Amidst all the angst and acrimony of last year's trench-warfare presidential campaign, there was one area in which the two major-party candidates purported to agree. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump favored allowing the importation of cheap drugs from Canada.

Drug reimportation would be a no-brainer policy move if actual human beings ran our government. Disgust with high prescription drug prices is nearly universal - 77 percent say drug prices are "unreasonable" - and 71 percent of respondents favor allowing the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada.

The entire pharmaceutical industry is floated by a protectionist racket. Drugs that are in fact very cheap to make are kept artificially expensive - we have drugs that cost $1,000 a pill here in America that sell for $4 in India, for instance.

The means of keeping prices high vary, but include lengthy patents to push production of generics into the future, the barring of foreign competition (usually on "safety" grounds), and the prohibition of negotiations to lower prices for bulk purchases by both the federal and state governments. Without government intervention, the pharmaceutical industry would be profitable, but it wouldn't be the massive cash factory it is now. In 2015, for instance, the 20 largest drug companies made a collective $124 billion in profits.

All the industry needs to protect those sums is the continued cooperation of Congress.

So naturally it spends money - not a lot by industry standards, but a ton by the standards of the ludicrously cheap dates we call federal politicians - to make sure they always have just enough dependable people in office to block change.

Which brings us back to drug importation. Trump announced early in the race that he was in favor of bringing in cheaper drugs from Canada and made it a big stump theme. I remember in New Hampshire last year listening to Trump ridicule Jeb Bush for having a Big Pharma honcho as his campaign finance chairman.

"The head of Johnson and Johnson [Woody Johnson] is Jeb Bush's top fundraiser," Trump crowed. "Do you think Jeb Bush is going to make drug prices competitive?"

Trump continued this theme throughout his candidacy. He said "allowing consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas will bring more options." Even after the election, in December, Trump sent pharma stocks tumbling when he vowed in Time to "bring down drug prices."

The Democrats, meanwhile, put allowing importation of drugs from countries like Canada in their platform last summer. There were some ominous caveats in the language ("with appropriate safety protections"), but Clinton seemed to make bringing pharmaceutical prices down a priority in her rhetoric as the campaign progressed.

Along with scandals like the furor over drugmaker Mylan's EpiPen - a lifesaving injection for sufferers of severe allergies, often children, that was being sold for an outrageous $630 a pop - the seeming synergy of the two candidates' positions led to the hope that something might actually be done about the problem, no matter who won.

No such luck. Trump's support for drug importation basically went up in smoke from the moment he started filling out his executive appointees. Virtually every Trump nominee who would have influence over the importation question was bluntly opposed to the idea.

His FDA chief, Scott Gottlieb, was not only against importation, he'd written a Forbes editorial in 2016 denouncing then-candidate Trump's position on the issue. Trump's Health and Human Services chief, Tom Price, also has a long history of supporting pharmaceutical industry initiatives. Price's former press secretary, Ellen Carmichael, is now president of a political research firm called the Lafayette Company and just a few weeks ago was penning an anti-importation editorial reprinted by the Partnership for Safe Medicines, a leading industry group lobbying against reform.

Back in January, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar introduced an amendment to a budget resolution that would have paved the way for drug importation. Twelve Republicans, including John McCain, Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski, voted for it. But the measure died when thirteen Democrats voted no.

Social media slammed the 13 Dems, who included Mark Warner of Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware, and Cory Booker and Bob Menendez in New Jersey (a New Jersey senator voting against big pharma is as rare as an Iowan voting against ethanol, which makes it more notable that Booker later came around on the issue). Many of those senators had supported alternative plans that, they said, better addressed the issue that really concerned them: safety. One by one, each of the 13 Democrats insisted that they liked the importation idea in general, but were too concerned about foreign poisons to vote yes.

A Coons spokesperson said the Sanders-Klobuchar amendment "didn't meet the safety standards he believes are necessary." Booker said he wanted to "ensure foreign drugs meet American safety standards." And so on.

