By Bernard Avishai, Paul Baicich, Russell Banks, Sue Bergeron, Michael Brod, Nick Bromell, Robert Chametzky, Kristi Coulter (x2), Benj DeMott, Chauncy DeVega, Mark Dudzic, Donna Gaines, Richard Goldstein, Karen Hornick, Bob Ingram, Bruce Jackson, Summer Lee, Bob Levin, Bob Liss, Leslie Lopez, C. Liegh McIness (2), Greil Marcus, Dennis Myers, Nathan Osborne, Ron Primeau, Lee Russell, Ruby Sales, Aram Saroyan, Budd Shenkin, Fredric Smoler, Tom Smucker, Laurie Stone, & Bill Svelmoe.
Letter to My Neighbors (in New Hampshire)
By Bernard Avishai
Dearest Phyllis—and Tom, if you’re listening!
I always feel we have had an unfinished conversation; something you recently wrote to Sidra, Phyllis, prompts me to open up. It is when you wrote her, after visiting a Trump rally, that you are sick of being “talked down to” and that you also try not to be condescending when you get into political conversations with people.
I can’t imagine that, at this point, you and Tom don’t know how much I love and admire you both. You, Phyllis, are among the most soulful and insightful people I know; and I think of Tom as the very model of American responsibility, entrepreneurship and know-how. (I have been teaching a case about his repair business to my students for the last 10 years.) I have nothing but admiration for the way you have coped with all the family ordeals, which is so familiar to Sidra and myself, given the challenges in our own family.
But there is something about this Trump presidency that disturbs me, deeply, and I would not be doing justice to my feelings for you, my respect for you, if I simply held back. It is not that he has been advancing a Republican, or Conservative, or libertarian, ideas. I am still Canadian enough to see that the actions of a Commonwealth in healthcare, climate policy, infrastructure, gun-licensing, and so forth, are terribly important and can work without encroaching on the necessary liberties of people; but I’m perfectly happy to have a conversation about each issue, one at a time, and know that we may disagree, probably will disagree, and still find plenty of common ground. We can debate how much taxing and inequality a society can stand, and you may be surprised how much I (a former HBR editor after all) care about keeping market conditions lively; we can debate, as Breyer and Scalia debated, constitutional matters.
What bugs me so much about Trump, though, is none of these things. Rather, I am concerned that the way he conducts himself, the example he sets, the self-inflation, the desperate need to pretend to know what he clearly does not, the replacement of the sincere search for truth (however provisional) with naked cynicism, the need for loyalty that destroys the civil service, the self-enrichment—all of this, and more—well, republican democracies are not that strong. Actually, democracy is a pretty fragile thing; the norms that Trump represents, or I should say the lack of them, can destroy a democracy. We swim in these norms like fish swim in water, and so barely notice them—or how much our public institutions depend on them.
If I had a student in class who pretended to do the work but didn’t, cheated on exams, made things up on the fly, attacked other students for some kind of superficial difference, but couldn’t stop bragging that he was the smartest, and attacked me, or the college, for not giving him high grades; then also made passes at every woman in the room, insisted on speaking all the time, and lied time after time—look, the problem would not be just how I would feel about him personally, or about the ideology he purported to have, or whether I might find his brass curiously charming, or whether the people he attacked were themselves less than perfect—none of these things. The problem is whether, with this student in the room, I could actually conduct a class. Well, democracy is something like a class we agree to have. We have to believe in the norms of ordinary debate and discourse in order to solve disagreements nonviolently; that’s what American democratic institutions were designed to do.
Don’t misunderstand: what you told me, Phyllis, about being thrilled at Trump rallies has really stuck with me. I can well appreciate that Trump’s apparent frankness—the way he seems to just share everything that comes into his mind—the way he seems not to be some political salesman conning you—well, I can see how that could create so much solidarity among people who are sick and tired of being, as you put it, talked down to.
I fear, however, that this pose of his, of being some regular guy, who just happens to have come into a lot of money, and so has penetrated the elites and knows them, but also hates being talked down to, and so is actually a kind of champion hitting back at all the fancy thinkers—Phyllis, isn’t this the big con? I don’t want to compare Trump to the rise of demagogues and dictators in the 20th century; America has its own language and history. But I’ve watched and read—much better to watch than read!—so many of their speeches—the way they stirred up ordinary citizens who are feeling ignored and misunderstood with the pose of being a victim of hypocritical elites, too. Victim, victim, they are victims just like the rest of us.
Oh, and they love the nation so much. And audiences love them. They speak to us as if they are so sincere, so engaged, and maybe they are, a little. In the end, they can’t live without the power and the attention. Anyway, they are not builders. They destroy for their own momentary thrill the difficult, boring institutions that actually allow us to muddle through.
I get it; there are plenty of old hacks in the Democratic party who also love power much too much. But I think it’s being dishonest to deny that Trump is in a class by himself. He was a running joke in New York long before he was president. If I were selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, or condos in Florida, I would definitely want to hire him. But tell me the truth, Phyllis, would you ever go to a doctor who behaved that way? Would Tom ever hire a mechanic or manager like that? Can we really have a president who, when he’s on television, we have to tell our children and grandchildren not to behave that way?
Trump said something honest last week: he said you may not like my personality but you “need me.” Do we? Is there nothing more to running an economy than the need to project “confidence”? There is nothing more to international diplomacy than the need to project “strength”? (I hear all the time that the economy was better when he took over. Crediting Trump for that would be like saying that Obama was responsible for the recession because, just after he took over, we were losing jobs every month. Moving from third gear to fourth is not first to fourth.)
Anyway, I’ve said enough. More than I should have, probably. Forgive me: I think this election really matters. 10 years of Bibi has brought Israel’s democracy to a point I’m not sure it can recover from. Another four years of Trump and I don’t know what will become of America’s democratic institutions either. I hate to think that everything I was proud of since World War II, the international alliances that Truman and Ike built, the civil rights movement, the sense of tolerance, will all go to hell, or at least into eclipse; that the inclusive democracy I simply took for granted will go the way of Hungary, Italy, and Turkey.
Oh, one more thing: I am also afraid of political violence, and both sides can be guilty of extremes here.
Love, your neighbour always, Bernie
Letter from America
By Kristi Coulter
Dear every Aussie, Brit, Canadian, and European who has chosen this moment to impart STARTLING NEW NEWS to Americans about the state of things in our country: please fuck off into the sea, build yourself a little shell castle, and stay there for the rest of your life. (And take your prissy, smug “sorry to says” with you, because no one believes you are remotely sorry.) Do you have any fucking IDEA how hard Americans are working to change things? Do you understand that we are living under minority rule, enabled by our badly outdated Constitution and made worse by a regressive tax structure and literally centuries of systemic racism? Do you grasp that even in better days, a country of 331 MILLION PEOPLE is going to be more unwieldy than your own double-digit-million, generally more heterogeneous populations? You do not sound concerned. You sound like the kind of person who comes here, visits only Disneyland and Vegas, and then proclaims us to be a superficial nation obsessed with shallow experiences and junk food, again in the tone of SEARING NEW CULTURAL INSIGHT. You sound like an asshole, and I bet that’s your rep in your own country too. But they’re stuck with you, and we can tell you to fuck off. So please do so.
Known Unknowns
By Mark Dudzic
I promised to maintain a Labor Day to Election Day blackout on comments on the inadequacies of the Democratic Presidential and Senatorial tickets because, you know, Trump. So let me just say that Biden has a large but not overwhelming lead, especially given the vicissitudes of the Electoral College. This should be a cause of serious concern and a spur to action.
This is an election where the fog of war is especially thick. How many new voters have the Republicans picked up with their under-the-radar registration drives? How many voters have been purged or will be disqualified under new voter ID provisions? How many mail ballots will be lost, damaged, misplaced or disqualified because of some technical defect? Will the evangelicals mobilize in full force? (You gotta think that, with all the plagues Jehovah is sending our way, some of them might want to take another look at what that says about Pharaoh.) How many voters will be deterred by long lines or intimidated by armed militias at polling places? Will an early season snowstorm strike the Front Range in Colorado? Nobody really knows. But we’re about to find out.
And I never thought I would live to see the day where mainstream pundits are seriously debating the possibilities of a coup and mass political violence. Civic and social movement organizations are busy drafting contingency plans. The AFL-CIO—an organization that in its entire history never once uttered the words “general strike”—is calling on its state leaders to prepare to mobilize in the event that Trump tries to steal the election.
Trump will never concede defeat and he has incited and empowered an armed cohort of fascist wannabes and assorted loonies. So there is a high likelihood that there will be at least some election and post-election violence and disruption. If it quickly becomes clear that Biden has won decisively, those disruptions will be minimal. Things will get a little dicey if it comes down to disputed vote counts in a few key states. But ultimately the rule of law will prevail. Trump has gone out of the way to antagonize the leading elements of the deep state. When the time comes, the Marines will be glad to frog march him out of the White House in time for Anthony Fauci to disinfect it for the next occupant.
After all, now that the pro-business and socially conservative Supreme Court has been safely secured for the next generation, the corporate and political establishment has very little stake in another Tramp administration. Biden is promising a return to neoliberal normalcy. We’ll have to wait until January 20 to see if he can put that toothpaste back in the tube.
Oh, and based on some bitter experiences projecting vote counts in union organizing campaigns, anyone who says that they are undecided at this point in the election is almost certainly going to vote for Trump. The only possible exception is if that person happens to be your grandmother and you can threaten her with no more holiday visits unless she votes for Biden. So do your patriotic duty and call your grandma today.
Brothers in Arms
By Paul Baicich & Lee Russell
Mark Dudzic passed along a note from his friend Paul Baicich who “was president of the Machinists local at National Airport during the Eastern Airlines strike where Trump-buddy Frank Lorenzo bought the airline, tried to bust the unions and ran it into bankruptcy.” Baicich, in turn, had forwarded on an email from his friend Lee Russell
Gang –
Lee Russell and I worked for 13 years together, loading planes on the ramp at DCA, although Lee often was on “day shift” and I would be on “evening shift.” Beyond those 13 years, we were two years together on strike when we became very close. He was the IAMAW LL 796 president before I took on that position. Whatever his role, Lee was a solid leader before and during 691 days of striking (1989-91) at EAL.. The Russell family, like others, went through all the family’s savings during the strike (including all that had been set aside for his three kids to go to college)… All three, instead, went into the military…. Mike, his oldest and a really great kid, was shot down and killed in Afghanistan (2005) while being transferred in a Chinook helicopter….
When I caught up with Lee a few years ago in Fredericksburg, Virginia, I appeared at his door….and we were both wearing Bernie T-shirts… Tells ya something.
He and his new wife are living and retired in Florida… near Cape Canaveral. (Yvonne and I visited him a couple of years ago when driving through Florida.)
Anyhow, I wrote to him last weekend, and he replied today.
It might interest you.
Be safe, Paul
—— Forwarded Message ——
From: “Lee”
Hey Paul
Things are tight here. We have been early voting for a week. It’s scary I am keeping my fingers crossed.
I woke up at 4am last Monday. I made a table with sawhorses and a peace of plywood and put my son’s flag on it.
Then I made a sign. My son was not a looser or a sucker. He was a Hero. Please vote for Joe or leave it blank.
Then I made another sign. John Mccain was an American Hero. Trump is a lier and a cheat.
Then I went to the poll and set it up.
At one point I thought I was going to get beat up. But I held my ground and stayed all day. 7:30 to 5:00 I stood in one spot never moved not even a piss brake. I will do it again on election day and maybe Friday.
Vote Joe.
