Tag Archives: politics

How Do Things Change?

February 10, 2025 – 10:30 am

a tentative start to a historical investigation

Last week I argued that mere election tactics — a more attractive candidate, some new slogans, a better framing of the issues — will not be enough to overcome the MAGA movement in the long run. (We defeated them soundly in the elections of 2018 and 2020, but MAGA showed amazing resilience.) MAGA itself is not just an unfortunate convergence of political forces, it is a cultural movement of some depth. Defeating it will require a counter-movement.

The 2024 campaign showed that the counter-movement can’t just be a reversion to some prior status quo. My assessment of how the Harris campaign failed is that Trump managed to tag Harris as the candidate of the status quo and present himself as the candidate who will shake things up. [1]

Harris’ problem was that (as a whole) the status quo is not working for many Americans. I listed a number of ways that things are not working, but fundamentally they boil down to this: It gets harder and harder to plan for a successful life with any confidence that your plan will succeed. Far too many Americans feel that the system is stacked against them, and that simply trying harder is not the answer.

Rather than present any coherent program, Trump has responded to the public’s justified anxiety with scapegoating and nostalgia: Immigrants, foreigners, minorities, and people who rebel against their assigned gender roles are the problem, and we should look to the greatness of America’s past — now, apparently, the high tariffs of the 1890s — for our salvation. To the extent that he has a plan — like ignoring climate change and reverting to the fossil-fuel economy of the 20th century — it is likely to be counterproductive.

But “don’t do that” has turned out to be an unpersuasive message for the Democrats. It worked when Trump was in office, actively doing unpopular things. But as soon as he was defeated, nostalgia renewed its charms. To a large extent, Trump’s 2024 message was that electing him would make it 2019 again, and all the disruption of the Covid pandemic (including the parts he brought on himself) would be behind us.

But realizing that we need a deeper movement is not the same as having one, or even knowing what it would be or how it might come together.

With that question in mind, I’ve been looking at history. Despite recently being idealized as the new “again” in Make America Great Again, the late 1800s were a low point in American history, dominated by the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Industry after industry was reorganizing as a monopolistic trust with the power to maximally exploit both workers and consumers. It was a hard time both for urban factory workers and rural small farmers.

Somehow, things got better: Antitrust laws got passed. Governments began to regulate working conditions, product safety, and child labor. Standard Oil was broken up. Unions began to win a few battles. And the gap between rich and poor narrowed. The New Deal was unthinkable in 1880, but by the 1930s it was popular. This was a profound change in what David Graeber referred to as “political common sense“. How did it happen?

A friend recommended a place to start: The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn. The book was published in 1978, so to the extent that it says something about the present day, either about MAGA or how a democratic movement might oppose it, that message arises naturally from the history, and not from some pro- or anti-Trump bias of the author. [2]

What was Populism? These days, MAGA and similar neo-fascist movements in other countries are often described as “populist”, but the version in the late 1800s was quite different. There is a surface similarity — in each case, large numbers of working class people found themselves resisting their era’s educated consensus — but from there things diverge fairly quickly.

In the 19th century, farming was still the largest American occupation, employing over half the labor force as late as 1880. But the system was stacked against small farmers in two ways: First, farmers with no capital beyond their land found themselves at the mercy of “furnishing merchants”, who would lend money for them to plant a crop (and survive through the growing season) in exchange for a contract on the harvest. Once he had contracted with a furnishing merchant, the farmer was stuck with that merchant, and would typically end up both paying high prices for his supplies and receiving a low price for his crop. [3]

But second, that long-term situation was made much worse by post-Civil-War monetary policy. The Civil War had been financed in part by printing paper currency, known as “greenbacks“. That had caused inflation during the war, and the prevailing economic wisdom of the time was that the dollar needed to be made “sound” again. In other words, the greenbacks had to be withdrawn from circulation, so that all US money could be redeemable for gold again. (Greenbacks became fully convertible to gold in 1878.)

In modern terms, the government’s policy was to shrink the money supply. If expanding the money supply had caused inflation, shrinking it could be counted on to achieve deflation; i.e., prices would come back down.

if you think like a consumer, deflation sound great. (Just last fall, that’s what Trump was promising his voters: “Prices will come down. You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast.”) But now imagine being a farmer who is counting on selling his wheat or cotton at the end of the season: You bought and borrowed when prices were high, and now you have to sell when prices are lower. The result was that large numbers of farmers were failing to clear their debts. Every year, many would lose their land and wind up as sharecroppers or worse.

The conventional wisdom of the time was that, sure, times were hard. But the “sound dollar” had to be restored, so farmers would just have to become more efficient. If some had to go broke in the process, well, that’s capitalism for you. Creative destruction and all that.

At some point, though, farmers began to realize that this wasn’t a story of individual failure, but of a badly structured system. And some postulated a solution: Farmers could cooperate rather than compete. They could form “farmer alliances” to pool their resources, negotiate for common supplies, and market their crops collectively.

Through the 1870s and 1880s, farmer alliances played a game of escalating pressure with the merchants and banks. Initial co-op successes would lead to new merchant strategies to freeze the co-ops out of the market, resulting in some larger co-op plan. The ultimate trump card was played by the system’s last line of defense, the bankers: Banks would take mortgages on individual farms (the old model), but they would loan nothing to a co-op backed by the land of its members.

Watching the more prosperous classes act in concert to thwart their plans radicalized the farmers and made them turn to politics. They created the People’s Party, whose presidential candidate carried four western states in the 1892 election. The party was organized around a platform, some of which was achieved decades later, but much of which might still be considered radical today. It wanted a revision of the banking system that would orient it toward the interests of “the producing classes” rather than “the money trust”. It wanted a flexible money supply (which we have today) rather than a gold standard. And it wanted government ownership of the railroads and other essential utilities that could be manipulated against working people by monopolies and trusts.

Ultimately, the People’s Party supported the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896, and then faded into insignificance.

So Populism was a failure in the sense that it never achieved power. But David Graeber once said that “one of the chief aims of revolutionary activity is to transform political common sense”. By that standard, Populism was more successful. [4]

Partisanship. The People’s Party ran into partisan loyalties that were left over from the Civil War and generally had more to do with identity than with life experience. If you were a White Southern Protestant or a Northern urban Catholic, then you were a Democrat. But if you were a Northern Protestant or a Southern Negro, you were Republican. Those loyalties were hard to break, and each party charged that the Populists were really agents of the other party. “Patriotism” meant faithfulness to the team your people played on during the War.

How movements happen. Goodwyn has a lot to say about this, and argues against the view that protest movements arise naturally during “hard times”. History, he says, does not support this.

“The masses” do not rebel in instinctive response to hard times and exploitation because they have been culturally organized by their societies not to rebel. They have, instead, been instructed in deference.

He points to parallel ways this worked in his own day on both sides of the Iron Curtain. (This is 1978, remember.)

The retreat of the Russian populace represents a simple acknowledgment of ruthless state power. Deference is an essential ingredient of personal survival. In America, on the other hand, mass resignation represents a public manifestation of a private loss, a decline in what people think they have a political right to aspire to — in essence, a decline of individual political self-respect on the part of millions of people.

He then asks the billion-dollar question:

How does mass protest happen at all then?

Which he then proceeds to answer: There are four stages:

  • forming: the creation of an autonomous institution where new interpretations can materialize that run counter to those of prevailing authority
  • recruiting: the creation of a tactical means to attract masses of people
  • educating: the achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis
  • politicizing: the creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas, shared now by the rank and file of the mass movement, can be expressed in an autonomous political way.

And he notes that “Imposing cultural roadblocks stand in the way of a democratic movement at every stage of this sequential project.”

For the populist movement, the first stage was the creation of farmers’ alliances. After years of experimenting, the farmers alliances came up with a mass recruitment model: large-scale cooperatives that farmers could join in hopes of getting cheaper supplies, better crop prices, and various other benefits. Then the co-ops themselves became educating institutions that taught farmers how the monetary system tilted the playing field against them, and how an alternative system might work. And finally the People’s Party itself provided an electoral outlet.

How well the People’s Party did in various states corresponded to how well the previous stages had taken hold.

In the 20th century, labor unions played a similar role to the co-ops: Masses of workers would join a union in hope of getting better pay and improved working conditions. And the union would then educate them in the issues relevant to their situation. [5]

MAGA. It’s worth considering how Goodwyn’s model applies to MAGA. You wouldn’t expect it to fit perfectly, because fundamentally MAGA isn’t a democratic movement. There has always been big money behind it, and the grassroots aspects, while genuine in some sense, also include quite a bit of astroturf. [6]

However, there are a number of parallels. The initial hurdle MAGA faced was getting its working-class foot-soldiers to believe in themselves rather than be intimidated by experts like economists, climate scientists, and medical researchers. The internet has undoubtedly made this easier, but the validation of “doing your own research” was also key.

And what was the recruiting institution that could attract masses of people and educate them in the new way of looking at the world? Evangelical churches. People came to them for the variety of reasons that always attract people to churches, and usually not for political indoctrination. But once there, they could be taught that elite scientists (like those promoting anti-Genesis ideas of evolution) were agents of the Devil. Their sense of grievance could be raised and sharpened, and the whole idea of a fact-based or reason-based worldview could be undermined. You might join because you enjoyed singing in the choir, but after a few years you were ready to believe that DEI was an anti-White conspiracy, or that economic malaise was God’s punishment for tolerating gay marriage and trans rights. You were ready to march for Trump.

Counter-movement. The lack of an obvious recruiting-and-educating institution is an obvious hole in the formation of an anti-MAGA counter-movement. Conservatives seem well aware of possible avenues — like the universities, a revitalized union movement, or even charitable activities like refugee resettlement or soup kitchens — and are committed to shutting them down.

Conversely, this is why a number of left-leaning voices (Perry Bacon, for one) are encouraging their listeners to connect with institutions where they can meet with like-minded folks.

I find the historical pattern evocative, even if I can’t immediately see how to implement it: The recruiting-and-educating institutions offer a very simple practical advantage: higher wages, say, or better crop prices. But by engaging in the institution’s core activity, people begin to see the oppressive forces arrayed against them, and begin to radicalize.

[1] And indeed, he is shaking things up. In my opinion, however, the parts of the status quo he is attacking are the best parts: the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the independence of federal institutions like the Department of Justice and the military, just to name a few.

Trump’s attacks on what he calls “the Deep State” are telling. If you know any federal employees, you probably understand that there is a Deep State, but it’s not the monster Trump paints it as.

The Deep State consists of federal workers who are more committed to the mission of their agencies than they are to the current administration. So career EPA officials will resist a president who wants to harm the environment, career prosecutors will drag their feet about harassing the current administration’s political enemies, career public health officials will do their best to support best practices against pressure from above, and so on. To the extent that the agencies are well set up and well motivated, their employees’ loyalty to the agency mission is a good thing, not a bad thing.

[2] Populism is literally just a place to start. I’m going to be delving into other aspects of the 1870-1941 period in future posts.

[3] Something similar happened to miners and factory workers who were paid in vouchers that could only be redeemed at company-approved merchants, who used that monopoly power to drive workers ever deeper into debt. As 16 tons puts it “I owe my soul to the company store.”

[4] Another movement that benefits from Graeber’s political-common-sense standard is the French Revolution. It is frequently judged a failure (especially by comparison to the American Revolution) because it didn’t achieve a lasting Republic, but instead devolved into the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon. However, the French Revolution changed political history. Before the revolution, absolute monarchy was still seen as a valid and plausible form of government. Afterwards, it wasn’t. The Czars of Russia might hang on for another century or so, but the writing was on the wall.

[5] It is unfortunate that farmers alliances and labor unions didn’t peak at the same time. Combined, they might have achieved significant political power.

[6] MAGA precursors, like the John Birch Society and the Tea Party, always had wealthy donors. You can see the pattern in present-day groups like Moms for Liberty. While there are indeed concerned moms in Moms For Liberty, the group’s expansion has been greased by professional consulting and seed money from wealthy establishment groups like the Heritage Foundation.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (9)

The ball is in Trump’s court

December 16, 2024 – 9:32 am

Democrats can’t resist Trump until he starts doing things.

In a Perry Bacon article I linked to two weeks ago, he cautioned against “turning into an amateur political strategist”. It’s a tough temptation to resist, and I’ve been in several conversations recently that veered into who the Democrats’ 2028 nominee should be, what groups of voters we should be trying to win over, how our message needs to change, and so on.

If you find your mind heading in that direction, all I can say is “Slow down.” The election of 2028 or even 2026 will be fought on a battlefield that doesn’t exist yet.

