How America Ends

A very lengthy piece in The Atlantic looks at the crossroads at which America finds itself.  One of the two major political parties no longer support democracy and is fighting tooth and claw to maintain minority rule against the rapidly changing demographics sweeping the country and supporting an individual who not only denigrates the office of the presidency but who also holds the majority of the nation's citizens in contempt and heaps hate and vitriol on anyone who opposes his policies that benefit the few while harming the many.  Through it all, the Republican Party has refused to adopt policies that would broaden its appeal to others outside its base of aging, less educated whites, religious extremists and outright racists. Meanwhile Trump and his Republican enablers accuse their political opponents of the very hate and bigotry that they themselves embody. Where this will all end is anyone's guess as the 2020 presidential election approaches, but one thing is certain: America's democracy is facing its greatest threat since the eve of the Civil War when another white minority sought desperately to stave off a diminution of its power and ultimately resorted to armed rebellion.  Here are article highlights:

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

 “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage,” Trump told the crowd at his reelection kickoff event in Orlando in June. “They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” This is the core of [Trump's] the president’s pitch to his supporters: He is all that stands between them and the abyss. In October, with the specter of impeachment looming, he fumed on Twitter, “What is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!”Over the past 25 years, both red and blue areas have become more deeply hued, with Democrats clustering in cities and suburbs and Republicans filling in rural areas and exurbs. In Congress, where the two caucuses once overlapped ideologically, the dividing aisle has turned into a chasm.

As partisans have drifted apart geographically and ideologically, they’ve become more hostile toward each other. In 1960, less than 5 percent of Democrats and Republicans said they’d be unhappy if their children married someone from the other party; today, 35 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats would be, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute/Atlantic poll—far higher than the percentages that object to marriages crossing the boundaries of race and religion.

Recent research by political scientists at Vanderbilt University and other institutions has found both Republicans and Democrats distressingly willing to dehumanize members of the opposite party. . . . [Trump] The president encourages and exploits such fears. This is a dangerous line to cross. As the researchers write, “Dehumanization may loosen the moral restraints that would normally prevent us from harming another human being.” 

[O]verheated rhetoric has helped radicalize some individuals. Cesar Sayoc, who was arrested for targeting multiple prominent Democrats with pipe bombs, was an avid Fox News watcher; in court filings, his lawyers said he took inspiration from Trump’s white-supremacist rhetoric. “It is impossible,” they wrote, “to separate the political climate and [Sayoc’s] mental illness.” . . . . political protests have turned violent, most notably in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a Unite the Right rally led to the murder of a young woman. But the biggest driver might be demographic change. The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests.

If there are precedents for such a transition, they lie here in the United States, where white Englishmen initially predominated, and the boundaries of the dominant group have been under negotiation ever since. Within the living memory of most Americans, a majority of the country’s residents were white Christians. That is no longer the case, and voters are not insensate to the change—nearly a third of conservatives say they face “a lot” of discrimination for their beliefs, as do more than half of white evangelicals. But more epochal than the change that has already happened is the change that is yet to come: Sometime in the next quarter century or so, depending on immigration rates and the vagaries of ethnic and racial identification, nonwhites will become a majority in the U.S.

For some Americans, that change will be cause for celebration; for others, it may pass unnoticed. But the transition is already producing a sharp political backlash, exploited and exacerbated by [Trump] the president. In 2016, white working-class voters who said that discrimination against whites is a serious problem, or who said they felt like strangers in their own country, were almost twice as likely to vote for Trump as those who did not. Two-thirds of Trump voters agreed that “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline.” 

In 2002, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John Judis published a book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that demographic changes—the browning of America, along with the movement of more women, professionals, and young people into the Democratic fold—would soon usher in a “new progressive era” that would relegate Republicans to permanent minority political status.. . . . now many conservatives, surveying demographic trends, have concluded that Teixeira wasn’t wrong—merely premature. They can see the GOP’s sinking fortunes among younger voters, and feel the culture turning against them, condemning them today for views that were commonplace only yesterday. They are losing faith that they can win elections in the future. With this come dark possibilities. 

[T]he GOP has redoubled its efforts to narrow the electorate and raise the odds that it can win legislative majorities with a minority of votes. In the first five years after conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 39 percent of the counties that the law had previously restrained reduced their number of polling places. And while gerrymandering is a bipartisan sin, over the past decade Republicans have indulged in it more heavily. . . . All political parties maneuver for advantage, but only a party that has concluded it cannot win the votes of large swaths of the public will seek to deter them from casting those votes at all. Instead of reaching out and inviting new allies into its coalition, the political right hardens, turning against the democratic processes it fears will subsume it.

A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism, winning converts to its principles and evolving with each generation. A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic question—and at some point, the numbers no longer add up. Trump has led his party to this dead end, and it may well cost him his chance for reelection, presuming he is not removed through impeachment.

But [Trump's] the president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost. 

That conservatives—despite currently holding the White House, the Senate, and many state governments—are losing faith in their ability to win elections in the future bodes ill for the smooth functioning of American democracy. That they believe these electoral losses would lead to their destruction is even more worrying. [T]he most catastrophic collapse of a democracy in the 19th century took place right here in the United States, sparked by the anxieties of white voters who feared the decline of their own power within a diversifying nation.   The slaveholding South exercised disproportionate political power in the early republic. America’s first dozen presidents—excepting only those named Adams—were slaveholders. Twelve of the first 16 secretaries of state came from slave states. The South initially dominated Congress as well, buoyed by its ability to count three-fifths of the enslaved persons held as property for the purposes of apportionment. 

