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But Trump’s policy was something altogether different. It was child abuse, plain and simple. “That’s why it’s so chilling,” Gelernt told me. “D.O.J. officials apparently declined to exempt even cases with a baby.

When the number of immigrants surged at the border in 2014, President Barack Obama responded by building more detention facilities and holding families indefinitely — though still together — and faced a legal backlash.

what galls Gelernt now, after seeing the Times report about the inspector general’s investigation, is that his suspicions were right all along: Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly told the local U.S. attorneys.

note what Rosenstein did not deny: That he refused his U.S. attorneys permission to automatically exempt undocumented immigrants with young children from prosecution.

what we have lately learned about Rosenstein is that he is a very canny political operator. He has a gift for threading needles that even a tailor would envy.

While serving in the Trump Justice Department, for instance, he wrote a memo recommending the removal of James Comey as the head of the F.B.I., and he later defended his boss, William Barr, after he misled the public about the results of the Mueller investigation

But he also had the presence of mind to appoint Robert S. Mueller in the first place — and, though he has denied it, to question Trump’s own presence of mind. (It has been reported that he suggested secretly recording Trump’s ravings in order to expose him as unfit to lead.)

when it was Rosenstein’s turn, he did nothing to stop government-orchestrated cruelty. Instead, he simply did his job.

People who feel themselves under threat have a high tolerance for cruelty in their leaders: A little savagery to defend the homeland might be a good thing.

But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. He is first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty, betrayal and cheating long before he put on political garb.

The nationalists relish Trump’s disruption, his savagery. Some everyday conservatives — homeowners, parents, shopkeepers — feel in their bones that some new danger is afoot.

During Tuesday night’s debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump’s vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human conversation impossible

What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he’ll do to America in a second term.

this election has devolved to certain key questions: Does America still have a moral core, a basic framework that makes this a decent place to live? Will we let Trump and his felons drag us to moral chaos?

In this presidential campaign, Trump’s nationalist platform — trade, immigration — has faded into the background while his immoral nature has taken center stage

You can see this separation in the polls. Fourteen percent of Trump’s 2016 battleground state supporters are not sure they will support him again. Only 16 percent of white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016; 28 percent now support Joe Biden, according to an August Fox News poll.

Some Republicans see Trump’s immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But his immorality is voracious, a widening gyre that threatens the basic stability of civic life. If he undermines this election, and his Republican enablers let him, he’ll approach what comes next with appalling ferocity.

“There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”

I do ask you to believe that every person you meet has this moral essence, this quality of soul.

Because humans have souls, each one is of infinite value and dignity. Because humans have souls, each one is equal to all the others. We are not equal in physical strength or I.Q. or net worth, but we are radically equal at the level of who we essentially are.

Donald Trump, and Trumpism generally, is the embodiment of an ethos that covers up the soul. Or to be more precise, each is an ethos that deadens the soul under the reign of the ego.

It is the place where our moral yearnings come from, too. Most people yearn to lead good lives. When they act with a spirit of cooperation, their souls sing and they are happy.

when they feel their lives have no moral purpose, they experience a sickness of the soul — a sense of lostness, pain and self-contempt.

Hawks and cobras are not morally responsible for their actions; but humans, possessors of souls, are caught in a moral drama, either doing good or doing ill.

The soul is the name we can give to that part of our consciousness where moral life takes place. The soul is the place our moral sentiments flow from, the emotions that make us feel admiration at the sight of generosity and disgust at the sight of cruelty.

Trump, and Trumpism generally, represents a kind of nihilism that you might call amoral realism. This ethos is built around the idea that we live in a dog-eat-dog world. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

Might makes right. I’m justified in grabbing all that I can because if I don’t, the other guy will. People are selfish; deal with it.

This ethos — which is central to not only Trump’s approach to life, but also Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s — gives people a permission slip to be selfish.

In an amoral world, cruelty, dishonesty, vainglory and arrogance are valorized as survival skills.

In the mind of an amoral realist, life is not a moral drama; it’s a competition for power and gain, red in tooth and claw. Other people are not possessors of souls, of infinite dignity and worth; they are objects to be utilized.

