Brett Kavanaugh, Susan Collins, and our Age of Unreason

The drama had been building for days around confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Kavanaugh had perjured himself repeatedly before the U.S. Senate, and stands accused of assaulting multiple women, one of whom, Christine Blasey Ford, offered moving testimony to a senate committee. During the hearing, Kavanaugh erupted in a volcanic, partisan rage, accusing Democratic members of the committee and a shadowy Clintonian conspiracy, of undermining him. Since then, professional organizations of lawyers, and former and current Supreme Court Justices--the latter explicitly, the former obliquely--have warned that confirming Kavanaugh will bring the Court into disrepute. Clearly, confirmation would also send a disturbing message about the impunity that sexual abusers enjoy.

And what a cast of misfit characters it was, whom we expected to weigh in on the fate of the nation. Alaskan Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski crossed the floor to oppose his nomination. Heidi Heitkamp imperilled her career as a Democrat in North Dakota to oppose Kavanaugh. Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia offered Kavanaugh his support, anxious to hang onto his marginal seat, less anxious to use this hard-won power to do anything particularly useful.

Then there was Jeff Flake, the great Republican moralist who, ambushed by furious assault victims in a senate elevator, sorrowfully hitched his support of Kavanaugh to the conduct of an investigation into the allegations against him--so long as the investigation was given neither the scope, resources, nor time to undertake any significant investigative work. Flake told us proudly that the fact that he will not run for re-election liberated him to make this heroic stand on behalf of victims of sexual assault. It did not, however, appear to have liberated him from the habits and mindset cultivated over a lifetime as a Republican, of fooling himself and the media into believing that mournful words of agony equate to an actual defense of women and their bodies or of national institutions and thereby our democracy.

Faced with mounting evidence of Kavanaugh’s unsuitability for this post, Republicans as a whole held ranks, allowing themselves to be represented by a few old men on committee, who alternated between making lecherous comments about Dr Ford and sounding like they had stumbled out of Ben Carson’s surgery room in mid-process. Members of this party are proud to keep their spinal columns locked in a hidden senate vault, the keys to which are likely hidden in the pouch beneath Mitch McConnell’s chin.

But another figure moved center stage on Friday. It was none other than The Mendacious Mediocrity from Maine, Susan Collins, a Republican who has carefully cultivated a reputation as a moderate with idle-minded journalists. Every so often, on votes of particular and public controversy, Collins, like Flake on this occasions, makes her agonies public, flipping and flopping, sighing and frowning, and making a great show of being faced with fundamental moral conflict.

On this occasion, she delivered her much-anticipated verdict in a speech to the Senate. Within a few moments of beginning her speech, it became clear that she was not simply going to vote for Kavanaugh, but was going to unearth what ought to have been his dead career, and sing its praises to the heavens, or at least the Republican version of the heavens, whose core deities include Mitch McConnell--this week-end referred to by a leading historian of fascist Germany as the “gravedigger of American democracy--and Donald Trump.

When Collins had finished, her colleagues rushed to praise her, claiming that even if one disagreed with her premises--and we shall get to these soon enough--one had to acknowledge that this was a speech that restored the lustre of the deeply-compromised senate. To listen to senators, her speech had been a masterpiece--Lincolnian if not Churchillian, her gravelly rasp however, having its origins not in mid-morning drunkenness, but in the difficulty of getting her chops around the scale of the fibs she was telling, which clearly came up her throat easier than they went down ours.

But if Collins’ speech represents the future of the senate, it is a future that involves having last rites read for the senate, a stake driven through its heart, and the earth over its interred body salted. It is to replace American democracy with a wilderness that will give authoritarians the peace they need to cement the absolute power to which our national oligarchy aspires.

Collins’ speech reminded me of nothing more than an early line from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, a fitting text indeed to revisit in our own age of un-reason. Paine wrote that “it is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”

By this metric, Collins and every one of her colleagues are ready for the commission of any crime. But the one they have in mind is the assassination of American democracy, because this much-praised speech in honor of Kavanaugh was anything but a declaration of firm moral principles. It was little more than a bricolage of FOX News talking points, the dishonesty of which it is worth examining.

Central to Collins’ lengthy defense of Kavanaugh was a series of claims about reassurances he offered her that he had no intention of gutting Roe v. Wade, such is his respect for precedent. All very well and good if Collins had been locked in a basement for the past few weeks. But since she’s been very much alive, doing her moderate dance for the past weeks, she has no excuse for not knowing that during this period Kavanaugh lied fluently and often to the senate, perjuring himself in a fashion that in normal circumstances would have unquestionably disqualified him from occupying a powerful office. It is not even seriously contested that Kavanaugh lied repeatedly during this process. That Collins’ defense is based on trust of his remarks during this process demonstrates to what degree even supposedly moderate Republicans refuse to process evidence. Collins’ leading premise, designed to give comfort to those who believe women should be regarded as persons with individual rights, is based on an extraordinary act of mental lying.

But there was oh so much more. Collins devoted a surprising amount of her testimony to exhibiting her sympathy with victims of sexual assault. She was with them all the way, she believed them, she would protect them, and she hoped that this episode would reveal the seriousness of this problem. Voting for Kavanaugh, she reassured us all, was not to suggest that sexual assault was a good thing. Merely, it seemed, that multiple accusations of such abuse are not to be a bar to holding high office and do not require exhaustive, thorough, and transparent investigation.

Along these lines, Collins pledged to ensure that women would never in the future feel the need to feel shame, fear, or anxiety about coming forward with their stories, praising Dr Ford’s courage. But this logic is only possible in Republicans’ fantasy world, and not in the real one that most of us inhabit, wherein confirming Kavanaugh sends a chilling message to women: that women who are victims of sexual abuse and assault know full well that their tormentors and abusers can count on some of the most powerful people--men and women--in the country, and the most powerful institutions in the nature, to foster a culture of impunity that offers those tormentors and abusers license to repeat their acts of violence or know that they will go unpunished and uncensured.

But Collins wasn’t finished. She was, she wanted us to know, angry. But she reserved her anger for whomever leaked Ford’s letter, rather than for the man who has lied shamelessly to her and her colleagues, and who stands accused of assaulting women, and who responded to those allegations by invoking a grand national conspiracy, and issuing flippant replies worthy of any overgrown frat boy, to the female senators who sought to get to the bottom of allegations. Collins is like the person who gets more angry with the whistleblower than with the lawbreaker the former exposed. Like Kavanaugh, her sympathies are entirely with those in power who run the risk of having their hypocrisy and malfeasance exposed.

Collins still wasn’t finished. She grew positively Trumpian in her assessment of Kavanaugh. With a straight face, she claimed to believe that the man who went off the rails blathering about a Clintonian conspiracy, stands accused of shocking violence, and who lied repeatedly and fluently to senators and the public will actually help to lessen the country’s partisan divide and restore faith in the court. Kavanaugh’s partisan rage was invoked by one former and two current Supreme Court justices as they warned the public and the senate that introducing this level of partisanship to the court would be dangerous in the extreme.

But Collins wasn’t having any of this. As she outlined what she believed to be his qualifications to serve in a position of immense and comparably unaccountable authority, she argued that if senators opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, they would damage faith in the judiciary. This feat of mental gymnastics--“lying like a throw rug” is an expression it brings to mind--would require for most of us another visit to Ben Carson, and the extraction of sufficient grey matter as to not be able to see how confirming an accused sexual abuser--who has lied and lied often during his confirmation process, demonstrated partisan adherence to unhinged conspiracy theories, and exhibited an unseemly willingness to perform on command for the authoritarian clown in the White House--will do immeasurably greater damage to the court.

Confirming Kavanaugh brings not just the senate and its processes, but the court and the legitimacy of its rulings, into deep disrepute. I can’t imagine that any one of the court’s most fervently conservative justices, want to have to rule alongside a man of Kavanaugh’s character.

We know, after his angry performance for Trump before the senate committee, that we might hear Kavanaugh’s voice as the Supreme Court deliberates, but the words will be those of Donald Trump. Look carefully, when Kavanaugh speaks from the Supreme Court bench, and you might just see Trump’s hands, inserted so deeply up Kavanaugh’s backside that if they were just a little bit bigger they would waggle in the justice’s mouth every time he speaks.

