MAGA's nostalgia for a fictitious white America

The Trump regime shows very little actual imagination. MAGA looks backward to a non-existent past when men were men and dark people knew their place. Columnist Jamelle Bouie has their number: 

... You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshiped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.

The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.

The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. 

... Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. 

It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration. ...

Bouie concludes:

[Trump's] vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past.

Healthy, living countries look forward. MAGA poses the question: do we choose life?

• • •

The Trump regime's hatred of migrants frequently seems to focus on Mexicans, Central Americans and other speakers of Spanish. But MAGA's venom is also directed at many others, particular those long time targets of racist nativism: Chinese immigrants. Catherine Rampell is the economics decoder for The Bulwark; she picked up on the focus of the White House's attack on the Smithsonian Museum. 

... the White House recently released a 162-page report on the most critical issue facing voters: woke museum exhibitions. ... the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus. After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.

... The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to restrict immigration based on race or nationality. It banned nearly all Chinese laborers from coming to the United States for a decade; it also blocked Chinese immigrants who were already in the United States from ever becoming naturalized citizens. The premise was: If you were of Chinese descent, you were incapable of ever becoming an American, on account of your race.

The law was born of widespread anti-Chinese sentiment. It was passed amid a decade of growing repression and violence against Chinese immigrants in the Western United States, which resulted in massacres such as those in L.A.’s Chinatown (1871) and at Deep Creek in Oregon (1887), as well as many other acts of violence in the region before and after the bill was made law.

And then as now, economic precarity laid the predicate for virulent nativism. The late nineteenth century was a period of significant economic and technological upheaval owing to industrialization, job displacement, and the country’s evolving geographic footprint (including the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which relied heavily on Chinese and Irish immigrant labor).

There's nothing new about MAGA's nativism. Unless we're from indigenous native ancestry, we all came to this continent from somewhere else. And, together, we make the country however great it may be and become.

No more "consequence free world" -- thanks Donnie!

What's the Orange Toddler going to say in his national broadcast tonight? Looks like he wants to whine on about the 2020 election he lost -- and threaten the 2026 midterms which he is going to lose. I won't be watching; I've got something better to do.

But I know at least one purpose that inspires this unwanted intrusion in our evening: he's managed to start a war against Iran which he is losing. He is desperate for some distraction. He/we are being humiliated by a second rate theocracy with a lot more brains and a lot more guts than exist in the US government these days.

Military historian Phillips P. O'Brien provides an apt and accurate description of what's going on:

The US-Iran War is a war of superlatives, because it is so absurd. It has already been the most “corrupt” war in US history (easily), the most “strategy-free” war in US history, and the most pointless war in US history. It might also be the stupidest. Another thing it is, without a doubt, is Donald Trump’s War (indeed that might be its name in history). This makes it a war with the stability of Donald Trump’s personality (i.e., very little). This week, for instance, the ceasefire between Iran and the USA completely broke down (yes, four days of constant bombardment means it has broken down) but if it instantly reasserted itself today, no one could be surprised because that is how Trump operates. ....

... The most recent polls are pretty consistent—somewhere between 60-66% of Americans do not support the war and consider it a failure. Only the GOP/MAGA base still supports this unending war (ironically enough). Also, the Iranian regime has consolidated its hold on power and seems to have rebuilt some of its military assets. However that is an irrelevance in Donald Trump’s War. He will do anything not to accept defeat for now.

... Look, Khamenei was a terrible guy, but the USA had pursued and legitimized a policy of leader assassination. Now it complains about this policy that has made Trump himself a legitimate target for Iran. What did he think? Did Trump believe he could assassinate whomever he wanted in Iran and Iran would not contemplate retaliating in kind?

The US believed for too long that it was living in a consequence free world, where it could do what it wanted and was so powerful that other states would simply bow to its magnificence, accept all insults, and grovel for its friendship. Well guess what? Actions have consequences, and the US has deliberately chosen policies with pretty terrible ones.

Wake up and smell the roses America. You planted these ones.

Actually, I am not sure Donald Trump's War on Iran is the stupidest war in our history. I could make a case for what we call the "War of 1812" and what Europe, if it remembers it at all, thinks of as minor skirmish adjacent to the Napoleonic wars which shaped the modern era. The USofA got lucky in that one; the world powers were distracted by their own quarrels and couldn't follow up on the blows they'd dealt the Americans. (I'm an interested student of that one; one of its failures laid the basis for my family's subsequent well-being.) 

Credit where due

I try to know as much history as I can study, but Kevin M. Levin has just taught me there's a lot I've missed about how the Union won the Civil War. 

By Committee of Ladies of Philadelphia via Wikipedia

Roughly 75 percent of free born African American men of military age in the North volunteered to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. No other demographic group in American history has mobilized for war at anything close to that rate.

These men enlisted knowing they would receive unequal pay until Congress relented in 1864, that they would serve under white officers and be denied commissions, and that capture might mean enslavement or execution rather than a prison camp. Finally, they served not knowing whether that service would translate into citizenship.

Roughly 180,000 Black men ultimately served in the United States Colored Troops, nearly a tenth of the Union army by the war’s end. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women who fled to Union lines and forced emancipation onto the war’s agenda before Washington had decided what the war was about.

Frederick Douglass understood precisely what this service meant, which is why he threw himself into recruitment. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.,” he declared in 1863, “let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.” 

Apparently civilians in Union cities knew who was defending them. I feel pretty certain that Donald Trump and his merry band of vandals who are busily trying to cover up what we should learn in US history doesn't know this. And they'd only work harder to push lies if they were taught it. But we can do better.

Memories of delight

There are so many ways to reflect on America 250. I loved this one. 

The Center for Asian American Media writes: 

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, we’re looking through our Memories to Light archives of home movies from our community and are moved by how Asian Americans have long been an integral part of our nation. 

