Death Of The GOP? Bring It On!

Covering Up The Cover Up by Nancy Ohanian

Devin Nunes, a Central Valley Trumpist goon, is the ranking Republican on the House Intel Committee. One of his staffers, Derek Harvey, has been leaking the whistleblower's name. That's illegal. But Harvey hasn't been arrested and Nunes hasn't fired him. Mark Zaid, one of the whistleblower’s attorneys: "Exposing the identity of the whistleblower and attacking our client would do nothing to undercut the validity of the complaint’s allegations. What it would do, however, is put that individual and their family at risk of harm. Perhaps more important, it would deter future whistleblowers from coming forward in subsequent administrations, Democratic or Republican."

Do you remember Greg Mankiw? His name used to be in the news very regularly, at least for an economist. (He's a New Keynesian.) He's an author and columnist but he's probably best known for having been George W. Bush's chair of the Council of Economic advisors and then for being both Romney campaign's chief economic advisor. Until yesterday, Mankiw was a Republican opponent of Trump's. Yesterday he left the Republican Party. "I just came back from city hall," he wrote on his blog, "where I switched my voter registration from Republican to unenrolled (aka independent)... [T]he Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump's misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during his impeachment). I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior. Maybe someday, the party will return to having honorable leaders like Bush, McCain, and Romney. Until then, count me out."




Like all the conservatives fleeing the GOP, Mankiw is ferociously anti-progressive and insists the Democrats nominate a conservative, someone more like Bush or Romney. He says he wants to see Status Quo Joe, Mayo Pete, Amy Klobuchar or Andrew Yang as the party nominee. He rails against Bernie and Elizabeth. Of course. Conservative Republicans would be perfectly happy with a conservative Democrat instead of Trump but conservatives don't want an agent of change, especially not Bernie. Just tune in to Comcast TV any day and you will hear NeverTrump Republicans, ex-Republicans or wealthy conservaDems talking about how Bernie makes their skin crawl.

Charlie Sykes is another prominent Republican who opposes Trump. He's the editor of The Bulwark, the conservative anti-Trump bastion. But his column of advice to Republicans on how to survive their impeachment nightmare was in Politico. Denial, he wrote to Senate Republicans, won't work. And there's no escape. They now know they "are going to have to render a verdict not just on Donald’s Trump’s policies, but on his personal conduct... You’ll have to vote up or down and your decision will have consequences that will linger long past this election cycle. The situation is already grim. 'It feels like a horror movie,' one senator recently told the Washington Post. But it is all about to get worse: the evidence, the venue and the president’s conduct. There may be more smoking guns, the trial will be televised, and based on the past few weeks, Trump is likely to be more unhinged than ever. In honor of the season, I offer you some unsolicited Halloween-themed advice to help you navigate the coming nightmare. If you take this advice, you have a chance of saving your party. Ignore it, and, well, you’ve seen what happens in those horror movies, right?

1. Don’t hide in the basement.

So far you and your fellow Republicans have been able to hide behind complaints about process and the claim that the impeachment probe is “illegitimate.” Your colleagues in the House actually stormed the secure hearing room in the basement of the Capitol and complained about the process even as a few dozen GOP lawmakers were inside being part of that process. It was juvenile and self-defeating. Sooner or later, you will have to confront the substance of case; and that is not likely to get any better.

You have to consider the possibility that there may be more transcripts, more tapes, more whistleblowers. The new evidence is not likely to be exculpatory, because the president’s conduct in pressuring foreign governments for dirt on the Bidens and obstructing justice has already been well documented.

The venue will also change. Republicans are complaining that the process has been secretive, but be careful what you wish for. The trial will be must-see television and not even Fox News will be able to keep much of the evidence from your constituents. Polls already suggest historically high support for the impeachment inquiry, and we have not even begun those public hearings. In short, pretending that the facts aren’t facts-- that you’ll be safe behind your flimsy justification-- is not going to help when everything is out in the open. Deal with it.

2. To kill the monster requires confronting how you made him.

As you watch this reckless and unleashed presidency it may have occurred to you how much you have contributed to this moment. You have convinced Trump that he can take you for granted. The president has bullied and berated you and, again and again, you have rolled over. And it has made things only worse.

Trump’s instinct is to escalate both his tactics and his language. The cascade of stories in just the last week-- Ukraine, Syria, the G-7 and Doral, the launching of a criminal probe against his own Department of Justice, his reference to critics as “human scum”-- are a microcosm of his presidency and where we are going.

Between now and the beginning of the Senate trial, that behavior could become even more erratic and you will be forced to defend an ever-widening gyre of inanities, deceptions, abuses of power, episodes of self-dealing and other assorted outrages. Imagine six months of Giuliani butt-dials.

The first step to saving your life is to recognize what the monster feeds on. In this case, it’s your fear of standing up to him.

3. You survive only if you fight back.

All the craziness might suggest that a policy of strategic silence is the best option. This includes not signing on to more resolutions like the one authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham condemning the House inquiry. Graham may be immune to humiliation and indifferent to history’s verdict, but you likely will not be.

You probably also think you can finesse this by finding a middle ground where you can acknowledge that the call to the Ukrainian president was inappropriate and Trump’s behavior questionable, but not impeachable.

