Tag Archives: Trump

There Really Are Two Americas

We are facing a division in this country unlike anything we’ve seen since the 60s, or perhaps the Civil War. If America is to emerge reasonably intact, we need to look honestly at what just happened (and by “looking honestly,” I don’t mean self-righteous whining about campaign tactics, the primary process, Clinton’s policy positions or her deficits as a candidate, none of which were dispositive, and none of which is particularly productive.)

The ugly truth is that his voters saw Trump’s bigotry and authoritarianism as features, not bugs. They didn’t overlook his appalling behaviors—they embraced and endorsed them. They applauded his repeated attacks on “political correctness” and routinely told reporters that what they liked about him was that he “tells it like it is”–“it is” being things like the illegitimacy of a black President.

The people who voted for Trump were overwhelmingly rural, less-educated white Christians. Research showed that the characteristics most predictive of support for Trump were racial resentment and misogyny—not economic distress.

The people who voted for Clinton were overwhelmingly urban, and there were more of us than there were of them. Clinton won the popular vote, but thanks to the Electoral College, rural votes count for more, so she lost the Presidency.

The urban/rural divide is more telling than the other ways we “slice and dice” the American population, and it is getting more acute. I have previously linked to an essay–an angry and not altogether fair rant, really–by the editors of The Stranger, a Seattle alternative newspaper, written in the wake of John Kerry’s defeat. Its authors describe an “Urban Archipelago” composed of blue cities in red states; twelve years later, the divide they portrayed so vividly has grown even larger.

It’s time to state something that we’ve felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion…

The entire (very long) essay is worth reading–and re-reading. But the following, lightly edited paragraphs on urban values are a great description of the worldview so many rural Americans reject.

So how do we live and what are we for? Look around you, urbanite, at the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities, and tribes that are smashed together in every urban center (yes, even Seattle): We’re for that. We’re for pluralism of thought, race, and identity. We’re for a freedom of religion that includes the freedom from religion–not as some crazy aberration, but as an equally valid approach to life. We are for the right to choose one’s own sexual and recreational behavior, to control one’s own body and what one puts inside it. We are for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…

Unlike the people who flee from cities in search of a life free from disagreement and dark skin, we are for contentiousness, discourse, and the heightened understanding of life that grows from having to accommodate opposing viewpoints. We’re for opposition. And just to be clear: The non-urban argument, the red state position, isn’t oppositional, it’s negational–they are in active denial of the existence of other places, other people, other ideas. It’s reactionary utopianism, and it is a clear and present danger; urbanists should be upfront and unapologetic about our contempt for their politics and their negational values. Republicans have succeeded in making the word “liberal”–which literally means “free from bigotry… favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded”–into an epithet. Urbanists should proclaim their liberalism from the highest rooftop (we have higher rooftops than they do); it’s the only way we survive…

Let’s see, what else are we for? How about education? Cities are beehives of intellectual energy; students and teachers are everywhere you look, studying, teaching, thinking. In Seattle, you can barely throw a rock without hitting a college. It’s time to start celebrating that, because if the reds have their way, advanced degrees will one day be awarded based on the number of Bible verses a person can recite from memory. In the city, people ask you what you’re reading. Outside the city, they ask you why you’re reading. You do the math–and you’ll have to, because non-urbanists can hardly even count their own children at this point. For too long now, we’ve caved to the non-urban wisdom that decries universities as bastions of elitism and snobbery. Guess what: That’s why we should embrace them. Outside of the city, elitism and snobbery are code words for literacy and complexity. And when the oil dries up, we’re not going to be turning to priests for answers–we’ll be calling the scientists. And speaking of science: SCIENCE! That’s another thing we’re for. And reason. And history…

As part of our pro-reason platform, we’re for paying taxes–taxes, after all, support the urban infrastructure on which we all rely, and as such, are a necessary part of the social contract we sign every day…

A city belongs to everyone in it, and expands to contain whoever desires to join its ranks. People migrate to cities and open independent businesses or work at established ones. They import cultural influences, thus enriching the urban arts and nightlife, which in turn enrich everything. Most importantly, they bring the indisputable fact of their own bodies and minds. We wait in line with them at QFC, we stand shoulder to shoulder with them at the bar, we cram ourselves next to them on the bus. We share our psychic and physical space, however limited it might be, because others share it with us. It’s not a question of tolerance, nor even of personal freedom; it’s a matter of recognizing the fundamental interdependence of all citizens..