Memories to Light is CAAM’s archive of Asian American home footage from across the country, spanning six decades (1920s through the 1980s). These images embody shared social, cultural, and political representations of Asian America and demonstrate the importance of collective storytelling as a path toward greater understanding of the Asian American experience. 

What a gift! 

How to live in a nation that hates you?

I'm not unusual in being moved by this 250th US anniversary to think about the present through the lens of Centennials Past.  Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. has offered his reflections in America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries.  A scholar of James Baldwin, he is not into pretty pictures of the past; this is not that kind of nation. 

And so Glaude begins:

I do not love America, and never have, especially now.

From there, he's more than ready to tell us why that is:

... Desperately afraid of being exposed, particularly to themselves, most white Americans have been led by that fear, and continue to be led, into a kind of delirium that erupts, repeatedly, in unimaginable violence and draconian policies. They lash out. They destroy or render entire populations invisible, lock them away in prisons, push them to the edges of our communities, or deport them in order to keep the country, or their idea of the country, from being torn asunder.

... Trump’s reelection in 2024 signaled that a large swath of white America was unwilling to struggle any longer over race matters. Instead, he reasserted the fantasy of a white Republic. ... 

The burden of white America is a lot to carry. But here Glaude is -- and here we all are.

Glaude takes up various bits of our history and white America's shame in the light of the five great commemorative anniversaries. Particular horrors bubble to the top of this stew for deeper examination. 

For example, launching off the fact that Frederick Douglass's home place was western New York state in the years before the Civil War, Glaude dissects the Tops Market hate massacre in Buffalo in 2021. This one got to me, because Buffalo also was my home place, and I do not want to forget...

... Well over a century after Douglass delivered his speech in Corinthian Hall and Garnet announced in Buffalo that pharaohs were on both sides of the Red Sea, Payton Gendron, an eighteen-year-old white male from Conklin, New York, drove over two hundred miles to east Buffalo, exited his car with a semiautomatic rifle with the word Nigger scrawled on its barrel, and opened fire at the Tops Friendly Market. He was dressed in tactical gear and live-streamed his killing spree on Twitch. [Ten shoppers died.]

Gendron purposefully chose this area because of its high concentration of Black residents. Buffalo is the sixth most segregated city in the country and the third poorest city in the nation. Thirty-five percent of African Americans and 40 percent of Black children in Buffalo live below the poverty line. In 2021, African American unemployment in the city stood at 11 percent. Masten Park on the East Side, where the Tops grocery store is located, is like most Black neighborhoods in poor cities teeming with Black people trying to make ends meet. Severe residential segregation has drawn a hard line between Black and white residents in the city. One reporter likened Main Street to the Berlin Wall, a divide, like railroad tracks in small Southern towns, that separates Black and white neighborhoods. 

Before the horror on May 14, Black people lived in a city that fundamentally devalued and disregarded them, no matter which political party governed. They lived and died by a thousand daily cuts in “the city of good neighbors. ...

Glaude goes on to recount the testimony of the survivors and the relatives of the murdered. These are people who do not have the option of ignoring the reality that too much of their own country discounts their humanity. 

How to live in a nation that hates you? Glaude takes this as his problem and his text:

... We are forced to live with the idea that, because of the color of our skin and because of the color of yours, somehow that says something about our value, our worth. ... 

... There is this palpable sense throughout the country that everything is collapsing around us—that hatred has overrun basic values and that greed has trumped decency. Hope for a racially just society seems like a fool’s desire, because so many white folks—those who can’t imagine themselves as anything but white—have lost their damn minds. 

But love breaks through. Not some sentimentalized love of country that can easily slip into a kind of idolatry that makes one monstrous, but the love of people close to the ground, who give this place meaning and purpose. The love that motivated slaves to imagine a future as a free people when nothing about their experience suggested that such a future could be possible; the love that announces hatred must never have the last word. ...

... Your country? Your history? No. It is ours. Our sweat and tears have shaped this land. You feel us in the music; our sound rolls off your tongue. Our presence fills your classic literature. Our wails and moans, our joys and laughter, make this place swing. Your country? No. The bars of music that begin each chapter of this book suggest otherwise. And no matter your efforts to make us invisible or to deny the history of the country that unravels your myths and legends, we know America would not be America without us. 

The reality is what it is. The country has given us Donald Trump, and we have to deal with this madness again. The pounding in the skull returns as we struggle to beat back the “intolerable bitterness of spirit,” because these people have done this shit again in the 250th year of America, U.S.A., a semiquincentennial blues.

Glaude would never deny he's a kind of preacher. 

Centennials past ...

My family has been bumping about the United States for a long time, since well before this was a nation, since Europeans started expropriating New England from its inhabitants. I am fortunate to have come into considerable family archives; I find it interesting to catalogue ancestral markers of these observances

At the time of the first (1875-6) centennial, a great-great grandfather, E. G. Spaulding, was a prosperous civic grandee, a banker and former mayor of Buffalo. He erected his personal monument to the country which had been so good to him. He was full of energy and pride.

 

The ostensible purpose of this massive pseudo-classical stone horror was to mark 50 years since the passing of his ancestor, Levi Spaulding, who fought in the American revolutionary army from Bunker Hill through Yorktown. But one panel was also an affirmation of the struggle of this own lifetime; old E.G. was in Congress during Lincoln's fraught Civil War term. He knew where he stood on the battles of his day.

   

Click to enlarge images. 

 • • •

Come the 150th anniversary of the country in 1926, the city of Buffalo was in its commercial heyday. Most of the great civic monuments were in construction or planning in that decade, including Shea's Performing Arts Center, the Peace Bridge to Canada and the art deco City Hall. In addition to industry, Buffalo profited greatly being the gateway to booze smuggled in from Canada, defying Prohibition. I remember asking my mother about that year's sesquicentennial. She was unusually vague in her memories. She was 18 that year, graduating from high school, about to go off with her family on a summer cruise around the Mediterranean, then off to college. She remembered she took her flask with her. Under Prohibition, you had to be sure you didn't drink something that turned out to be paint thinner.

