Dead Patriots Society

Dead Patriots Society

may our children not behave like our president

Post #4, December 1, 2024

Preface: The following was posted before news broke on the same day that President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter. This development would seem to strengthen the case that Biden should pardon at least some of the January 6 defendants. Many would oppose that on the grounds that it would be a false equivalency. But in the minds of millions it would not be, and might dampen somewhat the impression that the President’s pardon of his son was raw politics.

I have posted a response from by dear professor Michael Cummings, of the political science department of the University of Colorado, Denver, who invested great time and energy into my master’s thesis, and various other papers. I have known Michael Cummings for forty-some years, ever since I took my first run at a masters. Including his response is the least I can do in appreciation. You will find it following the Afterward (which is more properly an appendix) below.

BY NOW, it may have occurred to many Trump opponents that the outcome of this election could have been worse. Harris could have won, and all hell might have broken loose.

Or either of the would-be assassins might have succeeded, and the same, or worse, might have happened  sooner.

So as despairing as many Americans are about the outcome of this election, if they believe truth and justice be on their side, if not exclusively, they must also believe those things still have purchasing power.

And the same may find some solace in this: unbalanced power is destined to over-extend, and in doing so will provoke countervailing power to restore a rough balance. We see this both in domestic and international politics. There may be no such thing as an ironclad law in political science, but this might be as close as it gets.

Similarly, it is too soon to assume compassionate conservatism is dead. If its opposite is Donald Trump who seems to know no boundaries, the former may be destined for a revival.

Democrats must now hone their political skills and work with the seemingly few moderate Republicans to stop the worst of Trump’s plans, and thereby demonstrate to the American voters they can govern.

Can Democrats strike a grand bargain with John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, in exchange for him refusing to comply with Trump’s plans for recess appointments? 

Progressive activists need to be vigilant, persevering, and creative, but receptive to any good policies Trump might actually dream up. I say this even though I don’t feel I owe Trump the benefit of any doubt. We know this guy inside and out. But like they say, even a broken clock is right twice each day.

Afterall, this is a guy who publicly mimicked a disabled reporter, openly cheats at golf, publicly took Putin at his word that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, contrary to the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, and asserts that immigrants “are poisoning our blood.” Did I leave anything out?

If this sounds presumptuous and unfair, I recommend Bob Woodward’s book on Trump’s first term titled “Rage”. There is plenty right there, which is why I am re-reading it. And there is more to come in “Peril”,  which I plan to read as well.

It is important that we know this man and what he is capable of. That is just as important as understanding how the Democrats so widely missed the mark and managed to lose to him. In trying to understand how the Democrats accomplished that, I am reading back columns by Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post. He and I don’t agree on a lot, but he gives me insight. He is not glib, and he seems like someone I could have a conversation with.

I learned of Marc Thiessen just the other day when he co-authored with Danielle Pletka an op-ed in the Washington Post proposing that Biden pardon Trump, even at this stage of the game. I learned that the two had proposed such in June of 2023 (see:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/15/biden-pardon-trump-argument-politics/). The same idea occurred to me some time ago, but only lingered a couple of days, It resurfaced a few days before the election. Only then did I voice it to anyone, which anyone–a dear friend–thought I was out of my mind.

Thiessen and Pletka begin their arguments, in both op-eds, recounting the conciliatory words of President Biden when he assumed office. Like many, maybe even most who voted for him, I thought he was running for one term, with a pledge to rebuild the center in American politics. But the victorious Party cannot help itself, and the progressive agenda, which I supported, took center stage. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia seemed to single-handedly frustrate some of that, and his determination eventually frustrated me. But with the Biden administration downplaying warnings about inflation (like it would call Russia’s security concerns a “non-starter”), maybe Manchin spared the Democrats and the Nation of something worse.

