At The Guardian, Corey Robin writes—Will Steve Bannon's war tear apart the Republican party?
The proverbial ink on Bannon’s resignation was barely dry when the media began reporting his plans to mount an insurrection against the “Republican establishment” in Congress and the “globalists” in the White House.
Bannon has now decamped to Breitbart to wage “war” – his words – on the forces in Washington that have prevented Trump from turning the Republican party into a populist movement of economic nationalism, and even on Trump if he strays from the path. A source close to Bannon analogized the coming struggle to the French Revolution.
Since Charlottesville, pundits and historians have wondered whether we’re headed for a civil war. With Bannon’s exit, it’s clear that we are. Only it won’t be between North and South or right and left. It will be within the Republican partyitself.
The question is: will it be like the war Buckley launched, a purgative struggle as a prelude to a new era of conservative power and rule? Or will it mark the end of the Reagan regime, unveiling a conservative movement in terminal crisis as it strives to reconcile the irreconcilable?
At The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes—The most consequential question facing the world:
[A]t the risk of being accused of cultural imperialism, I’d argue that the challenge to liberal democracy is far and away the most consequential question facing the world. If liberal democracy does not survive and thrive, every other problem we face becomes much more difficult. [...]
But liberal democracy is, in principle, a simple if also profound idea: a belief in governments created through free elections and universal suffrage; an independent judiciary; and guarantees of the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion and press. Some of my more libertarian-leaning friends — and in our shared desire to defend liberal democracy, we are friends — would define it as excluding various forms of regulation and redistribution.
[W]e should not petrify ourselves with too many comparisons between our time and the 1930s. On the eve of World War II, as historian Ian Kershaw reminds us in “To Hell and Back,” his monumental history of Europe from 1914 to 1949, three-fifths of Europeans lived under authoritarian regimes — a calculation that does not even include Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
We are far from such a catastrophe, but I’m grateful to Luce and others for warning us not to take liberal democracy for granted. When liberal democrats become arrogant and forget that governments have an obligation to create the circumstances for widespread well-being, autocrats will always be there offering security and prosperity in exchange for less freedom. Liberal democracy must be defended. It must also deliver the goods.
At The New Republic, David Dayen writes—The CEOs Won’t Save Us: Why do we keep falling for the myth that business leaders are the moral pillars of America?
Our everyday lives have become so consumed by partisan politics that fabulously wealthy and powerful CEOs can become folk heroes for defying a president. Since Donald Trump preempted mass resignations from his business executive panels last week by disbanding two of them (on manufacturing and economic policy) and canceling a third (on infrastructure), pundits have fallen over themselves to praise CEOs as the moral conscience of the nation.
The same corporate celebrity culture that elevated Trump from the boardroom to the White House is now building monuments to the bold CEOs who criticize him. But like the sets of The Apprentice, the backdrop is fake. Public relations spin aside, major corporations remain committed to the Trump agenda, and they have practically been the sole beneficiaries of the administration’s actions thus far. The only difference after Charlottesville is that all their lobbying and favor-trading has gone underground.
Let’s first stipulate that these corporate advisory panels, a staple of presidencies in the modern age, shouldn’t exist. They merely allow CEOs to influence the president directly, rather than through registered lobbyists. If you’re not remembering any made-for-TV White House meetings in which Medicaid or food stamps beneficiaries detailed their plight to President Trump and made the case for increased benefits, that’s because such open groveling only happens with business titans.
At The New Republic, Brian Beutler writes—Remember This: Paul Ryan Is Pandering to Neo-Nazis:
Paul Ryan has always relied on the assumption that the people he answers to—constituents and reporters—are stupid.
This is why he dresses up his routine deceptions with condescension while slathering us with Eddie Haskell-esque flattery. It’s why he prefaces his highly spun talking points with the proviso that he doesn’t “want to get too wonky here.” [...]
perhaps most importantly, he shows he thinks you’re stupid in the many ways he protects President Donald Trump from accountability. On Monday night, during a CNN-moderated town hall event in Wisconsin, he offered the following justification for opposing a congressional resolution that would censure Trump for coddling white supremacists:
I will not support that. I think that would be—that would be so counterproductive. If we descend this issue into some partisan hack-fest, into some bickering against each other, and demean it down to some political food fight, what good does that do to unify this country?
Ryan, who was recently gearing up for years’ worth of partisan investigations of President Hillary Clinton, says censuring Trump for coddling Nazis would be too partisan for his taste.
At Think Progress, Joe Romm writes—Trump officials rewrite Energy Dept. study to make renewables look bad, fail anyway:
Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s long-awaited grid study is finally out. But while Trump officials clearly tried to rewrite the previously leaked staff draft to give the impression that renewable energy sources are a threat to baseload power and grid resilience, they mostly botched the job.
Back in April, Perry ordered a study to back up his claims that solar and wind power were undermining the U.S. electric grid’s reliability and forcing the premature retirement of baseload nuclear and coal plants. In July, Bloomberg obtained the draft report, written by Department of Energy staff, and revealed that they found essentially the opposite, as we reported.
As far as retirement of baseload plants, the draft report report found that factors like environmental regulations and renewable energy subsidies “played minor roles compared to the long-standing drop in electricity demand relative to previous expectation and years of low electric prices driven by high natural gas availability.”
A second bombshell conclusion in the draft report was that “the power system is more reliable today due to better planning, market discipline, and better operating rules and standards.”