The final of Collins’ talking points worthy of dissection is one oft-repeated these days. She spoke a great deal, as have many of her colleagues, about the role of the presumption of innocence in all of this (ironic in itself for a party for whom such a presumption is color coded). But for being a bunch of lawyers, Republican legislators have a poor grasp of law, and forget the role of the senate in this process. The senate isn’t supposed to base its confirmation on guilt or on innocence. It is not putting nominees on trial. And there are no legal consequences for a nominee who is not confirmed. There is no constitutionally-protected right to serve on the Supreme Court. This is a matter of power, not law. Rather, the senate is participating in a crucial part of a job interview. They are evaluating candidates for competence, intelligence, integrity, and independence. Kavanaugh, in addition to being accused of a crime, demonstrated only mediocre competence, and no integrity and independence whatsoever.

This job interview, moreover, is not for any ordinary position. It is for a lifetime appointment to a position that gives its occupant extraordinary power over hundreds of millions of people. Guilty or not of the charges Ford and others made against Kavanaugh, even the smallest sliver of doubt should make any Republican who governs in good faith recoil, and recommend the nomination of one of any number of conservative-minded judges not afflicted by such serious allegations and Kavanaugh’s transparently partisan lying.

But Collins and other so-called moderates, including Nevada’s invertebrate senator Dean Heller, came to evaluate Kavanaugh’s nominee not in good faith, but rather committed to his confirmation. This is made clear by the fact that as they defend his nomination, they offer no logical, truthful arguments for the necessity of his particular candidacy. Instead, they offer a mendacious medley of claims as to why Americans should accept to have their laws determined by a man who is accused of vicious abuse of women, and whose career is a testimony to his extraordinary affinity, in cases involving contests of power, for the rights of the strong over those of the weak, and the wellbeing of the rich over that of the poor.

I hope that Flake’s retirement years will be dogged by his support for this lying, dangerous man, who offered fealty to an authoritarian-minded president rather than to the public interest, and that Collins and Heller will pay an electoral price, the latter in a month, the former when she faces re-election.

But I have little hope for the long-term survival not just of rulings that protect women’s abilities to govern their own bodies, but also for regulations designed to keep our air clean, our water safe, and our food free of poisons; for the rights of working people to organize themselves, and make their voices heard collectively in ways that none of us can do alone; for the hard-won but barely-realized sanctity of voting rights; and for our ability to hold to account aspiring dictators who this justiced has told us stand outside of the law he is supposed to uphold. Absent some dramatic development one minute before metaphorical midnight, or a truly democratic an anti-authoritarian wave of unanticipated proportions in November, I fear this is yet another knell heralding the slow death of our democracy

Kavanaugh, the Court, and the Republicans' Assault on Democracy

Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and potential appointment has been a long time in coming. As the Republican Party today ignores or dismisses the testimony of a woman who has alleged sexual assault against a Supreme Court nominee--someone who is about to be given lifetime power over the lives, liberties, and wellbeing of all women in the U.S.--we are seeing the ongoing crescendo of processes set in motion ten years ago, and with roots far further back.

In the early years of the Obama administration, the Republican Party came to realize that obstruction or even destruction of the normal processes of governance was not merely a way to inhibit the ability of the Obama administration to pursue its policy ends.  The method simultaneously served other purposes.  Serial, indiscriminate, destructive obstruction was also designed to diminish Americans' faith in the processes of democracy and the legitimacy of institutions of government and governance.

And finally, obstruction represented a taunt, and an effort to bait Democrats to--in comparatively minor but still significant ways--begin their own abandonment of certain processes and procedures designed to preserve democratic norms over the long-term even when they proved barriers to short-term political gains. In this game—toxic for our institutions and discourse—the left cannot win and should not wish to win. An ideology premised on protecting and empowering the unprotected and disempowered majority relies on the power of construction, which requires legitimacy and process, rather than that the power of destruction, which works as well if not better for the right-wing’s project of dismantling democratic safeguards, regulations, and institutions.

This was a logical strategic move from a party which, by 2009, had in only one of the past five elections won support from a majority or plurality of voters. Today, that record is one in seven, that one triumph facilitated by a naked appeal to patriotism in the aftermath of an illegal, immoral, and ill-advised war of aggression designed to scare the country into an embrace of neoconservative terror. Our constitution allows for a minority of voters to claim triumph in national elections, but the continuation of this undemocratic and dangerous feature should be taken not as an indulgence, but as the power of what Paine described as the “vanity of governing from beyond the grave,…the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”  In addition to its injustice, the framework is calculated in the twenty-first century to generate cynicism and mistrust.

The Republican Party’s embrace of this strategy was accompanied by a shutting down of its other evolutionary pathways and a movement if not a centrally-driven decision to morph into a nakedly ethnic nationalist party.

Diminishing faith in democracy and institutions initially created a deadlock.  That deadlock, in the context of the recession, put the United States on autopilot toward austerity, making the state powerless in ways that reaffirmed people's mistrust.  The absence of regulation is corruption and abuse.  The absence of measures to protect wellbeing is a vacuum entered by powerful economic and social predators. This, combined with an unimaginative, historically illiterate, and cowardly approach by Democrats between 2009 and 2016, continued the cycle of mistrust and disenchantment. Campaigns premised on transformation of an unjust political economy demonstrated not even remote interest in anything more than technocratic tinkering, and subsequent efforts to displace blame onto hostile Republicans ignore the genuine commitment to a faltering liberal political economy by Obama-era Democrats.

Since 2016, the strategy of deliberately diminishing faith in democracy and institutions has been used to make the case for mounting authoritarianism and corporatism, a two-pronged assault on civil and political rights on the one hand--targeting the rights of ethno-religious minorities and women--and on social and economic rights on the other. The deliberate attempts to further engineer both political and economic inequality creates conditions of great instability and anger, and combined with diminished faith, makes more likely the routine deployment of violence as a legitimized mode of politics, whether by the state against its critics, or by ethno-nationalist groups against those they are instructed to see as the wrongful beneficiaries of democratic forms of governance, encouraging those nationalists' turn to authoritarianism.

Thus far, many of these efforts to destroy faith in institutions have focused on the executive and legislative bodies.  However, Republicans' decision to obstruct Merrick Garland's nomination in 2016, and their decision today to back the nomination of an accused abuser as the best possible candidate for a position of extraordinary power, demonstrate their intent to diminish the legitimacy of the court.  Should Kavanaugh's appointment prove successful, Republicans will not just have secured the ability to shape the contours of American live for decades to come, relying on the rulings of a confirmed authoritarian-sympathizer and accused predator.  They will also call the legitimacy of that court into question in ways that will enable the rejection of law should it intervene on behalf of democracy, and which will muddy the waters around the sites of legitimate power in the United States.

I certainly don't believe that in 2009 Republican legislators set out with the express intention of creating the world that is now emerging from a decade of their guerrilla campaign against government.  But as an institution, the Republican Party is motivated by a particularly cynical and baleful version of the short-term, zero-sum approach to power that afflicts American political parties and political discourse more broadly.  Their temptations lurked in the desire to engage in willing association with movements that deal simultaneously in legislative maneuvers and party conventions, but also white-cloaked cross-burnings and a return to what Gilbert Allardyce described as "years of marching columns, flags, and torchlight, a season when grown men indulged themselves in pagan pageantry and Roman salutes," an era that its survivors hoped would appear to the future as a "nightmare," but which its jack-booted legions believed was a “vision of the world that was to come.”

The essence of this broad strategy is to create a climate of mistrust, fear, uncertainty, and anger.  In such an environment, when democracy is weakened in its ability to speak for people who do not possess power in the form of wealth and privilege--the majority--the outcome is a political wilderness, where desolation is taken for peace, might is read as making right, and the strong are permitted to prey on the weak. 

Good Sweden, Bad Sweden

As I wandered through Arlanda airport waiting from my flight to California from Stockholm in early July, I buckled to temptation and took a pass through the airport bookshop. A caution-tape yellow and black book caught my eye, and the title made me look twice: Good Sweden, Bad Sweden it blared.

Paul Rapacioli is the founder of The Local, an online newspaper covering Swedish news, culture, and lifestyle. What sets it off from other papers is that it’s in English, perfect for someone like me who is keen to follow events in Sweden, but whose Swedish is fit for little more than ordering tea (a risky business, Swedes put odd things in their tea), explaining that I don’t speak Swedish, or taking and clarifying orders from a three- and six-year-old about whatever game they’re indulging me in.

In Good Sweden, Bad Sweden, Rapacioli sets out to explore why Sweden and its social democracy assume outsized significance in the world today, situating the discussion against changes in media, politics, and Sweden itself. The book is timely on the eve of the country’s September 9 election.

Much conventional wisdom holds that elections in Sweden are less seismic in character than some across the Atlantic, in part thanks to a comparative consensus governing the parameters of political economy and the bounds of civility. However, this election seems different both inasmuch as it is drawing greater than usual attention elsewhere in the world, and in that there are some disturbing potential outcomes.

