Summary: I hope I’m wrong in predicting potentially apocalyptic consequences flowing from Britain’s ill considered decision to leave the European Union. I’m not holding out hope, however. In the very short time since the Brexit referendum, the pound has shed something in excess of 10% of its value, Scotland and Northern Ireland are talking about leaving the United Kingdom in order to be able to become part of the European Union again, Scotland by declaring independence and Northern Ireland by joining the Republic, David Cameron is a lame-duck who will surely vanish into well-deserved permanent political exile in consequence of his galactically stupid decision to press forward with the Brexit referendum in the first place, for above all, champagne corks were no doubt popping in the Moscow Kremlin Thursday evening.
Because the real winner in the Brexit referendum was not the 17 million useful idiots who voted to take Britain out of the EU, it was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the Russian government, which has pursued a long game policy since 1949 of breaking the unity of the West by any means necessary. They have been materially assisted by such self-seeking and marginal men as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. We are comprehensively betrayed from within. We must now do what we so often criticize the French for doing. We must seek scapegoats and punish them by driving Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson into the political wilderness and by depriving Donald Trump of the White House. Anything else would play straight into Vladimir Vladimirovich’s small, but grasping hands. If we don’t want to see Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Champs Elysées, the West needs to strap on its balls and kick Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump if not into the Tower of London, then certainly out of our political life. We can’t afford a hostile Russian takeover bid of the two most influential governments in the Atlantic alliance.
I hope this post proves to be wrong. Categorically, comprehensively, galactically, one hundred percent wrong. I hope I can recant of it in sackcloth and ashes if I am proven wrong.
But I don’t think I will be proven wrong.
Brexit is a disaster.
It is one of the worst, most galactically stupid political miscalculations ever made by any British politician. It is now well known that the infamous referendum on leaving the European Union was a political risk taken by discredited outgoing British Prime Minister David Cameron back in 2013, when he tried to throw a bone to the fascist tendency within his own party by promising a referendum on EU membership. Cameron, like an awful lot of Tories and an awful lot of Labour, believed that Brexit couldn’t possibly pass, and that a would be a passing thing, rather like the Scots independence referendum last year. (Of that, more, later.)
Cameron was wrong. As a result of his mistake, Cameron is the first casualty of Brexit. It is not certain whether David Cameron took the decision to step down from the Treasury Bench of his own accord, or whether he was pushed out by Tory Party elders, or whether he may have gotten a subtle, but unavoidable, nudge from Buck House. At all events, it’s clear the David Cameron no longer possesses the confidence of the House, and that he probably no longer possesses the confidence of the Queen, either. When you’ve lost both Westminster Palace and Buckingham Palace, it’s time to get the hell out of Number 10. No knighthood and no peerage can be expected to reward him for his service.
With David Cameron, “discredited Dave,” on his way out, we should take a moment to parse out the immediate and long-term ramifications of Britain’s pending exit from the European Union. Those ramifications are potentially apocalyptic.
Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t fared much better, either. Not only did Mr. Corbyn fail to command a majority in a vote of confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but he has also had to contend with the resignation or sacking of two thirds of his shadow cabinet. Though Corbyn has not stepped down, claiming that he has a broader mandate from Labour voters then from Labour MPs, there are clear signs that the coup effort within Labour may not only not be over, but that it may well succeed within the next week to 10 days. Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of moving into Number 10 Downing St. seem to be fading rather rapidly.
As much as the British political landscape seems to be littered with the broken and bleeding remains of political careers, the British economic landscape appears equally unpromising. In recent days,, sterling has taken its biggest hits as the mid-1980s, shedding 10% of its value in a single night. The pound has got altogether dickie in 24 hours. Thursday morning, the pound was standing at $1.48. By evening’s end, the pound was standing at $1.32, and there is speculation that if the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street can’t calm jittery investors in the City and elsewhere, the bottom could drop out of the oldest active currency in the world. Indeed, some forecasters are predicting that the pound could be at parity with the dollar by the Fourth of July.
Indeed, the status of sterling as one of the world's reserve currencies is in grave doubt. Investors are already fleeing the island of Britain for the relative safety of the island of Manhattan. Already, the Fed reports that interest in US treasuries has shown a marked uptick.
But more than just taking a hit to the pound, Britain has also sacrificed a great deal of national and institutional credibility by this ill-considered vote. As from last Friday, the financial capital of Europe has ceased to be London and is now Berlin, and to a lesser extent, New York. London has overnight yielded pride of place, and it will take Londoners a long time to reconcile themselves to their new status as inhabitants of the backwater capital of a second-tier state that used to be one of the major shot-callers in Europe.
As much as London’s status took a hit last night, so too did the institutional status and indeed the institutional trustworthiness of Her Majesty’s Government. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to count for something. At the Prime Minister’s word, countries around the world used to tremble. The merest rumbling from the British lion was enough to bring third world despots to heel. Just ask the Argentines, who may again be thinking very seriously about trying conclusions again with Britain for possession of the Malvinas. The Prime Minister of Britain has now become the head of the government of a second-tier state. Who now speaks for Europe?
From last Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks for Europe. The first female Chancellor in the history of the German Empire, of the Weimar Republic, or of the Bundesrepublik now enjoys more political influence on the Continent than any German leader since the Iron Chancellor Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen 140 years ago. The world now attends carefully on Angela Merkel’s words, while it airily dismisses the words of discredited David Cameron and holds the words of other British politicians, such as Brexit cheerleaders Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in contempt.
From last Friday, the credibility of her Majesty’s government is nil, the pound is dickie, and the British electorate is viewed worldwide as much of irresponsible yobs.
That’s the reality Britain woke up to last Friday morning when the discovered that roughly 17,000,000 thoroughly irresponsible voters had opted to cut Britain’s nose off to spite its face.
And if the short-term ramifications of Brexit are upsetting, the long-term ramifications of Brexit are almost too horrifying, to apocalyptic, to contemplate.
Because, in truth, Brexit may lead, sooner rather than later, to the breakup of the United Kingdom itself. The first great experiment in multinational European integration, the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland as one joint entity, forming a precedent from which James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution drew inspiration for the United States, may find its days numbered.
Already, there is talk from the devolved Scottish government in Edinburgh of taking up again the issue of Scottish independence. It’s open to question what form of government the Scots might choose. Will they opt for a personal union with England in the form of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Scots? Will HM travel north to receive the Scottish crown and anointing on the Stone of Destiny in Scone? Will the Royal Scottish ducal titles, Rothesay and Albany, remain as appanages of the House of Windsor? What about the Earldom of Carrick? Or the barony of Renfrew? Or will Scotland opt to become a republic, with all of the political fractiousness that republics in Europe tend to manifest?
The Scots opted in the last independence referendum to remain part of the United Kingdom because the United Kingdom was part of the EU. With the United Kingdom set to leave the EU, again because of the foolishness of an electorate easily swayed by the blandishments of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the case for Scots independence within the EU becomes almost unanswerable. And if Scotland becomes independent within the European Union, what kind of border controls will have to be erected between Scotland and England. Part of the rationale for the original Act of Union back in 1707 was to bring a halt to the interminable raiding back and forth across the Border. Will Brexit result in a heavily fortified border between the two halves of the island of Britain?
And what of Northern Ireland? Already, Sinn Féin has called for a unification referendum in the Emerald Isle. Will Hibernia once again be whole and entire? Will the fondest hopes of the Irish diaspora, that a free Ireland might govern the whole island finally be in prospect? Will 26+6 finally equal One? Will Northern Ireland, which voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the EU find her EU home by reunifying with the Republic.
Irish reunification may be closer now than it has been since partition in 1922. Certainly, Ireland’s thumping majority adoption of marriage equality by referendum last year should put paid to the common Protestant assertion that “home rule means Rome rule.” An Ireland that can so decisively reject the preferences of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican is certainly not a place where Rome rule should hold any terrors. Though it is paradoxical to think that the acceptance of queerfolk, so otherwise objectionable to Protestants in Ulster, might be the factor that greases the skids of reunification, stranger things have happened in Hibernia. Because, paradoxically, a body politic willing to tell the Roman Catholic Church to sod off when it comes to integrating fairies (all puns fully intended) into Irish society, is a body politic that’s not willing to let institutional religion, particularly not institutional Roman religion, get in the way of individual civil liberties.
If Scotland and Ulster are soon to depart from the United Kingdom, what is left? Wales? One is reminded of the devastatingly dismissive piece of dialogue from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons: “why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”
The day may not be far in the future when the rump of the United Kingdom consists of England, Wales and Monmouthshire, and a few small islands around the fringe. I wouldn’t put it all past the Channel Islands to jump ship and make common cause with the French Republic. So much for “the Queen, our Duke.” Some United Kingdom, some British Commonwealth and Empire. Thank God Winston Churchill isn’t alive to see what may well be coming.
Writing in Friday’s New York Times, columnist Max Fisher suggested that the United Kingdom was what the European union had wanted to be but never quite became, a successful multinational state with a common government, a common currency, common national policy, and, symbolically but still importantly, a common head of state. And the United Kingdom, the first great multinational project in the world, has survived for more than 300 years. It has outlasted changes of dynasty, wars of national liberation, the acquisition and loss of Empire, class conflict, economic dislocations, two world wars, the ‘15 and the ‘45, and Margaret Thatcher, and yet the United Kingdom, under the amazing Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in the history of any of the British nations, has managed to soldier on right up until last Thursday. It would be a shame, Fisher suggested, were the great multinational experiment that is United Kingdom to break up on the rock of what was essentially a fit of superannuated, over-65, English nationalist pique.
For the one overwhelming demographic reality that came out of the Brexit vote is a sharp generational divide. Brexit carried because the over-65 cohort came out in far greater numbers than did young voters. Indeed, the Brexit result can be interpreted to say some fairly positively uncomplimentary things about older British voters. Because the negative repercussions of Brexit will fall overwhelmingly and most heavily upon the younger citizens of the United Kingdom. A much circulated Facebook meme details the numerous ways in which younger Britons will suffer as a result of the shortsighted selfishness of their elders. That’s a wound that won’t heal easily. As younger voters begin to enter Parliament in increasing numbers as the years pass, they can be expected to carry into the House a sense of historic grievance which it is not unreasonable to foresee will inform their decisions. I expect that the voters who were over 65 at the time of Brexit may find a rising generation of new MPs entirely unsympathetic to the sense of entitlement so common to the elderly the world over. The older generation in Britain has wounded itself, the United Kingdom, and the world in ways that cannot even begin to be evaluated.
But we may and must ask a larger question. Who benefits from this self-inflicted wound orchestrated by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, in which Donald Trump, whom at least one angry Scot has referred to as a “cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, shitgibbon,” has made himself so disastrously complicit?
We know that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin last Thursday night. Soviet/Russian policy toward the West has always been to promote dissension, disunity, and mistrust in the European West. It is an open secret that the Soviets, including successive foreign ministers such as Andrei Gromyko and Eduard Shevardnadze tried hard to keep the EU from becoming a reality. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the quintessential Soviet apparatchik now running post-Soviet Russia, is pursuing long-standing Soviet policy.
It is in the Kremlin’s interest to have a weak and divided Europe on its western frontier not only because of the almost pathological fear of invasion from the West which is so much a part of the Russian psyche, but also because a weak and divided Europe leaves invasion routes from the east wide-open.
This is something that right-wing leaders on the Continent seem to have forgotten. When right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen and right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders made their predictable appeals for copycat referenda in France and the Netherlands last week, they seem not to have been aware of the presence in the room of Adam-zad, The Bear That Walks like a Man, with whom Rudyard Kipling warned us a century ago we should have no truce.
The willingness of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and other crypto fascist politicians in Europe to make common cause with Russia, even at the cost of weakening the West, is somewhat akin to the Republican objections to Woodrow Wilson that called forth from him one of the most withering expressions of scorn in American political history: ““A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
One could so characterize the “leave” voters in the British electorate, but one really can’t blame 17 million yobs for succumbing to the frivolous and wicked blandishments of a small group of crypto fascists who, like the French right in the 1930s that preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, seem to prefer Vladimir Putin to EU Secretary-General Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen.
It’s hard not to read into the whole sorry mess a certain sense of sexual insecurity, even of penetration anxiety. Deep in the Freudian unconscious of many Brexiteers, informing their resentment of Brussels and its Eurocrats appears to be a sense that British membership in the EU has stripped the nation of its testosterone, making Britain soft, weak, and effeminate, too tolerant of Muslims, black people, and queerfolk. (After all, London is one of the gayest cities in what is still the EU) This certainly plays into the fascistic nature of UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage (the Sir Oswald Mosley for the 21st century). Fascism involves appeals to the so-called manly virtues, fetishizing masculinity, war, and violence. One could indeed cue up a scene from Cruising, or Interior. Leather bar, and not be too distant from what is going on in the Freudian id of the more militant supporters of Brexit.
And if Brexit is about creeping fears in much of the British electorate that Britain has become weak and unmanly, then the appeal of manly man Vladimir Putin and of the regime of manly discipline he has enforced on Russia becomes possible to understand, if not to approve of.
In the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists appealed to many of the same kind of insecurities Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson or so eager to stoke. The 1930s were a difficult time for Britain. Though the Empire had attained its greatest extent in 1932, the nation had not yet recovered from World War I and much of the British political class found itself quailing before the aggressively nationalist regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. To the British Union of Fascists, Mussolini and Hitler had drafted the blueprint for a fascist future, to which they were prepared to urge British adherence.
In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s Russia represents the same kind of alternative and the same kind of implied critique that Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy represented of the liberal West in the 1920s in the 1930s. In our own time, the right-wing populists of Europe project onto Putin’s Russia what they consider should be the correct values of European society. Seen through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, these 1930s era values appear curiously out of place to American Democratic and British Labour party observers. Culturally conservative circles in both Great Britain and the United States profess to admire Vladimir Putin because, to them, his regime represents not only so-called moral clarity, but also a value system more in keeping with their own Weltanschauung, or world-outlook, a value system whose frame of reference is a radically out of touch with the realities of the modern European West. It is no surprise that both the American right and its European counterpart have gushed over Vladimir Vladimirovich, to the extent that right-wing American pundits and politicians have wished that Vladimir Vladimirovich, with all his homophobic, religiously-infused nationalism, were in charge in this country. Donald Trump, with his effusive -and treasonable- praise for Vladimir Vladimirovich, falls squarely within the standard deviation of the Western right.
