Why a Landslide of "Rebuke" Was Never Coming

Even blue New York has Trump mobs

The political discourse is always irritating and tiresome, but sometimes it gets so ridiculous that I have to wade into the bullshit muck and make an intervention. In the wake of Joe Biden's decisive yet not landslide victory over an incumbent, lots of liberals and leftists have been beating their chests over the fact that it wasn't truly a "rebuke" of Trump at the ballot box.

I find this viewpoint completely perplexing. What country do these people think they live in?

George McClellan got 45% of the vote during the Civil War (in the North!) running against Lincoln while basically saying he would roll back emancipation. Richard Nixon expanded the Vietnam war to Cambodia and Laos, unleashed the FBI on dissenters, and abused his power and was rewarded with a landslide victory in 1972. So was Reagan twelve years later after he gutted the welfare state. Dubya did not get elected with the popular vote, but he won it in 2004 after the illegal, unprovoked, and disastrous invasion of Iraq. 

In his four years in office Trump became the Republican party, and the party became Trump. That was made clear at the convention, when no platform was written. The party just re-upped their old one, because Trump WAS the platform. Plenty of Republicans who reluctantly voted for him in 2016 enthusiastically voted for him this time around. And why not? He gave them what they wanted. He cut taxes, packed the courts, punished immigrants, and made the liberals crazy. When people showed up to protest police brutality at the White House, he tear gassed them and held a Bible aloft. He was their id, and his "respectable" voters secretly delighted at seeing him do and say the things they might not do but wished they could.

In regards to his disastrous response on COVID, since when have Americans valued human life? Every years tens of thousands of people die from guns, drug overdoses, alcoholism, and automobiles and the response is basically "That's no big deal." It's been the same line about COVID. In fact, these same people are far more concerned about the restrictions meant to stop the spread of the virus than the virus itself. Anthony Fauci to them is just another liberal. They are united in their hatred and fear of liberals, and would literally rather die than do something a liberal asked them to do. 

Trump's politicization of COVID did not help him with most of the electorate, but it allowed him to more firmly lasso his conservative base. For the anti-mask crowd that little piece of cloth on their face is an insult to their identity and their mythological narrative about themselves. They are self-reliant, rugged individuals, and no one has the right to tell them what to do, or even have any knowledge they must respect. This is also why they love the police so much, since they exist to visibly shackle and beat down the others who are not allowed to have access to this reckless freedom. 

I wonder why so many are so incapable of seeing the people who surround them. For some it's ignorance. They live in blue enclaves and don't mix outside of them. However, it is also a function of people who know better about their friends and family but won't admit the ugly truth. There is no magic bullet. The vampire's victims don't come back to life after the stake is driven through his heart. 

I would have loved a "rebuke" of Trump, but that was never coming. And yes, it disturbing that after all that he has done that so many would vote for him again. That's unfortunate, but it's also reality. If we are going to get anywhere, a lot of people are going to have to grow up and start facing things as they actually are in order to change them instead of finding solace in magical thinking. 

Listening to Tusk and Waiting for History to Happen

The weather in New Jersey has been damp and rainy of late, with today being no exception. That combined with the feelings of the worlds of the living and dead coming into close contact with each other that always happen around this time, has depressed my mood. (There' a reason the ancients chose this time of year for Halloween!) I mean this literally, by the way, in that my emotions are feeling less intense than I expected on the eve of such an important election. 

I feel like I am waiting for history to happen with knowledge that it will be happening no matter what in two days. I just don't know what it will look like, and instead of worrying have labored hard save my energy for what I expect to be a post-election landscape where that energy will be needed. My thoughts on this can run wild, from "this will be a blowout of such proportions that there can be no doubt" to "will it be my fate to be run over by a pickup with Trucknutz driven by a Three Percenter at a protest to save democracy?"

This week starts my first full official week of hybrid teaching at my school. I don't need to go in until Thursday, and who the hell knows what will be in store before then? I planned out all my classes this week anyway, because what else can I do?

As usual music has been a faithful emotional companion. I have been listening to Fleetwood Mac's Tusk album over and over again, pun intended. (The first track practically invites you to!) For a long time I didn't rate Fleetwood Mac because of Bill Clinton. I was in the depths of my punk phase when he used "Don't Stop" as his campaign song in 1992 and all the Boomers seemed giddy about it. I've always hated Boomer self-regard, and I'd also read that the original 70s punks were directly opposed to this kind of music. Like a lot of overly doctrinaire teenagers, I bought the fundamentalist narrative.

Years later I became more sympathetic through some friends whose music taste was so unimpeachably indie and cool that I wouldn't feel like a sellout for spinning Rumours. By that time I had also come to the conclusion that most punk rock beyond the vital core was formulaic (which is why bands like the Sex Pistols imploded at The Clash moved on to a more diverse sound.) In the midst of this discovery I was living in rural East Texas and happened upon a pristine vinyl copy of Tusk at the local Goodwill. 

It came into my life at the right time, in the midst of a personal crisis. It's a strange sounding album, full of Lindsay Buckingham's desire to learn from the punks and impress them filtered through a snowstorm of cocaine. Tusk is also the sound of the "survivor" trope of the 1970s. It's the sound of the sixties being over and drugs and excess being the only things left and now they've done their damage and failed to fill the hole. It's the sound of exhaustion, the dark night before the Reagan Dawn in the conservative narrative. For me it was what I listened to late at night while brooding, and early in the morning when I had to face another day I didn't want to see. It got me through a lot.

