Political issues – Page 18

Clues to the future in how people talk

This video has been dubbed so that Trump is speaking with a British accent. His words are the same. How many fans would Trump have if he actually talked like this?

We Americans believe that the British are excessively judgmental about how people talk (and they are). But not only are we Americans just as judgmental, some linguists say that Americans are even more judgmental than the British. Does how people talk affect our politics far more than we realize? Does it shed some light on who will prosper and who will not?

Our reactions to how people talk are largely unconscious. But, as we listen to someone talk, we are rapidly making judgments about how smart they are, how nice they are, how rich or poor they are, how educated they are, and whether they are, or are not, like us. If the way people talk marks them as a member of an out-group, then we apply the stereotypes that we associate with that out-group.

Let’s listen to the Trump supporters in the video below. I don’t think many Trump supporters read this blog. But if they did, they’d recognize the people in the video as members of their own in-group, just like everyone else at a Trump rally. Those of us who despise Trump, however, will have very different responses. We will realize — quite correctly — that the people in the video are not very smart, not very nice, not very rich, not very well educated, and not like us:

After you watch these two videos, it’s easy to see that Trump supporters like Trump because of how he talks to them. Trump comes across as just as stupid, just as mean, just as hardscrabble, and just as ignorant as they are. Thus they see Trump as one of them. Nothing else matters to them, because they don’t know and don’t care what it actually takes to manage and govern a world as complicated as the world we live in. Because they’re enraged and confused, cruelty toward out-groups seems to be their only domestic policy, their only foreign policy, and their only economic policy.

Unfortunately for Trump supporters, their ignorance makes them easy to deceive. Trump is not like them. Trump is a rich guy from New York City whose social set is the global oligarchy, an oligarchy all about money and power and that lives on the shady side of law and ethics. Trump is deceiving and exploiting his supporters for the benefit of people who are like Trump. Trump’s narcissism feeds on their adulation. In return, Trump flatters them with his attention. They believe that someone is finally speaking up for them. He assures them that they will be great again. But that is not going to happen. Trump is, if anything, expediting their obsolescence by convincing them that they don’t have to change, or learn, or be nice, or educate their children, and that it’s the rest of the world that is the problem.

After the catastrophic election of 2016, many liberals were quick to blame themselves. If only we had reached out to them! We must engage them and empathize with them! That is a delusion. Trump supporters are too far gone for liberal reaching-out, because liberals are a demonized out-group. As they see it, only one of them can save them. Trump is quite literally seen as the answer to their prayers.

But back to language. It’s a shame that linguists have had so little to say about the culture war now raging in America, because linguists have a long, long memory, for cultures as well as for languages. Most people who write about American politics invoke American history, and there they stop. But no matter how much one knows about American history, I suspect that American history is a shallow source for understanding this culture war. To my lights, the part of American history most relevant to today’s culture war is not Jefferson vs. Hamilton but the displacement of native Americans and the loss of native American culture.

Linguists have a lot to say about what occurs when one language (or culture) replaces another. It’s always complicated, but the factors tend to be similar, whether the cultural replacement occurred 5,000 years ago (as when the Indo-European languages and cultures became dominant in Europe and parts of Asia), or 2,000 years ago, as when Latin took over in western Europe. (We need to keep in mind that, though English is a Germanic language, about 60 percent of English words derive from Latin.) Among those factors are technology (going all the way back to the wheel), migration, and the kind of economic power that comes from trading, or from political or economic exploitation.

At the level of causes that can be keenly felt by every human individual, there are two factors that are pretty much always involved in cultural displacement: prestige, and its opposite, stigma.

In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, a book about how Indo-European languages swept over Europe during the bronze and iron ages, David Anthony writes:

The pre-Indo-European languages of Europe were abandoned because they were linked to membership in social groups that became stigmatized. How that process of stigmatization happened is a fascinating question, and the possibilities are much more varied than just invasion and conquest…. Negative evaluations associated with the dying language lead to a descending series of reclassifications by succeeding generations, until no one wants to speak like Grandpa anymore. Language shift and the stigmatization of old identities go hand in hand. [p. 340, sentence order inverted for emphasis]

And:

Usually language shift flows in the direction of paramount prestige and power. [p. 341]

As the world relentlessly globalizes (whether for good or for ill), something remarkable is happening with language. It is very rapid, because it has happened in our lifetimes. English is becoming the global lingua franca. Millions of people are learning English. I did not realize until I was Googling for this post that more people today speak English as a second language (more than 1 billion) than speak English as their first language (less than 400 million). Whether as a first or second language, to speak English today (as long as your accent is not stigmatized) is a matter of great prestige.

In the American culture war, what we have is not language displacement but culture displacement, driven by the usual factors — technology, economics, migration, and prestige vs. stigma. Trump’s supporters speak English, but many or most of them speak stigmatized dialects of English. When Trump speaks to his supporters, he speaks to them in a stigmatized dialect — a New York working-class dialect.

In a piece in the Washington Post, “Donald Trump’s accent, explained,” a linguist is quoted: “He wants to sound macho. As part of his whole tough-guy persona, he adopts almost a working-class style of speech.”

I lamented above that linguists haven’t had more to say about American politics and the American culture war. But I would mention two papers by linguists that are relevant:

Talking Donald Trump: A sociolinguistic study, by Jennifer Scalfani

Silencing nonstandard speakers: A content analysis of accent portrayals on American primetime television, by four linguists

What I’m arguing here is that what we are living through is not just a culture war but actually is the rage and death throes of a doomed culture — white, rural, Christian America. At the risk of making it sound facile, I’d have to say that their doom is obvious. They lack the skills, the knowledge, the intelligence, and even the will to adapt to a changing world. They are stigmatized. The world looks down on them, and they know it. Almost all of the social goods required for success and expansion in today’s world belong to the other side. As for the rage of rural white America, that is easy to understand, because, in their lifetimes, they have seen a reversal of prestige vs. stigma, aggravated by economic humiliation. In the glory days of white rural America, black people and gay people were stigmatized. White rural churchgoers had prestige. Now it is the other way around, which is why these changes seem like the end of the world and the work of the devil to them.

