforce the rule of law. America is not there yet—but the acquittal vote was a fateful step in that direction.

The process by which a democracy becomes an authoritarian regime is what social scientists call authoritarianization. The process does not need to be sudden and dramatic. Often, democratic mechanisms are eroded over a period of months or years, slowly degrading the ability of the public to choose its leaders or hold them to account.

Legislators in functioning democracies need not agree on substantive policy matters—they might fight over environmental safeguards, for example, or tax rates, or immigration, or health care. But no matter the party or ideology they support, they must hold sacred the right of the people to choose their own leaders. The entire Senate Republican Conference has only one legislator willing to act on that principle. The lesson Trump has learned from impeachment is that the Republican Party will let him get away with anything he wants to do.

After calling the accusation that Trump collaborated with foreign powers in an effort to swing American elections a "hoax," Barr set up an official channel  for the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to funnel foreign dirt on Trump’s rivals to the Justice Department. After falsely  claiming that Joe Biden had demanded  the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son, Trump has engaged in the exact act he accused Biden of engaging in, by attempting to shield his henchman Roger Stone from legal consequences  for breaking the law on his behalf, leading to the resignation of the prosecutors working on the case. Barr also has handpicked advisers  “reviewing” the case against Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia officials during the transition. The day of Trump’s acquittal, the Justice Department announced that Barr would have to approve any investigations into the 2020 presidential candidates, giving him the authority to shut down criminal investigations of the president’s associates or approve inquiries into his rivals. Speaking to reporters, Trump  claimed the “absolute right” to determine who is and who is not prosecuted by the Justice Department. There is no law but Trump.

Modern authoritarian institutions diligently seek to preserve the appearance of democratic accountability. Perhaps for this reason, Barr has insisted publicly that he is protecting the independence of the Justice Department. “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody,” he told reporters last week. Barr insisted,  “If Trump were to say ‘Go investigate somebody,’ and you sense it’s because they’re a political opponent, then an attorney general shouldn’t carry that out, wouldn’t carry that out.” This is a lawyerly dodge masquerading as bluster—Barr does not need to be bullied into shielding Trump and his friends or pursuing his enemies. Indeed, Barr’s task is to do so while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy over the process, which is impossible to do when Trump makes such demands publicly. Privately, Trump seethes that Barr has not thrown more of his critics in prison, as Barr and his underlings scheme to sate the president’s rage.

Although in nearly every other context, Barr has been an advocate for the harshest possible punishments, it would be wrong to say his insistence on leniency for Stone is inconsistent or out of character. He has attacked the reform-minded district attorneys who are pursuing less harsh punishments as “anti-law-enforcement DAs” who are seeking “pathetically lenient” sentences. And he has warned critics of police misconduct that if they don’t “respect” law enforcement, “they might find themselves without the police protection they need”—turning policing from a public service into a protection racket. But Barr is also the man who pushed for pardons for high-ranking government officials who broke federal law in the Iran-Contra affair. The underlying principle here, from Stone to Iran-Contra, is authoritarian but consistent: Members of the ruling clique are entitled to criticize law enforcement without sanction, and entitled to leniency when they commit crimes on the boss’s behalf. Everyone else is entitled to kneel.

Trump has also engaged in a purge of officials who testified truthfully—some of them only somewhat truthfully—in the impeachment hearings. Trump fired his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, who confirmed that Trump had conditioned aid to Ukraine on procuring an announcement that Biden’s son Hunter was under investigation by Ukrainian authorities. He removed not only Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman but also his twin brother, Yevgeny Vindman, from the White House staff after Vindman’s truthful testimony that the president sought to coerce Ukraine into falsely implicating the Bidens. Trump mocked Alexander Vindman on Twitter after his ouster by putting his rank in scare quotes, a marked contrast to his effusive praise for war criminals. Similarly, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie Liu, had her nomination for a top position in the Treasury Department withdrawn after Trump publicly attacked prosecutors in her office for their handling of the Stone case.