Biden talks a lot about the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism

At its deepest level, that struggle is between systems that put the dignity of individual souls at the center and systems that operate by the logic of dominance and submission.

The presidency, as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

One of the hardest, soul-wearying parts of living through the Trump presidency was that we had to endure a steady downpour of lies, transgressions and demoralizing behavior

Say what you will about Biden, but he has generally put human dignity at the center of his political vision. He treats people with charity and respect.

The contest between Biden and Trumpism is less Democrat versus Republican or liberal versus conservative than it is between an essentially moral vision and an essentially amoral one, a contest between decency and its opposite.

Putin didn’t manage to outgrow the KGB officer inside of him, the officer who’d been taught that the USSR was the greatest hope for the progress of mankind and that the west was an enemy capable only of corruption. Launching his time machine into the past, it was as if he were returning to his Soviet youth, during which he’d been so comfortable. He gradually forced all of his subjects to return there as well.

Our medieval pyramid has stood tall for all that time, its surface changing, but never its fundamental form. And it’s always been a single Russian ruler sitting at its peak: Pyotr I, Nicholas II, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov… Today, Putin has been sitting at its peak for more than 20 years.

The Pyramid of Power poisons the ruler with absolute authority. It shoots archaic, medieval vibrations into the ruler and his retinue, seeming to say: “you are the masters of a country whose integrity can only be maintained by violence and cruelty; be as opaque as I am, as cruel and unpredictable, everything is allowed to you, you must call forth shock and awe in your population, the people must not understand you, but they must fear you.”

Judging by recent events, the idea of restoring the Russian Empire has entirely taken possession of Putin.

Yeltsin and the other creators of Perestroika surrounding him not only didn’t destroy the vicious Pyramid of Power, they didn’t bury their Soviet past either – unlike the post-war Germans who buried the corpse of their nazism in the 1950s

The corpse of this monster, which had annihilated tens of millions of its own citizens and thrown its country back 70 years into the past, was propped up in a corner: it’ll rot on its own, they thought. But it turned out not to be dead.

After the war with Georgia and the seizure of its territories, the “peacemaker” Obama offered Putin … a reset of their relations! Which is to say, c’mon, Vladimir, let’s forget all of that and start from scratch. The result of that “reset” was the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine.

The ideology of Putinism is quite eclectic; in it, respect for the Soviet lies side by side with feudal ethics, Lenin sharing a bed with Tsarist Russian and Russian Orthodox Christianity.

Putin’s favorite philosopher is Ivan Ilyin – a monarchist, Russian nationalist, anti-Semite, and ideologist of the White movement, who was expelled by Lenin from Soviet Russia in 1922 and ended his life in exile

In his articles, Ilyin hoped that, after the fall of Bolshevism, Russia would have its own great führer, who would bring the country up from its knees. Indeed, “Russia rising from its knees” is the preferred slogan of Putin and of his Putinists.

Paradoxically, the principle of Russian power hasn’t even remotely changed in the last five centuries.

A lot has happened in the last 20 years. The president of the Russian Federation’s face has turned into an impenetrable mask, radiating cruelty, anger, and discontent

Merkel admitted that, in her opinion, Putin lives in his own fantasy land. If that’s so, what’s the point of seriously engaging with such a ruler?

For 16 years, Merkel, who grew up in the GDR and should therefore understand Putin’s true nature, “has established a dialogue”. The results of that dialogue: the seizure of certain territories in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the capture of the DPR and LPR, and now: a full-scale war with Ukraine.

“Under Putin, Russia has gotten up from its knees!” his supporters often chant. Someone once joked: the country got up from its knees, but quickly got down onto all fours: corruption, authoritarianism, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and poverty. Now we might add another: war.

It was also cultivated by the approval of irresponsible western politicians, cynical businessmen, and corrupt journalists and political scientists.

I met many admirers of Putin in Germany, from taxi drivers to businessmen and professors. One aged participant in the student revolution of ’68 confessed:

“I really like your Putin!”“And why exactly is that?”“He’s strong. Tells the truth. And he’s against America. Not like the slugs we’ve got here.”“And it doesn’t bother you that, in Russia, there’s monstrous corruption, there are practically no elections or independent courts, the opposition is being destroyed, the provinces are impoverished, Nemtsov was murdered, and TV’s become propaganda?”

