Just sharing a clip that’s interesting since we’ve had a couple references to the 1988 election (wimp factor, Big Mo, Joe Isuzu, and of course the tank).  fivethirtyeight explores whether there are defining moments or turning points in campaigns through the Dukakis campaign.

 

 

Liberals and Democrats in my filter bubble – IRL, in the media, on social media – are spending a lot of time blaming people for Trump.  Racist Republican leaders, strategists, funders, and voters get the most blame.  There’s also a fairly loud contingent that want to (pre-emptively) blame Sanders supporters, independents, and third party folks for Trump and his continued existence.  But the blame is always other people.

But did we liberals and Democrats have anything to do with Trump’s rise?

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Did you sit quietly by while Bill Clinton did his dog whistle race politicking?  While Hillary talked about super-predators?  Yes?  Then you promoted racism in politics.  Not as bluntly and crudely as Trump, but you helped legitimize the environment of racial anxiety he’s tapping into now.
2. Did you protest the crime and welfare reform bills that Bill, Hillary, Schumer and others supported and brag about to this day?  If not, you stood idly by while millions of black families were torn apart and millions of children were pushed into poverty – by laws that we knew at the time were biased.
3. Do you laugh at and make jokes about the intelligence of Trump and Republican voters?  If so, then, in addition to belittling people with your intellectual privilege, you antagonize and make sure they will never feel at home in your party.  You give Republicans proof points that Democrats aren’t really for the people.  You make us out to be such elite elitists that a billionaire can call us elitists and get cheers.  Nobody joins causes or groups that insult them – so when you mock and belittle them, you shut the door to our movement, leaving them with only demagogues to turn to.
4. Do you say sadly, “I just don’t understand how they can. . . ” without really trying to?   Yeah?  Well that’s not being thoughtful and sad or hurting in an enlightened way.  That’s just another way of being elitist.  See question #3. [Question 4 A do you wish people would read Toni Morrison and Coates and Malcolm X, but refuse to read Hillbilly Elegy or the like because “oh, I don’t want to hear it”? Update: Below are a couple more worthwhile links.]
5. Do you know what the median income is in the United States?  If not, then you’re probably unaware of the key economic reality of Americans outside of your filter bubble.  It’s $51,000 which is very low just about anywhere – not enough to save, own a home, build equity, pay student loans, send kids to college.  It’s been stagnant for years, too, so there are generations of working folks who haven’t had the American dream, no matter how they voted.  Not until Obama or Sanders has the party really owned income inequality as an issue in the last 30+ years.  So all that resentment we’re hearing now?  Kind of on us, too.
6. Talking to a Trump supporter, would you be able to name five specific things that Hillary or the Democrats have done to help the economic security of families below the median income?  SCOTUS doesn’t count.  Neither does “well, it’s obvious” – Name five specific things (specific like the way DOMA prevented same sex marriages and then overturning DOMA-style laws allowed it).  Almost nobody can think of five, but once you do, present them to a Trump supporter and see if you or the person you’re talking to believes it.
7. Have you spoken to a person with kids who is below the median income who isn’t your child’s caretaker, housekeeper, doorman, or gardener etc. about what their lives will look like ten years from now?
8. Do you know the minimum wage in your state?  Even if you don’t know the amount, you probably know that the amount * 52 weeks * 8 hours is well below the poverty level.  What have Dems done on that front?  How many times have you made phone calls or pinged your Congressional Representative to fix it?  Do you personally pay your domestic help sufficiently above minimum wage to keep him or her above the poverty line?  Are you contributing to their FICA (which also protects them from disability or their kids from loss of life)?
9. Do you hate stereotypes of people, but feel comfortable labeling the 10 million people who voted for Trump as racists? If yes, is that because you’re so smart,  you can tell what’s in the souls of ten million people without meeting them? That’s kind of messed up isn’t it – your stereotypes work but others don’t?  Are you sure you’re the party of love, understanding and inclusion?