In any administration, political appointees serve at the pleasure of the president. But these officials did not somehow fail in performing their official duties or even clash with official policy. As Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma put it, “People were supposed to have loyalty. Obviously they didn’t.”

Public officials swear an oath to the Constitution, not to Donald Trump. The purged officials were removed for their disloyalty to the latter, not the former. With the exception of Romney, who voted against acquittal on the first of the two charges, the GOP now makes no distinction between fealty to Trump and loyalty to the country. The Founders devised the impeachment clause as a remedy for a chief executive who abuses his power to stay in office. But as there were no parties at the time of the founding, they did not foresee that such a chief executive would be shielded by toadies who envision their civic obligations as beginning and ending with devotion to the leader.

Much has been made of Trump’s unfitness for office. But if Trump were the only one who were unfit, his authoritarian impulses would have been easier to contain. Instead, the Republican Party is slowly transforming into a regime party, one whose primary duty is to maintain its control of the government at all costs. The benefits here are mutual: By keeping Trump in power, the party retains power. Individuals who want to rise in the Republican Party and its associated organizations today must be unwavering in their devotion to the leader—that is the only way to have a career in the GOP, let alone reap the associated political and financial benefits. Allowing Trump to fall would render all the humiliations, compromises, and sacrifices the party has made to keep him in power meaningless.  

But keeping Trump in office is not the ultimate goal, despite party members’ obsequious public performances toward Trump. Rather, the purpose is to preserve the authoritarian structure Trump and Barr are building, so that it can be inherited by the next Republican president. To be more specific, the Trump administration is not fighting a “deep state”; it is seeking to build one that will outlast him.

These recent events are not the only evidence that the United States has entered a process of authoritarianization. Aside from Trump’s claim, effectively uncontested by Senate Republicans, that he can unilaterally direct the Justice Department to prosecute anyone he wants, Trump has asserted blanket authority to block congressional oversight. His office has claimed that he can blithely ignore congressional appropriations as he sees fit. The Republican-controlled Senate has ratified Trump’s authority to interfere in American elections, while helping install judges who understand that their paramount obligation is to shield Trump from accountability. The president’s public attacks on political opponents and detractors, and his demands that they be sanctioned or prosecuted, have had the intended effect of silencing elite criticism of the administration—most former high-ranking military officials would only anonymously  rebuke the president’s purge of the Vindmans and his subsequent attacks on them. Potential future dissidents are meant to note the folly of placing their civic obligations before the whims of the president.

Let us pause for a moment to take stock of this vision of government. It is a state in which the legislature can neither oversee the executive branch nor pass laws that constrain it. A state in which legal requests for government records on those associated with the political opposition are satisfied immediately, and such requests related to the sitting executive are denied wholesale. It is a system in which the executive can be neither investigated for criminal activity nor removed by the legislature for breaking the law. It is a government in which only the regime party may make enforceable demands, and where the opposition party may compete in elections, but only against the efforts of federal law enforcement to marginalize them for their opposition to the president. It is a vision of government in which members of the civil service may break the law on the leader’s behalf, but commit an unforgivable crime should they reveal such malfeasance to the public.

Were it in any other nation, how would you describe a government that functions this way?

Trump’s record of success in the courts is one reason the U.S. has yet to cross another dangerous threshold—as long as the judiciary remains sympathetic to Trump, he has little motivation to openly defy a court order. But if the day comes when he chooses to do so, we can be certain that Republican legislators will do exactly what they have done every other time Trump has broken the law: nothing.

People may think of authoritarian nations in Cold War terms, as states with bombastic leaders who grant themselves extravagant titles and weigh their chests down with meaningless medals. These are nations without legislatures, without courts, with populations cowed by armies of secret police.

This is not how many authoritarian nations work today. Most have elections, legislatures, courts; they possess all the trappings of democracy. In fact, most deny that they are authoritarian at all. “Few contemporary dictatorships admit that they are just that,” writes the scholar Milan Svolik in The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. “If we were to trust dictators’ declarations about their regimes, most of them would be democracies.”

