Don’t Blame Hillary - WSJ

Don’t Blame Hillary - WSJ

Friday’s commencement address at Wellesley—an attack on the man who defeated her—is only the latest outburst from a failed candidate, who has now vowed to take a leading position in the anti-Trump “resistance.” On the right these things provoke new headlines about sore loserhood. Far more interesting is the irritation Mrs. Clinton’s refusal to fade away is causing among fellow Democrats who blame her for the loss against what should have been an easily defeatable Republican nominee.

This is supremely unfair to Mrs. Clinton. As flawed a candidate as she might have been, the truth is almost certainly the reverse. It is today’s Democratic Party that gave us Mrs. Clinton, as well as the thumping in November.

Yes, the Clintons have always been flexible about principles, a big reason for the appeal of the more purist Bernie Sanders. Back when her husband was running for president as a “New Democrat” in 1992, the idea was that the party had shed its McGovernite past and moved to the center, so that it could now be trusted on values, the economy and national security. At the time Mr. Clinton advertised his wife as “two for the price of one.”

Once they got in, Mrs. Clinton reverted to type by pushing, unsuccessfully, for universal health care. But after that belly-flop and the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, they dialed it back, and by 1996 her husband was telling the American people “the era of big government is over.”

As New York’s junior senator, Mrs. Clinton was firmly ensconced within her party. “On the 1,390 votes she cast in which most senators from one party voted differently from most senators across the aisle,” notes an April 2016 piece from Roll Call, “Clinton went against the Democratic grain only 49 times.”

Even on the single issue that came to be used against her in last year’s Democratic presidential primary—her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq—Mrs. Clinton was squarely with her party. We’ve forgotten it today, but more Democrats voted with Mrs. Clinton on that one than against, including Harry Reid, John Edwards, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and John Kerry. Only a few years later she, again like them, opposed the surge.

So which is she, hawk or dove? The truth is that she is both—and neither. In a notable section in the memoirs of fellow Obama cabinet member Bob Gates, he relates a conversation in which she admits her opposition to the surge in Iraq “had been political because she was facing [Barack Obama] in the Iowa primary.” Again this only puts her within the mainstream of her party: Most of the other Democrats who had voted for the war in 2002 would also oppose the surge in 2007.

It has been a consistent pattern for Mrs. Clinton. On almost any issue that energizes her party—from same-sex marriage to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal—Mrs. Clinton has gone where the party has pulled her even if it meant going against where she had been. This is what Hollywood actress Rosario Dawson meant last summer when she asked a group of Sanders delegates at the convention to understand that Mrs. Clinton “is not a leader, she’s a follower.”

But on what became the single overriding theme of her campaign, Mrs. Clinton was truly in sync with her party. This is the idea that she should be elected because she’s a woman, and that a coalition of millennials, minorities and women would come together to make it happen. So where Donald Trump had “Make America Great Again,” Mrs. Clinton had the identity project par excellence: “I’m with her.”
After all, who could be more deserving to succeed the first African-American president than the first woman president?

It didn’t turn out that way. And if you take the Trump blinders off for some perspective, there’s another dynamic that had little to do with Mrs. Clinton: the hemorrhaging of Democratic seats over the Obama years—from the governorships to state legislatures to Capitol Hill—to the point where the Democratic Party is now at its lowest levels in a century.

By the time Mrs. Clinton had secured the nomination for president, she had embraced everything a far more progressive party wanted her to embrace. But she also inherited a party that was losing elections all across the country.

So maybe it wasn’t only a flawed messenger that led Democrats to defeat in 2016. Maybe there’s a problem with the message, too.

How Losing My Political Values Helped Me Gain My Freedom [Warden]

How Losing My Political Values Helped Me Gain My Freedom [Warden]

There's a frustrating game that the left plays with conservatives. It's an Alinksy tactic called, "Make them live up to their values." Now, living up to one's values isn't a bad thing, but setting high standards ultimately means that you'll sometimes fall short.

The left loves to exploit these shortcomings--every Christian who falls short of perfection is a hypocrite; the social values candidate you voted for just got arrested for drunk driving. Haha, everything you believe and advocate is now discredited.

They got away with it for years, waving away the lies, hypocrisy, indiscretions, and criminal behavior from their own politicians while beating the right mercilessly with the missteps of their own. It's effective because the right always maintains a baseline of integrity not displayed by the left, as evidenced by comparing what happens to Republican politicians when they're caught in criminal behavior with what happens to Democrats. Republican voters and politicians reluctantly dump the malefactor while Democrats defend their guy and launch an offensive against those who demand accountability.

And then came along Trump, a guy just ripe for demonization by the left. I think it's fair to say that even his early supporters worried that the Democrats would successfully make him toxic to the general voting public with his boorish behavior, vulgarity, multiple bankruptcies and very public divorces.

But something strange happened. Not only did Donald Trump not care about attacks on his character, neither did anyone else. We saw this new paradigm assert itself over and over during the primary throughout repeated media predictions that this time he's gone to far and he's cooked.

This same indifference that helped Trump carry the election has continued into the early days of his administration. With it comes a refreshingly freeing state of mind. Personally, I don't feel in any way responsible for Trump, nor do I feel compelled to defend him against attack.

Why? Because I voted for retribution.

I stumbled across a rarity yesterday--a leftist who is curious enough about how the right thinks to read and study us.

Someone pointed this series of tweets to me after the writer linked my article, How Losing My Political Values Helped Me Gain My Freedom, as an example of the emotional state of the reactionary right.

....

During the Obama years, we saw a radical shift. No longer were the Tom Delays and the Rush Limbaughs of the world the exclusive targets of what Bill Clinton labeled "the politics of personal destruction." Your average citizen was now in the cross hairs as well.

I first became aware of this during the Joe the Plumber episode when the media relentlessly attacked a citizen simply for asking, on his own property where Barack Obama was a guest, a question that happened to make their Boy-King look silly.

I thought it was a one-off due to the threat that Plumber's inquiry posed, but soon after the examples piled up--the slandering of the Tea Party movement, targeting of Christian wedding photographers, the harassment of the Memories Pizza owners, etc...

Which leads me to social media, Facebook specifically.

As this dramatic shift occurred, we began to see another shift within social media, one that reached its apex during the 2016 presidential election. That was the politicization of everything, not just by the institutional left, but by the soft left as well.

Where before the voters on the left were mostly passive receivers of Cultural Marxism, they had now become active participants via propaganda, slander, social shaming, and otherizing. This meant that conservatives were now being assaulted on two fronts, both from the institutional left and the soft left.

Every conservative who is active on Facebook knows what I'm talking about. After decades of Americans keeping their politics mostly to themselves, suddenly our feeds were jammed up with political invective.

It wasn't just directed at politicians. It was personal--a relentless litany of insults and abuse, first at the Tea Party and then Trump supporters. Most of it was generalized, but the message was clear. They held our kind in contempt and didn't care who knew it. In fact, they seemed to be in a contest to see who could broadcast it the loudest.

Most conservatives were hurt by this. We tend to keep our politics relatively private, both out of decorum and respect for our relationships with people whose politics differ from ours. The message that these public posts sent to us was that our "friends" on the left didn't respect or value us enough to avoid giving offense.

As someone who has been following politics since high school, I tend not to trust my own instincts what the average voter thinks. I'm simply to close to the subject. My wife, however, is a fairly low-key traditionalist who doesn't care to immerse herself in that world and so I use her as my political weather vane.

And so I knew that there was a storm brewing when she snapped down her phone over breakfast one day after reading Facebook and told me how sick and tired she was of her friends' political posts.

"When they say those things," she fumed, "they're talking about our family."

"I'm so sick and tired of being told that I'm a bad person because I disagree with someone's position on abortion or transgender bathrooms. Who do they think they are to tell everyone what they're required to believe?"

The hurt had turned to anger and quiet resolve.

The left sought to reprimand the right. What they did was alienate it. Their social media echo chamber only served to steel conservative misgivings about Donald Trump, if for no other reason than we simply couldn't abide by being pushed around for another 4-8 years.

It's one thing to know that your friends disagree with you. It's another to realize that they think you're stupid, uneducated, a bigot, bully, sexist, jerk and everything that's wrong with the world.

Who’s Afraid of Betsy DeVos? - WSJ

Who’s Afraid of Betsy DeVos? - WSJ

Perhaps Mrs. DeVos’s most important qualification is that she has the courage of her convictions. Progressives are willing to brook billionaires who use their wealth to expand government or augment their political influence. Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker, whose family is a major Democratic patron, served as President Obama’s Commerce secretary. But a conservative who’s dedicated her private fortune to liberating poor kids trapped in lousy public schools? The horror!

The DeVoses have donated tens of millions of dollars to charity including a children’s hospital in Michigan and an international art competition in Grand Rapids. They’ve also given to Christian organizations, which the left cites as evidence of concealed bigotry. Yet education has been their main philanthropic cause.

