Good to see you guys on here. Wish I’d kept up the blogging, but work steamrolled me for months on end, so I had to quit. Now that the election’s over, I thought I’d post these perhaps overly granular ideas here.

I posted on Twitter about this, under my other alias — OK, my real name — and might also do so on my other blog and FB page. So maybe the Mister Jones mask is slipping. But fuck it.

Lurking around FB, etc., I’m seeing people — HRC supporters, like me, feeling crushed and angry — saying stuff about “the red states”: how shockingly many there turn out to be, how the red states suck, and should be ashamed, have betrayed the country, how these people will now refuse to even travel to Ohio or Pennsylvania, how horrifying it is to learn how vast and monolithic the hatred is, etc.  . . .

This is one of the many things that I hate. The goddamned Electoral College.

That’s the map these people are looking at, of course: the Electoral College map. And despite being generally “college educated,” they don’t seem to get what it does and doesn’t show about political feeling throughout the country.

I’m amazed to find that because the EC — touted on news-TV because it’s so easy, the map so fun to fill in — generally awards a totality of electoral votes to whoever gets the majority of popular votes in a state, these upset people — and believe me, I feel the upset — think Ohio, say, is in essence monolithically right-wing and California, say, is deeply liberal. And because these people are, in fact, coastal elites, they also deduce that mainly only the embattled coasts voted for Clinton in this election. Most of the rest of the country thus becomes that vast, “red,” monolithic heart- and hinterland out there, shockingly bigger and more hostile to liberal and progressive ideas, to women, to immigrants, than anyone could have thought, and just generally a good place to stay away from.

Which of course only worsens the devastating problem that liberalism already faces: many ordinary Americans believe, with plenty of justification, that coastal elites look down on them and want to push them around. Hence, in part, and in its worst form yet, Trumpism.

But if these disappointed liberals would stop looking at that stupid EC map, which is designed — I mean the EC itself was, at the founding! — to paper over the realities of American democracy, they might begin to get a picture of how the country really feels and acts politically. If you look away from the map, certain facts emerge that make it a lot harder to pull into your little tribal silo and bitch about, say, “Ohio,” or “the country.”

Begin by looking at the country as a whole. These people I’m talking read the EC map as exposing the majority of the country as overwhelmingly rightwing. But hello: she won the popular vote. Not by much, but she did win it.  More voters countrywide wanted Clinton for president than Trump for president.

So there’s another thing to hate about the goddamned EC: if we’d gotten rid of it, we’d have our first female president now, and we wouldn’t have Donald Trump.

Then look at what’s going on in the states. In Ohio, supposedly so horribly “red,” she won 44% of the vote. In California, so blue, Trump won a full third. Clinton won almost a third of the vote in Cambria County, PA, a place I chose to look  at because I’d thought nobody there would vote for her.

But let’s go to New York — so blue, so liberal, and especially, one presumes, truest blue in the southern tier. What’s this? In groovy Brooklyn, one in every five voters chose Trump? He killed in Staten Island — not even close. He took Suffolk handily and almost took Nassau. It’s actually kind of amazing that Clinton won Nassau, a sign of demographic shift.

So are these liberals who now hate Ohio so much that they refuse even to travel there also planning on boycotting the Hamptons? Are they staying out of certain sections of California?

This kind of liberaloid idiocy in political thinking has been encouraged by the very mechanism that has also robbed us — for the second all-important time in sixteen years! — of majority rule in  our choice of president: the God damned abomination that is the Electoral College. This year it’s also robbed us of the first woman president, of sanity instead of madness, and of any hope for some kind of stability, even for progress, in our national politics, the very thing more Americans voted for.

The American people, by the narrowest of margins, chose Clinton for  president over Trump. The Electoral College denies the American people its choice, even as it plays into the anxieties and straight-up snobbism of supposedly intelligent liberals assessing the country’s politics.

Stop showing us that fucking map.

