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NEW GEOGRAPHY--One obvious, if little discussed, reason the progressive wave receded last week: The left’s increasingly unappealing economic agenda. In the past, progressives focused on improving conditions for working and middle class Americans through economic growth, home ownership and expansive infrastructure projects.

Today, notes former Bill Clinton aide William Galston, progressives rarely promote economic growth, having developed a particular hostility to many of the industries—energy manufacturing, transportation and agriculture—that offer economic opportunity to millions of Americans. This new environmental orientation has been less than enthusiastically embraced away from the coasts, where Trump, not coincidentally, triumphed.

In contrast to the old Democratic notions embraced by the likes of Harry Truman or the late California Governor Pat Brown, today’s progressives promote social control and the consolidation of a cognitively determined world order. Its promise amounts to forging a kind of high-tech middle ages in which the new aristocracy—techies, media grandees, financial moguls, academics, high-level bureaucrats—dominate while the middle class becomes increasingly serf-like.

In this new neo-feudalism, property ownership, like power, is concentrated in ever fewer hands.

Trumpism as anti-feudalism

The Trump victory tapped into a class rebellion among middle- and working-class voters who feelthe most alienated and pessimistic about the future. The post-industrial, asset-inflated world so beneficial to the Apples, Googles, media stars and the trustifarians in glamour cities has been less kind to the middle and working class, whose incomes have dropped or stagnated over the past decade and a half.

While some percentage of Trump’s supporters were fundamentally “deplorable,” this wasn’t the KKK triumph imagined by scriptwriter Adam Sorkin. Rather, he won with the support of many people who had previously voted for Barack Obama.

White working class voters, endless mocked and sometimes even demonized in the media, were massively underestimated by the pollsters, as well — who used 2012 exit polls that undercounted as many as 10 million white voters over 45 to build their models for who would turn out in 2016. 

And Trump dominated those voters, winning them by 40 percentage points — a 15 point improvement over Mitt Romney’s margin. Trump’s opponent, it should be noted, was also white.

How feudalism could trump populism.

It remains to be seen how Trump’s voters will feel about their choice in the years to come, but the basic incoherence of his world-view, along with the corporatist leaning of the Republican majority in Congress, could undermine any attempt to restore upward mobility

There are fundamentally three forces driving our post-modern feudalization, all of them related. One is globalization, highlighted throughout the campaign, and clearly responsible for considerable job losses for certain classes and certain regions. As countries such as China and India move up the value-added chain, even higher-paid workers will face mounting economic competition. San Jose and Raleigh soon could feel some of  the pain that Youngstown and Flint have absorbed for decades.

The second is immigration which, for all its many blessings, tends to depress wages for lower and middle workers. Many native-born Americans who used to enjoy steady work have joined the rapidly expanding, and economically vulnerable, precariat made up of contingent, irregularly employed workers. Both Bernie Sanders and Trump identified the problems faced by such workers by unrestricted immigration.

Undereducated whites are not the only ones who are suffering from downward mobility. Trump trailed but still considerably outperformed previous GOP nominees among both Latinos and African Americans. Increasingly, educated workers are threatened by such things as -IB visas for skilled workers, which essentially replaces indigenous skilled workers with imported indentured servants. This has already resulted in job losses among IT workers at places like the Disney Company and Southern California Edison.

The third driver of feudalization lies in the concentration of business and property ownership. Lenin once identified “small scale production” as what “gives birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie.” America’s small firms are in retreat while large corporations increasingly dominate everything from food to technology. For the first time in our modern history, exits from business now exceed new incorporations.

Similarly, home ownership has dropped to its lowest level in five decades, with the decline steepestamong young people. More millennials now live with their parents than with a partner. And when they do move out, they are often trapped into renting, often at high rates, with little chance of ever buying a house.

The Religious Slant of Ecotopia

The first feudal era was characterized by constrained class mobility, a decline of middle orders and a persistent concentration of power, first in feudal lords and later kings. But what held Medieval society together was an attachment to common articles of faith. Catholic dogma defined and justified the ascension of the aristocracy and royalty, and explained in theological terms both why the poor should accept their fate, and why middle-class aspirations were a threat to the moral order.

Today religion is in, pardon the pun, secular decline. Particularly in the bluest states, it has been replaced by two new faiths. One is the green religion, now focused on climate change. The other new faith is technological determinism, the idea that there is a magical, disruptive solution to any problem, including those relating to nature.

Nowhere are these two religions more commingled than in America’s Ecotopia, which extends from Northern California to the Pacific Northwest and is both the home to our leading tech companies and birthplace of modern environmentalism.

 Structural changes help explain this melding. Today Silicon Valley profits have become more centered on software and media than hardware, so the constraints associated with environmental regulations, such as high energy and water costs, have become less important to oligarchs. At the same time many Silicon Valley companies — notably Tesla/Solar City — have sought to profit from the shift to “green” energy, feeding on the beneficent federal subsidies attached to it.

For these interests, the GOP’s great sweep represents a bit of an unexpected setback. The federal subsidies driving some of these industries are likely to be scaled back. Used to a cozy relationship with the White House, the tech elite, with the notable exception of Peter Thiel, finds itself on the outside looking in.

Acolytes of the technocratic green ideology, hostile to Trump, geographically and ideologically removed from the rest of the nation and already functioning as a kind of wealthy, cossetted alt-nation, are now talking vaguely about succession. That conversation is driven in part by apocalyptic predictions about climate change generally accepted without skepticism in media, academic and political circles.

 Although couched in scientism, green politics should be seen as somewhat faith-based, a craving more about piety than practical reality. Both Bjorn Lomborg and NASA’s Richard Hansen, one of the earliest heralds of climate change, doubt that the measures embraced by the Paris accords will prove remotely effective in reducing temperature rise. California , a recent report demonstrates. could literally fall into the ocean with no appreciable impact on global temperature, particularly given that countries like China continue to boost their coal capacity.

Neo-feudalism and the fate of the middle class.

Most critically, the theology of green progressives will do as little good for today’s middle and working class people as extreme Catholic dogma did for the medieval peasantry. Overall, according to a recent Social Science Council report, California is now the most unequal state when it comes to “well being,” combining stupendous, mostly coastal wealth with the highest rate of poverty in the nation, concentrated inland.

Neo-feudalism diminishes  the property owning middle-class. In the Bay Area, regional governments are now seeking to limit all new development to a mere fraction of the area’s land mass, all but guaranteeing the future generations will face almost impossibly high housing prices. And a new set of state regulations, including a requirement that new houses have “zero” net energy use all but guarantees that houses, over time, will continue becoming ever more expensive.

The Bay Area’s regional plan also says goodbye to the American dream, suggesting that 82 percent of all new housing should be rental. Ultimately there will be little left for “little people” save for low end service jobs and benefit-less roles in the gig economy   created by the oligarchs  . Tech firms in the Valley employ shockingly few Latinos or African Americans, who make up barely 6 percent, for example, of Facebook’s workforce. And that’s better than the average of barely 5 percent among the leading tech firms.

Older industries do far better on these terms. In manufacturing, 16.2% of workers are Latinos and 9.7% are African America, according to 2015 data.  In mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, Latinos make up 16.9% of the workforce and African-Americans 4.8%, while in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, nearly a quarter of the workforce—23%—is Latino and 2.7 percent is African-American.

As the green ideology undermines the last bastions of the middle and working class economy, some of the most extreme “ethnic cleansing” is taking place in such cities as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, where high prices, regulations ,  sometimes aided local redevelopment,  have worked to push minorities to the poorer suburbs, or out of the region entirely.

Oligarchs and Alms for the Poor

Silicon Valley’s answer to this to this reality is hardly reassuring. At a conference on environmental economics several years back, I discussed with a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist the impact of these policies on homeownership and family formation. A low birthrate didn’t faze him because he believed “we really don’t need people now,” at least not those without special skills. Ultimately robots will do most of the basic work, he explained.

Of course, if the largely childless hipsters on of San Francisco may accede to this view, it’s unlikely that many others, including the poor and undocumented immigrants, will embrace the post-human perspective at the heart of Silicon Valley. Of course the oligarchs have a solution to the marginalization of the masses: a pool of subsidies to help cover artificially inflated housing and energy costs. Elon Musk and other valley heavyweightssupport a government-sponsored minimum income for what they regard as an  increasingly redundant population.

The oligarchs do not want risk a rebellion from below; the Trump victory demonstrates that potential. Yet don’t worry much about their being burdened by their call for societal generosity. Skilled at tax avoidance, they’ll pass the bill on to the remaining middle and working class residents, while the regulatory clerisy, both in government and the universities, enjoy pensions and other protections unavailable to the masses.  

Trump and the New Feudalism

For all the awfulness associated with Trump, his election stemmed from a disinclination among Americans to accept their place in the new technocratic order. Trump is best praised for some of the enemies he has made—movie stars and hierarchs of the environmental left, the racial grievance industry, the high-tech oligarchs, the bureaucracy and a university system that serves largely as a giant re-education camp. Not surprisingly, those enemies are having a collective fit about his victory.

Yet for all the pleasure one can derive from this spectacle, it’s dubious that Trump, himself the licker off a silver spoon, will be effective at slowing America’s slide towards neo-feudalism. After all, his basic policy instincts tend to be wrong: cutting taxes on the rich is not what the middle and working classes need. And banning illegal immigration and engaging in trade wars may help some industries, but will certainly hurt others. By themselves, there’s no chance that those steps will restore prosperity to so many Americans.

But Trump’s working-class-fueled victory should finally convince the operatives in both parties that restoring upward mobility constitutes our  great political challenge. There could be some common ground in policies that embrace things like expanding skills  education and economically useful infrastructure, relaxing federal regulation and reducing taxation of small enterprise.

What Trump deserves credit for—perhaps the only thing he deserves credit for—is derailing the predictable transition of the same old insiders who would feed at the trough in a Clinton Inc. administration. Now it’s up to the rest of us—those who supported him and those, like me, who did not—to determine that making America “great again” also means standing up to the new feudalism, and chasing this regressive order back into the darkness of the past, where it belongs.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. … where this piece was most recently posted. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. This piece first appeared at The Daily Beast and was published most recently by New Geography.) 

-cw

YOU GOTTA STAND FOR SOMETHING--As Donald Trump plans his transition into the White House, some have called for “unity.” Let’s “come together,” they say. Let’s “give him a chance.”

I say no.

When a man abuses his wife, you don’t tell her to give him a chance. You don’t tell her to try to talk things out with him. Meet him halfway. Hear his side of it. Believe him when he says he loves her and he won’t hit her again.

Why? Because it won’t work.

The rules of normal social conduct don’t apply in such a case. Nor do they apply in this one. As I’ve said before, Trump exhibits textbook emotional abuse tactics. 

If you give him a chance, he’ll walk all over you. If you go into any negotiation ready to meet him in the middle, he’ll demand it isn’t enough, that he must get his way entirely. And he’ll strong-arm you to get it.

We already have evidence that Trump does absolutely everything he can get away with.

He walked in on naked teenage beauty queens while they were changing, just because he could. Twelve women have accused him of sexual assault. He openly admits that he kisses and gropes them without consent.

He doesn’t pay contractors for their work. During the campaign, he even stiffed his own pollster. And his lawyers had to meet with him in pairs to prevent him from lying about their meetings.