I think the place for political thinking to start is with one obvious fact: The Trumpists won in 2024. They got the White House and both houses of Congress. They control the Supreme Court to an extent that no partisan faction has in my lifetime. And I draw one major conclusion from those facts: The ball is in their court. We can’t know precisely what they’ll do with it until they start doing things. The things they do and the consequences of those actions will shape the landscape of 2026 and 2028.

Trump has raised many hopes and expectations among the people who voted for him. Specifically:

  • The economy is going to be fabulous. Not only will inflation stop, but prices will go back down to what they were the last time Trump was president. The trade deficit will vanish: Americans will get good jobs making the products we no longer import, but other Americans won’t lose their jobs making products for export. Increased oil and gas production will make energy much cheaper, lowering the price of everything. But we won’t have to worry about increased disasters from climate change.
  • Trump will wield unchecked power without abusing it. Neither Congress nor the courts nor the states will be able to stand in his way. But he won’t be petty and go after political opponents who broke no laws. He won’t make Americans afraid to criticize him. He won’t govern for his own profit. He won’t alter the rules to make future Democratic victories impossible. And he won’t ignore the Constitution to seek a third term.
  • The government is going to get drastically smaller. Spending will go way down without cutting Social Security or Medicare or defense. Regulations will be slashed without unleashing bad behavior from predatory corporations. Taxes will go down, but the budget deficit will vanish. Corruption will disappear. Private companies and the free market will serve Americans’ interests better and more efficiently than big government programs like ObamaCare or Medicare for All.
  • American strength will make the world safer. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East will end on terms favorable to US interests. Terrorism will stop. Tariffs will be an unanswerable weapon that makes other countries do what we want.
  • The immigration problem will be solved. The Army will round up 10-20 million undocumented nonwhite people living here, without terrorizing the rest of us. They will be held in camps until they can be deported to other countries, who will accept them for fear of American tariffs. That roundup and detention power will be wielded without abuse, and only the bad, criminal immigrants will be affected. The good Latinos will stay and the bad ones will get kicked out. American industries (like agriculture) won’t be affected by the sudden departure of their work force.
  • Normal (i.e., White, Christian, straight) Americans will matter again. Small towns and rural areas will make a comeback. Working people will get a fair shake and won’t be exploited by giant unregulated corporations, so unions and consumer-protection agencies won’t be needed.

And more. Now, I think the picture I just painted is a fairy tale, because many of those goals are contradictory and most of the rest are unlikely. But just for a moment, let’s imagine Trump fulfills all of it. The people who voted for him look at the results and say, “That’s what I voted for.” The people who didn’t vote for him have to admit (if we are honest) that our fears were groundless. How do the Democrats surge in 2026 and 2028 to regain power?

It’s simple: They don’t. And more than that, they shouldn’t. If the MAGA movement can do all that, it will deserve to stay in power. Gavin Newsom (or whoever you’re picturing) won’t be able to run against it. No “message” you can come up with will win over Hispanics or suburban women or demoralized nonvoters or whichever other group you attribute our 2024 loss to.

What that means in practice is that, while we continue to espouse our own values, and oppose nominees and proposals that look wrong to us, it’s way too soon to start shaping any sort of campaign. A large chunk of the 2026 and 2028 campaigns will necessarily be reactive. Trump will disappoint many of the people who voted for him, either by not doing what he said he would do (“build the wall” from his first administration) or by doing it and having it turn out differently than he said it would. Future Democratic campaigns will center on exploiting that disappointment.

But we can’t design those campaigns until we see who he disappoints and how.

So what does that mean Democrats should be doing now? Laying the groundwork for the Trump-disappointed-you campaign, whatever it turns out to be. We need to constantly call attention to the ways Trump tries to move the goalposts. (Bringing prices down, we now learn from him, is very hard.) We need to highlight those people who are being harmed by his policies, once those policies start to take shape.

The upcoming leadership battle in the House will be the first substantive thing to look at. For the first time in decades, all committee chairs will be White men.

The budget will be a target-rich environment, because Republican math just doesn’t work. Either their cuts won’t total up the way they anticipated, or they will cut things they said they wouldn’t. Probably both. And if there’s a deficit, they own it.

I know that vision is not nearly as inspiring as a ten-point-plan to elect AOC. But this is the reality we have arrived in: The voters have given MAGA a chance to prove itself. We won’t know how to run against them until we see how they fail that test.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (16)

My Way-Too-Soon Election Response

November 11, 2024 – 9:17 am

Tuesday was traumatic. How do we recover, as individuals and as a country?

There’s a lot for all of us to process here. About the outside world, the emotions roiling around inside, what we need to be preparing for, and so on. This post is a very quick and incomplete response.

One important thing I’ll say up front: This is a secure-your-own-mask-first situation. We’ve all been knocked off balance, and we need to get our balance back before we go charging out into the world. So do what you need to do and don’t feel guilty about it: gather friends around you, sit in a dark room alone, make art, play solitaire, binge on some silly TV show, whatever. Things are happening deep down, and we need to let those processes do their work. Whatever you decide to do next will benefit if you take care of yourself now.

Me. The hardest thing for me right now is re-envisioning my country. It’s been many years since I have seen America as a “city upon a hill” or the “last best hope of Earth“. But still, I’ve gone on believing that the great majority of Americans aspire to be better and do better. A lot of my commitment to writing has come from my belief that if I work to understand things and explain them clearly, then other people will understand those things too, and most of them will do the right thing, or at least do better than they otherwise would have.

This election demonstrates how naive that belief is. Some Americans were fooled by Trump’s lies about the economy or crime or history or whatever, but many weren’t. They saw exactly what Trump is, and they chose him. Many of the people who believed him weren’t fooled into doing it. They chose to believe, because his lies justified something they wanted to do.

Oddly, though, I am continuing to write, as you can see.

I am reminded of a Zen story: A man meditated in a cave for twenty years, believing that if he could achieve enlightenment, he would rise to a higher state of being and attain mystical powers. One day a great teacher passed through a nearby village, so the man left his cave to seek the sage’s advice. “I wish you had asked me sooner,” the great teacher said sadly, “because there is no higher state of being. There are no mystical powers.”

Crestfallen, the man sat down in the dust and remained there for some while after the sage had continued on his way. As the sun went down, he got up and went back to his cave. Not knowing what else to do with himself, he began his evening meditations. And then he became enlightened.

So far, no enlightenment. But I’ll let you know.

Something similar happens in Elie Wiesel’s recounting of a trial of God he witnessed as a boy in a Nazi concentration camp. (I haven’t recently read either his account or the play it inspired, so I might not have the story exactly right.) After a lengthy and spirited argument, this makeshift Jewish court finds God guilty of violating his covenant and forsaking the Jewish people. And then they move on to their evening prayers.

Election night. Despite everything I’ve said in this blog about avoiding speculation and being prepared for whatever happens, by Election Day I had become fairly optimistic. That all went south very quickly.

I had made myself a list of early indicators, beginning with how Trump Media stock performed that day. (It was way up, a bad sign.) Next came how easily Trump carried Florida. (It was called almost immediately, another bad sign.) Things just got worse from there. I briefly held out some hope for the Blue Wall states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) until early reports showed Harris underperforming Biden’s 2020 results (when Biden just barely won those states). So I was in bed by 11 and never got up in the night to see if some amazing comeback had started.

I had expected to be deeply depressed if Harris lost, but in fact I haven’t been. I’m disappointed, but I’ve been oddly serene.

No doubt part of my serenity is ignoble. Due to a variety of privileges — I’m White, male, heterosexual, cis, English-speaking, native-born, Christian enough to fake it, and financially secure — I am not in MAGA’s direct line of fire. So whatever trouble I get into will probably come from risks I choose to take rather than brownshirts pounding on my door. Many people are not in my situation, and I am not going to tell them they should be serene.

But there’s also another factor — I hope a larger factor — in how I feel, and I had to search my quote file until I found something that expressed it. In Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton wrote:

Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

It’s not a perfect metaphor, because we could in fact vote or contribute or volunteer to influence the election. But the scale of the election dwarfed individual action. The closer it got, the more it seemed like a storm. In spite of my propensity to latch onto hopeful signs, in the days and months leading up to the election, I was filled with a very painful dread.

That dread is gone. The hammer has fallen. My faith in the American people was misplaced, so I can now get on with reconstructing that important piece of my worldview.

What happened. As always, we should start with the undeniable facts before making a case for this or that interpretation.

Trump won. He carried the Electoral College 312-226, and also won the popular vote by around 3 1/2 million votes, which is not quite the margin that Obama had over Romney (5 million), and well below the margin Biden had over Trump (7 million) or Obama had over McCain (9 1/2 million).

So it was not a historic landslide, but it was a clear win. Trump had appeared to be ready to try to steal the election if he didn’t win it, but that turned out not to be necessary. Coincidentally, all online talk of “voter fraud” evaporated as it became clear Trump was winning legitimately. The whole point of the GOP’s “election integrity” issue was to provide an excuse not to certify a Harris victory. But with Trump winning, fraud was no longer a concern.

Republicans also won the Senate. Ted Cruz and Rick Scott retained their seats, and no seats flipped from Republicans to Democrats. Democrats lost Joe Manchin’s West Virginia seat, something everyone expected as soon as Manchin announced he wouldn’t run. In addition, Democratic incumbents Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Jon Tester in Montana were defeated. The new Senate looks to have a 53-47 Republican majority. (Casey is still holding out hope that uncounted provisional ballots will overcome McCormick’s lead. But few think that’s likely.)

The final result in the House is taking longer to emerge, but Republicans look likely to retain their majority there as well.

How did it happen? At the simplest level, it happened because too many people voted for Trump and not enough for Harris. Because the US has secret ballots, there’s no way to know for sure who those people were. But we do have exit polls.

It’s important to phrase things correctly here, because it’s way too easy to scapegoat groups of people unfairly. For example, you’ll hear that Trump won because of the Latino vote (which is true in a sense that we’ll get in a minute). But if you look at the news-consortium exit poll, Harris won the Hispanic/Latino vote 52%-46%, while Trump won the White Evangelical/Born-Again vote 82%-17%. So if you’re looking for someone to blame, look at Evangelicals, not Latinos.

However, most analysts are using the 2020 election as a baseline: Harris lost because she didn’t do as well as Biden did in 2020. And that brings a second exit poll into the conversation. Biden won the Hispanic/Latino vote 65%-32% in 2020, and lost the White Evangelical/Born-Again vote 24%-76%. So if you’re looking for Democratic slippage from 2020 to 2024, you’ll find it in both groups, but the Hispanic/Latino vote stands out; the Democratic margin among Latinos dropped from 33% to 6%.

The Latino vote also stands out because it’s puzzling, at least to non-Latinos like me. Trump ran largely on hostility to non-White immigrants and a promise to deport millions of people, many of whom are Latino. Again, it’s important to nuance this correctly: Latino voters are citizens — non-citizen voting was one of Trump’s lies — and Trump’s prospective deportees are not. Many Latino voters are solidly middle class, speak English with an accent that is more regional than foreign-born, and are well along the immigrant path traveled in the 20th century by Italians and Greeks. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that as Latinos assimilate into America, they begin to vote more and more like other Americans. After all, Polish Americans may still value their Polish heritage, but they typically don’t base their votes on an agenda of Polish issues.

Still, I have a hard time believing that MAGA racism will respect legal, social, or economic boundaries. Puerto Ricans have been citizens since 1917, and they are still fair game for racist insults. Native Americans are sometimes told to “Go back where you came from”, which is probably Siberia many thousands of years ago. When the racial profiling starts, your skin color and family name may matter more than your legal status. Also, I would suspect that Latino citizens are much more likely than Anglos to know somebody at risk of deportation. I don’t understand why that wasn’t a bigger consideration.

The other example of surprising slippage is women. Biden won the female vote 57%-42%, and Harris won it 53%-45%. This, in spite of not just Harris’ gender, but Trump’s responsibility for the Dobbs decision, a jury affirming that he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and a series of creepy anti-woman statements.

There was also slippage — not much, but some — among Blacks. Biden won the Black vote 87%-12%, while Harris won it 85%-13%. Harris actually improved slightly on Biden’s performance among Black women (91% to 90%), but did worse among Black men (77% to 79%). (I assume that round-off errors account for the math anomaly in those numbers.)

Meanwhile, the White vote barely changed: Harris and Biden each got 41%.

Finally, there’s turnout. Total voter turnout was 65% in 2024 compared to 67% in 2020. However, by American historical standards 65% is high, not low. You have to go back to 1908 (66%) to find another election with turnout this high. The 2020 adjustments to the Covid pandemic made it easier to vote then than at any other time in US history. So it’s unfair to fault the Harris campaign for not matching that turnout.

