Political issues – Page 26

The crazy is bottom up, not top down

Charlotte Observer

I have no idea what Fox-watchers and Limbaugh listeners are being told — probably the usual stuff about Benghazi and whatever it takes at the moment to keep Republicans angry, disinformed, and motivated to vote. But it’s pretty clear now that the mainstream media have fully realized that Donald Trump is a dangerous madman and that the possibility of his being elected president is an existential threat to the United States (if not to the world, if Trump gets his hand on the button).

All that is true. But there is one very important thing that the mainstream media and its pundits still are not acknowledging. That is that Donald Trump is not the source of the political insanity that has long been evident in this country, not just during this campaign. The political insanity is in the Republican Party itself and in the media that feed, inflame, and constantly deceive Republican voters. When you understand that this is bottom up, not top down, then it’s clear that only a crazy man like Trump could have gotten the Republican nomination in the first place. It’s also clear that the implosion of Trump’s campaign, though it will head off the present emergency, will not solve the problem that makes this country half insane and almost ungovernable.

We might hope that the younger sons of Rupert Murdoch might have plans for Fox News that would bring an end to the 24/7 paranoia and deception that has been fed to Republican voters for the past 18 years under Roger Ailes and which has made many, if not most, Republican voters delusional and driven by rage and paranoia. But we can’t count on it. Rush Limbaugh’s career will eventually end. But we have no idea when.

With the Dumpster fire of Donald Trump’s campaign safely behind us, we might imagine that we’d be out of the woods. But we would not be out of the woods. Nothing but the destruction of the Republican Party as it is today, a total reform of its pundits, mass firings at right wing “think tanks,” and calling out the meanness of some churches and theologies would ensure that we’re really out of the woods.

Below: Just one day’s worth of Trump headlines from the Washington Post.

Also:

Update 6:30 p.m. Aug. 4:

For some graphic evidence that the crazy is bottom up, have a look at this New York Times video from Trump rallies. If you’ve ever been verbally assaulted by a right-winger, you know that they get their words from the right-wing media, because they don’t have the knowledge or intellect to come up with their own. But the crazy, and the hatred, were already there before someone like Trump or Limbaugh put words in their mouths.

Why is Ailes’ head on the block?

So Roger Ailes, an evil genius whose genius and whose evil can be topped by few (other than Dick Cheney), is being escorted out of Fox News. The cover story is that Ailes’ departure (which sounds like a firing) has something to do with sexual harassment. Horse. Wash. The right-wing money and billionaire money behind Fox News couldn’t care less about a little old sexual harassment case as long as Ailes delivers what his bosses want. Corporations routinely buy their way out of sexual harassment cases. It’s just a cost of doing business. Ailes is a pig, and everyone always has known that Ailes is a pig. Something else is behind his firing. What might that be?

We can only speculate and hope for future leaks. But my guess is that the vast right-wing conspiracy is plenty pissed off about what has been happening. Roger Ailes’ job was to help make money for his billionaire owners, to keep the clueless, white, right-wing voters angry, deceived, and paranoid, and to keep them under control. That’s where Ailes failed spectacularly. He grew Fox News. He kept the white idiocracy inflamed and angry. But he failed to control them. Failing to control them not only allowed Donald Trump to get the Republican presidential nomination, it also has threatened the very future of the Republican Party and broke the puppet strings that tie the white idiocracy to the billionaires who expect, for their investment, to set the agenda and get total political control of the country through a preferably legal election. They must be incredibly pissed off, because this election may well cost the right-wing elite not only the White House for another eight years but also control of Congress as well. They stand to lose control of the Supreme Court pretty much forever.

But right-wing billionaires always have a plan. Fox News’ 24/7 paranoia-mongering, hate-mongering, and keeping its target audience completely distracted and deceived is absolutely critical to the right-wing plan, whatever that plan is. That plan may now be starting to unfold, with the firing of Ailes as one of the first steps.

In the coming days and weeks, we need to pay careful attention to changes at Fox News. As usual, pay no attention to what they’ll say about Ailes’ departure and the selection of his replacement. That will be a lie and a cover story, as always. Rather, pay attention to what they do, while deconstructing their cover stories for clues to what they’re trying to distract us from. Changes at Fox News may be the first real clues we get to how the right-wing elite are retooling for a new strategy, now that the old has blown up in their ugly faces.