This is a man who’ll do anything he can get away with. And he’s about as ready to change as a man who beats his wife would be.

So we can’t roll over and let him. We fight.

That’s what we must do now. We must make it absolutely as hard as possible for this man to wreck our democracy. And that’s not a partisan statement.

At this point, it’s not about whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. It’s not about whether you prefer to repeal NAFTA or Obamacare, or about whether you think same-sex marriage should be legal.

It’s now about whether you think the democracy the United States has had for over 200 years should remain in existence. If the answer to that question is yes, then it’s time to fight. Because that’s what’s under threat.

The pain of this bitter election hurts. For the second time in recent years, the Electoral College is on track to install a president who received fewer votes from the American people than his opponent.

We’re all dealing with difficult emotions in different ways. I’m listening to audiobooks and knitting. Okay, and ugly crying. Others are protesting. And some are trying to handle their anger and fear by “thinking positive.”

It’s not the time for that. Not when thinking positive means denying reality.

It’s been only days since the election and Trump has already appointed Steve Bannon, a white supremacist and “alt-right” media kingpin, as a top adviser. If you wanted to give Trump a chance, there. He’s had one. He blew it.

The next four years are going to be hard. But now is the time to start mobilizing. The continuation of our very democracy depends on it.

(OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It and an occasional contributer to CityWatch. Distributed by OtherWords.org.)

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-This has been a long week. As a politically engaged vocal activist and a writer, I find it beyond challenging to silence my voice on social media. I respect and appreciate my friends’ decision to remain unwired for respite, peace and healing. 

I realize that unfortunately leaves me vulnerable to attacks. No matter which side of the aisle, we can probably agree that Trump has legitimized the voices of racists, sexists, homophobes, white supremacists and others. He may not be any of these things (well, pretty hard to walk back the sexist part) but in that scenario, he used the dog whistles to court the KKK, ant-Semites, and others in those camps to "win."  

I had a bizarre cyberbullying experience two nights post-election. A woman with a substantial following had posted about the protests on her Facebook wall. Some had written some pretty heated comments, which is their right. I’m not even sure at this point why I even bother to parachute into enemy territory but I did. I wrote a fairly innocuous fact-based comment and seconds later, “Laura Israel” asked if I “support criminals.” I took the bait. Her response included pretty vitriolic words about Hillary Clinton and an attack on me that included personal information. I felt violated. Did I know this woman? 

Moments later, I received a message from “D, whom I didn’t know but who shared this same Laura Israel had attacked her on one of the blogger’s Facebook threads about same-sex marriage and called her pretty vile names. Both “Laura Israel” and her “friend” had similar profiles so I suspected they might belong to a group. 

About an hour later, D. messaged that she had uncovered both Laura and her “friend” were troll accounts belonging to the same woman. It turned out “Laura” was someone I know. I had been a guest at her daughter’s bat mitzvah, celebrated at her holiday parties and her son’s bris. 

Since Donald J. Trump’s “season opener” with The Wall, I’ve wondered who nearby was on board. After Tuesday, I’ve begun to feel like we are in inside-out McCarthyism or the Salem Witch Trials. We aren’t really sure whom we can trust. I do not believe every person who voted for Trump shares the views he spewed at his rallies or in his early morning Twitter rampages. We don’t even know if he shares them. But we’ve turned the corner on what is accepted form. 

On the flip side, Donald Trump’s “anti-PC” scapegoating and rhetoric have exposed not only those who stand behind his dog whistles. He has also exposed our neighbors and Facebook “friends” who are appalled, people like the nurse from my children’s elementary school who turns out has a pretty strong activist bent. 

So, look around. We don’t know who might hold racist, sexist, ant-Semitic views or who might be hiding behind a phony troll profile or two to fire off cyberbullying missives to anyone who disagrees. But we also don’t know who among us is gearing up to protect our collective rights and to save the planet. 

Good will prevail. And despite the Electoral College outcome, Love Trumps Hate.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

BATTLING GEN X AND MILLENNIAL PERSPECTIVES?-The 2016 election is in the rear-view mirror. But the votes and views of a key demographic group – young women -- will reverberate significantly in future elections. Two members of this group, Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton, were the most visible representatives of their peers during the campaign. Examining their unique demographic characteristics and attitudes provides clues about what we can expect from the emerging female electorate going forward. 

Diversity

Let’s start with the basics. While very close in age, the two women fall into different generations. At 35, Ivanka Trump is at the front end of the much-discussed millennial cohort. Millennials are now the largest generation, making up more than one quarter of the nation’s population. Chelsea, at 36, is a young Gen Xer, a group with a less distinctive profile in public opinion. Together, Millennials and Gen Xers make up the largest share of eligible (not actual) voters (56%). 

The United States is experiencing what demographer Bill Frey calls a “diversity explosion,” with Millennials the most diverse generation in our history. Ivanka and Chelsea are part of the declining national white share of America’s population. Among Millennials, 56% are now white, 21% Hispanic, 14% African-American and 7% Asian. 

The Millennial generation is also the most educated generation in history, especially its women. Women surpassed men in bachelor’s degrees conferred in 1982, master’s degrees in 1987, and doctoral and other professional degrees in 2006. Ivanka and Chelsea’s Ivy League educations are not the norm for most young women, but their levels of education illustrate the impressive gains their female peers are making. This election, women with a college degree were 51 percent of voters and voted for Hillary Clinton, 58%-38%. 

The Future Family

Ivanka married at age 27, just days before her 28th birthday; Chelsea at age 30. Like many other women their ages and younger, they married later (and will be married longer if they stay married.) In 2015, the average age of first marriage was 27 for women and 29 for men, up from 21 for women and 23 for men of the Silent generation (born 1928–45). Around 20% of Millennials are married today. A quarter are the children of divorce or parental separation, true for Ivanka but not for Chelsea. 

While these two women have married, the rise of the non-married electorate may be more consequential politically. In the AEI/Brookings Institution/Center for American Progress report “States of Change: The Demographic Evolution of the American Electorate, 1974–2060,” we note that in 1974, 70% of eligible voters were married. Today, the married share of the eligible electorate is down to 52%. The non-married share is almost as large at 48%. Among female eligible voters, the non-married share has surpassed the married share. Strong majorities of non-married women (a group that includes single, divorced and widowed women) have voted Democratic in every presidential election since the 1980s, the first time the exit pollsters collected these data, and they have become more Democratic over time. Non-married women voted 62 percent for Hillary Clinton. Sixty-seven percent voted for Barack Obama in 2012. 

Religious intermarriage is becoming more common, and both Ivanka and Chelsea married someone of a different faith. Pew’s 2014 religious landscape survey found that people who married after 2010 were more than twice as likely to be in religious intermarriages as those who married before 1960 (39%-19%). 

Millennials are leading another significant religious change in America: the rise of the “nones.” More than a third of Millennials (35%) say they have no formal religious affiliation. Still, around 50% of Millennials say they are absolutely certain they believe in God. 

Declining fertility is another big story of our time, and the current fertility rate of 1.9 births per woman now falls below the replacement rate of 2.1. Ivanka has three children at this point, and Chelsea, two. Today, according to Gallup, American women say their ideal family size is 2.6 children, down from 3.6, a figure that remained constant until the late 1950s. In the same survey, 40% of Americans 18-40 years old who do not have children said they want them someday. Young adults still want kids; they just aren’t having as many. 

Women at Work -- And at Home?

Ivanka and Chelsea are working mothers, as both have highlighted in recent public appearances. They are both working moms of newborns, to boot. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 68% of married mothers in 2015 were in the labor force, as were three-fourths of mothers not married or living apart from their spouse. Fifty-eight percent of mothers with infants under a year old were in the workforce either full- or part-time last year. 

As more women have entered the U.S. workforce, their attitudes about working have shifted. Since 2007, around 50% of women, up from 36% when Gallup first asked the question in 1974, have consistently told the pollsters that if they were free to do either -- a big “if” for most women -- they would prefer to have a job outside the home than to stay home and take care of their house and family. While a majority of younger women and women with a college degree said they would prefer to work, a majority of women with children said they would not. In Gallup’s 2014-15 data, 54% of employed women with children under 18 preferred to stay home, as did 57% of women not currently employed with children. 

In 2015, both parents worked in 61% of married-couple families with children under 18, according to the BLS. Ivanka and Chelsea have more resources than most working mothers to help them navigate the work-family balance. More millennial husbands than husbands in earlier generations say they help at home. Fifty-nine percent of parents employed full-time say they share household chores equally, but women still handle most child-rearing responsibilities.

Ivanka is not alone in professing the joys of parenthood, as she did in her September Wall Street Journal article. In a 2015 Pew study, more than three in four parents with children under 18 described being a parent as enjoyable and, separately, rewarding. Mothers and fathers both gave equally as high responses. 

Political Laggards, Social Leaders?

In terms of partisan identification, Ivanka spoke for many in her generation when she said at the GOP convention: “I do not consider myself categorically Republican or Democrat.” More young people describe themselves as independents than as Republicans or Democrats. This election, more young voters cast ballots for third-party candidates than older voters did. But in recent elections, young voters have voted heavily Democratic. They voted solidly for President Obama in 2008 (66%) and 2012 (60%), fueled largely by the preferences of minority youth. 

In 2016, they voted 55% for Clinton to 37% for Trump. White young people voted narrowly for Trump, 48%- 43%. Minority millennials voted heavily for Clinton. Young white women voted for Clinton, 51%- 42%. Their older sisters, white women ages 30–44, voted more closely for Trump, 49%- 45%.

Younger voters pay some attention to politics. In the Spring 2016 Harvard Institute of Politics (IOP) poll, over half of 18- to 29-year-olds said they are following closely this year’s presidential election (60%) and, separately, news about national politics (52%). But unlike Ivanka and Chelsea, most do not actively participate. Although 37% have liked a political issue on Facebook and 29% a political candidate, most are passive and don’t engage in traditional political activities such as volunteering. 

Even though Ivanka and Chelsea haven’t made explicit their opinions on many mainstream issues, polling data show clear patterns in young people’s attitudes. Both Gen Xers and Millennials strongly support gay marriage, but until recently, young women were much more supportive than young men. Today their views are similar. Young men and women support marijuana legalization, but young women are more dubious about it than men. On abortion, the young, like other generations, want to keep abortion legal but are willing to put restrictions on its use. Young women are less supportive about women being drafted than are young men. Although these issues get substantial media attention, the top issues for most young people -- as for their parents -- are the economy, terrorism and health care. 

The granddaughters of feminism are charting their own course. In the Harvard IOP poll, 37% of women 18-29 years old identified themselves as feminists, while 58% did not. That’s not to say young women don’t think there’s progress to be made. In another poll from Pew earlier this fall, 63% of women 18-34 said there are still significant obstacles that make it harder for women to get ahead than men, compared with 38% of men this age who gave this response. When asked if they’ve ever personally experienced discrimination because of their sex, more women say they haven’t than say they have (53%-46%). 

Life at the Local Level

Ivanka and Chelsea campaigned on behalf of a parent for the country’s highest elected office, but young people aren’t very confident in government. They want the federal government to do many things and at the same time have little trust in it. Nearly two-thirds don’t think Social Security will be available when they retire. Similarly, young people are neither cheerleaders for nor hostile to big business. Many observers have commented on their distrust in central institutions, but this could have a silver lining. As they grow up, they are likely to be more self-reliant and perhaps more active in their local communities, where they have higher confidence that problems can be solved. 

