Buttigieg’s $7 Million Fundraising Haul Puts Democrats on Notice

Openly gay South Bend (Ind.) Mayor Pete Buttigieg continues to surprise Democrats and pundits alike.  First, one poll showed that 68% of respondents said that they were comfortable with a gay candidate (while seniors are more likely to voice reservations about gay candidates, a majority (56 percent) now say they have no objections).  Second, Buttigieg announced that he had raised over $7 million during his first months on the campaign trail.  Neither of these things were expected and, indeed, on fundraising, Buttigieg is doing better than a number of candidates thought to be more formidable.  A piece in Politico looks at Buttigieg's continued ability to surprise.  Here are excerpts:

Pete Buttigieg’s Monday fundraising announcement carried an unmistakable message to his 2020 rivals: He’s here to stay.

The South Bend (Ind.) mayor has jolted the 2020 presidential campaign with growing media attention and rising public polling, and he did it again Monday by saying he raised over $7 million during his first months on the trail, seeding his campaign with the resources to take advantage of the early burst of national attention.

Buttigieg’s fundraising haul is the clearest sign yet that he’s emerging as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination in an unorthodox way. The 37-year-old, openly gay candidate is raising millions online and capturing the attention of national Democrats in a string of viral moments in recent weeks, while also leaning on a network of fellow mayors to build roots on the ground.

“He’s disrupting the entire 2020 race,” said Jon Soltz, president of VoteVets, a progressive group that hasn’t endorsed a 2020 candidate. Soltz added: “The more and more people hear from him, the more they think he’s the fresh face that they’ve been waiting for.”

Buttigieg is the first presidential candidate to offer a glimpse at his fundraising totals from the first quarter of 2019 — garnering significant cable news coverage all day Monday.

Sanders and O’Rourke’s total first-quarter numbers will also likely dwarf Buttigieg’s. But the mayor is likely to surpass several senators and governors also running for the Democratic presidential nomination, which “is quite extraordinary for a mayor,” said Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic consultant who worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid.

Unlike some of his 2020 primary opponents, Buttigieg didn’t start with a ready-made digital fundraising program to tap into. In an email to supporters, Buttigieg said he “started with just about 20,000 people on our email list, and not many people even knew who I was.” In contrast, Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand sunk millions into their programs during their Senate bids, while O’Rourke built an enormous list of supporters during his Texas Senate bid last cycle.

Buttigieg dropped only $15,000 on Facebook ads in the past three months, near the bottom of the 2020 field.

“Buttigieg’s first-quarter numbers are the stuff of a very real organic phenomenon that establishes him as a surging candidate who has achieved real liftoff.” . . . . It’s also a network that Buttigieg can return to, quarter after quarter, so the small-dollar component of Buttigieg’s early fundraising “is worth so much more than that over the next year,” said Soltz, who also warned that Buttigieg’s newfound status will also likely “start drawing attacks from other candidates.”

[F]or Buttigieg, this fundraising haul “means he’s viable, and at the very least, he’s going to be around for a while,” said Julianna Smoot, a Democratic strategist who served as the national finance director on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“That’s the kind of money that means you can actually start building a strategy for the early states,” Smoot added.

Buttigieg’s viability is also showing up in the polls, where he’s jumped to 4 percent nationally, according to a Quinnipiac University survey released last week. An Iowa-based poll released by another progressive group, Focus On Rural America, also showed Buttigieg moving from 0 to 6 percent support among Democrats in the state.

Former Ambassador David Jacobson, a Democratic donor who donated to the mayor during his failed bid for Democratic National Committee chairman in 2017, said the fundraising haul will help bring more donors to Buttigieg.

“What it does is it [provides] evidence — not just to me and my fundraising friends but to people in general — that, you know what? This guy's got something and I need to look more closely at it,” Jacobson said. “Like everything else, success breeds success. I do think that his number that he released today is going to encourage people to look his way.”

Buttigieg is also surging at a time when another Democrat with deep roots in the industrial Midwest is stumbling.  . . . . “The thing about Mayor Pete is he doesn’t have baggage,” said Democratic activist Molly Jong-Fast, who’s planning to host a fundraiser for Buttigieg.

