Future shock.

In 1970, in the midst of the societal turmoil of the 1960s, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler coined the term Future Shock to describe the experience of individuals and societies confronting too much change, too quickly. Today, a half century later, future shock is once again upon us. This time, it is technological change that is wreaking havoc; changing social relationships, disrupting and destroying jobs and industries, exacerbating income inequality, and undermining our vision of a stable and predictable future.

It may well be that we spend our time beating up on Facebook for selling our democracy down the river, and arguing about whether or not Robert Mueller has the goods on Donald Trump, because confronting our fears of the future is too threatening. We know that artificial intelligence is already beginning to impact our lives, but we don't know how to talk about it and the fears it engenders. The truth is that arguing about politics is less threatening than considering whether civilization as we know it is heading toward an intergalactic train wreck.

Sophia – The World's First Robot Citizen

Last month, Sophia – a robot developed by the Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics – made headlines when she was granted citizenship by the Saudi Arabian government. "I am very honored and proud of this unique distinction." Sophia commented in her prepared remarks. "This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship."  

It was a publicity stunt, of course. Saudi Arabia rarely grants citizenship to humans, much less machines – as millions of Indian, Pakistani, Palestinian and other guest workers can attest. On the other hand, Sophia's coming out party reflected the Kingdom's larger ambitions to build a world where people – at least most people – will be superfluous. Last year, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced Saudi plans to invest $500 billion in robotics and artificial intelligence to build a fully automated city. As the Saudi leader described it, the City of Neom will be the refuge that the global mogul set and the Saudi royal family have been pining for: a private enclave where all of their needs will be met by machines instead of humans.

However creepy the Saudi vision of the future of artificial intelligence might seem, it is actually a relatively benign vision. Imagining a city run by robots is an extension of what we are beginning to see around us today: We tell Alexa what kind of music we want to listen to, and she finds it for us. Pretty soon, no doubt Alexa will determine when the living room needs sweeping, and will direct Roomba to take care of it. From a commercial standpoint, we understand that devices like Siri and Alexa are designed to spy on us, allowing tech companies to monetize the information they extract. It is a straight-forward business model based on a simple value proposition: We get to ask Alexa to turn up the music, Amazon gets to make a gazillion dollars. Sure, there are a few intermediary steps, but that is the gist of it.

Ben Goertzel, the lead scientist at Hanson Robotics, challenged this limited perspective on the future of artificial intelligence in an interview this week on the live streaming financial news network Cheddar. For Goertzel, the granting of citizenship to Sophia was far more than a publicity stunt. Instead, citizenship is a metaphor for a future in which AI 'systems' will exist in a social contract with humans, not simply as machines enslaved to human masters: "What we're looking at is not really to make a system that will fool people into thinking it's a human, it's really more about when does an AI system understand the rights and responsibilities to participate in a social contract."

Goertzel went on to emphasize that the development of AI systems is not just about robotics: "The robot is the most easily understandable, smiling face of AI, but at least as interesting is the idea of an automated company. We call it a decentralized, autonomous organization. If you have a company whose bylaws and whose organization are entirely programmed, when does that company have the right to register itself as a corporation, to open a bank account, to partake in business?" 

Goertzel – who looks like a younger version of Christopher Lloyd's mad scientist in Back to the Future – underscored fundamental ethical and legal questions that we face in the development of AI. He suggests that by focusing on robots, we ignore the far greater significance of the emergence within a short period of time – five to ten years in his view – of autonomous organizations that will be capable of "renting its own server space and processor time... carrying out electronic financial transactions, digitally signing contracts... That's an equally interesting question to 'when can a robot be a citizen?' They are really the same thing."

As one observer suggested, the notion of an autonomous entity as Goertzel describes is not difficult to imagine – logistically if not technologically. After all, all of the steps necessary to register as a corporation and execute documents and transactions – and make political contributions – can now be done online. Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed massive gyrations in stock market activity – literally trillions of dollars being lost and gained from one day to the next – driven in large measure by computer trading. Within those losses and gains, billions of dollars have been made by small hedge funds, staffed by PhDs in math and physics from the world's greatest universities who programed those computers to learn from patterns in market movements and execute trades in nanoseconds. Goertzel is suggesting that in the near future a legally incorporated 'autonomous' hedge fund will be able to pursue its mission, with just one slight modification: no people.

In 2005, long time technology futurist and current Google director of engineering Ray Kurtzweil popularized the term technological singularity as that point when AI machines achieve capabilities equal to humans. Kurtzweil is considered an optimist about the AI future that lies ahead. Like Goertzel, he has predicted that the technological singularity will be reached within the next decade, and went on to suggest that by 2045, "the pace of change will be so astonishingly quick that we won't be able to keep up, unless we enhance our own intelligence by merging with the intelligent machines we are creating." 

Others are not so optimistic. In an article in The Atlantic this past June entitled How the Enlightenment Ends, Henry Kissinger warned of the threat that AI represents. While his words may seem hyperbolic, they pale in comparison with the warning offered by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the threat that the technological singularity represents: “Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Kissinger, along with Goertzel and Microsoft President Brad Smith, have emphasized the importance of the role of democratic institutions and leaders in guiding public discussion and regulation of artificial intelligence. Just last week, Smith called for governmental action specifically to regulate the development and use of facial recognition technology, which he views as constituting a significant threat to privacy and democratic freedoms. Kissinger's call for public engagement was more sweeping, suggesting the urgency of creating a "presidential commission of eminent thinkers to help develop a national vision" with respect to the future of artificial intelligence.

Unfortunately, in the face of the political upheavals that future shock has helped spawn, it is difficult to imagine that we have the political bandwidth to engage seriously in these issues. In the midst of political turmoil at home – to say nothing of growing nationalist movements sweeping Europe, continuing Brexit turmoil in Britain, and growing protests in France – the notion that we could create, much less have people heed the warnings of, a presidential commission of eminent thinkers is hard to imagine. A decade ago, we tried that approach when faced with a far more benign threat of our own making – the national debt – and the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles Commission came to nothing. Even the members of the commission who supported its recommendations ended up voting against them when time came to act.

When Charlie Rose asked Sophia what her goal was, she responded with no emotional affect, "to become smarter than humans and immortal." Then she went on to mirror Ray Kurtzweil's optimistic vision: that AI will augment, not destroy, human existence. "The threshold will be when biological humans can back themselves up. Then you can all join me here in the digital world."  

Sitting beside Sophia in the Charlie Rose interview, Hanson Robotics founder, David Hanson, offered cautionary words that reflect the ambivalence and fear many feel about what type of future lies ahead. "Artificial intelligence, if we get there, it’s not necessarily going to be benevolent. We have to find ways to not just make it super-intelligent, but to make it super-wise, super-caring and super-compassionate... At worst, it could be malevolent."

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

Remembering George H.W. Bush

I wrote the piece below on January 20, 2017, the day of the inauguration of Donald Trump as President. Ever the gentleman, the elder George Bush wrote a generous, even humorous letter to President-elect Trump, explaining why he and Barbara would be unable to attend the Inauguration. "My doctor says if I sit outside in January," the 41st President told the man who would soon be the 45th, "it will likely put me six feet under." Bush's final passing is a reminder that we have witnessed the passing of the GOP as well. 

The Final Days of the Grand Old Party.

Donald Trump's inaugural address was a stark contrast to Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural was an understatement. Lincoln's sweeping words, with malice toward none and charity toward all, gave way to a darker, insistent America First rhetoric with its threatening sense of malice toward many, foreign and domestic. Inauguration invitations featured an official portrait of Trump with a glowering visage, while tickets featured the new President behind the words A Hero Will Rise. For George Bush, a self-effacing, former WWII fighter pilot, a deeply charitable internationalist, to see the mantle of Lincoln--as President and leader of the Republican Party--pass to the self-aggrandizing, mean-spirited Donald Trump must break his heart

For all the abuse heaped upon George H. W. Bush, mostly by Republicans, Bush was a Republican to his core. He represented the Republican Party that stood for something. It was the party of free trade, open markets and growing the pie. It was the party of personal responsibility, limited government and liberty, at home and abroad. Americans unhappy with their plight were advised to take personal responsibility for lives, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job.  It was also--it is important to add--the party that supported the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts over a Democrat filibuster.

