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.

To Break Through Conservative Propaganda, Progressive Pushback Needs to Ground Itself in Long-Established American Traditions

News that the American Civil Liberties Union plans to spend millions to back ballot initiatives and various political issues in the 2018 election cycle is yet more concrete evidence that the progressive backlash provoked by Donald Trump’s election is very real.  The ACLU is in a position to spend $25 million for this purpose because, whereas it raised $5.5 million in the year before Trump’s election, it has raised as astounding $93 million in the year since.  Alongside this massive increase in fundraising has come a quadrupling of its membership, to 1.75 million.  This combination of increased members and financial resources is deeply heartening for those of us looking for evidence of a real changes in the political landscape, as is the ACLU’s ambition to become a left-wing analogue of the National Rifle Association in terms of its ability to affect policy.  The growth of the ACLU is also a reminder of the importance of building out an infrastructure and fighting the good fight even in less receptive times; now that the political environment is in rapid flux, the ACLU is not only positioned to act, but is a recognizable organization through which people are able to band together and flex their political muscle.

I’ve been a member of the ACLU for many years; in fact, as far as I can remember, it’s the first political organization I joined (in an early example of how political backlash can work, nothing could have made me more excited to sign up than the patrician George H.W. Bush's famous accusation that Michael Dukakis was a "card-carrying member" of the organization).  Its emphasis on civil rights and particularly free speech, even when these positions might receive scant support from either side of the spectrum, spoke to my youthful sense of righteousness and a foundational belief in free speech that has only grown stronger over time.  And so it’s not surprising that the ACLU’s current success feels especially gratifying to me.

But though what I’ve written so far might sound like a testimonial in support of joining the ACLU (and I will neither encourage nor discourage any of you from reading it this way), I want to sound a note of caution about the left’s increased ability to throw large amounts of money and advertising behind points of view that are not simply progressive, but also exist in a world in which the right wing has spent much time and energy attempting to define their meaning for the public.  It’s not enough to advocate for certain issues; we also need to proceed in ways that incorporate philosophical arguments for why these positions fit into a broader American morality and patriotism.  Not to do so would be to tacitly embrace a naive, overly optimistic, and potentially self-sabotaging read of the perilous and propagandistic state at which American politics has arrived.

Take protection of immigrants’ rights.  For millions of Americans, defense of immigrants and refugees is an expression of our shared humanity, a clear case of a politically weak or even powerless group requiring assistance on the most basic moral grounds.  But this is clearly not the way that many Americans view the matter.  Donald Trump and a great deal of the Republican Party have identified newcomers to this country as an existential threat, explicitly on the grounds that they take American jobs and act as vectors for terrorism, and somewhat less explicitly on the grounds that they threaten the culture and whiteness of our country.  Because this framework has such a powerful hold in the public discourse, any pushback from the left needs to be aware of it and answer its wrongful assumptions, lest progressives inadvertently provide more ammunition to positions they oppose.

For example, it makes sense to ground advocacy for documented immigrants to our country in America’s centuries-long status as a nation of immigrants, where newcomers are welcomed as the citizens of tomorrow, just like nearly all of our own ancestors once were.  It’s also crucial that we argue for the net economic benefits of immigrants, and demonstrate the basic economic fact that rather than taking away jobs, immigrants help to grow the economy by creating new jobs, paying taxes, and helping drive demand as consumers.  These arguments have the benefit of being neither liberal nor conservative positions, but reiterations of basic facts.

More fraught are (mostly conservative white) racialized fears about demographic and cultural change.  Frankly, such fears can’t be addressed directly.  A person who believes the United States should be majority white forever is in the throes of a racism that we still have no easy cures for, and the response to which should ever and always be unremitting opposition and contempt.  But such fears can be countered and undermined by reminding everyone of the very American story of immigrants contributing to American greatness.  Just because people express bigoted views worthy of contempt doesn’t mean the right answer is to ignore them; if there are ways to neutralize nativist appeals, then we need to explore those avenues.  And as I’ve repeatedly argued on this site, we have to acknowledge the very real economic malaise that many people face: that these Americans have chosen to blame the wrong targets for their predicament doesn’t mean they don’t deserve an economy that helps them as well.