Trump's Alarming Ignorance About Foreign Aid

With threats to close the U.S./Mexican border - something that will cause possible severe economic damage to the USA and cause severe adverse impacts on U.S. border cities - and his cutting off of all foreign aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Donald Trump has shown his near total ignorance on the issue of foreign aid which more often than not is driven not by U.S. generosity  but instead by the benefits the USA derives. No doubt his ignorance embracing, knuckle dragging base loves that Trump is "punishing" "those people" and is too ignorant to grasp that Trump's actions will only make matters worse and harm U.S. interests.  A piece by former Republican Michael Gerson looks at the stupidity and self-inflicted harm that Trump's petulant ignorance will bring to American interests.  Here are excerpts:

There are times when President Trump manages to be so wrong — so empirically groundless, so logically fallacious, so stridently uninformed — that it seems like a form of parody. But more often than not, this reflects an authentic and alarming ignorance. The mask of a barroom political crank turns out to be the face of the president of the United States.

Such appears to be the case in Trump’s recent threat to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — countries known as the Northern Triangle of Central America — as punishment for their failure to stem migrant flows to the United States.

To make this action a rational one, Trump must imagine that foreign aid is nothing more than cash loaded onto cargo planes and dropped on the presidential compounds of corrupt rulers as reward for subservience to U.S. interests. So he wants to cancel the deliveries until they do what we wish.

The reality of foreign assistance is very different. It is seldom given directly to foreign governments. The work is often contracted to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work in partnership with locals. And it is generally designed to improve conditions within foreign countries that can give rise to global threats.

This role is obvious, say, in fighting infectious diseases. It is better to deal with an Ebola outbreak as close as possible to the source, rather than waiting for the threat to arrive in Georgia or Kansas. But this is equally true when it comes to a flow of refugees.

Consider an example in Guatemala. More than a decade ago, a remarkable institution called International Justice Mission (IJM) — an NGO dedicated to the fight against modern forms of slavery — began working with local authorities to improve the prosecution of child sexual assault. This partnership improved the capacities of police, prosecutors and courts, while making the whole system less traumatizing for survivors. As a result of the initiative — supported by a grant from the State Department — successful prosecutions in Guatemala have increased by 300 percent, imposing real consequences on predators.

Imagine you had a child and lived in a country where children were raped with impunity. Wouldn’t a dangerous trek north to the United States make more sense? But this program and others like it are threatened by [Trump’s] the president’s aid cutoff. In the real world of U.S. interests, we need more of these efforts to reduce the supply side of illegal migration. And the supply side of sexual trafficking. And of criminal gangs. And of the drug trade. And of illegal arms dealing. And of radicalism and terrorism.

One of the main drivers of illegal migration has been the collapse of criminal-justice systems in Central America. And it reflects a global problem. . . . . Roughly a third of people in the world live in relatively just and stable criminal-justice systems. Another third live under the protection of private security forces — a system that turns security into a luxury good. (In Guatemala, for example, there are seven times more people involved in providing private security than public security.) And a third of people live without the effective protection of the law, experiencing what Haugen calls “everyday violence” from corrupt and exploitative officials.

If U.S. policy does not address the functional collapse of criminal-justice systems in places such as the Northern Triangle, it is not seriously addressing the problem of illegal migration. Yet the IJM program in Guatemala and similar efforts are the kind of spending now being threatened by the president’s announcement. This means that U.S. policy has become self-destructive to U.S. interests.

[T]he lack of justice leading to everyday violence has become a global problem, with consequences that spill up on many shores, including our own. It is a matter deserving policy creativity rather than Trump’s public threats.

It would make far more sense to double assistance for these programs — designed to support local reformers, not to impose American solutions — than to end them. But an absence of vision is one cost of ignorance.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer

As noted before, so far I have not decided on the Democrat presidential nominee contender that I support.  Rather, it continues to be a case of who I do not support: Sanders, Harris, Warren, Castro . . .and others to be identified.  Joe Biden - who still has not announced - will likely be added to that list largely because (i) I see him as too old, (ii) I worry about his elect-ability, and (iii) he has a lot of baggage that we can count on being dredged up and thrown his way should he be the nominee. Baggage that could significantly quell much needed enthusiasm to ensure anti-Trump voters actually go to the polls and cast their votes. A long piece in New York Magazine looks at some of this baggage and suggest how problematical it could be when  high turnout will be crucial from every element of the Democrat base.  Here are excerpts:

It’s still three months before the first Democratic debate, nearly a year before Super Tuesday, and he hasn’t even declared yet, but poll after presidential poll continues to show 76-year-old former vice-president Joe Biden leading an enormous, diverse, and talented Democratic field.

