Promise keepers

Nobody loves the electric company. We usually only notice it when we pay the bill or, more acutely, when something goes wrong. The power is just supposed to flow.

Here on Martha's Vineyard, we get our electric from a company called Eversource. Some of our experiences with them have not been so good -- like the time they were upgrading the lines on a nearby road and blew out our power. Fortunately we only lost a bunch of surge protectors. Remember to use those surge protectors!

These days, Eversource is completing a much anticipated project to bring a high capacity cable from the Cape to the Island, ending use of diesel for electric generation. It's a big deal. 

After Donald Trump's attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, a lot of big companies swore off contributing to members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 vote for Biden. Most of them have gone back on their promises.

But a few have held out. Judd Legum assembled an honor role of promise keepers that stuck to their word.  And Eversource was among them: 

On January 13, 2021, Eversource Energy, a large electricity provider in the Northeast, announced that it would not donate to any of the members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. In a statement, Eversource’s Chief Communications Officer Jim Hunt said, “at Eversource, we were deeply disturbed by the intentional disruption of our democratic process and the violence that occurred at the Capitol last week.”

Eversource has kept its promise not to donate to any election deniers and has made few political contributions in general. NRG Energy, a competing electricity provider serving some of the same states as Eversource, also promised not to donate to any election deniers, but has since reneged.

Other promise keepers include AirBnB, Expedia, Nike, and Lyft.  Read all about the good guys!

How soon will the rats start to jump?

Are we getting to the stage of the Trump regime when we might begin seeing preparation for a rat exodus? The vermin that jump off a sinking ship, that is. It seems early, but there's evidence.

Trump's White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, gave a series of tell-all interviews to a reporter for Vanity Fair, Chris Whipple. Peter Baker at the New York Times (gift) provided a summary of these with some additions of his own.

Wiles here comes off as either ignorant, or stupid, or afraid of the consequences to herself of the bad company she's keeping. I doubt she's either of the first two -- but her behavior here carries a strong whiff of the last. Above all, she insists the crimes of the administration come from her boss, not from her.

Ms. Wiles described her own reservations about certain policies in real time to Mr. Whipple, author of a well-regarded book on White House chiefs of staff, even as debates raged inside the administration. She said she urged Mr. Trump not to pardon the most violent rioters from Jan. 6, 2021, which he did anyway. She unsuccessfully tried to get him to delay his major tariffs because of a “huge disagreement” among his advisers. And she said the administration needed to “look harder” at deportations to prevent mistakes. 

But she did not complain about being overruled and at various points said she “got on board” with the eventual decisions. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.” 

... Ms. Wiles does not view her role as constraining Mr. Trump. Instead, she makes clear that her mission is to facilitate his desires even if she sometimes thinks he is going too far.

This is someone who knows she is part of a crew that seems to be thieving and murdering for fun and profit. Wiles has some regrets, but mostly she hangs back and criticizes cautiously.

Mr. Musk’s demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development including its lifesaving aid to impoverished people around the globe upset Ms. Wiles. “I was initially aghast,” she told Mr. Whipple. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to U.S.A.I.D. believed, as I did, that they do very good work.” 

Mr. Musk’s approach was “not the way I would do it.” She said she called Mr. Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalled telling him. She said that Mr. Musk was a disrupter. “But no rational person could think the U.S.A.I.D. process was a good one. Nobody.” 

She offered no objection to Mr. Trump’s saber rattling against Venezuela and bombing of boats carrying alleged drug traffickers, suggesting that regime change against President Nicolás Maduro was Mr. Trump’s real goal. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she said. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

Oh yeah, and then there are those pesky migrants under assault by the Department of Homeland Security's new posse of masked thugs. Wiles has misgivings ...

Ms. Wiles expressed misgivings about how the roundup of immigrants has been carried out at times. “I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” she said. Criminals should be deported, she added. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” When two mothers were arrested and deported with their children after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings, she said, “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”

Josh Marshall sees successful guile in what Wiles chose to get spread around by Vanity Faire and Baker: 

If I’m not mistaken, Wiles seems to have tried to warn Trump off of his wildest and most malevolent actions. She tried. And she wants us to know she tried.

Well maybe. Maybe she's just trying to look less complicit. But I will not be surprised if she and other smarter Trump enablers are getting an inkling that one of these days there may be a personal cost from enabling Trump's criminal initiatives.

Just as the Wiles story took over the news, at the New Yorker, editor Michael Luo published History’s Judgment of Those Who Go Along. He writes about several lawyers who've left the Justice Department, refusing to violate professional standards. 

He recounts the story of the internment of Japanese-ancestry residents of the West Coast at the outbreak of World War II and how history has judged the high government officials who did that dirty deed -- and mostly privately knew better. 

... Anyone still serving in the Trump Administration must reckon with the reality that, when the government has previously perpetrated egregious miscarriages of justice, history has not been forgiving to those who’ve gone along, however reluctantly. ...

Luo believes that people choosing to carry out the Trump Administration's crimes may learn they've lost themselves in pursuit of not much more than permanent infamy.

Standing firm on principle sometimes sits opposite other factors, such as fealty to colleagues and professional ambition, but it invariably comes from within. During the early days of the first Trump Administration, Sally Yates, who had been Obama’s Deputy Attorney General and had stayed on as the acting Attorney General, directed her staff not to defend an executive order from Trump restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries—his so-called Muslim ban. Trump fired her.  

Several months later, Yates delivered a commencement-week speech to graduates of Harvard Law School, in which she talked about the need to hone the “compass that’s inside all of us.” Introspection about difficult decisions that involve conscience, she said, helps “develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for.” 

For those in the second Trump Administration, the time to answer those questions could be now.

See no evil: the toll of the Trump team's Signal chat lapse(s?)

Wouldn't they have loved to get the intel on D-Day?

The people whose lives might be at risk as a result of the Trump team's frat boy approach to national security are not amused.

Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
Men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States expressed bewilderment after the leak of attack plans. “You’re going to kill somebody,” one pilot said.

Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and use of her right arm when the combat helicopter she piloted in the Iraq war was shot down, had a very direct response

Duckworth: ‘Pete Hegseth is a ‘f‑‑‑ing liar’ “...This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” Duckworth said in a statement. 

The Washington Post's judicious columnist Philip Bump unpacks what accountability for the security breach might look like and why we won't get it from the Trump clown show.

The point of accountability is to reinforce that bad things are bad. ...