But we already do import foreign drugs, and have an established safety certification process. In fact, an astonishing 40 percent of all pharmaceuticals sold in the United States are already imported, as are 80 percent of the chemical ingredients. These imported drugs and drug ingredients arrive by way of more than 300,000 foreign food and drug manufacturing facilities that are regularly certified as safe by the FDA.

These drugs come from manufacturing facilities not just in Canada but across the globe, from the first world to the third, sometimes using the same kind of degraded and underpaid labor forces we bemoan in other industries.

The only difference is that at the moment, the only entities that are allowed to benefit from these foreign imports are drug companies. The important ban only applies to pharmacists and consumers.

That's why the pharmaceutical industry works so tirelessly to keep Congress captured. It's not just to protect its many forms of federal subsidy, but also to keep customers and retailers from benefitting from the same money-saving overseas shopping in which they engage.

The controversy over the January fiasco led to hand-wringing within the Democratic Party. Minority leader Chuck Schumer convened an extraordinary meeting in mid-February to try to broker a truce between the reform advocates and the members who voted against importation.

That didn't accomplish much, and Sanders and others decided to continue trying to get importation to a vote. This led to the most recent, and less-publicized, fiasco.

A few weeks ago, on May 11th, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee met to consider the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017. This little-known piece of legislation would reauthorize the FDA to collect "user fees" from the makers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Although controversial to some who believe these fees make the FDA clients of the industries they're supposed to regulate - Sanders and Paul voted against it in committee - the overall bill is likely to sail through Congress, and in fact passed in committee, 21-2.

Sanders, along with co-sponsors Elizabeth Warren and Robert Casey, offered an amendment to the user-fee bill that would have allowed for importation of drugs from FDA-approved facilities in Canada. As Casey pointed out in committee, the amendment is laden with protections, requiring patients to have valid Canadian prescriptions, allowing the FDA to shut down bad actors, etc.

Once again, Democratic discipline broke down. The amendment this time was beaten in committee, 13-10. Two Democrats, Patty Murray and Michael Bennet, both of whom accept a lot of pharmaceutical money, voted no.

Interestingly, two Republicans from states bordering Canada who voted for almost exactly the same measure earlier in the year - Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine - now voted no as well.

This often seems to happen with controversial bills. The math will allow a large-ish number of members to cast a vote in favor of a popular policy disliked by industry, but if there's any danger of it actually passing, there will suddenly be defectors or converts. The political damage is limited to just a few poor souls who have to wear the unpopular vote.

Importation isn't dead yet. It could still be offered to the whole Senate as an amendment to this same bill later on, but since it didn't pass in committee, the idea's proponents are now at the mercy of a series of dubious actors.

Majority leader Mitch McConnell could for instance prevent the amendment from being voted on through a process known as "filling the tree," whereby bills are larded down with so many amendments by leadership before they hit the floor that there's no room for other ideas.

"Filling the tree" is one of a whole range of tricks that exist in both the House and the Senate to save members from themselves - i.e., from having to vote on issues they know would be popular with people, but unpopular with their donors.

That's not to say it will happen in the case of this issue, but that it does frequently with "populist" ideas. People like McConnell stay in leadership thanks in large part to their demonstrated skill at saving members from having to vote down ideas they know their constituents want.

The history of what's happened with drug importation in the last year is a classic example of how American politics works. Politicians in both parties endorse ideas they know are popular, and often get themselves elected on the strength of them.

But once the ideas get into the weeds of Congress, there are a million tricks that can be employed to keep business flowing as usual while giving politicians political cover. A year ago, it looked like we had a good shot at ramping back this vicious predatory practice of overpricing life-saving drugs. Today, absent a major public uproar, it looks like the idea will have to wait quite a while longer. And people wonder why Congress is so unpopular.
(c) 2017 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

A FEW days ago, an almost anonymous Palestinian woman received an unusual honor. An article of hers was published on top of the first page of the most respected newspaper on earth: New York Times.

The editors defined the writer, Diana Buttu, as: "a lawyer and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization."

I knew Diana Buttu when she first appeared on the Palestinian scene, in 2000, at the beginning of the second intifada. She was born in Canada, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who tried hard to assimilate in their new homeland, and received a good Canadian education.

