RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bernie Sanders, among others, has lived long enough to become a genuine McCarthyite.

Twenty-nine years ago, Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. Now he sounds like a Martin Dies Democrat.

“President Trump, in a reckless and dangerous manner, has revealed highly classified information to the Russians at a meeting in the Oval Office,” Vermont’s junior senator declared this week, “information that could expose extremely important sources and methods of intelligence gathering in the fight against ISIS.”

If only the Russians still engaged in a cold war against the United States instead of a hot war against ISIS, the Kremlin’s meddling might receive a pass. It certainly did for many decades.

“Who is to say that [Ted] Hall’s decision and those of [Klaus] Fuchs, Morris Cohen, [Julius] Rosenberg, and others who gave atomic secrets to the Soviets did not contribute significantly to what John Lewis Gaddis has called ‘the long peace’ that followed World War II?” wondered UC-San Diego Professor Michael E. Parrish. Many Are the Crimes author Ellen Schrecker infamously rejected the tag of traitor for Americans aiding the Russians; she insisted they merely “did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism.”

To quote a thinker more revered in those circles than Trump, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Schrecker recently took to the pages of the Nation to discuss the possibility of a sequel of sorts to the McCarthy era during the Trump Administration. She appears wrong even when right. A witch hunt has indeed arrived. Donald Trump recognized as much in tweeting, “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.” It just didn’t come the way the I-was-for-the-Russians-before-I-was-against-them wing of the Democratic Party imagined it would.

Trump did not provide nuclear secrets to the Russians, as Julius Rosenberg did. He did not give the Russians the formula for printing American greenbacks that allowed them to counterfeit our currency, as Harry Dexter White did. He did not intentionally shape international agreements, as Alger Hiss did at Yalta and in San Francisco at the founding of the United Nations, to benefit the Russians. Trump allegedly discussed the plans of a common enemy. Surely if Franklin Roosevelt could share information about a common enemy with Joseph Stalin, then Donald Trump doing so with Vladimir Putin’s emissary does not violate any norms.

Trump, not the 535 members of Congress or the nine Supreme Court Justices or the 16 members of the New York Times editorial board, serves as commander in chief. One can argue that the president should not share certain pieces of information with certain countries. But questioning the wisdom of an act differs from questioning its legality. Beyond the classification system’s genesis stemming from an executive order, Article II of the Constitution vests the power to conduct foreign policy with the president. In combatting the terrorists’ war on the West, reasons abound for allies, even ones made so by a common enemy, to share information — not the least of which involves an expectation that the foreign government reciprocates.

To call the creation of a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration’s Russian ties “quite a coup” reveals a literal truth beneath the metaphor. The opposition party can perform the heavy lifting of winning back Congress, or, alternatively, it can bring the administration’s agenda to a sclerotic halt by pressuring for the creation of a special prosecutor.

Clausewitz called war “politics by other means.” In our passive-aggressive society, a special prosecutor is politics by other means.

James Downton is the pen name of a Federalist contributor who is contractually prohibited from writing publicly about politics under his real name.

It’s nearly incontrovertible that a slow-motion coup d’etat is now taking place. Since November 9, 2016, forces within the U.S. government, media, and partisan opposition have aligned to overthrow the Electoral College winner, Donald Trump.

To achieve this they have undermined the institutions of the Fourth Estate, the bureaucratic apparatus of the U.S. government, and the very nature of a contentious yet affable two-party political system. Unlike the coup d’etat that sees a military or popular figure lead a minority resistance or majority force into power over the legitimate government, this coup d’etat is leaderless and exposes some of the deepest fissures in our system of government. This coup d’etat represents not the rule of one man or even many, but by the multitude of our elites.
This article outlines the mechanisms, institutions, and nature of this coup d’etat; not in defense of President Donald Trump — who has proven himself bereft of the temperament of a successful president — but in defense of the institutions of our republic that are now not just threatened, but may very well be on the verge of collapse.
‘1984’ Is An Apt Comparison, But Not As the Left Thinks

Shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, a sort of “meme” appeared among activists on the political left comparing the status of the United States to that of George Orwell’s “1984.” “Think pieces” from The New Yorker, CNN, The Atlantic, and Salon drew comparisons between President Trump and the brutally authoritarian future Orwell envisioned. In April of this year, screenings of the film version of Orwell’s dystopian novel were hosted around the world. “1984” surged up Amazon’s bestseller list. The tragedy of this exercise was that the comparison was very apt, but for different reasons.