... Trump — and by extension his party — have proved increasingly likely to rise to the defense of anyone seen as under fire from any perceived opponent. (“Deny, deny, deny,” Trump once reportedly advised an ally.) In any previous administration, Hegseth wouldn’t be the secretary of defense in the first place. Deeply unqualified (beyond his closeness to Trump) and mired in multiple scandals, he was nonetheless confirmed by a Republican-led Senate unwilling to face the ire of Trump. Since the Signal scandal broke, Hill Republicans — a group ostensibly empowered to enforce accountability from the executive branch — have not indicated any newfound appetite for challenging the White House. No one thinks the Justice Department, helmed by some of the more energetic Trump sycophants in America, will launch any serious investigation.

Without accountability, the damage here would not simply be that the U.S. government will continue to be led by people who don’t know or don’t care why communications about military operations occur over secure channels. It is also that there will be no public signal that the actions of these officials were bad. No signal to others in government. No signal to Trump’s base of support. No signal to America’s overseas allies that this government holds such mistakes to account.

This is precisely what (the deeply insecure) Trump wants to avoid, of course. He will happily malign people who used to serve under his direction — but always as he introduces some imaginary distance from them. It would be very hard for him to do so with Hegseth in particular: He picked and advocated Hegseth despite concerns about his readiness; if the criticisms of Hegseth were accurate, then so were the criticisms of Trump.

What results is a weird (and for the right, ironic) moral relativism, one centered on the whims and actions of Donald Trump. We know that religious conservatives revamped their moral boundaries once Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. What we’ve seen since is an entire party willing to shift black-and-white moral and ethical issues into a muddy, gray area in which Trump alone remains untainted.

Republican politicians have replaced both common sense and elementary ethical calculation with "Anything for Mr Trump." They've become servile as well as ignorant.

This is a test -- and it is no rehearsal

Maybe they thought she was a pushover because she has blonde hair that hangs down to her shoulders. Women in the Trump world tend to present such an appearance. They were wrong. The glasses might give her away.

They expected Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old conservative lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to violate her understanding of her professional responsibility by dropping the federal corruption case against New York's Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams' aid to Trump's goons at rounding up migrants. She wouldn't accept the bargain; after all, her office had reason to believe Adams is crook. Instead she argued back and resigned/was fired. (I expect which to be a contested question.)

And then six or seven attorneys at the Department of Justice in Washington in the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division also refused to do the corrupt deed.

Then lawyer Hagan Scotten who was prosecuting the Adams case in New York joined the defectors. “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” he wrote. And he quit. 

Emil Bove, Trump's flunky at DOJ, eventually did find such a cooperative underling. He also made his corrupt reasons for dropping the case clear in a vituperative letter, as did Trump's new more tame blonde Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Former US Attorney Joyce Vance immediately highlighted the human cost of these dramatic events. The attorneys at the Public Integrity Section proved their legal and personal integrity.

Rather than violate the oaths they took by following orders they could not abide by, they gave up their jobs, their incomes, and their benefits. It’s no small thing to forgo medical insurance when you’ve been living on a prosecutor’s salary and have given up your job with scant warning on a Thursday afternoon in February.

That’s the kind of courage that inspires us, and we hope it will inspire you, too. We have to stand up for what we believe in and what is right. We have to maintain our fight for democracy. It is up to us.

Writing in the New York Times, Masha Gessen draws on experience of Putin's Russia to share lessons from this drama:

In a column published last weekend, I mentioned the concept of collective hostage taking, pioneered by the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada. He spent decades trying to understand the methods of enforcement used by totalitarian regimes and the accommodations people make in response. He identified collective hostage taking as one of the most important totalitarian tools. It functions by enforcing collective responsibility and threatening collective punishment. 

In Stalin’s time, if people were arrested for a (usually invented) political crime, suspicion would also fall on their family members, their co-workers and their children’s schoolteachers and classmates. In later Soviet years, if dissidents were arrested, their colleagues would be scrutinized; some could lose their jobs or be demoted for “failing to exercise sufficient vigilance.” It is remarkable that Bove, if the reports are accurate, enacted collective hostage taking literally, by putting attorneys in a room and tasking them — over a video call — with finding at least one person to take the fall.

Levada had compassion for people who folded under conditions of collective hostage taking. Normal people confronted with abnormal demands will just try to survive, he wrote. Nothing prepares ordinary people for extraordinary times.

In fact, though, many life experiences do prepare us for times such as these. Most American schools, for example, practice collective punishment: If half of the class is unruly, the entire class may be docked recess. When I heard about lawyers being put in a room, I thought, “This has happened to my kids in New York City public schools.” In this way, U.S. schools are almost indistinguishable from the old Soviet ones.

The legal officials involved in the Adams debacle ... are only some of the first people to confront a choice most of us will face, if we choose to recognize it: Do you act like a schoolchild, who can survive and succeed only by conforming, or do you insist on your dignity and adult agency? 

Even in situations where the end seems preordained, as it certainly seemed to be in this case, will you be able to say, “I won’t be the one to do it”? If enough people withhold their cooperation, the end is no longer preordained.

The paragraph I've highlighted is our test. Opposing creeping tyranny requires both individual courage and collective solidarity. Americans aren't used to this, but we have many models in our history to draw on: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez, and so many more among the immigrants who made and are still making this land. The people who built this county weren't wimps and we needn't be either.

The limits of knowing history

This morning, January 27, an article which appears to be several years old [gift] popped up in the version of the New York Times which their algorithm deigns to show me. (You do know that we all get slightly different online versions of the "paper of record" in our digital feeds, don't you? Just part of life in our current mediated information environment.)

The Nazi's human death factory at Auschwitz (Poland) was liberated by the Soviet Russian army on January 27, 1945. The article is a thoughtful survey of what has happened to memory of the atrocities of a previous generation. 

... as the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, an occasion being marked by events around the world and culminating in a solemn ceremony at the former death camp on Monday that will include dozens of aging Holocaust survivors, Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is worried.

“More and more we seem to be having trouble connecting our historical knowledge with our moral choices today,” he said. “I can imagine a society that understands history very well but does not draw any conclusion from this knowledge.”

In this current political moment, he added, that can be dangerous. ... With the very notion of the truth and facts under assault in increasingly polarized societies, control over the historical narrative is yet another battlefield.

This cuts to the quick for me. I understand the human present through memory and interpretation and re-interpretation of what I know of what has gone before. And yes, history makes for both material and moral lessons. I cannot imagine trying to understand the world around me without the lens of history. 

Yet I am well aware most Americans live without much historical awareness. Where do people find a moral compass? I don't know. I try to retain mine.

• • •

A couple of years ago, I explored the strange phenomenon which is US "Holocaust Education." Too much of this operates as a comforting morality play about distant lands whose enormity reinforces contemporary ignorance. That piece still reads well.