But Trump may not let you. The president and his loudest supporters continue to insist that (a) the phone call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect,” (b) there was no quid pro quo, and (c) even if there was one, it was completely appropriate. Indeed, on Monday he urged to stop focusing on process and defend the merits of his actions. “I'd rather go into the details of the case rather than process... Process is good, but I think you ought to look at the case.”

The problem is that “the genius of our great president” demands total fealty. He will insist that acquittal be considered total exoneration, and he intends you to be a part of the whitewash. He wants you to embrace and ratify his conduct; and if you do, you will own it.

4. The sequel is often scarier than the original.

You need to consider the full implications of the precedent you will be setting if you vote to acquit the president. Imagine a second Trump term beyond the reach of credible constitutional accountability. Consider what that would mean for our political culture, constitutional norms and the future of your party.

“The boundaries of acceptable presidential behavior are defined by which actions the political system tolerates or condemns,” writes Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes.

We are already “perilously close to the point at which there may no longer be a national consensus that there’s anything constitutionally problematic about using governmental powers to advance one’s own pecuniary and electoral interests.”

Writes Wittes: “If a substantial group of members of Congress signals not merely that the president’s conduct does not warrant impeachment and removal but also that it does not even warrant branding as intolerable, such conduct will become normalized-- at a great cost to previously unquestioned first principles of constitutional governance-- even if the House impeaches Trump.”

This is why you should pay more attention to the Federalist Papers than Fox News.

On Fox News, the impeachment proceedings will be characterized as a “coup,” or an attempt to “overturn an election.” But they are neither.

5. Your ultimate weapon is always within reach.

Alexander Hamilton clearly envisioned impeachment as a constitutional check on “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He understood that impeachment proceedings were, by their nature, political, “as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” He also had no illusions about how divisive the process would be, noting that impeachment “will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community,” and that “in such cases there will always be the gravest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”

But the founders reposed their confidence in you; or rather in what they thought the Senate would be. “Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent?” What other body, asked Hamilton, would feel confident enough “to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality,” between the accused “and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS ACCUSERS?” (Emphasis Hamilton’s.)

There’s a good reason to listen to Hamilton here-- for the sake of the GOP.

Consider this: What if, instead of breaking with Richard Nixon in 1974, Republicans had stuck with him, deciding that Nixon’s impeachment was a test of tribal loyalty? What would the consequences have been if they had voted to acquit him on charges of obstructing justice, lying to the public, contempt of Congress and abuse of power? Specifically, what would it have meant for the Republican Party had it embraced the defense of Nixon’s corruption? If it had been less Barry Goldwater and more Lindsey Graham?

We know what actually happened. Even after abandoning Nixon, the GOP was punished in 1974 and 1976, but it was able to otherwise wipe the stink off relatively quickly, winning back the presidency in 1980 and holding it for 12 years.

But what if the party had gone all Watergate-is-no-big-deal? If it had, it’s unlikely that Ronald Reagan would even have been elected, because the GOP would have been haunted by Nixon for a generation.

In your idle moments, you have perhaps wondered what your legacy will be. Here’s the answer; history will remember what you do over the next few months.

Short term, breaking with Trump will spark a nasty blowback. But imagine for a moment a post-Trumpian Republican Party freed from the baggage of Trumpist corruption. The choice is between a party inextricably tied to Trump, with all of his crudity, dishonesty, lawlessness and arrogance, and a party that has shown that it is capable of being a principled defender of constitutional norms.

At the end of this process, the simple narrative is likely to be that the president has abused his power, broken the law and sold out his country. You have an opportunity to hold him accountable by doing your constitutional duty. History will want to know whether you got scared and shirked it.

Impeaching Trump-- Alexander Hamilton vs Vladimir Putin

When I studied the revolutionary period in high school, the teacher, Mr. Feinstein, a relatively conservative guy, loved Alexander Hamilton, who seemed pretty conservative to me. I preferred the more populist Thomas Jefferson, who I associated with the left. Hamilton hated the "common people," and democracy and wanted a king instead of a president and a House of Lords instead of a Senate. Last week, Ron Chernow, an historian who wrote, among many books, a classic biography of Alexander Hamilton (2004)-- the source material for Miranda's Broadway show.

Last week, Chernow's op-ed for the Washington Post, Hamilton Pushed For Impeachment Powers. Trump Is What He Had In Mind, made it clear that Hamilton would be backing Pelosi's impeachment inquiry against Trump. "Trump," he wrote, "has described the impeachment proceedings as a 'coup,' and his White House counsel has termed them 'unconstitutional.' This would come as a surprise to Alexander Hamilton, who wrote not only the 11 essays in The Federalist outlining and defending the powers of the presidency, but also the two essays devoted to impeachment. There seems little doubt, given his writings on the presidency, that Hamilton would have been aghast at Trump’s behavior and appalled by his invitation to foreign actors to meddle in our elections. As a result, he would most certainly have endorsed the current impeachment inquiry. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Trump embodies Hamilton’s worst fears about the kind of person who might someday head the government."

