In this quiet In(n), I feel safe trying to swim upstream about the angry white man – to humanize him, suggest that just because he’s voting for Trump, he may be something other than racist, sexist, xenophobic – that his vote may stand for more than supporting the most offensive things we hear on the news.  This is old news for reporters like James Fallows, who has been scolding the media to do more than get sound bites from 3 people at a Trump rally, and to actually go to their homes, bars, union halls, and social spots and listen.

But I recently saw a post on FB from a dear friend: “Hey Bernie Sanders and ‪#‎BernieBros‬ I’m begging you to get off your high horse and be sure you do everything you can possibly do to be sure Trump doesn’t win while you’re making a self-righteous Trumpian stink about delegates awarded to whomever wins the nomination fair and square‪#‎MakeAmericaWhiteAgain‬”  It was the intro to a Mother Jones video where they overlaid the horrifying images of whites putting down, beating on, water-cannoning, civil rights protesters on lines from Trump on the stump.  While the statement is kind of incoherent, it represents a line of argument that’s pretty common:  voting for Trump is so clearly racist, that slowing down Hillary is equally racist. Anything not HRC is racist.

As a privileged, reasonably smart, hard-working white man living in Manhattan with a six figure income but still scared as hell about my and my family’s future, perhaps it’s my political mission in mid-life to: 1) reach out to other freaked out and angry white men; and 2) to try and get liberals to stop sh**ting on them long enough to get them to join our cause.  So here goes:

I’ll start with a composite story of union workers I met in Decatur, Illinois in 1994.  Call the guy Jim.  When I met Jim, I was a union organizer and consultant working to help his union put pressure on the AE Staley company to bargain, avoid striking, and to create public support that would keep the company from locking them out.

At the time, Jim was in his mid-20s.  He was a trained and by all accounts skilled machinist, who helped keep a 1000 person corn processing plant running by fixing and replacing parts on highly complex, expensive, custom machines.  When I met him, he had two kids – 6 and 8.  He freely admitted that the first was an accident, but it was clear he enjoyed being a dad and loved his family.

He had been working at the plant for 6 years and was building seniority.  With help from his father (who had also worked in the plant, but was now retired), he made a down payment on a starter house.  He was doing OK:  house, a car that was in good shape, was setting aside money for retirement and for his kids to go to school.  He could take vacations at campgrounds and could afford to take his clan to Pizza Hut or sometimes Cracker Barrel on Friday nights.  The guy was also just a cheerful presence in the union office.  Not many young people were connected to the union, and Jim was active, well-liked, and generated interest from other young union members (many of whom were women or of color).  Jim was a good person to help heal the wounds from when the union leadership acted out of racist and sexist tendencies in earlier days.

The union eventually got locked out for a grueling 18 months.  During that time there were two suicides, several recovering alcoholics fell off the wagon, homes lost, savings drained, broken marriages, deferred medical treatment and doctor visits, cancelled Christmasses, and cancelled college plans for kids who came home from college to help.  Jim eventually went back into the plant – but with reduced pay, less overtime, worse health benefits than before, and lost seniority.

That was a defining moment for him.  As chronicled by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, the town of Decatur was a war zone:  not only was Jim’s plant (Staley/Tate & Lyle) locked out, but Caterpillar workers were on strike, as were workers at Bridgestone/Firestone and  two other companies.  In Decatur, over a third of the households had a breadwinner walking picket – and nearly all of them lost.  Frank reports, as many of us observed at the time, that the only national Democrat to show support for the working families of Decatur was Jesse Jackson.  The rest were frustratingly absent and unresponsive.

Back to Jim.  His union activism eventually caught up with him and he lost his job at the plant (which continued to weaken the union with each subsequent contract).  He found other jobs as a machinist, but most of them were temporary, none provided access to retirement plans, and his insurance was spotty.  Deferred medical bills and the slow drain on his savings forced him to sell his house in the 2000s, and he often took janitorial and laborer work at construction sites to keep going.  In 2008, as he approached 50, he saw his father’s pension take a hit and he helped his parents move into a smaller place.

Being specific to one Jim rather than the composite: the 6 and the 8 year old didn’t go to college, they went to trade schools, and the older one tried to learn computers but couldn’t find a program that she could afford that went beyond data entry and Microsoft Office.  The daughter’s a secretary – which is as white collar as the family gets now – struggling to stay current and hoping her company stays in business.  The son lives at home and is taking odd jobs as he can find them.