• • •

By the time of the Bicentennial of 1976, I can bring my own memories. I was 29 that year. While the tall ships sailed into New York harbor and the fire works lofted over Philadelphia, I was painting my parents' living room, the furniture swathed in tarps and the painter covered in roller spray. I don't think we wore masks when painting in those days. My chief memory is sweltering, with occasional breaks for the TV.

 

My generation, people who came of age in late 1960s, were often America skeptics. We had grown up inspired by the Civil Rights revolution, then watched the cities burn when hope for racial and economic justice was unfilled, while the boys were sent to Vietnam to die for what we knew was nothing good. Then a president turned out to be just a common crook and drunk -- and by 1976 we were left with Gerald Ford who seemed an interim stand-in for a national leader. 

 

By 1976 I was on board with Dorothy Day's one word reaction to the Bicentennial as printed in the National Catholic Reporter:

 

Dorothy summed up my feelings of the time. This still seems one appropriate response to the national festivites.

• • • 

So what's to make of America 250? 

 

I have to admit, I'm sort of enjoying the show. Donald Trump's ignorant, tacky effort to hijack the national celebration seems largely to inspire ridicule. This ia not a respectful country and never has been. This is also not really a backward looking country; we can wallow in MAGA's swamp of gloomy nostalgia for a season, but our history is that hope revives. Against all odds, we can still make that happen. Let's keep up the work.

On the eve of the July 4 holiday

When I was a child, the preeminent patriotic song was not "The Star Spangled Banner" ... Too formal and too hard to sing. For some, the song might have been "God Bless America" belted out on vinyl by Kate Smith. But mostly, the patriotic anthem was "My country 'tis of thee ..." Perhaps this had something to do with our proximity Canada where, incongruously to American ears, the same tune served as a national anthem pledging allegiance to British monarchy. Obviously an adaptable tune.

With this in mind, I was delighted to stumble upon this wonderful iteration contributed by W.E.B.Dubois:

... Of course you have faced the dilemma: it is announced, they all smirk and rise. If they are ultra, they remove their hats and look ecstatic; then they look at you. What shall you do? Noblesse oblige; you cannot be boorish, or ungracious; and too, after all it is your country and you do love its ideals if not all of its realities. Now, then, I have thought of a way out: Arise, gracefully remove your hat, and tilt your head. Then sing as follows, powerfully and with deep unction. They’ll hardly note the little changes and their feelings and your conscience will thus be saved:

My country tis of thee,
Late land of slavery,
         Of thee I sing.
Land where my father’s pride
Slept where my mother died,
From every mountain side
         Let freedom ring!

My native country thee
Land of the slave set free,
         Thy fame I love.
I love thy rocks and rills
And o’er thy hate which chills,
My heart with purpose thrills,
         To rise above. ... 

There are two additional verses.  

Takes one to know too many

Panic about newcomers to the United States seems to be a hardy perennial in the American experience. 

Because my parents were unusually old when they reproduced, closer to 40 than 25 when they had a child, I carry a memory of coming up with people who had come of age during the immigration restriction panic of the 1920s. Even in the 1950s, they saw nothing amiss in reflexive "soft" prejudice against people who came from what they saw as "shithole" countries; in their world, that would be people of Italian or, even worse, Polish ancestry. The great patriotic coalition of World War II had sanded some ugly edges off this for them and this disdain didn't extend either to European Jews or American-born Blacks. But during the restricted phase of legal immigration that extended to 1965, they were just normies with normie attitudes. 

My generation were more open to new experiences and newcomers; we call that the Sixties. We were beyond shocking and very controversial to previous generations.

And then, like many Americans, my parents became more and more open to the different sort of Americans who came among us when we opened legal immigration doors a crack. 

The dwindling white base of the current Republican Party desperately wants the past and their entitled bigotry back. The Supreme Court's too small majority affirming birthright citizenship does not mean the end of the fight; it merely signals a new phase in the never finished struggle over who is a real American.

Air Force vet and former Republican Congresscritter Adam Kinzinger speaks to this moment; he knows the worst of his former constituents.  

Why Trump Won't Stop Until He Ends Birthright Citizenship 

Who is an American isn’t a difficult question. Despite what four politicians in black robes tried to tell us ..., the 14th Amendment is incredibly clear, written in language anybody can read and comprehend: “Any persons born or naturalized in the United States.” It’s simple: If you’re born here, you’re an American, and entitled to all our country’s blessings. And it used to be pretty widely agreed upon that this was an asset that this set our country above other nations as a beacon of freedom.

When I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, I knew this was part of the deal. And I served in uniform alongside people that would have proudly given their life for their country, even if their parents were born somewhere else.

... Let’s be very clear about this: Trump and his allies are not going to stop trying to end Birthright Citizenship, and whoever succeeds him will pick up that mantle. Deciding “who is an American” is central to the MAGA project; it is among the very first steps in their playbook. 

If you think this is an overstatement, just look at one response yesterday from a prominent MAGA stooge—the CEO of the right-wing magazine The Federalist: 

click to enlarge

I'm reproducing this deranged screed here because most of us don't see the stuff our right wingers stew in. "Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners." "Deny entry to all female foreigners." "Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry." These people are scared stupid!

Kinzinger goes on: 

What makes America exceptional is the idea that citizenship isn’t about bloodlines or tribal membership—it’s about our shared commitment to a set of principles. It is a big, sprawling, living and breathing Democracy. This is what sets us apart from nations that define citizenship by ethnicity or religion. A Shining City on a Hill isn’t meant to be admired in the distance, it is an actual place with people, industry, traditions and faith.

