Shifts in Florida Show That Political Change Is Never Predetermined

I’ve been wanting to write a little something about this article in The New York Times.  It’s a good piece of reporting, but also exemplifies a fatalistic view of American politics that’s become pervasive not only in reporting, but in a lot of mainstream political thinking by people who frankly should know better. 

Titled “A ‘Blue’ Florida?  There Are No Quick Demographic Fixes for Democrats,” it takes a look at the ramifications of a state ballot initiative to re-enfranchise 1.5 million former felons, as well as of the influx of Puerto Rican refugees in the wake of Hurricane Maria.  The article throws cold water on progressive hopes that these new voters — who tend to vote for Democrats — will actually make much of a difference in the state’s politics.  To back this up, it points to low turnout rates among the former group, and the fact that the split between Democratic and Republican voters in the latter is not so large.  It also notes countervailing demographic changes, including the continued influx of conservative-leaning retirees into the Sunshine State.

On the one hand, the reminder that the Democrats can’t rely on demographics alone is a salutary one — who among us does not feel annoyed by all those prognostications that the Democrats need only sit back and wait for favorable population shifts to deliver them a permanent majority from sea to shining sea?  Particularly when some Democrats took these trends as an excuse not to take more seriously the economic and cultural challenges that have delivered unto us the surprising yet wholly predictable presidency of Donald J. Trump?

Yet a more sobering analysis based on raw numbers and extrapolations from past trends is not so useful if too many progressives take it as predetermined fate rather than important information that might drive action to better their chances of success.  For instance, are we to really believe that organizers in Florida have made such a massive and ground-breaking effort to re-enfranchise felons without any thought to trying to encourage those citizens to use their regained votes?  Likewise, can we really anticipate that Puerto Ricans forced to flee their homeland — in part because of the incompetence of our president — will vote in the same numbers and for the same parties as in past elections, or that no one will bother to rally and organize them?  We should beware a mindset — including in ourselves — that tells us that change is so very difficult, that ignores the benefits of organization and enthusiasm.

And in the wake of the mass shooting at a Parkland high school, we see the outlines of how quickly political shifts can happen, particularly when they’re a catalyzing of forces that have long been building up without being effectively channeled.  We’re also reminded how significant political change often doesn’t come from a single source, but through the convergence of overlapping factors.  In this case, Florida suddenly seems like it could take a much more progressive turn because demographic changes, outrage over gun violence, and a vociferous opposition to President Trump may well synergize into outcomes that a more static view of politics would not have anticipated.  It’s a wake-up call that there’s always a point to fighting for change we believe in, even when the odds seem stacked against us: we can never really anticipate when the tide will turn, and citizens formerly on the sidelines rally en masse to a common cause.

Breaking Free of the Violent World Gun Nuts Have Built Around Us

Everything can seem hopeless until suddenly it doesn’t — some form of this thought has been bouncing around in my head since the killing of 17 souls at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week.  The hope, to our country’s credit, is coming from surviving students, who, in the words of one of them, are calling "bullshit” on a state of affairs in which American students are called upon to die by gunfire in escalating numbers so that politicians never have to face the unnerving prospect of admitting they’re wrong and turning against reliable campaign donors like the National Rifle Association and other elements of the gun lobby.  Their willingness to speak out is shaming a nation, both progressives who have not pressed nearly hard enough on this issue in the face of what seemed like daunting odds, and conservatives, who may finally be waking up to the fact that the price of gun rights dogma may be their own children in the next school shooting.

I can say that the sheer scale of school shootings — 290 since 2013 alone — is a stain on our country’s conscience, but this has been said again and again with no action.  Reform founders on the illogic spewed by pro-gun forces, who insist that no particular law could stop any particular shooting.  Many people are beginning to push back on this obscuring argument, whose logic would suggest that passing any law ever on any topic is hopeless since it will not accomplish 100% of what it sets out to achieve.  

The evidence from states like Connecticut that have passed gun restrictions, as well as the sharp increase in mass shootings since the ban on semiautomatic weapons expired in 2004, suggests why gun rights advocates are so opposed to any legislation.  Despite their bad faith arguments, it turns out that even quite limited gun restrictions work in reducing slaughter in our schools and other public places.  And this evidence creates a powerful logic of its own — if a few laws can have an effect, then it follows that more, stronger laws would have an even greater beneficial effect.  And as some are arguing, this will help change the larger culture around gun violence.  This is the truth that the gun rights folks resist, and this is the truth that shows that they own the slaughter that we see in our schools and elsewhere.  They would rather people have an unfettered right to own guns than protect their own children’s safety, let alone the safety of their fellow citizens.

A toxic yet potent combination of commercial interests, racism, paranoia, feelings of powerlessness, and fantasies of control seem to drive the NRA and its ilk.  To a great extent, we are living in the world that they have fought tooth and nail to bring into being over the past few decades, ratified by the decisions of an extremely conservative Supreme Court that sided with their maximalist interpretation of the Second Amendment.  And as Kurt Andersen points out in his provocative Fantasyland, the complete victory that the gun rights movement achieved hasn't even been enough for them.  They began to propagate imagined threats to gun ownership, such as the idea that the Obama administration planned to confiscate firearms — a lie that, not coincidentally, escalated firearms purchases by people worried about this impending government crackdown.  And even after President Trump’s election, NRA head Wayne LaPierre warned attendees at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference that the U.S faces renewed threats from violent leftist forces, against which fantasized threat firearms are the obvious answer.

So we are living in their preferred world — and yet nearly all of us are feeling less secure for it.  What their extremism has wrought is a land of mass shootings that are, for all practical purposes, the functional equivalent of terrorism; though nearly all the shootings lack a distinct political purpose, they are in fact having the effect of increasingly terrorizing our nation.  Every time a shooting occurs, setting a new record for number of citizens slaughtered, it raises the anxiety level of all of us a little more.  In no population is this terrorizing function more obvious than in schoolchildren, who have now collectively been subjected to active shooter drills for going on two decades — drills that, on their own, instill fear in those that a healthier society would seek to nurture and soothe. 

It’s ironic, and more than a little suspect, that gun rights advocates, a purported group of libertarian-minded citizens, have done arguably more than any other group to set the stage for a massive enhancement in the power of the state over its citizens.  How else to describe the regime they’ve forced us to implement, in which students are as a matter of course made to play-act that they are in fear for their lives, and to accept the presence of metal detectors in their schools, and to accept the presence of armed security guards in their halls?  By the NRA’s logic of unfettered access to weapons of war for all comers, further turning not only our schools, but all public places, into fortresses of unfreedom is the price we all must pay when they impose their fantasies of individual firepower on the rest of us.

Given that so many gun rights extremists argue that guns give citizens the ability to overthrow a tyrannical government if push comes to shove, I think it’s a legitimate question whether our current bloody state of affairs is not such an unintended consequence of their logic.  After all, what do we make of a government that can’t protect its own citizens — its own children?!  Perhaps it deserves to be overthrown after all!  It’s also notable that a traditional definition of the state is that it’s an entity with a monopoly on the use of violence in society; from this perspective, the assertion that all we millions of citizens have our own right to perpetrate violence challenges this monopoly — it is, in effect, a subtle attack on collective, democratic action as embodied in our elected government, in favor of a brutish vision of every citizen for himself, defending his individual turf by force of arms rather than by relying on the power of laws and duly-appointed officials (aka the legal system) charged with enforcing them.

But the Florida students currently raising holy hell are also calling bullshit on this effort to delegitimize our ability to act collectively and democratically.  By reminding us that the American people are never truly stuck so long as we can speak out, organize, and vote, and that laws are how we express our collective will, they’re helping shake us out of our collective, fatalistic torpor.  We will vote out the bastards who take money from the NRA.  We will vote in people who will work to end this senseless killing.

Embrace of Potential Mass Death Abroad to Protect Americans Is Poisoning U.S. Alliance With South Korea

Paying attention to what’s going on between the United States and North and South Korea is well worth the effort, even at this point of news supersaturation.  It’s not just the high stakes of nuclear confrontation that show in the starkest way possible the incompetence and danger of Donald Trump’s presidency; what’s happening on the Korean Peninsula also reveals broader themes of American blindness to the world that go well beyond this particular misfit administration.

Perhaps surprisingly to many Americans, given the rhetoric of war that we’ve heard so recently from Trump administration officials, the Olympics in Pyeongchang have been accompanied by signs of a diplomatic thaw between the two Koreas.  The rhetoric from the White House has been dismissive of this development, but the administration's attitude may actually reveal the degree to which the United States has lost its way in its relationship with both countries.  In his most recent piece, New Republic columnist Jeet Heer brings us up to speed on some realities that Washington would rather the American people not know.

