ISLE AU HAUT, Maine-I drink coffee in the morning on a round, ornate oak table that once belonged to Harlan Fiske Stone, a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1925 to 1946 and the chief justice for the last five of those years. Stone and his family spent their summers on this windswept, remote island six miles off the coast of Maine.

Stone, a Republican and close friend of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, embodied a lost era in American politics. His brand of conservatism, grounded in the belief that the law is designed to protect the weak from the powerful, bears no resemblance to the self-proclaimed "strict constitutionalists" in the Federalist Society who have accumulated tremendous power in the judiciary. The Federalist Society, at the behest of President Trump, is in charge of vetting the 108 candidates for the federal judgeships that will be filled by the administration. The newest justice, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, comes out of the Federalist Society, as did Justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. The self-identified "liberals" in the judiciary, while progressive on social issues such as abortion and affirmative action, serve corporate power as assiduously as the right-wing ideologues of the Federalist Society. The Alliance for Justice points out that 85 percent of President Barack Obama's judicial nominees-280, or a third of the federal judiciary-had either been corporate attorneys or government prosecutors. Those who came out of corporate law firms accounted for 71 percent of the nominees, with only 4 percent coming from public interest groups and the same percentage having been attorneys who represented workers in labor disputes.

Stone repeatedly warned that unchecked corporate power would mean corporate tyranny and the death of democracy. He was joined in that thinking by Louis D. Brandeis, his fellow justice and ally on the court, who stated, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

The supposed clash between liberal and conservative judges is largely a fiction. The judiciary, despite the high-blown rhetoric about the sanctity of individual freedom by the Federalist Society, is a naked tool of corporate oppression. Our most basic constitutional rights-privacy, fair trials and elections, habeas corpus, probable-cause requirements, due process and freedom from exploitation-have been erased for many, especially the 2.3 million people railroaded into our prisons, most without ever going to trial. Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations are criminalized. Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security.

Our constitutional rights have steadily been stripped from us by judicial fiat. The Fourth Amendment, for example, reads: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Yet our telephone calls and texts, emails and financial, judicial and medical records, along with every website we visit and our physical travels, can be and commonly are tracked, recorded, photographed and stored in government computer banks.

The executive branch can order the assassination of U.S. citizens without trial. It can deploy the military into the streets to quell civil unrest under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), seize citizens-seizures that are in essence acts of extraordinary rendition-and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers while denying them due process.

Corporate campaign contributions, which largely determine who gets elected, are viewed by the courts as protected forms of free speech under the First Amendment. Corporate lobbying, which determines most of our legislation, is interpreted as the people's right to petition the government. Corporations are legally treated as persons except when they carry out fraud and other crimes; the heads of corporations routinely avoid being charged and going to prison by paying fines, usually symbolic and pulled from corporate accounts, while not being forced to admit wrongdoing. And corporations have rewritten the law to orchestrate a massive tax boycott.

Many among the 1 million lawyers in the United States, the deans of our law schools and the judges in our courts, whether self-identified liberals or Federalist Society members or supporters, refuse to hold corporate power accountable to the law. They have failed us. They alone have the education and skill to apply the law on behalf of the citizens. They alone know how to use the courts for justice rather than injustice. When this period of American history is written, the legal profession will be found to have borne much of the responsibility for our descent into corporate tyranny. Lawyers are supposed to be "officers of the court." They are supposed to be sentinels and guardians of the law. They are supposed to enlarge our access to justice. They are supposed to defend the law, not subvert it. This moral failure by the legal profession has obliterated our rights.

The radical libertarians in the Federalist Society, now ascendant within the legal system, champion a legal doctrine that is essentially preindustrial. It is centered exclusively on the rights of the individual and restricting the power of government. This can at times lead to rulings that protect personal liberty. The followers of this doctrine on the Supreme Court, for example, voted to overturn Connecticut's eminent-domain rape of a New London working-class neighborhood to make way for a pharmaceutical plant. The liberals, who formed the court majority, endorsed the taking of the neighborhood.