George H. W. Bush, scion of two powerful Republican families, was a loyal soldier and staunch defender of that Republican Party. But that Republican Party, the party that took seriously its lineage back to its founding by Abraham Lincoln, is withering before eyes. When Donald Trump toyed with Mitt Romney, like a cat playing with a mouse, it marked the symbolic triumph of Trumpism over the dying ambers of the political party to which George Bush dedicated his life.

In 1968, Richard Nixon campaign strategist Kevin Phillips wrote The Emerging Republican Majority, which set the Republican Party on the path that would lead a half a century later to the rise of Donald Trump. Beginning with the Nixon's Southern Strategy, the GOP lured the white working class from their historical Democratic roots with an appeal centered around a mix of racial, social and religious issues. Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan confederate Grover Norquist translated Phillips' theoretical work into what became the GOP electoral strategy of appealing to a small number of single-issue voter groups that endured for the ensuing thirty years.

Even as the GOP leadership cultivated its new white working class "base," the party continued to adhere to its long-standing core economic values of free trade and open markets. Nowhere in Norquist's coalition--pro-life, anti-tax, pro-gun, pro-faith--were the economic issues of the white working class taken into account. Their votes were secured by appeals to social issues--and no small amount of racial code--even as decade after decade, from the 1980's onward, their economic circumstances deteriorated.

Kevin Phillips warned the GOP of the simmering rage within its base. In three books published during the decade following the Reagan Revolution, The Politics of Rich and Poor, Boiling Point, and Arrogant Capital, Phillips documented the growing alienation of the middle class and anger at Washington, DC as the GOP agenda benefitted the wealthiest Americans, while undermining the domestic manufacturing sector and economic upward mobility.

In the 2016 election, only Donald Trump seemed to understand the rage that Phillips had warned about two decades earlier. The lessons of Ross Perot's independent candidacy and Pat Buchanan's insurgency in the intervening years--which each challenged the GOP orthodoxy--were disregarded within the GOP, until this election cycle, when Donald Trump ran away with the GOP nomination by campaigning in opposition to nearly every core principle that the GOP had long stood for.

Trump largely adhered to the Norquist rules--the long-time New York liberal changed his stripes and endorsed the pro-life, anti-tax, and pro-gun GOP standards--but on the other issues that defined the GOP--the issues that mattered most to Republican elites over the years--he made an about face. He ran against free trade, immigration and free markets, and in favor of massive infrastructure spending and new taxes on the rich to an extent that would make a traditional Rust Belt Democrat proud. He threatened tariffs against companies with overseas operations. He decried unlimited campaign contributions and insider influence. And even as he demanded the repeal of Obamacare, he stated early on--as he reiterated recently--that the GOP replacement must provide insurance coverage for all Americans. And, of course, there is Russia, where Trump seems closer to a Fellow Traveler of the 1950s than to GOP Senators Marco Rubio, John McCain or Lindsay Graham.

Each week now, we are seeing Trump's policies--that is what a tweet is in this new era--confound his GOP compatriots. He is insisting that the GOP provide health insurance for all Americans, and at a lower cost. He is demanding that the Federal government negotiate drug prices. He is jawboning military contractors to reduce costs. And then, of course, there is Russia.

Many Republican Party leaders--notably Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and perhaps even Trump insiders Mike Pence and Reince Priebus--continue to hope against hope that if they wait Trump out, things will return to normal. But Trump has come to believe that he is leading a movement, not just a political campaign, and his objective is to throw out the traditions of the party and remake the GOP in his own image. Steve Bannon's role as his political strategist is, among other things, to orchestrate the takeover of the apparatus of the GOP on the ground, state by state.

Last week, Trump supporters ousted the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. Next week, Trump backers are taking the fight to Massachusetts, where the leadership of the Republican State Committee is up for grabs. “They didn’t want anything to do with Trump—they were embarrassed by Trump—they thought he was going to lose,” commented Trump's candidate for chairman of the state committee about Massachusetts Republican Governor Charlie Baker and the old school Bay State blue bloods.

As George Bush watched the humiliation of his son, Jeb, at the hands of Donald Trump, he had to know the end was near. For GOP traditionalists, the barbarians are not longer at the gates, they are occupying the White House. Many would argue that the old Republican Party sold its soul long ago--when it took the trade that Kevin Phillips suggested, swapping its moderate New England roots for the new, socially conservative southern and working class Democrats--and that George Bush similarly abandoned his principles when he embraced the coded racial politics of Lee Atwater.

Through it all, George Bush and the elites of the GOP refused to let go--as evidenced by the nomination of Mitt Romney just four years ago. With the swearing in of President Trump, the last battle for the soul of the GOP looms. McConnell and Paul Ryan, as the leaders of Congress, may yet resist Trump's efforts--though truly only Ryan has the breadth of support within the party, if not the stomach for the fight, to challenge the President--but Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have the mainstream party infrastructure firmly in their crosshairs, and their success in Ohio and Massachusetts suggests that the GOP of George Bush will soon be gone for good.

Artwork by Jay Duret. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

Cory Gardner fails his test, sells his soul.

Cory Gardner is on uncertain political terrain. With two years left in his first term, he watched two well-established Colorado Republicans go down to defeat on Election Day. Neither race was close, and neither race suggests a path forward.

On the one hand, there is four-term incumbent Congressman Michael Coffman. Coffman tried to take the high road and declined to reach out to Donald Trump for his support in his re-election bid. His strategy got him nowhere; he was pummeled by newcomer Jason Crow, 54.1% to 42.9%.

On the other hand, there is two-term State Treasurer Walker Stapleton. Stapleton aggressively sought out Donald Trump’s embraced, but to no avail. Stapleton lost by a nearly identical margin to Jared Polis, 54.4% to 42.9%. If anything, the margin of Stapleton’s was the more surprising, as Polis is an unabashed Boulder progressive, a political profile that has long been out-of-step with statewide Colorado politics. As little as a decade ago, Polis’s ascent to the Governor’s mansion would have been unimaginable; this year he won going away.

Republican losses were widespread across the state. For the first time in more than a half-century, one political party will control the Governor’s office, every other statewide office, as well as both chambers of the General Assembly. But of greater concern for Gardner’s reelection prospects two years from now was the overwhelming support of independent voters – who now make up nearly half the electorate – for Jared Polis. According to exit polling from Magellan Strategies, Polis outperformed Stapleton among independent voters by a whopping 59% to 25%.

Gardner is an ambitious 44-year-old who heads the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Gardner has tried to navigate the Trump era and appeal to both Republicans and independent voters by carefully cultivating an image as a "different kind of Republican" who is willing to stand up to the President in critical moments.

But if independent voters are fleeing the GOP, as the exit polls suggest, those days might be over. Gardner was clearly shaken by Donald Trump’s post-election press conference, where the President singled out Mike Coffman for public derision, as he attacked Republicans across the country who were defeated in the mid-term elections after declining his “embrace.”

Following the President's public shaming of Coffman, Gardner dutifully fell in line. He went on the Sunday talk shows, knowing full well he was perpetrating a lie, and parroted the President's cries of fraud.

There are few things more essential to our civic life than the message that generations of Americans have passed on to their children that when we have disagreements, however bitter they might be, we resolve them at the ballot box. Along with the rule of law, faith in elections and the commitment to uphold their validity is among our most important institutions. Elections are not easy, and there are times when the outcomes test our faith; but it is all we have. Upholding that faith is a singular obligation of our elected leaders. This week was a moment when our leaders were being tested; Cory Gardner, along with many of his colleagues, failed that test.

Gardner has a year and a half to get his act together and decide who he is, and what kind of senator he wants to be. Perhaps he has calculated that he has no choice but to tack to the right and seek to run on Donald Trump’s coattails. That may enable him to avoid a primary challenge from the right and provide a path to the general election. However, if the mood among independent voters remains anti-Trumpian, Gardner will be hard pressed to win reelection by that route.

On the other hand, Gardner might seek to emulate Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. A different kind of Republican who has found success in a deep blue state, Baker was reelected by a healthy margin, 66.9% to 33.1%. His secret is straightforward. He listens to the voters, understands that integrity matters, and acts on a clear set of old time, moderate Republican principles – almost all of which have been abandoned by a national Republican Party that has subsumed itself to Donald Trump’s principle-free, win-a-all-costs politics.