By the mid-19th century, demographics were clearly on the side of the free states, where the population was rapidly expanding. Immigrants surged across the Atlantic, finding jobs in Northern factories and settling on midwestern farms. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the foreign-born would form 19 percent of the population of the Northern states, but just 4 percent of the Southern population. 

As Southern politicians perceived that demographic trends were starting to favor the North, they began to regard popular democracy itself as a threat. . . . Today, a Republican Party that appeals primarily to white Christian voters is fighting a losing battle. The Electoral College, Supreme Court, and Senate may delay defeat for a time, but they cannot postpone it forever. The GOP’s efforts to cling to power by coercion instead of persuasion have illuminated the perils of defining a political party in a pluralistic democracy around a common heritage, rather than around values or ideals. Consider Trump’s push to slow the pace of immigration, which has backfired spectacularly, turning public opinion against his restrictionist stance.

The post-2012 {GOP defeat] report defined the GOP ideologically, urging its leaders to reach out to new groups, emphasize the values they had in common, and rebuild the party into an organization capable of winning a majority of the votes in a presidential race. Anton’s essay, by contrast, defined the party as the defender of “a people, a civilization” threatened by America’s growing diversity. The GOP’s efforts to broaden its coalition, he thundered, were an abject surrender. If it lost the next election, conservatives would be subjected to “vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent.”

Anton and some 63 million other Americans charged the cockpit. The standard-bearers of the Republican Party were vanquished by a candidate who had never spent a day in public office, and who oozed disdain for democratic processes. Instead of reaching out to a diversifying electorate, Donald Trump doubled down on core Republican constituencies, promising to protect them from a culture and a polity that, he said, were turning against them.

When Trump’s presidency comes to its end, the Republican Party will confront the same choice it faced before his rise, only even more urgently. In 2013, the party’s leaders saw the path that lay before them clearly, and urged Republicans to reach out to voters of diverse backgrounds whose own values matched the “ideals, philosophy and principles” of the GOP. Trumpism deprioritizes conservative ideas and principles in favor of ethno-nationalism.

The stakes in this battle on the right are much higher than the next election. If Republican voters can’t be convinced that democratic elections will continue to offer them a viable path to victory, that they can thrive within a diversifying nation, and that even in defeat their basic rights will be protected, then Trumpism will extend long after Trump leaves office—and our democracy will suffer for it.

Be very afraid for the future. 

Brexit: Putin's Other Huge Victory

One of Vladimir Putin's long term goals has been to destabilize western democracies.  Toward this goal, Russian agents fanned the flames of the pro-Breit forces in the United Kingdom and at the same time worked to throw the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.  Putin has triumphed beyond his wildest dreams. Both the UK and the United States have been torn apart socially and politically as both nations have found themselves with two camps: (i) the rural, older, racist, xenophobic, less educated (and I would add, delusional) base that voted for Brexit and voted for Trump, and (ii) the urban, educated, younger, future facing base that voted to remain in the European Union and against Trump. In the UK, the division is becoming more extreme - and perhaps offers a glimpse of where the USA is headed - and is being likened by some to a civil war.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the simmering animosity splitting the British public.  Here are article excerpts:

Like the election of President Trump, the 2016 Brexit referendum vote crystallized divisions between cities and towns, young and old, the beneficiaries of globalization and those left behind.

And far from fading, the Brexit divide seems to have become entrenched within many British workplaces, families and social circles.

Friendships lost or relationships broken by Brexit have been bemoaned by politicians, featured in newspaper advice columns and spawned novels and at least one play.

According to one survey, more than a third of those who wish to remain in the European Union would be upset if a close relative married a strong leave supporter, suggesting that Brexit has morphed into a clash of values.

In the aftermath of the referendum, Relate, a counseling service, said that a fifth of the 300 relationship support practitioners surveyed had worked with clients who argued over Brexit. And analysts say Britons are increasingly likely to define themselves in relation to Brexit, rather than allegiance to a party, a dividing line noticed by psychotherapists too. “It’s a bit like 16th-century France between the Catholics and the Protestants,” said Brett Kahr, senior clinical research fellow in psychotherapy and mental health at the Center for Child Mental Health, adding: “I think there is a great deal of hatred of one position toward the other, and a lack of willingness to engage.

Some experts worry that, rather than open feuding, a chilly silence has descended across parts of a population that is often adept at avoiding confrontations.

“Brexit is ever-present in the consulting room,” said Sarah Niblock, chief executive of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. “It is now so excruciating, and so difficult for people to have conversations about Brexit — families, workplaces neighbors are so split — there is so much of a division between groups in society that it is almost as if the therapeutic room has become the last place people can talk with any ease.”

Those trying to make sense of it all include Candida Yates, professor of culture and communication at Bournemouth University, who is researching Brexit sentiment. . . . . For the remainers it was rather like a bereavement group. “There was this huge sense of loss. People talked about waking up on the day of the vote crying and in shock and they didn’t fully understand it themselves. They understood that they were upset but why did they feel so strongly? So it was a bit like a therapy group.”

For leavers there was more a sense of grievance than grief, Ms. Yates said, and a feeling “that they had been left behind, they had been forgotten, it was really this town-city divide.” Winning the referendum was an unexpected victory — some described it as a gift — but a precarious one.

“They couldn’t quite believe their luck and also said — even back then in 2016 — ‘It will be taken away,’ ” Ms. Yates said. “They were saying, ‘They won’t let us have it.’

There was a real feeling of ‘them and us’ and a feeling of powerlessness. They had managed to get this, but how long they could hang on to it, they didn’t know,” she added.
“People talked about it being like a civil war,” she said. Indeed, some mentioned Britain’s Civil War, which took place in the 17th century, or even episodes further back in history.  “They talked about the Civil War, they talked about the Norman yoke, people have gone back and back. It’s as if these earlier schisms had been reawoken.”