Update, July 30, 2016: In an interview with Slate magazine, Gabriel Sherman, who wrote an unauthorized biography of Roger Ailes, talks about what he thinks is going on inside Fox news. Here’s the link and a quote: “My sense is that they are not going to just rip the place up before November. But I think they will be watching the political landscape in America as the election unfolds. They have people right now looking at how they are going to reposition this network for a post-2016 landscape.”

“Where to Invade Next”

It’s easy to dislike Michael Moore. He’s rude, and he looks like a slob. But his documentaries fill an important need, because he tells us what we otherwise wouldn’t hear.

In this blog, I’ve often mentioned the Overton window. That’s the window of allowable discourse, the range of ideas that the mainstream media will talk about because it’s assumed to be the range of ideas that the public will accept.

For years, the Overton window has been pulled hard to the right. It was assumed that European-style socialism was something that the American people just didn’t want to talk about until Bernie Sanders proved otherwise. With “Where to Invade Next,” Michael Moore shows that Europe is not the decaying freedomless hell hole that the right-wing media say it is. The American people are deeply immersed in their delusion of American exceptionalism and rarely question the notion that we Americans are the best at everything, that the whole world envies us.

In “Where to Invade Next,” we are reminded that, in many ways, the civilized world feels sorry for us Americans. Even Tunisians feel sorry for us. Moore doesn’t whitewash Europe’s history or Europe’s problems. He sheds a lot of light, actually, on how Germans deal with the shame of their history and how even peaceful Norway has to grapple with right-wing terrorism and mass murder.

And you will definitely want to know what French schoolchildren have for lunch.

Taboos, truth-telling, and an F-word

For as long as I have been politically conscious, there has been a strong taboo against using certain words in public discourse. One of those words is the H-word — Hitler. (Nice people lower their voices when they say the name.) That taboo led to what we call Godwin’s law, which posits that if any online political discussion goes on for long enough, it becomes almost a certainty that someone will use the H-word. Another one of those words is the F-word — fascism. Again, I lower my voice. These are words that nice people don’t use.

The moment one uses either of these words — I like to call them rhetorical bludgeons — he is deemed guilty of rhetorical excess and automatically loses the argument. The assumption underlying the taboo is that this is America, we’re better than that, and that American democracy could not possibly ever fall into fascism or produce a demagogue like, you know, the H-guy.

But, just as a thought experiment, what would happen if the F-word ever became the right word? Our public discourse and therefore the front line of our defenses would be paralyzed until we came to our senses.

And so I am encouraged to see the F-word increasingly finding its way into print as the Trump phenomenon grows. Andrew Sullivan used the F-word in a long article in the May issue of New York magazine. Yesterday, Robert Kagan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, used the F-word in an op-ed in the Washington Post, “This is how fascism comes to America.”

We have always known that, if fascism ever did come to America, religion would be right in the middle of it. From the very first colonists, American religion has always had a strong stink of evil in it.

For far, far too long — decades, actually — Republican politicians and the vilest of preachers have gotten away with incendiary rhetoric. Older Republicans have been imbibing this rhetoric for almost 40 years now. Who are these people? Matthew MacWilliams, an academic who studies authoritarianism, published an article back in February that said:

“A voter’s gender, education, age, ideology, party identification, income, and race simply had no statistical bearing on whether someone supported Trump. Neither, despite predictions to the contrary, did evangelicalism.

“Here is what did: authoritarianism, by which I mean Americans’ inclination to authoritarian behavior. When political scientists use the term authoritarianism, we are not talking about dictatorships but about a worldview. People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders. And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies.”

Yep. We all know these people, the authoritarians, pretty much synonymous with the word Republican. Preachers and Republican operatives have made sure that the authoritarians among us always feel threatened. But now the Republican Party has lost control of the machinery it created to angrify and harness authoritarians for political purposes. A rogue moved in and took over. It’s really that simple. And there’s a word for it.

Update:

The New Yorker uses the F-word, the H-word, and the A-word — fascism, Hitler, authoritarian.

