"Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it." – Sebastian Junger

It’s a question we don’t ask often enough: Why do American soldiers disproportionately suffer from PTSD? We would expect veterans to report higher rates of PTSD relative to civilians, but not higher than combat troops in other countries.

And yet the numbers are striking: In Canada and Britain, close to 10 percent of combat soldiers are diagnosed with PTSD. In Israel, a country in which military service is mandatory, the rates are roughly 1 percent. Among American troops, the rates are as high as 25 percent. This is especially remarkable in light of the fact that only 10 percent experience combat.

"There's something literally deadly about social isolation, the kind of individualism that typifies our modern society"There is no accepted explanation for this disparity. Whatever the reason, American soldiers have a harder time reintegrating into society after combat.

Author and filmmaker Sebastian Junger has taken up this question in his latest book, Tribe. His inquiry leads to a provocative conclusion: The problem isn’t the soldiers or the wars, it’s our society.

On Junger’s view, life in America is hollow and atomized. Humans, he argues, evolved to live in small groups in which inter-reliance and cooperation were essential. In combat, soldiers function much like our tribal predecessors. They live, eat, sleep, and fight together. When they come home, that sense of solidarity disappears. The civilian world feels alien. It’s "anti-human," Junger told me.

Anti-human may not be the right word, but to the extent that a fragmented existence is inconsistent with our evolutionary past, he makes a compelling point.

I spoke with Junger last month about his new book, his thoughts on America’s PTSD problem, and what he learned about community and belonging in combat. A transcript of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity and length, is below.

Sean Illing
Most people understand that we have a PTSD problem in this country, but I’m not sure they understand how bad or unusual it is. A fourth of our veterans are filing claims for PTSD despite only 10 percent seeing actual combat.
In the book, you connect this to the alienated climate soldiers face when they come home. At war, every soldier feels essential. The circumstances are extreme. The intensity of connection is unique. Self-sacrifice is the cardinal virtue.

Sebastian Junger
Basically, soldiers in combat experience something that's a pretty close reproduction of our evolutionary past. We evolved to live in groups of 30, 40, 50 people functioning very closely. Sleeping together, eating together, doing everything together. Our survival depended on the group.

That's our evolutionary past. It's also life in combat. It's even life in a platoon at a rear base. Most of the military does not fire their weapons at the enemy, do not get shot, but they do function in these close, tight-knit groups, and those emotional bonds become incredibly important. That's what we're wired for.

Sean Illing
Shifting from this to the isolation of civilian life can be psychologically disorienting. Indeed, you argue this is why many soldiers actually miss the war.

Sebastian Junger
We're primates, we're social animals, and we're wired for that close, communal connection. When you take people who've experienced the pleasure of that, and you pick them up and put them back down in the great American suburb, they're going to feel like something is missing because there is something missing. If you look at the rates of mental illness, suicide, depression, schizophrenia, in the modern American environment, they're sky high and climbing.

The suicide rate keeps going up, which is odd for a society that's this wealthy and well-off. It's not that the suicide is increasing among the very poor. It's actually increasing among the affluent. That, to me, says there's something literally deadly about social isolation, the kind of individualism that typifies our modern society.

Sean Illing
You write that "[t]oday’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it." What do you mean?

Sebastian Junger
I wasn't a soldier, I'm not a veteran, but the impression I get from talking to them is that their sense of purpose and their sense of devotion to a common good is foremost in their minds in combat. The common good, by the way, not being the country so much as the platoon.

Then they come back and they see a country which is racially divided, it's economically divided, it's politically divided. There are powerful, wealthy people frankly getting away with enormous financial crimes without consequences.

It's a country at war with itself, and I think on some level, unconsciously or consciously, it must be quite complicated for soldiers who risked their lives for this country, were wounded maybe, lost friends, to come back and see that the thing they were fighting for is fighting with itself. I think that must be incredibly demoralizing.

Sean Illing
Do you have any ideas about how we could better reintegrate our veterans into society?

Sebastian Junger
Well, do they really want to be reintegrated? The point of my book is that it's a fragmented, alienated society with very high suicide rates. Do we want to help them transition back to something that's psychologically toxic? Is that really doing them a service?

The fact that they are psychologically rebelling against the transition home says something very healthy about them, because they're transitioning to something that if you look at rates of mental illness is obviously not doing anyone much good.

The real question is do we want to help the vets? We help the vets by helping ourselves. How can we transform society so that it is psychologically a more inclusive and welcoming place for everybody? I don't think you can help vets transition to a society that has such basic emotional and psychological problems as ours.

Sean Illing
I associate tribalism with political pathologies — in-group/out-group thinking, nativism, identity politics. But you suggest in the book that tribalism has its benefits. In the context of combat, at least, you describe a tribal orientation as psychologically healthy. Is that right?

Sebastian Junger
We can't get too hung up on the language. My book is about community, and close communal connection of the sort that humans enjoyed and depended on for hundreds of thousands of years. One compelling word for that is tribe. Had I called my book Community, nobody would have bought it. Tribedefinitely has more resonance, more punch.

I've been asked this sort of tribalism question a lot, and I'm like, "Listen, tribalism is bad if you define your tribe too narrowly." If your tribe is your town, and that's it, and you don't care about the rest of the state or the rest of the country, that's not so good. If your tribe is merely your political party, that’s not helpful either.

But what if you define your tribe as this nation? Now we're starting to have a conversation about how we can all function a little bit more communally toward the greater good. The highest form of enlightenment, of course, would be to see the human race as one huge tribe. I don't think there's any evidence in our evolutionary past that we have the neurological wiring to do that, but, hey, you never know.