Ethnic nationalists are in power--the U.S., Hungary, Poland, Norway, Austria--or prominence--France, Britain, Germany--across the west. Sweden’s national variant, the Swedish Democrats, are now snapping at the electoral heels of not just the Moderate Party which comprises the centerpiece of Sweden’s right-wing “Alliance” grouping, but also the Social Democratic Party. Recent polls have given the Social Democrats a slight edge, and seen the Moderates pull ahead of the Swedish Democrats, but the gap separating the first and third polling parties remains small.

Many Americans look to the social democratic parties of Europe--whether in hope or fear--for alternative models to our country’s lengthy history of liberalism, and the current administration’s tilt toward fascism. The Labour Party consolidated Britain’s welfare state in the most dramatic burst of activity during the late-1940s. French and Spanish socialist movements as well as parties claim power regularly, as well as the streets. But few parties of the left in Europe have had the success of Sweden’s Social Democrats.

The Social Democrats have been the party of government for 78 of the last one hundred years, and the largest party in every election for 104 years. They have dipped only once below a 30% result in one hundred years, and that was in 1920. During their heyday, they averaged around 45% in parliament, and twice topped 50%.

If those percentages don’t sound remarkable in countries that have seen parties secure “landslide” victories, it must be borne in mind that all of these elections have occurred in system of proportional representation. In 1964, for example, when it secured 47.3% of the vote, the Social Democrats were competing against five other parties, rather than in a Republicans vs Democrats scenario. Their 45.3% in 1994 pit them against six other parties. To Americans who argue that proportional representation--which empowers more than two parties and offers a finer grain of representation--leads to chaos, the Social Democrats’ electoral success and the political hegemony the party exerted in and out of government is a stunning riposte.

It is possible to overstate the Social Democrats’ power. While they have eschewed a South Africa ANC-style alliance with communists, the communist (now Left) party delivered supply and confidence votes for coalitions headed by the social democrats, which at other points included the Environment and Agrarian (now the liberal Centre) parties. And variable results between a bicameral parliament before the 1970s meant that some Social Democrat governments teetered on a knife-edge.

One of the party’s successes across its history was its ability to cast itself as a neutral arbiter between the Trade Union Confederation (LO) and the employers’ associations, a model which generated noteworthy stability, predictability, and captured American Marquis Childs’ attention, leading to the publication of Sweden: The Middle Way, in 1936. Childs not only began the process of popularizing the Swedish model abroad, but also offered an early argument for social democracy as a middle road between liberalism and communism, preserving the former’s respect for civil and political liberties with the latter’s defense of social and economic rights. The brand Childs helped to launch was since been shorn up by the Social Democrats’ electoral success, notable names like Volvo and IKEA, and lately the export of a lifestyle brand which competes with Nordic noir for global attention.

But, depending on how you look at it, the Social Democrats’ success has bred hubris; or their sometimes comparatively narrow grip on formal political power has been dramatically eroded by de-industrialization, global political events beyond their control, and the kind of changes in media that Rapacioli outlines in Good Sweden, Bad Sweden. The Social Democrats’ regularly- and convincingly-reconstituted model of modernity has failed to keep apace with events in the world, and amidst converging political cultures that demand drama and are susceptible to manipulation, the absence of leadership capable of forcefully restating the case for social democracy in the contemporary world and in relation to long-term historical trajectories, has put the party, its cause, and the society it seeks to protect in peril.

Part of the challenge comes from the Alliance, a grouping of four liberal and conservative parties. These range from the Centre Party, once a governing ally of the Social Democrats, and now claiming a liberal mantle, to the Moderate Party, which served as the inspiration for the 2010 reinvigoration of Britain’s Conservative Party, which mixed talk of compassion with brutal austerity. Sweden’s Moderates maintain a smiling, technocratic face. Their program might be described as the “Americanization” of Sweden’s social and welfare system. They would disclaim any comparison, which would sell poorly in a country that looks warily across the Atlantic at the profiteering, unequal, callous United States, and with some astonishment at Americans who beat their chests and bay at the moon about the splendor of their country even as they settle for a decrepit education system, a costly and debt-inducing healthcare system, and an astonishingly expensive public higher education system, never mind the absence of real vacation time and parental leave.

But the Moderates’ program for gradual privatization, reduction of tax obligations, intended or otherwise, will lead that way over time. Even partial privatization creates new interests, new incentives, and new momentum, and questions the basic logic of universalism underpinning Sweden’s social democracy, which distinguishes it from many of Europe’s other nominally social democratic states. And a steady if slow reduction of tax obligations weaken a safety net that depends on a broad and deep commitment to its maintenance.

The kind of robust welfare state that Swedes enjoy has taken decades, considerable political capital, and a great deal of care to build, but as has been demonstrated elsewhere in the world, such elaborate systems can be undone much more rapidly, and collapse like a Jenga game if turned over to wreckers, deliberate or otherwise.

The other challenge to the left comes from the Swedish Democrats, an ethnic nationalist party with fascist roots and sensibilities. Catapulted to prominence in part by the Social Democrats initial decision to open the country’s doors to refugees in late-2015, the Swedish Democrats have waged a racist campaign, officially and unofficially offering voters a mash-up of all the far-right’s favorite bogeys: Muslims, Roma, Jews, and continental Europeans. With each new anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic utterance that slips a Swedish Democrat official’s lips, the party insists that it isn’t actually racist, and that the individual in question was just a bad apple. But the whole barrel has clearly been afflicted by the party’s wholehearted return to ethnic nationalism, the variant of nationalism responsible for most of the twentieth century’s calamities and horrors.

The Swedish Democrats have been celebrated by American fascist Steve Bannon, and the party has bound itself to Donald Trump’s own stance on immigration, and drawn dismay from Israeli newspapers. They have also committed themselves to dismantling the flawed but essential project of European unity. Trump gave voice to their views when in Britain earlier this year he discussed how “allowing immigration to take place in Europe is a shame,” because migrants “changed the fabric of Europe,” meaning that Europeans were “losing their culture.” This full-volume tin dog whistle, echoed by Jimmie Akesson, Sweden’s heartless Tin Man, defines European culture initially in terms of values. Those values are then linked to race by the argument that democracy, the welfare state Akesson pledges to whiten, and political culture are incompatible with non-Europeans or Islam.

In some regards, the Swedish Democrats have already won. Their surge in the polls after fears about the repercussions of admitting large numbers of migrants reached Sweden’s voters forced the Social Democrats into dramatic retreat, and the left-wing party’s leadership eschews most of its earlier humanitarian commitments.

Thus far, Swedish conservative parties have shown far greater restraint than some counterparts in refusing to deal with ethnic nationalists. Had the Alliance permitted itself to engage with the ethnic nationalists, they could now be in government. They have pledged that they will maintain this opposition to cooperation after this next election as well, although some dissembling about this helped to precipitate a recent change in Moderate Party leadership. But if current polls indicate where the post-election chips will fall, the temptation to break the pledge will be great. With some variation, polling suggests that the left and right blocs will each secure around 40% of parliamentary seats, with roughly 20% accruing to the ethnic nationalists.

This likely means another minority government (the Social Democrats and Greens currently run one). A government by either right or left that requires budgetary support from the other constrains the ability of the bloc in question to pursue its more substantive political economic commitments, and will open Sweden’s political system to further wild charges from the Swedish Democrats about a conspiracy to silence them. Like the far-right in the United States, they rail against “political correctness,” understood in most contexts to be nothing more sinister than an effort to eschew the racism and bigotry that defined earlier political discourse.

Serious questions about education and healthcare also loom large in the election. But as Rapacioli discovered, the entanglement of crime and immigration is coming to dominate Swedish discourse in part because it reenters the country after being energized, and in some cases fabricated outright, by media elsewhere. Until the last couple of days, when serious global media outlets turned their attention to the coming election, virtually all of the hits from entering “Sweden” and “election” into a google news search came from FOX, Breitbart, the Daily Telegraph, RT, the Daily Express, and a few other right-wing British tabloids and Russian-sponsored outlets. Headlines portrayed a picture of a country under siege, in flames, etc. Rapacioli does a good job of demonstrating the processes whereby right-wing media come to and cultivate these stories, and their impacts on Swedes’ perceptions of their own media and politics.

With considerable linguistic assistance, I took a Dagens Nyheter political quiz and, unsurprisingly, found my views most closely associated with the Left Party, followed by the Greens and Social Democrats, then a lengthy gap before the Center, and then a long plummet to the Christian Democrats, Liberals, Moderates, and Swedish Democrats.