It’s almost poetically appropriate. . . . . He is the gaffe-master, the affable fuck-up, and also, oddly, the politician who’s supposed to make us feel safe. He is the amiable, easygoing, handsy-but-harmless guy who’s never going to give you a hard time about your own handsiness or prejudice, who’s gonna make a folksy argument about enacting fundamentally restrictive policies.

For his whole career, Biden’s role has been to comfort the lost, prized, and most fondly imagined Democratic voter, the one who’s like him: that guy in the diner, that guy in Ohio, that guy who’s white and so put off by the changed terms of gendered and racial power in this country that decades ago he fled for the party that was working to roll back the social advancements that had robbed him of his easy hold on power. That guy who believed that the system worked best when it worked for him.

Biden is the Democrats’ answer to the hunger to “make America great again,” dressed up in liberal clothes. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has in fact argued that Biden’s racial politics have offered a form of Trumpism on the left, a “liberal cover to white backlash.” To that I would add, he has provided liberal cover to anti-feminist backlash, the kind of old-fashioned paternalism of powerful men who don’t take women’s claims to their reproductive, professional, or political autonomy particularly seriously, who walk through the world with a casual assurance that men’s access to and authority over women’s bodies is natural.

Now it seems, That Guy is widely viewed as the best and safest candidate to get us out of this perilous and scary political period. But the irony is that so much of what is terrifying and dangerous about this time — the Trump administration, the ever more aggressive erosion of voting and reproductive rights, the crisis in criminal justice and yawning economic chasm between the rich and everyone else — are in fact problems that can in part be laid at the feet of Joe Biden himself, and the guys we’ve regularly been assured are Democrats’ only answer.

Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, 18 years after Brown v. Board of Education, less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and just three years after the Supreme Court case Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education would actually force many schools to fulfill the promise of integration put forth by Brown. Biden took office less than three weeks before Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court and a couple of years before the term “sexual harassment” would be coined by Lin Farley.

The right, meanwhile, was sucking strength from a backlash against disruptive social movements, growing fat and drunk on the language of piety and family values that would undergird its ultraconservative defense of the old power structures, self-righteously fueling up for the Reagan era. Republicans had, for the foreseeable future, won white men — America’s original citizens, the ones around whom our narratives and priorities are calibrated.

Rather than lean into an energetic defense of the values of liberty, equality, and inclusion that might define their role against the racist and anti-feminist backlash of the era, the Democratic Party appeared anxious to distance itself from being the feminized “mommy party,” and shunt to the side — rather than vigorously advocate for — the priorities of women, especially poor women, and people of color.

The party continued to be represented and led by mostly white men. And while officially Democrats remained on the progressive side, supporting reproductive rights, civil rights, and affirmative action, a contingent of Those Guys, Joe Biden notable among them, made folksy rationalizations for abrogating, rather than expanding and more fiercely protecting, new rights and protections.

A young Joe Biden was reliably anti-abortion, claiming that Roe v. Wade “went too far” and that he did not believe that “a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” He voted consistently for the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 legislative rider which forbid government-funded insurance programs from paying for abortion, making abortion all but inaccessible to poor people. In 1981, he proposed the “Biden Amendment,” prohibiting foreign aid to be used in any biomedical research related to abortion. The next year, he supported Jesse Helms’s amendment barring foreign NGOs receiving United States aid from using that aid to perform abortion.

Over the decades, Biden has evolved on the issue, yet into the 1990s and 2000s, he voted for the so-called “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.” And he regularly declined to fully support the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have banned the wide variety of oppressive state restrictions on abortion. . . . Even in the years since he has officially become pro-choice, he’s retained the sensibility first reflected in his comments about how women shouldn’t be wholly in charge of their own decisions . . .