Sean Illing
The problem with a tribe is that it implies an enemy, some external group against which the in-group defines itself. In that sense, it’s division by definition. Tribalism in combat or a hunter-gatherer context hardly needs a defense, but it’s more problematic in a modern, pluralistic context. Do you see a way around this tension?


Sebastian Junger
Thing is, we do live in a nation, right? We don't have to. We had a civil war, we could be two nations, we could be a collection of states, but we chose not to do that. We actually see ourselves as a nation, and as long as we see ourselves as a nation, it seems to me possible to think more broadly about our collective identity.
Interestingly, Donald Trump said, you either have a country or you don't. He was referring to illegal immigration, but it’s an interesting thing for him to say. Either you have a country or you don't.

If you have a country, you cannot talk about people in your country, your fellow citizens, your president, your government, as if they were the enemy. As if they were the source of the problems within your country, right?
Tribe's fine, talk tribe all you want, but if you're running for public office your definition of tribe has to include everyone in this country, and if it doesn't, you are acting in a deeply unpatriotic and dangerous way.

Sean Illing
You make clear in the book what we’ve lost by throwing off our tribal roots, but what have we gained?

Sebastian Junger
I think we've gained an enormous amount. I think on the whole we've gained a lot more than we've lost. My book is about what we've lost and how that has affected us, but we've got science, we've got medicine, we’ve got countless other luxuries. We know an enormous amount about the natural world, about the cosmos, and about our bodies. We've got rule of law, we've got a very evolved moral system, we've got books.

We've got this incredible heritage of learning and knowledge. Humans have never done this before. We never organized ourselves into groups of a million, 2 million, 3 million people; we've never done that. Humans have never done that before, and it has allowed us to build a robust, advanced civilization.

But there are downsides to the incredible affluence. I think it manifests in the individualization of society and in our chronic loneliness.

Sean Illing
I couldn’t help but think of Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone while reading Tribe. Putnam was among the first social scientists to trace the erosion of social capital in America. In many respects, you tell a similar story in your comparative analysis of modern and tribal culture. Do you believe we can recover the interreliance and cooperation of tribal society in a modern, capitalist context?

Sebastian Junger
There's clearly an adaptive trait in humans, which is to act individually if you possibly can. That's part of our evolutionary heritage as well. I think we're programmed to do that up until the point where doing that endangers us or degrades the quality of our life; then we act communally.

I know people who grew up under communism in Eastern Europe, and as poor and miserable as it often was, it was also, in human terms, very, very rich. Their poverty forced many families to live three generations in one apartment, in ghastly Soviet-era apartment blocks that nevertheless, in the courtyard, had a mixing of many families and many generations, and kids running around and communal child care and all that. That's tribal society right there.

Are those people better off, or worse off? In human terms, they're better off. In modern, economic terms, they're worse off. Ultimately, at the end of the day, what are we living for?

Sean Illing
You write about the sense of belonging and meaning that accompanies crisis. Suffering seems to activate the tribalistic virtues you exalt in the book. My favorite novel is Albert Camus’s The Plague because it’s about shared experience, about how crisis crystallizes our common vulnerability.

Tragedy has a way of stamping out solipsism. When the bombs fall or the hurricane strikes, the "I" becomes a "we" in a way that’s never so apparent in times of comfort. Do you think it’s possible to manufacture that sense of community and solidarity without the oppressive weight of suffering or combat?

Sebastian Junger
No, I don't think it's possible. I think in very transitory ways we can. You can go out and proactively try to cultivate more of a community nature in your neighborhood, and maybe a victory garden, whatever, but it's all voluntary. There are a lot of people who are busy, and they've got a conference call at 10, and then they've got to get in their car and rush off to do this or that. Most people are just not going to participate.

The monetary rewards for putting your energy and time into yourself are greater than the monetary rewards of putting your time and energy into the community. That's a collective good; it's not monetized at all. It's a waste of time in monetary terms.

In a modern, capitalist society you're really not going to get people making decisions where they sideline something that actually pays quite well for something that doesn't — it's not going to happen.

Sean Illing
Reading your book, it seemed to me that you were using the psychological state of our veterans as a measuring stick for the health of our society. So let’s close with the obvious question: After writing this book, do you believe we’re a good or healthy society?

Sebastian Junger
When you use the word bad or good, those are relative terms, they're moral terms, and it depends on how you define them. We're a good society if you define good in the terms that our society defines good as. Every society does that — it's natural.
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But if you step back and ask, are we a human society? In evolutionary terms, no we are not. We do not elevate the moral values that have always kept humans safe and happy and secure for hundreds of thousands of years. We do not elevate those qualities on a national level. In that sense, we are way outside of our evolutionary past and, in many ways, are an anti-human society.

Cross-posted at Vox

This weekend marks the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It’s hard to overstate how transformative that event was for this country. It has defined our politics ever since.  

In 2011, the RAND Corporation published a collection of essays called The Long Shadow of 9/11. The aim was to examine the legacy of 9/11 from a variety of perspectives -- military, fiscal, social, cultural, and policymaking. One of the more instructive essays was called “The Land of the Fearful, or the Home of the Brave?” The author was Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser to the president of RAND and the former chair of its political science department. Against the backdrop of a decade-long “war on terror,” Jenkins posed some important questions: How did 9/11 change America? How differently do we see the world as a result of that attack? How have we altered the balance between liberty and security?

On Thursday, I spoke with Jenkins about his 2011 essay. I wanted to know if his views have changed in the past five years, and if he's more or less optimistic about America's response to the terror problem. A transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length, follows.

Sean Illing: Something that doesn’t receive the attention it deserves is this pivot from war as a response to aggression to war as a preemptive instrument. Under international law, war was always understood to be a tool of last resort. A war was considered just if, among other things, it was waged in self-defense. At the very least, it had to be fought in order redress a wrong or reestablish peaceful relations.