Want to know more about Hamilton? This is long... and fantastic. If you have 3 hours, you're be richer for watching it:





You know who is completely against the impeachment inquiry? Trump's patron and benefactor, Vladimir Putin. Tatiana Stanovaya, scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, looked at why for Politico Sunday. "As impeachment proceedings loom over President Donald Trump," wrote Stanovaya, "some observers have speculated that Russia, actively enjoying sowing chaos in the United States, is delighted by the dysfunction tearing apart the U.S. government. Nineteen Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee signed a joint letter to the Wall Street Journal that was published on the paper’s op-ed page last month with the headline, 'Impeachment Is What Vladimir Putin Wants.' The GOP members of Congress wrote, 'His goal, now and before the 2016 election, has been to pit Americans against one another and erode confidence in our democratic process.' That might be true up to a point. But the impeachment investigation might be a bit too chaotic, even for Russian President Vladimir Putin."

There are many ways in which the Ukraine affair is terrifying the Kremlin, because it threatens to unwind what little progress Russia has made in recent years and undercuts its wider goals. Putin’s long-term goal is pretty clear: He wants the United States to conclude a “big deal” that would revise the outcome of the Cold War and limit the strategic threat that he believes the West poses to Russia through its military expansion, double standards in foreign affairs and liberal values.

...This is not the scandal the Kremlin wants for three reasons. First, the Russians were interested in an improvement in Russia-U.S. relations during the Trump presidency. Just after Trump’s election Moscow began preparing proposals aimed at finding ground for the kind of “big deal” the new American president had talked about during his campaign.

But the initial euphoria has faded. U.S.-Russia relations turned out to be worse than ever, following revelations of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Even so, Trump remains the one political actor the Kremlin has been relying on to revive bilateral relations.

...And now-- poof. A new cycle of chaos and madness has begun, which may lead to more negative repercussions for Russia. A new wave of anti-Russian sentiment is being unleashed in U.S. politics that could trigger new congressional sanctions. No less an authoritative figure than Nancy Pelosi has suggested that Russia was directly involved in the Trump-Ukraine mess. The call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is often interpreted as an extension of Russia’s 2016 interference. All the discussions about Ukraine in the United States almost always lead to Russia and become a reason to talk about Ukraine as its victim in need of protection. Altogether, any mention of Ukraine in the current anti-Russia news media further damages Russia’s international image, which, of course, is already considerably underwater.

The second reason for the Kremlin’s worry is that the Ukraine scandal undermines Trump’s capacity to conduct his own Russia policy, in opposition to the rest of the U.S. political establishment. As far as the Kremlin is concerned, Trump functions, in Putin’s eyes, as a buffer between Russia and the traditional U.S. national security establishment, which the Kremlin sees as implacably hostile. Trump has thrown overboard all of the established U.S. foreign policy approaches to Russia. He doesn’t preach and he doesn’t stand in Russia’s way. Trump is a businessman, not an ideological warrior, and he is not impeded by annoying democratic values.

Russia is ready to pay a price to maintain the Trump buffer, including enduring further rounds of Western economic sanctions. The rest of the U.S. political class, both Democratic and Republican, represents a long-term strategic threat to Russia and its geopolitical interests. Thus, regardless of whatever headaches Trump may create for the Kremlin, he will always seem like the lesser evil. Not surprisingly, whatever happens to Trump, Putin publicly supports him. But now, there is more scrutiny than ever on Trump’s foreign policy conduct, and he will likely not be able to operate in secret.

The third and final reason for the Kremlin to be worried comes from the growing fear that a private presidential conversation with Trump could be published without Russia’s permission. After the release of a transcript of the July 25 conversation between Trump and Zelensky, the Kremlin said that Washington would need Russian consent before publishing any transcripts of conversations between Putin and Trump.

Putin is probably not worried the transcripts can hurt his standings at home-- in domestic affairs he remains politically untouchable. Rather, there are two other problems Putin is likely concerned about if such a transcript is published. First, Putin surely sees the transcript as a potential tool that could be used by Trump’s rivals to undermine and weaken Trump, which is not good for Moscow. We know from news accounts that Trump has said some very embarrassing things to Russian officials, such as dismissing the significance of Russian interference in the 2016 election and endorsing the idea of a joint U.S.-Russian cyber unit to somehow prevent this from ever happening again. Second, the risk itself that the talk can be published is psychologically uncomfortable for the Russian president, as he likes to have intimate heart-to-heart conversations with his counterparts-- something that apparently worked during the Trump-Putin 2017 Helsinki summit. This is his style of dealing with his counterparts-- to try to find some special chemistry with other world leaders. It’s harder to establish that kind of rapport while thinking that all you say might go public tomorrow.

It’s possible that Putin wants to sow chaos in the United States. He certainly enjoyed Trump’s presidential campaign victory and its corrosive effect on American political life. But the Ukraine scandal and the impeachment investigation might be moving a bit too fast, even for the chaos mastermind. For Putin, it would have been better if the Ukraine scandal had never happened. Trump is better than a traditional American president, who would continue the traditional policy of treating Russia as a Cold war loser.

