September 28, 2017--Donald Trump's Buffoonery

David Brooks is not among my favorite columnists. For me he is often more intellectually pretentious than either insightful or trenchant. But occasionally, he gets it right. On Tuesday, for example, in his New York Times column, "The Abbie Hoffman Of the Right." 

He wrote about how Trump was not elected to be a legislative president (noting correctly that he never showed much interest in policy) but rather to be a "cultural president." He was "elected to shred the dominant American culture and to give voice to those who felt voiceless in that culture."

Thus his comparison to intentionally buffoon-like Abbie Hoffman who did a version of the same thing during the 1960s when he took on the WASPy high-culture establishment of post World War II America.

We can take a pass on the comparison to the Yippie culture warrior (it's a tenuous comparison at best) but can learn a great deal about the Trump phenomenon by paying attention to what Brooks has to say about Trump. I like his argument in part because I have been attempting for nearly two years now to press a version of the same perception. But, admittedly, not quite as well and not nearly as skillfully written. 

So in case you didn't see it, here are some quotes from Brooks' excellent piece--

In 2016, members of the outraged working class elected their own Abbie Hoffman as president. Trump is not good at much, but he is wickedly good at sticking his thumb in the eye of the educated elites. He doesn't have to build a new culture, or even attract a majority. He just has to tear down the old one. 

That's exactly what he's doing. Donald Trump came into a segmenting culture and he is further tearing apart every fissure. He has a nose for every wound in the body politic and day after day he sticks a red hot poker in one wound or another and rips it open. . . . 

The members of the educated class saw this past weekend's NFL fracas as a fight over racism. They felt mobilized and unified in that fight and full of righteous energy. Members of the working class saw the fracas as a fight about American identity. . . . 

He continually goes after racial matters in part because he's a bigot but also in part because multiculturalism is the theology of the educated class and it's the leverage point he can most effectively use to isolate the educated class from everyone else. [My italics]

He is so destructive because his enemies help him. He ramps up the aggression. His enemies ramp it up more, to preserve their own dignity. But the ensuing cultural violence only serves Trump's long-term destructive purpose. . . . 

It's possible that after four years of this Trump will have effectively destroyed the prevailing culture. The reign of the meritocratic establishment will be just as over as the reign of the Protestant establishment now is.  

Of course Donald Trump is a buffoon. Buffoonery is his most effective weapon. Because of him a new culture will have to be built, new values promulgated and a new social fabric will have to be woven, one that brings the different planets back into relation with one another.

Hate this or not, hate Trump or not, this is what is happening and we ignore this reality at our peril.

May 17, 2017--The Evangelicals

Until reading Frances Fitzgerald's definitive book about the Evangelical tradition in the United States, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, I grossly underestimated the influence the religious right has had on our electoral process. Their influence puts to shame whatever the Russians did or didn't do to affect our most recent presidential election.

The book is over-detailed and far from a page turner, but anyone interested in the religious and political history of our country, very much including how they are entwined, needs to work one's way through it.

The "story" really picks up in about 1988 when Pat Robertson and his protege, 27-year-old Ralph Reed enter the picture. Up to then, socially active Christians had largely devoted themselves to cultural issues such as abortion (totally against it), homosexual issues (totally against expanding gay people's rights), prayer in school (totally for it), and pornography (totally opposed to it), but they didn't in any substantial way organize themselves politically, believing on some level that church and state should remain more-or-less separate.

With Reed in mind to lead the effort to win the culture wars through direct engagement in the political and legislative process, that agenda changed and to that end Robertson created the Christian Coalition and tasked it under Reed's leadership to select and support candidates who shared his values to run for office at all levels from school boards to the presidency.

Here are the key paragraphs from The Evangelicals that lay out this radical new plan--

The Christian Coalition worked with lay evangelicals of different traditions and made alliances with other Christian Right groups at the local level. Its core mission was "to mobilize and train Christians for effective political action." In Robertson's vision the Coalition would recruit five or more activists in each of the nation's 175,000 precincts (my italics); it would start with elections for school boards, county commissioners, and other local races, where a small percentage of registered voters could make the difference. It would work up from there to congressional races and the White House. Ralph Reed, who ran the operation and served as the public face of the Coalition, had what was often called "choir boy looks," but he was a political engineer. . . . 