When the struggle in the occupied territories intensified, she returned to her parents' homeland. The Palestinian participants of the negotiations with Israel, which started after the Oslo agreement, were impressed by the young lawyer who spoke excellent English - something rare - and asked her to join the national endeavor.

When the negotiations died clinically, Diana Buttu disappeared from my eyes. Until her dramatic reappearance last week.

THE LOCATION and the headline of the article demonstrate the importance which the American editors saw in her argument. The headline was "Do we need a Palestinian Authority?" and further on, in another headline, "Shutter the Palestinian Authority."

The argument of Diana Buttu seduces by its simplicity: the usefulness of the Palestinian Authority has passed. It should be liquidated. Now.

The Palestinian Authority, she says, was set up for a specific purpose: to negotiate with Israel for the end of the occupation and the creation of the hoped-for Palestinian state. By its very nature, that was a task limited in time.

According to the Oslo agreement, the negotiations for ending the occupation should have reached their goal in 1999. Since then, 18 years have passed without any movement towards a solution. The only thing that has moved was the settlement movement, which has reached by now monstrous dimensions.

In these circumstances, says Buttu, the Palestinian Authority has become a "subcontractor" of the occupation. The Authority helps Israel to oppress the Palestinians. True, it employs a large number of educational and medical personnel, but more than a third of its budget - some 4 billion dollars - go the "security". The Palestinian security forces maintain a close cooperation with their Israeli colleagues. Meaning, they cooperate in upholding the occupation.

Also, Buttu complains about the lack of democracy. For 12 years now, no elections have taken place. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen) rules in contravention of the Palestinian Basic Law.

Her solution is simple: "it's time for the authority to go." To abolish the authority, to return the responsibility for the occupied Palestinian population to the Israeli occupier and adopt a "new Palestinian strategy."

What strategy, exactly?

Up to this point, Burttu's arguments were lucid an logical. But from here on they become unclear and nebulous.

BEFORE GOING on, I have to make some personal remarks.

I am an Israeli. I define myself as an Israeli patriot. As a son of the occupying nation I don't think that I have the right to give advice to the occupied nation.

True, I have devoted the last 79 years of my life to the achievement of peace between the two nations - a peace that, I believe, is an existential necessity for both. Since the end of the 1948 war I preach the establishment of an independent State of Palestinian side by side with the State of Israel. Some of my enemies in the extreme Israeli Right even accuse me of having invented the "Two-State Solution" (thus deserving the title of "traitor".)

In spite of all this, I have always abstained from giving the Palestinians advice. Even when Yasser Arafat declared several times publicly that I am his "friend", I did not see myself as an adviser. I have expressed my views and voiced them many times in the presence of Palestinians, but from that point to giving advice, the distance is great.

Now, too, I am not ready to give advice to the Palestinians in general, and to Diana Buttu in particular. But I take the liberty to to make some remarks about her revolutionary proposal.

Reading her article for the second and third time, I gain the impression that it contains a disproportion between the diagnosis and the medicine.

WHAT DOES she propose that the Palestinians do?

The first step is clear: break up the Palestinian Authority and return all the organs of Palestinian self-government to the Israeli military governor.

That is simple. But what next?

Diana Buttu voices several general proposals. "Non-violent mass protests", "boycott, divestment and sanctions", "addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees" (from the 1948 war) and the "Palestinian citizens of Israel". She mentions approvingly that already more than a third of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories support a single-state solution - meaning a bi-national state.

With due respect, will these remedies - all together and each one separately - liberate the Palestinian people?

There is no proof that it will.

Experience shows the it is easy for the occupation authorities to turn a "non-violent mass protest" into a very violent one. That happened in both intifadas, and especially in the second. It started with non-violent actions, and then the occupation authorities called in snipers. Within a few days the intifada became violent.

The use of boycotts? There is now in the world a large movement of BDS against Israel. The Israeli government is afraid of it and fights against it with all means, including ridiculous ones. But this fear does not spring from the economic damages this movement can cause, but from the damage it may cause to Israel's image. Such image may hurt, but it does not kill.

