Tag: Trump

Absurdity

…And The Mirror Warps

Strange times.

Fox News is defending CNN in the wake of a Trump insult and possible threat at his first press conference in over 160 days.  In recent years one could not imagine Fox News chastising someone who is in many ways the perfect flower of their mutated brand of “news.”  But since Roger Ayles has stepped down and may now be looking at some very serious problems, there seem to be a few people at Fox trying to reposition themselves in order to gain a credibility that the network actively shunned for  more than two decades.

This on top of a sitting senator actually testifying against a colleague before the senate committee vetting Trump’s cabinet picks.

That rumbling, still faint, may be the severe indigestion coming from one of the worst morning-afters this country has ever had.  The headiness of the post-election high has faded and people who thought everything was going to be “fine” (or some version thereof) are starting to wonder who this is snoring beside them.

It may make for some of the most trenchant reassessing we’ve done for a long, long time.  In that regard, this may turn out to have been to the good.

But only if it doesn’t take too long for the bromo to work

culture

A Problem Of Legitimacy

I’ve been trying to compose my thoughts about what transpired last November that has left us with one of the most uncertain political situations we have faced in so long that I find it difficult to make a comparison.  Possibly Rutherford B. Hayes.  Possibly Harding.

The aspect of this that has baffled me most is the fact that sixty million of my fellow citizens cast a ballot for a man they do not trust.

An odd statement, I know, but in all the rhetoric I’ve seen, both before and after the election, I see very little that suggests anyone actually trusts Trump. That’s not to say there weren’t many reasons for those who did to vote for him, but I don’t believe trust is one of them.  Maybe it’s opposite. Certainly a good dose of cynicism was involved.

I’m not going to rehearse here the various theories about stolen or corrupted elections. I’m not concerned with that at the moment. What I’m concerned about is those sixty million voters. Those and the ninety million who did not vote. For the purposes of this piece, I see them all of a piece.*

So one hundred fifty million Americans put a man in the White House they do not trust. Other metrics were involved. Other motives.

Firstly, about that trust thing.

When Obama was elected, people voted for him with a measure of confidence that he would represent their interests.  That change was in the offing. That he was capable of making a difference to the benefit of the country.  They talked about hope and change interchangeably. It was obvious that they felt he would do positive things. They trusted him.  Both times.

And the reaction of his opponents came out of recognition of that basic reality. What his enemies had to do was destroy that trust, if possible.  And because of that trust, their main weapon was denial.  Because it meant their candidates did not command such confidence or trust. He had to be shown, therefore, to be ineffective.

He had to be delegitimized.

In the brawl over the last eight years, perhaps they succeeded on a level not intended. They did not, I think, manage to delegitimize President Obama. Rather, they fulfilled one of Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical dictums and managed to delegitimize the idea of governance.

No, I don’t think that’s what they intended to do, but the fight they engaged was over fundamental principles of the purpose of government. In past fights, it was easier to simply discredit the person in office, either by impugning his reputation or exposing corrupt policies. This time, though, they had neither opportunity, not in any useful way. What policies they attempted to present as corrupt were not.  Some of them were mistakes, some bad ideas, some poorly managed, but none were in any way explicitly corrupt. And the man himself offered nothing to attack.  Even Obama’s detractors, unless they were being programmatically obtuse, could not but respect him.

Which left them only with a fight over principles.

Which they were losing.

Why else adopt a tactic of pure and undifferentiated obstruction?  This became obvious with the nomination of Merrick Garland, who had previously  enjoyed more than a little praise from the very people who then refused to even have hearings about his appointment to the Supreme Court. There was no good reason to do this.  It was purist petulance.  The commitment on the part of GOP senators and representatives to block everything Obama attempted to do had no basis in logic or sound thinking.  It was entirely party driven.  A short-sighted policy to delegitimize Obama’s presidency.

The intent, no doubt, was to show Obama’s philosophy of governance wanting.  That the Democrats, as exemplified by the president, had no good ideas. That based on their success at roadblocking even discussions on his policy measures the Republicans would show themselves as morally and philosophically superior.

The problem is, without that discussion there is no way to know who has the superior governing philosophy.  Ideas need airing, discussion, debate in order to determine their merit.  Instead, the GOP has successfully damaged, possibly destroyed, public trust in governance of any kind, at least at the federal level, for a substantial number of citizens.  By blanket opposition to anything Obama attempted, nothing was shown to be superior—only achievable.  Namely, the inevitable loss of public confidence in government.

They managed to strip the presidency of legitimacy.

They intended to strip Obama of legitimacy.  They failed.  He still retains it.  But he’s leaving office.  It is the office that has been damaged, though public understanding of that fact has probably not caught up with the reality.

What could be more inevitable then that we elect a man who already has no legitimacy to an office that may be badly lacking it?

The idea of legitimacy is a tricky one. It precedes trust. It is an intangible assumption that a person or institution deserves to be entrusted with representational responsibilities, that they are what they appear to be, that their actions, in part and in total, are born out of sound motives and based on confidence in the abilities and competencies required to be present and at the ready. In part, it is a kind of faith that what will be done will be done for the benefit of the community. That even in failure, the attempts to fulfill duties are done in good faith. When all these various implicit characteristics are in place and extant, then trust follows.

Legitimacy underlies all assumptions of power back to the days of kings and pharaohs and other potentates.  It is the reason for such grave concern over lineage and the legal rights of heirs and successors. Because continuity is important, certainly, but the imprimatur of authority must be seen to pass rightfully from one hand to the next in order for chaos to be kept at bay. It is a delicate, powerful thing which, when in place, is hardly thought of but once damaged or absent can be seen as all important. Which explains both why we are now so troubled by possible outside interference with this election and why forms are being so rigorously defended by those who know something is amiss. Why, specifically, the Electoral College did not act in its legal capacity to change its vote in the face of evident misadventure and the clear unsuitability of the president elect—because in the absence of legitimacy in the outcome the legitimacy of the institutions must be protected. Because the office has been damaged in the eyes of the people, a changed vote by the Electors could easily have been the final blow to a marginally creditable system. Barring Trump would be seen as less a decision against a usurper than as one more reason to distrust the system.

I say “usurper” purposefully, though with full admission of the irony implied.

It was usurpation that invented those so-called popular sanctions, those speeches, those monotonous congratulations, the customary tribute that in every age the same men pay, with great prodigality and in almost the same words, to the most contradictory measures. In them, fear apes all the appearances of courage, to congratulate itself on its own shame and to express thanks for its own misfortunes. A peculiar stratagem that deceives no one! A game that impresses no one and that should have succumbed long ago to the arrows of ridicule! But ridicule attacks all and destroys nothing.
Benjamin Constant, On the Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation, 1814

Constant was talking about Napoleon, of course, but consider—Napoleon achieved a position of ultimate power in France with the assent of the people who claimed legitimacy to bestow that power. That Napoleon turned out to be other than what anyone expected made him a species of usurper. He replaced legitimate authority by virtue of pure assertion. That he did so in the wake of the complete loss of legitimacy on the power of the monarchy only underscored the fact that he had no authenticity, only the force of a manufactured popular mandate.

People loved him.

For a while, at least. And when he had been beaten and exiled the first time, the Sisyphean task of recovering legitimacy in a Restoration ran into the reality of a desolated economy and a broken public trust led to a final surge of popular support during his Hundred Days.