Why did it happen? I want to urge caution here. After any political disaster, you’ll hear a bunch of voices saying basically the same thing: “This proves I was right all along” or “This wouldn’t have happened if only people had listened to me.”

So Bernie Sanders thinks this election proved Democrats need a more progressive agenda to win back the working class. Joe Manchin says Democrats ignored “the power of the middle”, which implies the party should move right, not left. Others blame the liberal cultural agenda — trans rights, Latinx-like language, defund the police — for turning off working-class voters. Or maybe Harris’ outreach to Nikki Haley conservatives wasn’t convincing enough, and the problem was all the progressive positions she espoused in her 2020 campaign. Josh Barro suggests the problem is that blue states and cities are not being governed well.

The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch for change from all this (or even burn-it-all-down), it didn’t fall flat.

Basically, whatever you believe, you can find somebody telling you that you are right, and Harris would have won if she had done what you wanted.

I want to encourage you to resist that message — and I’m going to try to resist it myself — because none of us will learn anything if we just insist we’ve been right from Day 1. We should all bear in mind that the US is a very big, very diverse country, and (whoever you are) most voters are not like you. It’s easy for me to imagine positions or messages or candidates that would have made me more enthusiastic about voting Democratic. But we need to be looking for an approach that inspires a broader coalition than showed up for Harris last week. That coalition is going to have to include people you don’t understand, the way I don’t understand the Latinos who voted for mass deportation, the women who voted to give away their own rights, or the young people who voted to make climate change worse.

This is exactly the wrong time for I-was-right-all-along thinking. Back in 1973, Eric Hoffer wrote:

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

So much of what passes for “obvious” or “common sense” right now only sounds that way because it is well grounded in a worldview that no longer applies. This is a truth that is easy to see in other people, but hard to see in ourselves.

We’re going to be in a weird position for the foreseeable future: Trump is going to try to run over a lot of legal, cultural, and political boundaries, and we need to be prepared to resist. It would be great to be able to resist from a place of rock-solid certainty. But if we’re going to turn this around in the long term, we also need to be humble and flexible in our thinking. Fairly often, we’re going to have to think thoughts like: “I don’t really don’t understand a lot of what’s happening, but I’m pretty sure I need to put my body here.”

Explanations we can eliminate. You don’t have to have the right explanation to recognize wrong ones.

Harris ran a bad campaign. Josh Marshall puts his finger on the statistic that debunks this.

In the seven swing states, the swing to Trump from 2020 to 2024 was 3.1 percentage points. In the other 43 states and Washington, DC the swing was 6.7 points.

Both candidates focused their ads, their messaging, and their personal appearances on the swing states. If the Trump campaign had been running rings around the Harris campaign, this arrow would have pointed in the other direction. In short: If you were a 2020 Biden voter, the more you saw of Harris and Trump, the more likely you were to vote for Harris.

I live in a typically liberal Boston suburb. Massachusetts is about as far from a swing state as you can get, so no national figures ever showed up here. Occasionally we’d see some ads aimed at New Hampshire, but we didn’t get nearly the blitz that Pennsylvanians got. And guess what? Harris slipped behind Biden’s performance here too.

Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro as her VP. This would be a good argument if Harris had won the national popular vote, but failed in the Electoral College because she lost Pennsylvania. But she also lost Wisconsin, where Walz probably helped her.

Also, Harris won the Jewish vote by a wide margin: 78%-22%. So Shapiro’s Judaism probably wouldn’t have helped the ticket.

Harris should have moved further left. We can never say what would have happened if a candidate had delivered a completely different message from the beginning. But I think it’s pretty clear that simply shifting left down the stretch, i.e., emphasizing the more liberal parts of Harris’ message and record, wouldn’t have helped.

The best evidence here comes from comparing Harris to Democratic Senate candidates. Candidates who are perceived as more liberal, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, generally did slightly worse than Harris in their states, while candidates perceived as more conservative (Tim Kaine and Bob Casey, say) did somewhat better.

I’m ignoring a bunch of the Senate races because I don’t see much to be gleaned from them. Jon Tester ran to Harris’ right in Montana and did 7% better, but Harris was never going to be conservative enough to win Montana — and as it turned out, Tester wasn’t either. Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks ran almost 8% behind Harris (and won anyway), but that’s more a reflection on her opponent, former governor Larry Hogan, one of the few non-MAGA Republican candidates. (It suggests that a moderate Republican could have won a landslide on the scale of Nixon in 1972 or LBJ in 1964.)

If you saw much election advertising, you know that Republicans worked hard to paint Harris as part of the “radical left”. I don’t think they’d have done that if they thought moving left would help her.

Things I think I know. I don’t have a sweeping theory, but I’ll offer a few tentative pieces of a theory.

We lost the information war. The aspect of this campaign I found most personally frustrating was how much of the pro-Trump argument centered on things that simply aren’t true. Our cities are not hellholes. There is no migrant crime wave. Crime in general is not rising. Most of the countries that compete with us would love to have our economy. Inflation is just about beaten. America was far from “great” when Trump left office in 2021. Trump has no magic plan for peace in Ukraine and Gaza. The justice system has favored Trump, not persecuted him.

Jess Piper writes:

I hate to say this, but it’s true: Ignorance won. And it will keep winning until we realize that we can’t win by playing politics as usual. This isn’t the same world. Knocking 100 doors is a personal connection that might win a small race — I don’t know that it can change the larger races. Trump’s folks weren’t knocking doors. They were lying to the masses through an extreme right-wing reality that most of us can’t conceive.

And Michael Tomasky elaborates:

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter. And that is why Donald Trump won.

It’s hard to know how important the pervasive misperception of facts really was. Did people believe Trump’s nonsense because it was actually convincing? Or did they want to support Trump for some other reason and latched onto whatever pro-Trump “facts” they could find? (Birtherism was like that. People who didn’t want to admit that a Black president scared or angered them instead claimed to be convinced that Obama was born in Kenya, despite clear evidence to the contrary.)

Past presidential campaigns have included some misinformation, but they revolved much more around philosophical disagreements not easily reduced to facts, like the significance of the national debt, or how to balance the public and private sectors.

One of the big questions going forward is whether Democrats want to continue being the reality-based party. I hope we do, just for the sake of my conscience. But if so, how do we make that work in the current information environment?

Harris had a steep hill to climb. Around the world, countries went through a period of inflation as their economies reopened after the pandemic. And around the world, the governments in power got thrown out. Here’s how Matt Yglesias put it just before the election:

The presumption is that Kamala Harris is — or at least might be — blowing it, either by being too liberal or too centrist, too welcoming of the Liz Cheneys of the world or not welcoming enough or that there is something fundamentally off-kilter about the American electorate or American society.

Consider, though, that on Oct. 27, Japan’s long-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party suffered one of its worst electoral results. In late September, Austria’s center-right People’s Party saw an 11-percentage-point decline in vote share and lost 20 of its 71 seats in Parliament. Over the summer, after being in power for 14 years, Britain’s Conservative Party collapsed in a landslide defeat, and France’s ruling centrist alliance lost over a third of its parliamentary seats.

… It is not a left-right thing. Examples show that each country has unique circumstances. Center-left governments from Sweden to Finland to New Zealand have lost, but so have center-right governments in Australia and Belgium. This year the center-left governing coalition in Portugal got tossed out. Last year the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the incumbent center-right governing party in the Netherlands, finished third in an election dominated by far-right parties.

Not long after Yglesias wrote that, Germany’s governing coalition collapsed.

I’m reluctant to give this explanation too much credit, because it says this election was a one-off and there’s nothing really to learn, other than to avoid being in power at the end of a pandemic. So in that sense it’s too easy. But it’s also a real thing that is an important part of the picture.

Harris’ outreach to Republican women came up empty. I’m not going to say it was a bad idea, but it didn’t work. I haven’t seen an exit poll that specifically breaks out Republican women, but the overall slippage among women in general makes it unlikely that many Liz Cheney Republicans crossed over.

After Trump’s 2016 win, big-city journalists trying to figure out Trump voters made countless trips to small-town diners. This time, I’d like to see them hang out in upscale suburban coffee shops and talk to women in business suits. Why did so many of them stay loyal to their party’s anti-woman candidate?

Democrats need a utopian vision. If Democrats had complete control and could remake America however we wanted, what would that look like? I honestly don’t know.

It’s not like Democrats don’t stand for anything. I can list a bunch of things an unconstrained Democratic administration would do, like make sure everyone gets the health care they need, raise taxes on billionaires, ban assault weapons, cut fossil fuel emissions, and make states out of D. C. and Puerto Rico. Maybe it would also reform the food system and break up the tech monopolies, though the details on those two are fuzzy.

But a list of policies doesn’t add up to a vision.

Whatever you think of it, libertarianism provided pre-MAGA conservatives with a utopian vision for decades. Republicans didn’t usually run on an explicitly libertarian platform, but libertarian rhetoric and libertarian philosophy was always in the background. (Reagan in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”) Trump mostly turned away from that, and slogans like “America First” and “Make America Great Again” may be vague, but they also evoke something sweeping.

I can’t think of anything comparable on the left. The communist vision collapsed with the Soviet Union, and I don’t know anybody who wants to revive it. But in the absence of a political vision, we’re left with a technocracy: Do what the experts think will work best.

This is a problem a new face won’t solve. Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or even AOC is not a vision.

What happens next? It’s Trump’s move. We don’t know yet who he’s going to appoint to high office or what the agenda of the new Congress will be. Establishing authoritarian government is work, and he may not have the energy for it. Maybe he’ll get so distracted by seeking his revenge against individuals that he won’t get around to systematically destroying democracy. We’ll see.

I’m reminded of a story Ursula le Guin told decades ago, repeating something from another woman’s novel: A female character discovers her baby eating a manuscript.

The damage was not, in fact, as great as it appeared at first sight to be, for babies, though persistent, are not thorough.

Trump has many babyish traits. We can hope that he won’t be thorough enough to do as much damage as we now fear.

This Adam Gurri article is full of good advice, but I especially appreciate this:

The biggest weakness of The Women’s March was its lack of strategic objective or timing. It simply demonstrated mass dissatisfaction with the Trump administration the day after it began. The best use of mass protest is in response to something specific. It does not even need to be an action, it can be as simple as some specific thing that Trump or a member of his administration says. But it has to have some substance, some specific area of concern. Perhaps it is about prosecuting his enemies. Perhaps it is about mass deportations. No one doubts there will be a steady supply of choices to latch onto. Those seeking to mobilize protests need to make sure they do pick something specific to latch onto, and be disciplined in making opposition to it the loudest rhetoric of the protest.

This time around, I don’t expect protesting against Trump himself to get very far. His followers expect it; they will just roll their eyes and talk about “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. But protesting something Trump does will at least draw attention to that thing. We have to wait for him to do something objectionable. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be a long wait.

In the meantime, prepare. Take care of yourself. Regain your balance.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments (37)

Questions for Donald Trump

September 30, 2024 – 9:13 am

The press often complains that Kamala Harris doesn’t answer enough questions.
Here are some unanswered questions for Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris faces frequent criticism from from news media sites like The New York Times and CNN for not doing more interviews or providing more details about the plans she would pursue if she becomes president. This week, she released a 82-page economic plan and gave a 24-minute interview to MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, but her critics were not satisfied.

The NYT’s Reid Epstein, for example, dismissed Ruhle (the host of MSNBC’s nightly The 11th Hour) as a “friendly interviewer” and compared the interview to Trump talking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity. [1] He wrote that Ruhle

avoided posing tricky questions about positions Ms. Harris supported during her 2020 presidential campaign or what, if anything, she knew about Mr. Biden’s physical condition or mental acuity as his own campaign deteriorated. [2]

and said that “A hard-hitting interview is yet to come.” [3]

Most of the specific questions Epstein accused Harris of “evading” are questions no politician ever answers, like why her opponent out-polls her on certain issues, or how she will pursue her plans if Democrats lose the Senate. (When was the last time you heard a candidate give a forthright answer to “What if your party loses?”) And as for the more general criticism, how are voters served by “tricky” questions that aim to “hit hard” rather than elicit information?

Yesterday the NYT pounded again on its Harris-needs-to-answer-questions theme by publishing Ashley Etienne’s essay. Etienne asserted that Harris needs to explain why she wants to be president (as if every previous campaign had communicated some unique and memorable reason). In general, people run for president because they think they can do a good job for the country. Why does Harris need a better reason?

I have written before about how the corporate media’s approach to this campaign fails to serve voters. CNN’s Jake Tapper often equates doing press interviews with “answer[ing] some of the questions that voters have about her policies”, but such questions are plainly not what interviewers ask. Dana Bash’s interview with Harris and Walz mostly confronted them with Trump-campaign talking points. In June, while he was still a candidate, Joe Biden sat with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for 22 minutes, most of which Stephanopoulos spent trying to get Biden to describe the circumstances under which he would withdraw from the race (another question no politician has ever answered). I sincerely doubt that an undecided voter would have wasted the President’s time like that.