During the 1990s, they patronized a private-school scholarship fund for low-income families and championed Michigan’s first charter school law. In 2000 they helped bankroll a voucher initiative, which was defeated by a union blitz. The DeVoses then turned to expanding charters, which have become Exhibit A in the progressive campaign against her. Unions claim Michigan charters are inferior to the state’s public schools and that 80% are run for profit.

These claims are spurious. Detroit charters are low performing—only 19% of students are proficient in English—but they’re better than the alternative. Charter students in Detroit on average score 60% more proficient on state tests than kids attending the city’s traditional public schools. Eighteen of the top 25 schools in Detroit are charters while 23 of the bottom 25 are traditional schools.

Two studies from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (2013, 2015) found that students attending Michigan charters gained on average an additional two months of learning every year over their traditional school counterparts. Charter school students in Detroit gained three months.

Eighty-percent of Michigan charters utilize a private education service provider. Yet only about half are operated by a for-profit entity, and almost all of these are mom-and-pop businesses run by Michigan residents. While unions have fought to keep failing public schools open, Mrs. DeVos backed a 2009 law allowing the state to close public schools—charters included—that scored in the bottom 5% of the state for three consecutive years. Only seven of the 54 schools with two strikes in the past two years were charters.

The real reason unions fear Mrs. DeVos is that she’s a rare reformer who has defeated them politically. Prior to being tapped by Mr. Trump, she chaired the American Federation for Children (AFC), which has helped elect hundreds of legislators across the country who support private school choice. Last year AFC and its affiliate groups spent $5 million on elections compared to the teachers unions’ $138 million. Yet 108 of the 121 candidates AFC supported won their races.

And while we're at it, here's Reason Magazine:

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Education, doesn't want to destroy public education. Public educators—and Title IX zealots—want to destroy Betsy DeVos. Passed in 1972, Title IX is the federal statute banning gender-based discrimination in any educational institution that receives federal funding. It effectively covers all public K-12 schools, many private elementary and secondary schools, and effectively all colleges, public or private.

Among DeVos's staunchest critics are so-called victims' rights groups. Know Your IX, an activist organization that works to diminish due process protections for students accused of sexual assault on university campuses, is tweeting under the hashtag #DearBetsy in hopes of pressuring her to continue the Education Department's misguided and legally suspect campaign against fairness and justice in university misconduct hearings.

"Ms. DeVos must fully explain whether she supports the radical view that it should be more difficult for campus sexual assault victims to receive justice," Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat and member of the committee that will vote on DeVos's confirmation, told Politico.

Title IX supporters portray their critics as radicals who believe that every rapist should go free and that every woman is a liar. Of course, this is not the case. The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights's (OCR) interpretation of Title IX has come under fire precisely because OCR has taken a radical position: It believes that university students accused of sexual misconduct should be left with very little means of proving their innocence before poorly trained bureaucrats. It is OCR's opinion—not Congress' or the Supreme Court's—that federal law requires universities to investigate wrongdoing in accordance with a definition of sexual harassment so broad that it threatens academic freedom and free speech while denying fundamental due process to the accused.

That's why civil liberties organizations including the American Association of University Professors and PEN America have expressed serious concerns about OCR's handling of Title IX under President Obama. These are not radical organizations, and they consist mostly of liberal thinkers who want to protect free speech and due process for all.

All that said, it's unclear whether victims' advocates have anything to worry about—DeVos's opinion on Title IX is not widely known. She has met with Sen. James Lankford, a Republican and major critic of OCR, to discuss the subject, but that's about it.

Devos is a donor to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and this fact has activists particularly worried:

The donations are "a red flag," said Lisa Maatz, the top policy adviser at the American Association of University Women, which advocates for strict enforcement of Title IX, the federal law that governs sex discrimination, harassment and sexual assault on college campuses. "In the absence of an actual record … I think these kinds of donations take on even greater importance, because we have to rely on her contributions to inform us on particular issues."

FIRE is primarily a free speech organization, and DeVos might have donated $10,000 to the group for reasons other than a desire to eviscerate Title IX. But even if DeVos shares FIRE's attitude toward Title IX (and I hope that she does), this would not make her a radical about the issue of campus sexual assault. As FIRE explains:

The basic protections for which FIRE argues—the right to the active participation of counsel; the right to see the evidence in one's case and to meaningfully question witnesses; and the right to an impartial tribunal, among others—benefit all parties and do not impede the pursuit of justice. Outside of the campus context, nobody would argue that reducing due process protections, including the burden of proof, is necessary to secure a just outcome.

Public university students who are accused of misconduct deserve a fair hearing and a chance to defend themselves: This is the idea that Title IX loyalists deem radical. If Betsy DeVos wanted to take a second look at OCR's directives, this would not make her an extremist. It would put her in the company of countless civil liberties groups that believe OCR is currently operating outside the law.

But the crusade to portray DeVos as a dangerous ideologue is mulit-faceted. Critics have not been content to hound her for possibly thinking that OCR has overstepped. They also accuse her of wanting to destroy the public education system entirely. Sensing that an education secretary who supports school choice reform is a threat to their political power, teachers unions and their allies are relentlessly insisting that DeVos is some kind of radical anarcho-capitalist or religious fanatic when it comes to private schools.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, had this to say: "In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America. Every American should be concerned that she would impose her reckless and extreme ideology on the nation."

Of course, there's nothing extreme or reckless about DeVos's support for school choice reforms. School choice is broadly popular, well-liked by fair-minded policy experts, and draws support from Democrats as well as Republicans. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a rising leader in the Democratic Party, was a supporter of school choice, at least until recently. He formerly served with DeVos on the board of the Alliance for School Choice, in fact. Here's what Booker had to say about school choice, according to Breitbart News:

I cannot ever stand up and stand against a parent having options because I benefited from my parents having options. And when people tell me they're against school choice, whether it's the Opportunity Scholarship Act or charter schools, I look at them and say, "As soon as you're telling me you're willing to send your kid to a failing school in my city or in Camden or Trenton, then I'll be with you."

Now that it's politically inconvenient for Booker to say anything that would perturb teachers unions—huge power brokers in the Democratic Party—Booker has changed his tune. He claims to have "serious concerns" about DeVos.

It's not just the Democratic Party stumping for the teachers unions. The New York Times, ever the enemy of a well-educated populace, accused DeVos of "damaging" the fabric of public education in her home state of Michigan, where she spent considerable money promoting charter schools:

She has poured money into charter schools advocacy, winning legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability. About 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated by for-profit companies, far higher than anywhere else. She has also argued for shutting down Detroit public schools, with the system turned over to charters or taxpayer money given out as vouchers for private schools. In that city, charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.

That Times editorial relies on reporting from the Times' Kate Zernike, who claims that DeVos is a "believer in a freer market than even some free market economists would endorse" and "pushed back on any regulation as too much regulation."

DeVos did nothing of the sort, as National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru explains:

You might think, then, that DeVos got legislation enacted that, well, reduced oversight of charter schools. The linked article, although biased against DeVos, makes no such claim. Rather, it shows that DeVos intervened to force the modification of legislation about charter schools. She opposed the creation of a commission that would have given traditional public schools a say in which charter-school networks could expand and which charter schools could continue to operate. (More on that dispute here and here.) The legislation that was eventually enacted omitted that provision and instead "allow[ed] the state to close the schools at the bottom of existing state rankings." There was, in other words, no reduction in oversight and accountability.

The Times is also waging war on established facts about charter schools. Studies consistently show that not all charters succeed, but providing kids with more education options leads to better outcomes in many cases. The Times editorial states that charter schools in Detroit "often perform no better than public schools, and sometimes worse." That's a curious misreading of the data, though, according to The Cato Institute's Jason Bedrick:

To claim, as the NYT does, that Detroit "charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse" based on these figures is a highly distorted way of presenting the data. It's equally true to say "Detroit charter schools almost always perform as well or better than traditional schools."

The Times has already proven that it has no interest in telling the truth about charter schools Just recently, a University of Michigan education professor was given room in the paper of record to argue that economists are generally skeptical of free market alternatives to public education. But the data she used to make this point was both out of date and misrepresented in the article. According to the most recent survey data, 44 percent of economists thought a voucher system would leave most students better off, 34 percent weren't sure, and just 5 percent thought not. Among economists with an opinion on the subject, the consensus overwhelmingly favored school choice.

That's because school choice is fundamentally un-radical. Education reformers don't want to defund public education and bring back child labor, they want to provide publicly funded alternatives to government-run schools that have failed their students, who are typically the poorest and least-privileged students.

