Corey Robin's Blog, page 31

When I was in college and in graduate school (so the 1980s and 1990s), the dividing line on free speech debates was, for the most part, a pretty conventional liberal/left divide. (I’m excluding the right.) That is, self-defined liberals tended to be absolutists on free speech. Self-defined leftists—from radical feminists to radical democrats to critical race theorists to Marxists—tended to be more critical of the idea of free speech.

What’s interesting about the contemporary moment, which I don’t think anyone’s really remarked upon, is that that clean divide has gotten blurry. There were always exceptions to that divide, I know: back in the 1980s and 1990s, some radical feminists were critical of the anti-free speech position within feminism; some liberals, like Cass Sunstein and Owen Fiss, were more sensitive to how power differentials in society constrained speech, and thus were more open to more regulatory approaches to speech; some Marxists were always leery of the critiques of free speech. Even so, there was a divide. That divide hasn’t now reversed, but it’s no longer the case that it maps so easily onto a simple and clear divide between liberalism and the left.

From what I see online, a lot of mainstream liberals today are far less absolutist in their defense of free speech, particularly on campuses; indeed, that absolutist position increasingly seems like the outlier among liberals. And parts of the left are now taking the more absolutist position. Once upon a time, a Jonathan Chait would denounce leftist campus critics of free speech, and it all made sense. Today, when he does that, he seems completely out to lunch: a lot of the people he’s talking about are conventional liberals just like him.

(On a related note, there was a funny moment on Twitter yesterday, when the ACLU defended Ann Coulter’s right to speak at Berkeley. Twitter liberals freaked out in surprise: the ACLU, defending Ann Coulter’s right to speak! How could that be? None of them seemed to remember or realize that it was the ACLU that defended Nazis—as in real members of the American Nazi Party—marching in Skokie, a Chicago suburb whose residents included many Holocaust survivors, back in the 1970s.)

Just so we’re clear. Nothing in this post is meant to be normative or prescriptive; I’ve tended to stay out of these debates of late, in part because they mostly don’t speak to my experience of campus free speech. Our challenge at Brooklyn College has never really been how to keep speakers off campus; it has almost always been how to get them on campus.

All I’m doing here is making a simple, and I believe non-normative empirical observation: that something new is happening on the divide between liberalism and the left over the question of free speech. Unlike the recent past, the free speech argument now cuts right across that divide. And to that extent, it takes us back to an earlier moment, in the 1930s and 1940s, when American liberals and the left were also in dialogue, and taking a mixture of cross-cutting positions, on the question of free speech.

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill:

English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself…

William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy:

In this work I have attempted to treat Economy as a Calculus of Pleasure and Pain…

I hesitate to say that men will ever have the means of measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. A unit of pleasure or of pain is difficult even to conceive; but it is the amount of these feelings which is continually prompting us to buying and selling, borrowing and lending, labouring and resting, producing and consuming; and it is from the quantitative effects of the feelings that we must estimate their comparative amounts. We can no more know nor measure gravity in its own nature than we can measure a feeling; but, just as we measure gravity by its effects in the motion of a pendulum, so we may estimate the equality or inequality of feelings by the decisions of the human mind. The will is our pendulum, and its oscillations are minutely registered in the price lists of the markets….

Many readers may, even after reading the preceding remarks, consider it quite impossible to create such a calculus as is here contemplated, because we have no means of defining and measuring quantities of feeling, like we can measure a mile, or a right angle, or any other physical quantity. I have granted that we can hardly form the conception of a unit of pleasure or pain, so that the numerical expression of quantities of feeling seems to be out of the question. But we only employ units of measurement in other things to facilitate the comparison of quantities; and if we can compare the quantities directly, we do not need the units.

Events, dear boy, events. That’s what Harold Macmillan is supposed to have said when he was asked what it was that a prime minister most feared. Like most of these famous statements, Macmillan probably never said it. But these days, events are, for me, something, on the whole, that I welcome rather than fear.

Our political conversations are so stuck, with people rehearsing the same lines of the same arguments; it doesn’t matter how bitter those arguments are, the familiarity of the lines are a comfort. It’s like a church hymnal.

