Political issues – Page 24

One bright spot in the political gloom

Another small reward for my political work here in the sticks was an invitation to the inauguration of Roy Cooper, the new governor of North Carolina.

Those of you outside the U.S. may not know that, one bright spot during the catastrophic November election was that North Carolina voters, by a narrow margin, threw out the Republican governor and elected a Democrat.

For six years now, North Carolina has been afflicted with a radical right-wing legislature. Clearly the people of North Carolina had become sick of right-wing overreach, and they took it out on Pat McCrory, who served only one term. I think it would be a reasonably safe prediction that American voters will become similarly sick of right-wing overreach at the national level and that the Republican Party will lose the U.S. Senate if not the House of Representatives in the 2018 election. As for Donald Trump, it’s impossible to imagine him getting a second term. In fact, impeachment seems much more likely.

Tribe

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger, Twelve/Hachette, 2016, 170 pages.

“As modern society reduced the role of community,” writes Sebastian Junger, “it simultaneously elevated the role of authority. The two are uneasy companions, and as one goes up, the other tends to go down.” Anthropologists have found, Junger writes, that in tribal societies there is little tolerance for major wealth disparities or for arbitrary authority. If some male tries to dominate, boss, and denigrate others, then a group of males will get together and take him down, killing him if necessary.

There is a huge irony in this, given the recent American election. Please note that Junger, in this book, does not talk much about contemporary politics, and of course the book was written before the election. But one of the worst social problems in the United States today, along with racism and disinformation, is economic inequality. The electorate’s response to this, totally in denial (thanks to disinformation and racism) about the black president who put the economy back together after white authoritarian males ransacked the economy eight years ago, was to vote for a domineering, bossy, white (OK, orange) billionaire with the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old who constantly denigrates others. What in the world is wrong with a society that would do that? The answer, I would say, is authoritarianism operating inside its bubble of delusion.

What would a tribe be, if we still had them? Your tribe, says Junger, are the people with whom you would share food and depend on for survival if all hell broke loose.

Authoritarian personalities, for some reason, read everything differently from people like me. It takes a village, I would say. No, say the authoritarians, what it takes are walls, lots of guns, scapegoats, a vindictive god who hates the same people we hate, and a big boss who speaks his mind and talks good shit that we can understand.

Junger points out (for example) that about 3 percent of people on unemployment assistance cheat the system, which costs the U.S. about $2 billion a year. Fraud in welfare and other entitlements, he says, adds about $1.5 billion to the annual losses. “Such abuse would be immediately punished in tribal society,” Junger writes.

However, Medicare and Medicaid fraud — fraud committed by hospitals, insurance companies, care providers, etc. — costs at least $100 billion a year, but nobody really knows the full cost. Fraud in the insurance industry, he says, is calculated at $100 to $300 billion a year. Fraud by defense contractors is estimated at about $100 billion a year. Total costs for the 2008 recession (brought to us by white authoritarian males) have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion.

And yet we have a political culture that remains focused on petty fraud by the poor rather than the outrageous larceny of the rich and powerful. Then the victims of this larceny, who understand that they’re being had but can’t figure out by whom, elect a billionaire for president, who immediately begins to install the princes of larceny in his government while vowing to make life harder still for the poor.

If the two basic ingredients of dynamite are nitrogen and some kind of oil or fat, then the basic ingredients of fascism are authoritarianism and propaganda, lit by the fuse of racism, scapegoating and a religion for white Americans invented in hell.

This is not a proper review of Junger’s Tribe, because I have focused on a single element of this book that just happens to speak directly to our current political situation and that stokes my anger. But this short book belongs on everyone’s required reading list for 2016.

Update: From the Washington Post today, here’s a story that underscores Junger’s point and that illustrates the appalling vileness of Republicans: Fox News wonders whether we should cancel food stamps because 0.09% of spending is fraudulent

Dreaming of a local economy

Recently, while rummaging in an old cedar chest that was being moved to the attic for storage, I came across my photographs from a trip to India in December 1994. The photo above particularly catches my eye. I took the photo in the Main Bazaar of Delhi’s Paharganj district (which is just across from the train station and a short tuk-tuk ride from Connaught Place). It’s interesting to look at what the photo says about India’s economy (which I suspect hasn’t changed all that much since 1994).