Yes, I’m still pretending there are potentially important policy matters involved in this crazy election cycle. Further on the anti-trust enforcement thing raised in the Democratic platform, it’s interesting to see, in that same article I linked to the other day, that a Sanders policy person is focusing the argument, maybe almost reflexively, on consumers, choice, and price: “We need more small businesses, medium-sized businesses being given the opportunity to compete and offer consumers more choices and lower prices.” Again, driving price down via competition = good. But again, legally restricting hyperdominance of one company in a market has important goals other than consumer-oriented ones. Anti-trust has something to do with restricting the potentially overwhelming political and economic power of corporate business, not just amping the buying power of consumers. Focusing on price is probably politically savvy, since it’s all anyone’s been talking about for years — and I know I could be read here as insensitive to urgent, day-to-day issues facing families — but I think lefty liberals, or whatever, should be watching this rhetoric as the Dems’ effort to adopt a trustbusting posture develops (if it even does). When the Sherman Act dismantled a railroad holding company that had been controlling a massive piece of all railroading, the entire rationale couldn’t have been to foster rock-bottom ticket prices for travelers, e.g.

Trying to distract myself from the idea that Scott Baio is a speaker at a Republican National Convention, I’ve read a bit about the platforms to be adopted at the conventions. In 2012, I noticed a sharp move to the right in the GOP platform. I did not notice any concomitantly sharp move to the left in the Dems’. This year, they say the GOP platform will move even more sharply to the right (is it the “right” any more, or just “lunacy”), to the point where Snopes has had to debunk a claim that it will call for abolition of national parks.

Perhaps more interesting, and possibly a gleam of light in a darkening world: word has it that the Dem platform will call, for the first time since the 1980’s, for antitrust enforcement.

This is kind of a big deal to me. For one thing, it must reflect the influence of Sanders and Warren and thus makes a real political thing out of the groundswell of support for them.

For another, it seeks to reverse a long trend in which all restriction on corporate hegemony has been consumer- rather than producer-oriented. Like it’s OK for a company to seek to monopolize its entire field, controlling supply chain, production, and distribution to the deficit  of competition, as long as the monopolization leads to low, low prices (Amazon, Walmart, etc.) The original idea of trust-busting was to benefit small producers, with competitive pricing a factor, not  rock-bottom prices the only goal, wielded like a license to kill. Underpricing just to drive competitors out of business is technically illegal. But late-80’s New Democrat types took enforcement off the table as a political matter.

You can blame the Reagan revolution and the DLC for the switch. You can also blame Ralph Nader and the whole idea of making “the consumer” the focus of the economy. Not that we don’t need consumer protection. But Nader helped refocus Americans’ inveterate anti-corporate, populist energy away from antitrust and toward tort. One effect has been tolerance of new forms of monopolistic practice.

“Platforms don’t mean anything,” I’ve heard. Some of the Bernie people seem to be saying two things at once:  “platforms don’t mean anything” and “it’s a scandal that more of Bernie’s agenda didn’t get in the platform.” I think platforms do mean something, though not everything — and it’s true that had the Sanders critique of TPP been admitted to the platform, we’d be seeing a sharp move leftward. This isn’t that. But I can’t see how the presumptive nominee, viewed as terminally slippery anyway, could reverse her position on TPP, now, and remain viable. The antitrust statements in the platform give me some dim hope for improvement in the party’s positions.

OK, here’s a nauseating flipside to that James Traub article we were dissing the other day. Where Traub, journo apologist for the benign authority of high-finance elites, calls his upscale readers to the barricades against the barbarian hordes, Irwin, evidently one of the same, takes a different approach. In the Times column self-parodyingly entitled “The Upshot,” Irwin takes a good hard look in the mirror and concludes that these people in favor of, say, rent control, who he’s spent a career agreeing with his corporate cohort are nothing but naive at best, might actually have a critique with its own fascinatingly weird coherence, its own set of exotic values entirely alien to those of the international corporatism he presumes on the part of his readers. Turns out, if you just shift your frame of reference, there might be something bizarrely understandable about all this irrational rejection of what the elites know is best for everybody.

A light is actually dawning for this poor guy. In 2016.

Favorite lines:  “…international businesspeople and others who make up the economic elite (including journalists like me who are peripheral members of it)…” Um, yeah. That’s been a bit of a problem, the access-oriented coziness of people like you with those you’re supposed to be covering. It’s been mentioned a number of times — out here in the real world, that is.

“But what if those gaps between the economic elite and the general public are created not by differences in expertise but in priorities?” Holy crap. Yeah: what if? Gosh, this might change everything! (I withhold comment on the faulty parallelism of the “not…but” construction. Well, no, I guess I don’t.)