But there’s been a paradigm shift with the “war on terror.” We’re now engaged in a permanent preventive war, where the goal is to eliminate a threat before it is imminent. How significant is this strategic shift in your mind?

Brian Michael Jenkins: Wow. You are right on top of something, Sean. We have, both at the strategic level and at the international level and the domestic individual level, pushed toward preventive war, which is quite new. When you look at warfare traditionally, it’s a response to an act of aggression, at least in our recent history. Instead, what we have seen is an articulation of policy positions that say the United States will take preemptive action, preemptive military action, in order to thwart potential terrorist threats and indeed will engage in preventive military operations.

On the domestic side, the fears created by terrorism have made in the eyes of policymakers and the public a traditional reactive criminal investigative response unsatisfactory. Instead, it has pushed the authorities upstream to take action and to prevent these attacks before they occur. That has meant changing the law. It has expanded the area to which people can be prosecuted on the basis of intentions alone. It is moving us also into a dangerous place, I think.

On the international side, there are a lot of risks associated with this preemptive logic. Certainly, overreaching is one. It also makes it almost impossible to measure progress, because there's no end. You can't say how close you are. It becomes a forever war. It may be that we redefine war and get it out of the notion of a finite undertaking and have to view military operations in much the same way that we look at law enforcement. That is, while we expect police to bring perpetrators to justice, we don't operate under any illusion that at some point the police will defeat crime.

SI: You wrote in your 2011 essay that terrorism provided "a lightning rod for America's broader anxieties," and that "it held a mirror to many of America's most enduring characteristics." Can you explain what you meant by that?

BMJ: I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in December 2001, three months after 9/11, and one of the senators asked me, "Mr. Jenkins, it's been three months since 9/11. Nothing has happened. Are we through it yet?" He was really asking, “Has the prospect of another 9/11 scale attack diminished?”

I think everyone was in agreement that this was going be a long-term task. Had I been able to report that 15 years later our jihadist terrorist foes had been able to kill fewer than 100 people in the United States over the 15-year period -- that certainly would be far less than people feared. I know every death is a tragedy, so I don't want to diminish that and say, "It was just fewer than 100, so what?” But in a country that experiences 14,000 to 15,000 criminal homicides a year, terrorism on this level isn’t going to bring down a republic.

SI: That leads nicely to my follow-up question: Do you think our persistent preoccupation with terrorism scales with the actual threat level?

BMJ: No. They're two separate domains entirely. The fear of what terrorists might do vastly exceeds any realistic assessment of the individual risk. Therefore, if we look at the levels of apprehension, we have to ask, "What is going on here?" The likelihood of an American being killed in the United States at the hands of a terrorist approaches lottery odds. This is not a major threat to our personal security.

But terrorism now has a face. It's a lighting rod, a condenser for broader anxieties. Americans are apprehensive about the changing demographics of the country, the changing ethnic complexion of the country, the status of the United States as a world superpower, about the economic future of the United States. Those anxieties fuel fears of terrorism as the fear of terrorism becomes an expression of these broader anxieties.

SI: You’ve said that "the 9/11 attacks did not create a security state, but they created a state preoccupied with its security." What’s the distinction?

BMJ: We have become obsessed with security. The most frequent question I am asked is, "Are we safer now?" As if that is the sole criteria for measuring what is taking place. We are involved in a struggle, and it is a tough struggle.

This is controversial, but if we include the invasion of Iraq and dealing with the insurgents in Iraq along with the war in Afghanistan as part of the broader post-9/11 military operations, we're talking 10,000 American fatalities, 50,000 wounded, somewhere between $4 trillion and $6 trillion spent. It's not a level anywhere near the level of casualties that we experienced with Vietnam or Korea or World War II, where we lost over 400,000 men and women in combat.

During World War II, I don’t think anyone would ask the question, "Are we safer now?" But this has become our obsession, and it pushes authorities to try to abolish all risk.

SI: Terrorism has become one of our most salient political issues. What are the implications of this in terms of our discourse and our national psychology?

BMJ: It has become an obsession, and I think it's had a distorting effect, and one could say that's precisely what's it's supposed to do. Terrorism is calculated to create an atmosphere of alarm, which will in turn cause people to exaggerate the threat, and it often works. When people see an administrative building in San Bernardino or a nightclub in Orlando attacked, they don’t turn to statisticians and say, "What are the odds of that happening here?" They are frightened, and therefore terrorism has this corrosive effect on a broader society.

SI: One thing that concerns me is our response to another 9/11-like attack, which seems to me inevitable. Are you confident that we won't overreact when or if this happens?

BMJ: I'm not nationally recognized in the field of prophecy, so I'm not going to say whether there could or could never be another 9/11-scale attack. I don't know. I think we are far better-equipped now than we were before 9/11.

SI: Perhaps not on the scale of 9/11, but I think it's inevitable that there will be other major attacks.

BMJ: There will be other attacks. My point is that an attack would not have to achieve the scale of the 9/11 to provoke an extraordinary reaction. A terrorist attack does not have to kill thousands. If we experienced in an American city what Paris experienced last fall, that might suffice to propel us into an extraordinary response abroad and in this county. It doesn't have to hit the 9/11 record to provoke the overreaction.

Again, if we look at the polling, immediately after 9/11 about 41 percent of the American people were frightened at the possibility of another terrorist attack taking place within weeks. That speaks to the efficacy of terrorism as a tactic.

SI: From our perch in 2016, can you say that we’ve sustained the shock of 9/11 without sacrificing our core values and principles as a country?

