The “That’s No Ballroom, It’s a Space Station!” Edition

Even before the weather forecasts proved my point, I made sure to get my More Stable Family the hell out of Washington and up to Cape Cod for a More Stable Fourth. I just didn’t want to spend my Fourth around a bunch of MAGAs and military occupiers; I didn’t think the Second Confederate President also would build a shitty “state fair” with bad exhibits and totally inadequate cooling/hydration stations with no real plan for bad weather and so many fireworks they’d actually harm the air quality. He’s not only happy to harm DC residents, he’s equally happy to harm his own supporters. And in the end, he didn’t even seem to enjoy himself:

Honestly, Palpatine did it better:

Up here “on Cape,” we had a scorcher of a July 4 at 86 degrees! The town parade still went off without a hitch, led by the grand marshal, a 102-year-old who fought through Germany with the 1st Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”) and served as a guard at the Nuremberg Trials. The first musical float played John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” and that totally captured the spirit of the day.

Cape Cod is the most “purple” place in Massachusetts – almost 40% voted Trump. At this time of year, it’s got vacationers from all over the country. The parade was wonderfully civil. The town Democratic Committee had a presence, though the Republicans did not – I’ve seen them show up before, so I don’t know why they didn’t this year. Local Democratic elected officials were there, as was the no-hope Republican candidate for the local congressional seat, who was received perfectly civilly. I know nothing about him, but at least he has a perfect alibi for the July 4 Patriot Front rally in DC, so that’s something.

I saw only two overt political statements in the rally, neither of which seemed to stir anyone: the float of a local boating club flew an American flag upside down. There is no way people in boating do that by oversight, considering an upside-down flag is a universal distress signal. Later, a classic car flew a small American flag and a small “Blue Lives Matter” flag—the kind that has one blue stripe and puts the rest of the flag in black and white. I love these people because they tell on themselves, not just in how this violates the “flag code” they claim to love, but also in how it deliberately integrates the colors of the Nazi SS into the American Flag. Thank you for your candor, if not your service!

For myself… I put my cap (a NATO International Security Assistance Force ballcap I bought in at a Canadian shop in Kandahar in 2007) over my heart when the leading flag-bearer and the Coast Guard color guard marched by, because that’s how I was raised. On my own home, I put up my American Flag with the Rebel Alliance symbol in the canton, as you see on my logo. I love this country and honor its flag, but I cannot embrace a flag with only 50 stars after seeing my fellow DC citizens tear-gassed in 2020, our city rampaged by Proud Boys in 2021, and military occupation today. DC statehood is my litmus test for the post-Trump era; 51 is the minimum number of stars on the next flag I fly.

The Big Idea

The first time our protagonists in Star Wars see the Death Star, it’s so huge they think it’s a small moon. It’s Obi-Wan Kenobi who first says, “That’s no moon; it’s a space station!”

Trump’s ballroom can’t destroy the planet – that’s what his environmental policies are for – but it certainly is a battle station. Trump has been very open about this.

This is an AI image he posted on Truth Social. Those drones don’t look designed to surveil the Reflecting Pool, do they? He’s also modifying the northern face of the building and shutting off Pennsylvania Avenue.

Trump is taking DC hostage. He’s building himself a fortress he can hold out in indefinitely, where he only needs a few hundred firm supporters to sustain him if and when his megalomaniacal project to become a dictator comes crashing down, as I believe it will. With “unlimited drones” in the White House compound, he can target anyone in the DC area. If people try to force him out in 2029, he won’t even need many loyal troops to do the job of attacking protesters.

In the ultimate crisis, where the military backs the pro-democracy side and moves to drag him out of the White House, he’ll threaten to destroy the Washington Monument, or the Lincoln Memorial, or at the very least ensure that the White House itself would sustain massive damage in the effort. If you’re thinking the guy who loosed a mob on Congress, illegally tore down the East Wing, and uprooted the South Lawn of the White House to install an Ultimate Fighting ring wouldn’t do these things, you’re crazy

What can we do to prevent this? Not a goddamned thing. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. There’s nothing left to “prevent.” Do you care about monuments more than you care about the democratic republic they symbolize? I’m pretty sure I know what Washington and Lincoln would have said about that. There comes a point where all we can do is what we do, and let the chips fall where they may. As Winston Churchill said to Hitler during the Blitz, “we will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do you worst, and we will do our best.”