Frankly, I understand the feelings of the remainers.  I find it very difficult to understand or even remain close to those who voted for Trump.  Their vote, to me, demonstrated that I had misread who I thought these people were. They were not the intelligent, decent people that I thought they were.  Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is smiling.

Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?

As the previous post noted, America offers two different worlds for LGBT Americans.  But increasingly, that division of America into two strongly differing worlds extends far beyond how LGBT citizens are treated - or perhaps more on point, mistreated.  One the one side there are the world of the racists, white supremacists and Christofascists (who from my experience are usually racists as well) and those who want to revive a mythical world where whites were supreme. Opposing them are those welcoming to modernity and a world of diversity and tolerance and equality for all. Yes, the division has perhaps always existed in some form, but it seems to be intensifying.  The divisions seem to be worsening and sadly we have an unfit occupant of the White House who is only too happy to intensify divisions if in his warped, self-centered world it maintains the loyalty of his base, a base that Hillary Clinton rightly described as a basket of delporables.  Where will it lead? That's anyone's guess.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at this near cultural civil war.  Here are excerpts:

A day after the brawling and racist brutality and deaths in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe asked, “How did we get to this place?” The more relevant question after Charlottesville—and other deadly episodes in Ferguson, Charleston, Dallas, St. Paul, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—is where the United States is headed. How fragile is the Union, our republic, and a country that has long been considered the world’s most stable democracy? The dangers are now bigger than the collective episodes of violence. “The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February. The organization documents more than nine hundred active (and growing) hate groups in the United States.

America’s stability is increasingly an undercurrent in political discourse. Earlier this year, I began a conversation with Keith Mines about America’s turmoil. Mines has spent his career—in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the United Nations, and now the State Department—navigating civil wars in other countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He returned to Washington after sixteen years to find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home. It haunts him. In March, Mines was one of several national-security experts whom Foreign Policy asked to evaluate the risks of a second civil war—with percentages. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years.

Other experts’ predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.

“We keep saying, ‘It can’t happen here,’ but then, holy smokes, it can,” Mines told me after we talked, on Sunday, about Charlottesville. The pattern of civil strife has evolved worldwide over the past sixty years. Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales. Mines’s definition of a civil war is large-scale violence that includes a rejection of traditional political authority and requires the National Guard to deal with it. On Saturday, McAuliffe put the National Guard on alert and declared a state of emergency.

To test Mines’s conjecture, I reached out to five prominent Civil War historians this weekend. “When you look at the map of red and blue states and overlap on top of it the map of the Civil War—and who was allied with who in the Civil War—not much has changed,” Judith Giesberg, the editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era and a historian at Villanova University, told me. “We never agreed on the outcome of the Civil War and the direction the country should go in. The postwar amendments were highly contentious—especially the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law—and they still are today. What does it mean to deliver voting rights to people of color? We still don’t know.”

She added, “Does that make us vulnerable to a repeat of the past? I don’t see a repeat of those specific circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we are not entering something similar in the way of a culture war. We are vulnerable to racism, tribalism, and conflicting visions of the way forward for our nation.”

Before Charlottesville, David Blight, a Yale historian, was already planning a conference in November on “American Disunion, Then and Now.” “Parallels and analogies are always risky, but we do have weakened institutions and not just polarized parties but parties that are risking disintegration, which is what happened in the eighteen-fifties,” he told me. “Slavery tore apart, over fifteen years, both major political parties. It destroyed the Whig Party, which was replaced by the Republican Party, and divided the Democratic Party into northern and southern parts.”

“So,” he said, “watch the parties” as an indicator of America’s health.  In the eighteen-fifties, Blight told me, Americans were not good at foreseeing or absorbing the “shock of events,” including the Fugitive Slave Act, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, the John Brown raid, and even the Mexican-American War. “No one predicted them. They forced people to reposition themselves,” Blight said. “We’re going through one of those repositionings now. Trump’s election is one of them, and we’re still trying to figure it out. But it’s not new. It dates to Obama’s election. We thought that would lead culture in the other direction, but it didn’t,” he said. “There was a tremendous resistance from the right, then these episodes of police violence, and all these things [from the past] exploded again. It’s not only a racial polarization but a seizure about identity.”

In the wake of Charlottesville, the chorus of condemnation from politicians across the political spectrum has been encouraging, but it is not necessarily reassuring or an indicator about the future, Gregory Downs, a historian at the University of California at Davis, told me. During the Civil War, even Southern politicians who denounced or were wary of secession for years—including Jefferson Davis—ended up as leaders of the Confederacy. “If the source of conflict is deeply embedded in cultural or social forces, then politicians are not inherently able to restrain them with calls for reason,” Downs said. He called the noxious white supremacists and neo-Nazis the “messengers,” rather than the “architects,” of the Republic’s potential collapse. But, he warned, “We take our stability for granted.”

He dug out for me a quote from the journalist Murat Halstead’s book “The War Claims of the South,” published in 1867. “The lesson of the war that should never depart from us,” Halstead wrote, “is that the American people have no exemption from the ordinary fate of humankind. If we sin, we must suffer for our sins, like the Empires that are tottering and the Nations that have perished.”

“Obviously, we have some pretty deep divisions along multiple lines—racial, ideological, rural versus urban,” he told me. “Whether they will lead to civil war, I doubt. We have strong gravitational forces that counteract what we’re seeing today.” He pointed out that “the spark in Charlottesville—taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee—doesn’t have to do with civil war. People are not debating the Civil War. They’re debating American society and race today.”