Now, a usurper can still do the job, but has the same problem as the delegitimized “rightful” ruler, namely a lack of trust from the people. In this instance, the office is the damaged part, which is why Obama was unable to pass on his still-intact legitimacy to an heir, namely Hillary Clinton. Large segments of the popular base that swept him into office in two historic elections did not stir itself to grant its favor upon her because she had been the one the ongoing attempts to delegitimize Obama had successfully tainted. They could not damage him so they attacked his staff.  The repeated harangue over settled questions served his enemies well, because she was seen finally as corrupt—so corrupt in fact that her corruption was beyond revelation.

Constant again: Usurpation brutalizes a people while oppressing it—accustoms it to trample on what it respected, to court what it despises, to despise itself. And if usurpation manages to endure for any length of time, it actually makes impossible any freedom or improvement after its fall.

The irony in our case, of course, is that the usurpation has been done for the usurper, rather than by him.

When I say that no one who supported him trusts Trump I base this on the immediate and almost desperate sounding apologia that followed on the heels of his election, that he never really meant all the things he said, that he was speaking allegorically or metaphorically, or, more cynically still, that he was only saying those things in order to win and would never actually act on any of it.  Often these apologies are made by people who months before lauded him for plain-speaking, for “saying it like it is,” for being “genuine.”  And again, this was all said with no sense of irony. Wishful thinking, perhaps.  But disturbingly, I think, based on a perception that it didn’t really matter, which suggests either no understanding of what was happening or an admission that all faith in the office had been lost and it was of no consequence who inhabited it.

Of course, the apologies on his behalf also suggest some understanding of how undesirable those things he said actually are. People made excuses for the visiting uncle at Thanksgiving who couldn’t stop telling off-color jokes and wondering why cousin so-n-so had to go an marry someone not of his or her ethnicity. Oh, he doesn’t really mean that, he’s just being, you know—

And no one seems to have the authority, the moral will—the legitimacy—to tell him to leave, or just shut up. Possibly because they see him as a founder of the feast.

This is no surprise in a movement which on the one hand is represented by David Brooks and on the other end by Alex Jones.

The lack of trust manifests among those who must now work with him.  Many stepped up to voice opposition to him during the campaign, but are now backpedaling because they see him as the one who may be useful to them. But while they may be acting as if everything is as it should be, they do not trust him, and may well believe he is not legitimate. They’re stuck, though, because the institutions they have worked so hard to control are in danger of collapse after several decades of sapping, and if they move aggressively to correct what is clearly a mistake they risk losing everything they have worked toward.

In order for a government to work effectively, a certain degree of confidence must be in place that what it does is done legitimately.  The general populace may know some of what goes on, but the entire point of a government is in its function of dealing with things too vast and complex for the average citizen to access, at least in the details. We have to trust that the institutions in place are managed by people who do what they do with a minimum degree of competence and for the benefit of those they represent. When Reagan began his campaign of delegitimizing the very idea of government (“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” August 12, 1986) he put at risk that powerful, fragile trust necessary for a government to function. It has never been a question of criticizing the government—we have always done that, it is part of the very institutions we rely on that we do that—but the very idea that the general will can be legitimately expressed through those institutions that Reagan called into question.

I doubt he intended the results we see now, but this is his true legacy. This is what has become of popular conservatism.+ Whether intended or not, this has been the consequence of the struggle against progressivism.

Conservatism itself has been usurped. It has morphed from a philosophy of preservation and economic and demographic caution to one that simply rejects change. From there it has become dynamically retrograde, identifying a priori change as a viable target, rejected out of hand as having somehow violated conservative prerogatives. Hence the assault on even New Deal concepts which have long become part of the settled landscape of Things To Be Conserved. (The entire movement to privatize as many public programs as possible is part of this. Should they acknowledge the legitimacy of these programs as part of the proper purview of government, they would be forced to admit change as a necessary aspect of their philosophy.)

There is in the current manifestation of the Conservative movement a deeply-nurtured mediocrity.  Partly this is a result of a mangled understanding of the nature of equality, but mostly it stems from a distrust of anything that requires imagination or innovation. The only vision put forth by their best lights is a vague ritual solemnity that masks an avarice without taste and certainly stripped of genuine morality. Form is all and even in that it is only the form of denial.

There is no climate change. There is no viable secularism. There is nothing to evolution. There is no alternative to oil, capitalism, or god.

There is no good progress.

Whether intended or not, this has been the consequence of their struggle against progressivism. Lacking a substantive alternative, they have engaged a battle of labels.  Over time, the things meant by those labels have been abandoned, so we no longer know—possibly on either side—what they mean.  So attempts at restructuring the economic landscape, for instance, to shift the flow of resources to a broader population are labeled Socialist, but what is meant by that within the context of the struggle has nothing to do with socialism.

So what has replaced genuine conservatism is a regressive denial of progress.  Consequently, one method in play to thwart progress is the categorical dismantling of the material and legal scaffolding on which any progress depends for any success.  Like social security. Or voting rights. Progress is not to be trusted.  Therefore the tools and foundations of it must be denied those who would most likely pursue it on behalf of those who would most likely support its use.  The so-called Safety Net must be destroyed so those it allows a degree of comfort and security to move forward cannot affect change.

This philosophy has been ideal for those who have been pouring huge amounts of money into the political process in order to secure for themselves a free field of movement to guarantee their hegemony over resources. The use of money in campaigns may have begun as a tool to support ideas and a representational legitimacy, but as the contest fragmented and the points of focus were lost, it became a means of winning.  When it was no longer clear what winning served, money became the end in itself. Building war chests on the chance that one day there might be a philosophy worth supporting has become endemic to the struggle. Consider the point-free arguments over taxation. We rarely hear clear arguments over what use taxes are to be put, only increasingly strident rhetoric over whether they should even exist.  Meanwhile, borrowing continues, because that feeds private coffers which then pay for more strident anti-tax rhetoric.

Through all this the one thing that is excised from our political life that will be perhaps the final brace to a damaged system is competence. Competence aligned to legitimacy is dangerous to a self-justifying mediocrity.

As I said at the beginning, I did not intend to talk about outside intervention here.  I am concerned with the voters, who have chosen to reward an illegitimate candidate, both by direct ballot and, more importantly, by abstention. The work of delegitimizing our institutions is all but accomplished and this election is proof.  Because popular sentiment became invested not in the office but in the persons involved, to the exclusion of much if not everything else. Once there was a time when it did not matter so much which candidate won, we all trusted that certain basic duties of the office would be fulfilled regardless.# So those who lost grumbled and went home and geared up for the next election and got on with their lives knowing the scaffolding and superstructure was in place.  That the one who won at minimum would fulfill the required functions of the office to the general benefit of the community.  We trusted in the legitimacy of the elected candidate. We could change our mind in four years.

That did not happen this time. One hundred fifty million voters decided there was no legitimacy to be had, so on the one hand keep the competent one out and on the other hand assume a principle aloofness and refuse to participate. Because those who voted for Trump do not trust him. This will become apparent. Nor do they have confidence in the institutions anymore, so why elect someone who would be adept at running those institutions?

They have placed themselves in a mindset that allows for no real alternatives other than the continued deterioration of systems they no longer believe in but hope will not abandon them. We have a crisis of legitimacy.  Worthy candidates will be seen as more a danger than a benefit because making things work to our benefit has been characterized as somehow inimical to our identity.

In a way, we have usurped our own government. In its place will now be a set of forms that will set the stage for a series of convulsions until finally we get past the constraints of our fear.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

*And yes, I acknowledge that voter suppression was an active force in all of this, but ninety million? No, suppression cannot account for even half of that.