Deep State by Nancy Ohanian

Republicans for the Rule of Law, the Never Trump group, is running this new ad on Fox & Friends, tomorrow I believe. I sincerely doubt it will do much good, considering who watches that show. You may enjoy it though:

Out Of Touch With Popular Culture-- But Not Out Of Touch With That Devil Alexander Hamilton

I was never a big fan of most pop music. I found it disposable and a waste of time for the most part. I was always more into cutting edge stuff-- like the just-released song up top by the Scottish band Paris Street Rebels. The band is barely 2 years old and their press agent tried to put their music in context by explaining that they take the best parts of the transatlantic Punk explosion of the 1970's and combine it with towering melodies and 21st century working class outrage. Their region has collapsed economically. All 4 "hail from the tough mining town of Ballingry, Fife, Scotland where the mines have long shut down and 'Thatcher' is still a dirty word. The band look to music as an escape, an antidote and a means to elevate themselves and others like them from the indignity of a story left untold, a destiny unfulfilled. Beyond the confines of their beginnings, Paris Street Rebels' ultimate goal is to unite the forgotten people, the misfits, the lost, the persecuted, the afraid and everyone in between. To give something back in an age where musicians and artists only exist to take. To give the world what it's been missing ever since Rock 'n' Roll lost its teeth. 'Freakshow' is a schizophrenic anthem penned in desperation. The need to escape to an almost mythical, promised land where authenticity trumps artifice and drives the narrative whilst simultaneously realizing that this can only be achieved by changing the place and time you're in."

I ran the Student Activities Board at my university. I was out of touch with pop culture back then too. I booked unknown bands and artists very few people wanted to hear. But now anyone who went to Stony Brook in those days brags about how they heard Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, the Dead, Otis Redding, Tim Buckley, The Airplane, Ravi Shankar, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, The Who, Jackson Browne, The Byrds... long before anyone had heard of them. (I had to fight off a serious impeachment challenge for "wasting" $400 of student money on The Doors.

Earlier today I explained why I never watched The West Wing. Another admission: though I had been invited numerous times, I never went to see Hamilton. Let me explain why-- but first some context. I was an "A" student in high school. And history was my best subject. One teacher, who was embarrassed that I had so much more knowledge about the subject than she did was wise enough to have me teach the class while she took the opportunity to go to the teachers' lounge and smoke cigarettes. The following year, we got a young wiz kid, Mr. Feldman as our history teacher. Madison High was lucky to get him and he definitely knew more about history than I did. I graduated in 1965 but he stayed. I found an old NY Times article about the school from 1975, 10 years after I had left.

When New York City first desegregated its high school system 10 years ago, James Madison High School in the South Flatbush section of Brooklyn seemed a good place to start. Academically, it was one of the best in the entire city and regularly sent almost 90 per cent of its 1,000 graduates off to college. The faculty had a fair complement of civil‐rights sympathizers, and the surrounding community, a grid of neat brick and stucco houses set off by tiny but faultlessly trimmed lawns, was dominated by middle‐class Jews, largely Democratic and loosely liberal, who presumably would offer little objection to giving blacks and Puerto Ricans a chance at a better education. “When the blacks first came,” recalls Rae Marcus, now an assistant principal at the school, “there was none of the feeling of ‘Why us?’ The community and faculty and kids were all ready. If integration would work any place, we thought, it would work at Madison.”

Chuck Schumer graduated a year after me, went to Harvard and soon after was elected to the state Assembly (where he quickly turned himself over to Wall Street). The Times interviewed the young Assemblyman for the story. He was socially liberal and said "I looked at the black kids with the same regard as the whites in the business and commercial course. There was no animosity or anything. They were just different; they were not the kinds of kids who were friends.”

I couldn't resist but the quote I was really looking for was Mr. Feldman's, the whiz kid history teacher, who seemed mournful that the school was by then desegregated.

Others have moved beyond a sense of helplessness to one of resentment. “In the old days, teaching wasn't work; it was a pleasant experience,” says Stanley Feldstein, a history teacher who has written three books on race and ethnic history and has one of the school's few doctorates. “Now I look on it as a job.” Several weeks ago, Feldstein, now so unhappy that he is seeking a transfer to another high school, had to take a knife away from one of his freshman girls who was prepared to stick it into a boy who had just pinched her. “I just don't like to be a cop, that's all,” he said. “You're not really in class to teach any more. You're there just to keep discipline.'

In some ways Mr. Feldstein was one of my favorite teachers. I saw one serious flaw at the time: Alexander Hamilton-worship. My own idol was my grandfather and he always taught me that Hamilton was a capitalist pig and Washington's biggest mistake. I was crestfallen when Mr. Feldstein sang his praises at every opportunity. I started thinking Mr. Feldstein might be the first Republican I had ever met. I didn't care what he said about this-- I was, and would always be, a Jeffersonian.

This morning I was happy to see that one of my friends, Matt Stoller, wrote a wonderful piece for The Baffler about Hamilton-- The Hamilton Hustle-- a couple of years ago. He found all the recent praise for Hamilton, especially within the Democratic Party, "strange [since] it presumes that Alexander Hamilton was a figure for whom social justice and democracy were key animating traits." Maybe Stoller had a grandfather like mine. "Given how Democrats, in particular, embraced the show and Hamilton himself as a paragon of social justice," he wrote, "you would think that he had fought to enlarge the democratic rights of all Americans. But Alexander Hamilton simply didn’t believe in democracy, which he labeled an American 'disease.' He fought--with military force-- any model of organizing the American political economy that might promote egalitarian politics. He was an authoritarian, and proud of it." More recently, there were people who found his rile analogous to Trotsky's in the Russian Revolution.