Because the Western right evidently craves a return to the regimes of discipline so common and prevalent in Europe during the 1930s, from Mussolini’s corporate state in fascist Italy to Germany’s Third Reich, to the little Hitlers in the Baltic states, the so-called Royal dictatorships of the Balkans, Greece under Ioannis Metaxas, and Spain under Francisco Franco, to say nothing of France, belabored throughout the 1930s by a rightist defeatism that ultimately found its fullest expression in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy French regime in 1940: Better Adolf Hitler then Léon Blum. And as in the 1930s, a lack of confidence in the power of the West and in the strength of its values has engendered in the right kind of defeatism that sooner or later verges into treason.
For indeed, “treason” is the most appropriate word for describing the conduct of that pro-Nazi French Right which was willing to sacrifice the Third Republic, selling out France because of their preferential option for Adolf Hitler over Léon Blum. And “treason” may be similarly correct term for the politicians in the West who view the fascist experience through rose-colored lenses, and who, like the Obamanators in this country, who have so frequently expressed their admiration for Vladimir Putin and their wish that he could be in charge in this country. By playing to the selfish desires of a largely superannuated, over-65 electorate, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson played directly into the hands of the Kremlin.
Moreover, so has Donald Trump. The offenses of that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon in this regard are many and varied. The first, of course, is his breathtakingly foolish suggestion that the United States should reduce or eliminate its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty organization. Even someone as foolish as Donald Trump is presumed to have enough understanding of the dynamics of the free world proposes to lead to realize that the steady, stated, “long game” objective of Soviet/Russian foreign-policy since the Atlantic alliance was formed in 1949 has been to destabilize NATO by driving wedges into the infrastructure of the alliance. Their biggest victory came when France took itself out of the military command structure of NATO in 1968. Because Charles de Gaulle was president of the Fifth Republic at the time, and because de Gaulle’s loyalty to the West was unimpeachable and above suspicion, any question of France’s military exit from NATO being part of some sort of Soviet kriegßpiel against the West was necessarily rejected immediately as unacceptable and inadmissible. Infuriating though the general’s foreign policy was, there was never any question of France’s unimpeachable loyalty to the West, notwithstanding the continuing strength of the French Communist Party.
But Charles de Gaulle had a long and illustrious history of service not only to France, but to the West in general. It had been de Gaulle, who as a lowly General of Division, by refusing to accept the German conquest of France in 1940, and by considering to himself the unconquerable forces of free, fighting France, redeemed the honor of the Republic, gave France the will to live and persevere, and brought a reborn nation safely into postwar Europe.
For all of his missteps and occasional gas, Charles de Gaulle was far more legitimately a hero, and orders of magnitude greater a man then such marginal self-aggrandizing, self-dealing, self-important serial prevaricators as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and certainly that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon Donald Trump. The General was to his core a man of honor, a man of duty, a man of country. Farage, Johnson, and Trump, on the other hand, are flimflam artists, frauds, political charlatans of the extremest order. Like the French Right of the 1930s which was willing to sell out the West to the Nazis, Farage, Johnson, and Trump make absolutely no bones in 2016 about being willing to sell out the West to Russia.
All of their policy prescriptions are in line with the Kremlin’s stated position on the issues in question. By actively seeking to destroy the West, including the United Kingdom, these three marginal men have done more damage to the West than all the Soviet spies who infiltrated Western intelligence apparatuses during the Cold War. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are more dangerous to the West then Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt put together. For Philby, Burgess, and Blunt could only deliver the damage to the West as Soviet moles embedded deep within the British intelligence apparatus. Farage and Johnson, on the other hand, can do incalculable damage to the West because they are such effective demagogues. By campaigning in favor of Brexit, Farage and Johnson have turned 17 million British voters into unconscious dupes of the Kremlin.
In this country, of the possible advent of a Trump presidency is even more disturbing. Again, it is worth noting that despite the unhinged claims of the John Birch society that Dwight David Eisenhower was a communist agent, this country has never had an actual “Manchurian candidate” for president until now. Trump is a threat not so much because he would be a conscious and willing dupe of the Kremlin but because he is so foolish and so lacking in impulse control that Vladimir Vladimirovich and the Russian intelligence apparat could lead him by the nose, turning him into an eager and uncritical agent of Russian policy simply by appealing to his vanity or by baiting him and playing to his predictable ill temper and lack of impulse control.
If Nigel Farage enters the British government, or if, God help us, the Queen is forced to ask Boris Johnson to form a government, her Majesty’s government will become, by inevitable and sickening degrees, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. The Tory Party, which cut its 20th century teeth on opposition to Russian/Soviet policy, would inevitably become the party of Putin. The same can be said of Donald Trump and any Trump administration in this country. We cannot allow the two most important governments in the Atlantic alliance to be a subject of a hostile Russian takeover bid or to have at their top man who are ideologically allied with, or in thrall to, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. We cannot allow Russia to secure by subterfuge what the Soviet Union could not win in more than four decades of Cold War.
Right now, we have been betrayed at the highest levels. As the revolutionary tribunal of the First French Republic might have said, ironically quoting both Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre: “Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, la patrie est en danger! Aux armes! Aux barricades!” We are betrayed! Citizens, the Fatherland is in danger! To arms! To the barricades! Though the French tendency to find scapegoats in time of political crisis has been much commented upon and deprecated by English-language commentators, we must sometimes acknowledge that even the French can from time to time occasionally get it right, that sometimes they are right to seek scapegoats, and that this is probably one of those times.
Though we should be loath to tumble to facile conspiracy theories, the particular concatenation of events in Europe and the United States in recent years supports a probable cause belief that the Russian long game is underway. Russia’s invasion of the Crimea, Russian probes around the Swedish defense perimeter and along the frontiers of the Kingdom of Norway, Russia’s singularly infelicitous and ham-handed attempts to meddle in the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, Vladimir Vladimirovich’s undisguised support for the Brexit referendum, the efforts of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson to set in motion not merely the breakup of the European Union but also the potential breakup of the United Kingdom itself, together with shitgibbon Donald Trump’s asinine suggestions concerning NATO are all too much of a piece to be coincidental. A kriegßpiel, or something very much equivalent thereto, is underway against the West.
As Britain plunges into uncertainty and recrimination of the Brexit outcome, and as even Brexiteers find themselves experiencing a heavy dose of buyers remorse, to the extent that public opinion in Britain is now clamoring for what amounts to a do-over, Farage, Johnson, Trump, and Putin all find themselves sharing a vested interest in preserving the new status quo.
On the other hand, it is in the interests of those of us who believe in the concept of the West to rally together and to drive the traitors from our midst. Now, “traitor” is a strong word, and I don’t use it in its strict legal signification here, but I think it’s safe to say that like the French traitors of 1940 preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump are all tantamount to traitors. If we cannot round them up and march them through Traitors’ Gate in the Tower of London or send them packing to Guantánamo, we can, at the very least, make sure that we drive Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson so far out into the political wilderness that they, like the discredited idiot, David Cameron, (what his name never be spoken again!) will never come back to afflict the lives of reasonable people again. Similarly, good people in this country will need to make common cause to ensure that Donald Trump never comes anywhere close to the White House. We can’t afford to dance to Moscow’s tune, and we won’t have to, if we’re smart enough not to be taken in by the sort of blandishments that inflicted Brexit upon the world.
Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, l’ouest est en danger!
We are betrayed! Citizens, the West is in danger!
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
THE DISASTROUS RAMIFICATIONS OF BREXIT: RUSSIA'S KRIEGSSPIEL AGAINST THE WEST
Summary: I hope I’m wrong in predicting potentially apocalyptic consequences flowing from Britain’s ill considered decision to leave the European Union. I’m not holding out hope, however. In the very short time since the Brexit referendum, the pound has shed something in excess of 10% of its value, Scotland and Northern Ireland are talking about leaving the United Kingdom in order to be able to become part of the European Union again, Scotland by declaring independence and Northern Ireland by joining the Republic, David Cameron is a lame-duck who will surely vanish into well-deserved permanent political exile in consequence of his galactically stupid decision to press forward with the Brexit referendum in the first place, and above all, champagne corks were no doubt popping in the Moscow Kremlin Thursday evening.
Because the real winner in the Brexit referendum was the 17 million useful idiots who voted to take Britain out of the EU, it was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the Russian government, which has pursued a long game policy since 1949 of breaking the unity of the West by any means necessary. They have been materially assisted by such self-seeking and marginal men as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. We are comprehensively betrayed from within. We must now do what we so often criticize the French for doing. We must seek scapegoats and punish them by driving Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson into the political wilderness and by depriving Donald Trump of the White House. Anything else would play straight into Vladimir Vladimirovich’s small, but grasping hands. If we don’t want to see Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Champs Elysées, the West needs to strap on his balls and kick Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump if not into the Tower of London, then certainly out of our political life. We can’t afford a hostile Russian takeover bid of the two most influential governments in the Atlantic alliance.
I hope this post proves to be wrong. Categorically, comprehensively, galactically, one hundred percent wrong. I hope I can recant of it in sackcloth and ashes if I am proven wrong.
But I don’t think I will be proven wrong.
Brexit is a disaster.
It is one of the worst, most galactically stupid political miscalculations ever made by any British politician. It is now well known that the infamous referendum on leaving the European Union was a political risk taken by discredited outgoing British Prime Minister David Cameron back in 2013, when he tried to throw a bone to the fascist tendency within his own party by promising a referendum on EU membership. Cameron, like an awful lot of Tories and an awful lot of Labour, believed that Brexit couldn’t possibly pass, and that a would be a passing thing, rather like the Scots independence referendum last year. (Of that, more, later.)
Cameron was wrong. As a result of his mistake, Cameron is the first casualty of Brexit. It is not certain whether David Cameron took the decision to step down from the Treasury Bench of his own accord, or whether he was pushed out by Tory Party elders, or whether he may have gotten a subtle, but unavoidable, nudge from Buck House. At all events, it’s clear the David Cameron no longer possesses the confidence of the House, and that he probably no longer possesses the confidence of the Queen, either. When you’ve lost both Westminster Palace and Buckingham Palace, it’s time to get the hell out of Number 10. No knighthood and no peerage can be expected to reward him for his service.
With David Cameron, “discredited Dave,” on his way out, we should take a moment to parse out the immediate and long-term ramifications of Britain’s pending exit from the European Union. Those ramifications are potentially apocalyptic.
Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t fared much better, either. Not only did Mr. Corbyn fail to command a majority in a vote of confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but he has also had to contend with the resignation or sacking of two thirds of his shadow cabinet. Though Corbyn has not stepped down, claiming that he has a broader mandate from Labour voters then from Labour MPs, there are clear signs that the coup effort within Labour may not only not be over, but that it may well succeed within the next week to 10 days. Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of moving into Number 10 Downing St. seem to be fading rather rapidly.
As much as the British political landscape seems to be littered with the broken and bleeding remains of political careers, the British economic landscape appears equally unpromising. In recent days,, sterling has taken its biggest hits as the mid-1980s, shedding 10% of its value in a single night. The pound has got altogether dickie in 24 hours. Thursday morning, the pound was standing at $1.48. By evening’s end, the pound was standing at $1.32, and there is speculation that if the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street can’t calm jittery investors in the City and elsewhere, the bottom could drop out of the oldest active currency in the world. Indeed, some forecasters are predicting that the pound could be at parity with the dollar by the Fourth of July.
Indeed, the status of sterling as one of the world's reserve currencies is in grave doubt. Investors are already fleeing the island of Britain for the relative safety of the island of Manhattan. Already, the Fed reports that interest in US treasuries has shown a marked uptick.
But more than just taking a hit to the pound, Britain has also sacrificed a great deal of national and institutional credibility by this ill-considered vote. As from last Friday, the financial capital of Europe has ceased to be London and is now Berlin, and to a lesser extent, New York. London has overnight yielded pride of place, and it will take Londoners a long time to reconcile themselves to their new status as inhabitants of the backwater capital of a second-tier state that used to be one of the major shot-callers in Europe.
As much as London’s status took a hit last night, so too did the institutional status and indeed the institutional trustworthiness of Her Majesty’s Government. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to count for something. At the Prime Minister’s word, countries around the world used to tremble. The merest rumbling from the British lion was enough to bring third world despots to heel. Just ask the Argentines, who may again be thinking very seriously about trying conclusions again with Britain for possession of the Malvinas. The Prime Minister of Britain has now become the head of the government of a second-tier state. Who now speaks for Europe?
From last Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks for Europe. The first female Chancellor in the history of the German Empire, of the Weimar Republic, or of the Bundesrepublik now enjoys more political influence on the Continent than any German leader since the Iron Chancellor Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen 140 years ago. The world now attends carefully on Angela Merkel’s words, while it airily dismisses the words of discredited David Cameron and holds the words of other British politicians, such as Brexit cheerleaders Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in contempt.
From last Friday, the credibility of her Majesty’s government is nil, the pound is dickie, and the British electorate is viewed worldwide as much of irresponsible yobs.
That’s the reality Britain woke up to last Friday morning when the discovered that roughly 17,000,000 thoroughly irresponsible voters had opted to cut Britain’s nose off to spite its face.
And if the short-term ramifications of Brexit are upsetting, the long-term ramifications of Brexit are almost too horrifying, to apocalyptic, to contemplate.
Because, in truth, Brexit may lead, sooner rather than later, to the breakup of the United Kingdom itself. The first great experiment in multinational European integration, the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland as one joint entity, forming a precedent from which James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution drew inspiration for the United States, may find its days numbered.
Already, there is talk from the devolved Scottish government in Edinburgh of taking up again the issue of Scottish independence. It’s open to question what form of government the Scots might choose. Will they opt for a personal union with England in the form of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Scots? Will HM travel north to receive the Scottish crown and anointing on the Stone of Destiny in Scone? Will the Royal Scottish ducal titles, Rothesay and Albany, remain as appanages of the House of Windsor? What about the Earldom of Carrick? Or the barony of Renfrew? Or will Scotland opt to become a republic, with all of the political fractiousness that republics in Europe tend to manifest?
The Scots opted in the last independence referendum to remain part of the United Kingdom because the United Kingdom was part of the EU. With the United Kingdom set to leave the EU, again because of the foolishness of an electorate easily swayed by the blandishments of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the case for Scots independence within the EU becomes almost unanswerable. And if Scotland becomes independent within the European Union, what kind of border controls will have to be erected between Scotland and England. Part of the rationale for the original Act of Union back in 1707 was to bring a halt to the interminable raiding back and forth across the Border. Will Brexit result in a heavily fortified border between the two halves of the island of Britain?
And what of Northern Ireland? Already, Sinn Féin has called for a unification referendum in the Emerald Isle. Will Hibernia once again be whole and entire? Will the fondest hopes of the Irish diaspora, that a free Ireland might govern the whole island finally be in prospect? Will 26+6 finally equal One? Will Northern Ireland, which voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the EU find her EU home by reunifying with the Republic.