BMJ: I think we have. It would be erroneous to claim that civil liberties have been savaged. That will provoke a quarrel on the part of some people who make a good case that we have done things that are contrary to our basic values in terms of interrogation, in terms of intelligence, in terms of torture, in terms of some of these prosecutions.

But we haven't abandoned our systems and our laws entirely. We've involved ourselves in activities that were outside the rules, which has been revealed, and we're debating these now. I think that that tension, that debate, is absolutely essential. That's what you do in a free society.
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Are there some concerns? Absolutely. But I don't think we’ve ripped up the Constitution. We have, however, put into place an awful lot that under a less benign government or a more frightened citizenry could become the basis for extraordinary changes in our society. So there’s a risk of incremental tyranny against which we have to guard.

Cross-posted at Vox

Louisiana is underwater.

If you don’t live in or around Louisiana, you may not know that. And it’s not your fault. Cable news has mostly ignored it. Sure, there’s been coverage, but not as much you’d expect given the scale of the suffering. As Rod Dreher noted on his blog, a screenshot of CNN’s home page over the weekend was conspicuously silent on this story. Among other stupidities, Adele’s admission that she can’t dance was deemed more newsworthy than a drowning American state.

To recap, parts of Southern and Central Louisiana absorbed two feet of rain in less than three days last week (For perspective, that’s basically a Seattle rainy season’s worth of rain). This was an unprecedented weather event. Areas with no history of flooding were deluged, leaving many without the protections of flood insurance. Baton Rouge, a major city in the region, was utterly devastated. Motorists were stranded on interstates. Whole neighborhoods were washed away. Parents were separated from children. Tens of thousands of people were rendered homeless. Major roads and highways were destroyed. In Denham Springs, an adjacent town, 90 percent of homes were decimated by flood waters. The figures are scarcely better in the surrounding parishes.
The aerial footage is apocalyptic.

All told, something like 20,000 Louisianans have been displaced, and over 10,000 are taking refuge in makeshift shelters. Seven people have died. Twelve parishes have been declared federal disaster zones. These numbers will rise in the coming days. The rain has subsided, but the water has not. There’s nowhere for it to go as the rivers remain high and thus cannot take runoff from the tributaries.

This is already the worst natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and it’s far from over.

In Louisiana, there’s a gnawing sense that the national media seems wholly uninterested in this disaster. One listens in vain for a mention of the floods amid the breathless coverage of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s email testimony. I monitored the news over the weekend and was disturbed by the indifference. The historic floods felt like an afterthought, a throwaway segment sandwiched between Buick commercials.

Sadly, this is not surprising. There is no such thing as television news in this country. There are networks that peddle entertainment under the guise of news. Networks care about narratives, stories they can fit into familiar boxes and bundle for audiences. If a suspicious package was left at a mall in Toledo on Sunday, cable news would’ve covered it with greater care than they did Louisiana this weekend. Why? Because it’s Islamic terrorism, and that’s scary and an obvious ratings boon. Hurricane Katrina received non-stop coverage, but that was about race and class and privilege and a famous American city – human suffering was merely incidental. It’s not that such stories aren’t deserving of coverage. The issue is how comparatively little attention a story like this receives, a story of devastating consequence, and, clearly, a story that doesn’t fit neatly into pre-established media narratives. It’s just regular people living out their Sisyphean nightmares in places no one cares about.

If this storm had a name or if it happened in a city the country recognizes, anchors and camera crews would abound. Instead, it’s a half-reported B-story. The disaster porn coverage networks liberally apply to non-stories all the damn time isn’t coming. But this is a sprawling human tragedy, and it’s happening right now, just beyond the view of a media more interested in Justin Bieber’s Instagram status than in the sufferings of flyover country.
I lived in Louisiana nearly half of my life. I know the people there. They’re a strong, spirited lot. They have a way of singing and dancing around pain. They’ll close ranks and deal with the challenges ahead. But more people should know about their struggle. That so many don’t is itself a tragedy, and the national media is largely to blame. They appear to be coming around to the horrors they neglected, a good thing to be sure, but shame on them for taking so long.

Cross-posted at Salon

In the last two weeks, Donald Trump has slandered the family of a dead soldier, committed treason by inviting Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email account, admitted he lied about receiving a letter from the NFL, saw an Air Force mother get booed at one of his rallies, claimed Russia wouldn’t invade Ukraine even though they already have, refused to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan’s candidacy, falsely accused a fire marshal of limiting his crowd for political reasons, tossed a baby out of a rally, and called Hillary Clinton “the devil.”

That’s as bad as it gets. CNN reports that even Trump’s campaign staff feels “like they are wasting their time” at this point. John Harwood similarly claims a close ally of Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort told him the veteran operative can’t control his candidate and is now “mailing it in.”Joe Scarborough, the conservative commentator, earnestly questioned Trump’s “mental wellbeing” on the his show Wednesday morning. “There is nothing rational about this behavior at all,” Scarborough said. “It’s as if he’s trying to blow himself up.”

Four months ago, several observers floated the idea that Donald Trump was a self-saboteur. “To all outward appearances,” John Fund wrote in The National Review, “Trump seems to be engaged in a form of self-sabotaging behavior in which people both move toward a goal and then from deep within do things to defeat themselves.” This was a fair question at the time. Trump showed no interest in the mechanics of campaigning. He showed even less interest in policy. And he continually undermined his campaign with needlessly offensive gaffes.

A few days before Fund’s piece was published, Stephanie Cegielski, former communications director of the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great again, ran an open letter to Trump supporters. In it Cegielski argued that Trump was, in fact, a self-saboteur. “I don’t think even Trump thought he would go this far,” she wrote, “and I don’t even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all…What was once his desire to rank second place to send a message to America and increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country.”