Both Ivanka and Chelsea appear to have close relationships with their parents, another factor that defines the younger generations. Young people often talk to or text with their parents, and 32% of 18- to 34-year-olds live with a parent, surpassing for the first time the number of those living with a spouse or partner in their own household. Many also live near their parents. In the 2014 General Social Survey, over half (53%) of young adults said they lived in the same city as when they were 16 years old. Of those who moved away, one in five lived in the same state, while slightly more (one in four) moved to a different state. 

A Younger Direction

Ivanka and Chelsea didn’t sign up to be presidential surrogates, but both were a credit to their families on the campaign trail. Both have said their friendship will continue after the dispiriting political brawl that was this year’s campaign, something that could serve as good advice for the rest of us. And in an interview with 60 Minutes this week, Ivanka said she is “going to be a daughter” in her father’s presidential administration, rather than having a more formal role. As she and Chelsea return to their lives off the campaign trail, the demographic and attitudinal footprint of young women gives us a sense of how this emerging electorate will reshape the country’s political and cultural landscape for generations to come.

This piece is adapted from an article that first appeared on WSJ.com.

(Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow and Heather Sims a program manager at the American Enterprise Institute. This piece was posted most recently at New Geography.)[[[   http://www.newgeography.com/content/005451-ivanka-trump-chelsea-clinton-and-emerging-female-electorate ]]] Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

Tags: Karlyn Bowman, Heather Sims, American Enterprise Institute, New Geography, Wall Street Journal, Millennials, Gen Xers, women in the workplace, demographic opinion patterns

TRUMP BRAND ADJUSTMENT BEGINS-Throughout the election, critics often savaged the media for “normalizing Trump,” broadly defined as the act of treating his rank sexism, xenophobia and fascist dog-whistles as just another policy difference against equally valid opponents. This trend, borne largely by a combination of cognitive dissonance and access, is being accelerated now that Trump has won the election, and its continuation, if left unchecked, could undermine opposition for years to come.

Oprah Winfrey, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, said Trump’s recent visit to the White House gave her “hope” and suggested he has been “humbled” by the experience. The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins told his readers to “calm down” and that Trump wasn’t the “worst thing.” His college, Nouriel Roubini, insisted the Oval Office will “tame” Trump. People magazine ran a glowing profile of Trump and his wife Melania (though a former People writer accused Trump of sexual assault). The New York Times’ Nick Kristof dubiously added that we should “Grit our teeth and give Trump a chance.” The mainstays—Washington Post, New York Times and CNN—while frequently critical, are coving Trump’s transition as they would any other. President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have all issued statements recognizing Trump’s legitimacy and pleading we give him a chance.

Overall there’s a creeping sense that we’re stuck with Trump and we should make it “work” in some type of do-goody liberal appeal to patriotism.

But this is wrong, both tactically and ethically. Trump isn’t normal and he should never be treated as such, regardless of what President Obama and Clinton and Sanders say. These people are politicians, bound by a different covenant. The media, namely progressive media, is subject to no such charge. The overall message of normalizing Trump is that you can steamroll women, LGBT people, the disabled, Muslims, and people of color, yet everything will be okay so long as you win. Indeed, when asked if he thought his rhetoric had gone too far, Trump responded, “No, I won.” This is the logic of a fascist, and liberals are acquiescing to him by pivoting to “Trump as our kooky uncle” normalization mode.

In addition to it working in Trump’s favor in the present, it creates a moral hazard for all future Trumps: you can go as far right as you want and smear as many vulnerable populations you want, so long as you surpass 270 electoral votes come fall.

Had Trump lost, he would likely have been cast out of proper company, left to build his own Breitbart-like brand operating on the margins of acceptable opinion. Influential and profitable to be sure, but not mainstream. Political principles, to say nothing of morality, should not shift based on the outcome of an election. If Trump was a vulgar racist and sexual predator before November 8, he still is after, regardless of his new position.

So what to do?

Those not appealing to bromides about “working together” are staging massive protests throughout the country, from Austin to Portland to Kansas City to New York. As expected, the same pundit class that neither predicted nor adequately combated Trump’s rise are concern trolling those taking to the streets to show their revulsion. The Daily Show ran a boring segment hand-wringing over some overturned cars. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait insisted the people shouldn’t denounce Trump the day after the election because it was “a little soon.” Too soon? Given the stakes, one is compelled to ask, why wait?

Israel has already signaled it will expand settlements with the blessing of the president-elect. The cabinet looks like it will be stuffed with unqualified Trump cronies. Virulently anti-poor people Paul Ryan has effectively been put in charge of budget priorities and is floating Medicare cuts. A climate change denier is selecting the head of the EPA. Why wait to use every available avenue to undermine Trump on the altar of civility?

Instead of appealing to civility or plotting a run four years down the road, pundits who truly want to undermine Trump as much as possible should spend more time supporting their local anti-Trump protests and far less time treating Trump like just another politician. The left can only combat Trump by leveraging both its political and activist wings, not indulging in Sorkinesque gestures of “working together.”

(Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst at FAIR and contributing writer for AlterNet. This perspective was posted most recently at TruthDig.) 

-cw

PERSPECTIVE-Ivanka Trump will take the oath of office as President of the United States in 2032. By then, she will have served in Congress for ten years, filling Rep. Peter King’s seat in New York. This would come after four years as White House Press Secretary. 

I can hear the readers of this article madly typing comments, many of them expressing outrage.

Before you hit the “send now” button, you should understand that those who are well-acquainted with me know my affection for satire. I have even written a few satirical pieces for Citywatch. 

In my early youth, I developed an appreciation for the genre. Steve Allen’s and Ernie Kovacs’ off-the-wall skits, while not about politics, not to mention tame by today’s standards, were the prototypes for contemporary comedic interpretations of current events and social norms. 

John Oliver’s work is at the top of my list these days (Jon Stewart is OK, but Colbert is a frightful bore.) Oliver pulls no punches and uses gut-busting delivery and politically incorrect content, although I wish he would refrain from over-reliance on the F-bomb. 

I’m waiting for someone to perform a skit about Ivanka Trump rising to power; Chelsea Clinton too – it has been reported that she is being groomed to run for Congress. There’s great potential material here. It could top all of the Donald Trump/Hilary Clinton sketches that appeared on SNL. 

I thought Donald Trump’s campaign was satire – until November 8th – but Clinton ended up as the punchline. So, while I am not serious about either Ivanka’s or Chelsea’s prospects for leading the nation, the recent election proves that anything can happen. Maybe Billy Bush can resurrect his family’s political fortunes. 

Yes, anything can happen, but, judging from partisan Facebook posts, few of Clinton’s supporters failed to recognize that right up through late in the afternoon of November 8th. By the way, Dave Chappelle’s sketch with Chris Rock on SNL hilariously made that point. 

Both candidates took their lumps in the parodies; perhaps Trump more so, but his rants were softballs which the writers were able to knock out of the park. Many Clinton supporters may have developed a false sense of security by assuming the satire reflected the prevailing sentiment across all regions. However, what may seem funny and improbable one day, can become reality the next.

Too many people have a myopic view of the world. They do not understand how anyone can hold an opposing position. As a result, they can get blindsided and unduly horrified when results do not go their way. 

We owe it to ourselves to understand the underlying reasons for the views of a wider audience, not just what is reported in the mainstream and social media, or fed to us by partisan organizations. Michael Moore had it right. 

Unless we make an effort to understand each other, we will allow satire to obscure reality. Then it will no longer be funny.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and serves as President of the Valley Village Homeowners Association. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. The views presented are those of Mr. Hatfield and his alone and do not represent the opinions of Valley Village Homeowners Association or CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LEANING RIGHT--After eight years of George W. Bush ("the uniter, not the divider") and Barack H. Obama ("hope and change") we now have the Orange Man who came into office to "Make America Great Again".  Like so many others I voted for all three of them, and have both hopes and fears for the future, and a dent in my forehead from all the times I smacked my hand into it after Trump said something stupid. 

Yet after listening to a President who SAID things (transparency, listening to the other side) that were wonderful but yet DID things that were unforgiveable (oversaw an IRS, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Justice who were shockingly partisan and arguably corrupt), count me in as someone who will focus not on what Trump SAYS but what he DOES. 

And in so doing, he based his campaign on representing the oppressed (including, if they will accept him, Black Americans who are hurting more than ever). 

For all of Hillary Clinton's talk of killing Citizens United, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton with only half the money she spent, and a very, very small payroll...after overcoming more money than the GOP elites of Mitt Romney, the Bush Family and the Beltway Bunch could have ever thrown against one man. 

So eight years after electing its first African-American President, how did billionaire Donald Trump become the elected voice (of the electoral college, but not the popular vote) of so many who felt voiceless and unrepresented in the halls of power in D.C.? 

1) His efforts focused on what he would DO, and his supporters latched onto the gist of what he said, not on all the verbal "gotcha" moments his opponents threw at him. 

No, he is NOT an eloquent speaker--he's brash, frequently puts his foot in his mouth, and appears to be a rough, shoot-from-the-hip modern-day conglomeration of Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt.  The elites hate him, but the ordinary Joe/Jane loves him.  The Wall Street wealthy despise him, but those in the desperate middle class look to him for REAL "hope and change". 

Of course, it's likely that both Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt were more eloquent than Mr. Trump, but all three of them--and their supporters--recognized elitist bigots and those stacking the deck in their favor when they recognized it.  Currently, those wanting an end to borders and a focus on cheap labor are--intentionally or otherwise--KILLING the Middle Class. 

And after not one, but two Presidents, both a cowboy and a community organizer, clearly played to the wealthy elites, and oversaw income inequality that is both historical and breath-taking in its extent and severity, much of mainstream America wanted to reward hard work and playing by the rules. 

You know ... "Make America Great Again?" 

Hence the Trump team might scare both the Far Right and the Far Left, but both Reince Priebus and Stephen Bannon (for all their flaws) represent the moderate-conservative center of this nation who both did and want more outreach to minorities than Mitt Romney ever, EVER performed. 

And if Trump and his team are so "bigoted" then why are his three adult children married to Jews, with Tiffany Trump dating a Jew, to boot?  If Bill Clinton is the "first black President", then arguably isn't Donald Trump then the "first Jewish President"? 

Furthermore, if President Obama was the voice of the little guy, why were those most happy with him either uber-wealthy (Silicon Valley, Wall Street) or insulated from the realities of our harsh economy (public sector employees, high-paying jobs, those with cozy governmental contracts), leaving the Middle Class with nothing but debt and a painful loss of the American Dream? 

And although Obama supporters would probably rather swallow a bag of razor blades than admit it, eight years and ten trillion dollars of debt, and a host of excuses that stopped meaning anything six years ago, we ARE in the middle of a Second Great Depression, and a Second Gilded Age, to boot (the first was in the late 1800's, and resulted in labor unions and a 40-hour work week). 

Hence we saw labor unions more in favor of Trump (or at least individuals belonging to labor unions) than we ever saw them vote for a GOP candidate in decades, and more black Americans (and many Latino Americans) voting for Trump in historic percentages.   