• • •

And today I can make the same recommendation I always make on the subject of the memory of 20th century Nazi barbarism: find a copy of the memoir from Gerda Weissmann (later Klein), All But My Life. Ms. Weissmann was one of lucky (??) few; the Nazis transported her to a series of slave labor camps while killing all her family and eradicating the world she had known. It is brutal, simple, and totally approachable at nearly 80 years distance.

Character counts

As I read the largely generous assessments of the deceased former president, I feel old. For so many of these authors, Jimmy Carter was the first president they remember or worked for. Carter was the fifth president whose term -- achievements and questionable decisions -- I remember being sharply conscious of in real time. His presidency came along at the end of a decade in which I'd truly settled into my adult skin. I neither loved him nor hated him; I voted for him twice without passion. It took what Republicans stuck us with in the next decade for me to engage passionately with national politics after the strange interlude created by defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, and fall of Nixon.

Over the years, I've written here quite a bit about Carter and his times. I came to appreciate him, probably far more than I ever could have liked his presidency if I'd been paying more attention.

Chris Geidner, aka LawDork, has drawn lessons from Carter's life that seem worth reproducing.

Jimmy Carter's life gives us a framework for living humanely in this moment

... When I look at Jimmy Carter’s life and accomplishments, I believe that he has provided us with several important guidelines for living humanely this moment:

    •    We must be steadfast in our principles — and be willing to speak out to advance those principles. 

    •    We need not believe that our institutions will protect us to hold out an expectation that they should.

    •    We should do what we can to hold those institutions accountable, improve them where we can, and discard them if we determine that they are not salvageable. 

    •    We must do what we can to protect one another when those institutions fail us, as they inevitably will.

    •    Those with more — materially and otherwise — must stand up for and support those with less. 

    •    We must remain humble and be willing to learn.

These are not easy guidelines to adhere to, and I’m sure that Carter himself failed in doing so at times even as I think he exemplifies them. But, the goal remains.

As we face the inauguration of a man who has shown himself utterly dishonest, selfish, and cruel, we are about to learn again, painfully, that character counts in governance.

He's just a rich crook and the Republican Party is a cult

I shouldn't, but I retain the ability to be amazed by my fellow citizens.

Click to enlarge.

Aaron Blake reports:

In April, [a You-Gov poll] showed 58 percent of Republicans said that a convicted felon should not be allowed to become president. But after Trump’s conviction in Manhattan last week, that number plummeted to just 23 percent.

Republicans in April said by a 41-point margin that a conviction would be disqualifying; they now say by a 35-point margin that it’s not disqualifying.

The same poll in April showed 37 percent of Republicans said they would not be willing to vote for a convicted felon “under any circumstances.” That number has now dropped to 14 percent.

... Trump’s party is certainly a reflection of his own situational approach to principles.

We're back to "what the hell is wrong with these people?" I'm sure the answer is multi-faceted and some facets may be forgivable. But too many are not. The only recourse is to outnumber them in a free and fair election in November.

Republicans kiss up to Trump; a righteous Froomkin rant

Republican U.S. Senator John Thune of South Dakota leaped out to endorse Donald Trump the other day. There was no reason for the timing of this endorsement -- except that he wants to lead Senate Republicans when Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell steps back. 

Meanwhile, McConnell is fully expected to endorse Trump immanently -- endorse a man who called the Senate leader a "loser" and threw racist insults at McConnell's Chinese American wife. 

For many years, journalist Dan Froomkin wrote the White House Watch column at the Washington Post; he took no prisoners, exposing politicians' stupidity and malfeasance. When his employers found him too hot to handle, he was fired and went on to the Intercept and then his own website, PressWatch. 

Froomkin has nothing good to say about Republican pols who've seen Trump try once to overthrow our democracy and are flocking to him now. He's disgusted with the Trump endorsements by formerly serious figures. And he's disgusted by political media which treat the coming presidential election as just one more normal contest.

... the powerful people who knew better — who are bending the knee to Trump only now — are hypocritical, craven opportunists going through a very public and newsworthy moral collapse.

That is how the media should be covering them. These people are forsaking the principles they had previously proclaimed — and why? Because they want something (mostly power and money) more than they care about those principles.

Every time that happens ought to be a major news story. Another person has sacrificed their self-respect to become an enabler of tyranny and chaos.

But I’m not seeing that.

I’m seeing reporters writing without any sense of shock or alarm about members of Congress, titans of industry, and others bending the knee as if it’s just a normal part of a normal presidential race.

It is, however, not remotely normal that a major-party nominee for president is an irrational impulsive lying rapist racist crime lord and would-be dictator.

Bending the knee to Trump is a break with core human values like empathy and decency – and democracy. It’s an expression of approval for lying, cheating, stealing, and attempted insurrection.

... Every single new public figure who endorses Trump should be asked by reporters to explain how that squares with their moral beliefs. 

Do they consider Trump trustworthy? Reliable? Do they agree that the government should root out certain people like vermin? Do they condone his contempt for pluralism? Do they share his willingness to turn over parts of Europe to Vladimir Putin? Do they support setting up camps for the mass deportation of long-time U.S. residents who lack documentation? 

And if not, why are they so willing to abandon their principles? What exactly do they think makes that worth it?

 These are not just normal times.

In search of a critical eye, intellectual vigor, and humility ...

While watching college football yesterday, I heard that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had been hospitalized following a fall in which he broke a hip. Let's hope the 76 year old basketball great has good doctors and manages a speedy recovery.

I'd been planning to post one of Abdul-Jabbar's homilies soon enough. Why not do it today? 

"A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life." -- Muhammad Ali, The Greatest

Sometimes when I look back on some of the ideas I had when I was twenty, and how arrogantly certain I was of being right, I wish I could hop in a time machine, go back to UCLA, and kick my smug, twenty-year-old ass. But most of the time, I just smile when I think back because I know that being wrong is part of the process of getting it right.

I wasn’t wrong about everything. The Vietnam War was bad. As the Pentagon Papers proved, President Lyndon Johnson lied to the American public as well as to Congress about what was really going on there. I wasn’t wrong about the treatment of Blacks in America and the need for equal treatment and opportunities.

The real issue isn’t which specific ideologies, philosophies, or politics have changed, but whether one’s ability to recognize their own weaknesses in forming opinions and stubbornness in keeping them, despite evidence to the contrary, has grown. With age can come a belief that you are suddenly imbued with supernatural wisdom. For some, that’s just an illusion that allows them to not challenge their opinions—and to rebuff others’ disagreements. There’s a difference between being resolved and being stubborn. ...