Back then my thoughts of dread were connected to my personal life. I was living 1500 miles from my wife. I had close family members falling ill. I didn't like where I lived and was getting bullied at my suboptimal job. Nowadays I am far happier in my personal life, but the dread is for my country and its future. I don't know if democracy is going to survive, nor how much bloodshed will take place killing it or defending it. For the next 48 hours I just need to distract myself in ways that are far calmer that doom-scrolling. 

As good friend in Texas said on a particularly tough night as we say outside listening to music, "This isn't a problem Tusk can't solve." 

The One Issue on the Ballot

In 1992 "the issues" were hip. Feels like a million years ago.

I was a weird kid who watched the nightly news every evening, read the newspaper, and read the news magazines in the library. From too young an age I began to understand media on a meta level, and absorbed the critique that election coverage did not do enough to focus on "the issues."

While the claim was repeated to the point that I wished the critics in question would just talk about the damn issues instead of the media, it was essentially right. Part of Ross Perot's appeal in 1992 came from his focus on the minutae of economic policy. The 1984 election had been a referendum on Reagan and the 1988 election was reduced to pure symbolism. It was all Willie Horton's mugshot, Dukakis in a tank, and Bush saying "read my lips." 

The political media loves the personalities and horse race stuff still today, in large part because these reporters do not have the knowledge or intellectual firepower to actually discuss policy in a meaningful way. It also draws in a lot more eyeballs. 

However, this year discussion of "the issues" has slid below even where it was in 1988, and this time it's not just a media framing. Issues discourse is so thin because Trump himself has become the issue. This election is really a referendum: are we going to have a democracy, or not?

Trump and the Republican Party have made it clear that they are willing to maintain minority rule through suppression, gerrymandering, the electoral college, Senate, and the courts. They have not made any attempt to reach the majority of Americans, what has to be a first in my lifetime. Trump himself is the issue. It's why his party did not even bother to write a new platform. Their only platform is Trump.

And what is Trump? He is the avatar of white nationalism. Plenty of people voting for him would admit that he's an incompetent doofus, but that doesn't matter. In fact, it helps his case. Having an ignorant, maladroit white man occupying the position recently vacated by a competent, intelligent Black man sends the message that badges of whiteness will allow white Americans to have an elevated place in American society no matter how undeserving they are. 

Despite being a foul-mouthed adulterer and tax cheat, he is also the avatar of white Christian supremacy. By banning Muslims and treating American Jews like Israelis in disguise he sends the message over and over again that this is a white Christian nation. (There's a good reason that Allan Lichtman's history of conservatism is called A White Protestant Nation.) Putting someone like Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court -a doctrinal Catholic (except on social justice) who practices religion like a Pentecostal Protestant- is the capstone of this message. 

Most who vote for Trump don't really care that much about his tax plan or even his immigration policy. They want the assurance that they are the only people that matter in this nation. (Hence why the "black lives matter" slogan triggers them so much.) They want to go to the bar without their mask on and tell "politically incorrect" jokes because the biggest of wage of whiteness for white people in America is to never, ever be told what to do, especially when their behavior hurts others. "Free, white, and 21" indeed. 

Are we going to have a multi-racial democracy or not? That's been the issue since Reconstruction in America. This year it's the only issue on the ballot. 

Poll Numbers and the Culture War

 Yesterday Grinnell College released their latest poll, one that the experts were anticipating due to its quality and methodology. Most people did not look beyond the headline, which has Biden up by eight points nationally. The misbegotten narrative that civil unrest helps an incumbent president had mystified too many Very Smart People, and so they had to reckon with the poll disproving that. 

I was all too aware that Trump does not benefit from disorder the same way he did in 2016 as a challenger, especially with his opponent being an old establishment moderate. I wanted to get into the weeds and look at who was supporting who. What I found was that Biden is well ahead not just in the cities, but in the suburbs. Trump is dominant in rural areas. A Fox News poll yesterday showed Biden up as well, and had results broken down by age. Biden is ahead both with Gen X voters and Millennials and Gen Zers of voting age. Trump is ahead by less with voters 55 and up.  It should be noted, while he leads with older voters, that lead has been cut from 2016. 

There's been a lot of analysis of poll numbers around race and class, and I think that information is super important. On my end, however, I'd like to highlight how geography and age compound race and class and can show us where the deeper veins of Trump's support lie. 

Trump's base is not just white and without a college degree (which is not necessarily the class distinction marker a lot of people think it is, but I don't have time for that right now.) His base is aged and rural as well. All of the talk of "economic anxiety" has failed to take into account how cultural anxiety is the dominant theme for his base, with the economy sort of slotted into it. 

The fundamental issue beneath this cultural anxiety is that the country is changing in ways that Trump's people don't like. It's becoming less white, less rural, less Christian. Trump voters are concerned that they will no longer be the unquestioned norm in American life. This is why "cancel culture" is such a potent meme for them. This is why my trip to an Italian deli in mid-June included an old white guy yelling a profanity-laced tirade at the owner about statues being toppled. To them the police are their guardians against all who they dislike and seeing them criticized feels like a fundamental threat to their existence. 

Back in 2016 I heard some great analysis from Farai Chideya on NPR, who actually went to Trumpy Rust Belt areas and talked to his voters. She found that they tended to be economically comfortable themselves, but were concerned about their communities changing and their children needing to leave in order to have opportunity. These people often had contempt for the poor in their own communities (and not just poor Black people.) 

Trump has not expanded his base. He is doubling down on people who feel left behind not because of their economic situation, but because they are losing their cultural primacy. While their numbers are dwindling because the country is changing, their feelings of resentment and being threatened make them far more dangerous than four years ago. They think America is "their" country and if anyone who is not a conservative is in power they will not see them as legitimate. They are opposed to wearing masks so vehemently because it is an assault on their identity to do a thing that a liberal (or perceived liberal) asks them to do. If they think that people who disagree with them are anti-American, they will have no qualms about taking away their vote or invalidating an election. 