Given these divisions, decent, moral people cannot be complacent or refuse to take sides. Throughout history, bad things happen when good people do nothing and fail to act until it is too late. With a would be autocrat in the White House who seems to revel in cruelty and division, one must get involved and act now.  One of the easiest ways to act is to get out and vote against those who market hate and division.  Sadly, these hate merchants are usually Republicans. 

The Right Wing Media's Civil War

In the past the right wing media from Fox News to blogs like Red State have provided a monolithic noise machine attacking Democrats and progressive policies while basically brainwashing its listeners.  It one of the reasons that much of the Republican Party base is so ill informed on so many issues even as the base reacts to the propaganda like Pavlov's dog.  Now, Donald Trump has thrown a wrench in the smooth running operation as some on the right find it impossible to support a serial liar and con-artist who is utterly unprepared and unfit to occupy the White House.  True, most of the right wing media continue to spin lies, but the cracks in the facade are growing as a piece in Salon examines.  Long term, this could be a very good thing for America.  Here are some column highlights:

What good is having a right-wing echo chamber if it’s not cranked up and blaring out a disciplined message during the presidential campaign? The conservative movement continues to grapple with that propaganda question in the wake of Donald Trump clinching the nomination, which has created deep fissures within the right-wing media and its historically united front.

For decades, conservatives have taken pride in their media bubble that not only keeps Republican fans selectively informed about breaking news, but also bashes away at all political foes. In full-fledged campaign mode, the right-wing media can effectively serve as a battering ram that Republicans use to attack their enemies or fend off in-coming volleys.

But Trump has scrambled that long-held equation. Embracing positions that often fall outside the orthodoxy of modern-day conservatism, while simultaneously rolling out non-stop insults, Trump has presented conservative pundits with a monumental headache: How do you defend a creation like Trump? Or as one National Review Trump headline lamented last month, “What’s a Conservative to Do?” 

That riddle is especially tricky when Trump puts would-be allies in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the truly indefensible, like the widening scandal surrounding Trump University, the presumptive nominee’s former real estate seminar business. Over the years the dubious venture has been the subject of several ongoing fraud investigations and lawsuits, including one by the state of New York on behalf of 5,000 alleged victims.
 The strange part? Some key conservative voices agree with the Democrat’s legal assessment. That’s why back in February, a National Review writer denounced the Trump seminars as “a massive scam.” And last month,The Weekly Standard warned that Trump U. represented a “political time bomb” that could doom the candidate’s November chances: “Democrats will see to that.” 

 [W]atching the conservative media this campaign season: It’s been completely knocked off its game. Known for its regimented messaging and willingness to almost robotically defend any Republican front-runner and nominee, Trump is finding only a smattering of defenders when it comes to damning allegations about his scam seminars.

And when Trump recently escalated the Trump U. story by attacking Judge Gonzalo Curiel and insisted he couldn’t be impartial because of his “Mexican heritage,” the presumptive nominee found himself even further isolated within the conservative movement.
 As The Atlantic noted after reviewing previously secret training materials for Trump U., “the playbook focuses on the seminars’ real purpose: to browbeat attendees into purchasing expensive Trump University course packages.” According to an affidavit from former student Richard Hewson, he and his wife “concluded that we had paid over $20,000 for nothing, based on our belief in Donald Trump and the promises made at the free seminar and three-day workshop.” . . . . The con appeared to touch every aspect of the real estate selling events. 

Even Trump’s fiercest media defender, Breitbart.com, has taken a timid approach to the Trump U. fraud story, with the site refusing to offer up a full-throated defense of the alleged scam.

The ferocious conservative echo chamber isn’t built for nuance and it’s not designed for internal debate. But by sparking so much general dissention and by putting conservatives in the position of having to defend something as noxious as Trump U., the nominee is helping to mute the right-wing media voice this campaign season.

Should Democrats Worry About Their Own Possible Civil War?

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With the Republican Party in what amounts to an officially declared civil war and its would be standard bearers being more or less all crazy, it would be easier for Democrats to gloat.  However, the reality is that the Democrat Party has its own divisions and truly serious issue of voter apathy, indifference and, in my view out right laziness.  Elections truly matter, yet too many in the Democrat base literally sit on their asses and fail to vote unless a particularly charismatic candidate manages to motivate the.  Worse yet, the party establishment is out of touch with the base in many ways albeit not as horrifically so as in the case of the GOP. In addition, the Democrat establishment has not pandered to hate-filled extremists and Neanderthals as has been the case with the GOP for over 35 years or more.  A piece in Salon looks at the very real issues that the Democrat establishment needs to address (Are you listening Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hillary?).  Here are excerpts:

Yeah, I know, let’s back up for a minute. I said “post-Bernie landscape.” Deal with it. I’m not going all “I told you so,” even though I did. There really was an opening after New Hampshire, a moment when we all sensed a potential tipping point that could have happened but didn’t quite. That window slammed shut in Nevada and South Carolina and across the South, and I’m not buying the higher-math hypotheses about how Sanders might make inroads with African-American voters in other regions in a way he spectacularly failed to do in the South, and then might win Michigan or Ohio or Florida and push on toward a big victory in New York that flips the race upside down again. I could certainly be wrong, because wrongness is the order of the day in 2016. But I think the next few weeks are about Bernie’s supporters moving through the stages of the Kübler-Ross model and coming to grips with reality, helped along ever so much by uneasy Clintonite gloating.

