Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Best Analysis I’ve Seen

As I said yesterday, political finger-pointing is utterly beside the point. Harris ran a masterful campaign–unfortunately, she was female and Black, running against a man who encouraged people to vote their misogyny and bigotries.

As I also said yesterday, the election results weren’t political–they were cultural.

The best analysis I’ve seen was from Talking Points Memo.

That analysis began with what we all saw: this was a campaign “fought directly over the issues of democracy, rule of law, basic decency and respect, and protection for the marginalized.” Those were the principles and values that lost–soundly. As David Kurtz wrote, this wasn’t another fluke of our crazy Electoral College.

The dark path ahead was chosen clearly and unequivocally: With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote. Second, Trump will win without undue reliance on the quirks of our 18th century anti-majoritarian constitutional structure.

There is clarity in that result. This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one.

Donald Trump’s win isn’t the product of a constitutional quirk. It’s not the result of a poorly conceived or executed campaign by Kamala Harris. It’s not a messaging failure or a tactical error or a strategic blunder. Other broader dynamics at play – like a post-pandemic revulsion toward incumbents or an anti-inflation backlash – are too limited in their scope and specific in their focus to account for the choice that was made: Donald Trump. It would be a category error to ascribe our current predicament to a political failure.

If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.

There’s a lesson here: don’t expect politics to fix a cultural problem. Kurtz isn’t counseling us to ignore politics–although he also reminds us that we are at risk of losing the mechanisms for achieving political results – the threats to free and fair elections, majority rule, and the rule of law itself will make politics much harder. What he is doing is reminding us that what needs to change is the culture.

For those of us who believe in the rule of law, a pluralistic society, and standing up to unkind people who engage in hurting others as public blood sport, we’re going to have to take a long view toward promoting those principles in all aspects of our culture so that they are ultimately reflected in our politics in a way they simply are not now. I recognize that many of us have already been doing this slow and steady work, which makes the overnight result even more discouraging. It remains an enormous, decades-long task, but it is something each of us can engage in without uprooting our lives or changing professions or moving abroad.

With respect to the political tasks we face, he reminds us that marginalized and the disenfranchised folks are always hurt first and that it will be worse this time because hurting them has been advertised as the point.

The challenge before us is enormous. It is not a challenge any of us signed up for. It’s been foisted upon us. The past decade has felt like a detour from the lives and aspirations we had hoped to have. I feel a special empathy for those who came of age in the 1960s at the peak of Great Society reforms and have spent their adults lives witnessing their erosion. Those of us with an act or two left, and especially those with their whole lives still to dedicate to making America better than she is presenting right now, owe it to those whose time is ending to summon our essential optimism, roll up our sleeves, and get to down to the hard work that our current predicament demands. That may sound like a rallying cry, but I’m also trying to convince myself.

The first step to finding  a solution to any problem is to define it accurately. Blaming campaign errors or systemic electoral issues just keeps us from recognizing the (very ugly) truth: a majority of American voters are unhappy with social changes that confer civic equality on people they consider inferior. They are unable to recognize the multiple ways those social changes actually benefit them, and they want to “return” to a time that existed only in their imaginations.

Good people have work to do.

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Hubbell Cuts To The Chase

We are now seeing the “Chattering Class” carping and criticising and offering convoluted reasons for America’s descent into fascism–aka, the election of Donald Trump. Harris should have gone more to the Left, no, she should have gone to the Right, the problem was Democratic elitism, etc. (Interestingly, very few media pundits have addressed the very real role played by the media environment, very much including a mainstream press which failed repeatedly to call insanity insanity, instead normalizing aberrant rhetoric and behavior that formerly would have been consider shocking and disqualifying.)

Almost all of those smug analyses are efforts to avoid the truth–refusals to face what really happened. Robert Hubbell, however, was clear-eyed:

Just as the media normalized Trump before the election, there is a wholesale effort to “normalize” the election results. Pundits are claiming the election was decided by voters’ concerns over inflation, immigration, or crime. Those issues are post-facto rationalizations offered by voters to conceal their real reasons for voting for a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser over an eminently qualified candidate.