“No. Those are your internal affairs. If Russians accept all of that and don’t protest, that must mean they like Putin.”Ironclad logic. The experience of Germany in the ’30s didn’t seem to have taught such Europeans anything.

Now, one thing has become clear: with this war, Putin has crossed a line – a red line. The mask is off, the armor of the “enlightened autocrat” has cracked. Now, all westerners who sympathize with the “strong Russian tsar” have to shut up and realize that a full-scale war is being unleashed in 21st-century Europe.

The aggressor is Putin’s Russia. It will bring nothing but death and destruction to Europe. This war was unleashed by a man corrupted by absolute power, who, in his madness, has decided to redraw the map of our world.

If you listen to Putin’s speech announcing a “special operation”, America and Nato are mentioned more than Ukraine. Let us also recall his recent “ultimatum” to Nato. As such, his goal isn’t Ukraine, but western civilization, the hatred for which he lapped up in the black milk he drank from the KGB’s teat.

Who’s to blame? Us. Russians. And we’ll now have to bear this guilt until Putin’s regime collapses

People have finally understood this today. He attacked a free and democratic country precisely because it is a free and democratic country. But he’s the one who’s doomed because the world of freedom and democracy is far bigger than his dark and gloomy lair.

there was also something about the presentation and context—the fetishization of violence against innocents, followed by the celebration of violence against innocents—that blunted their emotional effectiveness.

As my network grew, I became desensitized to all the images of wanton cruelty and ultraviolence.

the world of online jihad could have had another effect on the Boston bombers: it might well have inured them to violence. The further I crawled down the extremist rabbit hole and the more caved-in skulls and headless corpses I saw, the more I found that my natural revulsion, usually an uncontrollable instinct, was easier to suppress.

The old-school political Religious Right establishment wonders why the evangelical next generation rejects their way.

The evangelical movement is filled with younger, multiethnic, gospel-centered Christians. They are defined by a clear theology and a clear mission — not by the doctrinally vacuous resentment over a lost regime of nominal, cultural “Christian America.”

The next generation knows that our witness is counter to the culture, not just on the sanctity of life and the stability of the family but, most importantly, on the core of the gospel itself: Christ and him crucified.

Conservative scholar and former adviser to President George W. Bush Peter Wehner argues that evangelical Christian voters now have a special burden. “Trump voters — the fully committed and the partially committed — made his presidency possible, so they have part ownership in it. We’ll see the level of competence and honor and toxicity that will characterize the next four years.”

“The point here is that our allegiances have to be to things beyond party and tribe and ideology; there needs to be an allegiance to truth, as best as we mere mortals can discern it – and in the case of Evangelical Christians, an allegiance to a Lord who asks of us to act justly and to love mercy.

“One of the things that really concerns me as a Christian is how in the political arena our faith has become weaponized, how our political loyalties disfigure our faith commitments rather than our faith commitments shaping our politics.

“The idea that Trump’s most vocal supporters will in the future weigh in on the importance of character in public leaders is risible,” Wehner says. “That argument is now gone, at least for a time. Many Evangelical Christians marched under the banner — some even helped raise the banner — for a man whose personality is characterized by vindictiveness, cruelty and coarseness.” He explains, “They rallied behind a man who in my estimation embodies a Nietzschean ethic rather than a Christian one, and there’s a price that will be paid for that. Trump supporters would say it was worth it in order to prevent a Clinton presidency.”

“In many ways empathy and sympathy – what Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments referred to as ‘fellow feeling’ — are lost, or at least de-valued, virtues.” Ultimately, however, Wehner, like Teetsel, comes down on the side of engagement, explaining that “politics, for all its mundane aspects and downsides, is still a means through which we pursue justice, protect human dignity and advance human flourishing, and those things are never unimportant.”

“In the last few decades – and especially in the last year — Christians have often done politics poorly,” Wehner observes. “So do most other groups in democracy. The answer is to do politics better. I think we can, and I hope we do. Because this nation is in a difficult place just now, in need of healing and reform and restoration.” People of different faiths or of no faith at all certainly can agree with that.