Given that Trump supporters do speak English, it would be possible for them to save themselves. They could, through education, better information, better politics, and improvement in their language skills, unload some of the stigma and work to adapt. Many of their children will do that. But the older ones won’t. As they slide into minority status, they could join a coalition, as other minorities do. But they won’t do that either. Part of what Trump and the Republican Party is teaching them is not to join a coalition of, say, working class minorities. White, rural, working-class America has everything in common with black (or Hispanic), rural, working-class America. But the Republican Party has cleverly assured that today’s older Republicans will never, even if it would make them less poor and get them medical care, join a coalition that isn’t all white and waving the Christian flag. The 2016 election, I believe, is the last national election that the Republican Party will ever be able to win, unless it completely re-invents itself. Republicans lost the popular vote. Only by lying, cheating, and relying on Russian help could they pull it off. That won’t happen again. We’re onto them.

I have another suspicion here about what may be going on in the longer scheme of things. The rotting away of white, rural, Christian America is probably just an ordinary, localized event, if you look at it from a global perspective with a timeline of 100 years or so. Theirs is not the only culture that is is dying or that has recently died. But from a 2,000-year perspective, this may also be the last stand of Christian true believers. If the test of true belief is the willingness to go to war with the infidels, then only white, rural, evangelical and fundamentalist Americans are still standing. Europe, and the Catholic church, passed that point long ago. In not too many more years, good-byes may be in order not only for white, rural, Christian Americans, but also for true-believing Christianity.

What do we owe Trump supporters? We owe them what everyone is owed: equal justice, equal rights, equal opportunity, and all the goods that go with a decent society, including public education, medical care, jobs, retirement, and self-respect. Those are the very things that they would deny to others.

I am not a linguist, nor a sociologist, nor a political scientist, nor a historian (though I can read). But I do know these people. Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the church have brought out the very worst in them. Even if it had been otherwise, and if the authority they crave had brought out the best in them, I believe they still would remain in decline, because they are unfit for a changing world and cannot adapt, as a consequence of their own failings. There ought to be a word for it, because it’s something I’ve seen over and over in how dysfunctional people live their lives. They cling, as though for dear life, to the very thing that is pulling them down.

Nancy Pelosi tips her hand

Twitter, Christine Pelosi

“I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison.”

A lot of people who want justice for Donald Trump have been grumbling about Nancy Pelosi, because Pelosi seems to be dragging her feet on impeachment. However, I don’t see anything to grumble about. A lot of politics is tactical and scripted. My interpretation of Pelosi’s tactics is that she wants a widespread, bottom-up outcry for impeachment. The more she seems to be resisting impeachment, the harder she is pushed. That’s exactly what she wants. She wants history to record that, as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, she brought justice to the most dangerous and most criminal president in history.

This morning, in Politico, Pelosi revealed — and I believe she is serious — what she really has in mind for Trump: prison.

The Politico article is Pelosi tells Dems she wants to see Trump in prison.

Republicans just naturally assume that because Republicans try to inflict political damage on Democrats with endless witch-hunt investigations, that that’s what Democrats are doing. Republicans, as usual, are delusional. The difference is that Republicans never had anything on Hillary Clinton, and the investigators knew it, even if the ignorati didn’t. Lock-her-up Republicans are quick to gloat, but slow to learn. Whereas Trump is not just a criminal, he’s a crime lord who must be held responsible for a long list of state and federal crimes — financial crimes, tax crimes, obstruction, conspiracy, and, in my opinion, treason. His financial crimes aren’t just about real estate. Trump also is deeply and criminally involved in the financial crimes of the global billionaire oligarchy, to whom he clearly owes dirty money, and lots of it.

Nancy Pelosi, we should keep in mind, has access to more information about what’s going on behind the scenes than any Democrat in the country. Her strategy, I believe, is to first politically destroy Trump by exposing Trump’s criminality in televised House hearings. She has about nine months to do that, because Trump must be politically destroyed before next year’s presidential primaries, so that the Republican Party can pick another candidate. I continue to believe that the odds are close to zip that Trump will be around to run for a second term. Rather, I think Trump will resign once 60 percent or more of the American population see his criminality, and once the Republican Party sees that Trump is doomed and turns on him. Trump will try to cut a deal for his resignation. But even if Trump manages to evade prosecution for his federal crimes, New York State has enough on him to lock him up for the rest of his miserable life.

Nancy Pelosi does not need to bluff, because she has more power here than Trump does, and she knows it. Trump, propped up by Republican propaganda and by stooges (such as William Barr) in key positions, has enough power to slow things down and to throw sand in the works, but ultimately it’s Trump’s criminal guilt that will take away all his power and ensure his doom. Pelosi’s task is that she must expose Trump’s crimes for all to see, on television. She has everything she needs to do that. She has the power of Congress, and the law, behind her. State law — not only in New York but probably also in other states — are a backstop against Republican dirty tricks and presidential pardons.

When Nancy Pelosi used the word “prison” yesterday, she knew exactly what she was saying and what she was doing. Now we get to watch as she plays her hand.

Update: Jennifer Rubin, at the Washington Post, drawing on another article by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, describes an actual legal structure for what Nancy Pelosi may have in mind. The article is, Forget impeachment. Tee up prosecution.

Part of the argument is that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has already prejudged the case for impeachment. Republicans would look the other way and blame Democrats no matter what Trump has done. So, by this kind of road map, the House would investigate Trump’s crimes, concluding with a resolution referring the case and all the evidence to prosecutors as soon as Trump is out of office.

That sounds like a plan to me.

Why do we know so little about socialism?

John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, by William A. Edmundson. Cambridge University Press, 2017. 212 pages.

I am going to propose an answer to the question that I raise in the headline: The reason we know so little about socialism is that, for two generations, since the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the Overton window has been narrowed and pulled hard to the right. Socialism now lies outside the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. Even Democrats are terrified of the word socialism, because it’s now a grenade word flung from the right to demonize and sabotage any idea that might reduce economic and political inequality or that might help the poor or hurt the rich. (Not that this is new. Decades ago, the right also saw the development of Social Security and Medicare as treacherous socialism.) The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is believed to have been the last word on the viability of socialism.

