Compromise

One of my favorite television series is Foyle's War, a British detective show set in the channel-side town of Hastings during World War II.  The series' protagonist is Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, a local policeman who struggles to uphold the law while war rages around the world and his jurisdiction sits in the cross hairs of a threatened German invasion.

A recurring theme in the series is the question of how much principles can be compromised in the service of defeating a greater evil.  In the very first episode, Foyle confronts a murderer who happens to work for the admiralty in an office dedicated to cracking German naval codes.  He argues to Foyle that arresting him will materially set back this work, costing the lives of hundreds of British sailors and possibly giving Germany time to starve Britain into submission.

And his victims weren't that much of a loss.  One was a German woman living in England.  She was an enemy alien, but otherwise innocent.  She would not be the last innocent German woman to die in the war; there would be thousands before it was over.  His other victim was a thoroughly disreputable pub owner involved in blackmail and associated with a corrupt civil servant taking bribes to help young men avoid conscription.

Viewed from a certain perspective it's a persuasive argument and Foyle admits to his driver that he was tempted to let him go.  But in the end he concludes "Murder is murder.  You stop believing in that, and we might as well not be fighting a war, because you end up like the Nazis."

Now, personally, I find that reasoning a little simplistic but essentially valid.  For one thing, when one considers the crimes of National Socialism, overlooking the petty murders of powerful people comes pretty far down the list.  Here's how I would have put it:

World War II was, above all, a war for western civilization.  To allow National Socialism to succeed in the land that produced Luther, Gutenberg, Bach and countless other luminaries would have discredited the whole idea of western civilization and tarnished the many blessings it has brought to the world.

As an aside, I think that's why it's proper to consider the crimes of the National Socialists as more significant than those of the bolsheviks.  Viewed from the western perspective the Germans were "one of us."  The Russians were never really part of the west, the efforts of their monarchs notwithstanding.

One of the pillars of western civilization is the rule of law.  It is honored more in some parts of the west than in others but all western societies acknowledge it to some extent.  To allow a murderer to go unpunished might have been useful to winning the war but it would have undermined the reasons for fighting the war in the first place.

Which brings me to Donald Trump.  Every day legions of Trumpkins insist that those who oppose Trump are only assisting Hillary Clinton.  Many of them accuse Trump's critics of being actively and consciously in league with Clinton, despite the fact that most of these critics have been criticizing the Clintons for decades in even harsher language than that deployed against Trump.

I should say here that there are two broad classes of Trump supporters: those who have concluded, somewhat reluctantly, that, despite his flaws, Trump is preferable to Clinton; and those who are wholly devoted to him, who have ascribed to him an almost messianic mission to save the United States.  Sometimes this latter group reminds me of the entranced thugee cultists of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

But Trump's conservative critics have made essentially the same calculation that Foyle did.  Some, including myself, have even been tempted from time to time to support him.  But Trump, and the people he attracts, have no knowledge of, or respect for, the ideals, the principles, the institutions and the traditions that made the United States what they are, or were.

The actual policies that might result from a Trump presidency may or may not be more harmful than those that would result from a Clinton administration.  But if conservatives attach themselves to Trump, they will have done critical damage to their ability to advocate for a return to the constitutional principles that are the only way to make America great again.

The Ruling Class

Kurt Schlichter had a column yesterday taking to task America's "corrupt and incompetent ruling class."  This idea that there is some alien sinister force controlling the country is ubiquitous among large segments of the public including the legions of trumpkins.

And although it sounds like a dire and ominous characterization of American politics, it is ironically comforting in that it relieves voters of the pain of confronting the real culprits in our country's predicament - us.  We, the citizens of this country, are the ruling class. The government we have is the government we chose.  Unfortunately, we are every bit as corrupt and incompetent as the shadowy figures haunting Mr. Schlicher's dreams.

We are corrupt because our votes are for sale.  It is commonplace for politicians to brag about how they will direct public funds to some local project whose major, if not only, justification is the dumping of money into the local economy.  Others promise free stuff paid for by the taxes confiscated from our fellow citizens.  Still others stroke our vanity or envy by punishing behaviors we find objectionable even though they impinge on no one else's rights.

Some twenty years ago I was talking with a co-worker about Bill Clinton's numerous misdeeds including the perjury that got him impeached.  I asked him how he could support someone so obviously corrupt.  "My 401(k) is doing great." he said.  His reaction was typical.  Clinton's defenders never denied his crimes.  They couldn't without looking completely foolish.  Clinton himself could quibble over the meaning of "is" with a straight face.  He might have even made himself believe it.  This, after all, is a man who takes moral instruction from George Costanza.