Irish reunification may be closer now than it has been since partition in 1922. Certainly, Ireland’s thumping majority adoption of marriage equality by referendum last year should put paid to the common Protestant assertion that “home rule means Rome rule.” An Ireland that can so decisively reject the preferences of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican is certainly not a place where Rome rule should hold any terrors. Though it is paradoxical to think that the acceptance of queerfolk, so otherwise objectionable to Protestants in Ulster, might be the factor that greases the skids of reunification, stranger things have happened in Hibernia. Because, paradoxically, a body politic willing to tell the Roman Catholic Church to sod off when it comes to integrating fairies (all puns fully intended) into Irish society, is a body politic that’s not willing to let institutional religion, particularly not institutional Roman religion, get in the way of individual civil liberties.
If Scotland and Ulster are soon to depart from the United Kingdom, what is left? Wales? One is reminded of the devastatingly dismissive piece of dialogue from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons: “why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”
The day may not be far in the future when the rump of the United Kingdom consists of England, Wales and Monmouthshire, and a few small islands around the fringe. I wouldn’t put it all past the Channel Islands to jump ship and make common cause with the French Republic. So much for “the Queen, our Duke.” Some United Kingdom, some British Commonwealth and Empire. Thank God Winston Churchill isn’t alive to see what may well be coming.
Writing in Friday’s New York Times, columnist Max Fisher suggested that the United Kingdom was what the European union had wanted to be but never quite became, a successful multinational state with a common government, a common currency, common national policy, and, symbolically but still importantly, a common head of state. And the United Kingdom, the first great multinational project in the world, has survived for more than 300 years. It has outlasted changes of dynasty, wars of national liberation, the acquisition and loss of Empire, class conflict, economic dislocations, two world wars, the ‘15 and the ‘45, and Margaret Thatcher, and yet the United Kingdom, under the amazing Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in the history of any of the British nations, has managed to soldier on right up until last Thursday. It would be a shame, Fisher suggested, were the great multinational experiment that is United Kingdom to break up on the rock of what was essentially a fit of superannuated, over-65, English nationalist pique.
For the one overwhelming demographic reality that came out of the Brexit vote is a sharp generational divide. Brexit carried because the over-65 cohort came out in far greater numbers than did young voters. Indeed, the Brexit result can be interpreted to say some fairly positively uncomplimentary things about older British voters. Because the negative repercussions of Brexit will fall overwhelmingly and most heavily upon the younger citizens of the United Kingdom. A much circulated Facebook meme details the numerous ways in which younger Britons will suffer as a result of the shortsighted selfishness of their elders. That’s a wound that won’t heal easily. As younger voters begin to enter Parliament in increasing numbers as the years pass, they can be expected to carry into the House a sense of historic grievance which it is not unreasonable to foresee will inform their decisions. I expect that the voters who were over 65 at the time of Brexit may find a rising generation of new MPs entirely unsympathetic to the sense of entitlement so common to the elderly the world over. The older generation in Britain has wounded itself, the United Kingdom, and the world in ways that cannot even begin to be evaluated.
But we may and must ask a larger question. Who benefits from this self-inflicted wound orchestrated by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, in which Donald Trump, whom at least one angry Scot has referred to as a “cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, shitgibbon,” has made himself so disastrously complicit?
We know that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin last Thursday night. Soviet/Russian policy toward the West has always been to promote dissension, disunity, and mistrust in the European West. It is an open secret that the Soviets, including successive foreign ministers such as Andrei Gromyko and Eduard Shevardnadze tried hard to keep the EU from becoming a reality. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the quintessential Soviet apparatchik now running post-Soviet Russia, is pursuing long-standing Soviet policy.
It is in the Kremlin’s interest to have a weak and divided Europe on its western frontier not only because of the almost pathological fear of invasion from the West which is so much a part of the Russian psyche, but also because a weak and divided Europe leaves invasion routes from the east wide-open.
This is something that right-wing leaders on the Continent seem to have forgotten. When right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen and right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders made their predictable appeals for copycat referenda in France and the Netherlands last week, they seem not to have been aware of the presence in the room of Adam-zad, The Bear That Walks like a Man, with whom Rudyard Kipling warned us a century ago we should have no truce.
The willingness of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and other crypto fascist politicians in Europe to make common cause with Russia, even at the cost of weakening the West, is somewhat akin to the Republican objections to Woodrow Wilson that called forth from him one of the most withering expressions of scorn in American political history: ““A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
One could so characterize the “leave” voters in the British electorate, but one really can’t blame 17 million yobs for succumbing to the frivolous and wicked blandishments of a small group of crypto fascists who, like the French right in the 1930s that preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, seem to prefer Vladimir Putin to EU Secretary-General Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen.
It’s hard not to read into the whole sorry mess a certain sense of sexual insecurity, even of penetration anxiety. Deep in the Freudian unconscious of many Brexiteers, informing their resentment of Brussels and its Eurocrats appears to be a sense that British membership in the EU has stripped the nation of its testosterone, making Britain soft, weak, and effeminate, too tolerant of Muslims, black people, and queerfolk. (After all, London is one of the gayest cities in what is still the EU) This certainly plays into the fascistic nature of UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage (the Sir Oswald Mosley for the 21st century). Fascism involves appeals to the so-called manly virtues, fetishizing masculinity, war, and violence. One could indeed cue up a scene from Cruising, or Interior. Leather bar, and not be too distant from what is going on in the Freudian id of the more militant supporters of Brexit.
And if Brexit is about creeping fears in much of the British electorate that Britain has become weak and unmanly, then the appeal of manly man Vladimir Putin and of the regime of manly discipline he has enforced on Russia becomes possible to understand, if not to approve of.
In the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists appealed to many of the same kind of insecurities Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson or so eager to stoke. The 1930s were a difficult time for Britain. Though the Empire had attained its greatest extent in 1932, the nation had not yet recovered from World War I and much of the British political class found itself quailing before the aggressively nationalist regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. To the British Union of Fascists, Mussolini and Hitler had drafted the blueprint for a fascist future, to which they were prepared to urge British adherence.
In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s Russia represents the same kind of alternative and the same kind of implied critique that Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy represented of the liberal West in the 1920s in the 1930s. In our own time, the right-wing populists of Europe project onto Putin’s Russia what they consider should be the correct values of European society. Seen through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, these 1930s era values appear curiously out of place to American Democratic and British Labour party observers. Culturally conservative circles in both Great Britain and the United States profess to admire Vladimir Putin because, to them, his regime represents not only so-called moral clarity, but also a value system more in keeping with their own Weltanschauung, or world-outlook, a value system whose frame of reference is a radically out of touch with the realities of the modern European West. It is no surprise that both the American right and its European counterpart have gushed over Vladimir Vladimirovich, to the extent that right-wing American pundits and politicians have wished that Vladimir Vladimirovich, with all his homophobic, religiously-infused nationalism, were in charge in this country. Donald Trump, with his effusive -and treasonable- praise for Vladimir Vladimirovich, falls squarely within the standard deviation of the Western right.
Because the Western right evidently craves a return to the regimes of discipline so common and prevalent in Europe during the 1930s, from Mussolini’s corporate state in fascist Italy to Germany’s Third Reich, to the little Hitlers in the Baltic states, the so-called Royal dictatorships of the Balkans, Greece under Ioannis Metaxas, and Spain under Francisco Franco, to say nothing of France, belabored throughout the 1930s by a rightist defeatism that ultimately found its fullest expression in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy French regime in 1940: Better Adolf Hitler then Léon Blum. And as in the 1930s, a lack of confidence in the power of the West and in the strength of its values has engendered in the right kind of defeatism that sooner or later verges into treason.
For indeed, “treason” is the most appropriate word for describing the conduct of that pro-Nazi French Right which was willing to sacrifice the Third Republic, selling out France because of their preferential option for Adolf Hitler over Léon Blum. And “treason” may be similarly correct term for the politicians in the West who view the fascist experience through rose-colored lenses, and who, like the Obamanators in this country, who have so frequently expressed their admiration for Vladimir Putin and their wish that he could be in charge in this country. By playing to the selfish desires of a largely superannuated, over-65 electorate, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson played directly into the hands of the Kremlin.
Moreover, so has Donald Trump. The offenses of that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon in this regard are many and varied. The first, of course, is his breathtakingly foolish suggestion that the United States should reduce or eliminate its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty organization. Even someone as foolish as Donald Trump is presumed to have enough understanding of the dynamics of the free world proposes to lead to realize that the steady, stated, “long game” objective of Soviet/Russian foreign-policy since the Atlantic alliance was formed in 1949 has been to destabilize NATO by driving wedges into the infrastructure of the alliance. Their biggest victory came when France took itself out of the military command structure of NATO in 1968. Because Charles de Gaulle was president of the Fifth Republic at the time, and because de Gaulle’s loyalty to the West was unimpeachable and above suspicion, any question of France’s military exit from NATO being part of some sort of Soviet kriegßpiel against the West was necessarily rejected immediately as unacceptable and inadmissible. Infuriating though the general’s foreign policy was, there was never any question of France’s unimpeachable loyalty to the West, notwithstanding the continuing strength of the French Communist Party.
But Charles de Gaulle had a long and illustrious history of service not only to France, but to the West in general. It had been de Gaulle, who as a lowly General of Division, by refusing to accept the German conquest of France in 1940, and by considering to himself the unconquerable forces of free, fighting France, redeemed the honor of the Republic, gave France the will to live and persevere, and brought a reborn nation safely into postwar Europe.
For all of his missteps and occasional gas, Charles de Gaulle was far more legitimately a hero, and orders of magnitude greater a man then such marginal self-aggrandizing, self-dealing, self-important serial prevaricators as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and certainly that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon Donald Trump. The General was to his core a man of honor, a man of duty, a man of country. Farage, Johnson, and Trump, on the other hand, are flimflam artists, frauds, political charlatans of the extremest order. Like the French Right of the 1930s which was willing to sell out the West to the Nazis, Farage, Johnson, and Trump make absolutely no bones in 2016 about being willing to sell out the West to Russia.
All of their policy prescriptions are in line with the Kremlin’s stated position on the issues in question. By actively seeking to destroy the West, including the United Kingdom, these three marginal men have done more damage to the West than all the Soviet spies who infiltrated Western intelligence apparatuses during the Cold War. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are more dangerous to the West then Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt put together. For Philby, Burgess, and Blunt could only deliver the damage to the West as Soviet moles embedded deep within the British intelligence apparatus. Farage and Johnson, on the other hand, can do incalculable damage to the West because they are such effective demagogues. By campaigning in favor of Brexit, Farage and Johnson have turned 17 million British voters into unconscious dupes of the Kremlin.
In this country, of the possible advent of a Trump presidency is even more disturbing. Again, it is worth noting that despite the unhinged claims of the John Birch society that Dwight David Eisenhower was a communist agent, this country has never had an actual “Manchurian candidate” for president until now. Trump is a threat not so much because he would be a conscious and willing dupe of the Kremlin but because he is so foolish and so lacking in impulse control that Vladimir Vladimirovich and the Russian intelligence apparat could lead him by the nose, turning him into an eager and uncritical agent of Russian policy simply by appealing to his vanity or by baiting him and playing to his predictable ill temper and lack of impulse control.
If Nigel Farage enters the British government, or if, God help us, the Queen is forced to ask Boris Johnson to form a government, her Majesty’s government will become, by inevitable and sickening degrees, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. The Tory Party, which cut its 20th century teeth on opposition to Russian/Soviet policy, would inevitably become the party of Putin. The same can be said of Donald Trump and any Trump administration in this country. We cannot allow the two most important governments in the Atlantic alliance to be a subject of a hostile Russian takeover bid or to have at their top man who are ideologically allied with, or in thrall to, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. We cannot allow Russia to secure by subterfuge what the Soviet Union could not win in more than four decades of Cold War.
Right now, we have been betrayed at the highest levels. As the revolutionary tribunal of the First French Republic might have said, ironically quoting both Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre: “Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, la patrie est en danger! Aux armes! Aux barricades!” We are betrayed! Citizens, the Fatherland is in danger! To arms! To the barricades! Though the French tendency to find scapegoats in time of political crisis has been much commented upon and deprecated by English-language commentators, we must sometimes acknowledge that even the French can from time to time occasionally get it right, that sometimes they are right to seek scapegoats, and that this is probably one of those times.
Though we should be loath to tumble to facile conspiracy theories, the particular concatenation of events in Europe and the United States in recent years supports a probable cause belief that the Russian long game is underway. Russia’s invasion of the Crimea, Russian probes around the Swedish defense perimeter and along the frontiers of the Kingdom of Norway, Russia’s singularly infelicitous and ham-handed attempts to meddle in the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, Vladimir Vladimirovich’s undisguised support for the Brexit referendum, the efforts of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson to set in motion not merely the breakup of the European Union but also the potential breakup of the United Kingdom itself, together with shitgibbon Donald Trump’s asinine suggestions concerning NATO are all too much of a piece to be coincidental. A kriegßpiel, or something very much equivalent thereto, is underway against the West.
As Britain plunges into uncertainty and recrimination of the Brexit outcome, and as even Brexiteers find themselves experiencing a heavy dose of buyers remorse, to the extent that public opinion in Britain is now clamoring for what amounts to a do-over, Farage, Johnson, Trump, and Putin all find themselves sharing a vested interest in preserving the new status quo.
On the other hand, it is in the interests of those of us who believe in the concept of the West to rally together and to drive the traitors from our midst. Now, “traitor” is a strong word, and I don’t use it in its strict legal signification here, but I think it’s safe to say that like the French traitors of 1940 preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump are all tantamount to traitors. If we cannot round them up and march them through Traitors’ Gate in the Tower of London or send them packing to Guantánamo, we can, at the very least, make sure that we drive Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson so far out into the political wilderness that they, like the discredited idiot, David Cameron, (what his name never be spoken again!) will never come back to afflict the lives of reasonable people again. Similarly, good people in this country will need to make common cause to ensure that Donald Trump never comes anywhere close to the White House. We can’t afford to dance to Moscow’s tune, and we won’t have to, if we’re smart enough not to be taken in by the sort of blandishments that inflicted Brexit upon the world.
Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, l’ouest est en danger!
We are betrayed! Citizens, the West is in danger!
Because the real winner in the Brexit referendum was the 17 million useful idiots who voted to take Britain out of the EU, it was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and the Russian government, which has pursued a long game policy since 1949 of breaking the unity of the West by any means necessary. They have been materially assisted by such self-seeking and marginal men as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. We are comprehensively betrayed from within. We must now do what we so often criticize the French for doing. We must seek scapegoats and punish them by driving Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson into the political wilderness and by depriving Donald Trump of the White House. Anything else would play straight into Vladimir Vladimirovich’s small, but grasping hands. If we don’t want to see Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Champs Elysées, the West needs to strap on his balls and kick Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump if not into the Tower of London, then certainly out of our political life. We can’t afford a hostile Russian takeover bid of the two most influential governments in the Atlantic alliance.