Public discourse now holds that, on the matter of socialism, the case is closed. Yes, Bernie Sanders rudely brought up the subject. But few people really know what he might be talking about. If Sanders himself knows, he’s doing a very poor job of explaining it. The political problem for liberals seems to be, how can we make gains in justice and equality without being defeated at the outset by the s-word grenade?

But there is a very great irony here, though it is an irony that only the intelligentsia are aware of. That is that, while the idea of socialism was being driven out of public discourse, enormous progress in moral and political philosophy was being made behind the scenes, in academia. In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice. This book almost certainly will stand as the most important work of the 20th Century in moral and political philosophy. Rawls, in dialogue with other scholars, continued to develop his theory of justice throughout his life. He died in 2002. The year before his death, he published Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Those were his last words on the subject.

Rawls’ theory of justice is still very active terrain in academia, though it rarely spills over into public discourse. Why is that? I would suggest that there are two reasons. The first is that justice as fairness lies outside the Overton window, and it is far too liberal to be tolerated in today’s public discourse. The second is that what has been written on the theory is very difficult to read. It is written by philosophers, for philosophers. I recently complained to a friend that, in other difficult subjects such as physics, we have science journalists who work to make progress in science known to the intelligent public. Scientists themselves often write books for lay readers. In philosophy, there is a wall between public discourse and the ivory tower. If there are journalists of philosophy, at least in English, I don’t know who they are. If you are, like me, an ordinary non-academic but motivated person, and you want to know about justice as fairness, you’ve got to climb a wall.

Edmundson’s John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, though it is as dense and difficult to read as Rawls, wants to make only one simple point. That is that Rawls eventually concluded that liberal democratic socialism is the only form of government that satisfies the requirements of justice as fairness. Five types of government are candidates. Four types fail: property-owning democracy, laissez-faire capitalism, welfare-state capitalism, and state socialism. (The Soviet Union, by the way, was an example of state socialism.)

Before Rawls, Karl Marx would have been the go-to source on socialism. The hippies of the 1960s had only Marx. (In fact, the hippies of the 1960s almost destroyed the manuscript for A Theory of Justice. Rawls was at Stanford University at the time, and the manuscript was in his office. In April 1970, students firebombed the building in which Rawls’ office was located. The adjoining office was completely destroyed. Rawls’ office had smoke and water damage. Rawls and his wife salvaged the soaked but legible manuscript, dried the pages, and retyped it.) After Rawls, I think it would be safe to say that Marx is now mostly obsolete and mostly of historical interest.

It would be similarly safe to say that, after Rawls, the previous state-of-the-art in moral philosophy is obsolete and has been replaced by justice as fairness. That would be utilitarianism, which boils down to the greatest good for the greatest number, a moral philosophy under which some can be permitted to suffer if it makes others better off. Justice as fairness does not allow the suffering of the few for the benefit of the many.

Of course Rawls has critics. It has been a while since I attempted a brief survey of arguments against Rawls. My impression, as I recall, was that many of Rawls’ critics are people such as academic theologians who don’t want what they see as the authority of “revealed” sources made obsolete and superseded by human reason.

Because Rawls almost never comes up in public discourse, it occurred to me to wonder how I became aware of Rawls in the first place. I believe that the answer to that is that Thomas Piketty refers to Rawls in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. There are four references to Rawls in that book’s index (only one is in the text; the other three are in the notes). The title of Rawls’ first book, A Theory of Justice, certainly would have caught my eye, and that’s probably when I looked into it and ordered the book from Amazon.

Rawls’ ideas — whether on justice as fairness or on socialism — are just too much for me to try to go into there. I can only encourage people to do their own reading. One reason that Rawls (not to mention Edmundson) is difficult to read is that there is a long list of concepts that must be understood. The concepts have names that often aren’t very helpful. For example, it’s not enough just to know the meaning of the English word “reciprocity,” because the term stands for a much more complicated concept in Rawls’ writing. Other terms are “the difference principle,” “fair value,” “the special psychologies,” “distributive justice,” “envy,” “excusable envy,” “ideal theory,” “non-ideal theory,” “lexical priority,” “the motivation principle,” “nearly just society,” “non-comparing groups,” “peace by satisfaction,” “perfectly ordered society,” “principle of continuity,” “pure procedural justice,” “pure ownership,” “reasonable pluralism,” “reconciliation requirement,” “reflective equilibrium,” “relative stability,” “restricted utility principle,” “self-esteem,” “self-respect,” “social minimum,” “socially dangerous extent,” “testamentary freedom,” “unusual risk aversion,” “well-ordered society,” and so on.

All of the above terms are of course defined somewhere, but the trick is to grasp the concept when you first encounter it and attach that concept to its term. I would suggest that anyone who wishes to read up on justice as fairness make a list of these terms as they are encountered, with one’s own notes on what they mean. The terms are used over and over again, and if you’ve forgotten the concept, then the text will be opaque.

The memory of relatively recent experiments in socialism (at least in the English-speaking world) also are being lost. I was born in 1948, and thus I have no memory of Clement Attlee, who followed Winston Churchill as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1945. Attlee did deliver on his promise of bringing socialism to the United Kingdom. That form of government stood until Margaret Thatcher dismantled it. I know very little about this period, so a biography of Attlee and a history of that period in the United Kingdom are now on my reading list.

Ironically, academic philosophers are aware of how other and better alternatives to our current form of government are unknown to most people (though they’re doing next to nothing about it). Edmundson quotes Michael Walzer:

For many years now, I have been worrying about what might be called the cultural reproduction of the left. [I]n comparison with the different religious communities, the secular left does not seem able to pass on to its next generations a rich intellectual culture or an engaging popular culture. The tradition is thin. I worried about this with regard to the American left and also, in greater anxiety, with the regard to the Zionist left.

