Category Archives: Politics

How We Can Resist and Defeat Cheeto Jesus

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Cheeto JesusBecause I am a big fan of action over just talking, I have been looking for stuff to do with the coming resistance to Cheeto Jesus’ lame agenda to destroy all of America and replace it with shoddy versions of good things.

Stopping Cheeto Jesus

So I have been doing a number of things. One is that I’ve been nagging Frank and James about a podcast to go with this blog. We’ve done quite a bit of work on that, but we are (hopefully temporarily) stalled. I’ve also found great things like this: Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda. Print it out, because eventually it will be taken down in Cheeto Jesus’ America.

They looked at what worked to harm so much of the Democratic Party in the first two years of President Obama’s first term. We all remember the Tea Party, of course. So they looked at it and other groups that were successful. But it was mainly the Tea Party.

So if you are staring at the future with horror in mind and need something to take your mind off of what is about to happen this is a great way to help cope. Will it do anything? Maybe not at first, because the backlash is going to be incredibly fierce.

Democrats vs Republicans

Democrats believe in institutional norms. They respect process and they listen to the other side.

Republicans don’t. They have no interest in anyone who isn’t willing to do what they want. And they will do whatever it takes to hold onto power — even for just second more. I am certainly a partisan, but I think this is objectively true: Republicans lie, cheat, steal, deflect, project, and never admit error.

A Plan to Resist

But part of the reason that the Republicans are trying to cling to power is because they lost in North Carolina thanks to things like Moral Mondays. This guide is part of using that same tactics locally to get Republicans out of power until they learn to behave like civilized members of society.

First

Start showing up at local congressional events that your congress-critter will be at, and hold them accountable. When they start hiding (and Republicans will), start showing up at their office. Work out details to get access to the fundraisers they need and confront them. Be sure to bring the media.

Second

Be polite but firm about the questions on representatives’ support for Cheeto Jesus’ plans to destroy America. This is where it is going to get tricky. Republicans are authoritarians and that means they will be quick to call the cops on you and anyone else. To them, citizens demanding answers are criminals. The question is how this will play in the media. Thus, a little old lady who doesn’t look like she will harm a fly is the best person to ask the pointed questions. Because then it makes the media want to show how mean the congressperson is for arresting a little old lady who just wanted to have her questions answered. Even better if it was the lady who just handed him cookies right before she asked her question about why he wants to kill her grandchildren.

Third

If you can’t show up because the fuzz is on you (well okay, only a few people are like that), organize phone banks that target the offices with the same polite but pointed questions. And record the responses from staff. One person bitching you out is priceless because the media adores that kind of thing.

Fourth

Keep up the pressure. And if need be, run against them in a primary. Don’t do this to the Democrats. Do this solely to the Republicans. We are way, way too quick to pile on our side for not being sufficiently pure. At this moment in time, the idea shouldn’t be “Joe Manchin needs to support our view on coal” but “This Republican should be terrified about his re-election chances.”

Beyond “Indivisible”

The Indivisible guide doesn’t mention this, but I think it is important: all this work needs to be long term. Don’t expect victories right away. It takes a while to build up enough momentum on the Democratic side. Consider my own experience: I ran for Congress in 2004. I did okay: 38.2 percent of the vote. That was with next to no money (I am a terrible fundraiser). My performance caught the attention of the national party. As a result, the next election, the DNC found and worked closely with a serious candidate. And my Congressional district turned from red to blue.

It just took a little bit of time.

So there is no reason this won’t be the case this time if all of us work on doing this. If you can’t do these specific things, there will be others in the days to come. It’s time to get to work to defeat Cheeto Jesus.

Image cropped from Trump Dementia by JohnHain. It is in the public domain.

Blank Stares in the Real World

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Blank StaresAs I write this, it is the day before Christmas. So I’m looking forward to how Christmas will go. What I know is that in as much as a talk about anything of substance, no communication will go on. I will get a lot of blank stares. This is one of the reasons that I do my best to stay busy cooking on holidays. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten to the point where I find very few people are able to understand what I have to say when I am talking about anything that matters to me.

I’ve heard this about this blog. “I checked out Frank’s blog, but I really couldn’t understand what he was talking about” — virtual blank stares. And the first time I heard that, I was shocked. Frankly Curious is hardly filled with deep subject matter. And I go out of my way to write in a simple style. But over time, I’ve come to understand it. And it concerns me greatly, because it isn’t just about me.

