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Wall Street. Wednesday. Watch Out!

@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.

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Post-Election Fascist Scenarios for the United States

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: 

  • 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.

Here’s What We Learned During This Miserable, Endless Election Year

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 sphereDonald Trump stepped out from a puff of brimstone to sell America a monorailHillary 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!)

     
 

1

WE DIDN'T KNOW TRUMP HAD THIS IN HIM
This is probably something you've noticed. Very few people figured on Trump being a serious candidate. He laid waste to our conventional wisdom and all of the well-worn cliches in which we've taken comfort.

 

 

2

WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ELSE, EITHER
Or at least, we don't know what we thought we knew. In a race where political science has been upended and norms put to the torch, we were all like the cast of "Lost," struggling to feed ourselves and wary of smoke monsters.

 

3

THE FBI IS AS POLITICAL AS IT HAS EVER BEEN
The fact that Rudy Giuliani's cronies essentially walked up to the edge of staging an actual coup d'etat shouldn't make us sleep that easy!

 

 

4

SOMETIMES OLD BRAND NAMES CAN FAIL
See Jeb Bush.

 

5

SOMETIMES BIG MONEY CAN FAIL
See Jeb Bush.

 

 

6

TWITTER MAY BE LOSING MONEY BUT IT'S POWERFUL IN POLITICS
It elevated Trump in the first place. It also frequently set the narrative before the pundit class could get there. And it's been a Love Canal of grotesqueness throughout.

 

7

SOBERING THOUGHT #1
Trump has come very close to winning this thing. Just think about what might have happened if he'd invested any time or effort in a real ground game!

 

 

8

SOBERING THOUGHT #2
Clinton has come very close to winning this thing. But her ability to govern, and to keep the Democratic coalition together, may depend on her abandoning the middle-of-the-road Clintonism that she wears like a pantsuit.

 

9

PAUL RYAN ISN'T SHREWD
Donald Trump finally exposed the fact that the Emperor of the House has no clothes.

 

 

10

"PARTY LEADER" REALLY IS AN OXYMORON
Or, in the case of Reince Priebus and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, just "moron" will do.

 

11

WHAT "ISSUES" MATTERED IN THIS RACE?
Did any? (See also: the lack of ideas.)

 

 

12

THE BOTTOM LINE
We always knew that this wasn't going to be a particularly upbeat election. But this campaign season exposed a real darkness at the center of our body politic, a lack of vision among our leaders, and no small amount of rot in our institutions, which we've always trusted to keep autocrats at bay. Whoever wins this race will face an enormous challenge stitching this country back together, and as near as we can tell, only one of the major-party candidates has even a passing interest in doing so.

 

(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

 

 

 

 

 

I Can’t Vote. If You Can, You Must

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

Stanford Rape Survivor’s Moving Essay: Life after the Trial

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

Advice to Hillary: Act Like Reagan

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

What Makes Us American is Not Race but Anglo Saxon Ideas: Due Process, Rep Government, Free Speech

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. 

Tom Hayden Fought for the Rights of All Living Things

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.

Bill as ‘First Lady’ … My Best Chance of Being Part of a Political Sea Change!

VOICES--In watching a recent Frontline presentation covering the respective lives of 2016 presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it dawned on me that while voting for Hillary might have reasonably been construed as only just the latest example of my 48 year voting history of either holding my nose and voting for the supposed "lesser of two evils" or alternatively wasting my vote by voting for a Jill Stein-esque candidate, that had objectively no chance of winning. 

Voting for Hillary next month might actually be my best chance of being part of a sea change away from what has been a male chauvinist American politics that Donald Trump's continuing crude comments and candidacy prove is regretably still alive and well. 

In this morality play, Hillary represents the every(wo)man who has had to suffer the humiliation of a lying and philandering husband, who in what would be his new role as "first lady" would now have to live under the same historically humiliating role he and other presidents have put their undervalued wives into in the past. 

It would also serve as a final repudiation of a male chauvinism that Donald Trump is clearly the posterboy for and whose successful candidacy in capturing the Republican presidential nomination shows is still regretably alive and well in too many places in this country. 

The ultimate revenge and substantive 2017 reality of a Hillary presidency is to say that it's no longer business as usual at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Just as Barak Obama's presidency has made one think in a whole new light about what will never again be the "white” house, Hillary Clinton as president will irrevocably challenge and change what has been the negatively stereotypic roles of both president and "first lady.” 

Hopefully many other American societal roles that continue to undervalue women and others at a time when we need the best of all our people if we expect to survive the contradictions that have brought down great societies in the past. 

Be a part of a political sea change. Vote for Bill as ‘first lady.’

 

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected])

-cw

Not Just ‘Bad Boy’ Talk: Election 2016 is a Referendum on Feminism

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-As we head to the last weeks of the most contentious election cycle in my memory, I’ve come to realize that our choice is much bigger than who will reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Certainly, we need to consider party platforms, candidates’ views on the economy, foreign policy, SCOTUS nominations, immigration, and civil rights. We need to look at which candidate is best qualified to serve as president. 

Perhaps it’s neither irony nor a coincidence that in the first election where a woman is on top of a major party ticket, her opponent has a decades-long history of sexual objectification and attempts to humiliate women. This election is a referendum on feminism and the way we see women in a fast-evolving world. 

For decades, Donald J. Trump has included his “bad boy” objectification of women as part of his brand. He’s made countless guest spots on Howard Stern, where their shtick typically included rating, ranking, and discussing female celebrities in graphic sexual terms. In December 2004, Trump initiated a discussion about then 18-year old Lindsay Lohan that was capped by his observation that “deeply troubled women are the best in bed.” He approved of Stern referring to his daughter Ivanka as “a piece of ass” and jokingly agreed when Stern’s sidekick Robin characterized him as a predator.

Trump shares his ideas about women whether or not he believes the mic is hot. In 1994, he told Primetime Live’s Nancy Collins that “putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing,” blaming the demise of his first marriage to putting wife Ivana in a management position at one of his Atlantic City casinos. 

Three years earlier in May 1991, he was quoted in an Esquire magazine profile about bad press, “You know, it doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass. But she’s got to be young and beautiful.” 

The Republican candidate’s Twitter account has been his arsenal to disparage the looks of any woman who criticizes him, from Arianna Huffington to New York Times columnist Gail Collins, as well as a Who’s Who of celebrities. 

Trump’s surrogates and campaign staff appear on cable news panels and interviews to defend his words as “entertainment” but his words denote his character and he has escalated his M.O. since he first declared his candidacy. Many of us watched Mr. Trump taunt Megyn Kelly when she asked him during a primary debate about his insulting attacks on female celebrities. He’s come to the defense of Roger Ailes and Jeffrey Epstein as “nice guys” and said if a woman is sexually harassed at work, she should find a new job. On abortion, Trump has backpedaled on his statement that any woman seeking abortion should receive “some sort of punishment.” 

By now, we’ve all heard the 2005 tape where Trump (“egged on by the host to say bad dirty words,” per Melania) bragged how his fame allows him to grab women’s vaginas or kiss them without consent. Trump, along with Melania, Rudy Giuliani and other surrogates, have attempted to minimize his words as “locker room talk” or what happens when two teenaged boys get together. 

In a recently shared Entertainment Tonight report from 1992, Trump jokes about a ten-year old girl on the escalator at Trump Tower: “In ten years, I’ll be dating her.” 

As of this article, at least ten women have come forward alleging Trump had touched them without their consent, a list that includes People’s Natasha Stoynoff. Trump has denied all allegations, shouting at his rallies that the women weren’t “hot enough” for him to assault. “Have you seen her? She wouldn’t be my first choice.” 

At the second debate, Secretary Clinton brought up Alicia Machado, the Miss Universe Trump taunted with names and had subjected to a humiliating personal training session in front of members of the press. Mr. Trump’s early morning tweets challenged followers to watch her “sex tape.”

And of course, at the third debate, Trump muttered under his breath, calling Secretary Clinton a “Nasty Woman,” which has become the rallying cry for feminists. 

Secretary Clinton spoke what many of us have been thinking each time Mr. Trump attacks women. “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity, their self-worth and I don’t think there is a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like. So we now know what Donald thinks and what he says and how he acts toward women. That’s who Donald is.” 

We do need to examine the issues and the platforms to determine which candidate we believe aligns with our ideals for our country. That’s the responsibility we all carry as participants in a democracy.

But beyond this, our vote may serve as a strong message to every man who has touched or grabbed us without our consent, to every classmate, teacher, husband, partner, colleague, boss, family member, and stranger who has attempted to humiliate us in order to boost his own ego. Our vote is a message to every man and woman who has downplayed the importance of rape, who has unfairly victim-blamed, and who has referred to aggressive references to sexual assault as “locker room talk” or “boy talk.” Assuming all men are rapists waiting for opportunity is a tremendous insult to men, as well. As Howard Beale screamed in Network (1976), “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” 

Our vote can also deliver the message that women can be intelligent, accomplished, educated, and strong. And maybe one of us can even be the president.