Indeed, the problem is general…. [C]ompare three national liberation movements — in India, Israel, and Algeria. In each case, the movement was secular and leftist; in each case, it succeeded in establishing a secular state; and in each case, this secular state was challenged some 30 years later by religious zealots. Three different religions but three similar versions of zealotry: modernized, politicized, ideological. The leaders of the secular liberationists, people like Nehru, Ben-Gurion, and Ben Bella, were convinced that secularization was inevitable — the disenchantment of the social world. But they did not succeed in creating a rich cultural alternative to the old religion. They thought they didn’t have to do that; modern science was the alternative. Modern science, however, does not produce emotionally appealing life-cycle celebrations or moving accounts of the value and purpose of our lives. That’s what religion does, and secular leftism, though often described on analogy with religion, has not been similarly creative.

What this all boils down to, I think, is that those of us on the left have a great deal of intellectual work to do. And, having done some of that work, it must be shared with the rational public.

I’ll attempt an analogy to cooking. I have sometimes made fun of some provincial Chinese restaurants in these parts after discovering that Mexicans are doing the cooking. That cooking is bound to be terrible, because the cooks don’t even understand what they’re trying to achieve. So it is with alternatives to our endangered American democracy, with its appalling injustices and its extreme economic and political inequalities. Something must be done about it. But we’re not even sure what we’re trying to achieve, or how to talk about it.

How did that happen? Partly, as Walzer said, we on the left have been doing a poor job. And partly it’s that the sheer meanness and glibness of the opposition, with their simple, cunning, and deceitful stories — have gotten way out ahead of us.

The left needs a clear vision of what it wants to achieve. The left needs the necessary concepts and language for a public discourse in which we can work out our differences, and for what Walzer calls “cultural reproduction.” And somehow this must be explained to the many, many people who would benefit but who have very hard heads addled by fundamentalist religion and opposition propaganda.

The far left

What do these people have in common?: Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, David Sirota, Michael Flynn, Vladimir Putin.

The answer, I would say, is that we don’t really know. That’s what is so disturbing. But first, let’s review who these people are.

Glenn Greenwald is an American lawyer and journalist (though I would say propagandist) who now lives in Brazil. Some years ago, when George Bush was president and Greenwald was writing for publications such as Salon, he made sense (at least to people with politics similar to mine). It gradually became clear, though, that Greenwald had another agenda — a disguised agenda — and it wasn’t at all clear what that agenda was. Reasonable publications stopped carrying his material, and Greenwald and a couple of other people started an online news site, The Intercept, to run Greenwald’s material and other “adversarial journalism.”

Julian Assange is the editor of Wikileaks. Like Greenwald, Assange did reasonable work on government secrecy back when Bush was president. But, like Greenwald, it subsequently became clear that Assange had another agenda — a disguised agenda — and it wasn’t at all clear what that agenda was. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. He is under investigation in the United States for his role in Russia’s attempt to undermine the 2016 election and elect Donald Trump.

Jill Stein, a member of the Green Party, ran for president in the U.S. in 2012 and 2016. In 2016, she got 1,457,216 votes. In December 2015, she was photographed in Moscow at the head table of a dinner, with Vladimir Putin. Michael Flynn, a notorious American Republican, also was at the table.

David Sirota is an American journalist — or should I say former journalist? — who recently went to work for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Before that, he had written, in The Atlantic, the Guardian, and other publications, hit pieces against other Democratic candidates for president, including and especially Beto O’Rourke. These publications have cut him off now, and, like Greenwald, no responsible publication will ever publish him again. Having mentioned Bernie Sanders, it might be good to remind ourselves that, though Sanders (a U.S. senator from Vermont) caucuses with the Democratic Party, he considers himself a democratic socialist. His party affiliation is not clear because, in Vermont, there is no party registration.

Michael Flynn is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general. He is a Republican. Briefly, he was national security adviser to Donald Trump. Two days after the 2016 election, in a meeting in the Oval Office, President Obama expressed to Donald Trump “profound concerns” about hiring Flynn. Flynn was charged with lying to the FBI about his interactions with the Russian ambassador. During a sentencing hearing last December with Judge Emmett G. Sullivan, Sullivan told Flynn that “arguably you sold your country out.” As I mentioned above, Flynn was photographed in Moscow with Vladimir Putin and Jill Stein.

Vladimir Putin, of course, is the president of Russia. His career was in the KGB. He is an oligarch’s oligarch who takes great pains to hide his wealth and how he came by it. But some estimates are as high as $200 billion, which might make him the richest person on earth.

Now let’s return to our question: What do these people have in common? Again, there is a great deal that we don’t know. But there are some things that we can say with high confidence. They all hate and have actively worked to damage the Democratic Party. With the exception of Sirota, they all have secretive or mysterious connections to Russia. They all have worked hard to influence American presidential elections, all of them by seeking to damage Democratic candidates, intentionally or unintentionally to the benefit of Republicans.

The mystery here is what far leftists such as Jill Stein have in common with far-right actors such as Michael Flynn. Why would a leftist like Julian Assange work with Russia to elect Donald Trump and damage the Democratic Party? Why has the leftist Glenn Greenwald, who seems to like Russia better than his own country, been so busy this week saying that the investigation of Russia’s influence on the 2016 election is overblown? Why are so many right-wingers including Michael Flynn and Donald Trump so entangled with Russia? What is David Sirota’s real agenda, and is he, like Greenwald, Assange, and Stein, out to damage the United States by screwing with its politics? What does Sirota have in mind for Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and why would Sanders hire him?

Where the right wing is concerned, we know what their interest in Russia is: money, and the empowerment of oligarchies over democracies.

Where the far left is concerned, I can only speculate, because their agenda is disguised. My suspicion and working theory, though, is that theirs is a politics that demonizes the United States, that believes that reform is not possible, and that believes that the United States has too much power on the international stage. I strongly suspect that, as some die-hard supporters of Bernie Sanders have told me (they voted for Stein), they believe that the U.S. can’t be fixed without first tearing it apart. They scorn what they see as “incremental” reform. They saw Hillary Clinton as being as bad as, or worse than, Donald Trump.