Like many others, Buttu uses here the example of South Africa. This is an imagined example. The world-wide boycott was indeed impressive, but it did not kill the apartheid regime. This is a western illusion, which reflects contempt for the "natives".

The racist regime in South Africa was not brought down by foreigner, nice as they were, but by those despised "natives". The blacks started campaigns of armed struggle (yes, the great Nelson Mandela was a "terrorist") and mass strikes, which brought down the economy. The international boycott played a welcome supporting role.

Buttu has high hopes for "Palestinian boycotts". Can they really hurt the Israeli economy? One can always bring in a million Chinese workers.

Buttu also mentions the international court in the Hague. The trouble is that Jewish psychology is hardened against "goyish justice". Aren't they all anti-Semites? Israel spits on them, as it spit on the UNO resolution at its time.

WHAT IS left? There is only one alternative, the one Buttu wisely refrains from mentioning: terrorism.

Many peoples throughout history started wars of liberation, violent struggles against their oppressors. In Israeli jargon that is called "terror."

Let's ignore for a moment the ideological aspect and concentrate on the practical aspect only: does one believe that a "terrorist" campaign by the occupied people against the occupying people can, under existing circumstances, succeed?

I doubt it. I doubt it very much. The Israeli security services have shown, until now, considerable ability in fighting against armed resistance.

If so, what remains for the Palestinians to do? In two words: Hold on.

And here there lies the special talent of Mahmous Abbas. He is a great one for holding on. For leading a people that is passing a terrible ordeal, an ordeal of suffering and humiliation, without giving in. Abbas does not give in. If someone will take his place, somewhere in the future, he will not give in either. Not Marwan Barghouti, for example.

As a young man I was a member of the Irgun, the underground military organization. During Workd War II, my company organized a "trial" for Marshal Phillip Petain, who became head the French government after the French collapse. This "government" was located in Vichy and took orders from the German occupation.

Much against my will, I was appointed counsel for the defense. I took the job seriously, and, to my surprise, discovered that Petain had logic on his side. He saved Paris from destruction and made it possible for most of the French people to survive the occupation. When the Nazi empire broke down, France, under Charles de Gaulle, joined the victors.

Of course, Diana Buttu does not refer to this emotion-laden historic example. But one should remember.

A FEW days before the publication of Buttu's article, a leader of the Israeli fascist right, Betsalel Smotrich, a deputy chairman of the Knesset, published an ultimatum to the Palestinians.

Smotrich proposed to put the Palestinian before a choice between three possibilities: to leave the country, to live in the country without citizenship rights or to rise up in arms - and then the Israeli army "would know how to deal with them."

In simple words: the choice is between (a) the mass expulsion of seven million Palestinians from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Israel proper and the Gaza Strip, which would amount to Genocide, (b) life as a people of slaves under an Apartheid regime and (c) simple genocide.

The unclear proposal of Buttu constitutes, in practice, the second choice. She mentions that many Palestinians approve of the "one-state solution". She shies away from a clear-cut statement and hides behind a formula that is becoming fashionable these days: "two-states or one state". Rather like: "swimming or drowning."

This is suicide. Dramatic suicide. Glorious suicide. Suicide none the less.

Both Buttu and Smotrich lead to disaster.

After all these years, the only practical solution remains as it was at the beginning: two states for two peoples. Two states that will live side by side in peace, perhaps even in friendship.

The Black sheriff from Milwaukee is a cartoon character whose elevation to Homeland Security is intended as an insult to Black people and a sop to the most bigoted elements of Donald Trump's base. Clarke's "talent is to cultivate a crude and shameless contempt for his own ethnicity, tuned to the racist receptors of his white patrons." He's a sick Black cat in a hat -- but he's got company.