In the policy battle over school choice, it's the teachers unions who are the radicals. They believe that they are entitled to an unbreakable monopoly on providing K-12 education, in defiance of a wealth of evidence suggesting that such a system is marred by bad incentives and serves only to protect public employees at the expense of kids and families. They smear any suggestion that competition could improve the system as an attempt to destroy public schools.

No, Betsy DeVos doesn't want to destroy public schools. Nor is there any reason to believe she wants to turn rapists loose on college campuses. Those who say otherwise are the real extremists.

I Didn't Vote For Him But... - L'Ombre de l'Olivier

I Didn't Vote For Him But... - L'Ombre de l'Olivier

Why Trump Won

I have a lot of American friends and acquaintances who are of the non-“Liberal” persuasion; Libertarians, Conservatives etc. While some of them (a very few) were keen Trump voters and a fair number of others were unkeen Trump voters, who voted for him because #NeverHillary, there were a lot who were unwilling to vote for him or for Clinton and I suspect a few who drank heavily, held a clothespeg over their nose and voted for Clinton.

In the last two months since the election, and particularly the last few days I’ve seen a lot of them say things like this (from Larry Correia on the Book of FecesFaces)

I don’t even want to like the guy… Stop being such assholes, news media! You’re such douches you’re making people root for him.

Phrases like “I didn’t vote for him. But I’m starting to wish I had.” or “STOP MAKING ME WANT TO LIKE HIM.” are showing up all over the place. We’re even getting to “I’m not aboard the Trump Train yet. But I’ve got my ticket in hand and I’m standing on the platform.” or “I’m at the ticket counter for the Trump Train”

As Larry’s comment suggests, there’s a reason for this: the MSM and their buddies in Hollywood have thrown so much bile and hate towards Trump when he’s done next to nothing that the rest of us are beginning to think he might be all right after all. The accusations come from the sneering classes who have failed to hide their disdain for us normal people and are so over the top, so deranged, that it seems like they are scared of him. Plus of course Americans tend to have a spot for the plucky underdog, and although it is hard to see a billionaire as a plucky underdog, the frothing left have managed to do just that.

It is true that “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less” however Trump has also managed to make cabinet picks that are entirely reasonable for non-liberals. Indeed some of them (DeVos, Perry and Pruitt) are the sorts of pick that we would have prayed for a President Bush, say, to make but were absolutely certain he wouldn’t make. Trump may not have been an obvious ally, but he’s no longer looking like an obvious Democratic Party stooge.

I don’t think the sneering classes have quite figured out how much their disdain for the rest of us is reciprocated. If these attacks continue, and continue to be baseless and laughably so, then Trump can expect that a large number of people on the right who didn’t want him and mostly don’t trust him are going to unite behind him and support him for longer than might be expected. The fact that this is caused by hate from the left makes it all the more Schadenboner delicious

Oikophobia on the rise after Trump win: Glenn Reynolds

Oikophobia on the rise after Trump win

How crazy has the reaction to Trump’s impending presidency gotten? So crazy that Democratic operatives are scared of plumbers, and I don’t mean the Watergate kind.

No, really. Ned Resnikoff, a “senior editor” at the liberal website ThinkProgress, wrote on Facebook that he’d called a plumber to fix a clogged drain. The plumber showed up, did the job and left, but Resnikoff was left shaken, though with a functioning drain. Wrote Resnikoff, “He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional. But he was also a middle-aged white man with a Southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”

This created fear: “While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home.”

When it was all over, Resnikoff reported that he was “rattled” at the thought that a Trump supporter might have been in his home. “I couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger.”

Well. When people have irrational, exaggerated fears we call them phobias. We heard a lot during this year’s immigration debate about “xenophobia,” an exaggerated or irrational fear of foreigners. But this plumber wasn’t a foreigner. He was an American with an American regional accent who thought the American election had turned out okay. What do you call the irrational fear of an American, by an American?

Roger Scruton coined the term “oikophobia” (from the Greed oikos for “home”) to describe the fear of one’s fellow countrymen. And there seems to be rather a lot of it among the gentry liberals who make up America’s ruling class.

In fact, another piece on reacting to the election, by Tim Kreider in The Week, is titled "I love America. It's Americans I hate." Writes Kreider, “The public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don't need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die. . . . A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed.”

“A vote for Trump,” Kreider continues, “is kind of like a murder.” Though his piece concludes on a (slightly) more hopeful note, the point is clear: Americans, at least Trump-voting Americans, are “pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases.”

It’s gotten worse since Election Day, but there’s nothing new about this. I’ve been reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, and this categorization of lower and working-class whites as (to coin a word) “deplorables” goes way back. And we’ve certainly seen it before this election.

Angelo Codevilla wrote in 2010: “Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that ‘we’ are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.” Most ruling classes think that sort of thing about the ruled, of course, but as Codevilla notes, it sits poorly with American notions of equality.

And in a notorious Yale Law Journal article, feminist law professor Wendy Brown wrote about an experience in which, after a wilderness hike, she returned to her car to find it wouldn’t start. A man in an NRA hat spent a couple of hours helping her get it going, but rather than display appreciation for this act of unselfishness, Brown wrote that she was lucky she had friends along, as a guy like that was probably a rapist.

Another law professor, Douglas Laycock, wrote an article in response entitled, appropriately enough, Vicious Stereotypes In Polite Society. In polite society, expressing fear of unknown blacks is unacceptable; expressing fear of working-class white men, on the other hand, is not. “It is useful to consider how the story would have been told if Professor Brown’s car had broken down in Harlem instead of in the mountains. Suppose her benefactor had been a young black male with a radical political button. ... I am confident that her report of the encounter would have been very different.”

As Isenberg’s White Trash notes, the desire to feel superior to somebody is a powerful human drive, and it has often been aimed at poor and working-class whites. But it’s not very attractive, and contempt is likely to be returned with contempt. Those who are still grappling with the reality that Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as president next week may want to take a look in the mirror.

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist - Vox

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist - Vox

The debate over whether it makes sense to call Donald Trump a fascist began during the Republican primary and continues after his election to the presidency. More than a year ago, the conservative writer Robert Kagan offered one of the strongest votes in favor of the proposition: “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster … and with an entire national political party … falling into line behind him.”

One of the strongest “no” votes came from Vox’s Dylan Matthews, who arrived at that conclusion after interviewing several scholars of fascism. Trump, Matthews wrote, “is not a fascist. … Rather, he's a right-wing populist.”

At the New Republic, just before the election, Jeet Heer suggested that such a definitive answer was inappropriate: “Fascism,” he wrote, “has never been a fixed creed; it’s a syndrome, a series of intertwined tendencies.”

This debate over labels may seem merely semantic. But definitions matter. The point of labels is to identify, clarify, understand, and, if relevant, figure out ways of coping with the phenomenon at hand. Labeling Trump or other new-right parties and politicians “fascist” implies something not just about what these people and movements stand for but how the opposition should deal with them.

As a student of fascism and National Socialism, particularly in the 1930s, I side with those who say that Trump still falls on the “populist” side of the spectrum. That hardly means that he or the people who claim to be part of his movement do not pose a threat to democracy, but the type of threat differs from that posed by “classical” fascists.

Still, given how prevalent the term fascism has become in American and European political debates — and there is a parallel discussion across the Atlantic over whether France’s Front National, led by Marie Le Pen, or Germany’s Pegida party, or Austria’s Freedom Party ought to be described as fascist or populist — it is worth carefully considering what made fascism distinct and so politically powerful. Doing so will allow us to gain a better handle on whether we face similar dangers today to those of the ’30s.

Four key characteristics of fascism (not in evidence in Trumpism)
Academics have fought passionately over how to define fascism, but scholars generally focus on four crucial characteristics. First fascists were nationalists: They believed the nation, rather than individuals (like liberals) or classes (like Marxists), was the key actor in political life; that it existed above or separate from the citizens composing it; and that it had a special mission or “soul” that needed to be nurtured and protected from internal and external enemies.

Membership in the nation was determined on a religious, ethnic, or racial basis. Alfredo Rocco, for example, one of fascism’s chief “intellectuals,” once wrote: “For Liberalism, society has no purposes other than those of the members living at a given moment. For Fascism, [the nation] has … ends … quite distinct from those of the individuals which at a given moment compose it. … For Liberalism, the individual is the end and the [nation] the means. … For Fascism, [the nation] is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.”

Second, fascists shared a deep suspicion of capitalism, because it disrupted and divided national communities and destroyed national traditions. They therefore advocated a level of state intervention in the economy surpassed only by the contemporary Soviet Union. At the first Labor Day celebration held under Nazi rule in May 1933, Joseph Goebbels proclaimed:

the German people [were now] assembled in unanimous, unswerving loyalty to the state, the race (Volk), and the German nation to which we all belong. Every difference is wiped away. The barriers of class hatred and the arrogance of social status that for over 50 years divided the nation from itself have been torn down. Germans of all classes, tribes (Stämme), professions, and denominations have joined hands across the barriers that separated them and have vowed henceforth to live as a community, to work and fight for the fatherland that unites us all. … The class struggle is at an end. The idea of the national community rises above the ruins of the bankrupt liberal-capitalist state. … Thus the German people marches into the future.