I’ve long held that intelligence is a kind of myth. Indeed, my major takeaway from the Flynn effect is that IQ scores tell us about the way people think — not their absolute abilities. So “intelligence” is more a function of how we were raised to think about thinking than anything else.

The Intellectual Blueprint

But it still scares the hell out of me. To most people, I must be an unbelievably boring person. I’m very interested in ideas — maybe because they are the only things I feel I can control. But if I think about something enough, I can get to the point where I have a kind of intellectual blueprint — a map of what there is to know, what I feel fairly certain I do know, and what is foggy or worse.

I seem to live in a world of people who are only vaguely aware that such blueprints exist. Instead, they have intellectual index cards — and even the space on them seems to be daunting. My father has been reading articles about people who were exonerated after being on death row. And he seems to be trying to change his mind to be against the death penalty, after being for it for almost 84 years.

He keeps approaching me on the subject, and I’ll admit: I’m not very nice about it. I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t have the patience to teach remedial moral philosophy to adults. I’m pleased that he’s struggling with the issue, but I don’t think we are even involved in the same kind of intellectual endeavor.

The Intellectual Index Card for the Death Penalty

My father’s thinking on it (and like I said: he is really struggling in an admirable way) goes like this:

  1. An eye-for-an-eye is common sense
  2. But so much evidence shows it doesn’t work
  3. Polly Klaas.

In other words, it’s just a muddle placed on top of his “common sense” that the right response to murder is murder. It’s probably this effort to find a practical reason to be against the death penalty that makes it hard for me to be helpful. Yes, just from a practical standpoint, the death penalty is wrong. But that is not why I’m against it. And it is not the reason that I want anyone to be against it.

Intellectual Canvas Size

But the broader issue is the size of the intellectual canvas that any of us are going to work on. I always thrill to the experience of seeing a problem in a larger context. Currently, I mostly see the death penalty in the context of free will — or rather the lack of it. That’s not to say that I have found the ultimate context. But it’s a context that easily includes the other issues that people talk about the death penalty.

So yes, I can have a conversation with people about our flawed criminal justice system — and our racist society. And I can have a conversation about two wrongs not canceling each other. I can have a conversation (Gladly!) about mercy. But if we are talking about the death penalty, I will eventually get to free will. And that means blank stares in most cases. And when not, I get misunderstandings about nature versus nurture.

No Blank Stares at Frankly Curious

I don’t mean to flatter my readers, but one big reason I continue to write this blog is that the regulars around here don’t give me blank stares. We constitute a group that can communicate. And I say that knowing full well that we don’t communicate at a particularly high level. But each of our intellectual cutting edges are compatible.

Around here I neither need to put on airs nor talk about things at a level I don’t care about. Too bad it isn’t that way in the real world. Of course, the truth is that I don’t change in the real world. That’s why I get all those blank stares.

Eye image by Apple iPhone 4s. It is in the public domain.

No Country for Jewish Liberals

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No Country for Jewish LiberalsPolitically, the city is somewhat more liberal than Israel at large; over the years local voters have given pluralities to centrist parties — Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert’s Kadima, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, and Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union — ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud. This is in line with the residents’ high educational level and general middle-class prosperity as well as their secular bent. But liberal is a relative term; based on the parties and politicians they vote for and the news media they absorb, the people of Modi’in sit very comfortably within the Israeli “security hawk” consensus: unhappy with the “isolated, ideological” West Bank settlements, but untroubled by the expansion of the large “settlement blocs” closer to Israel proper, not to mention the Jewish neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem. The majority of Modi’in residents are theoretically in favor of the two-state solution, but suspicious, at best, of even the most moderate Palestinians and resentful of foreign pressure on any Israeli government.

–Larry Derfner
No Country for Jewish Liberals

Image of No Country for Jewish Liberals taken from Just World Books. Licensed under Fair Use. The book won’t be released until this April; I got the quote from John Judis.

Not a Society for Walking

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No WalkingRain brings out the worst in drivers. It’s curious. You would think it would be otherwise. They are, after all, inside warm and dry cars. And the roads are slippery. So it is the time when drivers should slow down and take it easy. But they do just the opposite. They drive faster — more recklessly. A storm is the worst time to be walking around — because the drivers are so awful.