I’ve also been thinking about the backlash against liberal initiatives in light of the effort underway in Florida to re-enfranchise to citizens who have permanently lost their voting rights due to felony convictions.  An incredible 1.6 million otherwise-eligible Floridians are currently unable to vote, including a staggering 20% of the state’s African-American population.  An ongoing petition would put an initiative on the ballot in 2018 to restore voting rights to those who have served their time and completed their parole requirements.  All efforts to strip people’s right to vote should be viewed with a deeply skeptical eye, and Florida’s status as one of only three states with a lifetime ban on the franchise puts it in scandalously poor company. 

Yet I can’t help thinking of the likely Republican counter-attack against this initiative.  They will contend that the Democratic Party is the party of criminality and minorities.  It would not be surprising if they also used the success of this initiative to attempt to discredit future outcomes in Florida elections — not because any law has been violated, but simply because casting doubt on our electoral process is increasingly part of what the GOP views as an acceptable path to power.  There is nothing any of us can do to stop Republican politicians from adopting anti-democratic stances — but we can at least anticipate and counter them.  In this case, I would hope that the Florida ballot initiative is supported by a broader discussion of the basic immorality of removing a person’s right to vote, the implicit racism of a policy that disproportionately affects minorities, and the undeniable fact that the Republican Party has all but abandoned its ability to win over a majority of Americans and so has grown reliant on undemocratic means to suppress the vote.

Tying specific issues back to their roots in American tradition, morality, and democracy; and framing them in a way that cuts through the right-wing framework rather than simply adding easy fodder to backwards conservative arguments: I can't say I know how we do this effectively, but my gut is telling me we need to figure out how.

Have Progressives Let Themselves Become Identified With the Shortcomings of the U.S. Economy?

Since the 2016 election, New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall has analyzed the constituency of both our major parties in deeply insightful ways, and has become one of my go-to’s for trying to understand the origins and scope of our American political crisis.  His writing on the GOP has been superb, but his thoughts on the Democratic Party in particular have delved into territory that progressives ignore at their peril.  I’m hoping to revisit some of his arguments in full soon, but for the time being I want to talk a little about a column from early December.  

Titled “Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears,” Edsall's piece engages with the thoughts of a pair of sociologists who argue that liberals and liberalism more broadly have played an important role in energizing the powerful right-wing movement of which Trump is the current apotheosis.  As with many of his columns, Edsall brings in points of view with which I don’t necessarily agree, but which are deeply thought-provoking.  

First, Karen Stenner argues that a liberal democracy such as that generally supported by the left can end up creating conditions that undermine it, by advocating values that threaten and provoke resistance from those with a far different mindset.  She also asserts that these same values essentially involve a sort of unilateral disarmament on the part of the left — for instance, by insisting on the absolute value of free speech, it allows into the public sphere hateful or racist speech inimical to liberal values of tolerance.  In a similar vein, but to my reckoning more grounded in the actuality of American politics and economics, Eric Schnurer tells Edsall that a combination of economic, demographic, and cultural changes make typical Trump voters feel that they are being left behind by the country, while at the same time these very changes are embraced as progress by their typical “blue state” counterparts.  Finally, Edsall checks in with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who throws into the mix the idea that liberals have unhelpfully backed down from making a stronger public case that liberal government works — that we’re better off with environmental laws that give us clean air, that the welfare states lifts people out of poverty, that globalization has had some benefits for Americans.  Synching up somewhat with Stenner’s framework, Pinker argues that there will always be a clash between “enlightenment values” and “innate tribalism,” but that modernity will ultimately prevail.

For me at least, the dialogue that Edsall facilitates here is heady, exciting stuff.  It hits various sweet spots — inquiring into the nature of Trump voters’ grievances, exploring unexamined assumptions of Democratic and progressive voters, and suggesting that the way forward requires mass empathy for those millions of our fellow Americans who have embraced, to varying degrees, an un-American authoritarian in the White House.  Backlash is an enormous part of Donald Trump’s rise to power — backlash against a black man in the White House, backlash against the cultural changes that are disorienting and weakening people’s sense of status in the world, and backlash against an economic system that seems not to serve most people any longer.