 

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

What We Can Expect from President Hillary Clinton

URBAN PERSPECTIVE-The race for the White House is effectively over. Hillary Clinton will be the 45th president of the U.S. The question now is what can Americans expect from a Clinton White House? She has laid out pages after pages of policy wonk positions on civil and women’s rights, civil liberties, taxes, jobs, the economy, health care, education, military preparedness, and combatting terrorism on her campaign website. Most of them are the almost obligatory positions that Democratic presidential candidates have taken on the big-ticket issues. 

However, it’s one thing to spell out an agenda on paper and another to get any of it through. She’ll almost certainly kick things off by trying to make good on the pledge that she made in a speech at a Michigan auto and aircraft parts manufacturing plant near Detroit in August, 2016. She promised a big spending plan to the tune of nearly $300 billion on a vast array of infrastructure building and repair projects -- roads, bridges, airports schools, sewer systems and so on. The projects would create new jobs for thousands. 

Clinton made it clear that she expects the rich to foot much of the bill by demanding hefty tax hikes on them. She added the final FDR touch to her big spending plan by promising to plop the legislation on Congress’ table within her first 100 days in office. 

Clinton knows full well the perils ahead. The biggest threat is the Congress that she’ll have to go to with her big spending package. A GOP-controlled Congress will be as hostile to her big budget and tax increases as it was to Obama’s. 

With a big White House win, Clinton is on far more solid ground when she tries to follow through with the pledge. This will give her the breathing space needed to get parts of her jobs, education, health care, and infrastructure overhaul programs through. 

A Democratic take-back of the Senate is absolutely a must be when it comes to the Supreme Court. Arizona Senator John McCain has openly saber rattled for the GOP to block any Clinton high court pick. Clinton almost certainly will have the chance to pick one, two, or even three more justices to the bench. The judges she will choose will be in the mold of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. They will not be radical ideologues of the left. They will be judges with long standing court experience, solid legal credentials, and the highest ratings from the ABA and other legal groups. They will deliver safe and predictable votes on everything from women’s and civil rights to stemming environmental abuses.

Clinton can’t and won’t try to avoid the problem that has been perennially the single biggest tormenting lightening rod for black-white discord, namely, wanton police violence against blacks and minorities, and the astronomical numbers of blacks in America’s jails and prisons.

Her Oval Office to-do list is a mix of old and new proposals on police and criminal justice reform. They will meet with a wall of intense opposition, stonewalling or disregard by conservative Democrats and GOP congresspersons and state legislators, police and prison unions, and victim rights groups. To get one or more of her justice initiatives through Congress she’ll need a lot of help from Democrats within and without Capitol Hill. She’ll get lots of help here from civil rights groups and criminal justice reformers. 

Clinton’s policies on foreign affairs, military security, the fight against terrorism and checking Iran’s nuclear ambition, will be more muscular than Obama’s. She won’t send in troops to Syria. But she’ll be tough on sanctions, and enforcing a no-fly zone there. She will back with weapons and logistical support any faction with a pronounced tilt toward the U.S. that purports to be any kind of real alternative to ISIS and the Assad regime. 

She’ll rigorously monitor Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal, cut not a penny from U.S. military financial backing to Israel, while making the obligatory nod on paper to a Palestinian state. She will take the hardest of hard lines on Russia’s saber rattling in Eastern Europe and other hot spots. But this is still a far cry from a big ramp up in the U.S. military presence in Iraq or Afghanistan as Obama did. 

President Clinton will be pulled and tugged at by corporate and defense industry lobbyists, the oil and nuclear power industry, government regulators, conservative family values groups, conservative GOP senators and house members, foreign diplomats and leaders, and in turn, LGBT, women, civil rights and liberties, and environmental watchdog groups. They all have their priorities and agendas and will vie to get either White House support for their pet legislation, or to kill or cripple legislation that threatens their interests. 

Clinton’s entire political history, if anything, has shown that she will keep a firm, cautious and conciliatory eye on American public opinion when it comes to making policy decisions and determining priorities. That’s what presidents, all presidents, must do and President Clinton will be no different.

 

(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of What We Can Expect from President Hillary Clinton (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network. Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

Trump Will Go Away, but the Anger He’s Stirred Up will be Around Long After Nov 9

NEW GEOGRAPHY--For progressives, the gloating is about to begin. The Washington Monthly proclaims that we are on the cusp of a “second progressive era,” where the technocratic “new class” overcomes a Republican Party reduced to “know-nothing madness.”

To be sure, Trump himself proved a mean-spirited and ultimately ineffective political vessel. But the forces that he aroused will outlive him and could get stronger in the future. In this respect Trump may reprise the role played another intemperate figure, the late Senator Barry Goldwater. Like Trump, Goldwater openly spurned political consensus, opposing everything from civil rights and Medicare to détente. His defeat led to huge losses at the congressional level, as could indeed occur this year as well.

Goldwater might have failed in 1964, but his defeat did not augur a second New Deal, as some, including President Lyndon Johnson, may have hoped. Instead, his campaign set the stage for something of a right-wing resurgence that defined American politics until the election of President Obama. Pushing the deep South into the GOP, Goldwater created the “Southern strategy” that in 1968 helped elect Richard Nixon; this was followed in 1980 by the victory of Goldwater acolyte Ronald Reagan.

History could repeat itself after this fall’s disaster. People who wrote off the GOP in 1964 soon became victims of their own hubris, believing they could extend the welfare state and the federal government without limits and, as it turned out, without broad popular support. In this notion they were sustained by the even then liberally oriented media and a wide section of the “respectable” business community.

Three decades later a similar constellation of forces —- Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street—have locked in behind Hillary Clinton. But it is the transformation of the media itself both more ideologically uniform and concentrated more than ever on the true-blue coasts, that threatens to exacerbate Progressive Triumphalism. In this election, notes Carl Cannon, no Trump fan himself, coverage has become so utterly partisan that “the 2016 election will be remembered as one in which much of the mainstream media all but admitted aligning itself with the Democratic Party.”

 Progressive Triumphalism may lead the Clintonites to believe her election represented not just a rejection of the unique horribleness of Trump, but proof of wide support for their favored progressive agenda. Yet in reality, modern progressivism faces significant cultural, geographic, economic and demographic headwinds that will not ease once the New York poseur dispatched.

Successful modern Democratic candidates, including President Obama and former President Clinton, generally avoid openly embracing an ever bigger federal government. Obama, of course, proved a centralizer par excellence, but he did it stealthily and, for the most part, without the approval of Congress. This allowed him to take some bold actions, but limited the ability to “transform” the country into some variant of European welfare, crony capitalist state.

Hillary Clinton lacks both Obama’s rhetorical skills and her erstwhile husband’s political ones. Her entire approach in the campaign has been based on creating an ever more intrusive and ever larger federal government. Even during Bill Clinton’s reign, she was known to be the most enthusiastic supporter of governmental regulation, and it’s unlikely that, approaching 70, she will change her approach. It seems almost certain, for example, that she will push HUD and the EPA to reshape local communities in ways pleasing to the bureaucracy.

Yet most Americans do not seem to want a bigger state to interfere with their daily life. A solid majority—some 54 percent—recently told Gallup they favor a less intrusive federal government, compared to only 41 percent who want a more activist Washington. The federal government is now regarded by half of all Americans, according to another poll by Gallup, as “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003 only 30 percent of Americans felt that way.

Nor is this trend likely to fade with time. Millennials may be liberal on issues like immigration and gay marriage, but are not generally fans of centralization, fewer than one-third favor federal solutions over locally based ones. 

Due largely to Trump’s awful persona, Hillary likely will get some wins in “flyover country,” the vast territory that stretches from the Appalachians to the coastal ranges. In certain areas with strong sense of traditional morality, such as in Germanic Wisconsin and parts of Michigan, notes Mike Barone, Trump’s lewdness and celebrity-mania proved in the primaries incompatible with even conservative small town and rural sensibilities, more so in fact than in the cosmopolitan cores, where sexual obsessions are more celebrated than denounced.

Yet Trump’s strongest states, with some exceptions, remain in the country’s mid-section; he still clings to leads in most of the Intermountain West, Texas, the mid-south and the Great Plains. He is still killing it in West Virginia. This edge extends beyond a preponderance of “deplorables” and what Bubba himself has referred to as “your standard redneck.”

Exacerbating this cultural and class discussion is the growing division between the coastal and interior economies. Essentially, as I have argued elsewhere, the country is split fundamentally by how regions makes money. The heartland regions generally thrive by producing and transporting “stuff”—food, energy, manufactured goods —while the Democrats do best where the economy revolves around images, media, financial engineering and tourism.