But normal people can't deny the truth staring them in the face without feeling completely foolish.  So instead of proclaiming Clinton's innocence, they insisted his crimes didn't matter.  "Everyone lies about sex."  "The French are so much more sophisticated than we are.  After all, Mitterand's mistress and wife attended his funeral together."  "Ken Starr is on a witch hunt."

This attitude, when applied to the federal government, becomes even more insidious because we trample our constitution for our own personal gain.  Most of the giveaways, for which we reward politicians, are simply outside the scope of Congress' legislative authority.  But we deliberately jettisoned the Constitution back in the thirties in the fear and panic of what would become known as the Great Depression.

People were suffering through an economic downturn and they decided that giving more power to an arrogant coterie of social engineers was the way out of it.  Ironically, the misery of the depression had already been enhanced by short-sighted government attempts to fight it, such as the Smoot-Hawley tarriffs.  But the voters shit-canned one of the greatest political documents ever produced, a work of genius by an assembly of statesmen the likes of which we are likely never to see again, for some newfangled, and frankly absurd, ideas about bureaucrats manipulating levers of economic power to control an economy as large and complex as that of the United States.  Like Esau in the Bible, we sold our birthright for a bowl of stew.

We are incompetent because we fail to do the work of vetting our candidates before they are elected and holding them accountable afterwards.  We take political speeches, and even advertisements and bumper stickers, at face value as if the people behind them don't have actual records and actions that can be evaluated.

And this kind of research isn't even that hard.  We live in an age that the citizens of earlier days could not have dreamed of.  An untold wealth of information is available right at home.  In days not too long ago, in depth research of candidates and issues could only be done at a public library.  And even there the information available, when measured against the worldwide sum of information, was frustratingly small.  Now there is virtually no fact that cannot be researched almost instantly.  But still I hear registered voters discuss candidates and issues in terms so trite and superficial it would be pure flattery to call them cliches.

So don't blame George Soros, the Koch brothers or anyone else.  The architect of our present predicament is staring back at you from the mirror.  As Pogo says, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Unfalsifiability

Jim Geraghty has a column in National Review Online discussing an attitude among certain Trump followers that is fairly obvious to anyone who spends time reading their comments on the internet.  And that is their unshakable belief that their stubby-fingered messiah is a political genius who is just misunderstood by the elites that oppose him.  No amount of bad news can diminish their ovine devotion to the Donald.  Their reasoning is a flexible as a contortionist.  During the primaries, when Trump was leading in the polls, they were gospel.  Now that he trails Hillary across the country, the polls are meaningless, or they are rigged or just lies.

Trumpism is a kind of religion.  It's adherents are motivated by faith in their casino god and not by reason or empiricism.  Ask a Trumpswab what evidence, fact, occurrence or revelation would convince him that Trump is not the god-emperor they he imagines him to be and you will get no answer.  Trumpism is an unfalsifiable belief.  In his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg surveyed the history of Trump defenders assuring the public that his juvenile buffoonish manner was just for the primary season and that he would eventually "pivot" to a more presidential demeanor.  Simultaneously he surveyed Trump's history of defying that prediction at every term.  Goldberg then publicly challenged the Trumpkins:

I want to put forward a challenge to everyone still clinging to the he-can-change, pie-in-the-sky, free-beer-tomorrow, Godot’s-bus-is-just-running-late, he-can-change fantasy. Pick a date. Any date between now and Election Day. I want you to commit to the idea that if he hasn’t changed by that day, he never will. And on that day, you need to accept that he is the same cheeto-dusted smatterer some of us saw from Day 1. Then, ask yourself: “What should we do now?”

I suspect that the date Jonah is asking for will never arrive.  I suspect Trump will remain the same narcissistic blowhard he always has been.  And when he goes down to defeat, the Trumpsters will blame #NeverTrump.  Some of them are already laying the groundwork for that.

So I ran through all that just to say this.  Trumpism reminds me of another unfalsifiable religion that claims a significant number of adherents - Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, or CAGW.  CAGW is a faith based on computer models that is impervious to actual facts.  There has been no warming trend for fifteen years now.  We're in the middle of a run of exceptionally mild hurricane seasons.  Fifteen years ago ABC predicted that Manhattan would be under water by now.

None of that matters.  Whatever happens is taken as proof that CAGW is happening and that it's the greatest, most immediate threat the world faces.  If it's warm out that's global warming.  If it's cold out, that's global warming.  Things that have nothing to do with climate, like earthquakes and volcanoes, are taken as proof of global warming.

There are other examples of devotion to ideas that flies in the face of evidence, Obamacare and Head Start for instance.  It appears that unfalsifiable faiths are a tempting refuge for all sorts of people.