Liberals and Democrats need to take a look at whether they’ve truly been an alternative to the Republican Party and whether or not they’re culpable, too, in creating a body politic where a Trump thrives.  As BHO famously reminded us:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

In Obama’s narrative, Democrats are no more entitled to the votes of these folks than Republicans are.  Worse, when Democrats engage in memes mocking their intelligence and education, tut-tutting why they don’t get it, reducing them to their racial anxieties and prejudices, they make very clear: “not only do we not intend to help you, we find you distasteful.”  (Obama famously mis-spoke the rest of this otherwise sympathetic analysis with “cling to their guns”, but he was calling out the same phenomenon.)

It’s easy to want Trump voters to just go away and take all their distasteful, unevolved behavior with them.  But that won’t happen no matter how soundly HRC beats him.  If liberals and Dems aren’t going to connect with them, are unwilling to hear their pains or heed their concerns, they’ll come back even more angry.  Remember how we were all terrified when Trump might lose because Rubio and Cruz would be worse – more electable, more effective, less unhinged?  That’s what our next demagogue will be – smoother and more effective than Trump, and we’ll have done nothing to get right with the disaffected.

=====================

More reading:

“The Politics of Resentment” an article summarizing the research of a professor who repeatedly visits every county in Wisconsin to understand the voting divide and contradictory behavior.  There’s also a book.  Short version:  some people start their political identity building with a simple question:  “are you with us or are you with them?”

Deer Hunting With Jesus:  Notes from America’s Class War I haven’t read it, only downloaded it, but many find it akin, even superior to Hillbilly Elegy.  

“Winner Take All Politics” Bill Moyers interviews the authors of the book by the same name.  Covers a lot of ground, but for this post, it’s also about the destruction, cooptation, or dilution of intermediating groups like unions and political parties.

White Trash – the link is to an interview with the author.

 

 

Watching Khizr and Ghazala Khan out-duel Donald Trump these last few days, I was, like everyone else, moved and impressed by this immigrant couple.

But, as I watched them in multiple interviews over the weekend, I couldn’t shake how familiar they seemed. Something inside me said, “I know you.”  And something about them made me think of the small town I grew up in.

We didn’t have any Pakistanis in Crabtree, Pennsylvania in the 1970s. And, I doubt there are any there now.  Or Muslims of any kind. But when I was a kid, we still had a fair amount of old people who were born in the 19^th Century and immigrated to America in the early part of the 20^th Century.  I would see them around town, walking to get their mail at the post office or leaving the social club at the Volunteer Fire Department in late afternoon. They were contemporaries of my grandparents. Some of the men were veterans of the Great War.  They mostly came from Italy and Eastern Europe and worked in the coal mines in Crabtree and nearby towns.

I hadn’t thought about these people in a long time. Watching the Khans brought them all back.

Like Ghazala most of the women wore head scarves.  Different fabrics and colors and with none of the regrettable political context attached to a hajib. I don’t know why they wore them, perhaps out of modesty and old country tradition. Or perhaps because they were just old and didn’t have access to an array of L’Oréal products to make their hair look fuller and less gray.

Like the Khans, there was a formality to them. Probably because I most frequently encountered them in church, when people dressed up for church, and so I remember the men looking like Mr. Khan.  In a sport coat. Reserved. Mostly bald, speaking clear, but what we used to call “broken,” English.

They were devout Catholics (though some of the men only went to church on Easter and Christmas). Some of them still observed the conservative practice of men and women sitting on opposite sides of the church during mass.

I was an altar boy for years and for one week each summer, each altar boy had to serve the weekday 7:00 a.m mass. No greater hardship for a twelve-year old boy than to wake up at 6:00 a.m on a summer morning, put on long pants, and walk to the un-air conditioned church for the early mass. Attendance was usually sparse, and the congregation was mostly these older immigrants.

Prior to mass, the priest sat in a pew with the congregants and led them in praying the rosary. If, as an altar boy, you arrived at church a little too early, you had to take your place next to the priest until the rosary was completed.  As you kneeled in the pew, you checked Father Kieren’s rosary with great attention to see how far along he was.

I’ll never forget those immigrant voices. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” they said in voices from Italy, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. In their new country where they were free to pray and work and prosper.