Another example of radical libertarianism on the bench occurred when attorneys Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer and I sued President Obama over Section 1021 of the NDAA, which overturned the 1878 act that prohibited the government from using the military as a domestic police force. We garnered support from some charter members of the Federalist Society. This proclivity by the Federalist Society to hold up the primacy of individual rights became especially important when, after the temporary injunction of Section 1021 issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was overturned by the higher appellate court, we had to file a cert, or petition, to request that the case, Hedges v. Obama, be heard before the Supreme Court.

"As obnoxious as [Antonin] Scalia was on cultural issues, he was the strongest modern justice in terms of protecting First Amendment speech, press and assembly rights-no liberal came anywhere near him in these areas," Afran told me about the late justice. "In fact, Scalia was the justice who sympathized with our cert petition in the NDAA case. [Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg denied our petition without circulating it among the other justices. When we went to Scalia, he immediately asked for additional briefs to circulate. It was his dissents in the Guantanamo cases that we relied on in our cert petition. He issued strong dissents holding that the Guantanamo inmates and others taken by the military in Afghanistan should have complete civil rights in criminal prosecutions. He went much further than the majority did in these cases and condemned any holding of civilians by the military."

But although the Federalist Society purports to be against curtailment of civil liberties, leading some members to embrace traditional liberal positions on issues such as drug laws and sexual freedom, the organization also supports the judicial system's position that corporations hold the rights of individuals. It is hostile to nearly all government regulations and regulatory agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It opposes the rights of labor unions, voting rights laws, gender equality laws and the separation of church and state. It seeks to outlaw abortion and overturn Roe v. Wade. The self-proclaimed "originalism" or "textualism" philosophy of the Federalist Society has crippled the ability of the legal system to act en masse in class action suits against corrupt corporate entities. And for all the rhetoric about championing individual liberty, as Mayer pointed out, "they never did a thing about any First Amendment intrusions that all of the legislation passed after 9/11 involved." The Supreme Court did not accept our cert, leaving Section 1021 as law.

The Federalist Society says it seeks legal interpretations that are faithful to those that would have been made at the time the Constitution was written in the late 18th century. This fossilization of the law is a clever rhetorical subterfuge to advance the interests of the corporations and the oligarchs who have bankrolled the Federalist Society-the Mercer Foundation, the late John Olin, the late Richard Scaife, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry. The Federalist Society has close ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose lobbyists draft and push corporate-sponsored bills through state legislatures and Congress.

Stone knew that the law would become moribund if it was frozen in time. It was a living entity, one that had to forever adapt to changing economic, social and political reality. He embraced what Oliver Wendell Holmes called "legal realism." The law was not only about logic but also about the experience of a lived human society. If judges could not read and interpret that society, if they clung to rigid dogma or a self-imposed legal fundamentalism, then the law would be transformed into a sterile constitutionalism. Stone called on judges to "have less reverence for the way in which an old doctrine was applied to an old situation." The law had to be "flexible." Judges, to carry out astute rulings, had to make a close study of contemporary politics, economics, domestic and global business practices and culture, not attempt to intuit what the Founding Fathers intended.

Stone was wary of radicals and socialists. He could be skeptical of New Deal programs, although he believed the court had no right to reverse New Deal legislation. But he understood that the law was the primary institution tasked with protecting the public from predatory capitalism and the abuses of power. He voted consistently with Holmes and Brandeis, two of the court's most innovative and brilliant jurists. The three were so often in dissent to the conservative majority they were nicknamed "The Three Musketeers."

The law, Stone said, must never "become the monopoly of any social or economic class." He condemned his fellow conservatives for reading their economic preferences into the law and "into the Constitution as well." By doing so, he said, they "placed in jeopardy a great and useful institution of government."

Stone embraced the doctrine of "preferred freedoms"-the position that First Amendment freedoms are preeminent in the hierarchy of constitutional rights and permit justices to override any legislation that curbs these freedoms. This became the basis for court decisions to overturn state laws that persecuted and silenced African-Americans, radicals-including communists, anarchists and socialists-and labor and religious activists.