Arguing that the United States itself has enabled the recent “North Korean charm offensive” — which includes Kim Jong Un’s sister attending the Olympic games and the dictator himself offering to hold a summit with South Korea’s president — Heer reviews Trump administration actions that have served to increasingly divide the U.S. and one of its closest allies.  He points in particular to Trump’s belligerent “fire and fury” language towards North Korea, as well as reports that his administration is seriously considering a limited first-strike against North Korea.  This "tough" rhetoric, whatever its effects on North Korea turn out to be, seems to have had a decisive impact on South Korea: its leadership has taken it seriously enough to explore an improvement of relations with the North.  In a nutshell, the U.S.’s apparent willingness to go to war, at the possible cost of literally millions of South Korean lives, has suggested to the South Koreans that this may not be the sort of alliance that actually keeps their country safe.  

The Trump administration notion that the situation on the Korean Peninsula is all about U.S. security first and foremost was perhaps best encapsulated by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who last month said that “this administration is prepared to do what it takes to ensure that people in Los Angeles and Denver and New York aren’t held at risk from Kim Jong-un having a nuclear weapon.”  As Heer notes, “His words are consistent not just with the madman theory, but Trump’s broader America First agenda.  Pompeo’s statement implies a belief that American lives are so valuable that any threat to them from a foreign power, however remote, is worth a war that would unquestionably cause mass death in Seoul.”  Heer also references a report from Vox, in which a variety of experts assert that a war on the Korean Peninsula might include casualties in the millions.

It seems like it should be unnecessary to point this out, but a declared U.S. policy that accepts the death of millions of civilians — and not just any old civilians, but civilians of an ally — as the outcome of a successful foreign policy is on its face a outright catastrophic moral and political failure.  There is no scenario in which U.S. actions that resulted in the deaths of millions would not permanently destroy our country’s reputation in the world; putting it in terms that these Dr. Strangelovian strategists claim to understand, this would catastrophically undermine U.S. national security, however you wanted to define that term.

In an accompanying tweet, Heer makes the case that not just conservatives, but Americans from across the political spectrum, have been unable to see how such thinking would alienate the South Koreans because of a basic inability to imagine matters from the South Korean perspective; as evidence, he points to various commentary asserting that the South Koreans are simply being duped by North Korea's overtures.  Heer’s retort is that no people understand the threat of North Korea better than South Koreans, and so the openness to better relations with such a brutal and feared regime should be seen in the light of serious U.S. diplomatic failures. 

What really unnerves me about Heer’s point regarding U.S. willingness to accept mass death as long as it happens to non-Americans is that this is hardly a new or unfamiliar mindset.  In fact, if so many Americans seem not to realize the horror of Trump administration policy, not to mention the counterproductive nature of such slaughter, it’s likely because such thinking has been at the heart of the war on terror that’s now fast approaching its second decade.  The idea that the U.S. is always justified in killing people in other countries so long as it can be justified as saving American lives has arguably been THE central tenet of this catastrophic endeavor.  It’s a notion that’s been tacitly accepted across the political spectrum, despite its patent immorality and quite demonstrable counter-productiveness to actual long-term American security.  To see it pop up in the Korean context is illuminating, as it shows how this fundamentally immoral notion becomes demonstrably insane when applied to an actual ally.  It should be obvious that a U.S. policy that results in the deaths of millions of civilians of a friendly nation could in no way be considered a success for America; yet this is the logic to which all Americans are invited to subscribe.

In the context of South Korea, such a policy, if carried out, would embrace such a twisted moral calculus as to permanently change what it means to be an American, re-defining our populace as a nation of sociopaths, without regard for any life beyond our own.  Yet it’s chilling to realize that we’ve already applied this logic for years with nary a public discussion, counting the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan as acceptable “collateral damage” so long as the government could point to American lives saved.  Perhaps now that this logic has officially been taken to its most absurd extreme — contemplating the deaths of millions of South Koreans to save millions of Americans — people will begin to open their eyes to its indefensibility.  The South Koreans, at least, have awakened to this insanity.

I’ll end with this theoretical question: if North Korea’s antagonism to the U.S comes from our alliance with South Korea, but South Korea manages a true reconciliation with the North, so that it no longer fears war, what exactly would be the U.S. involvement at that point?  There is an underlying idea that North Korea is simply crazy, an abstract evil, but this is obviously not the case, but simply rhetoric from the American side.  If the North and South no longer contemplated war with each other, would the United States continue to act as if North Korea were an existential threat to this country, or would we actually stand down?  I sometimes get the sense that the Trump administration feels it needs North Korea as a bogeyman to distract and scare the American people.  I’ve thought before about how often foreign policy seems to just be domestic politics by other means, and North Korea often feels like a clear demonstration of this phenomenon: a way to manipulate and rouse one party’s base, a point only accentuated by the idea that even the most horrific of wars would not spill a drop of American blood, even at the sacrifice of untold numbers of foreign souls.

Porter Scandal Reminds Us That the Moral Bankruptcy of this White House is Bottomless

I take it as a sign of hope that sharp reporting and incisive commentary have been the hallmark of the Rob Porter scandal, even as this incident confirms — as if we needed further confirmation — our worst fears about the morally compromised nature of this White House.  Many in the media are still able to recognize a real scandal when they see one, and the outrage expressed by so many other observers shows that we’re not yet numbed to this American nightmare, even as each week brings new revelations and details about the still-to-be-numbered circles of hell through which the body politic is forced to descend: our own modern-day Winthropian harrowing.

As White House staff secretary, Porter was in charge of passing on state documents to President Trump; but his role was larger than even this important one, as he also performed functions such as assisting in drafting the president’s State of the Union speech.  In other words, he was a man privy to the deepest secrets of our country, and who clearly had the president’s trust.  Credible accusations of his abusive behavior by multiple women, including two ex-wives, meant that he was not able to gain a permanent security clearance, but only held a temporary one for the entire time he performed this highly sensitive job.  One major concern about someone with such personal vulnerabilities is that he could be blackmailed by someone using this compromising information; and this is the reason the FBI ultimately indicated it could not give him a permanent clearance.

The irony is rich here, as Donald Trump’s campaign was likely won on its insistence that Hillary Clinton did not protect national secrets when she used a private server for her emails.  But because everything about the Age of Trump is overdetermined and multi-layered, Porter’s story also intersects with another great theme of our time, the misogyny embodied by the Trump campaign and the #MeToo backlash.  As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg suggests, Porter’s identity as an abuser ensured that he would be welcome at this White House, even if his background would have disqualified him from service in any previous one:

It’s fair to think that Trump sets the bar for what’s considered acceptable in this White House.  Porter’s father, Roger Porter, a Harvard professor who worked for presidents including Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, once wrote of how presidents create administrative cultures: “Scholars of management today write much about the ‘tone at the top.’  Like all presidents, Gerald Ford established a tone that permeated the executive branch.”  Trump, evidently, established one as well.

A telling example of this trickle-down effect can be found in how Porter defended himself from the allegations to other members of the White House.  According to the New York Times, Porter told White House counsel Donald McGahn "about the possible allegations because he was concerned that what he characterized as false charges from aggrieved women who were out to destroy him could derail his F.B.I. background check, according to one of the two people briefed on the matter.”  Could there be a more Trump-favor-currying defense than to suggest that the charges were lies from women "out to destroy him"?  As with Trump's dismissal of the allegations against himself and others, there is an underlying theme of women being vengeful and mendacious for no reason at all but simply out of inherent batshit craziness.  

Vox writer Jane Coaston says that Trump’s own legacy of abusing women set the dynamics not only for the White House’s approach to Porter, but also for its response to the various allegations against White House officials and those it has supported, from Steve Bannon and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to failed GOP Senate candidate and alleged pedophile Roy Moore:

For the White House, the politics are simple: Protect Trump.  Because Trump himself is accused of assaulting dozens of women, they’ve had to lower the bar for male behavior so that even he can meet it.  Any allegation of misconduct made against anyone close to Trump, then, must be dismissed as if it were being made against Trump himself.

This observation captures, simply and directly, the fundamental reason that this White House will ever and always be on the side of abusers of women: to even acknowledge that such abusers exist is to open the door to admitting that Donald Trump could be an abuser himself.  And the deeper source for this logical endpoint is Donald Trump's immoral character, as his abuse of women in the past stems from a place of profound disrespect and arguably hatred for womankind.