The real question is whether the rest of us will be willing to put our lives on the line in two months to bring back democracy. Get ready.

The Reality Gap

 In the midst of a deadly pandemic he has completely failed to control and an economic collapse connected to that failure, it seems insane that Donald Trump even has a chance in this election. By all rights he should be where Jimmy Carter was in 1980 or Herbert Hoover in 1932.

A lot of this can be chalked up to partisanship. Most Republicans would rather cut off their left arms than vote for a Democrat. Trump is the ultimate test of their partisan loyalty and they have been overzealous in trying to pass it.

However, it's not just simple partisanship. Beneath that divide lies a fundamental difference in how Americans apprehend reality. Conservatism is less of a set of ideas than it is a mental universe. Conservative media defines the parameters of that world, and if something does not cross that media world's threshold, it never registers. This gives Trump a huge advantage, since his followers never even hear about his failures and malicious behavior.

For example, a relative sent us a letter in the mail from the middle of the country. It did not get here until more than two weeks after it was sent. My relative was perplexed by this, completely unaware that the Trump administration has been sabotaging the postal service. When I brought this up, they refused to believe me. I sent them some news articles to explain what I was talking about. When the topic came up again after we finally got the letter, my relative again acted dumbfounded, as if the reason was not plain as day. 

It's not merely the fact that so many live in an alternate reality, it is that they CHOOSE to live in that reality. That is an absolutely crucial point that a lot of people don't seem to get. I know people with advanced degrees who are climate change deniers. It's not that they are "dumb" or "ignorant" it's that they have CHOSEN to live in this alternate reality. If their alternate reality is questioned their entire identity collapses and so they simply refuse to connect the president's policies against the post office to the reason why their mail arrives so late. 

Anyone who has been around fervent religious believers understands this dynamic well, and it's no coincidence that there's a lot of crossover between Trump voters and die hard white evangelicals. (Nor is it that the same group is well represented in QAnon circles, but that's a story for another time.) Thirty years ago the media landscape was such that news of the president sabotaging the post office would have registered with ordinary conservatives, but now they view any news coming from outside their media to be suspect.

The reality gap is keeping Trump viable in this election, but it might not be enough to put him over the top. Even so, the huge percentage of the country that has elected to live in an alternate reality are not going away. They will remain the majority in broad swathes of the country. The media landscape will be even more fractured and divided as years go on. A Democratic Congress and president who does not realize this, and who thinks they broke the spell by defeating Trump, will be setting themselves up for failure. 

Further Into The Fire

 

Arthur Brown knows what's up

In January of 2017, on the eve of Trump's inauguration, I wrote about how we were all headed into the fire. I knew some would be burned, and others would be consumed. I also knew that nothing be the same after it was over.

The thought of those who the fire would consume made me cry on the train to work the day after the election. It's what kept me up at night in the following years. It's why I protested at immigrant detention centers and started donating money to political campaigns for the first time. 

This last week I have felt the flames getting higher. The sabotaging of the post office to assist in stealing an election, which the president openly stated, makes me think that the temperature will only be getting hotter in these crucial momths. With so many Republicans falling into line it's obvious that this election will be rigged and the theft will hold unless there is mass action in the streets that could possibly lead to bloodshed. 

Amidst all of this, day after day, over a thousand people die of covid in America when other wealthy nations have death totals barely in double digits. This fundamental fact of life and death has become so normalized that we don't even really bother to comprehend its horror. The past three and a half years of being in the fire have burned away our sensitivities.

Authoritarian regimes rely on a sense of inevitability. Vaclav Havel's brilliant essay "The Power of the Powerless" recognized this. He described Czechoslovakia under Communist rule as a place where people did not believe in the slogans they mouthed, but followed them nevertheless. What else was there to do? The most powerful thing that could be done in these circumstances, as Havel noted, was for people to "live in the truth." 

If enough people refuse to cooperate with a regime, that regime either falls or sustains itself with mass bloodshed (which can of course lead to armed revolt, too). Fortunately, the Eastern bloc governments mostly opted for the former. I actually don't know what would happen in this country under those circumstances. Certainly Prague in 1968 turned out a lot worse than it did in 1989.

The question that each and every person who cares about the survival of American democracy needs to ask themselves is whether they are willing to put their lives on the line in November. If not, the fire will keep burning until there's nothing left.

A Reason For Hope

As we get closer to the election, Donald Trump only gets more and more brazen. This weekend he effectively purged the post office, trying to hobble the institution necessary to carry out a free and fair election during a pandemic. Today he issued executive orders from his golf course that don't seem to be legal or constitutional. He is trying to rule by decree and to manipulate voting. If this was happening in another country our media would not be shy about calling this open authoritarianism. 

The United States has been drifting this direction for four years under Trump. Once the reality of him losing power has surfaced, his few remaining scruples have been dropped. The chaos of the pandemic, which he has made worse by failing to address it, has given him cover. Like other authoritarians he creates so much disruption that it is hard for anyone to know where to begin or to know what to do. It makes people just feel helpless.

So we sit confused, doom-scrolling through social media, and not doing anything. In the days of late May and early June I could feel the seismic shifts of history beneath my feet, but they passed. The crowds at the White House and in the streets across the country faded. The fundamental power relationship in the country managed to weather the storm. 

The hardcore 40-45% of the country loyal to Trump have not been changed, either. They are flying bigger banners this time around, doubling down on their choice. They are fighting mask decrees and spreading wild conspiracy theories on social media.

There is a true "silent majority" in this country that wants conservatives out of power, but its silence is the problem. Most people in this group still believe in American democracy. They still think an election can fix this. I doubt that it will. I go into this November with about a 50-50 feeling that American democracy will not survive it. 

