Donald Trump’s presidential win is a vivid refutation of two adages: cheaters never prosper, and might doesn’t make right. These are not just comforting words that parents say to their bullied children. They are, or at least ought to be, the letter of the law. From community ordinances all the way up to international agreements, the law is built around compliance (against cheating) and constraints on powerful actors (against bullying). So are many rule-based activities like professional sports. Just ask rule-breakers like the disgraced bicyclist Lance Armstrong or bullies like soccer player David Pratt who was kicked out of a game at the three-second mark for lunging at another player. But politics is a different matter. Bullies and rule-breakers are in charge of many countries today, including Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. And now Donald Trump has broken laws and punched down all the way to the White House. American voters either ignored or celebrated Trump’s behavior of macho misconduct. There’s a long American tradition of honoring outlaws that dates back at least to the days of Billy the Kid. On top of that, many voters relished the prospect of putting …read more Source:: Institute for Policy...
In Philadelphia this past weekend, I met a number of people who’d given up on democracy. They railed about politicians who make promises they don’t keep. They spun conspiracy theories about the government. A number of those who answered the door told me that they weren’t going to vote. Then there were the grim young men who said, hell yeah, they were going to vote for Trump. They spoke of the Republican presidential candidate as if he were Tony Montana, the gangster played by Al Pacino in the film Scarface: violent, lawless, and powerful. Trump elicited respect laced with fear. According to his supporters, he’d stand up to America’s enemies abroad and be tough on crime domestically. Several said to me—with the usual preface of “don’t get me wrong but…”—that a woman president would be too weak or “mixed up by hormones” to do those necessary things. If you cross celebrity culture with gun culture and add a few dollops of testosterone, you get Donald Trump. Much has been written about the rise of the global far right (including by me). It’s important to understand that this global trend is not a type of politics. It is an anti-politics. The far right embodied …read more Source:: Institute for Policy...
(Image: Flickr/Republic of Korea) Nixon lied. Surely this is not a shocker. But what’s interesting about the latest revelation concerning Nixon and Vietnam is that the most duplicitous president in U.S. history actually knew that the U.S. air war in Southeast Asia was a dismal failure. Even as Nixon was telling the media that the saturation...