As an aside, here’s something you should learn as you grow older: Stop using “man” when referring to humankind (as ... Ali’s quote ... [does]). That’s not being woke, it’s being accurate. Using man is disrespectful and insisting to use it regardless proves you haven’t learned anything in the past 30 years.

Just to piggyback off Ali’s quote, anyone who thinks the same at 70 as they did at 50 hasn’t been paying attention. This is not about changing political sides or taste in music or playing pickleball instead of tennis. It’s being aware that the world is in a constant state of flux. Greek philosopher Heraclitus made this point best: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” (There’s that “man” again.)

Nothing remains the same and so we must approach each new idea or opinion with the same critical eye, intellectual vigor, and humility as we did in our youth. We must be willing to be wrong, yet also willing to be proven wrong. The rocky treacherous path to being right is the one thing that doesn’t change. The willingness to walk that path is what gives our beliefs value.

It isn't easy to avoid becoming stuck. Engagement with the world's joys and pains helps, if we can endure them. Perhaps a wisdom in aging is to discern just how much immersion in the flow of life we can bear and yet hold a steady course despite changes and chances.

Erudite Partner is an ethicist; from her I've learned that what makes for an ethical life is usually a product of what habits we form and encourage in ourselves. Courage always buttresses all other desirable habits which shape our changes.

Let's wish Kareem all good courage in his physical challenges.

Kareem in hospital

Moral injury compounding death and destruction

Benjamin Wittes edits Lawfare for the Brookings Institution. In the context of exploring Strategy, Law, and Morality in Israel’s Gaza Operation he has written a cogent description of the two societies at war in that benighted corner of the world which captures what Americans don't often know and perhaps are newly learning. 

With the possible exception of the Demilitarized Zone in the Korean peninsula, there is no geographic line in the world across which life changes more dramatically over a shorter distance than the border of Israel and the Gaza Strip.

On one side of the line, the per-capita gross domestic product is $55,000 per year, according to the International Monetary Fund—just over two-thirds that of the United States. The population density is low. While Israel itself packs a lot of people into a small area, in general, the region surrounding the Gaza border lies outside of the sprawl that runs up and down the coastal plain and between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It is dotted with small agricultural villages. The only major city in the region, Ashkelon, is 13 kilometers away and has fewer than 150,000 people—with closer-by Sderot having only about a fifth that many people.

On this side of the line, governance is the province of a modern, highly functional state, overseen by an elected government. Infrastructure is modern. Social services are highly developed. The sovereignty of that state, while controversial in academic circles worldwide and still unrecognized by a number of regional actors, is firmly established and increasingly recognized by the other states in the region. The lingua franca on this side of the line is Hebrew, but depending on precisely where along the border and how far from it you are, the street language for many people may also be Arabic, Russian, or English. 

San Francisco cease fire demonstration

Cross over into Gaza—and, the proximity being what it is, Israeli villages extend right up to the line—and everything changes. The per-capita income plummets by more than 97 percent to around $1,250 per year, according to the World Bank. Worldwide, only wealthy city-states like Monaco and Singapore and jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Macau exceed Gaza’s population density; more than 2 million people are crammed into an area roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Gaza’s infrastructure is a disaster, with drinkable water and electricity alike both scarce, and food insecurity widespread. Government social services are virtually nonexistent. The deprivation is fueled, in part, by a long, partial blockade of the territory maintained by both Israel and Egypt.

The territory is ruled by Hamas, a fundamentalist militia that both the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist organization, which won a legislative election in 2006 and seized executive power in a kind of coup the following year. Hamas’s military infrastructure is deeply embedded within the civilian population with both command centers located in civilian buildings and weapons caches and launch sites based in or near civilian institutions or residences. Sovereignty, however, is undetermined. Israel, which was the occupying power until 2005, makes no sovereign claims over Gaza. Neither does Egypt, which occupied the strip from the time of Israel’s founding until 1967. The Palestinian Authority has never declared a Palestinian state and doesn’t control the territory in any event. And Hamas has not declared itself a sovereign entity either. The spoken language on this side of the line is almost uniformly Arabic. Roughly half of the population is under 18.

I draw this picture of contrast neither to assign blame for the shocking disparity in living conditions evident in the descriptions (there’s enough blame to go around), nor to complain on behalf of Palestinians about their comparative misfortune (though complaint is certainly justified), nor to triumph on behalf of Israelis at their comparative windfall (though the accomplishments of the Israeli state are nothing to sneeze at). 

Wittes continues to discuss both legal and moral implications of Israel's bombing and apparent impending invasion of the Gaza territory. They say they aim to eradicate Hamas in response to the atrocities of 10/7. He asks, can Israel mount an assault that is more than collective punishment, largely of the innocent, more than a reprisal for evil done that itself is evil in return?

You can read his argument yourself. It's very clear. I was most struck by this:

... as I see it anyway, to wage this conflict even in self-defense without a coherent strategy is morally dicey. It is not, to be clear, a war crime. There is no principle of the law of armed conflict that makes it a crime to respond flailingly and without a well-thought-through strategy to an armed attack.  

Yet when a lot of civilians (many of them children) are going to die in a conflict, that fact imparts a certain responsibility to think things through carefully—and specifically to think through the question of how things are going to be better at the end of the conflict than they are now. This same point, by the way, flows from the fact that a lot of Israeli soldiers—for whose lives the Israeli government is more directly accountable—are also going to die. Without a strategy, a sound, well-thought-through strategy, the operation is really just a giant reprisal attack.

... if Israel is not operating pursuant to clear objectives that warrant the cost it is exacting, that is a grave moral problem irrespective of whether the individual strikes are lawful. And it’s a problem that Israel needs to rectify immediately.

Israel's backers, especially the Biden administration, need to be saying this loud and clear.

• • •

After all, the United State, to our sorrow, knows what a war without definable ends looks like. We made exactly that in Afghanistan for 20 years and left, bloodied, without having accomplished anything except spreading misery and a lot of dead Afghans.

Today's New York Times includes a heart-rending account (gift article) by a U.S. Marine veteran sniper turned journalist who got to ride along with a Ukrainian sniper team trying to kill Russian soldiers. 

“I don’t want to kill, but I have to — I’ve seen what they’ve done,” Raptor [Ukrainian sniper's nom de guerre] went on, his own moral and martial purpose linked to the atrocities Russian forces had committed throughout the war. For Raptor, the reason for pulling the trigger was clear. For me and my comrades, all these years later, the reason we chose to kill can continue to elude us.

We found ourselves in the middle of some poorly thought-out counterinsurgency strategy, propping up a corrupt government that collapsed almost as soon as the United States left. We were protecting each other. That became a binding ideology, all the clarity we could summon in the puzzle our politicians in Washington handed us. We stumbled through exhausted, mouthing our lines, until our tours ended and we were discharged.