Kamala Harris lost because Trump’s supporters were motivated by racism, misogyny, and white supremacy. They voted for a felon and against prosecutor/senator/vice president because she is a woman of Black and South Asian ancestry. All of the remaining explanations are camouflage to conceal the real motivations of those who voted against Kamala Harris.

We will learn nothing if we accept pollsters’ dog-and-pony show to explain the election with exit polls and crosstabs in spreadsheets that have nothing to do with the real motivations of voters. Do not conflate data with information. Do not mistake information for knowledge. Do not confuse knowledge and understanding. Do not accept percentages and cohorts in response to the simple but profound question, “Why?”

Racism. Misogyny. White supremacy. Occam’s Razor.

Hubble is exactly right. H.L. Mencken predicted this years ago, locating the problem precisely in the defects of We the People:

As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”

Well, we’re there.

Those of us who live in a kinder, less hateful world misunderstood the effects of Trump’s out-and-proud racism. We thought his horrific Madison Square Garden rally damaged him–as it certainly did with the nice, normal people who weren’t going to vote for him anyway. What is now clear, however, is that Trump’s supporters don’t share the reactions of nice, normal people. For them, it was a welcome endorsement of their bigotries, a reassurance that their resentments are valid, and an explicit permission to express them. It was a rejection of “political correctness” (aka civility), and a validation of the public expression of invective and meanness.

We all need to recognize that the inhumanity, the bigotry, the misogyny isn’t a bug–its a feature. Indeed, it is the feature. It isn’t a distasteful aspect of the Trump campaign that voters nevertheless overlooked–it is what a majority of our fellow-citizens voted for.

Living with that understanding is hurtful, to put it mildly.

But there’s a semi-silver lining. There’s a biblical adage to the effect that “the truth shall make you free.” Now we know. And when those who are working to build a better, kinder, more inclusive society know what they are up against, they can fight for that society more effectively.

We are about to see some very dark years. The theocrats and autocrats and ignoramuses will attack the foundational premises of America, and they will do considerable damage. Meanwhile, the rest of us need to step back and consider whether we want to defend a status quo that has morphed and ossified in unfortunate ways–a status quo with serious systemic flaws, economic unfairness, overly-complex and under-inclusive social programs…the list is long. The insecurities generated by the gaps and injustices undoubtedly contributed to the frustration and hate. Our jobs, during the dark days, will be to consider what we will build when the edifice built on racism, misogyny, homophobia and nationalism collapses.

Because it will. And we need to be ready to pick up the pieces–ready to replace both the dark side and the considerable flaws that preceded and enabled it with a better, more humane, more just version of the American Idea.

We need to resist the worst that will come. We must try to protect the objects of Trumpers’ animus. But we also need to plan for what will come after.

We have work to do.

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Where The Real America Must Go

We’ve just had a crushing blow to our belief in American goodness. Like many of you, I am frantic not for myself–I’m 83, and my likely duration in the Dark Ages won’t be long. But I have children and grandchildren, who are suddenly faced with a world far more precarious than the one we all thought we occupied.

I’m fortunate that one of my sons lives in Amsterdam, and one of my granddaughters lives in England. While the wave of fascism that is sweeping the globe will undoubtedly affect them to some extent, and the global consequences of electing an ignorant lunatic as U.S. President will be significant, their prospects aren’t as bleak as they would be here over the next years.

Or as daunting as the landscape that faces the rest of the family.

My youngest son–parent of the younger two grandkids–has taken what I believe to be the only rational position available to those of us who still occupy a sane and humane America.  With his permission, I’m sharing the message he sent to his son and daughter, both of whom are currently in college, and both of whom were blindsided by the (previously) unthinkable results of the election.