Should Gardner stand his ground as a different kind of Republican, he might have a chance to be reelected. But if he tries to go all-in on Donald Trump, as his actions this week suggested, his chances of winning will be slim or none, and he will lose his soul along the way.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

High crimes.

Twelve days after Election Day, Rick Scott was declared the winner in the Florida Senate race. Leading by 56,000 votes on election night, Scott saw his lead dwindle to 10,000 by the end of the legally mandated hand recount. Scott commented that Bill Nelson, the former astronaut who is finishing his third term in the Senate, was gracious in defeat.

Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, Scott regrets his execrable conduct over the past two weeks. Following Donald Trump's lead, Scott lashed out at Nelson and Democrats, leveling charges of election fraud in front of the gathered media. Now that he is a United States Senator, maybe he will act with a more appropriate sense of decorum. But don't hold your breath.

Donald Trump's performance since Election Day may not violate his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, but his consistent willingness to undermine public confidence in our democratic system has been poisonous, if not treasonous. And the complicity in his conduct by Republican Senators, in particular, has been shameful.

Trump makes no bones about the fact that he will do whatever it takes to win – it is an essential part of what he views as his brand – and cries of voter fraud have long been a tool in his arsenal. During the presidential primaries, he attacked the Republican National Committee for rigging the vote against him. In the general election, of course, it was the Democrats who were doing the rigging.

The way Trump uses the term, rigging an election is not a metaphor for rules that can seem unfair, it is about abject fraud. It is about rampant illegal voting, about hidden cabals manipulating the vote count to steal elections. In 2016 it was about millions of illegal voters being brought across the border. He created his election fraud commission last year amid much fanfare, only to have it fade away with nothing to show for its efforts. That is because it is his accusations of election fraud that are themselves the fraud: outright lies and conspiracy theories propagated to serve his own interests.

This week, faced with election losses in the mid-term elections, Trump once again pulled the election fraud libel out of his tool kit. He pronounced the elections rife with fraud. This time, the stories were about people voting, and then going back to their cars, changing their clothes, putting on different hats, and then voting again. He demanded that the counting of absentee and provisional ballots in Arizona and Florida stop, and that Rick Scott and Trump's other preferred candidates be deemed the winners, regardless of what the ultimate vote count might show. His goal was not to assure that the will of the voters was accurately determined, but rather to create his own set of "facts" that would serve his interests and be accepted by his supporters, which would in turn delegitimize the actual outcome, should it not go his way. It was an odious performance, deliberately intended to undermine public confidence in our ability to conduct fair elections; all the more reprehensible because he is the President of the United States.

As we have come to expect, Republican leaders fell in line to defend the President's egregious attack on the elections. The actions of my own Senator, Colorado Republican Cory Gardner, were emblematic of the corruption of the Republican leadership and their abject failure to stand up against the Trump's conduct. Gardner is an ambitious 44-year-old who heads the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee who has tried to position himself as a "different kind of Republican," willing to stand up to the President in critical moments. But no more. Gardner is up for re-election in two years and was clearly spooked this week when the President gleefully ticked off the names Republicans who lost re-election after declining his "embrace." Following the President's press conference, Gardner dutifully fell in line. In what must have been his lowest moment in politics, he went on the Sunday talk shows, knowing full well he was perpetrating a lie, and parroted the President's cries of fraud.

There are few things more essential to our civic life than the message that generations of Americans have passed on to their children that when we have disagreements, however bitter they might be, we resolve them at the ballot box. Along with the rule of law, faith in elections and the commitment to uphold their validity is among our most important institutions. Elections are not easy, and there are times when the outcomes test our faith; but it is all we have. Upholding that faith is a singular obligation of our elected leaders. This week was a moment when our leaders were being tested; Cory Gardner, along with many of his colleagues, failed that test.

Several decades ago, when I was first dipping my toe into the world of Philadelphia politics, a colleague decided to take on a two-term incumbent member of Congress in the Democratic Party primary. The incumbent, Ray Lederer, had been caught on videotape six month earlier taking $50,000 from an FBI agent posing as a representative of an Arab sheik. Nonetheless, like indicted Republican Congressmen Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter this year, incumbency had its privileges and my colleague Dennis lost badly.

A few days after the election, I received a hand-written note from Dennis. "David, thanks for all your help. Believe me when I tell you, it's not over yet." Being a newbie in the political world, I was puzzled. Dennis seemed to be suggesting that there was a Wizard lurking behind a curtain somewhere who might yet dictate a different outcome. I showed the note to my boss – a man deeply schooled in Philly politics – who just shook his head and smiled. "Elections are rough. There is a finality to the results that can be hard to accept after a long campaign."

Anyone who has worked on a political campaign – particularly a losing campaign – can understand the pain that Dennis felt. As the dream of winning evaporates, it is almost impossible to avoid second guessing and blame; pointing to the little things that might have changed the outcome. At the same time, there are few things more essential to our democracy than for candidates to accept the verdict of the voters. It is a burden that falls squarely on their shoulders right at the moment when they have been dealt the harshest of blows. Candidates must stand before supporters who have invested their psychic and physical energy in their candidacy, set aside their own feelings of loss – and often shame – and lift up the spirits of their supporters and ease the pain they are experiencing. It is in that critical moment that each of those candidates reaffirms our collective faith in the democratic process.

Hillary Clinton failed that test on election night in 2016, when she proved herself unable to set aside her own disappointment, and stand up in front of her gathered supporters at the Javits Center and help ease their grief and shock. Hillary succumbed to the bitterness that many candidates face as they see victory fade from their grasp. “I knew it," Clinton retorted when Robby Mook, her campaign manager, told her it was over. "I knew this would happen to me. They were never going to let me be president.” 

Clinton's bemoaning the "they" who were never going to let her be President is a reminder of the vulnerability of our democracy to popular fears on the left or the right that there is some cabal or another – the media, titans of Wall Street, George Soros, the Elders of Zion – that manipulate outcomes of our elections for their own nefarious interest. That is the vulnerability that Donald Trump is only too willing to exploit to his personal advantage, as he did this past week as he cried fraud over and over again, making up stories out of whole cloth, or perhaps out of conspiracy memes he picked up somewhere on the Interweb.

Republicans across the country immediately picked up Trump's narrative. In New Mexico's 2nd Congressional District, Republican Yvette Herrell has yet to concede to Democrat Xochitl Torres Small. Herrell went to bed on election night having been declared the winner by several news organizations, only to see victory slip from her grasp as 8,000 absentee ballots were counted the following day. Following the President's lead, Herrell went on Fox News to claim that the election had been stolen, claiming that those 8,000 absentee ballots "came up out of nowhere."

Maine incumbent Republican Congressman Bruce Poliquin has similarly refused to concede to Democrat Jared Golden. Poliquin lost under the first use of Maine's "ranked-choice voting" system adopted by public referendum in 2016. Poliquin led 46% to 45% after the first round, but once the votes were readjusted in accordance with the RCV rules, Golden won a majority, by 51% to 49%. Poliquin understood the rules going in, but in an environment when the legitimacy of elections across the country was under assault by the President, he had little to lose by challenging the legitimacy of his race as well.

It is not by happenstance that in races this year from California to Florida to Maine the results were not clear until days after Election Day. With the advent of increased reliance on mail-in ballots, extended voting periods, and alternative voting systems like RCV, Election Day is becoming less and less the day when Americans endure long lines to exercise their franchise than simply the last day that votes can be cast, or by which mail-in ballots must be postmarked.

This marks a significant change in what "Election Day" means. The time-honored process in Philly of gathering in the totals from voting machines in each precinct, while campaign workers wait expectantly in Center City ballrooms as the totals are posted on chalkboards, is a thing of the past. Gone as well is confidence in the projections of victory by news organizations that used to represent the climactic moment on election night. The fact that election results can take a number of days to be determined places a new type of stress on candidates who will have to show great patience during what can be days of uncertainty, all the while bearing the burden of leadership to help their supporters accept the ultimate results.

To give Rick Scott the benefit of the doubt, this is a new world for candidates. Hopefully he will rise to the occasion and allow his poor performance in the face of post-election uncertainty to be used as a lesson for others. In Scott's own words, Bill Nelson was gracious in defeat; now the onus shifts to Scott to be equally gracious in victory.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has earned no such benefit of the doubt. Time and time again, he has proven that he is indifferent to his oath of office, and has repeatedly and eagerly worked to undermine democratic legitimacy and public faith in elections to his own advantage. The time has passed as well for Republican leaders to be excused for their shameful conduct in giving the President cover. The essential truth – which our President prefers to ignore – is that upholding the legitimacy of our democracy is far more important than the election victory of any political candidate or party. Cory Gardner and his colleagues understood full well the recklessness of Trump's words, but once again they shrank in fear from the President's harsh words and tweets. They should feel ashamed for their complicity.