It seems clear to me that the demand for “hard-hitting interviews” is not about getting voters the information they need. Instead, critics seek the theater of an interviewer fencing with Harris and trying to trap her with “tricky questions”.

With that distinction in mind, I pose a challenge for the talking heads complaining that Harris isn’t sitting down with them: Tell us what questions you think Harris still needs to answer. If the point is to get voters the information they need, why does it matter that you (or someone from your organization) be in the room when it happens?

The double standard. I have also often complained that the press wants to hold Harris (like Biden before her) to a standard that they don’t apply to Trump. For example, whenever Biden would say the wrong word or call someone by the wrong name, the press would largely ignore whatever he had been trying to say (even if it was perfectly clear) and instead write a story highlighting the mistake and using it to question the President’s mental capacity. But Trump often makes similar mistakes, and regularly goes off on incoherent rambles that are arguably insane. Subsequent press reports do not highlight these moments, and Trump’s mental acuity is rarely questioned. Instead, reporters do their best to read sense into Trump’s words and report what they divine he meant rather than what he said.

Trump also gets credit for being more accessible to the press than Harris, even if he does not actually answer their questions, or answers with a transparent lie. Often, Trump responds to a “hard-hitting” or “tricky” question — or even just a question he has no good answer for — by calling the questioner “nasty” or accusing him or her of representing “fake news“. This vitriol has trained many reporters not to ask Trump difficult questions.

How well do you think that tactic would work for Harris?

Taking my own advice. So what I’m going to do below is follow the advice I’ve just given: I’m going to list the questions that I believe Trump still needs to answer. In my opinion, these are all questions voters might wonder about, and nothing in them is the least bit “tricky”. I have not tried to frame them in a hostile manner. Whenever possible, I have quoted Trump directly rather than put my own interpretation on his words. I have provided references for any facts that I claim, and in several of them I ask him to point to sources he considers more trustworthy. I have tried to focus my questions on positions he holds now, without comparison to differing positions he may have taken many years ago.

I believe that Trump has not given adequate answers to any of these questions. (If you know that he has, please leave a comment with a link referencing his answer.) Further, I don’t care how Trump provides this information, as long as it results in actual answers. To satisfy me, he doesn’t have to sit down with an interviewer I like or trust. If he wants to work his answers into speeches without being interviewed at all, or even without acknowledging that anyone has asked, that would be fine too.

Unlike The New York Times, I am looking for information, not theater.

Questions about the economy. Trump’s economic proposals can be summed up as tariffs, tax cuts, and increased fossil fuel production. Since energy is an input into almost every other product, Trump is counting on increased oil production from his “drill baby drill” policy to drive down prices across the board. Meanwhile tariffs are supposed to simultaneously protect American industries from foreign competition while generating “trillions” in revenue that will bring down the deficit and pay for income tax cuts as well as some undetermined number of additional programs (like childcare, apparently). But he has provided very few specifics that can be tested and analyzed.

So here are my questions:

You have described tariffs as “a tax on another country“, even though the money is actually collected from the American importer, not the foreign exporter. What convinces you that the tax will ultimately be paid by foreign exporters (who would have to compensate by cutting their prices) rather than American consumers (who would have to pay higher prices)? Can you point to an economic analysis that supports your view?

If tariffs result in American companies facing less price competition from imports, won’t they just raise their prices? Does anything in your plan prevent this?

In some speeches you have suggested across-the-board tariffs of 10%, but in others it’s 20%, with rates up to 200% on specific products like electric cars. Can you be more specific about your tariff rates and how much revenue you expect to collect?

Many American industries depend on exports. What will you do if other countries retaliate with tariffs against American products?

Oil production in the US has been rising steadily since 2008, and is now higher than in any other nation. The price of oil is currently lower than at any time since 2021, and at $68 per barrel is below the estimated break-even price of new wells in the Permian Basin. How much more production do you think we can get, and how low do you think the price of oil can go?

Questions about the environment. During his four years in office, Trump rolled back regulations designed to protect the environment, pulled out of the Paris Accords , and repeatedly minimized the effects of climate change.

You have said the climate change will increase sea level “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years“. Where did you get this information? Why do you find that source’s estimate more reliable than the EPA’s estimate that sea level is rising about an eighth of an inch every year?

Do you believe that warmer ocean temperatures contribute to destructive storms like Hurricane Helene?

Should the federal government be doing anything to decrease the use of fossil fuels in the US?

Questions about foreign policy. Trump’s first answer to questions about almost any foreign policy problem is that the problem wouldn’t exist if he were still president: Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine, Hamas wouldn’t have attack Israel on October 7, and so on. Whatever you think of those claims, such answers are not adequate. The 47th president will have to deal with the situations that currently exist, independent of what might have happened in some alternate timeline.

In 2020, you proposed a modified two-state peace plan for Israel and Palestine, in which the Palestinian state would be fragmented and considerably smaller than territory Israel acquired in the 1967 war. But this year, you said that achieving two-state solution of any sort would be “very, very tough“. Do you currently have a vision of a future peace in that region? What long-term goals should US policy be working toward?

You have said you could end the Ukraine War in one day by talking to Presidents Putin and Zelenskyy, but you haven’t said what you would try to get them to agree to. J. D. Vance has described the process like this:

Trump sits down, says to the Russians, Ukrainians, and Europeans: ‘You guys need to figure out what does a peaceful settlement look like.’ And what it probably looks like is something like the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine. That becomes like a demilitarized zone. It is heavily fortified so that Russians don’t invade again. Ukraine retains its independent sovereignty. Russia gets a guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine. It doesn’t join NATO. It doesn’t join some of these allied institutions.

Is that accurate?

Should the United States try to promote democracy in other countries?

You have said that Russia can do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t spend enough on their own defense. Which NATO nations does that currently leave vulnerable?

Questions about immigration. The issue Trump talks about most often and most passionately is immigration. But there is still much he hasn’t told us.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator James Lankford negotiated a bill to increase border security. Mitch McConnell said it didn’t pass because “our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all”. Is that an accurate description of what happened? Why did you oppose the bill?

You have proposed “mass deportation” of all undocumented immigrants, and have estimated that 20 million or more such people are currently in the United States. Could you describe in detail how that deportation operation would be carried out? How long do you expect this operation to take, and how much do you expect it to cost?

Given that many American citizens and legal residents have brown skin, common Hispanic names, and speak Spanish as their first language how will you protect them from being swept up in the mass deportation operation by mistake?

The US Chamber of Commerce claims we already have a labor shortage, with 8.2 million job openings but only 7.2 million job seekers. If we deport millions of workers, how will the US economy replace them? In particular, won’t deporting low-wage workers increase inflation?

Should the United States continue to honor its treaty obligations to offer asylum to refugees who face persecution in their home countries?

Is Christianity just one religion among many in America, or should the government treat Christians differently? For example, should Christian immigrants be favored over immigrants who practice Islam or some other religion?

Questions about social issues.

You have said that crime is “rampant and out of control“, and that the FBI statistics that show crime falling are “fake numbers“. Why do you base these claims on? Why is your source (whatever it is) more credible than the FBI?

You have said you would not sign a national abortion ban, and that you want the issue left to the states. But some abortion issues necessarily are made at the federal level. The drug mifepristone, used in about half of all abortions, is subject to FDA approval, which it currently has. You said in June that your FDA would not revoke access to the drug, but a subsequent comment in August was less clear. [4] Can you state a definite position on mifepristone?

In February, you told the NRA that “nothing happened” on gun control during your administration, and emphasized “We did nothing.” Can you offer any hope to Americans who worry about mass shootings?

Questions about his indictments. In the summer of 2022, Trump complained that the January 6 Committee hearings were “one-sided“. But with regard to the claims made in the indictments against him, we don’t know Trump’s side of the story because he has never told it. Instead, he has refused to let himself be pinned down to any one account, and has thrown up multiple contradictory defenses, or simply claimed “I did nothing wrong” with no further details.

Sometimes, for example, he blames Antifa for the January 6 violence, sometimes he denies or minimizes the violence, and at other times he valorizes the violence by claiming that the convicted rioters are “warriors“, “hostages“, or “patriots“. Similarly, he has never explained exactly why he took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago or what he intended to do with them.

The press has simply accepted that he’s not going to provide these answers and has stopped asking the questions. That’s wrong. Voters deserve to know this information. Trump’s legal maneuvers have prevented the answers from coming out in court, but not even the Supreme Court can grant him immunity from the press or the voters. He should be asked the following questions, and criticized if he evades them.

When you asked the crowd to go to the Capitol on January 6, what did you expect them to do there? If you had gone to the Capitol yourself, as you told the crowd you would do, what did you intend to do?

The people who fought with police (and injured more than a hundred of them) on January 6 — were they your supporters?

At what point (if any) do you think the January 6th march to the Capitol started to go wrong? When did you become aware that the marchers had turned violent? Why didn’t you ask the crowd to go home at that point?

When people from your own campaign (like Bill Stepian) or your own administration (like Attorney General Bill Barr and CISA Director Chris Krebs) told you that you had lost the 2020 election and there was no significant fraud, why didn’t you believe them?

If you still believe the 2020 election was decided by fraud, how do you think the fraud was carried out? Please be specific.

Were any of the documents you brought to Mar-a-Lago after your presidency still classified? If not, when and how were they declassified?

On many occasions you have said that the Presidential Records Act gave you the right to possess the classified documents. I have looked for a legal expert who shares your interpretation of the PRA and I have not found one. Who is advising you on this? Is there a particular section in the law that you think gives you this right?

Did you understand that Mar-a-Lago had not been approved as a secure site for storing classified documents, and that you no longer had a security clearance?

Why were you interested in keeping those particular documents? What did you intend to do with them?

Why didn’t you return the documents when the National Archives asked for them?

When your lawyers told the government that all classified documents had been returned, were they carrying out your instructions? Did you believe that claim to be true?

When the FBI’s search discovered classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, were you surprised, or did you already know the documents were there? Some of your supporters believe the FBI planted the documents. Do you?

Were you aware that your employees at Mar-a-Lago were moving boxes of documents from room to room? Did you instruct them to do so? Was the purpose to hide the documents from someone?

Conclusion. The New York Times and corporate media in general are fond of “both sides” framing, a tendency the Pitchbot often parodies:

Whether it’s Kamala Harris celebrating Diwali or Donald Trump celebrating one really rough and nasty day of police violence, both candidates have embraced controversial holidays.

But on the unanswered-questions theme, coverage has been bizarrely one-sided: Only Harris needs to answer more questions or provide more information, and only Harris is criticized for “evasion” if her answers are unsatisfactory.

I hope the list above has made obvious that Trump also has a lot of questions to answer. The fact that the press has stopped asking does not mean that he has answered.

[1] The Ruhle/Hannity comparison is a false equivalence.

After the 2020 election, Hannity (like several other Fox News hosts) said one thing to his viewers about Trump’s allegations of voting-machine fraud, but said something quite different to colleagues in text messages. He was not the whole problem, but he certainly played a role in Fox needing to pay $787 million to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit. Ruhle has not been associated with any comparable journalistic wrongdoing. Hannity has repeatedly participated in Republican fund-raising, including for Trump’s 2020 campaign. Such partisan activity is a firing offense at MSNBC — and virtually any news organization other than Fox.

James Fallows commented:

We know how [Stephanie Ruhle is] going to vote—she has told us, and explained why. But she is not like Sean Hannity—nor Fox’s Jesse Watters or the now-exiled Tucker Carlson. She differs in that she respects the boundaries of established fact and won’t lie or pander to help “her side.” (If you disagree: Please send me an example of her doing so.)

[2] Harris has made it clear that she believes President Biden retains the physical and mental capacity to do his job, so there is no further question for her to answer. Prior to Biden withdrawing his candidacy, worries within the Democratic Party centered on whether Biden could turn the presidential race around and govern effectively until January, 2029 — not whether he could govern effectively until January, 2025.

[3] It’s striking how perfectly the satirical New York Times Pitchbot anticipated Epstein’s commentary:

Kamala Harris gave an interview, but not the right kind of interview.

[4] “Less clear” is kind. TNR described Trump’s answer as “gibberish“.

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Republicans Scramble to Contain Their Abortion Disaster

April 15, 2024 – 10:20 am

Trump’s let-the-states-decide statement looked clever until Arizona actually decided.

All across the country, the abortion issue has been helping Democrats and hurting Republicans.