+ To be clear, I do not see this movement as legitimately conservative. This is the name they have taken from people who are or were genuine conservative thinkers and who would never have countenanced the circus taking place under their rubric.

#No, I do not mean to suggest there were no differences between candidates, only that regardless who won, which ideology or philosophy became dominant for the duration, the institutions of the country could be depended on to continue and that certain values were held on common by both sides of the political divide.

culture

So What Do We Do Now?

It has been clear for all of the campaign season and is now becoming clearer that Donald Trump should not be president.  He is temperamentally unsuited to the position, he does not have the working knowledge of how things work in a government, and he is wildly unpredictable.  He is also as thin-skinned as they come.

But so what?  He has been elected.  For better or worse, unless something remarkable happens, he will be president for the next four years.

By remarkable I mean any of several possible legal scenarios.

There is a petition circulating to request the Electors of the Electoral College change their vote. This is possible and, as previously noted, not only perfectly legal but one of the reasons the College was established to begin with.  It is also possible Trump will decide this is a bad move for him and resign.  It is questionable whether this would leave Pence in place. After the inauguration, it is possible congress could impeach him.  There is ample in his background that would seem sufficient.

Addressing just one of these, I could suggest that the Electors do something even more remarkable, and that is to nullify their vote entirely.  Give it to no one.  This would likely force a new election.  We would have to do the whole thing over.

I do not believe we have ever had a nominee winning the Electoral vote with such a gap in the popular vote before,  As the ballots continue to be counted, it is clear that among those who actually went to the polls, Hillary Clinton is the winner.  It would be ethical and legal for the College, on December 19th, to change their votes to reflect this reality.  Will that happen?  I rather doubt it.  I do not believe there is sufficient moral fiber extant to take that kind of a position and it may well be that most of them, aligned with Party the way they seem to be, want this.

Which means the elephant is loose in the china shop.  This is going to hurt and hurt a lot.

So what are our options?

It has been suggested we abolish the Electoral College.  It is, however, in the Constitution, so getting rid of it requires a constitutional convention, which means opening the whole thing up to revision.  I personally don’t trust that we have on hand the wisdom to do that.  We see all the time other countries that continually rewrite their constitutions and it rarely ever comes out well.  We might pass a new amendment to nullify it, the way we did with Prohibition, and that would avoid putting the whole thing on the surgeon’s table, but that would also require an enormous consensus across the country, something we’ve been lacking of late.  I don’t think that would work, either.

So here’s a thought.  There is no reason to have the Electoral vote announced at the same time as we’re doing the popular vote tally.  As we are now painfully aware, on that day, the votes just aren’t all in.  Expecting this big complicated mechanism to do all this fairly and honestly in one day may be too much.  Had we not locked in those ballots on the day and waited for the balance of the vote count, we would not have a fait accompli the undoing of which could cause a violent ruction.  Since it is the case that they meet for the final vote on December 19th, we should simply wait till then for any kind of announcement.

There was a time I hated the idea of term limits, but I’m coming around to the notion.  The real damage of this election is in the fact that through negligence and apathy we returned a vast number of incumbents who are set on undoing so much that mitigates the reality that we have been on a course of public pillage which has cost us jobs, savings, security for millions of people who simply do not have the resources to hire the kind of legal help to protect themselves.  Supposedly, that has been the task of our government.  But how can the government do that without some sense of what its constituents want?  We do not vote in sufficient numbers, regularly enough, to place representation in Washington that reflects the reality of our lives.  For whatever reason, Americans have traditionally disliked politics and whenever an excuse presents refuse to participate, even at the most basic level of exercising the franchise.

With that in mind, two things we could change that might make it easier.  First, make election day a national holiday.  That would be simple enough.  Secondly, do what Bernie Sanders suggests, make registration automatic, a birthright.  When you turn 18, you’re registered to vote.

Of course I can see obstacles.  Certain parties have always tried to tie the right to vote to property.  The resistance to things like Motor  Voter registration demonstrates that.  But dammit, that would settle it.  At the time of your majority, you would also receive a federal ID, good for all manner of thing.  If you can’t get to the place to do so, then we should have mobile registration units that will come to you to secure that ID.  I think voter ID laws as they stand are there simply to bar people from voting.  We saw this in Wisconsin in a pronounced way.  So simply make it law that at 18 you are automatically registered to vote and at the same time you receive your federal ID.  In fact, it could be done as part of the whole senior high school process, folded in with yearbook photographs.  Done.  Turning someone with such an ID away from a polling place would then be a violation of federal law.

Another issue is this whole nonsense about third parties.  Here’s a reality.  Third parties have never gained traction in this country.  There are many reasons for this.  Firstly, because it was never intended that there be parties as such, but secondly because we do not create coalition governments as are done in many places where having three, four, even five parties is normal and the winning party must create a government from proportional parts of all parties.  Here, with the winner-takes-call method we have, third parties do little more than muddy already murky waters.

But a more trenchant reason is that the two parties we do have take in and absorb viable third party concepts and people.  One or the other morphs into what becomes effectively a new party.  Which is one reason talking about what either party was like half a century ago is absurd.  There may be some continuity but rarely consistency.

Given that, what I would suggest right now is for Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and Barack Obama to form a coalition to essentially invade one or the other party and begin to transform it in accordance with whatever program they devise between themselves.  We cannot ignore Stein or Johnson or at least not what they represent, they made substantial showings in this election.  But they will never, at this rate, achieve the kind of authority to challenge either major party, certainly not soon enough to do much good.  But by forming a nexus of change within one or the other, they could remake one of the two major parties.  Rather than let it happen as it does by accident, it should be done consciously and directly.  These four represent the chief aspects of what might make a responsive party.  Together, they could be amazing.

Finally, given that we are likely stuck with the situation at hand for the next four years, two more ground level suggestions.  The first, the people in congress are supposed to represent all of us.  Whether you voted for them or not, by law they are still our representatives—our employees, basically.  Treat them that way.  Don’t leave the conversation because they’re not your guy.  Flood their offices with your input.  Tell them what you want.  All the time.  Burn their ears.  They must represent you, that’s how it is supposed to work.  Act toward them as if you had put them there.  You can still work to unseat them and put someone more to your liking in their place, but while they are there make them do their job.

Secondly, since it would seem civics is rarely taught in school anymore, maybe we should start local classes in it to acquaint people with how all this is supposed to work.  Bring the kids.  It has become obvious that too many Americans don’t understand the first thing about the way the government works—or could work if people did their part, which they can’t do if they don’t know how.

We are possibly about to lose a great deal.  We have a government in place that won by a minority of voters.  That is not majority rule it is minority veto.  It may be that such things must happen before we act.  Secession, a Great Depression, the Cold War.  If true, it does not reflect well of us.  The tools are there but we have to turn the dials.

Lastly, there are many people in this last election who were turned away from the polls.  Voter suppression is very real.  But many more just opted out.  They were discouraged, perhaps, by their choices, but that’s simply not good enough.  You play the hand you’re dealt or you end up barred from the game.  Stop waiting to be inspired.  Inspiration is not reason, it is not logic, it is not a substitute for dealing with reality.  It’s not sexy, but when you vote, the fact is you’re hiring an employee to do a job.  The only factors that matter are “Is he/she qualified” and “Do they support the things I support?”  Everything else is a bonus and that merits reelection.  If they fail in their job, your fire them at the next election.  But being swept off your feet by bold rhetoric and substanceless campaign slogans and baseless judgments of “personality” is a sure way to be disappointed—even badly betrayed.  But significantly, keep that in mind—at the end of the day, the president is an employee.  He—or she—works for you.  Handing over your conscience because they dazzle you with promises of brilliance not based on ability or sympathy is irresponsible.

