After the Future

What Kind of America Does Steve Bannon Want?

I cannot take Trump seriously as someone who will take governing seriously. He will see the presidency as his own reality show, and will care mainly about his ratings. So one has to wonder which faction among his advisors he will see as more likely to deliver the higher ratings--the Priebus/GOP establishment faction or the Bannon/Alt-Right faction. It's hard to see these two factions living together amicably, so one or the other will play the more dominant role. I'm not sure which one I hope will win. 

If Priebus wins, then so do McConnell and Ryan. If Bannon wins, then it looks like we might very well be getting something unexpected. Bannon is a wild card, and so while I think I understand the motivations and agenda of Priebus/McConnell/Ryan--same old carrying water for the 1%--I don't pretend at this point to understand Bannon, his motivations, or his agenda. So we owe it to ourselves to make some attempt to take the measure of the man. And I do so in the spirit expressed by Andrew O'Hehir in an interesting piece on Bannon over the weekend:

According to many people who evidently don’t care for him, Bannon is a racist, a white supremacist or a white nationalist (which are not all the same thing), and may also be an anti-Semite and a misogynist. These epithets may or may not be accurate, but they strike me as giving off more heat than light. They provide very little information about what sort of person the incoming White House strategist might be, or what he might want.

Bannon himself insists that he's not a racist. He will admit that racists and anti-Semites are attracted to Breitbart, and in an interview with Sarah Posner at Mother Jones he calls Breitbart the platform of the Alt Right, and the Alt Right surely comprises racists and white nationalists. But he insists that skin-color racism is not what he, personally, stands for or what Breitbart stands for now or ever. He sees himself instead as an anti-elitist, anti-globalist nationalist and an economic populist, and he delights in saying that the Liberal media don't have a clue as to what he's about. Michael Wolff in a very interesting piece he did recently on Bannon in the Hollywood Reporter talks about how Bannon sees himself as aligning with the interests of downwardly mobile America:

To say that he sees this donor class—which in his telling is also “ascendant America,” e.g. the elites, as well as “the metrosexual bubble” that encompasses cosmopolitan sensibilities to be found as far and wide as Shanghai, London’s Chelsea, Hollywood and the Upper West Side—as a world apart, is an understatement. In his view, there’s hardly a connection between this world and its opposite — fly-over America, left-behind America, downwardly mobile America—hardly a common language.

This is partly why he regards the liberal characterization of himself as socially vile, as the politically incorrect devil incarnate, as laughable—and why he is stoutly unapologetic. They—liberals and media—don’t understand what he is saying, or why, or to whom. ...

He absolutely—mockingly—rejects the idea that this is a racial line. “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he tells me. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver—” by “we” he means the Trump White House “—we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

In a nascent administration that seems, at best, random in its beliefs, Bannon can seem to be not just a focused voice, but almost a messianic one:

“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Now I don't know enough about Bannon to judge how seriously to take this, but this is not the McConnell/Ryan vision for America. Bannon appears to hate the Republican establishment as much as anybody on the populist Left. We'll see If that's true. If it is, should we expect him to reach out to the Bernie Sanders' populist Left to get, say, his infra-structure plan implemented? Certainly the Ryan/McConnell establishment Right has no interest in supporting such a project. It's plausible because Trump certainly owes nothing to the Republican establishment, and especially to Ryan and McConnell, and I think he would enjoy showing them up. A lot depends on the outcome of the infighting between Priebus and Bannon and our learning who Steve Bannon really is. That will be interesting, if somewhat frightening, to watch. 

Because if Bannon turns out truly to be an economic populist, is the cost of embracing that program too great if it turns out that white nationalism will be strengthened by it? He can deny it all he wants, but his brand of nationalism clearly has white nationalist overtones, or Breitbart would not be such a magnet for people with those sentiments. And even if he's personally not racist, he's playing with fire insofar as he and Trump draw on racist passons to fuel support for their agenda. 

While supporters of a traditional America and white nationalism are not the same thing, clearly there is some significant overlap between them. Today's NYT piece on white nationalism makes the distinction between traditionalist cultural nationalists and racists:

Several studies of other countries have found that a desire to protect traditional values and culture is the strongest predictor of support for the sort of populism that propelled Mr. Trump to power in the United States.

Many of those voters would not think of themselves as white nationalists, and the cultural values and traditions they seek to protect are not necessarily explicitly racial. However, those traditions formed when national identity and culture were essentially synonymous with whiteness. So the impulse to protect them from social and demographic change is essentially an attempt to turn back the clock to a less-diverse time.

And ends with this warning:

Mr. Trump’s criticism of immigrants and promise to “make America great again” may have tapped into those same cultural anxieties, fueling his success with older and less-educated white voters. (Over all, he won white voters by 21 percentage points.)

Professor Kaufmann argues that anxiety over white identity and anti-immigrant populist politicians can have a symbiotic relationship, each strengthening the other. When populist politicians gain mainstream success, that can make white nationalist ideas more socially acceptable.

“It’s not just a question of ethnic change and people being alarmed over it,” he said. “It’s also a question of what people see as the boundaries of acceptable opposition. It’s about what counts as racism, and whether it’s racist to vote for a far-right party.”

“This is all about the anti-racist norm,” Professor Kaufmann continued. “If it’s weakening or eroding because people think the boundaries have shifted.”

Shifting norms on race are deeply worrying. But I think whatever the vestigial presence of traditional racism in America, it is being stimulated by legitimate pressures flowing from globalization. Globalization has a negative impact on ordinary people both in economic and cultural identity terms. The two do go together in ways that affect ordinary Americans in heartland America negatively while at the same time benefiting coastal cosmopolitans. Ordinary white, working class Americans feel themselves under siege both economically and in terms of their basic identity as Americans. Cosmopolitans mainly see the culture war aspect, but are unaware of how that plays into a very real class war. People who vote Blue are siding with the Global elites whether they are aware of it or not.