And that gets us to the core of MAGA. The movement to end birthright citizenship isn’t trying to make America stronger. It’s trying to make America smaller, more fearful, more divided. It’s trying to turn the Constitution into a weapon against the very people it was designed to protect. Ultimately, Trump wants a smaller citizenry, a smaller democracy and a smaller America—in every sense of the word.

This is an existential fight for [Stephen Miller], for Trump and for the sociopaths they’ve got running the government right now. It is the skeleton key to the fascist takeover so many of them pray for each night. So the fight continues because they will never stop. 

America, as they know it, cannot exist with birthright citizenship in place because they believe it diminishes them. And, to me, that’s what makes the MAGA movement so weak and pathetic. They want to make being born here a curse, when the rest of us know it is an immense privilege. ...

What happened at the Supreme Court is not just another move in an ongoing MAGA v. Dems chess match. This is our existential fight.

Yet more on the Juneteenth holiday: against forgetting

Kevin Young self-describes as a post-evangelical pastor. Also a white guy and "a lifter." Not my instinctive go-to for theological or other insight. 

Yet, as belatedly and arduously the Juneteenth holdiay becomes more internalized as a national holiday, as well as a Black remembrance, he offers a perspective that I find compelling. He writes:

... The Hebrew scriptures are obsessed—I mean absolutely OBSESSED—with memory. 

The command to remember appears over 200 times in the Old Testament alone. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt,” says Deuteronomy 5:15. God did not issue that command as a footnote but as the foundation of Israel’s entire ethical framework.

You were oppressed. 
You know what oppression feels like. 
Therefore, you do not oppress.
Remember!

To forget is not simply to be careless. In the theology of the Hebrew Bible, to forget is to sin.

When white people dismantle the legal protections of Black voters, erase Black history from classrooms, defund the celebrations of Black freedom, and quietly remove the holidays that honor Black lives from our national calendar, we are not just making administrative, fiscal, or even political decisions. 

No.

We are committing an act of spiritual forgetting. We are sinning against memory, and we are willfully sinning against the image-bearers we have chosen to forget. 

The alternative to forgetting is both pain admitting to horrors and joy in human liberation -- joy at the defeat of our particular American slavery, but also joy in in the possibility of wider community and a better future. This is a choice. "Let us march on til victory is won!"

Juneteenth 2026

Let us celebrate "a new birth of freedom!" 

Sociologist Robert P. Jones makes a suggestion that works for me:

... The period of 15 days that span the space between Juneteenth and Independence Day could ... function as an enduring season of critical patriotism for our time. Alongside the celebratory fireworks and other well-established practices surrounding the Fourth of July, we could develop a new civic liturgy that include the creative interplay of lament and celebration, reckoning and repair, truth-telling and hope. Borrowing from the High Holidays model, Juneteenth could function like Yom Kippur, recalling our struggles to overcome our shortcomings and achieve freedom, while Independence Day could echo Rosh Hashanah, recommitting us to shared national ideals.

Such a practice could also embrace a conviction that is deeply engrained in Judaism, Christianity, and indeed most religious traditions—that no people can live with integrity into the future if they cannot face their past failures to live up to their principles. ...

Bringing the Juneteenth and the Fourth of July together in a creative mutual orbit, where each is embraced by the gravitational force of the other, can also help us develop other rituals that are honest about our country’s failings while also being hopeful about its possibilities. 

Perhaps it takes time for a new federal holiday to acquire full potency. 

Juneteenth, proclaimed nationally in 2021, has been a living remembrance within Black culture, migrating from Texas along with the diaspora and particularly noted in California where so many African American citizens arrived from the southwest. Nationally the holiday still might take further seasoning. Somehow I doubt that Trump and MAGA will succeed in erasing this happy anniversary, anymore than they'll succeed in Making America White Again. All together now, "let us march on 'til victory is won!"

A lesson for us all

 

Last Sunday in church I had an unexpected experience. At the end of the service, the musician launched into a stirring rendition of James Weldon Johnson's hymn, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" -- otherwise known since the early 20th century as the "Black (or Negro) national anthem." 

 

In the sort of overwhelmingly white churches I attend, the hymn has become a commonplace. There was an era when a gay community whose men were dying in droves during the worst of HIV/AIDS took it up enthusiastically. That made a certain emotional sense; the lyric speaks the joy of the dismissed and discarded.

 

Yet I have been uncomfortable. The practice smacked of cultural appropriation; what right did a bunch of historically illiterate white Americans have to Black Americans' hymn of liberty?

 

Now the Trump administration has sought to erase the federal holiday that marks Juneteenth, the day of liberation from chattel slavery for four million Americans. No more free admission to National Parks to mark Black liberation under the MAGA regime!

 

Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin discusses why it feels so much more plausible and honest for us all to celebrate Juneteenth in this awful year when Donald's decrepitude tries to overrun us all.

Juneteenth Is Not Someone Else's Story 
Emancipation didn't just free four million people. It rebuilt the country the rest of us still live in.

 

... Juneteenth is a federal holiday now. It belongs to the country, which I understand to mean that it belongs to all of us, and not in some abstract, ceremonial sense. Emancipation did not simply liberate four million enslaved people and leave everyone else untouched. It rewrote the Constitution, redefined citizenship, and forced a reckoning over federal power that still shapes our politics. It launched a fight over Reconstruction whose outcome determined who could vote and who counted as a full citizen, a fight whose unfinished business runs through Jim Crow, through the civil rights movement, and into our own disputes over voting rights and equal protection.
 

... None of us, whatever our ancestry, lives outside the world that emancipation built. 

I am not ceding anything. This is part of my history too, not because I share an ancestral claim to bondage or liberation, but because I am an American living inside the consequences of that rupture and the story of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom is the central drama of this nation’s history.
 