 

 

culture

Electors

Talk is heating up about the possibility that the Electoral College might displace Trump and select Clinton.  I have a couple of thoughts on this.

Firstly, this would be perfectly legitimate.  If you need a historical reference, check Federalist #68, which discusses the electoral college and its purpose. Remember, the United States was formulated as a republic, which is not the same thing as a democracy.  The Founders wanted to keep a firewall between The People and their government.  Over the course of time, we have gotten used to the idea that We The People directly elect our national representatives.  We do not, although it certainly appears that way and most folks can be forgiven for believing otherwise.

As constituted, the Electoral College was to be the final say.  The possibility that someone completely unsuited to the presidency drove the Founders to cautious hedging.  The phrase which no doubt will be oft-quoted in the coming weeks till the Electors meet is this one:

“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States”

What they sought to do was prevent the possibility of a demagogue rising to the highest office, which in many ways seems to have just happened.  But the entire paper is worthy of scrutiny.  for instance:

“It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.”

Historically, there have been instances of individual Electors changing their initial votes. There has never been an instance where the College overturned an election presumably won during the popular election.  Needless to say, occasionally there have been presidents elected by the College who lost the popular vote.  Four times before now.

There are two things to bear in mind in the current situation.  The first is the mood of the country.  We had two unpopular candidates.  One was unpopular for perfectly understandable reasons, namely the things that came out of his mouth during the campaign.  The other was unpopular for a variety of reasons that have to do with public perception and the complex propaganda of her enemies.  Be that as it may, the campaign season has been tainted by an excess of irrationality.  We already saw threats of armed uprising by certain groups should the “wrong” candidate win.  We are now seeing mass protests by people who are profoundly unsettled by the one who presumably did win.  The divide is severe and based now as much on wish-fulfillment and the swift justifications of revisionism as on the perception of looming catastrophe.  And now we are seeing a mounting count of popular votes accruing the presumed loser, far more than can be reasonably explained away by statistical error.

It would seem a good time for the Electoral College to exercise its legal authority.

But at what risk?  Civil War?  Riot, certainly.

Which leads directly to the second point.  The Republican Party controls both houses of congress and several high-ranking members have already stated they will oppose anything and everything Hillary Clinton might do, basically a continuance of their stance toward Obama.  What point is there, then, in handing her the election by way of an arcane and untested method if for four years she will be required to do nothing but dodge political bullets, worry over impeachment, and be thwarted at every turn?  As it now stands, she’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.  Had there been any turnover in congress to increase the Democratic presence, it might be worth a shot.

I’m asking questions here not proposing solutions.  We have made someone the Principle who clearly cannot do the job.  We have elected exactly the kind of person the Founders sought to guard against by establishing the Electoral College.  The question is, if they act how will that much change the next four years.

Something to think about.

 

 

culture

47

The number will make sense presently.

It’s Friday. I’ve spent the last few days trying to process what happened Tuesday. It is not going well. I’m angry, frightened, and more than a little disgusted by the fact that we allowed Donald Trump to be elected president. I’m a cynic most days, an optimist forced by reality to concede that the world is perhaps more malign than not.  But I’m also, marginally, an intellectual. By that I mean someone who deals with that reality by trying to understand it and make it cogent. By looking at things through the lens of causality, knowing that events are products, usually of combinations of factors no one person can see. So when the inexplicable happens, I do my best to analyze it and find the underlying drivers. This is how I am able to walk out my door every morning and conduct my life.

It is clear from everyone’s reactions that no one expected this, least of all Trump.  I think he was planning his next reality show, Real Losers of Presidential Races.  For that reason among many others, I do not believe he is even remotely prepared for the unsortable mess he is about to be required to deal with. As for the country, well, we’ve been playing with this idea that a “businessman” might be a good president. We’re about to find out.

What concerns me even more is the vast ocean of Red that now controls the country.  If Trump’s election was some kind of protest against establishment Washington, it failed, because most of the incumbents kept their seats.  So clearly there was only one office this vote was aimed at.  I’ve been saying to anyone interested in my opinion that possibly the more important part of this election was Congress.  Well, clearly no one listens to me.

Why am I so pessimistic about this election?  Because the ideology in control of this majority is contrary to everything I thought we were trying to build.   I can’t think of one thing these people want to do that will be good for anyone but the rich.  And actually I don’t think it will be very good for them in the long run, either.

Trump has sided with congressional Republicans in a desire to repeal what they persistently misname Obamacare.  There are people who have been hurt by this law, yes.  But there are many, many others who for the first time in their lives had access to meaningful healthcare.  Those millions will lose that unless what the Republican Party intends to do is simply expand MediCare to cover them.  That is not in their playbook.  They are committed to a policy that you should pay for your life yourself, that it is not the government’s job to make your life easier or better, even if the condition of your life is a consequence of government policy in the first place.  So the ACA gets repealed, insurance companies start voiding existing policies which are not profitable, healthcare costs resume their precipitous rise, and in a few years people start dying from treatable and often preventable illnesses that they might have avoided had they had the resources.  The pharmaceutical industry will once again gouge people, their profits will once more soar to ridiculous heights, and the poor will go begging.

Trump wants to “do something” about immigration. What he and apparently the majority of GOP congressional members mean by that involves mass deportations, stricter rules for visas, green cards, guest worker permits, etc, and punitive restraints against countries which have a problem with drug cartels running roughshod over them and making life hell for people trying to make a living, which is why they’re coming here in the first place.  We do not recognize “life under threat from a drug dealer” to be a legitimate form of persecution, so the drug war, which we fund, puts all these countries and their citizens in a bind which we refuse to take responsibility for.  Medium-sized businesses here that presently rely on guest workers (which is a good portion of the agricultural industry not owned by Archer Daniels Midland and the like) will find themselves stripped of a labor force they to date have had a difficult if not impossible time replacing with Americans who can’t afford to live on seasonal work at low wages. Other examples abound.  This will also mean deporting children and young people born here but never naturalized who have never known any other country.  In essence if not status they are Americans, but no matter.  Their “documents” are not in order.

Trump wants to produce jobs, “big league.”  Obama will be leaving office after presiding over seven years of the largest private sector jobs growth since the end of the Vietnam War (which is very relevant, that date), but Trump and the GOP act as if nothing has changed since 2008.  If you are one of those still underemployed or out of work, maybe Obama’s record makes no difference to you.  But it should.  The usual method of pumping up jobs numbers, employed by both parties but much indulged in recent times by the very Republican administrations who vowed to shrink the size of the government, has been to increase federal jobs and supply grants to states for state jobs.  These are not stable jobs because they depend on funding tools that are also unreliable given the recent push to cut spending and cut taxes.  Obama has reduced the deficit, which will rise if President Trump opts to pump money into infrastructure programs in order to produce those jobs.  If he intends to stick to the GOP pledge to cut taxes even further, that means he will have to borrow the money, which will increase the debt again. We don’t have much wiggle room there after the catastrophic policies of the Bush years.  We’re going to be bouncing up against 100% of GDP and then, Katy-bar-the-door if we have another recession because there will simply be no relief.  Trump has a track record of borrowing and defaulting.  He cannot default on this kind of debt, so the question will be,. what then?