Energy is the issue that most separates the heartland from the coasts. The increasingly radical calls for “decarbonization” by leading Democrats spell the loss of jobs throughout the heartland, either directly by attacking fossil fuels or by boosting energy costs. Since 2010, the energy boom has helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the heartland, many of them in manufacturing. At the same time, most big city Democratic strongholds continued to deindustrialize and shed factory employment. No surprise then that the increasingly anti-carbon Democrats control just one legislature, Illinois, outside the Northeast and the West Coast.

Trump’s romp through the primaries, like that of Bernie Sanders, rode on the perceived relative decline of the country’s middle and working classes. For all her well-calculated programmatic appeals, Hillary Clinton emerged as the willing candidate of the ruling economic oligarchy, something made more painfully obvious from the recent WikiLeaks tapes. Her likely approach to the economy, more of the same, is no doubt attractive to the Wall Street investment banks, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, renewable energy providers and inner city real estate speculators who have thrived under Obama.

Yet more of the same seems unlikely to reverse income stagnation, as exemplified by the huge reserve army of unemployed, many of them middle aged men, outside the labor force. The fact remains that Obama’s vaunted “era of hope and change,” as liberal journalist Thomas Frank has noted, has not brought much positive improvement for the middle class or historically disadvantaged minorities.

The notion that free trade and illegal immigration have harmed the prospects for millions of Americans will continue to gain adherents with many middle and working class voters—particularly in the heartland. We are likely to hear this appeal again in the future. If the GOP could find a better, less divisive face for their policies, a Reagan rather than a Goldwater, this working-class base could be expanded enough to overcome the progressive tide as early as 2018.

The one place where the progressives seem to have won most handily is on issues of culture. Virtually the entire entertainment, fashion, and food establishments now openly allied with the left; the culture of luxury, expressed in the page of The New York Times, has found its political voice by identifying with such issues as gay rights, transgender bathrooms , abortion and, to some extent, Black Lives Matter. In contrast, the Republicans cultural constituency has devolved to a bunch of country music crooners, open cultural reactionaries and, yes, a revolting collection of racist and misogynist “deplorables.”

Yet perhaps nowhere is the danger of Progressive Triumphalism more acute. Despite the cultural progressive embrace of the notion that more diversity is always good, the reality is that our racial divide remains stark and is arguably getting worse. As for immigration, polls say that more people want to decrease not just the undocumented but even legal immigration than increase it.

And then there’s the mountain rebellion against political correctness. Relative few Americans have much patience with such things as “micro-aggressions,” “safe spaces,” the generally anti-American tone of history instruction whose adherents are largely concentrated in the media and college campuses. Fewer still would endorse the anti-police agitation now sweeping progressive circles. For some, voting for Trump represents the opportunity to extend a “middle finger” to the ruling elites of both parties.

Yet Trump’s appeal also represented something of a poke in the eye for the old-school religious right; Trump has actually helped the GOP by embracing openly gay figures like Peter Thiel. He may have caused many bad things, but the New Yorker succeeded, as no Republican in a generation, in making the holy rollers largely irrelevant.

The dangers for the Democrats lie in going too far in their secularism. As recent emails hacked by WikiLeaks have demonstrated, there is widespread contempt in left circles for most organized religion, most importantly for the moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, even under a more progressive Pope. Some Democrats may argue that irreligiosity will remain “in” among millennials. Yet this was also said about boomers and turned out to be wrong. Few sociologists in the 1970s would have expected a religious revival that arose in the next decade.

Simply put, millennials’ economic and cultural views could shift, as they become somewhat less “idealistic” and more concerned with buying homes and raising children. They could shift more the center and right, much as Baby Boomers have done.

No matter what happens this year, the battle for America’s political soul is not remotely over. Trump may fade into deserved ignominy and hopefully obscurity, but his nationalist and populist message will not fade with him as long as concerns over jobs, America’s role in the world, and disdain for political correctness remain. If Hillary and her supporters over-shoot their nonexistent mandate and try to impose their whole agenda before achieving a supportable consensus, American politics could well end up going in directions that the progressives, and their media claque, might either not anticipate or much like.

(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 column was posted most recently at New Geography.)

-cw

 

 

 

Talkin’ Baseball: Rival Interpretations of Billy Goat's Curse

GELFAND’S WORLD--I am not by birth or upbringing a fan of the Chicago Cubs. But I know a few. For them, it's been a life of tragedy. Some of them have moved here to Los Angeles and have found it extremely odd that local baseball teams can win pennants and even on occasion the World Series. They don't know how to react or what to say. For the native Chicagoan, doom is the normal order of the universe, at least when it comes to National League baseball. Come to think of it, it's also pretty much the case for American League baseball, but White Sox fans (World Series victories in 1906, 1917, and then nothing until 2005), haven't had the kind of public relations that the Cubs (aka "cubbies") had. 

That's because the Cubs had Mike Royko as a fan and observer. It didn't hurt that Mike Royko was the Vin Scully of newspaper columnists, albeit a sarcastic and argumentative version. As an example of his 7500 published columns, here is one that got a lot of play at the time, a wry take on the corporate MBA takeover of once family organizations. Royko spun out newspaper columns the way Scully spun out play calling, with the right train of words and without shouting. 

Royko wrote for a series of Chicago newspapers. What the Sun Times and the Tribune had in common was a restaurant called the Billy Goat Tavern, known colloquially as Billy Goat's. It is in an odd location, underneath Michigan Avenue. Billy Goat's is a long flight of stairs down from the avenue, but an even longer way above the Chicago River. That's the way the river crossing was designed, with the Wrigley building set high above the water, back along the northern end of the bridge, with Chicago's version of Rodeo Drive to the north, and with a lower level and its own road in proximity to the newsrooms of the day, back when newspapers were flourishing. And along that road, there is the tavern. It was a hangout for writers and printers and typesetters back in the days before automation. 

Billy Goat's was memorialized by comedian John Belushi in the early days of Saturday Night Live. On the show, it was the fictional place made famous by the words "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger." The phrase wasn't a Belushi invention, but was taken from the real life lunch counter. 

In the next few days, sports fans will be hearing about Billy Goat's curse ad infinitum. Billy Sianis was a Greek immigrant to Chicago who founded the tavern. The story goes that Sianis went to the 1945 World Series at Wrigley, taking his pet goat with him. The goat was ejected, ostensibly for smelling like a goat, and Sianis was annoyed. He cast a curse of Wagnerian proportions on the Cubs, and they never got to another World Series ever again, throughout the remainder of the millennium. 

Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to rid the Cubs of the curse, but to no avail. You have to understand that curses of this magnitude are hard to abolish. After all, in Richard Wagner's ring cycle, ridding the world of its curse required the death of the gods and the destruction of Valhalla. Now that was a curse. 

As to Billy Goat's curse, I have a theory, as Royko had his. My theory goes like this: Just like Purdue University went to the Rose Bowl once in the preceding millennium and then once more in the current millennium, the Cubs are absolved of the curse for at least one World Series appearance between now and the year 3000. Maybe even a couple more. The millennium broke curses, at least on midwestern sports teams. 

Royko had a different slant, being a Chicago native, friend and patron of the tavern and its Sianis owners, and a deep social observer. In his very last column (March 21, 1997), just before succumbing to a massive stroke at a relatively young age, Royko wrote a piece titled, It was Wrigley, not some goat, who cursed the Cubs. As Royko explained, the Cubs went through World War II with a team populated by players who were rejected by the army. They were good enough to get into the 1945 World Series because most of the other teams had lost a substantial amount of talent to the armed services. After the war, the other teams brought back the talent and Wrigley kept his team of 4F's. As Royko explained, the Cubs could have beefed up their postwar lineup by following in the footsteps of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had desegregated baseball in 1947. 

Wrigley wouldn't do that, and the very white Cubs floundered for a few more decades. (It's a story not unlike that of the Boston Red Sox, who continued to lose under racist ownership throughout much of the modern era.) 

Times have changed, and Chicago baseball is now competing on a more even level. It's been a while since the Cubs won a World Series -- it was last done in 1908 -- and I don't have enough fingers and toes to count off the time lapse. Back in 1908, the movie capitals of the world were New York, Paris, and London, and even the existence of Hollywood was known to only some. There were a few cars at the time, and there were steam powered locomotives. Radio had been invented, but it was dots and dashes, and ships at sea communicated by Morse Code. There were a few airplanes, mostly crafted of wood and canvas, and the Wright brothers went public with an airplane that could carry a passenger.  

And that's the last time the Cubs won a World Series. 

So here's to the Chicago northside, to Steppenwolf Theater and the Second City, to the Parthenon restaurant and the Lyric Opera, and to a World Series victory in this, the new millennium. 

Epitaph 

Tom Hayden died on Sunday. He personified one wing of 1960s youth radicalism which he turned into a productive career in California politics and later into political education. There will be long articles written about him. Those who had a chance to chat with him at Democratic Party events will remember his remarkable wit.