... Black Americans inherited Juneteenth as lived memory, as family history, as a chain of testimony passed down with a weight and intimacy I will never replicate. Nor do I have any interest in attempting to do so.
 

... Nobody should cede this story. Juneteenth is the only national holiday that celebrates the freedom of over four million people, in a nation that has long claimed to be ‘exceptional’ in advancing freedom. We should all be reaching for it, from wherever we stand, both as historians and students of history. Because a nation that only half remembers its emancipation has not yet finished becoming free.

This Juneteenth, it behooves us to celebrate emancipation and refuse to cede our aspirations for more perfect freedom.

Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won." 

We're living in a magical kingdom with a demented guide

 

The irreplaceable Jonathan V Last at The Bulwark captures the complete lunacy that the madman in the White House and his billionaire buddies have led us into with his Iran debacle

Markets 

The funniest part of this whole thing—the real sorcery—is that the world’s financial markets agree that we’re in a great place and the current status quo is amazing.

America and Israel launched our war against Iran on February 28. Since then,

• America spent in the neighborhood of $30 billion on the war.

• The world experienced the worst oil shock in recorded history.

• Inflation is running very hot.

• There’s been something like $58 billion in damage to infrastructure in the Middle East, which has curtailed industrial outputs independent of the shipping crisis.

• Global companies have lost at least $25 billion in revenue because of the war.

And yet the S&P 500 is . . . up since the war started? Way up?

It gets better! In two days’ time, we will have the biggest IPO in history. SpaceX will shatter records. It will be valued at close to $2 trillion dollars. It will make Elon Musk the world’s first (acknowledged) trillionaire.

It’s going to be the most obscene financial orgy in a century. Like watching John D. Rockefeller and Louis XIV spit roast Caligula.

Iran and the SpaceX IPO are the same thing. Magical thinking. ...

We apparently have an appetite for this sort of thing. Until we don't. Neither Louis XIV (felled by senile gangrene) nor Caligula (killed by associates) ended well. 

Death of Caligula

The American republic, eventually, broke up John D. Rockefeller's oil empire by court order in 1911 and he went on to invent modern foundation philanthropy, for good and ill.

Keeping the fire burning ... it's a forever thing

For over a decade, Erudite Partner has been publishing occasional essays at the news site TomDispatch. The editor, Tom Engelhardt, came to publishing from the New England Free Press where he worked in the late 1960s -- in those days, radical publishing meant literally becoming printers of physical flyers as well as books. When I passed through Boston and visited in the spring of 1969, I imagine I met him; there were a lot of nice, earnest young men in the loft where they ran the presses. He later built TomDispatch into a syndication service for writing and distribution of progressive thinking.

 

Like all of us who have worked since the Sixties to tend and sometimes ignite the smoldering coals of struggles for justice, Tom is getting on. Others plan to take up his work in some form as Tom retires. Tom, you have served the people well and truthfully. 

 

Erudite Partner looks back at the more than one hundred essays she has written for Tom in a final piece: About That Arc of the Moral Universe; Sometimes It’s More Like a Meandering Sine Wave.

Where we spend our treasure ...

I found this interview long, meandering, and finally a bit woo-woo. But one observation by Israeli popular intellectual Yuval Harari to the NY Times' Ezra Klein [gift] stayed with me:

... For most of history, a lot of the budget of every kingdom, empire, republic, city state was invested or wasted on soldiers and fortresses and warships and things like that and nobody felt safe. 

One of the miracles of the international systems of recent decades — and this is not about writing pacifist poetry, it’s about government budgets: You look at the budgets, and you see that on average, in the early 21st century, about 6 to 7 percent of the government budget went to defense, to the military, compared with 10 percent on average that went to health care. 

It’s the first time in history that humanity spent more on health care than on defense. They felt more secure than in any previous time in history because there was this taboo on invading and conquering other countries by force. 

If we now break this taboo, it will force everybody to arm themselves to the teeth at the expense of health care, education, welfare and so forth — and nobody will feel safer as a result. 

Because countries and leaders constantly miscalculate. 

In the Vietnam War, the Americans thought they were stronger. It turned out they were wrong. 

Putin was convinced he would crush Ukraine in 48 hours. He was wrong. 

So this vision of basing the peace and order of the world on a hierarchy of strong and weak, with the weak always obeying the strong and thereby buying peace, it has been tried over thousands of years, and we know where it leads. 

It leads, on the one hand, to empire — and on the other hand, to endless wars.

I am not confident I know enough history to confirm Harari's observation about where humans have spent the product of our labor, but it seems plausible. The strong always want to seize it for their lethal pissing contests. 

And I am willing to opine that ordinary people will always, if given a chance, turn the product of their labor to that which enables human flourishing, even though we can be greedy and foolish. Worth thinking about.

Does the character of leaders matter?

Phillips P. O'Brien's The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler--How War Made Them and How They Made War approaches the history of what Americans call World War II from an angle that I found counter-intuitive. Studying history, I've absorbed the lesson that most of what happened in human societies had less of its origins in the foibles of individuals than in wide economic and intellectual forces which shaped the possible. But, of course, people with power play out their times in the terrain which those forces make possible. This book is O'Brien's whack at how five strong leaders shaped their European war.

And it's a delicious volume, human stories smoothly recounted and convincingly deconstructed on the landscape observed by a student of military history and international relations. I had been reading O'Brien's indispensable substack on the Ukraine war and wanted to explore his scholarship. This makes an easy introduction.

For the purposes of this book, the strategic decision is the choice by the leader, with or without the opinions of advisers, of the strategic plan that the state should follow. The implementation is the translation of that plan into action. ... One of the great tests of grand-strategic leadership is learning what not to do as well as what to do.