Trump was the ONLY candidate that really emphasized what UNDEREMPLOYMENT was, and that we'd had no reasonable GDP growth for the entirety of the Obama Era.  Because "it's the economy, stupid!" 

2) Trump listened to his supporters, and to suffering Americans, in ways that neither the younger Bush nor Obama ever did. 

A surge to the Left helps only a few at the expense of the majority, and while Big Hollywood, Big Technology, and Big Green did well under Obama (just as major defense contractors did well under GW Bush), ordinary Americans and struggling small businesses were smashed and belittled whenever they complained. 

And just as the GOP was unforgivably guilty of ignoring the ever-worsening costs and access problems to health care, the Obama Administration was guilty of ignoring the shrieks and screams of businesses, economists, and independent contractors who complained about the "Affordable" Care Act. 

So when Donald Trump, on the campaign trail, emphasized a "repeal and replace" for the ACA, did enough leading Democrats acknowledge they should have been more responsive and respectful to those who complained about the ACA?  

Hardly--in so many words, they said, "Shut up, we know better. You just can't stand it that a black President was elected." 

Right--and so when I and my fellow physicians (most who, like myself voted for Obama in 2008) actually LISTENED to our patients (who didn't have good jobs like we did), and became aware of the fiscally-untenable future of the ACA, it became obvious that true "hope and change" was in order.  

And Trump HAS supported the "no pre-existing conditions" and "young adults remaining on their parent's health plans" that virtually all of America wanted before and after the ACA was passed. 

So the "secret handshake" and quiet, subdued, fearful suggestions of my patients and fellow physicians (and they were of both genders, and of all ethnic backgrounds!) led to an understanding that there were undercurrents that the insulated, "everything is fine, nothing to see here" Obama/Clinton crowd truly ignored.   

Not "deplorable" and not "unwashed" and not "stupid".  And certainly NOT "bigoted". Just IGNORED, and willing to work very hard to fight for an economic future for themselves and their children. 

And the first patient of mine who had major concerns about the ACA (President Obama's version of President GW Bush's Iraq fiasco)?  A young, U.S.-born, twentysomething Latino male with a mother who arrived here illegally and spoke not a single word of English. 

Some of us choose to listen, and some choose not to.  Some choose to presume they have a stranglehold over being "smart" and "right", and some choose to always ask themselves if they could be wrong.  

It's that simple.

3) Trump promises to make America inclusive...but one that follows the law, and doesn't have a problem promoting its own best interests. 

Those shrieking about racism might have their own divisive, race-obsessed agenda to confront. In his 60 minutes interview that just aired on Sunday, Trump told any of his supporters who crossed the line into bigotry to "Stop it."  He also supported those who protested out of passion but had a problem with those paid protestors causing destruction and injury. 

And how about, and what ARE we to do, about those far-Left agitators who are behind most of the destruction in the Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump protests?  When DO we acknowledge they're out there, and are the REAL dividing force in our nation? 

WILL we acknowledge that the Koch Brothers did NOT support Trump (they're libertarian globalists who have no problem sending the middle class straight to Hades in order to get cheap labor), but that George Soros is a vile man who must be limit-set, if not stopped altogether?   

Or at least acknowledge that the Koch Brothers and Soros are some creepy fellows (no less than Mitt Romney, who never did stop fighting Trump...and why is that?) who are dangerous to this nation. 

On a related note, when WILL we acknowledge that Trump repeatedly, as have many if not most of us, supported LEGAL immigration but NOT ILLEGAL immigration?   

Legal and illegal immigration is NOT the same, dammitall, and to dismiss those decrying lawbreaking (especially those hurting the rest of us to make a few bucks) as racists is itself immoral...and maybe even racist, to boot. 

Are "sanctuary cities" angelic defenders of the unrepresented, or merely corporate-run entities with an agenda that will send Black America straight to hell? 

And doesn't Trump's "New Deal for Black America" a sign that he's trying to do outreach for ALL Americans, or something that will be ignored because it's coming from the Orange Man? 

America is more divided than ever.  Donald Trump clearly won the electoral vote, but Hillary Clinton clearly won the popular vote. 

Not good.  But at least we'll brook no apologists for this new Trump Administration.   

There will be RESULTS, or a demand for a new person to bring about change.

And let's not forget how many people have ignored, and continue to ignore, those of our fellow Americans who are suffering and want nothing more than the opportunity to succeed through their own hard work, and by obeying the rules, and the laws, and the morals, of our American nation.

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties.  He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)

-cw

ELECTORAL COLLEGE REDUX-At 11:30 p.m. on Election Night 2012, outraged at President Barack Obama’s re-election victory over GOP nominee Mitt Romney, Donald J. Trump tweeted, “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” 

Karma, of course, has its own cruel irony. The day after Trump’s stunning presidential triumph this week, tens of thousands of Americans unleashed their own outrage by beginning to march, if not on Washington, then at least on the streets of many of America’s cities, trying to stop the travesty they saw in his election. 

Those demonstrations on the streets reflect the feeling among millions in American unwilling to accept Trump’s victory, at least without some kind of protest – chanting their slogans “Not My President” and “Trump and Pence make no sense.” 

Racist, sexist, and a homophobe. Correct or not, concerns over those allegations against the brash, outspoken billionaire have left the first days after his election full of doom and gloom for protesters and others mourning the bitter, unexpected defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton. 

In response, Trump supporters have taken to social media and denounced demonstrators as hypocrites or worse for not accepting defeat in a democratic process. 

This is not new, of course, in American presidential history. In 1969, protesters assaulted Richard Nixon’s inaugural motorcade along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington with smoke bombs, rocks and rotten eggs.  

In 2000, thousands of demonstrators attended George W. Bush’s inauguration ceremonies in the nation’s capital where Bush's limousine was hit by a tennis ball and an egg thrown from the crowd during the inaugural parade. 

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, that son of a Bush has got to go," chanted a cluster of protesters among a group of protesters along the parade route. Meanwhile, more than 10,000 protesters marched in San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

And as far back as 1860, news of that year’s presidential victory by a Northern Republican led the state legislature of South Carolina to declare Abraham Lincoln's election a hostile act and its intention to secede from the Union. 

Understandably, today the Obama White House is urging anyone choosing to protest Trump’s election, to do so non-violently. 

“We’re Democrats and Republicans, but we’re Americans and patriots first,” Obama press secretary Josh Ernest cautioned Thursday, amid what some protesters were calling the dawn of a new fascism. 

The concern is being further fueled by the fact that, though winning the presidency through an Electoral College majority, Trump apparently lost the popular vote to Mrs. Clinton, much as George W.  Bush lost the national vote to Democrat Al Gore. 

Mrs. Clinton will have won the popular vote by a wider percentage margin than not only Gore in 2000 but also John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard Nixon in 1968. 

Incidentally, Mrs. Clinton and George W. Bush are not the first candidates to have won the popular vote but lost the presidency, though the others date back to the 19th century. 

In the 1824 election, John Quincy Adams was elected president in a campaign decided by the House of Representatives under the provisions of Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution after no candidate secured a majority of the electoral vote. Andrew Jackson had received the most electoral votes, but lost the presidency in the House vote.  

Rutherford B. Hayes won the bitter 1876 presidential election despite Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York winning the popular vote. Even the electoral votes were in dispute but was resolved in a deal in which Democrats acquiesced to Hayes's election in exchange for Republicans agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction.  

In 1888, incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland of New York won the popular vote but was unseated by Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College when Cleveland failed to carry his home state where New York City’s Tammany Hall political machine helped defeat helped defeat him. 

In all those instances, supporters of the defeated candidates have raised the question of electing a president in a way some see counter to traditional democratic rules. 

“If we really subscribe to the notion that ‘majority rules,’ then why do we deny the majority their chosen candidate?” asked a disappointed Jennifer M. Granholm, a Clinton supporter and a former governor of Michigan, in the wake of the most recent election. 

Trump would appear to agree. Or he did, at least, in a Twitter post on the eve of the 2012 election when he called the Electoral College “a disaster for democracy.” At the time Trump believed that Romney, who he supported, had beaten President Obama in the popular vote. He hadn’t. 

Today, the beneficiary of the unique indirect election of the American presidency put in place by the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Trump finds that his gleaming black leather size 12 Oxford is on the other foot.

(Tony Castro, a former political reporter and columnist, is the author of five books, the most recent being “Looking for Hemingway: Spain, The Bullfights and a Final Rite of Passage” (Lyons Press) He is an occasional contributor to CityWatch). Prepped for CityWatch for Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY-In an election so ugly and so close, one is reluctant to proclaim winners. But it’s clear that there’s a loser -- the very notion of the United States of America. 

Instead we have populations and geographies that barely seem to belong in the same country, if not to the same planet. The electorate is so divided that many states went for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton by lopsided margins. The Northeast was solidly Democratic, with Clinton winning New York, Massachusetts and Vermont with three-fifths of the vote or more. Washington, D.C., heavily black and the seat of the bureaucracy and pundit class, delivered an almost Soviet-style 93% to 4% margin. 

On the other side was a series of states where Trump won just as easily, including Tennessee and Kentucky, with three-fifths of the vote, and West Virginia, by a margin of two-to-one -- higher than those attained by 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. 

Much of the rest of the map has followed the usual patterns: Democratic domination of Illinois and the West Coast, while Republicans held the South. Where the election was decided was in previous battleground states: Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. 

The Revolt of Middle America 

America is a nation of many economies, but those that produce real, tangible things -- food, fiber, energy and manufactured goods -- went overwhelmingly for Trump. He won virtually every state from Appalachia to the Rockies, with the exceptions of heavily Hispanic Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, and President Obama’s home base of Illinois. 

Some of his biggest margins were in energy states -- Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Wyoming, and North Dakota -- where the fracking revolution created a burst of prosperity. Generally speaking, the more carbon-intensive the economy, the better the Republicans did. Many of his biggest wins took place across the energy-producing regions of the country, including Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, Idaho, and especially West Virginia, where he won by a remarkable margin of 68% to 27%. The energy industry could well be the biggest financial winner in the election. 

The Green Trap 

Clinton’s support for climate change legislation, a lower priority among the electorate than other concerns, was seen as necessary to shore up support from greens threatening to attack her from the left. Yet the issue never caught on the heartland, which tends to see climate change mitigation as injurious to them. 

This may have proven a major miscalculation, as the energy economy is also tied closely to manufacturing. Besides climate change, the heartland had many reasons to fear a continuation of Obama policies, particularly related to regulation and global trade, which seems to have been a big factor in Trump’s upset win in normally moderate to liberal Wisconsin. 

Trump either won, or closely contested all the traditional manufacturing states -- Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa and even Michigan, where union voters did not support Clinton as they had Obama and where trade was also a big issue. Trump did consistently better than Romney in all these states, even though Romney was a native of Michigan. Perhaps the most significant turnaround was in Ohio, which Obama won with barely 51% of the vote in 2012. This year Trump reversed this loss and won by over seven points. 

Agricultural states, reeling from the decline of commodity prices, not surprisingly, also went for the New Yorker. 

Premature Epitaphs for the White Voter 

Race, as is often the case, played a major role in the election. For much of the election, commentators, particularly in the dominant Eastern media, seemed to be openly celebrating what CNN heralded as “the decline of the white voter.” The “new America,” they suggested, would be a coalition of minorities, educated workers and millennials. 