But then something comes along—an Occupy, a Black Lives Matter, a Sanders, a BDS, and long before that, a Seattle—that no one who was not involved in the planning or organizing, expected, and the conversation is pushed out of that groove. Suddenly we’re talking about something else; suddenly, we think something else is possible, there is an alternative. Suddenly everything we thought we knew, we no longer know.

I know the counter to this: Trump. But Trump, however unexpected, hasn’t changed the conversation. He’s just intensified the conversation we’ve been having since the 1970s (the fear of the radical right, the sigh of the neoliberal settlement). Ironically, despite so many of us saying Trump couldn’t win, his election has simply confirmed everything we already knew.

So while everyone continues that conversation, reading from the same hymnal, arguing about the same things we always argue about (and the left has its own stuckness when it comes to these arguments), I remain watchful, hopeful, for that event. What other choice do I have?

I think Sanders’ defense on NPR of supporting candidates who are anti-abortion is completely wrongheaded. The bottom line commitment of the left is to freedom, to emancipation from all manner of domination, and reproductive freedom is a critical part of that program of emancipation. I simply don’t see how the state or a parent or a husband or a boyfriend or anyone can force a woman to carry a fetus to term and bear a child against her will. I don’t think the left should compromise on that. At all.

(Though the left makes all manner of ugly compromises all the time, so it would be a big mistake to cast this entire discussion as strictly about political morality. Like many leftists, I supported Sanders despite his backing, in word and deed, of the State of Israel, which is a comprehensive regime of systemic human domination and degradation. Liberals who think abortion is non-negotiable don’t think support for illegal or immoral wars is non-negotiable, and wars can also be the instruments of domination and degradation, particularly of women. This business of lines in the sand gets tricky.)

I also think Sanders’ statement may have been completely unnecessary, since according to this article, Mello’s position on abortion seems to have “changed” in a more progressive direction. The potential gratuitousness of Sanders’ statement calls to mind that cliché about it being worse than a crime, it was a blunder.

What I find a little hard to swallow is the liberal freakout on Twitter over Sanders’ decision to endorse Mello. Mello’s position, as described here, is virtually identical to Tim Kaine’s position. Like Kaine, Mello has taken bad positions on abortion in the past. (Before he went to the Senate, Kaine voted for parental notification laws and bans on late-term abortions and funding for centers that tried to dissuade women from having abortions. And don’t forget: immediately after Clinton chose Kaine as her VP candidate, he came out—explicitly in defiance of Clinton’s position—in favor of the Hyde Amendment.) Like Kaine, Mello has “evolved,” claiming that his position now is that while he personally opposes abortion, he would never translate that view into policy. And according to a seemingly credible Twitter thread I read (I know, I’m laughing at that oxymoron myself), Mello had an abortion rights advocate speaking powerfully in favor of reproductive rights on stage with him during his campaign.

A lot of liberals were either silent on Kaine’s positions on abortion or drafted extended apologetics about his “evolution” on abortion or claimed that basically his position didn’t matter because even if he eventually became President, the Democratic Party as a whole was pro-choice. Regardless of how they got there, these folks wound up enthusiastically supporting Kaine for VP. (Just go back and read NARAL’s or Cecile Richards’ statements on the selection of Kaine or the reports in Vox and the Center for American Progress on Kaine.) Yet now liberals are going after Sanders because he endorses a candidate for mayor of Omaha—mayor of Omaha; as opposed to that trifling position of Vice President of the United States—whose “evolution” is similar, if not identical? It’s hard not to think that this is about something other than abortion.

I’ve argued many times that I think Eichmann in Jerusalem is a much better guide to fascism—and, to whatever extent that mode of politics is relevant today, to our times as well—than is Origins of Totalitarianism. There are many reasons I believe this, but three stand out.

First, Origins sees totalitarianism as essentially a mass phenomenon, by which Arendt means not only the rise of the mass but also the liquidation of all familiar institutions, established elites, and traditional hierarchies. Eichmann completely dispenses with that view, emphasizing instead how fascism is much more of an elite affair dependent upon long-standing social hierarchies.