To assert Hamilton disliked democracy is not controversial. The great historian Henry Adams described an evening at a New York dinner, when Hamilton replied to democratic sentiment by banging the table and saying, “Your people, sir-- your people is a great beast!” Hamilton’s recommendation to the Constitutional Convention, for instance, was to have a president for life, and to explicitly make that president not subject to law.

Professional historians generally avoid emphasizing Hamilton’s disdain for the people, at least when they write for the broad public. Better to steer safely clear of the freight train of publicity and money behind the modern Hamilton myth. One exception is amateur historian William Hogeland, who noted in a recent Boston Review essay that Hamilton had strong authoritarian tendencies. Hamilton, he wrote, consistently emphasized “the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.”

Indeed, most of Hamilton’s legacy is astonishingly counter-democratic. His central role in founding both the financial infrastructure of Wall Street and a nascent military establishment (which supplanted the colonial system of locally controlled democratic militias) was rooted in his self-appointed crusade to undermine the ability of ordinary Americans to govern themselves. We should be grateful not that Hamilton structured the essential institutions of America to fit his vision, but that he failed to do so. Had he succeeded, we would probably be living in a military dictatorship.

Viewers of the play Hamilton have a difficult time grasping this point. It just seems outlandish that an important American political official would argue that democracy was an actively bad system. Sure, America’s leadership caste has done plenty on its own to subvert the legal norms and folkways of self-rule, via voting restrictions, lobbying and corruption, and other appurtenances of access-driven self-dealing. But the idea of openly opposing the hallowed ideal of popular self-government is simply inconsistent with the past two hundred years of American political culture. And this is because, in the election of 1800, when Hamilton and his Federalist allies were finally crushed, America repudiated aristocracy and began the long journey toward establishing a democratic political culture and undoing some, though not all, of the damage wrought by Hamilton’s plutocratic-leaning Federalist Party.

Indeed, the shifting popular image of Hamilton is itself a gauge of the relative strength of democratic institutions at any given moment. In the roaring 1920s, when Wall Street lorded it over all facets of our public life, treasury secretary Andrew Mellon put Hamilton’s face on the ten-dollar bill. Mellon was the third richest man in the country, famous for, among other things, having his brother and chairman of one of his coal mining subsidiaries extoll the virtues of using machine guns to enforce labor discipline. Mellon himself, who later presided over the Great Depression, was routinely lauded by big business interests as the “greatest secretary of the treasury since Alexander Hamilton.” Big business leaders in Pittsburgh, such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, worshipped Hamilton (as well as Napoleon).

During the next decade, as populists put constraints on big money, Hamilton fell into disrepute. In 1925, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then just a lawyer, recognized Hamilton as an authoritarian, saying that he had in his mind after reading a popular new book on Hamilton and Jefferson “a picture of escape after escape which this nation passed through in those first ten years; a picture of what might have been if the Republic had been finally organized as Alexander Hamilton sought.” By 1947, a post-war congressional report titled “Fascism in Action” listed Hamilton as one intellectual inspiration for the Nazi regime. Hamilton’s name practically became an epithet among Democrats of the New Deal era, which makes it all the more surprising that he is the darling of the modern party.

Within this context, it’s useful to recognize that Hamilton the play is not the real story of Alexander Hamilton; rather, as historian Nancy Isenberg has noted, it’s a revealing parable about the politics of the finance-friendly Obama era. The play is based on Ron Chernow’s eight-hundred-page 2004 biography of Hamilton. Chernow argues that “Hamilton was an abolitionist who opposed states’ rights, favored an activist central government, a very liberal interpretation of the Constitution and executive rather than legislative powers.” Hamilton, he notes, “sounds . . . like a modern Democrat.” The abolition arguments are laughably false; Hamilton married into a slaveholding family and traded slaves himself. But they are only part of a much broader obfuscation of Hamilton’s politics.

To understand how outrageous Chernow’s understanding of Hamilton is, we must go through a few key stories from Hamilton’s life. We should probably start with the Newburgh Conspiracy—Hamilton’s attempt to foment a military coup against the Continental Congress after the Revolution. In 1782 several men tried to organize an uprising against the Continental Congress. The key leader was Robert Morris, Congress’s superintendent of finance and one of Hamilton’s mentors. Morris was the wealthiest man in the country, and perhaps the most powerful financier America has ever known, with the possible exception of J. P. Morgan. His chief subordinate in the plot was a twenty-seven-year-old Hamilton, former aide-de-camp of George Washington and delegate to the Congress.

After the war, army officers, then camped out in Newburgh, New York, had not been paid for years of service. Morris and Hamilton saw in this financial-cum-political crisis an opportunity to structure a strong alliance between the military elite and wealthy investors. Military officers presented a petition to Congress for back pay. Congress tried to pass a tax to pay the soldiers, while also withholding payments owed to bondholders. Hamilton blocked this move. Indeed, according to Hogeland, “when a motion was raised to levy the impost only for the purpose of paying army officers, Hamilton shot it down: all bondholders must be included.” Meanwhile, Morris and Hamilton secretly encouraged General Horatio Gates at Newburgh to organize a mutiny. After unifying investors and the military elite, Morris and Hamilton calculated that the military officer corps would threaten Congress with force unless the Articles of Confederation were amended to allow full federal taxing power by federal officials. This coup attempt would then, they reasoned, force Congress to override state governments that were more democratic in their approach to political economy, and place aristocrats in charge.