To be sure, the minority share of the electorate is only going to grow -- from less than 30% today to over 40% in 2032 -- as more white Americans continue to die than be born. Just between 2012 and 2016, the Latino and Asian electorate grew 17% and 16%, respectively; the white electorate expanded barely 2%. 

In Colorado the new minority math was seen, with a strong showing among Latinos, the educated suburbs around Denver and millennials. 

That may be the future, but now is now. Exit polling nationwide showed Trump won two-to-one among people without a college degree, matched Clinton among college graduates, losing only those with graduate degrees, a group that has voted for the Democrats since 1988. 

But there’s simply more high school graduates than those with graduate degrees. And for now there are a lot more whites than minorities. As we look into the future, these groups will fade somewhat but right now they can still determine elections. Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump’s decisive win in Florida, a state that is home to many white retirees, including from the old industrial states. 

Latinos may be the one group in the “new America” that made a difference for Clinton, not only in Colorado, but also in Nevada. Republicans paid a price for Trump’s intemperate comments on immigration and about Mexico. 

They also made states like Texas and North Carolina closer, and may have helped secure Clinton’s win in Virginia. In contrast, neither African-Americans nor millennials seem to have turned out as heavily, both in numbers and percentage terms, as they did for President Obama. Trump appears to have made some modest gains with both groups, contrary to the conventional wisdom. 

Class Warrior 

Class has been a bigger factor in this election than in any election since the New Deal era. Trump’s insurgency rode largely on middle- and working-class fears about globalization, immigration and the cultural arrogance of the “progressive” cultural elite. This is something Bill Clinton understands better than his wife. 

Trump owes his election to what one writer has called “the leftover people.”  These may be “deplorables” to the pundits but their grievances are real – their incomes and their lifespans have been decreasing.  They have noticed, as Thomas Frank has written, that the Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.” 

Many of these voters were once Democrats, and feel they have been betrayed. And they include a large swath of the middle class, whose fury explains much of what happened tonight. Trump has connected better with these voters than Romney, who won those making between $50,000 and $90,000 by a narrow 52 percent margin. Early analysis of this year’s election shows Trump doing better among these kinds of voters. 

At the same time, however, affluent voters -- those making $100,000 and above -- seem to have tilted over to the Democrats this year. This is the first time the “rich” have gone against the GOP since the 1964 Goldwater debacle. Obama did better among the wealthy, winning eight of the 10 richest counties in 2012. In virtually all these counties, Clinton did even better. 

What does this mean for America’s traditional middle class, whose numbers have been fading for a generation? Long the majority, notes Pew, they are no longer, outnumbered by the lower and upper classes combined. Yet like the Anglo population, in this election what’s left of America’s middle class has shown itself not ready to face the sunset. 

Now What? 

Given the unpredictable nature of Trump, it’s hard to see what he will do. Although himself a businessman, he was opposed overwhelmingly by his own class. Clinton won more support from big business and the business elite. If you had a billionaire primary, Clinton would have won by as much as 20 to 1. 

Initially many of those business interests closest to both Obama and Clinton -- Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood -- will be on the outside looking in. Their advantages from tax avoidance could be lessened. Merger-mania, yet another form of asset inflation, will continue unabated, particularly in the tech and media space. 

The clear challenge for (I can’t believe I am writing these words) President Trump will not be so much to punish these enemies, but to embrace those people -- largely middle class, suburban, small town and white -- who are not part of his world, but made him President. If he embraces his role as a radical reformer, he could do much good, for example with a flatter tax system, restoring federalism, seizing the advantage of the energy revolution and reviving military preparedness. 

The question is whether he will, or is capable, of doing these things. A Hillary Clinton administration would have been safer, and predictable, but it would not have addressed the very things that made Americans turn to this bizarre political poseur. Now it’s up to Trump to live up to his promise to restore the country’s self-confidence, and, for the rest of us, to make sure he does it in accordance with the Constitution and basic decency.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. … where this piece was originally posted. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY-She had it all -- the pliant media, the tech oligarchs, Wall Street, the property moguls, the academics, and the all-around “smart people.” What Hillary Clinton didn’t have was flyover country, the economic “leftovers,” the small towns, the un-hipstered suburbs, and other unfashionable places. As Thomas Frank has noted, Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.” No surprise, then, that working- and middle-class voters went for Donald Trump and helped him break through in states -- Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa ---that have usually gone blue in recent presidential elections. 

Trump seized on the widespread sense that American life was destined to get worse from generation to generation. Americans wanted opportunity for the next generation, not a managed decline. Democrats -- and I was one for over 40 years -- once offered this to the working and middle classes that have now deserted the party. 

More than anything, the Trump vote says “no” to oligarchies and ruling classes that not only hoard their wealth but also are convinced that they are morally superior. Trump may be as ostentatious as anyone in flaunting his own wealth, but compared with his garishness, the hypocrisy of the elites is infinitely worse. It’s one thing to be told that decline and future stagnation are your lot by, say, selfless monks wearing hair shirts or tough party cadres who live, like the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks, with the common people. It’s quite another, when the message comes from trustafarians writing for the New York Times or people who fly their own planes and own numerous homes. 

Concern about climate change galvanized the elites -- Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley -- but left Main Street cold. Wall Street placed its bets on Trump and, like many blocs within the new “progressive” constituency, reacted with shock that the American people hadn’t bought in to their investment. 

The map tells all. Clinton won by large margins in the Northeast and on the West Coast, and in states -- Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada -- where Trump’s intemperate comments roused Latino voters. But outside of Illinois, a whole swath of the country, from the hills of Appalachia to the fringes of the Rockies, went solidly for Trump. 

Why would that be? Start with basic economics. The economy in the nation’s interior relies on producing things -- an endeavor that the coasts have largely abandoned. Energy, manufacturing, and agriculture still define these economies, and employ many white-collar as well as blue-collar workers. If you live in Texas and Oklahoma, “decarbonization” is a much less attractive concept than it might seem in Manhattan or San Francisco. Trump swept the areas that keep the lights on and the motors turning -- Ohio, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, Wyoming, Idaho, Louisiana, and especially West Virginia, where he won by a remarkable 68 to 27 margin. 

Among other things, the media missed the fact that the middle of the country and the South continue to gain population. The “blue” model, for the most part, expels people, while, in contrast, the “red” one appeals, particularly to middle- and working-class families. Texas and Florida are now our second and third most-populous states. Once the pacesetter, New York is a mere shadow of itself as a determiner of elections, and California, no longer growing more quickly than the rest of the country, has perched itself on the Left fringe, with obvious bad ramifications -- high housing and energy bills, depressed blue-collar sectors -- for middle-aged, middle-class families. 

In contrast, Trump’s America presents an alternative model, which honors small enterprise, allows housing to meet demand, and does not see the United States as part of a global system to be managed. That there are xenophobic, and even racist, elements in the Trumpian ranks is undeniable -- but for most Americans, the true “deplorables” have been the self-appointed regulators and financial masters who seem determined to halt their upward progress, and that of their children. 

If our governing elites want to know how Trump happened, they need only look in the mirror.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. This perspective was posted most recently at New Geography.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRUTHDIG--The people Hillary Clinton derided as a “basket of deplorables” have spoken. They have voted out of the pain of their economic misfortune, which Clinton’s branch of the Democratic Party helped engender.

What you have is a defeat of elitism. Clinton’s arrogance was on full display with the revelation of her speeches cozying up to Goldman Sachs—the bank that caused this misery more than any other—and the irony of this is not lost on the people who are hurting and can’t pay their bills. This is a victory for a neofascist populism—scapegoating immigrants and Muslims—and if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrats’ candidate, I feel confident he would have won. We were denied the opportunity of a confrontation between a progressive populist, represented by Sanders, and a neofascist populist.

It’s a repudiation of the arrogant elitism of the Democratic Party machine as represented by the Clintons, whose radical deregulation of Wall Street created this mess. And instead of recognizing the error of their ways and standing up to the banks, Clinton’s campaign cozied up to them, and that did not give people who are hurting confidence that she would respond to their needs or that she gave a damn about their suffering. She’s terminally tone-deaf.

So too were the mainstream media, which treated the wreckage of the Great Recession as a minor inconvenience, ignoring the deep suffering of the many millions who lost their homes, savings and jobs. The candidate of Goldman Sachs was defeated, unfortunately by a billionaire exemplar of everything that’s evil in late-stage capitalism, who will now worsen instead of fix the system. Thanks to the arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership that stifled the Sanders revolution, we are entering a very dangerous period with a Trump presidency, and this will be a time to see whether our system of checks and balances functions as our Founding Fathers intended.

Make no mistake about it: This is a crisis of confidence for America’s ruling elite that far surpasses Nixon’s Watergate scandal. They were the enablers of radical deregulation that betrayed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s contract with the American people in the wake of the Great Depression. The people are hurting, and regrettably, Trump was the only vehicle presented to them by either major party in the general election to register their deepest discontent. The Trump voters are the messenger; don’t demonize them in an effort to salvage the prestige of the superrich elite that has temporarily lost its grip on the main levers of power in this nation.

Thankfully, the Clinton era is over, and the sick notion that the Democratic Party of FDR needed to find a new home in the temples of Wall Street greed has been rudely shattered by the deep anger of the very folks that the Democrats had presumed to represent. That includes working-class women, who failed to respond to the siren song of Clinton, whom the democratic hacks offered instead of a true progressive like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Yes, we need a female president, but not in the mold of Margaret Thatcher.

(Robert Scheer is the founder of TruthDig … where this commentary was first posted.) Graphic credit: Mr. Fish

-cw

THE MOURNING AFTER-Was your party rejected by the voters during Tuesday’s election? If so, here are two things you should know. 

1. You should be prepared to feel some intense emotional distress. 

2. But it should lift pretty much completely by this time next week. 

That mixed news comes from a study published last year. Lamar Pierce of Washington University, Todd Rogers of Harvard University, and Jason Snyder of the University of California–Los Angeles tracked Americans’ emotional reactions to the 2012 election, in which President Barack Obama defeated challenger Mitt Romney. 

They found evidence of the agony of defeat, but the thrill of victory? Not so much. 

“We find that the pain of losing an election is much larger than the joy of winning one,” they write in the Journal of Experimental Political Science. “Elections strongly affect the immediate happiness/sadness of partisan losers, but minimally impact partisan winners.” 

Pierce and his colleagues used data from CivicScience polls. Each day during the weeks immediately before and after Election Day 2012, an average of 210 Republicans and 111 Democrats were asked, “How happy are you today -- very happy, happy, so-so, unhappy, or very unhappy?” 

They found “little change in the likelihood that Democrats report being happy,” even after Obama’s re-election win. 

However, “immediately following the election, Republicans’ self-reported happiness drops from approximately 60 percent to 30 percent.” That represents “a strong negative effect on the baseline level of happiness” for members of the losing party. 

The researchers compared this drop with the effects of other events that caused distress: Specifically, the reaction of parents with children to the mass shooting at Newtown Elementary School, and that of Boston-area residents to the Boston Marathon bombing. 

Each of those events did indeed lower happiness levels in those demographics. But the plunge in mood was twice as large for partisans whose party had lost the election. 

“People’s social, physical, economic, and mental lives are shaped by their partisan identities, and these social identities are widely and deeply held,” the researchers note. Thanks to this intense personal connection, “winning an election is fine, but losing one is painful, at least in the short run.” 