Stone, as the dean of Columbia Law School before being named U.S. attorney general in 1924 and joining the Supreme Court the year after that, said the school's mission was "devoted to teaching its students how to live rather than how to make a living." He denounced the Palmer Raids and mass deportations of radicals that ended in 1920. He defended five Socialist members of the New York State Assembly who were stripped of their elected seats by their legislative colleagues in 1920 because of their political views. And he said that everyone, including aliens-meaning those who were not citizens but who lived in the United States-deserved due process.

"[A]ny system which confers upon administrative officers power to restrain the liberty of individuals, without safeguards substantially like those which exist in criminal cases and without adequate authority for judicial review of the action of such administrative officers will result in abuse of power and in intolerable injustice and cruelty to individuals," he wrote of laws that stripped aliens of constitutional rights.

As attorney general he weeded out corrupt officials and zealously enforced antitrust laws, swiftly making enemies of many leading industrialists, including Andrew Mellon. He also, ominously, appointed J. Edgar Hoover to run the FBI. His aggressive antitrust campaigns led to calls by the business community for his removal as attorney general, and he was elevated to the Supreme Court in 1925, a move that, as the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser newspaper observed, "protected business from disturbing litigation or the threat of such litigation [and] has saved the [Coolidge] administration from the charge that it has betrayed business. ..."

The 1920s were, as Alpheus Thomas Mason wrote in his 1956 biography, "Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law," "a decade pre-eminent for the exploitative large-scale business; its leaders preached the 'Gospel of Goods.' 'Canonization of the salesman' was seen 'as the brightest hope of America.' The absorbing ambition was to make two dollars grow where one had grown before, to engineer, as utilities magnate Samuel Insull put it, 'all I could out of a dollar'-that is, get something for nothing."

Organized labor, which before World War I had been a potent social and political force, had been crushed through government repression, including the use of the Espionage and Sedition acts. Government regulations and controls had been weakened or abolished. It was a time when, as Sinclair Lewis said of Babbittry-referring to the philistine behavior of the lead character in his 1922 novel "Babbitt," about the vacuity of American culture-the goal in life was to be "rich, fat, arrogant, and superior." Inequality had reached appalling levels, with 60 percent of American families existing barely above subsistence level by the time of the 1929 crash. The American god was profit. Those not blessed to be rich and powerful were sacrificed on the altar of the marketplace.

The New Hampshire-born Stone, grounded in rural New England conservatism and Yankee thrift, was appalled by the orgy of greed and inequality engineered by his fellow elites. He denounced a hedonistic culture dominated by unethical oligarchs and corporations very similar to those that exist today.

"Wealth, power, the struggle for ephemeral social and political prestige, which so absorb our attention and energy, are but the passing phase of every age; ninety-day wonders which pass from man's recollection almost before the actors who have striven from them have passed from the stage," he wrote. "What is significant in the record of man's development is none of these. It is rather those forces in society and the lives of those individuals, who have, in each generation, added something to man's intellectual and moral attainment, that lay hold on the imagination and compel admiration and reverence in each succeeding generation."

Wall Street's crash in 1929 and the widespread suffering caused by the Depression confirmed Stone's fears about unfettered capitalism. Victorian-era writer Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and whose libertarian philosophy was widely embraced in the 1920s, argued that liberty was measured by the "relative paucity of restraint" that government places on the individual. Stone saw this belief, replicated in the ideology of neoliberalism, as a recipe for corporate oppression and exploitation.

If the law remained trapped in the agrarian, white male, slave-holding society in which the authors of the Constitution lived, if it was used to exclusively defend "individualism," there would be no legal mechanisms to halt the abuse of corporate power. The rise of modern markets, industrialization, technology, imperial expansion and global capitalism necessitated a legal system that understood and responded to modernity. Stone bitterly attacked the concept of natural law and natural rights, used to justify the greed of the ruling elites by attempting to place economic transactions beyond the scope of the courts. Laissez faire economics was not, he said, a harbinger of progress. The purpose of the law was not to maximize corporate profit. In Stone's reasoning, a clash between the courts and the lords of commerce was inevitable.