Biden wasn’t simply a comforter of patriarchal impulses toward controlling women’s bodies. Though he campaigned in 1972 as a strong supporter of civil rights, and initially voted in favor of school busing legislation intended to integrate schools in both the North and South, Biden changed his tune a couple of years into his Senate tenure. Faced with angry pressure from white constituents rearing back from integration measures that would mean busing white children into black neighborhoods, Biden previewed his anti-abortion agreement with Republican Jesse Helms by siding with him on anti-busing measures, calling the approach to school integration “a bankrupt concept” and “asinine policy.” Biden’s anti-busing stance offered an out for his Democratic colleagues, several of whom also turned on busing, helping to defeat the legislation.

In later decades, Biden’s legislative efforts reinforced other kinds of racial disparities. In 1988, he co-sponsored legislation that enacted mandatory-minimum sentences for drug possession, including higher sentences for those in possession of crack over powder cocaine, a ruling that specifically targeted poorer African-American and Latino populations, while letting wealthier white drug users off the hook.

But even those constituents — those guys in diners, worried about jobs and mounting debt — haven’t always been served by him. Biden, the senator from Delaware, where many credit card companies and banks are incorporated, has long advocated on behalf of those financial entities. This is one of the ironies of his role as blue-collar Everyman; that guy is regularly screwed by the very companies Biden represents. As beneficiary of enormous campaign donations from his home state’s financial behemoth MBNA, in 1999 Biden voted to repeal Glass-Steagall legislation that, since 1933, had separated commercial and investment banking, paving the way for the financial crisis. Biden was one of a handful of Democrats to oppose a measure that would have required credit card companies to warn consumers of the risks of only paying the minimum due on their credit card bills and worked against legislation that would have increased protections for those whose debts mounted thanks to medical bills and for those in the military.

Then, of course, there was his stewardship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which hit its infamous nadir with the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. . . . Perhaps most crucially, he declined to call any of the three women — Rose Jourdain, Angela Wright, and Sukari Hardnett — who were willing to testify about their own experiences of Thomas’s inappropriate behavior, and thereby corroborate Hill’s claims.

In talking to the Washington Post the year after those hearings, Biden would offer up a pretty good description of the forces that have shaped the political universe, and his role in it, through his decades in political life. “That last hearing was not about Clarence Thomas, it was not about Anita Hill,” he told E.J. Dionne. “It was about a massive power struggle going on in this country, a power struggle between women and men, and a power struggle between minorities and the majority, and it’s a reflection of the schizophrenic personality of the American public now with regard to both those issues, feminism and race.”

Biden is correct that these have been the major power struggles. What he seems less willing to admit is that over and over again, he has been on the wrong side of them.

To be fair to Biden, that is not the whole story of his political career. Because, yes, he has done good and progressive things as well. He has, in many ways, truly “evolved.” . . . As vice-president, Biden famously became an engaged supporter of gay marriage. He has worked to extend the Voting Rights Act and amendments to the Fair Housing Act. In 2010, he supported a bill that reduced those sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. He has voiced some support for $15 minimum-wage measures and has said that the vote he regrets most was the one to repeal Glass-Steagall legislation.

His great feminist achievement was the Violence Against Women Act, a crucial piece of legislation that Republicans remain eager to let lapse, and which is understood in many circles to have been a form of repentance for Biden’s horrifying failures regarding Anita Hill’s testimony.

Biden has managed to squeak out some mild expressions of regret for the impact of the crime bill and his role in the Hill hearings. But most of them feel empty, as if he is unwilling to acknowledge the active role he actually played.

But his remarks about Hill and his failure to account for his own shortcomings during her testimony — his unwillingness to take issues of harassment seriously, despite his work with “It’s On Us” — are only amplified by his actual behavior toward women. This week, Lucy Flores has written about the discomfort that she experienced when Biden touched her oddly before joining her onstage at a political event, days before the 2014 Nevada election in which she was running for lieutenant governor.

To some degree, the appeal of Biden makes sense. Disruption of social order is scary, eruptive, discombobulating. Middle-of-the-road white men feel safe to a country that was built by and around them. But the lasting power of a politician like Biden shows what happens when a period of reflexive comfort stands for too long. Because when you behave as if your party isn’t actually committed to fighting on the side of the disenfranchised, you don’t fight on the side of the disenfranchised.