Yet all these backlashes are not created equal.  The racism-infused reaction to the demographic and political rise of minorities is a sorry judgment on the state of much of white America’s claims to basic decency, and the conflict it embodies is not one from which liberals can retreat a single iota and still consider themselves liberal.  Likewise, the backlash created by cultural developments such as gay marriage and the continuing empowerment of women in the workplace and society requires unyielding push-back.  But the final leg of this destabilizing triad — our deindustrializing, globalizing, inequality-revving economy — is in my judgment the lynchpin and accelerant of these other two great clashes.  This recent piece from Edsall, as with several over the past year, is so exciting to me because, in a nutshell, it suggests a dangerous complicity by otherwise liberal-minded people in an economic dynamic that is deeply damaging to people who, generally speaking, come from less urban areas, and who generally have a lower educational background.  This dynamic is summarized well by Schnurer:

I don’t think there’s much argument that the modern economy is killing off small towns, US-based manufacturing, the interior of the US generally, etc. There is, or could be, an argument as to whether that’s just the necessary functioning of larger economic forces, or whether there are political choices that have produced, or at least aided and abetted, those outcomes. In any event, while most of us in Blue World see these changes as beneficent, they have had devastating effects on the economies of “red” communities.

[. . .]

The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that. I think they’ve risen in angry revolt, and now intend to give back to the “elite” in the same terms that they’ve been given to. I don’t think this is good — in fact, I think it’s a very dangerous situation — but I think we need to understand it in order to responsibly address it.

I keep arguing that economic malaise has been key to creating conditions for cultural and racial resentment to boil over into a movement that presents an existential challenge to our democracy, but I want to be clear that the way people experience threats to their well being is not so neatly divided into the categories I’ve been discussing.  The disturbance that millions of people are living through is felt so powerfully in part because it feels like it threatens them across a broad spectrum of their lives.  If you’re a factory worker who’s lost a job, this undermines more than just your economic livelihood — for instance, it threatens more abstract but deeply important things like the culture you thought you were part of, and the way you view illegal immigrants who Fox News keeps telling you are the reason you lost your job.

While Edsall’s article raises the broad question of whether liberalism has in part created the forces that now threaten our political system, the question of whether liberalism has endorsed, tacitly or not, an economic regime that largely benefits them while doing great harm to great swathes of the population seems to me the most critical piece of our political puzzle.  This is not only because I think economic unease is the great accelerant to cultural and racial resentment, but because it’s the one enormous part of our lives that we can actually exert real collective control over.  So it becomes more than a little disturbing when you stop to consider whether too many progressives have either embraced, or failed to gauge the true harm of, a modern capitalism that has eviscerated entire regions of the country.

If you accept, at least for argument’s sake, that many Trump voters associate progressives and progressivism with a destructive free market capitalism, then the combination of cultural revanchism and economic protectionism that the president espouses begins to feel more understandable as a position that Trump supporters might see as a direct rejection of liberalism.  If liberals have indeed placed themselves, implicitly or explicitly, on the side of an economic system that in serious ways contradicts or undermines values they hold dear, then this could help to explain some of the muddled state we have gotten ourselves into.  The question of whether the economic benefits that have accrued to many Democrats over the past decades — particularly those at the higher end of the income scale — is slowing the party as a whole from acknowledging and addressing the real structural problems in our economy seems like a question worth pursuing.  Better to bring the party's contradictions into the light of day than to let them fester unexamined. 

Claims of Donald Trump's Mental Deterioration Excuse GOP-Endorsed Authoritarianism

In the day or two since excerpts from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House were published online, I’ve been seeing a much increased discussion of Donald Trump’s mental health (or lack thereof) in response to some of its reporting.  And just yesterday, CNN had a story out that a group of mostly Democratic congresspeople received a briefing from a Yale psychiatrist about the president’s psychological fitness.  But whether or not Trump is in psychological decline, the choice of his opponents to focus on his mental competence strikes me as a potentially dangerous cop-out for addressing the real dangers of the Trump era.  Such an emphasis threatens to reduce our political crisis to the mental shortcomings of a single man, when in fact we face a multi-faceted democratic emergency.