Unhappy people can take heart in that last point. The data suggests that, “over the eight weeks before and after (the 2012 election), happiness is relatively constant, except for Republicans in the week immediately following the election.” This suggests their sense of well-being returned to its normal level within seven days. 

So if today it feels like the world is ending, keep in mind that this pain is temporary. And remember: the next election in LA is only four months away! 

Wait, now I’m getting depressed.

(Tom Jacobs writes for Pacific Standard Magazine where this perspective was firs posted.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-Any fair-minded person knows that fighting racism (and other forms of discrimination) is an important pursuit. But people harm that effort when they label as racist those people who are not.

In October 2013, President Barack Obama made a great, spirited and fair challenge to the Republicans.

"You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it.”

At the time, the Democrats had just lost control of the U.S. Senate. Several years earlier in his first term, they lost control of the House of Representatives. Despite that slide, the still-standing Obama courageously threw down the gauntlet.

Last night, with more help from the previously unknown campaign advisor Kellyanne Conway than from the Republican establishment, Donald Trump rose to the occasion and won.

Instead of acknowledging that Trump’s crystal ball had a better read on the American voting population than did Hillary Clinton’s, suddenly, sadly, but not unpredictably, some of those on (or disenfranchised by) the losing side of the scoreboard spent much of the night online labeling the outcome that which it is not: racism, misogyny and sundry other accusations.

From a friend: “We live in a racist country and now have a racist president. Next he'll go after Jews….Hitler got elected too.”

But the friend did not have an answer for this: Are you saying that the people who overwhelmingly elected Obama in 2008, and re-elected him in 2012, (except those who were too young to vote in those elections) suddenly became “racists” last night?

I guess, channeling Bill Clinton’s wordplay, it depends on your meaning of unfairness, discrimination, anti-Semitism, dishonesty, racism, sexism and misogyny.

• Was it unfair when former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, as proven by WikiLeaks, rigged the Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders?
• Was it discrimination or anti-Semitism when, as proven by WikiLeaks, the DNC plotted to use Sanders’ Judaism against him in the West Virginia and other primaries?
• Was it dishonest when Wasserman-Schultz’s successor, Donna Brazile, as proven by WikiLeaks, told Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly that she “did not receive any questions from CNN” that she leaked to the Clinton campaign?
• Was it racist when Brazile said in the same interview, “As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted because your information is totally false. 
• Was it sexist when Hillary described Bill Clinton’s assault accusers as a “Bimbo Brigade,” or when her longtime ally James Carville described their motivations as “(when you)…drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find.”
• Was it appropriate for Hillary to embrace Beyoncé and Jay Z at their concert this weekend teeming with racist, misogynistic lyrics? What if that was a concert for Trump?

If what happened with Trump’s near-solo victory over Clinton was motivated by racism, how does one explain the Republicans’ simultaneously retaining control of the Senate and House? Many of those candidates ran away from Trump during the long campaign slog.

In fact, were the 59,581,587 million Americans who voted for Trump in cahoots, but the 59,787,604 million who supported Clinton were not? That would be one crowded chat room! (The Electoral College gives those in every state a balanced voice despite the popular vote. Those are the rules of the game.)

Take out of the equation those who do harbor racist beliefs, because they exist on both sides. What you have left is still have a mass of good people who overwhelmingly elected, and then re-elected, Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. When you power-wash off the tabloid stuff, they decided that things were not working out, and that significant change was better than more of the same. That is all it is.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a contributor to CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640 and Huffington Post. He blogs on humane issues at http://ericgarcetti.blogspot.com/. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-At the risk of momentarily being labeled as a jingoist, the world’s stability is largely based on that of the United States. Election Day has finally arrived, so buckle-up amigas y amigos, your investment portfolio may be in for a wild ride until the world’s financial markets calibrate life with a new President, Senate, House of Representatives and the geopolitical mish-mosh that is about to ensue.

GUEST WORDS--As the Presidential election campaign ends, the smears and accusations have not let up. The Clinton forces accuse Donald Trump of fascist tendencies because of his dog whistles to white supremacists and support from what is now called the Alt-Right, an amalgam of racists and bigots. And, the Trump forces accuse Hillary Clinton of corruption based on her long history of collusion between private business interests and government. 

Unfortunately, both sets of accusations have a grain of truth, and in my view, under the right circumstances either presidency could react to a wide range of economic, political, and military crises with fascistic responses. 

I realize this prediction will strike many supporters of Hillary Clinton as far-fetched because they only see one component of fascism: extreme bigotry, and have therefore incorrectly concluded that a Clinton presidency would end the fascist threat from Donald Trump. 

But, in fact, fascism has many components, as I have previously written in City Watch, in particular foreign wars, authoritarian rule, mass surveillance, and police and (sometimes) vigilante political repression. As I hope to demonstrate through many links to supportive documents, these are all frequent historical components of U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy, regardless of the party in power at the White House, Congress, or even local government.

We do not yet know who the next President of the United States will be, nor what policies and programs the next administration will pursue. But, we do know the next administration will face crises large and small, and we also know that the toolbox that the administration will reach into to deal with these crises is filled with fascist implements.

One set of crises would be economic, and a look at recent booms and busts indicates that the Great Recession that began 2007 is hardly unique. Many more sharp economic downturns are on their way, and the only question is when. Likewise, military conflicts are widespread and increasing in the Middle East and Africa, as well as between the U.S. and China and the U.S. and Russia. Just like economic crises, the only unknowns are when, where, and how deadly. 

So what is in the tool box? 

Internationally, the United States spends over $1 trillion per year on military and security, which supports, among many categories, approximately 1000 foreign military installations. Our government also possesses an arsenal of 7000 nuclear weapons, for which it intends to spend $1 trillion to modernize. At the same time according to the U.S. State Department, the U.S. military conducts unclassified training operations in 137 foreign countries. 

Plus, the U.S. is actively involved in two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, which are now approaching 15 years, with little chance of ending in the foreseeable future, regardless of who is elected President. Their total cost is so far estimated to be $5 trillion, a truly staggering sum. In addition, the U.S. is currently engaged in drone warfare in at least six countries: Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya, with prospects for expanded drone warfare in more, not fewer, countries. 

If we look back, though, to the entire post-WW II era, the crisis-response toolbox has much more to offer, according to author William Blum. There is a long, sordid, and totally bi-partisan history of the U.S. government supporting regimes that are variously characterized as authoritarian, totalitarian, and fascist police states. This partial list includes 22 countries at present, as well as 67 countries in the past. 

According to Blum, the United States government also has ample experience with a vast array of fascist practices. Since 1945 our government has: 

• Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected. 

• Dropped bombs  on the people of more than 30 countries. 

• Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders. 

• Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. 

• Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. 

• Attempting 60 coups of foreign governments. 

• Since 1980, intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries: Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria. 

The Domestic Tool Box 

In the past century, the U.S. has had many domestic mass movements, including unionization movements from the 1890s through the 1930s, the anti-Vietnam war movement, Civil Rights movement, Ban the Bomb movement, student movement, anti-Iraq War movement, and women’s movement. In the past few years, new mass movements include Occupy Wall Street, which had over 1000 encampments throughout the entire country. There is also the Black Lives Matters movement, and related grass roots groups opposing police violence. 

The list of mass movements also include many that have a climate change and ecological focus, such Bill McKibben’s 350.com and the movement to stop the Dakota Pipeline in North Dakota. While we don’t know which new mass movements will emerge over the next four years, we do know the history of government responses to such movements. Occasionally they are co-opted through legislation, like the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968 in response to the Civil Rights movement and the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s. Many times, though, the mass movements are the victims of police surveillance, sabotage, and direct police repression, such as Occupy and the Dakota Pipeline.

Furthermore, the United Sates has a long history of repressive legislation, and many of these laws have distinct fascist overtones. They include the Espionage Act and Sabotage Act from President Woodrow Wilson to the first and second Patriot Acts after 9/11. Along the way, these laws have been complemented by anti-communist legislation, most originating with the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, including the Smith Action, McCarran Act, Subversive Activities Control Act, Internal Security Act, and Hubert Humphrey’s Anti-Communist Control Act of 1954.

Other notable government programs to disrupt domestic political movements include Cointelpro, which began under FDR, and Operation Chaos, both of which were widely used against the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. President Lyndon Johnson initiated Operation Chaos in 1967, and the program ended with a New York Times expose in 1974. 

The formation of SWAT teams has continued to grow in the United States from their initial formation by the LAPD in the 1960s to the present, when nearly every U.S. police department has established a SWAT team. The U.S. government has heavily militarized these SWAT teams, and local SWAT teams deploy at least 80,000 times per year. In recent years these local military functions have been boosted by anti-terrorist spying and surveillance sections added to local police departments, all linked to 78 regional fusion centers. 

In addition, the Department of Defense has and will set up an elaborate drone-spying network in the United States, as shown on the RPA Dod Ops Activities map below. Beyond the direct use by the military, local police and related agencies will also have access to these drones, including Stingrays to monitor cell phone conversations. Presumably, they will be used to augment the complete monitoring of all domestic and international telecommunications in the United States by the National Security Agency and other government intelligence offices, as exposed by Edward Snowden and other whistle blowers. 

In applying the above history to the Presidential election, the following implications should be carefully considered: 

First, the Hillary Clinton supporters ignore the historic role of mass movements, as opposed to voting in presidential elections, to block racist and fascist movements, such as the rise of the KKK during the Woodrow Wilson administration, and then again in recent decades. In both cases, anti-racist and anti-KKK movements lead to the demise of this domestic terrorist organization, even thought DW Griffith was able to spark a short-term revival of the KKK through the premier of his pro-Klan movie, Birth of a Nation, at the White house during the Wilson administration. Later, from the 1970s to date, there have been hundreds of grass roots confrontations to stop KKK and neo-Nazi rallies all throughout the United States. 

Second, the Hillary Clinton campaign has vastly overestimated the anti-fascist role of the Democratic Party. A quick look at the many fascistic programs supported by Democratic administrations’ domestic and foreign policies should finally put this belief to bed. After all, the Democrats are the party of the still active Espionage and Sabotage Actions, Cointelpro (FDR and Johnson), Operation Chaos (Johnson), Anti-Communist Witch Hunts (Truman), Korean War (Truman), Bay of Pigs (Kennedy), Vietnam and Laos Wars (Kennedy, Johnson), Cold War (Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton), "Peacetime" conscription (FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson), mass incarceration and welfare "reform" (Clinton), Bombing of Yugoslavia (Clinton), Escalation in Afghanistan and Libya (Obama), drone missile attacks (Obama), mass deportations (Obama), support of Saudi Arabia (FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama), support of the Shah (Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter), and support of Israeli settlements (Carter, Clinton, Obama). 

Third, the Clinton Campaign has also exaggerated the fascist menace of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. Unlike real fascists, he does not have support of the country’s business class or most of the press, does not have a mass movement of organized street thugs, does not call for aggressive wars, and does not call for subservience to the state. While all this could change, especially in response of to a sudden crisis, the same prediction applies to a Hillary Clinton administration. 

Fourth, both presidential campaigns have deployed slogans that can be used to build public support for a wide range of harsh government response to economic, political, and military crises. “Make America Great Again” echoes Mussolini fascist call to Italians to restore the glory of the Roman Empire, while “Better Together” parallels the Third Reich’s call for all Germans to unite through aggressive pan-Germanism.  