When I wrote in August 2015 that Mr. Trump was a cartoon version of every left-wing media stereotype of the reactionary, nativist, misogynist right, I thought that I was well within the mainstream of conservative thought — only to find conservative Trump critics denounced for apostasy by a right that decided that it was comfortable with embracing Trumpism.

relatively few of my listeners bought into the crude nativism Mr. Trump was selling at his rallies.

What they did buy into was the argument that this was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton. You simply cannot overstate this as a factor in the final outcome

As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas, to parties, to tribes, to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.

In this binary tribal world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles.

If everything — the Supreme Court, the fate of Western civilization, the survival of the planet — depends on tribal victory, then neither individuals nor ideas can be determinative.

In this political universe, voters accept that they must tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse; the stakes are such that no qualms can get in the way of the greater cause.

For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton — that he was a secret Muslim, that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.

Even among Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of betrayal.

When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection retribution.

And then, there was social media. Unless you have experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics. In my timelines, I found myself called a “cuckservative,” a favorite gibe of white nationalists; and someone Photoshopped my face into a gas chamber. Under the withering fire of the trolls, one conservative commentator and Republican political leader after another fell in line.

we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.

That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored

We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.

This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.

Second, even if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him.

Third, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench.

Fourth, it is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty.

As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment.”

Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain.

With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a danger to the party and the nation in its existential nature.

sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice.

History is alive, and she has a lot to teach us. I quote William Faulkner (what history professor hasn't?) who famously declared: "The past is never dead. It is not even past."

In fact, presidential hopeful Ben Carson's comparisons to slavery were so common that he was parodied as suggesting that even buying a Megabus ticket is like slavery (which, sadly, is almost believable).

People aren't always sure what to do with history. But the laziest use is to make facile comparisons between then and now, this person and that.

Mostly these comparisons are shallow and not rooted in any depth of meaningful knowledge of the past. They rely on caricatures and selective historical tidbits in a way that, indeed, just about anyone can be compared to anyone else.

These comparisons tend to come in two forms: those meant to elevate, and those meant to denigrate. Both use historical comparisons to accomplish their goals

By associating their 21st-century political agendas with the 18th-century American rebels, modern Tea Partiers collapse the distance between then and now in order to legitimize their cause.

Slavery is another popular go-to comparison. But ... sorry, Kesha: Recording contracts are not like slavery. And Republicans: ”Neither is the national debt, Obamacare, income tax, or gun control. Or the TSA, global warming, or Affirmative Action.

History is not a deck of cards from which to randomly draw for comparative purposes. It is an immense repository of human thinking, doing, and being that can and should help us be slightly less narrow-minded and shortsighted than our forefathers and foremothers sometimes were. Good uses of history require more substance, unpacking, and analysis than a few quick sound bites can provide.

History as critique, honest assessment, and self-examination. Thinking long and hard about the treatment of Native Americans, past and present. American imperialism. Slavery, and its intertwining with the rise of modern capitalism. Xenophobia. Suppression of women's rights. These stories need to be told and retold, painful as they may be.

People who make historical comparisons don't actually believe that Ted Cruz is like Robespierre. But then why bother? The reason there aren't longer expositions of how exactly Trump is like Hitler is because, well, very quickly the analogy would break down. Male ... popular ... racist ... oh, never mind. These analogies are usually politically motivated, shallow, and intended to shock or damn. It's just lazy, and more politics as usual.

When we say that Trump or Obama is like Hitler, we slowly water down our actual knowledge of the very historical things we are using for comparison. When people link their frustration with the Affordable Care Act or gun control to slavery, they greatly diminish the historical magnitude and importance of a horrific historical reality that irreversibly altered the lives of 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans who were forced across the Atlantic to the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries. Scholars speak of a "social death" that came from the incredible violence, emotional damage, and physical dislocation that took place during the Middle Passage and beyond.

Flippant comparisons also belittle and ignore the way that historical trauma creates immense ongoing psychological pain and tangible collective struggle that continues through generations, even up through the present.

One charitable reading of why people make these comparisons is that they fear we will end up in unpleasant and unfortunate situations that are like past circumstances. Behind the charge of Trump being a fascist is the fear that Trump, if elected president, will rule unilaterally in a way that oppresses certain segments of the population.