But the democratic institutions that authoritarian nations retain are largely vestigial or have little power to check the executive, either because they are under regime control, or because they are cowed or co-opted into submission.

Similarly, the typical image of an authoritarian nation involves violently suppressing dissent and assassinating or imprisoning political opponents and journalists. But violent suppression has tremendous risks and costs, and so authoritarians have developed more subtle methods of repression.

“Rather than using brute force to maintain control, today’s authoritarian regimes use strategies that are subtler and more ambiguous in nature to silence, deter, and demobilize opponents,” the scholar Erica Frantz writes. “Doing so serves a number of purposes. It attracts less attention, enables them to plausibly deny a role in what occurred, makes it difficult for opponents to launch a decisive response, and helps the regime feign compliance with democratic norms of behavior.”

Sarada Peri: Trump is going to cheat

The collapse of Joe Biden’s campaign is a case in point. If not for an anonymous whistle-blower, Americans might never have learned of Trump’s effort to use public funds to extort Ukraine into falsely implicating Biden in a crime. But the months-long discussion of baseless allegations of corruption against Biden likely served the same purpose, spooking Democratic primary voters who might have otherwise considered supporting him.

Ultimately, no one can ever know whether Biden’s campaign collapsed because he is a poor candidate, because his policies were unpopular, because he was out-campaigned by his rivals, or because the president successfully used his official powers to destroy a political enemy. One could hardly imagine a more successful example of what Frantz calls “low intensity” political repression—a threat was neutralized with minimal consequences to the Trump administration, indeed without even a clear burden of responsibility for the outcome. If the president’s frame-up of Biden was not a perfect crime, it was close.  

The frequent worries that it can happen here are arrogant in one respect: It already has happened here. American democracy has always been most vulnerable to an ideology that reserves democratic rights to one specific demographic group, raising that faction as the only one that possesses a fundamentally heritable claim to self-government. Those who are not members of this faction are rendered, by definition, an existential threat.

In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877, the Republican Party abandoned black voters in the South to authoritarian rule for nearly a century. But the Southern Democrats who destroyed the Reconstruction governments and imposed one-party despotism imagined themselves to be not effacing democracy, but rescuing it from the tyranny of the unworthy and ignorant. “Genuine democracy,” declared the terrorist turned South Carolina governor and senator Ben Tillman, was “the rule of the people—of all the white people, rich and poor alike.”

Similarly, many members of the Republican elite have transitioned seamlessly from attempting to restrain Trump’s authoritarian impulses to enabling them, all the while telling themselves they are acting in the best interests of democracy. This delusion is necessary, a version of the apocalyptic  fantasy that conservative pundits have fed their audiences. In this self-justifying myth, only Trump stands between conservative Americans and a left-wing armageddon in which effete white liberals and the black and brown masses they control shut the right out of power forever.

As the president’s adviser and Fox News host Tucker Carlson has said, Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.” Barr envisions his defense of the regime as a rational response to a “holy war,” waged by “so-called progressives” whose “mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection.” Michael Anton, the former Trump national-security aide, wrote  prior to the 2016 election that “the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are.”

Adam Serwer: The dangerous ideas of Bill Barr

To save “democracy” then, they must, at any cost, preserve a system in which only those who are worthy—that is, those who vote Republican—may select leaders and make policy. If that means disenfranchising nonwhite voters, so be it. If it means imposing a nationwide racial gerrymander to enhance the power of white voters at the expense of everyone else, then that is what must be done. And if it means allowing the president to use his authority to prevent the opposition from competing in free and fair elections, then that is but a small price to pay. The irony is no less visible to today’s Trumpists than it was to Tillman, and it is no more an impediment.

The insistence, by Cotton and other Trump defenders, that “the Democrats have never accepted that Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and they will never forgive him, either” has it exactly backwards. Democrats impeached Trump to preserve a democratic system in which they have a chance of winning, in which the president cannot blithely frame his rivals for invented crimes. Republicans acquitted him because they fear that a system not rigged in their favor is one in which they will never win again.