I hope this post proves to be wrong. Categorically, comprehensively, galactically, one hundred percent wrong. I hope I can recant of it in sackcloth and ashes if I am proven wrong.
But I don’t think I will be proven wrong.
Brexit is a disaster.
It is one of the worst, most galactically stupid political miscalculations ever made by any British politician. It is now well known that the infamous referendum on leaving the European Union was a political risk taken by discredited outgoing British Prime Minister David Cameron back in 2013, when he tried to throw a bone to the fascist tendency within his own party by promising a referendum on EU membership. Cameron, like an awful lot of Tories and an awful lot of Labour, believed that Brexit couldn’t possibly pass, and that a would be a passing thing, rather like the Scots independence referendum last year. (Of that, more, later.)
Cameron was wrong. As a result of his mistake, Cameron is the first casualty of Brexit. It is not certain whether David Cameron took the decision to step down from the Treasury Bench of his own accord, or whether he was pushed out by Tory Party elders, or whether he may have gotten a subtle, but unavoidable, nudge from Buck House. At all events, it’s clear the David Cameron no longer possesses the confidence of the House, and that he probably no longer possesses the confidence of the Queen, either. When you’ve lost both Westminster Palace and Buckingham Palace, it’s time to get the hell out of Number 10. No knighthood and no peerage can be expected to reward him for his service.
With David Cameron, “discredited Dave,” on his way out, we should take a moment to parse out the immediate and long-term ramifications of Britain’s pending exit from the European Union. Those ramifications are potentially apocalyptic.
Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t fared much better, either. Not only did Mr. Corbyn fail to command a majority in a vote of confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but he has also had to contend with the resignation or sacking of two thirds of his shadow cabinet. Though Corbyn has not stepped down, claiming that he has a broader mandate from Labour voters then from Labour MPs, there are clear signs that the coup effort within Labour may not only not be over, but that it may well succeed within the next week to 10 days. Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of moving into Number 10 Downing St. seem to be fading rather rapidly.
As much as the British political landscape seems to be littered with the broken and bleeding remains of political careers, the British economic landscape appears equally unpromising. In recent days,, sterling has taken its biggest hits as the mid-1980s, shedding 10% of its value in a single night. The pound has got altogether dickie in 24 hours. Thursday morning, the pound was standing at $1.48. By evening’s end, the pound was standing at $1.32, and there is speculation that if the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street can’t calm jittery investors in the City and elsewhere, the bottom could drop out of the oldest active currency in the world. Indeed, some forecasters are predicting that the pound could be at parity with the dollar by the Fourth of July.
Indeed, the status of sterling as one of the world's reserve currencies is in grave doubt. Investors are already fleeing the island of Britain for the relative safety of the island of Manhattan. Already, the Fed reports that interest in US treasuries has shown a marked uptick.
But more than just taking a hit to the pound, Britain has also sacrificed a great deal of national and institutional credibility by this ill-considered vote. As from last Friday, the financial capital of Europe has ceased to be London and is now Berlin, and to a lesser extent, New York. London has overnight yielded pride of place, and it will take Londoners a long time to reconcile themselves to their new status as inhabitants of the backwater capital of a second-tier state that used to be one of the major shot-callers in Europe.
As much as London’s status took a hit last night, so too did the institutional status and indeed the institutional trustworthiness of Her Majesty’s Government. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to count for something. At the Prime Minister’s word, countries around the world used to tremble. The merest rumbling from the British lion was enough to bring third world despots to heel. Just ask the Argentines, who may again be thinking very seriously about trying conclusions again with Britain for possession of the Malvinas. The Prime Minister of Britain has now become the head of the government of a second-tier state. Who now speaks for Europe?
From last Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks for Europe. The first female Chancellor in the history of the German Empire, of the Weimar Republic, or of the Bundesrepublik now enjoys more political influence on the Continent than any German leader since the Iron Chancellor Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen 140 years ago. The world now attends carefully on Angela Merkel’s words, while it airily dismisses the words of discredited David Cameron and holds the words of other British politicians, such as Brexit cheerleaders Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in contempt.
From last Friday, the credibility of her Majesty’s government is nil, the pound is dickie, and the British electorate is viewed worldwide as much of irresponsible yobs.
That’s the reality Britain woke up to last Friday morning when the discovered that roughly 17,000,000 thoroughly irresponsible voters had opted to cut Britain’s nose off to spite its face.
And if the short-term ramifications of Brexit are upsetting, the long-term ramifications of Brexit are almost too horrifying, to apocalyptic, to contemplate.
Because, in truth, Brexit may lead, sooner rather than later, to the breakup of the United Kingdom itself. The first great experiment in multinational European integration, the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland as one joint entity, forming a precedent from which James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution drew inspiration for the United States, may find its days numbered.
Already, there is talk from the devolved Scottish government in Edinburgh of taking up again the issue of Scottish independence. It’s open to question what form of government the Scots might choose. Will they opt for a personal union with England in the form of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Scots? Will HM travel north to receive the Scottish crown and anointing on the Stone of Destiny in Scone? Will the Royal Scottish ducal titles, Rothesay and Albany, remain as appanages of the House of Windsor? What about the Earldom of Carrick? Or the barony of Renfrew? Or will Scotland opt to become a republic, with all of the political fractiousness that republics in Europe tend to manifest?
The Scots opted in the last independence referendum to remain part of the United Kingdom because the United Kingdom was part of the EU. With the United Kingdom set to leave the EU, again because of the foolishness of an electorate easily swayed by the blandishments of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the case for Scots independence within the EU becomes almost unanswerable. And if Scotland becomes independent within the European Union, what kind of border controls will have to be erected between Scotland and England. Part of the rationale for the original Act of Union back in 1707 was to bring a halt to the interminable raiding back and forth across the Border. Will Brexit result in a heavily fortified border between the two halves of the island of Britain?
And what of Northern Ireland? Already, Sinn Féin has called for a unification referendum in the Emerald Isle. Will Hibernia once again be whole and entire? Will the fondest hopes of the Irish diaspora, that a free Ireland might govern the whole island finally be in prospect? Will 26+6 finally equal One? Will Northern Ireland, which voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the EU find her EU home by reunifying with the Republic.
Irish reunification may be closer now than it has been since partition in 1922. Certainly, Ireland’s thumping majority adoption of marriage equality by referendum last year should put paid to the common Protestant assertion that “home rule means Rome rule.” An Ireland that can so decisively reject the preferences of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican is certainly not a place where Rome rule should hold any terrors. Though it is paradoxical to think that the acceptance of queerfolk, so otherwise objectionable to Protestants in Ulster, might be the factor that greases the skids of reunification, stranger things have happened in Hibernia. Because, paradoxically, a body politic willing to tell the Roman Catholic Church to sod off when it comes to integrating fairies (all puns fully intended) into Irish society, is a body politic that’s not willing to let institutional religion, particularly not institutional Roman religion, get in the way of individual civil liberties.
If Scotland and Ulster are soon to depart from the United Kingdom, what is left? Wales? One is reminded of the devastatingly dismissive piece of dialogue from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons: “why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”
The day may not be far in the future when the rump of the United Kingdom consists of England, Wales and Monmouthshire, and a few small islands around the fringe. I wouldn’t put it all past the Channel Islands to jump ship and make common cause with the French Republic. So much for “the Queen, our Duke.” Some United Kingdom, some British Commonwealth and Empire. Thank God Winston Churchill isn’t alive to see what may well be coming.
Writing in Friday’s New York Times, columnist Max Fisher suggested that the United Kingdom was what the European union had wanted to be but never quite became, a successful multinational state with a common government, a common currency, common national policy, and, symbolically but still importantly, a common head of state. And the United Kingdom, the first great multinational project in the world, has survived for more than 300 years. It has outlasted changes of dynasty, wars of national liberation, the acquisition and loss of Empire, class conflict, economic dislocations, two world wars, the ‘15 and the ‘45, and Margaret Thatcher, and yet the United Kingdom, under the amazing Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in the history of any of the British nations, has managed to soldier on right up until last Thursday. It would be a shame, Fisher suggested, were the great multinational experiment that is United Kingdom to break up on the rock of what was essentially a fit of superannuated, over-65, English nationalist pique.
For the one overwhelming demographic reality that came out of the Brexit vote is a sharp generational divide. Brexit carried because the over-65 cohort came out in far greater numbers than did young voters. Indeed, the Brexit result can be interpreted to say some fairly positively uncomplimentary things about older British voters. Because the negative repercussions of Brexit will fall overwhelmingly and most heavily upon the younger citizens of the United Kingdom. A much circulated Facebook meme details the numerous ways in which younger Britons will suffer as a result of the shortsighted selfishness of their elders. That’s a wound that won’t heal easily. As younger voters begin to enter Parliament in increasing numbers as the years pass, they can be expected to carry into the House a sense of historic grievance which it is not unreasonable to foresee will inform their decisions. I expect that the voters who were over 65 at the time of Brexit may find a rising generation of new MPs entirely unsympathetic to the sense of entitlement so common to the elderly the world over. The older generation in Britain has wounded itself, the United Kingdom, and the world in ways that cannot even begin to be evaluated.
But we may and must ask a larger question. Who benefits from this self-inflicted wound orchestrated by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, in which Donald Trump, whom at least one angry Scot has referred to as a “cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, shitgibbon,” has made himself so disastrously complicit?
We know that champagne corks were popping in the Kremlin last Thursday night. Soviet/Russian policy toward the West has always been to promote dissension, disunity, and mistrust in the European West. It is an open secret that the Soviets, including successive foreign ministers such as Andrei Gromyko and Eduard Shevardnadze tried hard to keep the EU from becoming a reality. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the quintessential Soviet apparatchik now running post-Soviet Russia, is pursuing long-standing Soviet policy.
It is in the Kremlin’s interest to have a weak and divided Europe on its western frontier not only because of the almost pathological fear of invasion from the West which is so much a part of the Russian psyche, but also because a weak and divided Europe leaves invasion routes from the east wide-open.
This is something that right-wing leaders on the Continent seem to have forgotten. When right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen and right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders made their predictable appeals for copycat referenda in France and the Netherlands last week, they seem not to have been aware of the presence in the room of Adam-zad, The Bear That Walks like a Man, with whom Rudyard Kipling warned us a century ago we should have no truce.
The willingness of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and other crypto fascist politicians in Europe to make common cause with Russia, even at the cost of weakening the West, is somewhat akin to the Republican objections to Woodrow Wilson that called forth from him one of the most withering expressions of scorn in American political history: ““A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
One could so characterize the “leave” voters in the British electorate, but one really can’t blame 17 million yobs for succumbing to the frivolous and wicked blandishments of a small group of crypto fascists who, like the French right in the 1930s that preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, seem to prefer Vladimir Putin to EU Secretary-General Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen.
It’s hard not to read into the whole sorry mess a certain sense of sexual insecurity, even of penetration anxiety. Deep in the Freudian unconscious of many Brexiteers, informing their resentment of Brussels and its Eurocrats appears to be a sense that British membership in the EU has stripped the nation of its testosterone, making Britain soft, weak, and effeminate, too tolerant of Muslims, black people, and queerfolk. (After all, London is one of the gayest cities in what is still the EU) This certainly plays into the fascistic nature of UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage (the Sir Oswald Mosley for the 21st century). Fascism involves appeals to the so-called manly virtues, fetishizing masculinity, war, and violence. One could indeed cue up a scene from Cruising, or Interior. Leather bar, and not be too distant from what is going on in the Freudian id of the more militant supporters of Brexit.
And if Brexit is about creeping fears in much of the British electorate that Britain has become weak and unmanly, then the appeal of manly man Vladimir Putin and of the regime of manly discipline he has enforced on Russia becomes possible to understand, if not to approve of.
In the 1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists appealed to many of the same kind of insecurities Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson or so eager to stoke. The 1930s were a difficult time for Britain. Though the Empire had attained its greatest extent in 1932, the nation had not yet recovered from World War I and much of the British political class found itself quailing before the aggressively nationalist regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. To the British Union of Fascists, Mussolini and Hitler had drafted the blueprint for a fascist future, to which they were prepared to urge British adherence.
In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s Russia represents the same kind of alternative and the same kind of implied critique that Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy represented of the liberal West in the 1920s in the 1930s. In our own time, the right-wing populists of Europe project onto Putin’s Russia what they consider should be the correct values of European society. Seen through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, these 1930s era values appear curiously out of place to American Democratic and British Labour party observers. Culturally conservative circles in both Great Britain and the United States profess to admire Vladimir Putin because, to them, his regime represents not only so-called moral clarity, but also a value system more in keeping with their own Weltanschauung, or world-outlook, a value system whose frame of reference is a radically out of touch with the realities of the modern European West. It is no surprise that both the American right and its European counterpart have gushed over Vladimir Vladimirovich, to the extent that right-wing American pundits and politicians have wished that Vladimir Vladimirovich, with all his homophobic, religiously-infused nationalism, were in charge in this country. Donald Trump, with his effusive -and treasonable- praise for Vladimir Vladimirovich, falls squarely within the standard deviation of the Western right.
Because the Western right evidently craves a return to the regimes of discipline so common and prevalent in Europe during the 1930s, from Mussolini’s corporate state in fascist Italy to Germany’s Third Reich, to the little Hitlers in the Baltic states, the so-called Royal dictatorships of the Balkans, Greece under Ioannis Metaxas, and Spain under Francisco Franco, to say nothing of France, belabored throughout the 1930s by a rightist defeatism that ultimately found its fullest expression in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy French regime in 1940: Better Adolf Hitler then Léon Blum. And as in the 1930s, a lack of confidence in the power of the West and in the strength of its values has engendered in the right kind of defeatism that sooner or later verges into treason.
For indeed, “treason” is the most appropriate word for describing the conduct of that pro-Nazi French Right which was willing to sacrifice the Third Republic, selling out France because of their preferential option for Adolf Hitler over Léon Blum. And “treason” may be similarly correct term for the politicians in the West who view the fascist experience through rose-colored lenses, and who, like the Obamanators in this country, who have so frequently expressed their admiration for Vladimir Putin and their wish that he could be in charge in this country. By playing to the selfish desires of a largely superannuated, over-65 electorate, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson played directly into the hands of the Kremlin.