Your editor chose not to fix spelling errors in the email above since the correspondent wasn’t worried about proofing an email to a friend. Paul Baicich mused about his friend’s way with words:
Lee, with a H.S. degree, still could TALK to our members better than yours truly, with a Masters degree, ever could. Lee was always a natural; I had to learn to unlearn a bunch of crap.
Home to Pueblo
By Leslie Lopez
The author has written compelling “case studies” of how her Indo-Hispano parents became Bernie-to-Trump voters. This editor checked in with her recently, noting that Covid had killed the husband of a beloved Guatemalan-American elder in my neighborhood and asking for an update on her parents. She responded as follows…
Thank you for checking in. I’m so sorry to hear about your friend; my heart really goes to her and your family on your collective loss. This virus hits elders so hard. In NM, we call it the “cabronavirus,” or la cabrona. Chicanos also remind others “no te olvidas tu mascara.”
Apologies for the delayed response, I’ve been in transit back home to Pueblo. After two covid tests (pre/post travel), a quiet quarantine at my in-laws’ welcoming casita on their farm in Sugar City, I just made it to Pueblo last week. Dad turned 80 over the summer and his shoulder is giving out so I needed to come home and help them. I arrived just in time – mom had taken to shooters of fireball (and she doesn’t drink!) and dad was mixing Korean soju with his beer. They’d immersed themselves in Korean dramas and telenovelas. I’m getting them out of the house a bit more, going to the farms at sunrise, taking short drives to the mountains to see the changing aspens, laughing at their wild stories, and dad and I just renewed our fishing licenses.
I’ve also volunteered for the Colorado State Fed a little, CO is a swing state and there are “Latinos for Trump” signs around so I’m trying to work in some cold-calling for the dems between working remotely and helping my parents. I can’t figure out if these signs are from the Proud Boys or official Trump campaign signs (there are two “Latinos for Trump” orgs).
Daily, I gently confront my parents with Trump hypocrisies; and daily they retort: “at least he doesn’t hate the United States”. They don’t see any difference between Biden and Trump as far as the corporate swamp is concerned. But they mistakenly believe that dems are heavily influenced by AOC, Omar, etc. -people they view as dismantling the U.S. They also think the last real chance DC had at cleaning “the swamp” was Sanders. Left with what they perceive as a choice between America-hating liberals or nationalist Trump voters – they’re going with the US, (Trump). Dad genuinely believes the only way to equality in the US is to bring back the draft so all classes do their duty to this country. He believes this would immediately get us out of unnecessary wars. He, my uncles, and grandfathers all the way to the civil war (NM union soldiers) served in the military. My family was here before it was the US. This area was Commanche/Ute/Pueblo/Apache, then New Spain for 250 years, then Mexico for 40, then the US. Granted, conscription was responsible for their service, but they’re proud they did their duty to this country. They see BLM and other racial equality groups as being totally divisive and opportunistic, however, they do support police reform and demilitarization and they don’t think defunding the police would lead to any meaningful reform.
Bear in mind that my mom’s brother, my uncle Henry, was beaten so badly by Pueblo police he had to have a steel plate in his skull. My grandfather knew the Pueblo police and attorneys were in cahoots so he got a Denver lawyer for my uncle. The case went all the way to the CO Supreme court (Harmes v. CO) and mandated video in jail stairwells (the stairwell in Pueblo was notorious for police beatings). My grandma Lopez (Dad’s mom) was charged with vandalism after spitting on a shop window in Rocky Ford that said “No Mexicans of Dogs allowed”. Thankfully, the judge dismissed the charges against her. In Colorado, my parents have dealt with a level of racism and discrimination most people have not experienced – yet, they love this country deeply. They’ve been lifelong democrats, always voting union – which they saw dismantled and outsourced in the 80s. CF&I steel mill closing hit Pueblo hard (like everywhere else). This is their math: Clinton’s + NAFTA = decimation of unions, privatization (swamp). I cringe anytime a Clinton endorses any democrat; it’s the kiss of death for most working class people.
Southern Colorado chicanos have always come through for the dems. Now that collective bargaining for public workers has been won, hopefully Coloradoans will get a taste of what workers’ rights looks and feels like again. Since marijuana has been legalized, massive profits are going to just a few people while dispensary workers are paid minimum wage with no benefits. Further, marijuana warehouses devour water, and they are starting to dominate the Arkansas valley known for its Pueblo chile, Rocky Ford melons, and peaches & cream corn.
I honestly don’t know where we’re headed, Benj. As always, I think unions are the answer – it’s the way I was raised. I’m just glad to be home.
New York, New York
By Tom Smucker
Fellow residents of New York City, let us turn away for a moment from puzzling about Trump supporting Michigan militias, Oregon Proud Boys, Wisconsin farmers, Carolina racists, and Florida Hispanics. Let us ponder instead where this new pre-fascist mix of celebrity, finance, gambling, golfing, partying, publicity, pop culture, and politics was birthed. Not the Deep South, the Far West, the Great Plains, but, it can and did happen here, the Big Apple.
Fear City, New York’s Fiscal Crises and the Rise of Austerity Politics, by Kim Phillips-Fein documents New York’s near bankruptcy in the 1970s, how Gerald Ford and the D.C. Republicans brought Abe Beame and the New York Democrats to heel, dismantling a last bastion of full strength New Deal infrastructure. Towards the end of the book, coup in place, who walks onto center stage, promising to invest, via a complicated scam, in the sagging, unloved city with a glitzy hotel next to Grand Central Station? Donald Trump.
What wound was so deep that the city allowed (begged?) Trump to flourish? Why did so much of the rest of the country respond and bond with a celebrity whose persona was pure New York? Something terrible happened in those swing counties around the Great Lakes in 2016. But it came out of Manhattan.
Putting Cruelty First
By Robert Chametzky
I have been rereading Avishai Margalit’s book from the mid-1990s The decent society. It’s not a long book, and its claim is short and simple seeming: “A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people.” Matters are, indeed, only simple seeming, what with this being political philosophy. Still, the subtleties, distinctions, and refinements never occlude the main point, which, as Alan Ryan noted back when the book was new,
is based on the idea that any sort of cruelty toward [hu]man or beast is wrong. But only people suffer from the sort of cruelty that is humiliation—for example, having one’s stammer mimicked—and a decent society is one that eradicates abuse, where humiliation is a particular form of abuse. The requirement of eradicating all cruelty, including humiliation, does not require any moral justification in its turn, since the paradigm example of moral behavior is behavior that prevents cruelty. This is where justification comes to an end.
And it is the cruelty, and the evident enjoyment of it, that is the aspect of Trump / GOP that is most alarming. Or better: it’s that it isn’t really an aspect at all but is rather their core. All the other—the mendacity, the self-dealing, the toadying—are aspects, and one can, more or less, cope with them. But cruelty retains its capacity to shock.
With respect to the campaign itself, we here in IA are abundantly oversupplied with advertising, as POTUS and congressional seats are all in play, as too are state-level races. It is quite horrible. It leads, also, to reflection on an underacknowledged consequence of direct election of POTUS: if every vote mattered, not just those falling from swinging-states, no place would be spared this stuff, and the costs of campaigns would go upper and upper. Unless, of course, campaign finance reform were enacted—so, thank you, SCUMTUS SCOTUS, bulwark of reaction, for eliminating that possibility.
On Biden we might remember that the last two POTUS to take office (BHO 2008 and The Don 2016) were each in a position to crush a GOP Congress, and neither did, which is part of why we are where we are. BHO’s uniting/healing/Trinitarian self-vision (not red states, not blue states, United States) led him deeply astray (though the miraculous nature of his win might well mislead those given to certain kinds of beliefs–note that he very much likes Marilynne Robinson’s novels). The Don, recall, presented in some ways to the left of the rest of the 2016 GOP candidate flesh-mob (what he said about Social Security, health care, and infrastructure, as well as trade). In the event, however, he had no interest in pursuing any of it (or. apparently, much of anything except being the cock of the walk and feathering the family nest–trade being the odd exception). My worry is that Biden–by all accounts a decent man–might be in such a position too (with Dems taking Congress), but revert to type and “reach across aisle” rather than écrasez l’infâme. Regression, we might fear, not just to the mean, but to the cruel.
Democracy in America
By Fredric Smoler
The calm, dark joke came from a celebrated older journalist interviewing two celebrated and much younger ones. All three were persuasively optimistic about the probability of Biden’s victory and plausibly optimistic about the Senate, and the older one observed that according to a venerated statistician Trump had only a 13% chance of eking a victory in the electoral college (the same statistician now estimates it to be a 10 or 11% percent chance). Then the older journalist noted that if a pilot announced that aircraft had only a 13% chance of crashing, there’d be a rush for the exits.
It’s a subtler joke than I’d first thought. The analogy seems to collapse a second after the punchline, since we can’t rush for the exits. This does the joke no harm; it merely becomes more Eastern European. If Trump wins the Russian joke about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist will become ours, too: the pessimist thinks it can’t get any worse, and the optimist cheerily points out that of course it can! The plane crash gag, in both senses of that word, is the sense that if Trump wins we’ll be Eastern Europeans for at least another four years. Trump at his probable worst is Orban or Morawiecki. If you’re more pessimistic and multiculturally inclined, he’s Modi. He’s not Mussolini, let alone worse, but as they used to say on the Right, we ought not define deviance down. If Trump Victorious loses the popular vote by the likely number of millions, we’re not much of a democracy. If he wins because the judges he’s appointed allow voter suppression on an unprecedented scale, which in conjunction with the pandemic is why he’s likeliest to win, we won’t be much of a republic either. The norms are gone, and if a Republican minority in the Senate retains its current moral character the Constitutional provisions intended to constrain a rogue executive will remain dead letters. If the Boeing of State crashes relatively few American lives will be newly at hazard, but that won’t be true of our political selfhood. We’ll no longer be able to imagine ourselves as wicked old Europe’s second chance, nor as exceptional in any hopeful way. De Gaulle remarked that Petain had perhaps loved the French too much and France not enough. The part of us that an American Petain would have loved will mostly be fine, but that other part, the incorporeal and at least as precious part, will feel dead as nail in door.
Why might the plane crash, and what can be done to improve airline safety for the next flight? The best explanations for Trump’s remaining chance fall into three categories: the increasingly anti-majoritarian character of American constitutional arrangements, the pandemic, and the continuing appeal of Trump’s attacks on what have been called, in this case not unreasonably, the neoliberal policy consensus of the first post-Cold War quarter-century. The pandemic means that even a pretty large popular majority can be undone by the courts. If it isn’t, the courts as now staffed mean that legislation to address the grievances Trump successfully exploited in 2016 will probably be struck down, and the grievances will remain for the next Trump to exploit. The next Trump will almost certainly be less indolent, less fatuous, less feckless and less stupid, but very probably more ruthless, because less madly certain that he can’t lose an honest election, or even an ordinarily dishonest one. Happily, Biden’s victory remains the likeliest outcome, and his will to use that victory to improve airline safety seems to be growing.
Most of the constitutional issues are now widely discussed. The electoral college is anti-majoritarian: if everyone voted—man, woman and child–a straightforward calculation gives every citizen of Wyoming 3.6 times the influence of every Californian. In addition, different percentages of state electorates are too young, or prisoners, or former prisoners, and other groups will in various states find it disproportionately difficult to vote. More and more effective gerrymandering lets bare majorities effectively disenfranchise very large minorities, and votes are worth more in states where few vote, so current Republican strategy is to discourage voting, in a pinch to undo voting. A mathematician calculated that while in 2016 both Oklahoma and Oregon had seven electoral votes, individual votes cast had very different weights in electing the president, because only 52 percent of eligible voters turned out in Oklahoma, while 66.6 percent turned out to vote in Oregon. The mathematician assigned votes cast in OK and OR weights of 1.22 and 0.89. South Carolina’s 56.8 percent turnout, compared to the 69.8 percent turnout in Colorado, meant that while both states have nine electoral votes, in 2016 a vote cast in South Carolina had a weight of 1.09 compared to a Colorado voter’s weight of 0.82. If uneven rates of voting reflected only demography (relative cohort size) plus varying levels of civic virtue, the results might be unwelcome but not necessarily unjust. But few think South Carolinians and Oklahomans are vastly less civic-minded than Oregonians and Coloradans.