For decades it worked the other way: Pro-choice women were confident the Supreme Court would protect their rights, so they mostly ignored the extreme positions Republican politicians took and based their votes on other issues. But since the Dobbs decision reversed Roe v Wade last year, the intentions of elected officials matter again.

After taking their lumps in the 2022 elections, Republican politicians have been trying to figure out how to finesse the issue. How do they avoid the ire of female voters without alienating their personhood-at-conception base? Last fall, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin thought he had the formula: a “compromise” abortion ban at 15 weeks. But that idea went down in flames as Republicans lost control of the Virginia legislature.

Trump also has been searching for an answer. For a while he also toyed with a 15-week ban, but then last week he stalled for time, saying he’d make a statement this week. I was skeptical about this, because Trump often says he’s going to do something and then doesn’t. But in fact he did make a statement on Monday.

I don’t usually post Trump videos, but I think you need to see this to appreciate just how far off-the-rails this guy has gone. To start with, his make-up is comical; he almost looks like he’s wearing blackface. Then there are the obvious, how-stupid-do-you-think-we-are lies about how “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded” the end of Roe, and Democrats “support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month”. (In fact, Biden supports restoring the pre-Dobbs status quo, which drew a line at viability, i.e. 24-28 weeks. More radical people, like me, want the government to butt out completely and let women decide how to handle their own problem pregnancies. But describing that view as “support” for abortion is dishonest. I, for one, am neutral on abortion; I have never tried to persuade a woman to get one.)

But the gist of the statement is that Trump is proud of engineering the conservative Supreme Court majority that decided Dobbs, and he doesn’t want to take any public position beyond letting the states (and not women together with their families and doctors) decide when abortion is permissible. He later said he wouldn’t sign a federal abortion ban if Congress presented him with one. (But then, Trump says a lot of things, and most of them turn out not to be true. When he was president, he claimed his tax plan wouldn’t help the rich. But when Paul Ryan gave him a plan that focused most of its benefits on the rich, he signed it. And we’re still waiting to see the “terrific” health care plan he promised in 2015. )

He’s also proud of being opportunistic on the issue.

You must follow your heart on this issue. But remember: You must also win elections.

That let-the-states-decide position looked clever for about a day. But then a state decided: Tuesday, Arizona’s Supreme Court reinstated an 1864 law banning all abortions that aren’t necessary to save a woman’s life. (In the previous post, I explain why I believe this is a correct reading of a horrible legal situation. It’s the legislature, not the court, that should never have allowed this to happen.)

Then Trump had to scramble: He said Arizona went too far, and predicted the situation would be “straightened out”. Arizona’s mini-Trump, Senate candidate Kari Lake, completely reversed her position. Previously, she had specifically endorsed the 1864 law (by its number in the legal code). But now she says

I oppose today’s ruling, and I am calling on Katie Hobbs and the State Legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.

So far as I know, this is the first time Lake has admitted that Katie Hobbs (who defeated Lake in 2022) is indeed governor. I also love the invocation of “common sense solution”, a conservative buzz phrase Sarah Palin popularized: It’s a placeholder. You’re supposed to insert whatever position you think makes sense, and then imagine Lake said that.

But Lake hasn’t said anything. As of this moment, neither Lake nor Trump (nor any other Republican who either has real power or is running to get it) has made an actual proposal to fix Arizona’s draconian abortion law. When it comes time to govern — and not just posture — that’s what you need to do: put a real proposal on paper and vote it up or down, knowing that you’ll make some people unhappy.

Are any Republicans, at either the state or national levels, ready to govern? That’s what the coming weeks will tell us.

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A Different Take on Retro Conservative Fantasy

April 15, 2024 – 8:54 am

Sometimes unrealistic fantasies raise questions that deserve serious answers.

The Washington Post’s “Tradwives, SAHGs and the dream of feminine leisure” is one of those rare articles that is way more interesting than its apparent topic. OK, there’s a “tradwife” trend of sorts: social media influencers who style themselves as classic 1950s housewives, and a parallel group of stay-at-home girlfriends (or what we used to call “kept women”). But this “trend” doesn’t represent all that many women, and you probably don’t need a major newspaper to tell you what to think about them. After all, if women had been happy in these kinds of roles, second-wave feminism would never have caught on.

But Monica Hesse takes a much more interesting approach. She doesn’t analyze tradwifery as a serious option, as in “Were women really happier before feminism?”. Instead, she approaches that vision for what it is: a fantasy. “I dream of feminine leisure”, say many of the tradwives and SAHGs. And then Hesse asks why that dream might be beguiling.

Her down-to-earth answer is simple: Life is hard these days.

The fact of the matter is that almost nobody who works for a living has the time they wish they did to look, feel or be their best, much less to cultivate a highly aesthetic relationship with a thing called ease.

What if the problem is not feminism but capitalism — specifically the American version, where work-life balance is a punchline? What if instead of 11 paid vacation days, as the average American gets, these women got the full month that is standard in the United Kingdom? What if instead of five (or six or seven) days a week, they worked the four days that countries such as South Africa and Belgium are piloting? Would that allow enough time to do a full skin-care regimen and pack a great suitcase? If college weren’t so ghastly expensive here, maybe that one lady’s daughter wouldn’t be so keen on the patriarchy as a route to leisure that bypasses the long, uphill road to financial independence.

It wasn’t fair when women had no choice to stay home. It’s not fair if women are working but are still doing the work of maintaining a home. It’s not fair if both men and women are trying to juggle it together and are still finding that there aren’t enough hours or dollars in a day.

Who wouldn’t dream of feminine leisure?

To her credit, Hesse also imagines the male side of this fantasy: Who wouldn’t want to return from work each evening to find a home in perfect order, dinner on the table, and a well-rested spouse ready to draw you into the “ease” she has been cultivating all day? (Now you just need a willing partner and a senior-vice-president salary to pay for it all.)

Hesse’s article expresses a point of view that could generalize: Maybe we’re approaching retro conservative fantasies all wrong. At root, most of them aren’t really about then, they’re critiques of now: Why does life have to be so hard? Why is it so hard to pay for college? To get a career started? To find a serious relationship partner and stay together? To afford a home? To fit children into the equation and offer them at least as good a chance as you had?

Maybe people who are trying to wish their way out of this box deserve our empathy rather than our condemnation. The various retro fantasies they indulge may not be fact-based or workable in practice, but at least they address the question: Life wouldn’t be so hard if some sugar daddy would take care of me. Or if immigrants and minorities hadn’t stolen my place in line. Or if everybody went back to Jesus. Or if the government stopped sending our money overseas. Or if we had a strong-man leader who could make our country great again (whatever era “again” is supposed to point to).

Maybe the best liberal response isn’t a screed about the evils of sexism or xenophobia or authoritarianism. Maybe we should skip past the specifics and give our own answer to the underlying question: Why is life so hard these days?

We do have such an answer, one that I believe is far more realistic and supportable than anything conservatives offer: Life is hard because sometime in the late 1970s, the US scrapped the controls that kept the rich from capturing all the growth in the economy.

We scrapped antitrust enforcement, so as a consumer you have to take whatever deal monopolies offer you. (The endless “choices” you face at the mall are often just different tentacles of the same octopus.) We scrapped unions, so as a worker you have no negotiating power. And we changed the tax system so that whatever the rich capture, they keep. The result is this graph, which every American voter should be able to draw on a napkin.

If hourly compensation had kept up, the average Americans would make more than double what they do now. So you could afford a one-income household, if that’s what your family wanted. Or you could save up for year-long sabbaticals and return to the workplace with new vision and energy. Or you could retire at 50 and see the world.

Corporate talking heads may denounce this point of view as “class warfare” or “socialism”, but such name-calling isn’t really a refutation. And it is nostalgic in a manner of speaking, but the point isn’t to recreate some past era; it’s to get back to the trends that held in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, when economic gains were widely shared.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (15)

The Corruption of the Evangelical Movement

January 15, 2024 – 9:10 am

Tim Alberta indicts the religion he grew up in, but ends on a hopeful note. How convincing is that?

In the news sources I follow, Tim Alberta and his new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an age of extremism have been everywhere lately. As of yesterday, it was the #1 best seller in Amazon’s “Christian Church history” category. The book’s web page boosts it as a “New York Times Bestseller, one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year, and an Air Mail best book of the year.” An excerpt — the book’s prologue, in which Alberta reminisces about his Evangelical-preacher father and describes how his father’s flock assailed Alberta for his politics when he returned to the megachurch his father founded for his father’s funeral — has appeared in The Atlantic. He’s been interviewed on numerous MSNBC shows, including The 11th Hour. Michelle Goldberg wrote a column about his book, though I can’t find any clue that she read all the way to the end.

So chances are you’ve heard about Alberta, and maybe you know the thesis of his book: He surveys how right-wing politics has taken over the Evangelical movement, which today is often more about Trump than about Jesus, and whose Promised Land is not Heaven, but an America re-dominated by Christian leaders (who are probably White, male, and Republican, and definitely straight). Christianity, whose “kingdom is not of this world“, has been corrupted by a very worldly American nationalism.

What is special about Alberta’s perspective is that he critiques Evangelicalism from the inside. The fundamental problem he sees in Christian Nationalism isn’t that it violates the Constitution or opposes democracy or goes down the rabbit holes of absurd conspiracy theories, but that it is a heresy. Worshiping America (or Trump) is a form of idolatry. Jesus, in Alberta’s view, would have us change the world by channeling God’s love, not by promoting an angry, fearful, hateful brand of politics. God is eternal, and He cares little about nations, which come and go. (Galatians 3:28 says “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”)

Access. Alberta’s book demonstrates a level of access that I find hard to imagine. Some of the most famous — and most outrageous — characters in American Christianity sit down with him and share their unguarded (or barely guarded) thoughts.

  • Robert Jeffress (the Dallas megachurch pastor who was key in bringing Evangelicals to Trump in 2016 and in defending his worst excesses) discussed his post-1/6 doubts about how far he went to promote Trump. “I had that internal conversation with myself — and with God, too — about, you know, when do you cross the line? When does the mission get compromised?” Alberta pushed on that a little and Jeffress confessed, “I think it can be [compromised]. I think it even was, these last few years.” (Jeffress is back in the Trump fold now.)
  • Greg Locke, the Tennessee preacher whose church mushroomed when he defied public-health restrictions to stay open during the pandemic, and instead turned his church into a center of anti-vax, anti-liberal, and anti-government conspiracy theories, tells Alberta, “I’ve grown. … Are there times that it’s been perceived that I cared more about the kingdom of earth than the kingdom of heaven? Probably. And that was probably my fault. I probably shot myself in the foot and got a little too animated about things.” (Maybe he meant it.)
  • On election day 2022, Alberta had breakfast with the Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed, who predicted a big night for Senate candidate Herschel Walker.
  • He reports numerous conversations with Russell Moore, a central character in the right/left struggles of the Southern Baptist Convention. And with Jerry Falwell Jr., who was pushed out as president of Liberty University under a cloud of scandal.

It goes on like that. List everybody you wish you could talk to about these issues, and Alberta talked to them. They appear to have taken his questions seriously rather than stiff-arming him as part of the liberal media. People who usually take a double-down, show-no-weakness attitude towards probing questions seem to have wanted Alberta to understand them and their points of view.

What point of view? Because we so seldom get our questions answered, people like me have a hard time piecing together how Evangelicals look at themselves and come to their (to me) bizarre-looking political positions. As best I can piece it together now, the logical order goes like this: Over the last 50 years or so, American culture has either de-emphasized or outright rejected many conservative Christian ideas about morality. So now abortion, homosexuality, interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, pre- and extra-marital sex, and even (in some communities) transsexuality are all OK. Evangelicals see this creep of standards as moving primarily against them, rather than in favor of previously oppressed groups like, say, gays. So they extrapolate forward to a society where they will be persecuted the way the early Christians were by Rome. When churches were closed during the pandemic — along with theaters, sporting events, and any other place where crowds typically assemble — they took it personally, as the first act of a liberal Deep State that is eager to shut them down.

This interpretation and this fear looks paranoid to me. (After all, I’m pretty liberal and I never run into anybody who is eager to shut down churches permanently and persecute their members. The suggestion just never comes up.) So I have no idea who in particular they should be afraid of. But it’s very real to them, which is why many of them have a we-are-facing-the-apocalypse mindset. Preachers and politicians have promoted this fear, preyed on it, and taken advantage of it. The result is a sense of desperation, a willingness to believe ridiculous conspiracy theories, and an eagerness approve some very un-Christ-like tactics.

That result looks to Alberta like a profound loss of faith in the message of Jesus, who said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” Instead, Evangelicals find themselves looking for someone more badass than Jesus, which is what they like about Trump.