But I can get behind a push to invest in infrastructure.  We need it badly.  What I cannot get behind is the continued refusal to address the extraction of capital out of our economy by way of a tax cut program that sees even more money sucked into the coffers of Big Business and out of the country.  You can’t increase spending AND cut taxes forever.  Eventually you reach the point where the mule dies.  (Old joke, the farmer who tries to train his mule to work on less and less food over time, until one day the mule keels over dead and he doesn’t understand why.)

I will say this again.  I know people don’t like taxes, but it’s largely reflexive.  They fail repeatedly to understand whose taxes are supposed to go up.  Coupled with the fact that to make up for what states are not getting from the federal government anymore, local taxes have to rise, the blame is universal.  People want services, but they don’t want to pay for them.  As services deteriorate due to lack of funds, they complain when a tax increase is sought which is intended to bring those services back up to par.  It’s a vicious circle of misapprehension.

Taxes are one of the surest tools to fix capital in a community.

Be that as it may, let us go on.

Why did people vote for Trump?  We don’t have to dig far to understand that by his own words he is a misogynist, a racist, someone who sees no problem contradicting himself, a liar, what we used to call a demagogue.  The projections for the election gave him a very low chance of winning. What happened?

A combination of things.  People wanted someone not a Washington “insider.”  Whatever that means.  No, I know what it’s intended to mean, but then why did they send all their incumbents back?  But Trump is not an insider, so there is that.

A certain segment of the population has been chafing under what they derisively term Political Correctness for decades.  It’s like having your table manners constantly corrected.  Why can’t I haver as baseball team named after Native Americans?  Why does that make me “culturally insensitive?” It’s just baseball.  And why do I have to adjust a lifetime of rote understanding to accommodate a biological male using the girls’ bathroom at my daughter’s high school?  And why are you still making me feel bad about slavery 150 years after it ended?  And why can’t I whistle at a pretty woman on the street?

Why do I have to change everything I’ve always taken for granted because someone I don’t know has gotten their feelings hurt?

Of course it’s more complicated than that, but for many it amounts to that level of anger.  They want to be who they are and not be criticized for it.

Unfortunately, this includes a host of less trivial-sounding factors, like reflexive distrust of anyone who doesn’t look like them, talk like them, think like them, or go to church like them.  These are not harmless traits, as we have seen.  Racism, nativism, intolerance, protectionism, all aided and abetted by a thick strain of anti-intellectualism which manages to include antagonism toward expertise, toward science, toward any kind of reasoning that calls into question who they are.

Added to that, we have people who have adopted a political view akin to religious dogma.  Hillary is a criminal.  No matter that she has been investigated, questioned, and cleared on every charge for decades.  FOX news or Rush Limbaugh told them.  This is holy.  They will not be dissuaded because if they have this wrong then everything they believe, everything they are, is wrong, and then what?  It took them years to acquire the veneer of informed opinion, they have neither the time or the capacity to undo all that armchair work.

Then there are people who truly believe the federal government is nothing but evil, just by virtue of existing, and they may feel that this is a good chance to see it crippled.  The instances of militia groups declaring armed uprisings should Hillary win are examples.

Some people are so enamored of money that anyone with more than seven figures to their name is automatically worthy of respect if not outright admiration.

Finally, there are those who simply cannot get past the idea of a woman in charge.  For them, it wouldn’t have mattered who it was.  I doubt Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin would have gotten their vote.

It may also be that, Americans being traditionally contrarian, a sizeable number of voters resented being told that Hillary was a shoe-in.  We still retain a perverse affection for the underdog—I say perverse because we don’t seem very consistent on who that may be.  When some CEO raking in hundreds of millions of dollars on bonuses complains about the cruel regulations placed on his company can successfully pose as a persecuted underdog, we may have a problem with understanding what that word actually is intended to describe.  Be that as it may, I wouldn’t doubt that a significant fraction of those who voted for Trump did so out of a misplaced sense of fairness.

Which brings me to the number.  47.  That would be 47%.  According to some polls, that is the percentage of people who did not vote.  Ninety million, more or less. I suspect the odds are good that the overwhelming majority of them would probably have voted against Trump.  Since this has been the case in the past, I’m going to assume it to be true. Hillary did win the popular vote.

Liberal apathy.

Oh, certainly a lot of them stayed home because they didn’t get to vote for Bernie Sanders.  “I didn’t get my candidate so I’m not going to vote at all!”  I have zero respect for this.  For many reasons, but just look at what you have done to the rest of us if that’s your reasoning.  Because if so, you not only left us with Trump, you were also instrumental in all those GOP incumbents going back to Congress.  You have damaged us with your petty snit.  “If I can’t have chocolate ice cream, I don’t want any!”

But there are many others who saw the projections and decided they didn’t need to go vote because Hillary was a shoe-in.  Despite the fact that she told you not to rely on those polls.  But even if that were the case and she was a shoe-in and she had won, the fact that you also didn’t vote to oust the Republican majority would have meant four years of the kind of grinding gridlock Obama has been through.  This was irresponsible.

47% of you decided to have no say in the future of your country and by your absence you have left us with what may turn out to be the most devastating administration since—

I won’t say.  You have no sense of history.  You don’t understand the concept of voting strategically.  I can only conclude that you are either selfish or lazy.  Either way, you will learn the price of abstaining.  As will we all.

I’m not criticizing people who voted third party.  They voted.  They acted responsibly.

So thank you for your nonparticipation.  The subsequent state of the country can be laid in large part at your feet.  You have, by your absence, shot us all in the face.

This is, in my experience, a liberal problem.  I remember back in the Sixties, when the country was in comparable disarray, how the Left began to hate liberals.  It seemed to many that the Left was a monolith, and subsequently all of them were painted with the same brush and labeled Liberal.  Liberal bashing has been a hallmark of the Republican Right since Reagan took office,  but really the GOP should be grateful to liberals, because they are so uninvolved.  There are likely many reasons for this, but the big one I have noticed is that liberals don’t seem to have any staying power.  They attack a cause, work to solve the problems, often overcome obstacles and put reforms in place.  Things change.  And then a curious thing happens.  They go home.  They leave the field.

In a way, this is understandable and very American.  For them, politics is a grimy, necessary chore that must be attended to in order to have the time, the space, and the freedom to do all the other things in life worth doing.  We should be able to solve the damn problem and be done with it.  Finished.  Now there are Other Things.  They assume the fix is done and we can go about our lives.

The Right has been like that as long as there was a status quo few people complained about.  But that hasn’t been the case since the Korean War.  So the Right does what it does.  For many of them, this is religion.  They fight, they stay, they don’t go home.  So when the liberal left decides it has won and does go home, the conservatives are still there, working to undo everything they don’t like.  That has been happening since 1980, consistently, and it is time liberals learned this lesson.  You can’t assume problems stays fixed.

Whatever the base cause, the fact remains that, at least for me, everything I like about this country is under attack by people who, for a variety of reasons, don’t like what progress has brought them.  In my opinion, they have bought the argument that it is not rich people taking everything not nailed down that is hurting them but all the people who have benefited from the totality of a civil rights movement that has not yet finished its work.

I still believe we can make a pretty good world.  But we have to collectively get over the idea that unrestrained acquisition is the only valid metric of success.

But you people who stayed home and left us with this mess? Read between the lines.

 

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Endorsement

With only a couple weeks now till the election, I’ve decided to make it plain (if i I haven’t already) that I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton.

I have a number of reasons for doing so, some of which are not quantifiable, but if I may I’d like to state a few of them.