More to the point, Cegielski added: “I believe Trump senses he is in over his head and doesn’t really want the nomination. He wanted to help his brand and have fun, but not to be savaged by the Clintons if he’s the candidate. He wouldn’t mind falling short of a delegate majority, losing the nomination, and then playing angry celebrity victim in the coming years.”

That last point about losing and playing the victim is critical. Trump is already working to seed the narrative. “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” he told supporters at a rally in Ohio on Monday afternoon, referencing fanciful reports of voter fraud. The next day, in Virginia, he repeated the claim: “We gotta beat a totally dishonest machine…We’re running against a rigged system, and we’re running against a dishonest media.”

This is a no-lose strategy for Trump. His core audience is disposed to distrust the media and all things establishment. By implying the system is rigged against him now, he delegitimizes the process in the minds of his voters, who clearly don’t care about the facts and thus won’t flinch when they’re told voter fraud is a mythical problem. An ongoing study by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, for example, found that “an examination of voter fraud claims reveal that voter fraud is very rare, voter impersonation is nearly non-existent, and much of the of the problems associated with alleged fraud in elections relates to unintentional mistakes by voters or election administrators.” But this is really beside the point.

Trump has lied with impunity since he launched his non-campaign, and it hasn’t mattered one bit. He appeared on Sean Hannity’s show Monday night and said, “I’ve been hearing about it [voter fraud] for a long time. I know last time you had precincts were there were practically nobody voting for Republican and I think that’s wrong…people were curious, how is it possible?” Like his claim that “thousands” of Muslims were rejoicing in the streets after 9/11, this is total bullshit. Is there any doubt Trump plucked this imaginary memory out of the ether? If a journalist was in the room, she would’ve asked which precincts he was referring to? Instead, Hannity, a consummate hack, mumbled a one-word response: “Absolutely.”

There’s no good reason to suppose Trump wants to be president. Running for president? Sure. That’s a path to political celebrity. But he’s given no indication that he’s serious about doing the job. He doesn’t know what a presidential candidate has to know, and he’s doesn’t care that he doesn’t know. He even implied to John Kasich’s adviser that his VP “would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.” That’s essentially the entire job of the president.

Trump is a little man with a big ego who likes the idea of being president but wants nothing to do with the responsibilities that entails. I suspect this was always about him – his brand, his fame, his business. That he’s made it this far without a plan or a vision or a plausible defense of his candidacy has to be a shock even to Trump. The best possible outcome now is for him to lose without appearing to quit. Then he can retreat to the world of entertainment with an inflated celebrity and a legion of alienated supporters convinced their hero-charlatan was wronged by a corrupt system.
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If this isn’t what Trump has in mind, the only other explanation for his self-destructive behavior is that he’s completely unhinged. Which, I confess, is entirely possible.

Cross-posted at Salon

Since Richard Nixon’s administration, the GOP has walked a thin line: They wanted to be the party of racists and ethno-nationalists without actually being racist or ethno-nationalist. It was called the “Southern Strategy,” and it was a smashing success. The party of Lincoln absorbed the segregationist white South and the GOP became the default option for nativists and cultural discontents. It was a risky long-term bet, but the string of electoral victories made it immediately rewarding.

And then Donald Trump happened.
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Trump has violated the unwritten rule in Republican politics: You court the racists, but you do it discreetly. Trump has put his racism front and center, and it earned him the most primary votes in the history of the Republican Party. After 50 years of flirting with the “silent majority,” the GOP now has an intractable demand-side problem, and the election results prove it.

Political scientist Michael Tesler pointed this out in a recent analysis of Trump’s campaign. Previously, race was implicit in Republican rhetoric. Republicans have long been more likely to hold racist beliefs, but ostensibly they weren’t voting on the basis of those beliefs. Not so this year.

Tesler writes: “Donald Trump’s campaign effectively bucked what the political scientists Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders adroitly termed the Republican Party’s electoral temptation of race – using implicit racial appeals to win over racially conservative voters without appearing overtly racist. Trump’s play instead was to make several explicitly hostile statements about minority groups.”

Trump’s amoral pandering has activated anti-minority sentiment in an uncommonly powerful way this year. Drawing on data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) and the 2012 CCAP, Tesler shows that Trump succeeded because he appealed to the most racially resentful primary voters. Those who scored highest on racial resentment were roughly 30 percent more likely to vote Trump in the primaries. The same is true of voters with strong anti-Muslim attitudes.

Importantly, Tesler writes, the 2016 “pattern is noticeably different from 2008 and 2012, when racial conservatism had a slightly negative relationship with support for the eventual GOP nominees.” Now, in other words, racism isn’t merely correlated with voting preferences; it appears to be the motivating factor. I use the word “appears” deliberately here, as causation is difficult to prove. But these numbers certainly suggest a causal relationship. And when you consider that Trump launched his campaign by self-identifying as a “Birther,” his appeal is fairly obvious.

This is not surprising. Trump is a political entrepreneur par excellence. He understood his audience (read: customers) and gave them exactly what they wanted: cutural resentment wrapped in nationalist rhetoric and racist innuendo. In doing so, he pulled back the curtain on Republican politics. Things have changed. There’s no point in dog-whistling to racists once your party has nominated a “textbook racist,” to borrow Paul Ryan’s phrase.

But there may be good news. A Trump-like Republican candidate was inevitable and therefore necessary. The GOP had to explode at some point. Party elites could not preserve the balance forever. Establishment Republicans are essentially libertarians. They pay lip service to culture war issues, but all they care about is low taxes and limited government. These policies don’t benefit working class whites, so they tethered them to racial and cultural narratives. But now those racial and cultural narratives have supplanted the conservative ideology they were designed to help inaugurate. Trump doesn’t have an ideology. He doesn’t have ideas. He’s just a conduit for fear. And he’s the face of the party.