When Israel's Gaza response concludes -- which it must someday -- will justified rage at Hamas atrocities turn to further moral injury to Israel and the supportive world as well as material injury and death to unfortunate Gazans?

That small, ghastly, sacred place ...

Revenge Is Like Drinking Poison And Waiting For The Other Person To Die. Nelson Mandela

Professor Peter Beinart, a Jewish activist and honest man, writes in the New York Times: 

... Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”

... In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.

... From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. ... I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.

Though Beinart lives and works in New York City, he's not some ivory tower pundit. His parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa. He made the moral and intellectual mistake of endorsing George W. Bush's Iraq campaign and since has remade himself as a skeptical and humble observer of conventional wisdom.

If you read once source on Israel/Palestine, I highly recommend his substack: The Beinart Notebook.

"Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return" -- W.H. Auden

Somebody on Xitter liberated this article from behind the paywall at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. I am going to pass it along intact here; he speaks to his fellow Israelis, but Americans too need to listen up. The author, Gideon Levy, is an all too experienced Israeli journalist.

Opinion | Israel can’t imprison two million Gazans without paying a cruel price

Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that we’ll never pay the price and be punished for it. We’ll carry on undisturbed. We’ll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess and protect the settlers busy with their pogroms.

We'll visit Joseph’s Tomb, Othniel’s Tomb and Joshua’s Altar in the Palestinian territories, and of course the Temple Mount – over 5,000 Jews on Sukkot alone. 

We’ll fire at innocent people, take out people’s eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip, and everything will be all right. 

We’ll build a terrifying obstacle around Gaza – the underground wall alone cost 3 billion shekels ($765 million) – and we’ll be safe. We’ll rely on the geniuses of the army's 8200 cyber-intelligence unit and on the Shin Bet security service agents who know everything. 

We’ll transfer half an army from the Gaza border to the Hawara border in the West Bank, only to protect far-right lawmaker Zvi Sukkot and the settlers. And everything will be all right, both in Hawara and at the Erez crossing into Gaza.

It turns out that even the world's most sophisticated and expensive obstacle can be breached with a smoky old bulldozer when the motivation is great. This arrogant barrier can be crossed by bicycle and moped despite the billions poured into it and all the famous experts...

We thought we’d continue to go down to Gaza, scatter a few crumbs in the form of tens of thousands of Israeli work permits – always contingent on good behavior – and still keep them in prison.

We’ll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they’re erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.

We’ll keep holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners, sometimes without trial, most of them political prisoners. And we won’t agree to discuss their release even after they've been in prison for decades.

We’ll tell them that only by force will their prisoners see freedom. We thought we would arrogantly keep rejecting any attempt at a diplomatic solution, only because we don’t want to deal with all that, and everything would continue that way forever.

Once again it was proved that this isn’t how it is. A few hundred armed Palestinians breached the barrier and invaded Israel in a way no Israeli imagined was possible. A few hundred people proved it’s impossible to imprison 2 million people forever without paying a cruel price.

Just as the smoky old Palestinian bulldozer tore through the world’s smartest barrier Saturday, it tore away at Israel’s arrogance and complacency. And that’s also how it tore away at the idea that it’s enough to occasionally attack Gaza with suicide drones.

On Saturday, Israel saw pictures it has never seen before. Palestinian vehicles patrolling its cities, bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear away at that arrogance.

The Gaza Palestinians have decided they’re willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Is there any hope in that? No. Will Israel learn its lesson? No.

On Saturday they were already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about occupying the Strip and punishing Gaza “as it has never been punished before.” But Israel hasn’t stopped punishing Gaza since 1948, not for a moment.

After 75 years of abuse, the worse possible scenario awaits it once again. The threats of “flattening Gaza” prove only one thing: We haven’t learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay, even though Israel is paying a high price once again.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay the price, but it didn’t start with him and it won’t end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza.

Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom."

Hamas fighters used earth-moving equipment to breach the border fence between Gaza and Israel on Saturday, allowing more than 1,500 fighters to surge through nearly 30 points along the border. 
Credit...Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa/Reuters

The poet W.H. Auden came to hate the poem from which the title I've given this post is taken... But it remains all too true to our benighted moral compasses.

Persevering in the good fight

When authoritarians are working to replace established ethical norms with the dictates of the Leader, some of the speed bumps they have to overcome are professional standards. Some people will refuse to play by new rules which violate what they've been taught is responsible -- right and righteous -- behavior. We saw plenty of that during the Trump presidency, notably even from some Trump-appointed judges when the sitting president tried, falsely, to claim he'd been defeated by non-existent election fraud.

Some professionals have been fighting the standards fight for decades. Erudite Partner, in her role as an academic ethicist, worked with professional psychologists during the so-called War on Terror to stigmatize the George W. Bush regime's cooptation of the psychological discipline. Psychologists committed abuses -- torture -- on inmates at our American gulag in Guantanamo. (This admitted torture is why those prisoners, some of them documented "bad guys," have never come to trial; the USofA screwed up, rendering proceedings at law almost impossible.)

Form a 2007 demonstration at an American Psychological Association convention

Psychologist Roy Eidelson reports that the American Psychological Association is still dodging setting effectual ethical standards for members who work with the government. He reports on

... approval of a set of wholly inadequate professional practice guidelines for operational psychology. If this domain is unfamiliar to you, operational psychologists are primarily involved in non-clinical activities linked to national security, national defense, and public safety. Their largest source of employment is the military-intelligence establishment, which includes the Department of Defense and the CIA.

Of particular concern from the standpoint of professional ethics, in some cases these psychologists are called upon to inflict harm, to dispense with informed consent, and to operate in a covert manner such that external oversight by professional boards becomes difficult or impossible. They’re eager to have the APA’s official blessing of this weaponization of the profession because it’s a step toward achieving greater recognition and legitimacy for this kind of work.

In light of the manifest misalignment between key features of operational psychology and the profession’s fundamental ethical principles, I believe the proposed guidelines should have been rejected outright, so as not to lend credence to these practices without sufficient discussion and debate about the profoundly consequential issues involved. 

But it’s worth pointing out that these guidelines deserved a flunking grade simply in comparison to other guidelines recently approved by the APA’s Council for other professional practice areas. For instance, both the guidelines for working with persons with disabilities (2022) and the guidelines for working with sexual minority persons (2021) are each over four-times the length of these vague, abstract, and bare-bones guidelines for operational psychology. Count me among those who find it hard to understand why appropriate guidelines for how to ethically support military-intelligence operations are apparently so much less complicated than guidance for psychologists engaged in other work....