The only problem is that history really doesn't repeat itself. If anything, it remixes themes, reprises melodies, and borrows nasty racist ideologies. There are no exact historical analogs to today's politicians — jackasses or saviors.

"History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes." And it is in the rhyming that history still plays an important role.

Historian William Bouwsma once noted that the past is not the "private preserve of professional historians." Rather, he argued that history is a public utility, like water and electricity. If Bouwsma is right, the kind of history most people want is like water: clear, available at the turn of a knob, and easily controllable. But really, history is more like electricity shooting down the string of Franklin's fabled kite: wild, with alternating currents and unexpected twists, offshoots, and end results.

Voting for Trump won't bring about an American Holocaust, but it could usher in a new yet rhyming phase of history in which US citizens and immigrants from certain backgrounds are targeted and legally discriminated against, have their civil liberties curtailed, and even get forcibly relocated into "safe" areas. Hard to imagine?

American history, as Jon Stewart brilliantly reminded us, is at its core a series of events in which the current dominant group (no matter how recently established) dumps on the newest immigrant group. Catholics. Jews. Irish. Asians. They've all been in the crosshairs. All of them have been viewed as just as dangerous as the current out-group: Muslims.

The GOP's current crisis mirrors the French Revolution? Ted Cruz is like Robespierre? Please. You are granting way too much historical importance to the self-implosion of a political movement that rose to power over the past 30 years on a platform of moralistic piety, militarism, anti-abortion, and xenophobia.

If simplistic comparisons cheapen the past and dumb down our public discourse, using the past to understand how we got to where we are today is actually productive. It increases knowledge, broadens our perspective, and helps connect dots over time.

If Americans truly want to understand this GOP moment, we need not look to revolutionary France, but to the circa-1970s US, when the modern Republican Party was born. I know, Republican pundits like to call themselves the "party of Lincoln," but that is mostly nonsense

To compare Trump to Napoleon or Hitler is to make a vacuous historical comparison that obscures more than it reveals. But it is actually constructive to try to understand Trump as a fairly logical outcome of some of the cultural impulses that drove the moral majority and the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It tells us how we got here and, potentially, how to move forward.

Done well, history gives us perspective; it helps us gain a longer view of things. Through an understanding of the past we come to see trends over time, outcomes, causes, effects. We understand that stories and individual lives are embedded in larger processes. We learn of the boundless resilience of the human spirit, along with the depressing capacity for evil — even the banal variety — of humankind.

The past warns us against cruelty, begs us to be compassionate, asks that we simply stop and look our fellow human beings in the eyes.

Why, then, is Obama-Washington still on my office wall? Mostly to remind me of the irony of history. Of its complexity. That the past might not be past but is also not the present. It is a warning against mistaking progression in years with progress on issues. It is a reminder that each one of us plays an important part in the unfolding of history.

Mr. Trump rejects all three.

Republicans used to argue that character mattered in our political leaders. But apparently that applied only to Democrats like Bill Clinton. Today, we’re told such considerations are irrelevant, inapposite, quaint. We’re electing a president rather than a pope, after all, so there’s no problem wrapping Republican arms around a moral wreck. At least he’s our moral wreck.

The hypocrisy isn’t lost on anyone.

the reality is that Republican lawmakers have been put in this position because Mr. Trump was more popular among Republicans than anyone else in the race. He took the lead in the national polls in July 2015 and pretty much never lost it

his European-style ethnic nationalism, which relies on stoking grievances, resentments and fear of the other — Mexicans, Muslims, Syrian refugees, the Chinese, etc.— has a powerful sway in the Republican Party today. To be clear, not all of Mr. Trump’s supporters are drawn to his ethnic nationalism. But all of his supporters are willing to accept it.

When a narcissist like Mr. Trump is victorious, as he was in the Republican primary, and when he has done it on his terms, he’s not going to listen to outside counsel from people who think they can change the patterns of a lifetime. Republicans have not changed Mr. Trump for the better; he has changed them for the worse

Mr. Trump — through his attacks against Hispanics that began the day he announced his candidacy — is doing with Hispanics today what Senator Goldwater did with black voters in the early 1960s.

