POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued)

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POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued)

Much of the discussion following the Electoral College victory of Donald Trump centers around differences over whether his victory was primarily a reflection of the overt racism of his campaign or the disaffection of a relatively small but decisive section of the white working class and rural voters in some Mid-Western swing states.  It is hard to disentangle, since in the US class is often experienced through a powerful lens of race and culture – including traditional “masculine” culture --  not just economics.

Republicans have been the party of white resentment for decades, and there is no evidence that racism brought out a bigger vote than in previous elections.  Open racists and fascists like the KKK and the neo-Nazis have long seen the Republicans as their major political party of choice.  Whatever one concludes about the result, there is no question that Trump’s rhetoric and political associations have empowered a new level of white nationalist extremism in the public sphere.

The article by Mike Davis, linked just below, has what I thought was the best political analysis of the electoral numbers and a hopeful view of the way forward.

There is lots of room for improvement where we live, but there is something definitely to be proud of in our city and its values, as illustrated by the response of the Mayor to the Trump election:

MARTY WALSH: Where do we go from here?

Trump said things in his campaign that alienated and even threatened people I care about, including women, immigrants, gay, lesbian, and trans people, people of color, people with disabilities and Muslims. Those words angered me during the campaign, and they concern me greatly now that he has won… But we will not compromise our values as a city. That’s our sacred duty.  We will defend our friends, neighbors, and family members from any and all efforts to exclude them, harm them, or strip them of their rights. Boston is a city of inclusion, a city of compassion, a welcoming, diverse, global city. We’ll stay that way…  We will not stop being a city that values and respects immigrants, both documented and undocumented. Our Office for Immigrant Advancement will continue to nurture and support the foreign-born in Boston, with everything from citizenship classes to cultural celebrations to free legal advice. Boston was here for my parents when they came here. We will always be a city that welcomes newcomers… We will double-down on our belief in gender equality, and we will not let up in the quest for pay equity led by our Office of Women’s Advancement.  More

MIKE DAVIS: Not a Revolution – Yet

But whatever the hypothesis, it must take account of the real revolution in American politics, the Sanders campaign. The downward or blocked mobility of graduates, especially from working-class and immigrant backgrounds, is the major emergent social reality, not the long agony of the Rustbelt. I say this while recognizing the momentum given to economic nationalism by the loss of five million industrial jobs over the last decade, more than half of them in the South.  But Trumpism, however it evolves, cannot unify millennial economic distress with that of older white workers, while Sanders showed that heartland discontent can be brought under the umbrella of a “democratic socialism” that reignites New Deal hopes for a Economic Bill of Rights. With the Democratic establishment in temporary disarray, the real opportunity for transformational political change (“critical realignment” in a now-archaic vocabulary) belongs to Sanders and Warren. We must hurry.   More

Why Do White Working-Class People Vote Against Their Interests? They Don’t.

Corporate Democrats have never advanced their interests—and at least Republicans offer a basic, if misleading, story about why they are getting screwed… The first step was the collapse of the industrial heartland. This hit white working-class people incredibly hard—and it remains a phenomenon that is not understood on the East and West Coasts. It is painted as a natural evolution of our economy and as if the onus is on people to adapt to it. This fails to capture how many families and communities were dependent on the industrial economy. Many Ohioans are now staring at a future where they themselves and their kids have less opportunity than their parents… The collapse of the industrial heartland resulted from a choice about whether we would reshape our economic models to serve workers and communities over profits—or continue to serve corporate interests that painted the global movement of capital as inevitable… De-industrialization was a traumatic experience for white working class people. Yet we’re surprised when this constituency exhibits PTSD.   More

VIDEO INTERVIEW (click on the image to watch)

Bernie Sanders Is ‘Deeply Humiliated’ that Democrats Can’t Appeal to the White Working Class

BLACK LIVES MATTER Issues Official Statement on Donald Trump's Election

Here’s what we know: Civic engagement is one way to engage democracy, and our lives don’t revolve around election cycles. We are obliged to earn the trust of future generations—to defend economic, social and political power for all people. We are confident that we have the commitment, the people power and the vision to organize our country into a safe place for black people—one that leads with inclusivity and a commitment to justice, not intimidation and fear… We fight for our collective liberation because we are clear that until black people are free, no one is free. We are committed to practicing empathy for one another in this struggle—but we do not and will not negotiate with racists, fascists or anyone who demands we compromise our existence… Because it is our duty to win, we will continue to fight. And today, like every day before it, we demand reparations, economic justice, a commitment to black futures and an end to the war on black people, in the United States and around the world.

The work will be harder, but the work is the same.   More

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Pick for Attorney General, Is a Fierce Opponent of Civil Rights

Donald Trump has chosen a white nationalist as his chief strategist and a white nationalist sympathizer as his pick for Attorney General. Like the Confederate general he is named after, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has long been a leading voice for the Old South and the conservative white backlash vote Trump courted throughout his campaign. Sessions, as a US senator from Alabama, has been the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a US Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s.  The Senate rejected Sessions for a federal judgeship during the Reagan administration because of racist statements he made and for falsely prosecuting black political activists in Alabama. He opposed the Voting Rights Act, the country’s most important civil rights law.   More

Slavery, Democracy, and the Racialized Roots of the Electoral College

Though Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the national popular vote, Mr. Trump is now President-elect based on the indirect representational nature of the Electoral College. There is nothing particularly novel about this latest (un)democraticcontradiction—it happened in 1876, 1888, and 2000—except that it opens up a critical space for examining the racialized genesis of the Electoral College itself…  In 1787, white men of status met in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution. Questions of elections, taxation, and governance, among others, were debated vigorously. One of the most contentious themes considered over the course of the four-month convention was by what process to elect a president… In a direct election system, the North would have outnumbered the South (which had a large population but far fewer eligible voters), whose roughly 550,000 enslaved black people were disenfranchised. Delegates from the South generally supported Madison’s idea of the Electoral College over a direct election system because it was based solely on population volume, not citizenship status or enfranchisement. In conjunction, and at Madison’s urging, the convention agreed to count each enslaved black person as three-fifths of a citizen for the purpose of calculating each state’s representation in the Electoral College and in the allotment of congressional seats.   More