Moreover, so has Donald Trump. The offenses of that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon in this regard are many and varied. The first, of course, is his breathtakingly foolish suggestion that the United States should reduce or eliminate its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty organization. Even someone as foolish as Donald Trump is presumed to have enough understanding of the dynamics of the free world proposes to lead to realize that the steady, stated, “long game” objective of Soviet/Russian foreign-policy since the Atlantic alliance was formed in 1949 has been to destabilize NATO by driving wedges into the infrastructure of the alliance. Their biggest victory came when France took itself out of the military command structure of NATO in 1968. Because Charles de Gaulle was president of the Fifth Republic at the time, and because de Gaulle’s loyalty to the West was unimpeachable and above suspicion, any question of France’s military exit from NATO being part of some sort of Soviet kriegßpiel against the West was necessarily rejected immediately as unacceptable and inadmissible. Infuriating though the general’s foreign policy was, there was never any question of France’s unimpeachable loyalty to the West, notwithstanding the continuing strength of the French Communist Party.
But Charles de Gaulle had a long and illustrious history of service not only to France, but to the West in general. It had been de Gaulle, who as a lowly General of Division, by refusing to accept the German conquest of France in 1940, and by considering to himself the unconquerable forces of free, fighting France, redeemed the honor of the Republic, gave France the will to live and persevere, and brought a reborn nation safely into postwar Europe.
For all of his missteps and occasional gas, Charles de Gaulle was far more legitimately a hero, and orders of magnitude greater a man then such marginal self-aggrandizing, self-dealing, self-important serial prevaricators as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and certainly that cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon Donald Trump. The General was to his core a man of honor, a man of duty, a man of country. Farage, Johnson, and Trump, on the other hand, are flimflam artists, frauds, political charlatans of the extremest order. Like the French Right of the 1930s which was willing to sell out the West to the Nazis, Farage, Johnson, and Trump make absolutely no bones in 2016 about being willing to sell out the West to Russia.
All of their policy prescriptions are in line with the Kremlin’s stated position on the issues in question. By actively seeking to destroy the West, including the United Kingdom, these three marginal men have done more damage to the West than all the Soviet spies who infiltrated Western intelligence apparatuses during the Cold War. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are more dangerous to the West then Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt put together. For Philby, Burgess, and Blunt could only deliver the damage to the West as Soviet moles embedded deep within the British intelligence apparatus. Farage and Johnson, on the other hand, can do incalculable damage to the West because they are such effective demagogues. By campaigning in favor of Brexit, Farage and Johnson have turned 17 million British voters into unconscious dupes of the Kremlin.
In this country, of the possible advent of a Trump presidency is even more disturbing. Again, it is worth noting that despite the unhinged claims of the John Birch society that Dwight David Eisenhower was a communist agent, this country has never had an actual “Manchurian candidate” for president until now. Trump is a threat not so much because he would be a conscious and willing dupe of the Kremlin but because he is so foolish and so lacking in impulse control that Vladimir Vladimirovich and the Russian intelligence apparat could lead him by the nose, turning him into an eager and uncritical agent of Russian policy simply by appealing to his vanity or by baiting him and playing to his predictable ill temper and lack of impulse control.
If Nigel Farage enters the British government, or if, God help us, the Queen is forced to ask Boris Johnson to form a government, her Majesty’s government will become, by inevitable and sickening degrees, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. The Tory Party, which cut its 20th century teeth on opposition to Russian/Soviet policy, would inevitably become the party of Putin. The same can be said of Donald Trump and any Trump administration in this country. We cannot allow the two most important governments in the Atlantic alliance to be a subject of a hostile Russian takeover bid or to have at their top man who are ideologically allied with, or in thrall to, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. We cannot allow Russia to secure by subterfuge what the Soviet Union could not win in more than four decades of Cold War.
Right now, we have been betrayed at the highest levels. As the revolutionary tribunal of the First French Republic might have said, ironically quoting both Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien Robespierre: “Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, la patrie est en danger! Aux armes! Aux barricades!” We are betrayed! Citizens, the Fatherland is in danger! To arms! To the barricades! Though the French tendency to find scapegoats in time of political crisis has been much commented upon and deprecated by English-language commentators, we must sometimes acknowledge that even the French can from time to time occasionally get it right, that sometimes they are right to seek scapegoats, and that this is probably one of those times.
Though we should be loath to tumble to facile conspiracy theories, the particular concatenation of events in Europe and the United States in recent years supports a probable cause belief that the Russian long game is underway. Russia’s invasion of the Crimea, Russian probes around the Swedish defense perimeter and along the frontiers of the Kingdom of Norway, Russia’s singularly infelicitous and ham-handed attempts to meddle in the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, Vladimir Vladimirovich’s undisguised support for the Brexit referendum, the efforts of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson to set in motion not merely the breakup of the European Union but also the potential breakup of the United Kingdom itself, together with shitgibbon Donald Trump’s asinine suggestions concerning NATO are all too much of a piece to be coincidental. A kriegßpiel, or something very much equivalent thereto, is underway against the West.
As Britain plunges into uncertainty and recrimination of the Brexit outcome, and as even Brexiteers find themselves experiencing a heavy dose of buyers remorse, to the extent that public opinion in Britain is now clamoring for what amounts to a do-over, Farage, Johnson, Trump, and Putin all find themselves sharing a vested interest in preserving the new status quo.
On the other hand, it is in the interests of those of us who believe in the concept of the West to rally together and to drive the traitors from our midst. Now, “traitor” is a strong word, and I don’t use it in its strict legal signification here, but I think it’s safe to say that like the French traitors of 1940 preferred Adolf Hitler to Léon Blum, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump are all tantamount to traitors. If we cannot round them up and march them through Traitors’ Gate in the Tower of London or send them packing to Guantánamo, we can, at the very least, make sure that we drive Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson so far out into the political wilderness that they, like the discredited idiot, David Cameron, (what his name never be spoken again!) will never come back to afflict the lives of reasonable people again. Similarly, good people in this country will need to make common cause to ensure that Donald Trump never comes anywhere close to the White House. We can’t afford to dance to Moscow’s tune, and we won’t have to, if we’re smart enough not to be taken in by the sort of blandishments that inflicted Brexit upon the world.
Nous sommes trahis! Citoyens, l’ouest est en danger!
We are betrayed! Citizens, the West is in danger!
Thursday, June 23, 2016
THE KREMLIN’S CANDIDATE; WHY TRUMPISM IS TREASON
Summary: the election of Donald Trump would represent a national security disaster unparalleled American history. Trump is a Manchurian candidate in the truest sense . His public utterances make as clear as if he had shouted from the housetops his willingness to sell America out to Russia, China, and North Korea. While this conduct may not rise to the constitutional definition of treason, it nevertheless puts his cause and the Republican cause into the realms, at the very least, of constructive treason. Donald Trump’s willingness to cause harm to this country and her national security ought to disqualify him from any office of trust or profit anywhere in the United States, right down to local dog-catcher. Donald Trump is a traitor.
Britain votes today on the fraught question of whether to leave the European Union. The Brexit vote can be expected to have long ranging, potentially disastrous, ramifications for the United Kingdom and for NATO. As always, we should ask who stands to benefit from any shortsighted British decision to leave the EU. The immediate answer is glaringly obvious, Russia and her dictatorial Pres. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would be the most immediate winners should Britain leave the EU.
Republican presidential presumptive nominee Donald Trump has made his support for the “leave” side very clear and very public. Trump is almost alone among American political leaders or wannabe leaders in urging a Brexit, and it tends to fall in line with Donald Trump's other pro-Russia, anti-America, views and sentiments.
The Donald and Vladimir Vladimirovich has certainly become a mutual admiration society in recent weeks. It is no secret that the Russian strongman would prefer to deal with a President Trump rather than with a President Clinton. Indeed, reports have emerged from the Kremlin that the Putin regime would regard an election of Hillary Clinton as a casus belli, i.e., a justification for war. Presumably, this is intended to terrorize the American people into voting for gospodin Putin’s preferred candidate, Donald Trump.
We know why Vladimir Vladimirovich prefers Trump. The Donald is so ill-educated in even the rudiments of statecraft, and so thin-skinned, that it would be possible for Vladimir Vladimirovich to lead him by the nose. This of course has been the dream of generations of Soviet and Russian leaders, to have an American president whom they can essentially control. By attempting to intermeddle in the 2016 election, the Kremlin is, to all intents and purposes, undertaking a hostile takeover bid of the highest echelons of the United States government.
Doing so under threat of war if we elect the “wrong” candidate is a kind of blackmail which accomplishes two purposes. First, to the extent that the news of gospodin Putin’s war threat becomes known to the broad American electorate, the bloody mindedness we inherited from the British will assert itself as Americans line up and say “we will not go quietly, we will not be blackmailed or bullied.” The indignation that such Russian intervention in our elections can be expected to stir would be worth at least a million votes to Sec. Clinton’s campaign.
The second purpose gospodin Putin’s threat accomplishes is to drive Trump’s cause, and by extension that of the Republican Party whose nominee he is, fairly definitively into the realms of treason.
Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.” The bar for treason is fairly high, which explains why it is the only federal crime which is specifically defined in the Constitution. It was placed there to ward off the kinds of abuses that had crept into the English law of treason, particularly under King Henry VIII, where so much as discussing the physical health of the King could be construed as treason.
But though the constitutional bar is high, prosecutions for treason can and have happened in the United States. There is thus a potentially compelling argument for pursuing Donald Trump on a charge of treason, or at the very least denying him a four year lease on the White House. If levying war against the United States or to hearing to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort is treason, then what can we say about Donald Trump’s policy proposals and prescriptions?
• The Donald has spoken of the desirability of pulling American support from NATO, while at the same time speaking glowingly of Vladimir Putin, who as we know, ardently desires Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States. An American exit from NATO would create as much havoc as a 100 armored division thrust into Germany’s Fulda gap. Does that strike anyone as giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
• The Donald has also advocated pulling our tripwire military presence from the Republic of Korea. Who benefits from an American pullout from South Korea? The obvious answer is North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. And if we pull out of South Korea, how does Japan defend herself? The Donald would have Japan arm herself of the teeth with nuclear weapons the Japanese have no desire or inclination to possess. Apparently, in his ignorance, The Donald has no recollection of two proper nouns that carry a whole weight of meaning to the people not only of Japan, but also of the world. Those nouns are Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who is The Donald trying to sell out? Is it South Korea? Is it Japan? Or is it the entire American position in East Asia and the Western Pacific?
• The Donald’s public support for Britain’s departure from the EU also constitutes a material gift of aid and comfort to our enemies. The EU, as currently constituted, has been one of the most effective and helpful tools for rebuilding European civilization after the horrors of World War II that could be devised by the wit or artifice of man. Europe knows, too well, the horrific price of division and competing nationalisms. But again, it’s worth considering who has a vested interest in the breakup of the unified Europe, and that is the Kremlin. During the vote on Scottish secession last year, Russian intervention in favor of the breakaway of the northern kingdom was clear and muscular. From the Kremlin and from state media alike, there emerged a steady drumbeat of Russian criticism of the voting process in the referendum, along with steady Russian claims that the election (which returned a blowout 55-45 majority for keeping the United Kingdom entire) had somehow been “rigged.” This notwithstanding the fact that British elections are a byword for integrity, transparency, and trustworthiness in result. The Kremlin’s interest in sundering the United Kingdom is unambiguously informed by its belief that an independent Scotland would not have been able to control effectively the so-called GIUK gap through which Russian submarines and surface naval assets can pass into the North Atlantic. They are hoping for similar results from a Brexit, reckoning that the strategic calculus can only be favorable to Moscow and harmful to Washington.
Listening to Donald Trump’s policy prescriptions, to the extent that he has made any, is to listen to a whole series of proposals calculated to harm the United States and its national security. Unlike differences over domestic policy, where Donald Trump is also vulnerable to a charge of aiding and abetting terrorism with his ridiculous positions on gun safety legislation, foreign policy proposals which can be expected to do harm to the United States stand in a somewhat different constitutional realm. When a presidential candidate proposes measures or takes positions that cause actual harm or raise the reasonable foreseeability of harm, he is skirting close to treason, if not actually definitively entering the realms of treason.
While basic considerations of due process, derived from centuries of common law experience, declare that a person is innocent until proven guilty, those principles do not apply in a political campaign where the public can judge an un-vetted candidate solely upon the words that come out of his mouth; what you say is your job interview to the 320 million Americans who will be your boss.
By that token, the Donald is flubbing his job interview quite badly. Not only is he flubbing it badly, but he is also giving clear indication that he is in fact a “Manchurian candidate,” whose willingness to sell America down the river to the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans ought to unfit him for any office of trust or profit whatsoever under the United States, or any of them, right down to local dog-catcher.
We cannot afford to elect a potential traitor to the presidency of the United States. All of Trump’s bullshit about Benghazi or “crooked Hillary” notwithstanding, he convicts himself out of the words of his own mouth, if not of treason, certainly of treasonable intent at the very least. Under section 4 of Article II of the Constitution, “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” If Donald Trump were to be inaugurated, his impeachment for treason should be set in train immediately. Based on his words alone, the Congress would have ample justification to remove him from office.
However, the simplest way to prevent the national trauma of an impeachment is to ensure the Donald Trump never gets to the White House. If redbaiting will keep Donald Trump away from the White House and ensure his defeat at the polls, then let us, as liberals and progressives, not be self-defeatingly unwilling to engage in redbaiting for the sake of the nation.
Donald Trump is a traitor, and that says something non-recommending about his supporters. A preventative and comprehensive prophylaxis is recommended.
-xxx-
Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. He expects that if Donald Trump is elected President of the United States he will be obliged to seek political asylum abroad to avoid the insensate and vindictive response of President Trump, who is made it very clear how he proposes to deal with even the slightest criticism. Dublin is looking very attractive right about now.
Britain votes today on the fraught question of whether to leave the European Union. The Brexit vote can be expected to have long ranging, potentially disastrous, ramifications for the United Kingdom and for NATO. As always, we should ask who stands to benefit from any shortsighted British decision to leave the EU. The immediate answer is glaringly obvious, Russia and her dictatorial Pres. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would be the most immediate winners should Britain leave the EU.
Republican presidential presumptive nominee Donald Trump has made his support for the “leave” side very clear and very public. Trump is almost alone among American political leaders or wannabe leaders in urging a Brexit, and it tends to fall in line with Donald Trump's other pro-Russia, anti-America, views and sentiments.
The Donald and Vladimir Vladimirovich has certainly become a mutual admiration society in recent weeks. It is no secret that the Russian strongman would prefer to deal with a President Trump rather than with a President Clinton. Indeed, reports have emerged from the Kremlin that the Putin regime would regard an election of Hillary Clinton as a casus belli, i.e., a justification for war. Presumably, this is intended to terrorize the American people into voting for gospodin Putin’s preferred candidate, Donald Trump.