The villain of “1984” isn’t a “man” but an entity — a bureaucracy with an authoritarian impulse. Big Brother isn’t so much a man or a leader but a symbol of the omnipotent reach of the bureaucratic state that dominated the dystopian future. The fear of an elected leader turning into a tyrant — as the political Left and some on the political Right feared in Trump — doesn’t play into the narrative of the novel. Rather, it is the fear of a nearly faceless administrative state; a state that has achieved a near totality in terms of tyranny.

This fear of the administrative state was a key feature among at least two individuals writing at the Claremont Review of Books, Publius Decius Mus and professor Angelo Codevilla. Decius’s “The Flight 93 Election” essay acted as a sort of rallying cry for some conservatives and small-“r” republican intellectuals against the very real fear that a Hillary Clinton victory would cement the totalizing power of the administrative state — that is career bureaucrats and administrators who view the virtues of the republic as something to be washed away and remade in their own “progressive” image. Decius writes:

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

New Orleans — Robert E. Lee lost again.

The statue of the Confederate Army’s general in chief vanished Friday from atop a 60-foot-tall column in the middle of Lee Circle. This work is the fourth of four Confederate-oriented statues that the city of New Orleans has removed in recent weeks, amid considerable and well-deserved controversy.

During my annual pilgrimage to the Crescent City early this month, I saw Lee rise above well-tended grounds, including grass and flowers, although the concrete at his monument’s base was badly broken. Interestingly enough, the man who led one side of the Civil War to defeat stood just two blocks north of the spectacular National WWII Museum, which chronicles a unified America’s triumph in that mammoth struggle.

Along the landmark’s side, a graffito demanded: “Take It Down Now.” That ultimately victorious sentiment was popular around here, but not unanimous.

“They should leave it,” said Marquis, a black man in a white T-shirt. A couple of weeks back, he sat at the statute’s base and listened to music on a small speaker wirelessly connected to his cell phone. He breathed a whiff of disgust at those who wanted Lee toppled. “As someone said, ‘Ain’t no blood in him.’”

Marquis took a drag off of his cigarette and continued. “He’s just standing there. So, they’re going to take him down. And who are they going to put up there? Donald Trump?”

Even then, Lee was not long for the circle that bears his name.

In what seems like a major act of virtue signaling, New Orleans’ Democratic mayor Mitch Landrieu led the effort to purify the Big Easy of these four Confederate-era artworks. The first honored a bloody white rebellion against the city’s biracial government during Reconstruction. Workers then swept a depiction of Confederate president Jefferson Davis from a pedestal on Jefferson Davis Highway. Tuesday saw General P. G. T. Beauregard’s retreat. And now, Lee has achieved his rendezvous with obscurity.

This exercise is reminiscent of former Governor George Elmer Pataki (R., N.Y.). In his own massive act of virtue signaling, he secured federal funds from G. W. Bush’s EPA to dredge up and remove PCBs that had sat quietly for decades at the bottom of the Hudson River. This noxious industrial runoff was from General Electric factories in upstate New York. Rather than let sleeping toxins lie, Pataki had the riverbed vacuumed. The result? PCB levels shot up, and the Hudson’s relatively clean waters were befouled anew.

Likewise, this episode has stirred up the relative tranquility in New Orleans, with long-healed wounds being scratched open. Just blocks from the ever-delightful New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which I savored for the 23rd consecutive time a few weeks ago, a group of Confederate sympathizers waved the South’s Battle Flag beside Beauregard’s striking statute at City Park. A year ago, Beauregard sat in splendor beneath the sun, all alone. Confederate flags were nowhere in sight. This year’s display of Rebel sympathies and banners did not signal progress. And now, Beauregard has been scraped from his pedestal and whisked to an undisclosed location.

This episode has stirred up the relative tranquility in New Orleans, with long-healed wounds being scratched open.

Say what you will about these statues, they tend to be excellent works of art. Despite the horrors at their roots, they beautifully capture the human physique and, very often, the equestrian form. If nothing else, they added vivid, dramatic images to this lovely city.