Having tried to remain reasonably objective up to this point, here’s what I really think. These people on the far left are damned fools, and their agenda is dangerous. Part of the danger is that the activities of the far left (and that includes Bernie Sanders) are going to make it very difficult to explain to the American people during the next year that the Democratic Party is not about far-left socialism. As in 2016, that puts us at risk of seeing an election thrown to the right with the deliberate assistance of the far left. Could Donald Trump have won the 2016 election (if he won it — I have my doubts) without the assistance of anti-American players such as Julian Assange, Jill Stein, and Vladimir Putin? It could happen again, because the far left is getting back into action, doing again what they did in 2016 — promoting a divisive politics, and trying to damage the Democratic Party while apologizing for, and actually working with, Russia.

There really are people — including a few people I know — who believe that America can’t be fixed without tearing it apart first. I can’t imagine how they’ve convinced themselves that some kind of socialist utopia would emerge from the ashes of a failed American state. The opposite would happen. A corrupt, anti-democratic, Russia-like oligarchy would arise from the ashes of a failed American state. And that, of course, is what Russia and the meddling of oligarchs are trying to bring about, with the active help of some members of the Republican Party. Post-Trump, pro-oligarch anti-democratic Republicans are in control of the Republican Party.

I am an active member of the Democratic Party. I will try to summarize my politics as a Democrat, because I think I’m pretty typical. The word “socialist” is going to be used as a bludgeon word in the 2020 election. I do not identify as a socialist. I identify as a Democrat, though I have no problem with the term “democratic socialism” if the term is properly defined and properly used. I am a socialist to the very same degree that Republican voters who love their Social Security and Medicare are socialists. But unlike Republicans, I want to extend and improve the social safety net to make the lives and health care of working people more secure. I want to accomplish that not with deficit spending but with much higher taxes on the rich, especially on income that is produced by playing with capital rather than producing anything. I am intrigued by the idea of a wealth tax, to start reversing extreme inequality in wealth and income, which is a threat not only to the social fabric but also to democracy. I want an end to the corruption that allows the rich to avoid taxes.

I want a Green New Deal. I want immediate action on climate change, coordinated globally. I want a foreign policy based on diplomacy rather than vast military power. I want a foreign policy based on fairness and human welfare rather than oil and the profits of the rich. I want nuclear disarmament. I want religion out of government, and I would tax religion when it violates the contract of not meddling in government affairs. I want serious, rational regulation of corporations. I want serious, rational regulation of social media. I want a new, revised, re-thought version of a Fairness Doctrine that will stand in the way of Fox News acting as a privatized ministry of propaganda, so powerful that its pundits actually tell a foolish president what to say and what to do.

I want corporate money out of politics. I want a criminal justice system that is fair and merciful to the little people and that doesn’t ignore the criminality of the rich. I want a politics that does not scapegoat all the people that white people and their white religion hate. I want fair elections, with no one’s vote suppressed. I want an objective system of legislative districting and an end to political and racial gerrymandering. I want new infrastructure, but with less emphasis on roads and automobiles. I want greenways and highway underpasses for animal migrations. I want more public land, public parks, public access, and nature preserves, not less. I want humane treatment of wild animals and farm animals. I want a lower-carbon agriculture aimed at reducing the consumption of meat and other unhealthy commodities and that keeps dangerous chemicals out of the food chain. I want our oceans cleaned up.

I want affordable higher education at our public universities and some kind of amnesty on student debt, because our young people have been exploited to the point of enslavement. I want not just job training, but real education, education that brings back literature, languages, history, and music, and which doesn’t neglect science. I want the Democratic Party to figure out how to explain to people that no one likes abortion, but that Democrats don’t want to go back to a coat-hanger era in which we put women and doctors in prison. I want Democrats to be able to explain to Republicans that there’s a difference between a farmer’s shotgun and some damned fool’s arsenal of AK-47’s.

To say that we can’t afford these things is a Republican lie. It’s a nation of untaxed billionaires that we can’t afford. To say that having these things makes government too big is a Republican lie. Tell that to the Finns or Danes, the happiest people on earth. My list may seem long. But public policy already addresses all these things, but badly.

So, call me a Democrat, a democratic socialist, a leftist, a liberal … I’ll answer to all of those. You can even call me an incrementalist, if incremental improvements are all we can gain in our messed-up politics. But my politics and my hopes for America have nothing in common with anyone who thinks that you have to break America before you can fix America, or who thinks that our hope lies in Russia rather than in Washington.

Michael Flynn and Jill Stein with Vladimir Putin

Whitewash

While Republicans are having a public orgy of gloating (which we will not forget, when payback time comes), the responsible media are crying foul. Here are a few examples:

In the Washington Post, Phillip Bump, under the headline What we still don’t know about the Mueller probe, lists several questions that must be answered. The most disturbing of these questions is: Why have the people around Trump constantly lied? What are they covering up?

“Why did so many people lie about what happened? A campaign adviser, Trump’s personal attorney, his national security adviser, his former campaign manager, his former deputy campaign manager — all admitted to misleading investigators.”

Slate has several pieces this morning:

Bill Barr’s Weasel Words: All the ways the attorney general is spinning the Mueller report to protect Trump

William Barr Did What Donald Trump Hired Him to Do

William Barr Can’t Exonerate Donald Trump

At the Atlantic, Barr’s Startling and Unseemly Haste.

At the New Republic:

Yes, Trump Obstructed Justice. And William Barr Is Helping Him Cover It Up

History Will Damn Donald Trump

My view remains unchanged: Not only will history damn Donald Trump, history also will damn the Republican Party. As difficult as it is for us, now that the Trump’s attorney general has joined the cover-up, we must wait for Congress to do the job.

We didn’t learn much yesterday, except for this: The corruption of the Republican Party is bottomless. And there is a lot of stuff that they desperately don’t want us to know.