Stone excoriated the legal profession for its failure to curb the avarice of the "giant economic forces which our industrial and financial world have created." Lawyers, he went on, were not supposed to be guardians of corporate power. He asked why "a bar which has done so much to develop and refine the technique of business organization, to provide skillfully devised methods for financing industry, which has guided a world-wide commercial expansion, has done relatively so little to remedy the evils of the investment market; so little to adapt the fiduciary principle of nineteenth-century equity to twentieth-century business practices; so little to improve the functioning of the administrative mechanisms which modern government sets up to prevent abuses; so little to make law more readily available as an instrument of justice to the common man." The law, he said, was about "the advancement of the public interest." He castigated the educated elites, especially lawyers and judges, who used their skills to become "the obsequious servant of business" and in the process were "tainted with the moral and manners of the marketplace in its most anti-social manifestations." And he warned law schools that their exclusive focus on "proficiency" overlooked "the grave danger to the public if this proficiency be directed wholly to private ends without thought of the social consequences." He lambasted "the cramped mind of the clever lawyer, for whom intellectual dignity and freedom had been forbidden by the interests which he served." He called the legal profession's service to corporation power a "sad spectacle" and attorneys who sold their souls to corporations "lawyer criminals."

He was viciously attacked. The Wall Street lawyer William D. Guthrie responded in the Fordham Law Review, warning readers that Stone was peddling "subversive doctrines" championed by "false prophets" that had as their goal "national socialism, the repudiation of standards and obligation heretofore upheld, the leveling of classes, the destruction of property, and the overthrow of our federal system designed to be composed of sovereign and indestructible states."

But Stone understood a seminal fact that eludes our day's Federalist Society and the Republican and Democratic party leaderships: Corporations cannot be trusted with social and political power. Stone knew that the law must be the barrier that curbed the insatiable corporate lust for profit. If the law failed in this task, then corporate despotism was certain.

He wrote of the excesses of capitalism that led to the Depression:

I venture to assert that when the history of the financial era which has just drawn to a close comes to be written, most of its mistakes and its major faults will be ascribed to the failure to observe the fiduciary principle, the precept as old as the holy writ, that "a man cannot serve two masters." More than a century ago equity gave a hospitable reception to that principle, and the common law was not slow to follow in giving it recognition. No thinking man can believe that an economy built upon a business foundation can long endure without some loyalty to that principle. The separation of ownership from management, the development of the corporate structure so as to vest in small groups control over the resources of great numbers of small and uniformed investors, make imperative a fresh and active devotion to that principle if the modern world of business is to perform its proper function. Yet those who serve nominally as trustees, but relieved, by clever legal devices, from the obligation to protect those whose interests they purport to represent, corporate officers and directors who award themselves huge bonuses from corporate funds without the assent or even the knowledge of their stockholders, reorganization committees created to serve interests other than those whose securities they control, financial institutions which, in the infinite variety of their operations, consider only last, if at all, the interests of those who funds they command, suggest how far we have ignored the necessary implications of that principle. The loss and suffering inflicted on individuals, the harm done to a social order founded upon business and dependent upon its integrity, are incalculable.

Stone had his flaws. After he refused to grant a stay of execution for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two anarchists were hanged in August 1927. (A courtier took a fishing boat to retrieve the fateful decision that Stone made while he was at his vacation home here on Isle au Haut. He probably signed off on their execution orders on the table where I sit each morning.) He sometimes ruled against the rights of unions. He endorsed the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. He was not sympathetic to conscientious objectors unless on religious grounds. He did not always protect the constitutional rights of communists. He could use the law to curb what he saw as Franklin Roosevelt's consolidation of power within the executive branch.

But Stone had the integrity and courage to throw bombs at the establishment. He attacked, for example, the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership after World War II, calling it a "high-grade lynching party." "I don't mind what he [the chief Nuremberg prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson] does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law," he wrote. "This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." He noted acidly that the Nuremberg Trials were being used to justify the proposition that "the leaders of the vanquished are to be executed by the victors."

Stone spent his summers in a gray-shingled cottage with blue-green trim overlooking a small island harbor. He and his wife built the cottage, which still stands, in 1916. He tramped about the island in old clothes. One day at the dock a woman mistook the Supreme Court justice for a porter. She asked him to carry her bags. Stone, a burly man who had played football in college, lifted the suitcases and followed her without a word.