While Trump-specific behaviors such as the president’s erratic public statements about North Korea can persuasively be argued to originate in the president’s damaged psyche, the larger harm he’s causing, from attacks on the free press to a tax bill that threatens to send economic inequality into hyperdrive, are more properly described as far right-wing policies.  Trump is not primarily an enormous threat to American democracy and prosperity because he might be mentally ill, but because his words and actions propagate an authoritarian agenda.  My personal take is that his authoritarianism is less because Donald Trump has a well thought-out political belief system, and more because his tendencies toward self-aggrandizement and the need to protect himself from the truth of Russian collusion push him in such an anti-democratic direction.  Such inclinations are also clearly being shaped and encouraged by members of his staff.

But more than this, the president’s personal tendencies are finding common cause with an authoritarian mindset that has clearly been growing for some time both in the Republican base and in the Republican Party at large.  Exhibit A is the fact that Trump has managed through his first year to retain a solid core of support from a significant minority of the population, and that Republican representatives and senators have nearly unanimously closed ranks around his presidency.  

The dangers of overemphasizing Donald Trump's mental issues are greatest in the context of the Russia investigations, which at this stage have determined collusion between the president's 2016 campaign and the Russian government.  It is quite possible that as more facts about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia enter the public consciousness, and a narrative of this collusion begins to take hold, the GOP’s protection of the president will begin to waiver.  At that point, one path to saving their own skins would be to play the mental health card.  By asserting that the president is mentally ill as a way of removing him from office, perhaps through invocation of the 25th Amendment, such a course would give them an opportunity to sleaze out of their own complicity with his corrupt behavior and endorsement of retrograde policies.

Again, I feel like I can’t say this often or emphatically enough: Trump is not the biggest problem our political system faces — the Republican Party is.  I employ the term “political malpractice” a little too often even by my own reckoning, but at the risk of overuse, I’m going to deploy it one more time here: it would be political malpractice for the Democratic Party not to do everything it can to highlight to the public that the most egregious behavior and policies of Donald Trump are inseparable from the agenda of the contemporary GOP.  This is a party that has gerrymandered and voter-suppressed its way into not only a House majority, but into control of statehouses across the country.  Twisting the structure of democracy to perpetuate rule by a party with minority support across the nation is on a continuum with the more overt authoritarianism displayed by the president and indeed endorsed by the party at large.

For me, the nightmare scenario is for Republican politicians to be the ones to “save” the country from Donald Trump on the basis of his real or alleged mental incompetence, rather than for him to be felled on the grounds of political malfeasance and moral unfitness — grounds that would implicate and sully the GOP at large, and very deservedly so.  The distance between these two possible outcomes is vast: either Donald Trump is scapegoated as a unique outlier, or he's branded as the failed avatar of a GOP in which authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism vie for pride of place as the most pressing reason for ending this party’s role as a major player in American politics.

In Which The Hot Screen Tries to Sound Optimistic About 2018 and Beyond (While Avoiding Abject Pollyanna-ism)

Since the disastrous 2016 election, one of the fundamental debates on the Democratic-progressive side has been over whether the future path to victory will involve winning over Trump voters, or energizing its own base in sufficient numbers to win.  One of The Hot Screen’s guiding beliefs is that a progressive movement that appeals to far more than a narrow majority of the American population is within reach, as long as we’re bold enough to articulate and fight for a real vision of economic and social justice.  While we’ve been persuaded that white supremacism and racial resentment play a larger role in the Trumpist and far-right political movement than we believed (or wanted to believe), we remain convinced that a key aspect of draining the power and influence of these resentments is to ensure that the economy serves all Americans, not just the wealthiest; that economic insecurity is an accelerant to racial scapegoating, and economic security a suppressant.

That said, how we approach the debate over appealing to Trump voters versus energizing Democratic voters is crucial to building this new majority movement.  The results of the Virginia election earlier this month point towards the power of an energized, more traditional Democratic electorate; likewise, the sustained feminist backlash against Harvey Weinstein and other male predators suggests political repercussions for the Republican party come 2018 and 2020, though it’s clear that both parties may be roiled in ways we can’t predict.  In other words, recent events are providing evidence that, as one might expect, an energized Democratic base is showing great electoral strength. 