David Clarke, the sheriff of Milwaukee County who appears slated for a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, has made himself valuable to the White Man's Party through ostentatious display of hatred and contempt for his fellow Blacks. Clarke is the go-to Negro for denunciations of Black Lives Matter ("Black Lies Matter," in his words) as Islamic State sympathizers who should be "scooped" up, charged with treason and detained "indefinitely at Gitmo." Clarke shares his repugnant political specialty with a debased cast of domestic and international characters, including presidents Yoweri Museveni and Salva Kiir, of Uganda and South Sudan, respectively, and Roy Innis, the late former leader of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

All three of the living professional Black-hating-Negroes make themselves readily identifiable as eager allies of American-style white supremacy by wearing huge black cowboy hats. Yoweri Museveni, Ronald Reagan's favorite African since seizing power in Uganda in 1986, turned his country's army into a central African military appendage of U.S. imperialism. Under Washington's direction, Museveni incorporated minority Tutsis from neighboring Rwanda into his armed forces, then supported their 1990 invasion of Rwanda, which led to mass tribal slaughter and the overthrow of the majority Hutu government, followed by the invasion and occupation of the Democratic Republic of Congo by Rwandan Tutsi forces under Paul Kagame, resulting in the death of more than six million Congolese, and still counting. (Kagame should also wear a cowboy hat, but prefers the military beret.) As mercenaries of U.S. Empire, both Museveni and Kagame contribute troops to virtually every western-funded "peace keeping" operation on the continent.

Salva Kiir sports a cowboy hat reportedly given to him by President George W. Bush during a visit to the White House in 2006, five years before South Sudan declared independence under U.S. sponsorship. The hat has become an even more important signifier that Kiir has superpower support, now that he has reverted to the role of warlord in his country's catastrophic tribal conflict.

Roy Innis, who died in 2017, usually went hatless. He kicked whites out of staff positions in the Congress of Racial Equality in 1968, then almost immediately endorsed Richard Nixon for president. Innis's vicious diatribes against fellow Blacks earned him a steady stream of speaking engagements at rightwing Republican functions. He backed Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court in the 1980s, Clarence Thomas in 1991, and Rudolph Giuliani for Mayor of New York in 1989.

David Clarke plays cartoon Black cowboy kiss-up to the same white supremacist audience on the U.S. domestic circuit, and has counterparts in the far-flung Black diasporas of the other white settler colonies and "mother countries." His talent is to cultivate a crude and shameless contempt for his own ethnicity, tuned to the sick receptors of his white patrons. He fills both a psychic and political need of the racists, insulting Blacks with words that even modern day Klansmen hesitate to use in public: "Let me tell you why blacks sell drugs and involve themselves in criminal behavior instead of a more socially acceptable lifestyle - because they're uneducated, they're lazy, and they're morally bankrupt," Clarke said on a rightwing podcast. Clarke and his ilk serve to sanitize and normalize the most vile, blatantly racist behavior (and thoughts), simply by playing "crackers" in blackface. (The hat conveys the message to even the dullest bigot.) He invoked a lynching party when he vowed, during the campaign, to bring out "pitchforks and torches" against the media and political establishment in Washington.

Clarke and his despicable domestic cohort do not proselytize to Black people. They are not seeking to build a base of support in their "own" community -- which they constantly dis-own -- so they cannot sway significant numbers of Black people to vote for racists. They are the Anti-Blacks, useful because their antics drive other Black folks up the wall -- to the delight of white racists.

Patrisse Cullors, of the Movement for Black Lives, has good reason to think that David Clarke would use his influence at Homeland Security to make her a political prisoner. "The way he demonizes Black Lives Matter is befitting for an enemy in a war zone," she writes. "He openly dismisses civil liberties and suggests introducing limitless detention."

Clarke's services to white supremacy became much more marketable with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. He became a regular on Fox News in the aftermath of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. In that sense, he is in debt to Cullors and her comrades for his political fame and new job.

But, let's be clear: the pursuit of upward mobility through cultivation of white folks' political favor is not confined to base and conniving caricatures like David Clarke. Sadly, it has become the main route to political fortune in Black America. The best (or worst) example is Barack Obama, who spent a lifetime making himself acceptable to the more politically correct section of the white ruling class. Obama was not a Black leader; he was the Black politician most acceptable and attractive to white Democrats and moneybags - "articulate and bright and clean" in the whitest kind of way, not "like Jesse Jackson."