THOMAS PIKETTY: We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail

Let it be said at once: Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this.  Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote…  The tragedy is that Trump’s program will only strengthen the trend towards inequality. He intends to abolish the health insurance laboriously granted to low-paid workers under Obama and to set the country on a headlong course into fiscal dumping, with a reduction from 35% to 15% in the rate of federal tax on corporation profits, whereas to date the United States had resisted this trend, already witnessed in Europe.  More

PAUL KRUGMAN: Trump's Medicare Killers

During the campaign, Donald Trump often promised to be a different kind of Republican, one who would represent the interests of working-class voters who depend on major government programs. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he declared, under the headline “Why Donald Trump Won’t Touch Your Entitlements.”

It was, of course, a lie. The transition team’s point man on Social Security is a longtime advocate of privatization, and all indications are that the incoming administration is getting ready to kill Medicare, replacing it with vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance. Oh, and it’s also likely to raise the age of Medicare eligibility.  More

Donald Trump is ready to bring Islamophobia into the White House

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon as “chief strategist” has sparked a backlash, with critics accusing Trump of elevating an anti-Semite into the halls of power.   What’s received less attention is that Bannon, as executive chairman of Breitbart News, has also broadcast the views of some of America’s leading Islamophobes, including Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney.

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia–alongside a healthy dose of right-wing Zionism–go hand in hand among adherents of the Internet-savvy white nationalist movement that has supported Trump’s rise to power. The choice to bring Bannon into the Oval Office, potentially alongside other anti-Muslim ideologues that have clustered around Trump, portends a dark future for the Muslim American community. More

Trump Camp’s Talk of Registry and Japanese Internment Raises Muslims’ Fears

A prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump drew concern and condemnation from advocates for Muslims’ rights on Wednesday after he cited World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps as a “precedent” for an immigrant registry suggested by a member of the president-elect’s transition team…  Representative Mark Takano, a Japanese-American and Democrat from California whose parents and grandparents were imprisoned during World War II, said in a statement on Thursday that the comments reflected “an alarming resurgence of racism and xenophobia in our political discourse.” He called on Mr. Trump to denounce them.  Robert S. McCaw, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group, called the reference to internment camps as a precedent “absolutely deplorable” and said that it would “return America to one of the darkest chapters of its history.”  More

No Fly, Safe and Humanitarian Zones

– in the United States, not Syria

The slaughter in Syria, with its terrible consequences in that country, the region and worldwide, demands urgent action to end the horrific human suffering. Unfortunately, some well-intentioned, concerned people advocate ratcheting up U.S. military engagement, which could lead to more death, destruction and suffering, not less. There are several reasoned refutations of supposed humanitarian intervention proposals such as a no-fly zone (promoted by some during the presidential election campaign) safe zones and humanitarian zones.  In the wake of the election and President-elect Donald Trump’s appeals to xenophobia, racism, misogyny and fear, no-fly, safe and humanitarian zones do have applicability, but in the United States, not Syria…  Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant, anti-woman and Islamophobic rhetoric and policies demand the creation of safe zones and spaces for targeted populations.   More

TRUMP WORLD

Trump doesn’t really represent a challenge to the American system. He isn’t a billionaire version of Eugene Debs. But his campaign took us into the logic of fascism, and it’s no accident that there are strong echoes of the 1930s now: economic crisis; a social class that, having lost its status and privileges, is keen to find scapegoats; violence, both physical and verbal, directed against movements of the left led by people of colour; a systematic ambiguity regarding his intentions, for example when he said that he would leave us ‘in suspense’ as to whether he would accept the election result if Clinton won. Trump’s acceptance speech was typically banal and superficial, but touched on the central themes of the nostalgic fascist imagination: praise for the family and for strength; promises of reconquering the global economy and restoring at last a lost hegemony…  Although class resentment is one of the ties that bind the inhabitants of Trump world, the greatest injustice for Trump’s followers isn’t that society is deeply divided along class lines (a fact hidden by the dominant but increasingly fragile ideology of the ‘middle class’) but that power is sliding out of their hands, a weakness evidenced by their demographic decline. What they want from their strong man isn’t to transform society, but to recover their position of natural dominance in the order of things, not only economically but also politically (the White House had not only been confiscated by a black family, the ultimate disgrace, but was being contested by a woman) and symbolically (restoring a white, monocultural image after the multicultural break of the Obama years).   More

Mike Pence Will Be the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in U.S. History

Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants — would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend. “This may not be our preferred candidate, but that doesn’t mean it may not be God’s candidate to do something that we don’t see,” said David Barton, a prominent Christian right activist and president of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.”  … Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.   More

In Trump, extremism found its champion – and maybe its demise

Through his connections to these digital demagogues, Trump has empowered narratives that would otherwise have no place in electoral politics.  But by bringing unprecedented attention to extremist views in 2016, Trump also forced America to see these threats in the light of day. That could be their undoing. Exposed, these guises of bigotry have been recognized, decoded and even classified – as the “alt-right” – by the press and public… In Trump’s journey to abolish political correctness, he has led his supporters to an awkward impasse. No doubt, his backers continue to admire in Trump someone who has the courage to “tell it like it is.” But now they often find themselves saying, “He doesn’t really mean that.” These two sentiments cannot logically coexist.   More