But The Hot Screen has been intrigued as well by several recent pieces of reporting that suggest ways in which progressives can, if not defuse the Trump base completely, then begin to peel away crucial votes from what is a large minority of the U.S. voting population.  First, Ezra Klein of Vox makes the case that, although our current political situation has drawn comparisons with eras as dramatic as the pre-Civil War era and early Nazi Germany, we might be better served looking to the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency.  As Klein describes, the Democrats generally looked at the 2004 election as a crossroads for the country, and George W.’s defeat of John Kerry led to familiar soul-searching about whether the Democrats had lost touch with the American people.  Yet by 2006, in the face of President Bush’s increasingly undeniable incompetence in matters of both war and peace (the never-ending Iraq War, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina), Democrats re-took Congress, and in 2008, of course, the presidency.  Klein doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of which electoral coalitions rose and fell to make this possible, but his basic points seem a solid orienting principle — the failures of the governing party do eventually translate into electoral losses, and shifts in the balance of power can happen faster than we think.

Klein’s fellow Voxer, Matthew Yglesias, has written what feels to me like a companion piece to Klein’s essay, in which he explores the mechanics of how Democrats might begin to peel away people who voted for Trump in the last election.  Focusing on to the victory of a ballot initiative that expands Medicaid in the state of Maine — a state that Hillary Clinton won only narrowly — he sees evidence that it’s possible to win over small but electorally significant chunks of the Trump coalition.  Yglesias points to the vulnerability inherent in Trump’s 2016 electoral appeal, which combined rancid white nationalism with vows to protect Americans’ entitlement programs like Social Security.  As has become glaringly obvious by now, Trump has doubled down on culture war, while going all in with the economic agenda of the 1%, through his support for Obamacare repeal, the GOP’s truly noxious leave-no-millionaire-behind tax plan, or his own budget’s call for severe cuts to Social Security.  As Yglesias puts it:

No matter what Democrats say or do, small towns that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 are almost certain to support him again in 2020 and to support GOP candidates in 2018.  But pulling 5 or 10 percent of them away would deal a devastating blow to the GOP’s overall electoral fortunes.

And while Ralph Northan’s Virginia victory powered mostly by white college graduates was impressive, to make significant midterm inroads, Democrats will need to win in places where the white population tilts more working class.  The Maine referendum seems to point the way to do it: remind people that Democrats like the same safety net programs they do, and that Trump has broken his promises to protect them.

To return for a moment to the debate we started with: it’s one thing to speculate that it’s possible to peel away Trump voters with populist appeals, it’s another thing to find evidence that this is possible and that Donald Trump’s betrayals of his voters will inflict electoral damage on both him and the GOP at large in future elections.

Former 2012 Obama presidential campaign manager Jim Messina offers another take on winning over Trump voters.  In a piece titled “Trump’s Tweets Are Hurting Him with the Voters He Needs Most,” Messina relates insights he’s gained from running focus groups involving Obama voters who either turned to Trump or at least did not vote for Hillary Clinton.  In April, a group of such voters from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania indicated that though they were aware of Donald Trump’s racism and misogyny, they believed the president was working on improving the economy — results that have actually been reflected in national polls that show Trump’s handling of the economy receiving approval on the order of 25% higher than his overall job rating.  At the same time, the focus group voiced concern about Trump’s constant Twitter battles, and how they worried he was not focused on helping the economy.

This much is suggestive of a way to woo this particular subset of Trump voters — but it gets even better.  Messina’s firm went on to try out four different criticisms of Trump’s handling of the economy.  The one that linked his tweeting with lack of success in bringing jobs back to the U.S. decreased the former Obama voters’ approval of Trump’s handling of the economy by 21 points.  Just as potently, linking Trump’s huge tax cuts for the rich and program cuts for the middle class dropped his approval on the economy by 24 points with this group.  Messina also notes another intriguing fact: when they approached those voters again six weeks later, those who’d received the message linking Trump’s tweeting to his lack of progress on the economy had a much worse view of Trump than the other respondents.