The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump

In search of environmental justice

Since 1974, the people of the Walnut Tree community have lived in the shadow of Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station, Duke’s largest coal-burning power plant in the Carolinas. Not until 2008 were scrubbers installed on the plant’s stacks. For all those years, people in Walnut Tree were at Ground Zero for the plant’s emissions — fly ash, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and all the extremely toxic heavy metals that are found at trace levels in the wastes from coal combustion.

Unsurprisingly, people began to get sick. Also unsurprisingly, the official response was that the steam plant had nothing to do with it.

It would be difficult to overestimate the political and economic power of Duke Energy in North Carolina. Working largely through the Republican Party, Duke Energy (along with other fossil fuel fortunes including the out-of-state Koch brothers) helped engineer the Tea Party takeover of North Carolina in 2010. North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, worked for Duke Energy for 28 years. McCrory and the right-wing legislature have moved with terrifying efficiency to try to protect Duke Energy’s interests, to bring fracking and offshore oil drilling to North Carolina, to slow the state’s investment in renewable energy, and to weaken environmental regulations and the state agencies that enforce them. Part of the purpose of North Carolina’s so-called bathroom law is to distract people (and the media) from the rest of the right-wing agenda in North Carolina.

In February 2014, a massive coal ash spill into the Dan River near Eden focused the nation’s attention (at last!) on what Duke Energy and the politicians they own were trying to do in North Carolina.

Back in 2012, when I and a small group of sassy (and very smart) Stokes County citizens started the organization that we call No Fracking in Stokes, we had no idea how the fracking issue would play out or how it would end up connecting with the coal ash issue. There is much local history here that needs to be written, but by 2015 a powerful coalition had formed to fight not only for the environment but also for environmental justice in our obscure little county. Among these organizations are No Fracking in Stokes, Appalachian Voices, Clean Water for North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the NAACP. I sometimes refer to these organizations as the cavalry that rode in to help us.

As readers of this blog know, Stokes County is a rare piece of largely unspoiled earth in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The beautiful Dan River winds down out of Virginia, through Stokes County, and back into Virginia again. North Carolina’s most popular state park, Hanging Rock State Park, is here. Climb to the top of the Hanging Rock promontory and look around. You’ll see what we’re protecting. But because the county is controlled by Republicans, and because many of the people are poor and are too busy just trying to get by to pay attention, outside interests would like write the county off as an environmental sacrifice zone.

Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has gotten involved. That group held a hearing in Walnut Cove last month, specifically on the question of environmental justice in the Walnut Tree neighborhood. Last year, the Rev. William Barber, who has led North Carolina’s powerful Moral Monday movement, spoke in Walnut Cove. He also brought the resources of the NAACP to the struggle.

It seems quite possible that, in the larger statewide struggle to hold Duke Energy accountable and to expose the corruption of the Republican Party’s protection of Duke Energy, Walnut Tree will be Duke Energy’s Waterloo, because in Walnut Tree the legal questions relating to environmental justice become crystal clear.

These photos are from a cookout last Saturday in the Walnut Tree community. They’ve gotten organized. They have plans to build a community center. They have a legal strategy for getting the Walnut Tree community annexed into the little town of Walnut Cove (Walnut Tree desperately needs Walnut Cove’s water, which comes from deep wells that are a safe distance from the coal ash impoundments).

As someone from Appalachian Voices said, this is what winning looks like. It has taken 40 years, though we’re still not done.

The white working class is lost. Let’s move on.

Mark Storms, accused of killing a man in church (with a gun) over who would sit where

As a liberal and as a Democrat, I am predisposed to being sympathetic to the plight of the white working class. But I’ve just about gotten over it.

While the low-end media that serve low-information white voters carry on with the usual anger and distraction, the media followed by more-intelligent Americans is trying to grapple with a serious issue. How did Donald Trump happen? Andrew Sullivan worries that America has never been more ripe for fascism. Many intellectuals have accused the Democratic Party of abandoning the white working class. In the elite right-wing media, the problems of the white working class are attributed to moral failure — white working folks just aren’t honoring anymore the “moral” regimen that the high church and their social betters have rammed down their throats for so long.