It's easy for coastal cosmopolitan Blues to dismiss Trump voters as delusory and troglodytic, but the loss of meaning is deeply real for them. The American meaning story, that has been mostly a white European meaning story, has been under attack during the same decades that they have seen their economic fortunes diminish. Downward mobility is scary, and it's understandable that people experiencing it are angry, and they don't want to hear any patronizing, sanctimonious crap from coastal cosmopolitan Blues about their being racist. Steve Bannon understands this very well, and he's exploiting it very skillfully for his own purposes.

So, yes, many in the Tea Party are not really economic populists. The Koch-Brothers Right is mainly driven by an Ayn Randian ideology that is about as anti-populist as you can get.  And yet it has played a significant role in shaping the agenda and thinking of the Tea Party Right because of the way it reinforces a rugged individualist mythos that gives Americans, whether they are ascending or descending, a sense of meaning and identity. I think Bannon is presenting himself as a competitor with the Koch Brothers to be a more effective spokesperson for the aggrieved, populist wing of the Tea Party Right. If we take him at his word he will do it by both providing the meaning-affirming nationalist mythos (MAGA) and deliver, an nationalist economic program--good paying jobs,  and "It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution— conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.” 

I don't know if he's serious, but it sounds like a winning formula to me. Bannon gets in a way that cosmopolitan Blues don't that there really is a class conflict dimension to this. And he is looking to exploit it. And if he's successful if he will dislodge the populist wing of the Tea Party from the Kochs and possibly develop a very powerful, lasting right-leaning coalition because the Left, when given the opportunity did not give populists a constructive, progressive channel.

I don't know if I'm right about that, but this much is clear: there are no real power centers on the Left that are competing for the populist vote. Sanders tried and failed; Bannon and Trump tried and succeeded. It may turn out that Trump will align with the Ryan/McConnell establishment elites, but he may not, he may stick it out with the populists who brought him to the dance, and since Bannon is calling the tune, that could be even more scary. 

In the meanwhile most liberals in Blue America are not understanding what's really going on. Blue-leaning non-elites will probably tell you that they are appalled by the racism and jingoism of the most enthusiastic Trump supporters, and so that makes them lean more toward the world view of the global elites who are politically correct on those issues. But they are being driven into the arms of the enemy, so to speak, in the same way that many people in heartland American feel they are being driven into Trump's arms.  

O"Hehir's piece is a riff on Bannon's self describing himself as a Leninist, which for Bannon means that he sees himself, like Lenin, as a class warrior on a mission to destroy the old order. O'Hehir says that his interviewer "Radosh remembers him saying, 'Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.'” O'Hehir draws some other similarities to Lenin: 

Both Lenin and Bannon were thrust into positions of power unexpectedly, before objective conditions appeared “ready,” although the specifics are different in important ways. Although Lenin was not the only public face of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was its acknowledged leader and principal theoretician. No one else could possibly have seized the reins of the newborn Soviet state, or have kept it alive for more than a few months. Bannon is the power behind the throne in a much murkier arrangement, where the outward forms of democracy must be maintained even though the new regime and its supporters openly yearn for a different direction. (You know where I’m going with that — but I won’t use the word!)

That unpreparedness — that sense of a revolutionary movement gathering uncontrollable and unpredictable momentum, in a context of political chaos — had well-known historical consequences in the first instance, even if scholars continue to argue about them a century later. What will the consequences be for Steve Bannon and his free-range figurehead, neither of whom had any reasonable expectation of ending up where they are today?

So yes, that echoes what I had to say about the worse case scenario in a post last week. It could very well play out that way. Or maybe in some way that we simply cannot predict right now. So which would you choose? A Priebus/McConnell/Ryan Trump presidency or the wild card--Bannon/Leninist/Jacksonian one? 

Diversity Includes Everybody or Why Hillary Lost (Updated)

Last Spring during the primaries, when I argued with people who liked Bernie but thought he couldn't win, I would say that Hillary was going to be the Martha Coakley of 2016. I think the comparison holds. Liberals who think the country rejected her because she was a woman don't get it. Had Elizabeth Warren run, I guarantee you she would have won. Hillary was/is broadly perceived as a smug, liberal establishment elite who is clueless about ordinary Americans' concerns. She used the language of inclusion, but white working class folks heard that as excluding them (deplorables--she talkin' 'bout me?). Until the Dems figure out how to fix this, our democracy is likely to continue in its death spiral. There is no changing the minds of the hardcore Right, but the Dems are pushing too many otherwise decent non-ideologues into their arms because they feel they have nowhere else to go. Mark Lilla gets it:

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life.

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. . . .

National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan’s playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from its identity-conscious wing, concentrated his energies on domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance) and defined America’s role in the post-1989 world. By remaining in office for two terms, he was then able to accomplish much for different groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.

Whoever tells the best story wins, and that's why Bernie would have won had he been nominated. He has little patience for cultural Left tribalism. And that's why he appeared blindsided by BLM. His civil rights credentials are unimpeachable, but he came across as oblivious of the identity politics rules of the game, a game he doesn't want to play, and the narrative developed that he was clueless about the concerns of Black Americans. No. IMO, he just didn't want to waste his time and energy on a cultural Left story that undermines the real objectives of the political Left. His focus was and is on justice for everybody. He sees the big picture. 

"Difference" is the trendy French thing that even the French don't take seriously anymore. It's something second-rate American intellectuals in high schools, universities, and the media focus on because they are bored, and it's a "thing". But it is not a serious thing; it never was. It's time to focus on building a political coalition that respects the differences but is energized by the humanity that we share. Such a coalition would be savvy about how the "difference" narrative plays right into the divide-and-conquer game plan laid out by Ameica's oligarchs. 

In another paragraph Lilla makes this point trenchantly:

...the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)

 Exactly.

 Update: Conor Lynch makes a similar argument in Salon:

Trump’s victory was a rude awakening for Democrats who have become all too complacent within the Washington power structure, and who mistakenly assumed that changing demographics, identity politics and sheer celebrity would be enough to stop the right-wing populism of Trump. Trump didn’t win the election because of a Republican insurgency; he won because of a Democratic collapse. He won because neoliberalism failed.