Messina concludes that Democrats should “relentlessly” link Trump’s universe of Twitter comments to his economic failures.  It is hard to find fault with this common-sense assessment; in fact, it gratifyingly accords with The Hot Screen’s rule (not always followed) to never attack Trump without including an economic criticism.  In a way, Messina’s focus on Trump’s tweets is a kind of ju-jitsu method of using Trump’s domination of the media against him.  That Trump tweets about non-economic matters is not proof that he’s not working on the economy — but the obvious energy he puts into the world of Twitter, coupled with people’s own lived experience of a lackluster economy, turn his tweets into a persuasive symbol and crucial piece of evidence that he’s not looking out for average Americans.  Highlighting his tweets as a phenomena in themselves, rather than engaging with their substance, is also a clean way to sidestep the distracting function the tweets seem pretty obviously meant to serve.

The grounds for optimism in the articles I’ve highlighted share a rational approach to politics: people are persuadable by facts; every reaction sparks a counter-reaction; all Americans share a common commitment to democracy.  But because our political crisis is ultimately about so much more than simply citizens’ rational appraisal of their circumstances, I want to end with an article by Michael Kruse that revisits Trump voters in Johnstown, PA with whom the author spoke during the 2016 campaign.  The point it drives home is that there is a certain segment of the population that seems no longer persuadable to vote for someone other than Trump; that certain voters have moved from making their support of Trump contingent on his betterment of their lives to offering him their approval no matter what happens.  As Kruse memorably puts it:

Johnstown voters do not intend to hold the president accountable for the nonnegotiable pledges he made to them.  It’s not that the people who made Trump president have generously moved the goalposts for him.  It’s that they have eliminated the goalposts altogether [. . .]  His supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments.  For them, it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting.

Convinced that Trump is working hard to protect the little guy, the supporters interviewed here appear mired in a toxic combination of hopelessness, resentment, racism, and economic insecurity grounded in the real-world conditions of their city and region.  Mills and mines that were the backbone of the economy have closed over the last few decades, with no new engine of prosperity to take their place.  The population of Johnstown has declined precipitously, and drug overdoses are at an epidemic level.  It is impossible not to feel pity and a kindred hopelessness reading about their lives, even as their open expressions of racism invite contempt.  It is a tragic situation that also begs this basic question: what sort of people are we, that we would allow such economic and social devastation in this country we hold in common?

Now, in ways that few believed possible, we are paying the price for our neglect and our consent to the economic dislocations of the last few decades.  Embittered losers of our inequality-generating system, such as the interviewees of Johnstown, give Trump and the GOP the unwavering support they need, not only to continue the evisceration of the American economy but to pull the country into an authoritarianism that has become the right-wing’s solution to containing the social instability of rampant inequality.  Either we figure out how to bring real hope to such people’s lives, or we make sure that we never again lose a presidential election to fellow citizens whose only source of satisfaction seems to be to bring the whole American house burning down, so that we are all left in the same scorched place.  This is the nightmare we need to face up to, and it is one that needs to be fought not only with the practical tools of electioneering, but with a poise of compassion for our fellow citizens and a willingness to open our eyes to an economic system that is clearly manufacturing the conditions for an American fascism, just as much as it’s pumping unfathomable wealth into the pockets of our social betters, our corporate overlords, and their associated 1% ilk.

Paul Ryan to Women of America: Lay Back and Think of George Washington

One of the most painfully annoying things a politician can do is to explain to the public, in matter-of-fact terms, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, some idea that he thinks is unimpeachably great, but which in fact is so larded with noxious assumptions and implications that you feel the need to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming.  GOP Representative Paul Ryan is a master of this particular rhetorical art, and managed to outdo himself last week while discussing the number of American workers in relation to impending retirees.  He asserted that this disparity is creating a problem for the economy — I assume for funding programs like social security and keeping up economic growth — and said that the obvious solution is for Americans to start having more babies.