But here’s the real point: None of that is actually the point. What happens next is far more important. If the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 had a purpose, and still has one, it goes far beyond Bernie Sanders. If the question was whether a septuagenarian senator from Vermont who calls himself a socialist could win the Democratic nomination or the presidential election, the answer was always exceedingly likely to be no. We were all startled to discover how possible and even plausible “yes” looked, for a moment there, and in that possibility we caught a glimpse of a possible future. Bernie Sanders was at best a highly imperfect messenger for such possibilities of political revolution and democratic redemption. If you were designing a candidate to be unelectable on a national scale, you could hardly do better than a crotchety old Jewish guy from Brooklyn whose political ideology has not budged since 1963 and who represents the smallest and most liberal state in the nation. (OK, I exaggerate: Wyoming actually has fewer people than Vermont, not to mention a lot fewer NPR listeners.) 

Indeed, the most striking aspect of the Sanders phenomenon is that he came as close as he did, given how poorly suited he was for the role. Let me say it again: Bernie Sanders was never the solution, and Hillary Clinton, much as she has done to earn the ire and mistrust of critics on the left, was never the problem. They are both symptoms or symbols, and in the short run the outcome of their symbolic collision was not in doubt. But the long run, and the collision between the forces behind Clinton and Sanders — that’s an entirely different matter.

As Sanders’ most ‘roid-raged and testosterone-fueled supporters will ultimately admit, Hillary Clinton is vastly preferable as president to any possible Republican, semi-lovable Rust Belt New Ager John Kasich included. If Clinton runs against Trump or Cruz or Rubio, each of whom is a dangerous opponent in a different register, the distinctions are stark and undeniable. She represents what I recently heard Jeb Bush describe as “regular-order democracy,” and look where that got him. Those guys represent pitchforks and screaming and strange things on fire and the most gruesome scenes from “Game of Thrones.” You won’t catch me hauling out the “Coke vs. Pepsi” line from the Ralph Nader era in this particular election. The 2016 choice is more like last week’s Nestea from the back of the fridge versus a foul-smelling mystery beverage that might be diesel fuel or lawn chemicals or sorority-house vomit, but that someone in a Halloween mask has promised will get you really wasted. 

For Hillary Clinton and the political faction she embodies or represents, America is pretty much OK, both in itself and in its relationship to the world, and American politics are mostly OK too. Yeah, the Republicans have gotten really weird and increasingly crazy and some significant tweaks are needed to correct for that: We need to consolidate gains in LGBT rights and push back on women’s reproductive freedom and confront the lingering legacy of racism. We can make guns a little tougher to buy, make college a little more affordable and make sure that working people have slightly more resources and better healthcare. Those are not bad things! Moreover, it’s understandable that to many Democratic voters those sound like realistic and potentially achievable goals, whereas the Sanders agenda of “political revolution” and free stuff for everyone sounds unhinged and impossible.

The problem with all that is not the agenda itself but the reassuring frame of “regular-order democracy” around it, in which such things might actually happen. No such democracy exists, which was and is the fundamental point of the Sanders campaign. You won’t hear Hillary Clinton use the term “oligarchy” to describe the way the United States is governed, as Sanders does in every stump speech. Why should she? She’s one of the oligarchs, or more properly one of their trusted employees. You won’t hear her say that free-market capitalism has utterly failed to improve the lives of ordinary people, or that the neoliberal economic regime of low taxes and government austerity is a disastrous scam that has robbed from the poor and given to the rich. Or that much of this resulted from the deregulation of financial markets carried out by her husband’s administration and a Democratic Congress, as directed by their oligarch overlords.

Hillary Clinton genuinely believes, I suspect, that things are not nearly as bad as hothead Bernie makes them sound, that most of the problems are things a competent and compassionate administrator can fix, and that the Democratic Party hasn’t made any fundamental mistakes. Change a couple of the proper nouns and that is exactly, word for word, what Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney believed too. A similar comeuppance may be on the way. The Democratic establishment is desperately trying to ignore the moment of popular awakening embodied by the Sanders campaign, or to explain it away. Hence we are told that only young white people want single-payer healthcare, tuition-free public universities or a $15 minimum wage. 

 

We’ve heard the arguments from advocates of the Democratic Long March for many years: On some uncertain day that lies just beyond the visible horizon, we will have our permanent demographic majority and we can start nudging the party away from being the Slightly Gayer Republicans and back toward genuine progressive priorities and policies. 

What those people generally don’t explain is who’s going to make that happen in a political party that has deliberately stripped itself of any core ideology or fundamental set of principles (I’m sorry, but “niceness” and “tolerance” do not count), a party that lacks any coherent socioeconomic base and whose voters no longer even pretend to care unless there’s a charismatic presidential candidate at the top of the ticket.  We already know that the devastating GOP sweep of the 2014 midterms, which produced the largest Republican congressional majority since Herbert Hoover was president, resulted from record low turnout and widespread voter apathy.

Party insiders and “activists,” if any can still be found in that demoralized institution, can’t and won’t make any of that possible. It will take a rebel incursion, an invading force of newcomers from outside the Democratic Party and outside politics, to inject the necessary vitality. It will take a new generation who don’t carry the scars of the Cold War and the Reagan era, who are uncontaminated by the party’s ideological decay and free of its defensive assumptions about the nature of political reality.

Hillary Clinton will almost certainly be the 2016 Democratic nominee, and of course our attention will now shift to the historic nature of her candidacy. But the strange curse that has followed Clinton’s entire career refuses to release its grip, and in the year of the Sanders revolution and the Trump garbage fire she feels a little bit like yesterday’s papers. I think that’s a big reason why Clinton supporters seem so angst-ridden; even in victory she’s had the rug pulled out from beneath her once again.

It was the campaign of Bernie Sanders — quixotic, doomed and fighting uphill against enormous odds — that struck genuine terror into the hearts of the political establishment.