But the question beyond these individual parties is one that voters around the world face when they contemplate voting. How should the world’s national communities create bases of identity, belonging, and community? Across the past two hundred years, in large measure, the answers offered have dealt with two forms of nationalism.

The first, ethno-linguistic nationalism, suggests that language and ethnicity should be the basis for belonging in nations. Ethnic nationalism is by definition exclusive, as it goes to pains to draw lines around the “pure” national community, and victimize those regarded as second-tier citizens, interlopers, or subversives, each of these characterizations offered on the basis of language and ethnicity. It is this form of nationalism--its torch carried around the world today by Donald Trump in the U.S., Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Jimmie Akesson in Sweden, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and too many others elsewhere--which has led to or supported yellow stars, internment camps, segregation, and colonialism.

The other form of nationalism is civic nationalism, wherein belonging is defined by shared access to law, institutions, and the fruits of collective investment. Some countries like the U.S. have juggled the two versions at some points, or restricted themselves to a narrow--and often disingenuous--form of civic nationalism, focusing on law and a handful of public institutions. While better than openly ethnic nationalist states, this model has the obvious weakness of generating social and economic inequities which leave populations highly vulnerable to appeals by ethnic nationalists.

Sweden, and some other countries around the world, have taken this model further, creating a welfare state with universal benefits that give greater meaning to belonging, and expanding the number of institutions designed to serve a state’s people. Here, Swedishness is defined not by being an ethnic Swede, but by sharing access to the welfare state in its entirety. It is this model that is being challenged--deliberately by Sweden’s far right, and more subtly by its Alliance grouping. It is my fear that too many Swedes, like too many Americans, will use the election to give a black eye to some representative of “conventional wisdom,” be that the Social Democrats, the Alliance, or any of those that the Swedish Democrats have dubbed parties to a dastardly conspiracy of tolerance and decency. Americans in electing Trump and Britons in backing Brexit have realized that “blowing up the system” to make a statement comes with dramatic and uncertain costs and very real casualties.

And so hopefully as Swedes participate in their election, they will consider not just the immediate repercussions of a vote for their pocketbook or for parties they might wish to discipline, but will look at this election in its larger global and national historical context.




Some reading material on Swedish history/politics


Brandal, Nik, et al. The Nordic Model of Social Democracy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Hilson, Mary. The Nordic Model: Scandinavia Since 1945. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.

Hinde, Dominic. A Utopia Like Any Other: Inside the Swedish Model. Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited, 2016.

Kautto, Mikko, et al, eds. Nordic Social Policy: Changing Welfare States. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Kent, Neil. A Concise History of Sweden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Misgeld, Klaus, et al, eds. Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labour Party in Sweden. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.

Partanen, Anu. The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life. New York: Harper, 2016.

Rapacioli, Paul. Good Sweden, Bad Sweden: the use and abuse of Swedish values in a Post-Truth world. Stockholm: Volante, 2018.

Ruin, Olof. Tage Erlander: Serving the Welfare State, 1946-1969. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.

Sejersted, Francis. The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Tragardh, Lars, ed. State and Civil Society in Northern Europe: The Swedish Model Reconsidered. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.

Dean Heller’s studiously ineffective protest of family destruction makes him a doormat for fascism

Nevada Senator Dean Heller recently offered a statement highlighting his opposition on paper to the Trump administration's most recent methods of barbarism: the deliberate policy of abusing children and destroying families on our southern border.

Trump has repeatedly and shamelessly lied by blaming Democrats and former president Obama for the origins of this policy. Trump has openly admitted that family separations are a strategy to instill terror and bring his critics to the negotiating table. And Trump has been defended by a series of morally depraved conservative allies. His Homeland Security secretary has also lied openly about the origins and rationale of the policy.

Dean Heller's statement, signed along with other Republican senators, acknowledges that enforcement of immigration policy should be "consistent with our values and ordinary human decency." While it sought to spread the blame to courts, it was also fairly clear in identifying Trump's "zero tolerance" policy as the source of the decision to abuse children, violate their human rights, and rip families apart.

The Republican senators' letter was addressed to the Attorney General. It steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the role of the president in calling for and defending these moral abominations and human rights abuses. The Republican senators declined to acknowledge that it is the president who sees the destruction of families as a negotiating ploy, a moral necessity, a fulfillment of his central campaign promises backed by his party, and a tool with which to discipline migrants.

On June 23, Trump will appear alongside Dean Heller to raise money for his re-election. The juxtaposition of Heller's weak but critical letter with his embrace of and by Donald Trump, is typical of how Nevada's Republican senator has dealt with the fascism menacing our country.

Time and again Heller has offered tepid criticism of Trump's actions--the assault on Americans' healthcare; the nomination of unqualified, corrupt, and malicious cabinet secretaries; gross violations of human rights. Heller has tantalized the media and Nevadans with threats to take bold action, before folding in the most complete and humiliating fashion. Time and again, Heller's brief time on his high horse has been followed by the utter collapse of his spinal column as he dismounts, and slithers off to do the President's bidding, whether that involves plunging our healthcare structures into chaos, passing a gargantuan tax giveaway to the wealthy, backing corrupt plutocrats for appointed office, or backing violent criminals to head government agencies.

These gross moral failures on the part of Dean Heller are not only nauseating in their own right. They represent one of two things. One possibility is that they are a carefully calibrated strategy that has so far managed to fool many Nevadans into thinking that Heller is a thoughtful moderate, when instead he is a powerful and enthusiastic supporter of the Trump agenda. The second possibility is that Heller is actually stupid enough to believe that a letter like the one he issued, in the context in which it was issued, represents a way of influencing the Trump administration.

Either scenario should be chilling for Nevadans. The Trump administration, and the bulk of the Republican Party, are mounting an assault on our country and many of its citizens that possesses all the hallmarks of fascism: palingenetic ethnic-ultranationalism; contempt for workers' organization; hostility toward internationalism; assaults on civil and human rights; scapegoating vulnerable minorities; the introduction of violence into political discourse and practice; a populist economic veneer over the promotion of profound economic inequality; destructive militarism; contempt for constitutional democracy; hostility toward the media; an authoritarianism which demands subservience from citizens, etc.

Whatever happens, our country will remain deeply marked by our experimentation with this fascism. But if the administration’s fascism continues to be strengthened, either by active proponents or foolishly misguided enablers, we are unlikely to survive as a society. In a global context where the United States joins other powerful authoritarians in seeking to export their model, the ascent of democracy as a global model will look like a blip on the historical radar.

Dean Heller might not realize how grave is the threat faced by our country. But he clearly recognizes that there are problematic features of Trump's program--the joint Republican statement implies a belief that Trump's immigration policy is immoral and indecent. Given that recognition, how can Heller and others believe that a letter to an Attorney General will influence Trump? How do they believe they can discipline this administration when they vote for its nominees, pass its favored legislation, and appear alongside its megalomaniac head at fundraisers? Their words might offer criticism, but their every action confirms that they are all bark and no bite. Their actions amount to a wink and a nod, a message to the fascist administration that they have its back, even if that sometimes means pretending to their constituents that they are troubled by its actions.

Nevada Senator Dean Heller is happiest when sitting astride a fence. Perhaps he enjoys the view, but it’s more like that it serves as his safe space, out of reach of the jack-booted racists and economic fundamentalists on the right, and removed from Nevada’s wider population which is suffering as a result of the crushing assault on civil, political, social, and economic rights mounted by the Trump administration with Heller’s assistance.

For the past few years Heller has paid lip service to decency, tolerance, reason, and other important values that hold our society together. And as he has mouthed his commitment to those values, he has steadily undermined them with a set of votes that have enabled an administration that makes profound appeals to people’s worst instincts by embracing bigotry, generating economic inequality, enshrining civic inequities, pedaling hate, and seeking to bring the same kind of savage disorder it is sewing in our own country to the international sphere.

The vicious assault on children and families on our southern border is the latest example of Heller’s spinelessness. No letters and no media statements will halt the depravity enacted there by the Trump administration and its Republican backers. That will require Republican senators rejecting each and every piece of Trump-backed legislation, turning down each and every Trump nominee, avoiding any Trump-associated fundraisers, and taking every opportunity to assail Trump’s administration in public. Otherwise, they are doormats and doormen at best, and enthusiastic allies at worst, for an administration that is taking our country and our world to the brink.