By the time some CityWatch readers check out this article, they will know who the next U.S. president is. If and when the crises and fascistic responses that have appeared in my crystal ball eventually emerge, I trust these readers will not only remember what they read here. The real response will be their support or participation in the many anti-fascist movements that will emerge in response to U.S. wars, repressive policing, spying and surveillance, and patriotic bluster. 

(Victor Rothman lives in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CAMPAIGN 2016--Remember Jeb Bush? You know, he was the guy, with the... thing? And our dear friend Martin O’ Malley! He held an event in Iowa in a blizzard. One guy showed up ― and he wasn’t really feeling it, as it turned out. 

So much has happened since we launched First To Last in January 2015. American politics as we understood it seems to have fallen apart. Jeb Bush folded like aHoberman sphere; Donald Trump stepped out from a puff of brimstone to sell America a monorail. Hillary Clinton, like The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” abides.

We’ve seen Bernie Sanders ― who maybe didn’t think he was going to be in this race too long ― hang on through the entire primary, and influence the Democratic Party. We learned, the hard way, that winners don’t finish third. (Sorry, Marco Rubio.) And somehow, Wikileaks has gone from plumbing the secrets of the Deep State to being as obsessed with dumb campaign minutiae and horse-race politics as the establishment media it rebelled against. Who knew Julian Assange was destined to become Woke Mark Halperin? Seems a disappointment.

Seriously, what have we learned? Here are our Dirty Dozen takeaways. No time to be clever, people, the apocalypse is nigh. (Hey, that’s also Trump’s pitch to America!)

(Howard Fineman Global Editorial Director, Jason Linkins  Eat The Press Editor, and Lauren Weber  The Morning Email Editor, The Huffington Post … where this piece was first posted.)

-cw

ELECTION 2016--In an era of increasing dissatisfaction with and disengagement from governments, political parties, and much of the rest of the democratic establishment, it’s more important than ever that you show up and vote.

Suffrage is not a right afforded to everyone. Rather, voting is a privilege in the United States – and a hard-earned privilege at that.

At the beginning of the republic, only those white men with land were allowed a hand in electing our leaders and lawmakers. Later, under President Andrew Jackson, that decision-making power was extended to most white men. After a lengthy civil war – shedding a staggering amount of blood and treasure – successive amendments to the US constitution granting broader voting rights followed. Women, at this time, were entirely disregarded – until the 19th amendment passed in 1920.

Although some people of color were allowed to vote, many still faced disenfranchisement prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the recent gutting of that act by the supreme court, the systematic disenfranchisement of people of color is alive and well today.

Progress on suffrage has always tended to be incremental. And, far from being a closed chapter in our history, the fight to keep things moving forward continues to this day.

For every thousand people living in the US, seven are incarcerated. That population consists disproportionately of black and brown people, whether accused and convicted of crimes or held by immigration authorities.

Even when the incarcerated leave prison, they often return to our communities without the ability to vote. That means the people most affected by our political institutions and processes today often have absolutely have no say in how they are run. This group includes me. In Maryland, my state of residence, for instance, I will not be able vote until the year 2045.

Disenfranchisement and legal exclusion – whether by race, gender, class, immigration status, or otherwise – from our democratic institutions is one of the most significant failures of American society today.

One of the most contentious general elections in modern US history is in front of us. Next Tuesday, if, instead of making your way to the booth, you decide to go shopping, out for lunch or dinner, stay at home, play a video game, or whatever, just remember that many of us cannot vote but would dearly like to. While universal suffrage remains an ideal yet to be attained, if you’re lucky enough to be able to vote, don’t let that privilege go to waste.

(Whisteblower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) is the US Army Private (Pfc) who leaked military and government documents to the online media outlet Wikileaks which became the basis for the Collateral Murder video, which showed the killing of unarmed civilians by a US Apache helicopter crew in Iraq. Leaks made by Manning also resulted in the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and a series of embarrassing US diplomatic cables that became known as Cablegate. In 2013, was convicted by a military court or the disclosures and sentence to 35 years in prison. This piece was posted most recently at Common Dreams.) 

-cw

FIRST PERSON--It is impossible to fully express the devastation of sexual assault in words. But for millions who read the “victim impact statement” written by Emily Doe, the pseudonym used by the 23-year-old woman at the center of the Stanford rape case, the letter was a powerful recounting of the pain, anguish, anger, sadness, and strength of a rape survivor. Doe’s message went viral; as Glamour magazine notes, four days after it was publicly released it “had been viewed 11 million times; it was read aloud on CNN and the floor of Congress.”

Brock Turner, Doe’s attacker, was sentenced to a mere six months in jail. He ultimately served just three. The glaring injustice in the case, as in so many cases of rape and sexual assault, made Doe’s words resound even more loudly. Citing the importance of her message, Glamour magazine named Doe a Woman of the Year, and published her incredibly powerful followup essay.

“From the beginning, I was told I was a best-case scenario,” Doe writes. “I had forensic evidence, sober un­biased witnesses, a slurred voice mail, police at the scene. I had everything, and I was still told it was not a slam dunk. I thought, if this is what having it good looks like, what other hells are survivors living? I’m barely getting through this but I am being told I’m the lucky one, some sort of VIP. It was like being checked into a hotel room for a year with stained sheets, rancid water, and a bucket with an attendant saying, No this is great! Most rooms don’t even have a bucket.”

Despite all that, Turner would receive a slap on the wrist. Doe writes of how stunned she was by the leniency Judge Aaron Persky showed the rapist.

“[W]hen it was quickly announced that he’d be receiving six months, I was struck silent. Immediately I felt embarrassed for trying, for being led to believe I had any influence. The violation of my body and my being added up to a few months out of his summer. The judge would release him back to his life, back to the 40 people who had written him letters from Ohio. I began to panic; I thought, this can’t be the best-case ­scenario. If this case was meant to set the bar, the bar had been set on the floor.”

Just one day after the sentencing, Doe was contacted by Buzzfeed with a request to publish her statement. She agreed. Doe could not have expected the overwhelming response; she received an outpouring of thanks from people around the world who were moved by her words.

“I started getting e-mails forwarded to me from Botswana to Ireland to India,” Doe writes. “I received watercolor paintings of lighthouses and bicycle earrings. A woman who plucked a picture of her young daughter from the inside of her cubicle wrote, This is who you’re saving.”

She goes on to point out that blaming victims—suggesting women should get better at avoiding being raped, instead of telling rapists not to rape—is not a real solution. Dismantling rape culture starts with recognizing that rapists are responsible for rape, and demanding justice for survivors.

“If you think the answer is that women need to be more sober, more civil, more upright, that girls must be better at exercising fear, must wear more layers with eyes open wider, we will go nowhere.” Doe writes. “When Judge Aaron Persky mutes the word justice, when Brock Turner serves one month for every felony, we go nowhere. When we all make it a priority to avoid harming or violating another human being, and when we hold accountable those who do, when the campaign to recall this judge declares that survivors deserve better, then we are going somewhere.”

The entire essay, which can be found on the Glamour site, is well worth a read. As the outlet notes, you can support the campaign to recall Judge Aaron Persky by visiting recallaaronpersky.com. [[hotlink]]

(Kali Holloway writes for AlterNet. This piece was posted most recently at TruthDig.)  Photo credit: Valeri Pizhanski / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

-cw

GELFAND’S WORLD-Most everyone understands that Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president a week from Tuesday and will be sworn in on Friday, January 20 of the new year. Even now, Hillary and her staff are getting an earful about what she should do as president. May I offer a bit of advice? Hillary should take note of how Ronald Reagan acted when he was governor of California. 

That's right -- when he was governor, back in 1969-70. 

Back then, there had been lots of student protests and even a few incidents that led to the police using tear gas and clubs. Student riot was the colloquialism for demonstrations based on political speech and on the escalating war in Viet Nam. At the time, it appeared that California, if not necessarily the whole United States, was entering into a period in which student demonstrations would become more and more a part of society in general. Students closed down college administration buildings and whole campuses. Rebellious groups predicted that their movement would force needed changes not only in universities, but in society as a whole. The Peoples' Park rebellion in Berkeley led to prolonged strife, including violence between police and students. 

In response to the violence that had been and was yet to be, Reagan famously remarked, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." Reagan was not willing to acquiesce in what he saw as extortion over either public facilities or public policy. In his mind, you could not just close down a public resource because you had an ideological gripe. 

Perhaps you may have recognized a philosophical similarity between 1960s students and today's Republican congress. The students were headstrong, convinced of the rightness of their cause, and unwilling to engage in the kind of back-and-forth that negotiation requires. The students, not being trained troops, could just barely close down a small piece of publicly owned land in Berkeley. But if they could have, they would have closed down the whole United States government. Radical organizers pretty well said as much in public meetings all over the country. 

Twice now since the 1990s, we've seen that same attitude in a high place. A small group of people got together and forced the closure of the U.S. government. We call that group the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich was the early pioneer of this tactic in the years 1995-96 of the first Clinton presidency. We saw it again during October of 2013, in the fifth year of Obama's presidency. 

In each case, we saw a self-selected and extremely self-righteous group insist on imposing its own ideology on the rest of the country. In the latter case, the congressional Republicans decided that their ideological pursuits outweighed the benefits of maintaining the national government. 

"Shut it down" said the student radicals. 

"SHUT IT DOWN" said congressional Republicans. Shut it down, indeed. 

Looking back to the earlier events, it is obvious that Reagan had an overly circumscribed view of student thought. He was biased and narrow. But he was effective in maintaining some semblance of public order in the governmental setting. He did that by calling his opponents' bluff. 

We have had analogous conflicts over the past 20 years when we've had a Democratic president and at least one house of congress held by the Republicans. The Republicans have been willing to threaten shutting down the government, and they have been believable because they have been able to convince the rest of us that they don't care if the government continues or does not. In fact, some of them have been able to convince people that they truly relish the idea of putting federal agencies out of business. 

Democrats are philosophically and temperamentally opposed to government shutdowns. 

The new president will likely be facing a Republican led House of Representatives which will have nothing better to do than make mischief. We've already been told that congressman Jason Chaffetz intends to spend most of the efforts of his House Oversight Committee on investigating Hillary Clinton. Can attacks on liberal causes and even threats of impeachment be far down the line? 

Shutting down the federal government is part of this unwholesome package because it is the way that the Republicans try to enforce their warped ideas. They will complain about deficit spending and find some excuse (like the need to raise the debt ceiling) to make trouble. The threat of a government shutdown will be used in an attempt to extort favors. 

A counter-strategy is available, but Hillary and her congressional allies have to be willing to use it. As I've mentioned in these pages before, the most serious weakness of the congressional Democrats is their chronic failure to do payback when they are unfairly attacked. Reagan had his own way of dealing with recalcitrant Democrats. He threatened to go over their heads and take his case directly to the people. In earlier years, Lyndon Johnson could make life difficult for those who opposed him, and Richard Nixon developed the science of sneakiness and dirty tricks to a whole new level. 

Hillary Clinton won't have to go nearly as far as her predecessors in order to be toughly effective. All she has to do is withhold money from her opponents' states and districts. She doesn't have to make war on all Republicans, only those who make things personal. That word personal includes unmerited threats of investigations and it means threats to shut down the government. It also means threats to damage Planned Parenthood and other worthy social and medical programs. 