“Yes, rent control is a bad idea if you’re worried about the long-term prospects for economic efficiency. But maybe the people who advocate these policies know exactly what they’re rooting for, and that’s not it.” Nothing wrong here that a few years in a Maoist reeducation camp wouldn’t fix.

“Life isn’t just about money, and jobs aren’t just about income.” Wait, what? Sorry. Need time to process.

I find this piece more offensive than Traub’s. At least Traub is sticking to his guns as a class warrior for his people. This other dude has essentially wasted his whole career selling what he now seems a bit blithely — flexibly — inclined to deem a blinkered line of gab. It’s like just because this fool’s suddenly had an idea — probably the first he’s ever had — legitimacy may now be officially conferred upon decades’ worth of argument and activism on the other side. Because that turns out to be, you know, the upshot. Now he can start mining a whole new vein of thinky pieces with fake reporting, because there must be a dozen wrinkles to be pressed out of this one, dim insight. So really, it all works out.

In related news, David Brooks has been tooling down the Monongahela like Stuart Little, looking into the “real pain” he’s recently learned is “out there,” reporting back this hot news: “Whoa, it really sucks here, people, who knew!” And yet Brooks has already tipped that he’s leading us right back where he started: we’re gonna need a few more Teddy Roosevelts. That’s just what he thought back in the ’90’s, when he and Bill Kristol were laughing it up over the nanny state while all those irrational meatheads were getting set to lose their jobs. The upshot: amazingly enough, he’s always been right. Just for different reasons now.

Haters gonna hate. And what I hate are these God-damned nescient sons of bitches and the complacent, supercilious, self-regarding middlebrow journalistic culture they rode in on.

I’ve been slammed with other stuff so haven’t posted here much lately, but I’ve had a few stray thoughts:

1. In the context of “Brexit,” which also relates to both Trump and Sanders as alternatives to global corporate elites’ hegemony over the governments of nation states, this Twitter thread by Matt Stoller was of great interest to me: https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/746765092218277888. Stoller’s point is that we’re constantly being presented with a manufactured choice between xenophobic, racist, warmongering, hyper-nationalism,  in the form of rightist populism (Trump, Boris); and multicultural, tolerant, diplomatic corporatism, in the form of neoliberalism (Clintons, EU). He tracks how things got that way — how internationalist elites came to see corporate power as more legit than sovereign power. They actually think they’re peaceniks.
2. Yesterday I heard a soundbite from Cameron after a lovely but sad goodbye EU dinner that he and the other leaders of member nations attended. Cameron said something like he was sorry, in a way, that the “leave” voters couldn’t have attended that dinner with him; they might gotten seen how jolly goodhearted it all is.
3. Finally, I wish I had time to go wild in detail on these remarks by James Traub. Did you guys see this? The headline sounds like controversy clickbait, but it actually reflects what’s in the piece. The attitude expressed here 100% disingenuous in its crisis-mongering, since this is the point of view apologists for the upper crust have been taking for thirty years or so. The lead grafs alone are one big howler: Traub thinks the nation is now in an existential crisis that makes the 1960’s look mild. He’s my age yet seems not to recall three decisive political assassinations; nearly every major American city repeatedly engulfed in flames (at one point, gun emplacements at the top of the Capitol steps); nearly 50K U.S. combat casualties; [UPDATE: skyrocketing crime rates]; etc. This is the kind of crap that gets you a Trump and a Brexit.

Here’s something: a lefty post from the trenchant scholar Corey Robin on the provocative fact that mainstream proof of Trump’s unseriousness as a presidential candidate has now devolved on his lack of funds. The post is no defense or promotion of Trump: Robin is a close, critical student of conservative ideology from Burke to the Tea Party.  He’s noting how fundraising skills now equate, in traditional politics, with political competence:

I take it as a given that Trump is a con man and a grifter, who is more than likely in this just for the money (never underestimate the grifter’s appetite for the buck.) But notice what he is saying: I don’t need money to speak. I can communicate directly with the media. Not just communicate, but have an actual back and forth, where reporters get to ask me questions and I get to answer them.

And notice this journalist’s response to that claim: That kind of communication with the media is not the mark of a serious candidate in a democratic election. . .

More here.