We know why Vladimir Vladimirovich prefers Trump. The Donald is so ill-educated in even the rudiments of statecraft, and so thin-skinned, that it would be possible for Vladimir Vladimirovich to lead him by the nose. This of course has been the dream of generations of Soviet and Russian leaders, to have an American president whom they can essentially control. By attempting to intermeddle in the 2016 election, the Kremlin is, to all intents and purposes, undertaking a hostile takeover bid of the highest echelons of the United States government.
Doing so under threat of war if we elect the “wrong” candidate is a kind of blackmail which accomplishes two purposes. First, to the extent that the news of gospodin Putin’s war threat becomes known to the broad American electorate, the bloody mindedness we inherited from the British will assert itself as Americans line up and say “we will not go quietly, we will not be blackmailed or bullied.” The indignation that such Russian intervention in our elections can be expected to stir would be worth at least a million votes to Sec. Clinton’s campaign.
The second purpose gospodin Putin’s threat accomplishes is to drive Trump’s cause, and by extension that of the Republican Party whose nominee he is, fairly definitively into the realms of treason.
Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.” The bar for treason is fairly high, which explains why it is the only federal crime which is specifically defined in the Constitution. It was placed there to ward off the kinds of abuses that had crept into the English law of treason, particularly under King Henry VIII, where so much as discussing the physical health of the King could be construed as treason.
But though the constitutional bar is high, prosecutions for treason can and have happened in the United States. There is thus a potentially compelling argument for pursuing Donald Trump on a charge of treason, or at the very least denying him a four year lease on the White House. If levying war against the United States or to hearing to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort is treason, then what can we say about Donald Trump’s policy proposals and prescriptions?
• The Donald has spoken of the desirability of pulling American support from NATO, while at the same time speaking glowingly of Vladimir Putin, who as we know, ardently desires Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States. An American exit from NATO would create as much havoc as a 100 armored division thrust into Germany’s Fulda gap. Does that strike anyone as giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
• The Donald has also advocated pulling our tripwire military presence from the Republic of Korea. Who benefits from an American pullout from South Korea? The obvious answer is North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. And if we pull out of South Korea, how does Japan defend herself? The Donald would have Japan arm herself of the teeth with nuclear weapons the Japanese have no desire or inclination to possess. Apparently, in his ignorance, The Donald has no recollection of two proper nouns that carry a whole weight of meaning to the people not only of Japan, but also of the world. Those nouns are Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who is The Donald trying to sell out? Is it South Korea? Is it Japan? Or is it the entire American position in East Asia and the Western Pacific?
• The Donald’s public support for Britain’s departure from the EU also constitutes a material gift of aid and comfort to our enemies. The EU, as currently constituted, has been one of the most effective and helpful tools for rebuilding European civilization after the horrors of World War II that could be devised by the wit or artifice of man. Europe knows, too well, the horrific price of division and competing nationalisms. But again, it’s worth considering who has a vested interest in the breakup of the unified Europe, and that is the Kremlin. During the vote on Scottish secession last year, Russian intervention in favor of the breakaway of the northern kingdom was clear and muscular. From the Kremlin and from state media alike, there emerged a steady drumbeat of Russian criticism of the voting process in the referendum, along with steady Russian claims that the election (which returned a blowout 55-45 majority for keeping the United Kingdom entire) had somehow been “rigged.” This notwithstanding the fact that British elections are a byword for integrity, transparency, and trustworthiness in result. The Kremlin’s interest in sundering the United Kingdom is unambiguously informed by its belief that an independent Scotland would not have been able to control effectively the so-called GIUK gap through which Russian submarines and surface naval assets can pass into the North Atlantic. They are hoping for similar results from a Brexit, reckoning that the strategic calculus can only be favorable to Moscow and harmful to Washington.
Listening to Donald Trump’s policy prescriptions, to the extent that he has made any, is to listen to a whole series of proposals calculated to harm the United States and its national security. Unlike differences over domestic policy, where Donald Trump is also vulnerable to a charge of aiding and abetting terrorism with his ridiculous positions on gun safety legislation, foreign policy proposals which can be expected to do harm to the United States stand in a somewhat different constitutional realm. When a presidential candidate proposes measures or takes positions that cause actual harm or raise the reasonable foreseeability of harm, he is skirting close to treason, if not actually definitively entering the realms of treason.
While basic considerations of due process, derived from centuries of common law experience, declare that a person is innocent until proven guilty, those principles do not apply in a political campaign where the public can judge an un-vetted candidate solely upon the words that come out of his mouth; what you say is your job interview to the 320 million Americans who will be your boss.
By that token, the Donald is flubbing his job interview quite badly. Not only is he flubbing it badly, but he is also giving clear indication that he is in fact a “Manchurian candidate,” whose willingness to sell America down the river to the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans ought to unfit him for any office of trust or profit whatsoever under the United States, or any of them, right down to local dog-catcher.
We cannot afford to elect a potential traitor to the presidency of the United States. All of Trump’s bullshit about Benghazi or “crooked Hillary” notwithstanding, he convicts himself out of the words of his own mouth, if not of treason, certainly of treasonable intent at the very least. Under section 4 of Article II of the Constitution, “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” If Donald Trump were to be inaugurated, his impeachment for treason should be set in train immediately. Based on his words alone, the Congress would have ample justification to remove him from office.
However, the simplest way to prevent the national trauma of an impeachment is to ensure the Donald Trump never gets to the White House. If redbaiting will keep Donald Trump away from the White House and ensure his defeat at the polls, then let us, as liberals and progressives, not be self-defeatingly unwilling to engage in redbaiting for the sake of the nation.
Donald Trump is a traitor, and that says something non-recommending about his supporters. A preventative and comprehensive prophylaxis is recommended.
-xxx-
Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. He expects that if Donald Trump is elected President of the United States he will be obliged to seek political asylum abroad to avoid the insensate and vindictive response of President Trump, who is made it very clear how he proposes to deal with even the slightest criticism. Dublin is looking very attractive right about now.
Sunday, June 12, 2016
AFTER THE ORLANDO MASSACRE: TIME TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH ... AGAIN
Summary: Fifty are dead and a like number are injured in the worst mass shooting in American history, at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. At this stage, we are still too early in the process to have a definitive idea what happened. The shooter may, but we don’t know, have had some of allegiance to Daesh, the Islamic death cult known in this country as ISIS or ISIL. Naturally, assholes like Donald Trump and the Westboro Baptist Church have weighed in, and the usual political food fight is just ginning up. But at this stage, it really is too early to draw definitive conclusions. Instead, it’s time for a considerate silence as we try to figure out what do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
_____________________________________________
When the news hit concerning the mass shooting in at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left fifty dead and a like number injured, my immediate frame of reference for comparison was the Sandy Hook school shooting and the events in Tucson which led to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the death of United States Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll. But, even before that, my very first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.
Oh, my God.
My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.
The immediate temptation under such circumstances is to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame. Certainly, the last 12 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another, as Donald Trump tries to make political capital, as Hillary Clinton and President Obama do the adult thing, the right thing, trying to calm a shocked nation, and as the rest of us try to make sense of the worst mass shooting in American history.
At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.
In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we know? what do we think? What can we prove?
At the moment, what we know is that fifty are dead and a like number have been wounded. We know that a suspected shooter is dead, shot by the police. We know that the suspected shooter has posted a series of homophobic Web tidbits and that he apparently professed some sort of allegiance to Daesh, and perhaps more importantly, he was a known domestic abuser. Leaving aside the claim of allegiance to Daesh, which at this point appears to be more a red herring than a serious profession of allegiance to the Islamic death cult, we do know that he was apparently moved to murderous rage by the spectacle of two gay men kissing one another. Just about any queer person can tell you that such behavior screams “closet case.” We should not be surprised, in coming days, to find that the alleged shooter was himself a closeted homosexual. “I want to fuck you, but I’ve got so many hangups that instead of getting naked with you and making love, I prefer to kill you.”
What we think is a more problematic issue. From this morning’s events, politicians, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias. Certainly, Donald Trump has seen this incident as a godsend to restore the hopes of his failing campaign. Meanwhile, the Westboro Baptist Church, which can always be depended upon to say something outrageous in such circumstances, let fly with its usual hateful tweets. About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy any support at all across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots.
Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land. Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”
What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase. The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues. Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.
Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.
No one would argue that the downturn in our American economy has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated. Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy. When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.
Thus, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Orlando early this morning, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations. As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point. There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooter, or whether he had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved.
In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooter, his motives, whether there are accomplices, and whether this morning’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous. At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.
In short, we know very little, we think -- perhaps -- too much, and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.
Nonetheless, whether this morning’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of an unbalanced individual, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk.
So today, let our thoughts and prayers be with who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the fifty victims whose lives were so tragically cut short. Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know? What do we think? What can we prove?
For now, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments. A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council from 2002-2010. The views expressed herein are exclusively his own. This post is adapted from the one he wrote when Congresswoman Giffords was shot and U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll was assassinated. Like President Obama, Mr. Marchand is sick and tired of having to rework the same comments every few months.
NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case. Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.
_____________________________________________
When the news hit concerning the mass shooting in at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left fifty dead and a like number injured, my immediate frame of reference for comparison was the Sandy Hook school shooting and the events in Tucson which led to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the death of United States Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll. But, even before that, my very first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.
Oh, my God.
My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.
The immediate temptation under such circumstances is to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame. Certainly, the last 12 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another, as Donald Trump tries to make political capital, as Hillary Clinton and President Obama do the adult thing, the right thing, trying to calm a shocked nation, and as the rest of us try to make sense of the worst mass shooting in American history.
At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.
In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we know? what do we think? What can we prove?
At the moment, what we know is that fifty are dead and a like number have been wounded. We know that a suspected shooter is dead, shot by the police. We know that the suspected shooter has posted a series of homophobic Web tidbits and that he apparently professed some sort of allegiance to Daesh, and perhaps more importantly, he was a known domestic abuser. Leaving aside the claim of allegiance to Daesh, which at this point appears to be more a red herring than a serious profession of allegiance to the Islamic death cult, we do know that he was apparently moved to murderous rage by the spectacle of two gay men kissing one another. Just about any queer person can tell you that such behavior screams “closet case.” We should not be surprised, in coming days, to find that the alleged shooter was himself a closeted homosexual. “I want to fuck you, but I’ve got so many hangups that instead of getting naked with you and making love, I prefer to kill you.”
What we think is a more problematic issue. From this morning’s events, politicians, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias. Certainly, Donald Trump has seen this incident as a godsend to restore the hopes of his failing campaign. Meanwhile, the Westboro Baptist Church, which can always be depended upon to say something outrageous in such circumstances, let fly with its usual hateful tweets. About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy any support at all across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots.
Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land. Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”
What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase. The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues. Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.
Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.
No one would argue that the downturn in our American economy has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated. Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy. When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.
Thus, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Orlando early this morning, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations. As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point. There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooter, or whether he had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved.
In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooter, his motives, whether there are accomplices, and whether this morning’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous. At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.
In short, we know very little, we think -- perhaps -- too much, and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.
Nonetheless, whether this morning’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of an unbalanced individual, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk.
So today, let our thoughts and prayers be with who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the fifty victims whose lives were so tragically cut short. Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know? What do we think? What can we prove?
For now, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments. A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council from 2002-2010. The views expressed herein are exclusively his own. This post is adapted from the one he wrote when Congresswoman Giffords was shot and U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll was assassinated. Like President Obama, Mr. Marchand is sick and tired of having to rework the same comments every few months.
NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case. Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
DIXVILLE NOTCH
Summary: The Democratic primary campaign has, to all intents and purposes, come to an end. Militant Sanders supporters notwithstanding, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States. Bernie can either yield gracefully and keep open the possibility of a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket, or he can pander to his supporters and forfeit that chance altogether, becoming a pariah in the Party of which he is a relatively recent member. We need to change the rules of the convention to abolish the racist and antidemocratic caucus mechanism, requiring every state to have a closed primary, and refusing to seat state delegations chosen by caucuses, and we also need to provide for a rule requiring that the Party’s nominee have been a registered Democrat for at least five years. We can’t run the risk of any more hostile takeovers by people who want to bern the party down.
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About two hours ago, I had my own “Dixville Notch” moment, as I walked into my polling place and discovered that I was the very first voter of the day.
If you are the very first voter, you are responsible for doing a number of things that other voters are not. You have to look at any touchscreens to make sure that they register zero, then you get to look inside the ballot box to make sure it hasn’t been pre-stuffed, after which you have to sign off on the whole thing.
This ritual is intended to make sure that there is no hanky-panky at the precinct, that overzealous supporters of any particular candidate can’t play fast and loose with vote totals.
I behaved myself, of course, and refrained from electioneering; though my allegiance to Hillary Rodham Clinton is an open secret, #imwithher; neither her name nor Bernard Sanders’ name were ever mentioned.
I must confess, the experience of being the very first voter, though new to me, reminded me of why I have made the effort to vote in every election since I turned 18. But this election is more consequential than any I have ever participated in.
As I write, in the early morning hours of June 7, 2016, voters in California will go to the polls. Democrats, or should I say sane Americans, will have a choice between Hillary Rodham Clinton or Bernard Sanders. For Sanders, this primary process is approaching endgame. It’s hard to tell who is angrier about that prospect, the Vermont Senator or his more unhinged supporters who see their hopes of a Sanders presidency going south.
The sheer ugliness of Sanders supporters I will leave to another time. What Bernard Sanders confronts right now, however, is one that in California politics is called a “drill,” i.e., having to make a political decision that is bound to piss off a powerful constituency no matter what decision you make. What makes a drill more problematic is that one does not have the traditional French option of deciding not to decide. How Bernard Sanders responds in the next 12 to 24 hours to the news that Hillary Clinton is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party is the drill.
He can yield gracefully, and in so doing keep open the possibility of a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket, albeit at the acknowledged risk of being called a “sellout” by his more militant supporters. Or, he can continue to be churlish and unyielding, defiant and kamikaze-like, and be a hero to his supporters and a pariah to the rest of the Democratic Party. In short, how Bernie behaves today and tonight will determine whether there is a place for him on the ticket or in a putative Clinton administration. The choice now is his. We can only hope that he makes the right one.
But what we do know is that Democratic Party’s concessions to the insurgent Vermont Senator are probably at an end. Cornel West, the concession appointment to the platform committee, will soon find himself outvoted and outspoken. Barney Frank, whom Sanders tried to have kicked out of his position as cochair of the Rules Committee, is not likely to be in a magnanimous mood now that Senator Sanders has lost. And indeed, now maybe it is time to make some significant rules changes in the way the party nominates its candidate.