It isn’t a news flash that we live in a society designed for cars. But unless you spend a little time walking around, you will no see just how bad it is. Watching drivers as they often literally tap their fingers waiting for you to cross the street, you would get the impression that they are the ones being pelted with rain as they move down the road at three miles per hour. Really: I live roughly a half hour’s walk from the nearest store. It takes roughly two minutes to drive there. But most drivers are deeply annoyed that they can’t cut it down to a minute and a half.

Walking Near Construction

In downtown Santa Rosa, Court House Square is completely fenced off — apparently being remodeled or something. Today, I was doing some Christmas shopping and this required that I make my way to the bank in that area. But absolutely no concern was given to walking. I found myself in what was very much like the worst maze ever designed. In addition to endless unmarked dead-ends, there were numerous areas where I had to backtrack because a sidewalk simply ended on a busy street without a crosswalk.[1] In order to walk two blocks, I ended up walking at least eight.

I run into this kind of thing quite a lot. When construction is going on, little if any thought is given to how it will affect those walking. If a car has to go around the block, big deal. But today, what would normally have taken me three minutes to walk took more like a half hour — just to get from where the bus dropped me off to the bank that used to be two blocks away but that is now blocked by the post-apocalyptic no man’s land of “Coming soon!” urban renewal.

The Speed of a Worthless Life

The other issue is the speed of life. I just don’t have hours and hours to run errands. We’ve created a society that is the worst that it can be. No one has any time. And everything takes forever because our lives are designed around the idea that oil companies need to make a lot of money. So it’s not surprising that in addition to things being designed to be bad for walking, they are even worse when any construction goes on.

This is no way to live a life. But it probably does explain why I avoid going outside most days.

[1] I never jaywalk for two reasons. First: I always assume that drivers are trying to kill me because they are. Second, I don’t want to give some psychopathic police officer a reason to harass me.

No Walking image by OpenIcons. It is in the public domain.

The Liberals Are Enemy of World’s Poor Myth

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Rigged - World's Poor - Dean BakerIn winter 2016, near the peak of Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, a new line became popular among the nation’s policy elite: Bernie Sanders is the enemy of the world’s poor. Their argument was that Sanders, by pushing trade policies to help US workers, specifically manufacturing workers, risked undermining the well-being of the world’s poor because exporting manufactured goods to the United States and other wealthy countries is their path out of poverty. The role model was China, which by exporting has largely eliminated extreme poverty and drastically reduced poverty among its population. Sanders and his supporters would block the rest of the developing world from following the same course.

This line, in its Sanders-bashing permutation, appeared early on in Vox, the millennial-oriented media upstart, and was quickly picked up elsewhere. After all, it was pretty irresistible. The ally of the downtrodden and enemy of the rich was pushing policies that would condemn much of the world to poverty.

The story made a nice contribution to preserving the status quo, but it was less valuable if you respect honesty in public debate. The problem in the logic of this argument should be apparent to anyone who has taken an introductory economics course. It assumes that the basic problem of manufacturing workers in the developing world is the need for someone who will buy their stuff. If people in the United States don’t buy it, then the workers will be out on the street and growth in the developing world will grind to a halt.

In this story, the problem is that we don’t have enough people in the world to buy stuff. In other words, there is a shortage of demand. But is it really true that no one else in the world would buy the stuff produced by manufacturing workers in the developing world if they couldn’t sell it to consumers in the United States? Suppose people in the developing world bought the stuff they produced raising their living standards by
raising their own consumption.

That is how the economics is supposed to work. In the standard theory, general shortages of demand are not a problem. Economists have traditionally assumed that economies tended toward full employment. The basic economic constraint was a lack of supply. The problem was that we couldn’t produce enough goods and services, not that we were producing too much and couldn’t find anyone to buy them. In fact, this is why all the standard models used to analyze trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership assume trade doesn’t affect total employment. Economies adjust so that shortages of demand are not a problem.

In this standard story (and the Sanders critics are people who care about textbook economics), capital flows from slow-growing rich countries, where it is relatively plentiful and so gets a low rate of return, to fast-growing poor countries, where it is scarce and gets a high rate of return.

So the United States, Japan, and the European Union should be running large trade surpluses, which is what an outflow of capital means. Rich countries like ours should be lending money to developing countries, providing them with the means to build up their capital stock and infrastructure while they use their own resources to meet their people’s basic needs.