Like many liberals, I was appalled at the right-wing media blaming white working people — blaming the victim — for global factors that are shutting them out of the economy and robbing them of their pride and dignity.

But a friend pushed back. They did bring it on themselves in many ways, he said. The more I have thought about it, the more I think my friend is right. The white working class has become mired in hatred and racism. It is proud of its ignorance. Its preferred religion — the low-church glorification of the rich, glorification of the military and war, vilification of the poor, gun worship, overt hatred of anyone who isn’t just like them, its dreams of theocracy with crushing power over the rest of us — this religion is so vile that I don’t hesitate to call it evil. Don’t miss this recent piece in the Washington Post which says that there have been 626 violent deaths in “houses of worship” since 1999. Most of those deaths occur in Baptist churches. Yet white losers are so deluded about the nature of the real world that their terror-de-jour is fear of transsexuals in bathrooms. That is moral insanity. I do believe that, as a whole, the white working class has become morally insane.

I am chairman of the Democratic Party in my county. Of course I have asked myself whether we have abandoned these white working class voters and whether there is anything we can do to win them back. But now I am pretty much persuaded that such a thing would be completely impossible. Nor is this the fault of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party thought that it could go on harnessing white resentment. Elite Republicans thought they could control white losers and inflame white losers with the right-wing propaganda system and keep on using white losers and their hatreds to win elections. But white so-called conservatives (I don’t think they’re conservatives at all — I call them right-wingers, or losers) were smart enough (though just barely) to catch on to the bait and switch. They figured out (or Donald Trump explained it to them with one-syllable and a few two-syllable words) that the Republican Party was only bilking them for votes while screwing them economically with the true agenda of the Republican Party, the billionaire agenda.

If the Republican Party couldn’t contain these people and actually is being destroyed by them, then who is crazy enough to think that the Democratic Party could do any better? White haters have simply become unfit for the modern world. They know nothing. Their skills are mostly obsolete. They lack the intelligence to adapt. They’d rather go down in angry flames and celebrate their hatreds than join the rest of us in the pluralistic modern world, with our arc toward justice.

Republicans are pretty much all alike, except that a very few of them are rich. Whereas we Democrats are a diverse coalition. Could any coalition possibly contain the white working class? No. They don’t do coalitions anymore. It took them 35 years to destroy the Republican Party. But the fragile Democratic coalition wouldn’t be able to handle these holy folks for even a single election cycle. They truly believe, from their trashed enclaves in the interior of America, that their god hates the same people they hate, that God is on their side, and that they are entitled to dominate the world, even though they and their preachers don’t know a thing about the world and the nature of the change that is destroying them.

Let’s admit it. White working people think very highly of themselves and their morals, but the truth is that they are morally degenerate and dangerous. The right-wing propaganda system, with its hate radio and fake news, which bilked them for decades to win elections by pumping up their anger and hatred, made these people far worse than they already were. Remember how nice they were during the Civil Rights era?

I don’t see a solution. We just have to hope that the United States of America can survive these people without the tyranny and fascism that Andrew Sullivan describes in the link above. We need to do everything possible to save their children from becoming just like their parents and grandparents. But all we can do now is try to contain them, anesthetize them with bread and circuses, and wait for them to die off — which they are doing at an accelerating rate, not least because of their own self-destructive behavior.

Further reading:

God tells tow truck driver to leave woman stranded on the highway because of her Bernie Sanders sticker. “The conservative Christian, 51, from Travelers Rest, South Carolina, said he felt proud that he ‘finally drew a line in the sand and stood up for what I believed.’ ”

Ironies in the evolution of tyranny

Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. By Jack Rakove, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 488 pages.

My reading at present is focused on the American colonial era, the revolution, and the development of the American Constitution. I took a lot of notes while reading this book by Jack Rakove. But one passage in particular flashes at me as though it was written in bright red neon. Rakove is talking about James Madison:

“Yet this reactionary fear of the threat to property also converged with his youthful commitment to freedom of conscience to produce one powerful insight about the protection of rights in republican America. These two concerns enabled Madison to perceive a truth that the political theory of the age did not yet properly recognize. In a republic, unlike a monarchy, the problem of rights would not be to guard the people as a whole against the arbitrary power of government, but rather to secure individuals and minorities against the legal authority of popular majorities.”