The Khans did America a great service by possibly preventing a deranged, dangerously unprepared man from becoming president. But, their bigger service may have been to introduce Islamic immigrants to people in America who have never met a Muslim, but whose own families came from Belarus, or Krakow, or Sant’ Agata Feltria, Italy.  To allow a nation of immigrants to think, “you look familiar . . . I know you!”

Trump just squeezes every bit of living out of long summer weekends.  None of what I’m listing below is new, but all of these events were from one week end.

A dizzying array of political incompetence and mental illness. As I mentioned in an earlier post if he were my dad, I’d hug him and seek out the best possible institutional care for him.

This was a weekend when new GDP numbers were released on Friday. Any sane and competent campaign would have spent the weekend hammering Obama and Hillary for slow economic growth. Not the Trump campaign. Not a word.

Instead, these were the headlines emanating from the Trump campaign.

He Picks a Fight with the Khans and Has His Ass Handed to Him

Everyone by now knows about the Khans. What’s amazing is that if Trump had any discipline, he could have just stayed quiet, and the story would have faded away after a couple of days.  Instead, he goes after a Gold Star mother and father, and they don’t back down. Man, he picked the wrong Pakistani-Muslim, Gold Star parents to mess with.

Thanks to Trump, they’ve been all over the media all weekend and into this Monday morning, speaking with a dignity and restraint that Trump likely can’t even recognize. I sure that Trump’s asking his lawyers if he can sue them for libel and make them spend $50k in legal fees.

Perhaps, we should thank Trump for making the Khans the face of Islam in America.

Gives a Sarah-Palin Level Disastrous Interview with George Stephanopoulos

Take a coffee break and watch the entire thing.  The link is below. In twenty-two minutes, in addition to ripping the Khans as noted above, he:

Lies about helping to build the Vietnam veterans memorial in NYC.

Lies about not having any relationship with Mike Bloomberg, despite the fact that the media this morning is displaying photos of him playing golf with Bloomberg, attending baseball games with him, showing up at other public events with him.

He says that Russia should be allowed to keep the Crimea.

He says Russia is not going to move into the Ukraine. Stephanopoulos says, “aren’t they already there?” And then he does go all Palin-incoherent.

He says that he’s never met Putin even though the media this morning can play multiple clips where he brags about his relationship with Putin.

Most disturbingly, he keeps talking about how Putin has been “nice” to him.  “Nice?”  I didn’t Google “Putin, nice”, but I’m pretty sure that the results would be meager. The Trump Russia policy is best summed up by a quote from Frank Burns in season 3 of MASH when he’s flustered by a pretty nurse, “It’s nice . . . to be nice . . . to the nice.”

Oh, yeah, he also lied about the NFL sending him a letter asking him to move the presidential debates so that they don’t conflict with NFL games.  And he lied about the Koch brothers asking him for a meeting. These were just palette cleanser lies between the weekend barbecue main course lies.

Here’s the entire Stephanopoulos interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWdQD0SANgY

 

On the web page of a decent article about the state of [a certain segment of] white Christians in the New Yorker, this related article box bubbled up:

 

My reasons for latching onto it are pretty predictable and obvious – smug, douchenozzles insult and ‘splain till they’re as red in the face as the Pinot they’re drinking and then wonder why they aren’t getting more votes.

A friend went a little deeper and ticked it off neatly:

1. Gossip, but on our side, so it’s cool
2. Ego-self-stroking
3. Mockery
4. Because this article might prove it once and for all (or, let’s keep talking to ourselves)
5. Mockery

The best part of this whole experience, though, was actually clicking into the Rousseau article, wherein you’ll find the best self-parodying New Yorker-ese ever seen and which can not be topped:

No Enlightenment thinker observing our current predicament from the afterlife would be able to say “I told you so” as confidently as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an awkward and prickly autodidact from Geneva, who was memorably described by Isaiah Berlin as the “greatest militant lowbrow in history.”