* * *

Yet the Rob Porter scandal has exposed one other troubling fact about this administration that is not directly connected to its contempt for women and frat house-like embrace of bros who abuse.  This looks like it may be the incident that finally ends General John Kelly’s position as White House Chief of Staff, as it appears that he covered and advocated for Porter despite knowledge of his abusive past; as such, it’s a good time to remind ourselves of the perniciousness of Donald Trump having brought so many generals into top administration positions in the first place.  Of the three major appointments — Kelly, General James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, and General H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor — it's Kelly who has most fully demonstrated the reality of the dangers of bringing military men into civilian roles.

Who can forget those heady early days of Kelly’s tenure, when there was a widespread consensus, across both elected officials and the media, that his appointment was a good thing, since he would bring order to the chaos of the White House?  But very soon, Kelly began to reveal his true character, as a sympathizer and accomplice to Donald Trump’s worst qualities.  Kelly slandered a sitting member of Congress, who just happened to be African-American, and never apologized to her even after the actual facts were made known; he made disturbing statements about American service members being superior to civilians; he recently called DACA recipients too “scared” and “lazy” to seek extensions of their status.  And this is just a small sampling of his misdeeds.

But my point is not simply that John Kelly has turned out to be a morally compromised man.  It’s that both Kelly and the Trump White House sought to employ his military service as proof of his unimpeachable rectitude and apolitical loyalty to the United States over partisanship.  This, we can clearly see, was not only a scam, but a deeply chilling and dangerous one.  Poll after poll shows the U.S. military to be one of the most admired institutions in the United States; I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that it’s become identified with competence, teamwork, and a sort of generic patriotism beyond party or faction (whether or not these are valid assessments of the military is another question).  As Kelly repeatedly acted and spoke in ways that contradicted his technocratic role, criticism of the man was absorbed by the reserves of goodwill based on his military service.  But as time went on, this goodwill began to be depleted, so that at this point it is undeniable that he shares many of the same backwards beliefs as his unfit boss, so that he is no longer credibly seen as some sort of neutral actor.

But to call out Kelly’s bad faith is not enough; we also need to recognize the darker political move in essentially using the goodwill citizens associate with the U.S. military to help advance a host of right-wing maneuvers, from demonizing immigrants to denigrating women.  If nothing else, Kelly’s tenure has demonstrated that concerns about such a move are not at all abstract.  Kelly’s military service was indeed employed in defense of a right-wing agenda, a fact reinforced by solid evidence at this point that Kelly shares a right-wing belief system.  Kelly abused his own service for partisan ends, but the broader offense is a White House that enabled this situation in the first place.

Did NRA Shoot Itself in the Foot By Funneling Russian Funds to Trump Campaign?

As Donald Trump escalates his war against the executive branch he was elected to lead, it’s become clear that his desperate efforts to avoid accountability for his campaign’s collusion with the Russian government have only made it this far because of the Republican Party’s willingness to protect him.  Many commentators argue that the GOP is doing this out of the most basic of political calculations — Donald Trump will sign legislation that Congress wants, and damage to the president will also damage the party.  The Hot Screen has tended to emphasize that the GOP interest goes beyond such a simple calculation, and that the party has long been sliding towards the authoritarian, anti-democratic positioning that the president has fully embraced: from this point of view, authoritarianism is necessity for the president, destiny for the Republican Party.

But recent reports that Russian interests may have funneled millions of dollars to the National Rifle Association’s effort to campaign for Donald Trump raise the possibility that the GOP’s assistance in squashing the Russia investigation may be more directly self-serving than protecting a president who embodies strongman tendencies with which they agree.  A few words about the NRA-Russia connection first, though: according to the McClatchy news service article linked to above, “The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency.”  The NRA apparently spent $30 million to support Trump in 2016, which is three times as much as the organization spent supporting Mitt Romney is 2012.  Moreover, the NRA says it spent $55 million on the 2016 elections — but there are reports that this spending may have been closer to $70 million. It’s also important to note that, as Talking Points Memo outlines, ties between the NRA and Russian interests go back years, beyond these recent financial allegations. 

If this funding story turns out to be true, the narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 election immediately broadens from whether the Trump campaign received support, to whether the GOP as a whole was assisted by Russian intervention.  Even if party leaders merely suspect this to be the case, the idea that Republican senators and representatives may have benefitted from Russian cash is a storyline that should rightly terrify them, and that they’d seek to discredit by smearing or shutting down the more-prominent Mueller investigation.

This Vox article also notes the possibility that the NRA may not have been the only conservative organization to have been infiltrated by Russian interests.  I would note, though, that “infiltration” is arguably not the proper way to look at the relationship between an organization like the NRA and Russian agents.  Not just guns rights advocates, but conservative religious figures and white nationalists, look to Russia and see not an authoritarian monstrosity, but a model of government, pseudo-Christianity, and values worthy of emulation and respect.  I suspect the bigger, more unsettling story is less about innocent groups being co-opted or suborned, but about such groups forming de facto alliances with right-wing organizations abroad.

We still don’t have a lot of information about the full extent of the NRA funding allegations — yet there is already solid reporting in the public record of ties between the NRA and unseemly Russian figures with links both to organized crime and the Kremlin.  It is not too soon to start publicizing these facts: seldom has there been an organization so vicious, repellent, and deserving of being called out for its connections to Russian authoritarians who have no love for our country.  If the NRA has been stupid enough to cultivate ties with such people, it should be made to pay the price in reputation, influence, and political power.

White Collar Unionizing on the Rise While Blue Collar Organizing Founders

To continue the union theme of my previous post, I wanted to talk a little about this fascinating piece from last month’s Atlantic magazine.  Titled “Organized Labor’s Growing Class Divide,” it tells a fraught story that in some ways offers some strains of hope.  Although unionization across the U.S. economy has plummeted over the past 40 years, particularly in the private sector, white-collar workers are currently forming unions in numbers that defy the overall decline in labor organizing.  Some 90,000 people in “professional and technical occupations” joined unions last year, and the number of workers in unions in "law, arts, design, entertainment, sports and media" increased from 4% in 2010 to 7% in 2017.

A remarkable, if explicable, development that this piece highlights is the growing divide in the success of unionizing in the above-referenced areas when compared to industries we more commonly associate with union efforts, such as manufacturing.  In an ironic twist of history, it turns out that the very inequalities that are tearing at the fabric of our country are also creating a divide in labor organizing.  The article notes that while lesser-skilled workers in places like auto plants are less able to find other jobs if their company (illegally) punishes them for organizing efforts, workers in white collar industries have higher confidence that they’ll be able to find another job elsewhere.  Moreover, a higher proportion of white collar workers organizing these days are younger and so less likely to have families that they need to support, and that might limit their ability and willingness to gamble with their job prospects.  It also makes the basic point that white collar work is generally less physically demanding, and so workers literally have more energy outside work to do union organizing.

The article also points out structural changes in the economy, particularly since the Great Recession, that are feeding this disparity: out of around 12 million jobs created, more than two-thirds went to workers with a B.A., so that “[b]lue-collar workers [. . . ] are competing for a smaller and smaller share of jobs in the economy, and thus may feel less willing to commit to labor drives.”

I’m obviously pro-union, but the larger principle I’m arguing for goes beyond the elemental structure of labor power embodied by unions.  The power balance between an employer and employee will always be skewed to the employer; we can either embrace this fact with the free market fundamentalists, and accept the downward spiral in wages and economic success that results, or we can choose to see that employment is a basic human right, that economic power is political power, and that the solution to this imbalance is for the many who are employed to band together to get a fair shake out of the few who employ them.  And if that weren't enough, the rise of Trump and the authoritarian right can be seen as a direct result of a steady diminishment of American prosperity that has been abetted by the de-unionization of the American workforce (as I argued in my last piece). 

My utopian hope is that the principles of solidarity and fairness that drive white collar workers to form and join unions will also lead them to reach across the economic divide and support similar efforts by blue-collar workers.  Self-interest should also be a motivation: these are not competitors for their jobs, but fellow citizens who, at the most basic level, will be more powerful political allies against an oligarchic mindset that has conquered the Republican Party and largely neutralized the labor traditions of the Democrats.  You can't make political change if you don't make alliances based on common interests; wanting sound employment at fair pay is one of the commonest.