This brings us to the so-called Tea Party, the contemporary right-wing movement by angry white losers, financed by billionaires. Though the Tea Party has taken a wrecking bar to the American democracy wherever it can gerrymander itself into a stronghold, I am thinking in particular about the state of North Carolina, where the Tea Party legislature actually called a special emergency session, ostensibly to shoot down a local ordinance in Charlotte that was meant to afford transgendered people some dignity in the use of public bathrooms.

But, in truth, the bathroom issue was just a smokescreen in this legislation, called HB2. The transgender part of HB2 was meant to appeal to the fears and hatreds of mouth-breathing voters in rural North Carolina while also distracting the media. The real and even more slimy intent of HB2, as is always the case with the Republican Party, is the billionaire agenda. HB2 prevents local governments from setting a minimum wage that is higher than the minimum wage set by federal or state law. HB2 also prevents local governments from passing ordinances that grant civil rights protections. But the biggest piece of slime is that HB2 prevents workers from suing for workplace discrimination in state courts. This part of HB2 is pretty technical and has sneaked under the radar, but it was a big item on the wish list of the billionaire Republican donor class, and now the billionaires’ servants in the North Carolina legislature have checked it off their list. Here’s an article on that.

And, by the way, HB2 shows that the Republican Party doesn’t give a fig for any principle, if power is involved. HB2 also tramples on the principle of local rule and local government. North Carolina’s cities tend to be liberal and to vote Democratic. But the Republicans in Raleigh never hesitate to use state law to keep counties and municipalities from doing anything remotely liberal. Even property rights are not sacred to these radical Republicans. If your neighbors want to frack for gas but you don’t, then the state will use its power to frack you whether you want it or not. Or, if you’ve got a nice water system, as Asheville does, or a nice airport, as Charlotte does, then the state will just take it from you if it can.

This brings us back to James Madison. Madison foresaw even in the mid-1780s how kings (or even “big government”) were not the only potential tyrant under the new American Constitution. Rather, it was the tyranny of the majority that Madison was concerned about.

Not until 1868 did we get a remedy — the 14th Amendment. The Southern states were trampling on the rights of former slaves during Reconstruction, and the federal government stepped in to try to stop it. Many of the ugliest parts of American history touch on the 14th Amendment. White Southerners fought back with Jim Crow laws and legalized segregation, which stood until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Why it took so long is a political mystery that I may never understand.

Today’s so-called Tea Party derives its methods and inspiration not from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists protested against a despotic king and a Parliament who gave them no representation in the government. Rather, the so-called Tea Party is shockingly similar in its methods with the Jim Crow racists, who with violence against blacks, the activities of “militias,” gerrymandering, and rigged elections used the government to allow the white majority to hold the black minority down.

The current era is the most shameful period in North Carolina’s history in a hundred years. We will eventually throw the right-wing radicals out of power in Raleigh — hopefully starting with the governor this year. Cleaning up the legislature will take more time. It is highly fitting that the de factor leader of this movement to restore justice in North Carolina is a black man, the Rev. William Barber of the NAACP, who started the Moral Monday movement. I may have some comments on Barber’s new book soon.

What’s next in North Carolina?

North Carolina’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, worked for Duke Energy for 28 years before he became governor. In 2014 alone, Duke Energy donated $3 million to the Republican Governor’s Association. Last year, McCrory had a fancy dinner at the governor’s mansion for the Duke Energy CEO and other Duke Energy executives.

So it surprised no one when political operatives at North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality overrode the recommendations of the department’s staff and cut some sweet deals with Duke Energy on coal ash cleanup, a plan that would save Duke Energy millions of dollars while leaving millions of tons of coal ash where it is.

It was six years ago that right-wing Republicans got control of North Carolina’s legislature. Two years later, McCrory was elected. All across the state, including rural, Republican-dominated places such as Stokes County, people are mobilizing to reverse this right-wing takeover. These photos were taken last week at a hearing by the Department of Environmental Quality on the plan for coal ash cleanup at Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station. Duke Energy wants to make some tweaks that would classify Belews Creek as a low-priority coal ash site.