Notice how skinny the horse is. Animals don’t have very good lives in India. Look at the horse’s harness. It’s well used, but it appears to be of good quality. Look at the wagon. It has big wheels and rides high. It must have been built for bad roads, roads that probably are very muddy in monsoon season. It could be firewood on the wagon, but it also could be roots that are used for some purpose — maybe seasoning, or medicine. I tend to doubt that it’s firewood because it’s all so small. There is no shortage of big trees for firewood, even around Delhi. Notice that the man’s feet are bare. My guess would be that the man driving the cart has driven the cart into Delhi from some nearby rural area, for the purpose of selling these roots. Notice the bags hanging on the wagon. I have no idea what’s in them. Though the man is poor, he owns a horse and wagon. For a person of his caste, that’s probably a big deal.

Now look at the man carrying the stainless steel cylinder. What do you suppose is in the container? I’d guess milk, or maybe oil, but of course I don’t really know. The man is wearing a white apron. I’d guess that he is a vendor in the marketplace, that he sells food, and that the cylinder contains one of the ingredients that he uses to make whatever food he cooks and sells in the bazaar. [Update: See comments. A reader has identified the container as a tiffin.]

Notice the table in the far right of the photo with the bags of merchandise stacked on it. If you buy food in the marketplace, you see what those things are for. They’re little plates, and they’re made from leaves that are somehow pressed into bowl shape, using some sort of low-tech manufacturing process. My guess would be that it’s done with steam and some sort of press.

You can buy all the necessities of life in New Delhi’s Main Bazaar. It has been 25 years since I was in Delhi. At the time, there was no sign of any corporate presence in the bazaar. It was all local enterprise. It’s a beautiful economy, actually. It’s a subsistence economy, but you can buy everything you need to live. For the sellers, it’s a livelihood. It’s all local. I don’t remember even seeing any trucks in the market. It was mostly human and animal traffic.

All markets in all places surely pass through this level of development. When, do you suppose, did we leave that behind here in the United States? Clearly, in 18th Century America, our markets operated at that level. Here, for example, is an article on market days in colonial Williamsburg. My guess is that, even in the 19th Century, we Americans were moving more toward a store-based, merchant-based economy, with fewer people meeting for market days to trade directly with each other. And, of course, by the time automobiles came into the picture, it was all over.

When I was a child in the 1950s, the rural countryside was dotted with country stores. They largely sold commercial brands, brought to the store by distributors’ trucks. Many of these old storefronts, mostly abandoned now, are still standing, though a few have managed to stay in business.

There has been a major new change in the last 15 or so years, though, brought to us by corporations and globalization. First it was Walmart that started bringing cheap Chinese imports to rural Americans. But now the dollar stores are cutting into Walmart’s business. The dollar stores (for example, Dollar General) are now all over the rural countryside the way the old country stores used to be. The dollar stores, ugly as sin, sell everyday items that cut down on trips to Walmart. I confess I sometimes go to Dollar General stores, when I need something like cat litter or cleaning supplies. Watching people check out is terrifying to me. Many people, obviously, buy their groceries there. They feed their families on food bought at Dollar General. Everything is processed, and there is no fresh food at all. It’s all about carbs and meat and sugar water.

So, who has the advanced economy? My answer would be India, by far! Just think about it. Americans who, relatively speaking, are as poor and low-caste as the man driving the cart in the Delhi bazaar now drive their trucks and beat-up old cars to Dollar Generals, where they exchange the money they got from their degrading corporate jobs for cheap foodstuffs shipped in from the global economy, much of it from China, where it was produced by peasants brought to the city by corporations to work degrading corporate jobs. Corporations do all this, and what enables it is the cheap fossil fuel that makes it economically feasible to ship that stuff halfway around the world. Whereas in the Delhi market, the shipping is limited to the range that a horse and cart can manage.

The poor Americans who work the degrading jobs and who spend half their paychecks at Dollar General (and the other half on cars and gas — Trump voters) seem to never question the insanity of how it all works. They are an incurious and passive lot, as willing to get their religion and politics from dumb-ass country preachers as to get their bread and milk and sugar water at Dollar General. It’s only we liberals who question this corporatization and globalization and who dream of local markets. It’s only we liberals who are horrified at how the Republican Party is doing everything possible to hand everything over for further corporatization, including education. It’s only we liberals to whom the word corporate and corporatized are ugly words. As for the Trump voters, they don’t know what hit them, and they probably never will. They get slave wages for their degrading corporate jobs, and they scrape by, handing their entire income back to corporations for bad food, sugar water, cigarettes, trucks, and gasoline. The country folk could grow their own vegetables, but they don’t. They don’t eat vegetables anymore. They prefer the stuff from Dollar General, which is exactly how the corporations want it.