What's more dangerous: a Black opportunist that curries favor with the worst elements of the White Man's Party, but whose primary effect on Black politics is to make Black folks more vigilant, or a smooth Black operator who is so good at gaining the confidence of the ruling class that they entrust him to wage war on most of the world, and to impose capitalist austerity at home, knowing his mere presence will pacify Blacks and neutralize them as a force for change?

Neither of these political actors advance the cause of Black political self-determination, and one of them is threat to human survival in general.

There's no end to the maladies that ail American politics these days. It would, indeed, be far easier and quicker to identify what's working than to itemize the travails that bedevil our pathetic polity in 2017. Altogether, if this country was a piece of art it would have to combine the orderliness of Pollock with the perceptual logic of Dali, all rooted in the joyful well-being of Hieronymous Bosch, in order to do justice to our times.

For those of you who for some reason always wanted to know what it looks like when an empire cracks apart, I've got some lovely news for you: A certain North American specimen, not generally known for its generosity, is nevertheless happy to oblige you today. Truly, the full catalog of America's political woes could crash Amazon's entire array of server farms, and most of us are struggling enough with chronic nausea these days such that revisiting all these horror stories again is way too depressing to contemplate. So I won't. But there is one thing that inflames my tortured mind more than any of these items - perhaps because it is the one thing that explains them all.

Here it is: I am sickened to live in a society that treats a malignant illness as just another legitimate point of view, when in fact it's the very disease that is killing us. We don't treat a heroin epidemic as an innocuous choice that some may opt for and some may reject. We don't treat cholera as just another flavor of ice cream that some prefer while others go for strawberry. And we don't welcome Nazism as a legitimate belief system that deserves the same consideration as any other old model of race relations a society might adopt. So why do we treat 'conservatism' like some harmless cup of tea that some choose over Earl Grey or Jasmine?

I'm dead serious. And I mean like, literally, dead serious, because if we're honest about it, that which goes by the name of conservatism today is not an ideology - it's a death machine.

Maybe there was once a responsible, legitimate (if misguided and merely moderately deceitful) ideology by the name of conservatism - I don't know. Regardless, we're not talking about Dwight Eisenhower or Gerry Ford here. We're talking about societal hemlock. And it's been that way for a generation or two, but of course now the threat from this monstrosity is no longer just a moral disaster, it's a full-blown existential crisis, wrapped inside a suicide vest.

Death machine, huh? Maybe you're thinking, "Sure, those Trump idiots are completely bonkers, but calling them a willful agent of the apocalypse is little extreme. I mean, artistic license is a good thing, but c'mon man..." Sorry. I'm not kidding. I'm being quite literal. This is a belief system which is bringing death to thousands-year-old traditions of Western values, to democracy, to the country, to people's lives, to the truth, and to the planet. Because of the threat this represents, we need to stop treating 'conservatism' as just another legitimate ideological choice. It's not. It's a murder weapon metastasized to global proportions.

That this movement is a threat to Western values is transparent. Today's so-called 'conservatives' are the enemy of equality, human rights and liberty (despite their protestations to the exact contrary). They instead embody elitism, bigotry and repression. They don't stand for gay rights any more than they ever did for civil rights back in the day, or equal pay for equal work. They worship power and its use to colonize others abroad while repressing dissent at home. Five minutes at any given Trump rally last year would have made that clear enough. But in case the message was somehow lost, one look at our fearless leader and his fawning relations with the likes of Putin, Erdogan and Duterte, combined with the shattering of the Western alliance with leaders like Angela Merkel and those of other (once-)allied democracies tells you all you need to know.