 

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

-cw

This Year’s Angry Populist Politics are Threatening America's Silent Majority

GOD BLESS OUR INDIRECT DEMOCRACY--Suppose we ask all Americans to vote on whether anyone whose first name starts with the letter “A” should pay an extra tax, giving everyone else a tax break. The appalling measure would probably pass. 

From the perspective of us A-listers (sorry, couldn’t resist), that would amount to a classic case of the kind of “tyranny of the majority” our Founding Fathers were so eager to avoid, illustrating why certain filters, or brakes, on direct democracy are desirable. The idea was that people shouldn’t legislate themselves, but instead leave that up to their representatives. 

And even if the people’s representatives get carried away, our political system has other checks and balances to insulate it from too much democracy: Congress itself is split into two bodies; unelected judges protect the Constitution from lawmakers; our nation’s monetary policy is set by an “independent” (undemocratic, that is) Federal Reserve Board. We’ve also developed a stable of technocratic agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to govern areas of American life at a dotted-line remove from the democratic process.

All these checks on democracy, together, constitute the genius of American democracy. We pride ourselves on our freedom to do as we damned please, but at the same time we’ve locked away all the chocolate and given the key to a friend, and warned him not to listen to us if we call to ask for it urgently late some night. Of course we then complain about how the system doesn’t work, about how we can’t binge on chocolate whenever we want. 

Such complaints are the fuel of the term “populism.” The word wasn’t current in the era of the Founders, and it remains vaguely defined in ours, but it’s precisely what our republic’s designers were intent on protecting against: The danger that over-indulging majority passions could overwhelm and subvert the system at any given moment. 

This is the election year of mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore populism (to cite the Howard Beale character from the classic Network movie), with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump railing against how bankers, Washington, the Federal Reserve, foreigners, and conspiring elites are holding back “the people.” Those are familiar rants, yet, there is something novel about the threat posed by today’s populism: The real threat nowadays is a potential tyranny of an agitated minority, more so than a potential tyranny of the majority. 

The two dangers are easy to confuse because agitated minorities can look very much like a majority now that they can mobilize via once unimaginable communications technology and dominate wall-to-wall cable TV news coverage. Who knows how far William Jennings Bryan or Eugene V. Debs would have gotten with a Twitter following, a YouTube channel, and the ability to call into CNN? 

Let’s tweak our imagined tax referendum to illustrate what a tyranny of the minority looks like. Suppose that instead of asking Americans whether people whose first name starts with an A should pay more taxes, we ask them to vote on whether A-listers should be exempted from ever again having to pay any taxes. 

This measure, if uncoupled from any other balloting in a low-turnout vote, might conceivably pass. Why? Because we A-listers would turn out to vote in droves, and most everyone else would have little incentive to vote, or to speak out against the measure. 

The real threat nowadays is a potential tyranny of an agitated minority, more so than a potential tyranny of the majority. 

It’s an extreme hypothetical, but too much of American political life has become vulnerable to hijacking by intensely motivated and agitated minorities. It’s why teachers unions can control school board elections, why the gun lobby can punch above its weight in Washington, and why we haven’t fixed our broken immigration system. 

The danger of not appreciating the threat posed by an extremely motivated minority, as opposed to an untrammeled majority, is that our society is enabling the former threat with its overzealous vigilance against the latter. So, for instance, while a bicameral Congress and the separation of powers that allots the executive a veto and the courts judicial review are good brakes on majority rule, the Senate’s filibuster rules and the so-called “Hastert Rule” observed by House Republicans go too far in empowering agitating minorities. 

The Senate’s longtime filibuster rules were infamous in delaying the adoption of needed civil rights in the 20th century, long after a majority of Americans were ready to go along. This was a case of an aggrieved minority—white Southern Democrats—subverting the will of the majority to protect said minority. 

The Hastert Rule in the House is a more recent, and less formalized, tradition in the House of Representatives that has similarly served to block immigration reform favored by a majority of Americans, and by a majority of their representatives in Congress. The policy, enunciated by Dennis Hastert when he was the Republican Speaker of the House (long before he was revealed to be a child molester), and loosely followed by some predecessors and successors, is that proposed legislation should not be brought for a vote on the floor of the House unless it is supported by a majority of the party’s own caucus. 

As speaker in recent years, John Boehner set aside the rule at key times to allow for bipartisan votes to keep the government open when some far-right Republicans were threatening to close it down, and that’s one reason Mr. Boehner is no longer in office. But he did not allow the House to vote on a sensible immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in 2013, which would have legalized the status of the millions of undocumented workers in this country. The bill could have passed in the House with the support of Democrats and more moderate Republicans (as it did in the Senate), but the Hastert Rule stood in the way. 

The Founding Fathers intended for both chambers of the Congress, as well as the president and the judiciary, to all wrestle with thorny issues like immigration—balancing the will of the people with the Constitution. It’s a perversion of their design for one faction within the House to hijack the process, and allow for an agitated minority of anti-immigration nativists to become the arbiters of what constitutes a proposal worth voting on. 

Immigration and international trade feature prominently in this election cycle’s populist discourse, but it’s inaccurate to portray these issues, as the media often does, as pitting elites against “the people.” Opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans view trade in a positive light and favor immigration reform along the lines of what the Senate passed three years ago (as opposed to mass deportations and a wall). It’s easy to lose track of that reality, though, given the asymmetry of passion and interest between supporters and opponents of immigration and free trade. 

Richard Nixon’s odes to the concept of a “silent majority,” whose support he cherished, were often mocked by pundits in his day but it’s a concept worth revisiting. Today there is a silent majority that thinks it’d be insane to deport millions of hard-working, law-abiding immigrant workers. But, like many other insane ideas out there, this one isn’t going to keep most people from going about their daily business. It’s the supporters of the insanity who likely consider immigration THE ISSUE of our times, and can be found screaming at rallies and pestering their members of Congress, threatening to have them “primaried” if they work with Democrats on the issue. 

The dangers posed by agitated minorities are not merely an American phenomenon. They are wreaking greater havoc in other western democracies, like Colombia and Britain, that have ill-advisedly put big questions to a public vote in 2016. Elites in London and Bogotá were seeking additional legitimacy for their decisions to stay in the European Union and reach a final peace settlement with a vanquished narco-insurgency by engaging their silent majorities in the process. In the end, sizable impassioned minorities prevailed.

Trump’s populist campaign narrative of elites pitted against “the people” is off. Today’s politics is pitting elites and a silent (or quieter) majority against a loud, angry, mobilized faction of people susceptible to a populist pitch. The question on November 8 is whether the silent majority makes itself heard, or whether it will cede the electoral battleground to the more clamorous minority.

 

(Andrés Martinez is the executive editor of Zócalo Public Square. Primary Editor: Joe Mathews. Secondary Editor: Sara Catania. Photo by Brynn Anderson/Associated Press.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.)

 

Such a Nasty Man … Who Cares Whether he Concedes? A Contrarian Thought or Two on Debate Three

GELFAND’S WORLD--This week, the nation's press and pundits are all aflutter about Donald Trump's response to a question that came up in Wednesday's third and final presidential debate. Trump refused to agree to accept the results of the November 8 election. His answer is being quoted by every commentator: "I will look at it at the time," but it might just as well have been, "I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it." My view is that the editorial writers are taking a rather pessimistic view of the American people in treating this one remark as the most newsworthy event of the evening. 

First of all, let's make the point that a Trump loss without a formal concession speech would not be the worst outcome ever for an American presidential election. Consider one previous election back in the 1860s, when the state of South Carolina attacked a federal fortification and seceded from the United States. They didn't even wait until Lincoln's inauguration. 

So when Trump loses, it hardly matters whether he makes a gracious concession speech, engages in fiery rhetoric, or says nothing at all. It's not going to lead to a civil war. The fiery rhetoric would actually be better for his reputation, because his failure to say anything would just mark him as a pouting loser. 

Perhaps I'm being a little naive here, but I took Trump's response to be an attempt at his Trumpian form of standup comedy. His follow up line, "I will keep you in suspense," made that point. What he may have been trying to say in effect was that we are all getting a little tired of the pomposity of debate moderators, so take this question and shove it. 

Of course turning the presidential election into one big joke is not what normal people expect, but it's in line with the entire Trump campaign. I suspect that the long-term interpretation of that response eventually will be that Trump came unprepared for this question -- unprepared in the deeper political sense -- just as he has been unprepared on so many other topics. 

This is my day to be optimistic about American democracy (fueled in part by the substantial repudiation of Trump's answer by so many well known conservatives). Assuming Hillary Clinton wins, which is becoming ever more likely, the majority of the American people will accept the result as legitimate. It's true that some will refuse to accept the result, but that would be the case whether Trump concedes or not. Most of us will tune in to the inauguration on January 20 and watch the peaceful transfer of power. Those who have some grasp of world history (and particularly European history) will be thankful. 