Third, fascists were deeply anti-liberal and anti-democratic. Liberalism was rejected for its promotion of individualism and individual rights, its emphasis on reason and rationality, its acceptance of pluralism, and its cosmopolitanism. As Mussolini once argued, “The man of fascism is [not merely] an individual, he is nation and fatherland.” The good life, he suggested, is one “in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realized that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.” (Self-denial and the sacrifice of self-interests are not qualities that Trump is especially known for.)

Democracy was anathema because it did not recognize a “higher” or “national” good that transcended the interest of particular individuals, social groups, or electoral majorities. Fascists were also convinced that “the people” were best off, and politics most efficacious, when led by a strong ruler or a committed minority. As Hitler infamously put it, there must be “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one empire, one leader”).

Fourth, fascists embraced violence as a means and an end. Fascism was revolutionary: It aimed not to reform but to destroy the modern world — and for this, a constant and probably violent struggle would be necessary. Violence was not merely the method through which revolution would be accomplished; it was valuable in and of itself, providing supporters with powerful “bonding” experiences and “cleansing” the nation of its weaknesses and decadence. Mussolini, for example, argued that “[w]ar alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death.”

Historically, fascism arose in a political environment of unremitting tumult and hopelessness
These characteristics made fascism distinctive; they did not alone make it powerful. Although we associate fascism with the collapse of democracy in interwar Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, its origins lie decades earlier, in the period of rapid and disorienting change that hit Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During these decades, capitalism dramatically reshaped Western societies, destroying traditional communities, professions, and cultural norms. This was also, of course, a period of immense immigration, as peasants flocked from rural areas decimated by the inflow of cheap agricultural products from the “new” world to cities and the citizens of poorer countries flocked to richer ones in search of better lives and opportunities.

Then as now, these changes frightened people and led to the rise of new political movements that aimed to capture and channel these fears. Right-wing nationalist movements — the predecessors of fascism — were among these, promising to protect citizens from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets. Although these types of movements appeared across the West, they did not fundamentally threaten existing political orders before 1914. The characteristics of these movements alone, in other words, were not enough to make them powerful; it took certain conditions to give them the mass support they needed to overthrow existing political regimes. The First World War and its aftermath along with the failures and miscalculations of existing democratic institutions and elites provided these conditions.

As the war ended, dictatorships collapsed and were replaced by democracies, but most of them arose in countries with no previous experience with that form of government — and therefore none of the institutions, habits, and norms necessary for making democracy work. These new democratic governments then faced immense problems. The war had killed, maimed, and traumatized millions of Europeans and left the continent physically and economically devastated. Governments had to reintegrate millions of soldiers back into society and rebuild their economies. Austria and Germany had to deal with the humiliation of defeat and a punitive peace, and were quickly hit by hyperinflation.

In addition, across the continent lawlessness and violence became endemic after 1918. In Italy, for example, left- and right-wing militias fought battles in the urban and rural areas, workers occupied factories, and peasants seized land. Germany’s Weimar Republic was hit by assassinations and violent left- and right-wing uprisings. Despite all this, fascists remained marginal — initially. In Italy’s first postwar election, fascists received almost no votes. In Germany, Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch flopped. Mussolini and Hitler might well have remained the marginal cranks many of their contemporaries took them for had not democracies and other political actors continued to stumble.

But stumble they did. As time passed, problems mounted, democratic governments failed to deal with them, and other political parties — on both the right and left — failed to offer convincing responses to citizens’ fears and concerns.

Mainstream political parties fled the field
The Great Depression, of course, was particularly important — but it wasn’t merely the economic downturn that boosted fascism, but rather the way democratic governments and non-fascist political parties responded to it. Too many democratic governments responded passively or ineffectively to the Depression, leaving Europeans to suffer its horrible effects on their own. (Tellingly, in places where governments responded actively, like the United States and Sweden, democracy survived the interwar years.)

Other political parties also failed to offer convincing alternatives to the status quo. By the early 1930s, liberal parties had been discredited, as citizens found their faith in markets, their unwillingness to respond forcefully to capitalism’s downsides, and their indifference or hostility to nationalism and cultural concerns completely out of sync with interwar realities.

With the exception of Scandinavian social democrats, meanwhile, most socialist parties were also flummoxed by the Depression, telling citizens that their lives would only improve once capitalism had collapsed and that they could, therefore, do little to help them in the interim. (Socialists were also, of course, like most of their successors today, indifferent or hostile to concerns about national identity and the evisceration of traditional norms and communities, which was also an unwise political stance during a period of immense social upheaval.)

One group that did offer a strong criticism of the status quo as well as a powerful alternative to it was the communists, and during the Great Depression their vote share soared in many European countries. Communism’s appeal was, however, limited by an almost exclusive focus on the working class and hostility to nationalism. And so in all too many European countries, it was fascists who offered the most powerful critique of the status quo as well as the most powerful alternative to it.

Fascists criticized democracy as inefficient, unresponsive, and weak, and promised to replace it with a regime that would respond actively to the Depression, use the state to protect citizens from capitalism’s most destructive effects, and end the divisions and conflicts that had weakened their nations — often, of course, by ridding them of those viewed as outside of or a threat to it. Fascists also promised to restore a sense of pride and purpose to societies that for too long had felt battered by forces outside their control. Such appeals enabled fascist parties in Germany and elsewhere to attract an extremely broad, cross-class constituency.

But even with the failures of democratic governments and other political parties, fascists could not come to power alone. And so another condition necessary for fascism’s rise was the connivance of traditional conservatives. In both Italy and Germany, for example, conservatives, obsessed with thwarting the left, fooled themselves into believing they could use fascists for their own purposes, maneuvering them into political power. Once in power, however, Hitler and Mussolini repaid this debt by eliminating their erstwhile conservative allies as well as much of the rest of the old order, viewing them, correctly, as a hindrance to their revolutionary projects.

Today’s right-wing populists have made peace with capitalism, and don’t overtly embrace war
As this brief discussion should make clear, there are some similarities between fascists and today’s populists, including Donald Trump, but also some crucial differences.

First, while contemporary populists often extol things like “national sovereignty” (see Brexit) and the importance of national values and communities, they rarely present the nation as an “organic entity” existing above or beyond the people. And “the people” tend to be defined on the basis of shared customs, traditions, and behaviors, rather than on purely racial or ethnic grounds. Populists are thus more often xenophobic than racist.

Second, while populists are often critical of free market, globalized capitalism, their disapproval is more muted and selective than that of true fascists, and they advocate nowhere near the type of state intervention in the economy that Mussolini or Hitler, for example, did. Trump’s intervention to save a few hundred jobs in an air conditioning factory in Indiana may run afoul of free market principles, but it hardly amounts to the type of wholesale rethinking of the relationship between states and capitalism offered by interwar fascists and National Socialists.

Third, populists claim to speak in the name of the “the people,” and often demonize those disagreeing with them. They are thus inherently anti-pluralist, dismissive of the rights of minorities and the legitimacy of alternative viewpoints. Populism is therefore illiberal, but not necessarily anti-democratic. Indeed, populists claim to want to improve democracy, at least as they define it — to rid it of corruption and inefficiency and make it more responsive to “the people.” For this reason, unlike fascists, they offer no alternative to democracy, other than moving it from its liberal version to an illiberal or majoritarian one.

Fourth, populists do not openly embrace violence as either a means or an end: They neither claim to advocate the sort of revolutionary transformation of politics, economy, and society for which violence would almost certainly be necessary nor do they explicitly encourage their supporters to engage in it.

Populists thus share some characteristics with fascists, but their profiles also diverge in critical ways. This divergence reflects the different contexts within which they arose and point to different ways of dealing with them.

What turned the cranky nationalist movements of Europe’s late 19th century into the powerful fascist parties of the interwar period was primarily the changing conditions they faced: namely the immense problems created by the First World War and its aftermath combined with the failures and miscalculations of democratic institutions and elites in responding to them.

While Western democracies surely face serious problems today, including poverty, rising inequality, diminishing social mobility, and communities eviscerated by a decline in local civil society organizations, the departure of local businesses, deteriorating infrastructure, and so on, we are simply not in the 1920s or ’30s. Levels of economic and social dislocation are not remotely as high — in the US, unemployment is around 5 percent, a healthy figure — and democratic norms are stronger than in early to mid-20th-century Europe. This is not, however, reason for complacency. Many commentators have recently sounded alarms about the dangers of democratic “backsliding.”