The Beto-Warren ticket

This morning, the New York Times reports that Beto O’Rourke’s campaign raised $6.1 million in the first 24 hours after he announced for president. That’s more than any other candidate, though Bernie Sanders, at $5.9 million, came close.

This adds considerable support to my belief that Beto will win the nomination. If that’s the case, then I think it’s also obvious who would be the perfect running mate: Elizabeth Warren.

Yes, it’s early. And yes, I’m ignoring my own advice about not making up our minds too soon and giving the candidates time to speak for themselves. It’s only partly for political reasons (or the $6.1 million) that I see Beto as the frontrunner. My main reason for seeing things this way is that, like it or not, media attention will make or break a candidate. Beto already is — and I believe he will remain — the media favorite.

Just look at how the media mangled the 2016 election. I’m not convinced that Donald Trump actually won that election. We need to hear what Robert Mueller and several House committees are going to tell us about the depth of the meddling. But one thing is for sure: The media could not take their eyes off Trump. The 2016 election was a train wreck of media malpractice and manipulated media, with the largest part of it working in Trump’s favor and against Hillary Clinton. No, this isn’t fair. Our media may be slightly chastened after helping to send a crime family and traitor to the White House 2016, but they’re still going to dispatch their reporters and cameras toward whatever they think will pull in the most eyeballs.

Much of the criticism of Beto’s campaign has been valid. But it’s also fixable. It’s true that his message has been vague. In 2018, he ran his campaign against the odious Ted Cruz without a pollster or a speech writer. With that $6.1 million, Beto can now afford a speech writer, and I expect he’ll get one quick.

The more progressive wing of the Democratic Party believes that Beto is too conservative. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that, when Beto ran against Cruz, the votes were all coming from Texas. For a national campaign, Beto will have to rethink things. He clearly hasn’t done that yet. The more progressive wing of the Democratic Party (that includes me) want a Green New Deal. We want reforms of the type that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have done such a good job of defining. I expect Beto to get on board with those things. If he doesn’t, then his frontrunner status is his to lose.

But I think it’s also important for Democrats of the left to acknowledge that many of the people who will be voting for Democrats in 2020 are not San Francisco liberals (like me). Those voters will feel more comfortable with a Democrat who is “too conservative.” That’s one of the reasons why Elizabeth Warren would be so important in balancing the ticket. She is strong where Beto is weak. Democrats must win the suburbs in 2020, and what the suburbs want is hardly radical — decency, predictability, stability, prosperity, and good lives for their children. They want to fix capitalism, not throw it over (which is what Warren wants, in spite of Republican bleating about “socialism”).

There is a saying in the business world: “Hire for character, train for skills.” There is a lot of truth in that. The right-wing demonization machine is already hard at work trying to demonize Beto for things he wrote on line when he was 15, and for a DWI case when he was 26. That stuff won’t stick. During the past few days, it also has come out that Beto was a member of a hacking group, “Cult of the Dead Cow.” Republicans will find that disturbing. But who gives a rat’s tail what Republicans think. Almost half of them are such withered souls that they think that Trump was sent by God. We Democrats should stop worrying about Trump 2020. Trump will be gone, brought down by the law. Fox News will have to find someone else.

To me, Beto-as-hacker-boy, out to save a sorry world from itself, says a lot about his character. It shows a revolutionary, transgressive spirit, rather than a dull, obedient, conservative one. He majored in English literature at Columbia, and that alone may show that Beto has an Irish heart to go with his Irish name. (The president of Ireland, Michael Higgins, is a poet.) At this very moment, I would guess, “establishment” Democrats and corporate money are knocking on Beto’s door, eager to co-opt him. I hope that Beto has the character to resist. Keep waving your arms, Beto.

Policy can be learned. But a fiery spirit, charisma, and telegenic star power cannot be learned. Those things are a rare gift. No other candidate has anything like it. Wonkdom will not win the next election. Fair or not, star power will. Like Obama, Beto’s spirit of reform is inspiring rather than angry. Only Beto has the qualities that will attract the media and the affection of the American people.

Update: Politico equates “balance” with sucking up to Republicans and snarking at Democrats. But money impresses them.

The inequalities of banking

Increasingly, liberals are noticing that it’s very expensive to be poor. It may seem strange to those of us for whom bank accounts are an ordinary fact of life. But many people cannot afford bank accounts. Consequently poor people pay more for just about everything.

Often when I go to the post office, I see people buying money orders and paying with cash. Fortunately, money orders from the U.S. Postal Service aren’t expensive — $1.20 for up to $500. But cashing a check may have cost them up to 12 percent. Many people with precarious finances do have bank accounts, but they get eaten alive by fees. Americans paid $34.3 billion just in overdraft fees in 2017. The poorest are the most vulnerable, with a typical poor person with a bank account being charged about $450 each year.

Democrats — in particular Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — have proposed that all U.S. post offices offer retail banking services. Republicans, naturally, don’t like the idea. Even some centrists don’t like the idea. But it seems to me that any serious plan for reducing economic inequality must include a mechanism for giving poor people options that allow them to avoid financial predation, which is at present a lucrative and ugly business.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, those who are solvent and who know how to manage money make money from their banks. “Rewards” cards are the main vehicle for that.

Rewards cards are increasingly controversial, because merchants are charged more by credit card companies when customers pay with a rewards card. Some people have even made a hobby of juggling rewards cards to maximize cash back, using spreadsheets to track the best deals. According to the New York Magazine article that I just cited, more than 90 percent of credit card transactions now involve “rewards.” This is costing banks more and more money, so powerful financial interests are fighting for changes.

Though it is merchants who have to pay for the use of credit cards, we all pay for the credit card industry through higher prices charged by merchants. What rational person would not want to get some of that money back, if the banks let you do it?

I confess that I have two rewards card. Each year I earn a significant sum from my Bank of America rewards card by paying the full balance each month and collecting the rewards. Recently I acquired an Amazon Prime rewards card. I really didn’t want another credit card, but 5 percent cash back on everything I buy from Amazon and Whole Foods was just too good a deal to turn down, since Amazon and Whole Foods are my two main supply lines. And, strangely enough, Bank of America even sweetened the deal a bit last month by allowing customers to choose their 3 percent category, with online shopping as one of the categories. That probably was to compete with Amazon’s card. But the difference between 5 percent and 3 percent was too much to pass up.