Second, Origins sees totalitarianism as the liquidation of the individual agent and individual action; even the regime’s leaders, Arendt argues there, are unthinking automatons, having squandered their selfhood long ago. Eichmann emphasizes the persistence of the individual, personal agency and personal action—from the topmost perpetrator down to the most abject victim. The particular agent Arendt has most in mind is the collaborator, a self who stands somewhere in between the perpetrator and the victim (and thus unsettles all of our most cherished dichotomies), and how these collaborators make particular decisions—under conditions of great constraint, yes—and thereby perpetuate regimes of evil.

But the last reason why I think Eichmann is such a great book, and so helpful at this particular moment, is that it mounts a devastating critique of intentionality—the inner state of mind, the personal motive, that allegedly gives rise to an action—as the primary way of understanding political life. Against the focus on intentions and motives, Arendt insisted that we attend to actions, to what people do, and the institutional setting in which that action occurs.

I wrote about this in a long piece for The Nation a while back:

Even if Eichmann was a rabid anti-Semite, one had to be mindful of the gulf between his thoughts and his actions: ”extermination per se,” Arendt added in the letter to McCarthy, “is more important than anti-semitism or racism.” Attending to Eichmann’s motives risked a loss of focus. It threatened to drown him, with all his undetermined agency and criminal excess, in the stream of his intentions…

By erecting a wall between anti-Semitism as a motive and the execution of the Holocaust, however, Arendt was less interested in making a claim about Eichmann or even the Nazis than she was in mounting a philosophical argument about what Susan Neiman has called, in Evil in Modern Thought, “the impotence of intention.” Against centuries of moral teaching and jurisprudence, which assumed that the nature and extent of a wrongdoer’s guilt are determined by his intentions, Arendt suggested that inner states of mind—ideologies, beliefs, intentions, motives—could neither mitigate nor aggravate an offense. They simply didn’t matter. The body count of the Holocaust was so massive that it rendered any intention, no matter how malignant, moot. In Neiman’s words: “What counts is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell.”

That is why Arendt proved so willing to entertain Eichmann’s most outlandish claims about himself: that “he ‘personally’ never had anything whatever against Jews,” that “he had plenty of ‘private reasons’ for not being a Jew hater.” If Eichmann was lying, then he had failed to confront the reality of his deeds. Did he seriously think his role in the Shoah might be mitigated if he could show that he bore the Jews no ill will? If he wasn’t lying, then his honesty was a piece of almost comic lunacy—a self-confessed mass murderer insisting that he never meant anyone any harm—made all the more terrible by the fact that it was true.

In the literature of ancient Greece, a smallness, a blankness, can tear a hole in the world: Hector doesn’t slay Achilles, Paris does. There is a cold, almost cruel, accent on the disproportion between actors and actions, intentions and consequences. Arendt’s insistence on the blankness behind Eichmann’s actions—“except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement,” she wrote, Eichmann “had no motives at all”—issued from a similarly chilly outpost of antiquity….

Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s evil—with its leeriness of his inner state and ideology, its almost archaic attention to the fullness and finality of his deeds—was a natural extension of her return to the Greeks. “In every action the person is expressed as in no other human activity,” she told Günter Gaus in 1964; what a person does was all she—we—needed to know. Hence her contemptuous references to Eichmann’s “private reasons,” his “personally” not feeling any hatred for the Jews: Whatever Eichmann’s feelings or intentions, all his railroads led to hell. What further proof of his criminality, his evil, did one need?

So much of our discussion of Trump (and before that, of Obama) focuses on what are his true aims, what are Bannon’s real goals. The problem here is that in our probably fruitless quest to divine the ultimate truth of Trump’s inner self, we completely lose track of the political field, what actually happens, which often bears almost no resemblance to what we imagine might be animating Trump.