Fast-forward to today. Like many Democrats, forced now to reckon with the discontent which propelled Trump to victory, it is increasingly clear that he got large numbers of voters to identify with his grievances and contempt for wokeness. And I have come to believe that the only hope of defeating Trump without resulting chaos would have been a magnanimous act by Biden to pardon most if not all of the January sixth defendants, and to call for a halt to all prosecutions of Trump.

Marc Thiessen’s and Danielle Pletka’s op-ed in June of 2023 is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a couple excerpts:

 “In pardoning Trump, Biden would be a true statesman. Sparing the country the ordeal of a trial would go a long way toward repairing the nation’s frayed political fabric. He would display the kind of leadership that has been missing in Washington. And he would drive Trump crazy. With one action, Biden would eliminate the narrative of a “deep state” conspiracy that is helping to fuel Trump’s political comeback.

“….This isn’t about Trump. It is about the nation. It is within Biden’s power to restore norms that have been torn apart by both Trump and his opponents. If ever there were a time to heal, this is it.”

There is no painless way for Democrats to do what we need to do. Maybe Thiessen and Pletka were mistaken, but I like to think they weren’t. Just because Donald Trump seems to be spared of any humility, does not mean it can’t do the rest of us some good.

Afterward

As stated above the idea of Biden pardoning Trump came to me sometime in the last couple of years, but I do not recall when. It recurred a couple days before the election. Immediately after the election, I consulted the Chinese Book of Changes for advice on the new state of affairs. The first answer was titled “Deliverance”. It begins: “Here the movement goes out of the sphere of danger. The obstacle has been removed, the difficulties are being resolved. Deliverance is not yet achieved; it is just in its beginning….”

I was perplexed by this answer, which struck me as wide of the mark. The second answer, “Darkening of the Light”, also called “wounding of the bright”, seemed like a better match, from my admittedly partisan point of view.

“Here a man of dark nature is in a position of authority and brings harm to the wise and able man (emphasis added).

“DARKENING OF THE LIGHT. In adversity it furthers one to be persevering.”

Further:

“In a time of darkness it is essential to be cautious and reserved. One should not needlessly awaken overwhelming enmity by inconsiderate behavior. In such times one must not fall in with the practices of others; neither should one drag them censoriously into the light. In social intercourse one should not be all-knowing. One should let many things pass, without being duped.”

In the oft-quoted words of Shakespeare’s comical character Falstaff, “discretion is the better part of valor.”

This seemed to fit the conditions as I saw them. But what was with the first answer, Deliverance? Only a day or two afterward would it dawn on me that it must have been referring to 2021, when Biden won the White House with the promise to restore some normalcy and bipartisanship.

“Deliverance” refers to “a time in which tensions and complications begin to be eased. At such times we ought to make our way back to ordinary conditions as soon as possible….”

“These periods of sudden change have great importance. Just as rain relieves atmospheric tension, making all the buds burst open, so a time of deliverance from burdensome pressure has a liberating and stimulating effect on life. One thing is important, however: in such times we must not overdue our triumph. The point is not to push on farther than is necessary…(emphasis added).

(The switch to the first person plural in the paragraph above is interesting.)

Further:

“Thunder and rain set in:

The image of DELIVERANCE.

Thus the superior man pardons mistakes and forgives misdeeds.

“A thunderstorm has the effect of clearing the air; the superior man produces a similar effect when dealing with the mistakes and sins of men that induce a condition of tension. Through clarity he brings deliverance. However, when failings come to light, he does not dwell on them; he simply passes over mistakes, the unintentional transgressions, just as thunder dies away. He forgives misdeeds, the intentional transgressions, just as water washes everything clean.”

Having received this information immediately after Trump’s victory on November 5, I was understandably receptive to the argument of Marc Thiessen and Danielle Pletka.