–Dean Baker
Rigged — Read it for free!

Text about liberals being enemies of the world’s poor and book cover taken from Rigged by Dean Baker. Licensed under Fair Use.

Trump Is Nietzsche’s Last Man Not Übermensch

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Hugo Drochon: Trump Is Nietzsche's Last ManI’ve heard it said that Trump may represent some approximation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and I think that’s deeply mistaken. But the reasons why it’s mistaken can help us think about what Trump actually is. First, it’s wrong because Trump represents everything Nietzsche hated. The philistinism, the mediocrity, the worshipping of money for its own sake — this is exactly the opposite of what Nietzsche advocated. By Übermensch, Nietzsche meant someone who could live beyond good and evil, beyond conventional values, who refused to appeal to herd instincts.

There’s a passage in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which he talks about the Übermensch, and I think it’s quite relevant. Zarathustra, the protagonist, comes down from his mountain retreat and tells the people in the town square that he’s going to teach them about the Übermensch, about what mankind should become, and the people are having none of it. They don’t want to hear that they’ve stopped believing in God; that life is chaos; that nothing lasts; that they’re living in illusion.

Zarathustra realizes the people are too decadent to hear this and so he decides instead to teach them about the “Last Man.” And the “Last Man” is the kind of person who doesn’t want to think, who fears progress, who is risk-averse, and desirous of comfort — who just wants everything to stay the same. Of course, the people erupt in joy when they hear this because this is what they really want.

This is what Trump is to me. This is what he represents. He’s a kind of “Last Man” demagogue, telling the people that he’s going make things great again, which is to say simple and how they once were — and they love him for it.

For Nietzsche, the celebration of a man like Trump was the inevitable result of a democratic culture built on the virtues of ignorance and self-fulfillment.

–Hugo Drochon
In What Nietzsche’s Philosophy Can Tell Us About Why Brexit and Trump Won

Image cropped from Hugo Drochon at Princeton University Press. Licensed under Fair Use.

How Democrats Win Short-Term: Ignore Schumer

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Chuck SchumerSchumer’s idea is a faithful reflection of the way Congress thought about politics years ago, when Schumer was coming up through the system. It’s a totally plausible model, which assumes that vulnerable members of Congress can shore up their standing by proving to their constituents that they can win concrete achievements. That is how Schumer has built a career, and he wants to help Democrats in red states do the same, by finding some bills where they can shake hands with Trump and cut ribbons on some bridges, and so on. Schumer’s idea can be boiled down to:

Senate Democrats work with Trump → Voters conclude Senate Democrats are doing a good job → Senate Democrats win reelection.

Yet both empirical research and recent experience show that this dynamic, which seems to make sense, does not actually work at all. The truth is that voters pay little attention to legislative details, or even to Congress at all. They make decisions on the basis of how they feel about the president, not how they feel about Congress. And a major factor in their evaluation of the president is the presence or absence of partisan conflict. If a president has support from the opposition party, it tells voters he’s doing well, and they then choose to reward the president’s party down-ballot.

This dynamic played out during George W Bush’s first term. After 9/11 — an extraordinary event, to be sure — both parties rallied around Bush. This caused his approval ratings to skyrocket, and as a result, Democrats in Congress suffered an unusual beating in the 2002 midterm, which ordinarily would have been an opportunity for the opposing party to record gains. Indeed, the bipartisan halo around Bush persisted long enough to let him win reelection in 2004. Only in Bush’s second term, when partisan cooperation collapsed, did Democrats make major gains.

Under Obama, Schumer logic would have dictated that vulnerable Republicans demonstrate a willingness to work together with the extremely popular new president. Instead, the Republican Party denied any bipartisan support for almost any bill, despite the popularity of both Obama and the proposals at issue. This created a sense of partisan dysfunction that allowed Republicans to make major gains in midterm elections, despite the fact that their party and its agenda remained deeply unpopular. The actual dynamic, then, is:

Senate Democrats work with Trump → Voters conclude Trump is doing a good job → Senate Republicans and Trump win reelection

or:

Senate Democrats don’t work with Trump → Voters conclude Trump is doing a bad job → Senate Democrats win reelection

If Schumer wants to prevent bad outcomes, he might cut some deals with Trump. But those deals are going to put his members at risk. If he wants to protect his red-state seats, he needs to drive down Trump’s approval ratings, which means fighting Trump on everything. It’s unfortunate for the Democratic Party that its most powerful elected official does not seem to understand the basic political dynamic.