[A] Supreme Court and decades of federal legislation shaped in part by Joe Biden and his party have managed to reverse many of the achievements of the 20th century’s most transformative social movements: the very achievements that had provoked the kind of backlash that politicians like Joe Biden were put in place to quell.

Very often, we are told — by people on television and in political media, perhaps by the people in our social circle and our families — that Joe Biden is the only way that Democrats can win in 2020. It’s a version of what we have been told over and over and over again for 50 years. But when I look at these last decades, I don’t actually see how much we’ve won with a party run by Those Guys. I see how much we’ve lost.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

America Already Had a Gay President

Gay Democrat presidential nominee candidate Pete Buttigieg.

With South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a gay man married to a man, showing himself to be surprisingly popular among 2020 Democrat nomination contenders, the chatter classes are talking up a storm about Buttigieg and what his candidacy might mean.  The chatter overlooks the reality that were he to be elected, Buttigieg would not be the first gay president of the United States. All that's needed to understand this truth is  to look at history that has not been re-written to make individuals conform to the heterosexual normative.  Over the years I have written several pieces on the fact that Abraham Lincoln was likely gay.  One such piece can be found here.  

William Rufus King.

But Lincoln was not the only possibly gay president.  A college and law school classmate originally from Alabama cross posted a piece from AL.com on Facebook that looks at President James Buchanan - America's only "bachelor president" - and his relationship with William Rufus King (who also served as U.S. vice president and, maybe more surprisingly, was a gay senator from Alabama).  Here are article excerpts:

“If elected, you would be the first openly gay president of the United States,” Stephen Colbert said to Pete Buttigieg after the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, declared his candidacy. While the characterization of being openly gay or “out” is relatively new, the fact is the United States has already had a gay president whose contemporaries knew it: James Buchanan. Indeed, the United States has also had a gay vice president and, maybe more surprisingly, a gay senator from Alabama.

If students taking U.S. history classes are taught anything about Buchanan, they learn that he was "our only bachelor president." How quaint. But, by using euphemisms, we falsely educate students - indeed all Americans - about the realities of this country's history. We also distort how and why Buttigieg's sexual identity matters today.

Before becoming president in 1857, Buchanan openly lived with William Rufus King, who at various times served as senator from Alabama, ambassador to France and, finally, Franklin Pierce's vice president. They met in Washington as young politicians, and lived together on and off for more than 16 years until King's death from tuberculosis in 1853.

Buchanan’s biographer, Jean H. Baker, believes that his relationship with the Southerner King partially explains why this Pennsylvanian was a “doughface,” a Northerner who did not oppose slavery. Indeed, Buchanan explicitly urged the Supreme Court to deliver an expansive ruling in the Dred Scott case - which denied freed slaves American citizenship and forbade Congress from regulating slavery in U.S. territories - and lobbied Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state.

How do we know Buchanan and King were a couple? In 1844, after King assumed his posting in Paris, Buchanan wrote a letter to a friend, complaining about being alone and not being able to find the right gentleman partner:

"I am now 'solitary and alone,' having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection."

Maybe he was only looking for a roommate, but who "woos" a roommate? And he admits he would not deliver "ardent or romantic affection" to a woman.

Similarly, King wrote Buchanan from Paris:

"I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation. For myself, I shall feel lonely in the midst of Paris, for here I shall have no Friend with whom I shall commune as with my own thoughts."

Their peers knew about their relationship, which Buchanan and King made no real effort to hide. Andrew Jackson referred to King as "Miss Nancy" - a euphemism for a homosexual.

Other contemporaries called King Buchanan's "better half," and one congressman referred to him as "Mrs. B." All this would be quite peculiar if Buchanan was not gay. And we are not likely to get more explicit acknowledgment because both Buchanan and King had their personal papers burned after death. By not openly discussing this moment, we forget that being gay in the mid-19th century did not automatically exclude a man from national leadership. The idea that some people, including politicians and social leaders, are gay was not news or shocking to our forefathers. Americans generally considered it a private matter, and irrelevant to holding or performing public office. We obscure or even deny all this history, and, consequently, we miseducated our children and misdirect our attention. Moreover, we obfuscate perhaps the one positive step we took as a country in electing James Buchanan, who makes almost every list of the worst U.S. presidents. Let's stop pretending Buchanan was a bachelor, and take a lesson from our forebears. Instead of focusing on a candidate's sexuality, let's spend our time assessing their aptitude to lead our country in this perilous moment in history.