The weakening of some democratic norms is one thing; fascist revolution is another
In a recent excellent essay in the New York Times, two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that Trump “tested positive” as a threat to democracy, given “a failure to reject violence unambiguously, a readiness to curtail rivals’ civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of elected governments.”

They also described Trump as a “serial norm breaker” — abetted by a Republican Party that has been willing to violate longstanding informal rules that constrained political ill will (including, for example, simply declining to consider President Obama’s most recent nominee for the Supreme Court). Their point of comparison was less Germany in the 1930s than Latin American countries that adopted US-style constitutions and then drifted toward strongman-style government.

The setbacks to democracy and the populism that Levitsky and Ziblatt warn of are definitely possible. But the word “backsliding” itself hints at a crucial difference between populism and fascism: In the former, the danger is a gradual erosion of democratic norms and institutions; in the latter, democracy ends through a revolutionary, often violent, conquest of power, which historically occurred only because democracy had already essentially ceased to function at all.

Whether populism brings enough democratic erosion to actually threaten the continued existence of democracy — as it has done, for example, in places like Turkey and Hungary and is threatening to do in Poland — is thus a very open question in the US and Western Europe, where democratic norms and institutions have deep historical roots and, despite current hysteria, are still very much in place. The ultimate consequences, in other words, of contemporary populism depend as much on how democratic institutions, parties, and elites respond to contemporary problems and populists as they will on populists themselves. If problems go unaddressed and mainstream parties can’t convince electorates that they, rather than populists, have the best responses to them, then the appeal and radicalism of populism will grow.

In Europe, where populists are not (yet) in power, governments need to find ways to deal with rising inequality, wage stagnation, high unemployment, immigration and integration, and terrorism. In the US, after Trump’s victory, other democratic institutions and actors will need to be vigilant policing attacks on the Constitution, the rule of law, and minority rights.

In both Europe and the US, the response of mainstream parties of the right and left to contemporary problems and populists will also be crucial. Will traditional parties of the right — Republicans in the US, Christian Democrats and conservatives in Europe — push back against populism’s radical tendencies, or will they fall in line like their interwar counterparts?

In the US, there are already signs that many Republicans, even NeverTrumpers, are lining up behind Trump, unwilling to take a stance against Trump’s continued flouting of democratic norms (for example, his insistence on massive electoral fraud and denigration of CIA findings about Russian hacks); the myriad conflicts of interests inherent in his own businesses; and his choice of Cabinet appointees, who not only lack anything resembling traditional qualifications for the jobs for which they have been chosen but who have also often openly questioned the validity of the very departments they are being tasked with leading.

Will traditional parties of the left — the Democratic Party in the US, Social Democratic and Labor parties in Europe — be able to reform their organizational infrastructures and appeals so as to be able to recapture the working- and middle-class voters they lost to the populist right? In the US, those worrying signs that a significant number of Republicans will not band together to check Trump leaves the Democratic Party as the most important watchdog or conservator of democracy. Successfully carrying out that role will require a degree of efficacy and cohesion the party has hitherto not exhibited.

In order to be able to check Trump, the Democrats will need to overcome or reconcile their internal divisions over both cultural and economic issues; only then can they hope to build the type of broad, cross-class coalition that would enable them to win elections at the national, state, and local levels and prevent Trump and his Republican enablers from playing different groups of Americans against one another, as they did so successfully in our most election as well as in many of the ones proceeding it.

Populism, in short, should not be blithely equated to fascism, nor does 2016 look like 1933. But in politics, as in much of the rest of life, nothing lasts forever, and for democracy to not just survive but thrive, democrats — including Democrats — will need to start doing better.

Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author of a forthcoming book, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancient Regime to the Collapse of Communism.

‘My Fellow Liberals, I’m Tired Of You’ | The American Conservative

‘My Fellow Liberals, I’m Tired Of You’ | The American Conservative

I’m a secular/agnostic Californian and longtime reader of your blog. I’ve enjoyed your books beginning with Crunchy Cons, and have valued your insights over the years.

Though you don’t know me, I feel like I know you and your family. And I want to share with you, from the liberal bastion of Northern California, that I am officially tired of the type of people who have surrounded me my entire life. In the wake of Trump’s election, I am experiencing “tribe fatigue.” I’m not tired of The Other, Detestable Tribe. I’m tired of my own.

A bit about me: I am a [deleted] with two young children. My parents were non-religious Democrats, and my ex-Catholic mom loathes organized religion to this day.

So I was raised a secular liberal. My college professors were secular liberals. During my journalism phase, my newspaper colleagues were secular liberals. My law school professors and peers were – in the vast majority – secular liberals. Almost everyone at my corporate law firm was a secular liberal. My California neighbors and friends are secular liberals, as are my colleagues. My mother, siblings, and their spouses are all secular liberals.

By all rights, I should be a member in good standing of their tribe, “liking” their Facebook posts and joining their candlelight vigils against the evil Trump Administration. But November 8 and its aftermath revealed to me that I am just so tired of these people. I can’t be like them, and I don’t want my kids turning into them.

I am tired of their undisguised contempt for tens of millions of Americans, with no effort to temper their response to the election with humility or empathy.

I am tired of their unexamined snobbery and condescension.

I am tired of their name-calling and virtue-signaling as signs of supposedly high intelligence.

I am tired of their trendiness, jumping on every left-liberal bandwagon that comes along (transgender activism, anyone?) and then acting like anyone not on board is an idiot/hater.

I am tired of their shallowness. It’s hard to have a deep conversation with people who are obsessed with moving their kids’ pawns across the board (grades, sports, college, grad school, career) and, in their spare time, entertaining themselves and taking great vacations.

I am tired of their acceptance of vulgarity and sarcastic irreverence as the cultural ocean in which their kids swim. I like pop culture as much as the next person, but people who would never raise their kids on junk food seem to think nothing of letting then wallow in cultural junk, exposed to nothing ennobling, aspirational, or even earnest.

I am tired of watching them raise clueless kids (see above) who go off to college and within months are convinced they live in a rapey, racist patriarchy; “Make America Great Again” is hate speech; and Black Lives Matter agitators are their brothers-in-arms against White Privilege. If my kids are like that at nineteen, I’ll feel I’ve seriously failed them as a parent. Yet the general sentiment seems to be these are good, liberal kids who may have gotten a bit carried away.

I am tired of their lack of interest in any form of serious morality or self-betterment. These are decent, responsible people, many compassionate by temperament. Yet they seem two-dimensional, as if they believe that being a nice, well-socialized person who holds the correct political views is all there is, and there is nothing else to talk about. Isn’t there, though?

I am tired of being bored and exasperated by everybody. I feel like I have read this book a thousand times, and there are no surprises in it. Down with Trump! Trans Lives Matter! Climate deniers are destroying the planet! No cake, we’re gluten-free!

These are good people in a lot of ways. But there has got to be a better tribe.

That leads me to . . . drum roll . . . the Christian Right. It is no small feat, switching tribes. It feels stressful and weird to abandon your tribe for the Detested Other Side.

Since November 8, my husband and I have been taking the kids to church. (He is politically conservative with a religious bent, so no argument there.) I have come this close to buying a giant poster of the American flag for the living room. I may do it still.

Right now, I am struggling to accept the basic Christian doctrines (virgin birth, resurrection, second coming) because I feel the Christian tribe may be the right tribe for my family. We just finished watching a BBC miniseries about the birth of Jesus, which was so beautiful and moving compared to secular TV. My nine-year-old really enjoyed it. I want to prepare my kids to live according to some unchanging truth, not subject to every passing trend, and this felt like a start. But I worry that an inability to believe in the supernatural aspects of the faith will limit my ability to be a “real” Christian.

Last Sunday’s sermon mentioned 1 Peter:18-19, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors.” This may be obvious to you, but secular liberalism does seem empty in some way, despite all the things my educated, middle-class tribe has to be grateful for. If that’s what’s been handed down to me, I want more, especially for my precious kids. I’m trying.

why 53% of white women voted Trump

why 53% of white women voted Trump

There has been much bellyaching by liberal white women that 53% of us voted for Donald Trump in November presidential election.

After learning of this statistic, Sa’iyda Shabazz writes a challenge letter to her white friends in The Mary Sue:

So, you voted for Trump. You don’t have to admit it, I know you did. Granted, I think the fact that some of you won’t admit it is telling. Some of you have said that you have stayed silent because you didn’t want to get dragged for voting for him.

If you’re standing by your choice, why won’t you defend it? And to those of you who have been open with your admiration…what exactly do you admire about him?

She concludes: I may still be your friend, but our relationship will never be the same.

My response is below:

Dear Sa’iyda Shabazz,

While I am not your friend (and clearly won’t be anytime soon), I feel obliged to explain.