...The Clinton campaign tried to make this election all about Trump’s hatefulness (“Love Trumps Hate”) and his “basket of deplorables,” while offering no real vision of progressive and populist change. And when those on the left raised legitimate concerns about Clinton’s uninspiring message or her political baggage during and after the primaries, they were ridiculously labeled sexist or racist “bros” by establishment figures (even though some of Clinton’s harshest progressive critics were in fact women and people of color). In a February essay, former Salon writer Daniel Denvir described this cynical political strategy in Salon as “peak neoliberalism, where a distorted version of identity politics is used to defend an oligarchy and a national security state, celebrating diversity in the management of exploitation and warfare.”...

If Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment accomplished anything, it was to push away irritated or bitter voters who are tired of being called Islamophobic when they criticize radical Islam or racist when they contemplate voting Republican. Consider a reader over at the Atlantic, who started in the “NeverTrump” camp and claims to still “deplore” the president-elect, yet ended up voting for him anyway. His reason? What he views as left-wing identity politics run amok. “Accusations of racism are being thrown about as political weapons (mostly by white liberals) in a way that belittles the seriousness of bigotry,” writes the reader, who is white but married to a Mexican-American. “When everything is about identity politics, is the left really surprised that on Tuesday millions of white Americans, for the first time ever, voted as ‘white’? If you want identity politics, identity politics is what you will get.”

Draining the Swamp

For those who were naive enough to take Trump at his word, this piece by Jane Mayer should disabuse them of their wishful thinking:

During the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.

Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”

Many of Trump’s transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower. On Friday, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” The influence of the Kochs and their allies is particularly clear in the areas of energy and the environment. The few remarks Trump made on these issues during the campaign reflected the fondest hopes of the oil, gas, and coal producers. He vowed to withdraw from the international climate treaty negotiated last year in Paris, remove regulations that curb carbon emissions, legalize oil drilling and mining on federal lands and in seas, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.

To read on, scroll down to "The Dark Money Cabinet".

George Packer: The Dems are Dead; Long Live the Dems

The Democratic Party claims half the country, but it’s hollowed out at the core. Hillary Clinton became the sixth Democratic Presidential candidate in the past seven elections to win the popular vote; yet during Barack Obama’s Presidency the Party lost both houses of Congress, fourteen governorships, and thirty state legislatures, comprising more than nine hundred seats. The Party’s leaders are all past the official retirement age, other than Obama, who has governed as the charismatic and enlightened head of an atrophying body. Did Democrats even notice? More than Republicans, they tend to turn out only when they’re inspired. The Party has allowed personality and demography to take the place of political organizing....

In the long run, the Democratic Party faces two choices. It can continue to collapse until it’s transformed into something new, like the nineteenth-century Whigs, forerunners of the Republican Party. Or it can rebuild itself from the ground up. Not every four years but continuously; not with celebrity endorsements but on school boards and town councils; not by creating more virtual echo chambers but by learning again how to talk and listen to other Americans, especially those who elected Trump because they felt ignored and left behind. President Trump is almost certain to betray them. The country will need an opposition capable of pointing that out. (Packer, New Yorker, 11/21/16)

Why Trump Won

The reasons are complex, and Elizabeth Drew in her NYRB piece about the election covers most of them, but I think it comes down to this part of her article where she quotes J.D. Vance:

In an important change from four years ago, only 26 percent of rural voters went for Clinton, in contrast with the 40 percent of them who supported Obama in 2012. Clinton came across to them as an creature from another, urban, world—a wealthy woman who liked big government and didn’t understand them. Her husband knew how to talk to them; he’d grown up around them and he spoke in their idiom. Jenna Johnson, who covered the election for The Washington Post, wrote that it’s not going too far to say that rural voters (presumably white ones) “hate” Hillary Clinton. J. D. Vance, author of the recent and New York Times best-seller Hillbilly Elegy, who grew up poor in Appalachia and went to Yale Law School, has become something of an oracle about the rural poor, a thoughtful one. He uses a critical word in describing how Trump wins the support of so many of his people: relatable. “People who are drawn to Trump are drawn to him because he’s a little outrageous, he’s a little relatable, and fundamentally he is angry and spiteful and critical of the things that people feel anger and spite toward,” Vance has said. “It’s people who are perceived to be powerful. It’s the Hillary Clintons of the world, the Barack Obamas of the world, the Wall Street executives of the world. There just isn’t anyone out there who will talk about the system like it’s completely rigged like Donald Trump does. It’s certainly not something you’re going to hear from Hillary Clinton.”

The End of the Experiment? (Updated)

The tragedy of the Trump movement is that one set of struggling people has been pitted against other groups of struggling people by someone who has known little struggle, at least in the material sense, and hence seems to have little empathy for anyone struggling, and even to consider struggling a symptom of weakness....

From the beginning, America has been of two minds about the Other. One mind says, Be suspicious of it, dominate it, deport it, exploit it, enslave it, kill it as needed. The other mind denies that there can be any such thing as the Other, in the face of the claim that all are created equal.

The first mind has always held violence nearby, to use as needed, and that violence has infused everything we do—our entertainments, our sex, our schools, our ads, our jokes, our view of the earth itself, somehow even our food. It sends our young people abroad in heavy armor, fills public spaces with gunshots, drives people quietly insane in their homes.

And here it comes again, that brittle frontier spirit, that lone lean guy in our heads, with a gun and a fear of encroachment. But he’s picked up a few tricks along the way, has learned to come at us in a form we know and have forgotten to be suspicious of, from TV: famous, likably cranky, a fan of winning by any means necessary, exploiting our recent dullness and our aversion to calling stupidity stupidity, lest we seem too precious....

I’ve never before imagined America as fragile, as an experiment that could, within my very lifetime, fail.

But I imagine it that way now. (George Saunders, The New Yorker, July 11/18, 2016)

I imagine it that way now, too. Could this election represent more dramatically how the country splits between the two minds Saunders describes? There is some solace to be taken in the fact that more than half of Americans did not vote for Trump. But it may not matter unless the "Second Mind" realizes that it's in a knife fight with the people who have the "First Mind". More than anything else, Trump represents the abrogation of norms, traditions, protocols, that sensible people understand are essential for living together sanely and for finding peaceful ways to adjudicate their disputes. The erosion of all these norms in the public square didn't start with Trump, but he has brought it to a crescendo. It is driven by the thinking of the First Mind, which began with Newt Gingrich back in '94, but could be traced back to Nixon in '72.