Across 20 years, Jim’s economic condition deteriorated – it never improved.  He didn’t achieve his dream of home ownership or sending his kids to school.  His skills are up to date but outdated by the economy, and his retirement looks grimmer than his father’s.  He doesn’t go to the doctor for fear of co-pays or expensive medication, and is nervous when he takes his wife.  Age is catching up to him.

And now it’s time to vote.

Sorry.  I hit publish instead of save.  I was debating posting this and did the classic draft thing.  What was interesting to me about this argument against HRC wasn’t getting attacked like, say, a Young Turks video (despite some stylistic similarities).  More interesting was that pro-Sanders types – who are now trying to defend the legitimacy of having been or continuing to be supportive, or trying to justify his persistence as a candidate – are posting it like crazy in my part of the world.  People who were going quiet because they thought they had crossed the line and were supporting Trump, got active again around this post.  More interesting still was that nobody was piling on about how deluded, arrogant, privileged, Naderite, or a-historical she is.  It might be because she’s pretty, likable, and isn’t lily white (which is to say I haven’t unpacked her ethnicity). But that didn’t help Rosario Dawson . . . So probably more just wondering if she was making an argument that wasn’t easily dismissed.

I think, had I returned to this, I might not have published it at all, but one of the good things about blogs is that it catches in-between moments, so rather than take it down, I’ll just leave the initial thinking.

My world on Facebook recently got ugly.  I’ve recently been called weak, stupid, immoral, and unprincipled – but by my affluent, urban, Democratic friends, not by the bigoted, misogynist pro-life  xenophobes who occupy a range of the political spectrum.  I want to delete my account to keep me going from back, but, like Apple and iTunes, I have too much stuff there to leave.  But there’s a thought there:

My FB world contains four constituencies:

1. HS friends, re-connects, and curiouses – these are people with whom I grew up in a semi-depressed steel town in Western PA.  It was and is more working class than any of the towns 90% of my current colleagues have ever experienced outside of a movie or a visit upstate.  Politically they are (a mix of) New Deal Democrats holding on, skeptical Democrats who resisted Reagan Dems, straight up Republicans, and Trump supporters. Many move along the spectrum within a conversation and most are sympathetic to each other having grown up with all those views. That sympathy allows them to see friends who really hate HRC/theClintons/Dems and who support Trump as something other than racist xenophobes.
2. day to day friends – people that I stay in touch despite no longer having time or ease of access to stay in touch.
3. political friends – overlaps with day to day friends, but these are people with whom I was active in college, as a union organizer, congressional staffer, or volunteer.
4.  acquaintances or work associations – these are people who I know from work or connections to work circles.  This one is tricky, because I don’t really have friendships with them, but you don’t want to not be friends with them, and you don’t want to unfriend them if the friendship stems from early promiscuous days.  

A HS friend of mine once mentioned that he thought it was great how we grew up in one kind of town and work in a much more rarefied environment as it gave us different perspectives.  But it gets tricky on FB where I may be talking to one group (or the post has one group in mind) but others weigh in, misinterpret the post or simply want to get in that conversation.

The most educated and sophisticated of these groups is the last. They are all graduates of prestigious colleges (and care about the colleges other people come from), are generally Democrats and call themselves liberals or moderate liberals.  And they are brutally dismissive of views as stupid, ill-informed, are able to quote lines about complicity to make insufficient hatred of Trump and insufficient support of HRC into something akin to those who allowed Hitler to come to power (seriously, the wording can’t be accidental).

Group #1 is a mix of education, income, and worldliness.    Within that group are strong Trump supporters/HRC haters and people who are truly disenfranchised/disconnected from the political system.  Many of them work hard, are frustrated at the diminishing return they get for that hard work.  They don’t see the connection between the all-important SCOTUS appointments and their lives that is an article of faith within Democratic orthodoxy (“it’s SCOTUS, stupid” runs one clever re-tread).  They associate with a racist Trump, though I don’t think they’re the enemy (and they might have some race and diversity challenges) out of party loyalty, Clinton distrust, and a fatalism that nobody is really going to make their work go farther toward a better life.  In more honest and elitist terms:  they are the least educated, least worldly, most small-minded (on average) of the groups.  And they are also the most open, most civil, and most compromising group of people in my admittedly narrow life.

Anyway, my point here is that the orthodoxy of the educated liberals in group 4, combined with a papal infallibility because they read more newspapers with college-educated minds has made them the savage ones in my life.

If this strikes any chords, let’s go with it.  I’m aware this might be re-treading old issues or merely complaining.