Stone did not possess the Emersonian brilliance and rhetorical flourishes of a Holmes or the trenchant social analysis of a Brandeis, but he was an astute legal scholar. There would be no place for him in today's Republican or Democratic parties or judiciary, seized by the corporate interests he fought. The Federalist Society, along with corporate lobbyists, would have mounted a fierce campaign to block him from becoming attorney general and a Supreme Court justice. His iron fidelity to the rule of law would have seen him, like Ralph Nader, tossed into the political and judicial wilderness.

Stone opposed socialism because, as he told his friend Harold Laski, the British political philosopher and socialist, he believed the judicial system could be reformed and empowered to protect the public from the tyranny of corporate elites. If the judicial system failed in its task to safeguard democracy, he conceded to Laski, socialism was the only alternative.
(c) 2017 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. Keep up with Chris Hedges' latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/chris-hedges.

I DON'T know when the wheel was invented, or who invented it.

However, I have no doubt that it was invented again and again, with many happy inventors sharing the glory.

The same is true for the Israeli-Palestinian Confederation. From time to time it appears in public as a brand-new idea, with another group of inventors proudly presenting it to the public.

This just shows that you cannot suppress a good idea. It appears again and again. During the last few weeks, it has appeared in several articles, presented by new inventors.

Every time it happens, I would take off my hat, if I had one. As Europeans used to do when they met a lady or an old acquaintance.

ACTUALLY, the United Nations Partition Plan adopted by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947 (Resolution 181) already proposed a kind of confederation, though without using the term. It said that the two new states that it created - one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem as a separate unit - would be united in an "economic union".

A few days later, the "war of 1948" broke out. It was a bitter and cruel war, and when it ended in early 1949, nothing of the UN resolution remained. There were still some desultory negotiations, but they petered out.

The war had created "facts on the ground" - Israel controlled vastly more territory than was allotted to it, Jordan and Egypt had taken over what was left. Palestine had ceased to exist, the very name erased from the map, with half the Palestinian people evicted from their homes.

Immediately after the war, I tried to set up a group of young Jews, Muslims and Druze to propagate the setting up of a Palestinian state next to the new State of Israel. This initiative led nowhere. In 1954, when some Palestinians in the West Bank revolted against their Jordanian masters, I published a call for the Israeli government to support the creation of a Palestinian state. It was ignored.

It was three years later that the idea of an Israeli-Palestinian federation first took on a serious form. The 1956 Israeli attack on Egypt, in collusion with France and the UK, aroused the disgust of many Israelis. In the middle of the war, I got a phone call from Nathan Yellin-Mor. He proposed that we do something about it.

Yellin-Mor had been the political leader of Lehi (alias the Stern Gang) the most extreme of the three underground organizations that fought against British rule. I was the owner and editor-in-chief of a popular news magazine.

We set up a group called Semitic Action. As a first step, we decided to compose a document. Not one of those flimsy political programs that are published today and forgotten tomorrow, but a serious plan for the total overhaul of the State of Israel. It took us more than a year.

We were some 20 people, most of them prominent in their field, and met at least once a week for our deliberations. We divided the subjects among us. The subject of peace with the Arabs fell to me.

THE BASIS of the new creed was that we Israelis are a new nation - not outside the Jewish people but a part of it, much like Australia was a new nation within the Anglo-Saxon community. A new nation created by its geo-political situation, climate, culture and traditions.

(This idea itself was not quite new. In the early 1940s, a handful of poets and writers, nicknamed the Canaanites, had proposed something similar, but denied any connection with the world Jewish people and also denied the existence of the Arab nation or nations.)

In our view, the new "Hebrew" nation was a part of the "Semitic Region" and therefore a natural ally of the Arab nations. (We categorically refused to call it "Middle East", an Eurocentric, imperialist term.)

In a dozen detailed paragraphs we outlined the structure of a federation that would consist of the two sovereign states of Israel and Palestine and be in charge of their joint economic and other interests. Citizens of either of the two states would travel freely in the other one, but not be allowed to settle there.

We foresaw that this federation would in due course become part of a wider confederation of all the countries of the Semitic region in Asia and Africa.