I’m returning to a theme. We are in revolutionary times. In revolutionary times, the worst thing we can do is try to hold on to the forms and norms we appreciated before Trump. They’re gone. Either we build something new, or we accept what he’s building.

Mea Culpa

I apologize: I believed in Graham Platner. Intellectually, he said everything I wanted to hear. Politically, he was the obvious choice to me: the best Chuck Schumer could come up with against him was Janet Mills, a popular governor, but a politician even older than Susan Collins who was so clearly uninterested in the job of Senator that she barely even mustered a front-porch campaign. In this sense, I was less pro-Platner than I was anti-anti-Platner; and I stand by that. It was Dems’ job to come up with someone better than him, and they didn’t, as the Democratic voters of Maine soundly confirmed.

I’m too afraid of needles ever to get a tattoo, but I’ve been a drunk young man out with friends in the Balkans before, and I can imagine stumbling into a tattoo parlor, seeing something that looks badass, getting it, and then going on for years thinking of it as a memento of a great night with friends, whatever its darker meaning. I wanted to look past this in Platner and see a redemption tale of a vet who’s clearly struggling with PTSD, and his eloquence and charisma on the trail made that seem possible.

Maybe no one ever is too far gone for redemption, but there certainly comes a point where someone is far gone enough that their redemption arc doesn’t need to include the U.S. Senate. I hope Platner gets the help he needs and/or the accountability he deserves, and I hope Maine Democrats come up with a good alternative candidate to face Susan Collins, who may not have a Nazi tattoo, but votes Nazi whenever it matters.

Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad DSA?

Since the Democratic congressional primaries in New York and Colorado, we’re seeing a number of candidates coming into the Democratic Party as members or affiliates of the Democratic Socialists of America. At a time when the pro-democracy coalition needs to expand more than ever, the success of these DSA-aligned candidates seems to be breaking the brains of what passes for “leadership” in the Democratic Party. A lot of people who told disgruntled Sanders supporters in 2016, 2020, and 2024 that they needed to “vote blue no matter who” suddenly seem to have strict conditions on “who.”

I’m not a huge DSA fan. I’ve always viewed Bernie Sanders as a gadfly, maybe with some good ideas, but utterly incapable of national executive leadership. To say his critique of America’s problems or Democratic leadership is correct is not to say that he’s the solution. I’m a bigger fan of Elizabeth Warren, but as brilliant as she is she also showed she doesn’t have the skillset for the presidency, nor does she claim to belong to the DSA, though her views are certainly close to many of theirs. It seems pretty clear that some of the DSA’s younger members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani are generational political talents.

I consider myself a committed Liberal, perhaps a Left-Liberal, maybe even a Social Democrat – which still isn’t the same as a Democratic Socialist. But then, I suspect most people voting Democratic Socialist aren’t really Democratic Socialists themselves, if they really thought through my distinctions above.

I don’t buy into the basic Marxist class-based premise of the world Democratic Socialists seem to have. I’ve been in too many ex-Communist counties that all fell apart from their own inefficiency and corruption or from nationalisms that 50 years of state-enforced class consciousness somehow failed to suppress. At the end of the day, what Marx missed is that nationality and culture are more immutable than class, which always has at least a very faint amount of mobility – just enough to convince lower classes they’ve got a shot at being upper classes someday. But there’s nothing that will convince a Frenchman he’ll someday be English or German, or should want to be. America is - or was - the exception to that kind of thinking.

Despite all that, I welcome the DSA’s growing footprint in the Democratic Party, because God knows someone needs to be shaking it up if it’s going to be an effective opposition as we spiral into authoritarianism. I’m deeply unimpressed by those Democratic leaders who scornfully look on the DSA as upstarts, and while there are some similarities, I’m particularly disgusted by those who refer to them as a “Democratic Tea Party.”