As to the debate itself, a few points are worth making. Let's start with the lesson of Richard Nixon and John Kennedy from their initial debate back in 1960. Historians love to tell us that people who heard the presidential debate on the radio either called it a draw or felt that Nixon won marginally. But television viewers got a favorable view of John Kennedy and an unflattering view of Nixon when picture was added to sound.  

Somehow, Donald Trump didn't get the memo. In contrast to Hillary Clinton's poise, he couldn't keep himself from twitching, frowning, smirking, and interrupting. He did a little better job of holding back on the interruptions during the first half hour or so, where he appeared to be scripted and rehearsed. His answers were plainly arguable from the intellectual standpoint, but he had his words in grammatical order and his attacks followed one another in some semblance of structure. 

In this, he seemed to have help from the moderator, who has paradoxically been praised for his performance in a lot of places. It's true that he asked real questions and largely stayed away from Bill Clinton's sex life, but his economic biases came through. Particularly when he brought up the national debt, his question, you might say, was questionable. One commentator on the Daily Kos website who writes under the pseudonym dcg2 summed up the moderator's approach deftly.  The moderator took it as a given that a mounting national debt is a bad thing, even though some serious economists point out that we don't, at this time, have an economic problem based on the debt. 

And yes, it's true that the questions thrown at the candidates were filtered through the conservative perspective, without raising real world worries such as climate change or the continuing loss of union power. This had two opposing effects, one negative and one positive. The negative effect was to force the more liberal candidate to recite a few conservative platitudes such as creating a deficit-free federal budget. The more positive side is that it allowed Hillary Clinton to present the liberal argument on topics such as Planned Parenthood, Roe vs. Wade, and social security, all without some obnoxious talk show host constantly interrupting her. There are not all that many opportunities for the liberal side to tell its story to conservative viewers, and Hillary made use of this one.

Speaking of interruptions, the Donald managed to hold himself in check for that first half hour or so. Perhaps he shouldn't have agreed to participate in 90 minute debates, because he obviously cannot maintain self control for more than a few moments. His style of interrupting with the word "wrong" escalated through the evening, leading to his most serious mistake of the evening, his interruption with the phrase, "Such a nasty woman." Perhaps Trump was trying to play to those who have been propagandized against the Clintons for decades, but the remark will reverberate against him for the remainder of the campaign. 

After the debate, I chatted with a few people to get their take. One view struck me as perspicacious: Trump comes across as somebody who is used to talking to underlings. In that context, he can interrupt, insult, and be dead wrong, and he doesn't expect to be corrected. In short, he expects to be treated as the boss. Some of this came out earlier in the campaign, when he complained about debate moderators such as Megyn Kelly. He expects subservience from most everyone, and goes ballistic when he doesn't get it. 

In the world of the corporate board meeting, the CEO presides not as an equal, but literally as the boss. There is a big contrast in candidate debates, where no candidate has the right to rule over the others. Trump understands this at some intellectual level, but his lifelong habits, now ingrained as instincts, keep pushing him towards the boss role. He appears unable to help himself, and keeps succumbing to his instincts by making irritating interruptions. 

Some of the deeper thinking pundits are beginning to understand that Hillary Clinton is not just the passive beneficiary of Trump's ineptitude. She, along with her otherwise invisible campaign staff, have played Trump like a violin, and he has cooperated in his own downfall. 

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

-cw

Civility and Its Abusers

PUFFED UP POLITICS-In a few more weeks, on the heels of a final Presidential decision by voters, and after the punditry and handwringing recedes, we may get a breather from the spew that has shredded this election season’s political discourse. This is neither the first nor last battering that will be visited on democracy’s dented carapace, but rather another in a long series of assaults born of ignorance, profit-seeking, appeals to outrage and delight in cheap and cheesy titillation. 

Those who pitch their political wares from such a low view of the world are regrettable, but expected features of the human landscape. They often rise higher than their deserved station on the back of moxie, materialism, vanity, and cultural division. This election cycle we have experienced a species of this parasitic ilk that personifies incivility. We’ve borne witness to a kind of acting out that sunders civil discourse and rejects a shared sense of mutuality and reciprocity. Instead of a striving vision for a common future, we’ve received a “gonna-tell-it-like-is” tough-guy, sneering and dog-whistling to the very darkest beliefs and urges in those who see themselves as losing out to everyone else. 

Highly visible figures, especially those inclined to preen in their own perceived exceptionalism, tacitly approve and effectively uncork ideas and actions in people who occupy the more impulsive margins of society. They stir the latent anger, rage and pent-up hatreds of society's discontents, too often at the peril of people who prefer to behave – and live alongside others who behave – in more civilized and tolerant ways.  

Community grows at the epicenters of tolerance and civility. Chaos threatens when those willing to pull the strings of a distorted public imagination grant their adherents permission to act in concert with base, even violent instincts, no matter the cost or collateral damage to others. There's nothing inherently wrong with alternative views, outright protest, angry demonstration, competing ideologies, and even nonviolent rebellion that challenges the status quo. We see these in all forms and permutations, often contained in the places where American civil society and nonprofit organizations offer a social safety valve to blow off steam and channel discontent productively. Problems arise, however, when putative leaders ignite righteous passions and then turn their backs on or disavow responsibility for the consequences of the rebellion they incite.  

Unbound, the “tell it like it is” mantra becomes “do as you please, it’s okay.” That’s when people end up getting wounded, further disaffected or abandoned. Surely a large part of the American electorate, called to take up electoral arms, will suffer political abandonment in the months and years ahead. Those who have chanted racist, sexist, anti-immigrant and other vicious incantations will resort to simmering and stewing, some feeling validated enough by their so-called democratic engagement to abuse and damage civility even more. Others will see loyalty and devotion rewarded by their crass commodification as the next audience for a low-brow television series or as customers for more worthless crap hocked their way. 

The degree of abuse visited on American democracy this election season has left civility punched in the face and momentarily knocked senseless on the street. We’re owed a refund, I believe, but it’s one we are never likely to collect because professed leaders obsessed with merely their own grasping, groping needs think not a jot about what happens next, nor do they care for the collective who.  

It is up to those who care about strengthening democracy to see demagoguery for what it is, to name it, to call it out and, in so doing, to sustain the vigilance and struggle that counters chaos and strives toward civil society. 

 

(Paul Vandeventer is President and CEO of Community Partners.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.)

Does American Politics Need Villains to Be Successful?

VOICES FROM THE SQUARE--For most of 2016, American politics could best be described as caught in a populist moment. Populism has always come in two variations, and we’ve seen both this year. The most familiar form, ably represented in all its raw madness-of-crowds by Donald Trump, is based on resentment of immigrants and other non-majority identities (racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious most prominently), and rancor directed at political elites for their perceived role in changing social norms. This is the populism familiar from historian Richard Hofstadter’s “status anxiety” explanation of late 19th Century populism, or, in more recent history, the presidential campaigns of George Wallace.

The other version of populism is built around policies that would support working and low-income families, often coupled with a sharp critique of economic elites—“the 99 percent” versus “the 1 percent.” This was the populism that Bernie Sanders rode during a surprisingly successful challenge to the anointed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and that mobilized younger voters almost as powerfully as Barack Obama had eight years earlier.

It would be a mistake to treat these two populisms as flip sides of the same coin. The white cultural resentment generated by Trump—particularly because it represents a distinct minority defined by identity rather than ideology—is a profound challenge to the Republican Party and to mainstream conservatism, just as Wallace’s was to the Democratic Party in another era. The policy differences between populist Democrats like Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren and their mainstream counterparts such as Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine, however, are subtle. Sanders’ proposals, for example, flowed easily enough into the party platform and the vision of its nominee Hillary Clinton.

Remaining policy differences between the two camps are relatively minor, such as those between “free college” and “debt-free college,” or between a restoration of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall banking regulations repealed in 1998 and a proposed new regulatory regime. These are still differences of ideology, but modest ones; and the differences in identity between the Sanders and Clinton camps, other than on matters of age and style, are hard to find. Instead, the left’s version of populism can seem more like a fresh coat of paint, or a sharper argument for otherwise standard liberal policies.

Nonetheless, the distinction between left populism and mainstream progressive politics does diverge in one significant way: Sanders and Warren want to name names. Their narrative, like Trump’s, is one of “heroes and villains”—the villains being not immigrants, but the “millionaire and billionaire class” or big political donors. Warren, for example, has been relentlessly focused on personnel, more insistent on limiting the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street and going after the Obama administration acolytes of former Citigroup chairman and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (whom she blames for the tame treatment of executives during the financial crisis) than on any other particular policy.

In Hillary Clinton’s view of the world, though, there are few villains, and when they are named it is with legalistic care. (Trump himself is a villain, but carefully distinguished from other Republicans, even those who support him.) Politics, in this view, is a matter of problems, to be fixed, often by elites wielding dispassionate expertise.

