Today Is A Very Important Day In America

On Sunday, Selma "Bloody Sunday" veteran, John Lewis (D-GA) unexpectedtly showed up at the annual commemorative march and delivered an impassioned plea to voters to use the ballot box as "a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of America." Is America still redeemable after just 3 years of Trump and the ascendancy of Trumpism? At around the same time, The Atlantic was preparing to published author George Packer's deeply disturbing opus, on how Trump is winning his war on American institutions, "destroying the civil service and bending the government to his will." Ironically, Trump is turning out to be not just the least progressive president in history, but also the least conservative. Oh, yeah-- and a pusillanimous GOP filled with spineless and desperate career politicians, has allowed him to redefine what conservative means in the context of American politics.

Packer began by pointing out that when Señor Trumpanzee "came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited. The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk. After three years, the adults have all left the room-- saying just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the peril-- while Trump is still there." This is exactly what many Trump voters wanted.

James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many government officials, not excluding himself, went into the administration convinced “that they are either smarter than the president, or that they can hold their own against the president, or that they can protect the institution against the president because they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that they love or served in previously against what they perceive to be, I will say neutrally, the inappropriate actions of the president. And I think they are fooling themselves. They’re fooling themselves. He’s light-years ahead of them.”

The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents-- his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president.

But the adults’ greatest miscalculation was to overestimate themselves-- particularly in believing that other Americans saw them as selfless public servants, their stature derived from a high-minded commitment to the good of the nation.

When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy-- the permanent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. In his inexperience and rashness-- the very qualities his supporters loved-- he made early mistakes. He placed unreliable or inept commissars in charge of the bureaucracy, and it kept running on its own.

But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.

And that was just the intro. May I suggest you go the The Atlantic to read the body of Packer's brilliant essay. You may not share the visions of conservatives like William Barr, Erica Newland, Andrew McCabe and Mike Pompeo but the light Packer shines on them is one you will probably find elucidating. I couldn't result including this swampy tale though:

There’s always been corruption in Washington, and everywhere that power can be found, but it became institutionalized starting in the late 1970s and early ’80s, with the rise of the lobbying industry. The corruption that overtook the capital during that time was pecuniary and mostly legal, a matter of norm-breaking-- of people’s willingness to do what wasn’t done. Robert Kaiser, a former Washington Post editor and the author of the 2010 book So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, locates an early warning sign in Gerald Ford’s readiness to “sign up for every nasty piece of work that everybody offered him to cash in on being an ex-president.” Cashing in-- once known as selling out-- became a common path out of government, and then back in and out again. “There was a taboo structure,” Kaiser told me. “You don’t go from a senior Justice Department position to a senior partner in Lloyd Cutler’s law firm and then go back. It was a one-way trip. That taboo is no more.”





Former members of Congress and their aides cashed in as lobbyists. Retired military officers cashed in with defense contractors. Justice Department officials cashed in at high-paying law firms. Former diplomats cashed in by representing foreign interests as lobbyists or public-relations strategists. A few years high up in the Justice Department could translate into tens of millions of dollars in the private sector. Obscure aides on Capitol Hill became millionaires. Trent Lott abandoned his Senate seat early in order to get ahead of new restrictions on how soon he could start his career as a lobbyist. Ex-presidents gave six-figure speeches and signed eight-figure book deals.

...The swamp had been pooling between the Potomac and the Anacostia for three or four decades when Trump arrived in Washington, vowing to drain it. The slogan became one of his most potent. Fred Wertheimer, the president of the nonprofit Democracy 21 and an activist for good government since the Nixon presidency, says of Trump: “He was ahead of a lot of national politicians when he saw that the country sees Washington as rigged against them, as corrupted by money, as a lobbyist’s game—which is a game he played his whole life, until he ran against it. People wanted someone to take this on.” By then the federal government’s immune system had been badly compromised. Trump, in the name of a radical cure, set out to spread a devastating infection.

To Trump and his supporters, the swamp was full of scheming conspirators in drab D.C. office wear, coup plotters hidden in plain sight at desks, in lunchrooms, and on jogging paths around the federal capital: the deep state. A former Republican congressional aide named Mike Lofgren had introduced the phrase into the political bloodstream with an essay in 2014 and a book two years later. Lofgren meant the nexus of corporations, banks, and defense contractors that had gained so much financial and political control—sources of Washington’s corruption. But conservatives at Breitbart News, Fox News, and elsewhere began applying the term to career officials in law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, whom they accused of being Democratic partisans in cahoots with the liberal media first to prevent and then to undo Trump’s election. Like fake news and corruption, Trump reverse-engineered deep state into a weapon against his enemies, real or perceived.