Republicans now have an opportunity to course correct. The “Southern Strategy” has culminated in Trump, and it has to end with Trump. Make no mistake: this is an existential crisis for the GOP. They can recognize Trump as the political Frankenstein they helped build and set about redefining the party or they can fall into line and watch the party sink deeper into cultural rot.

Although Republican leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continue to disgrace themselves by disavowing everything Trump says while refusing to rescind their endorsements, many Republicans have seen the light. CNN reported last week that Mitt Romney is considering voting for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. The first GOP Congressman announced Tuesday that he won’t vote for Trump. Several Republican senators have already taken a stand. Others like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Lindsey Graham have been admirably critical of their nominee. And scores of conservative intellectuals, including George Will, have drawn a line with Trump.

On Monday, former Jeb Bush adviser Sally Bradshaw told CNN she’s leaving the party, and for familiar reasons: “I’ve been considering a switch for months. Ultimately, I could not abide the hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump and his complete lack of principles and conservative philosophy.” After Trump’s recent slander of the Khan family, one suspects more Republicans will follow Bradshaw out the door.

I’m not a conservative, but conservatism has a rich intellectual tradition, one worthy of engagement. Liberals benefit from their collisions with those ideas. The country does, too. What we have now isn’t an ideological or even a political debate. Instead, we have a culture war and thus an argument that no one can win.

Republicans will likely lose in November. But after that they ought to use Trump as an excuse to ideologically reboot. The culture war is over. Politics adapts to culture, not the other way around, and the country has spoken. Progressives have won the legislative battle. The GOP cannot survive if it doesn’t accept that. If they do, they can become something closer to Gary Johnson, a fiscally conservative and socially liberal candidate who accepts LGBT Americans, doesn’t race-bait, affirms the separation of church and state, wants to end the drug war, and has no interest in legislating morality.

That’s a Republican Party with a future. The current GOP is an anti-intellectual cultural movement death-rattling its way to extinction. Trump’s nomination makes that abundantly clear.

Cross-posted at Salon

Ten years from now, people will remember one moment from the Democratic convention: An appearance by the bereaved parents of Army Captain Humayun Khan. Powerful and undeniably authentic, the remarks by Khizr Khan cut to the bone of the argument against Donald Trump. These were two immigrant parents, two Muslim-Americans, whose son died in defense of his country and men. They’re a living refutation of Trump’s ethno-nationalist narrative.

“Our son, Humayun, had dreams too, of being a military lawyer, but he put those dreams aside the day he sacrificed his life to save the lives of his fellow soldiers,” Khan said on Thursday night. “If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America.”

“Let me ask you,” Khan added, “have you even read the United States constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”

These are strong words. Trump isn’t obliged to accept them, but there’s a modicum of tact required given the circumstances. The right response was obvious: thank the Khans for their sacrifice, honor their son’s heroism, and move on. Any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, would have done just that. But not Trump. His instinct was to attack, and in this case insult a Gold Star mother. At this point, we expect crudity from the GOP nominee. But this time a non-comment seemed likely. After all, these are grieving parents speaking eloquently about the loss of their son, an Army Captain, who died in combat. Trump couldn’t help himself, however.

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there,” Trump told a national television audience. “She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.” The implication is clear: Ghazala Khan wasn’t permitted to speak because she is Muslim. And Trump wasn’t misspeaking here. He doubled down in a separate interview with Maureen Dowd: “I’d like to hear his wife say something.”

This is a shameless slander. First, Ghazala Khan already spoke publicly about her son on MSNBC last week, during which she was reduced to tears. Still grieving, she allowed her husband to speak on the family’s behalf at the DNC. But this really isn’t the point. What Trump said was disgusting, untrue, and an affront to the entire Khan family.

It has to be said again: Donald Trump is a little man, a tiny tyrant puffed up by his own bullshit. He cannot countenance criticism of any kind, and the irony of his tough guy shtick is now unbearable. Here’s a guy so internally weak that he’s baiting the parents of a dead solider into a PR contest that he cannot win, and for what? Pride? Ego? It doesn’t matter. This is not the stuff of leaders. It’s also not new. Trump has blithely offended women, veterans, African-Americans, Mexican-American, and disabled people. Who’s left? As James Carville told me, “First it was POWs. Now it’s Gold Star moms. Next it’ll be war widows and orphans.”

Every single Republican who looks the other way, who continues to excuse this insanity, will spend the rest of their political lives defending their supine inaction. With Trump we are well beyond typical political cleavages. As Vox’s Ezra Klein put it, this isn’t “simply Democrat vs. Republican, but normal vs. abnormal.”

Prominent Republicans, including Trump’s VP nominee, have wisely distanced themselves from their nominee’s remarks. Jeb Bush said “This is incredibly disrespectful of a family that endured the ultimate sacrifice for our country.” Sen. Lindsey Graham said “This is going to a place where we’ve never gone before…There used to be some things that were sacred in American politics.” House Speaker Paul Ryan issued an obligatory statement praising the troops and insisting “a religious test for entering our country is not reflective” of American values. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck a similar note in a statement released on Sunday: “Capt. Khan was an American hero, and like all Americans I’m grateful for the sacrifices that selfless young men like Capt. Khan and their families have made in the war on terror.”

Let’s be clear: None of these criticisms matter if the person making them still endorses Donald Trump for president. The rhetorical contortions won’t work. You can’t say, on the one hand, that Trump is a “textbook racist” who doesn’t reflect American values and, on the other, say you’re supporting him for president of the United States. This is more than a contradiction. It’s cowardice.

