Mockingjay Madness

“It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us. We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.”
 —Historian/critic Neal Gabler, in a piece titled “Farewell, America” on BillMoyers.com, November 10

Let us take a moment to savor the complete lack of self-awareness in the above quote. Even as he is tarring millions of his fellow citizens with epithets like racism, misogyny, xenophobia and nativism, Neal Gabler styles himself as the last vestige of civility and politesse. He cannot logically have it both ways. Either he can elect to be the spokesman of all the throbbing anger in blue state America directing itself venomously at its red state cousins or he can choose to be polite and civil. Neither he nor anyone else (myself included) can be both things at the same time.

People generally fall into this paradox because they see themselves as being above partisan disputes—even while they are in the throes of them. This is because they know The Truth and are thus entitled to condemn others righteously. It is not particularly attractive or useful when religious fundamentalists do it and even less so when modern liberals do it.

We are seeing a lot of this sort of hyperbole in the wake of the November election. People who, only weeks ago, were arguing for respect of other countries, no matter what their political values, are now ready to declare war on Russia. It is like some sort of mass hysteria.

One of the most jaw-dropping examples I have seen of absent self-awareness was in the December 19 issue of The New Yorker. In the “Shouts & Murmurs” humor section, there was a piece by Cora Frazier entitled “Katniss Everdeen, White House Intern Application.” First, let me go on record as having long been a fan of The New Yorker’s cartoons and arts coverage. Its humor in prose, though, usually goes right past me. I found this particular item, however, very funny but not for any reason the writer must have intended. Her clear intent in invoking the protagonist of The Hunger Games was to portray President-elect Trump as the books’ evil President Snow. What people at The New Yorker do not seem to understand is that, for many people outside New York and other urban areas, New Yorker writers are the very epitome of the over-privileged, fatuous Capitol dwellers living it up while folks in the rural hinterland scrape by to survive, as portrayed in Suzanne Collins’s books.

Would Katniss Everdeen be a Trump supporter? Well, as portrayed in the movies (full disclosure: I know only the movies and not the novels) she certainly is a disrupter. I doubt, however, that it was author Collins’s intention to write a coded book series about the Tea Party or the Alt Right. Yet that is nearly how it plays. The urban/rural divide laid bare by the U.S. election results looks like nothing so much as the economic/cultural tensions in the fictional country of Panem. Yet Cora Frazier, whose stock and trade as a New Yorker humor writer should be nothing if not irony, apparently saw none in aligning Ms. Everdeen with the Wall Street fatcats and capital dwellers who uniformly supported Hillary Clinton. Or maybe we were meant to see her version of Katniss as a die-hard Sanders supporter?

Therein lies the challenge for Democrats. They have to stop believing their own propaganda that they are the party of the working class and actually again become the party of the working class. That is, if they want to. If they do not—after all, I hear the American working class is full of racists and xenophobes—then they should decide what they really do want to stand for. Once they have done that, then they must say so clearly and act accordingly.

Perhaps they could become the party of the new Cold War. After all, these days they really seem to be itching for a fight with the Russians.

Here is some more unsolicited advice for Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter). Do not demonize people because they do not see things the same way you do—especially if you are hoping to get some of them to vote for you. Not every policy dispute is an apocalyptic struggle of good and evil. Most importantly, though, try to keep a sense of humor. Otherwise it is going to be a long four or eight years for New Yorker readers.

Silver Linings Playbook

“I got an email from a guy who works for some sort of defense contractor, some lower-level job, served in the military. And he said, look, I served in the military with black and Latino soldiers. My supervisor is a young black woman who’s smart as a whip, and I admire her, and we get along great. I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics—I’m almost quoting him—he said, we don’t talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country.”
 —Columbia professor Mark Lilla, in a November 25 National Public Radio interview about how “identity liberalism” has been a disaster for Democrats
“As far as we were concerned, the problem was more with our communication than it was with our policy.”
 —House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, on Democratic losses in the 2016 general election

In my previous post, shortly after the U.S. election, I attempted to find a silver lining for people who were disappointed in the result. After years of hearing that the problem with U.S. politics was the amounts of money raised and spent, we had a presidential election where the winning candidate actually raised and spent far less—and is consequently far less beholden to donors—than the losing candidate. As it happens, I have yet to hear anyone complain about the amount of money in politics since November 8 or, actually, since Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination.