Even in apparent defeat, it introduced us to a newly politicized generation and a whole range of unimagined possibilities, and made clear that the Democratic Party fortress is not as well defended as everyone thought. As we have seen so vividly at the other end of the spectrum, a political party that has drifted off its moorings and alienated its base can become a zone of invasion and conquest and heated internal conflict. Such a conflict has been brewing on the left for decades, and now it’s here. As we have also seen, it could get ugly.

Nothing shows the rot within the Democrat establishment more than Debbie Wasserman Schultz supporting pay day lenders who are the equivalent of loan sharks.   In my view, she needs to go as DNC chair.  That said, notwithstanding her flaws, we must make sure Hillary wins the White House in order to save the nation form more GOP insanity.

The Civil War Within Islam

The American far right likes to paint Islam with a broad brush and equate all Muslims with violent and brutal Islamic extremists such as those who flew planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and more recently massacred innocents in Paris.  In fact, Islam is no more unified than the adherents of Christianity who range from Christian dominionists who want a Christian theocracy and advocate executing gays and others they view as non-believers to liberal Episcopalians and Lutherans.  To hold all Muslims responsible for the sins and horrible acts of the few is akin to holding modern day Lutherans and Episcopalians fully responsible the horrors done by the knuckle dragging evangelical fundamentalists.  Yes, the liberals of both faiths need to loudly condemn the hate and embrace of ignorance that defines the fundamentalist believers - something both groups of liberals and moderates fail to do sufficiently - but one must not miss the reality that a civil war is raging in Islam with large segments of the faithful opposing extremists.  The New York Times looks at what is happening in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation (I suspect that most American Bible thumpers do not even know that Indonesia is a Muslim nation).  Note the role of Saudi Arabia, America's false ally, in exporting extremist versions of Islam.   Here are article highlights:

The scene is horrifyingly familiar. Islamic State soldiers march a line of prisoners to a riverbank, shoot them one by one and dump their bodies over a blood-soaked dock into the water.

But instead of the celebratory music and words of praise expected in a jihadi video, the soundtrack features the former Indonesian president, Abdurrahman Wahid, singing a Javanese mystical poem: “Many who memorize the Quran and Hadith love to condemn others as infidels while ignoring their own infidelity to God, their hearts and minds still mired in filth.”

That powerful scene is one of many in a 90-minute film that amounts to a relentless, religious repudiation of the Islamic State and the opening salvo in a global campaign by the world’s largest Muslim group to challenge its ideology head-on.

The challenge, perhaps surprisingly, comes from Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population but which lies thousands of miles away from the Islamic State’s base in the Middle East.

“The spread of a shallow understanding of Islam renders this situation critical, as highly vocal elements within the Muslim population at large — extremist groups — justify their harsh and often savage behavior by claiming to act in accord with God’s commands, although they are grievously mistaken,” said A. Mustofa Bisri, the spiritual leader of the group, Nahdlatul Ulama, an Indonesian Muslim organization that claims more than 50 million members.

“According to the Sunni view of Islam,” he said, “every aspect and expression of religion should be imbued with love and compassion, and foster the perfection of human nature.”

This message of tolerance is at the heart of the group’s campaign against jihadism, which will be carried out online, and in hotel conference rooms and convention centers from North America to Europe to Asia. The film was released Thursday at the start of a three-day congress by the organization’s youth wing in the Central Java city of Yogyakarta.

As world leaders call for Muslims to take the lead in the ideological battle against a growing and increasingly violent offshoot of their own religion, analysts say the group’s campaign is a welcome antidote to jihadism.

The campaign by Nahdlatul Ulama, known as N.U., for a liberal, pluralistic Islam also comes at a time when Islam is at war with itself over central theological questions of how the faith is defined in the modern era.

In a way, it should not be surprising that this message comes from Indonesia, the home of Islam Nusantara, widely seen as one of the most progressive Islamic movements in the world. The movement — its name is Indonesian for “East Indies Islam” — dates back more than 500 years and promotes a spiritual interpretation of Islam that stresses nonviolence, inclusiveness and acceptance of other religions.

Indonesian Islam blended with local religious beliefs and traditions, creating a pluralistic society despite having a Muslim majority.

Indonesia today has more than 190 million Muslims, but also has a secular government and influential Christian, Hindu and Buddhist minorities.

Such liberalism poses a counterargument to the Islamic State, analysts said.  “We are directly challenging the idea of ISIS, which wants Islam to be uniform, meaning that if there is any other idea of Islam that is not following their ideas, those people are infidels who must be killed,” said Yahya Cholil Staquf, general secretary to the N.U. supreme council. “We will show that is not the case with Islam.”

N.U. has established a nonprofit organization, Bayt ar-Rahmah, in Winston-Salem, N.C., which will be the hub for international activities including conferences and seminars to promote Indonesia’s tradition of nonviolent, pluralistic Islam, Mr. Yahya said.

N.U. is also working with the University of Vienna in Austria, which collects and analyzes ISIS propaganda, to prepare responses to those messages, which N.U. will disseminate online and at conferences.

A prevention center based in Indonesia, expected to be operational by the end of the year, will train male and female Arabic-speaking students to engage with jihadist ideology and messaging under the guidance of N.U. theologians who are consulting Western academia.

In scene after scene, they challenge and denounce the Islamic State’s interpretations of the Quran and the Hadith, the book of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, as factually wrong and perverse.

The Islamic State’s theology, rooted in the fundamentalist Wahhabi movement, takes its cues from medieval Islamic jurisprudence, where slavery and execution of prisoners was accepted. The filmmakers accept the legitimacy of those positions for the time but argue that Islamic law needs to be updated to 21st-century norms.

“The problem with Middle East Islam is they have what I call religious racism,” said Azyumardi Azra, an Islamic scholar and former rector of the State Islamic University in Jakarta. “They feel that only the Arabs are real Muslims and the others are not.”