It’s interesting to analyze my own budget to try to come up with a rough index of how dependent on corporations I am. I’m plenty dependent — we all are. I don’t have a mortgage, or any debt, so the financial corporations don’t get anything out me. In fact, I actually make money off my bank by using a “rewards” card for purchases. I drive a 16-year-old Jeep (though I drive it very little — it’s the abbey’s beast of burden) and a leased Smart car. Because I don’t drive much, and because the car gets about 48 miles to the gallon, the oil companies don’t get much out of me. My total transportation and beast-of-burden cost is significantly less than what Trump voters pay just for their cigarettes. Though property taxes and homeowners insurance are a significant chunk of my budget, most of the money that I pay out to corporations goes for food. Whole Foods gets most of that. Still, most of what we liberals eat comes from smaller farms and smaller companies such as Arrowhead Mills, Hain Celestial, Spectrum, or Eden Organic. I buy only California wines and olive oil. I do not do business with the big agricultural monopolies.

I live in an agricultural county in which, even a hundred years ago, subsistence farming was the rule. The county has not changed all that much (except for the cars and Dollar Generals). The land is sparsely populated, with a sustainable land-to-people ratio. The fields and pastures are still here. Many of the barns are still standing. We could easily provide most of our food, but we don’t. It was in no way necessary for us to turn our basic needs over to global corporations. Why did we do it, while the local fields lie fallow, and the people who could be working the fields are unemployed? Would they really rather fry chicken at Bojangles than grow beans and corn? How I would love to drive a horse and wagon to Danbury once a week to trade with my neighbors! Why don’t we do that anymore? Is there any way to get back to that? I’m a liberal. I dream. If you think about it, my dream is a conservative dream about a past that was better and that we ought to return to. But our politics is as insane as our economy, and so my anti-corporate dream is seen as radical and liberal. Further corporatization is seen as conservative. Go figure.

Christmas wish: Deeper woods and a real drawbridge

Woodpiles are a symbol of security, aren’t they? [Click on photos for higher resolution]

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t seem to get past the gloom of the election. The feeling of being surrounded by madness, by mass delusion, and by white hatred keeps intruding. The virtual drawbridge isn’t working very well. I can’t keep myself from checking the news. Here in the sticks, the residents of the abbey can get farther away from the world than most people, but it isn’t far enough.

Yet there have been many times in history when people lived behind walls, if they could. I like to imagine (especially when going to sleep) being inside a defensive castle (such as Blarney castle, below). Comfort food helps. And maybe a little Christmas rum.

I wonder how long it would take to grow a 10-foot hedge of holly. Still, Merry Christmas.

The garden, seeded with winter cover crops that haven’t yet germinated

Ken spreading lime in the garden

I keep fantasizing about a rock wall or a high hedge around the abbey.

Fig tree, hoping for a survivable winter

The gate to the chickens’ summer pasture in the woods

Apple leaves reluctant to let go

Chickens snarfing chickweed

From the orchard

Where I’d like to be

The 2016 White House Christmas card

‘Twas an honor to receive a White House Christmas card again this year, and ’twill be an honor not to receive one next year.

Epistocracy?

Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, Princeton University Press, August 2016, 304 pages.

This is certainly one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a while. And now, after the horror of the 2016 election, is a good time to read it. Note that the book was published before the election and that nothing in the book specifically has to do with the 2016 election.

Brennan’s argument is that democracy does not work. The reason that democracy doesn’t work is that most voters don’t know a damned thing. Are you with him so far?

His argument is that we should consider epistocracy as an improvement on democracy. Epistocracy is government by those who do know stuff — government by wonks.

The moment you propose such a thing, all sorts of arguments — both obvious arguments and arguments that are not so obvious — come up. Brennan attempts to deal with those arguments.

Speaking strictly for myself, I find Brennan convincing, even though his tone is testy and somewhat condescending. I’m not going to get into the arguments here pro and con. There are many points on which I would disagree with Brennan. Nevertheless I take him seriously, as I believe we all should. I’d also give Brennan high marks for heresy, for thinking outside the box, and for hitting the nail on the head on the matter of democracy’s ability to cause train wrecks. If given the chance, idiot voters will elect idiot candidates after campaigns aimed at idiots. All we have to do is point to Donald Trump and then rest our case.

Brennan gives a powerful — and terrifying — account, based on research, of just how little voters actually know. Though I have always understood that voters are idiots, I have underestimated just how little they really know. And it’s actually true that many voters — propagandized voters — know less than nothing. The 2016 election has shown us just how dangerous it is when people can vote but can’t distinguish between real news and fake news. Not only that, but they greatly prefer the fake news.