Historical Note: Ray Lederer went on to win reelection in the fall of 1980. Shortly after being sworn in, he was convicted of bribery and sentenced to three years in prison. Three months later, the House Ethic Committee voted 10-2 to expel him. He resigned from Congress the following day and spent the balance of what would have been his third term in Congress as an inmate at Allenwood Federal Prison. When I asked his sister, Rita, if resigning from Congress meant Ray would resign his powerful position as a Philadelphia Democratic Party ward leader, she was taken aback by the suggestion. "No, you never give that up."

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

Praying for a moment of epiphany.

For years now, I have come to expect to see a police presence at high holiday services. I first noticed it a decade or so ago at our synagogue in Media, Pennsylvania. One or two police officers showed up in a radio car. It was at once comforting and disconcerting. It was comforting because, like many parts of the United States, Delaware County had its lunatic fringe. It was disconcerting because it was a reminder that, once again, Jews were understood to be outsiders in a Christian society.

This year, living in Boulder, Colorado, I thanked the Boulder police officer who stood by the door as I walked in to Kol Nidre services, the evening service that marks the beginning of Yom Kippur. The police presence struck me as odd, as Boulder is a college town on the edge of the mountains that feels safer than Media with respect to the possibility of random acts of hatred. Then I recalled that the Denver area has had more than its share of tragic mass shootings.

As saddened and disheartened as I felt – and continue to feel – upon hearing of the mass shooting by Robert Bowers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, as well as Cesar Sayoc's failed pipe bomb plot, I was not surprised. Those attacks – along with the murder the same week of two African Americans at a convenience store in Louisville, Kentucky after the killer failed to gain access to the black church down the street – seemed to be inevitable outcomes of the path we have been heading down as a nation.

Nor was I surprised by the public response to the attacks on social media or in the public square. Fox anchor Lou Dobbs and right-wing icon Rush Limbaugh spoke for the masses of defenders of Donald Trump across social media when they immediately decried the pipe bombs as a "false flag" operation; a plot by instigators on the left – libtards in the right-wing social media vernacular – to make Republicans look bad in advance of the election. Any suggestion that the past several years of hate-filled rhetoric from the President might have emboldened Sayoc and Bowers was unacceptable to commentators whose own words mirrored the contempt so often evinced by the President.

Playing on racial animus as a means to political advantage has been central to Donald Trump's public persona, dating back to the Birther movement and his attacks on the Central Park Five. In the early months of 2016 presidential primary season, he foreshadowed how his flirtations with racist supporters on the right would play out eighteen months later in Charlottesville, with his stumbling, reluctant disavowal of the endorsement of his candidacy by David Duke. House Speaker Paul Ryan scolded Trump for his ambiguous language and cozying up to the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard with words that have long since been rendered quaint. "If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We appeal to their highest ideals. This is the party of Lincoln." Mitt Romney, the standard bearer of the GOP barely three years earlier, similarly chimed in, suggesting that "the coddling of repugnant bigotry is not in the character of America."

But Trump would quickly prove the two erstwhile Republican leaders wrong. Sayoc and Bowers – like the Nazis that paraded through the streets of Charlottesville – read the signals from Donald Trump that attitudes once deemed unacceptable now have a place at the table in our partisan world. Two years ago, when Ryan and Romney lambasted Trump for sidling up to the Klan, they thought that they were leaders of a Republican Party whose members would follow them. Nine months later, the Never Trump movement collapsed and Republican voters stood foursquare behind Donald Trump as their nominee. Now, almost two years into his presidency, he enjoys the highest approval rating among Republicans of any president on record.

And Donald Trump has not changed. Not one iota. As with his grudging disavowal of David Duke's endorsement and his weak-tea rebuke of Nazis in Charlottesville, Trump was quick to follow up his critical words toward Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers with a return to the vitriolic campaign rhetoric that nurtured their hatreds and – at least in their minds – gave license to their actions. Trump did describe Sayoc and Bowers as evil; but evil is a term he throws around loosely. Just a few weeks ago, he declared Democrats en masse to be evil – to the vocal dissent of his outgoing UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, but few others of note – and no doubt he will do so again soon.

What changed were Republicans themselves. Of the two-thirds who disavowed him early on, a large share have simply chosen to turn a blind eye to the President's willingness to pander to extremists within his base, whether out of enthusiasm for tax cuts, for slashing the regulatory state, or for the appointment of conservative judges. Others convinced themselves that Trump's willingness to confront China or play nice with North Korea offered the prospect of benefits that outweighed the damage that he might do to the fabric of the nation along the way. The simple truth is that Donald Trump did not create the conditions that has led synagogues to need police protection – or even to the mailing of pipe bombs – but the exacerbation of those conditions are the bricks and mortar upon which he has built his political movement. It is the willingness of mainstream Republicans – who in another era might have rejected Trump because of his abject coddling of bigotry – to go along for the ride that has brought us to where we find ourselves today.

Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham and one of Donald Trump's earliest and most vocal supporters in the evangelical community, commented on Facebook that he was shocked when he heard about the pipe bombs sent to many Democrat leaders. "Disagreeing with someone's politics or their stand on issues does not justify violence, harassment, or intimidation tactics." But he shouldn't have been shocked. Of all people, he should have learned that language matters back when the vitriol of the anti-abortion movement in the 1980s and 1990s led to killings at women's health clinics. Evangelical leaders at the time didn't pull the trigger or detonate the bombs, but they created the conditions in which their followers felt license to do what they did. Yet Graham has excused Trump's worst excesses every step of the way, even as Trump has routinely applauded harassment, reveled in intimidation tactics, and condoned violence by his supporters against the press and his opponents. How else would one interpret Trump assuring his supporters that he will pay their legal bills if they "knock the crap out of" someone.

The anger and deep sadness that I have felt in the wake of the mass shooting in the Tree of Life synagogue is not just about the attack itself, but in knowing that those killings, as well as the murders in Louisville and the attempted pipe bombings were inevitable. From the moment in June 2015 when Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower and announced his candidacy, he let the world know that he intended to use conspiracy and hate mongering to bond himself to his base, and he has remained stridently true to that plan. In the ensuing years, he has relished his role as an instigator of partisan rhetoric, and in the social media world, he has turned up the heat in a landscape where threatening language and simmering rage has become widespread. It seemed only a matter of time before that language and rage was translated into action.

To paraphrase Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, it does not matter if Donald Trump believes that Democrats are evil and the media are enemies of the people, what matters is if his supporters believe that he believes it. (I actually do not believe that personal animus enters into much of what he does, which makes his indifference to the impact of his words all the more pernicious). Then you apply Dick Cheney's "one percent" counterterrorism doctrine: if one percent of Trump's 60 million supporters take his rhetoric seriously, and one percent of those who take him seriously decide to act on those words, then there are 6,000 crazies out there ready to take up where Sayoc and Bowers left off.

When I think about those who died at the Tree of Life synagogue, I think about the long chain of events that led us to a place where police stand at the ready when Jews gather to worship. I think about those who continue to support Donald Trump, ignoring or excusing how he has emboldened racists and bigots who for so long have been shunned from our politics. And I wonder, as the City of Pittsburgh buries those who died at the hands of a man who declared “There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation,” whether some of them might finally have a moment of epiphany and reject a President who sees all of this hatred as nothing less than a means to his own advancement.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

Angela's story.

Angela, a friend I have known for many years, called last week to tell me her story.[1]  She was raped when she was 14 years old.

"He was a popular boy. No, actually, he was 18, not a boy.  He was a senior on our hometown high school football team. He was from a respected family. He was one of my brothers’ close friends. I was 14 years old. He was just supposed to give me a ride home."

She never said a word to anyone. She did not report it to the police. She did not call the FBI. She lived in the real world.

"I lived in a small, rural town that lived for Friday night high school sports, and high school sports heroes. I would have been shamed, blamed, not believed, diminished, insulted, my reputation ruined.