Chris Giunchigliani has my vote for Nevada governor

This fall, the nation’s eyes will be on Nevada’s senate race, where incumbent Republican Dean Heller has staked his career on enabling a dangerous ethno-nationalist administration dedicated to increasing both inequality before the law, and socio-economic inequality, while undermining the norms-based international order created after the Second World War.

But as Nevadans begin early voting in this summer’s primary, another race, with even more immediate implications for the state’s future, looms large. Nevada’s next governor will have a great deal to say about the future of a state that remains underdeveloped in its social and physical infrastructure. The two Democrats vying for their party’s nomination offer some important contrasts, and Nevadans would do well to look closely at this race.

Both nominees are Clark County commissioners, but Chris Giunchigliani, the more left leaning of the two, also has experience as a state legislator. She and Steve Sisolak have spent a primary campaign debating education policy, the nature and desirability of growth, different models for development in Nevada, gun control, and environmental protection. Either of them would be much preferable to social and economic fundamentalist Adam Laxalt who looks likely to win the Republican nomination.

However, I believe that Chris Giunchigliani would be most likely to work on making Nevada a place that those of us who live here--as opposed to people who come to Reno or Las Vegas for a week-end--can imagine as truly being our home as well as our zip code.

Steve Sisolak has moved to the left to woo primary voters, but many of his conversions--and to be fair, he is now asked to comment on broader issues than fell under the remit of a county commissioner--are open to question. My guess is that the fairly conservative Sisolak would draw on his basic “fiscal conservatism” to build some kind of an informal alliance with legislative Republicans to arrest the greater ambitions of Democrats in the legislature. It’s a model that has served a conservative Democratic governor well in California, and has stymied efforts in that state to address the long-term effects of the recession or to make public institutions more public and accessible.

The question of whether Sisolak would hold to some of his better primary positions is neither trivial nor, as some conservative Democrats like to suggest, a “purity test.” Rather, it is a legitimate concern about the degree to which we can expect real movement toward a state political economy that puts Nevadan families and communities at the heart of the model for the state’s future.

At the heart of the difference between Sisolak and Giunchigliani--who has declared that she will serve as the “education governor”--are two different visions of development for Nevada.

Sisolak’s model for development revolves around the idea that continued growth--in a fragile ecosystem and political economy--is the future, now and forever, for Nevada. It also relies on the serially irresponsible idea that the way to improve our social environment and livelihoods is to always ask outsiders to pay the bill. Sooner or later, Nevadans alike will have to come to grips with the reality that if they want a better life, they can’t rely on tourists to provide ever-new subsidies.

Much has been made about Giunchigliani and Sisolak’s different views about the public subsidy to the football stadium--she opposed it, he favored it. But this seemingly small issue demonstrates a great deal about their respective views about development. In my view, much else of substance--related to education, housing, the environment, etc--flows from these philosophies of development.

Sisolak opted for a public subsidy for the big ticket item which offers little to Nevadans aside from the possibility--experts say that stadiums seldom live up to the economic hype--of trickle-down development. Giunchigliani suggested that the funds for the stadium could have been devoted to improving the state’s mangled education system. Sisolak replied that Nevadans weren’t paying for the stadium--rather, the funds came from a room tax that would be paid by visitors. This point in no way negated Giunchigliani’s argument that a stadium was a less important feature of development than new educational infrastructure, something that like the stadium could simultaneously generate jobs while offering something far more substantial and enduring to Nevada’s children than the faraway glimmer of an entertainment venue.

Diverging views about sites for investment aside, Sisolak’s constant crowing about getting outsiders to pay for the stadium also masks a deep problem. Tourist dollars impose both a vulnerable and decidedly limited ceiling on Nevadans’ ambitions, and one which works to the disadvantage of most Nevadans and their needs.. The state’s constitution and tax code are riddled with limits (no state income tax, limited property taxes, protections for the powerful mining sector) on the state’s ability to draw on a broad and predictable range of revenue. As a result, the state relies on the limited indulgence of its poorest citizens for regressive taxes that cut more deeply into their earnings than those of their wealthy neighbors.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about the big ticket item, stadium model of development. As Las Vegas races outward, it leaves far too many of its citizens behind. Families struggle to make ends meet, children fall through the cracks at straining schools, high rents and a threadbare safety net drive people to homelessness, and the transit infrastructure on which poorer Nevadans depend stagnates. New proposals to push the city further into the desert miss both ecological limits and social needs, while failing to embrace an opportunity to build inward and upward--the future of global cities.

Sisolak’s attacks on Chris Giunchigliani amount to ‘why, as a single member of the legislature, were you not able to pull our state out of a hole?” ignoring that the hole is dug by a mangled state constitution and system of governance, a deep set but changing libertarian political culture, and a lengthy period of Republican dominance at the gubernatorial level.

Giunchigliani appears to better understand that the traditional trickle-down model of development isn’t working for Nevada’s communities. Trickle down development is the equivalent of offering ‘thoughts and prayers’ after a shooting, in that it turns over responsibility for a public policy problem to a faith-based initiative: divine intervention in the one case, and the fantasy of a market that doesn’t actually exist as a thing except in the fevered dreams of Laxalt’s libertarianism. Markets are collections of relationships and interests. They don’t do public policy, although the manner in which they are or aren’t regulated has implications for public policy. Governments, in contrast do public policy, and that is why they are better placed to ensure that resources reach the people who need them before affluent interests have taken their pound of flesh.

At a series of debates, Sisolak appeared to attack Giunchigliani for spending a career fighting for lost causes rather than “getting things done.” But her battles, even if sometimes lost, were for our state’s forgotten children, beleaguered families, battered workforce, and fragile institutions, and it is precisely because people like Giunchigliani fought them before there was a consensus about the need to do so, that the conversation has changed, forcing even conservative Democrats like Sisolak to talk the talk. The wellbeing of those constituencies are not lost causes.

As a new Nevadan, I’d love to live in a state with uniformly-excellent public schools, well-funded public universities, great public transit, protected public lands, clean air, affordable healthcare, generous support for those who fall on hard times, in which people, rather than commercial entities, are recognized as the source of a state community’s wellbeing.

Based on the respective philosophies of development articulated by Nevada’s two Democratic contenders for the governorship, Chris Giunchigliani will get my vote. Hers is a pro-active, human-oriented approach to public policy, that asks Nevadans to assert control over their own destinies, eschewing the trickle down model of development that has served the state rather poorly in the past.

National Security officials embrace their own version of Trump's post-truth world

Today, the Senate intelligence committee offered bipartisan support for the nomination of Gina Haspel to head the CIA. Haspel, while a CIA officer, oversaw a torture site, and participated actively in efforts to destroy evidence of CIA torture.

Late last month, Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and a persistent critic of the Trump administration, took to the pages of the New York Times to attack the “post truth” condition of Trump’s America and to emphasize the “serious stress” being placed on American “traditions and institutions that protect us from living Hobbesian ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ lives.”

As the antidote to Trump’s attacks on American institutions, Hayden celebrated “intelligence work.” Such work, he claimed, “at least as practiced in the Western liberal tradition--reflects...threatened Enlightenment values: gathering, evaluating and analyzing information, and then disseminating conclusions for use, study or refutation.” Hayden proceeded to blame Trump for undermining those values through the president’s Muslim ban, his fragile ego, and own lack of intelligence.

Hayden argued that “intelligence shares a broader duty with...other truth-tellers to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes objective reality.”

These are a striking set of claims. While few inhabitants of the realm of reality would dispute the idea that Donald Trump’s fascism is undermining institutions, values, discourse, and thereby democracy, Hayden’s argument about the claim of national security agencies to be conveyors of Enlightenment values, “truth-tellers” that foster open modes of discourse deserve closer scrutiny and a good deal of skepticism.

Michael Hayden served as NSA Director, National Intelligence deputy director, and CIA director during the the Bush administration, a troubled period defined by the aggrandizement of power by the security state, a rash declaration of poorly-defined and unexplained war on terror. This period, and the abuses by the security state that it set in motion--abuses which, it should be noted, continued through the Obama administration--actually helped to facilitate Trump’s rise to power.

During this period, intelligence agencies offered a series of misleading claims that enabled the declaration of aggressive war--a crime--against Iraq, a war which led to the unravelling of the Middle East, the disintegration of the careers of several American presidential aspirants, and the proliferation of international terrorism.

During this era, Hayden defended expanded powers of domestic surveillance for the security state, warning that such powers were essential for American security. Hayden privatized components of these dangerous efforts, and contracts accrued to a company staffed by former high ranking intelligence officers. Hayden pursued whistleblowers with a vengeance (offering highly personalized attacks on Edward Snowden and lying to senators about the NSA’s spying programs), demonstrating little patience with the argument that Americans needed to know what happened behind the closed doors of the security state.