Kids, I’m still struggling to process the election results and to contextualize it in a way that is not entirely negative. I keep coming back to a handful of facts and themes. First, WE (our family) are likely to be OK. While we are psychologically traumatized by the implications of the election — and the thoughts of how bad Trump might be for vulnerable people, minority communities, and non-citizens — our daily lives are unlikely to be directly or irreparably affected by Trump’s election. In saying this, I am not discounting the genuine risk to women — particularly young women of childbearing age — but WE are fortunate enough to have resources and options that likely mute those direct threats.

Second, and really based on the first point, WE now also have a greater obligation to help those who aren’t as fortunate as we are. I don’t know how or in what ways those opportunities will present themselves, but we have an obligation to help those who are going to be attacked or adversely impacted by Trump and Trumpism in the years to come.

Finally, as horrible as many people have shown themselves to be, know that OUR community is still OUR community, and made up of all the same loving, caring, funny, positive-values-holding people. I am trying to focus on these facts in the days, weeks, and years ahead… OUR community will help us weather the dark storms ahead, and we must do our part to help our family and friends weather it as well.

I love you! We will be OK, even if we are currently suffering deep psychological wounds from this election and its implications.

I can’t add to that.

I think that message sums up both the challenge we face and the obligations we must now assume. The challenge is a concerted effort by a cohort of people who believe Hitler “had some good ideas” to remake the United States into a 21st-Century fascist state. There are far more people in that cohort than most of us recognized or still want to believe.

Our obligation is twofold: first, to resist that transformation with every fiber of our beings, with every tool we can muster, with every grassroots organization we can create or support; and second, for those of us who are privileged, who are fortunate that our circumstances (or religions or skin colors) buffer us from the full effect of authoritarian animus, to work wherever and whenever we can to ameliorate the adverse impacts on those less fortunate.

Speaking of community: I’ve been doing this blog for several years, and have been gratified by the genuine sense of community that has grown up among the regular commenters, few of whom know each other personally. With the exception of a couple of trolls who weigh in now and then, you disagree with civility, share your knowledge freely and offer each other–and me– much needed moral support. You are one of the communities my son referenced in his text to my grandchildren.

Like many of you, I am still in shock. But when we emerge, we need to figure out how to save our world–how to gift our children and grandchildren with an America that is recognizable and future worth inhabiting.

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Who Drinks The Kool-Aid?

There’s a thread running through my political conversations. (Granted, those conversations are with friends and family, all of whom detest MAGA and Trump.)  Why do all the indicators point to a close election? Why isn’t Harris easily eclipsing Trump?

Think about it. Even voters who don’t particularly like Harris surely understand that she is a normal politician, infinitely preferable to a senile narcissist with a third-grade vocabulary and a raft of “policies” that would plunge America into a recession (or worse) and threaten world peace.

Hundreds of members of former Republican administrations–including his own–warn that he is a fascist, a dangerous lunatic, a self-regarding autocrat who should not be allowed anywhere near power, let alone the Oval Office.

Trump is a convicted felon, an admitted sexual predator, a congenital liar, a six-times bankrupt “titan of industry”…I could go on, but readers of this blog are well aware of the extent of his depravity.

How, then, is he at all competitive for the Presidency?

It certainly isn’t due to his “policies.” To the extent that he even has them, those policies are anything but the conservative political positions traditionally held by the bygone GOP. The striking departures from those traditional positions means it also can’t be loyalty to the ideology that once characterized the GOP.

As Heather Cox Richardson recently reminded us, Trump has boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.” As Richardson put it, the GOP

had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.

Once in office, Trump put that racist and sexist base in the driver’s seat. He attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.

In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.

As Richardson explained, establishment Republicans had wanted a largely unregulated market-driven economy. MAGA Republicans, however,

want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.

Support for MAGA and Trump isn’t motivated by admiration for his character, intellect or personality. It isn’t motivated by his economic plans, which even conservative economists warn would severely damage the economy, or by loyalty to the GOP, which he has remade into a cult dominated by what used to be its disreputable fringe.

So–What explains his support?

I recently had a discussion with a local philanthropist who served in a state Republican administration, and I agree with his analysis. He ticked off three reasons he believes people support Trump.