Given our history, voter suppression’s intent and effect are ugly. When the Supreme Court dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act Republicans very notoriously got to work, and the most effective Republican tactic in the current election is attempted voter suppression on a heroic scale, enabled first by SCOTUS, at this moment by Republican-appointed lower court federal judges, and in a week or so very possibly by Trump’s new SCOTUS picks. Neither group seem very interested in protecting the right to vote in unprecedented circumstances (the pandemic), nor in very well-precedented circumstances and Trump-appointed judges have ruled in favor of restricting voting rights in 75% of the cases they’ve ruled on. As a wag remarked in 2000, nowadays the President can pick the Supreme Court, and the Court can then pick the President.
Trump has also made majorities on a lot of lower court panels. In a possibly not very close election conducted during a pandemic the Supreme Court and other parts of the federal judiciary may again pick the President. The Senate, too, is widely understood to be anti-majoritarian, e.g. the half a million people who live in Wyoming are represented by two senators, as are forty million people who live in California. The House is imperfectly majoritarian, e.g. Wyoming’s one member represents a bit over half a million people, Delaware’s one more than 900,000, Montana’s just under a million. At the national scale Republicans are overrepresented in the electoral college, the Senate, the House, and the judiciary. If, as still seems likely, the Democrats win b0th the presidency and the legislature, the courts as now constituted have an excellent chance of paralyzing the executive and legislature, which is what happened in both the Gilded Age and during the first part of the New Deal.
So how do we avoid a slightly delayed plane crash, or a plane crash in four years? Much of this, too, is suddenly pretty widely discussed. With the Presidency and legislative majorities, an outlook still likelier than not, plus the will to use what has been won, which means ending the filibuster, the Democrats can soften the electoral college’s anti-majoritarian effects. They can grant statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., abd expand both the House and the courts, both have been done before. Simple majorities can do all of these things and also curtail voter suppression in national elections. Deferring to pre-Trump, pre-McConnell and pre-Gingrich norms would be a one-sided suicide pact, which doesn’t mean we won’t see one, but one-sided suicide pacts are fairly rare. Biden has been a much better candidate than his critics on the Left predicted, and our best hope is that he also turns out to be a more effective president than some of his critics are now predicting. If Biden wins it’ll be in part because most Americans appreciate that he wants to unite the country after a vastly cynical opponent has so industriously and viciously sought to divide it. Paradoxically, we should hope that he doesn’t overvalue unity for his first two years. Instead, doing what is lawful, urgent and absolutely achievable, he should first restore majoritarian democracy, then use it to redress some of the grievances of the many, including a lot of voters Trump betrayed. If Biden reverses the worst aspects of the deregulatory revolution, and doesn’t get distracted by an inverted culture war, there’s a real chance that it’s Trumpism that’ll be dead as nail in door.
The Days Dwindle Down
By Bob Ingram
Here’s this Internet story of a guy driving past a long line of voters and hollers, “How long have you been waiting?”
“Four years,” comes a voice from the middle of the line.
Four years ago seems like Ozzie and Harriet; we had no real idea of the havoc and devastation Trump would wreak on Americans and the institutions that have sustained this country up until his dizzying and treasonous assault.
From his inaugural address, a dark portrait of the American carnage that he predicted and has made come to pass, to his reckless threats to international peace, there was always the perceived threat that when his back was against the final wall, he would invoke a war as a way out. We feared that he would sacrifice American lives to his political life and ambition.
He has. The pandemic that he says is not his responsibility could possibly kill a million Americans if Donald Trump is not replaced. At this writing, a new daily COVID 19 record has been set – and so-called “Trump Country” is where the pandemic is now reaping the most lives.
Trump has withdrawn from the pandemic war that is indeed his total responsibility, urging now that only the most vulnerable be protected and that the rest of America can go on dying until we have reached his impossible nirvana of “herd immunity.”
As November 3 ticks inexorably closer, a symbolic day of reckoning that is fraught with every fear – paranoid and real – of a Trump victory, this mad dog of a president hysterically dashes from crucial state to crucial state, holding superspreader rallies for his death-enchanted followers.
Martin Luther King’s dictum that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” will be severely tested on November 3 – and probably long after that – and many Americans, racked almost to ruin by Trump and the pandemic, have been overwhelmed by a sense of frustration and helplessness that has left us reeling as a nation.
The days are few now until America’s final reckoning. Can we take back what is left of America and begin to rebuild all that Trump and his accomplices have torn down? Can we, quite literally, survive?
November 3 looms. In Philadelphia, Proud Boys and police shared pizza at the Fraternal Order of Police headquarters. Are we that far gone? Has the evil that has infested the Department of Justice with William Barr seeped down to everyday police? Has Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley recovered his moral equilibrium after trailing Trump like a puppy as he marched to St. John’s church to defile the Bible?
So many vital questions will be answered next week and probably weeks beyond that. America is in the balance.
Fired Up
By Summer Lee
“What we hope is that on November 3rd, that we're not facing just an end, but we're facing a beginning… because November 3rd is the day that we begin to rebuild this society.” –PA State Rep. @SummerForPA pic.twitter.com/BpPj61Wv2i
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 24, 2020
Working the Phones
By Sue Bergeron
I’ve been phonebanking for years and frankly, it’s not my favorite way to campaign. It’s near the bottom for effectiveness, as well. My contact average hovers around 10%. If I’m making three hundred calls I might talk to thirty people. Half of those people will curse at me and hang up. That’s very frustrating but options are limited in a pandemic…
I’m amazed at how the diversity of ethnic names that come up on my computer screen has grown over the years. Culled from voter records, they’re registered Democrats and Undeclared voters. Each of these often hard to pronounce names tell a very distinct story. Many times when I reach the people attached to these names they tell me they’re people who came to America seeking a new life and became naturalized citizens. These new citizens’ voting records tell me that most of them vote faithfully. What really upsets me is that many citizens who were born here and have had the right to vote since they were of legal age never bother to do so! I’m pretty good with the names. I try very hard, anyway. Nothing gets you bounced off a call faster than stumbling on a name. Names matter. And the people behind the names matter. I love discussing elections with naturalized Americans. Their stories are inspiring and remind me of who we’re supposed to be as a country. Think Kihzr Khan waving his pocket Constitution in the air. Wake up, people, before you lose this precious right.
I’ve spoken with people from age 18 through age 91 during this week’s vital outreach effort for Pennsylvania, a state rich with 20 Electoral College votes. Trump won PA by a margin of only five votes per district in 2016. That means that even if my contact percentage is low it could still make the difference between winning or losing this election.
Trump hasn’t left the Keystone State out of his Superspreader Rally Tour. In Eastern PA he’s going after the suburban women’s vote with his disgusting dog whistle that Biden is going to put Cory Booker in charge of destroying their suburbs, which is code for creating cheap housing for minorities. But suburban women aren’t buying it. They’re not stupid. They are fed up with Trump’s rhetoric and lies and they are turning on him in droves. I can report that to you because I talk to them about it every day. He’s also trying to attract as many of the hard-nosed Trumpies west of the Philly suburbs as he can. Trump fans line up at the infamous Westmoreland County “Trump House” to drop a donation and buy Trump gear ahead of his rallies. The rural farmers and energy industry workers are a group rich with Trump voters whom he’s courting hard. Those working in the fracking industry are locked into highly lucrative jobs and they’ve been sold Trump’s lie that Biden is going to end fracking in Pennsylvania. This is false. The truth is (much to the chagrin of the Sanders coalition) Biden has made a compromise; a President Biden won’t end fracking that exists, but neither will he allow new fracking in PA. Trump is going out to Western PA, and along with spreading Covid-19 he’s spreading lies to the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers that say “Biden is a Commie” who will outlaw cows and render their farms obsolete. It’s my job to counter this udder nonsense.
Yesterday my contact rate was higher than usual. People want to talk about the changes to the VBM (Vote By Mail) initiative that have been coming hard and fast. Just yesterday another court decision was flipped by the Supreme Court: Pennsylvania Elections Board may now include mail-in ballots received up until November 6th as long as they are post-marked by November 3rd. Believe it or not, Elsie asked me if this meant she could mail her ballot in on the 3rd! “No! Why would you take that chance? Mail it now, Elsie!” Here’s another question from older folk almost too embarrassed to spit it out: “What’s a…naked ballot?” I explain that they must be careful to sign both envelopes, put the unsigned ballot inside the secrecy envelope and then put that envelope inside the stamped envelope. There are many questions about the privacy of their vote, whether the government is tracking them, and complaints that voting has become too complicated. But I have to applaud older Americans who have persevered during this pandemic. I love helping them the most. Some of them chide me for asking them who they’re voting for. I always say, “Did I ask you that? I’m sorry. I don’t usually ask. I like to tell.”
I reached a 20 year old fellow the other day. It was a wrong number and he started off by cursing at me and informed me he was a Socialist. He was pissed off that “the Democrats stole the election from Bernie Sanders, again.” I apologized and he was disarmed immediately. He kept saying the whole election was a “shit show.” It was so sad. I hear this a lot from the very young and it really hurts my heart. We ended up having a long conversation. He was worth it. He said his mail-in ballot was sitting on his dresser and every day he had to fight not to throw it out. “Oh please don’t do that,” I begged him. “Use your voice. It’s too late for me to see the world returned to what it once was. But you can start to rebuild the world right now. What kind of future will you have under four more years of Trump?” He admitted he was very scared of the pandemic. I assured Kyle, “Maybe Biden’s not your favorite choice but he’s a step toward positive change. Trump is killing us. Don’t vote third party, don’t write in, don’t throw that ballot away, Kyle! Fill it out for Joe Biden and go mail it today. You know in your heart it’s the right thing to do.”
Every day I tell myself this is the last phone session. I’m so done. But then an Elsie picks up or a Kyle picks up and I know it’s worth it.
Landslide Biden?!
By Bill Svelmoe
Take a look at the voting lines in Texas, Georgia, Indiana.
These aren’t supposed to be competitive states for Democrats. But people are getting up before dawn, standing in line for ten hours. Many of them are new voters. And somehow I don’t think they’re Trumpers.
The numbers are staggering. The silent commitment to vote in the face of one voter suppression tactic after another enacted by Trump and his Republican enablers is a sign, I suspect, of what is on the horizon. It is the sudden withdrawal of water from the beach before the arrival of the tsunami. Observant Trumpers will be running for the hills.
Keep the focus on the election. If Trump and Trumpism is swept away over the next few weeks, don’t think for an instant that an aroused electorate will let a benign-seeming lawyer from Notre Dame and five perhaps like-minded friends on the Supreme Court extend the rule of Trumpism past its expiration date.
If this election turns into the sound repudiation of Trumpism, perhaps best summed up as simply ideas lacking the covering of any fragment of human decency, that it is shaping up to be, then the Supreme Court will get the message. It follows the will of the people or the people will enact their will on the Court.
Trump’s tenure as the worst president in our history ends with Biden’s victory.
Trumpism ends if we also get the Senate. Capture the Senate, and the Supreme Court gets put on notice. Barrett or no Barrett. Follow the lead of the People’s House, or the people will introduce you to four new colleagues.