I noticed this last week in a panel discussion on Trump that I was a part of. There was a lot of discussion of the power of Trump’s tweets and communiques, what they revealed about his intentions. But as I pointed out, while Trump likes to make a big rhetorical to do of his antipathy to the courts, and likes to gin up his base and scare liberals with some terrifying plan to eliminate the autonomy of the judiciary, the actuality of his rule is that he has consistently been pushed back by the courts. And unlike FDR, who got so fed up with the judiciary’s challenges to his rule that he sought to completely restructure the Supreme Court, the most Trump has done is to threaten to appeal a court’s ruling. Which is exactly what most presidents do.

When Trump or Bannon is pushed back, the focus is not on their being pushed back but on what it is they wanted to do in the first place. (And again the same kind of discourse often dominated our discussions of Obama: not on the field of action in which he led, but on his deepest intentions and motives, what he really wanted or not.) That just seems like an extraordinarily unhelpful—and from an Arendtian view, entirely apolitical and antipolitical—way of viewing things.

In just a few passages in Eichmann, Arendt eviscerates that way of thinking: the point is not what one aims to do, it is what one does; the point is not the inner motive, but the field of action; not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell.

One of the many reasons I resist the Trump-as-fascist argument is that it often leads to (or accompanies) an inattention to or eclipse of matters of high politics and elite action: the jockeying for position at the highest levels of state, the coalitions and fractures within the dominant regime, the day-to-day events in which policy gets formed and unformed. There’s no intrinsic reason that an invocation of fascism should require that inattention; the best historical studies of fascism don’t ignore these questions at all. In the American context, however, the invocation of that parallel—whether to McCarthyism or now to Trump—often does.

The reason for that, I suspect, is that most people tend to think of fascism as primarily a form of mass politics, that most of the action is on the ground and at the grassroots, far away from the centers of elite power, and that fascism is best studied as a question not of events or policy or elite action but as a simple and straightforward reflection of deep, structural changes in culture, psyche, economy, and society. So the Trump parallel leads people to focus on questions of popular mobilization, the circulation of racist ideas and affects among the working class or lower middle class, long-term changes in the economy, and so on. The point is not that those questions shouldn’t be studied; they absolutely need to be, not only with respect to fascism but conservatism more generally, which I’ve always insisted is both an elitist politics and a populist politics, an elite politics that mobilizes the mass, often more skillfully than the left does. But I think for many people, when it comes to fascism and the right, the question of high politics almost seems irrelevant: it’s just the tail, everything else is the dog.

As my family was driving home this morning from my niece’s bat mitzvah up in Boston, I was thinking about this relationship between the Trump-as-fascist argument and the inattention to elites and elite action—and behind that, to the day-to-day changing polices and configurations of power in the Trump regime—and reflecting back on a panel I was on last week about Trump, which featured many of these sensibilities and assumptions, and I remembered this passage from Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, a book that—like Michael Rogin’s The Intellectuals and McCarthy—had a profound influence on my approach to politics, even at, particularly at, moments of great political evil:

Moreover, the mass murder of the Jews, more than any other single event, points up to the importance of returning to the contextual study of short-term events. In the wake of Treblinka and Auschwitz it is difficult not to scorn Fernand Braudel’s characterization of short-term events as mere “dust.” Braudel went so far as to imply that short-term events were not worth studying since, unlike long- and medium-range events, they “traverse history as flashes of light” destined instantly to “turn to darkness, often to oblivion.” Pace Braudel and his epigones, I have tried not only to contemplate the circumstances in which millions of Jews—along with millions of non-Jews—were reduced to “dust” in seconds of historical time but also to recapture the evanescent “light” of their torment to illuminate the historical landscape in which it occurred.

As we see the Trump regime begin to erode under the weight of the day-to-day events, as the weaknesses in the regime slowly begin to appear amid its crumbling edifice, and as the regime’s remaining strengths will undoubtedly be revealed in that same day-to-day calculus of power, I hope we can heed Mayer’s dictum. Which applies, as he makes clear, not only to fascism, but to politics more generally.

I’ve got an oped in the Times today on the GOP meltdown over Obamacare.