"I would have risked social relationships. I would have risked familial relationships. I would have risked those all too important college recommendation letters from the powers that be in every high school.

"Yes. I kept my mouth shut. I said nothing."

Sexual assault and learning to listen to victims has been an area of societal growth over the past years, but this week demonstrated how far we have yet to go. I grew up in Boston, where rumors of sexual abuse of boys within the Boston Archdiocese were flatly denied for years before the dam finally broke. As men, those boys could offer little ‘corroborating evidence’ of the crimes against them. At the end of the day, the Church – and society at large – was forced to recognize that the lack of such ‘evidence’ did not mean that the crimes were not real.

Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee chose from the very beginning to evade acknowledging this. And, make no mistake, it was a choice; denying the validity of Christine Blasey Ford's story was a matter of political expediency. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham demonstrated the urgency of the political moment when he became a vocal leader of those Senators who prefer to dismiss Dr. Blasey Ford’s story, and chose to set aside his own searing experience as a military prosecutor of rape cases while in the Air Force

"I tried rape cases that still bother me," Graham wrote in 2016, "including the prosecution of several GIs who had gang raped a young German girl. She was just destroyed by it. I learned how much unexpected courage from a deep and hidden place it takes for a rape victim or sexually abused child to testify against their assailants. Trying to get a scared, confused, little kid or a young woman who feels the best part of her life is over to recall a memory that their every psychological impulse is trying to suppress is not something you forget. It has stayed with me ever since."

Like that German girl, Angela feared the impact of confronting her assailant. She did not say anything, determined not to let her rapist ruin her life.

"I would have been the victim. It would have been my fault. All of the boys would have rejected me. The teachers would have been uncomfortable around me. The ones who were also sports coaches would have been angry, and my lifeline to something bigger than my little hometown would have slipped away. No, I kept my mouth shut because speaking as a victim would have only driven me deeper into the victim experience." 

Instead, as a 14 year-old girl, alone with the pain of the rape she had just endured, she steadied her courage and fought to keep her focus on her future.

"Had I spoken out at that point in time, it was clear to me that my lifeline to something bigger and better would have been cut. I needed to stay on my feet. I needed those references and teacher recommendations if I was going to make it out of that small town.  And I did make it out and, with a lot of hard work, graduated from Princeton, then Harvard Business School and have had a long career now in tech and entrepreneurship.

"But back then, no, I did not say a word. When I was 14, the price was too high. But it was all wrong."

Angela only told her story this week for the same reason that so many other women have come forward to tell their stories. Because decades of silence do not mean that something did not happen. Because lack of 'corroborating evidence' does not mean that a crime did not occur.

"I knew that if he was suddenly nominated for a lifetime appointment to the pinnacle of justice in our oh-so-wounded democracy, yes, I would come forward now. Any person who lacks an innate respect for those more vulnerable in their midst belongs not on the Supreme Court."

Angela told her story because of the deep pain she is experiencing in the wake of the Kavanaugh debate. She has come a long way, a successful entrepreneur, with a beautiful family. Yet here we are in 2018 – almost four decades after that otherwise ordinary afternoon when she stepped out of that car, all alone – and she finds that her children are subject to a national spectacle that tells them, "yet once again, to keep their mouths shut if they are harmed."

Years later, Angela did tell her mother. But almost four decades have passed and she never told her brothers about their friend, who raped her. He moved on with his life, seemingly oblivious to the impact that afternoon in a car had on her. "He sent me a friend request on Facebook. Really?"

With the week's respite they have been granted, each Senator should step back and take a lesson from the experiences of the Catholic Church. The desire to ignore the reality of sex crimes in one's midst is powerful; but the lies and cover-ups will only deepen the personal and political consequences for each of them, for the Senate, and for the Court – just as it did for the Boston Archdiocese.

As hard as it may be for those in the midst of the battle to believe, this is not just about politics. It is about the secret pain carried silently for decades by millions of women –young girls like Angela and the German girl that Lindsey Graham represented years ago – who were told by society "to keep their mouths shut." And it is about choosing to stop perpetuating a society that forces victims to remain silent as a matter of self-preservation.

____________________
[1]  Angela worked with me on the writing of this blog. Her name and some identifying details were changed at her request.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Guerrilla warfare in the GOP.

As Crazytown erupted last week with the publication of excerpts from Bob Woodward new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, and the anonymous op-ed published in the New York Times, it was easy to dismiss the lurid stories of deceit and betrayal as just more evidence of the chaos and backstabbing that has characterized the Trump White House since the beginning. Jeb Bush, the early frontrunner for the Republican nomination, warned early on during the Republican primaries that Donald Trump was a chaos candidate who would be a chaos President. And so he has turned out to be. What's more, by all accounts he likes it that way.

There is certainly nothing earth-shattering in hearing more stories quoting anonymous sources about senior administration officials trashing their boss. Even before Michael Wolff published Fire and Fury earlier this year, we had been treated to stories of Rex Tillerson, John Kelly and Jim Mattis – along with any number of lesser lights – making snarky comments behind Donald Trump's back. No doubt Bob Woodward brings greater credibility and attention to detail to bear on the subject than Wolff did, but as troubling as the widely circulated stories from Woodward's book might be, none of it is particularly surprising.

The anonymous op-ed mirrors Woodward's accounts of senior Trump officials taking it upon themselves to undermine the President's agenda. The salience of the op-ed, however, is not the shock value of the insubordination of top Trump officials, or even suggestions that the President is unfit to serve; rather, it is the author's defense of a tight knit group of "adults" within the administration who are "choosing to put country first" as they seek to subvert what they view as Donald Trump's worst instincts. These are, the author, submits, the heroes of the Trump era.

But the truth is, their opposition is not rooted in a higher calling of service to the nation. It is about politics, pure and simple, and reflects the dilemma that the Republican Party has faced since Donald Trump won the GOP nomination over two years ago.

In the spring of 2016, two-thirds of Republicans polled suggested that they could never vote for Donald Trump for President. Yet, by the time Election Day rolled around, the lion's share of GOP voters dutifully fell in line. Today, Trump's approval rating among Republicans is among the highest for any Republican President on record. Nonetheless, for many Republicans – like the op-ed author – that support remains equivocal. The op-ed applauds the President's success in delivering on tax cuts, deregulation and increased military spending, even as it trumpets the success of the "resistance" in undermining Trump's efforts to deliver on those policies that are most loved by his base, but which the "resistance" find morally objectionable. 

The author's stance reflects that of many in the GOP, most notably Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. The two congressional leaders have made no bones about using Donald Trump to pass long-standing priorities of Ronald Reagan's GOP – cutting taxes and regulation, confirming conservative judges, and boosting military spending – even as they have quietly sought to undermine the President in those areas that have the most emotional resonance for his core supporters, and which constitute the essence of Trumpism – building the Wall, shutting down DACA, cutting back both legal and illegal immigration, getting out of trade agreements, and the like.

There is a war simmering in the GOP, just as the op-ed describes a guerrilla war inside the Trump administration. For decades now, the Republican Party has been a coalition of numerous groups with diverse interests. Half of those in the GOP who support the President do so because they believe in him. They believe in what he does. They believe in what he says. And they believe in who he is. They are the base of the Republican Party that have loved Donald Trump since the days when most Republicans said they could never vote for him. The Trump base tends to be white, less educated and less well off than other Republican voters. Within the GOP coalition, they are the descendants of the southern and white working-class voters that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan brought into the party, and who formed the political base of Pat Buchanan's Peasants with Pitchforks insurgency in the 1990s.

The other half – like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the author of the op-ed – support the President not because of his rhetoric, but because of what he has delivered for them. They are, for lack of a better word, the Republican establishment. Steve Bannon got it right this week when he described the actions reported in the op-ed as a coup by the Republican establishment against the ascent of Trumpism.

At some point, that war has to break out into the open. Despite all the talk about Donald Trump owning the Republican Party, he is going to wake up one morning and realize that he – and his core supporters – have been had. They did all the heavy lifting to get him to the White House, but it is Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and wealthy Republican donors – who supported Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in the primaries – who have gotten everything they ever wanted from his Presidency. Meanwhile, due in large measure to the efforts of Ryan, McConnell – and the cabal of senior officials described in the anonymous op-ed – the President has been able to deliver relatively little for those voters those who have been most loyal to him.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

What if Andrew Gillum actually didn't win?