Response by Michael Cummings:

Pardon Trump? Then bye-bye, rule of law, and welcome to all future would-be despots! Pardoning Trump will not mollify the MAGAtes. “You’re all losers,” he told his followers in 2016. “But it’s not your fault. And only I can make you winners!” Tens of millions of Americans bought into this demeaning pitch, which he paraphrased endlessly in both 2016 and 2024. (In 2020, he had supposedly made them all “winners,” so his MAGA pitch changed to “Keep America Great.” Well, not the million Americans who died of Covid because of his denialism and delayed response.) The punchline of this stump speech was a lie, because nobody “makes” me a winner. But the loser pitch is real in a win-lose, “entropic” culture that creates a few big winners and millions of losers. When “winning is the only thing,” when beating out others in a war of all against all for wealth, status, and power is the key to personal happiness, the millions of losers are susceptible to authoritarian appeals of the Trumps, Putins, and Modis of the world. Even if Biden were to unwisely pardon Trump, the losers would still be losers, both objectively (ever rising income inequality) and subjectively (soaring deaths of despair).

Unable to address the cascading crises of our times, liberal democrats in the U.S. and around the world scramble to get better leaders, better policies, and reformed institutions—good for them—but they are missing the clue hiding in plain sight: a toxic culture that pits us against one another, undermining the common good, and its necessary alternative, a win-win, “synergistic” culture in which people primarily pursue values such as knowledge, friendship, family, community, craftsmanship, the arts, humor, exploration, and the simple pleasures of daily life. They ignore the millions of individuals, families, and groups that are already leading the way in choosing synergy over entropy in their daily lives. As Foucault puts it, they just don’t have power yet, referring to power not as a value but as a means to the end of making their government promote the common good.

When a plurality of voters choose a 34-times convicted felon, perennial sexual assaulter, habitual liar, racist, misogynist, and insurrectionist to lead them once again, we have a sick and dysfunctional culture that must be changed. Our officials and pundits assume we can’t change an entire culture, but we and other peoples have done it again and again. The myth that we’re stuck with a toxic culture is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In Winning, Losing, Living, I test my theory that cultural synergy promotes national well-being whereas cultural entropy undermines it in 21 diverse countries on five continents. My sample’s most entropic cultures turn out to be the U.S., Russia, and India—all under the sway of authoritarian charlatans–suffering from a wide array of social pathologies. The most synergistic cases are Finland (the world’s happiest country for the past seven years), Denmark, Iceland, and to a lesser degree Canada and Mexico. Even such mixed bags as France, New Zealand, Morocco, Peru, Vietnam, and Japan provide strong evidence that their win-win values help to offset the harmful consequences of their win-lose values.

We need to change our culture, not pardon our self-serving, felonious President-elect.

Dead Patriots Society

may our children not behave like our president

Post #3, November 17, 2024

Every day since the election, hopefully, more Harris voters conclude or at least come to suspect that most people who voted for Trump are not stupid. They just see things very differently. Indeed, it is more helpful to say that Trump voters and Harris voters literally see different things. This best explains why we talk past each other.

It is possible, and necessary, to separate the honest-to-God bad apples from the millions of Americans who voted them into power.

Take the criminal cases against Trump. Democrats insisted that no person is above the law, and failing to prosecute him would set an awful precedent. Little did they suspect that, due to the pursuit of one of those cases, the Supreme Court would issue a ruling that appears to have weakened the rule of law when applied to presidents.

Trump supporters interpreted the criminal prosecutions of Trump to be the “weaponization of the Justice Department” (the prosecution of Hunter Biden being an anomaly of some sort). Thus, the same might regard the objections by Democrats to Matt Gaetz becoming Attorney General to be sheer hypocrisy. From their perspective, since the Democrats weaponized the Justice Department in the first place, we need someone to weed out all the culprits, and perhaps to prosecute those outside the Department who pulled the strings.

This is just one issue in which Trump voters and Harris voters seem to be worlds apart. A similar and more fitting analogy would be that they reside on different planets. I will explain.