He goes on to remind of past abuses:

What does it actually mean, for instance, to “balance” the government’s urgent demand for actionable intelligence against the human dignity of those suspected of having that information?

Let’s remember too that the military-intelligence establishment has itself engaged in a lot of wordsmithing designed to disguise uncomfortable truths. Most obviously, the CIA used “enhanced interrogation techniques” as a substitute term for a much more familiar one: “torture.” With a similar purpose, the Pentagon reduced the number of reported detainee suicide attempts at Guantanamo by officially reclassifying them as cases of “manipulative self-injurious behavior.” And the number of “juveniles” imprisoned at Guantanamo was decreased by arbitrarily adopting sixteen as the cut-off age—even though a juvenile according to U.S. and international law is someone under eighteen at the time of any alleged crime....

The "War on Terror" taught large elements of the national security state to lie baldly. That lying was the precursor of the recent mendacious Trump presidency. It still matters to call these lies out.

Professional standards aren't enough, unaccompanied by activism, to resist fascism, but they are one sometimes surprising element of the defense of civilization. 

On the bombing of cities

Historian Adam Tooze has responded to the Oppenheimer movie about the scientist and the A-Bomb with a reminder that American and British bombing campaigns against cities in WWII can be seen as "the most concentrated expression of modern industrialism."  Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most remembered episodes. Eighty years ago this summer, the Allied bombing of Hamburg incinerated at least 40,000 humans.

On the ascending curve of aerial attacks on cities - a terrifying vision that haunted the 20th century - a crescendo that started in earnest in Guernica in 1937 and continued with the attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, the London Blitz and Coventry, after the RAF’s 1000-bomber raid on Cologne in 1942 and the sustained campaign against the German industrial centers of the Ruhr in the spring of 1943, Hamburg marked a point of culmination. It was the first aerial attack that came close to fully destroying a big city and rendering it at least temporarily uninhabitable. It was an important way-station en route to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

... The temperatures generated by the fire storm were unprecedented and anticipated those of the atomic explosions to come. Glass and metal melted. Bodies were mummified en masse.

In the aftermath, one million people were forced to flee the city in panic. In Berlin, in Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry the mood was apocalyptic. If the British and American bombers could do this to any German city at will, Speer remarked that the German economic planners might as well put a bullet in their brains.

... The most devastating single aerial attack of the war came not in Europe but in Japan, with the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10 1945, which likely killed over 100,000 people. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was not an isolated or unprecedented act of urbicide. It was the deliberate and long-planned extension of a campaign that first showed its terrifying potential in Hamburg 80 years ago.

Though historians have thoroughly documented all this, such is still not a common understanding in the Anglosphere, where we still (for some good reasons as well as morally ignorant ones) cling to the notion of WWII as "the good war."

Reading Tooze on urbicide-past had great resonance for me as it threw me back into the moment, in 1963 as an impressionable high school sophomore, when I first encountered the possibility that, though the Nazis had been unspeakably evil, "the West" had its own faults. I had a sort of in-school paper route that year, distributing paper copies of the New York Times delivered daily to a few student and faculty subscribers. For this I earned a few dollars a month which were all mine -- and which I immediately blew on a paperback book sale rake next to the school's administrative office. I don't imagine anyone else ever bought any book from that very haphazard collection, but I experienced buying from it as a tiny taste of freedom.

Somehow Dwight MacDonald's Memoirs of a Revolutionist caught my attention. Why it was there I don't know; MacDonald wrote cultural criticism for the New Yorker, and was a moderately well-known intellectual pundit. He'd have a successful Substack nowadays. The heart of this volume was the story of how he stopped being a very ordinary 1930s American leftist, took up Trotskyism and recovered, and made his unhappy peace with the 1950s United States as the world's lesser evil.

In the main essay, first published before the end of the European war in March 1945, he struggles with the morality of the Allies, already fully aware of Auschwitz, the attempted extermination of all European Jews and other misfits, as well as Nazi atrocities across occupied Europe. But even then -- before Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- he wasn't about to let the Allies off an ethical hook for the bombings of cities.

There was much moral indignation, for example, about the [V-8] rocket bombs [aimed by the Germans at London]. But the effects of "saturation bombing," which the British and American air forces have brought to a high degree of perfection, are just as indiscriminate and much more murderous. "The Allied air chiefs," states this morning's paper, "have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers. ... The Allied view is that bombardment of large German cities creates immediate need for relief. This is moved into the bombed areas by rail and road, and not only creates a traffic problem but draws transport away from the battle front. Evacuations of the homeless has the same result." The only mistake in the above is to say the decision has just been adopted ...

Even in 1945, even during a "good war," it was possible to observe that much of what one's "own side" was doing was immoral -- and to wrestle vigorously with the implications. Not necessarily to condemn one's side (MacDonald at length does not) but neither to erase crimes. 

In 1953, MacDonald added a footnote:

Six months after this was written, “we” humane and democratic Ameri­cans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying in the twinkling of an eye some 90,000 civilians— men, women, and children. This was the climax of the Anglo-American Policy of massacring civilian populations from the air, a policy which later evidence shows to have been morally indefensible, politically disastrous, and militarily of dubious value.

Not surprisingly, in 1963, I had never encountered anything like this moral complexity. MacDonald gave me a righteous preparation for the decade of Civil Rights struggle and Vietnam -- not mention his introduction to the Catholic Worker, a New Yorker profile of Dorothy Day, also reprinted in this book.

• • •

I think I'm going to skip the Oppenheimer film; I've agonized plenty over that era and the reviews don't point me to anything new. Besides, I seldom warm to movies. In 2011, I wrote up the book the film is based on here on the blog if anyone is interested.

Where's the moral responsibility? How can we see it?

As a side effect of trying to learn more about the Ukraine war, I've watched all of historian Timothy Snyder's Yale course on the convoluted history of that country. It's free and well worth your time.

I also branched out to read Snyder's broader account of the Nazi "final solution," Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. This is a horrifying volume advancing a tendentious thesis about the criminal destruction of European Jews. I find his approach both convincing and possibly not fully proven, despite Snyder's evident command of the incidents of the atrocity. I don't know whether I'll ever feel I have enough background to write about my questions. Or whether I have the stomach to acquire that background. But I feel drawn into this historiographic discussion by encountering Snyder.

Meanwhile, here's a short exposition of his view that we must understand the Holocaust as history in a particular time, place, and institutional framework. The center of Snyder's thesis is that Nazi destruction of states was what made mass murder possible, while Nazi anthropology made it necessary. From there he engages to the ethical questions this historical perspective raises.