The moment Trump entered the White House, he embarked on a colossal struggle with his own bureaucracy. He had to crush it or else it would destroy him. His aggrieved and predatory cortex impelled him to look for an official to hang out in public as a warning for others who might think of crossing him. Trump found one who had been nameless and faceless throughout his career.

...In his fourth year in power, Trump has largely succeeded in making the executive branch work on his personal behalf. He hasn’t done it by figuring out how to operate the bureaucratic levers of power, or by installing leaders with a vision of policy that he shares, or by channeling a popular groundswell into government action. He’s done it by punishing perceived enemies, co‑opting craven allies, and driving out career officials of competence and integrity. The result is a thin layer of political loyalists on top of a cowed bureaucracy.

Justice and State were obvious targets for Trump, but the rest of the executive branch is being similarly, if more quietly, bent to his will. One of every 14 political appointees in the Trump administration is a lobbyist; they largely run domestic policy. Trump’s biggest donors now have easy access to agency heads and to the president himself, as they swell his reelection coffers. In the last quarter of 2019, while being impeached, Trump raised nearly $50 million. His corruption of power, unprecedented in recent American history, only compounds the money corruption that first created the swamp.

Within the federal government, career officials are weighing outside job opportunities against their pension plans and their commitment to their oaths. More than 1,000 scientists have left the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and other agencies, according to the Washington Post. Almost 80 percent of employees at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture have quit. The Labor Department has made deep cuts in the number of safety inspectors, and worker deaths nationwide have increased dramatically, while recalls of unsafe consumer products have dropped off. When passing laws and changing regulations prove onerous, the Trump administration simply guts the government of expertise so that basic functions wither away, the well-connected feed on the remains, and the survivors keep their heads down, until the day comes when they face the same choice as McCabe and Yovanovitch: do Trump’s dirty work or be destroyed.

Four years is an emergency. Eight years is a permanent condition. “Things can hold together to the end of the first term, but after that, things fall apart,” Malinowski said. “People start leaving in droves. It’s one thing to commit four years of your life to the institution in the hope that you can be there for its restoration. It’s another to commit eight years. I can’t even wrap my head around what that would be like.”

And this, my friends, is precisely why today is so important-- so important to cast a ballot for Bernie and so important to nominate candidates like Mike Siegel (TX-10), Cristina Ramirez (Sen-TX), Cenk Uygur (CA-25), Liam O'Mara (CA-42)... instead of conservatives in contested races in Texas and California so that they can go on to November and defeat Trmpist bootlickerss like Michael McCaul, John Cornyn, Steve Knight (or Mike Garcia) and Ken Calvert. Bernie can beat Trump and Bernie needs a progressive Congress so he can beat conservatives of both parties who oppose the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free state colleges, and the rest of the platform they're running on-- rather than on a platform that doesn't go beyond the kind of personal careerism that always-- not sometimes-- leads to corruption. Mike Siegel told me late yesterday that "We are in the fight of our lives, and not everyone realizes it. Conservatives in the Democratic party are punching left instead of closing ranks to defeat an authoritarian regime. Here in the Texas 10th, I'm fending off two corporate-backed challengers who only showed an interest in this race after my 2018 campaign turned it from 'safe Republican' to 'battleground district.' One challenger takes money from private prisons and the corporate forces that are starving Texas municipal governments; the other received $360,000 in outside spending from an anti-Green New Deal super PAC. We are going to beat them anyway, because this campaign is fighting for the needs of the many and has earned the love and support of the people. We need more of this, in Texas and across the country: campaigns that fight for our communities, that fight on issues that matter in people's lives. I'm honored to have the support of Blue America and progressives across the country, who see how winning this race in Texas-- and sending home one of the most powerful Republicans in DC-- would have enormous positive repercussions for the politics of this nation."

Liam O'Mara, the Riverside County, California progressive candidate and history professor, sees it much the same way. "Corruption and subservience to corporate interests is a bipartisan problem, though obviously worse on the GOP side. But if we are to get a Congress that serves the needs of the people again, we need to get that corporate money out! I'm tired of having Representatives who ought to be wearing NASCAR jackets with their sponsors' names. All those other great progressive issues-- Medicare, global warming, education, etc.-- depend on breaking the grip of the oligarchs who currently choose our leaders. We can do better. If we start by electing a clean Congress, we can pass comprehensive legislation that ends the tyranny of Big Money in American politics. But that means we all need to step up. I know you get a lot of money-asks, but if we do this right, it won't have to stay this way! A progressive Congress can pass public financing for elections, but we can only get a progressive Congress with your support. Please donate whatever you can, and know that fixing our campaign finance system will be a top priority."