On Thursday, February 6, millions of Americans went about their lives as they would have any other day. They came home from overnight shifts, took the bus to work, made lunch for their children, cursed the traffic on their commute, or went out for a drink with friends. Yet the nation they live in may have been fundamentally changed the day before.

Democratic backsliding can be arrested. But that is an arduous task, and a Trump defeat in November is a necessary but not sufficient step. Many Americans have doubtless failed to recognize what has occurred, or how quickly the nation is hurtling toward a state of unfreedom that may prove impossible to reverse. How long the Trump administration lasts should be up to the American people to decide. But this president would never risk allowing them to freely make such a choice. The Republican Party has shown that nothing would cause it to restrain the president, and so he has no reason to restrain himself.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the American imagination of catastrophe has been limited to sudden, shocking events, the kind that shatter a sunny day in a storm of blood. That has left Americans unprepared for a different kind of catastrophe, the kind that spreads slowly and does not abruptly announce itself. For that reason, for most Americans, that Thursday morning felt like any other. But it was not—the Senate acquittal marked the beginning of a fundamental transition of the United States from a democracy, however flawed, toward authoritarianization. It was, in short, the end of the Trump administration, and the first day of the would-be Trump Regime.

*********

[serenagaywaterford]

7) Honestly, the only things that I truly ship on that show (as far as canon goes) are: handmaids & unwomen & marthas/freedom (duh), Moira/happiness, Emily/therapy, comfort and her kid -- she needs those badly, Janine/happiness, Serena/actual remorse for what she's done to all women and June/her 2 kids (platonically -- bc there are pervs out there). *I mentioned "unpopular opinions" earlier. By that, I did not mean the types that use "freedom of speech" as an alibi in order to spread bigotry and

8) harass/attack real life people, especially minorities** and women. I wonder why those types think that THT is a “propagandistic”, unimportant show. /s **Btw, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this: I think the show missed a good opportunity to address racism. I understand why Gilead is post-racist, I really do. Their focus is on fertility and that’s why a) fertile women of color are needed, b) infertile women and non straight people are considered useless/a threat. But on the other hand, the

9) series is supposed to be set in the near future. I mean, come on. They’re not even a little bit prejudiced?

———

It’s funny talking about shipping on THT. Cos I’ll diverge from you here in that I definitely do have a ship, and I very much enjoy it. However, it’s so AU and it will never, ever be canon and I’m fully aware of how incredibly problematic it is. But, meh. It’s a fun thing to play around with in my mind. I’ve stopped feeling bad about it tbh. But it definitely comes in second to thinking about the show overall and it’s not my sole reason for tuning in. Which is where I think things differ from other factions of fandom who’s sole purpose seems to be shipping and worshiping the man in a woman’s story.

I am 100% on board with all of those ships! I ship Gilead/Destruction, and all the rest should follow :)

Yeah, the racism thing. I’m probably the worst person to talk about this cos I’m white af. And really, it’s so difficult to manage the racism. Cos, if you deal with racism as it was addressed in the book (race was sort of talked about a tiny bit), then you don’t get Moira in such a prominent role. You wouldn’t have any actors of colour, as extras or minor characters playing Handmaid’s. No Handmaids or children could be anything but white. So, they’d face criticism for not having a diverse enough main cast. 

They would have had a really hard time having Luke be black, and therefore Hannah mixed in a society that only wants pure white kids. I doubt, in such a racist fascist society, they’d want to keep around Hannah as a rich, pampered young girl and we’d lose that whole subplot. So, Luke would have had to be white. 

And Moira, if they chose that route, her story would be SO divorced from everyone else’s that it probably wouldn’t mesh well overall. Arguably. (I’d argue that they’ve already fucked some of that up anyway.)

Maybe they thought it was too complicated to address properly so they just said, “Yeah, racism doesn’t exist! Only babies!!!”