Reed sometimes described his voter mobilization program as a covert military operation. "I want to be invisible," he told the Virginia Pilot in November 1991. "I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."

What is interesting and upsetting is how off the case the liberals and the media were. The Christian Coalition's strategic plans and victories were barely noticed or commented upon. And in the absence of that, progressive voters did little more than show up at the polls every two or four years. While politically active conservative Christians were mobilized in every election district in the country, liberals remained relatively dormant.

As Reed said, we wouldn't know what was going on until election night. Especially this past November 7th. We woke up and discovered that evangelicals had elected Donald Trump and both houses were to be solidly in Republican hands.

We had grown self-satisfied and lazy.

Fair warning.

Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson

January 4, 2017--It's Culture, Stupid

Some friends have poked me for not continuing to write about why Hillary Clinton lost the election and what that might say more generally about the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party.

It is not that I have lost interest in the subject, just that I needed a break from that depressing subject.

All the while, during that break, friends continued to attack the Trump presidency even before it commences. There is a lot to be depressed about, friends say, and I half agree.

To prove their point about how dire and scary things are, they tell me how Steve Bannon is hovering and as Trump sinks further into Alzheimer's (some very smart people I know have come to that diagnosis to explain his contradictory behavior) Bannon is itching to "run the show." Sort of like Edith Wilson, after her husband Woodrow had a debilitating stroke, in charge of things during the final years of his presidency. But of course times were simpler then and much less dangerous. North Korea, for example, did not have a nuclear arsenal and a certifiably unstable Supreme Leader threatening to unleash it.

So here goes--one more attempt to explain what happened in the last election and why Clinton and other Democrats were overwhelmed. Yes, I know she won the popular vote by a wide margin, but still Trump will be the one inaugurated in two weeks.

The excuse-makers continue to point to FBI director Comey's two letters about Hillary's emails and more ominously, the effects of the Russians hacking Democratic National Committee's emails.

Neither helped, but even if that hadn't happened Hillary still would have lost in the Electoral College.

Less conspiratorial-minded progressive analysts have come to conclude, as James Carville quotably did during the 1992 election that, "It's the economy, stupid."

Under ordinary circumstances, national elections are about the economy. Particularly how people view their own economic circumstances. This time around, to the struggling majority, things did not look so good.

But as I try to understand what happened, as powerful as economic issues were and continue to be, the reason Democrats have fared so poorly since 1980 when the Reagan era commenced is that more than the economy It's about culture, stupid.

Yes there were eight years of Clinton's presidency and another eight with Barack Obama in the White House, but that masked the political churning going on at the same time below the surface at the state and congressional levels where election-by-election Republicans won more-and-more governorships, congressional seats, and pulled off an astonishing gain of 900 local legislative seats. The latter, all during Obama's time in office.

By culture I am not thinking now about the Culture Wars that have been simmering and at times raging since at least Reagan times. Combatants fought about flag burning, prayer in school, creationism in the curriculum, same-sex marriage, abortion, bias in the media, climate change, science itself.

At the moment, many of these battles have been muted and a few even resolved. Same-sex marriage is now constitutionally protected with an astonishing 70 percent of Americans believing people should be able to marry who they love. And those who want their children to pray in school either have enrolled them in religious institutions or are homeschooling them.

This is not so say that what has divided us in this war has either gone away or been abandoned. I am suggesting that the worst of it may be over and yet a cultural divide continues to exist, even widen. I see this to be a cultural alienation that derives from socioeconomic and geographic causes.

To use Carville's rubric again, "It's the elites, stupid."

In this view, the heart of the cultural problem it's how the professional class, made up mainly of affluent progressives and Democrats, has distanced itself from any empathetic contact with struggling, less educated, less successful working people, except when they encounter them as patients, viewers, readers, clients, constituents, customers, recruits, students, or miscreants. And how it is primarily through these encounters that the liberal elites communicate their disdain for the needs and what they see to be in the supposed best interests of those beneath them on the meritocratic scale.