And they’ll all look an awful lot like RBG …
On Anything but a Roll
By Bob Levin
I am one of those who can’t forget 2016. So pessimistic optimism is the best I can do.
Each time a “political analyst” says Pennsylvania (or Florida or Jipipp*) is a “must win” state for Trump, I want to shriek and roll on the floor, out the door, down the hill, preferably all the way to New Zealand. “Win” and “Trump” in the same sentence strikes me like a lance through the eyeball. Hasn’t he befouled himself sufficiently to have ground that possibility like a testicle beneath his cloven hoof
And don’t get me started on the Supreme Court. Best case scenario is no progressive legislation for thirty–forty years. Worst is we’re hurled back seventy.
Where did these fuckheads come from? When I was in law school (1964-67), our few conservatives lurked in the shadows, eating spiders, tearing wings from flies. They seemed like diplodoci, sinking into the black ooze of extinction. What reverse-Darwin, soul-swapped dark magic has restored them, black-robed, frozen-souled, gibbering for revenge?
*A Levin family-ism for a distant locale, as in “…from here to Jipipp.”
Fear and Trumpery
By Bob Liss
Gee, Bob says the essence of what I might say, and from the perspective of the very same law school years. Like him, I think of 2016 (which I actually called correctly) whenever it seems to look good for electing Biden, a weak candidate, but he’s all we got.
Being from Manhattan and a private school background, I always felt Trump to be equally pathetic and disgusting. Not worth taking seriously any more than were the tabloids I passed up while waiting at the supermarket checkout line. The idea that this asshole is what my generation, my age cohorts, threw up–let rise to the top–is as incomprehensible as it is revolting. I feel ashamed of myself, of all of us…
This shit has progressed unbelievably, and our disbelief is a big part of the issue. The media complies with Trump’s tactics and agenda, and unwittingly abets him, getting mired in “issues,” of which there are really only two: the pandemic/holocaust proportions and the establishment of a fascist dictatorship.
Those opposing Trump are often actually abetting him, just by giving him coverage, making his outrageous claims the subject of discourse. A gross example of the media’s getting manipulated was the New Yorker‘s having devoted an entire issue’s cartoons to mocking Trump, during his 2016 campaign. We blame Comey, the Russians, but not our own folly. He spent nothing for this free advertisement.
Blame Me for Donald Trump
By Karen Hornick
Sometimes I feel that everything that’s wrong with American politics is because of me.
It’s become common in recent weeks to describe Trump’s particular pathology as “malignant narcissism,” a mental organization that is a little bit short of psychopath or sociopath in terms of obvious craziness but (as we know) just as, maybe more, dangerous to others. If he loses this time (please God) or if he wins again (OMG don’t even say it), we must still come to terms with my generation’s general botching of electoral politics, a series of mistakes and misreadings that stemmed more from personal ambition and aspiration than any of the genuinely collective values upon which Trump routinely spits.
What would have happened, for instance, if I had stayed in my hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania? I left in the mid-1970’s, along with at least 2/3 of my fellow over-achieving students at the local Catholic, working-class high school, with no hope of returning and, to be honest, a bit of fear that I might someday have to move back for more than a visit. It felt like escape from something too small for my big life goals, but now I see that I got out while the going was good. But not for everybody and maybe, in the long run, not even for me.
If we hadn’t left, would Pennsylvania be what it is today, in these 48 hours leading up to November 3, in the words of 538: “arguably the most important swing state this election as it’s currently the likeliest “tipping-point state” in our forecast, or the state that could determine the winner of the Electoral College.”
When I grew up, Johnstown was still a small but bustling town dominated by Big Steel but home to a respectable symphony orchestra, several excellent public high schools, multiple first-run movie houses, a pretty great regional library, good hospitals, and (I still can’t believe this) at least three successful, locally-owned department stores. Some people had less money, others had a lot more, but for the most part everyone was in the same boat. Or so it seemed.
Then a brain drain happened (not that there was much paid brainwork going in Johnstown at its demographic and economic peak). Shortly after I and at least 2/3 of my graduating class left town for college or military service (in expectation of college tuition afterwards), the steel companies abandoned the city. In result, for decades afterwards. Johnstown has struggled to recover through suffering one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Today the population is less than a third of what it was at its highest. The poverty rate of 38.68 in 2019 is now holding steady at 39.
In 2016, and again in 2020, this impoverished, dwindling town became one of the Rustbelt sites most frequently visited by national and international journalists. Wearing MAGA-hats and spouting Facebook-fed paranoia, the locals have seemed ever-happy to meet the reporter’s bottomless appetite for cranky, eccentric scare quotes. Many of the local representatives bear the last names of of kids with whom I’d gone to school. They speak with obvious relish in knowing their words carry shock and awe for their liberal listeners. Some of the quoted ones say they are single-issue voters (they are especially obsessed with abortion), but most of the interviewers linger on the ones more inclined to deliver the whole package: smirking about people of color, robotically repeating QAnonish beliefs, and in general, simultaneously concealing and expressing profound class resentment. When I was a Johnstown kid in the ‘60’s I only experienced views like this in TV and film parodies of John Birch/Cold War era barbarism.
There might be pockets of rabid anti-Communist and racist white people like in places like Indiana, my father said, but not so many in Western PA. Even so, I left that place for college, and I did so in unison with most of my classmates, most of us the children of WWII vets who returned from Europe and the Pacific and went straight to work in the mines and mills. What if, instead of leaving and getting a PhD in the humanities and spending my life teaching literature from a Marxist/feminist perspective to kids whose parents were wealthier and better-educated than mine could even dream of being, what if …
I’d stayed and spent my life persuading the neighbors and classmates who “stayed behind” that the threat of a Democratic socialist takeover, however preposterous and unlikely, is far, far preferable to the extension of the racist and fascist-oil administration that already holds power?
I’d challenge them to explain how come they believe abstract state powers have the right to decide when children must die in war, as targets of police excessive force, and in consequence of inadequate medical funding and the formation of public health policy that favors economic recovery?
I’d plead with them to pay more attention to the rights of individual women to make their own (and, at the moment, still legal) decisions about their own bodies and the organic matter that might be growing within?
What if … all I can hope for on this Sunday two days before the election that the people who live in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and their suburbs turn out to vote, for Biden and Harris, as they’ve never turned out to vote before?
I know how elitist all of the above may sound—I have both benefitted and suffered from those choices and thought patterns—and I know how oddly narcissistic it sounds to take responsibility for the initial election and not impossible re-election of Donald Trump.
But what seems plausible right now is that I and my hometown-leaving cohort displayed a collective narcissism more benign than malignant, but one whose effects were nonetheless pathological. It looks cultural but it’s also clearly political, and I feel Trump happened because I, and so many other liberal and more-to-the-left, college-educated people with comfortable incomes, stopped talking to the proverbial “Thanksgiving uncle,” the Archie Bunkers on the outer branches of the family tree, and all the others we left behind when we went away on the eve of our town’s economic collapse. Maybe the Trumpies of Johnstown may in fact be less intractably bigoted than we think. I’m not sure, and I honestly don’t understand why these ostensibly anti-big-government voters think it’s okay for the state but not individuals to decide what “life” is. I just don’t know. I haven’t had a real conversation with any of them in years, and yet I keep thinking … is there anything I could have done personally to have shaped history differently?
Who Let the Demons Out?
By Russell Banks
In the months leading up to the presidential election of 2016, the demons of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, demons of hatred and fear, having gnawed at the bars of their cages for decades, all got loose at once. For the last five years they’ve roamed the country practically at will. They have taken up residence and are breeding and multiplying in rural and suburban America, in the South and West especially. But after five years of free-roaming, they’re everywhere now, even up in the mountains of my northeastern corner of New York state. They have infected the people I have written about in my stories and novels like Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter and Continental Drift — people who, I confess, I love and in many ways admire. Language and social behavior and political positions that they previously viewed as impolite at best and taboo at worst have been normalized, made conventional, centrist.
These dark, demonic aspects of American identity have been with us from our beginnings. Born and bred in the Old World, they arrived on the shores of the Americas with the enslavers and the genocidal thieves and looters of the continent alongside the enlightened idealists and utopians eager to design and build a New World, democratic and free and egalitarian. Periodically, every few generations or so, we American descendants of those idealists and utopians manage to capture our demons and shackle them with our better nature and lock them in cages, so that, unhindered by their ravening, we can go on building humanity’s last best hope for a just and inclusive society. We did that in the 1960s and -70s, with the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and the work of activist feminists and, more recently, the LGBTQ community. We did it earlier in the 1930s with Roosevelt’s New Deal; in the first decade of the twentieth century with Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal; under Lincoln in the Civil War; and so on, back to before the time of the founders.
Sometimes it’s a dynamic, visionary leader who breaks out the shackles, and sometimes it’s a large, vocal, energized segment of the general populace. The periodicity and regular return of the caging of our loosed demons is what gives us hope for an end to the dark madness brought on by their escape. While they roam the countryside we comfort ourselves, more or less peaceably enduring the madness they bring, because we believe that it’s a temporary madness, and with the next election, or surely with the one after that, our better angels will bring an end to it, and we can go back to work building that just and inclusive society dreamed up by our ancestors.
But after four years of government by and for the demons of the dark side of our national soul, we have to ask ourselves if it’s still possible to capture, shackle and cage them yet one more time. Or have they grown so numerous and fat and so deeply embedded in our culture and governance that it’s now the better angels of our nature who are shackled and caged instead?
Donald Trump and his cohort and minions have devoured the Republican Party whole and have legitimized the hatreds and fears of over one-third of the voting population and possibly one-half of the general population. The most-watched media outlet in the country, Fox News, has become the propaganda arm of demonology and in the process has managed to lock down our better angels, the idealistic half of our population, the half dedicated to creating that just, inclusive society envisioned by our founders and their constitution and our declaration of independence from the crimes of the Old World.
Trump and his supporters in the Senate have weaponized the courts from the local level up to the Supreme Court; loosed private squads of heavily armed vigilantes to storm the streets to disband peaceful protests and surround polling places in order to intimidate voters and plot to kidnap governors who dare to protect their citizens from the ravages of a deadly pandemic. The rich have grown richer by multiples, and the numbers of the poor have increased geometrically.
Meanwhile, the rest of us, the half of the nation horrified by these turns of events, have retreated to small colonies of the saved, growing increasingly parochial and powerless, talking and preaching only to ourselves and to those who already agree with us, relying on each other and on what Trump has managed to contaminate as “fake news” for information about the world that has overtaken us. Joe Biden may well win the election on November 3rd, but my great fear is that Trump will refuse to lose, and half the country and the Senate and the Supreme Court will aid and abet him. Regardless of the results of the election, Trump will remain president until January 20, 2021, and the Senate will remain in the hands of the Republicans.
Between November 3rd and January 20th, we may be facing the conditions that bring about a military coup, although it will not be called that. The Covid-19 pandemic and its dire economic consequences and the requirements of national security may be used to justify a suspension of the electoral results. Biden is 77 years old, weakened politically by decades of compromise and accommodation, and his vice-president will be a middle-aged woman of color, a liberal senator from California. It’s difficult to imagine them bringing us to our senses in the face of a dedicated, well-financed thermidorian reaction to the Obama years and to the social and cultural changes of recent decades in matters of sexuality, race, law enforcement, and technology, a reaction enforced by national and state military units and militarized law enforcement departments and armed civilian militias. We were given a taste of that impulse and power in action this past summer during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, Washington, DC, New York City, and other American cities.