Nixon knew he was in a knife fight, but he was secretive about it. Gingrich took it public. He overreached and was eventually discredited, but the damage was done. Politicians on the Right learned that they could say any malevolent thing, and that the old civility norms didn't matter anymore so long as the malevolence was directed at the Other--the coalition of hippies, blacks, wetbacks, gays, and feminists--that they saw as seeking to destroy everything that they loved and cherished. No quarter can be given to these Others, and so the GOP in each successive cycle since 1972 became with increasing degrees of intensity the Radical Right and as such the home where those of Saunders' First Mind could feel at home. 

If the Right has always understood that it was in a knife fight, the Left has not understood that is in such a fight. Well, there really has been no robust political Left in this country. There has been a squishy cultural Left, but not a "political" Left that understands how political power works. What passes for the Left in this country is a coalition of moderate social democrats and neoliberals like Obama and Clinton. These moderates continue to play by the old rules and to respect the old norms. It's important that they do, but it puts them at a significant disadvantage, especially when those rules and norms preserve a status quo that favors elites and diminishes the fortunes of those who are not elites. Rules-and-norms moderates are extremely clumsy at adapting to the enormity of what they are confronting from a radicalized Right. 

***

I have been trying during the past week to put the best spin on Trump's winning the election. There's a part of me that was dreading four more years of political constipation that would have gotten even worse had Clinton been elected. I thought if she had been elected, we would have just postponed what we have now to 2020, so better maybe to deal with it sooner than later. This part of me argues that Trump's winning the election will administer a much-needed enema to get things moving again, and that to get things moving will require in the short run the explosive production of a big, stinking mess. That's what the Right in this country has done since 1972--make big, stinking messes, and it is inevitable that Trump and his Alt-Right thugs will make their own big, stinking mess.

The GOP's making big messes has been the pattern since 1972: With each cycle since then when the country elects Republicans to the White house an increasingly radical group of right-wing thugs rides the passions of aggrieved white folks, comes into power, makes a mess of things, gets tossed out, is replaced by moderates whose sole job is to clean up the mess made by the thugs they replaced. Then as soon as the mess is cleaned up, Americans elect the thugs again. Nixon left us Watergate for Ford and Carter to clean up. Reagan left a financial Augean Stable (unprecedented deficits, the first rash of massive bank failures--read David Stockman if you forget your history) for his moderate successors, Bush 1 and Clinton, to clean up. And Bush/Cheney left the biggest mess of all (so far) for their moderate successor, Obama, to clean up. 

As soon as the mess gets cleaned up, Americans want fast and furious again and so turn over the keys to the bus to the thugs who, once again, careen down the sidewalks crashing through fruit stands, and through fences and front yards, knocking down trees, mailboxes, lamp posts, side-swiping parked cars, and eventually flipping over into a ditch. What fun, especially if the wreckage is in a place like Iraq. And then it isn't fun anymore. It stops when Americans realize that they're not watching a movie, they're watching live, and the bus didn't crash through someone else's backyard but their own:

Oh, gee. Look, my retirement just evaporated, and whoa, my job has just been offshored, and, yikes, my house is underwater and I can't make the mortgage or pay my credit card debt, which I maxed out to pay for my kid's appendectomy. Rick Santelli will think I'm a loser. He's probably right, so I'll just shut up and focus all my frustration on the Mexicans. At least I'm not as big a loser as most of them. They're rapists and drug dealers, and even the decent ones don't play by the rules--they're cutting in line. Hey, get to the back of the bus, losers! Ok. Now I feel better. I think. Maybe not.

This is completely understandable human behavior when humans feel displaced in a culture that is suffering from ontological vertigo. And it points to what I believe is at the heart of the dysfunction: the story Americans tell themselves, aka, the American dream, no longer makes sense, and yet people hold onto it because nothing better presents itself. And so at the heart of our current crisis is a collective meaning deficit. Americans are people without a meaning habitat, a constructive story to orient them toward a positive future. And they are desperate and as such are easily conned by any grifter's pitch if it makes them feel a little better for a minute or two.  

Americans continue in this insanely dysfunctional pattern because they don't know what else to do, and I guess, because at some level they think it's the American dream to let red-blooded Americans run wild, with the confidence that they can call in the moderates to be the clean-up crew when things get too bad. But this pattern is not static; it is like a progressive terminal disease. The moderates provide a temporary remission, but then the disease comes back even more virulently when the symptoms return. So here's how it stands: either we find a cure for the underlying disease, or this American experiment will be soon be dead, killed by a metastasized First Mind.

So maybe the pattern since '72 holds now with Trump: He and his Alt-Right, First-Mind cronies will make the hugest, stinkiest mess yet, and Americans will vote him out in 2020. And, as usual, they will find some dull moderate who will clean up his mess. But one has to wonder if with the election of Trump we have reached a point of no return. I hope not, but it should be clear to anybody with a lick of sense that we have since 1972 been locked in a progressively destructive pattern. With each cycle the level of immoderation and insanity gets worse. It can't go on forever. Something has to emerge that will break the cycle.

It gets worse each time because the opposition to it is so ennervated and fecklessly moderate, so complacently satisfied to play its role as the clean-up crew. And this opposition is so caught up in its blinkered 1960/70s era identity politics preoccupations, that it is incapable of understanding the big picture and what is truly at stake here, which is that we are becoming a country ruled by thugs for whom the will to power is the only consideration. Is it that there is no robust opposition that cares or is just that it's just too stupid to understand what is happening?

***

Saunders raises the critical question that we must all face: Will this experiment fail in our lifetime? It is the question.But it's as if the cosmopolitan Left doesn't realize that it's indulging in its identity politics preoccupations while riding in a boxcar that is carrying them to the concentration camp. The political naïveté is astonishing. Perhaps instead they ought to direct its energies toward figuring out how to stop the train. That would require winning over many of the people who are working as its crew, decent people who have been conned but don't know it.