We’ve gone quiet. In addition to regular lives to lead, I’m wondering if you guys are sharing a depressed lull.  It feels like we’re watching the consolidation of HRC’s hold on the party get ugly and tedious.  There’s nothing Sanders can say to stay in that doesn’t sound bitter, force him to inadequately condemn delegate behavior that may or may not be understood, and there are enough polls out there to make even the friendliest HRC supporter call anyone who isn’t voicing full-throated support for HRC a collaborator with the new fascist.

On a personal note, I don’t talk politics with hardly anyone anymore.  There is only one reality in the new Democratic orthodoxy:  we must beat Trump, that means supporting HRC, keep any other thought to yourself.

So we’re getting HRC and WJC again.  Some brain donor on HRC’s campaign decided she should put Big Bill in charge of economic revitalization “because, you know, he knows how to do it,” she said. “Especially in places like coal country and inner-cities and other parts of our country that have really been left out.”

Is this pure ego on Bill’s part?  They’re putting crime, welfare, NAFTA, blowjobs, perjury, superpredators, the recovery that may or may not have been a recovery, and all the stuff HRC supporters told us “that’s her husband, don’t be sexist” right back in play.  As Obama’s numbers go up, commentators start to place him among the greats, we’re putting this one front and center to re-fight the 90s.

Time to donate money to Trump.  I don’t want to be on the wrong side of this fight.

So, Big Bill, WJC, the man who brought prosperity to us all, imprisoned excessive millions excessively, made welfare queens multiple jobs so others could raise their children in extreme poverty, and innovated the financial sector to all of our benefits and who still can talk to the people and win them over . . .

Yeah, he got booed by miners after his wife brought him “out of retirement” to shut these people . . . sorry, show these people . . . sorry, demonstrate compassion to people who have taken blow after economic blow over the last 30 years.

What do we call Big Bill’s role?  He’s not the black friend white liberals have and can check in.  He’s the guy who can go out and talk to those people.  He does our slumming for us.  Except he’s re-treading old lines from the 90s.  Back then, he told us the “future is coming, we can’t change that” and didn’t.  Now he’s telling them “The question is, are we going to get back in the future business, and are you going along for the ride?”  It’s almost hard to imagine HRC is suddenly looking soft in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsyvlania.

When we were playing that thought game about what kind of coalition HRC is thinking of building, Mr Jones asked “But if a big coalition emerges, what’s it a coalition *about*?”  That question was painfully hard to answer during WJC’s administrations, but it was muddled enough that we could convince enough of ourselves that it was indeed *about* us.

Now, while we still may not know what the coalition is about, some are pretty sure that it’s not about them and sending WJC in to charm them is only rubbing salt in the wound.

Does HRC have time to course correct?  Can she get out a message to convince those people?   They’re really gonna blow it.

Bet nobody’s done that one before, huh?

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan meets Trump today after more than a week refusing to endorse the inevitable nominee, offering to step out of his convention role (scaring the bejesus out of Trump, I’d wager), and playing a wait and see game.

In an earlier question from Mr Jones about whether Ryan was looking weak, muddle-headed, etc.  I hastily said no way it’s smart and was almost admiring of Ryan.  But then the NY Times runs a piece featuring Republicans who want Ryan to just endorse him already and say he’s walking a tightrope between party unity and his personal choices, and The Economist runs the cartoon above. Suddenly I’m jittery and my mind is wobbling between poles.

This is a symptom of the ‘balanced’ coverage of the press in which every article of every publication feels compelled to put in a counter-quote, or run a story that runs counter or shows a dissenting viewpoint.  (The NY Times piece quotes only one Senator as being critical of Ryan’s wait and see stance.)

So, I think Ryan is being remarkably smart on behalf of the party and himself.

• He’s reading Trump not as a the future of the party, but as the winner against a crowded, muddled, weak field of candidates in a transitional phase of the party.
• He is the only real leader in the party with any kind of clout
• If he believes, as do most others, that the White House is going to HRC, then he needs to protect the only remaining assets the Party has:  Congressional majorities.
• Trump actually needs Republican help, and Ryan is the only player who hasn’t walked away from him, so Ryan might be able to negotiate something.
• Ryan may be the only Republican who Trump can’t bully or mock as a loser.  Ryan’s got none of the weaknesses of Cruz or Rubio, he been enlisted to help the party (Romney ticket, House, almost candidate) and while he may not have the entertainment power of Trump Ryan is plenty savvy.