The less resistance there is to Mr. Trump now, the more political damage there will be later.

The stain of Trump will last long after his campaign. His insults, cruelty and bigotry will sear themselves into the memory of Americans for a long time to come, especially those who are the targets of his invective

Republican primary voters, in selecting him to represent their party, and Republican leaders now rallying to his side, have made his moral offenses their own

The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”

Women labor under a cloud of Trump’s distrust. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. Working moms are particularly lacking in loyalty, he believes, and thus do not make for good employees. “She’s not giving me 100 percent. She’s giving me 84 percent, and 16 percent is going towards taking care of children,

This is one reason that evangelicals, both men and women, gravitate to Trump, despite his obvious lack of interest in religion and blatantly loose morals. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy, to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it

In 1989, Trump had returned home from a painful scalp-reduction surgery, intended to remove a bald spot. His ex-wife Ivana had suggested the doctor—and he blamed her for his suffering. He held her arms and began pulling hair from her scalp, then tore off her clothes. Hurt writes: “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified … It is a violent assault. According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’ ” When the story resurfaced last summer, Trump’s campaign disavowed it. When Hurt was writing his book, Trump’s lawyers forced the author to include a statement from Ivana in the book, “A Note to Readers,” which softens the account but doesn’t disavow it: “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

The scene offers a graphic summation of Trump’s retrograde beliefs and real brutality. What’s worse, the same spirit informs his politics—the rampant cruelty, the violent impulses, the thirst for revenge, the absence of compassion. Misogyny isn’t an incidental part of Donald Trump. It’s who he is.

First, the anti-immigration obsession that had transfixed the right-wing inured many supposed gate-keepers (e.g., magazines, pundits) as well as the base to a candidate peddling a dangerous brew of nativism, protectionism and isolationism. If the “respectable” publications rant and rave about “amnesty,” one can imagine why Trump’s idea for a wall might have gotten traction rather than guffaws

Second, over the past seven years, the anti-government tirades from talk radio, from Beltway groups such as Heritage Action and even from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) saturated the base, convincing them that everyone with experience “betrayed them” and only outsiders devoid of exposure to governance had the secret sauce for peace and prosperity.

Third, the “establishment” — the officialdom of the Republican National Committee — facilitated Trump’s rise, convinced he’d run as an independent

One, therefore, is left with an unpleasant reality: A plurality of GOP voters wanted Trump

A significant segment of the GOP primary electorate itself lacked common sense, standards of decency, and intolerance of bigotry and cruelty. No group was worse than the evangelical “leaders” who cheered him along the way.

A Republican wag joked that the GOP needs not only a new candidate but also a new base. There is something to that. In the 2016 postmortem, it will be worth examining the extent to which the GOP has promoted crackpots, become ghettoized in distorted right-wing media and lost track of what 21st-century America believes and looks like

the party as a whole has to expand its vision and its base. It’s time to stop reveling in ignorance and celebrating lost causes.

It’s a problem when the rest of the country has to rescue the GOP and the country from Republican voters’ terrible judgment.

This segment of the right flipped from insisting on ideological purity to caring nothing about ideology. It’s now about winning, holding power and sneering at anyone not from “real” America.

Social conservatives lost on same-sex marriage, have lived with decades of Roe v. Wade and threw their lot in with Donald Trump, who embodies every grotesque habit and quality they’ve ranted about for years (e.g., infidelity, dishonesty, crudeness, cruelty). That leg is gone.

The economic leg has rotted away as well. Supply-side tax cuts have no sell with the general public (tax cuts for the rich!), and fiscal-discipline/small-government conservatives are nowhere to be found in Congress (which moves ahead on its own national health-care plan, peddles a “border adjustment tax” and looks to splurge on red ink).

In the foreign-policy realm, it’s not clear where the party is headed — but President Trump and his ilk seem bent on destroying the international liberal order, throwing their weight behind despots and blowing up international institutions that have existed since the end of World War II.

In the place of ideas and relevant policy, the right is now drenched in cultural resentment and fixated on keeping out immigrants.

The right’s rejection of all elites, including the entire mainstream media, has morphed into a rejection of objective truth.