Structure. Alberta’s book is made up of three parts: The Kingdom is his tour of Evangelical churches, where he talks to the Trumpiest pastors he can find, as well as to pastors who are struggling not to lose their churches to this Christian Nationalist movement. One such church is Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brighton, Michigan, which was founded by Alberta’s father and is where Tim grew up. In Chapter 1 we meet his father’s hand-picked successor, Chris Winans, who isn’t willing to endorse right-wing politics from the pulpit, and so is watching his membership plummet. But in Chapter 7 we meet Bill Bolin, whose Floodgate church in the same town is riding the right-wing wave — stolen election, vaccine horror stories, looming Christian persecution — to grow and prosper.

Part II, The Power, focuses on politicians and political operatives who are harnessing Christian Nationalism, people like the fake historian David Barton, Ralph Reed, and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA. Alberta attends a session of Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour, which is like a tent revival for QAnon types. But he also talks to an apostate of the religion-meets-rightwing-politics movement: Cal Thomas, who anticipated much of what ultimately went wrong in his 1999 book Blinded By Might.

Part III, The Glory, is the hopeful part of the book, which I found unconvincing. He focuses on people who have survived the right-wing wave, including a return to Winans at Cornerstone, who over a period of years has rebuilt the church’s membership while keeping his message Christian rather than nationalist. Activists who want the Southern Baptist Convention to address its sex-abuse issue win a vote, and then beat back a right-wing counterrevolution. Jerry Falwell Jr. gets ousted at Liberty University, and is replaced by people who maybe maybe will start to take LU’s stated mission seriously. Stuff like that.

In the final chapter, one of the book’s sympathetic characters, LU Professor Nick Olson, delivers this optimistic vision of a revitalized Christian church:

I think the first step is reimagining the Christian worldview. And that means replacing our dominant metaphor — culture war — with something different. That’s been the running theme for evangelicals: we’re always embattled, always fighting back. But what if we laid down our defense mechanisms? What if we reframed our relationship to creation, to our neighbors, to our enemies, in ways that are more closely aligned to the Sermon on the Mount? What if we were willing to lay down our power and our status to love others, even if that comes at cost to ourselves?

Good luck with that, Nick. It’s a beautiful thought, but the currents still seem to me to be running in the other direction.

My response. In his hopeful Part III, I think Alberta underestimates how deep the structural problems in Christianity run, a case I made in a 2022 post “How did Christianity become so toxic?“.

In my experience, the style of motivated reasoning we see in the Trumpist movement (where, for example, Bill Clinton’s sexual excesses were disqualifying, but Donald Trump’s as-bad-or-worse actions are just part of his charm) began a long time ago. The willingness of Christians to deny facts, to seize on any useful misrepresentation, and to apply more favorable standards to people on their own side — I was running into this back in the 70s when fundamentalists argued against evolution, and probably it had been going on for decades before that.

Over time, anti-evolution became a template for denying anything conservative Christians didn’t want to believe: global warming, the effectiveness of vaccines, anything. The nonsense put out by the anti-abortion movement — that six-week-old fetuses have a heartbeat, 15-week fetuses feel pain, abortion can cause breast cancer, and so on — is unkillable, because conservative Christians live in a world where facts and science don’t matter. If some argument advances your position, then it must be true. Standing against this kind of nonsense means that you have turned against your faith.

Any serious attempt to clean this all up and teach sound reasoning will cost Evangelicals things they value far more than the truth. They’ll have to admit that the Earth has been around far longer than a few thousand years, that the diversity of human languages must have started much earlier than the Tower of Babel, that there never was a worldwide flood, and so on. They’ll have to account for obvious contradictions in the Bible. (The clearest, I think, is between the two genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. It’s not just a matter of the names being different; they don’t have the same number of generations between David and Jesus.)

They won’t have to give up on the teachings of Jesus, but they’ll be left with a faith far more complicated than “that old time religion” they want to believe in.

Above all else, Evangelicals believe the things they want to believe. So it’s not going to happen — which means that even if the Trumpist heresy ultimately fails, there will soon be another one, because the tools to build one are so widely distributed and easy to use.

And then there’s the propensity to invent paranoid conspiracy theories. This is baked into the theology at a very deep level: There is a Devil, who represents ultimate evil and has human minions to work his will.

When rational people confront a conspiracy theory, the unraveling usually begins with one question: Who would do all this and why? But Evangelical theology provides a ready-made answer: The Devil and his minions would do this because they’re evil. The diverse pieces of the conspiracy may have no apparent contact with each other, but they share inspiration from a being not of this world. If in addition you allow them occasional acts of supernatural power, then there’s no conspiracy you can’t rationalize.

The paranoid part comes from the fact that Devil’s primary goal is to destroy the One True Church and persecute its followers. You may belong to the biggest, richest, most powerful religion on the planet, and your pastor may meet regularly with the President of the United States, but it doesn’t matter. Some powerful entity is trying to persecute you, and you will never be safe from him.

This is not to say that all Evangelicals are necessarily paranoid and captured by false narratives that they cannot examine rationally. But the DNA of their faith makes them vulnerable to paranoia and false narratives. If they understood that fact, they could guard against those traps and call each other back when they fall down those rabbit holes. But the vulnerability that their faith builds into their thinking processes is the very first thing they are driven to deny.

POSTSCRIPT

After reading the comments, I feel like I should post some general remarks about my attitude toward religion.

I am not, in general, against religion. I belong to a church myself, albeit a Unitarian Universalist church, which some people would say is not really a religion. (I disagree.)

There are obvious social advantages in belonging to a church: In our atomized society, we usually only meet people in specific roles, and it’s hard to form the kind of relationships where the whole of my life is involved in the whole of somebody else’s life. In a church, you not only meet a person, you may also meet the person’s spouse, kids, possibly parents, and some of their friends. Deeper conversations about what we’re each trying to do with our lives and what’s stopping us from doing it — they don’t violate our roles, the way they might in another setting.

But beyond the social, a weekly church service is a way to regularly remind myself, and for a community of people to remind each other, that we want to be better than this. Overall American culture places such importance on money, status, fame, career success, and so on. It can be hard to remember that life should be about more than that.

At its best, religion can posit what a better world looks like: a place where everyone is treated with respect, where people care about each other too much to let them fall through society’s cracks, where we aspire to find truth and beauty, and where everyone has a chance to become their best self. It’s valuable to know that this vision is not just some crazy idea I dreamed up, but that a community of people shares it.

So far I haven’t said anything about God, because traditional notions of God don’t play a big role in my thinking. I sometimes describe myself as a “functional atheist”. If you have a vision of God that is meaningful for you and helps you be a better person, I won’t try to talk you out of it. I may even use your God-language in our conversations, if it helps get an idea across. But “this is what God wants me to do” usually doesn’t come up when I’m trying to make decisions in my own life.

That said, I have an appreciation of even theistic religion. If a religious community has its vision of a better world right (or even close to right), the idea that God wants this for us can be powerful. If a religion motivates its believers to do the hard work of improving the world, I’m not eager to change their minds.

Now, obviously, a lot of religion isn’t like that. Communities of people can get together each week to justify being their worst selves, or to share a vision of a world where large parts of humanity are made to suffer. I’m not defending that. I just don’t think that religion necessarily has to turn out that way.

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The Big Picture: From Russia to Ukraine to Brexit to Trump

November 19, 2018 – 11:01 am

The author of On Tyranny is back with a travelogue of The Road to Unfreedom

For several years now, we’ve been observing a global trend of once-democratic countries moving towards fascism. The paradigmic example is Putin’s Russia, but various other “right-wing populist” leaders have taken their countries some greater or lesser distance down the same road: Duterte in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, Duda in Poland, Trump in the US, and (soon) Bolsonaro in Brazil. Even in countries that have held the extreme right at bay, some proto-fascist party has shown surprising strength: National Rally in France, Alternative for Germany, Austria’s Freedom Party, and several others.

Each country has a unique story to tell about personalities, opposition weakness, dissatisfaction among key voting blocs, or previous government corruption. But when you look at the larger picture, you have to ask why. Why now? Why the right rather than the left? Why everywhere at once?

Timothy Snyder has an answer for you. Like all big theories, it’s a bit speculative. If you want a case ready to take to court, you won’t find it here. But if you’re looking for way to tell one big story about the current crisis of democracy rather than framing it as an unfortunate convergence of many little stories, his recent book The Road to Unfreedom is as a good a narrative as I’ve found.

To an extent, I’m misrepresenting The Road to Unfreedom in this article. I’ll be focusing on the abstract stuff in the background, the frame that holds it together. But Snyder’s book is anything but abstract; it is also a detailed description of how the internal politics of Putin’s Russia led to the invasion of Ukraine, and then to information warfare against the European Union and the United States. It maps out the common tactics that show up again and again, from Russia to Ukraine to Brexit to Trump.

But why did those tactics work so well in so many different countries?

Two mythologies and the reality they hide. Snyder points to a sea change in the dominant mythology of democratic societies. For decades, we have been living under a flawed but more-or-less benign mythology he calls “the politics of inevitability”, which is a version of the myth of progress: Irreversible historical trends are pushing us towards an “end of history” in which all nations will become human-rights-respecting democracies joined in a global market. As we approach this goal, many good things are supposed to happen: societies become more tolerant, more and more groups achieve justice and get their rights recognized, and technological progress leads to economic growth that raises the overall standard of living.

The exact timing of these benefits may depend on some heroic action here or there, and occasionally there might be a temporary setback. But the overall outcome is destined; it just happens.

Politics in an era of inevitability becomes either boring or frustrating, depending on your point of view. On issue after issue — a new trade pact, a newly recognized civil right, a new market, new patterns of behavior that correspond to new technologies — there seems to be no real choice. The Future is going there; you either get with the program or you don’t.

Over the last two decades or so, that myth has been undermined, by a lack of progress, by hitting environmental limits, and by contradictions among the various values “the Future” was supposed to optimize. Climate change presents a possibility of dystopia rather than utopia. Both globalization and technological change have produced losers as well as winners. As new groups get their rights recognized, groups privileged by the old arrangements may feel less and less at home; society used to fit them like a glove, and it no longer does. The increased freedom of capitalists may lead to decreased opportunities for workers, and while overall economic growth may continue, the new wealth may simply pile up at the top.

Occasionally, the failure of inevitability manifests in some shocking statistic like this one: Life expectancy in the United States fell in both 2015 and 2016. The drop (from 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.6 years in 2016) corresponded to an increase in deaths related to hopelessness: drug overdoses and suicides. In the face of such news, the rhetoric of inevitable progress becomes unconvincing.

The faltering of inevitability has made room for a rival myth that Snyder calls “the politics of eternity”: Your own group (whatever it is) is perpetually virtuous and innocent, but it is surrounded and assailed by evil enemies. He refers to this viewpoint as “eternal” because the story never changes.

When each day is devoted to emotional venting about supposed enemies, the present becomes endless, eternal.

Nothing your group does can ever besmirch its innocence, and the rightful steps it takes to defend itself will never be accepted by the evil forces that assail it. All victories and defeats are just temporary. Only an annihilating defeat or a millennial victory at the end of time could truly break the cycle.

Both myths hide the reality that history is whatever humans make it. We are perpetually confronted with choices, and many outcomes are possible. Humanity makes progress (or not) depending on what we do. Virtue is not something we are born with or inherit from our ancestors; it either manifests in our actions or it does not.

Fictionalization. Inevitability politicians offer an idealized future. Eternity politicians have no utopian vision, so they instead offer a return to an idealized past. If you are suffering here and now, inevitability frames your pain as an aberration or a temporary inconvenience or a worthy sacrifice. Eternity, on the other hand, has no better future to offer you, but it tells you who to blame.

An eternity politician defines foes rather than formulating policies.

One key difference between the two myths is that the Future actually arrives, a little bit at a time. So the case for progress is inherently a fact-based case. An inevitability politician may make up facts, perhaps, or twist them, but he can’t do without them. “A plausible future,” Snyder writes, “requires a factual present.”

But eternity-politics requires only struggle, and the less factual the struggle, the easier it is to maintain. A real struggle might come to some conclusion, but an entirely made-up one never will.

The politics of eternity requires and produces problems that are insoluble because they are fictional.

So, for example, the millions of illegal voters who decide American elections can’t be stopped, because they’re not real. The struggle against them will go on forever. Democrats can never stop trying to take your guns, because they weren’t trying to take your guns in the first place. The War on Christmas will come back every year, regardless of anything the faithful might do to defend themselves.