More Sunday Male Beauty

The Need to Make Hard Decisions on Immigration Reform

In a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic former Republican David Frum makes a reasoned case for the need for comprehensive immigration reform and the need for liberals to get on-board as a means of preventing the fascist approach of racists and bigots (he doesn't name Trump and many in the GOP, but the inference is obvious.)  Of course, the GOP base doesn't want reform and Trump is exacerbating problems driving Central American refugees northward by announcing the end of all aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, stupidly believing that "punishing" the countries will stop the flow north.  Instead, expect the exact opposite to occur since the real solution would be to end the conditions driving refugees to flee in the first place.  Here are some highlights from the piece that looks at the issue from both a historic perspective and looking for a pragmatic way forward (read the entire piece):  

Through much of the 20th century, the United States received comparatively few immigrants. In the 60 years from 1915 until 1975, nearly a human lifetime, the United States admitted fewer immigrants than arrived, legally and illegally, in the single decade of the 1990s.

If you grew up in the 1950s, the 1960s, or even the 1970s, heavy immigration seemed mostly a chapter from the American past, narrated to the nostalgic strains of The Godfather or Fiddler on the Roof. The Ellis Island immigrant-inspection station—through which flowed the ancestors of so many of today’s Americans—closed in 1954. It reopened as a museum in 1990.

Yet rather than fading into history, immigration has only been accelerating. From 1990 to 2015, 44 million people left the global South to find new homes in the global North. They came from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They came to the United States above all, but to the nations of Europe too. The United Kingdom has received nearly as many immigrants, relative to its population, as the United States has. Germany and Sweden have received more. Some 45 million foreign-born people now make their home in the United States. About 11 million to 12 million live here illegally.

As with climate change, separating annual fluctuations from long-term trends is important. Illegal immigration into the United States by Mexicans is now declining. Border crossings by Central Americans are steeply rising. Year by year, immigration numbers may shift up or down. But decade by decade, immigration is remaking nations on a world-altering scale.

By 2027, the foreign-born proportion of the U.S. population is projected to equal its previous all-time peak, in 1890: 14.8 percent. Under present policy, that percentage will keep rising to new records thereafter.

This massive new wave of immigration has brought many benefits to the United States. Of the 122 Americans who won a Nobel Prize from 2000 to 2018, 34 were immigrants. Four of the five Americans who won Nobels in 2016 were born outside the country. Of the 41 Fortune 500 companies created since 1985, eight had an immigrant founder. In many ways, the United States is a stronger, richer, and more dynamic country because of international migration. But large-scale immigration also comes with considerable social and political costs, and those must be accounted for. In November 2018, Hillary Clinton delivered a warning to Europeans that mass immigration was weakening democracy. “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration, because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, referring to the upsurge of far-right populism destabilizing countries such as France and Hungary. “I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken, particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message—‘We are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue, it will continue to roil the body politic.” Clinton’s assessment of the European political situation is accurate. According to recent poll numbers, 63 percent of French people believe too many immigrants are living in their country. One-third of the British people who voted in 2016 to leave the European Union cited immigration as their primary reason. In Germany, 38 percent rate immigration as the most important issue facing their country. Thanks in great part to their anti-immigration messages, populist parties now govern Italy, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

And of course, anti-immigration sentiment was crucial to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Immigration on a very large scale is politically stressful. Yet acknowledging that fact can be hazardous to mainstream politicians. . . . . It wasn’t always this way, even on the left. As recently as 2015, the senator and presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders defended at least some immigration restrictions in language drawn from the immigration-skeptical tradition of organized labor.