Democrats Stopped Fighting for Unions, and Trump May Be the Price We're All Paying

As a slow-motion, right-wing coup continues to propagate from the White House, day by sordid day, a central question that haunts our politics is which democratic institutions and organizations will resist and halt this authoritarian stupidity.  A recent article by Eric Levitz reminds us of one of the reasons we’ve arrived at this pass: the evisceration of unions over the past few decades, and the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to fully defend workers’ basic right to organize.  

Levitz provides a concise overview of the decline of unions over the past 40 years and how the Democrats have repeatedly failed to pass legislation that might slow or arrest this decline.  He makes the point that while unions have continued to provide massive organizational and financial support to the Democrats, the Democrats have not reciprocated in the area that most counts — passing laws to make it easier to organize and protect unions.

Apart from the disheartening numbers of the decline in union membership over the last four decades — from 26% to 10.7% of the working population — Levitz’s most shocking statistics are those that show the relationship between unions and votes for Democrats.  In so-called “right to work states” — where employees don’t have to pay dues in order to gain the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement in a unionized workplace, thus depriving the union of crucial resources for political organizing — Democrats’ share of the vote has declined an average of 3.5%.  He quotes Nation writer Sean McElwee, who contends that anti-union legislation in Wisconsin and Michigan may have cost Hillary Clinton victory in those two states.  Lest you think this is mere sour grapes, he also notes the shocking statistic that in 2008, Barack Obama won unionized white men by 18 points, but lost non-unionized white men by 16 points.  Yes, you read that correctly.  White working class men, seen as the backbone of Trump's support, voted for a black man by nearly 20%.  Racism may be a huge part of Trump's appeal, but this is a clear indicator that people's sense of economic empowerment is crucial to their susceptibility to such appeals when it's time to cast their votes. 

Such observations remind us that one of the lesser-known but critical decisions of the last administration that helped set the stage for the rise of Trump was President Obama’s failure to back the Employee Free Choice Act, which essentially would have made it easier to organize unions.  At the time, it felt like a slap in the face to unions, who spent $250 million backing Obama’s candidacy, and whose workers voted for him by the margins cited above.

From the vantage point of 2018, though, we can see that this failure was a critical mistake for the future of the Democrats, if also a symptom of a party that ultimately chose to embrace neoliberalism with a few legislative tweaks rather than the structural, pro-worker, pro-consumer reforms that the financial crisis and Great Recession called out for.  Just as none of the bankers who helped wreck the economy went to jail, no American workers got the government boost they needed to bring more democratic control over their workplaces and help stabilize the economy; they also didn't get the help they needed to be able to continue their assistance in getting Democrats elected.

Not surprisingly, without a program to break apart too-big-to-fail banks, permanently reign in the excessive financialization of the economy, address the debt that cripples college students, bring affordable health care to ALL Americans, and boost the prospects of unions and the pay of American workers to fair levels, econonic inequality continues to grow past ever-more grotesque benchmarks, and economic despair continues to haunt millions.

And now we are all learning that simple human suffering isn’t even the full extent of the price we’re all paying.  Throttle the American dream, kill the unions, outsource the jobs, and reward the richest among us long enough, and you end up creating the conditions for a Trump to come along and upend our democracy itself; to clear the path for the GOP to embrace its full authoritarian potential, and take the war against average Americans to sick new depths.  It's not enough that our citizenship stops when we walk through the door at work, and we find ourselves reduced to peons subject to surveillance, overwork, and termination if we assert our democratic right to organize.  No, now we must be taxed to pay for tax breaks for the richest Americans, and see social programs that benefit the working and middle classes put on the chopping block to help pay for these breaks.

But even this is not the worst of it.  Make Americans suffer enough, deprive them of decent news sources, take away their worker protections, and point the finger at minorities and immigrants as the cause of their worries, and it turns out frightening numbers of us are ready for a strongman who tells us that the solution is him; that the solution is that our nation is not pure enough, has been polluted by parasitic outsiders, and must make war on all who challenge his reign, be it the FBI or undocumented immigrants unwittingly brought to our country by their parents.

Unions have traditionally been a key way for average Americans to feel a stake in our country; to exercise collective power against the rich and entitled; to feel a connection between their workplace and their democracy.  Small wonder that Donald Trump, who claims to be the great protector of the American workers, has not a single word to say on protecting unions.  I suspect that if more American workers were unionized, this glaring omission would have sunk his spurious appeal to them, bigly.

Opponents of Equality See #MeToo as a Feminist Power Grab, Not a Human Rights Cause

In a recent column, Thomas Edsall offers up a variety of perspectives on the political consequences of the ongoing revolt against sexual harassment that’s swept Hollywood and is now beginning to take down elected officials.  Academics who’ve been studying and polling women’s rights issues see a more complex dynamic than a simple assessment that the movement will hurt or help the chances of Democrats in upcoming elections.

Some sobering statistics suggest that even if we’re in the midst of a seismic shift in attitudes, sentiment around harassment and equal rights is still starkly divided between political parties and deeply tied to gender.  Some observers also interpret some polling as suggesting that the #MeToo movement may create its own backlash.  Given that this movement is itself arguably a backlash against the election of Donald Trump, whether this movement is provoking its own backlash or simply running into existing attitudes that helped elect Donald Trump seems an open and vital question.  Within this question lurks the deeper question of how social change occurs, and what relationship it has to politics.

Politically, the boilerplate questions to ask are whether this social movement will bring undecided or persuadable voters from the Republican to the Democratic side of the ticket, whether it will inspire more Democratic or Republican partisans to vote, and whether it will energize the leadership and elected officials of either party.  On the plus side for Democrats, a huge number of women are running for office in 2018, which would seem to bring a very real energy to the party, and to offer females incensed by harassment and other equality issues an obvious party and slate of candidates to support.  

Against such optimistic signs we need to weigh recent history; for instance, white women voted for Donald Trump 52% to 43%.  Is it realistic to think that many of these voters will change their minds because of the #MeToo movement and the revelations beyond Trump’s harassment that have driven it over the past year?  Comments by Columbia University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi are worth reading carefully; she cautions that a larger framework of political and cultural sympathies shapes how some people might respond to arguments for female political empowerment:

If the idea is that Democrats can win over and mobilize people who did not vote for them last cycle by calling Trump a sexist, and Roy Moore a predator — even if many voters agree and are disturbed by Moore and Trump — many of them can also sympathize with Trump in a sense. The same people who are bashing Trump have also disparaged them (Trump supporters) as misogynistic, racist, homophobic, ignorant, etc. — to their minds, unfairly. So they don’t put a lot of stock in those messengers, and indeed, hearing Democrats sling these kinds of labels around will probably just stir up resentment against the left.

[P]rogressives have done a great job framing racial inequality, feminism and LGBTQ rights as part of the same basic struggle. However, this association works both ways. Accusations of misogyny, for instance, are often heard in the context of a fundamentally anti-white, anti-Christian culture war — a zero-sum campaign waged against ordinary hard-working Americans by condescending and politically-correct liberal elites.

What a recurrent theme this is!: people have preconceived interpretative frameworks that all too easily channel what could be disruptive new information into reinforcing an existing mindset.  This, of course, is otherwise known as human nature, though amplified in this case by a conservative propaganda apparatus and a starting mindset that is particularly hostile to allowing in new facts.  The fundamental difficulty of persuading people, in tandem with the fundamental importance of making a persuasive effort in a democracy, suggests that hitting on a strategy to maximize persuasion and minimize backlash is the key question if this movement is to achieve its broadest possible impact in our politics and society.

On this score, I’m drawn to the perspective of Stonybrook University political scientist Leonie Huddy, who notes how the two parties already have captured the loyalty of pro- and anti-feminists, and suggests that linking not only gender issues but race and immigration arguments into a broader economic framework is necessary.  Her final point is key — she argues that doing so “reduces the sense that one group wins at another group’s expense.”

This zero-sum mindset sometimes feels like the key issue in contemporary U.S. politics.  It’s a notion that haunts necessary coalition building within the Democratic Party, and it’s an essential part of the moral sickness of racism that poisons the legitimacy of the GOP.  “That woman is accusing that man of sexual harassment because she wants his job.”  “If we allow black people to vote with abandon, they will use their power to serve their own kind and punish white people.”  “If we let immigrants into the country, they will take my job.”  Appallingly absent is the idea that fellow citizens might cooperate, or might not place paramount importance on the dominance and submission of other groups.  