It’s like this writer actually hangs out with us!  How often have we had this very argument?  “Which Enlightenment thinker is most entitled to say I told you so?”  “Which of the pre-Socratics can claim, if heeded, to be the most likely anti-dote of Trump?” “Which of Aquinas’s followers opened the door for modern-day evangelicals to claim the mantle of Christianity?”

Many people have pointed out how much we’ll miss Obama and how we might not see his like again. He is an exceptional and unique historical figure. But, we are also going to miss Joe Biden, and the kind of politician he represents.

Check out the link below to an interview Biden did with a group of journalists on Morning Joe this week.  It’s remarkable. He’s warm, funny, smart, finding common ground.  All hands on shoulders, patting a guy on the leg while he disagrees with him. He also in twenty-four minutes:

• Talks about how important personal relationships are in politics. How, though he disagreed with everything Strom Thurmond stood for, Thurmond asked on his deathbed for Biden to speak at his funeral.  How he and Chris Dodd were the only two Democrats at Jesse Helm’s funeral in July 2008.  How at the funeral Helms’s widow said to him, “we’re voting for you, Joe. We have the sign in our yard.”  He’s one of the last of those senators from the 1970s, when senators from both parties ate lunch together, and knew each other’s families, and could be friends despite deep political differences. He’s essentially magnanimous. And, I think magnanimity is probably the most important virtue for any leader. And something Trump is devoid of.
• He goes deep on Iraq and foreign policy as befits someone with 35 years on the world stage. He modestly notes that he has personal relationships with every world leader. That’s a lot of experience leaving government.
• He goes right at income inequality issues like few politicians can do anymore. “My dad sold GM cars. He was a job creator. He sold the damn cars.”

It’s an amazing performance, and he takes a lot with him as he exits the world stage.  The link is here.

http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_mj_biden1_160727

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.

The only reason I hesitate to observe the obvious, that Trump is running as a Fascist, is that it’s an insult to hard-working Fascists, living and deceased.  The Trump “campaign” is under performing General Vargas in Woody Allen’s Bananas by any measure.

I haven’t blogged about the GOP convention because I really can’t keep up with it all.  That is, of course, Trump’s main rhetorical weapon.  If every word you utter is at one time some combination of a lie, a personal insult, a racist comment, or a potential future constitutional crises, it makes rebuttal a bit tricky.

It feels like this convention has been going on for weeks, but it’s only been three days.  And yet, in those three days, we have the following stories. Any of which would be career-ending for any other politician.  But, because Trump floods the zone with lies and narcissism, he gets away with it.

Here’s what he’s done in three days:

He Undermines our Commitment to NATO.

He’s about to become one of two people nominated for President of the United States.  And he chose this week to suggest that he wouldn’t defend the former Soviet Baltic Republics if Russia decided to invade or intimidate them.

He Uses the Courts to Punish His Critics

Trump is one step away from being the most powerful person in the world, but he’s still using the courts to intimidate people who dare to criticize him. Last week, the story broke that he was suing a former campaign staffer.  Yesterday, he served a cease and desist order on his ghost writer from thirty years ago who had the temerity to criticize him in public.  Does anyone doubt that President Trump will use the civil courts to punish his critics? And the IRS, HUD, the FBI, NSA, CIA?

He’ll Delegate the Powers of the President to the Vice President

The Times reports that Trump’s son offered the vice presidency to John Kasich with the promise that a Trump vice president will have authority over foreign and domestic policy, while Trump focuses on “making America great again.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/magazine/how-donald-trump-picked-his-running-mate.html

This is not the first time that the Trump campaign has floated this novel concept of the vice presidency. It’s probably not constitutional . . . . and, aw, c’mon.  I can’t even finish this sentence. You can’t delegate being president.

He Will Destroy the Civil Service

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12233454/christie-trump-purge-federal-employees

He has An Aryan-Featured Woman Greet Him with a Fascist Salute  

I’m not sure why Laura Ingraham was speaking at all. And, I’m sure she didn’t mean it.  And if you watch the video, it happens pretty quickly. On the other hand, she’s a professional entertainer and she’s on a big stage and should be aware of her every gesture.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/20/laura_ingraham_closes_rnc_speech_with_some_sort_of_a_salute.html

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.