But the political rise of Donald Trump has radicalized many of his opponents on immigration. Some mainstream liberal commentators, such as Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times, have called for completely open borders. While not many Democrats have gone that far publicly, some—including most prominently the 2020 presidential hopefuls—have expressed ever greater unease about removing people who cross borders unauthorized. . . . While it would be destabilizing and impractical to remove all the people who have been living peaceably in this country for many years, it does not follow that any non-felon who sets foot in the U.S. has a right to stay here.

Trump demagogically seized on the caravan as a voting issue before the November midterm elections—and goaded many of his critics to equally inflammatory responses. “This whole caravan in the last week of the election is a giant lie. This is Trump’s Reichstag fire. It is a lie,” said a guest on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes. But however manipulatively oversold, the caravan existed . . . .

Demagogues don’t rise by talking about irrelevant issues. Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address: unemployment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immigration now. Voters get to decide what the country’s problems are. Political elites have to devise solutions to those problems. If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones.

Across the developed world, very high levels of immigration have coincided with widening class divisions, the discrediting of political and economic elites, and the rise of extremist politics. And immigration pressures will only intensify in the decades ahead, for reasons obscured by media coverage of immigrants as poor and desperate. That coverage isn’t entirely wrong.

Since 1990, the number of human beings living in extreme poverty—defined as less than $2 a day—has declined by nearly two-thirds. . . . That comparative affluence allows the strivers to buy things once impossibly out of reach: air conditioners, smartphones, motorized vehicles. But the thing those strivers want more than anything else—the great golden ticket into a whole new life—is exit from the less successful countries of the global South into the more successful countries of the global North.

We are talking here about astonishingly large numbers of potential immigrants—large and fast-growing. Egypt will add 50 million people to its population over the next three decades. Bangladesh will reach 200 million people; Pakistan, 300 million. The populations of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, countries that have already sent so many people northward, will rise by 50 percent by 2050, to more than 47 million. Twenty-six African countries will double their population by the time today’s college seniors celebrate their 50th birthday. Altogether, the population of Africa in 2050 will almost equal the entire population of the world in 1950: 2.5 billion people.

Hundreds of millions of people will want to become Americans. Only a relatively small number realistically can. Who should choose which ones do? According to what rules? How will those rules be enforced? The Trump-era debate about a wall misses the point. The planet of tomorrow will be better educated, more mobile, more networked. Huddling behind a concrete barrier will not hold the world at bay when more and more of that world can afford a plane ticket. If Americans want to shape their own national destiny, rather than have it shaped by others, they have decisions to make now.

But at present, the most important immigration decisions are made through an ungainly and ill-considered patchwork of policies. Almost 70 percent of those who settle lawfully in the United States gained entry because they were close relatives of previously admitted immigrants. Many of those previously admitted immigrants were in their turn relatives of someone who had arrived even earlier.

In almost every legal immigration category, the United States executes its policy less by conscious decision than by excruciating delay. The backlog of people whose immigration petitions have been approved for entry but who have not yet been admitted is now nearing 4 million. (Only spouses and children are exempted from annual numerical caps.)

The question before the United States and other advanced countries is not: Immigration, yes or no? In a mobile world, there will inevitably be quite a lot of movement of people. Immigration is not all or nothing. The questions to ask are: How much? What kind?

Too little immigration, and you freeze your country out of the modern world. Too much, or the wrong kind, and you overstress your social-insurance system—and possibly upend your democracy. Choose well, and you build a stronger, richer country for both newcomers and the long-settled. Choose badly, and you aggravate inequality and inflame intergroup hostility. How we choose will shape the future that will in its turn shape us.

[A]ccording to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”

A classic 2005 study by the social scientist Karen Stenner predicted the consequences of such feelings. In any given population, according to Stenner, roughly one-third of people will have authoritarian tendencies. This habit of mind is just part of the way human beings are, in much the same way that a certain percentage will be born with depressive tendencies.

Happily, the authoritarian tendency does not necessarily lead to authoritarian politics. In secure and stable circumstances, it goes dormant.

The extremism and authoritarianism that have surged within the developed world since 2005 draw strength from many social and economic causes. Immigration is only one of them—but it is typically the spark that ignites the larger conflagration. Immigration has done particular damage to political parties of the moderate left. From the 1970s until the 2010s, social-democratic parties dominated the politics of the European Union member states. As of last spring, among the 28 governments of the EU, only Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden were led by social democrats.