Unqualified, ignorant people are preferred over qualified, knowledgeable public servants.

Loyalty to a person is the paramount consideration in staffing.

Only in a party in such dire straits — where resentment toward coastal elites became the defining feature — could Yiannopoulos  have gotten as far as he did.

The conservative movement — neither conservative nor a movement at this point — lies prostrate, reduced to a set of tribal identifiers (climate change denial, cultural resentment, xenophobia).

But periodic protests are not enough. Resistance movements need the support of permanent infrastructure. And they must be willing to engage in the time-intensive and expensive organizing that actually changes minds and behavior.

They elected executive committees to run their affairs, dispatched speakers to spread the word and held annual conventions. They also had women’s auxiliaries; the gender divide sounds awful today, but the women were the heart of the movement. They held fairs to raise money and sell goods made without slave labor. Then they started going door to door with petitions. The pro-slavery Congress forbade them from delivering those petitions, but that didn’t matter. Each time a woman approached a neighbor about signing, she got a chance to publicize slavery’s cruelty.

They should engage people in person, with concrete actions such as old-fashioned petition drives. Social media can help energize supporters, but beware of activism that never translates beyond Facebook or Twitter. The Freedom to Marry activists developed a smart approach to same-sex marriage rights: They trained supporters to each have conversations with five of their friends or relatives — and to ask people who responded positively to seek out five more.

“This is about community organizing rather than electoral campaigning.”

Anti-Trump forces should also embrace the potential for states and cities to become bastions of resistance.

If a Trump-tipped Supreme Court overturns abortion rights or same-sex marriage, these states could offer themselves as havens. If the GOP repeals Obamacare, they could imitate Massachusetts and pass state-based health-care systems. If the Trump administration demands any records they may have of illegal immigrants, states and cities could refuse.

Proud realists, neither man put much stock in the “democratic tsunami” that, in the fantasy of neoconservative true believers like Wolfowitz, the Iraq war would send sweeping out of Baghdad to engulf the Middle East. Instead they put their faith in “American leadership” and the restoration of American power through a decisive demonstration of American strength.

Rumsfeld is first and foremost a patriotic midwesterner, a politician who nourishes in his soul a primordial and undying belief in the manifest need for, and rightness of, American power. To him this truth is self-evident, imbibed at an Illinois breakfast table. Who do we want to lead in the world? Somebody else? The idea is plainly inconceivable.

As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”

He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.

month after month in his arrogance and tenacity he would deny an insurgency had taken root. Month after month, as the shortcomings of the army he had sent into Iraq—too small, too conventional, not configured or equipped or trained to fight an insurgency and thus fated in its impotent bludgeoning to make it ever worse—became impossible to deny, he would go on denying them, digging in his heels and resisting the change he had to know was necessary.

Thatcher said something else that's particularly interesting in this discussion. She said there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. And so what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social-- that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests

I want to echo something that FDR once said, When he said that, you know, you not only have to have personal freedoms and political freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak, you have to have social freedom. You have to have the freedom from want, the freedom from poverty, the freedom from-- that comes with a lack of health care.

How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public, public health, public transportation, public values, you know, public engagement is a pathology?

Individualize the social, which means that all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders of individuals.

that the government-- the larger social order, the society has no responsibility whatsoever so that-- you often hear this, I mean, if there--I mean, if you have an economic crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you know and millions of people are put out of work and they're all lining up for unemployment, what do we hear in the national media? We hear that maybe they don't know how to fill out unemployment forms, maybe it's about character.

I think that what we haven't seen before is an attack on the social contract, Bill, that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the way in which its being deconstructed and being disassembled that you now have as a classic example, you have a whole generation of young people who are now seen as disposable.

young people can't turn anywhere without in some way being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop, is to be a consumer. You can't walk on a college campus today and walk into the student union and not see everybody represented there from the local banks to Disneyland to local shops, all selling things.

Where are the public spaces for young people other learn a discourse that's not commodified, to be able to think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. Those things, they're just simply absent, they're not part of those public spheres because those spheres have been commodified.

Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” Why that metaphor, zombie politics? HENRY GIROUX: Because it's a politics that's informed by the machinery of social and civil death.