"When we get down to the question of why people collaborate, or why people in some way take part in the murder of their Jewish neighbors, we can't really handle that question without talking about the material and legal reality. ..."

".. if we treat this only as memory, it becomes a matter of respect for something that we don't really understand anymore."

All this has left me attuned to contemporary discussions of personal moral and practical responsibility when the state which we would call our own acts badly or even evilly. (Yes, I'm from the Vietnam generation. Many of us stewed in this as young people and some of us have never stopped.)

I thought I'd share a couple of interesting current tidbits from this discussion:

At the academic blog Crooked Timber, a commenter chimed in with this:

As an earnest young undergraduate I went to see Die Weisse Rose with friends, all of us not knowing what to expect. We were not alone in not leaving the theatre for quite some time after the credits rolled. We sat there literally stunned into silence and a discomforting degree of introspection. On our way home, finally, I reminded my friends of a comment aimed at western commentators in general that had very recently been offered by, I think, either Natan Sharansky or Andrei Sakharov: “The question is not, whose side are you on? The question is, whose side would you be on in our situation?” I was not alone in coming away from Die Weisse Rose knowing whose side I should have been on but now, thanks to the power of the film, quite unsure whose side I would have been on had I been in that situation, given the courage and integrity the right answer would have required.

This week the New York Times passed on a fascinating story about the controversy stirred by a Dutch museum which tried to display a balanced picture of both resistance and collaboration with the Nazi occupation of 1940-1944.

The Netherlands lost a higher percentage of its Jewish population than any other country in Western Europe. Nearly 75 percent of Dutch Jews — a total of 102,200 — were deported and murdered during the war, while in neighboring Belgium the number was closer to 40 percent, and in France 25 percent.

... [Liesbeth van der Horst, the museum’s director] agreed that the Dutch resistance was diffuse, “but some people may be surprised that there was more resistance than they realized.” However, she said, the museum sought to show that resisting the Nazis was difficult. “In the face of a threatening dictatorial regime, it’s not easy to just act,” she said.

... The exhibit portrays the lives of victims and perpetrators, bystanders and resisters, “and everything in between,” said Liesbeth van der Horst, the museum’s director, in an interview. “We wanted to tell the story of all the Dutch people.” 

“Sometimes people judge too easily, in hindsight,” she added. “They say, ‘More people should have been involved in the resistance,’ and ‘They didn’t do enough.’ Of course, it’s true, they didn’t do enough, but it was not that easy to do enough. You had to be prepared to die if you wanted to go into the resistance.”

In Black Earth, Snyder briefly applies his historical thesis to the Dutch occupation; this is both plausible and the sort of tendentious fitting of fact to thesis that his book leaves me wondering about.

The Netherlands was ... the closest approximation to statelessness in Western Europe. ... There was no head of state once Queen Wilhelmina left for London in May 1940. The Dutch government followed her into exile. The bureaucracy, in effect decapitated, was left with instructions to behave in a way that would serve the Dutch nation. Uniquely in western Europe, the SS sought and attained fundamental control of domestic policy. ... The Dutch police, like the Polish police, was ... directly subordinate to the German occupier. ... In the Netherlands, all religions had been organized into communities for purposes of legal recognition, and all citizens were registered according to religion. This meant Germans could make use of precise preexisting lists of Jewish citizens. Dutch citizens protested, but it made little difference. ... The Dutch were treated as citizens of an occupied country, unless they were Jewish. ...

I study history's horrors to engage the moral issues which events and actors raise. None of us know how we would react if push came to shove. And none of us want to find out.

A campaign operative's confession and cri de coeur

Tim Miller's Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell might not be to everyone's taste, but it sure was to mine. Miller made a career as a minor Republican campaign operative and media spinner over a couple of decades -- but knew in his gut that he couldn't stomach Donald Trump and bailed rather than work for the Orange God King. He now is a charming, queer fixture of the Never-Trump Bulwark (also not everyone's cup of tea).

Here's how Miller describes his new book:

Why We Did It is a book about the people who submitted to every whim of a comically unfit and detestable man who crapped all over them and took over the party they had given their life to. It’s about the army of consultants, politicians, and media figures who stood back and stood by as everything they ever fought for was degraded and devalued. The people who privately admitted they recognized all the risks but still climbed aboard for a ride on the SS Trump Hellship that they knew would assuredly sink. ... These people are not all barbarians or megalomaniacs. They are flawed men and women with shadow wants and desires. It’s just that in this case those desires allowed them to accept an unusual evil.

Being of the "what the hell is wrong with these people?" school myself, I wanted to know how Miller understood them. The book rewards with a history of how the Trump cult became ascendent within the Republican Party and with a taxonomy of its GOP enablers.

On the former point, Miller's answer is scary and convincing: the Republican Party has become what its most loyal constituency -- aggrieved old white men -- always wanted.

He got a glimpse while working on John McCain's campaign in Iowa in 2008. The candidate believed in honest, decent, if limited, public policies to enhance the lives all citizens. That's not what Miller encountered doing advance work:

A part of me realized that the party I had started volunteering for as an early pubescent teen was slipping away from me and the trajectory we were on was a dark one. The Republican voters I saw in Counciltucky [he didn't like Council Bluffs] weren’t looking for straight talk or paeans to national purpose. What they really wanted was to stick it in the other’s eye and be comforted by convenient lies. They just needed a leader shameless enough to give it to them.

As was likely the case for many confused Republican operatives, it was that anarcho-fascist Steve Bannon who offered insight into where the druthers of the GOP voters could be found:

“Centering the commenters” meant elevating the issues that most motivated core readers. Bannon would talk about the “hobbits” and “deplorables” who read Breitbart and how they powered the campaigns of the site’s favored anti-establishment candidates.  ... 

The result of this consistent elevation of and advocacy for fringe views was that it forced the political campaigns to respond to the things that highly engaged voters cared about. In theory, this is a good thing. In practice, it led to madness. People care about a lot of crazy shit to begin with, and when they are being goaded and inflamed by a [right-wing] propaganda machine it leads to fresh concerns that resonate emotionally, while being quite far afield from their daily lives.

Less inflammatory, more conventional Republicans didn't know what hit them when Donald Trump turned up, tickling the ids of GOP base voters.

It was the commenters, the hobbits, who had taken charge. And they were the ones dragging us along, no matter how we assured ourselves that we were in control.

Miller goes on to describe the flailing of his peer Republican campaign operatives and policy nerds when the party they thought they worked for vaporized and then was transformed after Trump's flukey 2016 election victory. He provides a taxonomy of enablers he names Messiahs and Junior Messiahs, Demonizers, LOL Nothing Matters, Republicans Tribalist Trolls, Strivers, Little Mixes, Peter Principle Disprovers, Nerd Revengers, The Inert Team Players, The Compartmentalizers, and Cartel Cashers.