BUT it’s absolutely asinine of the show to suggest that Gilead is post-racial. I don’t care how many babies are dying, there is literally no theocratic society/genocide/dictatorship in history that does not involve race in value judgement. I cannot for one second accept that Gilead wouldn’t be insanely racist and scapegoat not only “sinners” but also people of colour. Like, that is a hallmark of the creation of almost every fascist state? Blaming the Other is key! And skin colour is such an easy target. And lbr, white evangelicals of all types are racist. Like, really fucking racist. And fascists are SUPER racist. If we’re to believe SOJ were an extremely far right radical-terrorist group, it just makes ZERO sense that they wouldn’t be WILDLY racist and that would be a core component of their ideology. I personally don’t know of a single far right group that isn’t insanely racist and bigoted. Some claim they’re not, but they totally are.

Like... how did all that racism that is ingrained in conservative religious fanaticism and America just magically disappear? Nah. Not buying it. It seems lazy not to address it. At least ACKNOWLEDGE it any way, even the smallest possible way.

The lack of attention the programme showed to that aspect just made the protesters at Serena’s rally make no sense too. Why is the main protest calling her a Nazi? Nazi is a specific ideology, and race (ethnic cleansing) is a HUGE fucking component of it. Its main goal was to eradicate an entire race/ethnicity from the planet. From what we know, that doesn’t even come into play with Serena/Gilead’s ideology at all. I have no doubt that Serena was intent on legally/forcibly mandating women to give birth (very much like historical examples of this in El Salvador or Romania, even Russia), at least at that point. Basically removing women’s bodily autonomy completely. But that… isn’t exactly Nazi. The Nazis weren’t attempting to do that to white German women (They banned abortion for Aryans, but they weren’t forcing white women to give birth or be sex slaves. Abortion was just fine for Jews; in fact it was encouraged). Would the Nazis have got there eventually had they won the war and birthrates were plummeting? I wouldn’t put it past them but it’s never been an established cornerstone of their ideology. I guess there could have been more to it than we’ve seen on the show but based on TV canon, I don’t get it. It’s like they wanted to bring race into it… but forgot to actually reference it at all prior to 2x08 lol. 

I do think THT missed a huge opportunity to look into the intersection of various crises. Like, do I honestly believe a bunch of white evangelical radicals would just ignore their inherent racism for the sake of a few more babies? No way. And I think it’s been shown multiple times that the SOJ don’t really care about babies anyway; they want power and total control over women, period. The birthrate crisis was just a tool to manipulate people (including Serena and Wives) into accepting Gilead as necessary.

I think THT could have even addressed the lack of WOC as Handmaids. Why, if they were targetting all women, are there not far more WOC as Handmaids? As Econopeople? There’s only a handful. The majority are white IIRC. You’d think if they really are just after more babies, they’d have a lot more girls of all shapes, sizes, ages, colour. But they seem to be–with the exception of Moira, Emily, and June–fairly young (which seems odd logically simply cos their criteria for determining if a woman is fertile is her already having a child. Not that teen moms don’t exist, but so many of the Handmaids seem really young. You’d think there’d be a few more older 25+ women who actually have had kids. But hey, I don’t think Gilead really cares about logic anyway.), and with the exception of Moira and Brianna, mostly white. (Oh, and Lilly.) There are a few extras of colour. But it seemed like the ratio of actual American society vs Gileadean society was way off, and it would have been good to have an explanation for that, and it could have also set up more understanding about why they consider Serena a Nazi. From what I saw, she’s not a Nazi (so just a horrible violent anti-feminist religious whacko) so I’d really like to know what I’m missing.

Not to mention, I get that the book was VERY much from a single white woman’s POV so why would she feature much about race. It wouldn’t personally affect her much. It is the Handmaid’s Tale, and so she tells it as she knows it. However, the show can’t make the same claim. While June is the main POV character, the POV shifts often to other characters and there’s plenty of opportunity to show how race effects different characters. It doesn’t need to be a huge focus. Just acknowledge it, at the very least. Like they did with homophobia. This isn’t a show about homophobia specifically, but they included gay characters so acknowledged (quite a bit considering) about homophobia in Gilead (and pre-Gilead). I don’t see why the same treatment couldn’t be done with Moira and/or Luke’s POVs (way better coming from Moira lbr), or even RITA! Rita would be a great character to explore more, and add some layers to the overall world in the process.