It’s hardly in dispute that one major way our economy continues to grow is through population increase, lending Ryan’s statement a grain of truth that makes it hard to dismiss outright, and that adds to its overall fatuous quality.  But by zeroing in on the U.S. birth rate, Ryan tellingly ignores the fact that U.S. population growth has been supplemented by immigration for many years.  Yet he acts as if we have a population growth crisis, which would only be true if we were to become a nation that no longer allows in moderate numbers of documented immigrants.  The only reason this might be the case, of course, is because our government is currently headed by a nativist, anti-immigrant commander-in-chief who aims to make such restrictive policies the law of the land.

As this piece rightly points out, there’s a clear line between Ryan’s ideas and the thinking of right-wing GOP Representative Steve King, who said in a CNN interview earlier in 2017 that, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies. You’ve got to keep your birth rate up, and that you need to teach your children your values. In doing so, you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, and you can strengthen your way of life.”  Paul Ryan’s statement about the necessity of Americans getting busy making the l’il workers of tomorrow implicitly assumes this racist and nativist perspective, in which “real” native-born Americans are more valuable than those who happen to be born elsewhere.   

Ryan’s statement also runs up against his own dismal record on policies that actually help people raise children, and for those children to get an education that might allow them to fulfill their glorious destinies as Productive Workers.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that the soon-to-be-passed GOP tax bill would exclude millions of children from its Child Tax Credit increase, and Common Dreams notes that in 2009, Ryan voted against a bill that would allow federal employees to use up to four weeks of vacation time for parental leave — far less generous that the leave offered to families in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and many other countries.”

As has also been noted elsewhere, simply birthing out more future workers is hardly the only solution to budget issues created by relatively fewer people in the work force vis-a-vis the retired population.  As a glaringly obvious Exhibit A, it’s possible to amend the tax code to raise more money from the wealthy — an option that Ryan is philosophically and perhaps even cognitively unable to consider.  In the context of the “soak the rich — with firehose streams of free money!” GOP tax bill, the suggestion that we’re just plumb out of funds for government becomes laughable on its face, and the idea that the best solution to raise money is for average people to have more babies comes to seem bizarrely roundabout.

If nothing else, Ryan’s suggestion that it’s the patriotic duty of American women to pump out kids vividly illustrates the connections between an economics tilted to benefit the rich, a racist social vision, and a politics of misogyny.  If America is to remain as white as possible, but still retain a growing economy, then the importance of women’s reproductive function becomes increasingly prominent versus the million other things women are capable of.  And almost needless to say, the notion that our private choices to marry and reproduce should be informed by a sense of patriotic duty upends the relationship between citizen and state in a way more befitting an authoritarian regime than a democracy dedicated to personal freedom.  Ryan's is a bankrupt vision, morally and economically, and his ability to make it superficially sound like it's no big thing is yet one more reason to hope his Speakership gets drowned in a big blue wave in 2018.

Beating Back Authoritarian Challenge Will Take More Than Politics As Usual

Over at Slate, Jamelle Bouie elaborates on a point that I touched on briefly in Scenes From a Panicking White House, where I speculated that perceptions of Trump’s power may be overstated by his opposition.  Bouie suggests that a journalistic over-emphasis on Donald Trump’s hard core of supporters has created a blindness to the larger fact of his historical unpopularity.  He notes how absymal the president’s approval numbers are compared to previous presidents, and the concrete ways in which this is affecting his ability to get things done:

It matters that Trump is historically unpopular.  It robs him of potential allies in the Democratic Party.  Even “red state” Democrats like Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota or Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia must think hard about working with the president.  Likewise, it puts him on uneven ground with “blue state” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.  It weakens his overall agenda.  Public skepticism about Trump has transferred to his tax plans, putting Republicans in a hole as they move to transform the tax code.

Bouie contends that his declining poll numbers show that Trump’s scandals and mistakes have in fact hurt his political standing — that he’s not untouchable, as some pundits would have us believe.  And it’s not just that Trump is hindered, Bouie goes on to say; his weakness puts him on the verge of being a failed president.

As much as I agree with Bouie’s spot-on criticism of the media’s coverage of Donald Trump — there has surely been an underemphasis of the fact that only just over a third of the nation supports him, and this in turn has led to overstatements of his political clout — and as much as I like how this backs up my speculation that there is great possible harm in overestimating Donald Trump’s political power, Bouie’s conclusion that Trump is close to a failed presidency is a point I find myself both wholeheartedly agreeing and disagreeing with.  How can this be?!