These aggrieved whites in the crew believe in a story that makes a kind of sense because it sounds a lot like what they grew up with, and since no one is telling them a more compelling story that gives them a sense of purpose and meaning, they believe it. The naivete of the cosmopolitan Left lies in its not understanding that there is no saving the American experiment without the crew's help, and there is no American future with minority rights unless sane Americans with the Second Mind take control of the train. They need to develop a story that includes these aggrieved whites as much as the aggrieved of other colors, genders, and beliefs.  

So maybe the pattern will be broken in 2020, but in the worst possible way.  Maybe then, after Trump and his Alt Right thugs make their mess, they rig things to make it very hard to dislodge them, or maybe they will even refuse to  leave once the electorate inevitably votes them out. Do we have any reason to believe that they will respect the transfer-of-power norms and traditions that have sustained the American experiment? Have they respected any other norms when it didn't suit them? And who would stop them if they concocted some quasi-plausible justification that legitimated their refusal to leave? The Beltway moderates and the liberal media would scream about it, but who would force them to go? Mitch McConnell? Paul Ryan? The generals?  I fear most people wouldn't care, and those who would care might take to the streets for a while, but would eventually go home or be rounded up. This is how the experiment finally dies.

This is the worst case, but it is a very plausible worst case, and there are things we can do to insure it doesn't happen. It starts with winning back congress in '18, but doing that requires somebody or some group to emerge that understands that the culture wars are a distraction, that something much bigger is at stake. The real question is whether sane Americans in the center and center left will be able to produce an alternative American story that drawing on the Second Mind that creates an imaginative framework for envisioning a positive future, and that has a deep, positive, constructive energy that can offer an alternative to the negative, destructive energy that grounds the perverse but compelling story the Radical Right tells to give it its power and legitimacy.

Left cosmopolitanism does not offer a story robust enough to fill the meaning void so many Americans, including many who live in Blue America, feel with growing desperation. Something else is called for, something that inspires courage and camaraderie, a sense of mission to build something good and decent together. Is it too late to hope that that might be possible for us? 

Update: From Bernie Sanders NYT op ed 11/14:

In the coming days, I will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party. I believe strongly that the party must break loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor. We must open the doors of the party to welcome in the idealism and energy of young people and all Americans who are fighting for economic, social, racial and environmental justice. We must have the courage to take on the greed and power of Wall Street, the drug companies, the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry.

When my presidential campaign came to an end, I pledged to my supporters that the political revolution would continue. And now, more than ever, that must happen. We are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. When we stand together and don’t let demagogues divide us up by race, gender or national origin, there is nothing we cannot accomplish. We must go forward, not backward.

Exactly. Will the Democratic Party follow his lead? If it does, the country has a much better chance to keep the experiment going. 

Quote of the Day: Naomi Klein

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright--and that means white men most of all--these losses are unbearable. . . .

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.(In The Guardian)

Exactly. So who will arise to represent the genuine interests of non-elites? As I wrote a week ago ssuming a Clinton win before the election, I did not think it would be possible for that to happen within the Democratic Party, and i was ready to tear up my Democratic Party membership card and fly as an independent. I feel no tribal connection to the Blue Party. But now I'm willing to wait and see if the Sanders/Warren wing of the party can take advantage of the abject failure of the Davos/Wall Street wing and take control of the Party. If so, I might start caring again about Democrats. 

Constructive vs. Futile Protest

There have been street protests in the streets of the capitals of cosmopolitan America. The people protesting are understandably upset that a thug like Trump has been elected. I'm glad this kind of spontaneous resistance is arising, but these protests are futile and will aggravate the problem if they continue to be simply the expression of tribal cosmopolitans who see themselves outraged at the stupidity of racist, white America. This will just widen the divide that keeps the Ninety-nine percent divided and conquered by the One Percent

Blue cosmopolitans still don't get it If they think so many white working class people voted for Trump primarily because it's about race. It's first and foremost about identity loss. There are various kinds of Identity loss, but what's pertinent here is the kind that happens to people who come from traditional cultures in which all the supports that held that traditional culture together have been destroyed. Cosmopolitans feel badly about this kind of thing when it happens to aboriginal peoples, but have little compassion for it when it happens to white Americans. 

But the phenomenon is essentially the same. One's sense of Self and human dignity are deeply fragilized when one's old cultural habitat is destroyed and there is no suitable new habitat that they can move into. People react to this kind of loss passively in self-destructive behaviors like substance abuse, which is a huge problem in Red America. Or they react actively with rage. Rage can be the healthier choice if it can be channeled constructively. 

Global capitalism has destroyed the old habitat for these folks, and it has not provided a new one, and so they understandably rage against Blue elites, most of whom are doing just fine in the new global habitat. And then add to all of this the contempt that comes from Blue elites who call them racist, and it's understandable why they might react with rage toward their candidate whom they see as not having a clue.

Is race a part of it? Of course it is, but I think that for most people who voted for Trump in those purple counties in the upper Midwest and elsewhere, they are more aggravating factors than causal factors. Race plays a role in the sense described by Arlie Hochschild in her book about the Tea Party in Louisiana called Inside the Sacrifice Zone that I posted about last week:

The deep story that Hochschild creates for the Tea Party is a parable of the white American Dream. It begins with an image of a long line of people marching across a vast landscape. The Tea Partiers—white, older, Christian, predominantly male, many lacking college degrees—are somewhere in the middle of the line. They trudge wearily, but with resolve, up a hill. Ahead, beyond the ridge, lies wealth, success, dignity. Far behind them the line is composed of people of color, women, immigrants, refugees. As pensions are reduced and layoffs absorbed, the line slows, then stalls.

