Matt Yglesias wrote an article that at first struck me as obvious but now seems profound, Donald Trump Could Be a Generation-Long Disaster for the Republican Party. He made a branding argument. The Republican Party already struggles with support from any group that isn’t white and dying off fast. The key to Trump’s success in the GOP primary has been that he’s made text of the party’s long used subtext. And this doesn’t just speak for Donald Trump; it speaks of the Republican Party. As Yglesias conjectures, Latinos (but also African Americans, Muslims, and even young people) will not soon forgive and forget.

The key to the argument is Pete Wilson. He is well known in California and now more or less a cautionary tale. He was twice selected US Senator and then twice elected governor. On paper, he’s an incredibly successful politician. But he is also largely responsible for destroying the Republican Party in California. And that is due, in large part, to his association with Proposition 187.

Proposition 187 was passed in 1994 — at the same time that Pete Wilson won his second term as governor. It was the first ever state anti-immigration law that was supposed to stop, for example, undocumented children from using our public schools. It was a really vile law that was quickly found to be unconstitutional and was never put into effect. It was also an embarrassment. It was much like Proposition 8 in 2008 that made same-sex marriage illegal. People voted for it, but the state as a whole quickly saw it as a mistake.

So even though Wilson won in 1994, he branded the GOP as the party of intolerance. It is a little funny as a Californian. The state isn’t nearly as liberal as others think. But more important, the state isn’t as liberal as its own residents think. It isn’t just demographic factors that turned Prop 187 into an embarrassment. And it isn’t demographic factors at all that turned Prop 8 into one. Californians work themselves up into a froth over issues like that and then, in the clear light of day (without the drumbeat of an election), we are embarrassed because we don’t see ourselves as the intolerant people our voting often suggests.

California used to be a swing state. As I remember with great annoyance, George Bush Sr beat Michael Dukakis by over 3.5 percentage points. (Note: where I live in the Bay Area, Dukakis won; Prop 8 lost; and Prop 187 lost.) But now it is one of the bluest of states.

Barbara Boxer used to be a US Representative from liberal Marin County. She was widely considered a liberal extremist. I never thought she would be able to win any statewide election. She did win in a fairly close race in 1992, largely because of Bill Clinton. But since then, she’s been reelected by large margins: 10 percentage points in 1998, 20 in 2004, and 10 in the Republican’s huge year of 2010.

What’s more, the state assembly and senate are both currently 65% Democratic.

The issue for the Republican Party nationwide is whether this will happen to them. Pete Wilson and the Republicans won the battle in 1994, but lost the war — and quickly. In Donald Trump’s case, it doesn’t even look like he will win the battle. But he is doing a great job of branding the party as intolerant jerks. If you look at the data from Gallup, Trump has had strong approval from Republican voters from the beginning. His net favorability right now is 24 percentage points!

George Will hopes that the Republican Party can just put Trump behind it, lose in 2016, and come back strong in 2020. And maybe it can. But there will be even fewer white people then. And there will be more Latinos. And as much as they may be seen more and more as “white,” they are not likely to forgive and forget what the Republican Party is all about.

Update: Pete Wilson’s Endorsement

I wrote this early morning yesterday, not thinking about the Indiana primary. A few days ago, Pete Wilson endorsed Ted Cruz. Well, that’s all over now.

Matt Bruenig wrote a great article over the weekend, Does It Matter That Blacks Oppose Marriage Equality? It counters what is a very common argument on the left: that we shouldn’t sympathize with the white working class because they are just a bunch of bigots anyway. There are many problems with this thought.

One issue is that the white working class may over all be bigoted toward black and brown skinned people, a large percentage of them are not bigoted in the obvious way that, say, Donald Trump supporters often seem to be. This is where Bruenig got the title for his article. It turns out that as a group, African Americans are really bigoted toward the LGBT community. While blacks and whites were pretty much together on the issue of same-sex marriage back in 2001, support has almost doubled among whites, but has barely changed among blacks.

Given this, should we say that the African American community does not deserve our sympathy because it does not have the same beliefs that we do? It sounds absurd when put that way. And it is especially true when it was the “liberal” president Bill Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act. And given that in 2001, only about 30% of Americans were in favor of marriage equality, does it mean that no Americans deserved sympathy in 2001?

But to me, the bigger issue is just how class-based this idea is. The issue isn’t about the bigotry of the white working class; it is about the form of that bigotry. Because here is the unfortunate truth: we are all bigots. And if we are going to slice and dice the acceptable from the unacceptable bigotry, then we are lost.

I can find plenty of reasons to excuse the LGBT bigotry of the African American community. But I can do the same thing about the racial bigotry of the white working class. And doesn’t it say something of the educated liberal class that it finds one group more acceptable than the other? After all, among the educated liberal class, marriage inequality was the default position quite recently.