Other chapters dealt with the total separation between state and religion, free immigration, relations with the Jewish communities around the world and a social-democratic economy.

The document, called "The Hebrew Manifesto", was published before the State of Israel was ten years old.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, the man who "discovered" America, was asked how to make an egg stand up. He knocked the end of the egg on the table and lo and behold - it stood.

Since then, the "Egg of Columbus" has become proverbial in many languages, including Hebrew. The idea of a federation in Palestine is such an egg. It combines two principles: that there would be one country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and that both Israelis and Palestinians would live in their own independent state.

The "Whole of Eretz Israel" and the "Whole of Palestine" are right-wing slogans. The "Two-state Solution" belongs to the Left.

In this debate, "federation" and "confederation" are often used interchangeably. And indeed, no one quite knows the difference.

It is generally agreed that in a federation, the central authority has more powers, while in a "confederation" more powers are vested in the component units. But that is a vague distinction.

The American civil war was fought between the Southern "confederacy" which wanted to retain the rights of the component states in many fields, (with the fields tended by slaves), and the federation of the North, which wanted the central government to retain most of the important powers.

The world is full of federations and confederations. The United States, the Russian Federation, the Confederation Suisse, the United Kingdom, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (official translation: Federal Republic of Germany) and so on.

There are no two among them which resemble each other completely. States are as different from each other as human beings. Each state is the product of its geography, the special character of its peoples, its history, its wars, loves and hatreds.

Members of a federation do not have to love each other. Last week, in a bizarre way, the American civil war was fought again in a Southern city, at the foot of the statue of a Southern general. Bavarians have no great love for the "Prussians" of the north, Many Scots would love to get rid of the bloody English, as would many Quebecois from Canada. But common interests are strong, and very often they prevail.

When it is not a marriage of love, it is at least a marriage of convenience.

Technical advances and the demands of the modern economy drive the world together into larger and larger units. The much-maligned "globalization" is a global necessity. People who today wave the "Bonnie Blue Flag" or the Swastika are ridiculous.

One day in the future people will pity them as people today pity the Luddites, who smashed the machines at the beginning of the industrial era.

BACK TO us.

The idea of a federation or confederation of Israel/Palestine may sound simple, but it is not. There are many obstacles.

First of all, there is the vast difference in the living standards of the two peoples. It would necessitate massive help from the rich world for the Palestinians.

The historical hate between the two peoples, not since 1967, not since 1948, but right from the beginning in 1882, must be overcome. This is not the job of politicians, but of writers and poets, historians and philosophers, musicians and dancers.

This looks like a daunting mission, but I am deeply convinced that it is easier than it looks. In Israeli hospitals (doctors and nurses), in universities (professors and students), and, naturally, in joint peace demonstrations, bridges between the two peoples are already in place.

The very fact that the federation idea crops up again and again shows its necessity. The groups of activists who are bringing it up now were not yet born when we first proposed the idea - yet their message sounds new and fresh.

Donald Trump was even more agitated and combative than usual at Tuesday's press conference. How could he draw a line to separate the "neo-Nazis" and assorted "white supremacists" that had descended on Charlottesville, Virginia -- one of whom used his car to crush the life out of a young woman -- and the "very fine people" that favored keeping Robert E. Lee's statue on its pedestal in (recently renamed) Emancipation Park? And, where would the racist-removal project end?

The answer, as somebody once said, was blowing in the wind. "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee," warned Trump. "I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"

There is nothing wrong with Trump's logic. If the legacy of slavery is to be excised root and branch, then nothing less than the most profound social transformation is in order. Why stop with statues of long dead men? If you rightly condemn Washington and Jefferson as loathsome oppressors of humanity, you are then obligated to purge the nation and world of the poisoned fruit of their racist perversion.

What these forefathers "brought forth on this continent" was "a new nation, conceived" NOT in liberty, nor was it dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal. According to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's Dred Scott decision, the United States was founded as a white man's country in which "neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument" (the Declaration of Independence).