• I am the wife of a white husband (who is a kind, hard-working, devoted family man).
• I am the mother of a white son (who is the perfect mix of smart and sweet).
• I am the sister of a white brother (who has served this country honorably as a US Marine).
• I am the aunt of a white nephew (who has also served this country in the US Army).
• I am the daughter of a white father (who won a Pulitzer prize covering the race riots in Detroit, in an effort to support civil rights).
• I am the best friend of a white co-blogger (who has served in various hot spots across the globe as a Green Beret).
• I am the employee of a white, male employer (who is an awesome boss and a substantial taxpayer).

I see how hard all of these men work, how much they give to family and friends, and how much they give to this country. These are my primary relationships. When I vote, the quality of their lives are going to be a significant part of my decision matrix.

While life under Donald Trump may not be perfect for them, I anticipate that their lives will be better because of the policies that Trump plans to enact and the people he intends to put in charge. So will mine. And, so will those of progressives deriding those of us who voted for Trump…including you.

I am not going to vote so you feel “safe”. In fact, you voting your feelings is part of the problem.

After eight years of the Obama administration and its antics (e.g., global warming is more of a threat than terrorism), we will be safer only after January 20, 2017. I suspect there are many other Americans who are looking forward to that date as well.

As an extra bonus for my vote, I sense there is now an appreciation for the “alpha-male” that has been noticeably lacking for at least eight years. Dear Sa’iyda, please allow me to show you what that looks like:

I am so damned tired of the continuous white-man-bashing of social justice warriors. It seems I am not the only one, as the evidence suggests:

• There has been enormous backlash to MTV’s White Guy Resolution 2017 video, which is off-the -charts in terms of racism and sexism.
• White male college students are fighting back — and winning — when falsely accused of racism, sexism, and ginned-up crimes.
• Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy said she doesn’t need to cater to male Star Wars fans, and it appears, and men are assessing the new film based on how much gender justice messaging is depicted.

I admit that Donald Trump is far from perfect. However, I have seen this man grow during the campaign. I anticipate he will learn rapidly, adjust readily to the conditions of the Office of President, and continue to be flexible and adaptable in pursuing the best interests of all the citizens in this nation (just not the special, protected classes like Obama administration has done).

Sa’iyda: I sure hope you’re tolerant and open-minded enough to acknowledge improvements in both Trump and the country that you will see in the next four years (at least).

In conclusion, the one thing I like best about electing Donald Trump: The era of the Beta Male is over.

I hope my explanation helps. Thank you for the opportunity to do so.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Articles: Donald Trump is not a fascist

Articles: Donald Trump is not a fascist

For months now, the Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington Post: Trump, he asserts, is a fascist.

Sadly, Kinsley reveals, as so many before him have, that academic degrees are no substitute for intelligence, knowledge, critical analysis, and basic logic. The term “fascist” is a very distinct one and Kinsley can apply it to Trump only by redefining it entirely. His is a deconstructionist effort that leeches all meaning from the word.

Because Kinsley’s essay is currently behind a paywall, let me summarize briefly what his argument is before I demonstrate what a shoddy piece of disinformation it is.

Kinsley opens in a defensive posture, absolving himself of proving Godwin’s Law, which holds that internet discussions always end with Hitler analogies. Instead, Kinsley boasts, “I mean ‘fascist’ in the more clinical sense.”

What is this clinical sense? If you plow through an endless cascade of words, Kinsley accuses Trump of being a crony capitalist, not to enrich himself and his friends, but to claim boasting rights about his skills conferring material benefits on the American people. Kinsley calls this “corporate statism,” which he says is the same as “fascism,” although he considers himself too classy to call Trump a fascist (except when he calls Trump a fascist).

As is the case with so many Leftist arguments grounded in history, Kinsley could not be more wrong. “Corporate statism” is certainly a feature of Hitler’s fascism, but it’s also been a feature of Obama’s administration. Standing alone, corporate statism, while corrupt and unfair, is not fascism. It’s just garden-variety corruption. Actual “fascism” is not just about the state’s relationship to corporations; it’s also about the state’s relationship to the luckless individuals under its control.

The reality is that, no matter the myriad names given to the world’s political systems, there are only two types of governments: Those that vest more power in the state (statist systems) and those that vest less power in the state (individualist or liberty-oriented systems). Every government in the world, no matter the name given, its place in time, or its geographic location, falls along that continuum. Here’s a very basic illustration of that unvarying fact:



Lots of world leaders and regimes have occupied the continuum’s far left, statist side. Western Europe and Obama’s America occupy the area left of center while the area just to the right of center is America shortly before Obama dragged it over the red line.

Off to the far right is the Founders’ vision of a constitutionally limited government, one subordinated to individual citizens’ unalienable rights — that’s the one that is every conservative’s dream. It’s a nation that stops short of anarchy but that allows individuals maximum liberty. Conservatives want a smaller government that, by virtue of its limited size, has limited control over each individual’s ability to make his own choices, to live his life as he sees fit, and to see the government as his servant, rather than bowing to the government as his master.

Given that conservatives Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”? You can blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political “right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives, being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.

The correct analysis properly begins with jettisoning the terms “right wing” and “left wing.” Their antecedents are irrelevant to American politics and, in any event, statists have polluted them irreparably. The terms arose in France, in 1789, when Louis XVI’s supporters in the National Assembly sat on the president’s right and the revolutionaries to his left. We are not in France in 1789. Moreover, that archaic division ignores the fact that the left and the right in France were totalitarian in nature. Both wanted complete control; they just had different visions about the nature of that control.

“Fascism,” another historic term, is one that American statists embraced until Hitler tainted it. It first gained political traction in Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini defined it to mean “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” In other words, fascism is purely on the statist side of the continuum.

Savvy readers will have noticed that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state. The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case, for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.

What Kinsley missed entirely is that the decision to nationalize private property or to control it while it’s in private hands is not the most important issue when looking at the two systems. The central point is that, under both systems, the government owns and controls the individual citizens.

For ordinary citizens, the difference between communism and fascism can be seen as the difference between wearing ugly stainless steel handcuffs and stainless steel handcuffs garnished with pretty pink fur. Citizens are still wearing the state’s handcuffs, but in the fascist state (at least before the state gets the bit in its teeth) things look nicer.

Communists and fascists hated each other in the 1920s through 1940s not because they were diametrically opposed ideologies, but because they were similar ideologies fighting for the same slice of totalitarian pie. When they weren’t fighting each other for power, they supported each other, as was the case with Hitler and Stalin . . . right until Hitler decided he wanted Stalin’s territory, too. In Spain, there was a bloody civil war because communism and fascism were jealous rivals seeking total control.

Without exception, two bad things happen in totalitarian governments: (1) the government ceases to see it citizens as individuals and views them only as widgets who exist to aggrandize the state; and (2) the people who control statist governments fall prey to grandiose delusions and paranoia. Hitler and Stalin went after their own people. Hitler got the negative headlines only because he explosively sought control over Europe, without anticipating Churchill’s refusal to surrender or America’s ferocity when roused. Had Hitler been more discreet, as Stalin was in the Ukraine or in the gulags (or as Mao was in China), Hitler’s fascist, genocidal state could have lasted for decades more.

After the war, Hitler’s grandiosity ensured that “fascism” was a dirty word. American communists needed to move fast to erase Russia’s pact with Hitler and to disguise that “fascism” and “communism” are variations on a theme. Using America’s media and higher education systems, America’s communists associated the word “fascist” with “right wing.” This allowed them to affix the “fascist” label to those who cherish individual liberty, tying them to Hitler, the ultimate madman. It didn’t matter that the new label was deconstructionist sleight of hand. The only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly associations surrounding it.

So, no, fascism is not limited to state control over privately-held industry. In any event, Kinsey’s attempt to shoehorn Trump’s Carrier deal under the corporate statism side of the “fascism” label is also wrong. Outside of communism’s nationalizing industry, all governments engage in some way with wealth owners and wealth producers.

In America, the government’s engagement with businesses takes three primary forms: (1) it taxes corporate profits; (2) it enriches corporations that engage in conduct the government favors; and (3) it uses regulation to take over entirely an economic sector, as was done with Obamacare (an action Mussolini would have recognized). Cronyism or corporate statism, or whatever else you want to call it, happens when a government, to benefit government insiders, favors certain businesses over others and uses taxpayer monies as a sign of that favoritism.

Keep in mind that the government has no money of its own because it generates no wealth. All of the money it possesses it has taken from citizens via taxes and fees that are requested politely, with the understanding that the polite request is enforced with a gun. Any money that the government gives a corporation is taxpayer money. When a government foregoes collecting taxes, it is simply leaving money with its true owner — although this can be abused if the government foregoes tax collection for the benefit of a select few.