In an earlier post, Laska dissented point-by-point from Mark Schmitt’s op ed dissing Sanders’s progressivism as outdated. Now Matt Breunig  and Jacobin follow Laska and IatEotW with a related piece. (Breunig is probably too young to recall the Windows 95 launch.)

Don’t know if you guys have thoughts on this. It’s getting pushback, notably from liberal women, on my Twitter TL:

Tweet from Bernie:   No president can do it alone. That’s why I’m endorsing progressives Rep. @RepMarcyKaptur and Rep. @RickNolanmn. https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/kaptur-nolan?refcode=tw160613 …

It’s said that Kaptur is anti-choice and anti-stem-cell research. Sanders’s absence from the filibuster is also noted.

I can see how some legit progressives are anti-abortion; I can see how joining in the filibuster might have backfired (ha). But I note a sort of dogged tone to this move, and I’m genuinely confused — once again — about tactics in the Sanders campaign at this weird, maybe unique moment, and how they and the overall message are landing with voters now.

But maybe this sudden rush of charged-up Democratic party unity is just sort of flattening. Trump is manifestly, grotesquely unfit for office. Among all thinking people, therefore, everything’s a no-brainer now. I don’t mean I’d be scratching my head about who to vote for if Cruz, say, were the GOP nominee, I mean it bums me out that the first female presidency will come about — must come about! — in large part as a result of a situation in which the opponent is such a revolting parody of sheer incompetence that his own party has to try to run away from him as best it can. If it’s a blowout, great, but if Clinton were running against any even barely legit GOP male, the whole idea of female presidency would be getting put to a national test, and if she were to win, the question would be decided for all time and go away.

Under these idiotic, cartoon-like circumstances,  the many middle-of-the-road liberals who would have found themselves somehow reluctant to vote for Clinton — not, in this hypothetical situation, because she’s too hawkish, or too Wall Street, those are both perfectly good reasons — but just for some nagging, unspoken reason they can’t quite put their fingers on, like she seems slippery, or doesn’t always tell the truth, or isn’t inspiring, or she’s been around too long — qualities they’d be quicker to shrug off in a man — they’ll vote for Clinton now without any reluctance. But only because of Trump! So nothing really gets decided and resolved, psychologically, in this retrograde country about female fitness for office.

As CVFD has mentioned here, such a victory may be presented by future opponents as hollow: yeah, she beat Trump, big whoop. Merely as historic moments go, the presence of that monstrous fool is rendering a first-time female candidacy kind of lame.  I’d like to see her beat an actual politician. Trump has just rendered everything meaningless.

On the other unity front, yes, Warren is great at eviscerating Trump. Biden’s OK. And of course Obama will be great at that. And I guess it’s interesting that a sitting pres and VP are in a rare position to campaign forcefully for their successors. But again, whether or not they’re successful, intellectually and ideologically it’s pretty much shooting fish in a barrel. It can’t be that tough for the writers to come up with reasons why Trump sucks. (We could do it, if we weren’t so busy putting out this blog.) He handed them the most obvious issue with this judge thing, so Warren can  (rightly) say that he’s constitutionally unfit, just on separation of powers and potential abuse of office. That’s not a radical position, totally MOR, which is why it’s such an easy and appealing hook, of course.

I get it. But the fact that presidents can’t go after federal judges on any matter, let alone personal ones, doesn’t have much to do with EW’s real issues, which have to do, not with that most conservative American definition of equality — equality before the law — but with economic equality, a far more radical concept here.

So my real question has to do with Warren. It’s a real question in that I have no idea how this is going to go down.

Having joined forces intellectually, against Trump, with the most basic, unarguable, Civics 101, conservative definition of equality, will EW now be able to get Clinton to campaign actively on behalf of some of EW’s real issues? Make them part of the platform? Like the bill that would seek, anyway, to reverse the effects of Citizens United, which should be an issue HRC could bring some enthusiasm to, without seeming “impractical” or too far left or whatever  . . . ? If so, that might be a huge plus, and possibly could be achieved without the mutual rancor that marks and will continue to mark negotiations between the Clinton and Sanders camps, Sanders peoples’ desire to throw Barney Frank or whoever off the convention committees, HRC’s supporters’ resentment of having to give Sanders anything at all, etc. . . . ?

Maybe I’m not still flipping the bird. But man, these are still very weird times.