The Overton window today

Media theory has the concept of “agenda setting.” A large part of what drives the noisy discourse in the media every day is the competition among players with their own partisan agendas to set the media’s agenda and the public’s agenda. Obviously media attention can’t be focused on everything that matters. Some topics bore the public, so attempts to get boring topics onto the agenda will be difficult. Whereas it is much easier to get a topic onto the agenda if the topic can be made to appeal to the media-consuming public. Different segments of the public have different tastes. Obviously this business of agenda-setting is complicated and contentious.

The concept of the Overton window can be very useful in monitoring the media. The Overton window frames the range of political discourse that media consumers will tolerate. Discourse that lies outside the Overton window will be found only in fringe media and will reach a limited audience. The mainstream media, for all its claims of objectivity, is constrained to keep its discourse within the Overton window, and to move along with the Overton window, if it wants an audience. The mainstream media have no choice but to follow the Overton window, even to extremes.

As a leftist, it has been alarming to watch right-wing players achieve such success at moving the Overton window hard to the right during the last 20 years. Fox News had much to do with this success. Fox News’ first big achievement was the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Fox News’ audience rose to new heights after 9/11. Right-wing agenda setters were able to get the Iraq War onto the national agenda, whipping up a national war fever that was so out of control that even the mainstream media (and many Democrats) went along with it. For the record, it was clear to a few (including me) who were not susceptible to war fever that the selling of the Iraq war was a scam and that the media and pro-war players had whipped the country into a full-blown moral panic, or what Carl Jung might have called a psychic epidemic. The right wing had struck gold with its “War on Terror.” The Overton window kept moving to the right.

In short, the right wing developed a powerful formula that kept on working for years. The Republican Party, dependent on votes from low-information white people of modest means, continuing on the same trajectory set by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy from the 1970s, served up a cocktail to which low-information voters became addicted — guns, a repugnant right-wing God, racism, resentment of immigrants, glorification of wealth, glorification of war, fear of terrorism, opposition to the social safety net (though those voters are absolutely dependent on Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, etc., and, increasingly, Obamacare). The election (and re-election) of a black President gave right-wing players even more fuel to motivate their block of susceptible voters. The Tea Party arose, and by winning both houses of Congress in the backlash of hatred and resentment and fear from white voters, the right wing was able to paralyze the American democracy. The right wing had no power to enact its agenda at the national level (except through the Supreme Court), though they made great progress in some of the states including North Carolina. The Tea Party may have been the peak of right-wing success.

It became clear that the 2016 election would be a showdown. The stakes rose with the death of Antonin Scalia, which further damaged the right wing’s ability to impose an agenda for which there is no majority support and to defy future Democratic presidents and Congresses.

Such have been the political consequences of the Overton window’s hard move to the right. If those on the right lived in fear of terror, the war on Christmas, and dark-skinned “takers,” those of us on the left lived in fear of just how far to the right the American public discourse could be pushed. Just as right-wing forces paralyzed the government, they also were successful at paralyzing the mainstream media, which had to report on birtherism and climate-change denial (for example) as though it was reasonable public discourse. The mainstream media had to pretend that the left and right were in every way equivalent — equivalently reasonable, equivalently factual, and equivalently honest — even though the right-wing media had carried disinformation and distortion to a whole new level. The right-wing media could spin out lies faster than anyone could possibly shoot them down (and that was part of their strategy). The billionaire Koch brothers have actually started to complain in interviews that they’re surprised that the money they spend on propaganda doesn’t get the traction anymore that they think it ought to get.