For all their faux economic populism, the guiding spirit of the Tea Party was the disgusting Obama “Birther” myth, and they were massively astroturfed with conservative money, particularly from the Kochs. The Tea Party was a Nationalist project only thinly disguised as an economic one. The DSA may not have the right answers, but they’re absolutely asking the right questions.

As we welcome their expanded role in our coalition, I think there are a number of considerations we should bear in mind:

Generational Change: Sanders aside, more than anything else the DSA represents a younger generation of leadership, and as an “old” myself (at the younger end!) the resistance I see to that younger generation disgusts me. The most revealing contests in this regard have to be Platner vs Mills in Maine and Darializa Avila Chevalier vs Adriano Espaillat in the NY-13 congressional district.

I am not here to defend Platner (cf above) or Chevalier: both have serious issues, and while Chevalier can’t possibly lose her election – and may become the most irrelevant gadfly in Congress - Platner might end up costing us the Senate. But what’s terribly instructive from these campaigns is the institutional Democratic response, which only justifies the choices of Platner and Chevalier voters.

In New York, Espaillat – who as the first congressperson ever to have started life in America undocumented had a very appealing personal background – was so flummoxed by the idea of being challenged that by the end of the campaign he was reduced to calling Chevalier “Haitian” as a slur in an effort to rile up the Dominican vote. I’ve already flagged Mills’s joke of a campaign. Both Platner and Chevalier had real vulnerabilities that serious challengers could have flagged, but apparently that was too much work for Democratic Party leaders.

And spare me the pundits and consultants who fret that victories by people like Chevalier complicate races for other Dems in more purple areas. Look, if you can’t establish yourself as your own person and keep the focus on contrasting yourself to your opponent, you’re just not a good candidate for office.

Policy vs “Fighting:” a lot of what the DSA is about for many voters seems less about policy on a left-right spectrum and more about intensity: they’re seen to be “fighting” where more normie Dems aren’t. Of course this isn’t fair to every mainstream Dem, but this is one place the Tea Party comparison holds up: you’re more likely to see DSA out holding signs and confronting ICE than you are to see mainstream Dem leaders.

It goes deeper than this, though. It’s not just about fighting now – hey, Chuck Schumer shows up to No Kings rallies! – it’s that Dems aren’t perceived as having grasped the totality of Trumpism. Dems who backed Biden in 2020 because he promised normalcy, didn’t pursue Trump for insurrection in 2021, backed Biden again in 2024, and then switched to Harris with no primary, look like people who completely lost the plot. Dems who brag about having backed Trump’s impeachments just highlight the fact that their effort failed. The failure of the Biden Administration to force a reckoning for Trump for January 6, combined with the obvious cover-up of Biden’s deterioration in office, discredits any Democrat who was in a leadership position in his term - maybe not fatally, but enough they should have to answer for it on the trail.

But Also Policy! Populism has risen on Right and Left because a majority of Americans – obviously for different reasons – feel that their government isn’t serving them. I’m hardly the first person to observe that most people my age and younger aren’t proving as successful or comfortable in life as our parents were, and we don’t think it’s because we were “raised soft” or bought too many lattes or avocado toasts.

DSA has led the way in identifying an “Epstein Class,” in centering wealth inequality, and fighting for things like universal health care and affordable housing, and against AI data centers. This is great! Mainstream Dems who gushed over Klein and Thompson’s Abundance should love this stuff! These are ideas that can build a majority, so why stand in their way?

“Communism:” some DSA folk, especially Chevalier, have said (and may believe) some very dumb things about communism or seizing the means of production. Dems who are afraid of these attacks simply are showing themselves as unimaginative cowards. Harry Truman called this back in 1952: Republicans have said everything to help people since unions and Social Security is “socialist” and “communist.” People who shrink from the terms will shrink from the policy, when obviously the right statement is, “if [insert your personal issue] is wrong, I don’t want to be right,” followed by, “Grandpa Trump is ranting about the past and needs a nap.”

I am positive this is generational, because I’m positive I’m right in the middle of it. My formative years encompassed both the height of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I entered my young adulthood committed to helping repair post-communist Eastern Europe.