An even greater indignity follows: people begin cutting them in line. Many are those who had long stood behind them—blacks, women, immigrants, even Syrian refugees, all now aided by the federal government. Next an even more astonishing figure jumps ahead of them: a brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird, “fluttering its long, oil-drenched wings.” Thanks to environmental protections, it is granted higher social status than, say, an oil rig worker. The pelican, writes Hochschild, needs clean fish to eat, clean water to dive in, oil-free marshes, and protection from coastal erosion. That’s why it’s in line ahead of you. But really, it’s just an animal and you’re a human being. (From Nathaniel Rich's review of Arlie Hochschild's Inside the Sacrifice Zone in the NYRB)

Global capitalism hs destroyed the pelican's habitat, too, but restoring the pelican habitat is a higher priority for Blues than helping displaced working-class Whites to build something where they can live in dignity. So if I'm a white working class guy from the heartland, I'm not angry at you because you are black or brown;  I"m angry at the government because they are changing the rules so that you and the pelicans can cut ahead of me in line. Whether this is a story that accurately represents reality is not relevant; it's the story that animates the rage, and having some kind of graduate level seminar to challenge the validity of the story is not going to change anything. You change the story by telling a better one, one that more robustly explains the reality of their situation and that redirects their anger in a more productive way. 

Blue cosmopolitans need to understand that the Reds will keep winning so long as Blues keep pushing these folks into the arms of Red demagogues. Rabbi Michael Lerner gets it:

It turns out that shaming the supporters of Donald J. Trump is not a good political strategy. 

Though job loss and economic stagnation played a role in his victory, so did shame. As the principal investigator on a study of the middle class for the National Institute of Mental Health, I found that working people’s stress is often intensified by shame at their failure to “make it” in what they are taught is a meritocratic American economy. 

The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they are vulnerable not because they themselves have failed, but because of the selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).

Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being misunderstood.

Exactly. Blue cosmopolitans have to learn that many if not most of these aggrieved whites are potential allies if they are approached in the right way. I think Sanders understands this. Despite his being a Jewish socialist with a heavy New York accent, he has been very successful in obtaining the support of poor working class whites in rural Vermont. He does it because he is an honest, decent man, and he does it by emphasizing the justice issues, and deemphasizing the divisive culture-war issues. It's about respectfully agreeing to disagree on the second and finding common ground on the first.

I'm not sure the cosmopolitan left is politically mature enough to reach out to people for whom so far they have consistently demonstrated such smug contempt. A new story has to be told, but it won't be developed by anyone from the cosmopolitan left; It has to be told by people from the heartland, Ideally by a coalition of Black, Brown, and White heartlanders. This new story, if it is to avoid continued Progressive futility, will help all working people to understand who the real enemy is, and it will be a story not just about blowing up something that is bad, but about building up something that is good and just. 

Random Thoughts on the Election

This election proves that outlier candidates can win against the machine when people are riled up. I therefore strongly suggests that Bernie probably had a better chance of winning than HRC did in this cycle. Hillary lost this election because she was the Mitt Romney of 2016. As Romney was not a channel for angry conservative voters in 2012, neither was Clinton a channel for angry Progressive voters in 2016. The angry voters who stayed home in 2012 came out for Trump in 2016 and that's why Clinton lost counties in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan that Obama won in 2012. I think that Bernie would have won those counties had he run. 

***

For me, if we could go back six months and look forward there were three likely scenarios:

• Scenario 1: Trump wins and the GOP has majorities in Congress. Republicans must govern now instead of obstruct. This is what in fact we got.
• Scenario 2: Sanders/Warren wins with a Senate majority and is in position to make the case to Americans to give them the House in 2018. They restore sanity. This is what we could have got had Sanders been nominated.
• Scenario 3. Hillary wins with one or both houses of Congress still held by Republicans. Washington remains in stasis. Working class anger intensifies. Scenario 1 is made likely in 2020. 

From where I stand, Scenario 2 would have been the best possible scenario, but I am inclined to think that Scenario 1, as scary as it is, might have long-run advantages that Scenario 2 would not have. As I argued yesterday, Scenario 3 probably leads to Scenario 1 in 2020. But Scenario 1 probably leads to Scenario 2 in 2020. Clinton's win, Scenario 3,  would have continued the stasis; at least Scenario 1 breaks the logjam gives the Reds the chance to govern instead of obstruct, and in doing so to show who they really are. 

Scenario 1 is what we got, and so now Scenario 2 should be something possible in 2020 in a  way that it would not have been had Clinton won in Scenario 3.

Can Trump and his Republican majorities do a lot of damage? Yes, of course. It would have been safer and less nerve-wracking to have a Clinton presidency, but it would not have been as politically healthy. It's better for things to be in motion. 

There is a real opportunity for the Progressive left to mobilize now if it can find a way to respond to this as an opportunity rather than as a tragedy. And one of the most important things that it needs to do, is get away from identity politics and focus on the structural issues regarding economic justice and wealth distribution. But more on that when I have some time. It also needs to find better candidates than John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. 

 

 

Morally Outraged Americans Elect Mr. Potter to Clean Up Pottersville

At the end of the piece I posted Sunday I said, "If by some horrific turn of events Trump manages to win on Tuesday, then we get a head start on Scenario 1." What do I mean by Scenario 1? I assumed that Clinton would win and that we would have four more years of gridlock that would force the American people to choose one side or the other to break the impasse:

I think that the only legislative solution to break the impasse is for one side or the other--the  the Tea Party Right or Sanders/Warren Left--to win the White House and both houses in Congress. In Scenario 1 the Tea Party Right would win, and that would be truly frightening and world destabilizing. Eventually this movement self-immolates along the lines I wrote about yesterday, but as it goes up in flames there will be significant collateral damage both here and throughout the world. The Bush years will seem by comparison a model of constraint and sobriety. Whatever the legitimacy of the the grievances of the rank-and-file Trump supporters and Tea Partiers, their leadership is demented, even more demented than Dick Cheney and John Yoo. 

Scenario 2 would be the Sanders/Warren Progressives controlling the White House and both houses. I thought it was more likely that Scenario 1 would precede Scenario 2, but that it would happen in 2020 after four years of continued gridlock during a Clinton presidency. I am still incredulous that Americans could elect a preposterous thug like Trump; I feared more someone cleverer and shrewder than he arriving on the scene in the future (a more charismatic Ted Cruz type). I never seriously considered Scenario 1 could start as soon as now, but that's exactly what is happening. Clearly, while I took white populist rage very seriously, I underestimated its extent.