According to Hogeland,

In Morris’s plan these taxes, collected not by weak state governments but by a cadre of powerful federal officers, would be earmarked for making hefty interest payments to wealthy financiers—including Morris himself, along with his friends and colleagues—who held millions of dollars in federal bonds, the blue-chip tier of domestic war debt.

Douchebag! by Chip Proser

The mutiny itself failed due to a public statement by George Washington opposing a military uprising. But in broader terms, the plot succeeded, once Washington promptly warned Congress about the unstable situation and urged that they take drastic action to centralize and federalize the structure of the American republic. Military officers received what would be the equivalent today of multi-million-dollar bonuses, paid largely in federal debt instruments. This effectively institutionalized the elite coalition that Morris and Hamilton sought to weaponize into a tool of destabilization. The newly unified creditors and military officers formed a powerful bloc of aristocratic power within the Congress that pushed hard to dramatically expand federal taxing power. This group “set up [Hamilton’s] career,” Hogeland writes, because by placing him in power over their asset base-- a national debt-- they would assure a steady stream of unearned income. Chernow obscures Hamilton’s participation in the mutiny, claiming in a rushed disclaimer to preserve his hero’s honor that Hamilton feared a military uprising-- but he then proceeds to note that Hamilton “was playing with combustible forces” by attempting to recruit Washington to lead the coup. It’s a howling inconsistency bordering on falsification.

When Hamilton became Washington’s secretary of the treasury, he swiftly arranged the de facto payoff of the officer group at Newburgh, valuing their bonds at par and paying them the interest streams they wanted. Here was perhaps the clearest signal that the Federalist Party was structured as an alliance between bondholders and military elites, who would use a strong central government as a mechanism to extract money from the farming public. This was Hamiltonian statecraft, and it was modeled on the political system of the Whigs in Great Britain, the party of “monied interests” whose power was anchored by the Bank of England.



Chernow, a longtime Wall Street Journal financial writer, portrays Hamilton as a visionary financial genius who saw beyond the motley array of foolish yeoman farmers who supported his ideological foe Thomas Jefferson. In lieu of the static Jeffersonian vision of a yeoman’s republic, Chernow’s Hamilton is reputed to have created a dynamic, forward-looking national economy-- though it’s more accurate to say that Hamilton was simply determined to shore up the enduring basis of a financial and industrial empire. Hillary Clinton even quoted the play paraphrasing Hamilton’s line, “They don’t have a plan-- they just hate mine.” But in fact, there were competing modern visions of finance during the period, as Terry Bouton showed in Taming Democracy. And the one we have today-- a public central bank, substantial government involvement in credit markets, paper money-- has characteristics of both.

True to their own aristocratic instincts and affiliations, Hamilton and his mentor Morris wanted to insulate decision-making from democratic influence. Morris told Congress that redistributing wealth upward was essential so that the wealthy could acquire “those Funds which are necessary to the full Exercise of their Skill and Industry,” and thereby promote progress. While in office, Hamilton granted a group of proto-venture-capitalists monopoly control over all manufacturing in Paterson Falls, New Jersey, the site of some of the most powerful waterfalls on the East Coast. Hamilton, who captained this group of investors, thought it would power a network of factories he would then control. Among the prerogatives enjoyed by the funders of the Paterson Falls project was the authority to condemn lands and charge tolls, powers typically reserved to governments. More broadly, in the fight to establish a for-profit national bank owned and controlled by investors, he placed control over the currency in the hands of the wealthy, linking it to gold and putting private financiers in charge.

Morris and Hamilton sought, as much as possible, to shift sovereign powers traditionally reserved for governments into the hands of new chartered institutions-- private corporations and banks-- that would be strategically immunized from the democratic “disease.” These were not corporations or banks as we know them; they were quasi-governmental institutions with monopoly power. Jefferson sought to place an anti-monopoly provision in the Constitution precisely because of this well-understood link between monopoly finance and political power.

Chernow portrays this far-reaching debate over the future direction of America’s productive life as a byproduct of Hamilton’s unassailably noble attempt to have the federal government retire the Revolutionary War debt. This is simply false (and a very common lie, expressed with admiration by other prominent Hamilton fans like Alan Greenspan and Andrew Mellon). Hamilton wanted a large permanent debt; he wanted it financed so his backers could extract a steady income from the people by way of federal taxes. To pay off the debt would be to kill the goose laying the golden egg. By constricting the question of democracy to a question of accounting, Chernow misrepresents what was really at stake. It was a fight over democracy, authoritarianism, and political economy-- and in many ways, the same one we’re having today.

Protests broke out in the western parts of the country, similar to pre-Revolution-era revolts against the British, who, in extracting revenues for the Crown and its allies, were pursuing the same policies that Hamilton did. These protests were a response not to taxes, but to the specific tax structure Hamilton constructed. Western farmers, though not poor, had little access to cash, so they used whiskey as currency-- a medium of exchange that farmers in many cases produced sporadically in backyard stills. Hamilton’s tax was a political attack on these farmers, whom he saw as his political opponents. The levy targeted whiskey because western farmers had converted this commodity into a competitive monetary system. The whiskey levy was also regressive, with a low rate on industrial distillers and a high rate for small farmers, with the goal of driving the farmers out of the whiskey business. Furthermore, Hamilton placed the collection authority for the tax in the hands of the wealthiest big distillers, who could then use it to drive their smaller competitors out of business. This was all intended not only to destroy the political power of small farmers, but to foment a rebellion that Hamilton could then raise an army to crush. And that’s just what happened.