As upsetting as this is, one hopeful thought sustains me. I take heart in the notion that this disaster could bring about what Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom." The demolition of a failed system allows us to build something better. I am not optimistic about that outcome, mostly because it is beyond the imagination of most people in the aforementioned "silent majority." But I can hope. I plan on doing what needs to be done to turn that hope into reality.

The Thirty Percent Problem

As an educator this summer means many hours spent tying my brain into knots with anxiety. Over the next few days I expect to hear from my school, my wife's school district, and my children's school district about plans for fall. I pray that they are in some way compatible, since we are having to make shit up as we go all along. 

There's a deeper reason for that, of course. The United States has simply opted not to have any kind of national response to the pandemic. This is by design, since the president just wants people to go back to doing what they did before, thinking this will boost the economy and help him win the election. It also fits with his complete inability to build up, the man is only capable of destruction. 

When I have my daily anxiety attacks one thing I keep thinking about is how little will change even if Donald Trump loses the election and leaves office. A great number of Americans, I would estimate thirty percent, simply refuse to take the virus seriously. I've seen pictures and heard accounts from friends in some parts of the country where people do all kinds of activities in crowded, indoor areas without masks. Even here in New Jersey, which has suffered horribly from the virus, I will see people go into stores wearing a mask on their goddamned chins. 

This is not merely lax behavior, it is rooted in how deep our political divide has come. As plenty of others have pointed out, the thirty percent I mentioned before has reached "epistemtic closure." The people in that group simply do not trust ANYTHING that comes from outside their conservative world. This is not a matter of stupidity or ignorance, but a willful construction of an alternate reality. That's why presenting facts or educating will not matter. In fact, as with climate skeptics and anti-evolutionists, it only confirms their viewpoint if they are challenged and forced to defend it!

Social media and the segmentation of news into sources like talk radio, Breitbart, Fox, and OAN mean that the thirty percent has a constant stream of misinformation to confirm their membership in their community and distrust all those outside. Younger people might change their minds when exposed to other viewpoints, but as for the old, forget about it.

This means that even with a Biden presidency putting a national response in place, it would get nowhere. The militant minority could easily stop it. In fact, our political system is set up to let that happen. The unrepresentative nature of the Senate, the Senate filibuster, gerrymandering, and federalism all allow this thirty percent outsize power. A mask mandate and closures will simply never be undertaken by most Republican governors. What then? 

If Biden wins or he loses I predict that this disease will be endemic, killing and killing and killing and never stopping. There will be ebbs and flows, highs and lows, but it will always be here. And even if there is a vaccine developed (which I am skeptical of) enough of the thirty percent will refuse to take it and thus make it far less effective.

We've reached the point we have been traveling towards for years. The United States of America in its current state is ungovernable. There won't be a civil war, just decades of being an ever-burning dumpster fire of a country, like many of our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. It turns out we aren't all that exceptional after all. 

The 1988 Election's Long Shadow

This Bush ad is eerily like something out of the Soviet Union, and features the worst song ever recorded

Someone younger than me on Twitter today was asking why Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 election to George Bush so decisively after having a large lead in the polls after the Democratic convention. This particular election is obscure, especially to people who didn't live through it. Howeverm this was the first presidential election that I could meaningfully understand, so it has stuck in my mind pretty much ever since. I also hadn't really developed a political viewpoint of any kind yet, so I sort of watched it in a detached kind of way. (By 1992 I'd figured out that despite my conservative upbringing that I was a progressive, soon to be social democrat.)

In ensuing years I think it was an election that did a lot of damage to the Democratic Party, because the party took the exact wrong lessons from it. It's also a strange election, since it occurred in a far less partisan time when major swings could happen much easier than they do now.

When pressed for reasons why Dukakis lost, this is what I would list:

• A lackluster campaign that failed to establish a coherent narrative, e.g. the tank photo shoot
• The candidate's lack of charisma and passion
• General animus against northeastern liberals with ethnic backgrounds
• The Willie Horton ad
• Relatedly, the context of the War on Drugs
• Anger over Iran-Contra had faded and Reagan's approval went back up
• Roger Ailes helping Bush become a nasty political street fighter while using rhetoric ("kinder gentler nation") softer than hardcore Reaganism

I still remember the presidential debates when Bush called Dukakis a "liberal" with a sneer in his voice. Dukakis seemed to be embarrassed by the title instead of proudly defending his record. (This brilliant SNL sketch summed up the feeling of besieged liberalism at the time.) The Willie Horton ad was an even more infamous moment where Dukakis failed to strongly fight back against a nefarious and racist attack. 

The Democrats responded to this defeat by taking away the exact wrong lessons. Instead of realizing they needed to be strong and not back down to Republican bullshit, they assumed that they needed to preempt those attacks by being more conservative. Hence Democrats decided to get "tough on crime" and pass thing like the Clinton crime bill. Bill Clinton's "triangulation" strategy in office was, in many respects, the response to 1988. 

For years and years Democrats ran away from pushing a progressive agenda, seeing that as something inherently unpopular when in fact many of these ideas have broad support. For example, voters in red states like Oklahoma and Nebraska have passed Medicaid expansion ballot initiatives. Nebraska and Arkansas voters approved increases in the minimum wage. Democrats have been so afraid of their own shadows for so long that they are failing to capitalize on things they support that are very popular because they assume people don't want them. Would you vote for someone with that little confidence in themselves? (They're worse than me trying to date in college.)