The deeper reality that I’ve argued for repeatedly here at The Hot Screen is that most Americans have an overriding common interest: to secure themselves economically, politically, and socially from the ravages of our current state of predatory capitalism, in which most of us have been made to serve the needs of the economy rather than the economy made to serve the needs of Americans.  Donald Trump’s faux populism and policy of massive tax breaks for the rich should have provided decisive evidence to many of his voters that he’s not on their side in this struggle — yet he’s still able to maintain their support in part by playing to their fears around race, immigration, and gender, implicitly suggesting that their lives and livelihoods are threatened by a usurping and wanton brown-tinged, female-led army whose goal above all else is to miscegenate whiteness into oblivion while spending your hard-earned money on tax breaks for anchor babies and chain migration (“anchors” and “chains” not coincidentally evoking the idea of retardant forces that would drag and muddle to a standstill the otherwise predestined progress of the SS America across white-capped seas into a glorious future).  Make no mistake: the president's 1%-friendly policies are only going to worsen our collective economic prospects, increasing the right's interest in dividing Americans against each other to distract from the looting in plain view.

GOP Conspiracy-Mongering Obscures an Authoritarian Agenda: A Sunday Sermon

With the right wing’s escalating attempts to pre-emptively smear and outright obstruct special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump-Russia collusion — lately, most notably and tragi-comically by debunked claims of a “secret society” within the Justice Department fomenting a coup against the president — it’s now clear that conservatives will literally seize on any tool at hand to defend the president, no matter the collateral damage to our democracy.  The sheer number of bad faith actions to undermine a lawful investigative process is not only staggering in itself; it has also reached a point where no objective observer can deny that a quantitative change has occurred in the GOP’s collective attitude toward the rule of law.  It seems unlikely that the party, let alone the conservative propaganda machine, will accept the results of Mueller’s investigation if it implicates the president in any sort of wrongdoing.  It is not simply the “anything goes” effort that catches your attention, but the intent behind it — to defend a president for the sake of the Republican Party’s hold on power, no matter what illegal or unethical actions Donald Trump may have taken.  

In the past few days, with the news of the special counsel’s interview of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and as many as 20 other White House Staff, along with The New York Times story that Donald Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller back in June, the president’s attempts to obstruct the investigation into his possible wrongdoing — which, always remember, is ALSO an investigation into the already-established Russian interference in the 2016 election — have become undeniable.     

It’s difficult to imagine a more extreme scenario on which the GOP could have chosen to make a stand.  We already know that collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government occurred; apart from establishing the extent of the collusion, the other main question at this point is whether Trump was aware of or involved in this effort himself.  Multiple people have already been indicted by, or chosen to cooperate with, the special counsel's investigation.  But in undermining and stymying an investigation that goes to the legitimacy of our electoral process, and so involves the possibility of literal crimes against our democracy — an investigation that would not only punish malefactors, but also help prevent such interference in the future — the Republican leadership is choosing party over country in the starkest possible terms.  I don’t think I’m the first person to feel like he or she lacks the words to express how outrageous, frightening, and un-American it is to see one of our two major political parties essentially giving cover to an assault on our country.  

Part of what has me so unsettled right now is the disparity in the forces, in terms of energy and enthusiasm, set against each other.  On one side, the Republicans have literally mobilized their entire party, plus the enormous right-wing propaganda apparatus, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.  They insist unequivocally, against all evidence to the contrary, that there was no collusion, and that all is a plot to destroy the president (more on this shortly).  And as I already noted, they are doing so in a way that essentially refutes the rule of law in the country.  On the other side, the Democrats are, to put the best possible spin on it, scrupulously adhering to the rule of law, by deferring to and defending the Mueller investigation, and by doing what they can in Congress to make sure that the legislature’s investigations, though headed by Republicans, continue along.  It is an uneven clash, in that one side says their man is not only absolutely innocent, but that there is moreover a plot by real bad actors to malign his innocence.  On the other hand, the Democrats are essentially behaving as if the jury is still out on President Trump’s guilt or innocence.  

But to describe the disparity like this only gets us partway to the full, horrid situation.  Because it turns out that the way Republicans are working to undermine a federal investigation being conducted on behalf of the American people involves propagating a sprawling counter-narrative of conspiracy, treason, and paranoia that, believed by tens of millions of Americans, tears apart the common understanding that Americans need if we’re to actually be a country.  A Deep State seeks to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency, complete with secret societies and secret handshakes, and it was the Clinton campaign that conspired with the Russians.

As Jeet Heer discusses, such paranoid views, for much of American history associated only with the fringes of the political spectrum, are now embraced by the Oval Office and much of the conservative mainstream.  But though Donald Trump himself may be a paranoid personality (like his increasingly obvious antecedent, Richard M. Nixon), this top-down conspiracy theorizing is less the fevered work of people who feel powerless trying to piece together the obscure machinations of power, and much more the machinations of the powerful trying to obscure the wrongdoing of those with whom they share power.  In other words, it’s paranoia with a purpose, ad-hoc conspiracy theorizing that in itself constitutes a sort of conspiracy — an unacknowledged effort to spread lies to protect the guilty.  Politicos and operatives deploy conspiracy theories knowing full well that the tales they are telling are, in fact, lies.

This conspiracy-mongering is doing immeasurable damage to our politics and society because it’s being communicated to, and believed by, tens of millions of credulous Americans across the country.  The irony of the term “fake news” as a slander against the free press has never been greater, as an enormous chunk of the U.S. population takes as truth the most insane theories that exclude or excuse the bad acts of Trump and his ilk, and place the actual criminality (with interest!) on the president’s political opponents, and — arguably more chillingly — on the governmental agencies that administer the rule of law.

Opponents of Trump and other believers in a democratic United States make a serious error if we confuse our current situation with where we were a year or even six months ago.  Though the rule of law has held thus far, the escalating flow of authoritarian propaganda from the president and his apologists has corroded the democratic understandings of literally tens of millions of our fellow Americans.  While many of us have watched with growing anxiety as the president has provided daily evidence of his unfitness and animosity towards American democracy (depressingly hitting sequential new lows with the regularity of a Metamusil addict), millions of citizens have lived an opposite, if also fraught, reality.  From their perspective, the last year has hardened their sense that powerful agents are out to get them, and that these same agents are out to get the president as well.  Just as we’ve been growing angrier, so have they.  They have seen a president not abusing the powers of his office, but doing what he needs to in order to defend himself against implacable and nefarious foes.  We see a president more fully embracing an authoritarian view of his office; they see a heroic strong man acting righteously and never backing down, an infallible figure admirable in his refusal to brook limits to his power.  They see the dictatorial figure they’ve been longing for but never fully realized they wanted, at least not until he edged his way into the Oval Office.

What we fail to recognize at our collective peril is that while we’ve been playing by the rules of the democratic game, the right has been working to change the game into something a lot less synched up with truth and reality, and a lot more recognizable as the sort of system you see under authoritarian governments, where there is no truth but what your leaders tell you.  The attacks on the Justice Department and FBI, the idea that seditious elements of those organizations need to be purged, are a warning sign that we have crossed into extremely dangerous territory.  More precisely — such widespread and coordinated attacks are the dangerous territory.

We can only do democratic battle while we still have a democracy.  If the GOP is able to subvert federal law enforcement, the courts, perhaps the military — what then?  Literally anything goes at that point.  If the president could quash an investigation into whether the Russians attacked our elections, then there is really nothing he could not do.  This is part of what feels so uncanny about our crisis.  In apparently defending the president on a narrow though incredibly important point — whether or not he is implicated in collusion and obstruction of justice — the president and his party are making moves that take our government in a direction of unfettered power on all fronts, not simply in terms of being able to defend the president against what are, again, important but relatively narrow charges.  From one angle, this makes sense — after all, their ultimate, if mostly unvoiced, argument is that the president can’t have done anything illegal because he is by definition above the law; this notion lends itself in turn to a limitless and unconstitutional idea of the presidency that can't be squared with an executive that exists in tension with the other branches of government.

But one increasingly has the sense that the stakes are so high for the right because this sort of authoritarian government isn’t just a necessity in fighting off the potentially annihilating suspicions around Trump, but because it’s an end in itself.  As we’ve discussed before, from voter suppression to gerrymandering to delaying elections, the GOP has increasingly turned to anti-democratic tactics to hold power.  Now that much of the GOP has gone all in on the Trumpian white nationalist vision of America, in which America’s move towards a minority majority is seen as an existential threat to the proper nature of the nation, an opposition to democracy is necessarily embedded in the Republican Party.  After all, if white Americans will no longer be a majority in the near future, yet are considered the only legitimate Americans, then all manner of anti-majoritarian tomfoolery comes to seem justified.

