Winter Isn't Coming, It's Here

This post is a throwback, since I am writing it in a coffee house. I'm here in the evening because the roads in my town are so impassable from a snowstorm that I can't drive home yet. The town was unprepared for this storm, which is much more severe than predicted. The plows have been absent and the roads left unsande.

This seems to be a metaphor for our current political moment. So many predicted only a light snow but now we are getting buried in snow and ice, and the response has been tepid and inadequate. And just as the roads in my town are full of desperate people running out of gas having realized their fate too late, a lot of folks in our country have only now understood that we are up against fascism. 

Winter isn't coming, it's here.

Trump's attempt to intervene in the Florida recount goes against any precedent I've seen in my lifetime, and the response is basically a shrug and bemused chuckle from the liberal sectors of the media. The conservative media, on the other hand, is giving Trump's baseless accusations full-throated approval.What we have here is a president trying to interrupt the Democratic process for his benefit, and there's hardly been a response.

The same goes for Trump installing a whackadoodle con artist as Attorney General just so that he can protect himself from prosecution. Again, the response has been inadequate. Some protests, to be sure, but nothing that has the ability to stop this. This is not Watergate. After this Saturday Night Massacre there will be no Supreme Court subpoenas of presidential documents because this Supreme Court has become the judicial arm of the conservative movement. 

I am sitting here in a Starbucks drinking mediocre coffee and listening to bland music because people weren't prepared for winter. I am living in a country on the brink of losing what little democracy it ever had because so few are prepared to fight the fight that needs to be fought. I am losing hope that by the time enough people see the light, it will have been too late. 

Old Dad's Records (The Comebacks Episode)

Comebacks is the theme of the newest episode of my podcast. I start with one of the ultimate pop comeback songs, Tina Turner's "What's Love Gotta Do With It." The song certainly reflects the hard times Turner was emerging from, and its middle-aged world-weariness intrigued me as a young boy. From there I pull Elvis' double album From Vegas to Memphis/From Vegas to Memphis from my pile of old records. This is from Elvis' great and all too brief "comeback" period. I finish by discussing a new reissue of sessions from Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, his own "comeback album."

Watching the Dark Waters of History Flow on the Armistice Centennial

A short lived celebration

November 11, 1918, is one of those few truly memorable dates in world history. The first global war of the post-industrial world had ended. It had taken the lives of millions, destroyed several empires, and helped bring about the world’s first communist state.

In our cultural memory, we tend to think of World War I as a catastrophic, horrible waste. That memory dates back to the 1920s and works of literature like All Quiet On The Western Front and films like The Big Parade. The narrative that World War I meant nothing other than death and suffering still lives on a century later. In the recent Wonder Woman film the titular heroine needed to fight a villain who personified the destructive horror of war itself, and thus had her origin placed in the Great War, rather than in World War II, where her character had actually been born.

It is very easy to forget that in the Allied nations, at least, the established narrative of the war was very different on the November day the guns fell silent. The full name for the Great War was “The Great War For Civilization.” “Civilization” was a loaded word. It had been weaponized during the imperialist expansion of the preceding decades, an excuse to violently subjugate peoples who preferred to be free. During the Great War the target of civilization’s march shifted from Africa and Asia to Germany. Both the American and British war efforts established formidable and successful propaganda machines that pitched the war as a fight for higher ideals against a wicked enemy.

This point of view was affectionately parodied in the great British film The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp, made in the heat of World War II. The main character, an honor-obsessed aristocratic officer of the old school, hears of the armistice and beams with pride that the British had won the war with “fair play.” By 1943, in the midst of an even worse world war caused by the last one, the romantic view of a “Great War For Civilization” had become a joke. 

It is dangerous, however for us to ignore that initial postwar feeling of triumph, because it provides a lesson that we should learn from. It was another November day in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. That event, symbolizing the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, infamously gave rise to rhetoric that would’ve been at home in a Great War propaganda speech.

There was a feeling in those heady days of release, that the fear of nuclear annihilation had passed. There was an assumption that we would all be living in a more peaceful, connected, and democratic world. The problems of the past could very well have been solved.

Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the “end of history” found many willing adherents. Civilization, in the form of neoliberalism, had won, and there was truly No Alternative. Like the viewers of The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, we today have the wisdom to know just how preposterous that idea was.