The 1988 election also set this weird precedent of trying to be the party of decency in the face of Republican chicanery, with the implicit assumption that the voting public would reward virtue. Just as Dukakis did little to push back on scurrilous attacks against him, John Kerry said little in public about the Swift Boat lies, figuring that the truth would speak for itself. (Bill Clinton was more robust in his responses, but to be fair he actually did a lot of the things he was accused of!)

The other big lesson of needing an appealing narrative didn't quite sink in. Bill Clinton and especially Obama figured that out, but Gore, HRC, and Kerry never did. One of my big fears about Biden is that he will do the same, will run on "I'm not Trump," and that won't be enough. He like others in the Democratic leadership are of an older generation formed in liberal defeat in the 70s and 80s. I really hope they still aren't fighting 1988 in their heads, unable to forget the one that got away but without truly understanding why. 

The Speech I Want Joe Biden To Give

[Author's Note: I'm not a speech writer by trade, but here's what I would like to hear from the Democratic nominee. Hey Biden campaign, you can call me any time.)

My fellow Americans, we are in the midst of a daunting crisis. We have faced crises this dire in America's history before, but this is like nothing we have seen in our lifetimes. A deadly pandemic is ravaging the country, our economy is in free fall, and people have taken to the streets in massive numbers to protest racism and injustice. In the midst of this our president has been a modern day Nero, tweeting while the nation burns.

His failure to provide leadership and direction on the virus has caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. In the face of mass deprivation he has rewarded large corporations while letting everyday people suffer. His flagrantly racist politics and even cheerleading for police brutality have only fanned the flames of justified discontent. In a truly wretched spectacle he had peaceful protestors gassed so he could pose for a photo opportunity.

We all know that this country cannot move forward with Donald Trump in office. However, it would be a huge mistake to think that this country's troubles only began in January of 2017. Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere, nor did the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police. The past forty years have seen a fearsome rise in economic inequality. Our government has responded mostly by putting more people in prison instead of addressing the root of the problem.

It is here that I must admit that I have been part of the problem. In the 1990s I voted for crime bills motivated by the need to protect citizens, and not cognizant enough of the destructive effects of mass incarceration, especially on the Black community. At the time this approach was very popular.  All of us must admit the failures of the past, and to do better to ensure a brighter future.

We are living in difficult times, and problems such as ours demand solutions to match them. If we are to improve the lives of Americans, we must be willing to make sweeping reforms and remake many of our institutions. For example, the virus has shown that a health care system tied to employment where people lose coverage when they lose their jobs, doesn't work. Furthermore, this system is extremely costly, and leaves millions without protection. We need to have a universal health insurance system, so that every American is taken care of.

Some may argue that this will mean restrictions on freedom, but I say that universal health care will empower the people of this country. It will allow them more freedom to move jobs and switch careers, and the freedom that comes from knowing that an essential part of your life is being taken care of.

We need to expand the social safety net in other ways that will bring freedom. For example, we need to subsidize child care, which will allow more parents the ability to take the jobs they want, children of all backgrounds to be better prepared for school, and to reduce a massive fiscal burden on working families. We must provide low-cost college education so that young people may pursue a better life without being crushed by debt. An America where every citizen can pursue their dream no matter how much money they have is in our reach if we try.

This is nothing new in our history. FDR responded to the Great Depression by creating the minimum wage, social security, and farm subsidies. Abraham Lincoln supported the creation of land grant universities to broaden the reach of higher education. Both presidents understood that the best way to respond to a crisis in this country is to focus on improving the lives of regular people.

We also must listen to the voices of protest in the street. Our cities are segregated and they are policed in racist and violent ways. We must end the war on drugs by legalizing cannabis and decriminalizing other drugs so that addicts can be helped and low-level dealers rehabilitated. We must support affordable housing and not just place it in the poorest areas because that doesn't solve the problem of segregation. Housing, like health care, keeps getting more expensive, even though wages aren't going up. We must demilitarize the police, and reallocate resources from the prison-industrial complex to social welfare. Until we make a true effort for what Martin Luther King called "genuine equality," we will never be able to live up to this nation's promise.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln called the Civil War a "new birth of freedom." This moment of crisis calls for yet another that is long overdue. In addition to making sure all Americans are able to have a decent standard of living, we also must make our system democratic again. Even before Donald Trump took office, Republicans challenged the Voting Rights Act in court and got key provisions overturned. This has led to naked attempts at voter suppression across the country. The long lines we see on election day are a national disgrace. We must fight to ensure the right to vote by setting uniform voter qualifications across the entire country.

Trump promised to "drain the swamp," but instead has become the Swamp Monster in Chief. He has used the government to advance his personal wealth, but his brazen graft is sadly only an extreme version of the corruption causing our system to rot away. We need a Constitutional amendment to limit money in political campaigns so that the people and not the wealth and corporations have the ears of our leaders.

Donald Trump lost by three million votes, yet still became president. It is time to dismantle the electoral college. Due to the machinations of Mitch McConnell, Trump has packed the courts with radical conservatives. I aim to nominate additional justices to better reflect good jurisprudence and the will of the people. We cannot have a country where the person rejected by the majority still gets to be president. That is not democracy.

As my friend Barack liked to say, what is wrong with America can be fixed with what is right with America. Our nation rose to the challenge in the Civil War and Great Depression. We can do it again. I am not running for president merely to unseat an unfit, disastrous Donald Trump. I do so because I love this country and I believe in its future. This crisis presents an opportunity for a true rebirth of freedom. Let us not squander this golden opportunity. The darkest hour comes before the dawn.

Some Suggestions for the Sanders Campaign

Want a lesson in how to be a populist while not alienating potential supporters? Look no further than FDR.

Liz Warren was my favorite of the Democratic presidential candidates by far. Bernie was number two (and the only other one I feel genuine excitement for), so I have decided to back him against Biden. I live in New Jersey, so my vote might not even matter come June, but in the meantime I would like to do my bit to support him.