I will mention three points that come to mind:

1. Brennan’s emphasis is on the competence or incompetence of voters. I don’t think the problem is incompetence. Our right-wing North Carolina legislature, for example, and our Republican Congress, are entirely competent to accomplish what they want to accomplish — namely handing everything over to corporate interests for maximum exploitation by private profit, with the speediest possible transfer of wealth upward to the rich and super-rich. In my view, the question is not so much whether voters or candidates for office are competent, but whose interests are they concerned with.

2. Brennan never points this out, but one advantage of epistocracy would be that candidates for office would no longer have to pander to the stupidity and base instincts of the deplorables. If voters had to prove, before earning the right to vote, that they have appropriate knowledge and the ability to reason, then candidates for office would have to base their campaigns on things that actually matter.

3. Brennan says that politics makes people bitter enemies over small stakes. Not much, really, is at stake in elections, he says. I strongly disagree. Much is at stake. People die if we elect people who love, or profit from, war. People die if we see health care as a privilege meant only for those who can pay for its high costs. If we continue to elect Republicans, they will soon finish the job of allowing corporations and the rich to suck all the value out of the country and make peasants of the rest of us with no civil rights, other than the right to own guns with which to shoot each other. I strongly suspect that the reason the deplorables make a religion of the Second Amendment is that it’s the only part of the Constitution their tiny minds can understand.

Epistocratic government is such a radical idea that it would take a generation or two or three for us to get there. Maybe we should get started, before we become completely enslaved to billionaires. We’ve already reached a dangerous tipping point. More than half of Americans (or, at least, enough to swing the electoral vote), are living in a world of lies, horse shit, and propaganda — and loving it. How can that end well?

Damned by their own salvation

I wanted to post a link to this brilliant piece from Alternet, “An Insider’s View: The Dark Rigidity of Fundamentalist Rural America.” This piece is going viral among “educated elites” who understand the self-defeating stupidity of rural America (mostly because that’s where we happened to be born).

“In deep-red white America, the white Christian God is king, figuratively and literally. Religious fundamentalism is what has shaped most of their belief systems. Systems built on a fundamentalist framework are not conducive to introspection, questioning, learning, change. When you have a belief system that is built on fundamentalism, it isn’t open to outside criticism, especially by anyone not a member of your tribe and in a position of power. The problem isn’t ‘coastal elites don’t understand rural Americans.’ The problem is rural America doesn’t understand itself and will NEVER listen to anyone outside their bubble.”

The author totally nails it.

I’m still avoiding the news, but it’s horrifying:

Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election

Trump Turning to Ultra-Wealthy to Steer Economic Policy

Republicans plan to move forward on a years-old effort to shift Medicare to a system known as premium support

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Pick, Has Steered Money from Public Schools

Krugman on how Trump’s infrastructure scam would work

As the Alternet piece points out, religion is to blame more than any other factor. The author of the Alternet piece offers no real solutions, other than talking back to them. I don’t have any solutions either, other than talking back to them. I do know that I long ago passed the point of abiding by the unwritten rule that you don’t criticize people’s religion.

I have long noticed, in dysfunctional people, that they tend to cling as though for dear life to the very dysfunctions that are pulling them under. They can’t seem to see their dysfunction, or to change, and so they ruin their own lives and often the lives of others who are entangled with them. White trash Americans see fundamentalist religion as their salvation. Their preachers teach them that their religion is the only thing that can save the country. So their religion blocks the vital insight — that it’s actually religion itself that is ruining their lives and communities. Some avoid the trap, to be sure. They stop going to church and observe that their life gets better, though they’re poorly equipped for figuring out why. And of course there are some — those who aren’t fundamentalists — who are smart enough to take their religion with a grain of salt and perhaps find some benefit in the social glue that any community organization can provide.

I would argue that we need to start openly talking about the fundamentalist religion of white-trash America as the hell and danger to the country that it is. Then we have to figure out how to save us all from it.

Nightmare? We’re just getting started.

Before I vent, let’s try to do some calculus on how life in America is going to change. We’ve known for years what right-wing radicals and the Republican Party want to do, so much of this exercise is obvious and easy.

The social safety net:

• They’ve promised to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Twenty million people will lose their health insurance.

• They will “privatize” Social Security, claiming that they’re saving it. But what it really will mean is that, even assuming that privatized Social Security is operated without fraud, corporate interests will skim 20 percent of the money while adding no value. Benefits will be drastically cut. Social Security will be useless for those who are now under the age of 45 or 50, though I think that even Republicans know better than to drastically reduce benefits for people who are already retired, since most of those people voted for Trump. However, I’d say that the odds are that bankers will have a party on the money and will raid and destroy the Social Security system, as they did with savings and loan institutions during the 1980s and during the mortgage disaster during the Bush administration. Millions of old people will fall back into poverty. Bankers will write the legislation for the privatization of Social Security. Republicans have wanted this for 70 years.