So now Right wing extremists will control he White House, congress, and get their guy appointed to the Supreme Court. That, at least, breaks the impasse--but one shudders in anticipation of what they will do with unobstructed control.

And so one flounders about looking for a silver lining. Perhaps one can be found in the idea that because the Trump people are in so far over their heads that they will blunder more than they will do anything deeply destructive. Better a bunch of buffoons now than someone really scary smart later. Maybe their con will be exposed without their self-immolating and dragging the rest of us with them into the conflagration. Maybe. And maybe, just maybe, this lances the infection and allows the rage to drain so that a more sensible choices will be possible in 2018 and 2020. Maybe this creates the conditions that will usher in Scenario 2 sooner. Maybe. 

Assuming we have a functioning democracy in 2020, and assuming that the American people realize that hiring the wolf to manage the henhouse isn't really a solution for what ails them, they will sweep him and the rest of the extreme Right out after one term. And maybe, because the Clinton-Neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has been deeply discredited by this shocking defeat, the Sanders/Warren wing will be able to take control of it in a way that would have been otherwise very difficult. And so it would be they who sweep Trump and discredited Tea Partyism out and put the country back on a sane footing.

As I said, I'm floundering to find a silver lining here--I have no idea how this is going to play out, and there are plenty of scary, crazy ways it could as well. When will they start rounding up the wetbacks?

A Centrist Way Out of the Impasse? Not Likely

From Morton Kondracke:

If voters are furious with Washington now, they’ll be positively revolutionary in 2020 if none of the nation’s problems get addressed. And if America’s adversaries — Russia, China and Iran — continue to take advantage of the weakness our divisions exude, Trump and Cruz will be back.

The upshot of all this is that the next four years represent the last chance for mainstream politicians — of both parties — to prove they can govern. If they can’t, they’re gone — and ideological firebrands will be in charge of both parties.

And the corollary of that is, for their own sakes as well as the country’s, they’d better negotiate, compromise and get stuff done.

Clinton, assuming she’s elected, should immediately assemble GOP and Democratic leaders and say, “I pledge to stand up to my left wing and risk a 2020 challenge if you find the courage to resist threats from your right. We’ve got to work together — or else."

Job No. 1 should be to do what neither party has done for the past 20 years — ease the plight and address the needs of working-class families battered by the downside forces of globalization, technology and slow growth. That’s the cohort Trump has been inciting with calls for protectionism and nativism.

Clinton and GOP leaders could immediately resuscitate the deal that was being negotiated last year by Ryan, incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and GOP Sen. Rob Portman: a substantial cut in the corporate tax rate, a tax holiday for corporations repatriating profits held abroad and public-private investment in a well-planned and administered infrastructure-building program. It could get growth going.

Thereafter, Republicans should agree to Clinton proposals — also supported by the so-called “reformicon” movement in the GOP — to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, the child tax credit and the child-care tax credit, plus measures to reduce the cost of college. And Clinton should agree to a tax-reform proposal that lowers individual rates and caps or eliminates most special-interest loopholes.

Bracketing any discussion of the merit of these particular policy proposals, finding a way to compromise on them is extremely unlikely because Republican legislators don't have a base of support that will allow them to compromise. They stay in office only if they continue to obstruct.

I think that the only legislative solution to break the impasse is for one side or the other--the  the Tea Party Right or Sanders/Warren Left--to win the White House and both houses in Congress. In Scenario 1 the Tea Party Right would win, and that would be truly frightening and world destabilizing. Eventually this movement self-immolates along the lines I wrote about yesterday, but as it goes up in flames there will be significant collateral damage both here and throughout the world. The Bush years will seem by comparison a model of constraint and sobriety. Whatever the legitimacy of the the grievances of the rank-and-file Trump supporters and Tea Partiers, their leadership is demented, even more demented than Dick Cheney and John Yoo. 

In Scenario 2 the Sanders/Warren Left would to win, and that would create a space for some sanity to prevail, because, despite what Kondracke might think, they are not led by "ideological firebrands", even if some of its rank-and-file are. It is led, in fact, by sensible conservatives who want to return to something like the pre-Reagan, pre-Neoliberal, social democratic status quo ante.

Their "Left" agenda would be resisted by ideological cranks on the far Right, as it always has been. But I believe that there are many people now who might be described as populist centrists who are attracted to Trump and the Tea Party extremes not because they share their ideology, but because it provides for them the only outlet for their anger and resentment. Straight shooters like Sanders or Warren could win them over and in doing so siphon off much if not most of the unstable combustibles that are in the bomb waiting to explode on the extreme Right. I believe had Sanders been the nominee and won in this cycle, he could have made the case to the American people to help him to break the impasse by giving him the House in 2018. Someone like Hillary could never do that. 

And so in the short term, Kondracke's compromise scenario is not going to happen. There will be no compromise after Clinton takes the White House. And who knows how much worse things will get by 2020. And if Clinton runs again, and she probably will, that precludes Scenario 2, unless someone like Warren successfully challenges her in the primaries, and that's not likely. So Clinton winning n 2016 makes her running again in 2020 likely, which in turn makes Scenario 1 more likely beginning in 2021.

If by some horrific turn of events Trump manages to win on Tuesday, then we get a head start on Scenario 1.

The GOP's Path to Self-Immolation

Fascism/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism. . . . Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. (Wikipedia)

****

In “Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt writes:

Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

According to Arendt, the “chief disability” of authoritarian propaganda is that “it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.”