Let's think a bit about a threat to shut down the government. The so-called red states are, by and large, the old confederacy and the western plains states running from Oklahoma up through the Dakotas. Interestingly, they get more money from the federal government than they pay in the form of taxes. This makes them different from the blue states, which on the average pay more in federal taxes than they get back from the government. The red states gain a lot of income through military installations, NASA, defense plants, national parks, and national highways. 

Hillary's response to the extortionate threat of the Republican coalition should be taken from Governor Reagan: If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. If there is to be a government shutdown over raising the debt or over healthcare, then let's have it now. Make one thing especially clear: The people who will be hurt most are those whose congressmen are voting for this outrage, because they represent areas that get as much as two dollars back from the federal government for every dollar they pay in federal taxes. 

And one more thing. It should be whispered quietly to the red state congressmen that in the event of a shutdown, there will be some federal money that they will never see again. The chair of the senate Budget Committee, Bernie Sanders, will keep his blue pencil active every day that the shutdown continues. 

Part of the Democratic threat will include an officially nonpartisan commission on military base movements and closures, to be appointed by the president, whose real function will be to threaten red states with loss of federal income. Nothing brings out the willingness to compromise like the threat of losing local employment. 

In other words, the Democrats need to learn to play hardball politics because the Republicans have already made it their lifestyle. 

It's as simple as a television crime show. Mess with us? Then we mess with you. You want us to consider your governing philosophy? Then consider ours. We might eventually compromise, but we won't play the extortion game. There can be bargaining, but it has to be in good faith. And every day that the government stays shut down, your state loses ten million dollars off its military and governmental budget. Chairman Sanders will see to that. 

After three or four weeks of shutdown, the red state inhabitants who live off of government money -- directly through salaries or indirectly through selling goods and services to federal employees -- will be demanding that their Republican congressmen make a deal. At that point, and not until that point, the Democrats in congress will be able to bargain from a position of strength. 

Here's another way to think about this approach. There are now millions of people who are benefitting from the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Right now, the Act needs a little polishing in terms of adequate federal expenditures to maintain discount pricing on policies. But the millions who benefit by the insurance will be hurt by a legislative attack on the Act. Those people are spread all over the country, including in the bluest of the blue states. Their interests have to be protected, so we must create a new principle: Damage to the Affordable Care Act results in greater or equal damage to those states and congressional districts which vote to do that damage. 

One more thought, somewhat of a cliche, but still worth thinking about. Hillary should govern in her first term as if she was already in her second term -- that is to say, without concern for winning reelection. The people who vote for her this time around will love her for it, and the people who hate her aren't going to switch to supporting her anyway. She should forget any and all debts or favors she owes to anybody, including Wall Street, her fellow Democrats, and even president Obama. That's what being president is supposed to be about. 

We might also remember that when Reagan was governor of California and making his famous bloodbath remark, Hillary was a college student in an atmosphere of antiwar protest. She was also a leader in a generation that created the first inklings of the movement that was called Womens' Liberation. I'm thinking that maybe she can channel some of her 1960s idealism and directed anger towards worthy projects. And if she has to preside over a bloodbath, it will be different from Ronald Reagan's and it will be to a loftier end.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

NEW GEOGRAPHY-It’s increasingly unfashionable to celebrate those who made this republic and established its core values. On college campuses, the media and, increasingly, in corporate circles, the embrace of “diversity” extends to demeaning the founding designers who arose from a white population that was 80 percent British. 

In this American version of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” which tried to eviscerate traces of China’s past, venerable buildings are being renamed, athletes refuse to stand for the national anthem and, on some campuses, waving the American flag is now considered a “microaggression,” while English students at Yale want to avoid reading the likes of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer. 

Of course, some changes are justified. Asking anyone, particularly African Americans, to revere the Confederate flag or attend schools named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan is, indeed, offensive. But in our zeal to address old wrongs, we may also be sacrificing the very things that have made this republic so attractive to millions from distinctly different backgrounds for the last two centuries. 

Why we come here 

Just to clear the air, I have not a single drop of British blood in me. The closest ties I have to what I consider my cultural and political home country come from my great uncle Simon, who served in Gen. Allenby’s Jewish brigade in World War I, and that my wife, born in Montreal, came into the world a subject of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Career wise, I did work for a think tank in London for several years. 

But what ties most Americans to the founders is not race, but our embrace of a political and legal culture based on distinctly Anglo-Saxon ideas about due process, representative government, property rights and free speech. These proved infinitely superior to the divine right of czars, kaisers, emperors and other hereditary autocrats for generations of non-Anglo-Americans. 

This system, always capable of amendment, has allowed waves of traditional outsider groups -- African Americans, Latinos, women, Mormons, Jews and Muslims -- to join the economic, political and cultural mainstream. In some cases, as in the case of President Obama, they have also secured the highest reaches in the national firmament. 

The idiocy of ‘cultural appropriation’ 

The Maoist nature of the current anti-Anglo campaign is exemplified by the current notion of “cultural appropriation.” By this theory, writers and analysts are being told to stay away from topics that don’t resonate with their DNA. 

This approach undermines the very purpose of art as a means of transformation. Can we imagine reconstructing the realities of the antebellum South without “Huckleberry Finn?” Should all of the producers and directors responsible for “Zoot Suit” or “Roots” have been forced to submit to DNA screening? Do we kick Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones out of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame because of their “appropriations” from African American culture? 

When working well, a multicultural society works both directions. Think of the hit play “Hamilton,” written and conceived by a Hispanic, played largely by African Americans and adored by an entire generation of young theater lovers, many of whom are getting their first good taste of American history. By the standards of cultural appropriation, the Daughters of the American Revolution should be filing suit. 

The road to nihilism 

Cultures, and nations, get stronger when they can incorporate new elements into their existing narrative. The Roman Empire, by offering citizenship to non-Italians, extended its period of pre-eminence. “Rome,” declared the second-century Greek writer Aristides, “is a citadel which has all the people of earth as its villagers.” 

As in the case of the Roman Empire, America’s greatest achievement has been to incorporate other cultures into its mainstream. Despite the current racial discord, it must be noted that America has succeeded in welcoming, and integrating, vast numbers of Hispanics, Asians and Middle Easterners over the past half-century. 

Their growing success puts the lie to existing racist sentiments that have been fanned, in effect, if not consciously, by the candidacy of Donald Trump. Neither are our multicultural prospects made better by Hillary Clinton’s demeaning of largely white “deplorables” or her embrace of the Black Lives Matter politics of division and victimization. 

Both Clinton and Trump seem unable to acknowledge what America already is, or, more importantly, what it can be. On our streets, in our theaters, in our foods and in our music, we experience a rich commingling of cultures every day. Politicians may see advantages in stirring up enmity but America is becoming a profoundly less racist nation, and will be even less so in the future. For example, the percentage of Americans who approve of interracial marriages has grown from 4 percent in 1958 to 87 percent today. 

So let’s have more African Americans donning colonial garb to tell the national story while whites add black, Asian or Latino notes in their music, cooking and writings. This is a testament to the greatness of our Anglo founders’ vision, which should be embraced -- even by those of us whose lineage extends far from the British Isles. 

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org. This piece originally appeared on NewGeography.com. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams. 

TRUTHDIG--Tom Hayden and I happened to be on the same flight from Los Angeles to Sacramento as he prepared to begin his first year in the state Legislature in 1982. We sat next to each other and began to talk. For me, it was an unexpected treat. I always enjoyed the company of a man who, rather than talk about himself, seemed so interested in what others had to say. 

That, in fact, was one of his great qualities, rare in public figures -- especially in elected politics, the business Hayden was about to enter. He was nice to people, charming in an unassuming way.

On the plane to the capital, Hayden questioned me on how the Legislature worked. He wanted hints on getting along with his new colleagues, pitfalls to avoid, opportunities to do good. How would he, the famous antiwar radical, be treated by Sacramento’s conventional establishment? They were, after all, conventional politicians, including supporters of the Vietnam War he had opposed, and were still angry over the anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention. Hayden had been a leader in that protest. 

Here’s what happened after he got to Sacramento: While never one of the guys, Hayden compiled an impressive record in 10 years in the California Assembly and eight in the California Senate. He got millions of dollars for his district to improve the quality of Santa Monica Bay and rebuild the Santa Monica and Malibu piers. He helped delay University of California and Cal State University tuition increases. He led efforts that extended laws against sexual harassment. Also included in a long list of legislation was his Hayden Act, which extended the time shelters must keep abandoned animals alive, giving volunteers more time to find them homes. 

I got to know him best when he was involved in the frustrating work of local politics. I followed him around during his losing campaign for Los Angeles mayor in 1997. As a state senator, he campaigned through neighborhoods in an easy, relaxed manner, making some of his more controversial proposals sound palatable. Even when meeting with the editors of the Los Angeles Times, he passed the test of convincing his stuffy listeners that he wasn’t a threat to them and the city. 

These were mild efforts compared to his greatest Los Angeles crusade, taking up the cause of Salvadoran gang members in the abysmally crowded slums of a part of the city known as Pico-Union. The violent gangs were being targeted by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division anti-gang officers, some of whom turned out to be violent and crooked themselves. The public strongly supported the police, and anyone standing up for gang members was scorned and headed for political death. 

Caught up in all this was a Salvadoran gang member, Alex Sanchez, who served time in juvenile camps and state prisons for crimes including car theft and possession of weapons. A community leader, he was also trying to negotiate peace between rival gangs. It was clear, Hayden felt, that the Rampart gang cops and the immigration service disapproved of Sanchez’s leadership ability and peacemaking and were cooperating illegally to send him back to bloody El Salvador. 

The Times was investigating the Rampart cops intensely. Hayden wanted us to also dig into the Sanchez case. By then, defense of Sanchez had become a movement extending beyond Pico-Union.

Hayden came to the paper with a few other Sanchez supporters to meet with me and other editors. He recalled our meeting in his book “Street Wars.” Hayden said we editors “sat sphinxlike listening to our tale. I wondered if we were becoming too emotional, too conspiratorial.” But Hayden convinced us, and we quickly put reporters on the Sanchez story. 

Police continued their efforts to get rid of Sanchez. He was charged in 2009 with taking part in a 2006 gang murder. At this point, Sanchez was a well-respected leader in efforts to stop gang violence. It took three more years, but in 2012, charges were dropped in what prosecutors admitted was a flawed case. 

This was not a cause that attracted national attention. Helping the immigrant community organize was tough, gritty work for Hayden. It took him to Central America on an arduous trip to meet gang members in their homelands, where they had been deported, visiting the prisons where many of them were kept. 

In recent years, his health was failing. He looked older and thinner. But he persevered, just as he had during the Vietnam War protest era and the civil rights movement. That activism and his leadership in the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests helped shape national politics.

But Tom Hayden will also be remembered for his other, less well-known accomplishments -- by many in the still crowded Pico-Union slums, by swimmers and surfers at the Santa Monica beach and in shelters where volunteers seek homes for the abandoned animals that his Hayden Act helped save.

(Bill Boyarsky is a columnist for Truthdig, the Jewish Journal, and LA Observed. This piece was posted first at Truthdig.com.) Photo: Steve W. Grayson/AP. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.