Here are a couple more possible silver linings for those troubled by the dark clouds of the electoral result.

A Healthier Government/Media Relationship? We are now back to the normal state of things as far as the media are concerned. The natural and healthy role for the press has always been as an adversary to those who wield the reins of power. If journalists are not skeptical about those who govern us, then they risk being mere government stenographers and political enablers. While the press rightly covered the presidency of Barack Obama as a historical milestone, its coverage of his administration was too often lacking in curiosity and critical analysis. I am speaking here mainly of the news organs that reach most ordinary people, i.e. the major television network news organizations and agenda-setting national newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Of course, news consumers looking for more detailed coverage had lots of choices for getting their information, with editorial stances covering the entire political spectrum. (Conservatives looking for negative coverage of the administration, for example, certainly had their own organs.) The major corporate media, however, have a responsibility to report aggressively and not be government cheerleaders. If they were too eager to give the current administration a pass, that at least is definitely not going to be a problem for the incoming administration. That is a good thing.

Some think, though, that the corporate media are going too far in covering the president-elect negatively and that their reporting is not so much objective than just pro-Democrat. That may well be but, even if that is true, the result is that news consumers are much better served than they were during the previous eight years when coporate reporters showed little interest in the unintended consequences of government policies.

One thing that so far shows no signs of changing, unfortunately, is the major media’s lack of interest in life outside its urban strongholds and the unexpected hordes of Americans who confounded journalists by turning out for Trump. There is little evidence that they are breaking out of their Washington bubble. The Sunday morning TV panel discussions I have seen so far display mostly the same sort of insight from mostly the same journalists who spent months telling us that Donald Trump could never become president. Now they are just “explaining” why everything Trump does is wrong.

The danger in the press not becoming more diverse in its coverage and understanding of the country as a whole is that more people will continue to seek out alternative media, thereby exacerbating the political and cultural schism in the country. Certainly, having lots of media voices is healthy and desirable but not if it gets to the point where different parts of the country have their own completely separate realities.

An End to Political Dynasties? Even if you are disappointed in the election result, is there not at least a small part of you that is happy that during the recent election season Americans firmly and resoundingly rejected political dynasties? Republican voters were certainly emphatic that they had had enough of Bushes. In the general election an Electoral College majority was pretty clear that they had also had it with Clintons. Let us look back at the past three presidential elections. In each case someone with relatively little (in the case of Obama) or no (in the case of Trump) experience as an office-holder was preferred. More specifically, the elections of 2008 and 2016 were explicit rejections of the Clintons. Obama got nominated because so many Democrats did not want to go back to the Clinton days, and Trump got elected because so many voters—including former Democratics—still felt the same way. This is surprising since the economy during Bill Clinton’s presidency was about the best in recent memory. Hillary Clinton probably did herself no favors, at least in the general election, by following the lead of her party’s left wing in rejecting her husband’s sensible centrist policies. But maybe that did not even matter and her surname and long record in government were going to do her in anyway.

The irony is that the Democratic establishment put in the fix for Clinton precisely because it did not think a disruptive outsider like Bernie Sanders could win in the general election. People laughed, in turn, at the notion of Donald Trump getting the GOP nomination and then of him winning the presidency. The very idea that people in Pennsylvania who had voted for Sanders in the primary election would then turn around and vote for Trump in the general election was considered ludicrous.

Given what we know now, who knows what might have happened if Sanders had gotten a fair shot at the Democratic nomination? Could Sanders have actually won if he had been the Democratic nominee?

My guess is probably not. It is difficult to see Sanders running against the Democratic establishment the way Trump ran against the Republican establishment, and that was probably crucial to his victory. Trump made himself the best option for those who wanted to say, “A pox on both your houses!”

Maybe the ultimate silver lining for Democrats is that Republicans are now so unexpectedly and completely dominant in so much of the country that they have nowhere to go but down. Worryingly, though, that sounds a bit like the fellow who fell off a skyscraper and was heard on the way down by people on each of the various floors to be telling himself, “So far, so good.”