In recent weeks I’ve been re-reading Faulkner. His work terrifies me even as it clarifies what we’re up against, which is to say, who we really are. His novels are set in the 1920s and -30s, but that’s not ancient history. It’s my parents’ generation. It’s my history. Faulkner’s White characters are vicious racists, white supremacists to the bone, violent and armed, poor and ill-educated, reverent celebrants of the Lost Cause, bitter and terrified and childishly insecure. Not unlike my parents and my uncles and aunts — New Englanders, yes, but poor White American working people who had been poor White working people for ten generations. Faulkner saw them clearly, and yet he loved them. He saw that their hearts had been eaten by demons, the demons of history. This is a time to be afraid, my friends, a time to be very afraid. A storm the likes of which we have not seen in our long history is fast approaching.
Letter to You
By Benj DeMott
Bruce Springsteen roars No in Thunder to Trump in the chorus of “Rainmaker”–a track on his new CD, Letter to You. He images our grifter-in-chief as a hustler who tricks farmers longing to end a drought.
“Rainmaker, a little faith for hire
Rainmaker, the house is on fire
Rainmaker, take evеrything you have
Sometimes folks need to bеlieve in something so bad, so bad, so bad
They’ll hire a rainmaker”
Springsteen stretches out the term “rainmaker,” wrenching it into a retch that summons up his own revulsion at Trump. That triple-“so bad” in the chorus refuses to let Trump’s chumps off the hook, yet Springsteen has sympathy for the benighted. He’s always known the darkness on the edge of the town can get really dark and he catches the appeal of Trump’s clunky yet fascinating fasc:
“Slow moving wagon drawing through a dry town
Painted rainbow, crescent moon, and dark clouds
Brother patriot, come forth and lay it down
Your blood brother for king and crown
For your rainmaker”
Another couplet—“Rainmaker says white’s black and black’s white/Says night’s day and day’s night”—is tuned to Trump’s presidency. Listening to it, I flashed on the whopper that launched this month’s Trump rally in Michigan (per Mark Danner’s report in NYRB):
Amid the sensory swirl of the airplane hangar in Freeland, Michigan—the thousands of voices screaming, the red MAGA hats bobbing and shifting, the fifty-foot flags on cranes flapping and snapping, the long sleek blue-and-white bulk of Air Force One gleaming, the elbow-to-elbow crowd heaving and swelling (and, in my worried fancy, the predatory virus molecules dancing ominously amid the sea of tiny Trumps filling countless tiny cell phone screens)—the leader slow-walks toward us, fist pumping slowly, with that trademark ponderous tread of his (dating back at least to his boardroom entrances in The Apprentice), adjusts the mike, leans slightly sideways, and lances into it all with a stark declaration: “We brought you a lot of car plants, Michigan! We brought you a lot of car plants. You know that, right?”
Comes in prompt response the ear-splitting roar of affirmation, clear as clear can be: Yes, Mr. President, we know that! A joyful knowledge, a knowledge to celebrate: all those jobs in all those car plants! But what exactly is it possible to know about those car plants? I could not have been the only one in that obstreperous crowd, made up overwhelmingly of Michiganders, to know the presumably important fact that, well…those car plants didn’t exist.
Smoke from Detroit’s gone factories gets in my ears when I hear “Rainmaker.” I may be projecting but the cadences and piano-vs.-strings arrangement at the top seem to move in counterpoint to the Motown classic “Since I Lost My Baby.” The likeness I hear isn’t as undeniable as other Sixties echoes on Letter to You. (It’s not an homage like the break-down to the Beatles’ “I Got a Feeling” near the end of “If I were a Priest” or the opening drum-shot of “Jeanie Needs a Shooter,” which hits even harder than the one heard round the world in “Like a Rolling Stone.”) Yet I’m pretty sure Smokey Robinson’s glorious composition for the Temptations is lurking in “Rainmaker’s” music just as the song’s story looks back to the Burt Lancaster flic, The Rainmaker (1956), about a hustler in the heartland. Such pop references deepen “Rainmaker’s” soundtrack for the new, weird America, enabling Springsteen to hint at how far backward we’ve gone. While “Since I lost My Baby” is (putatively) a sad song, its yearning is grounded in an undoomy Midwest dailiness that’s almost unimaginable now.
“Sun a-shining, there’s plenty of light
A new day is dawning sunny and bright…
Birds are singing and the children are playing
There’s plenty of work and the bosses are paying
Not a sad word should my young heart be saying…”
I used to wonder why the song’s first utopian minute was really all I (or anyone) needed. Maybe it always evoked a time when Motown was the move and that social fact overrode the singer’s private woe. (I played the song a hundred times without ever hearing the line that limned what a young heart shouldn’t be saying–“But fun is a bore and with money I’m poor.” A rhyme that sounds pretty rich in retrospect.) Fifty years down the road—decades after deindustrialization ravaged cities and rural regions in the rust belt—“Rainmaker” takes in Smokey’s optimism and spits back ashes.
“Rainmaker” isn’t a one-off. Springsteen rips the “criminal clown” on America’s “throne” in another song, yet Letter to You isn’t pitched to current events in the way that, say, The Rising was made for the aftermath of 9/11. Faulkner said somewhere that The Sound and the Fury came out of a single image of a girl, shimmied up a tree, peeking in an upstairs widow, her muddy drawers being spied on by her younger brother lower down the tree. If there’s an image behind Letter to a Friend it may be a composite of all the Irish and Italian wakes Springsteen went to as kid. In a film about the making of the CD, Springsteen channels a Kerouac-y voice as memories of trainspotting in Freehold lead to a mortality ode…
By five or six, you were expected to go with your parents through the door of the funeral home with your hand in theirs make your way through the crowded room to the coffin then kneel at its side and stare death briefly in the eye…Your parents would raucously mingle. Then after a while you rode home with a strange sense of terror-filled accomplishment filling your young soul.
Back home, the bedtime prayer with that line about “if I die before I wake” seemed less rote and more ominous. In the film Springsteen’s memory segues into “One Minute You’re Here.” That’s the opening track on Letter to You where it preps you for the ride, though its acoustic folk-ish tones are removed from full-band work-outs that define the album. “One Minute You’re Here’s” mortal thoughts underscore the message in the music when Springsteen goes electric: “I’M ALIVE!” (as he yawps on “Ghosts”).
“One Minute You’re Here” has picked up a new shadow as we head into a hard covid winter.
“Autumn carnival on the edge of town
We walk down the midway arm-in-arm
One minute you’re here
Next minute you’re gone”
The song was actually born before the pandemic. Springsteen says the death in 2018 of his old friend George Thiess was germinal for Letter to You. Thiess formed the first band Springsteen joined. On Letter to You, Springsteen updates the rock-n-soul sounds he tried on with The Castilles as he found his vocation in the aural wonderland that was Anglo-American pop in the years between 1965-68.
Back in 2018, I lost the comrade who shared those sounds of surprise with me. It felt painfully apt that I first heard Letter to You on the 2nd anniversary of my brother Tom’s death. If he was here, Letter might’ve been our Thanksgiving CD this year, but I doubt we’d’ve waited to savor how Springsteen and the E-Street band get it, get it, get it, and then turn around and…get it again.
Joint exaltation, though, wouldn’t have been in the cards until after the Don is gone. (I’m just now reminded that Tommy, my Bernie Bro, had a clue long before me that America might be headed for some mean seasons. On a cross-country road trip in 2015 he saw tons of signs for Trump and Bernie, very few for Hillary.) But if we get our country back this week, I won’t just get on board Bruce’s burning train, I’ll crank the volume so my brother will hear it on the other side.
Where’s Roger Ailes?
By Dennis Myers
Elect This
By Laurie Stone
Sacha Baron Cohen–I’ll be your Jew. That’s how I read him. Monied, educated, and English. But still a Jew in that world. The world of Virginia Woolf’s casual, de rigueur anti-Semitic quips and Orwell’s spittle. The Jew in England. Shylock and Fagan. The nose, the hands greasy from counting money. Above all vulgar and out of it socially. Big gestures. Hands and voice. Vulgar in the extreme, and they seem to enjoy it, they seem not to understand how repulsive the rest of us find them. Cohen’s response: You want to see the Jew you secretly harbor in your thoughts, the Jew you no longer dare to speak about publicly–I’ll be your Jew, and in being your Jew, I will show you who you are. He’s fearless because of his class and accent, also his tall, handsome manself. Go baby, be their Jew and our reckless vulgarian. There is so much pleasure in what is understood as vulgarity. Another word for this is comedy.
xxx
Additional words on behalf of the cock in public space. The Toobin cock, any cock. When the vulnerability of the male body is introduced for evaluation—the size of the schlong, the beauty or ugliness of other parts—it levels the field on what can and cannot be protected by privacy. Power affords privacy. Poor people don’t get to have privacy. It is thought unremarkable to publicly scrutinize every pore and follicle on the female body.
Planet Spin
By Aram Saroyan
One of the things that’s come into sharper focus for me during this planetary turn of the wheel is that looking at misogyny or racism as systemic problems stitched into us more deeply than can be addressed on an ad hoc basis—that accepting that understanding probably represents an evolutionary advance of consciousness.
Big Muddy
By C. Leigh McInnes
I vote because my Pops was jailed for working to improve this country and because, if one does not participate in the democratic process, one is allowing others to make all the decisions. But I can’t think of the last time that I voted for someone that I knew was completely dedicated to black people and was not beholden to a machine that would limit the work that the person wanted to do for black people.
With that said, let’s discuss Ice Cube. When I first learned of the controversy, my initial thought was, “Damn, I didn’t know that NWA stands for Negroes Wanna Assimilate.” But, as I began to read and listen more intently, I realized that there are four aspects of this conundrum that must be analyzed before one makes a judgment. One, the Democrats did not take Ice Cube’s proposal seriously and treated him like a novice. Rather than giving Ice Cube respect or scheduling time for him to talk with their economic strategists, they simply told him, “We’ll get back to you after the election.” Everybody knows that when someone tells you, “I’ll get back to you later,” that usually means the person is not interested. It’s the “Don’t call us; we’ll call you” stiff-arm move. So, the first mistake was by the Democrat Party, treating Ice Cube as if his idea or program was insignificant. Two, the Trump Administration is proving that it is simply better at pimping black people than the Democrats. There is nothing in Trump’s history that makes one believe that he or his staff have any real interest in helping black people. But they are smart enough to give “lip service” to Ice Cube just so they can say, “See, we are willing to work with black people.” Three, while Ice Cube has not endorsed Trump or anyone, he’s allowing himself to be used by the Trump Administration to cloak their white supremacy. Although the Trump Administration is saying that they will work with him, neither he nor they have offered any specifics of what or how the Trump Administration will implement or utilize Ice Cube’s program. Ice Cube stated the Trump Administration has “altered its plan” to implement some of Ice Cube’s ideas. I would like more evidence. Until I see specific details, Ice Cube and Trumpists (per James Brown) “are like a dull knife, just ain’t cuttin’. You just talkin’ loud and sayin’ nuthin’.” I understand Ice Cube’s point about working with anyone who shows the willingness to help black people. But other than signing the HBCU permanent funding bill, Trump’s policies have constrained black people rather than helping them. And, even with the HBCU funding law, it wasn’t authored by Trump’s Administration, and Trump has implemented other policies that make it impossible for that law to be effective. In essence, although Ice Cube has good intentions, he has fallen prey to a Trojan Horse scam, in which something that looks like a peace offering conceals weapons that will be used to stab you in the back. Finally, the tweet/announcement by the Trump Administration that Ice Cube is supporting Trump is another ruse that’s dangerous to black people. Again, I’ll allow Ice Cube never said that he is supporting Trump. He’s claimed—in video and in writing—that he hasn’t endorsed anyone and that, after he posted his plan, both parties contacted him with different levels of responsiveness. So, while I want more clarity from Ice Cube, I’m not sure what more he can say to underscore he is not supporting Trump Ultimately, this is another great pimp (chess) move by Trump with Democrats being out-foxed by Republicans, leaving Ice Cube to take the lion’s share of the blame. This whole story may be another example that, in general, black people tend not engage in the kind of nuanced, critical thinking that we need so that we can judge political actors in a way that enables us to solve problems. What we have here, in the end, is just a big mess, which is what the Trump Administration wants. It serves their interests to muddy up the issues around the election. Trump benefits when black folks lose focus on defeating him because they are too busy fighting each other.