History does not end and it does not stop. Its dark waters flow and can break their banks and drown us in the flood. The world today is dominated by a wave of bigoted nationalism that our media mistakenly calls “populism.” The earth’s most powerful nation is led by a dangerously unhinged narcissist wannabe dictator who sows chaos with his every move. We are staring a near future of climate change dystopia straight in the face. A hundred years after the guns of the Great War went silent, we still stand at the river’s edge, uncertain of how long the ground under our feet will hold out.

What I Saw At The "No One Is Above The Law" Rally

 Months ago I signed up to get an alert for a snap protest in case the Trump administration moved to end the Justice Department’s investigation into its criminal behavior. As I expected, that day came after the midterm election, although I was not expecting it to be that very day.

I had a decision to make. Was I going to go to what would be a big protest in New York City where I work, or was I going to go to one in South Orange, New Jersey, sister city to my home base of Maplewood? While the NYC rally would have been more excited, I decided to stay local so my spouse and kids could join in.

The rally was right by the South Orange train station, with about fifty or sixty people attending. There was a mood of quiet determination in the air in the eeriness of the November dusk. I knew we would not be staying too long, since my six year olds were pretty exhausted and hungry.

I came to the protest in a fighting mood, but the event itself was deflating. The speeches by the organizers were tepid and illustrated a lingering concern of mine: most of those opposed to this regime aren’t prepared to take the necessary actions. After being told our democracy was under threat, the first speaker then urged us to contact our representatives.

Yup, that’s right. In the face of a wannabe despot shredding the rule of law the only action we were urged to take was the absolute bare minimum. In any case, our representatives were already with us on this, so even that small action was pretty worthless. If you truly believe American democracy is under threat, you need to be serving stronger tea than that.

The problem might be that the mostly white, affluent, suburban crowd there knows deep down that they will be fine no matter what the wannabe despot does to our political system. For that reason their responses lack the necessary urgency. These are people who proved capable of organizing local voters to get more Democrats elected in New Jersey, but taking on despotism requires a different approach.

We don’t need to call our representatives. We need to be able to bring the machine to a stop. Anything short of that will end in failure, and I have no confidence that the “Resistance” even has an idea of what is actually required in this moment. My only hope is the airport protests that happened after the Muslim Ban, which actually did force the government to make a retreat. More of that or it’s midnight, folks.

Regionalism And The Midterms

As always, there's been a lot of spin and punditry in the aftermath of the election. Much of it is full of sound and theory, signifying nothing more than the need to fill up blocks of time on television with idiot wind. 

One of the many things missed in all of this is the role of regions in the midterm elections. For example, the "urban versus rural" narrative ignores just how different many rural regions are from each other. You can see this in the election results. Iowa has long had a progressive rural block in its eastern counties, and this year the Democrats flipped two seats in that state. 

More broadly, the Midwest went hard for the Democrats. This region was mostly ignored in the pre-election coverage in favor of Georgia, Texas, and Florida, so reporters missed a huge story. No other region probably suffered more under the Tea Party policies and governors of the early to mid-2010s. This election was a huge rebuke, with Tea Party poster child Scott Walker sent packing in Wisconsin, Bruce Rauner canned in Illinois, Michigan brought back to the fold, and Kansas flipped after years of the Brownback disaster. I see a similar dynamic in New Jersey, which endured eight years of Chris Christie. This state will now be represented by Democrats in eleven of twelves of its districts. States that had been put under the yoke of activist conservative governors have proven to be receptive to the Democrats.

Trump and the Republicans put all their chips on an anti-immigrant, white nationalist appeal. While those arguments sadly appeal to white people nationwide, they appeal most to white people living in the South. You can see this in the election results. The South mostly held for Republicans, but pretty much all of the other regions did not. The current iteration of the Republican Party is such that it alienates a lot of "purple" suburbs, which is easy to see in the election results in New Jersey, California, and Virginia. Heck, the Republicans lost a seat that includes Cobb County, Georgia. That was once Gingrich country. 