So one of the central questions of our era has become: Does successful American politics need villains? Since the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, left populists have imagined that the politics of resentment that motivates the right can be coopted or converted to the left, redirected toward corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. While Trump attacks the “corruption” that leads to, in his view, bad trade deals, an ill-fated embrace of immigration and diversity, and American failure, left populists seem to be betting that an attack on “corruption” that names alternative targets betraying the American ideal—the Citizens United decision, middle-class wage stagnation, or the cost of college—will hook voters in the same way.

But there are major flaws in this thinking. The bonds of right populism are not so easily broken and reformed. The “heroes and villains” of Trump’s narrative (he is the only hero) are not forged by policy positions but by deep ties of cultural identity and affinity. Put more bluntly, white Trump and Tea Party supporters are not interested in a populism that involves an alliance with non-white, younger, culturally diverse voters. Meanwhile, the relentless attack on “corruption” from populists on both sides has led to the strange paradox that voters still view Hillary Clinton, merely a lifelong denizen of the existing political system, as more corrupt than the genuinely venal Trump, a master of tax scams, direct-marketing scams, and charity scams. Politics based on resentment and attacks on “corruption” have merely deepened mistrust of government, which is in itself a barrier to the policies that left populists favor.

Instead, perhaps what American politics really needs is a third kind of populism. Instead of the “them” populism of left and right, we should look to the tradition of “us” populism—one in which citizens work together, from local to national levels of government, to define and solve problems. A politics in which citizens are not just engaged as angry protestors calling on the system to change, but as part of the system itself.

America has had a populism like this before, as described in historian Lawrence Goodwyn’s portraits of the rise of late 19th century agrarian alliances, in Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America, and several other books. Where Hofstadter saw only resentment and status anxiety, Goodwyn saw millions of people who had been quiescent suddenly becoming engaged, participating fully through unions, farmers alliances, and new political movements to redesign the economic structures of a fast-growing country. He celebrated the cross-racial alliances forged in the South and the transformations of political consciousness experienced by individuals participating in this democratic renascence.

Our democracy would benefit from an investment in this kind of “us” populism, especially its ideas about refining existing institutions to strengthen citizen voices and public trust, and creating new mechanisms for public engagement and deliberation. This might include steps such as setting up participatory budgeting or seeing labor unions, community organizations, and similar associations as civil society institutions—rather than just economic claimants.

This new populism can’t simply be conjured into existence. It has to rise up from the lived experience of millions of individuals. But we have tools, including new technologies and new techniques of organizing, that can help. There are signs of a more meaningful and participatory democracy emerging in many American cities. Perhaps by the next presidential election, this budding “us” populism can compete with the populism of resentment that dominated in 2016.

(Mark Schmitt is the director of the Political Reform Program at New America. This piece originated at Zocalo Public Square.)

-cw

 

Trump's Resistance is Feudal

GELFAND’S WORLD--It would be a mistake to jail Dick Cheney just as it would be a mistake to jail Hillary Clinton 

The other night, Donald Trump said that if elected, he would throw Hillary Clinton in a dungeon. OK, I exaggerate a bit. He said that he would appoint a special prosecutor whose job it would be to send Hillary to jail. But actually, the two accounts are not all that different, since the desired outcome is essentially the same and the underlying attitude is essentially feudal. 

There are powerful historical and social reasons for opposing this approach to government and, curiously enough, they are exactly the same reasons why it would have been wrong for the Obama administration to try to prosecute George W. Bush or his vice president for war crimes. 

In stating this assertion, I oppose positions stated emphatically on the one hand by some American liberals and on the other hand by some American conservatives. The one group wanted Dick Cheney sent to prison, and the other group is now calling to have Hillary jailed. 

Those who fail to understand why both sides are wrong are failing to understand the fragility of democratic governance. 

Consider: We take for granted that there will be a presidential election every four years and that there will be a new president every four or eight years. This hope is actually one extreme on a continuum. It is optimistic in the sense that we have a national tradition -- presidential elections -- that has never been broken, but perhaps under the wrong circumstances could be. 

If we are to recognize that maintaining this tradition for over 220 years has at least partly been a lucky break for us, then there is a corollary: We should be careful about not taking democracy for granted, and we should be especially careful about doing what it takes to maintain the democratic tradition. 

There is of course an opposing, more pessimistic point of view: In one form, it is the claim that the current president intends to postpone or cancel the next election. I think I first heard people making that statement as far back as the Nixon administration, and the claim seems to get reborn with each new presidency. When you look at this claim carefully, it becomes apparent that it's opposite in one critical way from the throw her in jail trope. The throw her in jail view, although malicious, takes the continuation of our democracy for granted, while the assertion that the president plans to carry out a coup by cancelling elections assumes that our democracy is illusory. After all, if the president can crown himself king or declare himself dictator then it isn't much of a democracy. 

Historians tell us that we've had moments in our history when presidents took extraordinary powers. Lincoln negated the right of habeus corpus at one point in his presidency. Nixon in effect took the U.S. off the gold standard. George W Bush allowed the use of torture. Obama is accused (true or not) of violating the Constitution. 

Many of these allegations are demonstrably true, and others are matters of opinion. So if it is possible for an American president to act like a dictator, then what sort of democracy do we actually have? 

One obvious answer is that no president gets to be a complete dictator. Presidents sometimes push the envelope, but none has so far managed to collect a crown and royal scepter. There is plenty of balance in our system of checks and balances. 

But the most important element of this presidential system of ours is that new presidents come in and old presidents go out. The ultimate solution to presidential overreach is to elect a different one. The solution to political party overreach is the same. Routine elections are the answer. 

It's how we get rid of dictatorial behavior on the part of our leadership. Presidents stay as long as their electoral terms last, and no longer. It's almost the definition of true democracy vs. faux democracy. Any country in which the leader can cancel the upcoming elections (or never has elections) is not a true democracy. 

I'd like to think that there is a reason for why we have been able to maintain our tradition of 8 years and out. Part of that reason is that our government involves the participation of multiple actors, from presidents to senators to congressmen, and they have one thing in common. They are all players in a political game with defined rules of winning (getting more votes) and losing (getting fewer votes). It's not just a game of taking power as in a feudal monarchy, but a game of winning power according to a particular type of conflict. 

You might therefore treat our electoral system as having certain features analogous to chivalry. There is a cultural system with its own norms. Rather than the loyalty of the knight to his duke, we have a certain level of loyalty to a system as a whole. You can call it fealty to Constitutional law, or you can just say that this is the way that things are done. In either case, there were a lot of Republicans who chose loyalty to the system over their loyalty to Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis. We can see some of the same reaction from Republicans who are deserting Trump. 

Now let's imagine for a moment that when Obama ascended to the presidency, he didn't give George W Bush that well-photographed hand clasp, but instead acted to prosecute Bush and Cheney for war crimes. What message would this send? 

If you have any sense of history, you would immediately recognize that this would be a recipe for any future Republican president to find some reason to prosecute his predecessor. Allow me to remind you that a lot of Republicans carried decades-long grudges over the forced resignation of Richard Nixon. "He was hounded from office" was their claim. It took a while, but they finally got even (rightly or wrongly) through the impeachment of Bill Clinton. 

The effect of a current president taking legal action against a former president would create a dangerous incentive. Any current president would understand the risk inherent in becoming a former president. It could get him or her thrown in prison. One way of avoiding becoming a former president is to find some excuse for cancelling elections. 

In other words, our democratic system depends on a tradition, and we don't know whether that tradition is strong enough to stand up to presidents prosecuting their opponents. There's a reason that the authors of the Constitution limited removal of the president to a specific series of actions that require both houses of congress, and leave the sitting president out of the process other than as the person facing trial. The founders even required a supermajority in the Senate to complete the act of removing a president from office. Notice by the way that there have only been two impeachment trials in the history of our republic, and both failed to achieve a guilty verdict. 

Viewed in this way, Donald Trump's threat to jail Hillary Clinton is more feudal than modern. It is the idea that kings battle against other kings, with the winner taking all. America rejects that culture, replacing it with written rules that define how authority is gained, and how it is shared among competing arms of government. It's true that there have been occasional lapses, as when a member of congress beat another member in response to a difference of opinion over slavery, or when Alexander Hamilton died in a duel. But our culture does not exult Aaron Burr the way feudal culture exulted conquest and assassination. We make changes in executive power by electing new presidents, not by a process in which presidents imprison their opponents. 

While preparing this column, I came across a piece by Garrison Keillor.  It says some of what is said here (at least I'd like to think that) but in the unique Garrison Keillor style. It's worth a read, particularly where Keillor, referring to Trump's views, says, "The government is not a disaster; it is a culture of process and law and organization that is alien to him." 