An old friend and I are reading the Copernican Revolution, by Thomas Kuhn. It is a dense read, denser I would say than his more popular book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

My friend is more adept than I at scientific stuff, but he tolerates my excursions into politics and how contrasting theories in the history of science can inform us about the state of political polarization in the United States.

Copernicus was not the first to postulate that what is obvious could be misleading. It is obvious that the stars, the moon, the planets, and the sun are all circling the earth, all pretty much in the same direction, excluding the peculiar meanderings of planets (the “wanderers”).

It was those odd movements of the planets, which previous astronomers had gone to great lengths to explain with additional regressive, circular movements as they “circled” the earth, that led Copernicus to postulate that the earth was moving as well. In fact, he postulated three movements of the earth, one of which is most likely untrue.

But it is this fundamental insight that Copernicus and others came to which is analogous to our current state of politics: “Viewed from a moving earth a planet that in fact moved regularly would appear to move irregularly.”

Those are Kuhn’s words, and they contain a world of meaning, so-to-speak.

To Harris supporters, the Trump voters, and the MAGA people especially, are moving in ways that are not normal. And to the Trump voters, the Democrats and the woke vigilantes are the ones moving irregularly.

But it is possible that both sides are moving, presumably in opposite directions (hence the growing polarization), and to most observers on either side it might appear that only the other folks were moving, that one’s own planet is remaining still.

As a Harris voter, I need to be asking myself and other Democrats: What are we missing? What are we doing to contribute to the impression of the MAGA people that we are condescending and elitist and leaving them behind in our thinking and the politics we champion?

The best Democratic minds were likely asking this question months before the election, but the dynamics of the election season especially overwhelmed such thinking.

Somehow the much reduced “center” has got to hold, and rebuild itself. We all should be asking ourselves what our scared cow is, and if we are willing to take it off the pedestal. Maybe it was never the real thing anyway.

Dead Patriots Society

may our children not behave like our president

Post #2, November 15, 2024

Decades ago, before Rick Reilly became known as the Rock Star of sports journalism, Jack Nicholson said he was “hotter than a three-dollar pistol”. 

In 2019, Reilly, my Boulder High School classmate of ’76, nailed Donald Trump with his book “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.” To cheat like Trump does, tells us just how insecure he is. 

Here are some highlights from Rick’s book:

“Why does Trump cheat so much when he’s already a decent player? And how can he be so shameless as to cheat right in front of people? They call him on it, but he just shrugs and cheats some more.”

“I wrote this book to say one simple thing: If Trump constantly cons people in a thing that doesn’t matter, imagine what he’s doing in the things that do?”

“‘So what? He cheats at golf. It’s just golf. It doesn’t matter.’ But that’s exactly why it does matter. Golf isn’t political.”

And from the Acknowledgments: (again, written before January 6):

“Lastly, thank you to every reporter out there who keeps pursuing the truth head-first into the worst hurricane of lies, insults, and constitution-trampling I’ve seen in my 40 years in the business.”

If your head is still spinning and you aren’t sure where to begin with this piece-of-work we call Donald Trump, you could do worse than read Rick Reilly’s book.

Why does Trump openly cheat at golf? Perhaps for a similar reason that a surprising number of homicides committed by men happen with witnesses present. There was a time in our past when this might have been “adaptive”, a warning to those witnesses: “Don’t mess with me”.

Maybe Trump is saying: “Rules are for everyone but me. I am above the law.” His choice of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General,  an obvious move to weaponize the Justice Department, and his threats to senators that they better consent to recesses when necessary to avoid the constitutionally-mandated confirmation process–or face his wrath–are statements that he will transgress all bounds.

And so far, maybe it is accurate to say Trump is above the law. Our job, we citizens of the United States, is to make clear to him that he is not.

We aren’t going to do that with prosecutions that Special Counsel Jack Smith is shutting down, as the first post at Dead Patriots Society discussed. He might very well escape a legal accounting during his remaining time on earth.