Committee of Correspondence
By Nick Bromell
Dear Friends, Classmates, Colleagues, Allies:
THANK YOU SO MUCH! In response to my last letter from Democrats without Borders, you contributed an additional $2445 to the Cabarrus County (NC) Democrats, bringing our total to over $4300. Your generous outpouring of support has been a total gamechanger for the Cabarrus Democrats.
In this, my last letter before the election, I want to explain why the help you are lending Cabarrus County Dems is so crucial. I also want to let you know about two amazing Black women who are on the front lines there in the struggle against Trump’s Republican party. Finally, I have to share some discouraging facts about who supports Trump in North Carolina.
Although Cabarrus has been a conservative region for decades, as this map illustrates, the 8th District (in which it’s located) is now the most “flippable” in North Carolina. As I write, the Democratic challenger Patricia Timmons-Goodson trails Republican incumbent Richard Hudson by just 44% to 42%, with a sizable number of voters (14%) still undecided.
Timmons-Goodson is just one of many Black women who have become leaders in the struggle to defeat Trump. Before entering politics, she was the first Black woman to serve on North Carolina’s Supreme Court. In 2016, she was nominated by President Obama to serve as a federal judge. (But guess what? the nomination was blocked by Senators Richard Burr and Mitch McConnell.)
High-school principal Aimy Steele is a second Black woman striving to flip Cabarrus County blue. Fed up with the Republicans’ persistent defunding of public schools, she is running to represent NC-H82 (which includes much of Cabarrus County) in the North Carolina State House.
This race matters tremendously. Next year the North Carolina state legislature will redraw its district maps, and those maps will remain law for ten years. As you know, the Republicans have already gerrymandered the state beyond belief. In 2021, after this year’s modest, court-ordered reforms, they will have a chance to do it all over again.
To block them, the Democrats must pick up at least five new seats. Aimy Steele’s closely contested race is one of their strongest hopes. In 2018, she came within 6 points of upsetting the Republican incumbent. Now, the race is even tighter. Thanks to the recent court-ordered reform of gerrymandering, her district has been redrawn to be 3 points more favorable for Democrats. This is a winnable contest!
But let’s take a quick look at what she’s up against.
Her Republican opponent Kristin Baker has out-fundraised Steele by a margin of 2-1. The bulk of her donations, you may be surprised to learn, comes from medical professionals. Ten North Carolina medical practices have contributed $5000 each to Baker, or $50,000 collectively.[*] (By contrast, Steele has raised a total of $63,614.)
These eye-opening figures underscore that Trump supporters are not just noisy pickup-driving, horn-honking, flag-waving white men without a college degree. They also include radiologists, anesthesiologists, and other doctors and medical professionals – even though Trump is undoubtedly the most anti-science and anti-medicine president in US history.
So, we have our work cut out for us. We need to think at the local, not just the national level. Trump might be gone in six months, but the mindset that supports him will hang around for a long while. It is pervasive, and it is well funded – and not just by billionaires like the Koch brothers. So, with just 14 days left until the most important election day of our lifetimes, I ask you to remain alert, active, and generous. Please do consider making contributions to Aimy Steele and Patricia Timmons-Goodson, two courageous Black women who have stepped forward to battle Trumpists in critical races in a key swing state. As the game clock winds down, a fresh surge of support could get them to victory.
[*] Providence Anesthesiology PAC, Anesthesiologists of the Triad PAC, Central Carolina Radiologists for the Improvement of Medicine PAC, East Carolina Anesthesia Associates, Eastern Radiological PAC, NC Medical Soc State PAC, Northeast Anesthesia and Pain Specialists PAC, Piedmont Radiologists for Quality Medical Care PAC, Piedmont Triad Anesthesia Federal PAC, Southeastern Radiology Org PAC.
The Malignancy that Leapfrogs Crazy Tuesday
Bruce Jackson
Bonespurs
I’m assuming BoneSpurs will get his sorry ass whipped on Tuesday. If he doesn’t, anyone in the rational group reading this will have no better explanation of such a disaster than any of the 24/7 pundits. It might make some kind of sense, but not ours. We read. We think. We remember. He should be drowned in so many votes even his suck appointees to the Supreme Court won’t be able to ignore the mandate
But our kind of rational sense is not what Donald Trump is about, nor has it ever been, nor is it why his supporters have poured billions of $$ into whatever coffers have been open to give him whatever access he has thus far had.
Acceptance
Reporters keep asking BoneSpurs and his sucks whether or not he will ACCEPT an election in which Biden wins. He either evades or comes out with his favorite non sequitur, “The only way I could lose is if the election is rigged.” That is, of course, absurd. He could lose for a lot of reasons: he loses because he got fewer votes. He could have gotten fewer votes because he flunked at the job, because he’s a gonif, he understands nothing, he’s a misogynist, a racist, because he’s an aliterate sociopath…. The list is endless.
The kneejerk press had that conversation with him four years ago, and it was just as meaningless then as it is now. His acceptance or lack thereof goes to his mood or belief; it has nothing to do with what the various election commissions will certify and the courts will uphold; it has nothing to do with fact. It is like some idiot staring at the moon and screaming, “I shall never die.” Well, idiot, you shall. We may not bury you, but die you shall and we shall watch you rot.
This is not going to be Florida 2000 redux, when Al Gore folded before a Supreme Court he knew was going to cut him off at the knees anyway. Trump’s “acceptance” is as meaningless as his coming out of the crapper and telling Melania, “I just had [or didn’t have] a good shit.” Okay: so? As if she cared.
If, on January 20, he sits down on the floor of the Oval Office with his thumb in his mouth and holds his breath until his face turns blue, no matter: the U.S. marshals, who as of noon that day will have been working for Joe Biden, will drag him out, kicking and screaming or whimpering and whining. It will make no difference.
He’ll be out. And then he will, in all likelihood, be a defendant in a lot of felony trials, state and federal.
His Thugs
In the next week or so, some of his faithful supporters will, also in all likelihood, engage in acts of domestic terrorism. They’re doing that now. They attacked Joe Biden’s bus in Austin, Texas Saturday, so many of them, the local cops apparently fled in fear (or delight).
Those white-supremacist gun-toting goons who sleep with their MAGA hats wrapped around their dicks so they can find them in the dark, and their evangelical brethren, who seem capable of ignoring any sin other than abortion and/or being non-white, weren’t invented by Trump. They’ve been here all along. Trump and his enablers (think Stephen Miller and Bill Barr) just told them it was now okay to come out of the closet and wave their toys.
After January 20, we’ll once again have a functioning attorney general, and some time after that, a repopulated Justice Department. The new guys won’t encourage such behavior, let alone bury the indictments they earn. The racist gunthugs won’t go away, but some of them will start encountering a proper response.
Presidential Power
Before BoneSpurs, I’d never appreciated how much power the presidency had, nor did I understand how lopsided that power was. (I’m an alte cocker: my presidential memories go back to FDR). I now know that it is a power much more suited to fucking things up than to making good things happen. If a president populates the Federal agencies with rogues and scoundrels, nothing but villainy will result. That is where we are now. If a president populates them with honest, sincere, and competent people, things work right, but they don’t significantly change anything.
The Rest of Them
For significant change, for decency in government, a president needs a Congress that takes its job seriously and acts ethically. We’ve seen precious little of that the past ten years, perhaps for longer. But surely the past ten years: Congress blocked nearly every good thing Obama tried to set in motion, then it played Three Monkeys to every foul thing Trump & Company came up with.
The Real Villains
Trump could not have done all this harm alone; he did not do it alone. Whether his reaction to Covid-19, say, results from stupidity, malignant narcissism, or his being a sociopath, or all three, doesn’t matter. He got a lot of people dead who would not otherwise have been dead. He is responsible for a lot of people who, for the years they have left, will suffer heart, lung, kidney, liver, and all kinds of others afflictions they would not have suffered.
He didn’t give a hoot—but he did not do it alone. All the mass murderers you remember from the tabloid press: magnitudes short of the deaths Donald Trump owns.
Mitch McConnell enabled everything. Daryll Issa snitched and kissed ass. Lindsay Graham (who got an Air Force Reserve star he didn’t deserve) got on his knees and sucked until his soul turned inside out. You can name dozens of others. And you can add those who weren’t as proactive as McConnell, Issa and Graham but he just sat there with their mouths shut and their thumbs so far up their asses their voices went silent.
The Owners of the Villains
It doesn’t stop there. Trump and those members of Congress are underwritten by the Koch Brothers, by Andy Beal, Sheldon Adelson, and other billionaires. If Trump is flushed on Tuesday, if Lindsay Graham is flushed, those owners-of-pols will still be in place.
Trump is wretched in all the ways we’ve said, and all the ways you know and remember.. If you need a refresher, take a look at this nightmarish list posted October 30 on McSweeney’s: “Lest We Forget the Horror: A Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes. The Complete Listing (So Far): Atrocities 1-945”
But, for all that, he is a symptom, not a cause. As long as the rest of us have no way to control a judiciary and congress that is bought and sold, that beast isn’t dead.
When he goes, the evangelicals will not start listening to Christ more than the diamond-bedecked guy in the bespoke suit on the fancy stage making it up as he goes. When he goes, the racists won’t start loving their neighbor of whatever color or sexual status or political persuasion.
When BoneSpurs goes, the real work starts.
Chemistry Class
By Michael Brod
Determining the legacy of Trump and Trumpism will not be decided in the next election or the next four years. Trumpism will need to find its place in history at the direction of historians with the long view lens of deep hindsight. Negatives can produce positives particularly in politics. For every action there is a reaction.
Trump has exposed Americans to certain truths that have been ignored, particularly by the liberal establishment. A good deal of this is the legacy of a truly despicable president, Andrew Johnson, who refused to support the Reconstruction Acts inaugurated by Abraham Lincoln. The result of that refusal has been exposed by Trumpism, and has shaken Americans awake, from their Rip van Winkle slumber, to the fact that their democracy has been made a mockery of by Trump and his enablers.
Liberals, by relentlessly responding to Trump’s steady stream of personal taunts, insults and blatant lying, have become victims of their own righteousness and also victims of the media’s fascination with the Trump Freak Show that has given Trump the lion’s share of media exposure.
This is shocking when you consider that so many liberals are college educated and solidly middle class. How blind they have been, and maybe still are—walling themselves off from large segments of American society. The Deplorables…Latinos…the marginally employed…the working class.
Facts. Who needs them? Personalities certainly don’t. Biden’s ability to manifest a personality will determine the outcome of this election. I think he gets this. “Will you shut up, man.” Five words that have gotten more airtime than any other lines from the debate. Like I said, personality is more important than “facts.”
The Power of Prayer
By Chauncey DeVega
During the second and final presidential debate last week, there was one perfect moment that captured the collective frustration and disgust of the American people and likely the world. “Zeitgeist” is an overused and misapplied word — but in this moment, it applies. As Trump spewed out his lies, delusions and fantasies, Joe Biden looked down, flummoxed, and said quietly, “Oh, God.” With those words, he spoke for all sane and decent human beings watching the president of the United States humiliate himself, and us.