Ryan loses very little by not endorsing Trump and focusing his energy on the House majority.  There are too many Republicans withholding support for Ryan to be blamed for a loss in November.  It’s a principled stand to say Trump was sinking the party and Ryan chose to keep the ship afloat while Trump went down.  And Ryan gets loads of time in the national press talking about his brand of conservatism and being the guy everyone wishes was running instead – setting up for 2020.

A frustrating part of political analysis in the media and amongst people following the election is the facile way in which we characterize voters based on their votes.  We see this with Trump all the time.  I’ll just mention the Rob Reiner interview which got a lot of shares with “Word”, “Truth”, “Nailedit” affirming that yes Trump voters are racist xenophobes, SMH, what’s the matter with these people.

The process is pretty simple:  look at what the candidate says; gather what you think are the salient features of the talk track; turn those facts into the narrative of the candidate; and then assume that every vote for the person is an endorsement of that narrative.   Trump makes bigoted, misogynist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual statements, therefore people who vote for him are … (It might be useful for Democrats who are baffled at people’s votes to put together a counter-narrative of HRC, picking 5 top facts that someone else  might pick for their narrative and see if that humanizes the vote.)

So, while walking the dog, I tried to lay out the dimensions that go into a vote.  I wonder if it helps us see the millions of people who vote for Trump as something other than rabid bigots; people who vote for Sanders as more than bros or sexists who can’t bear to vote for HRC; and Woman Card carrying HRC supporters as being more concerned about the working class or working poor than NAFTA, the welfare reform bill, or war votes might indicate.

1. Values – Does this person convey values that resonate with what I want?  For me, personally, I resonate with people who view government as having a positive role to play in people’s lives, promote economic opportunity, and treat basic economic outcomes as a right.  If a person scans as sharing those values, they are in my consideration set.  For conservatives, it might be smaller government, skepticism of publicly financed anything, a sense that liberals are elitists who only want to be smarter than me.  For many people, not meeting this test means that the candidate won’t get a vote – period, even if it means not voting (gasp!).
2. Character – this is pretty obvious, but think about integrity.  Sanders may not be the crazy uncle, he may be the guy who’s too old and set in his ways to find it worthwhile to screw anybody.  Trump could scan as a guy who knows what he is, isn’t pretending to be some things he’s not.  Most important, he hasn’t done enough public service to have a record of screwing people.  Again, this might be enough to exclude a candidate from consideration – period, even if it means not voting (gasp!).
3. Other people’s endorsements – also pretty straightforward.  Krugman is the person on whom many of my liberal friends rely on to determine that Sanders is an old-fashioned blunt instrument crank and HRC is the ingenious policy wonk.  Unions used to play a role in helping to sort out what’s in your best interest, and various scorecards from groups such as the NRA, NARAL, NRDC, ADA, Family Research Council, etc. help people decide votes.  If you have an issue that you consider to be the most important, than that rating/endorsement may be all you need to know.
4. Policies – I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I don’t know what’s in the Iran deal, but I support it.  I trust the values and approach of the President, think the US needs an ally other than Saudi Arabia, and I’m a sucker for the transformative political, economic, and cultural power of an emerging  middle class in a developing/evolving country.  But, honestly, I have no fucking idea.  I also know that we should have done the stimulus package in 2008 at the levels Krugman says we should have done them because … that math he did.  A lot of policy conversation among the cognoscenti is parlor talk and based a lot more on proxy thinking and faith in 1 through 3 above.  For many people who come home from work too exhausted to play with their kids, looking at position papers, checking out a Vox analysis, or comparing healthcare plans isn’t going to happen.  This is part of the reason they donate to political parties and participate in intermediating organizations.  The previous three dimensions will have to do – sorry if that makes me stupid, and causes me to vote in ways that appear to you to be not in my self interest, but my feet are killing me and I want to see my kid’s soccer game.
5. Competition – “Who is the best of the lot?  I mean, I’ll never vote for the other Party, so who bugs me the least?”
6. Ability to beat the opponent – no explanation needed.

This list is largely in order with the exception of #6, which might be #1 in certain circles and certain contexts.  But different voters will have different matrices and calculuseseseses (hmmm) at different times in their lives.  Some of the pieces above – values, character, beating the opponent – may be go/no-goes.  Policy, for people who are concerned about one issue above all others, might be the deciding factor for people who rely on the party to sort out the rest.

I think there’s more here, but I’m at 719 words when I typed 719, so I’ll stop at 728.