It is at these times when we professionals say or imply that, "We know better than you what's good for you."

This ranges from claiming to know what your children should learn (Common Core), how you are to receive health care (Obamacare), how you should gather the news (CNN and New York Times), what sports teams to root for (Yankees and Steelers), how much you should weigh, even what you should eat (anything that includes kale).

In all of this, too many professionals evince a form of moral superiority that "average" people feel as criticism and even condemnation.

This election cycle they finally said, ENOUGH. You're not going to tell us who to vote for. In fact, to assert that we will not be politically intimidated, we're going to vote for and elect, from your smug point of view, the most preposterous orange-faced candidate ever. And in this, rather than being offended by his vulgarity and sexism, they flung it back at us as if to assert their own imperviousness, basking reciprocally in his politically incorrect "inappropriateness."

It was a year of in-your-face and f-you.

As evidence of how culture of this kind is playing itself out politically, look at the map of where Duck Dynasty is viewers' favorite TV show.

                                      

It is also a map of Donald Trump's America.

And, as with Duck Dynasty itself, watching it, embracing it and its values is one more way ignored Americas are expressing their anger, culture, and power.

F-us indeed.

April 2, 2015--Religious Freedom Restoration Act

All of a sudden in Indiana they're not talking so much about the Final Four who will square off there this weekend to determine which team will win the NCAA basketball title. This in spite of the fact that institutional prestige is at stake (though why this sort of renown should be for "institutions of higher learning" is beyond me) as are big bucks--win, lose, or draw, all four teams stand to earn up to $10 million dollars each for having clawed their way to Indianapolis. (The unpaid players, by the way, come away with at most a free pair of sneakers.)

What is really at stake Down Home In Indiana is a fight for the soul of the state--whether or not they want to remain a part of the 21st century or begin to impose a theocracy just slightly more tolerant than the Religious Police in Iran would allow.

Of course I am exaggerating. The law recently passed by the state legislature, signed by potential GOP clown car Governor Mike Pence, and almost immediately condemned by various rights organizations and just as quickly endorsed by Ted Cruz, Mark Rubio, and Scott Walker (no surprises there) as well as by Jeb Bush (I guess, sadly, no surprise) would reaffirm that Indiana supports freedom of religion while at the same time wants that freedom to permit Hoosiers by the law to be able to cite religious belief as sufficient reason not to serve, among others, gay people.

Just as one pizzeria did yesterday when it announced that if you're gay there will be no pepperoni pizza for you. Because, as they proudly proclaimed, "We're a Christian establishment."

So in spite of the hemming and hawing that this law in Indiana as well as dozens of others around the country is just a simple assertion of religious liberty, it is more a measure to allow and justify overt forms of discrimination.

Do not most all states' constitutions affirm freedom of religion? Not that they or we really need that--after all, we have a Constitution that in its very First Amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting the establishment of religion or impeding the exercise of religion.

What is interesting is that the establishment of religion was an intense issue during the early years of our Republic because a number of colonies did have state-sanctioned and supported religions--official religions, if you will (as in England), and the Framers wanted to end that practice. Freedom of religious practice, which we focus on today, was in a sense a secondary matter.

Though increasingly politicians pandering to the religious right are not reluctant to assert that, "We are a Christian nation," as if we have an established religion. To me as a Jew/non-beliver this sounds like the beginning of a theocracy or, at the very least, unconstitutional.

Just as we thought the racial and cultural wars were abating (Barack Obama's election and reelection are still the best evidence for that as has been the momentum in support for same-sex marriages), here they are raging again.

In virtually all the states that have been enacting religious freedom restoration acts there has been other legislation to suppress the voting rights of low-income citizens. An unabashed strategy to make it more difficult for people of color to vote. I should say, vote for Democrats.

And just as states such as Indiana have been required by the federal courts to permit same-sex marriages, we have this spate of legislation that allows businesses to refuse service to gays and others Christian pizzerias will refuse to serve. Not that anyone who knows anything about pizza would order one in Indiana.