These rule changes will not be congenial to Sanders nor will they be congenial to his supporters, And they should not be. The party should not respond well to a hostile takeover bid. First, the ridiculous, borderline racist, anti-democratic caucus process should be done away with entirely. Caucuses are, by well-nigh universal accord, a lousy way to choose delegates. They are intended to advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. They take place largely in heavily white, nondiverse states, which raises the inference that a candidate who builds his strength in the caucus states is trafficking in a kind of racism unbecoming any Democrat. The caucuses it should be replaced immediately, as Minnesota has just done, by honest-to-God primary elections, in which every registered Democrat can vote, and where there is a legitimate secret ballot, so that voters need not fear any retribution for their choice. There have been numerous accounts of Hillary Clinton supporters facing retribution from angry Sanders supporters at caucuses. This must stop.
As much, however, as the caucus system should be replaced by primaries in which every registered Democrat may vote, they should be replaced by closed primaries, in which only registered Democrats may vote. Persons who choose to register no party preference have volitionally opted out of the Democratic process. They have opted to make a very public statement that they are not part of the Democratic Party. Why the hell should so-called independents be allowed a voice in choosing the nominee of the Democratic Party for dogcatcher, let alone President? If, for example, one registers as “no party preference,” one is engaged in a very public repudiation of the Democratic Party and its values. We don’t need such people intruding into our process and skewing our elections for our nominees. After all, what good is partisanship when you allow interlopers to screw up your process.
Hell, you might as well give up on the whole primary process and allow the GOP to select our candidates for us! This is what Bernie Sanders and his militant supporters don’t understand. The other major rules change that should happen is a requirement that someone seeking the Democratic nomination for president demonstrate a history in the Party. I find it an obscenity from a partisan perspective, that Bernie Sanders didn’t register is a Democrat until late last year, and now he wants to be our nominee for the presidency of United States. No, and a thousand times no! The convention should adopt a rule effective in the 2020 campaign requiring that no name may be placed in nomination who has not been a registered Democrat for at least five years, i.e., long enough to have participated in at least the previous election cycle.
Finally, to put some teeth into these rule changes, the convention should adopt a rule, effective in the 2020 election cycle, providing that states which have not discontinued the caucus process and adopted the closed primary will not have their delegations seated at the convention. And to prevent a nonconforming nomination from being made, at the convention, of a candidate who came “late to the party,” any delegate who proposes such a motion should, by operation of law, be deemed immediately to have forfeited his or her credentials as a delegate and be removed from the convention by any means necessary.
Does our process need reform? Yes, it does, but not in the direction Bernie Sanders and his supporters have advocated. If we do as Bernie Sanders and his supporters want, we won’t have a Party left by the time he and his friends have finished Berning it down.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed in this column are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. He is most definitely with Hillary Clinton.
-----------------------------------------------------
About two hours ago, I had my own “Dixville Notch” moment, as I walked into my polling place and discovered that I was the very first voter of the day.
If you are the very first voter, you are responsible for doing a number of things that other voters are not. You have to look at any touchscreens to make sure that they register zero, then you get to look inside the ballot box to make sure it hasn’t been pre-stuffed, after which you have to sign off on the whole thing.
This ritual is intended to make sure that there is no hanky-panky at the precinct, that overzealous supporters of any particular candidate can’t play fast and loose with vote totals.
I behaved myself, of course, and refrained from electioneering; though my allegiance to Hillary Rodham Clinton is an open secret, #imwithher; neither her name nor Bernard Sanders’ name were ever mentioned.
I must confess, the experience of being the very first voter, though new to me, reminded me of why I have made the effort to vote in every election since I turned 18. But this election is more consequential than any I have ever participated in.
As I write, in the early morning hours of June 7, 2016, voters in California will go to the polls. Democrats, or should I say sane Americans, will have a choice between Hillary Rodham Clinton or Bernard Sanders. For Sanders, this primary process is approaching endgame. It’s hard to tell who is angrier about that prospect, the Vermont Senator or his more unhinged supporters who see their hopes of a Sanders presidency going south.
The sheer ugliness of Sanders supporters I will leave to another time. What Bernard Sanders confronts right now, however, is one that in California politics is called a “drill,” i.e., having to make a political decision that is bound to piss off a powerful constituency no matter what decision you make. What makes a drill more problematic is that one does not have the traditional French option of deciding not to decide. How Bernard Sanders responds in the next 12 to 24 hours to the news that Hillary Clinton is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party is the drill.
He can yield gracefully, and in so doing keep open the possibility of a Clinton-Sanders unity ticket, albeit at the acknowledged risk of being called a “sellout” by his more militant supporters. Or, he can continue to be churlish and unyielding, defiant and kamikaze-like, and be a hero to his supporters and a pariah to the rest of the Democratic Party. In short, how Bernie behaves today and tonight will determine whether there is a place for him on the ticket or in a putative Clinton administration. The choice now is his. We can only hope that he makes the right one.
But what we do know is that Democratic Party’s concessions to the insurgent Vermont Senator are probably at an end. Cornel West, the concession appointment to the platform committee, will soon find himself outvoted and outspoken. Barney Frank, whom Sanders tried to have kicked out of his position as cochair of the Rules Committee, is not likely to be in a magnanimous mood now that Senator Sanders has lost. And indeed, now maybe it is time to make some significant rules changes in the way the party nominates its candidate.
These rule changes will not be congenial to Sanders nor will they be congenial to his supporters, And they should not be. The party should not respond well to a hostile takeover bid. First, the ridiculous, borderline racist, anti-democratic caucus process should be done away with entirely. Caucuses are, by well-nigh universal accord, a lousy way to choose delegates. They are intended to advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. They take place largely in heavily white, nondiverse states, which raises the inference that a candidate who builds his strength in the caucus states is trafficking in a kind of racism unbecoming any Democrat. The caucuses it should be replaced immediately, as Minnesota has just done, by honest-to-God primary elections, in which every registered Democrat can vote, and where there is a legitimate secret ballot, so that voters need not fear any retribution for their choice. There have been numerous accounts of Hillary Clinton supporters facing retribution from angry Sanders supporters at caucuses. This must stop.
As much, however, as the caucus system should be replaced by primaries in which every registered Democrat may vote, they should be replaced by closed primaries, in which only registered Democrats may vote. Persons who choose to register no party preference have volitionally opted out of the Democratic process. They have opted to make a very public statement that they are not part of the Democratic Party. Why the hell should so-called independents be allowed a voice in choosing the nominee of the Democratic Party for dogcatcher, let alone President? If, for example, one registers as “no party preference,” one is engaged in a very public repudiation of the Democratic Party and its values. We don’t need such people intruding into our process and skewing our elections for our nominees. After all, what good is partisanship when you allow interlopers to screw up your process.
Hell, you might as well give up on the whole primary process and allow the GOP to select our candidates for us! This is what Bernie Sanders and his militant supporters don’t understand. The other major rules change that should happen is a requirement that someone seeking the Democratic nomination for president demonstrate a history in the Party. I find it an obscenity from a partisan perspective, that Bernie Sanders didn’t register is a Democrat until late last year, and now he wants to be our nominee for the presidency of United States. No, and a thousand times no! The convention should adopt a rule effective in the 2020 campaign requiring that no name may be placed in nomination who has not been a registered Democrat for at least five years, i.e., long enough to have participated in at least the previous election cycle.
Finally, to put some teeth into these rule changes, the convention should adopt a rule, effective in the 2020 election cycle, providing that states which have not discontinued the caucus process and adopted the closed primary will not have their delegations seated at the convention. And to prevent a nonconforming nomination from being made, at the convention, of a candidate who came “late to the party,” any delegate who proposes such a motion should, by operation of law, be deemed immediately to have forfeited his or her credentials as a delegate and be removed from the convention by any means necessary.
Does our process need reform? Yes, it does, but not in the direction Bernie Sanders and his supporters have advocated. If we do as Bernie Sanders and his supporters want, we won’t have a Party left by the time he and his friends have finished Berning it down.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed in this column are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. He is most definitely with Hillary Clinton.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
ON THE APPLICABILITY OF THE NINTH CHAPTER OF THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES TO OUR CURRENT POLITICAL SITUATION
Summary: There has been a certain tendency among ideological purists in the insurgent campaign of Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders to attack Hillary Rodham Clinton for the apparent recency of her support for marriage equality. Apparently, these ideological purists are disconnected from the Scriptures which form so important a part of the Western Canon, and which, in the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, recount the story of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.
Yet, none of us can claim to be Simon pure on marriage equality. For most of us, coming around to the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David should be able to tie the knot and have their unions recognized was a fairly heavy lift. It required of all of us, straight or queer, a reevaluation of a lot of heretofore unexamined verities. A great many people in our society have still not come round to the idea that Ruth should be allowed to marry Naomi or the Jonathan and David can be husbands together. To attack Hillary Rodham Clinton for not coming around “soon enough,” is ridiculous, privileged hypocrisy. To attack her because her husband signed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is not only privileged, it’s just out and out sexist.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
A not insignificant number of Bernard Sanders purists, including many privileged young homosexuals who are in a position, thanks to the struggles of their elders and betters, to take their protected status for granted, have taken up the cudgels against Hillary Rodham Clinton attacking her for being “late to the ball”, as it were, on marriage equality. Of course, these are the same purists who attacked President Obama because they didn’t like his timetable for evolution on the issue of marriage equality, either.
I think I’m in a position to speak with some credibility, even authority, on this issue. I was one of the first attorneys in California to take on a marriage case. By that, I don’t mean an ordinary straight divorce, I mean that I was one of the first attorneys in California, perhaps the very first, to challenge the validity of California’s gender-specific marriage law.
Early in 1993, I was approached by two young men who had been rebuffed in their attempt to procure a marriage license from the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder. We discussed the matter, and we decided to challenge the ban. We took a flyer. Our philosophy in so doing was simple. We figured that either one of two things would happen: either the courts would be so startled by our writ petition that they would deny it out of hand, with a one sentence per curiam decision reading simply “the petition is denied.” or, if the court considered our petition sufficiently meritorious, we might be able to sneak through a major breakthrough in the cause a marriage equality.
We were inspired by the recent Hawai’i case of Baehr v. Lewin (1993) 74 Haw. 530, in which the Hawai’i Supreme Court had required the state to demonstrate a compelling government interest for denying the liberty of marital contract to same-sex couples. We took a careful look at the opinion, and we also analyzed the likelihood that the courts might attempt to use our petition to come down with a retrograde, homophobic opinion such as that in Bowers v. Hardwick, (1986) 478 U.S. 186, which had upheld the authority of states to criminalize same-sex intimacy. Knowing as I did the personnel who would probably make up the appellate panel reviewing our petition, I believed the risk was justified by the potential reward.
So, we went ahead and filed our petition. We were expecting a hostile, at best indifferent, reaction from the straight community. What took us rather by surprise was the enormous hostility we encountered from the “official” Gay and Lesbian Movement. My clients and I were shunned by the Official Movement, and essentially cast out into the wilderness. While the Los Angeles Times ran a fairly lengthy and even sympathetic article, we received next to no attention from the queer press. The “Official Lawyers” of the “Official” Homosexual Movement “ordered” me to cease and desist.
I could see two reasons for the hostile reaction of the so-called “Official” Movement. First, all of the “Official Homosexuals” were wrapped up in the battle over the right of queer folk to be cannon fodder, for the right to kill and to be killed while wearing our country’s uniform. It’s curiously ironic, isn’t it, that in America, your first-class citizenship should be a function of your willingness to kill or be killed while wearing the national uniform. Because apparently, the right to be cannon fodder was viewed as being substantially more important than our right to form legally recognized families.
The second reason that I encountered such hostility from the “Official” Movement was simply that the “Official” Movement is very territorial. They didn’t want an unknown like me poaching in territory of which they proposed to take exclusive possession when the moment was right. My clients and I, to the view of the “Official” Movement, were unwelcome, unwanted interlopers. And we were treated as such. We were publicly scoffed at by gay and lesbian Center director Lorri Jean, and by other “Official” homosexuals who took their cue from her; we were attacked, ignored, and written out of the Offical, Canonical, History. Had we been successful, I expect we would still have been revised right out of the Official History.
Of course, it must be conceded that the climate for marriage in 1993 was considerably different than it is today. A great many Americans, both queer and straight, were uncertain about whether the queer nation, let alone American society as a whole, was prepared to assimilate the ramifications of allowing Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David to tie the nuptial knot. Indeed, if you had asked me, when I graduated from law school in 1989, whether I supported marriage equality, my own answer would probably have been a somewhat equivocal “not really.”
My “evolution” on the subject was precipitated not only by my responsibility to my clients, which required that I be able to zealously represent their interests, but also by the fact that a cousin of mine and his same-sex partner (now husband) had adopted a daughter. At the time, second parent adoptions were not an option for them; only one of the two men could legally be the girl’s father, though both men were parents to this girl (now an astonishingly self-possessed young woman) in every way that mattered. But if something untoward were to happen to the girl’s legal father, his partner, also the girl’s father in every way that matters, would have no rights with respect to the child that the law would be compelled to respect or even acknowledge. I wanted to change that.
Those two factors contributed in large part to my own “road to Damascus” moment. I became an advocate for same gender marriage. I remember a conversation I had during this time with a professional colleague who cautioned me that our national conversation on marriage was only beginning. It would be, he suggested, at least ten years before we would see any progress. His estimate turned out to be prescient. Though Vermont opened the door for civil unions in Baker v. State, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999), it would not be until 2003 that Massachusetts would open the way to full marriage equality with the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health (2003) 440 Mass. 309, 798 N.E.2d 941. My colleague’s ten-year prediction had proven eerily correct.
Of course there was backlash and even more there was what Lyndon Johnson famously called frontlash, as states without marriage equality sought to preempt it or prohibit it from taking root within their borders. Indeed, the whole issue of marriage formed a large part of the George W. Bush administration’s pandering approach to social conservatives during his 2004 campaign, though, privately, even the Bush administration gave intimations that it might be prepared to regard civil unions as an acceptable “Plan B” option.
For queerfolk, evolution on marriage came fairly quickly and fairly uniformly. Though certain so-called lesbian separatists and followers of homonormativity opposed marriage because it represented a queer co-optation of a straight institution, the vast majority of America’s queerfolk came round to marriage equality fairly quickly and fairly comprehensively.