While pundits and journalists focus on the problems of personality (Trump’s or the GOP’s as a whole) and policy (the Republican bill was a terrible bill, the assumption being that Republicans somehow never pass terrible bills), of timing (the GOP should have waited to do healthcare until after they dealt with taxes, an analysis that gets things backward) and tactics (Trump negotiated badly, Ryan led badly), the real story, I argue, is deeper and more structural:

Movements long ensconced and habituated to power — such that when their leaders are out of office, their ideas still dominate — get out of that practice. They lose touch with that external reality of their opponents. The impulsion outward disappears; they grow isolated and doctrinaire, more sectarian than evangelical. Arguments their predecessors had to sweat their way through soften into lazy nostrums or harden into rigid dogmas. The free-market ideal, Hayek says, “became stationary when it was most influential.”

Now the movement’s problem is the opposite of when it was in its ascendancy. Its leaders may control all the elected branches of the federal government, as the Republicans do now and as the Democrats did under Jimmy Carter, and many of the state governments, but they no longer control or set the terms of political debate as much as they once did. Their power in government conceals their slipping hold on public legitimacy.

It’s not that the character of the personnel has changed: The Tea Party supporter is no more zealous than Barry Goldwater, and on any given day, Ronald Reagan could be as fuzzy and foggy as Donald Trump. It’s the context that has changed. Yesterday’s conservative wrote and read his Bible in the crucible of defeat; today’s recites his catechism in a cathedral of success.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Republican Party should now find itself uncertain about what to do. After 40 years in Zion, it has lost the will and clarity it acquired while wandering in the desert. The movement has lost the constraint of circumstance.

You can read more here.

Looking forward, there are two issues to consider.

First, taxes.

Now that the Republicans have been defeated on healthcare, or defeated themselves, I’m seeing on social media a fair amount of second-guessing and stealing victory from the jaws of defeat. Some analysts and partisans are now saying that Trump and Ryan and the Republicans didn’t really care about repealing Obamacare, that this was all kabuki theater orchestrated by Trump or Bannon or Ryan himself.

That’s, well,  not true.

If you go back to the best reporting on this issue, it’s clear that repealing Obamacare was never, simply, about an ideological antipathy to government-provided or government-subsidized insurance—though that of course played a role. What really was driving the repeal—and why Ryan insisted it had to be done first (that was no duping of Trump, as some are claiming, nor was it Bannon setting up the Freedom Caucus, as some are even more fantastically claiming)—was the tax cuts: not only the massive tax cuts that the repeal contained within itself, but also, and more important, the permanent tax cuts that repeal would make possible down the road this year (in a way that George W. Bush’s tax cuts were not permanent, much to the chagrin of the right). There was, in other words, a very rational reason to take on healthcare first; in some ways, given the ultimate long-term goals of the GOP (where cutting taxes has always proven to be the most tried and true method for keeping entitlement spending under control), they had no choice but to move on healthcare first.

That was why, ultimately, I thought the repeal might pass: Ryan and Trump could make it clear to the Unfreedom Caucus that without repeal, they couldn’t get permanent tax cuts.

Now, if they want permanent tax cuts, they’re going to have eliminate the Senate filibuster because they’d have to eliminate the Byrd Rule. So there’s no way of slicing yesterday’s defeat as anything other than a massive defeat for Trump, Ryan, and the entire GOP: not only on political grounds (I think people really underestimate how bad it is for a president to lose like this this early on; again, this is partially why Bannon worked so hard to get this bill passed) but also on substantive policy grounds insofar as this messes up their plans on taxes.

Second, the debt.

I’ve been saying for months that the Republicans are facing a Bermuda Triangle around Obamacare, taxes, and the debt. As we get toward the April deadline on the debt ceiling, will the Republicans lift the debt ceiling or enact stopgap measures that will allow the federal government to spend in the coming months?

You’ll recall that this issue dogged Obama like the plague: whether you think it was the GOP that controlled him on this issue or he who allowed himself to be controlled by the GOP, it was a real constraint on his presidency from 2010 onward. So as soon as Trump was elected I began to wonder to myself whether this same GOP, and particularly these meshuga Tea Partiers, would allow Trump simply to increase the debt ceiling without exacting some sort of price from him, the way they did with Obama.