My schizoid stance brings us back to one of the fundamental questions that has kept popping up since Donald Trump’s election: do the regular rules of electoral politics still apply, or are we in altogether new territory?  Let’s stay with Donald Trump’s exceedingly low approval ratings for the moment.  I take Bouie as making the case that the old rules apply, for example, insofar as he sees the president’s position in past discussions over the GOP tax plan to be weakened by his basic unpopularity.  I would agree that on something like the tax bill, this is the case.

But another fundamental question to ask is not whether Donald Trump is succeeding or failing under our normal measures of success in a democracy, but to what degree he is engaging in behavior that undermines our democracy — behavior that indicates he may be playing by a different set of rules entirely.  Because alongside traditional measures like approval polls and whether the president is actually able to get legislation he supports passed by Congress, there is a whole other dimension of the GOP’s near-lockstep march in running interference around Trump’s scandals, from the Russia investigation to his incompetence in handling the Puerto Rico disaster.  Our entire politics is haunted by an alternate storyline, unfolding on a daily basis, in which an authoritarian White House resorts to increasingly desperate and anti-democratic measures to assert its power.  We could even make the somewhat obvious observation that his incentive to take such measures increases as Donald Trump’s poll numbers decrease and as his scandals mount.  The greater his political weakness as measured in traditional terms, the greater the incentive to fight cultural wars, demonizing NFL players and immigrants; to call for the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton; to call on his supporters to simply, ominously “DO SOMETHING,” as he tweeted last month.  In this way, you can see how the authoritarian possibilities of the Trump White House exist in a parasitic relationship to more democratic measures of success.  

There is also the unpleasant fact that because of gerrymandering and more polarized party identification on the right, the GOP majority in Congress is dangerously insulated from broader public disapproval of Donald Trump.  With so many districts more or less impervious to a Democratic challenger, GOP congresspeople most fear attacks from their right flank, not from the left; and what better way to shore up that right flank than to support Donald Trump through thick and thin? 

Apart from Trump’s own authoritarian tendencies and the GOP’s built-in incentives to support Trump to the hilt, the other great challenge to our traditional understanding of politics right now is the degree to which Trump supporters are living in a different informational reality than the rest of Americans.  This piece by David Roberts at Vox is an excellent take on how the powerful right-wing media echo chamber has brought us to a point at which Americans are living in two different worlds of facts and explanations for what transpires in our shared world.  Roberts uses the real-world example of the Mueller investigation and Mueller’s possible finding of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to make his case.

The phenomenon of the influential right-wing media has been explored thoroughly and often over the last two decades as it evolved into the foul-headed hydra that poisons our discourse today, but Roberts makes the case that we’ve reached a turning point of deep “epistemic breach.”  This is a philosophy term concerning fundamental disagreement over “who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.”  Roberts’ assertion that the conservative movement is the primary cause of this breach as a general issue in our society is debatable, but it’s hard to argue that right-wingers and their media aren’t the primary cause of this in the political sphere.

“Epistemic breach” is some high-faluting terminology, but an alternate conservative universe of lies has been developing for a long time; with Donald Trump, a man who lies effortlessly and endlessly, this universe now feels like it’s enormous, self-sustaining, and in danger of suffocating us all, or at least breaking the country into irreconcilable systems of facts and understanding.  Roberts’ example involving Republicans rejecting Mueller’s possible future finding of collusion between Trump and Russia feels creepily accurate, as it’s only been borne out in the time since he wrote the article, with the right-wing embarking on a concerted effort to discredit Mueller even before the conclusion of his investigation.  

Roberts’ peroration is dismal:

The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.

If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices.

[If] the very preconditions of science and journalism as commonly understood have been eroded, then all that’s left is a raw contest of power.

Millions of us are aware of the evil of this fake news/alternative facts, right-wing discourse; if we’re going to return our country to a sounder course, we’re going to have to figure out a collective antidote to this corrosive assault on fact-based truth.