But for our straight neighbors, the issue was a little bit more complicated. To bring our straight neighbors around on marriage, we’ve had to make use of the social construct known as “proximity empathy.” Now proximity empathy is based on the idea that to know someone helps break down barriers to acceptance. It is the idea underlying National Coming Out Day; it’s a lot harder to deny the civil rights, the personhood, or the humanity of a queer person if you know one. When your child, your neighbor, your kin, your fellow parishioner, your coworker, your colleague, your you-name-it, comes out to you, it forces you to reassess your prejudices. The example that readily occurs in any discussion of proximity empathy is that of Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman, whose son Will came out as gay while an undergraduate at Yale.
Of course, appeals to proximity empathy don’t sit well with the purity police, and so, we have an awful lot of Bernie Sanders supporters taking up the cudgels against Hillary Clinton because they don’t like the fact that she --and the President-– both very publicly “evolved” on the issue of marriage in rather the same manner as Saul of Tarsus became Paul the God-intoxicated emissary of the Jesus Movement in the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. To purists, particularly the Sanders purists, anything less than permanent, early, unequivocal support is unacceptable. This, notwithstanding Senator Sanders’s own equivocations on the issue of marriage equality.
Still, we know the the limitations of the purist mind. We know that to purists, any indication of flexibility, any so-called evolution, is ideologically forbidden. And so we see Sanders trolls posting memes attacking Hillary Clinton for not having been “there” on marriage equality early enough. Add to that the Sanders supporters’ attacks on Hillary Clinton for the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, and it is easy to see the sexism and male privilege underlying so many of those attacks.
Many of these attacks come from millennial homosexuals who, in California at least, have been able to take for granted their faculty for participating openly in the life of the body politic. These millennial homosexuals have no concept of the time when the mere expression of physical intimacy with a person of one’s own sex could spell ruin.
They have no recollection of the time when California law provided no workplace protection for queerfolk. They don’t remember the demonstrations that took place when Republican Governor Pete Wilson vetoed California’s first employment nondiscrimination bill for LGBT people. They have no memory of that time in our relatively recent history when you could be denied housing for being queer, or when Megan’s law was being used to harass elderly gay men with ancient criminal records for having held their boyfriend’s hand during the 1940s.
Most of these millennial homosexuals, born in the late 1980s or 1990s, also have no memory of the AIDS epidemic that scarred the lives of a generation of queerfolk. To them, being a twentysomething gay man now has absolutely no resemblance to life if you happened to be a gay man born in the late 50s or early 60s. For those of us who were born in that timeframe, our twenties should have been a time when the world was our oyster, when we had phenomenal sex lives, when we were beautiful, the horizon was limitless, and the candy store was open.
Instead, we who were in our late teens and early 20s in the early 1980s entered adulthood to a reality of friends and lovers getting sick and dying. We attended so many funerals that we could recite from memory the Burial Office. A time that should have been for us a happy time full of promise was instead a Ragnarok, a gray and cheerless time when Fenrir the Wolf had devoured the sun and Valhalla had fallen. All we could say as the crisis began to moderate in the mid-1990s was what which the Abbé Sieyes had said when asked what he had done during the Terror: “j’ai survécu,” I survived.
Today’s millennial homosexuals have been able to do much more than merely survive. In Palm Springs, our millennial homosexuals enjoy a rather privileged existence. It’s hardly surprising that Palm Springs should be the gay playground of choice for millennial homosexuals from the Bay Area and West Hollywood. Yet they have the privilege of not remembering. It’s not a matter of having forgotten; it’s just that they weren’t born then, and they thus have absolutely no basis for comparison.
But we who are closer in age to Hillary Clinton then we are to the millennial homosexuals of Palm Springs understand what it is to evolve. We understand what it is to have buried our friends while reciting from constantly refreshed memory the Burial Office. And perhaps, being closer in age to Hillary Clinton, having seen the bullshit to which she has been subjected, and having put up with our own bullshit, we are a little bit older, a little bit sadder, and a little bit wiser.
And perhaps, just perhaps, as we late 50s and early 60s babies teeter on the brink of old farthood, we’ve learned that Simon purity is not sustainable, that forgiveness is a must, that evolution can happen, that the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles (and the Pauline conversion narrative set forth therein) contains truths we would do well to recall, and that finally, an imperfect friend is a hell of a lot better to have in your corner than a deadly enemy.
-XXX-
The views contained herein are those of the author, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Persons seeking legal advice should consult a licensed practitioner, one of whom of whom this incipient old fart happens to be.
Yet, none of us can claim to be Simon pure on marriage equality. For most of us, coming around to the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David should be able to tie the knot and have their unions recognized was a fairly heavy lift. It required of all of us, straight or queer, a reevaluation of a lot of heretofore unexamined verities. A great many people in our society have still not come round to the idea that Ruth should be allowed to marry Naomi or the Jonathan and David can be husbands together. To attack Hillary Rodham Clinton for not coming around “soon enough,” is ridiculous, privileged hypocrisy. To attack her because her husband signed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is not only privileged, it’s just out and out sexist.
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A not insignificant number of Bernard Sanders purists, including many privileged young homosexuals who are in a position, thanks to the struggles of their elders and betters, to take their protected status for granted, have taken up the cudgels against Hillary Rodham Clinton attacking her for being “late to the ball”, as it were, on marriage equality. Of course, these are the same purists who attacked President Obama because they didn’t like his timetable for evolution on the issue of marriage equality, either.
I think I’m in a position to speak with some credibility, even authority, on this issue. I was one of the first attorneys in California to take on a marriage case. By that, I don’t mean an ordinary straight divorce, I mean that I was one of the first attorneys in California, perhaps the very first, to challenge the validity of California’s gender-specific marriage law.
Early in 1993, I was approached by two young men who had been rebuffed in their attempt to procure a marriage license from the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder. We discussed the matter, and we decided to challenge the ban. We took a flyer. Our philosophy in so doing was simple. We figured that either one of two things would happen: either the courts would be so startled by our writ petition that they would deny it out of hand, with a one sentence per curiam decision reading simply “the petition is denied.” or, if the court considered our petition sufficiently meritorious, we might be able to sneak through a major breakthrough in the cause a marriage equality.
We were inspired by the recent Hawai’i case of Baehr v. Lewin (1993) 74 Haw. 530, in which the Hawai’i Supreme Court had required the state to demonstrate a compelling government interest for denying the liberty of marital contract to same-sex couples. We took a careful look at the opinion, and we also analyzed the likelihood that the courts might attempt to use our petition to come down with a retrograde, homophobic opinion such as that in Bowers v. Hardwick, (1986) 478 U.S. 186, which had upheld the authority of states to criminalize same-sex intimacy. Knowing as I did the personnel who would probably make up the appellate panel reviewing our petition, I believed the risk was justified by the potential reward.
So, we went ahead and filed our petition. We were expecting a hostile, at best indifferent, reaction from the straight community. What took us rather by surprise was the enormous hostility we encountered from the “official” Gay and Lesbian Movement. My clients and I were shunned by the Official Movement, and essentially cast out into the wilderness. While the Los Angeles Times ran a fairly lengthy and even sympathetic article, we received next to no attention from the queer press. The “Official Lawyers” of the “Official” Homosexual Movement “ordered” me to cease and desist.
I could see two reasons for the hostile reaction of the so-called “Official” Movement. First, all of the “Official Homosexuals” were wrapped up in the battle over the right of queer folk to be cannon fodder, for the right to kill and to be killed while wearing our country’s uniform. It’s curiously ironic, isn’t it, that in America, your first-class citizenship should be a function of your willingness to kill or be killed while wearing the national uniform. Because apparently, the right to be cannon fodder was viewed as being substantially more important than our right to form legally recognized families.
The second reason that I encountered such hostility from the “Official” Movement was simply that the “Official” Movement is very territorial. They didn’t want an unknown like me poaching in territory of which they proposed to take exclusive possession when the moment was right. My clients and I, to the view of the “Official” Movement, were unwelcome, unwanted interlopers. And we were treated as such. We were publicly scoffed at by gay and lesbian Center director Lorri Jean, and by other “Official” homosexuals who took their cue from her; we were attacked, ignored, and written out of the Offical, Canonical, History. Had we been successful, I expect we would still have been revised right out of the Official History.
Of course, it must be conceded that the climate for marriage in 1993 was considerably different than it is today. A great many Americans, both queer and straight, were uncertain about whether the queer nation, let alone American society as a whole, was prepared to assimilate the ramifications of allowing Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David to tie the nuptial knot. Indeed, if you had asked me, when I graduated from law school in 1989, whether I supported marriage equality, my own answer would probably have been a somewhat equivocal “not really.”
My “evolution” on the subject was precipitated not only by my responsibility to my clients, which required that I be able to zealously represent their interests, but also by the fact that a cousin of mine and his same-sex partner (now husband) had adopted a daughter. At the time, second parent adoptions were not an option for them; only one of the two men could legally be the girl’s father, though both men were parents to this girl (now an astonishingly self-possessed young woman) in every way that mattered. But if something untoward were to happen to the girl’s legal father, his partner, also the girl’s father in every way that matters, would have no rights with respect to the child that the law would be compelled to respect or even acknowledge. I wanted to change that.
Those two factors contributed in large part to my own “road to Damascus” moment. I became an advocate for same gender marriage. I remember a conversation I had during this time with a professional colleague who cautioned me that our national conversation on marriage was only beginning. It would be, he suggested, at least ten years before we would see any progress. His estimate turned out to be prescient. Though Vermont opened the door for civil unions in Baker v. State, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999), it would not be until 2003 that Massachusetts would open the way to full marriage equality with the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health (2003) 440 Mass. 309, 798 N.E.2d 941. My colleague’s ten-year prediction had proven eerily correct.
Of course there was backlash and even more there was what Lyndon Johnson famously called frontlash, as states without marriage equality sought to preempt it or prohibit it from taking root within their borders. Indeed, the whole issue of marriage formed a large part of the George W. Bush administration’s pandering approach to social conservatives during his 2004 campaign, though, privately, even the Bush administration gave intimations that it might be prepared to regard civil unions as an acceptable “Plan B” option.
For queerfolk, evolution on marriage came fairly quickly and fairly uniformly. Though certain so-called lesbian separatists and followers of homonormativity opposed marriage because it represented a queer co-optation of a straight institution, the vast majority of America’s queerfolk came round to marriage equality fairly quickly and fairly comprehensively.
But for our straight neighbors, the issue was a little bit more complicated. To bring our straight neighbors around on marriage, we’ve had to make use of the social construct known as “proximity empathy.” Now proximity empathy is based on the idea that to know someone helps break down barriers to acceptance. It is the idea underlying National Coming Out Day; it’s a lot harder to deny the civil rights, the personhood, or the humanity of a queer person if you know one. When your child, your neighbor, your kin, your fellow parishioner, your coworker, your colleague, your you-name-it, comes out to you, it forces you to reassess your prejudices. The example that readily occurs in any discussion of proximity empathy is that of Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman, whose son Will came out as gay while an undergraduate at Yale.
Of course, appeals to proximity empathy don’t sit well with the purity police, and so, we have an awful lot of Bernie Sanders supporters taking up the cudgels against Hillary Clinton because they don’t like the fact that she --and the President-– both very publicly “evolved” on the issue of marriage in rather the same manner as Saul of Tarsus became Paul the God-intoxicated emissary of the Jesus Movement in the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. To purists, particularly the Sanders purists, anything less than permanent, early, unequivocal support is unacceptable. This, notwithstanding Senator Sanders’s own equivocations on the issue of marriage equality.
Still, we know the the limitations of the purist mind. We know that to purists, any indication of flexibility, any so-called evolution, is ideologically forbidden. And so we see Sanders trolls posting memes attacking Hillary Clinton for not having been “there” on marriage equality early enough. Add to that the Sanders supporters’ attacks on Hillary Clinton for the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, and it is easy to see the sexism and male privilege underlying so many of those attacks.
Many of these attacks come from millennial homosexuals who, in California at least, have been able to take for granted their faculty for participating openly in the life of the body politic. These millennial homosexuals have no concept of the time when the mere expression of physical intimacy with a person of one’s own sex could spell ruin.
They have no recollection of the time when California law provided no workplace protection for queerfolk. They don’t remember the demonstrations that took place when Republican Governor Pete Wilson vetoed California’s first employment nondiscrimination bill for LGBT people. They have no memory of that time in our relatively recent history when you could be denied housing for being queer, or when Megan’s law was being used to harass elderly gay men with ancient criminal records for having held their boyfriend’s hand during the 1940s.
Most of these millennial homosexuals, born in the late 1980s or 1990s, also have no memory of the AIDS epidemic that scarred the lives of a generation of queerfolk. To them, being a twentysomething gay man now has absolutely no resemblance to life if you happened to be a gay man born in the late 50s or early 60s. For those of us who were born in that timeframe, our twenties should have been a time when the world was our oyster, when we had phenomenal sex lives, when we were beautiful, the horizon was limitless, and the candy store was open.
Instead, we who were in our late teens and early 20s in the early 1980s entered adulthood to a reality of friends and lovers getting sick and dying. We attended so many funerals that we could recite from memory the Burial Office. A time that should have been for us a happy time full of promise was instead a Ragnarok, a gray and cheerless time when Fenrir the Wolf had devoured the sun and Valhalla had fallen. All we could say as the crisis began to moderate in the mid-1990s was what which the Abbé Sieyes had said when asked what he had done during the Terror: “j’ai survécu,” I survived.
Today’s millennial homosexuals have been able to do much more than merely survive. In Palm Springs, our millennial homosexuals enjoy a rather privileged existence. It’s hardly surprising that Palm Springs should be the gay playground of choice for millennial homosexuals from the Bay Area and West Hollywood. Yet they have the privilege of not remembering. It’s not a matter of having forgotten; it’s just that they weren’t born then, and they thus have absolutely no basis for comparison.
But we who are closer in age to Hillary Clinton then we are to the millennial homosexuals of Palm Springs understand what it is to evolve. We understand what it is to have buried our friends while reciting from constantly refreshed memory the Burial Office. And perhaps, being closer in age to Hillary Clinton, having seen the bullshit to which she has been subjected, and having put up with our own bullshit, we are a little bit older, a little bit sadder, and a little bit wiser.
And perhaps, just perhaps, as we late 50s and early 60s babies teeter on the brink of old farthood, we’ve learned that Simon purity is not sustainable, that forgiveness is a must, that evolution can happen, that the Ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles (and the Pauline conversion narrative set forth therein) contains truths we would do well to recall, and that finally, an imperfect friend is a hell of a lot better to have in your corner than a deadly enemy.
-XXX-
The views contained herein are those of the author, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Persons seeking legal advice should consult a licensed practitioner, one of whom of whom this incipient old fart happens to be.
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