People older than I conflate socialism and communism with the Warsaw Pact (look it up, kids). People younger than I conflate communism with myth (China calls itself communist yet clearly isn’t), and socialism with… Scandinavia.

And bad news, folks, Scandinavia is better at The American Way than America is! Other than GDP, a shitty metric, there isn’t a single standard of human development and well-being where the Scandinavian countries don’t kick America’s ass. We may have invented free-market democratic republics, but we were so busy admiring our work we failed to notice others had improved our model. Anything that makes us more like Scandinavia would be better for every American who isn’t a billionaire.

Like FDR and Churchill with Stalin, let’s worry about beating the fascists first, and then we can handle any supposed “communists.” The DSA has neither a Stalin nor a KGB.

Israel: man, I can’t speak to the experience of Judaism in America, but there is one thing I’m professionally qualified to say: what Israel is doing in Gaza, and the West Bank, and now Lebanon, is textbook genocide. I have had up-close views of the work of the Milosevic Regime, the Taliban, the Assad Regime, and ISIS; I know whereof I speak when I say “genocide.”

Sure, there are mitigations and distractions. Yes, the Palestinians and Iranians absolutely would commit genocide against the Israelis if they could! Yes, the U.S. also supports Saudi Arabia and the UAE in genocidal conduct in Sudan without anyone protesting loudly. Yes, pro-Palestinian activists seem so reflexively anti-Western they ignore Russia’s genocidal acts against Ukraine, and ignored Bashar Assad’s acts in Syria. All of this is true!

And yet, Israel is committing genocide. None of these other facts change this fact.

Some Jewish Americans, like Miriam Adelson, are resolving this by embracing Zionism and the Christian Nationalists of the Republican Party who think Israel must exist for the Second Coming to take place, when all the Jews supposedly will be condemned to hellfire. I think they are on the verge of finding the hard limit of right-wing acceptance of Judaism. Christian Nationalism aside, for right-populism to work, there has to be an elite enemy to oppose: “illegals” and Haitians “eating dogs and cats” aren’t a convincing “elite.” But the right can’t attack wealthy cosmopolitans as a class, because that would be socialism! Whatever shall they call them instead…? It’s easy: whenever you hear one of them say “globalist,” they mean “Jew.”

But if the Jewish American right flank is holding tenuously by aligning with Nazis, the left flank is collapsing. It’s simply impossible to embrace both liberal democracy and the Netanyahu Regime. To regain liberal democracy status, Israel would have to take on its own West Bank settlers and ultra-Orthodox population, which likely would start a civil war. I don’t have a solution to this, but it’s a reality that won’t go away. So long as Israel continues on its path, it will remain just another herrenvolk state, no different from all the European ones they escaped.

Israel has made conscious policy choices that have cost it the sympathy and support of most Americans. Even Rahm freakin’ Emanuel, scion of a distinguished Zionist legacy, is calling this out in stark terms. Support for Israel has become a litmus test because Israel’s conduct is so outrageous that it’s an easy measure of someone’s core decency. The person who can come up with justifications for Israel’s behavior also can come up with justifications for lots of other things.

Support for Israel now is a litmus test, but it shouldn’t be the litmus test. I’ll be happy to ally with Zionists who see the danger of fascism in America and are committed to the fight against it. Whatever Israel’s ills, the United States can do nothing to change them for the better while we ourselves are under authoritarian government. Again with the FDR/Churchill/Stalin analogy, I’ll never support AIPAC, but I’m willing to ally with and even vote for AIPAC-aligned candidates where that helps us fight Trumpism. The defeat of Trumpism is the prerequisite for any improvement in Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

I hope you all had a safe and happy 4^th of July. Our Declaration of Independence is bigger than our government, and set in motion forces far beyond any government’s control. July 4, 1863 also was the day the Confederacy’s doom was sealed by U.S. Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, cementing the date as a “new birth of freedom.” The values of the Continental Congress and Grant’s Army of the Tennessee have been honored around the world this year because of their transcendence, and despite our current rulers. For their sakes, and our own, we must continue to live up to them.