I liked this article: https://www.vulture.com/2017/06/the-handmaids-tale-greatest-failing-is-how-it-handles-race.html

[hellofastestnewsfan]

This article was updated on Sunday, October 7 at 2:56 pm.

Unlike Senator Susan Collins, who took pages upon pages of text on national television to tell us something we already knew, I will cut right to the chase: I am out of the Republican Party.

I will also acknowledge right away what I assume will be the reaction of most of the remaining members of the GOP, ranging from “Good riddance” to “You were never a real Republican,” along with a smattering of “Who are you, anyway?”

Those Republicans will have a point. I am not a prominent Republican nor do I play a major role in Republican politics. What I write here are my views alone. I joined the party in the twilight of Jimmy Carter’s administration, cut my teeth in politics as an aide to a working class, Catholic Democrat in the Massachusetts House, and later served for a year on the personal staff of a senior Republican U.S. senator. Not exactly the profile of a conservative warrior.

I even quit the party once before, briefly, during what I thought was the bottom for the GOP: the 2012 primaries. I didn’t want to be associated with a party that took Newt Gingrich seriously as presidential timber, or with people whose callousness managed to shock even Ron Paul. It was an estrangement, not a break, and I came back when the danger of a Trump victory loomed. I was too late, but as a moderate conservative (among the few left), the pre-2016 GOP was the only party I could call home.

Small things sometimes matter, and Collins is among the smallest of things in the political world. And yet, she helped me finally to accept what I had been denying. Her speech on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh convinced me that the Republican Party now exists for one reason, and one reason only: for the exercise of raw political power, and not even for ends I would otherwise applaud or even support.

I have written on social media and elsewhere how I feel about Kavanaugh’s nomination. I initially viewed his nomination positively, as a standard GOP judicial appointment; then grew concerned about whether he should continue on as a nominee with the accusations against him; and finally, was appalled by his behavior in front of the Senate.

It was Collins, however, who made me realize that there would be no moderates to lead conservatives out of the rubble of the Trump era. Senator Jeff Flake is retiring and took a pass, and with all due respect to Senator Lisa Murkowski—who at least admitted that her “no” vote on cloture meant “no” rather than drag out the drama—she will not be the focus of a rejuvenated party.

When Collins spoke, she took the floor of the Senate to calm an anxious and divided nation by giving us all an extended soliloquy on… the severability of a clause.

The severability of a clause? Seriously?

It took almost half an hour before Collins got to the accusations against Kavanaugh, but the rest of what she said was irrelevant. She had clearly made up her mind weeks earlier, and she completely ignored Kavanaugh’s volcanic and bizarre performance in front of the Senate.

As an aside, let me say that I have no love for the Democratic Party, which is torn between totalitarian instincts on one side and complete political malpractice on the other. As a newly minted independent, I will vote for Democrats and Republicans I think are decent and well-meaning people; if I move back home to Massachusetts, I could cast a ballot for Republican Governor Charlie Baker and Democratic Representative Joe Kennedy and not think twice about it.

But during the Kavanaugh dumpster fire, the performance of the Democratic Party—with some honorable exceptions like Senators Chris Coons, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Amy Klobuchar—was execrable. From the moment they leaked the Ford letter, they were a Keystone Cops operation, with Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono willing to wave away the Constitution and get right to a presumption of guilt, and Senator Dianne Feinstein looking incompetent and outflanked instead of like the ranking member of one of the most important committees in America.

The Republicans, however, have now eclipsed the Democrats as a threat to the rule of law and to the constitutional norms of American society. They have become all about winning. Winning means not losing, and so instead of acting like a co-equal branch of government responsible for advice and consent, congressional Republicans now act like a parliamentary party facing the constant threat of a vote of no-confidence.