November Surprise

“I know liberals made a big mistake because we attacked your boy, Bush, like he was the end of the world, and he wasn’t. And Mitt Romney, we attacked that way. I gave Obama a million dollars, I was so afraid of Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney wouldn’t have changed my life that much or yours. Or John McCain. They were honorable men who we disagreed with, and we should have kept it that way. So we cried wolf, and that was wrong.”
 —Comedian Bill Maher, explaining why Democrats should have held their epithets in reserve for a real “fascist” like Trump, on the HBO show Real Time shortly before the election
“You are part of the problem. You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change.”
 —A Democratic National Committee staffer, venting to DNC chair Donna Brazile after the election, as reported by The Huffington Post

Well, that was a surprise.

A few weeks ago, in an email exchange with a Seattle friend, I did something that I should have learned long ago not to do. I made a prediction. I said that Hillary Clinton would win the election but that the country would be shocked by the narrowness of the margin. In Electoral College terms—and that was what I was talking about—boy, did I get that wrong. Not only did Clinton lose, but it was not even close.

Yes, Democrats can take some moral satisfaction in the fact, as National Public Radio keeps reminding me, they have won the popular vote in six of the seven most recent presidential elections—a span of 24 years. What will be more useful and productive for them, however, is to focus on the fact that, under the United States’ district/state voting system in the past 36 years, Republicans have held the White House for 20 of those years—and that does not include the impending four years of President Trump. More worryingly for the party, Republicans have won a majority in the House of Representatives in 10 of the past 12 congressional elections and won or tied in 8 of the past 12 Senate elections. Things are even worse for Dems at the state level. A Twitter tweeter pointed out the other day that Dems now need only one net loss of a state legislature to lose the ability, as a party, to block constitutional amendments.

How did things get to this place? For most of the past year the talk was all about the disintegration and destruction of the Republican party. There will be no lack of post-mortems and analysis and soul searching, but for now I will offer these observations:

• The practitioners and chroniclers of politics remind me sometimes of stuffy old English teachers. Just as the latter get so caught up in all their hoary grammar rules that they forget they are not the ones actually setting the rules, so the journalists and media analysts who have covered so many elections that they have no doubt about how the system works tend to forget who is actually collectively in charge of the country. Throughout the primary season the “experts” and pollsters told us continually that Trump had no chance of being nominated—only to be contradicted every week or so by new election results. Throughout the summer and autumn they continued on, telling us he could not win the presidency. During that span of time there were no inconvenient elections to contradict them—until the one on Tuesday. The leadership of both the major parties put way too much faith in the “experts” instead of listening and heeding citizens en masse.

• Republicans loosened up their nomination procedures, and their primaries became an unseemly food fight. By contrast Democrats, as confirmed by John Podesta’s and others’ hacked emails, tilted the scales from the beginning to ensure that Hillary Clinton was nominated. As bad as the GOP primary season looked, they had more candidates and those candidates—one female, one African-American, two with Spanish surnames, two in their 40s, three in their 50s—looked more like America than the old/white-skewing Democratic trio. And, for better or for worse, the ugly GOP process produced the next president.

• Substantively, a big problem for the Democratic party is that it approaches electoral politics the same way it approaches the economy—as a zero sum game. That approach keeps getting tripped up by reality. Both parties need to shift presidential debates back to ideas and policies rather than just carving the population into groups and pitting them against one other.

For those disappointed by the election, here is my attempt at a silver lining for you. If you believe that there is way too much money in politics and that deep pockets are determinative, then you should take comfort that the candidate who set an all-time record for the most money collected and spent lost and that the candidate who set a new benchmark for low campaign spending won. If that does not comfort you, then you need to assess whether support for campaign finance reform is genuinely one of your principles or merely a tactic. If you think Wall Street has too much influence in politics, the fact is that Wall Street’s preferred candidate lost.

For those who swore they would emigrate if Trump won, here is my suggestion. Try Canada. It is nearby and that dreamy Justin Trudeau will be just your cup of tea. The mythical socialized societies across the Atlantic may look alluring to you from a distance, but I have been over here now for nearly a decade and a half, and here is what I see. Yes, modern liberal culture holds sway in Europe more than in the U.S., but there is still more than enough populism, friction over immigration and refugees, suspicion of government, political dysfunction and mutual enmity to make you feel right at home.