At the same time, he rebuffed or ignored Congressional critics of the security state’s stealthily-expanded remit. Hayden reportedly told one internal critic that “We didn’t need [constitutional safeguards]” for expanding surveillance of Americans, acknowledging that he did not believe his agency needed to acquire warrants for this surveillance.

In confirmation hearings, Hayden attacked journalistic scrutiny of intelligence work. And he later defended the utility of torture. Hayden lied to Congress in an effort to obstruct investigations into torture, and his agency waged a long-term campaign to undermine the senate investigation and control the report that emerged from the investigation.

Hayden also presided over and later defended the CIA’s drone program, which involved using disposition matrices (statistical assessments) to murder often faceless people without anything resembling due process. Such murders violated key legal principles, allowed for simmering conflicts to continue beneath Congress’ radars, often struck the wrong targets, and killed massive numbers of innocent civilians (sometimes 90% of their victims)--not that they allowed for anything resembling a concrete statement of their intended targets’ guilt. Hayden made the extraordinary request to be allowed to blow people to smithereens on the basis of unknown vehicles or houses exhibiting activities associated with an Al Qaeda-esque “pattern of life.”

In sum, Michael Hayden was a national security leader who sought the unaccountable and secret expansion of intelligence agencies’ powers to surveil and intrude on the lives of American citizens. He enabled his agencies to murder--sometimes singly, sometimes on a massive scale--our global neighbors in flagrant violation of our laws and international accords. He defended torture, attacked the press, prosecuted whistleblowers to keep citizens from learning about his agencies’ work, and waged a cold war against elected representatives charged with overseeing his agencies and shedding light on the security state’s activities in the public interest.

Through these actions, Hayden exported violence and terror, and undermined the principles of an open society, arguing that the security state along had a right to evaluate the premises undergirding international policy, military intervention, civil liberties grabs, and constitutional safeguards.

In light of this track record, Hayden’s claims about the “Enlightened,” “liberal,” “truth telling,” and knowledge-disseminating qualities of intelligence agencies are not just absurd. They exhibit profound ignorance about the set of factors--and the rogue nature of our security services are one of these--that elevated Trump to office, are deliberately ahistorical in their efforts to deny the barbarism of U.S. national security policy, and represent a foray into “post truth” politics that might not quite rival Donald Trump’s excursions, but which promise to resonate long after this administration has ended.

Perhaps it’s worth looking at an actual Enlightenment-era thinker to see what people of that era thought about the issues Hayden describes. Each spring, my European history students read passages from Cesare Beccaria, an eighteenth-century jurist and criminologist. On Crimes and Punishments remains a representative piece of Enlightenment-era thinking about law, criminality, and justice.

In it, Beccaria argued that although laws “ought to be conventions between men in a state of freedom,” they were historically too often “the work of the passions of a few, or the consequences of a fortuitous or temporary necessity,” the state of exception perhaps represented by the pressures our own “forever war” on terror placed on our institutions. Beccaria also commented on the role of punishments, the need for transparency, and the problems of torture.

Punishments, he declared, should not “torment a sensible being.” Those torments constituted “useless cruelty, the instrument of furious fanaticism, or the impotency of tyrants.”

“Secret accusations,” of the sort effectively levelled by the CIA and the NSA before the despatch of a drone to create a crater of mangled limbs and spattered blood in place of the human accused and his or her neighbors, “are a manifest abuse” stemming from “the weakness of the government,” and have the effect of making “men false and treacherous.” He approvingly cited Montesquieu’s notion that public, processual accusations “are more conformable to the nature of a republic.”

Beccaria reserved some of his harshest words for torture. “No man,” he wrote, “can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection, until it have been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted.” “It is confounding all relations,” Beccaria argued, to suggest that “pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the muscles and fibres of a wretch in torture.” The purpose of torture, he acknowledged, as Hayden and his ilk fail to acknowledge, is “to terrify and be an example to others,” a legacy of “savage legislation” from the pre-Enlightenment darkness of the human past. Beccaria also noted that in the case of torture, the incentive to confess to end the terror and pain meant that “the very means employed to distinguish the innocent from the guilty will most effectually destroy all difference between them.”

Beccaria praised the early abolition of torture in Sweden and the abhorrence for the practice that he believed pertained in Britain.

Torture, he said, amounted to a declaration of barbarism: “Men, be insensible to pain. Nature has indeed given you an irresistible self-love, and an unalienable right of self-preservation; but I create in you a contrary sentiment, an heroic hatred of yourselves. I command you to accuse yourselves, and to declare the truth, midst the tearing of your flesh, and the dislocation of your bones.”

Beccaria, of course, does not represent the totality of Enlightenment thinking about terror and punishment. He did not anticipate the threat of international terrorism, but nor did he guess at the self-destructive qualities of democratic states exposed for centuries to what he and his compatriots believed to be systems of values and laws that transcended exception in order to endure alongside wiser and more enlightened and more democratic states.

Alongside the more obvious menaces to our democratic institutions represented by the Trump administration, and its fellow global authoritarians, lurk a group of people described in other contexts as “securocrats.” That constellation of national security officials have argued for over a decade now, often with bipartisan support, that laws and norms and institutions should be subordinated to their privileged knowledge, knowledge which, moreover, the public is not fit to see. Those officials have abused their power, fostered mistrust of government, meddled in elections, exported terror--torture, drone strikes, aggressive war--and battled representative institutions to assert their primacy at the heart of our government.

They now seek to associate themselves with resistance to authoritarianism, when in reality they have been its enablers. They have squandered a public trust that they never actually earned, and should be uprooted and disciplined, rather than praised and promoted. Rejecting Gina Haspel’s nomination provides one important opportunity for legislators to send such a signal. But so too would rejecting recent efforts to put the securocrats’ war on, of, and for terror on autopilot. Likewise, efforts to wind down U.S. backing for and participation in a Saudi-led campaign of terror and destabilization in Yemen.

The watchers should become the watched, and we should all give careful scrutiny for the willingness and wherewithal of our legislators to hold securocrats accountable at our extended moment of democratic crisis.

Senators Prepare to Declare a Forever War

A bipartisan group of senators have crafted SJ Resolution 159, designed to address a sprawling series of global conflicts waged by the United States for the past 17 years. SJ Resolution 159 functions as a broad authorization of military action in six countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya) against eight non-state entities (Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda in Syria, Haqqani Network, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb).

The authorization cedes responsibility for waging what amounts to war--although it steadfastly refuses to use that word--against these entities in these places, leaving open the possibility for the executive, with minimal oversight, to extend military force against “associated forces,” “organizations, persons, or forces,” in new geographies. The Resolution would obligate Congress to revisit this authorization--every four years.

The authors of the resolution--Senators Kaine, Flake, Corker, Coons, Young, and Nelson--suggest that the resolution is designed to “provide an updated, transparent, and sustainable statutory basis for counter-terrorism operations.” But what it really does is entrench ignorance, legitimate what Dexter Filkins called the “forever war,” and place on autopilot a broad range of conflicts. It marks an extraordinarily irresponsible Congressional abdication of responsibility, and an unbelievable misreading of the past seventeen years of dismally failed American international policy and warmaking.

The resolution contains a litany of dangerous features.

Congress should be responsible for exercising close oversight of war to ensure that violence is a last resort, undertaken only in the public interest,when all else has failed, and in close conformance with domestic and international law. In stark contrast, this resolution suggests that Congress wants nothing to do with its constitutional obligations, and is content to allow an overmighty executive to accumulate and wield further powers, leaving Congressional representatives to focus on their squabbles, and on carrying out the bidding of their monied sponsors.

Wars should be avoided at all costs. But when waged, they should be designed to achieve clear objectives, in conjunction with a series of political, economic, and social goals. Conflicts on autopilot generate their own toxic logic, seldom related to the public interest. In contrast, this resolution leaves the executive free to wage these wars without clearly articulating the relationship between military action and objectives related to the public interest.

Moreover, the resolution envisions wars that stretch over the horizon and span generations. Children born the year of 9/11 will soon be old enough to fight in the forever war it spawned. By leaving the duration of the authorization open and imposing weak oversight only at four year intervals, the resolution’s sponsors accept the legitimacy and logic of a “forever war,” a war waged on a time-scale so vast that periods longer than U.S. participation in the Second World War are regarded as appropriate intervals for revisitation.