And no, it's not just one buffoon we're talking about here. While a number of right-wing pundits have - to their partial credit - repudiated Trumpism, there are loads of problems with that alibi for their movement. First, a whole lot of other folks have not disowned the walking crime scene that is the Trump White House. Second, these are pundits - hardly a single Republican officeholder in Washington has found it ethically necessary to distance him or herself from the moral abyss DBA an orange-haired gorilla in a Brioni suit. Most importantly, however, Trump is far less the historical aberration from the tendencies of the last four decades than he is the expression of its logical outcome. The right has been trucking in racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, military aggression, environmental destruction and armed robbery of the 99 percent going back at least as far as William F. Buckley and Ronald (Jesus' Kid Brother) Reagan. Methinks the ladies of the conservative intelligentsia (pardon the oxymoron) doth protest too much when they seek to distance themselves from an administration whose only difference from its Republican predecessors is the grotesque overtness of its toxicity. (Especially when it doesn't take a Svengali to see that this administration is going to jail, and that its place in history will make Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison. It ain't too brave to want to make sure your name isn't associated with that particular catastrophe.)

Speaking of the rest of the GOP, they are even more liable for the destruction of American democracy than is McDonalds Stump himself. Democracies, of course, are built on such requisite features as constitutions, elections, fixed institutions with defined powers, and so on. But underlying all of that is something of even greater importance, a political culture that forms the fabric and the foundation upon which any democracy must be built. This foundation silently and implicitly stipulates the rules of the game and the boundaries of permissible behavior, and without it, there can be no functioning democracy. It is defined by elements such as a shared national identity that supersedes partisanship, an understanding that certain principles must be protected - even at the cost of one's own political fortunes - in order for the system to survive, and a basic level of trust such that one can hand over the keys of government to the other side without fearing that that new government will become a weapon used against the losers of an election, while at the same time believing that the next election will provide a genuine opportunity to return to power. These are the least tangible aspects of what sustains a functioning democracy, but they are also the most crucial. After all, you can have a formal written constitution or not, you can have a president or a prime minister, you can have two parties or many, you can have powerful states within a national government or not. In all these profound ways the British system differs from the American one, but nobody would claim that the UK is therefore not a democracy. What matters at the end of the day is the political culture of mutual respect and trust, the norms and the self-imposed restraints that form the fabric and foundation of a functioning democratic political culture.

And this is precisely what 'conservatives' have not been conserving for forty years now, but rather instead destroying. The necessity of preserving this crucial political culture is why impeaching a president for lying about a personal sexual relationship matters. It is why five conservative members of the Supreme Court breaking all their own internal rules and supposed principles in order to install their guy in the White House matters. It's why using the country's racial divide to win elections matters. It's why relentlessly employing the filibuster to block every item on the agenda of a president from the other party - even those items that you supported yourself only yesterday - matters. And why it matters when you then alter filibuster rule when it's used in the same way against you. This is why radical gerrymandering matters. This is why targeted voter suppression of the other party's base in order to prevail in elections you couldn't otherwise win matters. This is why refusing to act on a Supreme Court nomination for a year in order to get the nominee you want instead matters. And its why falsely claiming elections are rigged matters.

I have nothing particularly nice to say about the feeble and ineffectual (on a good day) Democratic Party, and especially its last two presidents. But all of the above examples of the undermining of American democracy in our time come from the Republican Party and the supposedly conservative folks who inhabit it. For all the many failings of the Democrats, there is no equivalent to any one of these items on their side of the aisle, let alone an equivalent to all of them. The upshot is that rather than conserving the Founders' democratic system that conservatives are forever cynically clothing themselves in, they are in fact destroying it. This is not death by a thousand cuts, but rather death by relentless saber slashes.

Conservatism is also death in a quite literal sense, as well. Just ask the million or so Iraqis who perished because of the right's war of choice justified by lies. Er, oops, wait a second... Turns out you can't ask them, because they're dead, killed by conservatives. But you could ask the tens of thousands Americans who are alive today because of Obamacare - which conservatives have fought relentlessly - and who may be dead tomorrow if the GOP manages to kill what skimpy health care protections Americans now enjoy. Or you can ask the workers who will be dying because the conservative movement is so determined to remove any sort of workplace safety regulations from providing them even modest protection. Or those who whose lives will be sacrificed in order to destroy the (woefully) basic environmental standards that have been built up over the last half-century. If you want to know what conservatism means for our environment and health, look no further than Flint, Michigan. The story that nobody in the media bothers to tell about that insane catastrophe is why it happened. The reason that 'Flint' has now become shorthand for environmental meltdown and lethal governmental buffoonery is that conservatives in Michigan's government - who fervently 'believe' in local control, mind you - passed legislation allowing the state to simply take over control of municipalities whenever it saw fit, despite the electoral choices of voters in those communities. That's what the conservative Snyder administration then proceeded to do in Flint, and the rest is history. By the way, their justification for doing so was that Flint was being mismanaged, so they - wait for it, now - had to come in and get it right. You can't make this shit up. And if you did, you could never find anyone in Hollywood willing to make a movie out of it, on account of its absurdly ridiculous improbability.