That it is necessary to place limitations, including self-limitations, on the exercise of power is—or was—a core belief among conservatives. No longer. Raw power, wielded so deftly by Senator Mitch McConnell, is exercised for its own sake, and by that I mean for the sake of fleecing gullible voters on hot-button social issues so that Republicans may stay in power. Of course, the institutional GOP will say that it countenances all of Trump’s many sins, and its own straying from principle, for good reason (including, of course, the holy grail of ending legal abortion).

Politics is about the exercise of power. But the new Trumpist GOP is not exercising power in the pursuit of anything resembling principle, and certainly not for conservative or Republican principles.

Free trade? Republicans are suddenly in love with tariffs, and now sound like bad imitations of early 1980s protectionist Democrats. A robust foreign policy? Not only have Republicans abandoned their claim to being the national-security party, they have managed to convince the party faithful that Russia—an avowed enemy that directly attacked our political institutions—is less of a threat than their neighbors who might be voting for Democrats. Respect for law enforcement? The GOP is backing Trump in attacks on the FBI and the entire intelligence community as Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the web of lies, financial arrangements, and Russian entanglements known collectively as the Trump campaign.

And most important, on the rule of law, congressional Republicans have utterly collapsed. They have sold their souls, purely at Trump’s behest, living in fear of the dreaded primary challenges that would take them away from the Forbidden City and send them back home to the provinces. Yes, an anti-constitutional senator like Hirono is unnerving, but she’s a piker next to her Republican colleagues, who have completely reversed themselves on everything from the limits of executive power to the independence of the judiciary, all to serve their leader in a way that would make the most devoted cult follower of Kim Jong Un blush.

Maybe it’s me. I’m not a Republican anymore, but am I still a conservative? Limited government: check. Strong national defense: check. Respect for tradition and deep distrust of sudden, dramatic change: check. Belief that people spend their money more wisely than government? That America is an exceptional nation with a global mission? That we are, in fact, a shining city on a hill and an example to others? Check, check, check.

But I can’t deny that I’ve strayed from the party. I believe abortion should remain legal. I am against the death penalty in all its forms outside of killing in war. I don’t think what’s good for massive corporations is always good for America. In foreign affairs, I am an institutionalist, a supporter of working through international bodies and agreements. I think our defense budget is too big, too centered on expensive toys, and that we are still too entranced by nuclear weapons.

I believe in the importance of diversity and toleration. I would like a shorter tax code. I would also like people to exhibit some public decorum and keep their shoes on in public.

Does this make me a liberal? No. I do not believe that human nature is malleable clay to be reshaped by wise government policy. Many of my views, which flow from that basic conservative idea, are not welcome in a Democratic tribe in the grip of the madness of identity politics.

But whatever my concerns about liberals, the true authoritarian muscle is now being flexed by the GOP, in a kind of buzzy, steroidal McCarthyism that lacks even anti-communism as a central organizing principle. The Republican Party, which controls all three branches of government and yet is addicted to whining about its own victimhood, is now the party of situational ethics and moral relativism in the name of winning at all costs.

So, I’m out. The Trumpers and the hucksters and the consultants and the hangers-on, like a colony of bees who exist only to sting and die, have swarmed together in a dangerous but suicidal cloud, and when that mindless hive finally extinguishes itself in a blaze of venom, there will be nothing left.

I’m a divorced man who is remarried. But love, in some ways, is easier than politics. I spent nearly 40 years as a Republican, a relationship that began when I joined a revitalized GOP that saw itself not as a victim, but as the vehicle for lifting America out of the wreckage of the 1970s, defeating the Soviet Union, and extending human freedom at home and abroad. I stayed during the turbulence of the Tea Party tomfoolery. I moved out briefly during the abusive 2012 primaries. But now I’m filing for divorce, and I am taking nothing with me when I go.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2y7IVft