First off, she is opposed, disrespected, and outright hated by all the right people. Her list of detractors is a grocery list of those I would like to see ousted from their own positions in government. This includes people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, Representative Issa, and just about every firebreathing Tea Party moron who has been miring the workings of my government in the muck of intransigence like a child refusing to eat their vegetables for far too long.  Given their records, if Hillary Clinton bothers them, then I’m voting for her.  This extends to the entire Republican establishment which made it their number one priority eight years ago to simply block and impede everything President Obama tried to do, for no good reason.  Try as I might I can find no justification for this other than petulance. If you aren’t willing to play the game you do not get to set the rules.

This has cost us as a nation.

Secondly, while I have been lukewarm about her for years, this past year I have come to respect her.  She’s tough, smart, and by virtue of the relentless vetting she has undergone at the hands of a congressional majority determined to ruin her has apparently been demonstrated to be not only less corrupt than one might wish to believe but also one of the more honest candidates we’ve had.  As to her criminality, the fact—the galling fact to many of those in my first category—is that if she were guilty of something we would know it by now and she would be under indictment.  They have tried.  They have spent multiple tens of millions, wasted months of public time, scoured, probed, intimidated, and otherwise made a nuisance of themselves in service of destroying—

Destroying what?

Apparently (and thirdly) a woman they fear. A woman.  I know there is another woman running for office, but in the course of this last year I have come to feel that Jill Stein is not capable of managing the office.  Her understanding, for one thing, of international finance and even basic economics seems lacking.  While she opposes many things I also oppose I do not see her as someone who could do a damn thing about any of it, not just because both parties would be disinclined to work with her but because she doesn’t show to me the requisite comprehension of the complexities of the problems.  She’s not being attacked much by the major parties because she is not a viable contender, but if she were then they would be going after her for the simple fact that, like Hillary, she is a woman. (Which means they would not bother discussing the issues, it would all be personal attack.)

(Years ago Phyllis Schlafly endorsed a woman for president—Michelle Bachman.  Demonstrating that she was less interested in the historic meaning of having a woman as president as she was in wrecking the legitimacy of the idea.)

Like Obama, I believe the bulk of the antipathy toward Hillary Clinton is in her failure to be a white male.

Yeah, I do think on a gut level, for many of her detractors, that’s about it. First a black man and now a woman. A woman!  Good gosh, what will the world think of us?  As far as I’m concerned, it’s about time.  She’s qualified.  Her lack of the appropriate genitalia should not be a factor.  But for some, it is. It will be.  If they’re in congress, they must go.  We need to get past this nonsense.

Fourthly, given her range of experience, I believe she will be best able to steer this ship that is our country through the reefs of the next several years quite ably.  Not, perhaps, spectacularly, but we don’t need that.  Spectacular has drawbacks. I’d like to bank on competence.  That’s what I’ve liked about Obama.  Say what you will, he has not wrecked us.  We’re coming out the end of his term better than when he began.  No, not for everyone, and for certain not without mistakes, gaffs, and bad calls along the way, but I believe we are in a better position to face the future now than we would have been under either of his opponents.  I have no desire to have that derailed by handing over the wheel to a berserker.

Which brings me to Five.  She is not Trump.  If ever there was a clear distinction between two candidates, this is it.  Aside from the meanness he has elicited in his base, he has a pitiful grasp of government, he has been a blatant hypocrite, a consistent liar, and a demagogue.  I don’t believe you can call him an ideologue because I can’t discern a cogent ideology, unless it’s narcissism.  But above and beyond all that, I do not believe he will Be There.  I believe he will get quickly bored and leave it all to his vice president.  We’ve seen a bit of what that can lead to (Cheney) and Pence is an ideologue, on par will all those in my first category, and I am weary of them.  But Trump will quickly tire of the innate difficulties of managing an office he doesn’t understand.  I believe this is why he has failed at so many of his well-touted business ventures.  He has no staying power.

Hillary Clinton does have staying power.

Finally (Six) at least publicly she supports many things I support.  Her statements on policy are consistent with many of my preferred positions.  I need not recount them here, I think. Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time should know.  Yes, there are some things that trouble me.  But I will still back her rather than risk destroying the country.

That has often been part of the hyperbolic campaign rhetoric of many campaigns, but this is the first time I’ve felt it had some legitimacy.  Trump’s assertion that he will virtually eliminate corporate taxes should surprise no one—he will directly benefit—but it will, under present circumstances, put us in such a hole that we might never climb out of it, effectively transforming the United States into the richest third world nation on the planet.  The poverty, the collapse of infrastructure, the ruin of any and all safety nets will tear us apart.

I know people don’t like taxes.  But for once we have to stop thinking of them as some kind of penalty.  Taxation, at its most basic, is the best and surest way to secure capital in the country.  That’s why we were able to build the strongest economy in history during a time when the top marginal tax rates were north of 80%.  Even the private sector did better because the money was  here, not free floating in some vague transnational pool of capital under no nation’s control.

Anyway, there’s my endorsement.

Since I’m in Missouri, I’m also throwing in my support for Jason Kander for senate and Chris Koster for governor.  Both of their opponents hold positions antithetical to my own.  It’s that simple.  I do not agree with either Roy Blunt or Eric Greitens.

Maybe now there will be no more political posts from me till after November 8th.  Maybe.  We’ll see.

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Trump Card

Just a couple of thoughts.  We’ve been hearing for months, here and there, how Donald Trump might be a trojan horse placed by the Democrats to discredit the Republican Party.  That, presumably, a deal was done between The Donald and Hillary to run the most absurd campaign and make her look like the only viable choice.  Not a bad idea for a potboiler political thriller.  And the closer to the election we get, some variation of that idea is making more sense.

However.  Despite what pessimists might say, the American electoral landscape is not really that controllable.  And any such actual plan would long since have been discovered and revealed.  You can’t keep something like that secret for this long.  Someone will know and will tell.  Just because that’s how things roll here.

But it’s not at all unlikely that some kind of a deal was done inside the GOP involving Trump.

Given the roster of candidates taking the field last year, what is perfectly plausible is that Trump was invited—maybe not even formally—to throw his hat in the ring.  Be a Republican candidate. It would have been easy to tickle his vanity and get him to do it.

Why?

Because he’s a known berserker.  We all know The Donald.  He could stand up there and say things none of the others could and make them look like rational choices by comparison.  Good cop bad cop.  When you look at the row of right wing crazy that was running—people dedicated to deregulation, tax breaks for the wealthy,  bigger military build-up, gutting healthcare reform, reinforcing corporate personhood, using immigrants as strawman threats against labor, natavism, anti-civil rights, security state wonks, anti-science pro-fundamentalist christian, nothing but a bucket of bad news for working class people—they needed, or thought they would benefit from, having someone who could draw attention away from all that by standing up there and being all the things Trump has been all along.  The others would look civil, thoughtful, responsible.  We would overlook their basic anti-egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism and, in some cases, their anti-humanitarianism, choose one of them, and clear the field for a fistfight they thought they could win with Hillary.  Or Bernie.

It went pear shaped very quickly.  They lost control of their candidate.

And the problem was they couldn’t really contradict him without making themselves vulnerable by their records, because Trump has not said a thing policy-wise that they had not all said, only in “nicer” terms.  He didn’t contradict one policy plank.  All he did was strip away the shiny so we could see the ugly underneath.

And they lost control.  Is this possible?