Future historians may conclude that was the precise symbolic moment when Biden won the 2020 election.
Christers & Grifters
What follows is the first page of an appeal for prayers and donations to protect Trump from Democrats, journalists and…witches.
The Metaphor of Qanon
By Budd Shenkin
Qanon sounds Onion-esque. Qanon “alleges, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.” I even understand that “pizzagate” is still operative in the Qanon canon, which alleges that Hillary Clinton operates the child sex ring out of a pizzaria in Washington, D.C. Right – child sex-trafficking rackets headed by Hillary Clinton, drinking blood, worshipping Satan. Sure. Anyone really believe that?
Well, apparently a lot of people do. The other night I saw TV interviews with “suburban women” who believed it. My mouth got stuck in the open position and my head got stuck in the rock back and forth mode. How stupid can these people be? What on earth could induce anyone to believe this crap? When a “suburban woman” was asked if she believed it was true, she answered “I wish it wasn’t,” and Brian Williams reacted on camera by shaking his lowered head in disbelief.
Me, after watching those amazing interviews I went to bed and finished up Bob Reich’s latest book, The System. (He’s an acquaintance, hence “Bob.”) He is such a cogent writer. In The System, he makes the familiar observation is that in the last 40 years inequality has skyrocketed, the powerful have become even more so, and the rich have succeeded in persistently changing the rules in their favor. As a result, the working class and the poor have gotten royally screwed.
Among the causal factors he cites are companies adopting the Milton Friedman viewpoint of shareholder power (as against stakeholder power, with the resulting orientation that nothing else matters except the stock price), the shift of power to management over workers as unions decline (under pressure), and governmental deregulation (under persistent corporate pressure). The result is that the very rich garner nearly all of the increasing wealth of our society; hence, the inequality.
What legitimizes the results? One is the belief system of market fundamentalism. Despite all the advantages nurtured by the favored to ensure their success, the belief is promulgated that the market is basically a fair test for all, and if you succeed you must have deserved it. I think Reich mentions the similarity of this belief to the divine right of kings.
The second legitimation comes from bribery. If you are one of the beneficiaries of the system – a highly paid lawyer, say – even though you don’t have the power directly, you are hired at a high price and thus quite ready to support the system. While they see themselves as professionals of the highest ethical values, their functions are essentially those of enablers.
The third legitimation is manufactured threats from “the other” – immigrants, minorities, visible enemies to divert attention from the invisible oppressing oligarchy.
It’s a very convincing and beautifully written book. I finished it and went to sleep.
I don’t know what I dreamed, but I must have dreamed, or dreamily thought about the book and the interviews. Night thinking can be the clearest.
Whatever it was, when I woke up, I thought I might have an answer of sorts for what had set Williams’ head to bobbing. Yes, the Qanon beliefs are more than absurd, who would believe them? Of course it’s tempting, and not wholly incorrect, to say that these people must be incredibly stupid and credulous and insulated from the world at large if they harbor Qanon beliefs. But it’s also true that when we think people are stupid, sometimes what we think of as stupid thinking can really just be alternative thinking, not alternative facts in the imbecilic Kellyanne Conway assertion, but alternative thinking. I thought that when we “listen to them,” we need to use our imagination to understand what they are saying.
I thought, did the Greeks really believe there were a bunch of gallivanting immortals on Mount Olympus, fighting with each other and visiting earth, seducing mortals and constantly intervening? What about the story of the Virgin Birth – any takers? But while these stories might be fanciful, that doesn’t mean they are not powerful. Millions of people find them full of truths. They are metaphors. You might not imbibe all the stories, but you still entertain them, because they are part of a larger perception, a larger orientation.
So I thought, what if we think about Qanon as a metaphor. Reich’s book outlines quite well the pressures on the middle class trying to keep afloat as the wealth goes elsewhere. The women leave home and work, everyone works longer hours, and families draw down savings and borrow (until 2008, anyway). And they get angry. They can’t put it all together the way Reich can, but they sense it. So when they hear a story, they listen. Elites draining the life out of the lower classes? Check. That their dreams have been stolen, and their dreams for their children, and that they have all even been defiled? Check.
They might not be the most capable people in the world, but nonetheless, they deserve a hell of a lot better than what they are getting. The world is getting richer, there is enough wealth available so that everyone could have a secure and satisfying life, but instead of that, the rich are keeping everything for themselves, and these working class people and middle class people are living very hard, insecure lives with no enticing future to even hope for. So if you were going to have a dream to encapsulate all that, wouldn’t the Qanon fantasy fill the bill? The elite is in on it, all of them. They are sucking our blood, they are taking our children.
So, as with The Book of Mormon – it’s a metaphor. Everyone doesn’t have that big, logical, schooled and drilled left cerebral lobe of logic. Some people think in terms of stories and impressions, in broad brush strokes, in intuition. Of course, pinning the savior button on Donald Trump is, well, more than regrettable. But pinning the conspirator button on Hillary isn’t far off, much as she might not be conscious of it. Reich pins it pretty firmly on Jamie Dimon, who might not be aware of it, either.
I just wish their metaphor included, as the poet David Shaddock asserts, identifying him as a less-cunning Milton-esque Satan.
Enigmas
By Kristi Coulter
Earlier this week, my trainer told me about a friend of his who’s still an undecided voter. “Trump is a dumbshit, but at least he’s transparent about it,” the friend said. “Biden is a mystery. He could do anything. We just don’t *know* anything about him.”
Now, I don’t know this guy; maybe he’s just trying to justify his own racism and nihilism by pretending Joe Biden—a two-term VP, a senator for almost forty years, a candidate with a website full of policy proposals, a man who has never been said to have a lot of unexpressed thoughts!—is some kind of SHADOWY ENIGMA.
But if he’s serious…well, that’s the kind of thinking that haunts me. Not just that it’s fine to elect someone you PERSONALLY believe to be stupid, but that Trump—you know, the one with the tax returns he can’t release because he’s under audit? the one who told Bob Woodward in February that covid was a BFD but he wasn’t going to admit it publicly? the one who made those secret phone calls to Ukraine?—has convinced people he’s TRANSPARENT.
That’s not transparency, I want to tell this guy. Trump’s stupidity is just so indomitable that it will make itself known no matter what, the way a dandelion pushes through concrete.
Where this and future elections are concerned, I worry more about guys like my trainer’s friend than I do about the card-carrying white supremacists and covid deniers of America.
xxx
I’m not saying that support for him is spun entirely of malice or bias. Keen economic anxiety and profound political estrangement are why many voters turned to him, as my Times colleague Farah Stockman explained especially well in a recent editorial that was set in America’s disheartened heartland. “Even false hope,” she noted, “is a form of hope, perhaps the most ubiquitous kind.
“The headline on the article was “Why They Loved Him.” But why haven’t more of them stopped loving him? And how did so many Americans beyond that group fall so hard for him, thrilling to his recklessness, applauding his divisiveness, indulging his unscrupulousness? He tapped into more cynicism and nihilism than this land of boundless tomorrows was supposed to contain.”
A Good Chance to End Trump Derangement Syndrome
By Nathan Osborne
I don’t like what the last four years has done politically to those around me. Trumpism has turned some of my friends and family angry, sadistic, and conspiratorial. As they feverishly ad lib Fox News talking points, they remind me of that moment a tweaker’s euphoria starts dipping into rage. We both know it’s not good. We silently agree to visit that place less. We eye with suspicion the dwindling days ‘til the 3rd, waiting for “our” moment to come.
And t’s not just conservatives. Much water-cooler or dinner-table discourse has been further cheapened into pure spectator sport. Resistance lib or MAGA-hat good ol’ boys both feel like annoying, meaningless fandoms akin to the argument “DC or Marvel?” You fight shitpost fire with fire, I guess… But that Democrat vid with Kamala et. al’s faces superimposed atop the Avengers defeating Thanos-Trump left a little to be desired on viewing after a 10-hour shift.
A wormhole opened up in 2016. It ripped a hole in the wheezing liberal facade. That delighted many– and I can in theory vibe with that. But something was lost in that thrill of victory. The lib-busters forgot or just didn’t give a fuck to consider from whence it came–the thrombotic, shriveled dick-vein of the TV fantasy-land complex. American politics has always leaned on larger-than-life figures. In sixth grade they had us memorize “O Captain My Captain.” That’s some weird stuff. But celebrity-worship diverges from mythical national figures in that it also binds up so much self-denial and thwarted, masturbatory desire. “Pop” in its lamest sense sometimes acts as the last defense for culture’s sublimating tendency. It’s doing a lot of work for people who haven’t got “theirs” for a long time. But instead of the Great Give, we’ve gotten a further, poisonous entanglement of the Lie. Something like a dictatorship of the spectator-tariet. That rush in seeing your favorite comic book character kick some ass is intense. But the comic’s come to life. It works for us, ostensibly, but we’re still pretty powerless. It’s off razing buildings some three states over, but who knows really where it goes to next.
How do you fight that? To fight Godzilla, do you summon a similar, opposing, unholy monster? It’s tempting, and it could work. The Dems haven’t gone that route this year. We’ve gotten the least anticipated, safest candidate in (my) recent memory. That sucks. But also–maybe we run with it. 2020 is the last transitional campaign the Dems can afford. We’re shifting from an older style of Boomer folksy liberalism to whatever’s next. Kamala– may she enjoy two reigns as VP– seems like a testing-ground for what works. Every candidate has awful online bases. But some are worse than others. Kamala’s troll army goes by the name “K-hive.” The name conveys some sort of ketamine-fueled dissociative groupthink. I feel the pull too. I read the articles announcing her status as running-mate. A certain telegenic quality in her face gave me a warm thrill. But I didn’t know crap about her except “Cop-mala.” I felt the flush of fandom, a certain parasocial stan-ing that suspends any real political or moral engagement. I think it’s time to recognize fandom for what it really is. A perfectly acceptable and viable kink between consenting adults (OnlyFans patrons and their content creators). But it’s slavish and distinctly un-American as a means of governing the nation.
Where do we go from here? A Biden presidency might offer a last interval gasp before the full effects of celebrity/ social media come home to roost. A return to Obama-era bureaucratic technocrats is just going to bring us another right-wing Godzilla. Fight back against a “return to brunch” where faceless experts keep everything in order for us behind the scenes. The Dems, if they hope to survive, need to pivot hard to the truly nameless and faceless. Minority support is shifting; a 2020 Dem victory may be the whitest it’s been in a while. It pisses me off to walk into the nice part of town and see the yard signs switch from red to blue. But that’s a dead-end bloc. Consolidating the comfortable contributes to the class/race confusion that makes Dems seem out of touch. Demographics and ideologies are realigning. But Dems still have commitments to healthcare and a redistributive philosophy that brings them nearer to the needs of working American than the opposition. They have a real opportunity to take on the twin monster of Celebrity and Meritocracy. Ain’t no way to build back better, though, if we’re stuck on deep state Resistance or managerial liberalism. Let’s vote Biden in, then reimagine the Democratic party’s obligation to the working people of America.
In the Court of History
By Ronald Primeau
Considering how many Americans have indulged the “flamboyantly dishonest” Donald Trump, Frank Bruni wonders “How Will I Ever Look at America the Same Way Again?” (NYT, Oct 29, 2020). I suggest we will never want to look in the same way at a country where our myths, the stories we tell ourselves, have failed. We might even some day want to thank Trump—even for the horrors he initiated—for getting us to see that we need real change. On a newscast in 2016 when he was asked how we should respond to Russian aggression, candidate Trump quipped that we had invaded a few places ourselves. Pundits ignored the remark while encouraging the vitriol that would become “the new normal.” For decades we had confidence in “rags to riches” stories and reassurance from the Theory of the Elect that our wealth and success were divinely bestowed. “American Exceptionalism” meant special talents, skills, and insights we expected the world to admire. With no reverence for these myths, Trump went rogue, putting himself above all. His disregard for decorum ceremoniously exposed many of our national myths for the delusions they are.