Compare what Obama did in 2009 with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“the stimulus”) versus what Trump is doing now: In 2009, the Democrats took taxpayer money, in the form of guaranteed loans, and handed it out to favored corporate constituencies. These corporations were usually staffed with Democratic Party insiders who promised to provide magical green benefits that would eventually create jobs and improve the climate. (Think: Solyndra.) Although the administration touted the stimulus’s success, claiming it “saved or created” over a million jobs (a metric that is almost entirely imaginary), the cold-cash reality is that jobs either weren’t created or did not last, green corporations went under, America’s real infrastructure (e.g., roads and bridges) continues to decline, and taxpayer money vanished into crony bank accounts.

The Carrier deal is different. Trump got Indiana to allow Carrier to keep more of its own profits through a series of tax incentives playing out over the next few years. The real incentive for Carrier and all American businesses is Trump’s overarching promises to (a) lower dramatically the corporate tax rate, which at 35% is now the highest in the Western world; (b) lift burdensome regulations that harm profits; and (c) increase available fossil fuel energy, bringing down costs. These benefits would not be conferred solely on “friends of Donald,” but would extend to all American businesses. This is the opposite of crony capitalism or “corporate statism” or “fascism.”

I’ll start worrying if Trump, like Obama, uses taxpayer money to give benefits to favored corporations that are, in turn, expected to return some portion of that taxpayer money to Trump and his buddies. And I’ll start worrying about a new dawn of fascism in America when Trump, instead of shrinking the regulatory state to lessen government’s hold on American purses and minds, starts to extend the regulatory state into every area of American life, from education, to business, to bathrooms, to forcing Americans to buy products they don’t want from an industry under government control.

One more thing: Obama said that the biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure to grab more guns from American hands. Statists always grab guns because their regimes are fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical government. Trump’s promise to protect the Second Amendment is the antithesis of a statist, especially a “fascist,” regime.

So, Kinsley, if you want to go around calling people “fascists,” start by looking in your own mirror and by saluting the picture of Obama you have hanging over your bed.

Michael Kinsley's Article:

Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Vanity Fair magazine and a contributing columnist for The Post.

Donald Trump is a fascist.

When you call somebody a fascist, you can mean any number of things. Often, it means no more than “somebody I don’t like.” It is an all-purpose epithet, usable by anyone against everyone from university deans to Fox News anchors. For that reason, the label should be used sparingly — saved for special occasions. As with “Nazi” or “Hitler,” it is often said that in any discussion, the first person reduced to using such a word has lost the argument. It’s ridiculous to compare any living person to Hitler or Mussolini.

But I mean “fascist” in the more clinical sense. For close to a year, and especially since his election as president, people have been trying to figure out Trump’s political principles: What does he stand for, how will he act as president? Various theories have been advanced. Some think he won the election by pandering simultaneously to different groups with conflicting agendas, and convincing all of them he was on their side. Was this a calculated exploitation of America’s “gimme gimme gimme” politics? Or was it the politics of a man who had no politics, who wanted to be president because, in our celebrity culture, it was the only job more glamorous than starring in his own reality television show? It has even been suggested, in the sole subject of conversation in Washington for the past month, that Trump might allow himself to be sworn in as president and then resign, having accomplished all he aspired to.

But now that we’ve seen a bit of him in action, it seems that Trump actually does have a recognizable agenda that explains how he simultaneously can pander to big business generally while “strong-arming” (the words of a Post editorial Friday) an air conditioning manufacturer to save a few hundred jobs for a while. Or how he can make nice with the authoritarian Vladimir Putin while making bellicose foreign policy noises in general. Or how he can blithely upset with a phone call the absurdly delicate balance of our relations with China and Taiwan. All this seemingly erratic behavior can be explained — if not justified — by thinking of Trump as a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world. He spent his previous career negotiating with the government on behalf of corporations; now he has switched teams. But it’s the same game.

The game has several names: “Corporate statism” is one. In Europe, they call it “dirigisme.” Those two other words for it — “Nazism” and “fascism” — are now beyond all respectability. It means, roughly, combining the power of the state with the power of corporations. At its mildest, it is intrusive regulations on business about parental leave and such. At its most toxic, it is concentration camps. In the 1930s, a few Americans (including a few liberals) bought into it. Pearl Harbor ended that argument. Even for Trump, “fascism” itself now is a dirty word, not just a policy choice. Even Trump would not use it — least of all about himself.

But the deal Trump negotiated with Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies, to “save” hundreds of jobs is a prime example of the philosophy. Trump brags about “saving” Midwestern blue-collar jobs through a combination of bribery and arm-twisting. Turns out hundreds more jobs will be lost, and Trump as president can’t possibly negotiate on behalf of millions of workers.

But Trump believes — truly believes, I think — in the title of one of his books: the art of the deal. He thinks he is the world’s greatest negotiator. When he says he won’t reveal his income taxes because he is in the midst of negotiations with the IRS, he may be sincere. He says, believably, that he gets audited every year. That means every year’s tax bill is just the government’s opening move in an annual chess game, and Trump doesn’t want to give away his own opening move. Now he plans to negotiate more “deals” and he thinks — because he can outfox some midlevel IRS auditors — that he can outfox the political and business leaders of the world. “The Art of the Deal” is not “Mein Kampf,” although “not ‘Mein Kampf’ ” isn’t much of an endorsement.

Just to be clear: If I’m correct that Trump actually has a governing philosophy, that’s a bad thing, not a good thing. If he actually has principles to guide him through those famous swamps he plans to drain, that’s alarming, not reassuring. Bad principles are not a good substitute for no principles. Four or eight years of bad principles may make no principles look pretty good.

Originalism and the electoral-college conundrum - The Washington Post

Originalism and the electoral-college conundrum - The Washington Post

This is the problem of the so-called “faithless Elector,” and, as everyone is aware, it is receiving a great deal more attention these days than possibly at any time in the history of our republic. Law professor Lawrence Lessig has famously called on electors to exercise their judgment and to cast their ballots in accordance with the popular-vote majority won by Hillary Clinton.

Putting aside — just for a moment — the question of whether this is a good idea, it does seem to me that the constitutionality of such an action can’t be seriously questioned — at least, not if you’re an originalist. In the original constitutional scheme, electors really were supposed to choose the president, exercising their discretion and judgment to find the best person for the job. Being chosen as an elector was a high public office (though it had only a single function, and the appointment terminated as soon as that one function had been performed), and the vote for electors was one to be taken quite seriously, because you were picking the people who would choose the next president.

If you question any of this, you should read Robert Delahunty’s terrific explication of the history of the electoral “college” (a phrase that, incidentally, was not used in the Constitution, nor in the ratification debates). Delahunty shows — conclusively and quite magisterially, in my view — that the original intent of the Constitution, supported by its text and overall structure, not only permits but also “requires” presidential electors to exercise “discretion and independent judgment” in casting their ballots.

....

Should the electors actually take this course? And if so, for whom should they vote?

I agree with co-blogger Orin Kerr’s critique of Lessig’s view that the electors should “uphold the fundamental principle of one person, one vote” by voting for Clinton because she won a substantial popular-vote plurality. As Orin puts it, there’s a “considerable clash” between the originalist idea that electors should exercise their independent judgment — that they should be, in Lessig’s nice phrase, “citizens exercising judgment,  not cogs turning a wheel” — and Lessig’s companion idea of “electors following the nationwide [plurality] vote.”

On the other hand, had I been chosen as an elector and were exercising my own independent judgment and discretion in the matter, I certainly would think it eminently reasonable to take into account the fact that a substantial plurality of my fellow citizens appear to view Clinton as qualified to be president. Added to the fact that a number of other candidates are manifestly unqualified, and are, in my judgment, a threat to our constitutional democracy, I’d certainly give faithlessness a long, hard look.

From the comments:

Why bother learning anything about the Constitution and our form of government if you can bury your head in the sand and pretend it's all partisan nonsense?

Electoral College -- Faithless Electors Encouraged | National Review

Electoral College -- Faithless Electors Encouraged | National Review

....

The hypocrisy is rather astonishing. A major theme of the Democrats and the press during the election was the absolute imperative of accepting the results. This lasted as a bedrock principle of democratic governance all the way until roughly 4 a.m. Wednesday, November 9, when it became clear that Trump had won and angry protests in the streets, pointless, harassing recounts, and calls for an Electoral College coup became the order of the day.

....

More than anything else, the calls for an Electoral College coup expose a standardless will to power of a Left that professes to value democratic procedure. What else to make of opponents of the Electoral College urging the Electoral College to overthrow an election? The University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson has called the Electoral College a “menace to the American polity.” Yet he is now a signer of a public letter urging members of this menace to re-engineer the November election to his liking.

The electors do have the power to act as a last check on a presidential tyrant. But the norm of electors rubber-stamping the election’s winner is so ingrained in our system that any deviation from it would constitute a revolutionary act. The rationales advanced for a radical departure from the practice as established over a couple of centuries are tinny and unconvincing at best.