In 1795, Washington and Hamilton raised more than ten thousand troops to march into Western Pennsylvania, the strongest redoubt of opposition to the new tax (known forever after as the Whiskey Rebellion). Washington, halfway through the march and perhaps doubting the wisdom of this use of military power, handed over command to Hamilton, and went home. Entrusted with executive power, Hamilton used indefinite detention, mass arrests, and round-ups; seized property (including food stores for the winter); and had soldiers administer loyalty oaths. He also attempted to collect testimony to use against his political enemies, such as William Findley and Albert Gallatin (who would later be Jefferson’s and Madison’s secretary of the treasury), which he “hoped to use,” as Hogeland writes, “to silence his political opponents by hanging them for treason.” This is the strong-armed tyranny that David Brooks (to take one among countless exemplars of latter-day Hamilton worship) celebrates when he says that Hamilton gave us “the fluid capital markets that are today the engine of world capitalism.” It is also, far from incidentally, what John Yoo cited as precedent when defending George W. Bush’s national security policies.



Similarly, Hamilton’s fights with John Adams in the late 1790s represented one of the most dangerous periods in American history, akin to the McCarthy era on steroids. The latter part of the French Revolution was as shocking to Americans of the early republic as the 1917 Russian Revolution was to their modern successors. It stoked the widespread fear among Federalists that any talk of democracy would lead to similar guillotine-style massacres; they began referring to Jefferson’s supporters as “Jacobins”-- an epithet that was the 1790s equivalent of “terrorist” or “communist.” This was the era of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made criticism of the government a federal crime. But in addition, and more frighteningly, Hamilton constructed the only partisan army in American history (titled the “New Army”) and tried to place himself at the head of it. Only Federalists could be officers. He envisioned himself leading an expedition into Florida and then South America, and mused aloud about putting Virginia “to the test” militarily. Ultimately, Adams-- perhaps the most unlikely savior of self-governance in the annals of our history-- figured out what Hamilton was doing and blocked him from becoming a New World Napoleon. The New Army was disbanded, and our military established a tradition of nonpartisanship.

...Hamilton lost, but not without bequeathing to later American citizens a starkly stratified political economy. Bouton argues that the defeats of the middle class in the 1780s and 1790s narrowed democracy for everyone. As poor white men found the freedoms for which they fought undermined by a wealthy elite, they in turn “tried to narrow the concept to exclude others.” Much of the turn toward a more reactionary version of white supremacy in the early 1800s, in other words, can be laid at Hamilton’s feet. Later on, Hamilton’s financial elite were ardently in favor of slave power. Manhattan, not any Southern state, was the first political entity to follow South Carolina’s call for secession, because of the merchants’ financial and cultural ties to the slave oligarchy. In other words, Hamilton’s unjust oligarchy of money and aristocracy fomented a more unjust oligarchy of race. The aggrieved rites of ethnic, racial, and cultural exclusion evident in today’s Trump uprising would no doubt spark a shock of recognition among the foes of Hamilton’s plutocracy-in-the-making.

...One of Hamilton’s biggest fans is Tim Geithner, the man who presided over the financial crisis and the gargantuan bank bailouts during the Obama presidency. In his 2014 memoir, Stress Test, Geithner wrote admiringly of Hamilton as the “original Mr. Bailout,” and said that “we were going to deploy federal resources in ways Hamilton never imagined, but given his advocacy for executive power and a strong financial system, I had to believe he would have approved.” He argues this was a financial policy decision. In doing so, he evades the pronounced anti-democratic impulses underlying the response to the financial crisis.

As economist Simon Johnson pointed out in a 2009 essay in The Atlantic titled “The Quiet Coup,” what the bailouts truly represented was the seizure of political power by a small group of American financiers. Just as in the founding era, we saw a massive foreclosure crisis and the evisceration of the main source of middle class wealth. A bailout, similar to one that created the national debt, ensured that wealth would be concentrated in the hands of a small group. The Citizens United decision and the ever-increasing importance of money in politics have strong parallels to the property disenfranchisement along class lines that occurred in the post-Revolutionary period. Just as turnout fell to record lows in much of the country in 2014, turnout collapsed after the rebellions were put down. And in another parallel, Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out across the country were evicted by armed guards-- a martial response coordinated by banks, the federal government, and many Democratic mayors.

The Obama era looks like an echo of the Federalist power grabs of the 1780s and 1790s, both in its enrichment and glorification of financial elites and its open disdain for anything resembling true economic democracy. The Obama political elite, in other words, celebrates Hamilton not in spite of Hamilton’s anti-democratic tendencies, but because of them.

Set in contrast to the actual life and career of its subject, the play Hamilton is a feat of political alchemy-- as is the stunningly successful marketing campaign surrounding it. But our generation’s version of Hamilton adulation isn’t all that different from the version that took hold in the 1920s: it’s designed to subvert democracy by helping the professional class to associate the rise of finance with the greatness of America, instead of seeing in that financial infrastructure the seeds of a dangerous authoritarian tradition.