Mid-West Flooding: Climate Change Meets a Degraded Infrastructure

The Mid-West remains a bastion for Trump and the Republican Party yet now, the failed policies of the Trump/Pence regime and the GOP are coming home to roost.  Years of inadequate infrastructure spending and denial that climate change is real is colliding head on with some of the worse flooding ever and the aging and sporadically repaired levees are failing in record numbers. The GOP aversion for taxes ignores the reality that infrastructure such as roads and in this case levees, do not miraculously spring out of nowhere and that taxes are needed for the same. Go to France or the UK and you see far better maintained roads and public transit.  They pay more in taxes, but they get something in return (and that doesn't even consider their far better healthcare delivery for the majority of the population, not just the wealthy).  A piece in the New York Times looks at the ongoing disaster in large parts of the Mid-West. One can only wonder what botched disaster relief Trump/Pence will deliver and when voters will wake up to the reality that allowing their votes to be swayed bu appeals to racism and hate is actually against their own economic interest.  Here are article excerpts: 

On the river-specked Midwestern prairie, the thousands of miles of levees are an insurance policy against nature’s whims that, at their best, keep cropland and towns dry, floodwaters at bay and the agriculture-driven economy churning. But the levees are aging, subject to uneven regulation and, in many cases, never designed to withstand the river levels seen in the last decade. 

Many of the levees, usually earthen and topped with grass, were built by farmers decades ago and are now managed by a patchwork of local government agencies known as levee districts that often do not coordinate or even follow the same rules. With increased flooding in the past few years, the levees are being tested more frequently than ever before, straining the finances and expertise of some of those districts. The levee situation has become so grave that the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s levee system a D grade in 2017, suggesting $80 billion in investment over 10 years. According to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees infrastructure on the Missouri River and some of its tributaries, at least 62 levees had been breached or overtopped in the Midwest in March, and hundreds of miles of levees had sustained damage.

“Our levees are big and they’re good,” Mr. Ideker said, but they were no match for this new normal. “Every event seems like it’s higher. It’s higher water. You build the levee higher. And the next time you build it higher. You can’t keep up with it.”

The situation has been exacerbated by wetter rainstorms, which are expected to worsen over time and have been attributed to climate change.

“There are layers that come together when big events like this happen — it’s never just one thing,” said Barbara Mayes Boustead, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who contributed to a 2018 federal report on climate change.

“We’re seeing more water in the river, but we haven’t improved the infrastructure,” said Mr. Waters, who farms along the Missouri River east of Kansas City, Mo. “Basically, when it comes to levees and flood control protection, we’re still driving on gravel roads and we’re trying to handle interstate traffic.”

But building ever-higher levees is not a panacea: Keeping water out of one area only means it will go somewhere else.

In the early 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers and towns along the Mississippi River followed a “levees only” policy that meant building higher and higher walls, leaving the river no way to release its power. That strategy failed spectacularly in the Great Flood of 1927, which inundated 27,000 square miles and displaced one million people. In the aftermath, officials built a more complex Mississippi River system that included a network of spillways and flood ways, as well as other tools, along with the levees.

In the areas hardest hit this past month, where levees are shredded and livelihoods shattered, many blame the Corps. In recent weeks, politicians from some of the flooded states have become vocal critics of the river management plan and called for the prioritization of flood control.

The devastation to the levees has left much of the Midwest with nothing to hold back the waters from even a relatively minor flood, which forecasters have warned is possible in the weeks ahead. As water recedes, at least for the moment, and the conversation shifts to recovery, many in the river bottom said they planned to stay and rebuild, hopeful that policies might change. Others said these levee breaks were probably their last.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be here,” said Rhonda Hunziger, the mayor of Craig, Mo., population 230, where residents piled sandbags through the night in a spirited but futile attempt to save their town from the Missouri River after surrounding levees burst.

Depending on what the insurance company decided, Ms. Hunziger said this could be the flood that forced her to higher ground. “I have lived with floods my whole life,” she said while staring out at the brown-hued water covering her nearly empty town. “And I am about ready to get off the bottom.”

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