We should be appalled at the suggestion that our country should be committed in this deliberately slipshod fashion to the logic of these “long wars.” But we should be more disturbed still by the way in which this resolution is designed to undermine incentives for re-thinking the logic of such a war. By undermining those incentives, the resolution legitimates a strategy that has failed time and again. The conflicts in which the U.S. has embroiled itself across the Sahel, Sahara, Horn of Africa, Middle East, South Asia, and Arabian Peninsula, are political, social, and economic in their origin. They are complex. And war is a blunt and ineffective instrument, designed to address proximate rather than ultimate causes, and to generate short-term rather than long-term “fixes.” A war policy on autopilot will be unaffected by any of the nuance necessary to address complex problems. It will be subjected to none of the rigor of debate that should define the decision to commit money and lives to armed conflict.

Deploying violent military force has been proven in most of these instances not just to be an ineffective policy. It has also been demonstrated, time and again, to be a destructive tool. Our war in Iraq created a power vacuum, spread terrorism to previously unaffected areas, and facilitated our own descent into acts of barbarism.

Alongside that conflict, the war in Afghanistan has failed to address the underlying sources of conflict in that country, all the while providing the glue to link fundamentalists there to others in the region, making real the fearsome transnational terror links that the Bush administration manufactured to lead us in our nightmarish descent into permanent war.

Our 17-year war has also had domestic repercussions. For centuries commentators have observed how long-term national security “crises” corrode democracy, damage institutions, empower rogue domestic actors, and undermine the public trust. We have seen all of these things occur in the United States, and continuing this directionless conflict only magnifies the damage that our embrace of all things “national security” will do to institutions that actually do serve the public interest.

Of course proponents of the resolution would argue that it is not “war” they are authorizing, but “military force,” a euphemistic term that does not evoke the violence of war, which maims people, strips people of their families, flattens homes, destroys economies, and consumes lives. The sponsors are Orwellian in their refusal to confront the violence that their nice, neutral-sounding resolution naturalizes.

Perhaps the most elementary observation one could make about the resolution is its utterly baffling and truly incomprehensible suggestion that it somehow makes sense to throw together a series of different conflicts in different geographies, with different origins, different actors, different trajectories, and different outlooks, under the umbrella of a single resolution. If using war to address any one of these conflicts would amount to using a sledge hammer against a grain of sand or a drop of water, this blanket military authorization against what might be anywhere between six and forty conflicts is akin to using said hammer against a sand dune or ocean wave.

This all-American mash-up of diverse conflicts, actors, and interests into a single, reconstituted war on terror is the ultimate expression of our legislators’ fatal hubris, profound ignorance, and serial irresponsibility. Any person of minimal intelligence and good-will would recognize that policy must be crafted and oversight offered in a highly specific way, in which particular military actions are scrutinized with reference to particular political goals and particular social and economic contexts and the welfare of particular people in those contexts.

There are long-term repercussions associated with this broad authorization and the power it cedes to the executive--not just the presidency, but the array of acronymed security services who thrive, financially and otherwise in the environment created by permanent war. So long as the executive--in its democratic guise or from its dark, undemocratic corners, increasingly guarded from legislative oversight--can make a link to existing forms or sources of terrorism, it can expand the array of geographies in which we wage war to any corner of the globe. Congress could push back, but this resolution itself is a clear signal that Congress is weary of the tiresome task of doing its job.

We have relatively recent experience of what can happen when Congress takes the opportunity to back a war with an eye to passing the buck and making the hollow declaration of supporting the troops as it sends them off to kill and be killed. The war in Iraq in 2003 became the moment when a comparatively targeted response to 9/11 went off the tracks.

Both parties are to blame for the state of affairs which allows our confederacy of senatorial dunces--Kaine, Flake, Corker, Coons, Young, and Nelson--to parade their resolution as a good idea. Republicans have long embraced the strategy of beating their chests and howling at the moon--or rather, at our darker complected global neighbors--to distract their gullible base from the party’s moral depravity and intellectual bankruptcy.

From the depths of not dissimilar intellectual impoverishment, the Democratic Party made a cynical gamble after 9/11 that embracing aggressive war could be used to counteract those who questioned its patriotism--a patriotism defined by respect for a flag and defilement of the public welfare. Little did they imagine that this decision would cost them two presidencies, help to undermine trust in the state they sought to make work in the public interest, and facilitate the elevation of a fascist to the presidency.

But the flaws of the two parties aside, it is in the clear interests of members of Congress to offer a thundering bipartisan rejection to a resolution that represents historic levels of bipartisan stupidity. That they exhibit this stupidity at a time when the executive is in the hands of a man who by any reckoning, and by the judgment of several of this resolution’s sponsors from across the parties, is an ignoramus of historical proportions, trailing a bloated ego and wearing his elephantine insecurity and malignant disrespect for the constitution on his ill-fitting sleeve, is particularly obscene and demands explanation.

Citizens expect their representatives to represent their interests, exert oversight, and ensure that policy--domestic and international--is carried out in the public interest. Congress gains nothing in the long term by ceding its authority to a less accountable and already overmighty executive.

We also know full well that we cannot trust the grimy, bloodstained securocrats, some of them state terrorists themselves. Their institutional interests and methods run counter to the public interest. Torture, drone strikes, and rogue NSA spying, and the constant efforts of the securocrats to beat back legislative oversight, are clear signals of the need for tighter oversight still, and the need for legislators to ensure that there is a close relationship between the broad political, economic, and social goals of our international policy, and the manner in which we use our military. Those who seek to introduce a greater degree of equality and justice into our own domestic politics have a particular obligation to ensure that their international policy offers the same on a global scale.

The aggrandizement of the foreign policy executive and the abuse of power by securocrats is a bipartisan problem. In different ways and to different degrees, this accumulation and abuse has been perpetuated and expanded by all recent presidencies. It is a product of hubris, of corroded institutional culture, and the self-perpetuating logic of violence.

Our legislators should reject this resolution and its craven, destructive, and toxic approach to international policy. But in return, they should create something good. They should redouble their efforts to exert oversight over disparate and often disconnected wars. They should work to educate themselves about the particular roots of conflict. They should reflect on how their behavior over the past decade and a half has often worsened conflicts at the great expense of the people absorbed by them. They should consider how and where social and economic policy, and negotiation, and an emphasis on collective responses, international law and norms, and attention to the welfare of our fellow global citizens, can re-frame the way in which they contemplate conflicts.

And they should consider whether at times the U.S. might ultimately make itself stronger in the world if it holds back from using its power and instead focuses on institution-building, norm-reinforcing, law-affirming, and peace-building. They might consider that at heart, democracy is a recognition that it is in the long-term interests of societies to distribute power broadly, and to legitimate deliberation rather than a state of nature in which the strong might prevail in the short term, but have then precious little to look forward to in the wilderness that passes for peace in their moral wasteland, where might, rather than justice and equality, makes right.

It is precisely to such a desolation that this resolution’s commitment to a forever war on autopilot will take our country if we do not work to stop it. It is a commonplace among beltway deadbeats that Americans don’t care about foreign policy, and that legislators consequently have no reason to do so either. It is urgent--for anyone who cares about justice and equality in our world, and the health of our own democracy--that we prove the cynics wrong.

War on Iraq, 15 years on

In his magisterial survey of European history since 1945, the late historian Tony Judt observed that “Afghanistan, in short, was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union. Its traumatic impact upon a generation of conscripted soldiers would emerge only later...It says something about the underlying fragility of the Soviet Union that it was so vulnerable to the impact of one--albeit spectacularly unsuccessful--neo-colonial adventure” (Judt, Postwar 594).

For a slightly different set of reasons, and in a less immediate sense, the same could be said for the 2003 invasion of Iraq launched by the United States for our own country’s political, cultural, and economic future. Fifteen years ago today, bombs rained down in Baghdad in what was variously described as a campaign to “shock and awe,” to export democracy, to embrace American empire, to mark a new era of warmaking and foreign policy, and to add an exclamation point rather than a tame period to the end of history.

Fifteen years on, there has yet to be a serious political reckoning for a war that helped to empower a class of securocrats, proved a boon to toxic American exceptionalism, represented corporate command of foreign policy, has led to the implosion of multiple Middle Eastern states, generated the proliferation of international terror, weakened our country’s civil liberties, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, dismantled the Iraqi state and deeply compromised the integrity of the newly “liberated” country, killed thousands of American soldiers while leaving far greater numbers of others with visible and invisible wounds, and generated sufficient mistrust in our political institutions and the right wing of the Democratic Party to at least facilitate the rise of a fascist to the presidency.