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the main source of financial support for Wahhabism worldwide, has had more success in imposing its interpretation and has even made inroads in Indonesia. Analysts say a steady flow of money from Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, supports an active and growing Wahhabist movement here.

Hedieh Mirahmadi, president of the World Organization for Resource Development and Education, an organization based in Washington that works to combat extremism, said that, according to open source data, supporters of the Islamic State were sending an average of 2.8 million messages a day to their followers on Twitter.

“Who’s going to counter that?” she asked.  “It’s what they are doing in Indonesia, it’s what we are doing in the U.S., and in other places,” she said. “You flood the space, and you hope people get the right messages.”

Frankly, to me it is maddening that the United States doesn't have a very blunt conversation with the Saudi royals.  Either the export of extremism abroad stops or America needs to drastically rethink its support for the Saudi royals and make it clear that Saudi funds in American banks will be frozen and/or confiscated.  The Saudi regime can crack down on moderates and bloggers but turns a blind eye to the export of Wahhabism.   This is simply unacceptable.

As for Muslims in the USA, my Muslim clients are incredibly hard working and want nothing to do with extremism - they came to America to escape it and make a better life for themselves and their families.   Just like most of our ancestors did. 

Today’s GOP is the Party of Jefferson Davis, Not of Lincoln

I constantly bemoan what has become of the Republican Party that I once knew.  A party where knowledge and learning and science were respected, a party that was moderate on social policies, and where racism wasn't openly celebrated.  That party is dead and gone and, in my view, its demise all tracks to the rise of the Christofascists - many of whom are racists from the South - in the GOP.  A rise that was cynically welcomed by the GOP leadership as a short term - and thoroughly misguided - strategy for winning elections.  The Frankenstein monster thus created now rules the GOP and few GOP elected officials have the moral decency to stand up to these foul elements in the party.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this sad transformation of the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower.  Here are excerpts:

One hundred and fifty years ago Thursday, after Union infantry effectively encircled the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee sent a note to Ulysses S. Grant proposing a meeting to discuss terms of surrender. With that, the Civil War began to end. 

And at some point in the future, it may yet.

[B]ut the old order also managed to adapt itself to the new circumstances. The subjugation of and violence against African Americans continued apace, particularly after U.S. Army troops withdrew from the South at the end of Reconstruction. Black voting was suppressed. The Southern labor system retained, in altered form, its most distinctive characteristic: unfree labor.

Indeed, one reason the race-based subjugation of labor was so resilient was that it was a linchpin not just of the Southern economy, but also of the entire U.S. economy. For much of the 20th century, the prevailing view of the North-South conflict was that it had pitted the increasingly advanced capitalist economy of the North against the pre-modern, quasi-feudal economy of the South. In recent years, however, a spate of new histories has placed the antebellum cotton economy of the South at the very center of 19th-century capitalism.

[T]oday, one of America’s most fundamental problems is that the alliance between the current form of Southern labor and the current form of New York finance is with us still. The five states that have no minimum wage laws of their own are in the South: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Southern-based corporations such as Wal-Mart are among the leading opponents of workers’ right to organize, and as Wal-Mart has expanded into the North and West, so have the “right-to-work” statutes of Southern states been enacted by Republican governments in the Midwest. 

The Southernization of the Republican Party and the increasing domination of Wall Street’s brand of shareholder capitalism over the nation’s economic life have combined to erode both the income and the power of U.S. workers. Unions are anathema to Wall Street and the GOP. Federal regulations empowering consumers and employees are opposed by both.

Fueled by the mega-donations of the mega-rich, today’s Republican Party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise. It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it. 

The American Civil War: The War That Never Ended

Although a native of New York State, I have lived the majority of my life in the South which at times is like living in one huge insane asylum where grievances of 150 years ago remain alive and well in the minds of some who prefer to live in the past even though that past was not as golden as they like to pretend.  If one looks at many of the political problems now facing America, many of them trace directly to the South, it's history of bigotry, and the religious insanity of the Bible Belt where ignorance is seemingly deemed a virtue. Except for the harsh winters, there are indeed times I'd like to return to New York and its relative sanity.  A piece in The Economist looks at the South's continuing refusal to stop living in the past.  Here are excerpts:

FOR something that ended 150 years ago on April 9th, America’s civil war is strangely newsworthy. Last month the Supreme Court heard a case that asked whether Texas should allow the Sons of Confederate Veterans to put a Confederate flag on their car licence-plates, and two white students were expelled from the University of Oklahoma for singing a song about lynching taught to them by a fraternity founded in the antebellum South.

Many Americans remain fascinated by the conflict. In 2002 the Library of Congress estimated that 70,000 books had been published about it, more than one a day since the war ended. This year at Appomattox courthouse in Virginia 1,000 volunteers will dress up to re-enact the surrender there of General Robert E. Lee.

Yet the war is more than an excuse for dressing up. It created a divide that has yet to disappear. For all the economic dynamism of the South, which over the past few decades has almost caught up with the rest of the country economically . . ., it remains a region apart, from the bedroom to the ballot box. If you know whether a state was part of the Confederacy, it is possible to make a reasonably accurate guess about where it stands on a range of seemingly unconnected matters, from party politics to gay marriage.

In the autumn of 2014, when control of the Senate was decided in the mid-term elections, one of the best ways to predict the outcome was to look up the results of the presidential election of 1860.

Today, only five states have no minimum-wage laws; all were Confederate 150 years ago. Of the ten states that lock up the highest proportion of their citizens, seven were Confederate. A further two that make the top ten—Oklahoma and Arizona—were created since 1865 and settled in the late 19th century by southerners escaping the depression that followed defeat.