–Jonathan Chait
Charles Schumer Is Leading Democrats to Their Doom, Continued

Image of Chuck Schumer is in the public domain.

Markets Do Not Reward Creativity Justly

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Capitalism - Markets Are Fundamentally FlawedAs regular readers know, I’m not keen on capitalism. But that doesn’t mean that I’m against markets. This causes no end of confusion with people, who think that capitalism is the only economic system with markets. As far as I know, there is no economic system that does not have markets. It’s just a question of how those markets are controlled. And I want to demonstrate how leaving markets to themselves really screws things up. (Capitalism just makes it all that much worse, but I’m not going into that today.)

I just started reading the third volume of Simon Callow’s Orson Welles series, One Man Band. In the preface, he makes note of a number of books and diaries that he made extensive use of. For example, he notes that he used Keith Baxter’s memoir, My Sentiments Exactly, as a primary source for his discussion of Chimes at Midnight. (Baxter played Hal in the film — wonderfully.) He also cites François Thomas (Author) and Jean-Piere Berthomé’s Orson Welles at Work. Callow says his debt to the book is “immense.”

Baxter’s memoir does not have a single review on Amazon — a good indication of just what a big seller it was. Orson Welles at Work is an academic book, written by two European film professors, and selling for $79.95. It’s popular among Welles fanatics. But it wasn’t popular in a general sense. The thing is, neither of these books were meant to popular in a general sense. But without these kinds of books, something like One Man Band could never even exist, much less be popular.

Books That Couldn’t Exist Without Books

Now I’m not criticizing Simon Callow in this regard. I think his writing on Orson Welles has been great. The world needs these kinds of books. That’s especially true in the case of Welles who has been written about widely, but always by biased sources (those who loved him and those who hated him). It’s good to have people who are willing to wade through all that (and more — Callow does independent research too) and try to make sense of it. That doesn’t make it objective, but it gives a more complete and just telling of his life.

So it makes sense that there would be far more people who want to pony up the money for One Man Band than Orson Wells at Work. But how does that justify Simon Callow (already a wealthy man from his acting) making so much more money than the authors who he depends upon? I don’t think it does, and this is why I think that markets need to be controlled.

The Problem With Markets

This is a concrete example of something I’ve talked about in theory. In the life cycle of a technology, the people who make all the money are the ones who have the good fortune to be in the cycle at the right time. Thus, the World Wide Web created lots of millionaires whereas as the ARPANET did not. And this is a fundamental problem.

Whenever I bring this up, people are quick to ask me if I have a solution. I don’t.[1] And after that it is left. It seems we always come back to Churchill, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” And “democracy” is always equated with capitalism. And we move on because: Soviet Union!

We have to get past the idea that the system we have in any way rewards people properly. There are fundamental problems with markets themselves. It would be nice to leave such problems to the economists, but they don’t seem much interest in moral philosophy — and that’s what I’m getting at. For economists, it is all about efficiency. We need to move up a level, and start asking the difficult questions that go beyond whether one system is one or two percent more efficient than another.

[1] I have some ways of making it better. We could get less of the controlled economy when it comes to keeping the rich rich. We could also get more of a controlled economy when it comes to helping out the poor.

The image in this article is everywhere on the internet. Based on its style, I assume it very much in the public domain.

Obamacare Repeal: Follow the Money

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Michael HiltzikPeople wondering why Republicans are so hell-bent on repealing Obamacare even though that would cost 20 million Americans their health insurance haven’t been heeding the old investigator’s maxim to “follow the money.”

The path leads to the Affordable Care Act’s tax provisions, and the discovery that repeal would provide the wealthiest taxpayers with an immediate tax cut totaling $346 billion over 10 years. Every cent of that would go to taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for couples). As Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan observed a few days after the election, the imperative of handing their wealthy patrons a gift of this magnitude may well outweigh their solicitude for the mostly middle- and low-income constituents whose individual insurance plans would be at risk from repeal.

“However ambivalent Republicans may be about health reform,” he wrote, “they are not at all ambivalent about big tax cuts to the wealthy.”

–Michael Hiltzik
The Real Reason the GOP Is Gung-Ho on Repealing Obamacare

Image of Michael Hiltzik cropped from one at The Los Angeles Times. Licensed under Fair Use.