In the years since 2004, partisan polarization, the near-disappearance of real journalism, the venom and conspiracy theories promoted by talk radio, Fox News and the blogosphere, and the improving legal and social status of previously marginalized groups have triggered and nurtured racial and cultural resentments.

Unlike the authors of The Urban Archipelago, City-dwellers can’t simply say “Fuck off” to rural America. For one thing, as we have once again been reminded, thanks to gerrymandering and the Electoral College their votes count more than ours; for another, that really isn’t a very liberal–or helpful– attitude.

Intentionally or not, rural white America has elected a would-be fascist, together with a large number of Senators and Representatives willing to do his bidding so long as it benefits their party and their financial patrons. The question the rest of us face is: what do we do now?

Tomorrow, I’ll suggest some answers to that question.

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What Can One Person Do?

Early Wednesday morning, I got a call from my 14-year-old grandson. He wanted reassurance that there are limits to what Trump can do, that “checks and balances” will contain him. He wanted to know what I thought would happen now.

He wanted to know just how frightened he should be.

My grandson is a freshman at an excellent high school in downtown Indianapolis. Before high school, he went to a magnet school, also downtown. His friends include African-Americans, Latinos and Muslims. Some of his classmates’ families immigrated to the United States. He is Jewish. During this ugly, divisive campaign they’ve all heard what will happen to “their kind” when Trump is President.

So many parents asked the principal of his high school what they should tell their children about these threats that she sent out an article from the Huffington Post, addressing that question.

Tell them, first, that we will protect them. Tell them that we have democratic processes in the U.S. that make it impossible for one mean person to do too much damage. Tell them that we will protect those democratic processes ― and we will use them ― so that Trump is unable to act on many of the false promises he made during his campaign.

Tell them, second, that you will honor the outcome of the election, but that you will fight bigotry. Tell them bigotry is not a democratic value, and that it will not be tolerated at your school.

I encourage those of you with children and grandchildren to read the entire article. But all of us who value fundamental American values of inclusion and equality–whether we are young or old, whether we have children or not, whether we are part of a minority group or as WASPy as they come–must resist the urge to “go along” with Trump’s efforts to undermine those values.

Many years ago, there was a television mini-series about the Holocaust that my mother and I watched with my children. After one episode, my mother said –with great conviction– that, had she been a German, she would never have gone along with the Nazis, that she would never have participated or stood by silently.

As I told her at the time, I wish I could be so sure of how I would have behaved. It’s one thing to sit on a couch in a free country and speculate on your response to a situation you don’t face, but when fascism (or any sort of authoritarianism) begins, it’s deceptively easy to convince yourself that this is just a “hiccup”–that really bad things aren’t happening, that the “other guy” would have been as bad or worse.

It’s so tempting to close your eyes to injustices aimed at other people. After all, we have lives to live, errands to run, houses to clean, offices to go to. How many of us would really, actively resist fascist measures that didn’t immediately or directly threaten us or our families?

It appears we are going to get the chance to answer that question.

In the wake of this horrific election and what a Trump Administration portends, every person of good will must resolve right now to be one of the “good Germans,” to be like the people who didn’t go along, who didn’t close their eyes, who didn’t make excuses for the early scapegoating, nativism and bigotry that ultimately enabled genocide.

This is a test. I can only hope we studied for it.

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Here’s the Choice

Absent a “November surprise,” this will be my last post about the 2016 Presidential race.

A friend shared a litany that pretty well sums up Donald Trump’s bona fides:

Donald Trump is facing multiple charges of defrauding students at Trump University, one case with a Court date set for November 28, 2016.