If I can't vote yet, I would like to offer some advice. The first would be to learn from the results on Super Tuesday. I was honestly shocked at how well Biden did, considering how tepid his campaign had been to this point, and how little he campaigned in places where he won. As the saying goes, "the party decides," and folks from Klobuchar to Clyburne decided to back the only established moderate candidate capable of uniting most of the party. (Warren was too progressive for them, but at least it wasn't Bloomberg.) With the nationalization of politics, retail politics (where Sanders has an advantage) are less important these days as well.

Something I learned from doing competitive debate in high school and college was that the worst thing you could do after a loss was to blame it on the judges or your opponents not playing fair. That might make you feel better, but it would not help you win the next time out. Unfortunately, the Bernie movement has a tendency to only find fault in others, and lacks the self-reflection needed to win this fight. That's why I think it's crucial that those of us coming to Bernie now offer our perspective, since we have a better understanding of how to preach to the unconverted.

In the first place, Super Tuesday was proof that trying to get new voters to the polls simply won't work. It could be that Sanders fails to inspire new voters, or that primary voting is such a specialized and rare thing that it's hard to get ANYONE to do it. In any case, to win he needs to get the votes of regular Democrats. This is going to be a problem, because a lot of Sanders supporters spend their time attacking Democratic politicians. Most voters, however, are not ideologically rigid. They tend to vote for who they like or who appeals to them for a variety of reasons. I know people who vote enthusiastically for candidates of wildly varying political ideologies because of this. If you tell someone that voting for Bernie means disdaining Obama, for example, you will lose. Obama is by far the most popular politician of my lifetime, especially in the Democratic Party. If Bernie wants the votes of African Americans in particular, he needs to claim the Obama legacy, not run against it as he often has done.

Another issue is in terms of branding. Sanders called himself a "democratic socialist," but his policies are really in line with the New Deal social democracy that the Democrats embraced before Jimmy Carter and the "Watergate babies." He could get a lot of mileage by showing himself to be in the party lineage, and not by using a label that's not only alienating to people in the middle, but also not even accurate to who he actually is.

Sanders also needs to use his anti-establishment rhetoric more selectively. It often takes on an "it's us against the world" mentality that understandably alienates the people on the outside looking in. It makes them feel as if they are not wanted in the "us." Compare this to how Barack Obama was able to bring people in. What seems to be getting lost these days is that Obama managed to win an insurgent campaign and go on to be the most popular president of my lifetime. Despite this, no one seems to be learning any lessons from him. (I am not saying he was flawless, only that he was good at getting elected president!) When the "establishment" stuff is aimed at other Democrats that a lot of progressive Democrats like, they are not going to warm to you.

There's also a problem that when every setback in the campaign is blamed on the media or party establishment, it makes Bernie sound like a loser. If you spend all your time complaining about process, guess what, you just lost. (Just look at Democrats in Congress failing to make Trump accountable for his crimes!)  In public it's better to project confidence about the next battle ahead, not complaining about how you were robbed in the last one. That plays well to the base, but as we've seen, that base is simply not enough to get him over the top.

Related to that, Sanders has to stop denying that the culture around his campaign is a liability, especially in attracting women. A minority of his online supporters seem more interested in proclaiming their moral superiority than in actually winning, and are huge assholes about it. The same people will then deny there's a problem. While every candidate has dickish supporters, the Sanders campaign seems to have a culture that cultivates behavior alienating to others. Part of the reason I am even writing this is to add an alternative voice to the mix. I am going for Bernie, but I personally know multiple Warren supporters (all women) who have basically said that the behavior of Sanders supporters has made it so that they simply don't want to be on the same team as them. Even if some folks feel this is merely a matter of perception, that perception has to be fixed.

Above all, I would urge the Sanders campaign to lean on positivity and on the promise of his program. The attraction of social democracy is that it promises a better world where all people can have dignity and protection. Isn't that a great thing? Don't we want a world where we are getting quality health care and able to go to college or have children without going bankrupt? (On a related note, he needs to stress child care as much or more than he is stressing college tuition.) Calling out "the banks" might help a little, but most people are less eaten up by anger than we have been led to believe.

Biden's biggest weakness is that he is trying to maintain a failed status quo. Bernie's greatest attraction is that he is offering something better. That message alone won't bring in voters unless they feel like they are welcome in the tent in tangible, not rhetorical ways. There's still time for Sanders to turn his campaign around, but when I see the dead-end nature of his supporters' resentment, I doubt it can happen. I hope I'm wrong.

Get Ready For 2020

Are you ready for 2020?

This is going to be a crucial year. Impeachment and an election are coming, the two remaining mechanisms we have within the legal system to end Trump's neofascist reign.

But are you ready for when Mitch McConnell doesn't allow for an actual impeachment trial? Are you ready for disinformation and propaganda and lies that would make the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth blush get shared in a massive torrent on social media? Are you ready for voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the electoral college to once again rob the majority of power?  You better get ready because I am almost positive that these things are going to be happening this year.

What are you going to do about it?

I don't really have the answers. In many respects I feel like the die was cast in November of 2016, and we are just in the aftermath of the point that has already turned. Most people opposed to Donald Trump are in denial about this.

So what happens when our democracy is exposed (again) as a total sham? I am completely in earnest about this, and I honestly don't know what I should do. In the face of the massive onslaught the opposition is already tearing itself to pieces, just like back in 2016. People are fighting like blazes over their preferred nominees and not really paying much attention to get out the vote efforts. We are taking knives to a gun fight and are then just knifing each other over and over again instead of uniting against the common enemy.