• They will “privatize” Medicare, again claiming that they’re saving it. Medicare will become more or less a voucher system for buying private insurance. The vouchers won’t provide nearly enough money to buy decent insurance. Insurance companies will make a killing, millions of old people will no longer get the medical care they need, the medical bills of old people with bad insurance will go unpaid, and the financial system will scoop up those old people’s assets (if any). Insurance companies will write the legislation for the privatization of Medicare.

• Medicaid will be drastically cut. There will be a crisis of health care for poor people and their children. It’s hard to imagine that Medicaid will continue to pay the cost of nursing homes for old people who have no assets. That cost is about $130 billion a year and rising, or about $80,000 a year per person.

• The social safety net is particularly important in an era of economic stress, job insecurity, and inequality. Republicans are about to pour gasoline onto the fire.

Education:

• It will take time, but Republicans will essentially dismantle the public school system. The public schools that remain will become rotting facilities for poorer children where little real education is possible. The children of the rich will go to private schools, subsidized with taxpayer money. The children of the average Trump supporter will get indoctrination, rather than education, in church schools and other sorry little schools run by for-profit outfits at taxpayer expense.

• The state university systems will be starved for money as their budgets are cut and cut again. The corporatization of universities (including some private universities) will accelerate. Faculties size and compensation will be reduced. There will be increasingly political pressure toward indoctrination and corporate training. The decline of liberal educations will rapidly accelerate.

• There will be no solution to the problem of student debt. It will only get worse, as deregulation allows bankers and other for-profit players to take advantage of young people who are struggling to find an economic niche for themselves that doesn’t involve frying chicken at Chick-fil-A.

The environment:

• It’s all over for global warming.

• The EPA will be gutted. Protections for clean water and clean air will be rolled back. Energy companies will write their own legislation for maximum profit and maximum pollution.

• The national park system will be sold off or ordered to find a way to make a profit — McDonaldized.

• Federal wilderness and forests will be sold off to corporations for exploitation with virtually no regulation.

• Offshore drilling will be permitted anywhere that oil companies think it might be profitable.

• Unless consumers demand better, the fate of animals in the industrial food system, which had started to improve a little, is going to get much worse.

Our infrastructure:

• The decline of our highway system, power grid, railway systems, and public assets of all sorts will be allowed to accelerate as budgets are cut.

Taxes, federal budget, and the deficit:

• Corporate taxes and taxes on the rich will be reduced to indecent levels.

• Estate taxes on the super-wealthy will be eliminated, and within two generations we will have an American aristocracy.

• There may be tiny and token income tax reductions for working people, but consumption taxes will more than make up for any reductions.

• The federal deficit will skyrocket. As the deficit skyrockets, deficits will be used as an excuse for yet more cuts in every area of the budget that Republicans don’t like. That means pretty much everything other than the military.

• Inequality, the worst social problem of our time, will rapidly worsen at a time when reversing inequality is absolutely essential to holding a democracy together.

Justice and the Constitution:

• Though they may pay lip service to the Constitution and the bill of rights, Republicans and their takeover of the courts will erode civil liberties in every way possible, especially as social unrest increases. The only part of the Constitution they really like is the part about guns. Look for a major clampdown on civil rights and privacy if there is a serious terrorist event.

• Trump, out of vindictiveness and the necessity of controlling his false narrative, will do everything possible to destroy the mainstream media and intimidate the exercise of free speech. The propagandization of the American people will intensify, and most Americans will eat it up. It’s too early to see how the right-wing media will reorganize itself and how it will cooperate with a fascist government.

• An activist Supreme Court will roll back every court decision possible that Republicans don’t like — abortion, gay rights and gay marriage, police overreach, the ability to discriminate on religious grounds, even basic civil rights. Remember, it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that, more than anything else, started this culture war.

• The militarization and thuggification of our police will continue.

• The prison population will grow.

• I have no idea to what degree Trump will be able to carry out his anti-immigrant and anti-Islam agenda. It will get ugly.

America’s place in the world, and the inevitability of war:

• Our allies as well as our enemies are terrified and will be looking for ways to contain us.

