January 22, 2018--The March

Saturday's Women's March was again extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands of largely young people, mainly women, turned out in the United States and around the world in all kinds of weather.

Not intentionally, Rona and I got swept into the periphery of it in New York City. We were in the vicinity of Times Square for another purpose and found ourselves . . . marching.

It was a powerful, emotional experience. I know that there has been some backbiting among the organizers who planned and carried out last year's version, held the day after Donald Trump's inauguration-- the size of that march eclipsing the much smaller crowd that showed up for his swearing in, nasty speech, and his still ongoing smarting that his inaugural turnout was by far the largest in history--but no matter. 

It was remarkable, amazing. So much energy, a palpable feeling of empowerment, which of course is the real goal of these marches--women taking more control of their political lives and destiny. 

Speaker after speaker took note of the fact that thousands of women nationwide, at all levels, are signing up to run for office. This suggests that November may be shaping up to be an historical comeuppance for Trump and his cult of followers. 

Say goodbye, Republicans, to your current majority in the House and I suspect the Senate. That would bring about a new day. That would truly be what is most historic about the current situation--new voters and newly activated citizens taking back their country. In perfect irony, they, we will make America great again. 

But besid the possibility that we will be engaged in a major war in Korea come November which will cause many Americans to rally to a president that they otherwise despise, there is another danger--

With the march itself. 

Rather an unanticipated consequence from its very nature--that it is a women's march. 

Though men are welcome to participate, the vast majority of those who marched were women.

If this becomes the electoral face of those who oppose Trump, with Hollywood stars pushing their way into the spotlight, there is the danger of a backlash among moderate, politically independent men who may come to feel excluded by the movement that the march represents. 

These men are needed as part of the coalition that has the potential in November, for all intents and purposes, to end the Trump presidency. To turn him into an instant lame duck. Domestically at least--powerless. 

These are some of the same men, not Trump acolytes, who could not bring themselves to pull the lever and vote for Hillary Clinton. Next time around, we cannot let this happen. They have to feel welcomed, comfortable being lead by women and willing to vote for women for Congress as well as at the state and municipal levels.

We have to write off Trump's 35-40 percent. They are the ones who would support him even if he murdered someone on Fifth Avenue, as he said with insight during the campaign. But to win and thereby rescue ourselves we need the active support of the persuadables. Some of them the old Reagan Democrats. Or their descendants. There are still plenty of them who are swing voters who live in swing states.

So what to do?

For the next march attention should be paid to the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of these men who must become political allies. In the next march they should have some public role to play. The themes to emphasize need to include a portion that are gender neutral--like inequality and our plummeting position in the world. These themes should not be so much about so-called "women's issues." It would be wise to include more that cross genders and are universal.

I understand that these suggestions will not go down well among some or even many, especially coming from a not-quite-dead-yet white male. But if we want to win--and we desperately should--I put these thoughts forward in the spirit of wanting to help.

December 22, 2016--Liberals Need to Fess Up

If we progressives are to rescue our political souls we need to begin by doing some fessing up.

I'll begin and then maybe you will consider doing the same.

Since 1981, Ronald Reagan's first year as president, most liberals have been big beneficiaries of conservative fiscal policy. Especially tax policy.

Though publicly rueing the dramatic cuts he and Congress pushed through, privately and unconfessedly we have done very well.

The Reagan tax cuts followed years later by the Bush tax cuts (re-upped by Barack Obama) were of benefit primality to upper-middle-income people. Not just the top 1-percent but most who were just upper-middle-class. Millions and millions of Americans with advanced education comfortably slotted into the professional, knowledge-working sectors of the economy.

People like me.

These are approximate numbers that reveal how I have fared thanks to Reagan, Bush, and even Obama--

Since 2001 when the Bush cuts took effect, Rona and I have paid at least $5,000 less a year in taxes. Over the course of these 15 years this totals $75,000.

Not bad, not bad at all.

This savings funds a lot of our lifestyle since it is discretionary income.