I guess this myopia reflects our larger condition. Climate change has humanity at the precipice, and we are doing fuck-all about it. Maybe we all know deep down that there is no future, and we would rather pretend otherwise than face that unhappy fact. I have resolved to get out there and keep fighting, because I can do no other. I do so with zero confidence that it will matter.

Joe Biden's Vanishing Consensus

Joe Biden has been involved in public life since sideburns and wide collars were acceptable on politicians. It's time for his to get out of the way.

I am breaking my resolution to stay away from the 2020 primary because I think we are seeing a bigger story playing out here beyond the horserace. When Donald Trump was elected president it should have been clear that "politics as usual" was over. (Even before his election Mitch McConnell's blocking of a Supreme Court nomination was proof enough.) Furthermore, anyone interested in actual political change could see that promising the American people to go back to the way it was before Trump was pretty weak tea. The only way forward is, well, forward.

Enter Joe Biden, first elected to the Senate in the early 70s. Now that he has entered the presidential race, he has shown just how many Democrats have refused to accept the new reality. They really want to believe that Republicans are simply good people that they disagree a little with, not fierce advocates for right wing extremism who are willing to suppress votes and engage in racial gerrymandering. Biden's comments this week, about how Republicans would somehow come to their senses after a Trump defeat, were pretty damning in this respect.

He is still stuck in a time when there was greater comity between the political parties. This is kind of surprising given Biden's role in the Bork affair, something that conservatives have long used to blame liberals for starting our never-ending low grade civil culture war.

You can see this as well in his comments on the Hyde Amendment, which since the 1970s has prevented federal funding of abortion. For a longtime this was accepted by many Democrats as part of a consensus on abortion. The practice was legalized nationwide, but government programs would not directly fund it. With the Republican attempts to criminalize abortion nationwide having obliterated one side of the bargain, rank and file Democrats are no longer willing to cede ground on the Hyde Amendment. Once Biden quickly understood this, he changed course immediately.

This was the political equivalent of an elder parent needing a child or grandchild to set up the wifi network in their house. Like a lot of people his age, Biden is kind of confused by the way things are today, and hasn't done the work to keep up. Telling Democrats to that they will be able to be friends with Republicans again reminds me of an older relative who told me to just call up universities and see if they had jobs after I had my PhD. No amount of me telling them that this is not how things are done was capable of changing their mind.

When I see the elders in my own life struggling to keep up I am understanding and try to help them. Joe Biden is trying to be president of the United States, an entirely different scenario. We don't need to help him figure it out, he just needs to get out of the way. Unfortunately, a lot of Democratic voters, especially the older ones, are just as clueless as he is. They too are unwilling to acknowledge the new reality. It is our job to break their stranglehold on the Democratic Party.

Impeachment Is A Kobayashi Maru (and we should still do it)

The day that the fuller version of the Mueller report dropped, I realized that the impeachment situation is a Kobayashi Maru scenario for opponents of Donald Trump. For those who don't know, Kobayashi Maru was a training exercise for Starfleet in the Star Trek universe where prospective captains were put into an impossible situation. They could try to rescue the civilians aboard the namesake ship, but would be destroyed by the enemy. The point of the simulation was not to guess the correct course of action, but to show how officers would react in bad circumstances.

Impeachment is a Kobayashi Maru because there are two options: to allow a brazen criminal to continue to occupy the presidency, or to exhaust political capital in what will be an inevitable failure to unseat that president. As has been obvious from day one, Republicans will follow Trump to the gates of Hell. They happily defended his breaking up of migrant families and tossing their kids into cages. They signed their deal with the devil, and now there's no going back. In any case, he is the key to their wildest dreams of unfettered capitalism and Christian dominionism. Even if ten Republican Senators defect (which will never happen), the Senate still would not be able to unseat Trump.

A lot of folks, including in the Democratic Party leadership, have made this calculation. They are concerned that this inevitable failure would boost Trump, allowing him an easy path to reelection in 2020. They are more rightly concerned with how focusing on Trump takes air away from appeals on issues like health care that are the party's winning advantage.

I've been thinking long and hard about this, but impeachment needs to be done. If failure is guaranteed either way (which it is), then doing the right thing actually becomes a lot easier. The pragmatic option doesn't exist. The question becomes simply this: are we going to give a proven criminal president a pass, or not? I do not see how we can live with ourselves if we refuse to carry out the Constitutionally mandated remedy for this situation.

It can also be carried out in a way that does not backfire, or where the consequences are at least mitigated. The message on impeachment can be intertwined with the "bread and butter" issues. Investigating the Trump finances (which aren't even part of the Mueller probe but are by far where most of the crime goes on) will dredge up all kinds of stuff. The message gets pretty easy: "Your tax return went down last year, but Donald Trump set up a system where people like him don't have to pay taxes." Any serious look into his business empire is going to turn up all kinds of stuff (just listen to the Trump Inc podcast), revelations that can be capitalized on, so long as Democrats run an economically populist campaign. This will be crucial, because with the economy growing they need to not just talk about "jobs," but about compensation, health care, child care, etc.

Ever since Trump's election, the country's politically apathetic soft middle has yearned for a "return to normal." This I think is secretly one of the Democratic party's biggest advantages in the 2020 election. If you spend time talking to so-called independent moderates, they tend to frame things in maddeningly imprecise generalizations. Last time around it was "I don't like either candidate" and people who deep down didn't like Trump ended up casting their vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, which in key states was effectively a vote for Trump. One of those garden variety suburban dipshit opinions could easily turn out to be "I'm just tired of Trump. I just don't want to have to care about politics." In that case, impeachment might actually be able to help Democrats.