O'Brien's subjects were two men born in the 1870s (Stalin, Churchill) and three in the 1880s (Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler). They were all, in some sense, survivors. 

Stalin clawed his way through prison under the Tsar, civil war, and Bolshevik revolution to make himself the unchallengable ruler of the Soviet Union by 1930. He was something of an unlikely successor to that more complex and brilliant revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin:

Stalin’s fundamental problem was that he was not competent enough to fulfill the purposes of his command. ... You can work very hard to create the reality you want, and with enough power you can often succeed. ... Playing up the idea of a vast conspiracy of traitors in their midst ... helped Stalin appeal to Lenin. He might not have been terribly competent, but he would take extreme measures to protect the Leninist line against all possible enemies—even those who were not enemies yet. Lenin approved of Stalin’s willingness to use the most brutal means against possible enemies, even when he was aware Stalin was making things up. ...

Churchill traveled around the British empire as a young privileged adventurer, then took up political party politics, and got himself appointed in 1914 as First Lord of the Admiralty in time to be held responsible for the British/Australian landing in Turkey which ended in a massacre. More to his credit, he also used his position to inspect the trench warfare in France and took enduring lessons:

Churchill now understood that modern weapons had made a mockery of bravery. Machines would determine the outcome of this war, and exposing oneself was more likely to lead to injury or death than anything else. ... If he had retained many boyish traits when the war started, the man that returned to London was more sober, cautious and methodical in his strategic outlook. He now had a holistic war strategy that stretched from the production of weapons to the deployment of forces in the field, all underlined by a coherent geopolitical vision.

O'Brien skims only lightly over the personal crisis of which Roosevelt was a survivor. During World War I he worked for the Wilson administration in the Department of the Navy and came away with an understanding of how controlling the oceans might be America's great strength. He was a political up-and-comer, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate on a losing 1920 ticket. And then he barely survived polio and emerged with paralyzed legs. Despite this seemingly insurmountable setback, he won the governorship of New York State in 1928 and then the presidency in 1932, in time to confront the Depression depths of bank failures and mass unemployment. But he also repudiated his non-militarist foreign policy positions.

During a time of financial hardship and growing military threats in both Europe and Asia, Roosevelt’s agenda strengthened the US Navy while providing desperately needed industrial jobs in shipyards up and down the country. It would be the start of Roosevelt’s military preparations for World War II, and would reveal the enduring legacy of his earlier experiences.

The three who became the leaders of the Allied powers had held responsible, although subordinate, positions during World War I; the two Axis dictators had been ordinary soldiers in the Great War. 

O'Brien manages no respect at all for Mussolini. Of these five men, I had known the least about the Italian fascist, so will quote at some length.

Making Italy great, and himself even greater, would be his foundational strategic mindset—even if he had as of yet no clear idea [in 1918] how to achieve it. ...

... Much of the time within the narrative of World War I, the Italian experience is overlooked in favour of the great battles of the Western and even Eastern Fronts. Yet by Western Front standards, the Italian soldier made an equal, and in some ways greater, sacrifice to that of his British and French comrades. By the end of the war, five million Italians had served in the armed forces, and 650,000 of them had died (or would soon perish because of war-received wounds) 

... trincerocrazia (rule by those who had served in the trenches) would form the core of a “new and better elite” which [Mussolini] claimed should rule Italy after the war. Of course, he was too modest to point out that a prominent newspaper editor who had served in the army would be ideally suited to lead this new trench-ocracy. Mussolini was coming closer and closer to arguing for an overthrow of the Italian state. The journey to a personal dictatorship was shortening. ...

Mussolini had a prescription for regaining Italy's imagined former military greatness.

He said the Germans had made a terrible mistake going on the defensive on the Western Front in 1917, as this was actually “more expensive” than going on the offensive. How anyone who had witnessed how machine guns and modern artillery could devastate attacking infantrymen could still think the defensive was more expensive boggles the mind. However, instilling the right values remained to Mussolini the key to preparing soldiers to advance. 

... In the balance between morale and equipment, willpower always triumphed over steel. Mussolini was “certain that thousands of cannons and machine guns are not enough for victory, if the spirit of the soldiers is lacking.”

Having posed the question of Italian "greatness," he made himself the answer for attaining it after that war.

If the Allies had unfairly thwarted Italy at Paris [in the Versailles Treaty], Mussolini would be the man to make Italy great again. He created his own political movement in the midst of this supposed humiliation ... In November 1921 the Fascist Party itself was founded with Mussolini as its leader, and in 1922 he seized power over all of Italy. It was the culmination of his wartime learning. 

Mussolini viewed the Italian state, not insensibly, as too weak and chaotic to save itself. He thus threatened a march on Rome more as an act of bluster than any widespread violent action. Indeed, he was prepared to call the whole thing off if the government reacted with force. Luckily for him they didn’t, and the indecisive King was only too happy to invite Mussolini to take power to end the chaos. Il Duce was made. 

World War I had taught Mussolini how to seize and manipulate power, and the value of acting like a great power even if you were not one. The only trouble with this strategic outlook would come if someone called Mussolini’s bluff.

The rest of O'Brien's account of Mussolini's role in World War II amounts to how Churchill and then Hitler did indeed call the Italian's bluff. Italian fighters executed their deposed dictator in 1945.

Despite having been born in Austria, Adolf Hitler volunteered as a lowly dispatch courier for the Germans in the Great War. And according to to O'Brien, Hitler got lucky, suffering a minor wound that kept him out of the worst of the German rout and killing fields, while leaving some indelible impressions. 

Hitler’s wound, in the thigh, was relatively light, but he was pulled off the line and sent to a military hospital near Berlin. Once there, due to the vagaries of military bureaucracy as much as anything, he would wait approximately six months before returning to the Western Front. Hitler was shocked by what he discovered in Germany. Instead of a people united in support for the war, he came face to face with widespread dissatisfaction, even defeatism, in both the army and the general public. 