The goal of totalitarian propaganda is to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader’s power. Its open distortion of reality is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness.(Jason Stanley in the NYT)

****

Trumpism does not seek simply to make a point and pass on its genes to more politically palatable heirs, nor is it readily apparent why he would need to settle for this. When George Will announced his departure from the G.O.P., last summer, he offered a modified version of Ronald Reagan’s quote about leaving the Democrats—“I didn’t leave the Party; the Party left me.” But a kind of converse narrative applies to Trump; he didn’t join the Republican Party so much as its most febrile elements joined him. Trump is partly a product of forces that the G.O.P. created by pandering to a base whose dilated pupils the Party mistook for gullibility, not abject, irrational fear that would send those voters scurrying to the nearest authoritarian savior they could find. The error was in thinking that this populace, mainlining Glenn Beck and Alex Jones theories and pondering how the Minutemen would have fought Sharia law, could be controlled. (For evidence to the contrary, the Party needed look no further than the premature political demise of Eric Cantor.) The old adage warns that one should beware of puppets that begin pulling their own strings. (Jelani Cobb)

It's three days until the election, and I am assuming that Donald Trump will lose. But even if he does, it is hard to see how the GOP doesn't continue its thirty-five year movement toward the hard right. In my post last week "Realigning the Colors", I argued that the Democratic Party--the Blues--while it may continue to do so rhetorically,  no longer structurally represents the interests of ordinary working Americans. I think this is obvious to anybody who is paying attention to party politics in this country, but if you need a fuller development of the argument to support this contention, you can read Tom Frank's Listen, Liberal. The Democratic Party at its core has become the party of Neoliberal cosmopolitan elites--dominated by professionals and the managerial class. They are liberals on cultural issues, and classic market liberals on economic issues.They are as such deeply out of touch with the interests and values of ordinary, i.e., non-elite, working Americans. 

Despite Republicans doing nothing to serve Black interests during the post-Reconstruction period, most Blacks remained Republicans out of habit until the Dems gave them a reason to switch in the mid 1960s. Until then they had no where else to go, and the GOP was, at least, the Party of the Great Emancipator. In the same way many black, brown, and white Progressives remain Democrats now because they think of it as the Party of FDR, the Kennedys, and LBJ. It no longer is; it has become the Party of Neoliberal cosmopolitan elites--of professionals, of business elites, of knowledge workers who live mostly on the coasts and in the bigger cities and university towns. Real Progressives remain Democrats out of habit because they have no where else to go.

Many of these economic elites lean Libertarian, and have in the past voted Republican, but this election cycle is pushing many of them to vote Blue. I think that trend will continue as it becomes clearer that the GOP continues to become the party of populist rage, a rage traditional GOP elites can no longer control. The Democrats will therefore continue to be largely dominated by Neoliberal and Libertarian economic elites--people who are Left-leaning on cultural issues, but resistant to taxes, regulation, and expanding entitlement programs when it comes to economic domestic policy. It's unlikely that the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing of the Party will be able to effect a takeover because the real power in the Party lies with these elites and in protecting their interests. A few bones will be thrown to the Progressives from time to time, but the essential structural interests of the Blue elite will remain sacrosanct. 

The consequences of this de facto realignment are abundantly evident. Non-elite Americans are feeling deeply insecure because (1) they are losing ground economically in a globalizing economy that favors economic elites, and (2) because they are feeling profound identity loss in the face of the contempt shown for their traditional values by Blue elites. Red non-elites are channeling that double-barreled insecurity into a populist rage, and since there is no constructive focus for that rage, it is being exploited by demagogues on the Right for fascistic, destructive purposes.

The social psychology here is all about projection. The populist rank-and-file mob, when exploited by a fascist demagogue, project its insecurities and fears onto the demagogue, a big personality, a big Daddy who promises to take care of them. Such demagogues obtain their power by sustaining this kind of transference by telling a simplistic story that explains how their shared political enemy is the cause of their grievances and by promising to avenge them for everything they have suffered. Big lies will be told and believed because all that matters is that a channel for the release of populist anger be found. And so as soon as the enemy is identified, he or she becomes a screen onto which the populist mob can project all its resentment and hatred and need for vengeance.

Blue elites like Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama are about as good as it gets when you need such a screen. They are symbols that embody the contempt Red non-elites feel is directed toward them, their values, and their sense of what it means to be an American. There is nothing that creates more rage than a profound sense of identity loss. It's at the heart of the neither-here-nor-there, am-I this-or-that identity crises educated Muslims experience that lead many of them to become become suicide bombers. Voting for Trump for so many Americans feeling a similar kind of identity loss is like donning a political suicide vest. Their rage at that the forces that have marginalized them and the people who symbolize those forces is greater than their need to pursue their normal, "rational" political self-interests. Rather a chosen, vengeful act of political self-immolation than passively being destroyed by forces beyond their control.

This isn't about who's right and who's wrong. It's about understanding the reality we have to deal with in the next decade and beyond. Populist rage is real, and the people who feel that rage have no reason to believe that the Democrats serve their interests, and so they have no place to go except to the Right. I have argued that the significance of this election lies in that the country was given the choice about whether it wanted to channel that rage constructively or destructively. The opportunity to do it constructively was lost when Dems chose not to nominate Bernie Sanders. It now looks inevitable that if there will be no constructive channel for populist rage that it will continue to intensify, and this intensity will be directed through the destructive channels provided on the Right, and the specific channel for that rage has become the GOP. Principled conservatives recognize that the party has abandoned them, and has become a channel for the destructive fascistic politics of resentment and vengeance. 

How does all this end? There is something inherently self-destructive about this kind of extreme Right politics, and it's hard to see how it ends except by burning itself out, and it very likely will burn itself out in violent self-immolation. The fascistic extreme Right will self-immolate sooner or later; they always do. There will be collateral damage. The question remains how long it will take and how much damage will be done. When the smoke clears, and only then, will some kind of realistic, constructive realignment be possible. 

 Jelani Cobb ends his New Yorker piece excerpted above with this paragraph:

In the broader context, Trumpism represents the demise of American exceptionalism, or at least the refutation of the most cogent arguments for it ever having existed in the first place. An exceptional nation would have better reflexes than this, would recognize the communicable nature of fear more quickly, would rally its immune defense more efficiently than the United States has in the past sixteen months. At a quaint moment in the recent past, it was possible to think that a decisive Clinton victory would exorcise Trumpism from public life. But, on the verge of the election, that idea increasingly seems like an indulgent delusion. The problem of Trump is not simply that his opinions far exceed his knowledge; it’s that what he does know is so hostile to democracy, not only in the Republican Party or the United States but in the world. Whatever happens on November 8th, we are at the outset of a much longer reckoning. 

 

[Revised for clarity and to improve usage 11/7.]