For my generation the Iraq war was and remains particularly significant. Our high school history and government classes were dominated by debates about the war. In rural northern California some of us were force-fed FOX news in classes as its charlatans counted down breathlessly to the start of the war. One teacher screamed at a few of us dissenters that we were unpatriotic “commies” for questioning the march to war. Within two years, some of the people who sat in those or neighboring classrooms were dead. Some of them died dramatic deaths in the battles and offensives that for at least a couple of years dominated our news, while others expired more slowly upon their return to a largely indifferent nation that had apparently exhausted its patriotism through the mindless blood-lust with which it beat the war drums in rhythm with the lies spat out weekly by the Bush administration.

Members of that administration conspired to wage aggressive war, and yet did not face justice for their actions and the devastating consequences of those actions. Indeed, we are witnessing their return to respectability during the Trump administration as people look back to what they portray as the benign Bush years.

Time and decisions that Americans make in the coming few years will tell. But it is entirely possible that a few decades from now historians could tell a very similar story about the crumbling of our own state to the one that Judt offered about the relationship between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the unravelling of that empire’s power.

Our journalists and press were certainly proven to be craven, inept, and awed by the power of the imperial presidency and its capacity to rally the nation around the flag, turning a blind eye to mounting contradictions, fallacies, and transparent lies. The media’s ineptitude and concomitant public cynicism can be linked to its inability to cover the 2016 primaries in a serious fashion.

The Democratic Party, supposedly the home of liberal internationalism and those sceptical of empire-building and aggressive war, proved itself to be a pitiful, hypocritical shell, measured not only by the number of its leading representatives who not voted for a ill-conceived, probably illegal, and self-evidently self-destructive war and then doubled-down on that position. Two of those figures became leaders of the party and not coincidentally led it to defeats in 2004 and 2016 that in turn led to financial meltdowns and a flirtation with fascism that still has plenty of time to turn into a fatal embrace.

Far from stamping out terror, the war expanded and connected existing but isolated terror networks, something that British intelligence and Middle East experts warned about in the months leading up to the war. It also brought the methods of terror into regular practice by the U.S. military and its intelligence agencies, degrading our ethics and recruiting for Al Qaeda and its ilk. The “forever war” launched by Bush and continued writ large and small by Obama and Trump, has also empowered our security state.

Abuses meted out by securocrats, and the impunity they enjoyed in the face of tepid efforts by legislators to reign them in, reinforced public mistrust in institutions of governance. The power of those securocrats also led them to take an outsized role in our politics. We might now depend on the work of a former FBI director to investigate a corrupt fascist administration, but let’s not forget that it was a highly politicized FBI which chose to publicize the investigation into Clinton’s e-mails while keeping their investigation about a far more compromised Trump campaign secret. We can be sure that whether Trump wins another term or is impeached, the security state will emerge stronger than ever. And the power of the securocrats expands at the direct expense of our democracy.

The Bush administration also regenerated an imperial cult of exceptionalism around the war, and that cult has helped to impair our ability to develop a functional international policy to combat the combination of global inequality, climate change, and authoritarianism, the combination of which could very well lead to a nightmarish global future.

There are certainly many other causes behind our national decrepitude and the frightening state of the world, just as there were behind the fall of the Soviet Union. But thus far, the 2003 invasion of Iraq has revealed the institutional, cultural, moral, and intellectual fragility of our country.Our task is to do what we can to ensure that it does not become a moment associated with the national and global demise of democracy and the cynical recuperation of aggressive war, terror, and brute violence.

Trump's Reshuffle Takes the U.S. Deeper into the Dark Side

Thugs, criminals, and enablers. These are the people being promoted during Trump’s shake-up of his administration. After the “tough guy” president fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson via twitter, he indicated that his choice to replace Tillerson is Mike Pompeo, currently the director of the C.I.A. His nominee to replace Pompeo is the deputy director of the C.I.A., Gina Haspel.

These are two deeply troubling nominations on several fronts.

Tillerson was widely perceived as being an independent voice in the administration. It is true that his independence stemmed from and reinforced his utter marginalization. International policy, whether the proposed meeting with North Korea’s leadership or statements about NATO, was conducted based on Trump’s whims and what little information he could process that was fed to him by advisors who read and appeased his mood.

Tillerson was not any force for good in the administration, but his was a voice that at least appeared to respect the (broadly) liberal, norm-based international order that has served the American public and the world at large inadequately but far better than anything that has come before. He criticized Russia’s extrajudicial killings when the administration would not. He seemed to recognize that dangerous words can have dangerous consequences.

Pompeo is a different creature. While Tillerson provided some check, or the threat of a check should he have threatened to resign at an inopportune moment, Pompeo will be an enabler of Trump’s basest, most ignorant, and authoritarian instincts.

Pompeo was a key proponent of the endless and partisan investigations into the non-scandal that was Benghazi. There were serious flaws with the international policy of the Obama administration in particular and the U.S. more systematically, but Pompeo’s cynical hijacking of the tools of oversight for nakedly partisan purposes ensured that those flaws received no attention. Then, as since, he did the bidding of his party, evincing no sense for or interest in the public good.

Pompeo has a history as an Islamophobe, characterizing terrorism as a feature of Islam, and seeking to hold “moderate Muslims” responsible for violent members of their faith. His congressional campaigns drew on bigoted websites that characterized an Asian American rival for his seat as a “turban topper,” and he supported torture and the secret torture facilities designed by the Bush administration during its war of terror.

He is a defender of the offshore prison at Guantanamo, and therefore a critic of constitutional safeguards and the U.S. justice system more broadly, which he does not view as capable of handling accusations of terrorism.

He defended the illegal and unaccountable surveillance of the NSA, attempted to normalize and legalize its activities, and castigated whistleblowers with a vengeance that demonstrated extraordinary contempt for democratic norms and the right of the public to know what elected and and appointed officials do in their name.

In other words, Pompeo has been a defender of the overmighty and abusive security state about which Trump whinged endlessly during his campaign. That security state and its employees have abused the rights of Americans, sought to curb the ability of our legislators to offer oversight, pursued both deeply immoral and clearly self-destructive methods that have debased our national culture, diminished the standing of our national security institutions, made our public less safe, and claimed the lives and dignity of our fellow global citizens, all while dispensing with the norms of justice and decency that we like to pretend is our national signature.

There are few better embodiments of the rogue security state emboldened by Pompeo than his deputy and would-be replacement, Gina Haspel. Haspel is a long-time C.I.A. employee who helped to engineer what Dick Cheney called America’s shift to the “dark side.” Even as the Bush administration pledged to wage a war in defense of our freedoms and their global dissemination, it embraced the use of torture, aggressive war, secret prisons, and the shredding of safeguards both for those captured by our country and by extension American soldiers or civilians held prisoner abroad.

The deputy director of the C.I.A., an institution profoundly culpable in our country’s descent into terror and criminality, was a central player in this tragedy. The New York Times documented how Haspel “oversaw the torture” of suspects, and then worked to cover up evidence of her team’s brutality. She did so from one of the “black sites” in southeast Asia designed to outsource the methods of barbarism embraced by a cancerous agency which has long bridled at the notion of democratic accountability, and which has metastasized at the expense of our legislature’s power.

The C.I.A. entered into what amounted to a cold war with senators who sought to shed light on its criminal behavior. The cover-up, as much as the crime, was directed not just at the victims of waterboarding and other abuses, but also at the heart of American democracy. We now rely on spies and their shadowy maneuvers to investigate the president’s ties to global authoritarians and obstruction of justice, but the current of public mistrust and cynicism which led to Trump’s election was created in part by the abuse by the rogue security agencies of the public trust.

Some of the people tortured by Haspel remain in Guantanamo, denied their day in court. The American public has still not learned the full extent of the routinized savagery that Haspel and others unleashed, unknown, in our names, precisely because of directives like the one she signed to facilitate the destruction of records associated with torture sites.

Likely criminals in our security state like Haspel, aided by accomplices in government like Pompeo, have sought to simultaneously erase the details of our long and sinister flirtation with the “dark side,” and to draw on Americans’ fears and prejudices to prepare us for a return to those methods.

Haspel should be on trial for her brutality, and Pompeo should never have been re-elected to office once he lent his Congressional power in support of an abusive security state. Instead, Trump is proposing the promotion of a criminal and her thuggish enabler to still greater positions of power in our government, demonstrating that impunity is alive and well for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and abuses of our constitution.

Citizens should express their forceful outrage over this appointment, and our senators should refuse to confirm people who are a disgrace not just to their country, but to the notions of a shared humanity, democracy, and rule of law.