• Even before we try to weigh the international situation (and I am bad at this, because domestic issues are a greater interest for me), we can confidently say two things. First, Republicans and their corporate backers love war and its profits. War was the primary product of the Bush-Cheney administration. Second, fascism requires scapegoats, fear, and emergency. The Trump administration will be able to whip up plenty of scapegoats, fear, and emergencies domestically, but I doubt that domestic enemies will be enough. Foreign enemies will be required, just as Bush-Cheney required foreign enemies to enable their war and their right-wing agenda. The odds of a new war are terrifyingly high, I would say. The costs of that war will further wreck the federal budget and drive up the deficit. The war will further roil domestic and global turmoil.

We are now a fascist country

Just hours ago, rational Americans believed that we were going to narrowly avoid a terrifying brush with fascism. Instead, we now live in a fascist country. Let’s don’t bother to quibble about using the word “fascism.” The only questions are whether our democracy will be able to survive it and how much damage fascism will do — to our institutions, to our culture, to the health and psyches of our people, and to the world. It is impossible to estimate at this point whether the “deep state” will be able to restrain a fascist president and a fascist Congress well enough to allow us to muddle through and eventually recover. Muddling through, followed by a slow recovery, is the best we can hope for. But if there is war and domestic turmoil, all bets are off.

Who will resist?

Commentators like Andrew Sullivan already have written that we must resist. How will we do that, especially after the courts turn against us and basic civil rights are taken away? The risk of protest is very high, because fascists require scapegoats to justify their agenda. Certainly the intelligentsia will fight back, but the words of the intelligentsia will have no effect on fascists. A diminished political class will fight back, but the tools of fascism will be used against them. If resistance is criminalized, and if Trump makes good on his boast about putting the political opposition in jail, then we are doomed.

Those of us who can see through Trump know that he can’t possibly make good on his promises to those who were deceived by him. Trump never admits failure, so all failures must be blamed on someone else. Everything that goes wrong will be blamed on those who resist. The danger this poses to those who resist is terrifying.

The American people

Readers of this blog know that I have no illusions about just how stupid, vile, and eager for delusion Americans can be. However, until last night I thought that they were merely a minority to be managed and who might slowly be brought back to reality and back to a sane and rational politics with some economic and social justice. But now we know that there are more of them than there are of us. They know nothing. They crave, and feast on, the lies and distortion they are fed by the right-wing media, which is the only media that can reach them now. They are dangerous. They finally have their Hitler. They now control the government. There can be no happy ending to this story. The only question is how enormous the disaster will be, and how permanent.

A bonus about what happened in King yesterday

A few days ago, I wrote a post about the nasty little town of King, North Carolina. Once again, King lived up to its nasty reputation on election day. An atheist activist and veteran, who was carrying a sign that said “Veterans Against Trump,” was deliberately hit by a truck driven by an old white guy who is a member of the VFW. There’s video of it. The story got into the papers. I think it would have gone viral, but it was obscured by the election news. When you watch the video, note the rage, hatred, and blind stupidity in the old white guy’s voice as he leans out of his truck yelling at the atheist. I would say that this kind of person is what we deal with here in the rural South. But last night we learned that it’s much worse than that. This entire country just handed power to guys like this old VFW guy. They’re a majority in most states.

I am sick to my stomach. I’m scared. I am doing my best to contain the rage I feel toward the American people — for their stupidity, their gullibility, and their turn to fascism. They don’t know what they’ve done, because they are too stupid and lied-to to know what they’ve done. While I’ve been writing this, my electronic devices have been chiming with Facebook messages, text messages, and phone calls from friends and political associates. Everyone is reaching out to each other for a bit of comfort in their shock and their fear for the future. But, at the same time, a majority of Americans are now celebrating and gloating. As Andrew Sullivan wrote last night, We the People did this.

We’ve got a lot of thinking to do.

Here’s a link to a newspaper story on what happened in King, with video. I’m quoted in the story, by the way. And here’s the next day’s version of the story with charges filed.

Update: My post was up before Vox.com came out with this today, but we’re on the same wavelength: Donald Trump’s presidency is going to be a disaster for the white working class

Update: Here is a story on Trump’s plans for highways and other infrastructure — privatize it, require Americans to pay tolls to use it, and allow corporations to rake in profits from it. If there’s anything white trash in the heartlands hate, it’s toll roads. Maybe this will help teach Trump voters what government is for, what government does, and why they need government.

Trump Just Told The Truth, And It’s More Terrifying Than His Racism And Lies

This is Obama’s fault — really

While the Republican Party’s strategy — for years — has been hell fire and scorched earth, President Obama persisted in his delusion that Republicans’ destructive, truth-free politics could be cured with “bipartisanship.” This delusion even persisted into Obama’s second term. It was in September 2013 that Obama appointed a Republican, James Comey, as director of the FBI.