The Republican strategy of firing up the base and everyone else be damned appears to be running into trouble. The Bible-thumping part of the base is weak on the coasts. In fact, it alienates swing voters in those places. The low-tax Republican economic message used to appeal to suburban voters in places like New Jersey, but the abject failure of those policies on the state level has discredited them.

If the Democrats are able to maintain their new hold on the Midwest and their increased margin of victory on the coasts, 2020 will be in the bag. Here's hoping that this regional shift holds.

Ten Years On

Last night was the tenth anniversary of the 2008 election. I have been thinking a lot about that night.  I had recently moved to Nacogdoches, a small town in the piney woods of East Texas that was just about as conservative as you would expect. My friends and I went to the one local bar that wasn't student-oriented to have beers and watch the returns. On this historic night none of the many TVs were tuned in, except for a small TV in the corner with the sound turned off.

When Obama crossed the threshold for an electoral voter majority, we cheered. It quickly became obvious that the other people in the space were incredibly unhappy. At that moment we took the hint and left. There was an acrid stench of hateful anger in the air, like the smell of gunpowder after shooting off fireworks.

We watched the returns and Obama's speech at my friends' house. The next day at the university I noticed something odd. Many of my students were very happy about the election, but they carried on with their celebration very quietly. I soon realized why. That same smell of hateful resentment was in the air. I noticed it especially when I went to teach my afternoon upper-level class, and a normally mild-mannered older student was ranting to his peers about how horrible the election of Barack Obama was. He was complaining about the need to purge "Republicans in Name Only." I realized in that moment that Obama was not to get an inch of respect or cooperation from Republicans. Later in April this town of 30,000 would draw 10,000 to the first big Tea Party rally.

The anger I was seeing directly contradicted the dominant media narrative of the time of a "post-racial nation." Ten years on it's obvious that the election or Barack Obama saw the creation of a mainstream and very successful version of white identity politics. Trump in the White House is the logical end point. Nowadays the anger I saw after Obama's election is the driving force in American politics.

Ten years after the Obama win the new president is making fear-mongering about immigrants the centerpiece of his campaign. The old prohibitions against open racism have fallen away. This all feels like a second Redemption, similar to when southern white conservatives terrorized their opponents to bring about the end of Reconstruction. Powerful and deadly forces have been unleashed on our country, I have no clue when it will stop.

The Desperate Despot

Paradoxically, Trump has had no greater ally in his political career than the media. His attacks on it as the "enemy of the people" energize his base as that same media keeps broadcasting Trump nonstop and allowing him to define the media narrative. All he has to do is to tweet something obnoxious and the entire news gathering apparatus will shift its focus.

Trump is best described in Brian Klaas's formulation as a wannabe despot. He has not yet completely bent the apparatus of the government to his will, but his behavior in the last two weeks shows that it is not for lack of trying. Trump has declared that he will end birthright citizenship, and is sending troops to the border to combat the threat of poor refugees that are 800 miles away. He has threatened these refugees with concentration camps and murder. After one of his supporters sent bombs to his opponents he has persisted in verbally attacking them, as well as CNN, who also received a bomb.

The media has been breathlessly reporting on all of this, implicitly burnishing Trump's image as a "tough" leader and man of action. I see something very different. I see the behavior of a man who is desperate and scared.

Because we keep chasing the shiny objects that flash before us on Twitter, we often miss the bigger perspective. Trump has not forgotten that with a Democratic Congress comes investigations into his finances and dealings, and potential impeachment. If you listen to the Trump Inc podcast (and you should) you'll know that any official lifting up of the rock of the Trump Organization is going to reveal all kinds of nastiness and crime. His own bag man, Michael Cohen, is cooperating with the Mueller investigation. Anything and everything Trump does is to protect himself. He really thinks that stoking anti-immigrant hate is going to save his skin. While his core beliefs are ethno-nationalist in nature, he being open about it at this moment because he thinks it will win the midterm.

One of the biggest myths about despotism is that it works hand in in hand with competence. Trump can't be a despot, we are told, because he is so chaotic and inept. Anyone who knows their history knows that these attributes describe a lot of autocrats. In fact, it's the norm rather than the exception for despots to be incompetent boobs. Trump is one of these boobs, flailing desperately in the face of his potential reckoning. Get out there this weekend and make sure it happens.