It’s happened before.  Back in the late Seventies the GOP courted the fundamentalist christian community, which till then had been traditionally apolitical.  They went in, backed a guy named Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, invited them into the tent to participate, made them promises about returning the country to a christian moral code (as defined by them, of course). It was a very cynical move because they clearly never intended to follow through on those promises.  All they wanted was a kind of religious fifth column that would stir up the conservative base and get out the votes.  It took longer, but they lost control of them.  By the Nineties they had morphed into neocons and eventually gave birth to the Tea Party.  That traditionally apolitical group got a taste for power politics and took matters into their own hands and look at the mess we have now.  The Republican Party lost control.

And a lot of sane, responsible, decent Republicans lost elections or just left the field, unwilling to mix it up with the fanatics.

The GOP grew this faction from a bean and it has now lurched into the field flailing against anything that is not consistent with—

Well, that’s part of the problem.  The Party apparatus itself knows that if it comes right out and says what the goals really are they could lose and lose bigtime.  By actions if not words it has been clear for a long time they want an oligarchy.  They don’t trust the average American, who may be too concerned with taking care of his or her family and might vote for things which will remove power from the privileged classes.  You can argue if you want, but just follow the money—and the jobs—and the voting records of those who have enabled the decimation of the middle class and the empowerment of the corporate elite.

But now the Party apparatus has a bigger problem—the frightened mob they have nurtured since 1976 has turned into a mindless mass of terror-driven reactionaries, poorly educated, selfish, and aggressively anti-progressive.  And they have lost control of that mob.

Which voted for the guy who was never supposed to get the nomination.

Now the rest of us have a problem.  Trump is not only uncontrollable by the GOP, his supporters are beginning to sound like those fifth columnists the religious right was supposed to be. Except they aren’t talking about voting conscience—as far as I can tell, they don’t have one—but about taking up arms if Hillary wins.

And some of the GOP stalwarts are doubling down.  McCain declaring that the Republicans will block all supreme court nominees made by Clinton is nothing but an attempt to appease that mob who seem to want no government rather than one they can’t understand.

They’re all complaining now that this isn’t what they intended, that they can’t support Trump, they never meant for this—

I’m reminded of the film Judgment At Nuremberg, in which Spencer Tracy plays a justice on the war crimes court, hearing the case of a German jurist, played by Burt Lancaster.  At the end, Lancaster tells Tracy “We never meant for it to go so far.” To which Tracy responds, “Sir, it went that far the first time you sentenced an innocent man.”  Or something to that effect.  One could say to those now-chagrined and embarrassed GOP apparatchits claiming they never intended this:  “It went this far the first time you placed party over country.”

We have a few weeks till the election. I don’t think there’s much else to say.  We have a choice between progress and destruction.  I believe that, no hyperbole intended.  The destruction has been coming for a long time.  Presidential election aside, we must expunge that mob of deplorables from the halls of power.  Maybe Hillary had to apologize for that, but she was right.  They are the worst aspects of our nature and—I’ll say it—too stupid to know how stupid they are.  But that’s not their fault.  They’ve been succored on the milk of ignorance by a cynical party machine that is now about to choke on its own poisons.

Vote.  Vote congressional seats.  Right now they’re as if not more important than who ends up in the oval office.

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New Look

Maybe I should have waited till January, but then again maybe I’ll change the theme again then. But I was starting to get bored with the old one and decided that–because I’m older now, but why that should matter I don’t know–it was time for a new look.  This one has sliding images on the header.  I grabbed a couple at random but I’ll likely change those at some point.

This has been a fascinating year. My boss asked me–because I’m older–if I’d ever witnessed an election cycle this bizarre.

No.

Contentious, yes. Clownish, surreal, weird–no. It’s been suggested that you’d have to go back to Lincoln’s election to find one even close to this in unpredictably oddball strangeness, and that’s a good contender, what with the near-demise of the Democratic Party as it split into three smaller parties, the Know Nothings, variations of fence-sitters, nativist groups, and the odd prediction of the apocalypse. Note that the Democratic Party of that time would have been the functional equivalent–even the philosophical equivalent–of the current Republican Party.

1968 was the first presidential year in which I had any kind of political awareness, and that was a bad one.  We had Wallace running a third party ticket based on the assertion that there was no real difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties (it would end up being a race between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, after an assassination and a steamroll over McGovern), but he himself was a nativist bigot who would most closely resemble the governor of Maine these days.

Nixon won on the promise of ending the Vietnam War (he didn’t, at least not fast enough for most of the country) and to “bring us together again”–which he also didn’t because he turned out to be a paranoid misanthrope.  I wonder how many people who had voted for him wished they’d gone with Humphrey, even though he had some baggage as well.  In 1972, Nixon was challenged by Edmund Muskie, who was a decent man who might have turned the country around, but the RNC ran a smear campaign highlighting his wife’s problems with depression.  As I say, Muskie was a decent man and withdrew rather than put his family through what he correctly perceived as a new level of nastiness.  You can probably trace it from there how our campaigns have become obsessed with the personal and have lost all sense of decency and decorum.  Carter may well have been our last decent president from the old school of national politics.

It is possible, though I do not expect it, that we may be able to alter the way we conduct politics.  It has reached a new low this time with a candidate who embodies all the worst aspects of the vulgar side of the American character.  People support him because they are getting off on being able to be rude, sexist, racist, and basically what they mistakenly see as open and honest.  Trump has elevated the idea that trash sitcoms are the highest form of national philosophy.  He’s a one-man roadshow based on Three and a Half Men and Sh*t My Dad Says.

And we have come to see what happens when people decide they have “won” the field and go home.  I’ll leave everyone to sort out who I’m talking about.  I’ll add that clearly the mean-spirited, compulsively frightened element of the Far Right were the ones who did NOT go home and today we see the results of their taking the field.  The Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, Alex Jones, Breitbart, Limbaugh…

I’ve unfriended a few people on Facebook over this.  First time since I’ve been on it I have preemptively done so, because I just get so weary of the mindless toxicity that shows up on my feed from them.  One in particular galled me by completely failing to make a distinction between fiction and personal opinion.  Maybe all of them, but one in particular decided that since J. K. Rowling had written about ugly things she had no standing to condemn the ugliness in real life.

I suppose one of the things that has bothered me more than maybe it should is the upsurge of people who don’t seem to understand the meaning of personal choice when it comes to sex.  I didn’t expect Rush Limbaugh to understand it and it didn’t surprise me when he came out condemning Consent.  But so many other people who ought to know better…

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’ve known people who seemed to think that if a woman decided to have a sex life on her own terms it meant she should be willing to fuck anyone who comes along, indiscriminately.  I thought there were fewer of them and I’ve been dismayed at how many women seem to think that way.  But it makes one thing abundantly clear, that no matter what else you might think about Hillary’s relationship with Bill, there was no way she could have divorced him and have the remotest chance of becoming president.  Because people are that petty.

Now, it may well be a divorced man might have just as much trouble, but I doubt it.

Anyway, we have a bit over three weeks till the election.  I’ll make one prediction: the fallout from all this weirdness is going to cling to our political landscape for months if not years.

And since Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize, it seems appropriate to end this post with…

The changes they are a-coimin’.

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Why We Need To Teach Civics

Listening to the debates, not between the candidates but among the potential voters, it becomes clear that for many the workings of our government are a thing of deep mystery and frustratingly obscure. Donald hammered on Hillary repeatedly that in 30 plus years in office she had an opportunity to “do something” about certain issues and she did nothing.

She was a senator and then she was secretary of state.

Neither position affords anyone the power to just “do something” about any damn thing they want.