Though his doubts about the true resilience of the German people remained, he did not want to admit that Germans might honestly doubt that this miserable war, which had already killed hundreds of thousands and brought misery and famine to their doorstep, was a mistake. No, the real culprit had to be the Jews. In his fact-free world, the Jews had used the war to embed their domination throughout the production process and to stoke animosity between Bavaria and Prussia, all the while skillfully avoiding military service themselves.

He did take one practical if over-blown lesson from his war experience:

Hitler had a much greater focus on the importance of military equipment in determining the outcome of modern battles. ... Hitler’s fascination with the largest, heaviest firepower reveals something common in dictators: a stress on strength, without a corresponding ability to understand rational trade-offs. ...

Hitler's wartime service convinced him that he had found his destiny:

... To answer the question of why [the 1918 German] disaster had occurred, Hitler fell back on the conspiracy theories he had been nursing for years and magnified them to enormous proportions. An internal, criminal enemy had poisoned the mind of the German people, leading them to betray the valiant troops at the front and transforming a possible war-winning situation into a humiliating defeat. 

This is the crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding Hitler as a war leader in World War II. It combined his grasp of how to win wars (heavy equipment based on German technology which carried the biggest punch possible) with how Germany lost this one (home front weakened and then betrayed by evil influences—particularly Jews). 

The combination of these ideas also seems to have been the motivation he needed to change professions. If Hitler went into the army in 1914 still thinking he would become a great artist or architect, by 1918 he had decided to immerse himself in politics. 

Having explored the life lessons these five men brought to World War II, O'Brien's actual recounting of the events of that war is more sparse. Pretty much all of them acted in accord with pre-existing character. 

Hitler, whose ego was already massive, started telling people that everything now depended on him and him alone, and that he needed to act in case he died early and Germany was deprived of his historic leadership. ...

Hitler's war became a parade of strategic failures for Germany. 

On the other hand --

After December 7, 1941, neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Winston Churchill had any doubts about the outcome of World War II. They were both convinced that Germany, Italy and Japan would all be crushed. ... Their earlier experiences with war had taught both Roosevelt and Churchill the vital importance of controlling the air-sea super-battlefield—and in that way they had a massive advantage over Adolf Hitler, with his more parochial war and life experiences.

The Russian ruler was the one who learned and adapted most over the course of the war. Because Stalin enjoyed the material support of Britain and the United States and led a country where war had evoked patriotic nationalism, he had time and opportunity to learn to be a successful war leader. 

Stalin’s meeting with [Roosevelt's envoy] Harry Hopkins was just one example of how he reacted to adversity not by doubling down on his own brilliance, but by trying to cultivate and benefit from the support of others. This was not because of any change of personality; it was because he had calculated, accurately, that the chances of his personal survival and that of the USSR (and then later of their further successes) would be better assured by taking help where he could get it, even if this showed him doing things that ideologically or personally he had not done before. ... Stalin had the capacity to learn. In 1941 and early 1942, Hitler and Stalin were quite similar as military commanders. ... 

When Stalin let his generals lead, with Allied materiel arriving, the immense size and valor of the Russian army came into play and turned the tide against Germany. Stalin learned.

O'Brien faults Roosevelt for not being willing to face his own mortality and for failing to prepare his vice president Harry Truman. From having been an anchor of stability, Roosevelt risked the final success of the alliance. 

Though one does not want to analyse Roosevelt’s psyche too much, part of him seemed to believe that, as long as he was president, he could not really die. ... in 1944, Roosevelt would make one of the most selfish choices in international relations history, something so profoundly self-centred that historians still shy away from addressing it. He not only decided to run for office while dying; he decided to change vice president to someone he did not like, would not confide in and would not prepare in any way to be president. ... 

... In refusing to provide the US government with an idea of concrete war aims and purposes, Roosevelt was making a mockery of the Clausewitzian notion of strategy being a connection between ends, ways and means. Roosevelt, more than any war leader, had a clear idea of ways and means—fighting the war with air-sea power and many machines over soldiers, etc.—but [these] seemed disconnected from the ends. The ends were what he wanted at any given moment. 

... By the end of the war, three of the five were dead: Hitler by suicide, Mussolini gunned down on a street corner and Roosevelt whose body failed after all his exertions. Even the two survivors, Churchill and Stalin, had aged greatly because of the stress of war leadership. Neither was the same forceful figure after the war that he had been when it started.

O'Brien concludes by arguing in favor of greater focus in historical accounts on the character and capacities of leaders. (Yes, now as then, that seems forever to mean all men.) I greatly enjoyed this book; it rounded my understanding of massive events which I've studied through other lenses. But I wonder -- is this truly the best way to greater understanding?

... grand strategy in World War II was far more personal than we might believe. ... then, now and in the future—we have to try to understand the minds of the individual leaders who make the crucial choices. Though we use phrases like “national interest” or “greater good,” these are abstract concepts in grand-strategy-making. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt had very personal notions of what national interest was; in some cases, notions that led to the lives of their fellow citizens being made far worse. All of them also believed that they were personally indispensable in terms of making their countries greater, and all imposed their own visions on their states during the course of the war. As such, they regularly acted like their personal views of the world were in the national interest of their countries, when they were decidedly not. If we want to understand strategy, we must also understand the strategist.

Perhaps. Certainly any contemporary American is forced to see what horrors a leader with no moral character at all can lead to.

Donald Trump's pecuniary presidency

In what amounts to a lament about the apparent shallowness of the California gubernatorial campaign, former Obama functionary Ben Rhodes reminds that the constitutional authors predicted our current national predicament.  

Benjamin Franklin portrait

The closing argument at the Constitutional Convention came from Benjamin Franklin. His speech defended the virtue of compromise itself. In it, he implored the delegates to rally behind an imperfect document as the best possible result. 