It’s interesting that this issue is at the core of Thomas Frank’s new book, Listen, Liberal. The rise of the New Democrats (and related groups) was based in large part on the idea that the white working class was made up of a bunch of pro-war bigots. And that’s how we get to our current Democratic Party that is liberal on social issues but most definitely not on economic issues. (Good God: Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist when he’s just a traditional, New Deal liberal.)

But there is something that Eric Alterman has written about in this regard that I think is really important. In the 1960s, when we decided that we needed to reverse segregation, it wasn’t upper class whites who were asked to sacrifice. It was working class whites. And although northern whites might not have been as offensively and outwardly bigoted as southern whites, anti-segregation programs worried them.

So it is a little much for the same class of people who were were willing to do nothing themselves to fight against our country’s long racist tradition to stand up now and say that white working class people don’t deserve our sympathy. The educated class has been making this argument for decades. You might even say that they are bigoted toward the white working class.

Paul Krugman’s Friday column comes out just after midnight my time on Thursday. I thought for a little while about live blogging the event. Now that even the most innumerate can see that Hillary Clinton has won the Democratic Party nomination, would Krugman move on to something besides another “Clinton rocks! Sanders sucks!” article. I thought the idea was very funny because I was almost certain that he would write something different. But I was wrong. Although his article, Wrath of the Conned, is nominally about the Republicans, it reads more like an attack on Sanders. Krugman is one of the great poor winners.

The article doesn’t mention Sanders by name and certainly doesn’t give him any credit in the campaign. You know, because Sanders sucks. The best we get is the truly ignorant claim that nonwhite voters supported Clinton because her “challenger” (Not Sanders!) “sometimes seemed to dismiss” the achievement of Obamacare. Yeah, it was all about Obamacare, Krugman. I’m a big Obamacare supporter, but it does far too much argumentative work for Krugman in his apologias for Obama.

Krugman also quoted the Crimson Hexagon study in the most facile way, saying that Clinton got the most negative coverage. That’s true, but it’s important to note that it wasn’t that much more negative than the other candidates and that the same study found the media covered Clinton far more than it did Sanders.

I don’t especially care, I suppose. But it is a good illustration of how people are often poor winners. Would it be so hard to say something nice about what the Sanders phenomenon has done? Clinton has turned left during this primary because Sanders was pounding her from the left. Imagine where we’d be now if Jim Webb had seen Sanders’ level of support. We wouldn’t be talking about the minimum wage; we’d be talking about who was going to drop more bombs on more countries.

Politicians do not exist in a vacuum. Clinton has shifted to the left on both trade deals and Social Security — because of the success of Bernie Sanders. Does he — Do we?! — get any credit for this? Or are the Krugman’s the nation going to continue to stew about Sanders’ unfortunate “Clinton isn’t qualified to be president” comment (which he took back far more publicly than he stated it)?

Poor Winners Can Help Us!

Scott Lemieux wrote a really good article over at New Republic yesterday, Why Hillary Will Govern More Like Bernie Than People Think. This goes along with what I’ve been saying for some time to disappointed Sanders supporters, “He made Clinton, the Democratic Party, and America better.” But now I find that I have to say it to Clinton supporters. Yes, Clinton is a politician, and like them all — including Bernie Sanders — she shifts with the political winds. And she would have been a far worse candidate if she had spent the last year having only to counter the insanity of the Republican Party.

Lemieux’s article is mostly about Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, and how he’s turned out to be far more of a progressive than anyone would have thought given what a political hack he has always been. Lemieux noted:

And so too has Clinton, I believe. And it has happened in a big way. As Lemieux said, “Leaders often act as weathervanes, but this isn’t a bad thing if the wind is blowing in the right direction.” So maybe it’s best that people like Krugman are determined to be poor winners. It can encourage the rest of us. We need to keep blowing — and hard.

Back in 2000, I worked long hours for a company named Equilibrium. They were known for a product that was very popular among professional graphic artists, DeBabelizer. It converted graphic files from one format to another. But I was hired when the company was on a big expansion, creating a product that they still sell, MediaRich. At the time, it was pretty cool, but now sounds almost trivial. It allows websites to change images on the fly. So if you are looking at a page selling shirts, you could see the model in all the different colors the shirt comes in. And it could do a whole lot more than that.

I liked that job. It paid well and I worked with some really great people. But I remember this one meeting. We had been working long hours because we were getting ready for some kind of product launch and one of the vice-presidents said, “We work hard and we play hard!” I thought it was a stupid thing to say because I had heard the exact same thing said at every corporate job I’d ever had, including at Microsoft. And it was always said with the same cheerful enthusiasm that indicated that the speaker thought it was a clever phrase they had just made up rather than the most tired of cliches.