Both of those bombshells are nowhere to be found in the final version released late Wednesday.
At The Washington Post, Katrina vanden Heuvel writes—Democrats are starting a fierce internal debate. Finally:
With President Trump flailing and even Republicans panning the GOP-controlled Congress, Democrats have begun a long-overdue debate about the party’s platform and strategy. Citizen movements and progressive political leaders such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are driving this debate. United in opposition to Trump’s reactionary agenda, they are calling on Democrats to embrace a bolder agenda for change. While many Beltway pundits warn against Democratic division, the party’s congressional leaders — Nancy Pelosi and Charles E. Schumer — understand that this has been a long time coming.
The “Better Deal” platform put forth by Senate Minority Leader Schumer (N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Pelosi (Calif.) received justified gibes on its framing and language. But its premise was exactly right. As Schumer put it in the New York Times, “In the last two elections, Democrats, including in the Senate, failed to articulate a strong, bold economic program [and] failed to communicate our values to show that we were on the side of working people, not the special interests. We will not repeat the same mistake.”
The Better Deal essentially endorses the big debate about a reform agenda that has already begun inside and outside the Democratic Party. Democratic failure isn’t about Vladimir Putin or James B. Comey or Hillary Clinton’s emails. Since Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats have lost the White House, both houses of Congress and about 1,000 state legislative seats. Republicans now have total control in a record 26 states. Clearly, a major debate about the party’s agenda, strategy and leadership is sorely needed.
At The Nation, Robert O. Borosage writes—Steve Bannon Is Gone, Leaving Behind Only His Worst Ideas:
Bannon’s most dangerous contribution to American politics over the past year was to help mainstream the racist ideas of the alt-right and give them an official spokesperson inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
This, more than anything else, will be Bannon’s legacy. While his positions on the economy and foreign relations were ignored even before he was fired, the racist and nationalist themes in the Bannon playbook are certain to survive his departure. Trump, after all, is the president who saw “many fine people” among the neo-Nazis marching and chanting in Charlottesville.
Inflaming far-right racism will continue to be a key political strategy for the Trump White House. In what turned out to be an exit interview with The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, Bannon described the strategy that he and Trump both embrace. “The longer [the Democrats] talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” he said. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.” Having stripped out a lot of the economic nationalism he ran on, Trump is apparently fine carrying on with just the latter.
At The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri writes—Eight lines from Trump’s Arizona speech corrected by switching the words ‘media’ and ‘neo-Nazis’:
Sometimes the only way to find a moment’s peace is to take refuge in a fantasy world of your own creation. President Trump certainly does, which is obvious every time he opens his mouth. My utopian fantasy is the world where, instead of directing his vitriol at the news media, the president of the United States used that time to take the relatively uncontroversial step of denouncing actual neo-Nazis. Join me in imagining this better world, where the following things he said Tuesday night in Arizona about the media were actually directed against appropriate targets.
1. It’s time to expose the [neo-Nazi] deceptions, and to challenge the [neo-Nazis] for their role in fomenting divisions. [...]
3. But for the most part, honestly, these [neo-Nazis] are really, really dishonest people, and they’re bad people.
4. And I really think they don’t like our country. I really believe that. [...]
8. If you want to discover the source of the division in our country, look no further than the [neo-Nazis] and the [white supremacists.]
At TomDispatch.com, John Feffer writes—Trump and the Geopolitics of Crazy—The Times They Are A-Changin’ in North Korea:
The United States has beaten its head against the wall of North Korea for more than 70 years, and that wall has changed little indeed as a result. The United States, meanwhile, has suffered one headache after another.
Over the last several weeks, the head banging has intensified. North Korea has tested a couple of possible intercontinental ballistic missiles. In response, Donald Trump has threatened that country with “fire and fury,” one-upping the rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang. And North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is debating whether to fire a missile or two into the waters around the American island of Guam as a warning of what his country is capable of doing.
Ignore, for the moment, Trump’s off-the-cuff belligerence. Despite all their promises to overhaul North Korea policy, his top officials have closely followed the same headache-inducing pattern as their predecessors.
At The Guardian, Phillip Ball writes—We can’t ban killer robots – it’s already too late:
One response to the call by experts in robotics and artificial intelligence for an ban on “killer robots” (“lethal autonomous weapons systems” or Laws in the language of international treaties) is to say: shouldn’t you have thought about that sooner?
Figures such as Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, are among the 116 specialists calling for the ban. “We do not have long to act,” they say. “Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.” But such systems are arguably already here, such as the “unmanned combat air vehicle” Taranis developed by BAE and others, or the autonomous SGR-A1 sentry gun made by Samsung and deployed along the South Korean border. Autonomous tanks are in the works, while human control of lethal drones is becoming just a matter of degree. [...]
How do we make autonomous technological systems safe and ethical? Avoiding robot-inflicted harm to humans was the problem explored in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, a collection of short stories so seminal that Asimov’s three laws of roboticsare sometimes discussed now almost as if they have the force of Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion. The irony is that Asimov’s stories were largely about how such well-motivated laws could be undermined by circumstances.
The following is an essay written nearly 90 years ago in January 1928 by the historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois succinctly deconstructing the hagiography of Robert E. Lee:
Each year on the 19th of January, there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this, and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like The New York Times may magisterially declare, “Of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.
No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege, and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame, because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.
Today we can best perpetuate his memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white South. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928. They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.
It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. It is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel—not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.