Under Obama, liberal journalists and partisan defenders of Obama had treated the GOP grandstanding on the debt as it if were all about race: these members of Congress simply refused to accept Obama’s legitimacy as a black president, so refused to increase the debt as a way of thumbing their nose at them. I always thought that explanation was wrong because it ignored how hardcore these people were on the tax/spending issue, and how their stance totally fit with Grover Norquist’s long-term strategy of divesting the government of tax money in order to force cuts in social spending (Norquist always being the best guide, when it comes to taxes and spending, to the reactionary mind).

Now we come to the Trump administration. Leftists alarmed by Trump tend to think the GOP will naturally fall in line with him and with Bannon’s vision of a different kind of GOP. So the debt ceiling from this perspective won’t even be an issue. I myself really didn’t know what would happen: would these Tea Party types really have the gumption to oppose Trump on the debt, to force him to come around to their priorities? I was dubious.

After what happened this past week, I’m no longer dubious. I still have no idea what the GOP will do, but I think it not impossible that the Unfreedom Caucus and their allies (a much wider group in the GOP) will replay with Trump what they did with Obama: demand concessions from Trump on taxes and spending in order to justify their voting to raise the debt ceiling. The difference this time around is that unlike Obama, Trump has far less room to maneuver: Obama had the entire Democratic Party vote and only needed a certain number of GOP votes; Trump has an uncertain number of GOP votes and will almost definitely have to reach out to the Democratic Party.

If the Democrats are smart and ready to play hardball, they could extract some concessions of their own—not necessarily on penny ante spending crap, which will never be enough to deal with the rot and which they can probably win anyway given GOP division on the budget, but maybe on some of the nastier parts of the Trump program.

I totally understand—I especially understand—the desire not to be over-confident that the GOP will fail to repeal Obamacare tomorrow. (Although the Unfreedom Caucus did announce about an hour ago that 25 of its members directly told Trump today that they would not vote to repeal; that right there, if they stick to their position, is enough to sink the bill.) And I genuinely have no idea how this is going to go down tomorrow: the bill could pass, it could fail, it could be postponed a few days, though Ryan has said he won’t do that. So no predictions from me. But we all should be clear about whence whatever hope we might have for tomorrow’s outcome comes: not from a sense that the GOP won’t do a terrible thing but from a sense that a sizable portion of the GOP wants to do a more terrible thing. That’s what we’re banking on here: not that the GOP is too good or too moderate but that its rage will overwhelm its reason.

Franz Neumann famously wrote, “No greater disservice has ever been rendered by political science than the statement that the liberal state was a ‘weak’ state. It was precisely as strong as it needed to be in the circumstances.” An analogous point could be made, I think, about the relationship between ideas and conservatism. While it’s fashionable to bemoan the lack of great thinkers and deep thinking on the right today—the passing from the scene of a Friedman or a Hayek, a Kristol or a Buckley, and their replacement by whatever it is that passes for conservative thinking and writing today—the truth is that conservative ideas are precisely as strong, its thinkers always as deep, as the movement needs them to be in the circumstances.

The Washington Post has a good article this morning on the response on Capitol Hill to Trump’s budget.

The big news is that the biggest opposition to Trump’s budget is coming from—it’s almost getting predictable, at this point—not the Democrats but the Republicans.

Some of President Trump’s best friends in Congress sharply criticized his first budget Thursday, with defense hawks saying the proposed hike in Pentagon spending wasn’t big enough, while rural conservatives and others attacked plans to cut a wide range of federal agencies and programs.

The bad mood among Republican critics was tempered by a consensus that the president’s budget wasn’t going very far on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers reminded everybody that they ultimately control the nation’s purse strings.

“While we have a responsibility to reduce our federal deficit, I am disappointed that many of the reductions and eliminations proposed in the president’s skinny budget are draconian, careless and counterproductive,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) the former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement. “We will certainly review this budget proposal, but Congress ultimately has the power of the purse.”