The unfairness built into this system is apparent. Those who are financially stronger are making money off of those who are financially weaker, through higher prices on virtually everything from groceries to gasoline. Does that mean that I should abstain from using a rewards card? No, because the rewards that I don’t collect would be pocketed by the bank, not by the poor.

Instead, we should demand financial reform that is fair to the poor and less harsh on merchants — at the banks’ expense. If that means an end to rewards cards, I’ll understand. As long as merchants reduced their prices to reflect reduced expenses for accepting credit cards (would they?) then we’d still get the money back through lower prices.

QAnon?

Vice President Mike Pence with members of the Broward County, Florida, SWAT team on Nov. 30, 2018. The officer wearing the “Q” patch was later disciplined and lost his tactical assignment. Wikipedia photo.

One of the many disturbing things about the Trump era is learning just how crazy many Americans are. For years now, susceptible old white people have been taught that only right-wing propaganda can be trusted. Anything else is fake news. All Trump supporters are immersed in a sea of propaganda. On the far fringe is QAnon.

NBC News reported yesterday that a QAnon book was No. 56 on Amazon’s list of bestselling books.

“The book claims without evidence a variety of outlandish claims including that prominent Democrats murder and eat children,” the NBC News story says. QAnon believers regularly appear at Trump rallies holding up “Q” signs.

“Adherents of the Qanon conspiracy theory falsely believe that the world is run by a Satanic cabal helmed by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” the NBC story says.

In an article about QAnon last August, the Washington Post wrote: “QAnon flirts with eschatology, fascist philosophy and the filmmaking of Francis Ford Coppola. Adherents believe a ‘Great Awakening’ will precede the final storm foretold by Trump. Once they make sense of the information drip-fed to them by ‘Q,’ they will usher in a Christian revival presaging total victory.”

A friend who monitors Twitter (I stay away from Twitter) sometimes sends me “tweets” from QAnon crazies. Not only do they really believe that stuff, they also believe that they’re the smart ones, that they’re on the inside of what’s really going on. It’s the rest of us who are fools.

QAnon, it would seem, serves two purposes. For one, it helps to keep right-wingers inflamed and alienated by demonizing those who practice rational politics. And, for two, it makes money for some very nasty people.

NBC News writes: “Conspiracy theory researcher Mike Rothschild told NBC News that ‘An Invitation to the Great Awakening’ is a new way for those pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory to make cash, since recent changes to YouTube’s algorithm have made it harder for conspiracy theorists to find new followers and cash in on true believers.”

The larger problem is that right-wing propaganda is highly profitable. In 2016 (the most recent year for which I can find numbers), Fox News had profits of $1.67 billion. MSNBC didn’t even come close, at $279 million. CNN is moving up, and is probably moving to the right, as well.

If we ever get out of this mess, one of the problems to be solved is to figure out how to deal with the fact that duping ignorant old white people is so profitable. According to Michael Cohen’s testimony last week, that’s why Trump ran for president in the first place. The Trump campaign was to be the “greatest infomercial in political history.” Inseparable from the problem of the profitability of right-wing politics is the profitability of right-wing religion — tax free. Christian revival indeed.

What a screenplay!

Since Michael Cohen’s career as a lawyer is over, he’ll be looking for a new job when he gets out of prison in 2022. I’d suggest that he move his family to Los Angeles, make a fresh California start, and get into the business of writing screenplays. Assuming that he wrote yesterday’s opening statement himself, he’s a good writer. Also, the year 2022 should be about the time Hollywood will start producing its first documentary blockbusters on the Trump catastrophe. Cohen will be a rich man again in no time, and an honest man to boot.

If you view the Trump catastrophe as a terrifying made-for-TV drama now in its third season, yesterday’s hearing before the House Oversight Committee was the episode in which the plot turned. Until yesterday, the prospect of justice was remote. The ugliest characters in American history were stealing everything they could carry off and smashing the rest. They were getting away with it. Viewers were aware of a mysterious character named Robert Mueller, who was seen once or twice in short scenes, emerging from a black sedan with his briefcase and hurrying through the door of the FBI building. But Mueller has had no speaking lines so far. For three seasons, viewers could easily believe that the villains were going to keep getting away with it all. The first three seasons were an international spectacle of crime, corruption, and treason. It was clear what the villains were doing to America: Neutralizing the rule of law, poisoning our politics, turning 40 percent of the population into lie-eating zombies, turning the U.S. into the new Russia with billionaires and oligarchs fully in control, and looting yet another country with impunity, this time the United States.

At last, yesterday, from the grandeur of the U.S. Capitol, with millions of people watching, the script gives us this:

I am ashamed of my weakness and misplaced loyalty — of the things I did for Mr. Trump in an effort to protect and promote him.

I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience.

I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is.

He is a racist.

He is a con man.

He is a cheat.”

At last, one of the key characters is saying what we’ve long known, having watched all three seasons so far. The wheels of justice have started to roll.

The screenplay of the Trump catastrophe will surely follow classical storytelling structure from here on, with justice done in the end and lots of bad guys perp-walked off to prison. But classical storytelling structure also calls for one more crisis, the worst crisis of all, a crisis so severe that we are forced to abandon our new hope. Technically, this crisis should occur just before the final elements of justice move into place. The villains, in a diabolical act so ghastly that we would not have thought it humanly possible, will make one last desperate effort to turn the tables back toward evil. Having nursed our hope through the entire fourth season, in the season-ender episode all hope is lost.

I am not being entirely unserious here. That’s because the Trump-catastrophe-as-reality-show accords with how Trump sees himself and how he sees the world — as posh reality TV with himself as the star. He spends half his day in the White House watching television. He is obsessed with ratings. And though he is too stupid to come up with a plot or write a screenplay on his own, he nevertheless has a primitive dramatic instinct. When the time comes, and when the long arm of the law lays its hand on Trump’s shoulder, he will not be able to resist one final act of appalling destruction to try to save himself.