....

Democratic Party Hypocrisy on Racism, Sexism, Homophobia | National Review

Democratic Party Hypocrisy on Racism, Sexism, Homophobia | National Review

Progressive outrage should not be taken too seriously because it is not intended to be serious. When Barack Obama invites rapper Kendrick Lamar into the White House and announces that his “To Pimp a Butterfly” is the president’s favorite song of the year — whose album cover shows the corpse of a murdered white judge, with Xs in place of eyes, on the White House lawn, as African-American youth toast his demise with drinks and cash — do we really assume that progressives like Obama believe in stopping hate speech and imagery, or perhaps even believe in anything at all?

Donald Trump, to progressives, supposedly harmed the Constitution and threatened our democracy because he would not say, after the WikiLeaks revelations, that he would accept the outcome of the election if he thought it was rigged. Yet after Clinton’s defeat, suddenly irate progressives have lodged conspiratorial charges that voting machines (miraculously only in swing states Hillary lost) were supposedly rigged, that the Electoral College should be dropped, and that electors should be bullied to ignore their pledges. Did anyone ever believe their original outrage at Trump’s suggestion that election results might be rigged? Are we now to have recounts in Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire, and all the close states Trump lost, and then on into spring more recounts of recounts, until the last count achieves the desired result?

The Democratic party leadership is no longer an alternative to corporate wealthy America, but is corporate wealthy America, albeit in a new garb of jeans and flip-flops, Silicon Valley–style. The small-business person, assembly-line worker, and non-government wage earner mostly now vote Republican. Progressivism is a pyramidal capstone of wealthy elites who have the influence and money to embrace boutique positions and the cunning to profess egalitarianism, all while they lead private lives that would otherwise be condemned as illiberal and apartheid-like. So affirmative action ends up providing high-cheekboned Elizabeth Warren entry into Harvard Law School, the same way that progressive investigative journalism is reduced to Politico’s “hack” Glenn Thrush (who asked the Clinton campaign to fact-check and approve his article), and in the manner that philanthropy is reduced to the Clintons’ piling up of millions by selling influence. We are a long way from Harry Truman’s working classes.

What exactly is the Democratic criticism so far of Trumpism? That he is jawboning companies not to lay off thousands of workers and leave the country? That he is barring revolving-door lobbying for five years? That he raised and spent too little on his amateurish campaign, had too few bundlers, and did not hire enough professional handlers? That he met with the press too much and mouthed off on the record? That too many working-class people voted for him and not enough of their supposed Silicon Valley, Wall Street, beltway, and Hollywood betters did? That conservative pundits had their columns fact-checked and researched by the Trump campaign? That the Republican party sabotaged his primary competitors to give him the nomination? Or that he wants impoverished miners to work again and export coal?

The Democratic party for now is reduced to a loud racist/sexist/homophobe broken record that fewer and fewer are listening to — including many of the Democratic elites who continue to play it.

What American law professors forgot and what Trump knew - Chicago Tribune

What American law professors forgot and what Trump knew - Chicago Tribune

It was lonely being a Donald Trump supporter in the legal academy. Of my thousands of colleagues teaching law in this country, I don't think more than a few dozen believed that he would have made a better president than Hillary Clinton, and not more than a handful of us were willing to go public with our support.

It has always been a risk to be a Republican teaching in a law school, where many teachers see a thin line between support for the GOP and bigotry or insanity. And yet, enough Americans liked what they saw in Trump to give him a smashing Electoral College victory.

How did it come about that law professors grew so out of touch with much of America?

To a hammer everything looks like a nail, and to a law professor everything is a problem in jurisprudence. Accordingly, it's my guess that the legal academy, over the past 80 years or so, began to wander too far from common sense, or, to be more precise, to depart from the essentials of the rule of law. Law professors forgot the most important notion that undergirds our legal system — the basic principle endorsed by the framers, that ours is a government of laws, not men (or women).

What this is supposed to mean is that we adhere to the original understanding of our Constitution and laws, and that if legal change is to be accomplished it is done not by judges or presidents, but by legislators or the American people, through constitutional amendments.

Since Franklin Roosevelt lambasted the U.S. Supreme Court for its "horse and buggy" definition of interstate commerce, however, the court, in recoil, has felt an obligation to rewrite the Constitution to meet the needs of the times, as the Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren did with abandon, and as subsequent courts have done, most notably with Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges.

The court has advanced the cause of human rights, undeniably, but at a cost of self-government by the American people.

This has been justified in the legal field through theories arguing that the Warren Court was engaged in teasing out "principles" of justice inherent in the Constitution, and, more boldly, by theorists who maintained that, at bottom, all law is politics.

A rear-guard action in the academy was maintained by those who lamented the Warren Court's failure to adhere to our tradition that the Constitution should be neutrally applied, without a thumb on the scale to implement policies favored by the justices. That view was best expressed by the late justice and former Chicago law professor Antonin Scalia, who ridiculed the idea of a "living Constitution" and maintained that the only valid jurisprudence was one that assigned law-making not to the judges but to legislatures. It is no coincidence that President-elect Trump singled out Scalia as his favorite justice. And it is probably no coincidence that President Barack Obama's executive orders stretched the law and Constitution to new lengths, often beyond the breaking points. He went to Harvard Law School in an era when critical legal studies, which challenge and overturn accepted legal norms and standards and practices, were at their zenith.

It seems to be well understood that some conservatives (I'm one) adhered to Trump early on because of the view that he would appoint a conservative like Scalia to the Supreme Court. But I can't help but wonder whether the many millions who voted for President-elect Trump also understood what the legal academy had all but forgotten, that what was at stake in the past election was nothing less than the rule of law and self-government itself.

You Are Still Crying Wolf | Slate Star Codex

You Are Still Crying Wolf | Slate Star Codex

A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have “cried wolf” so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:

When “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst”.

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source)

Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.

Trump has gone from campaign stop to campaign stop talking about how much he likes and respects minorities and wants to fight for them.

And if you believe he’s lying, fine. Yet I notice that people accusing Trump of racism use the word “openly” like a tic. He’s never just “racist” or “white supremacist”. He’s always “openly racist” and “openly white supremacist”. Trump is openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist. Trump is running on pure white supremacy, has thrown off the last pretense that his campaign is not about bigotry, has the slogan Make American Openly White Supremacist Again, is an openly white supremacist nominee, etc, etc, etc. And I’ve seen a few dozen articles like this where people say that “the bright side of a Trump victory is that finally America admitted its racism out in the open so nobody can pretend it’s not there anymore.”

This, I think, is the first level of crying wolf. What if, one day, there is a candidate who hates black people so much that he doesn’t go on a campaign stop to a traditionally black church in Detroit, talk about all of the contributions black people have made to America, promise to fight for black people, and say that his campaign is about opposing racism in all its forms? What if there’s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans?

We might want to use words like “openly racist” or “openly white supremacist” to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted “openly white supremacist” on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying “I love Hispanics!”

But doesn’t this still mean there are some white supremacists? Isn’t this still really important?

I mean, kind of. But remember that 4% of Americans believe that lizardmen control all major governments. And 5% of Obama voters believe that Obama is the Antichrist. The white supremacist vote is about the same as the lizardmen-control-everything vote, or the Obama-is-the-Antichrist-but-I-support-him-anyway vote.

4. Aren’t there a lot of voters who, although not willing to vote for David Duke or even willing to express negative feelings about black people on a poll, still have implicit racist feelings, the kind where they’re nervous when they see a black guy on a deserted street at night?

Probably. And this is why I am talking about crying wolf. If you wanted to worry about the voter with subconscious racist attitudes carefully hidden even from themselves, you shouldn’t have used the words “openly white supremacist KKK supporter” like a verbal tic.

5. But even if Donald Trump isn’t openly white supremacist, didn’t he get an endorsement from KKK leader David Duke? Didn’t he refuse to reject that endorsement? Doesn’t that mean that he secretly wants to court the white supremacist vote?

The answer is no on all counts.

6. What about Trump’s “drugs and crime” speech about Mexicans?

Trump said that:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I’m serious. It’s anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it’s saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people – but those generally aren’t the ones who are coming illegally.

Since everyone has been wrong about everything lately, I’ve started thinking it’s more important than ever to make clear predictions and grade myself on them, so here are my predictions for the Trump administration:

1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]

2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]

3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 95%]

4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.

5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]

6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].

7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].

8. No large demographic group (> 1 million people) get forced to sign up for a “registry” [confidence: 95%]

9> No large demographic group gets sent to internment camps [confidence: 99%]

10. Number of deportations during Trump’s four years will not be greater than Obama’s 8 [confidence: 90%]

If you disagree with me, come up with a bet and see if I’ll take it.