People believe these narratives because they are emotionally satisfying, not because they are factual. And so eternity propaganda doesn’t simply repeat what it wants the public to believe, but attempts to destroy the public’s confidence in any factual present or coherent narrative of history. Snyder describes Putin’s propaganda during the invasion of Ukraine like this:

According to Russian propaganda, Ukrainian society was full of nationalists but not a nation; the Ukrainian state was repressive but did not exist; Russians were forced to speak Ukrainian though there was no such language.

The point is not to win a rational argument, but to make rational argument impossible.

The tools and attitudes of ordinary journalism have failed to deal with this more fundamental attack.

One can mark the fictions and contradictions. This is not enough. These utterances were not logical arguments or factual assessments, but a calculated effort to undo logic and factuality. … The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis. He positioned himself as a side of the story while mocking factuality. “I am lying to you openly and we both know it” is not a side of the story. It is a trap.

And if the war is against factuality itself, the press becomes an enemy of the People.

in the Russian model, investigative reporting must be marginalized so that news can become a daily spectacle. The point of spectacle is to summon the emotions of both supporters and detractors and to confirm and strengthen polarization; every news cycle creates euphoria or depression, and reinforces a conviction that politics is about friends and enemies at home, rather than about policy that might improve the lives of citizens.

Already in 2014, as the Russia was invading Ukraine, Putin was unveiling a media strategy that has since become very familiar to American news consumers.

Western editors, although they had the reports of the Russian invasion on their desks in the late days of February and the early days of March 2014, chose to feature Putin’s exuberant denials. And so the narrative of the Russian invasion of Ukraine shifted in a subtle but profound way: it was not about what was happening to Ukrainians, but about what the Russian president chose to say about Ukraine.

You might think that history would be useful to a nostalgic movement, but only a vague, cherry-picked history will do. Putin, for example, is the heroic inheritor of both the czars and the Soviets who overthrew them. Similarly in the United States, Trumpists simultaneously revere the statues of slave-owning Confederates and blame slavery on the Democrats, claiming the legacies of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as it suits them. Actual history will never support the perpetual virtue and innocence of Russians, Americans, or anyone else, so it must be made incoherent as well.

Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.

Why Russia? In the West, the Great Recession of 2008 was a hammer blow to the myth of inevitability. For communities that had been stagnant or even falling behind for decades, it put an exclamation point on a growing sense that utopia was not coming.

But Russia had gotten to that point much sooner. Within one generation, the fall of the Soviet Union blasted away the Communist vision of historical inevitability, and the corruption and incompetence of the Yeltsin regime discredited the market-democracy alternative. So Russia was the ideal place to hone the new tactics, because it was ahead of other nations on the path to despair and cynicism.

From the beginning of his rule, Putin offered Russians narratives of danger, first from the terrorist Chechens. But after his fraudulent re-election in 2011 brought protesters into the streets, Putin decided he needed a larger enemy: the West, and particularly the United States. The protests, he claimed, resulted from a conspiracy by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Putin’s subsequent information war on the West has been motivated by internal politics. Russians know that their own democracy is a fraud, but Putin needs them to understand that all democracies are frauds. No Western nation should stand as an example Russians can aspire to.

Trump. Snyder goes into considerable detail about the course of the Ukraine war (where the current stalemate serves Putin’s interest), as well as the particular myths that have made the European Union vulnerable to attacks like Brexit. But let’s skip straight to Trump.

Trump’s advance to the Oval Office had three stages, each of which depended upon American vulnerability and required American cooperation. First, Russians had to transform a failed real estate developer into a recipient of their capital. Second, this failed real estate developer had to portray, on American television, a successful businessman. Finally, Russia intervened with purpose and success to support the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” in the 2016 presidential election.

Snyder often repeats the  notion of “Donald Trump, successful businessman” as a fundamentally fictional character.

In these conditions, a fictional candidate enjoyed a considerable advantage.

From his campaign through his administration, Trump has been about spectacle and outrage, rather than about substantive plans to improve the lives of Americans — even the Americans who voted for him. He provides emotional benefits for his followers — an energizing anger, self-righteousness, and revenge against largely imaginary enemies — rather than healthcare or highways or schools.

Trump governed just as he had run for office: as a producer of outrage rather than as a formulator of policy.

This can only work for an electorate that expects nothing better from government. And in that sense, it is the failure of inevitability politics that made us vulnerable.

The American politics of inevitability also prepared the way for the American politics of eternity more directly: by generating and legitimizing vast economic inequality at home. If there was no alternative to capitalism, then perhaps yawning gaps in wealth and income should be ignored, explained away, or even welcomed? If more capitalism meant more democracy, why worry? These mantras of inevitability provided the cover for the policies that made America more unequal, and inequality more painful.

Trump’s message resonated (at least among whites) wherever there was hopelessness.

The correlation between opioid use and Trump voting was spectacular and obvious, notably in the states that Trump had to win. … Every Pennsylvania county that Obama won in 2012 but Trump won in 2016 was in opioid crisis.  … With one exception, every Ohio county in opioid crisis posted significant gains for Trump in 2016 over Romney in 2012. … In Scioto County, Ohio, ground zero of the American opioid epidemic, Trump took a spectacular 33% more votes than Romney had.

It was in the localities where the American dream had died that Trump’s politics of eternity worked. He called for a return to the past, to a time when America was great. Without inequality, without a sense that the future was closed, he could not have found the supporters he needed.

Getting off the road to unfreedom. The recent mid-term elections demonstrated that Americans are not yet in thrall to eternity politics. The final tallies are not in yet, but in the best measure of national sentiment — the total popular vote for the House — Trump’s party looks to have lost by something like 8%. (Obama’s 2008 landslide was a 7% victory.)

But as we can see by looking at other countries, Trump is not unique. It was the failure of our politics and our culture that made us vulnerable to eternity politics. In Snyder’s view, we need to resist the charms of national mythology.

To break the spell of inevitability, we must see ourselves as we are, not on some exceptional path, but in history alongside others. To avoid the temptation of eternity, we must address our own particular problems, beginning with inequality, with timely public policy. To make of American politics an eternity of racial conflict is to allow economic inequality to worsen. To address widening disparities of opportunity, to restore a possibility of social advance and thus a sense of the future, requires seeing Americans as a citizenry rather than as groups in conflict. America will have both forms of equality, racial and economic, or it will have neither.

He ends with a call for a “politics of responsibility”, one recognizing that history has no direction of its own, and that we have no pre-ordained special role inside it. We can make a better world if we collectively decide to do so, but we can’t just wait for the better world to arrive on its own.

If we see history as it is, we see our places in it, what we might change, and how we might do better. We halt our thoughtless journey from inevitability to eternity, and exit the road to unfreedom

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John McCain Shot Liberty Valance

September 3, 2018 – 9:06 am

This week’s eulogies told us more about the hero we need
than the man we’ve lost.

In the classic John Ford western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a senator from an unnamed western state (Ranse Stoddard, played by Jimmy Stewart) is a living legend, and the legend goes like this: Once an idealistic young lawyer from the East, he arrived in the West to discover a town being terrorized by the gunslinger and gangster Liberty Valance. Though he barely knew how to shoot, Stoddard’s refusal to run away landed him in a gunfight with Valance, which he somehow won. Then Valance was dead and his tyranny ended.

Stoddard himself was ashamed to have killed a man in a lawless gunfight, but ever after, he was the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. On the strength of that reputation, he was chosen for the statehood convention, and then to represent the territory in Washington. When the territory became a state, he served three terms as its first governor, and then went on to the Senate. Now a national figure and a senior statesman, he is in line to be the next vice president.

But the truth about Stoddard is a bit more complicated: He did face Valance, got a shot off, and Valance wound up dead — but not because Stoddard’s shot killed him. Though he never promoted himself as Valance’s killer, he was never in a position to deny it either. So the story grew up around Stoddard and stuck with him because it was the myth that the West needed to tell: The Lawyer had killed the Gunslinger; the rule of law had ended the reign of violence.

Now Stoddard is finally able to tell the true story, because the man who did kill Valance is dead and can’t be tried for murder. But after he is done telling it, the local editor tears up his reporter’s notes and burns them. “This is the West, sir,” he explains. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

This week we celebrated the memory of another legendary western senator, John McCain. And we did it in pretty much the same way: We told the legend of the hero we need. That legend intersects with John McCain’s actual life in a number of ways, but the story of the real man is much more complicated — and in many ways less relevant to those of us who didn’t know him.

So by all means, let us discuss the legend, because it tells us a great deal about the times we live in.

The Trump Era. No president in my lifetime (or maybe ever) has dominated the national conversation the way Donald Trump does. Whether you love him or hate him, whether he fills you with pride or disgust, it’s hard to talk about anything or anybody else for very long.

The Trump style is made up of bombast, rudeness, and above all, divisiveness. Unlike previous presidents, he does not reach out to those who voted against him. [1] When he speaks, he does not talk to the nation, he talks to his base. He lies constantly, and his personal life is a parade of sleaze. [2] Every issue, first and foremost, is about him.

Trump’s story is full of irony. Having run on a pledge to “Make America Great Again”, his character is defined by smallness. There is nothing magnanimous about him, and there seems to be no situation that he is able to rise above. He cannot laugh at himself, and rarely laughs at all. Every personal slight must be answered, every blow returned with double force. Gold Star parents, bereaved widows of soldiers, leaders of our closest allies — it doesn’t matter. No one must be allowed to cast a shadow on Trump’s fragile ego.

Having taken offense at every perceived disrespect for the symbols of America — the flag, the anthem, the police — his own loyalty to the nation is questionable; when the Russians attacked our system of government, his weak and subservient response added to the speculation that he is in league with them. Having pledged to “drain the swamp”, he has flaunted his conflicts of interest and presided over the most corrupt administration in many decades. Having won on the strength of the Evangelical vote, he has governed as the anti-Jesus [3], concentrating his cruelty on “the least of these” and favoring the rich man over Lazarus. Famous for saying “You’re fired!”, he actually has no stomach for face-to-face confrontations, preferring to let John Kelly do the dirty work, or to tweet something nasty after he has left the meeting.

The hero we long for. What kind of hero do we need to celebrate in the Trump Era? One who embodies all the virtues that Trump so conspicuously lacks:

  • higher purpose
  • humility
  • willingness to endure hardship
  • courage
  • magnanimity
  • sense of humor
  • devotion to principle
  • idealistic vision of what America means and stands for
  • respect for opponents and willingness to ally with them on issues of common concern
  • compassion
  • honesty even when the truth is not flattering
  • willingness to confront facts and admit mistakes

It also wouldn’t hurt if that hero had a history of criticizing Russia. And it would be even better if he or she were a Republican, because a principled, virtuous, reasonable Republican Party is the single most conspicuous lack in America today. As a Democrat, I may yearn for a hero who can send the GOP into a long and well-deserved exile from power. But even better, I have to admit, would be to return to an America where the need to win was not so desperate, because Eisenhower-like Republicans could be trusted to preserve the Republic until we had a chance to make our case to the voters again.

McCain the legend. Was John McCain that hero? Sometimes. If we pick and choose properly, his life can bear the story we need to tell about it. [4]

He certainly endured hardship at the Hanoi Hilton, and in his final battle with cancer he showed that his fighter-pilot courage had not left him. President Obama said:

He had been to hell and back and yet somehow never lost his energy or his optimism or his zest for life. So cancer did not scare him.

Every time I heard him speak, at some point or other he stressed the importance of having a purpose higher than self. And it was there again (along with an idealistic vision of America) in his final message to the American people:

To be connected to America’s causes — liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people — brings happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

McCain didn’t say it explicitly, but it’s clear that he didn’t envy the guy who lives in a golden penthouse and has sex with porn stars (who he then needs to pay off). “I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth,” he wrote.

Humility, sense of humor … I first saw McCain in 1999, when he was running against George W. Bush in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary. I wasn’t blogging then, so I have no record of what he said beyond my own memory. I recall that he made a point about his campaign’s momentum (he would eventually win that primary) by joking about how unpopular he had been at the outset: “The first poll had me at 2%, and the margin of error was 5%. So I might have been at minus three.”

I was blogging by the time he ran in the 2008 cycle, so I have this:

He answers questions — even hostile questions — patiently and with empathy. (“Meeting adjourned,” he announces in response to the first gotcha. The room erupts in laughter, and then he answers.) He tells corny jokes and at the same time manages to wink at you, as if the real joke is that you have to tell jokes to win the world’s most serious job. He runs himself down, confessing to being fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, saying that his candidacy proves that “in America anything is possible.” And yet no one in the room forgets that he is John McCain, and he has survived things that would have destroyed any mere mortal. It is an amazing balancing act.