But we're not done yet. Conservatism also means death to the truth. Of course, when it comes to Herr Bloated Pumpkinhead and the current administration, the scale of dishonesty is absolutely epic. It is literally no exaggeration to say that a consumer of any generic statement by this White House would be more likely to know the truth by simply assuming its opposite is the case, than he or she would by accepting any given tweet or Spicerism as fact. No wonder Orwell is selling like hotcakes these days. This is a true "2+2=5" moment, Winston.

It's hardly surprising that a career New York City real estate developer who has spent a lifetime doing little but shameless self-promotion and fabricating scams running the gamut from bottled water to bottled diplomas would be unable to speak truthfully about nearly anything. And of course, when we say 'anything' here, we mean... anything. What's somewhat astonishing and most definitely disturbing, however, is the reaction that his compulsive tendency to lie produces among the roughly forty percent of Americans who form his political base. What has gone so wrong in the lives of these 'conservatives' that they not only tolerate being lied to incessantly, but actually crave it? This is not the place for an extended discussion of that question, but suffice it to say that conservatism's appeal among the public - including many whom it harms the most - cannot be understood outside the realm of political psychology. One might view these 'comfortably numb-nuts' as the rightful inheritors of America's storied Know Nothing tradition, but in fact that's too generous a label, since it turns out that it is actually possible in this world to know less than nothing if you're willing to work hard enough at it. When you believe that Iraq really had WMD, or that cutting taxes on billionaires will get you a sweet job, or that Donald Trump has your back, well then, graduating to the status of being a full-blown Know Nothing truly is something for which you are well-positioned to aspire.

This is where, alas, the Founders got it wrong, with their Enlightenment model of rationally calculating citizens. A good hundred million plus Americans have literally lost their minds in our time and, in order to soothe the resentments torturing their savage souls, they are taking down the country around their heads as they descend into an emotionally satisfying madness.

Or, at least it used to be the country they are taking down. Now it's the world. With the president's destruction of the Paris climate change accord, American conservatism is now bringing it on a planetary scale. Could this possibly be more jaw-dropping in its sheer stupidity? We are talking here about a phenomenon that literally threatens life on this planet, and conservatives - who are otherwise so consumed with fear so much of the time - insist on rejecting slam-dunk scientific evidence and making sure that we perish instead. Again, the pathological psychology of these folks is the only way to understand such a suicide mission, such an act of terrorism on a global scale. The president's speech was entirely laced with the rhetoric of bogus grievance - about how the United States is the laughing stock of the world because we're being duped and cheated by smarter, tougher, more cynical countries, and blah, blah, freaking blah... Apart from the sheer absurdity of this trope on the basis of any sort of actual logic or fact, there remains this outstanding question: Even if it was all true, who the hell cares? If the planet winds up being destroyed, does it really matter whether in the preceding years one country's GDP grew a half-percent slower than that of some other countries? What's that old line about deck chairs...? Could there be any other accurate term for a belief system that so jeopardizes an entire planet than 'death machine'?

We need to stop fooling around with this shit. Smallpox is not just another disease. Totalitarianism is not just another political system. Nuclear war is not just another form of conflict. And what calls itself 'conservatism' today is not just another form of legitimate, maybe-they're-right-maybe-they're-wrong, ideology.

All of these are life-threatening pathologies of epic proportion. It's bad enough that we have to expend so much energy to keep them at bay. But, by treating conservatism and conservatives as reasonable and acceptable we not only legitimize the unspeakable, we massively enhance its likelihood of successfully killing us.