I Love The Intercept, But…

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Scott LemieuxThe Intercept, during an election campaign between a competent, moderate liberal and an unprecedentedly unfit and corrupt candidate who ideologically represents a cross between George Wallace and Calvin Coolidge, devoted a substantial amount of resources to analyzing hacked emails from the campaign of the former. And rather than admitting that they had been sent on a snipe hunt by an Australian libertarian who was plainly trying to throw the election to Wallace/Coolidge, they decided to hype up inane trivia (“Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a PUBLICIST!” “Candidates say snarky things about opposing candidates in private emails!”) as if they were revealing the Pentagon Papers. And, as Paul [Campos] says, they did this in the context of media coverage being dominated by the coverage of Clinton non-scandals that revealed no significant misconduct, drowning out coverage of the countless examples of Trump’s actual misconduct. I can’t blame Glenn [Greenwald] and his publication for wanting to be preemptively absolved of any responsibility, but it won’t fly. It is absolutely true that The Intercept — like mainstream publications — also published coverage critical of Trump. Both Sides Do It was perfectly good enough for Trump, and while that it helped Trump in itself doesn’t condemn the press coverage the fact that this effective false equivalence is utterly ludicrous certainly does.

–Scott Lemieux
On the Accept-No-Responsibility, Blame-Everyone-Else Posture

Image of Scott Lemieux cropped from one at Muhlenberg College. Licensed under Fair Use.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Obama Presidency

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Ta-Nehisi CoatesSince the election, I’ve been clinging to voices of sanity. Anyone with a brain. I like imagining they aren’t outliers. Scientific lectures, comedy, even politicians talking — if the author has something to teach me. So, I’ve wondered, where has Ta-Nehisi Coates been? After all, Trump ran the most overtly racist campaign since George Wallace. Coates is one of our finest essayists — especially on racism in America. He would certainly have a unique way of viewing the election.

As it turns out, he’s been preparing a richly-layered analysis of Barack Obama. It appeared earlier this week in The Atlantic, My President Was Black. It features both interviews with Obama and Coates’ views on the President’s legacy. Like most of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing, it caused me both to question and accept many of his conclusions.

Why Was Obama So Centrist?

He notes, “I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history.” Skilled and moral, yes. But among the greatest? I’m not so sure. He didn’t pass all that many laws after 2010.

Coates continues, “He was phenomenal — the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people.”

Obama Was Constrained by Racism

This is unquestionably true. It gets at both my primary criticism of the Obama administration (not liberal enough), and Coates’s ongoing examination of the role racism plays in America. It’s unlikely Obama could have been much more liberal. Any such effort would have been excoriated as “Giving Free Money To Shiftless Negroes” (many Republican voters believe this falsehood).

Obama says as much to Ta-Nehisi Coates, talking about being approached by activist groups: “You feel like saying to these folks, ‘[Don’t] you think if I could do it, I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don’t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?'”

And here’s the conundrum of Obama — the devil’s bargain anyone who seeks power inevitably makes. The key factor in a “deal with the devil” story is very like the Midas legend; be careful what you wish for, you may get it. Obama was elected on a populist platform he had no hope of enacting. Racism will out.

Election 2016: The Unblackening

Ta-Nehisi Coates unflinchingly describes the myriad versions of racial backlash Obama’s mild-mannered demeanor inspired, and quotes the President in a frank observation of why New Deal politics may now be unsupportable:

But what I do believe is that if somebody didn’t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn’t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority… that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class—and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class, you now have a violent opposition to them—then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are, and what’s different, and what’s changed.

Obama and Coates (And you and I!) all know “what’s changed.” Wealth redistribution was fine when it went from richer to poorer white people. After the civil rights movement secured legal racial equality (theoretically anyway), suddenly redistribution became an evil. An assault on freedom. This reaction was in place long before mythical legends of Welfare Queens driving around in their Cadillacs.

I have struggled with the election results. There are two primary reasons. First, I am simply afraid of their practical ramifications for people inside and outside the country. Second, I know the hideousness that produced the results. This is both the hideousness of rapacious corporate greed that’s erased our safety net and the demonizing of the Other, which capitalism is quite happy to exploit. This is America’s fascism. Perhaps it always was.