In 1857, when Taney made his ruling, the value of U.S. slaves was greater than every other national asset except the land within its borders -- land that was itself stolen from the indigenous peoples, and much of which would be valueless without slave labor. The super-profits of the slave production system had made the United States a global economic power, the second great industrial power on Earth -- right behind Britain, where U.S. slave-produced cotton was the engine of its globalizing juggernaut. Through ruthless exploitation of captive Black bodies, writes Edward Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, "the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation of global influence."

U.S. imperialism is rooted in the rapacious expansionism of the slave system. George Washington envisioned the new nation as a "rising empire." Jefferson spoke of an "empire of liberty" -- meaning, the liberties he enjoyed from the labor (and sexual exploitation) of the slaves. White supremacy legitimized every avarice of the new nation. The Monroe Doctrine staked the exclusive U.S. claim to dominate the Western Hemisphere -- regarded as populated by inferior and "mongrel" races -- an "exceptionalism" Washington now insists extends to the entire planet.

Fascism, including the Nazi variety, is not some strange European social disease. After crushing Black Reconstruction, the southern states invented, from the bottom up, the world's first totally racially regimented society. U.S. "Jim Crow" inspired Adolph Hitler's vision for nation-building under Aryan supremacy, as documented in James Q. Whitman's recent book, Hitler's American Model. American fascism predated -- and has long outlived -- the European variety. It is generally accepted that fascist states are characterized, to one degree or another, by:

Extreme nationalism
Frequent resort to mob rule
Oppression of an internal "Other" as an organizing principle
Militarism
The political dominance of the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie

The Democratic Party, which founded this homegrown fascism, was now popularly identified as a haven for the nation's racial and ethnic "Others." However, the Democrats continued to pursue national reconciliation, as did the Republicans during the old Jim Crow. Even as the two parties were switching racial constituencies, they found common cause in imposing a "New" Jim Crow -- the mass Black incarceration regime that spread to all parts of the country with astounding speed at the close of the Sixties, and which is the most dramatic domestic expression of American fascism. The Democrats and Republicans are as close as "lips and teeth," as the Chinese say, when it comes to U.S. imperialism. They both belong to the War Party, committed to unfettered U.S. expansion and endless warfare against the darker peoples of the world -- a national mission that began with Washington and Jefferson, and must be undone.

Donald Trump warned that, by knocking the icons off their pedestals, "You are changing history, you're changing culture."

Will this time be different? Has Trump finally crossed a line that's the beginning of the unraveling of his presidency?

Last week he threatened nuclear war with North Korea. This week he doubled down on defending white supremacists even as his allies, corporate executives and military and intelligence chiefs, backed away.

Trump keeps spinning out. After a few cities removed monuments of Confederate Civil War heroes, he tweeted Thursday, "The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!"

The idea of replacing Trump is now edging back into the public's mind. The Washington Post's famed 1970s Watergate scandal reporter, Carl Bernstein, is urging the press to dig into sentiment for replacing Trump inside the GOP.

Petitions are circulating. A national PRRI poll released Thursday found 40 percent favor impeaching Trump. That's 72 percent of Democrats, compared to 58 percent six months ago, and 38 percent of independents, compared to 27 percent in February. Only 7 percent of Republicans, however, want to see him ousted, a figure holding firm from February.

With Congress firmly in GOP hands, the question becomes when would the House, which initiates the impeachment process, realize that it's in the GOP's benefit to do so. Of course, Trump could step down, as unlikely as that sounds. All of this is uncharted territory. But the latest Trump chaos is on par with last fall's grabbing-pussy boasts that at the time prompted some Republicans to consider their options for replacing candidate Trump.

All of these machinations lead to taking a closer look at Vice President Mike Pence, who would become history's latest accidental president-even if he, too, is under the cloud of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian collusion in the campaign. (In January, Pence told CBS News the campaign had no contacts with Russia, a claim that has been disproven.)

What would Pence bring to the presidency that's not already in Trump's White House, besides self-control and a lack of drama, threats of nuclear war and overt embraces of neo-Nazis and slavery-defenders? The answer appears to be even more doctrinaire right-wing positions than those taken by Trump. Pence would shepherd the agenda repeatedly rubber-stamped by the House and Senate GOP and vetoed by President Obama. As FiveThirtyEight.com noted after his selection, he's the most far-right veep nominee in 40 years.