And speaking of the soft middle, political corruption is something that most voters dislike. It's the reason Trump kept talking about "draining the swamp." It turns out, of course, that this was not about ending corruption, but invoking the kinds of metaphors for the opposition beloved by fascists. Impeachment hearings will dredge up things that are public but which have been allowed to leave the headlines, as well as brand new stories.

The danger, of course, is that the soft middle white suburban dipshit opinion after the Senate clears Trump could easily turn into "I guess Trump did nothing wrong and those Democrats ruined my life by putting all this stuff in the news that I didn't want to think about." That won't end so well.

Be that as it may, impeachment has to be attempted. Not just because the president has been proven to abuse his power (the basic litmus test of impeachment), but because if we take our political ideals seriously we MUST take action. And though failure may be inevitable in the short term, in the long term the Republicans will never be able to shake the stigma of their support of this criminal. Future generations will look back and know who was in the right.

I am reminded of another time in American history when a political faction held the country hostage against the demands of justice. In 1860 Lincoln gave his famous speech at Cooper Union in New York City, where the prairie politician moved his skeptical east coast audience by reminding them that slavery was wrong and nothing could ever change that. He ended his speech thus: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

We know we are right. We know our duty compels us. Time to act.

Take The 2020 Presidential Primary Pledge

Up until now I have been treating all of the 2020 presidential primary hype as an irritating annoyance. I've been muting the words "Beto," "Bernie," and "Kamala" among others for months on Twitter. It's the only way to make the site usable because lots of people have lots of bad opinions on the topic. I have come around to thinking that all the presidential primary hype is not merely annoying, it's actually extremely harmful.

One thing that killed the Democrats in the Obama era was the party faithful's focus on winning the White House while neglecting Congress and state-level offices. This meant that the Obama administration got precious little done, and that once blue states like Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Michigan suffered through the leadership of the worst kind of conservative governorships. Just think about the impact that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had on the discourse, and she's merely one representative in Congress. Imagine the legislative agenda if there were a hundred more people like her in Congress from the the kinds of safe Democratic districts that she won. Getting a more social democratic system will only happen if things change in that way, the most lefty president will founder with an unsympathetic Congress.

This is a long way of saying that at this stage I do not give a single shit about the Democratic presidential primary. There are a lot of candidates I like, and some I am lukewarm about. Whoever they nominate I will be voting and getting out the vote for because to do otherwise would be insanity. Since I live in Jersey and we vote last, there really isn't any reason for me to even pay attention to all of this until well after the early primaries are over and my choices have been limited. What I want to do is to make sure more candidates like Ocasio-Cortez, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams get nominated by the party in the lower tier races. I want to make sure that we are fighting voter suppression on every level so we do not have more stolen elections. The groundwork for that fight needs to be laid RIGHT NOW. The Democrats may nominate your preferred candidate, but what does it matter if voters are kept from voting for them next November?

Let's stop wasting our time and resources. As the old saying goes, don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes. There is a time and a season for presidential politics, but that's a ways off still. In that spirit, here is a pledge I have concocted for liberal, progressive, and Left voters that I will take and I hope others take too.

I pledge:

• To give campaign contributions to progressive Democrats in tight primaries in lower-tier races
• To call my representatives (especially my Democratic ones) and pressure them to push progressive policies
• To not blog, Tweet or post on Facebook about the 2020 primary until the Iowa caucus, and maybe not even then
• To not get into pointless arguments on social media with partisans of other primary candidates
• To not give any campaign contributions in the presidential primary, but so save them for the general election
• To go to protests against the current administration instead of primary rallies and to generally prioritize political action against the current regime over pushing my favored candidate
• To contribute and work for campaigns intended to combat voter suppression
• To vote and campaign for the Democratic nominee in the general election and to bury any leftover grudges from the primary process

Mueller Won't Save You

Donald Trump put hard times on us, but we gotta fight

I wrote last week about the difference between nice liberals and fighting liberals. In the days since the nice liberals have been having a field day. The nice liberals really really want to believe that our institutions work, that the real world is like The West Wing or Mr Smith Goes To Washington. So when George W Bush and Jeff Flake and Bob Corker criticize Trump these people swoon despite the horrible damage they have done and the reactionary nature of their politics. And when the Mueller indictments came down, my oh my these folks creamed their pants. They think they are seeing their faith in the system confirmed, and that they will not have to have their hands sullied by actually doing hard political work.

I have some bad news for the nice liberals: Mueller won't save you. Anti-Trump Republicans won't save you. Hilary won't save you. Bernie won't save you. Chuck and Nancy won't save you. The FBI won't save you. The courts won't save you. The military sure as shit won't save you. Only concerted, mass action has any chance of stopping this. As someone who is on the fighting side of the left, I implore all the nice liberals to put down their copies of What Happened and get out into the streets. And more than that, be prepared to join a general strike, or a bank boycott, or any other kind of collective action that demands something more.

If the Republicans control Congress after 2018, Trump's agenda will continue without a check. If the states stay Republican, we will see even worse gerrymandering after 2020, even worse voter suppression, even worse union busting. The Republicans know that their ideology is inherently unpopular. Most people don't want tax cuts for the rich and broad entitlements like Social Security and Medicare to be slashed. Yet that is conservative orthodoxy. Even using xenophobia and racism Trump still lost by three million votes. They need to rig the system permanently to maintain control, and in two years, I think that they will have it. If that happens all the indictments in the world won't mean shit.

Just look at what happened last year. All the nice liberals kept refreshing the page for 538's election prediction while others on the left went to Twitter to accuse Clinton of being a neoliberal. Look at what that got us. If the nice liberals as well as the socialist left refuse to unite against fascism and actually fight it, I guarantee you that fascism will triumph, indictments of not. So get out there and fight.