And the good times for us in this regard, with Donald Trump about to become president, look as if they will continue to roll. Maybe even accelerate. The stock market is so happy that the Dow is about to top 20,000 and our portfolio of stocks in only six weeks, thanks to the Trump Rally, has gone up more than 6-percent.

No bad, not bad at all.

All the time this has been happening, I have moaned and ranted here and among equally-privledged friends about the unfairness of the economic system, focusing my outrage primarily on how, as the result of right-wing fiscal policy, inequality has grown worse.

While all the time I and we have been thriving, millions are being left behind.

This looks and feels like hypocrisy to me.

And among the hypocrites you will find me.

Then, what else has been going on?

Again, since Reagan's time, white working-class and lower-middle-class Democrats have been drifting rightward. When the media noticed this phenomenon, they called these voters "Reagan Democrats," and a few weeks ago these same Democrats became "Trump Democrats," and their votes are propelling him to the White House.

All the while, what have many of us liberals been up to? Trying to enjoy ourselves, leaving the social policy agenda to Republican conservatives who have delivered more to us than the people whom they claim they represent.

I don't know about you, but I haven't noticed myself sending an additional $5,000 "equity" check to the IRS every April 15th with my tax returns.

Instead, at that time, I'm typically planning my next vacation in Maine and trip to Italy.

If we don't begin by taking an honest look at our own lives we will have no chance of overtaking the political forces at work. We used to be the party of "the working man." Now we are the party of self-indulgence and condescension.

More about that tomorrow.

August 4, 2015--The Southernization of America

Anyone interested in understanding the conservative resurgence or revolution, if you will, should turn off Fox News and read Godfrey Hodgson's prescient, 1996 eyeopener, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America.

If you are interested in the intellectual roots, he does a good job of summarizing the contributions of serious economists such as Friedrich Hayek; pseudo-serious novelists such as Ayn Rand; polemicists like William F. Buckley, Kevin Phillips, and Irving Kristol; evangelical religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell; and political figures including Barry Goldwater and of course Ronald Reagan.

All of this is familiar ground for anyone paying attention to the cultural and political shift rightward, but nowhere all pulled together as well as by Hodgson.

For me, noteworthy is Hodgson's insight--or at least his clear statement--of how the ideology and politics that followed on in the South, transforming it from the Democrats' Solid South, after the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were signed into law, and quickly became solidly conservative and Republican. The South at that time became the South that we now know and live with, continuing today to shift inexorably to the right.

Nothing that new about that. But what is new is Hodgson's perception that much of the North shortly thereafter--certainly by 1980 when Ronald Reagan became president by picking off millions of so-called Reagan Democrats--became southernized.

This happened in two stages--first there was the dramatic population shift of northerners to the former Confederate States and thereby their accruing electoral power. Reallocation of members and redistricting meant more seats in the House of Representatives for conservatives at the expense of liberal states such as New York and Pennsylvania; and, as Texas and Florida passed New York to become the second and third largest states, there was a dramatic increase in the South's number of votes in the Electoral College. With the South also becoming solidly Republican that made it much more difficult for Democrats to control Congress much less the White House.

The second stage, the result of Reagan's appeal to traditional blue collar Democrats and his election and reelection, subsequently turned a number of blue states into purple states (Pennsylvania is a good example) and over time threatened to turn a few northern purple states to red states.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of that transformation, and perplexing to progressives because of its role in the history of the emergence of the Progressive Movement, is Wisconsin, where Scott Walker managed to get elected governor three times, largely by acting as if Wisconsin were South Carolina.

As in the South he appealed to hawkish hyper-patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, evangelical impulses, anti-affirmative action forces, a desire to limit government of all kinds, dog-whistle racism, and above all attacks on unions. Thus, Wisconsin has tipped to the right and now culturally and politically could become a permanent part of the emerging conservative majority.

March 11, 2014--White Men

Democrats finally are paying attention to the fact that in the 2012 election Barack Obama received just 35 percent of the white male vote, down from 41 percent four years earlier.