Who could have guessed that, compared with Trump, the vile Richard Nixon was just a petty amateur? Garrett Graff writes in Raven Rock that, during the last days of Nixon’s presidency, James Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger became concerned that Nixon might do something foolish as payback or distraction, and they gave instructions to the military that no nuclear orders from Nixon would be executed without Schlesinger and Kissinger signing off.

Trump, a monster from the same mold as Nixon but worse, will have the same impulse. Let’s just hope that the Deep State will once again come to our rescue. That the Deep State should take precautions to save the country from depraved politicians is not surprising. What is surprising is that, in this screenplay, the Republican Party actually perverts itself into an enemy of justice and goes to war against congressional accountability, the Department of Justice, and maybe even the Pentagon before this is all over. After Trump, the Republican Party, having gone full fascist and embraced criminality and treason to stay in power, is doomed for a hundred years.

Yesterday’s screenplay also included hilarious scenes in which those who are still covering for Trump make pluperfect fools of themselves — for example, Rep. Jim Jordan from Ohio. He doesn’t seem to have a clue how this is all going to end, so he doesn’t realize the video of himself as dolt and villain that he has contributed to future documentaries.

Still, once the Trump catastrophe is finally brought to a close, the documentaries are made, and history moves on, we will still leave the theaters shaking our heads, worrying over the same old unanswered questions: How can people be so dumb? And how can people be so mean?

Update: I’m not kidding about a final crisis. As for what such a crisis might look like, Michael Cohen actually warned the U.S. Congress, and the world, yesterday:

“Indeed given my experience working for Mr. Trump I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to appear before you today.”

And given the ever-deepening stupidity and treason-coddling of the Republican Party, they may be stupid enough to go along with it. There is zero chance that Trump will be around to run for re-election in 2020. But the problem would be the same: getting him and his remaining accomplices out of the White House and out of the U.S. Congress.

The long, winding road to Denmark

A festive business dinner in Denmark with a technology team from the San Francisco Chronicle and employees of the Danish company CCI International. That’s me in the black shirt, second from the right. The year is 2002.

The curmudgeon H.L. Mencken left us a rich legacy of fine quotes. One of his best is about Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.” Mencken is entirely right. A moral suspicion of happiness and a duty to endure earthly misery “to lay up treasures in heaven” is a theological proposition that is inseparable from all forms of Christianity, whether Catholicism, Protestant Calvinism, or fundamentalism. Evangelicals who pursue “prosperity theology” do make one and only one exception. That exception is for rich people, who get to lay up their treasures on earth as well as in heaven.

I have been thinking about Denmark lately because Paul Krugman has mentioned Denmark in two of his recent columns. One column is about the misconceptions of conservatives. The other column is about “fanatical centrists.”

Krugman on conservatives’ horror of what they call “socialism”:

“What Americans who support ‘socialism’ actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: A market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.

“And in case you haven’t been there, the Nordic countries are not, in fact, hellholes. They have somewhat lower G.D.P. per capita than we do, but that’s largely because they take more vacations. Compared with America, they have higher life expectancy, much less poverty and significantly higher overall life satisfaction. Oh, and they have high levels of entrepreneurship — because people are more willing to take the risk of starting a business when they know that they won’t lose their health care or plunge into abject poverty if they fail.”

Krugman on the perpetual wrongness of fanatical centrists:

“But I’m not talking about the left. Radical leftists are virtually nonexistent in American politics; can you think of any prominent figure who wants us to move to the left of, say, Denmark? No, I’m talking about fanatical centrists.”

It’s a standing joke — with a lot of truth in it — that travel turns people into liberal Democrats. American conservatives can get away with lying about Europe and the Nordic countries because so many conservative voters know so little about the world. You can find many sources on the Internet that compare how Americans vote to whether they have a passport, for example, here. I will not concede that my saying such a thing amounts to economic snobbery. Many of my rural, Trump-loving neighbors drive enormous, gas-guzzling vehicles that cost more than $50,000. Many of my rural, Trump-loving neighbors also have enormous travel trailers that can be pulled only by enormous trucks. The median household income of Trump supporters in the 2016 primaries was about $72,000, well above the national median of $56,000.

Ignorance of the world is a choice.

Before I retired, I did business for some years with a Danish company that builds publishing systems for newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle (where I worked). I have made two business trips to Denmark. It is remarkable what the Nordic countries have accomplished. They always rank near the top of lists that measure happiness, trust, equality, and civic freedoms. Meanwhile, the United States is moving backwards, like other places in the world where the rich call the shots. Increasingly, though Europe has its own troubles, Europe feels like a refuge from American backsliding. It’s no wonder that so many people talk — maybe only half seriously — about leaving the United States. A recent Gallup poll found that a record number of Americans want to get out. The reason: Trump.

My recent trip to Scotland has made me resolve to get to Europe more often, though considerable frugalities and economies are necessary to make travel affordable on my fixed retirement income. Shortly after I arrived in Edinburgh back in August, Ken asked me if I was culture-shocked. Heck no, I said. I feel more at home here than I do at home. I meant it, too.

Still, I am not ready to throw in the towel on the United States. I am reluctant to make predictions, but, so far — especially now that Democrats have retaken the U.S. House of Representatives and the law takes it course — I believe we are approaching peak Trump. Trump is going to be brought down by the law, taking the Republican Party with him. Americans insisted on finding out the hard way (we liberals tried to warn them!) what billionaires and Republicans do when they get power. Rural white voters will continue to glorify a hell largely of their own making. But voters in the American suburbs, in the 2018 election, showed their remorse for falling for Trump in 2016. That won’t happen again. California and New York are leading the way. The suburbs are coming to their senses. Boomers will soon be leaving the world in droves, just as they entered. Young people see the world in a very different way. All roads now lead to Denmark. And we will all be happier for it.

Note: The Mencken quote is sometimes given as, “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.” I don’t know which is more accurate.