Donald Trump is facing a December 16, 2016 Court date to answer for claims he raped a 13 year old girl.

Donald Trump is the subject of multi-state investigations, uncovering fraud and self-dealing related to his Trump Foundation.

Donald Trump has a history of thousands of lawsuits against him over his business practices, in which he bankrupted small businesses and cheated employees.

Donald Trump has a long and well-documented history of harassing and disrespecting women.

But by all means, let’s talk about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Despite the loose use of the word “scandal,” what Clinton continues to be criticized for was her use of a private server for non-classified official emails, a use inconsistent with State Department rules. Period. Not for leaking state secrets, not for dereliction of duty, not for any sort of malfeasance. (Ironically, James Comey is currently being criticized for precisely the same behavior–ignoring agency rules.) The reason Clinton’s server use was an issue was concern about the possibility of a security breach caused by either the use of that server to transmit classified material (which would have been illegal) or a successful hack; thanks to the FBI investigation, we now know no such breach occurred. (It is yet another irony that the State Department’s network has been hacked, and more than once.)

Let’s stipulate that–as Clinton herself has admitted– she shouldn’t have made that decision, and she shouldn’t have been defensive about it when it was discovered.

Hillary Clinton may be the most-investigated public servant ever, and despite having been the object of right-wing conspiracy theories for over thirty years, she has never been found to have violated any law. She has had a distinguished career as a lawyer, in the United States Senate and as Secretary of State and has been a tireless crusader for women and families.

To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, when she’s been wrong, she’s been wrong within normal parameters.

Voters in this election have a choice between a highly qualified woman who–being human–has made mistakes of judgment, and a thin-skinned narcissist with zero relevant experience or knowledge and a documented history of fraud, sexual assault, unscrupulous business practices and frightening volatility–a man with no discernible policy positions who has based his entire campaign on insults, ludicrous assertions of his own superiority, and not-so- thinly-veiled appeals to racism, xenophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitism.

There is no equivalence. This is not a “lesser of two evils” choice. One candidate is amply and demonstrably qualified; the other is simply unthinkable.

If Hillary Clinton had killed Vince Foster, she would still be the better choice.

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Then What?

In two weeks, Americans will finally go to the polls. The fat lady hasn’t sung, but she’s humming, and unless every reputable pollster in the U.S. is monumentally wrong, Donald Trump will lose by a very substantial margin.

What we don’t yet know is how much damage the Orange Disaster will do to the “down ticket” races. For the sake of the republic, I’d like to see the Democrats take both the Senate (likely) and the House (not so likely), because otherwise, we are likely to continue the partisan gridlock that has prevented the federal government from functioning at anything but a bare minimum.

When the only thing Republicans can agree on is the need to block anything and everything proposed by a Democratic President, it’s no wonder judicial vacancies (at all levels) go unfilled, only stopgap budgets get passed, decaying infrastructure goes unattended and even urgently needed responses to public health crises are months late.

Whatever the contours of the next Congress, however, the GOP will face an immediate quandary. Can the party be stitched back together? Can its three distinct elements–the white nationalists, the Religious Right and the business/”country club”/establishment wing–continue to coexist in the same political organization?

An article by the Brookings organization suggests that the Republicans take a lesson from British Prime Minister Theresa May, who recently laid out what Brookings described as “a bold plan to reform her country—and her party.”

Prime Minister May framed her party’s task as creating what she calls a “Great Meritocracy”—a country “built on the values of fairness and opportunity, where everyone plays by the same rules and where every single person—regardless of their background, or that of their parents—is given the chance to be all they want to be.” It shouldn’t matter, she said, “where you were born, who your parents are, where you went to school, what your accent sounds like, what god you worship, whether you’re a man or a woman, or black or white.” But if we are honest, she concluded, we will admit that this is not the case today.

Back when I was a member of a very different GOP, those sentiments may not have been universally embraced by the party’s rank and file, but the commitment to meritocracy and the rule of law were at least Republican talking points.