There has to be a line. Politics has to give way to basic decency. Trump has become a mirror for everything base in our body politic. He doesn’t respect the process. He doesn’t respect the rule of law. And he’s made himself a conduit for fear without any regard for the consequences. It’s about “winning,” and nothing besides. Trump’s campaign is a monument to our own hate and stupidity, and serious Republicans cannot support him without owning that.

Khan said it best this weekend. Trump is “totally unfit for the presidency” and Republicans have “a moral obligation” to withdraw their support.” “History,” Khan added, “will not forgive them.”
Is there any doubt he’s right about that?

Cross-posted at Salon

Jill Stein is the Green Party's 2016 presidential candidate. A practicing physician, Stein has only held one elected office in her life, serving as a town meeting seat holder in Lexington, MA. But she has a decades-long history of progressive activism, working with non-profits and grassroots organizations to combat environmental injustice and financial corruption, among other things.

Dr. Stein is the lesser known of the two third-party candidates. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, has received far more media attention. But Stein has amassed a following on the far left. Wisely, she has seized on Bernie Sanders's capitulation to Hillary Clinton, using her Twitter account to lure his disillusioned supporters. “I call on the millions inspired by Bernie's call for political revolution to reject the self-defeating strategy of voting for the lesser evil,” she wrote two weeks ago.

On Wednesday, I sat down with Dr. Stein a few blocks from the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. I wanted to know why she was running and how she would respond to some of the common criticisms of her and the Green Party. I had only 15 minutes and thus little time for counterpoints. I posed the questions and got out of the way. Readers will have to decide whether she engaged the points I raised or whether her answers are persuasive.

Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

You've been very critical of Bernie Sanders, particularly since he capitulated to Clinton. You said recently that he was “lulled into compliance” by the Democratic Party. Do you think he's a sellout? Has he betrayed progressives?

No, I don't think so. I really respect what Bernie has done and never expected anything different. Bernie's a man of his word and he always said he would support the nominee. I extended an olive branch to him and I still hope that someday there will be a collaboration. This is a movement he gave life to, and his fingerprints are all over it and I think we owe him a debt of gratitude.

You've told progressives that there aren't enough differences between the parties to save the planet or their lives or their jobs. But only one party acknowledges the reality of climate change, only one party believes in universal health care, only one party rejects the phantasm of trickle down economics, only one party affirms a woman's right to control her reproductive cycle. Democrats don't always deliver on the policy front, but much of that has to do with Republican obstructionism. In any case, are these not hugely consequential differences between the parties?

Well, lip service in one thing but the track record is another, and as a scientist and a medical doctor, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that what we did under all of the above was actually worse for the climate then under “Drill Baby Drill.” All of the above turned out to be “Drill Baby Drill” on steroids because it totally took the lid off of fossil fuel extraction and production. So nature doesn't care about renewable energy – people care, but nature doesn't. So yes, all of the above gave us more renewable energy but it massively increased the output of fossil fuels and in fact the rate of increase of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere actually got a lot worse and is accelerating under a decade of Democratic policies. The Democrats promote fracking and “Drill Baby Drill” under all of the above. And by the way, we did have two Democratic houses of congress – why did they flip? Because Obama turned out to be a lesser evil president. He choose to bail out Wall Street. He choose to bring back Larry Summers, the architect of the Wall Street meltdown. That's why people went from blue to red. That's what's stimulating Donald Trump. If there's ever to be any hope of defeating Donald Trump, it's not gonna come from a Clinton neoliberal White House.

What's your response to those , such as Dan Savage, who say the Green Party makes no real, concerted effort to build itself up from the local level? The Green Party is rarely heard from beyond presidential elections. It seems to me a populist party would do well to develop its infrastructure more strategically, to raise awareness by pushing viable candidates in winnable contests around the country. It's a long game to be sure, but is there any other way to become a national brand? Focusing on symbolic presidential campaigns every 4 years seems ill-conceived at best, self-indulgent at worst.

That's just wrong. Dan Savage is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts, and he's completely uninformed. In fact, he makes the case for why we need to run at the national level, because otherwise we're ignored by the press, we're ignored by the pundits, we're ignored by the apologists and the elitists. We have a very strong movement and the Green Party is the national voice for it. We are running on all levels of political office, from librarians to school committees up to city councils and governors and for Congress.

Do you currently have any Green Party members serving as governors or competing seriously in gubernatorial campaigns? Do you have any members serving in Congress?

Do we have a system that actually allows people to know about who's running? See, we're kept off the ballot. Maybe that's news to you, but we actually have an extremely oppressive system. What happened? Why is it only the Green Party? We used to have multiple parties? We used to have a Labor Party? Why did they disappear? They had more funding. They had the infrastructure of the labor movement. They had the unions behind them. They were pushed off the political map by the scare campaigns, by the apologists for this predatory political system. In fact, we cannot run for local office unless we're also running for president – I bet Dan Savage didn't know that. So in order to run locally we have to run at the national level.

It's so funny that these pundits and party operatives are very busy telling people who are being thrown under the bus to be good little boys and girls to just follow marching orders and don't go outside of the political parties who are raking you over the coals. People are sick and tired of that.

In 2000, people implored Ralph Nader to run only in “safe states.” (non-swing states). He refused to do so and we know what happened. The idea was to allow progressives to vote their conscience in greater numbers and send a message to the Democratic Party without empowering the GOP. Voters know the Green Party or the Libertarian Party candidates aren't going to win. These are protest votes, and more people would cast them if they were confident they weren't doing Donald Trump or George W. Bush a solid. This matters a great deal to people who detest the two-party system but care deeply about core liberal principles or the balance of the Supreme Court. Why won't you do what many now wish Nader did?

Well, do we know what really happened in 2000? Didn't the Supreme Court call off the recount that Al Gore would have won? Gore refused to stand up. He just rolled over for the Supreme Court.