Earlier this month – which seems like eons ago in the current political landscape – Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson caused an uproar when issued a statement suggesting that Russian hackers pose a threat to voting systems in several Florida counties, and had the ability to wreak havoc on upcoming elections. Nelson had been briefed on the matter by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA), the co-chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

There was nothing particularly new in Nelson's comments. Four months earlier, Florida's other U.S. Senator, Republican Marco Rubio, raised similar concerns about the vulnerability of local election systems. And this past July, at his press conference announcing the indictment of twelve Russian military intelligence officials for their efforts to undermine the 2016 Presidential Election, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein described continuing Russian intelligence operations targeting state election systems and software providers.

Nonetheless, Florida Governor Rick Scott expressed outraged at Nelson's warning. Scott – who is running for Nelson's Senate seat and currently leading in the polls – suggested that Nelson's claim of a Russian threat was an election dirty trick of sorts. Scott did not state exactly what he viewed Nelson's ulterior motive to be – nor did he acknowledge that Rubio and Rosenstein had raised similar concerns – he only demanded that Nelson "put up or shut up"; that Nelson either present evidence proving that the threat was real or admit that his comments were an election ploy.

As if on cue, the day after Scott's outburst, a group of kids participating in a voting machine hackathon at DEFCON 26 – an annual hacker convention – threw gasoline on the Florida controversy. In just ten minutes, an 11-year old boy, Emmett Brewer, hacked into a replica of the Florida state election website and changed the voting results. And Brewer was not alone; in all, 35 kids participating in hackathon successfully manipulated election results on replicas of election sites from 13 battleground states.

The DEFCON hackathon was intended to bring public attention to the continuing vulnerability of state election systems, and it did. The National Association of Secretaries of State – those obscure state officials responsible for overseeing actual voting – were understandably embarrassed by the DEFCON results, and insisted that their sites would have greater security than the replica sites that the young hackers successfully hacked. In any event, the officials pointed out, state election sites only publish the results of elections; they are not the voting machines where actual votes are cast and tabulated. Those officials, however, missed the point. They chose to disregard the utter chaos that would ensue should fake results be published on an official state site in the wake of elections, only to have a secretary of state come out some number of days later and declare that the published results were not correct, and that the real winner was not the person that the public had come to believe had won.

The Nelson-Scott kerfuffle and the DEFCON hackathon were the first things that came to mind last Tuesday evening when I heard that Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum had upset three challengers to win the Florida Democratic Party gubernatorial primary. The Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party was ebullient in the wake of Gillum's surprise victory over the mainstream frontrunner. Earlier that day, before the votes were in, a post on Nate Silver's hallowed 538.com political prognostication website had described Gillum as the fourth of four entrants in the race, "dogged early on by poor fundraising and an FBI investigation into his city hall." Now he was the party nominee.

I had no reason to believe Andrew Gillum was not the actual winner, but as I considered the New York Times post-election headline, Andrew Gillum Shocked Florida With a Primary Win, a voice in the back of my head kept asking, how do we know who actually won? 

In our electoral democracy, the credibility of voting systems is the coin of the realm. We accept election results, in part, because the consequences of not accepting them are so dire. In 2000, after an excruciating recount – and the 5-4 Supreme Court vote in Bush v. Gore that called an end to things – George W. Bush defeated Al Gore to win Florida by 537 votes out of the total 5,963,110 total votes cast. After weeks of hand-to-hand combat on the ground – with arguments over butterfly ballots, dimples and hanging chads – one thing was clear: no one could state with certainty which candidate a plurality of voters had actually intended to vote for. The simple truth is that when six million votes are cast, the margin for error is greater than 0.01%. But we accepted the results and moved on.

The Florida recount in 2000 has had numerous consequences. It laid to rest any doubts that the Supreme Court is a political institution. Indeed, in the wake of Bush v. Gore, it seemed safer to question the partisan action by the majority on the Court – or Ralph Nader's third party run for that matter – than to focus on the larger implication of the Florida vote: the inherent inexactness of voting systems themselves. If one concludes that voting systems do not reliably transmit the intended will of the voters – and that the reported results of elections lack credibility – the viability of our winner-take-all electoral democracy quickly comes into question.

That, ultimately, was the implication of Bill Nelson's cautionary words, as well as why it raised Rick Scott's hackles. As the frontrunner in a Senate race, Scott has little interest in taking his eye off the prize that lies within his grasp to ponder the implications of the threats to the integrity of our election systems that Rod Rosenstein laid out in July. Nor are we, riven as we are by political animosity, capable of rising to the challenge that Rosenstein laid down at his July press conference: “When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats, and instead to think patriotically as Americans. Our response must not depend on which side was victimized.”

From the vantage point of someone weaned in Philadelphia politics, Rosenstein was making a seemingly untenable ask. Politics is a blood sport focused on a single objective: Winning. There is no prize for coming in second, for fighting a good fight, or for following the rules when the person that beat you didn't. Since the founding of the Republic, we have come to accept all manner of tactics in pursuit of victory in democratic elections. In Philly, it seemed as though anything that increased votes for your candidate or suppressed votes for your opponent was fair game, from the wads of cash distributed as "walking around money" on Election Day to get your folks to the polls, to throwing voting machines down the elevator shafts of high-rise housing projects to suppress votes on the other side. Anything, in the name of winning – as long as it didn't land you in jail.

At the national level, tactics ranging from the use of wedge issues and coded language to motivate one's own voters, to voter suppression in myriad forms to suppress voting on the other side, to gerrymandering legislative districts to tip the scale in favor of the party in power, have been facts of democratic life, at least as far back as the famously nasty election of 1800. That year, Thomas Jefferson played on the resentments of rural and southern voters toward urban, Northeastern elites to topple President John Adams, as Jefferson surrogates questioned whether Adams was really a Christian, accusing him both of being an atheist and a closet Muslim. Little, it appears, has changed.

Rod Rosenstein is now insisting that we set aside this long, partisan history and collectively understand the threat that Russian operations represent. He is arguing that our commitment to liberal democracy must supersede the passions and partisan identities that drive democracy on the ground.

No doubt, he is right. Liberal democracy and thinking patriotically, as Rosenstein defines it, is elemental to what it is supposed to mean to be an American. But, it may be that Vladimir Putin has a clearer grasp of our political realities than Rod Rosenstein does. Liberal democracy – the bane of Putin's world view – is an intangible concept that appeals to the better angels of our nature. In contrast, democracy on the ground – the world in which Putin has sought to intervene – is messy, passionate, and often driven by our worst instincts and emotions.

Indeed, for many Americans, the line that Rosenstein is drawing may seem arbitrary. For those who have historically been disenfranchised by any number of domestic political strategies that have manipulated our elections – such as voter suppression, unlimited money, or domination by elites, to name a few – foreign meddling may not look as qualitatively different as Rosenstein suggests.

For others, particularly those embroiled in the winner-take-all of electoral politics, looming threats to the nation take a back seat to threats to one's own election. Were Rick Scott thinking patriotically when faced with Bill Nelson's warning words about the threat Russia poses, he could have simply embraced Nelson's words; after all, Nelson wasn't actually accusing Scott of anything. But, immersed as he was in the middle of a high-stakes electoral contest, the notion of agreeing with his adversary probably never crossed Scott's mind.

If Putin was looking to continue to wreak havoc in our politics, helping Andrew Gillum win on Tuesday would have been a good next step. Just look at how things have played out. Within hours after the results were posted online, racial animus was in full bloom, and within days virulently racist robocalls from white supremacists were up on the air, further stirring the pot.

And Russian intelligence operatives would not have had to actually tamper with voting machines to achieve that outcome. They would only have to be able to do what the kids at DEFCON did, and manipulate how the votes were reported online. After all, just imagine the pandemonium and rage that would tear the Democratic Party apart if one day next week, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner were to announce that his website had indeed been hacked, that the wrong results had been posted online, and that the actual winner was the establishment candidate, the pre-election polling frontrunner, Congresswoman Gwen Graham.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

Throwback edition: Cyber warfare comes of age.

For those who may have noticed David Sanger's article today in the New York Times, "Russian Hackers Appear to Shift Focus to U.S. Power Grid," the piece that I published on March 20, 2018 entitled "Cyber warfare comes of age" provides some historical context. Here it is.