No president ever gets everything he wants on the budget, but this is Trump’s first year in office, the moment when he should be getting maximal cooperation. We’re now past the 50-day mark of Trump’s First 100 Days, and he has yet to win a single major victory. That doesn’t put him in the best negotiating position when it comes to dealing with Congress. Certainly not with the opposition, and increasingly, it seems, not with his party either.

What’s doubly interesting here is that the opposition from his party is as incoherent and divided as Trump himself.

One part of the party thinks Trump’s budget doesn’t go far enough; John McCain thinks that Trump’s increases in military spending aren’t nearly as big as they should be. Another part thinks Trump’s budget goes too far—either on increasing defense or decreasing spending on social programs and elsewhere. Another part doesn’t like the way Trump is going after their district-level pork. And there’s a last part—this one shocked me—that thinks that, when it comes to foreign policy, Trump’s budget pushes too hard on the military front, not hard enough on the diplomatic front.

Several Republicans also said they were wary of the deep cuts Trump proposed for foreign aid.

“As General [Jim] Mattis said prophetically, slashing the diplomatic efforts will cause them to have to buy more ammunition,” Rogers said, referring to the defense secretary. “There is two sides to fighting the problem that we’re in: There is military and then there’s diplomatic. And we can’t afford to dismantle the diplomatic half of that equation.”

That particular argument is almost an exact replay of the fight over Reagan’s budgets, only this time, it’s not Democrats saying the Republican president is leaning too much on hard power; it’s Republicans.

Three takeaways:

First, as I’ve said many times now, despite their reputation for party unity and discipline, the congressional Republicans are all over the map. We saw this in the fight to unseat John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and it was only their opposition to a second term for Obama that allowed them to paper over the fissures. Now those fissures are out in the open.

Second, the room for maneuver on Republican fiscal policy is rapidly narrowing. The Republicans, including Trump, want major tax cuts. Some part of the party, including Trump, also wants major increases in defense spending. Trump has said you can’t touch Social Security and Medicare, and even though hardliners in the party claim they want to privatize or eliminate these two programs, when the Republicans had their chance under George W. Bush to do it, they balked. And behind all that are the Obama-era agreements on spending and sequesters as well as these rules about pay-as-you-go—as well as another looming debt ceiling crisis—that stipulate that an increase in one area needs to be balanced by a decrease somewhere else or a tax increase. It’s really not clear where the GOP can go; they’re boxed in and they’ve boxed themselves in. Something’s gotta give.

Last, in the LRB six years ago, I argued that fiscal crises of the state, historically, have been auspicious moments for the left (think the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution). That began to change in the 1970s, when the radical right and the neoliberal center used related-type crises to push either austerity or supply-side economics, programs and policies we’ve been living with ever since. But given where things are now going—where the right, which has been in the driver’s seat on economic policy since the 1970s, finds it way forward increasingly blocked—it could be that we’ll find ourselves, in the coming years, in a fiscal crisis of the more familiar sort.

Not exactly a fiscal crisis like those that marked the modern era, when the monarchy literally began running out of money to pay for wars and other forms of state-building and was forced to summon a more democratic formation in order to raise money. After all, the deficit right now is not especially high, and there seems to be no sign that the American state couldn’t continue borrowing. Most of the constraints today are politically self-imposed, but in a way that’s the point: these politically self-imposed constraints seem like they are increasingly hamstringing movement on a range of fronts, and it could be that those hamstrings are at a breaking point.

An intelligent and properly aligned progressive opposition could use this moment to drive home the point that we do not find ourselves in this cul-de-sac just because of Trump or the GOP’s incompetence but because of a half-century of misalignment and misplaced priorities; the right and the neoliberal center have brought us to this impasse. An intelligent and properly aligned progressive opposition could use this moment as an opportunity to smash through the self-imposed constraints that both parties have placed on the imagination and on policy. An intelligent and properly aligned progressive opposition could use this moment the way its forbears did: as a moment to call forth a new political formation of the left.

It’s possible—if the left can get its act together.