One more brief story. A few years ago, I attended a scientific meeting in an eastern city. I shared a cab to the airport with a fellow scientist from one of the remaining dictatorships. He asked me a little about the American system, and as we passed various monuments, I tried to explain: "What made George Washington great was that he gave up power." There have been many military leaders, but not many national leaders have established a tradition of the peaceful transition of power. My fellow scientist looked a little surprised at this answer, as it was not something that his world included. 

The peaceful transition of power signified by the presidential inauguration is a continuing miracle in a world that has only slowly been adopting such traditions. It is this peaceful transition of power that Trump mocks in his threats to jail his opponent.

 

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

-cw

Hillary Hating Has Become a Cottage Industry

MY TURN-I literally have spent the last week trying to figure out why there is such fear and loathing expressed when it comes to Hillary Clinton. I have read so many outlandish "facts" from friends and neighbors on Facebook and other sites that baffle me beyond description. 

Some are people I have known for forty or more years. We carpooled together...our kids grew up together...we celebrated and commiserated together. How these honest, and in most cases, bright people could not only swallow but repeat these outlandish stories is beyond me. 

I have stayed away from writing about the Presidential election. I have never been a partisan voter, even though I identify more with the Democratic platform than with the Republican. I vote according to my considered preference, whether it comes to politicians or initiatives. 

When I discussed the content of this article with CityWatch publisher Ken Draper, it was supposed to be ready for last week. I wrote it, then let it sit for a day; then I decided I came off almost as strident and emotional as the people I was accusing. 

So I decided to start all over again. Believe it or not, this now represents a far more gentle approach. Now is a good time to reflect with so many "news" programs have lavished opinions and from all sides. Unfortunately, it was too early to start drinking so I doubled my usual caffeine intake. 

Many pundits trace the "Hate Hillary" phenomenon to 1992 when Governor Jerry Brown was running for President against Bill Clinton. Brown accused the former Governor of Arkansas of helping his wife’s law practice while he was in office -- an accusation that was never substantiated, like many of the Hillary tales. 

Hillary fired back via the press with a sentence that roiled traditionalists who were already fired up by the era’s culture wars: 

“I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas,” she said. Most of the media outlets neglected to report her complete quote that went on to say, “The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed…to assure that women can make the choices, whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination.” 

Go back to the eighties and nineties. Women were going through their own evolutionary process. Gloria Steinem was accused of starting a gender war. Women had started to join the workforce but in mostly non-decision making positions. 

When Bill Clinton appointed Madelyn Albright as Secretary of State it was a huge achievement for women. I must admit, when I first heard Hillary talk about baking cookies I could relate to this because I felt the same way. My children will never have the memory of smelling freshly baked cookies emanating from their mother’s kitchen. To this day, I still burn the garlic bread. 

Intellectually, one can understand why men would have resented Hillary in those days. She was not the kind of role model they wanted their wives and daughters to emulate. And they were starting to resent the changes occurring to the traditional "Father Knows Best" male roles. Unfortunately, men in Trump's age group were the first to experience these vast social changes. 

Why do women hate her so much? I think it’s been partly due to jealousy; she’s always been doing important things perhaps while some have remained in traditional roles. However, over the years, she has served as a role model to more and more women, millions of whom have since discovered they have options too. 

We should differentiate between what is true and what is urban myth. I don't remember any hue and cry when Ronald Regan accepted a two week, two million dollar fee plus the usual travel/staff perks from Japan shortly after he left the Presidency. At that time, Japan was one of our main trade competitors. Of course, he was a man and was “worthy” of such an expense. A woman receiving $250,000 for a speech was unheard of.   

There was no investigation of the private RNC email server President George W. Bush used and where 55 million emails were "lost," even though they are supposed to be retained. There were no investigations of Condoleezza Rice when we had more than five terrorist attacks against U.S. embassies and military bases during her tenure. 

The fact is, Jason Chafitz, Utah Congressman and Chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, turned down the request for extra money the State Department requested to beef up security at embassies and consulates in dangerous areas. This was before Benghazi. 

As a journalist, I have learned to check what are called "facts." Even the Investment Service Motley Fool, known as one of the most reliable Investment companies in the industry, recently included a list of the "Hillary Myths."  They certainly do not have anything to gain and I don't see them on the list of Hillary donors. 

Trump also blames Hillary for her husband of signing NAFTA, calling it the worst trade deal ever negotiated on the part of the United States. The initial beginnings for NAFTA were under President Reagan, who originally wanted a free trade agreement with Mexico. The famous Conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, helped draft it and the first President Bush signed it. 

While NAFTA was being negotiated, there was a lot of talk about a future extension -- eventually having a “Common Market” for the Americas. It was thought then to be a smart move to compete with the European Union. 

One more thing that irritates me: Everyone refers to Trump as "Mr. Trump.” His surrogates, news reporters, employees and even his critics have given him this "Mr." title, which infers he is above everyone else. Hillary refers to him as "Donald," which I am sure, in his world, is a breach of etiquette. On the other hand, most of the time she is referred to by her first name. 

The tapes that have been released as of this writing have featured ten women who tell Trump groping stories. He and I are from the same vintage and I will bet almost every woman over fifty who was in business or in the work force has been subjected to verbal and physical sexual overtures. (I can recall almost every incident that I ever experienced.) We didn't say anything because, 1) we would lose our jobs 2) we would lose the client 3) or we would upset our husbands, who might have thought we encouraged this kind of behavior, or worse, would threaten violence against the perpetrator. 

I developed some pretty smart responses to those overtures to ensure that a man wouldn't feel resentful and would want to continue our business relationship. I also developed a pretty good right hook. That brings up another couple of points. 

The complaint that Hillary said she has a public position and a private position is not a cardinal sin. Anyone in business faces the same situation.  

Lastly, appointed Cabinet officials "serve at the pleasure of the President.” As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s responsibility was to carry out the wishes of President Obama, whether she agreed with him or not. Similarly, the job of Trump's surrogates is also to defend his behavior and policies, whether they agree with him or not. 

Those of you who have a supervisor or a "boss" do the same. 

I think we can all agree that this election is like no other in our lifetimes. The outcome has not been determined and, in spite of the Trump rhetoric, it is not a rigged system. What frightens many of us is the consequences of either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump being elected as the 45th President of the United States. It is going to be an interminable three weeks. 

My personal opinion is that Hillary Clinton is being subjected to a double standard and is definitely encountering gender bias. 

Before you resend an inflammatory email or tweet, check with the professional non-biased fact checkers. Do not add to the very tense and dangerous atmosphere we are encountering. All of the facts I have discussed have been substantiated and are available online. 

As always comments welcome.

 

(Denyse Selesnick is a CityWatch columnist. She is a former publisher/journalist/international event organizer. Denyse can be reached at: [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

Finding Hope in These Dismal Times

WORKING AND WAITING FOR CHANGE-In these dismal days of climate change, imperial decline, endless war, and in my city, a hapless football team, I seem to be experiencing a strange and unaccustomed emotion: hope. How can that be? Maybe it’s because, like my poor San Francisco 49ers who have been “rebuilding” for the last two decades, I’m fortunate enough to be able to play the long game. 

But what exactly is making me feel hopeful at the moment? 

For one thing, we seem to have finally reached Peak Trump, and the reason why is important. 

Calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers didn’t do it. Promising to bring back waterboarding and commit assorted other war crimes didn’t do it. Flirting with the white supremacist crowd and their little friend Pepe the Frog didn't do it. But an 11-year-old video tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” seems to have been the drop of water that finally cracked the dam and sent even stalwart Republican leaders fleeing a flood of public revulsion. 

In the midst of the most frightening and depressing presidential election of my life, the reactions to this latest glimpse into the Mind of Trump have actually lifted my spirits. Not that many years ago, an exchange like the one between Donald Trump and Billy Bush would hardly have been news. Sexual harassment was an expected part of the lives of working women -- par for a Trump golf course. I remember, for instance, paging through my family’s New Yorker magazines and coming across a Whitney Darrow cartoon about a lesson at a secretarial school. A businessman is chasing a woman around a desk as the teacher explains, “Notice, class, how Angela circles, always keeping the desk between them...” 

There you have it: the devaluation of women’s work (secretarial skills reduced to techniques for evading the boss’s advances), the trivialization of sexual predation, and in Angela’s knowing smile, admiration for the woman who keeps her sense of humor while defending her virtue. 

What’s most surprising about the response to Trump’s hot-mic moment is the apparent national consensus that speaking -- or even thinking -- about sexual assault the way Trump did on this video is neither normal nor amusing. This shared assumption that women are not trophies for the taking marks an advance toward full personhood that we have achieved only in my lifetime. When you stop to think about it, it’s an extraordinary cultural shift. And once people figure out that women are, after all, human, it’s pretty hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle. 

Of course, there are still a lot of men who have a hard time with the woman-human being equation. Paul Ryan, for example, responded to the Trump video release by opining that “Women are to be championed and revered” -- a view that suggests we are either helpless creatures to be saved by a “champion” or other-than-human creatures belonging on some Victorian pedestal. 