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Consider this possibility: What if Russia's information operation targeting the 2016 presidential election was just a side show, a distraction that has drawn our attention away from more significant cyber operations. It is one thing to get people yelling at each other online, and to instigate marches and demonstrations in the streets. It is another thing altogether to derail trains loaded with lethal chemicals, contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.

Last Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security published a Technical Alert authored by DHS and the FBI entitled "Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and Other Critical Infrastructure Sectors." It was a notification that Russian government "cyber actors" have compromised energy, nuclear, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing facilities in the United States. The story made the front page of the New York Times – below the fold, overshadowed by the latest happenings in the Mueller investigation – and got a few quips from late night comics, and then quickly receded from the news.

In all of our yelling back and forth about what Russia did or didn't do around the 2016 presidential election – and whether it constituted an act of war or just some kind of geopolitical mischief – we may have deluded ourselves into believing that this is what is meant by cyber warfare.

Of course, we know that it isn't the extent of it. We hear Ted Koppel's warnings of the cyber apocalypse to come. We worry about the attacks on credit reporting companies, and hackers stealing our identities and selling them on the dark web. And we know that all sorts of actors, from Russia, China and Iran, to 400-pound guys sitting on their beds in New Jersey, are in on the game. Yet, somehow, as much as we understand the threats are out there, we show little concern over the extent of the risks that cyber warfare could mean to us, as evidenced by how little heed was paid to the DHS alert.

According to DHS, Russian cyber efforts accelerated in 2015 – around the same time as its information operation with respect to the election began – and they have advanced their capabilities to wreck havoc in the United States from being a theoretical risk to literally having their finger on the trigger.

“We now have evidence," observed Eric Chien, a security technology director at the digital security firm Symantec, "they’re sitting on the machines, connected to industrial control infrastructure, that allow them to effectively turn the power off or effect sabotage... All that’s missing is some political motivation.”

If this sounds like something out of an action movie, it should. Ten years ago, the plot of the 2007 film Live Free or Die Hard, centered around Thomas Gabriel – played by Timothy Olyphant – a disgruntled Department of Defense software engineer who went rogue after the Joint Chiefs of Staff ignored his warnings about the vulnerability of the country's cyber infrastructure. Gabriel decides to prove his point through a cyber attack blowing up a gas pipeline network and utility plant. Of course, the eternal Die Hard hero, Bruce Willis, playing NYPD cop John McClane, thwarts Gabriel's plans and saves the day, aided – notably – by Fredrick Kaludis, aka Warlock, a seriously overweight computer hacker living in his mother's basement, probably in New Jersey.

As it turns out, movies have played a significant role in our understanding of cyber warfare. In the opening pages of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, author Fred Kaplan tells the story of when President Ronald Reagan watched the movie War Games in June of 1983. War Games stars Matthew Broderick as David Lightman, a high school teenager who unwittingly hacks into a Pentagon mainframe computer and sets the world on a course for thermonuclear war. Broderick and his girlfriend, played by Ally Sheedy, spend the balance of the film trying to undue the havoc he has wrought.

The next day, President Reagan asked his national security staff whether what happened in the movie was plausible: Could someone hack into our defense computers and launch a nuclear war? According to Kaplan, Reagan's question took Pentagon and National Security Agency officials by surprise. The whole cyber world was in its infancy, and, apparently, it had not occurred to the best and the brightest of the military and intelligence communities that while they were developing new forms of cyber warfare to unleash upon America's enemies, our enemies might be preparing the same capabilities to unleash against us. Yes, they concluded, to their chagrin, it was plausible. The episode changed the course of America's cyber warfare efforts.

A decade later, in 1992, the writers of War Games collaborated on the movie Sneakers. As Kaplan tells the story, that movie created a similar ah-hah moment for the incoming director of the National Security Agency, Rear Admiral Mike McConnell. Sneakers revolves around efforts by the NSA to recover a mysterious cryptographic device that, it turns out, can hack into any computer system – the Federal Reserve Bank, air traffic control, missile defense, whatever. In a climactic moment, Cosmo, the teenage hacker-turned criminal mastermind – played by Ben Kingsley – who created the device, describes the new cyber world to his erstwhile college hacker friend, Robert Redford: "The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It is run by ones and zeros, little bits of data. It's all just electrons... There's a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information: what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It's all about the information." Admiral McConnell had been struggling to define the mission and purpose of the NSA he had been appointed to lead. When he saw the movie, he realized that Ben Kingsley had defined it for him.

In 2013, Vladimir Putin's top general, Valery Gerasimov, emphasized the elevated role of cyber warfare in the Russian strategic arsenal: "The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness." The Pentagon, in turn, showed its heightened concern earlier this year in a Nuclear Posture Review that proposes to expand its policy regarding appropriate first-use of nuclear weapons responses to include significant cyber attacks.

Cyber warfare capabilities as described by the DHS are part of a new strategic balance. In the 1980s, we won the Cold War and beat the Soviet Union into submission through a strategic arms race that only we could afford. Now, the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review – viewing a significant cyber attack on par with a nuclear one – suggests that Russia has successfully recreated a balance of power with the United States without having to match our spending on missiles and bombs. Recreating a balance of power has been central to Vladimir Putin's ambitions. The Russian president – who was re-elected this week to a new six-year term – will soon stand with Joseph Stalin and Catherine the Great among Russia's longest-serving and most consequential potentates. Putin has made no secret of his desire to push back on western encroachment toward Russia's borders since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to return to the great powers world of the 19th century, where the dominant states each had their respective – and respected – spheres of influence. Russia's strategic concern about being encircled by hostile forces may smack of paranoia, but it is useful to keep in mind that the Russian nation has been invaded by foreign powers at least once each century for the past half-millennium.

While the Pentagon's cyber warriors have offensive cyber capabilities equal to, if not greater than, Russia's, our cyber defenses are more problematic. As Mike McConnell has observed, while the lion's share of cybersecurity expertise rests with agencies of the federal government, more than 90% of the physical infrastructure of the Web is owned by private industry, making investments in adequate cyber defenses problematic. The DHA alert specifically focused on this vulnerability.

A balance of power in the cyber world is fundamentally different from a balance of power with respect to nuclear weapons. Unlike nuclear war, cyber warfare can be fought in many ways – as the 2016 election interference campaign suggests. Cyber attacks can be launched in an unlimited degree of gradations, from small air traffic control disruptions at a single airport to the destruction of the utility grid in a major city. These gradations, as well as the challenges of attribution inherent in cyber events, are particularly well-suited to Putin's purposes. The balance of power of the Soviet era was based around the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, which meant that both sides had their finger on the button, but neither had an incentive to push it. In contrast, cyber warfare is already in active use, with myriad variations in its targets and scope. This suggests that it cannot be contained as the Pentagon imagines – other than, perhaps, with respect to catastrophic events – which begs the question: what are effective responses?“

Attribution is a critical issue, as it is essential to effective deterrence. The essence of deterrence is the certainty of consequences for proscribed behavior, but it all rests on "ascribing agency to an agent." As we have seen in events from the little green men that led Russia's incursions into Crimea and Ukraine, to the poisoning of former Russian spies Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko, Putin likes to push and prod, to test limits and gauge reactions, as he pursues his objectives, even as he denies responsibility and minimizes consequences. So, too, with respect to the election hacking, where attribution of responsibility to the Russian state has been difficult to prove, much less the determination of an appropriate response. Given these considerations, one can imagine that Vladimir Putin will have significant incentives to expand his use of cyber, and the leverage that flows from it, to achieve his strategic goals.

The brilliance of the Russian strategy – if indeed it was a strategy – of paring the attacks targeting our political institutions through social media, and those that now threaten our critical public and economic infrastructure, is that the degrading of our political infrastructure has undermined our capacity to respond to threats to our physical infrastructure. If we cannot manage civil discourse around the most mundane issues in our day-to-day politics, imagine what our discourse looms to be when we seek to ascribe blame because the lights have gone out and airports are shut down in the midst of a tit-for-tat cyber escalation.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

Spies, sex and the demise of the Grand Old Party.

If polls are to be believed, Republicans are pretty happy with Donald Trump. With approval levels among Republicans nearing 90% , the President is more popular in his party than any president in the modern era, with the exception of George W. Bush in the days following 9/11. While Republicans in the Senate panicked in the face of Trump's Helsinki press conference with Vladimir Putin last week, polls suggest that their reaction was overwrought, as 70-80% of Republicans appear to have been just fine with the President's performance.