We knew what was coming, and we wanted it. Why else would we elect (at least in the electoral college) a known liar and cheater? Did we suspect our myths were no longer working and we needed someone to go for the jugular? We chose insulting tweets, over reassuring stories. At the same time, we cast demon Trump as scapegoat for our own hypocrisy, hatred for “Other,” and pious platitudes we claimed as our guiding inspirations. In Politico two months ago, John F. Harris warned us about “A President Who Makes Us Puke—Just Like He Was Supposed to” (July 9, 2020). Trump functions, Harris notes, like an ipecac which parents used to keep on hand. We swallowed sweet-tasting but toxic myths, and Trump was “the political equivalent of ipecac syrup” that “successfully emptied both ends of the digestive track” of exceptionalism, equal opportunity, upward social mobility, and the welcoming of immigrants. We now must slosh around in the vomit for a long while as we begin to clean up. Our stories are now upside down. Immigrants are criminals. Horatio Alger wants handouts. The Elect use the Bible (upside down) for publicity stunts.
Might Trumpism deserve some credit for shattering myths so powerful and resilient that it seemed they would last forever? A mere four (long!) years of bombast have made American Exceptionalism a joke. The melting pot has exploded. Bootstraps have snapped from the weight of so many lies. Does the wreckage demand a wholesale reshaping of American democracy? Trump’s presidency has been the most destructive presidency in our history. Did we need the painful dismantling and chaos he triggered? Let us hope Americans will be in a position someday to give him partial credit for what we go on to reimagine.
Night Time, Losing Time
By Greil Marcus
The last item in the October pre-election edition of Marcus’s Real Life Rock Top Ten column posted in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
- Street art, Lyndale Avenue and West 24th Street, in front of Misfit Coffee, Minneapolis (September 21).On a bright red newspaper dispensary box, a large white paste-on with a blank, pinkish eye staring out at nothing. On a mailbox a few feet away, a blue-and-white sticker showing a woman with short dark hair, fierce eyes, and a lettered bandana over her nose and mouth: “RESPECT MY EXISTENCE OR EXPECT MY RESISTANCE.”
If Donald Trump achieves four more years — and I’d give him about a 75 percent chance, holding his wins from 2016 except for Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump 280-Biden 258: polls don’t correct for voter suppression, where, to start at the scene of the art crime, post office self-sabotage, GOP suits against vote-by-mail, falsely invalidated ballots, polling place intimidation, disinformation online and on the streets, could mean a swing of three to five percent — this may be the only dissident form of speech left. Effaceable, replaceable — disable the security camera, sneak back into the long American night.
Tough Love
By Ruby Sales
It is night, and tonight I am moved to serve tough love to young voters. If you love your community heed their voices and vote whether you feel like it or not. Trump and thugs intend to declare war on us and voting gives us the space to build a non-violent movement where we win.
In GA record numbers of Black voters showed up and voted. It is estimated that 40% of the early voters who voted in GA so far are Black and 54% are women. However only 9 % are younger voters between the ages of 18- 20.
Young voters it is time to set aside your personal or even political dislike of voting or Biden to protect the lives and well-being of Indigenous and Black communities as well as White pro-democracy groups. Otherwise you sacrifice them to your ego. In a community in motion toward justice, we do not stamp our feet and pick up our marbles when the common good overrides your desires.
Social justice does not live or thrive on individualism. Although it does not destroy the aspirations and voices of individuals, it does not place their rights and wishes above the folk culture, common good and common desires. A majority vote reflects the way forward in the face of collective state-sanctioned danger. The community has spoken, and we must hear its voice.
Indeed it is important to recognize our individual preferences for political candidates. However when the community’s lives, survival and continuum are at stake, it is important to set aside our preferences and become a part of the community’s strategies of resistance.
Let me put it this way. When we are in a relationship, we negotiate our needs alongside and in relationship to the needs of our partners. More often than not, this means that we must ask despite our individual desires what is good for the both of us and the survival of the relationship. So it is within communities struggling to survive.
The South’s Gonna Rise Again: Mike Espy’s Comeback
By C. Liegh McIness
I was not that impressed by the State of Mississippi finally “retiring” the Confederate Flag because it wasn’t done by state-wide vote but as a pimp move by the state legislature to impact the economy. Moreover, the state has become even more Draconian since the removal of the Confederate Flag. That being said, on November 3, we will get a real understanding regarding just how much Mississippi has “changed” when voters decide between former Congressman Mike Espy and current US Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith for one of Mississippi’s US Senate Seats. An Afro-Mississippian has never been elected to a statewide office in Mississippi. Yet, Espy has long been considered one of the few, if any, who could become the first Afro-Mississippian elected to a state-wide office. Since the early 80s, Espy was a political superstar—the boy genius who was going to help move Mississippi into the present and into the future. In 1986, he became the first Afro-Mississippian to win a seat in the US House of Representatives in more than 100 years, since Reconstruction. He was so outstanding in the office that, in 1992, President Bill Clinton named him Agriculture Secretary, the first African American appointee to serve in the post. Among many of his accomplishments, Espy helped to increase the profits of catfish, soybeans, and cotton across the South with the deals he made with the US government and international markets for southern farmers. A good number of the current contracts, policies, and deals that southern farmers enjoy are a direct result of Espy’s work.
And, how was Espy repaid for this great work? In 1997, the Republican Party, led by mostly white southerners, fearing the rise of a southern black man as a political force and superstar, indicted Espy on charges of receiving improper gifts, including sports tickets, lodging, and airfare. Espy refused to plea bargain, and, on December 2, 1998, he was acquitted of all 30 criminal charges in the trial. Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz presented more than 70 witnesses during the trial and spent more than $20 million preparing and trying the case. Yet, during testimony before the jury, the prosecution’s star witness told Smaltz: “God knows, if I had $30 million, I could find dirt on you, sir.” Unfortunately, even after being found not guilty of every charge, the damage to Espy’s reputation had been done. The former boy genius who was destined to become the new, progressive face of Mississippi was forced to resign as Secretary of Agriculture.
Now, more than twenty years after Espy’s trial and more than one hundred and forty years after Reconstruction, Mississippi stands at its proverbial crossroad, deciding its future. What stands in its way is incumbent Hyde-Smith who is the perfect representation of Mississippi’s history. A former Dixiecrat, Hyde-Smith switched to the Republican Party citing that the Democrats had become too liberal for her. Then, while recently campaigning for Senator, she doubled down on her position by championing “public lynchings” as great events to frequent. She later posted a picture of herself in Confederate regalia and was recorded saying that it would be “a great idea” to make it difficult for liberals to vote. So, this is what is standing between Mike Espy and equality in Mississippi. Espy has conducted an excellent campaign, and I’ll be voting for him among other candidates and initiatives on the ballot. Many of y’all who’ve told me that I’m wrong about the significance of the removal of the Confederate Flag will now have your chance to prove me wrong. To be clear, Espy’s win will not change my position of being a Black Nationalist because black self-determination is still the only solution for black sovereignty. Still, Espy becoming the first Afro-Mississippian elected to a state-wide office will signify that just enough of the old white supremacist guard has died that equality and equity have enough room begin to flower.
Now What?
By Richard Goldstein
Let’s presume that the forces of democracy will prevail on Election Day, and that the margin for Joe Biden will be too great for lawsuits to dislodge it. None of that is guaranteed—far from it. But, in the glow of optimistic polls, let’s face the likelihood that what’s killing Donald Trump’s chances is not popular revulsion, but, rather, the pandemic. He is losing because, in key states that he won last time, Covid-19 is surging. It’s the virus, stupid.
But what if there had been no pandemic? What if the economy had not been hobbled by the need to shut so many businesses down? Would older voters veer as briskly toward the Democrats? Would suburban women be as likely to forsake the Republicans? What if Trump’s posturing had been more subtle, his sexism masked by facile gallantry, his racism sounded in dog whistles instead of blaring on a vuvuleza? Might a more decorous display of bigotry have been acceptable to most white voters? I pose these questions because I think our victory is contingent on a disease that, at some point, will cease to be a major threat. Then what?
The answer is to start thinking about how to make the blue walls of 2020 sturdier. I don’t believe it’s a question of moving to the center, but rather of making progressive politics more actively engaged with the whole society rather than focused exclusively on paradigms of race, sex, and other, more arcane concepts of identity. How to make the old dream of progressive populism correspond to waking life? Can we push the masses toward the left by countering the impression, in millions of people, that our side is oblivious to class? I’m not sure, but one thing seems clear. We could never afford to bask in the illusion that class is not a significant source of oppression, but we did anyway, because, finally, it allowed many prosperous people to enjoy the benefits of inequality while regarding themselves as victims of various biases. This pretense allowed the left to construct tribal identities which assume that the interests of minorities are pretty much identical. But look at the data: black support for Trump is in the single digits, while about a third of Latinos plan to vote for him, as do about a quarter of Asians. This divergence is a sign that the solidarity of black and brown people won’t always remain intact, and that the gender gap won’t always favor Democrats. To believe otherwise can only seem plausible if you ignore the decisive—and divisive—facts of class.
So, this is the first draft of an agenda that I call Radical Feasibility. It’s not the same as Thomas Frank’s perspective, because it fully recognizes that race and sex matter as much as economic status does. It’s not a repudiation of the struggle for social justice that I, along with many readers of this piece, have been part of for decades. It’s not a return to old Marxist ideas about the class struggle as the sole source of radical energy. It’s a rebalancing of what has been ignored. As the dust clears from this election, I intend to develop this agenda. But here are the preliminaries of what I hope will be a new attitude in a reinvigorated left.
Some possible tenets of Radical Feasibility: Abandoning strategies that are mostly symbolic–i.e. obsessions with vocabulary–since they provide a feeling a power that has no material basis. (A Latinx is the same person with a new suffix.) Understanding that people who share an identity are not the same when their class positions differ. Soliciting leadership from workers, so that our movement doesn’t have a Brahmin face. Rejecting the politics by which elites attach themselves to social issues, thereby preserving their own unacknowledged interests. A row of Black Lives Matter lawn signs does not change the complexion of an all-white neighborhood.
Intersectionality is a term with major academic cachet, but it’s seldom the basis of who gets to speak in the media. Let’s change that by infusing commentary with the full spectrum of class. Hiring college graduates of color is not a true mark of diversity unless it also includes people who don’t have a degree. After all, if we are really democrats, we must embrace the idea that, when it comes to political wisdom, education is no mark of superiority. Each of us is equally capable of reasoning—or not—and each of us belongs to a class whose interests we pursue even when we pretend otherwise. Let’s base identity politics on the full complexity of our identities. And let’s realize that a truly popular progressivism must consist of more than programs. It’s also about respect. So, no more bans on fat jokes while it’s perfectly acceptable to mock people of faith—we can fight against bigotry among the religious without belittling their theodicy. And no more comedy routines about blue-collar white men in baseball caps. (I have heard such bits on NPR, to howls of laughter from the audience.) If we want to maintain our majority, we need these uncool people—at least some of them—on our side.
Maybe this is naive. Certainly it’s premature, and probably reductive, as early attempts at a new sensibility usually are. But, still, here’s my mantra for 2021, courtesy of Leonard Cohen: “Democracy is coming to the USA” I’m not sure I believe that, but I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Skies Over America
Photo by Donna Gaines