McCain invited the two men who defeated his presidential campaigns, Bush and Barack Obama, to speak at his service in the National Cathedral on Saturday. (Trump was eventually invited to attend — by Lindsey Graham, with Cindy McCain’s approval — but spent the day playing golf.) Obama noted McCain’s humor, magnanimity, and respect for opponents:

After all, what better way to get a last laugh than to make George and I say nice things about him to a national audience? And most of all, it showed a largeness of spirit, an ability to see past differences in search of common ground.

Lindsey Graham noted the contrast between McCain’s magnanimity and Trump’s churlish response to McCain’s death. (He raised the White House flag back to full staff until public outrage made him lower it again.)

John McCain was a big man, worthy of a big country. Mr. President, you need to be the big man that the presidency requires.

Obama made a similar point more obliquely:

So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.

And Bush agreed:

To the face of those in authority, John McCain would insist: We are better than this. America is better than this.

Principle and respect for opponents were stressed by another of those opponents: former Vice President Joe Biden.

The way things changed so much in America, they look at him as if John came from another age, lived by a different code, an ancient, antiquated code where honor, courage, integrity, duty, were alive. That was obvious, how John lived his life. The truth is, John’s code was ageless, is ageless. When you talked earlier, Grant [Woods], you talked about values. It wasn’t about politics with John. He could disagree on substance, but the underlying values that animated everything John did, everything he was, come to a different conclusion. He’d part company with you if you lacked the basic values of decency, respect, knowing this project is bigger than yourself.

For Bush, McCain symbolized America, or at least the America we want to be:

Whatever the cause, it was this combination of courage and decency that defined John’s calling, and so closely paralleled the calling of his country. It’s this combination of courage and decency that makes the American military something new in history, an unrivaled power for good. It’s this combination of courage and decency that set America on a journey into the world to liberate death camps, to stand guard against extremism, and to work for the true peace that comes only with freedom.

And Meghan McCain drew the parallel most clearly, in a litany of statements about “the America of John McCain”, that culminated in:

The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold. She is resourceful, confident, secure. She meets her responsibilities. She speaks quietly because she is strong. America does not boast because she has no need to. The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great. That fervent faith, that proven devotion, that abiding love, that is what drove my father from the fiery skies above the Red River delta to the brink of the presidency itself.

McCain the man. Unless we are willing to massage their stories and avert our eyes from unfortunate facts, no actual human being is precisely the hero we need. So it is no insult to point out that the actual John McCain was not that hero.

McCain had a temper and could be verbally abusive. His commitment to campaign finance reform arose out of his own scandal. His opposition to torture was never as complete as it seemed. In order to get the Republican nomination in 2008, he embraced the same evangelical preachers he had called “agents of intolerance” in 2000. He famously corrected a supporter who questioned Obama’s citizenship and religion, but he also empowered Sarah Palin to rouse that same rabble.

He vigorously supported the Iraq invasion, and opposed Obama’s withdrawal from that war. In 2013, Mother Jones published a map of all the places McCain had threatened with military intervention.

And despite that one key vote against repealing ObamaCare, McCain was not that big of an anti-Trump rebel; he voted with the president 83% of the time — more than 538’s model of his state’s electorate would predict.

He talked a good game against Trump, but how much did he actually do? He was chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which had only one more Republican than Democrat. With the Democrats, he could have led an anti-Trump majority. He had subpoena power; any Trump scandal with a national-security angle was within his purview. He did nothing with that power.

So no, the real John McCain was not the hero the Trump Era calls for. He was not the anti-Trump.

Should we be cynical about him? To a large extent, it was McCain himself who orchestrated this celebration of the anti-Trump hero. He had known he was dying, and gave serious thought to his funeral. He invited Bush and Obama to speak and stipulated that Trump not speak. He wrote an explicitly political last message to America.

He knew his death would be a political weapon, and he very intentionally set out to use it. His death, like his life, would serve a purpose bigger than himself.

As his daughter Meghan acknowledged, no one would have been more cynical about such a display than John himself:

Several of you out there in the pews who crossed swords with him or found yourselves on the receiving end of his famous temper or were at a cross purpose to him on nearly anything, are right at this moment doing your best to stay stone-faced. Don’t. You know full well if John McCain were in your shoes today, he would be using some salty word he learned in the Navy while my mother jabbed him in the arm in embarrassment. He would look back at her and grumble, maybe stop talking, but he would keep grinning.

It is tempting to denounce all this, as voices from both the left and the right have. And yet, I will not.

This era needs an anti-Trump hero. The perfect avatar of that ideal has not emerged yet. In the meantime, we have John McCain, whose life in so many ways can remind us of the thing we long for.

We should celebrate that; neither in ignorance nor in cynicism, but in hope. Someday the Trump Era will end. May that day come soon. And if the Legend of John McCain helps it come sooner, then I say: “Print the legend.”

[1] Liberals and conservatives, respectively, often think of George W. Bush and Barack Obama as divisive presidents. But each tried to appeal to those who voted against him.

Bush worked with Ted Kennedy on education policy. The day after winning re-election in 2004, he directed a  portion of his speech to supporters of John Kerry: “We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it.” For his part, Kerry recounted his post-election conversation with Bush: “We talked about the danger of division in our country and the need — the desperate need for unity, for finding the common ground, coming together. Today I hope that we can begin the healing.”

Obama hoped to start his presidency with a bipartisan compromise: His stimulus package was smaller than many advisers recommended, and tax cuts made up about a third of the package. (In the end he got no Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate.) Later in his term, a variety of “grand bargains” with House Speaker John Boehner attempted to address what (at that time) was the Republicans’ central issue: the long-term budget deficit. But Boehner was never able to pull together enough support within his caucus.

Trump, on the other hand, is still tweeting about “Crooked Hillary”, pushing his Justice Department to prosecute her, and promoting conspiracy theories about the investigation that cleared her. I have tried to think of a similar situation in American history, and I have not come up with one.

[2] Think about where the hush-money story has gone. A long series of denials have collapsed, and Trump no longer bothers to argue about whether he had sexual affairs with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal during his marriage to Melania. He admits his lawyer Michael Cohen paid each woman six-figure sums so that they wouldn’t tell their stories before the election. The new line of defense is that the payments weren’t illegal, because the money ultimately came from his personal funds and not from the campaign. That’s how deep in the sleaze the President has gotten. I-paid-her-myself is a defense now.

Remember what a presidential scandal looked like during the Obama years? He put his feet up on an Oval Office desk. He ordered a Marine to hold his umbrella. His Christmas cards were too secular. Michelle wore sleeveless dresses.

[3] I’m intentionally not saying “anti-Christ”, because that evokes all the speculative Book of Revelation interpretations that have distracted so many Christians from Jesus’ teachings. I’m not postulating some end-times role for Trump, I’m just noting that it’s impossible to imagine him saying a single line of the Sermon on the Mount. Well, maybe: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” But the rest of it — turn the other cheek, love your enemies, blessed are the meek and the poor in spirit, “do not lay up for yourselves treasures on Earth” — no way.

[4] Something similar could be said about Ranse Stoddard, who really did have the virtues the myth assigned him. He didn’t kill Liberty Valance, but the people who thought he did were not disappointed when they met him.

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Getting Through This

July 17, 2017 – 10:30 am

Since the election, I’ve been trying to get comfortable with uncertainty rather than maintain a positive mental attitude.

I spent last week vacationing on an island with almost 300 Unitarians of all ages. We listened to chautauqua-style talks, played games, flew kites, and did a great deal of staring out to sea.

Unitarians, for the most part, are liberals. And liberals, you may have noticed, can be pretty depressing people these days. In the course of the week, I had many conversations like these:

  • A minister told me he can name 30 people in his (not terribly big) town who have been “disappeared” by ICE.
  • An EPA employee is watching her agency get disassembled, and deciding whether to keep fighting or give up and take a buy-out package.
  • A mother has serious doubts about her children’s future, both in a global-warming and a where-will-the-jobs-be sense.
  • A NASA researcher described administration proposals to simply turn off instruments on functioning satellites because they might provide data documenting climate change.
  • A grandmother raged about the early warning signs of a police state.
  • A former state Democratic Party official worries that the divisions of 2016 won’t heal in time for 2018 or even 2020.

And that’s not to mention all the people who expressed shame because they can’t make themselves pay attention to the news. They are the kind of folks who until recently have prided themselves on being committed and informed, but lately they’re choosing not to know things that they believe would only make them angry or frustrated or depressed. (These news-avoiders appear to be a fairly big club, though they never hold meetings.)

But the strangest thing, at least for me personally, was the number of people I already know, who read this blog, or the columns I write for UU World magazine, and expected me to provide a hopeful vision, one in which Right and Justice must ultimately prevail.

I’m not sure where they got this idea. I certainly have never advertised myself as a purveyor of hope, or posted a “5 Reasons the Good Guys Have to Win” article. The best I can figure is that it’s my affect: They know I dive deeply into the news, week after week, and yet I don’t seem to be depressed or angry or in despair. How do I do it? Maybe they think the secret sauce is that I’ve seen the ending already in my rose-colored crystal ball: I know the cavalry arrives in the final reel and saves everybody. Or maybe I have some deep insight into the Platonic essence of the Universe, which tells me that the Form of the Good is eternally triumphant, and the Trumps of this world can never ultimately prevail.

That’s not it. I mean, I do have a deep belief that the Trumps can never ultimately prevail, but that’s only because nobody ever ultimately prevails. If you look far enough into the future, people die, empires fall, civilizations crumble, and species go extinct. Ultimately, the Sun blows up, and if you keep looking far enough past that, the Universe goes cold. We may or may not save the world this time, but even if we do, the world won’t stay saved. It never does.

So anybody who is looking for an everything-well-be-fine message from me is barking up the wrong tree. My grand cosmic perspective is that shit keeps happening until it stops, and then (at some point) nothing ever happens again. If you find that comforting, you’re welcome. My bill is in the mail.

But I suppose that leaves a mystery: I see the same appalling developments everyone else does. So why aren’t I depressed or angry or driven by some desperate energy?

The answer to that one is simple: I’ve been here before.

I don’t mean that in a spooky deja-vu sense. But during a life crisis many years ago, I developed some habits and attitudes that are serving me well now.

Back in 1996, my wife was diagnosed with stage-2 breast cancer. At the time, that was right on the borderline of survivability. Again and again, people told us hopeful stories of their friends or relatives who lived through breast cancer, but invariably it was the less serious stage-1 version. In the media, we found a few stage-3 or stage-4 survival stories, but they were miraculous. Stage 2 was a genuine toss-up. With the best possible treatment, maybe you’d live and maybe you wouldn’t.

The medical advice we got was to hit it hard, because you really only got one shot. Survivals of recurrence were another set of miracle stories, and not anything you wanted to count on. In other words, “saving” some treatment in case the first ones didn’t work was a bad idea. So we set up a truly arduous 9-month plan that shot all the fireworks, one after another. This was going to take over our lives for most of a year, and there was no guarantee it would even work.

There is a whole branch of the publishing industry devoted to the mental attitude you’re supposed to maintain during such a process. Most authors at the time recommended staying relentlessly positive: This is going to work. Forget the statistics, forget how you feel today, this is going to work.

We were tempted to go for that, but the more we looked into it, the more brittle such an attitude seemed. Some people maintained it all the way to recovery, but others broke. They stayed positive until they couldn’t any more, and then they crashed into despair.

So instead, we decided to try to accept the uncertainty. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and if everything went well we wouldn’t know until sometime in the distant future when we would look back and said, “I guess we got through that.” In the meantime, we would do whatever we could with the quantity and quality of life we were allowed to spend together. (It turned out to be a lot; 21 years this August.)

Like most people I know, in the aftermath of Election Day I felt overwhelmed. How could this have happened? What did it mean? What would happen to us?

And then, without recognizing it until a month or two later, I slipped back into my cancer-treatment mindset. I started doing whatever I could think to do, and tried to accept that I have no idea whether it will work.

I see lots of people around me either getting depressed, trying not to think about it, or working to maintain a positive mental attitude. The PMA folks reach for anything they can pin their hopes to: Trump will self-destruct, he’ll be impeached, his voters will realize they’ve been conned, the 2018 election will put the Democrats back on the path to power, Trump’s abuses will just make the Revolution come faster, and so on.

And who knows? Maybe one of those things will turn out to be true. But once again, PMA seems like a brittle strategy to me: It will keep you going until one day it doesn’t, and then it will fail spectacularly.

Instead, I’ll advise you to do whatever you can think to do to defend whatever you think is worth defending. Take your best shot, not because it will necessarily work, but because it’s your best shot. Enjoy the country and democracy you have for as long as you have it. Resist those moments — both positive and negative — when you think you know how it all turns out.

You don’t know. None of us do. So do whatever you can think to do, and what happens will happen. If things go well, we won’t know until someday years from now, when we look back and say, “We got through this.”

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