  • Some subset of wealthy individuals care more about promised tax cuts for the rich than for the health and wellbeing of the country.
  • Some people are truly ignorant. Perhaps they get all their “news” from Fox and its clones, or they lack the intellectual capacity to understand what is at stake, or to evaluate competing political claims.
  • True MAGA movement folks–by far the largest group of Trump supporters, the ones who’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid”– are disproportionately people who are unhappy with their lives. They haven’t achieved the status or security or love or whatever else they believe they were entitled to, and they’re convinced it couldn’t be their fault; it must be the fault of “those people.” Trump gives them permission to point fingers and give voice to their bigotries: it’s those immigrants, those gay people, those uppity women and/or Blacks.

If the polls are right that the election is close, there are a lot more people in those three categories than I ever imagined…

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What If?

A line from an essay I read a few weeks ago in the Bulwark has remained with me, growing in resonance as we approach November 5th. The author wrote that “there aren’t any excuses left. Something like 47 percent of American voters have seen Trump, understood what he was, and wanted it.” Beneath everything–the pundits insisting that Harris do X or Y rather than whatever she’s doing at the time, the armies of lawyers preparing to do battle over the next “Big Lie,” the GOP’s increasing efforts to suppress votes–America has to grapple with that reality.

Some forty-seven percent of our fellow Americans support a mentally-ill, profoundly ignorant narcissist who tells them that they are the only “real” Americans. Forty-seven percent of us want to hand control of the nuclear codes to a misogynistic, homophobic, racist felon who has no comprehension of foreign policy–or for that matter, no understanding of how American government  works.

It really is incomprehensible. 

As the Bulwark essayist noted, that fact is the ugly truth this campaign has laid bare. If, when the votes are counted, Donald Trump garners forty percent or more–or, God help us, wins– we will no longer be able to take refuge in the comforting (and obviously inaccurate) belief that a large majority of Americans are people of good will and common sense. Even more than the pivotal choice we face–a choice between continuation of the American experiment and a country remade to conform to Project 2025’s theocratic and autocratic principles–the vote will be a referendum on that comforting belief.

The November 5th election will not be a choice based on policy differences–or on policy at all. It will be a twenty-first century replay of the Civil War–a challenge to the most fundamental bases of what I frequently refer to as “The American Idea.”

What the MAGA “patriots” don’t understand, what they actively reject, is the actual American exceptionalism that was baked into this country’s origin: the notion that one wouldn’t be an American by virtue of status or identity, but by embracing the philosophy of the new nation, by the willingness to “pledge allegiance” to an entirely new concept of governance.

It was–as anyone who has read any history will acknowledge–mostly aspirational. But with fits and starts (granted, lots more fits than most of us learned in our high school history classes), we’ve tried to follow that philosophy to its logical conclusion. We extended the franchise, welcoming non-landowners, freed slaves and women into the ranks of “We the People.” Our courts (again, with fits and starts) protected the rule of law against efforts to subvert it in favor of the greedy and unscrupulous and the efforts of racial and religious bigots.

What has so many of us worried sick right now isn’t simply the realization that many of our fellow citizens are credulous, racist and mean-spirited. There have always been folks like that (although not as vocal or empowered by rampant disinformation and the reinforcement of a semi-fascist cult).

We are worried to discover that there are so many of them, and terrified that we are losing that aspirational America, that “American Idea,” to frightened and angry people who never understood or embraced it.

Like so many other Americans, I live in a bubble. My friends and family and neighbors (including a number who’ve been life-long Republicans) are inclusive and welcoming–and equally appalled by polling that (correctly or not) tells us that the upcoming election–between a senile, certifiable lunatic who wants to be a dictator and a sane, experienced woman who has spent her entire adult life in public service–is “too close to call.”

Back in 2021, I quoted a Leonard Pitts column in which he wrote:

I’m an American. By that, I don’t simply mean that I’m a U.S. citizen, though I am. But what I really mean is that I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded.

Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.

In a few days, we’ll know whether we will hang on to those ideals for at least the time being–and we’ll know just how many voters reject Pitts’ (and my) definition of “American.”

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