Does race explain the persistence of difference? This may have been true in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Republicans energetically wooed southern white Democrats who were outraged by Lyndon Johnson’s civil-rights laws. But it no longer fits. The most segregated schools are now in the north-east. Mixed-race marriages are growing faster in some southern states than anywhere else in America.

Religion is a better explanation of southern exceptionalism. The civil war divided most of America’s Protestant sects, says Mark Noll of the University of Notre Dame. Both the Presbyterian and Methodist churches split into northern branches, which opposed slavery, and southern branches, which did not. Even after slavery ended, theological divisions persisted. In the north, which saw mass immigration from all over the world in the decades after the war, Protestant churches had to find some accommodation with Jews, Catholics and, eventually, non-believers.

In the South the share of those born outside America (which was low to begin with) actually fell after the civil war. New migrants moved west or north but rarely south. Because of this, southern churches could hold more traditional views without challenge. Those tented revival meetings that were such a feature of southern Protestantism were not intended to win converts so much as to purify and strengthen beliefs that were already there.

The Southern Baptist movement, which is strongly associated with the “values voters” who favour the Republicans, has its origins in support for slavery.

When piety is grafted on to a small-government political philosophy—57% of southerners think the government does “too much” and only 37% think it should do more, according to Gallup—it explains much of why the South remains different. 

[T]here are two possible futures for what was once the Confederacy. The continuing in-migration of large numbers of northerners, including many African-Americans, may transform the rest of the South the way it has already transformed Virginia and Florida, which are both swing states these days. Or the South might continue to expand its cultural and religious reach westwards, as it has into Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. Or both. Apologists for the old South like to point out that the last action of the war, a skirmish in Texas, resulted in a Confederate victory. It’s not over yet.

As the piece correctly notes, what truly poisons the South is conservative Christianity.  It embraces ignorance, celebrates division, and is terrified of modernity and knowledge.  

Has the Catholic Church Civil War Begun

For some years now the Republican Party has been caught in a civil war that pits the sane and rational Republicans - those that are left - against the insane, ignorance embracing forces of the Christofascists/Tea Party crowd who reject objective reality and oppose any and all modern knowledge.  Now, it seems a similar civil war may be igniting within the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the recent synod on the family in Rome.  In some ways the mindset of the "conservatives" it is not surprising given the fact that it is minds such as theirs that kept the Church's on the wrong side of history time and time again over the centuries be it refusing to concede that the earth revolved around the Sun instead of vice versa or the condemnation of Galileo.  The Spectator looks at the lines being drawn in the latest battle over whether or not the Church should enter the current century.  Here are highlights:

‘At this very critical moment, there is a strong sense that the church is like a ship without a rudder,’ said a prominent Catholic conservative last week. No big deal, you might think. Opponents of Pope Francis have been casting doubt on his leadership abilities for months — and especially since October’s Vatican Synod on the Family, at which liberal cardinals pre-emptively announced a softening of the church’s line on homosexuality and second marriages, only to have their proposals torn up by their colleagues.

But it is a big deal. The ‘rudderless’ comment came not from a mischievous traditionalist blogger but from Cardinal Raymond Burke, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura — that is, president of the Vatican’s supreme court. As it happens, Pope Francis intends to sack Burke, whose habit of dressing up like a Christmas tree at Latin Masses infuriates him. But he hasn’t got round to it yet. And thus we have the most senior American cardinal in Rome publicly questioning the stewardship of the Holy Father — possibly with the tacit approval of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

Nothing like this has happened since the backstabbing behind the scenes at the Second Vatican Council 50 years ago. It raises the question: is the Catholic church in the early stages of a civil war between liberals and conservatives, fought not over liturgical niceties (the source of relatively harmless squabbles under John Paul II and Benedict XVI) but fundamental issues of sexual morality?

The October synod was a disaster for Pope Francis. Before it started, he had successfully tweaked the Catholic mood music relating to divorcees and gay people.

The synod’s ‘special secretary’, the Italian archbishop Bruno Forte, wrote a mid-synod report suggesting that the participants wanted to recognise the virtuous aspects of gay unions. In doing so, Forte — an even more radical figure — overplayed his hand. Most synod fathers wanted no such thing. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal George Pell, head of the Vatican’s finances, were horrified. They ensured that the final report kicked Communion for divorcees into the long grass and did not even mention homosexual relationships. ‘Synod rebuffs Francis on gays,’ reported the media — the last thing the Pope wanted to read.

And now another voice is being heard. The last pope is neither dead nor senile nor as silent as we thought he was going to be. In the last month Benedict XVI has written to the ex-Anglicans of the Ordinariate expressing delight that they now worship in the former Bavarian chapel in Warwick Street, London; to Rome’s Pontifical Urban University about the dangers of relativism; and, most significantly, to supporters of the old liturgy.

Where does this leave Francis? Looking a bit like ‘the Hamlet Pope’, Paul VI, whom he has beatified. He supports some sort of reform, but uncertainty is breaking the church into factions reminiscent of the Anglican Communion. Old enemies of Benedict XVI reckon they can persuade Francis to stack the college of cardinals in their favour. 

Cristina Odone, former editor of the Catholic Herald, says that ‘Francis achieved miracles with his compassionate, off-the-cuff comments that detoxified the Catholic brand. He personifies optimism — but when he tries to turn this into policy he isn’t in command of the procedures or the details. The result is confusion.

 Regardless of what the so-called conservatives want to believe, the Church is dying in the west and it is largely because the Church's far right policies towards gays, women, contraception, and the divorced  are driving people away.  Especially the younger Catholics. Growth in ignorant backward areas such as equatorial Africa will not replace the losses in the west - especially since America and German are the main bank rollers of the Vatican.