Being Wrong About the Comforting Narrative

“Racism is never simple,” Ta-Nehisi Coates succinctly observes. Earlier, he delivers a solid refutation of my own previously held position:

One theory popular among (primarily) white intellectuals of varying political persuasions held that this response was largely the discontented rumblings of a white working class threatened by the menace of globalization and crony capitalism. Dismissing these rumblings as racism was said to condescend to this proletariat, which had long suffered the slings and arrows of coastal elites, heartless technocrats, and reformist snobs. Racism was not something to be coolly and empirically assessed but a slander upon the working man. Deindustrialization, globalization, and broad income inequality are real. And they have landed with at least as great a force upon black and Latino people in our country as upon white people. And yet these groups were strangely unrepresented in this new populism.

It’s what scientists call a positive feedback loop. Racism gave Republicans their first opportunities to chip away at the New Deal. That erosion made life for working people worse. That made them blame “government” (for presumably wasting their tax dollars on minorities) more. So it enabled further-right politicians, who slashed the safety net more — and on and on and on.

It’s not “chicken and egg,” because we know what came first. Racism did. But it is a self-strengthening mechanism. A Danish friend once told me their saying is “a screw without an end.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates Makes Me Think

Ultimately, Coates’s article made me reconsider Obama’s time in office. I wanted him to be more liberal. I still want Democrats to be. And yet, even the conservative ACA was seen as a giveaway to Those People. How much more could Obama have done? How do we end the screw?

Can we fight inequality without being accused of racial favoritism? Can we fight inequality without a dedication to alleviating the great injustices done to so many of our citizens? These positions seem contradictory. Since the disease of racism poisons all of us.

And Coates made me aware just how much darker Trump’s election was for people of color. What a slap in the face it is that the centrist, elegant Obamas incurred so much hatred. Even the “talented tenth” (or thousandth) of a percent are never acceptable enough.

Ta-Nehisi Coates noted of an Obama appearance at the storied Howard University, “Six months later the awful price of a black presidency would be known to those students.” What a price! What moral debts we have accrued. And what terrible interest we continue to pay.

Image cropped from Ta-Nehisi Coates by Montesbradley. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

What Barack Obama Still Can’t Say

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President Barack ObamaRacism greeted Obama in both his primary and general-election campaigns in 2008. Photos were circulated of him in Somali garb. Rush Limbaugh dubbed him “Barack the Magic Negro.” Roger Stone, who would go on to advise the Trump campaign, claimed that Michelle Obama could be heard on tape yelling “Whitey.” Detractors circulated emails claiming that the future first lady had written a racist senior thesis while at Princeton. A fifth of all West Virginia Democratic-primary voters in 2008 openly admitted that race had influenced their vote. Hillary Clinton trounced him 67 to 26 percent.

After Obama won the presidency in defiance of these racial headwinds, traffic to the white-supremacist website Stormfront increased sixfold. Before the election, in August, just before the Democratic National Convention, the FBI uncovered an assassination plot hatched by white supremacists in Denver. Mainstream conservative publications floated the notion that Obama’s memoir was too “stylish and penetrating” to have been written by the candidate, and found a plausible ghostwriter in the radical (and white) former Weatherman Bill Ayers. A Republican women’s club in California dispensed “Obama Bucks” featuring slices of watermelon, ribs, and fried chicken. At the Values Voter Summit that year, conventioneers hawked “Obama Waffles,” a waffle mix whose box featured a bug-eyed caricature of the candidate. Fake hip-hop lyrics were scrawled on the side (“Barry’s Bling Bling Waffle Ring”) and on the top, the same caricature was granted a turban and tagged with the instructions “Point box toward Mecca for tastier waffles.” The display was denounced by the summit’s sponsor, the Family Research Council. One would be forgiven for meeting this denunciation with guffaws: The council’s president, Tony Perkins, had once addressed the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens with a Confederate flag draped behind him. By 2015, Perkins had deemed the debate over Obama’s birth certificate “legitimate” and was saying that it “makes sense” to conclude that Obama was actually a Muslim.

By then, birtherism — inflamed in large part by a real-estate mogul and reality-TV star named Donald Trump — had overtaken the Republican rank and file. In 2015, one poll found that 54 percent of GOP voters thought Obama was a Muslim. Only 29 percent believed he’d been born in America.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates
My President Was Black

Image of Obama is in the public domain.