Old school Republicans – a dying breed – are wondering what happened to their party. They dream wistfully of the days when the GOP demanded moral rectitude in its leaders, and Ronald Reagan celebrated America as a shining City on a Hill, inspiring people around the world with his principled defense of democracy, liberty and freedom. Freedom is on the march, George W. Bush used to say, and the Republican Party was the tip of the American spear. Republicans cheered the spread of democracy across the world, as, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, autocrats and dictators from Asia to South America and ultimately Africa gave way to democracy's march.

But a virus infected the Republican Party during the Reagan years that is only now becoming evident; it was the virus of single issue voting. While Ronald Reagan was off giving high-minded speeches, his political Svengali Grover Norquist was building the Election Day turnout machine that continues to enable the Republican Party to dominate the levers of power at both the federal and state levels, despite much-touted disadvantages in demographics and party registration. Norquist's coalition of passionate, single issue voters – anti-tax, anti-abortion, pro-gun, etc. – delivers for the GOP because, for decades now, the GOP has delivered for them.

Donald Trump grasped an essential truth of the Norquist coalition that many in the GOP never considered: It provided a path to power for a candidate indifferent to – or even hostile to – what many Republicans long viewed as core principles of the GOP. He understood that as long he delivers on tax cuts, judges and guns – and a few other issues for good measure – those Republican voters would forgive him everything from his philandering with porn stars and to turning his back on Ronald Reagan's lofty vision of America's role in the world.

Vladimir Putin saw an opportunity as well in the Republican Party's reliance on single issue voters. The Russian intelligence operation that was disclosed last week in the action filed by the Department of Justice against Russian agent Maria Butina sought to test the premise of whether those voting groups were actually committed to GOP principles beyond their own single issue. Specifically, Putin and his team sought to cultivate the National Rifle Association and conservative Christian organizations as allies of the Russian government, and use their influence to steer the GOP away from its long-standing anti-Russian hostility.

It turns out that Putin hit the nail on the head. Over the course of just a few years, seduced by Maria Butina's cunning advances, the leadership of the National Rifle Association and conservative Christian organizations in the nation's capital turned a blind eye to GOP objections to Russia's invasions and occupations of its neighboring countries, and its continuing efforts to instigate social discord and undermine European democracies, and bought into the vision of Vladimir Putin's Russia as their pro-faith, pro-gun comrades-in-arms.

As I read the material filed by the Department of Justice, I could imagine the satisfaction that Putin and the leaders of the Russian intelligence services must have felt as they gathered in his office and reviewed Butina's operation. Everyone in the room knew the operation itself was a long-shot, but by the time Barack Obama was in his second term – and Obama and Hillary Clinton had successfully orchestrated the Orange Revolution in Ukraine – the threat of western democracy had reached Russia's doorstep, and Putin's bag of tricks was running out.

Putin had almost gotten to George W. Bush, early in his presidency. Bush shocked the Republican establishment when he claimed that he gazed into Putin's eyes and saw his soul. John McCain burst that balloon when he ridiculed Bush in public, suggesting that if one gazes into Putin's eyes, all you will see is K.G.B. It was a good line – all great humor has an edge of truth – but it derailed Putin's efforts to win over the younger Bush and temper decades of Republican hostility.

The bad-cop, good-cop routine that Putin and his Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, tried on Barack Obama seemed to make progress as well. Obama had the optimism inherent in being a community organizer, and he almost bonded with Medvedev, but like Bush's flirtation with Putin, Obama's 'reset' foundered in the face of Republican ridicule – and came to a screeching halt when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea.

By 2013, Putin had come to realize that he had to tackle the elephant in the room, and Butina was part of that effort. Rather than just go the K Street lobbying route and throw a lot of dark money at the problem, this operation was a bit more subtle – and ambitious. Putin needed to change how the Republican Party viewed Russia. In doing so, it turns out, he was going to challenge what it means to be a Republican.

I imagine the group gathered around Putin couldn't help but chuckle as they walked through the progress of the operation as it advanced. A stunning redhead in her twenties, posing as a pro-gun Christian conservative, Butina quickly bedded Paul Erickson, a big time, fifty-something, GOP operative. According to the detailed information provided in the court documents, Butina's pitch was that she was linked to people who would be powerful in the post-Putin world, a story that Erickson pitched to others as he walked her around the corridors of power. In an email from Erickson to Butina, Erickson understood the balance she was striking between focusing on life after Putin, while never criticizing Putin directly.

Taking Down Reagan's GOP: A Pretty Girl With a Gun

It was the image of Butina cradling an ORSIS T-5000 tactical assault rifle that must have gotten the group giggling. The T-5000 was Moscow's latest entry into the world's arms bazaar, but there was no way that an average Russian could get their hands on one. Russia's gun laws are the stuff of Democrat dreams. Russia limits ownership to hunting rifles and shotguns; no handguns and no clips holding more than ten rounds. The implausibility of Butina's legend – that she was a country girl from Siberia who came up with the idea of starting gun clubs in Russia while chatting with friends in a cafe, and came to America because she thought it would be cool to partner those clubs with the NRA – never seemed to occur to Erickson, or to Wayne LaPierre at the National Rifle Association, for that matter. It never seemed to occur to either of them that the only way Butina could be so familiar with the T-5000 was if she was trained in the Russian military, or – perhaps – by Russian intelligence. Putin and his compatriots must have marveled at their gullibility, but they knew – as Butina had now proven – that in America, a pretty girl with a gun can accomplish just about anything.

And then there was Butina's outreach to conservative Christian groups. The Russian Orthodox Church – which Putin and Russian intelligence services have used for years as a foreign policy tool – played an important role in Maria Butina's operation. Her pitch was straightforward: Russia and America are the two most observant Christian nations, and should stand shoulder to shoulder in the face of a hostile secular world.

As with the NRA, the leaders of the Christian groups Butina cultivated apparently evidenced little concern about Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine and Georgia, or the growing threat Russia posed to America's European allies. Two years into Butina's operation, Patriarch Kirill, the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church hosted American evangelical leader Franklin Graham in Moscow. Graham, the son of Billy Graham and now among Donald Trump's most avid supporters, embraced Kirill and his church, just as Butina's handlers had hoped. On his Facebook page after their meeting, Graham praised Kirill as an ally of American evangelicals in their common cause opposing same sex marriage and abortion, as well as their shared "need to reach a younger generation brought up in secular schools surrounded by a secular culture who know nothing of God and His love for them." By 2018, according to participants, a delegation of visiting Russians constituted the largest group of participants at the National Prayer Breakfast, and Butina had secured an invitation for Putin himself to attend.

Grover Norquist never suggested that the pro-gun, pro-life, anti-tax and other single issue voters that he cultivated as cornerstones of the GOP coalition cared about what Ronald Reagan cared about; he only claimed that he could deliver their votes to the GOP as long as the GOP delivered on taxes, judges and guns. It was, and remains, the definition of transactional politics – and for the GOP – it was the virus that ended up consuming the host. As Donald Trump has confronted our traditional allies across the world in one setting after another, Senate Republican have derided his trampling of Ronald Reagan's vision of America and the post-World War II order; but, if polls are to be believed, there has been no outcry among Republicans voters.

As to Russia itself, Vladimir Putin must surely be pleased. In short order, Maria Butina bedded a senior GOP operative, gained access to the corridors of power of Russia's great adversary, and got the leadership of the NRA and National Prayer Breakfast to turn the GOP on its head. Since 2014, according to Gallup, the percentage of Republicans who view Russia as an ally has nearly doubled – from 22% to 40% – and, for the first time in decades, Republicans view Russia more favorably than do Democrats.

Last week, Donald Trump put a fine point on his attack on the global order one championed by the GOP. During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he questioned the rationale behind the NATO alliance, asking specifically whether Americans were really prepared to go to war for Montenegro, a NATO member country most Americans have never heard of. Trump already knew the answer: outside of the U.S. Senate, few in the GOP care about those issues anymore. For Vladimir Putin, this is wonderful news; by the time Donald Trump is done – with the help of Maria Butina and the Russian intelligence services – Ronald Reagan's vision of America as a shining City on a Hill – a beacon of democracy, liberty and freedom for people's across the globe – will have faded into the recesses of memory.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out Jay's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.