We have waited all weekend for some kind of clarification on the meaning of Comey’s letter to the Republican Congress about Hillary Clinton. We’ve gotten no clarification. Until we hear some verifiable facts that might convince us otherwise, the safe assumption would be that Comey was under extreme pressure from Republicans in Congress to do something to swing the election that Republicans were clearly losing, including their Senate majority. How else can the emptiness and innuendo of the letter, and its timing, be explained? E.J. Dionne describes this scenario in a column yesterday in the Washington Post: “The evidence also suggests that he has been intimidated by pressure from Republicans in Congress whose interest is not in justice but in destroying Hillary Clinton… History shows that appeasing bullies never works. Maybe Comey has learned this lesson and will try to make amends in coming days.”

Obama campaigned as a liberal. After Obama took office, Republicans howled about his divisiveness and extreme leftistness, even as Obama governed for the center-right and the establishment and made bad appointment after bad appointment of establishmentarians and the usual suspects — no justice for the bankers who had so recently brought down the economy, no justice for the Republicans who had knowingly lied us into war, no justice for torture and war crimes. And those were just the justice issues. Republicans also had earned political payback, carefully measured out and carefully delivered under the klieg lights, to show that Democrats can play hardball, too, if that’s the game that Republicans insist on playing.

Obama’s cowardliness in responding to Republican bullying with bipartisan delusion was so exasperating that, during Obama’s first term, I actually changed my party affiliation from Democrat to unaffiliated, as a response to my frustration with the Democratic Party’s refusal to be Democrats. (I changed my affiliation back to Democrat a few years later when I got involved in local politics.) I can acknowledge that Obama’s political course was noble and statesmanlike. But let’s also acknowledge that it didn’t work, that it can’t work with today’s Republican Party, and that we’d be foolish to try it again. In politics, sometimes payback is the only thing that works.

I have a fantasy of having an opportunity to say a few words to President Hillary Clinton. I would ask her to act like a Democrat, even when no one is looking. No more bankers, no more tech billionaires, and no more of any of the “Third Way” Republicans-lite who had a hand in Bill Clinton’s presidency. President Hillary Clinton owes everything — everything — to the Democrats who worked so hard against a tide of ugliness and humiliation to get her elected. To Republicans she owes only payback, and lots of it.

My fantasy continues with walking across the Mall to the Capitol and saying a few words to the Senate Majority Leader, Dianne Feinstein. I want investigations, I’d say. I want never-ending, vigorous, hell-fire and scorched-earth investigations. I want investigations and media grandstanding just like the investigations that Republicans have done, but based on real crimes as opposed to imagined ones. I want to know what kind of communication James Comey had with Republicans before he sent to Congress his letter of Oct. 28, 2016. I want war crimes investigations. I want investigations of war profiteering. I want Dick Cheney prosecuted. I want prison sentences for everyone who was involved in torture, at every level of government, the military, and non-government organizations. I want bankers investigated. I want some bankers and billionaires in jail. I want churches and lots of Republican political outfits fined and taxed for violating IRS rules about tax-free meddling in politics. I want state governments that tried to restrict voting rights returned to federal oversight. I want Medicare expanded to cover all Americans of all ages. I want the Fairness Doctrine reintroduced and applied to cable television, putting an end to the propagandization of the most gullible and regressive elements of the American population. I want Elizabeth Warren to oversee the overhaul of federal taxation and banking. I want Bernie Sanders, not corporate lobbyists, to write the legislation for the 115th Congress, with climate, energy, infrastructure, education, and inequality as the first items on the agenda.

I want eight years of hell-fire, scorched-earth Democratic partisanship. I want no oxygen for the Republican Party, other than the oxygen required to burn it. Then let’s get on with the real work of government.

The dying gasps of the 1950s

There is an ugly little suburban town on the southern edge of my county that I would have to say is one the nastiest and most hateful little places I’ve ever known. To this day — 2016! — black friends tell me that black people are afraid to go there. In 2014, while I was working in the Democratic tent at the county fair, which is held in this little town, an older white man working a concession stand hesitated sourly before selling me a Coke. He did sell me the Coke, but he handed it to me with a hate look, because he knew that I’d come from the Democratic tent. Also, on election day in 2014, there was a great deal of embarrassing television and newspaper coverage after a Democrat was charged with assault on a Republican. The Democrat, a woman, had gotten fed up by, and felt threatened by, an older male Republican who had been in her face for much of the day outside the polls, using ugly terms that I won’t repeat here. She knocked him down.