Whether it be a law per se or a fundamental social norm, most of us are deterred from breaking it (absent an inherent respect for it) because we don’t need the resulting shame. Donald Trump would appear to have seldom known shame. 

But he must know his remaining years on this earth are not many. His power and all the personal thrill it brings him will soon dissipate. What will survive of him on earth will be how his young son, the rest of his family, and all Americans remember him.

“We cannot escape history”, Lincoln reminds us. “We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”

And how we all  remember Trump will be the lesser of the two reckonings he is due.

In the months and years ahead, we will find principled, non-violent means to frustrate and hopefully defeat Trump’s machinations, even as we accept and applaud any worthwhile policies he may propose or implement. We must be open to any good he would do, and vigilant not to return his wrongs with wrongs of our own. 

But make no mistake. To give a man like Donald Trump, who openly cheats at golf, the benefit of the doubt, would be foolish, and would shirk our civic duty. 

We know way too much about him.

Rick Reilly Might be the Only Man Trump Fears

Decades ago, before Rick Reilly became known as the Rock Star of sports journalism, Jack Nicholson said he was “hotter than a three-dollar pistol”. 

In 2019, Reilly, my Boulder High School classmate, nailed Donald Trump with his book “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.” To cheat like Trump does, tells us just how insecure he is. 

Here are some highlights from Rick’s book:

“Why does Trump cheat so much when he’s already a decent player? And how can he be so shameless as to cheat right in front of people? They call him on it, but he just shrugs and cheats some more.”

“I wrote this book to say one simple thing: If Trump constantly cons people in a thing that doesn’t matter, imagine what he’s doing in the things that do?”

“‘So what? He cheats at golf. It’s just golf. It doesn’t matter.’ But that’s exactly why it does matter. Golf isn’t political.”

And from the Acknowledgments: (again, written before January 6):

“Lastly, thank you to every reporter out there who keeps pursuing the truth head-first into the worst hurricane of lies, insults, and constitution-trampling I’ve seen in my 40 years in the business.”

If your head is still spinning and you aren’t sure where to begin with this piece-of-work we call Donald Trump, you could do worse than read Rick’s Reilly’s book.

Why does Trump openly cheat at golf? Perhaps for a similar reason that a surprising number of homicides committed by men happen with witnesses present. There was a time in our past when this might have been “adaptive”, a warning to those witnesses: “Don’t mess with me”.

Maybe Trump is saying: “Rules are for everyone but me. I am above the law.” His choice of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General,  an obvious move to weaponize the Justice Department, and his threats to senators that they better consent to recesses when necessary to avoid the confirmation process–or face his wrath–are statements that he will transgress all bounds.

And so far, maybe it is accurate to say Trump is above the law. Our job, we citizens of the United States, is to make clear to him that he is not.

We aren’t going to do that with prosecutions that Special Counsel Jack Smith is shutting down, as the first post at Dead Patriots Society discussed. He might very well escape a legal accounting during his remaining time on earth.

Whether it be a law per se or a fundamental social norm, most of us are deterred from breaking it (absent an inherent respect for it) because we don’t need the resulting shame. Donald Trump would appear to have seldom known shame. 

But he must know his remaining years on this earth are not many. His power and all the personal thrill it brings him will soon dissipate. What will survive of him on earth will be how his young son, the rest of his family, and all Americans remember him.

“We cannot escape history”, Lincoln reminds us. “We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”

And how we all  remember Trump will be the lesser of the two reckonings he is due.

In the months and years ahead, we will find principled, non-violent means to frustrate and hopefully defeat Trump’s machinations, even as we accept and applaud any worthwhile policies he may propose or implement. We must be open to any good he would do, and vigilant not to return his wrongs with wrongs of our own. 

But make no mistake. To give a man like Donald Trump, who openly cheats at golf, the benefit of the doubt would be foolish, and would shirk our civic duty. 

We know way too much about him.