In spite of warnings that a limit had been reached, right-wing players continued to just ramp up the strategy that had been so successful for so many years. This brought us Donald Trump. But this also exposed something new. It exposed that the majority of Americans would not tolerate being pushed any farther to the right. The Overton window has finally crashed into its limit on the right side. The crash occurred, in fact, with so much noise and so much damage that it may well destroy the Republican Party, which was suddenly caught red-handed with its methods of voter and media manipulation — not to mention its disguised oligarchic agenda — on full public display. Trump’s style, though it has tremendous appeal to about 20 percent of the electorate, won’t fly even with many Republicans, not to mention that it won’t fly in a national election.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has been pushing the Overton window to the left. The set of powerful players that Paul Krugman calls “radical centrists” (Bill and Hillary Clinton are of this type, as are many members of the Democratic Party) were stunned to see that it was possible to push the Overton window so far to the left. To call oneself a socialist, far from being the non-starter that it was previously thought to be, actually proved to be very popular, especially with young voters. And while Donald Trump (the ultimate oligarch) merely demagogued the real issue of inequality and oligarchy, Bernie Sanders actually articulated — and brought into public discourse — a strategy that is proven to control inequality and oligarchy — democratic socialism. Trump, it seems, is already trying to start his post-primary pivot toward “unity,” but his opponents won’t buy it for a second, and his supporters will think that he’s lost his balls and that his dick isn’t so big after all.

This is going to be a scary year, because the stakes are high, and elites know that both the left and the right are onto their game. That we’ve all been had is finally on the public’s agenda. Though we can partly thank Donald Trump for that, only a small group of the very dumbest voters can think that Trump has a solution. And Hillary Clinton, so accustomed to the nastiness of politics during an era in which the Overton window was so far to the right, is thrown severely off balance now that she doesn’t have to kiss up to right-wing discourse so much anymore, which required her voting for a war that was sheer madness, or opposing full civil rights for gay people. Thanks to the leftward widening of the Overton window, she is now obligated to kiss up to left-wing discourse instead and is surprised that we question her integrity or wonder how much she’d change her tune for the general election to appeal to radical centrists.

As a leftist, I am not in the least surprised that only a leftist like Bernie Sanders can (at last!) enter our public discourse without deceiving us about who he is or what his agenda is.

Who’s eating whose lunch?

Update: As of 7 p.m. on Jan. 23, the Sanders video had had 1,890,434 views on YouTube after two days and was rising fast. The Trump video had had 28,828 views after five days.

It’s fascinating to watch the political propaganda that comes out in election years. The propaganda is a kind of mirror that reflects either what we are as a country in 2016 — or what those who want our political support think we are. The contrast between this Bernie Sanders ad and the Donald Trump ad is striking. One is inclusive and hopeful. The other is fearful and includes images of dark-skinned scapegoats.

White working people who support Trump are right about one thing: Someone is eating their lunch, and their lives are getting harder.

Their incomes have been stuck for decades, and they are hanging on by their fingernails. While mortality is declining in other rich countries and among most demographics, white working-class people are dying younger, mostly because of suicide and the use of drugs and alcohol. Their divorce rates have risen dramatically, while for more educated people divorce rates are declining. Never have white working-class people (though they can’t quite admit it) been more in need of — and more reliant upon — the social safety net. That includes unemployment insurance, help paying for medical care, disability benefits, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.

The Trump ad reveals how desperate the right wing has become in trying to maintain the fiction that it’s poor people on welfare and people with dark skin who are eating the lunch of struggling white people. It’s the fiction that we’re running out of money and that undeserving poor people (rather than rich people) are sucking up all the money. It’s a propaganda that has to lie to people and stoke fear to get their support. It’s stunning that the man in the ad is a billionaire and that the targets of this ad seem to believe that a narcissistic billionaire is going to help them.

Notice how the Sanders ad is targeted at younger millennials and at a broad and much more hopeful demographic of Americans. These people have better sources of information. They know about the alarming rise in inequality and where our wealth and income are really going. It’s an everyday America that we know and love. It’s propaganda that doesn’t require deception. And though it’s sentimental, it only aims at inspiring people to vote and to get involved in a movement.

As propaganda, the Sanders ad is vastly superior, because it’s 100 percent inoffensive and gives no ammunition to the opposition. Whereas the Trump ad is repulsive to everyone but his supporters. I feel sorry for Trump’s ad agency. There is no way to package the man that doesn’t make the skin crawl on 68 percent of the population.

I have no idea whether Bernie Sanders can win this election. But at the moment, he is winning the heck out of the propaganda wars.

Note: The YouTube video below apparently has been deleted by the Trump campaign.