While morality may not be relative, politics is entirely so.  The problem is this:  you have a hundred people in a room who have been given a problem to solve.  There’s perhaps a right way to solve it, there are certainly wrong ways, and then there’s what each individual wants.

How do you simply “do something” in that situation?

Let’s compound it. Each of those hundred people is working with another set of probable conflicts. There is what he or she believes ought to be done, then there is what the people they represent want done, and then there is what she or he feels can be done.  Each one brings this bag of writhing conflict to the room and the task is to work with the other ninety-nine, each of whom has the same set of problems, to find a solution to the problem.

This is the fundamental nature of representative democracy.

In a word, it is impossible.  It is the human equivalent of asking the centipede how it manages to walk.

And yet.

Add to this the frustration of the constituency, each individual and group of individuals has a different set of desires.  They harangue their representatives to “do something” and get angry when nothing or, worse, the “wrong” thing gets done. Now yet another concern is heaped on top of all the others for the people in that room—keeping their job.

It’s amazing anything happens at all.

And despite what they may tell you, this happens in business, too.  All those moving parts have to be coordinated and, often—because they’re attached to people—assuaged.  So no, a Ross Perrot, a Mitt Romney, or a Donald Trump cannot magically step into this with their “business experience” and suddenly end the deadlocks and solve the problems.  Their “experience” ought to tell them this.  For one, they can’t actually fire the people they have to work with in congress.

If Trump’s accusations that Hillary “did nothing” when she had the chance have any resonance with voters it is because, I suspect, too many voters don’t understand the nature of the country in which we live.  Hillary tried to explain that she worked on several of those things, but if she can’t get people—many of whom in the last several years have publicly committed themselves to blocking any proposal that comes out of either the Obama White House or the Democratic side of the aisle—to go along with her proposals, just what do people think she could do?

That she has accomplished what she has is a minor miracle.

I received civics in grade school. We had to sit through it.  It was boring.  It used to be what was called social studies, which later seemed to morph into some kind of social psychology joined to history tracks instead of a study of how government is organized.  Probably it is taught in some schools still, but it seems not to be as a matter of course.

It’s why so many people are afraid a sitting president can take guns away from people or remove the Second Amendment.  A president can’t do that.  Just can’t.

But worse, it’s why so many people seem to not understand why their personal prejudice can’t be made law.

Frustration can be a driving force for a solution, though.  It seems that public frustration with the intractability we’ve endured in our politics is reaching a zenith and we may be about to witness an historic turn-over.

Ever since Reagan named government as the biggest problem we have there has been a tumor growing in the belly of our civil systems.  He was flat wrong.  Perhaps he was speaking in metaphor—he was an actor, after all, psychodrama depends on metaphor—but if so he delivered it with a straight face that appealed to the impatience everyone feels from time to time at the squabble in that room. With the benefit of the doubt, I believe he would be appalled at the consequences of his rhetoric.  We built the strongest nation in history through government, for good or ill, so just how much of a problem was it?  Depends on where you stand when you ask that question.

Because politics is relative.  Compromise is essential.

But I suspect a lot of people don’t actually know what compromise is.  You can’t tear down the bridge and then blame the other guy for not crossing the divide.

It might be useful to remember that the work in question is never “done” but is an ongoing, daily struggle.  Out of it we find a way.  But you can’t circumvent the process just because you think you’re right.  If you are, that will become evident over time.

We might want to remember that.  Civics.  The earlier the better.

culture

What Grabs You

So The Donald was caught on tape saying something egregious about what he wants to do with women.  This has caused much ire among those in his party of choice.  Not most of the other egregious things he has said, alleged, alluded to, implied, or otherwise allowed to exit from his mouth.  We have witnessed basically a year-long example of escalating reaction not to the content of his pronouncements but to the manner of their expression.

Paul Ryan has weighed in with an egregious bit of condescension of his own which adds to the evidence that he is a “classic” conservative who seems not to Get It.

As bookends showcasing the problem they could not be more apt.

The basic privilege the self-appointed “ruling class” has always tried to keep to itself is just this—that they are allowed, by virtue of their own money and power, to treat those not in the club any way they choose.  The whole idea of equality and respect is anathema to one of the main reasons they act and think as they do.  Trump is spilling the secrets of the inner sanctum by speaking the way he does.  He is being supported by people who have long chafed under the requirements to matriculate from the high school locker room.

So why is what Ryan said just more of the same?

Mr. Ryan said:  “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.”

Now, on its face you might see nothing wrong with that statement.  But remember, this is coming from a man who has consistently opposed women’s right to self-determination where it conflicted with his conception of morality.  (To be clear, he never actually said “rape is just another vector of conception.”  But he made it clear that he has a moral and ethical framework which would demote women’s ability to determine life choices to secondary status in the case of unwanted pregnancy)

This suggests that he sees women as having a role to fill.  A role which under certain circumstances supersedes their position as individuals.

Women are to be championed and revered…

Why?  Because they can’t champion themselves? And how do you revere something without putting it in a special category? Reverence is akin to a religious appreciation.  We can revere life but it becomes trickier to revere an individual without bringing to bear expectations that merit such reverence.  The first—life—is a concept not a person.  It’s easy to revere ideas, beliefs, works of art.  These are not people, they are categories of object.  People are revered only when they are removed from the daily grime of actual living. Saints are never made so until they are dead and for good reason.  A person cannot—nor should—fulfill the expectations of such status.  And it is not a status one seeks but one that is imposed.

Women are not objects of reverence.  He contradicts himself in the next phrase, “not objectified.”

This is the problem at the center of this whole issue, which is difficult to parse for some folks.

And the reason that what Ryan is saying is not much better than what Trump says.  Only different.

Trump is saying out loud what has been implicit in a certain mindset among self-styled “conservatives” for a long time.  They want their privilege.  They want things made available to them and denied to the general public, because these things constitute the trappings of power.

Not all of them pushing this program.  Some, I suspect, are just neurotic and insecure.  Trump is neither.  Ryan is just shallow.  But the arrogance of a Trump has found a home in the shallow waters of what has become conservative philosophy.

Other Republicans, in response to Trump’s comments, have opted for the word respect, but given the repeated, consistent assault on women’s health care options, the concerted opposition to equal rights legislation, the open misogyny toward female politicians, and the general inability to understand the driving essence of the women’s movement for, well, forever, these pronouncements carry little weight outside the fact that they fear for their privilege because a loudmouth is talking out of school.  They want to impose a style of respect on women that will push the real issues back into the box wherein they’ve been residing all along.  These same people have had many gracious and pleasant and approving things to say about the late Phyllis Schlafly and given her quite unvarnished statements about what she thinks women (of a certain class, of course) ought to do rather than try to live lives of personal fulfillment, I take their repudiation of Trump for what it is—an attempt to put the lid back on that box.  From time to time many of them have said things about women that demonstrate a vast disconnect—lack of understanding and lack of empathy and a total disregard for women as people.

They like women to be objects of reverence.  Why can’t they just climb back up on that pedestal where they “belong” and smile?

I don’t want to beat up too much on them, because I also believe that they believe they’re speaking from conscience.  I just wish they had taken the trouble to examine that conscience a few decades ago, before they laid the groundwork for someone like Trump, who has yet to say one thing that has not been part of the conservative playbook since Goldwater displaced liberal Republicans and started us on this road in 1964.  They only say these things in well-turned, polite, and convoluted ways so the average person won’t understand that they basically want to turn this country into a “gentlemen’s club” where they can get what they want without having to respect those who are expected to provide them their services.