Then There’s Hillary 

In her first debate with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton actually said the words “systemic racism.” Never in our history has a mainstream presidential candidate described our country’s racial institutions in that kind of language. Indeed, one of the biggest political problems the movement for racial justice has faced in the post-Civil Rights era has been how to account for the fact that, absent legal segregation, people of color, and especially African Americans, remain disproportionately represented among the poor, the unhoused, and the incarcerated. Institutional, or systemic, racism describes the mechanism at play. 

Here’s what Clinton said in that debate: 

“And it’s just a fact that if you're a young African-American man and you do the same thing as a young white man, you are more likely to be arrested, charged, convicted, and incarcerated. So we've got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.” 

She’s right of course. And she deserves credit for saying it, but it’s the analysis of groups like RaceForward, the organizing skills of the young activists of Black Lives Matter, and the moral voice of older leaders like the Reverend William Barber II of the North Carolina NAACP who created the atmosphere in which she had to say it. 

We are, in other words, witnessing a sea change in how people in mainstream politics talk about racism. Of course, there’s been pushback against Clinton’s rhetoric, but the idea that actual institutional structures exist that deeply constrain the lives of African Americans has now been admitted to the grown-ups’ table. 

Black communities have long known that they, and especially their young men, are at risk of police violence. That’s why sooner or later so many black parents of every economic class have “the talk” with their children about how to try to stay safe (or at least safer). But in the two years since the murder of Trayvon Martin by a self-styled vigilante, Black Lives Matter has focused national attention for the first time on the repeated deaths of unarmed black men and women at the hands of those who are meant to protect and serve. Now, even the mainstream media no longer treat such deaths as isolated incidents unworthy of coverage. Instead, it is recognized that they form a systemic pattern, and even presidential candidates have to respond to that pattern. That is a victory and it was almost beyond imagination even a few years ago. Of course, the real victory will come when police stop shooting unarmed people, but at least now the country generally admits that it happens. 

Similarly, many of us on the left have long known that wages in this country began to stagnate in the mid-1970s. We’ve watched the minimum wage (once intended to be for a family’s “breadwinner”) shrink to a poverty stipend. We’ve seen income and wealth inequality swell to the greatest levels since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century. But it took the Occupy movement to remind us that the 99% could reclaim political power. It took organizations like OUR Walmart and the Fight for $15, lifted by Bernie Sanders’s run for the Democratic nomination, to bring that discussion into the mainstream. 

For the first time in years, the words “working class” have slipped back into public discourse. CNN now runs stories with headlines like “Working class white men make less than they did in 1996.” A few years ago, as far as anyone could tell from the mainstream media, we lived in a country populated by a vast, undifferentiated “middle class,” and a few wealthy or impoverished outliers. Now, both the Trump and Clinton campaigns have found that they must address the pain of working people. We may not agree with their proposed solutions, but they have to talk about it. That, too, is a change and a victory of sorts. 

Wait! You Mean We Won Something? 

For many years I’ve noticed that my corner of the political world, roughly the American left, has had a very hard time recognizing and claiming our victories. Maybe that’s because it’s cost us so much to understand all the ways in which the standard American narrative is a lie, to grasp how little the American Way -- whatever Superman may have believed -- has had to do with truth and justice. 

From birth, Americans normally swim in an ocean of heroic mythology about American exceptionalism, and for many of us it’s been difficult to make our way out of its riptides. So our knowledge has been hard-won. Figuring out that the United States is not the international defender of liberty we learned about in school wasn’t easy. 

It took work to realize and accept, for instance, that our country routinely supported dictators and torturers. We opposed U.S. efforts to prop up strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and called out the hypocrisy when the U.S. government was shocked(!), shocked(!) to discover what they actually were. 

Having invested so much effort in recognizing the lies of the American exceptionalist narrative, we find it difficult to acknowledge when our government does something right. 

The Paris Agreement on climate, signed by 190 countries, comes into effect this November 4th. That’s because on October 5th, the world met two key criteria: ratification by at least 55 of the signatory countries, and ratification by countries responsible for producing 55% of the planet’s greenhouse gases. It’s fair to say that, without the Obama administration, this agreement to confront the extinction-level threat that climate change represents would not have come into being. Like any compromise, it’s by no means a perfect accord, but it’s the best chance we’ve seen in a long time that the Earth will remain the habitable and welcoming place for human beings (among many other species) that it’s been these last tens of thousands of years. This victory belongs to environmental activists around the world, and we should claim it! 

It’s almost as if, having worked so hard to understand the role and power of the United States on the world stage and of a ruling elite at home, we’ve imagined this country as a far greater powerhouse than it is.  It’s almost as if recognizing any cracks in the edifice of American power might endanger that hard-won worldview. It’s almost as if the possibility that we can sometimes push our country to do something right, that our side can sometimes win, seems to rattle us. Faced with that disorienting possibility, I suspect it’s sometimes easier to believe that, while we must always fight the good fight, our adversary is too strong for us ever to expect victories. 

On the domestic front many of us, both people of color and white Americans, have struggled to recognize our personal implicit racial biases. We’ve likewise taken the time and effort to reexamine what we were taught about U.S. history so that we could grasp the enduring and shape-shifting longevity of systemic racism. Knowing this history so well seems to make it harder for some of us to recognize and claim victories when they come. When, in front of 80 million Americans, Hillary Clinton says that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just [the] police,” that is a victory, and we should take it in and savor it. 

When President Obama responds to mass incarceration by commuting the sentences of federal drug offenders, that is a victory, however modest. It took half a decade for the ideas in Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow to penetrate to a mass audience. Now, the country has finally begun to recognize what prison activists have been saying for years: there is something very wrong when the “leader of the free world” has the largest prison population on the planet. An outrage that, a decade ago, was invisible to just about everyone except the affected communities and a small number of activists is now known to all. Our prisons are a national and international scandal and the spread of that knowledge -- and the urge to do something about it -- is also a victory, one worth celebrating, however provisionally. 

Who’s Most Likely to Be Hopeful? 

In the 1980s, I spent six months in Nicaragua’s war zones at a time when my government, the Reagan administration, was supporting the Contra armies against the Sandinista government. Together with many sectors of Nicaraguan society, the Sandinistas had thrown out the U.S.-supported dictator, Anastasio Somoza. Over and over I was struck by how living in the midst of war was like being stretched between two temporal realities. 

In the morning, a Nicaraguan in the town of Jalapa might help dig a communal refugio to shelter children from airplane attacks. In the afternoon, she might risk attack or kidnapping by the U.S.-backed Contras to plant trees that would take years to mature on mountains that had been clear-cut by American lumber companies during the Somoza dictatorship. You always had one eye on the present and the other on a better future. 

The Nicaraguans I knew seemed eternally ready for a party under the worst conditions imaginable. One day, in the city of Estelí, I remember running into an American friend who told me this story: she’d been feeling bummed recently because the Contras had attacked a little town near where she was living and killed seven children. It seemed to her as if this miserable war would never end. The family with whom she was staying was going to a fiesta that night and asked her along.

“I don’t feel like it,” she said. “I’m too depressed.” 

You can afford to be depressed,” they told her, “because you’re going home soon. We are the ones who will still be stuck in the war, so we have to have hope for the future. We have to dance. Now, get dressed, we’re going to a party.” 

What group in the United States is most optimistic about the future? Surprisingly, according to a recent Gallup Healthways poll, it’s not the billionaires among us, but poor African Americans. A Brookings report on the poll suggests a number of reasons for this, and adds:

“[T]he optimism of black Americans -- especially the poorest -- is a reason to be a little more hopeful. The second term of our first black President is nearing its end, but a renegade political candidate with open disdain for minority groups is enjoying rising support. At such a moment in history, it is noteworthy that it is black Americans who seem to be keeping faith with the American Dream.” 

Another poll, commissioned in 2015 by the Atlantic, found that “African Americans and Latinos are far more likely to be optimistic than their white counterparts, both about their personal station in life and the future of the country more broadly.” 

Such people are anything but stupid. They know that their communities are confronting terrible challenges, but they know, too, how important it is not to forget to dance. 

Why Doing Politics Is Like Surfing 

How do outrageous ideas -- for example, that women are human beings, or that the U.S. locks up way too many people, or even that gay people should be able to get married if they want to -- suddenly morph into everyday commonsense? It’s rarely an accident. It almost always involves dedicated people working away for years on an issue, often unnoticed, before it seems suddenly to surge into general awareness. 

Sometimes I think the politically engaged life is like surfing. You expend an enormous effort paddling past the breaking surf. Then you sit on your board breathing hard, scanning the horizon for the wave. Sometimes you sit out there for a long, long time, but when that wave comes, you have to be ready to grab it -- and enjoy it. 

Even when the wave looks like a sinking Donald J. Trump.

 

(Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

 

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