People have spoken of Robert Mueller’s potential firing as a red line that Trump cannot cross.  I agree — but without specific plans and consequences in mind that would take the fight to Trump, such drawing of lines is meaningless.  In fact, one could argue that Trump's direction that his White House counsel fire Mueller did cross this red line, even if the order was not carried out.  The GOP seems to understand this point, and so in the last few days we’ve seen attempts to muddle what happened, from arguments that Trump was simply talking out loud, to the idea that this news actually reinforces the integrity of our system since it shows that Trump wasn’t actually able to fire Mueller.  But the lack of a firm response by the Democratic party, and frankly by civil society more generally, may also have sent a dangerous signal to Donald Trump that nothing will actually happen when he actually goes through with firing Mueller (and yes, I am still betting that firing is a question of when and not if).  

In a sense, Trump’s failed effort to fire Mueller, while bad for the president in the eyes of some segment of the public and damning in terms of the obstruction of justice investigation, demonstrates that things are worse than we realized.  Again, if the president can literally fire anyone who threatens him, then what is to stop him from using the same scorched earth tactics in all areas of governance?  If it pleases the base, why not have the Justice Department investigate, prosecute, and jail Hillary Clinton?  If there is no opposition to stop him, then why should he stop?  

The Democratic Party can no longer pretend the country is not in a political crisis.  No regular business, whether on immigration or the budget, should be conducted until the Republicans are forced to provide a definitive yes or no on a law to protect the special counsel against firing.  If the GOP responds in the negative, then the highest order of business would be to put together a strategy to win the constitutional crisis that would result from such a firing.  And the opposition needs to make it absolutely clear that the GOP is complicit in the point we’ve reached, that in defending a corrupt president, Republicans have allowed that corruption to eat into their moral legitimacy, and to destroy any pretense they’ve had to be a legitimate American party.

Too many Democratic politicians think that this is more or less still politics as usual.  It’s not.  The Republican Party would rather burn down our democracy than lose its grip on power.  The GOP is attempting to change the rules away from democracy and into something dark and unaccountable.  The Democrats need to change the rules as well, but in a democratic direction, to fully discredit their authoritarian opponents.  The only language the right will ultimately understand is an electoral show of force — non-violent, democratic, and overwhelming.  In 2018, in 2020, and beyond, we need to hit American politics with a democratic shockwave that brings in a progressive, democratic vision that imposes accountability on those who have abused their power.  We need to be very clear that there can be no forgiveness for what these dark and power-mad men have threatened us with.  And we all need to reckon long and hard with how we got to this point, in order to make sure we never come this close to disaster again in our lifetimes.

This may be why I found the recent “Oprah 2020” bubble so distasteful.  Against an unqualified moral reprobate who took advantage of a multi-faceted decay in our democracy, the Democrats would run a contrary charismatic figure.  But by placing so much hope in a single person, these people signaled that they don’t grasp the nature of our crisis, where a worship of celebrity and showmanship has helped corrupt the political process.  A savior figure from the left shares something of the lazy authoritarianism that the right has embraced: it suggests that ordinary people cannot save themselves, and that they need a star to save them.  This line of thought is deeply undemocratic, and weakens our collective power by implying that we are all insufficient to bring about change in society.  It is a debilitating fairy tale that we tell ourselves because we are all a little scared right now, and feeling powerless.

Disparity in Prosperity of U.S. Cities Provides Window Into Interrelated Ills of Economy and Democracy

This shortish piece, titled "What Happens When the Richest U.S. Cities Turn to the World?," provides a small snapshot of the modern global economy — but I found it sharpening my perspective unexpectedly.  Its starting basic point is that several decades ago, large U.S. cities often had manufacturing as a major industry that in turn drove business in smaller, often more inland U.S. cities.  However, our current economy sees a trend in which huge cities like New York and Los Angeles often have closer economic interconnections with similarly-sized megalopolises abroad like Tokyo and New Delhi than with smaller American cities or even regions in their own states. 

This probably sounds to most readers like a basic, high-level description of globalization — and I think it is — but something about the granularity of the article's details helped make globalization just a little less abstract for me.  For instance, it describes how San Francisco, now such a tech hub, was once a major shipbuilding town, which in turn led companies there to purchase various manufactured goods — turbines, winches, radio equipment — from cities scattered across the country, from Schenectady, NY to Milwaukee, WI.  But that is all changed:

The companies that now drive the Bay Area’s soaring wealth — and that represent part of the American economy that’s booming — don’t need these communities in the same way.  Google’s digital products don’t have a physical supply chain.  Facebook doesn’t have dispersed manufacturers.  Apple, which does make tangible things, now primarily makes them overseas.

In the past, says one sociologist, smaller cities contributed to the rise of bigger cities, but a pattern has emerged in which the growth of major cities feeds the growth of other major cities, whether or not they’re in the same country.  A business school professor goes a step further and theorizes that global connections increase a city’s prosperity, and is directly accompanied by a loss of ties to smaller cities in their own nations.  The growth of a knowledge and service economy, which is seen to benefit large cities, is a key part of this trend.

The article also raises another point about the power relationship between the rising regions of the country and those areas left behind:

To put it more harshly, when global cities need other communities today, Ms. Sassen said, it’s often to extract value out of them. New York bankers need Middle America’s mortgages to construct securities. San Francisco start-ups need idle cars everywhere to amass billion-dollar valuations. Online retail giants need cheap land for their warehouses. . . [the] dynamic also leaves smaller places at the mercy of global cities, where decisions are made about which plants to close or where to create new jobs.  And so Tulsa, Buffalo and Tucson turn to Seattle as supplicants for a windfall of Amazon jobs.

What was once a symbiotic relationship among American locales has, from a certain point of view, turned exploitative — or even parasitic, as happened when the financial industry’s thirst for mortgage-backed securities to sell led to the issuance of shitty mortgages and into the massive real estate bubble like we saw leading up the 2008 meltdown.

Here’s a thought experiment: if you had a theoretical economy where one-tenth of the population was rich and the other nine-tenths were exploited and ripped off by the one-third, and lived in abject poverty, but this economy was the same size as a one where everyone had the same income, our dispassionate modern measures would say that these two economies were equally productive and valuable.  But common sense, not to mention basic humanity, say that this is not at all the case.  And though we’re not there yet, this is the direction the United States is trending.

Though it doesn’t focus on them, the article itself raises some of the political implications of this change, suggesting that many Americans' perception that the benefits of globalization are passing them by is firmly rooted in contemporary dynamics such as the article describes.  But this observation is only the tip of the iceberg.  If the globalized economy by its very workings distributes benefits wildly unequally, what’s the role of government in attempting to balance out these benefits more equitably?  Is there an economic solution to this question?  Is unfettered, borderless trade inherently undemocratic and bound only to make the rich richer?

These are all necessary questions, since the very trends this piece details are having profound and disturbing effects on our country’s democracy and political stability, for which we need look no further than the election of Donald J. Trump to the highest office in the land.  Republicans only provide bad-faith answers to the economic problems Americans are living: they would build a wall to keep out people who come to this country to take jobs no Americans want, but seem to have no ideas or even interest in addressing the real structural sources of inequality.  Meanwhile, as I’ve discussed before, the Democratic Party coalition contains many people who are benefitting from this new economic arrangement that disproportionately rewards large urban areas.  It is as if, at the highest level of the rules of the economy, we have changed the playing field, without any regard to how all the ordinary people of this country now tumble back and forth across its shifting landscape, some doing well, but others not being able to find their footing at all.

This is not just a moral question — although it is a deeply moral one indeed, which we have collectively avoided answering for too long.  It is also an urgent political one.  Because for every American who sees economic inequality and responds by calling for fair and democratic remedies, there’s another American who is ready to blame and rage at other Americans, along with immigrants, for causing this problem, and to abandon democracy for authoritarian solutions which will only ever result in the rich getting richer and too-big-to-fail businesses only getting bigger.

This is not to say that there are easy answers, let alone answers for which a national consensus exists.  But to not ask these questions, in this deranged age of Trump, is in itself a form of madness.  We can blame Trump all we want, but it’s the America we’ve built together that’s made him possible.