Long Hours Goofing Off

Over time, I’ve come to see that it was not just a cliche, it was also a lie. In fact, it is a double lie. My time in corporate America has shown that mostly, people do not work hard. They work long. It’s a way of proving fealty to the corporation, “Look, I’m willing to spend 12 hours a day in this cubical and rarely see my wife and kids! I’m a team player!” Meanwhile, these same people mostly goof off. I even see it here on Frankly Curious. I had asked my direct boss why it was that traffic here goes down so much on the weekends; she said, “It’s the same for every site; people surf the web most at work.”

Similarly, my last job was a tiny startup. We did amazing work until we ran out of money and the company was taken over by a bunch of real estate investors who destroyed it through utter incompetence. But the head of the company was in every day, putting in those hours. But what was he doing? Every time I looked, he was on some website about sail boats (he was really into boats). It’s pretty typical, though. So the idea that everyone is working hard is just nonsense.

At that point at that company, I wasn’t working either. I was terribly sick (I almost died). But more, everything I had built the two years before was being destroyed in the name of the egos of a real estate agent and a boat mechanic. When I was at Equilibrium, however, I wanted to work and go home. I did not like this nonsense of hanging out at work. But then, I was about ten years older than the other workers and was far more interested in finishing my first novel. And it annoyed me that I was expected to work long hours as though it were some kind of religious observance.

But the other part of this myth is the “play hard” part. I don’t even know what it is to “play hard.” But these people certainly didn’t do it. They didn’t play at all. It would be better to say that they “worked long and goofed off hard.” Because just killing time in a way that doesn’t seem like you are goofing off is a large part of what the people at Equilibrium did.

This occurred to me today as I was reading Thomas Frank’s new book, Listen, Liberal. A lot of the book is a critique of the “innovation mentality.” You know what it is: this idea that if we all get college degrees and think like entrepreneurs, then we will live in a bright shiny world. He talks about how every town goes out of its way to bring in those great “innovators” who will revitalize the boarded up downtown regions where people only go if they want to by sex or drugs. Frank remarked:

I remember at Equilibrium, we had a great big break room. And in it was a very expensive Foosball table. I never saw anyone play it. In fact, in all those long hours I never saw anyone in the break room (which I passed by often), except on Thursday mornings, when they would bring in bagels, and people would come in, get a bagel and cream cheese and take it back to their desks where they would eat and “work.”

This all goes back to the breakdown of worker solidarity. And here we have a variation of the paradox of thrift. Everyone wants to prove to the boss that they are the hardest worker. But there isn’t really that much work to be done. There were certainly times when long hours were required, but these were rare. And they were always because of sequencing: I needed to wait around for one person to finish something so that I could do my part. But the rest of the long hours is just one individual trying to outdo another individual. The end result, is that everyone ends up spending a whole lot more time at work, without any more getting done.

“Work hard, play hard” is a myth people use to justify wasting large parts of their lives.

It goes to show just how overworked I am that I’m only now getting to something I saw a week ago in a post at No More Mister Nice Blog, How Your Right-Wing Uncle Is Going to React to Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill. The point of the article is that Republicans will use Tubman differently how ever it works for them. So she will either be a terrible communist or a great gun loving Republican. It’s this latter conception of her that I find interesting and incredibly annoying.

The truth is that Harriet Tubman was a gun loving Republican. But the problem with that is that you can’t really compare someone who was born almost 200 years ago to someone today. Let’s start with the most obvious and silly thing. Of course Tubman was a Republican! The Republican Party was the anti-slavery party. I assure you that if chattel slavery were an open issue today, it would be the Republican Party that would be on television reading passages from the Bible to justify it. In the 1960s, the Democrats and Republicans crossed paths on this issue. This is the main reason why the south went from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.

My message to Republicans: after decades of using racial dog whistles to win elections, it is time to embrace the fact that you are a racist party. The group of people who ended slavery in this country might have called themselves Republicans, but they don’t represent who you are today.

Who’d’ve Thought Harriet Tubman Was Like That?!

The issue of guns is a little more subtle but far more interesting. You see, in the early days of the union, the Constitution really did protect gun rights in a most feeble way. It was only after the Civil War that gun rights started to be expanded because the southern states were trying to disarm former slaves. So of course Harriet Tubman would be pro-gun — both before and after the Civil War.

Compare this to what I’ve found in my life to be the typical gun owner: someone who owns a dozen or more guns and is waiting for the revolution that keeps not coming. You know: Ammon Bundy. These are people who live in a fantasy land where every Democratic president is a despot just waiting to storm their home. Its particularly funny when you consider that our military now has drones. So when Bundy and his fellow idiots occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, it really didn’t matter how many guns they had. The government could have just blown them all up using a drone.

On the other hand, guns actually did provide former slaves some degree of protection against state governments that really were trying to kill them. So it not only makes perfect sense that Harriet Tubman would be a gun loving Republican, it was entirely predictable. Yet we get absolutely fatuous statements from conservatives like this:

So we are supposed to be surprised. Why? Because Republicans think we are as stupid and ignorant as they are.