Pence was a smooth-talking radio host before being elected to the House, where he served in the leadership with current Speaker Paul Ryan. He was elected Indiana governor in 2012, but his backing of a "religious freedom" bill allowing businesses to refuse service to LGBT individuals caused such an economic backlash that his career seemed over until Trump rescued him.

Virtually all of his policy positions are in sync with the GOP's draconian 2016 platform, adopted at the convention soon after he introduced himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order." While it might be a relief for virtually everyone left of the political center should Trump be fired, Pence actually knows how Washington works and could deeply damage government and many public policies.

A quick survey of Pence's stances is revealing-beyond his habit of never meeting alone with a woman other than his wife because he believes such interactions are implicitly sexual. As the Washington Post put it, "There's little distance between that perspective and that of the ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse to sit next to a woman on an airplane, or the fundamentalist Muslims who demand that women be covered head to toe to contain the unstoppable sexual allure that renders men unable to control their urges."

Pence's Record

Here are snapshots from a biography of his career: After he was elected to the House in 2000, he opposed President George W. Bush's expansion of Medicare prescription drug benefits. During his 12 years in Congress, he introduced 90 bills and resolutions. None became law. He opposed Obama's Affordable Care Act, needless to say.

After becoming governor in 2013, he faced a state fiscal crisis. He cut tens of millions from the budget for higher education, social agencies and human services. Although Indiana's economy had the nation's worst job growth, he signed bills blocking local governments from raising the minimum wage or requiring businesses to offer better benefits. He pushed cutting income and business taxes, but would not sign laws reversing other regressive taxes.

Pence was a big booster of privatizing government services, whether new highways or traditional public schools. He repeatedly acted to boost charter schools and vouchers and undermine the teachers' unions, including making the state Board of Education an arm of the executive branch. From there, he clashed with educators over treatment of transgender students.

On energy and the environment, he rolled back energy efficiency standards, denounced and fought with the federal Environmental Protection Agency and declared Indiana was a pro-coal state. On guns, he signed a bill to let people keep guns in their cars parked on school grounds, recruited the NRA to train the Indiana National Guard and pre-empted the city of Gary from suing gun manufacturers whose weapons were sold illegally.

On health, he and the state GOP defunded Planned Parenthood, even with southern Indiana experiencing an HIV epidemic. He opposed needle exchanges for drug addiction treatment. While he did accept Obamacare funds to expand state-run Medicaid, he added bigger co-payments for recipients.

Pence received national attention after signing a so-called religious freedom bill in 2015, prompting some big state employers-notably Angie's List-to cancel a state-based expansion in Indianapolis, costing the state 1,000 jobs. The backlash forced him to rescind parts of the law. On women's health and reproductive rights, Pence has been a fundamentalist, signing into law a bill banning abortion procedures and penalizing providers. A federal court overruled the law, saying it was unconstitutional.

Pence also tried to create a state-run news service, to circumvent local media. He's repeatedly stonewalled reporters seeking public documents. He is known for using private emails to conduct official business-the same thing he criticized Hillary Clinton for. And he tried but failed to prevent Syrian refugees from resettling in the state. A court stopped him.

In the fall 2016 campaign, Pence said his role model for the vice presidency, if elected, would be Dick Cheney, George W. Bush's powerful surrogate.

"I frankly hold Dick Cheney in really high regard in his role as vice president and as an American," he told ABC-TV. "Vice President Cheney had experience in Congress as I do, and he was very active in working with members of the House and the Senate."

While tens of millions of Americans want the nightmare of Trump to end, a different right-wing takeover looms should Pence inherit the Oval Office. One can ask, as Carl Bernstein has, whether Republicans and careerists in military and intelligence circles have completely lost faith in Trump. It's anybody's guess when congressional Republicans will decide whether they would be better off with a President Pence-notwithstanding Mueller's probe.

The country's last accidental president was Gerald Ford, who took office after Richard Nixon resigned, and wasn't re-elected in 1976 after issuing a full pardon for Nixon two years before. Ford did not get much done in his time in office. But the mid-1970s was another era.