Alaska GOP Getting Baked by Upstart Progressives

One of The Hot Screen’s hot topics has been exploring seismic shifts in U.S. politics beyond the glaringly obvious one of Donald Trump’s election.  This has included keeping tabs both on the immediate backlash to the president and on longer-term progressive trends that run counter to the present right-wing lunge being executed by the GOP.  A while ago, we talked about a growing progressive tide in the state of Texas, which saw heartening liberal victories even amidst the national carnage of Trump’s election (it’s worth noting that Trump’s margin of victory was smaller in Texas than in the more historically bellweather state of Iowa).

Now there are signs that another long-time bastion of conservatism is beginning to trend toward progressives.  And so we cast our eyes to the far north, where a quiet revolution has been happening in icy Alaska.  As this fascinating Politico article details, the progressivism practiced by a new wave of politicians there differs in significant ways from what you see in bluer states, but they’ve been able to move the state forward on issues like voter registration, marijuana legalization, and an increased minimum wage.  The turnabout has been huge: in the last six years, they’ve captured the governorship, the Alaska House of Representatives, and control of city government in Anchorage, the state’s largest city (though the state's single U.S. congressman and two senators are Republican).

On some typically liberal issues, like weening our society off fossil fuels, the Alaska progressives aren't exactly in the forefront, given that the oil industry provides essentially all the funding for the state government and allows the government to provide each resident with a generous dividend (currently $1,100).  (It also seems possible that this generous long-time subsidy, based on taxation of the oil industry, may have helped lay the groundwork for Alaskans’ now being open to more progressive governance).  But one of these newcomers' key agendas has been to move Alaska away from budgetary over-reliance on this single industry, and so they’ve been fighting for a state income tax in order to keep vital public services from being hard hit by downturns in the price of oil.

What’s happening in Alaska is particularly exciting for me because it offers the possibility that matters are far from lost in the various rural, low-population states that are currently thought to be the irreversible domain of conservatives and the Republican Party.  One of the lessons the Politico piece reminds us of is that even a small number of committed, public-minded individuals can create change — particularly when their state has a smaller population and they’re able to make more of an impact.    

The article explicitly makes the case that their success has been at least in part by working around or cooperating with the traditional Democratic Party structure.  For instance, the progressive coalition was able to elect an independent as governor because the Democratic candidate agreed to step aside in order not to siphon off progressive votes.  The politicos interviewed also explicitly make clear their belief in recruiting the best possible candidates for political office, even when those people aren’t typical politicians; in this way, they brought in fresh faces who were embraced by voters.  But new recruits aren’t left to flounder like complete neophytes; the politicians and strategists spearheading this Alaskan movement have offered newcomers some of the elements of a professional campaign apparatus, including an advertising guru, graphic designer, and treasurer.  And in a state where only 15% of people are registered Democrats, they also made the decision to run many progressive candidates as independents. 

The organizing work and initiative taken by these upstarts is impressive, but they were also canny enough to recognize, where others did not, that Alaska was fertile ground for a progressive breakout.  Despite its reputation for conservatism and libertarianism, the ground had shifted without more traditional politicians having realized it — otherwise, you would have seen traditional Democratic pols creating this movement.  I mean, for god’s sake — Alaska!  The land of Sara Palin, the proto-Trump herself!  The fact that these folks are winning on common-sense, grassroots appeals to the public good provides yet more evidence that the Trumpian white backlash and GOP effort to reward the richest among us is hardly the only game in town these days. 

Racist Policies Are Evil in Themselves, But Are Also Serving a Larger Plutocratic Agenda

The backtracking and obfuscation by the White House, as well as its engagement of U.S. senators to dissemble on its behalf, show that the president’s “shithole” comments are doing serious damage to the president’s already shitty reputation.  I think this is because, at a visceral level, Americans are able to gauge more strongly than ever the depths of racism and white supremacy that fill Donald Trump’s otherwise empty soul.  Over at The Atlantic, Adam Serwer contextualizes and maps out this incident’s big-picture implications for the nature of the Trump presidency.  After quoting a century-ago Atlantic writer who argued against immigrants from Southern Europe in exactly the same terms right-wingers argue against immigrants from Latin American and Africa today, Serwer turns his attention to the racism inherent in the president’s words:

These remarks reflect scorn not only for those who wish to come here, but those who already have.  It is a president of the United States expressing his contempt for the tens of millions of descendants of Africans, most of whose forefathers had no choice in crossing the Atlantic, American citizens whom any president is bound to serve.  And it is a public admission of sorts that he is incapable of being a president for all Americans, the logic of his argument elevating not just white immigrants over brown ones, but white citizens over the people of color they share this country with.

The sheer stupidity of Trump’s disparagement of citizens with origins in the countries he insulted has not yet, I think, been fully registered and treated with adequate levels of rage and contempt across the U.S.  (This site is only a lukewarm fan of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, but the outrage he expressed in his harsh questioning of National Security Advisor Kristjen Nielsen about the incident is an example of what we should be hearing from all Democratic politicians).  Likewise, this latest declaration that the president does not consider himself the president of all Americans is one more warning sign that Trump has abdicated his basic constitutional responsibilities.  Serwer describes Trump’s obsession with race as a guiding principle that directs his policy-making — a fact that it would be deluded to ignore.  It is not just that the president is racist, but that this racism is being reflected in official policy.

At The New York Times, Charles Blow has written a column that I see as complementing Serwer's; putting together the points that the two writers make, you can see a framework emerge for understanding the full white supremacist bearings of this White House.  Blow sees Trump's racism as a point established beyond a shadow of a doubt, even before these latest remarks; and like Serwer, he points to the racism of his policies.  But Blow offers a variation that, while it may seem subtle, may actually be a way to open more people's eyes to the moral decrepitude of this administration.  For Blow, a racist president is de facto unacceptable, not simply because this is is morally reprehensible, but because his racism inevitably infects everything Trump has done and will do in office.  The central question for Blow is how the nation responds to this existential affront.  As he puts it, “We must stop believing that any of Trump’s actions are clear of the venom coursing through his convictions. Everything he does is an articulation of who he is and what he believes. Therefore, all policies he supports, positions he takes and appointments he makes are suspect.”

This might be a maximalist response to Trump’s racism, but it’s a correct one.  Much like Trump’s refusal to separate himself from his business interests, which makes every presidential decision questionable for how it might result in his own self-aggrandizement, Trump’s racism must be suspected in every decision he makes, from the economy, to handling disasters like Puerto Rico, to immigration.

But as the inescapable racism of some of the Trump's administration's highest priorities comes ever more clearly into focus, what is even more remarkable is the broader GOP's complicity in this broad effort to enshrine white supremacist notions in policy and law.   After all, the GOP has long embraced a subtler racism than this to appeal to the worst impulses of some white voters — but in defending Trump, it has kissed all that goodbye, and gone all in with Trump’s overt white nationalism.  Why would the GOP choose to permanently poison its brand after so many years of trying to walk a tightrope between outright racism and plausible deniability?

The answer to this question is deeply intertwined with the reasons why Donald Trump has so thoroughly been able to dominate the Republican Party so quickly, and I don't have anything like a full explanation to offer here.  But what I'm increasingly sure of is that Trump's willingness to not only play the race card, but to douse it in gasoline and throw it into our political system like a Molotov cocktail, is key to the way the GOP has subordinated itself to his cult of personality so very readily.  My rough guess today is that over the last three or four decades, the GOP has increasingly appealed to its loyal voters as the defender of what I'll call "the cult of whiteness" — a sort of primordial white supremacism, white supremacism with plausible deniability, white supremacism of the most banal sort in which whites are seen as "normal" or "preferable."  But as Adam Serwer explored in a previous essay (required reading, by the way), the idea of whites who may not even think of themselves as racist, but who simply see whites as people to be preferred over other races, is just a very basic definition of white supremacism, before you start bringing in all the violence and hatred that the concept inevitably involves.  Another way of putting it: the GOP has long been the home for a sanitized version of a racist mindset that can't actually ever be sanitized, at least not when it's shared as the single unifying principle by people as disparate as poor folk in Mississippi, small business owners in Southern California, and reclusive right-wing billionaires in their hidden mountain aeries.  So the GOP could be seen as party suffering a low-grade fever that inevitably became a full-blown white supremacist disease.

But the GOP's decision to double-down on racism now can also be seen as having its cause in the same reasons it's always entertained racism: to keep lower- and middle-class voters distracted by the supposed threat of people of color, as the party works to hoover more and more of the economic pie into the increasingly bloated bank accounts of the rich.  There is absolutely a connection between our state of extreme inequality and the new willingness of right-wing politicians to scapegoat people of color as the all-powerful creators of subpar wages and bleak life prospects — to the point where they would rather tear our country apart than have us look straight on at the unfairness of how the economy allots and rewards work today.