The distinctions he draws between these groups are clearly of some importance to Miller, but I found these vignettes somewhat boring. These Republicans found lots of ways to be assholes, but I just don't care. Obviously, something (and it was more than a paycheck) was missing in these people. Here are some of Miller's conclusions:

• For many people in Washington, their party is more a part of their identity than their ethnicity, religion, or personal history. It’s how they see themselves and how everyone in their social network defines them. Shedding an ingrained identity that others use to define you takes courage, even if that identity is toxic and self-destructive. All of this makes the bar for removing “Republican operative” from a person’s identity pretty hard. 

• ... my friends who stuck around the GOP had a visceral loathing that I’m not sure I realized was there even when I was part of it. When we were sparring with our Democratic counterparts, some of us were kind of faking it, going along with the kayfabe. While the rest of them were employing faux outrage and gamesmanship as well, it turns out that underneath the performance was a much more deep-seated desire to see the other side punished. To watch them get owned. Their grievances were based in part in ideology, but more often it seemed like simple interpersonal annoyance and privilege. 

• They live in liberal bubbles and find their neighbors’ excesses grating. They are sick of being told what they should and shouldn’t say or do. They are embittered that the media is always being unfair to them. They are tired of diversity requirements that mean they lose out on jobs to “people of color.” They blanche at the DEI packets being handed out at their kids’ schools. ... 

•... All of that annoyance and envy bottles up until it boils over. ... They all wanted to cut the left down a peg. Put a cap on the diversifying cultural elite who were flourishing at what they perceived was their expense. Trump was the vehicle for doing it.

All that seems an inadequate excuse for selfishly overthrowing a 230-year-old evolving democracy -- but hey, I've never been a Republican.

Why did the individual named Tim Miller bounce out -- become a RINO -- and join active resistance to Trumpism? It's got to have mattered that he's gay and had already chosen to affirm his orientation while still on the GOP team.

Coming out was the best decision I ever made, by a landslide. If you happen to be reading this and are still on the fence, I’m telling you, you should do it. It improved my life in myriad ways, big and small. It widened the aperture through which I viewed the world and expanded my capacity for empathy. It saved me. ... 

... coming out still required me to unravel a mindfuck that was a quarter century in the making. The closet is omnipresent and omnipotent. It engulfs you. It makes everything you do a lie.

Before and for quite awhile after he came out, he lived inside the cognitive dissonance of  compartmentalization: diving into his gay "personal" life while he "contorted himself into defending homophobes."  He could sustain the dissonance for awhile; and then he could no longer. Coming out prepared him to bolt away from Trump.

• • •

What made this book for me was Miller's candid description of "The Game," the ethos (and sometimes flexible ethics) of the work of campaigns. Been there, seen that, participated in a small way in its pleasures and its corruptions. Some quotes from Miller:

I confessed ... that politics offered me the same kind of competitive outlet that sports fandom had.  

... The horse race mindset, taken to its logical conclusion, makes ideology subordinate to gamesmanship.  

... They were hacks through and through, adrenaline junkies who were in it for the fight. No matter which role they were in, staffers began to see themselves as tacticians in this made-for-TV blood sport rather than as functionaries in a system that is aimed to produce the best policy outcomes for their fellow citizens.  

... Whether something was the right thing to do only mattered to the extent that it was also the right thing to do politically. When the strategy, politics, and policy impacts all aligned: great. But when they didn’t, well, that was a concern for the wonks. Not our problem.

Although almost all the campaigns I've worked in pretty much every year since 1989 have been for the success of what I consider desirable ideological ends -- more fairness, more justice, more equity, less cruelty -- I know the delicious rush that is doing campaign battle. You do bizarre things that your project demands: for example, in the service of trying to end the death penalty in California, I found myself working side by side amicably with the consultant for the state's Roman Catholic bishops. He had previously steered the successful 2008 Prop. 8 campaign to ban gay marriage. We each brought something ... I've also promoted candidates about whom I had plenty of reservations -- but enough hope to make the effort palatable. 

Election work is indeed an ethically dangerous game, but also a hell of an absorbing racket.

Tim Miller provides a delicious picture of that life for a Washington DC operative. I couldn't help enjoying that story, even as I loathed his employers.

January 6 committee hearings: a surprising ethical emphasis

Both the chairman, Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, and the vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, spoke a language which is currently foreign to our politics -- the language of democratic civic virtue.

Thompson invoked the example of the greatest exponent of democratic civic virtue the country has produced, President Lincoln:

Thinking back again to the Civil War, in the summer of 1864, the President of the United States was staring down what he believed would be a doomed bid for reelection. He believed his opponent, General George McClellan, would wave the white flag when it came to preserving the Union. But even with that grim fate hanging in the balance, President Lincoln was ready to accept the will of the voters, come what may. He made a quiet pledge.  

He wrote down the words, “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect....” 

It will be my duty. 

Lincoln sealed that memo and asked his cabinet secretaries to sign it, sight unseen. He asked them to make the same commitment he did. To accept defeat if indeed defeat was the will of the people. To uphold the rule of law. To do what every other President who came before him did... and what every President who followed him would do. 

Until Donald Trump.

Both Thompson and Cheney recalled to listeners that Congressmembers and all federal workers swear an oath (introduced during what my ancestors would have called the Rebellion of the South against Union, freedom, and modernity) to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

Cheney evoked the oft un-noted notion of political honor:

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

This is not how we talk about our politics. There is good reason. Many citizens feel they have been lied to over and over about unjust and unjustifiable U.S. wars ever since Vietnam. Too many have seen promises of prosperity crumble into rust and privation. Religious charlatans spew fear and vitriol in place of inspiration -- and often directly abuse and exploit their vulnerable flocks. Anger and cynicism eclipse civic virtue.

And yet, if this country is to make it through the challenges of our time, we need to be able to speak of and promote civic virtue.  

Perhaps coincidentally, a religion professor at the conservative Wheaton College, Esau McCaulley, offers a challenging call in today's New York Times to Christians -- mostly of the more conservative sort -- who hold what he labels "a deficient doctrine of sin and evil, limiting it to the individual." Writing about opposition to controls of guns, he concludes:

If some Christians refuse to do this good it will not be because believing in “evil hearts” eliminates the need for gun reform. It will be because they refuse to accept what the Christian faith teaches: Societies, like individual hearts, can be broken and twisted.

As we are by the January 6 hearings, we are recalled to collective civic virtue.