Just yesterday, a Democrat who is running for office had yet another unpleasant experience in this nasty little town, outside the polling place where early voting was going on. Again, I mustn’t repeat the hateful and racist language that Republicans were using about Democrats. This candidate for office happens to be country lawyer, and you’d think that he’s probably heard everything by now. But he was pretty shaken by, and disheartened by, this experience.

I’ve often wondered how that little town came to be so nasty. Partly, I’ve assumed, it’s because a large fundamentalist church run by a group of tiny-minded little Bible-college preachers pretty much runs the town. But friends who know more of the history of this county than I do tell me that, after Emancipation in the 19th Century, as freed slaves left the nearby plantations and went looking for land, and homes, this little town put up signs telling black people to move on, that they weren’t welcome. Why am I not surprised? This nasty little town has been a nasty little town for 150 years. It has nursed its hatred and racism for that long. It even has a white “militia” now to police itself. The militia even has a booth at the county fair.

This nasty little town remains pretty much segregated. I just ran the numbers and found that black voters are 1 percent of the population. Compare that with the nearby city of Winston-Salem, which is 35 percent African-American. What does it take to keep a little Southern town segregated? Nasty people, nasty churches, nasty politics, and nasty words for anyone who is seen as a threat to 150 years of nastiness. The name of this nasty little town is King, North Carolina. I apologize to the good people who live in this town. There certainly are some, and some of them are friends, but they’re a minority.

On the ground here in the rural South, election season is a tough time. Two weeks ago, in an adjoining (but also Republican) county, I went with my brother into an auto parts store to get some things we needed to hook up a TV antenna for our sister. The printer for the cash register was down, and while one of the guys behind the counter was working to fix it, a small cluster of customers was waiting to check out. A typical loudmouth Republican — white, male, and dumb as the brake shoes he was buying — based on no context that I was aware of, made a racist comment about President Obama, loud enough for all to hear. I looked away and ignored it. Then he made another racist comment about President Obama.

“Careful,” I said. “There might be Democrats in the room.”

He responded with a sexist comment about Hillary Clinton. Now one of the men behind the counter joined in.

“I just walk away if somebody says something I don’t like,” the man behind the counter said.

“Yeah, I just walk away,” said the man who had made the racist comment about President Obama.

“You’re not walking away,” I say. “You’re just standing there throwing out insults.”

My brother, embarrassed, told me to shut up. I can’t say that I blame him. He’s a Democrat, but he has to live with, and keep the peace with, these idiots. Whereas I can’t take it anymore.

Every morning, in front of my computer, I check my usual sources of news and commentary looking for something helpful and intelligent about what is going on in this country and what we might be able to do about it. I’m usually disappointed in the quality of the commentary. Our public intellectuals are as frustrated and dumbfounded as I am. Because I’m exasperated, one piece that has stuck in my mind is Dana Milbank’s piece in the Washington Post on Oct. 21. Trump, Milbank says, mustn’t just be defeated. He also must be humiliated, out of respect for the American democracy, which Trump obviously abhors and to which he is a grave danger.

Even before Trump, I was fed up. I am fed up with racist, hateful, ignorant white people. I am fed up with their politics. I am fed up with what comes out of their mouths. I am fed up with their religion. I try to channel my fed-upness into useful political work. If I ever truly told them what I think of them — and what they truly need to be told — I wouldn’t survive long. These people, increasingly, live right on the edge of violence. A part of the danger of Donald Trump is that he encourages the anger and the violence.

It is sometimes said that the old white people who support Trump idolize the 1950s as a golden age, and that basically what they want is to return to the golden age of the white ignorati. If only there was something like the ghosts who visited Ebenezer Scrooge, who would spirit these tiny-minded white people off on a trip around the country in the 1950s — and the planet — to see what life was like for hundreds of millions of other people. For many, it was not a golden age. It was a hell. No wonder the voiceless and powerless rose up. No wonder the 1960s happened. No wonder the Civil Rights Act happened, or gay liberation, or the women’s movement. Even white young males like me felt smothered by all that, and we threw it off. I’m a child of the ’60s. In our retirement and old age, we children of the ’60s seem to be having our last battle with the children of the ’50s. We children of the ’60s will win, too. Because we’re younger, and our children are younger.

If the miserable year 2016 is about anything, it’s about the ongoing project of throwing off the dark side of the 1950s, forever. I expect to live to see it. But the ’50s’ last stand is turning out to be the ugliest period of my fairly long life.