He won the election because he received more than half of women's votes (55 percent), 93 percent of the African-American vote,  71 percent of the Hispanic vote, 75 percent of the Asian vote, and 60 percent of voters between 18 and 29. That was his winning coalition.

But in the meantime, though Democrats kept the White House, largely because the overwhelming percentage of white male votes went to Republicans, the GOP maintained its majority in the House of Representatives and are threatening to wrest control of the Senate later this year.

This should not be new news. No Democrat running for president has received a majority of white men's votes since 1964 when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, carrying 44 states.

What's the problem?

These men voted for Democrats for decades--from at least Franklin Roosevelt's time to LBJ's. But then they began to drift toward the right. Most notably, Ronald Reagan was elected not just because Jimmy Carter and four years later Walter Mondale were weak candidates but because he figured out how to appeal to what came to be known as Reagan Democrats--disaffiliated white men.

Many of these white men felt abandoned by the Democrats because the party began to be perceived as too devoted to civil and women's rights. These men who felt they had worked hard to achieve middle-class status were appalled by their perception that New Deal and subsequent Great Society programs, including affirmative action, were unfair to working people. And, of course, there was a healthy dose of racism and misogyny in the mix.

On the other side of the political spectrum, liberals and progressives began to caricature these men with equal passion and overstatement. If liberals were not tree-hugging N___ -lovers, conservative white males were not all redneck, trailer-trash six-pack guzzlers. In fact, characterizing these Reagan Democrats as such only drove more of them further right as they felt mocked and ignored.

Fellow progressives, let's be honest--we do tend to show not-so-thinly-veiled contempt for these white men. We do not want to engage as equals the less-educated and the unwashed. In our hearts we know too many of us feel this way and those who we largely mischaracterize are not unaware of what we think about them. From this kind of contempt, one cannot expect to widen one's political coalition.

The Democrats' plan seems to be to let demographic changes solve their problem. Hispanics are among the fastest growing segment of the population and as soon as there are enough of them in, say, Texas, just carrying Texas, New York, and California will give Democrat presidential candidates a leg up on an Electoral College majority.

But--and this is a big but--just as we might expect to see a series of Democrats elected to the presidency, we will simultaneously see increasing Republican majorities in Congress.

Waiting for demographics to overwhelm white men, then, will not get the job done. So what to do?

First, acknowledge that the 35 percent of white men's votes Obama received in 2012 (as unpopular as he was and as African-Ameircan as he is) is not insignificant. Nor was the 41 percent in 2008. The challenge for Democrats, then, is how to at least retain that 35 percent and inch back to Obama's 2008 41 percent.

To begin to do this we have to stop making fun of, showing contempt for these frustrated and unhappy men. In addition, we should try to figure out why they feel so disaffiliated. Polls tell us that they think the Democrats are the Mommy Party, more concerned about giving everyone food stamps and welfare than standing up to the unions, communists, and terrorists.

We shouldn't go along with the call to keep the "military option" on the table when confronting Russia in Ukraine; but we should listen respectfully to that argument and not mock it.

When they chastise liberals for pandering to gays, we should calmly state why gays should be given the same rights as the rest of us, and not make fun of their alleged homophobia. We should back off from accusing them of "waging war on women" (war is not the most appropriate or fairest metaphor) and talk with them about their hopes for their daughters.

And in the policy realm, Democrats should look to embrace approaches that would address the concerns and needs of these men. There should be tax breaks as much for them as for the wealthiest. We should make it easier and less costly for their children and grandchildren to go to college. We should improve veterans benefits and emphasize health care that focuses on men's issues, not just reproductive issues.

Above all, we should emphasize approaches to helping low-income people become self-supporting. We should agree with these men that it is not a good thing for people to need government assistance. It should be the last resort. A guaranteed annual income, for example, which many conservatives support, would obviate the need for most of our current safety net programs and offer dignity to those unable to fully support themselves.

For the progressive in me, to come up with a list of viable policy suggestions is not easy. Better minds than mine should be able to come up with an agenda, which isn't pandering, that could increase Democrats' appeal to these alienated white men. Fairness requires this as does smart politics.