But the 2000 election isn't merely about Florida. Gore lost New Hampshire by something like 7,000 votes. Nader received over 20,000 votes in New Hampshire. This is a state Democrats have won in every presidential election since 1992 save for 2000. It's pretty clear Gore would've won if Nader wasn't on the ballot. That alone would've flipped the election.

Well, did he have a right to those votes? Do politicians have a new form of entitlement? Are they entitled to our votes? I think they have to earn our votes. And right now, Hillary Clinton doesn't have our votes. Nor does Donald Trump. In fact, the recent CNN poll shows the majority of their supporters don't support them – they're opposing the other candidate. So what's wrong with this system where people are voting against what they fear rather than for what they want. We're in a completely different time than the 2000 election, because most people have now rejected the Republican and Democratic parties. We can also see what the track record is of this politics of fear. It delivered everything we were afraid of, all the reasons you were supposed to vote for the lesser evil. We didn't want the expanding wars. We didn't want the melting climate. We didn't want the big bailouts and the attacks on immigrants, but this is what we got. Democracy needs a moral compass and we have to lead the way.

Speaking of lesser evils, you tweeted earlier today that there's “no evidence that Hillary Clinton is less evil than Donald Trump.” I think the words “evidence” and “evil” are mostly useless here. Trump doesn't have a record. All we have is his rhetoric and his behavior as a candidate, both of which are obscene and terrifying. So would you at least admit that there are more reasons to worry about a Trump presidency than a Clinton presidency? For all her faults, Clinton is a competent adult. Trump is a dangerous buffoon. Does that concern you at all?

Here's what I'm most worried about: Hillary Clinton gets into office and she has a Congress that's going to work with her. She's going to take us into an air war with Russia over Syria. She wants to start a no-fly zone. She wants to go head-to-head with a nuclear-armed power that Hillary's done a pretty good job of provoking these days. So we could slip into nuclear warfare like that, given Hillary Clinton's judgment and track record and her militarism. I think that is as realistic a scenario as anything.

Ok, but my question is, do you think there's a meaningful difference between Trump and Clinton? Is one not objectively scarier than the other?

I'm terrified of Donald Trump. I'm terrified of Hillary Clinton. And I'm most terrified of a political system and people who apologize for it. I'm terrified of people who tell us that we have two deadly choices and we must pick our weapon of self-destruction. We should not resign ourselves to a trajectory that is making a beeline for oblivion. The day of reckoning on climate is coming closer and closer, and I don't regard Hillary Clinton as one iota safer than Donald Trump on the climate. She's been promoting fracking around the world. Maybe she's the most effective evil. She gets a lot of people to do what she wants. She's got a whole Democratic Party system behind her, which has proven itself extremely effective and extremely dangerous.

Does the possibility of losing the Supreme Court for a generation trouble you? At the very least, Clinton would choose justices who would preserve women's rights and make crucial judgements about campaign finance and gun laws.

Like her vice presidential choice who does not support a woman's right to choose and has supported restrictions on abortion.

To be fair, I believe those are Tim Kaine's personal beliefs, not his policy positions. He has drawn a distinction between these things.

Well, he has supported policies that will restrict the right to choose. So I don't have faith in Hillary Clinton. We are the ones who should be pressuring the Supreme Court. This is how we got Roe v. Wade to start with in an extremely conservative court. This is how we brought the troops home from Vietnam, how we got the EPA, the Clean Air Act the Clean Water Act, and protections for workers under one of the most corrupt conservative presidents ever in the form of Richard Nixon. So we've been incredibly disempowered by drinking this Kool-aid that tells us we're powerless. I think we are whole people on a whole planet and when we get together on an agenda for people, planet, and peace over profit, we are an unstoppable movement. We are moving forward. We are the only campaign that can stop Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders could have stopped Donald Trump. He was beating him in every poll? Why did the DNC take him down? If Trump prevails, we have the DNC to thank for it.

I know you have to run, so one last question: If our choice was ultimately reduced to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, who would you rather live with? Who would more reliably defend progressive values?

Do we live in Iran where they tell us we have one or two choices. We live in the United States of America. We live in a democracy. We are building that democracy, and that democracy doesn't consist of two deadly choices.

Is that to say that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are equivalent evils in your mind?

I am not voting for either of them. I will not sleep at night with either of them elected, and I will work to move forward that political revolution so that we can actually have a democracy and a planet on which we can survive and thrive. Hillary Clinton is only going to fan the flames of the right-wing extremism supporting the Donald Trumps of the world.  

Cross-posted at Salon

Donald Trump is telling these marks in the crowd that marauding illegal immigrants are plundering their neighborhoods and endangering their lives. And yet crime rates today are precisely half what they were 25 years go. HALF. This man is utterly and completely full of shit. The whole speech is stuffed with lies. Trump doesn't even bother to couch his lies in half-truths. He knows the undiscerning dolts on the other end won't notice. Just as they fail to distinguish an asshole from a leader or a plan from a platitude. And Republican leaders, being good automatons, are thoughtlessly falling into line.
​
I want to be reasonable and engage the other side, but they're so cynical (exploiting base fears), so dishonest ("Hillary wants to abolish the 2nd Amendment"), that we're obligated to see them as the swindlers that they are. This is a disgrace. A nation founded by the likes of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson has been reduced to a lumbering republic death-rattling its way to banana republic status. It hurts to watch this. It really does. I don't understand it. I understand conservatism and liberalism and everything in between, but this is beyond conventional politics. This is fascism in its mildest, most distilled form. And it ought to terrify everyone. Because its a symptom of cultural and intellectual decadence.

​Trump is and must be seen as a monument to our own stupidity.