He also offered a warning. The new government “can only end in Despotism, as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

That hits awfully close to home. Old Ben had our number. We find ourselves confronted by a choice between accepting the flamboyant thievery of Donald Trump's regime or showing the character to seize the reins of power to construck something closer to opportunity and justice for us all.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has wise words to describe our predicament.

... what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?

You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the Union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.

This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).

The pecuniary presidency is a new frontier in the history of the office, the culmination of all that was dangerous about the vast concentration of power in a singular executive — “in all governments in which there is sown the seed of the rule of one man, no checks, no bars can prevent its growing into a monarchy or a despotism if the empire is extensive,” warned “a Maryland farmer” in the spring of 1788, on the eve of ratification — and the particular project of a particular man whose lust for gold rivals that of Cortés. ...

The founding generation knew that greed for gold might overthrow their handiwork. The country has seen this again and again, as when the great wealth of Southern planters provided a justification for human slavery and the great wealth of industrial capitalists undergirded the immiseration of working people for profit. Again and again, the mass of people had fought back, insisting we can be better than this. 

Donald is just an ordinary crook, robbing us every which way. The challenge of the moment is whether the majority of us can find the civic virtue to reform a system which makes rule by such a con man possible?

Marching for hope and a future

Yesterday thousands of Alabamians and friends from all over marched in Selma in support of a "National Day of Action for Voting Rights - All Roads to Lead to the South." The Supreme Court has decreed that racist white politicians can rig elections so NO Black politicians can have chance to represent their communities anywhere that white Republicans control state legislatures. That's just fine, say the infamous black robed six. No more Voting Rights Act in practice. No, this is not fine. Too many people have fought and died for the right to a meaningful vote.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts the struggle to win voting rights for all people in 1960s which culminated in Alabama.

Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

... Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

 Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6....

Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

The photos included here come from a wonderful photo gallery at the Tuscaloosa AL news site. It's well worth your time.

• • • 

I'm old enough so that the deadly SNCC Mississippi Summer project the year before, the Alabama voting rights campaign, and the Selma march over the bridge are part of my personal memories. A white teenager in a GOP household in Buffalo, NY, could follow the civil rights struggle in newspapers and short TV news broadcasts. I remember being mesmerized by the righteousness and bravery of the marchers.

And I was not as alone in that, as many white teenagers might be today. The private girls high school I attended had never had any Black students until my senior year; I bet the powers that be looked far and wide for the one shy girl who integrated that culturally rigid white place. She was enough younger that I never got a sense of how it turned out for her. 

But I do know that my graduating class were moved by the events of our time. It was the custom that each graduating class collect a sum of money to donate to the school toward something we thought would make the place better. We took a vote, all sixty-some of us, and made a plan. I was part of a delegation that went to the head of the school to present our plan: we wanted our class gift to begin to fund a scholarship fund for Black students. We more or less thought the school was a good place and we should share it.

As I remember, the principal seemed aghast. He was probably correct, even then, that there were legal impediments to such a racially conscious fund. I don't remember what we ended up doing for a class gift.

But in the mid-60s, it was possible for white teenagers to feel something in the wind, to identify with changing times. Can we again find that hope for a better, more just, more equitable country? There's nothing else to do ...

Mad King disease

I remember Jonestown. I was shopping in a San Francisco thrift store in November 1978 when the news came over the store radio that hundreds of members of Jim Jones' weird cult had "drunk the koolaid" and, along with Jones, were dead in a Guyana jungle. So was a Congressman who had gone to investigate what was happening to his constituents. Staff and journalists had also been shot.

Jim Jones' followers, mostly older Black citizens, had been a visible presence in San Francisco. He'd bus them in to demonstrations for cheaper housing. The white hippies who made up the rest of the crowd were both welcoming and bemused at this addition to their numbers; then off the People's Temple folks would go, usually insulated from much interaction with rest of us. Jones' ability to deliver a crowd gave him a local political potency. Eventually Jones led his followers off to remote South America, and, in his madness, murdered them.

That's the sort of thing that can happen when a cult takes hold of a mass of people. We should be warned. 

Paul Waldman believes it is appropriate to think of MAGA as a cult. That resonates with me. And Waldman expects more madness all the way through the midterm elections.

When the cult goes bad

In cults like Jonestown, the leader’s own descent into madness pulls everyone down with him, and that’s pretty much what’s happening now. There may not be any way to avert a midterm blowout [written before the Supremes allowed Southern states to resegregate their elections mitigating the likely blowout], but a different president would at least be promoting policies that weren’t so directly and dramatically damaging to his party’s political fortunes. He wouldn’t be knocking down buildings and talking constantly about his ballroom, and he wouldn’t have started a war like the one we’re in and telling people that they just have to suck it up and tolerate $5 a gallon gas because things will magically get better.

But now you have two factors that together are dooming the party. First, Trump is basically decompensating; whatever ability he once had to attract and persuade people has withered away, and all that’s left are the most unappealing parts of his personality. He is gaining no new adherents; instead, he’s losing support among the electorate every day.

Second, he built the current incarnation of the GOP around absolute loyalty to him, enforced through the kind of petty revenge he’s still trying to carry out. With just a couple of exceptions (e.g. Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Trump is trying very hard to defeat), Republicans all decided that they would not only support him unequivocally but engage in regular rituals of public fealty, the result of which is that their own identities were subsumed and voters who are mad at Trump can reasonably take out that anger at anyone with an R after their name.

Put it together, and every Republican on the ballot is little more than an appendage of a mad king who grows more unstable by the day. ...

It's up to the rest of us -- we're the majority -- to work every way we can to enforce that we've had enough of the cult of the Mad King. And at the same time, to seek to break the spell holding so many voters in the cult.