Working-class conservatism can be nationalist without being nativist or isolationist, Mrs. May insisted. It can reassert Britain’s control over immigration without endorsing prejudice against immigrations. It can reassert sovereignty over Britain’s laws and regulations without withdrawing from Europe or the world. And it can respect success in the market while insisting that the successful members of society have commensurate responsibilities to their fellow citizens.

I was particularly struck by the following quote from her speech, because it echoed populist themes that tend, in the U.S., to come from the Democrats:

 So if you’re a boss who earns a fortune but doesn’t look after your staff, an international company that treats tax laws as an optional extra . . . a director who takes out massive dividends while knowing the company pension is about to go bust, I’m putting you on notice: This can’t go on anymore. A change has got to come. And . . . the Conservative Party is going to make that change.

As I’ve noted repeatedly, the United States desperately needs two adult, responsible political parties. We don’t have a parliamentary system; there is very little likelihood of a third party–new or existing–emerging to fill the void that is the current GOP.

That said, I don’t see how the Chamber of Commerce members coexist with the David Dukes and the Roy Moores. I don’t see how a party that sneers at the very enterprise of government and views large (and growing) segments of its fellow citizens with disdain and explicit bigotry can expect to win elections.

I guess we just need to stay tuned…

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Who Are We?

A few weeks ago, a friend shared an essay from the Philadelphia Magazine that I’ve now reread more than once. It was all about bravery in times of American crisis--not, as the author explained, the personal courage that people display running into burning buildings and in similar exploits, but civic bravery, which she describes as

directly related to being a citizen, and it requires both personal courage and a bigger-picture, idealistic, long-game sort of mind-set. That strain of bravery, birthed in Philly in 1776, is what Americans both great and unknown would tap into in years to come, and what propelled most everything we think of as progress in this country: women’s suffrage, the New Deal, the Freedom Riders and so forth.

The article goes on to hone in on an aspect of American society that has been the focus of much punditry, not to mention a number of comments to this blog–the pervasiveness of an unbecoming fear that is both self-serving and disproportionate to the objects that trigger it:

The troublesome part about all of this is that so many of us seem unable or unwilling nowadays to accept fear as part of being alive in tumultuous times, or to push for the greater good despite personal risk (or perceived personal risk) the way our best countrymen have through the ages. How else to explain why our elected politicians can’t get past reelection concerns to pass even the basic gun legislation when most Americans clamor for it? Why else are so many unarmed young black men, one after the next after the next, dying at the hands of police officers? How to reconcile otherwise compassionate, charitable people scared to welcome refugees fleeing certain death (yearning to breathe free, just like your great-grandparents)?

After quoting former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski for the proposition that fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and paves the way for demagogues, she says the obvious: “Hey Mr. Brzezinski, meet Mr. Trump.”

The essay ends on a hopeful note, citing signs that might portend a revival of civic bravery. Some–like substituting Harriet Tubman for Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill–don’t seem particularly brave to me, but at a time when the Presidential candidate of a major American political party has enabled and normalized bigotry (with, it must be noted, the enthusiastic approval of a majority of that party’s members), Black Lives Matter certainly fits the bill. As she notes,

The time I spent writing this overlapped with the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police officers, followed by a sniper attack that killed five officers guarding otherwise peaceful protests. It seems there is no end to the fear and the hateful fruit it bears. But then: Black Lives Matter, a movement started mostly by millennials, is gaining momentum across all generations. This movement begun by blacks is roiling across races, as more people are finding that the essential nubs — life, liberty, innocents not being shot to death, not allowing fear to ruin lives — are too important to ignore. The movement is facing down threats, counter-protesters, online vitriol, death. But it goes on. Think of that photo from the Baton Rouge protests a few months back: a young black woman, a calm protester, standing wordless and serene in the street, surrounded by faceless police in riot gear. No puppies. No bubbles. Civil Bravery circa 2016, it turns out, looks an awful lot like Civil Bravery circa 1965.

The entire essay is worth a read–and some sober consideration.
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