It's a death machine. It's a death machine because in my estimation it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they have no-- they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency-

This casino capitalism as we talk about it, right, one of the things that it does that hasn't been done before, it doesn't just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That's different. That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it's an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.

as the social state is crippled, as the social state is in some way robbed, hollowed out and robbed of its potential and its capacities, what takes its place? The punishing state takes its place. You get this notion of incarceration, this, what we call the governing through crime complex where governance now has been ceded to corporations who largely are basically about benefiting the rich, the ultra-rich, the big corporations and allowing the state to exercise its power in enormously destructive and limited ways.

we kill the imagination by suggesting that the only kind of rationality that matters, the only kind of learning that matters is utterly instrumental, pragmatist. So what we do is we collapse education into training, and we end up suggesting that not knowing much is somehow a virtue. And I'll and I think what's so disturbing about this is not only do you see it in the popular culture with the lowest common denominator now drives that culture, but you also see it coming from politicians who actually say things that suggest something about the policies they'd like to implement.

Rick Santorum is not-- is kind of a, you know, an obvious figure. But when he stands up in front of a body of Republicans and he says, the last thing we need in the Republican party are intellectuals. And I think it's kind of a template for the sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates our culture.

I think intellectuals are-- there are two ways we can describe intellectuals. In the most general sense, we can say, "Intellectuals are people who take pride in ideas. They work with ideas." I mean, they believe that ideas matter. They believe that there's no such thing as common sense, good sense or bad sense, but reflective sense.

how we learn what we learn and what we do with the knowledge that we have is not just for ourselves. It's for the way in which we can expand and deepen the very processes of democracy in general, and address those problems and anti-democratic forces that work against it.

I think the real issue here is, you know, what would it mean to begin to do at least two things?

one is to develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we're facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language. We have to build a formative culture

Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured nature of these movements. I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives in the left and liberals is they are all sort of ensconced in these fragmented movements

here's the contradiction I hear in what you're saying. That if you write about a turning toward despair and cynicism in politics. Can you get movements out of despair and cynicism? Can you get people who will take on the system when they have been told that the system is so powerful and so overwhelming that they've lost their, as you call it, moral and political agency?

to be different than it is now, rather than romanticizing hope and turning it into something Disney-like, right, it really has to involve the hard work of A) recognizing the structures of domination that we have to face, B) organizing collectively and somehow to change those, and C) believing it can be done, that it's worth the struggle.

I refuse to become complicitous. I refuse to say--I refuse to be alive and to watch institutions being handed over to right wing zealots. I refuse to be alive and watch the planet be destroyed. I mean, when you mentioned-- you talk about the collective imagination, you know, I mean that imagination emerges when people find strength in collective organizations, when they find strength in each other.

he felt that only socialism could truly face down fascism;

he was still naive enough to want to abolish the stock exchange because he wanted an economy that benefited the many and not the few;

he passionately supported a robust welfare state on the lines of the post-war Labour government out of a patriotic love of his fellow countrymen and women

He despised Toryism, privilege and jingoism in all their manifestations.

He was also, of course, a serious anti-Communist, which is why some now on the neoconservative right cannot fathom him.

Above all, I think, he believed that class numbed people to the lives of their fellow citizens. It wasn’t masochism that prompted him to slum it in London and Paris; it was a desire to understand what was actually going on by living more fully on the margins and writing about it with candor and freshness.

led Arendt to conclude that Eichmann could not “think” — not because he was incapable of rational intelligence but because he could not think for himself beyond clichés. He was banal precisely because he was a fanatical anti-Semite, not despite it.

Although Arendt was wrong about the depth of Eichmann’s anti-Semitism, she was not wrong about these crucial aspects of his persona and mentality. She saw in him an all-too familiar syndrome of rigid self-righteousness; extreme defensiveness fueled by exaggerated metaphysical and world-historical theories; fervent patriotism based on the “purity” of one’s people; paranoid projections about the power of Jews and envy of them for their achievements in science, literature and philosophy; and contempt for Jews’ supposed deviousness, cowardice and pretensions to be the “chosen people.” This syndrome was banal in that it was widespread among National Socialists.