In 1925, Franklin Roosevelt asked whether there might yet be a Jefferson to lead the forces of democracy against Hamilton’s money power. Perhaps someone-- maybe Elizabeth Warren, who pointed out on PBS that Hamilton was a plutocrat-- is asking that question again. That said, Hamilton is a great musical. The songs are catchy. The lyrics are beautiful. But the agenda is hidden, because in America, no political leader, not even Donald Trump, can credibly come right out and pronounce democracy a bad thing and agitate for rule by big finance. And the reason for that is that Alexander Hamilton, despite his success in structuring Wall Street, lost the battle against American democracy. Thank God for that.

And I'll never go see it. But I have three updates from an old high school friend, who I checked in with to make sure I had my facts straight. Fist of all, he told me that when the teacher left the class in my hands she was actually out flirting with Mr. Feldstein. I never knew. And he said that Mr. Feldstein is gay-- which I didn't know either-- and he was also cruel towards my friend who had a lisp and who Mr Feldstein would openly mock in class. Sure... that's the kind of person who champions Alexander Hamilton!

Trump Considering Trade Tariffs: Is That Good or Bad?

U.S. Balance of Trade since 1960. Green indicates net inflow in dollars from abroad. Red indicates net outflow in dollars to foreign entities (source). Alexander Hamilton would not approve.

by Gaius Publius

A drive-by for a long holiday weekend. As noted here earlier, according to the writers at Axios, including former Politico denizen Mike Allen, Trump is strongly considering imposing trade tariffs on some foreign-produced products like steel.

Here's their report minus the fear-inducing headline (emphasis in original):

With the political world distracted by President Trump's media wars, one of the most consequential and contentious internal debates of his presidency unfolded during a tense meeting Monday in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, administration sources tell Axios.

• The outcome, with a potentially profound effect on U.S. economic and foreign policy, will be decided in coming days.
   
• With more than 20 top officials present, including Trump and Vice President Pence, the president and a small band of America First advisers made it clear they're hell-bent on imposing tariffs — potentially in the 20% range — on steel, and likely other imports.
   
• The penalties could eventually extend to other imports. Among those that may be considered: aluminum, semiconductors, paper, and appliances like washing machines.

One official estimated the sentiment in the room as 22 against and 3 in favor — but since one of the three is named Donald Trump, it was case closed.

No decision has been made, but the President is leaning towards imposing tariffs, despite opposition from nearly all his Cabinet.

The Trump plan was reportedly designed by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Steve Bannon, and policy advisors Peter Navarro and Stephen Miller — in other words, the anti-"globalists" in the administration.

No decision has been made, but one may be forthcoming fairly soon.

The Consequences

There are two ways to look at the consequences of this action, if it occurs. One is from the neoliberal establishment in both parties — "trade war," "loss of jobs," and particularly (quoting from Axios) "bad global politics."

The other way is this: Tariffs built America for nearly 150 years since its birth, protecting American industries from the ravages of industrially stronger nations. We became a 20th Century powerhouse thanks to tariffs and trade protection. The same is true of every developing country — that tariffs are good for the local economy — which is why the international (neoliberal) giants want to crush protectionism (unless it protects them).

After all, it's called "protectionism" for a reason. Economies need protecting from predatory giants in every age.

Further, if reverence for the founders carries any weight with you, especially reverence for our currently lionized founder Alexander Hamilton, U.S. trade protectionist policies — and government economic interventionist policies in general — start right at his desk:

Hamilton was alone among the “founding fathers” in understanding that the world was witnessing two revolutions simultaneously. One was the political transformation, embodied in the rise of republican government. The other was the economic rise of modern capitalism, with its globalizing networks of production, trade, and finance. Hamilton grasped the epochal importance of applied science and machinery as forces of production.

In the face of these changes, Hamilton created (and largely executed) a plan for government-led economic development along lines that would be followed in more recent times by many countries (particularly in East Asia) that have undergone rapid industrialization. His political mission was to create a state that could facilitate, encourage, and guide the process of economic change — a policy also known as dirigisme, although the expression never entered the American political lexicon the way its antonym, laissez-faire, did.

Do these moves by Donald Trump "echo Alexander Hamilton"? Even Bloomberg News thinks so.

Your Bottom Line

If this occurs, and you're one of those who hates Democratic Party neoliberalism, cheer this action and do it publicly, despite what you think of Trump — and despite however strongly pro-neoliberal Democrats want to shame you into silence.

Supporting the current neoliberal global order keeps all of us in our poverty-fueled place. This is what #RealResistance should be about — opposing rule by the rich — not following party flags and banners regardless of where they lead us.

And if that leads to a trade war, it would in any case, even if Bernie Sanders were the president doing it. After all, anyone who dares to threaten the current global organization of money, work and resources (the #RealResistance) will be resisted back, and the rhetoric will sound very much like the rhetoric in that Axios article — "be very afraid."

My thought: If we not willing to change the way the world is run, we'll never move out of the painful place were in until the whole thing just comes apart. Best to take down the current situation in pieces. Protecting American jobs and local industries is a great way to start.

Mes centimes,

GP