We need to keep our eyes on this bigger picture.  Remember — a White House source initially claimed Trump’s “shithouse” comment was a good thing, as it would rouse his base.  It also seems obvious that the White House thinks that a conversation about racism can harm Democrats.  I think there’s a grain of truth in this, in that an appearance that progressives and Democrats care about racism above all else will indeed guaranty that voters with racist sympathies (which are so often closely intertwined with broader cultural anxieties and economic anger) may never vote for them, and so cleave them still closer to the GOP.

But as hideous and outrage-inducing as it is, the evil of white supremacism being propagated from the executive and legislative branches is only part of a more comprehensive awfulness.  In the eyes of the right, racism's larger purpose is as a tool to make the vast majority of us poorer, and to aggrandize the power of the rich over the rest of the citizenry.  This increasingly explicit white supremacism is a key part of a larger con that needs to be exposed and rejected in its entirety — a con that has put our country on a path toward oligarchy and immiseration of the majority, no matter the color of your skin. 

Looking to James Baldwin to Help Take Our Bearings This MLK Day

As a way to inoculate or at least attempt to protect yourself against President Trump’s abominable choice to make MLK weekend all about his undeniable racism and denigration of people from predominantly black countries, might I suggest watching a 2016 documentary about James Baldwin titled I Am Not Your Negro.  Scripted around his final piece of writing, the film blends voiceover, archival footage, and contemporary video to capture the complexity and continued relevance of Baldwin’s observations on race in America.  For anyone (including me) who isn’t familiar with his writing or TV appearances, the film resurrects Baldwin as a prophet-like figure who worked to elucidate the stark and foundational realities of racism.  Whether reflecting on his relationships with civil rights activist Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., or eviscerating a professor on the Dick Cavett Show who wonders why Baldwin insists on talking about racial issues, Baldwin’s intellect and compassion are a glorious thing to behold.  He is like a man who has seen the truth of the world, and labors daily under its burden: in this, you might consider Baldwin to be an anti-Trump.  

Baldwin places the causes of racial strife squarely in the laps of white folk, and he hints at a moral vacuum at the center of white American and even Western culture as part of the answer.  In the film’s perhaps most striking sequence, he tells an audience frankly that “I'm not your nigger,”  but rather just another man; Baldwin then turns this into perhaps the most basic question underlying this country’s racial hatred: why does America need “niggers”?  I understand his question to mean, Why does America need to continue to create a demonized other on which it projects a thousand dark fears and fantasies, and what purposes might be served by institutionalizing racial hatred?  Today, not only African-Americans but Latinos and Muslims as well have been drawn into this web of racist targeting, signaling that the roots of this moral rot are not only alive, but insatiable as well.  Why is it still so hard for so many people to dare to answer Baldwin's question?

Racist-in-Chief Disparages Countries He Couldn't Even Find on a Map

Multiple sources, including Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, say that at a meeting between lawmakers and President Trump yesterday on immigration reform, the president asked why “he would want ‘all these people from shithole countries,’” in reference to immigration from African nations.  Trump also asked why the U.S. needed more Haitians, adding “Take them out.”  And as the sickly cherry on top, he also noted that the U.S. should admit more people from Norway, a country known not only for the whiteness of its snow, but of its populace as well.

As various people have noted, these comments are shocking without being surprising.  Donald Trump launched his candidacy with a speech that declared Mexicans “rapists,” and his campaign repeatedly appealed to a broad spectrum of racist notions.  In this one perverse way, at least, Donald Trump demonstrated truly egalitarian impulses, his racism encompassing all manner of black and brown people, or put more bluntly, all black and brown people.  His discrimination did not discriminate.  And since taking office, he has, among other reprehensible behavior, picked fights with African-Americans at an alarming rate; dismissed the severity of the crisis facing Puerto Ricans; and pardoned a man who tortured Latinos in detention centers that the pardonee liked to refer to as “concentration camps.”  

But we are right to be shocked.  Shocked at this president’s lack of self-control; shocked at the depth of hatred and stupidity which his expression of these thoughts telegraphs to the rest of us; shocked anew at the situation we are in, with a white supremacist in the White House, and a sense of helplessness, disbelief, and even fear over how we got here.  Let’s not forget that the White House’s initial response to reports of the remarks was not simply to deny them, but to let it be known that they thought such sentiments would play well with Trump’s base.  This response speaks both to the debased ways in which the president seeks to hold on to power, and to the degraded state of any of his supporters moved by such appeals to racism.  And the inability of Republican politicians to forcefully condemn the president's remarks reminds us that they're all in with completing the GOP's conversion into white supremacism's institutional defender.  Trump may have spoken the words, but the rot has overtaken the Republic Party as a whole.

There must be a point where the president’s lack of any moral authority means that politics as usual can no longer be conducted.  At a minimum, how can Democrats justify working with this president on immigration, when the policies he’s arguing for stem from a racist and un-American worldview?  How can they be party to even a watered-down version of this president’s immigration policy, tainted as it inevitably is by a fundamental belief in the superiority of white skin over dark? 

This president, and the advisors he’s surrounded himself with, view maintenance of the U.S. population as majority white to be of the highest priority.  They squawk about profound cultural differences between newcomers and established citizens, and about how immigrants steal American jobs, but their inability to calibrate the distance between these plausible-sounding claims and outright racism keeps giving the game away: it’s all about the racism.  After all, if the president’s interest is in protecting American jobs — as he’s said countless times — then why is his administration arguing that we need to have merit-based immigration, in which well-educated newcomers would be MORE likely to take jobs from existing citizens?  Merit has become shorthand for people with white skin and who preferably already speak English.

When the president makes openly racist comments, white Americans in particular have a greater responsibility than non-whites to respond forcefully.  Such comments are not only an attack on non-whites — in this case, people of African descent — but they’re also implicitly an appeal to other white people to uphold racism as something we all hold in common.  Trump feels it is OK to express such hateful ideas because he believes other people also say these things.  Certainly some white people do; but many more not only do not, but despise the racism that motivates it.  And it is on all of us to say that we’ve had enough, more than enough.  Every attempt to conscript us into this movement of right-wing hate and resentment needs to be called out for the abomination that it is.  I know that for my generation, and for the cohorts born after me, racism is by and large considered a disqualifying character trait, whether in a coworker, a friend, or a politician.  At times like this, it feels so clear that Trump is only still president through the forbearance of older generations who do not see racism as a non-negotiable evil. 

Is Amazing Ubiquity of Russia Connections Perversely Helping Trump?

Last month, I shared insights from a couple writers who’ve been closely tracking the Trump-Russia collusion story about why this tale has seemed so particularly difficult and complicated.  As we approach the end of this president’s first year in office, one of them has suggested another important framework for parsing what feels like both a deluge of information and the biggest mystery in the history of the republic.  Josh Marshall has identified what he considers the single biggest outstanding question: What’s the relation between Donald Trump’s long-standing financial ties to Russia and the Russian effort to work with the Trump campaign to subvert the 2016 election?  In doing so, he raises a subsidiary question that ranks high for me as another “collusion confusion” centerpiece: given Trump’s extensive ties to Russia and their obvious connection to why the Russian government sought to use his candidacy to affect the 2016 election, why did the Russian government make so many attempts to court him through people like George Papadopoulos, or through meetings like the notorious one at Trump Tower involving Don, Jr.?  This suggests to Marshall that the situation is not as straightforward as the Russian government having a long-standing understanding with Donald Trump, even as it’s impossible to think that his established involvement in Russian business wasn’t a major reason why Russia embarked on its effort.

Trump’s history with Russia and the Russian government’s “cold call” attempts to collude with the Trump campaign raise another basic point that is so obvious I almost hesitate to raise it: the surreally overdetermined nature of a Russian connection to Trump.  I submit that the sheer volume of Russia links in itself is a stumbling block for public comprehension of what has happened.  Think about it — even if collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government had not occurred, we would still have a president whose deep and obscure ties to that country would on their own raise serious questions about whether Russia has some form of financial leverage over him.  Together with the collusion, though, we’re faced with an unprecedented and overwhelming body of evidence that the president is unduly under the influence of Russia.  It is so extraordinary to think that a U.S. president might not place our national interests first and foremost that I think we’re collectively having difficulty accepting facts that are right in front of us.