Category: Politics

WHEN IT COMES TO WOMEN, THE GOP ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

Once upon a time, in a land now unimaginable, the Republican Party was a hotbed of women activists hellbent on fighting for human rights.  Really.  Republican women led the antislavery movement in the 19thcentury and catapulted from there into their own battle for suffrage.  Ida B. Wells, an iconic African American journalist and militant civil rights crusader, was a prominent Republican who saw the party of the late 1800s as the best conduit for hope and change.

Unfortunately, those aspirations did not live forever.  Far from a bastion of human rights advocacy, today’s GOP might as well be called the Grand Old Patriarchy. Out of 535 members in Congress, there are only 20 Republican women.  The party’s gender divide in the House breaks down to 187 men and 13 women, while Democrats in that body have 146 men and 89 women.   At the state level, you can count the number of GOP women governors on one hand, with two fingers left over.  

The race and ethnicity picture is just as bleak. Almost 90 percent of Republicans are white. There are only two African American Republicans in Congress, and one of them – Will Hurd of Texas – just announced he will not run again. Yet, Lindsey Graham, in a rare moment of candor back in the pre-Trump days of 2012, worried that, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” We should be so lucky.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in anthropology to understand why the Republican culture has fed and sustained the party’s demographics.  All you really need to grasp this dynamic can be found in the Archie Bunker theme song:  “Guys like us, we had it made. Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

Take South Carolina’s 3rdCongressional District for example.  In the wake of the Republican’s 2018 midterm disaster, which left the party with the lowest number of female House members in more than 25 years, an opportunity to mitigate those losses emerged earlier this year.  An incumbent’s death triggered a special election in this predominately red district.  The party’s female leaders at every level – from Rep. Susan Brooks, the outgoing co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, to Sarah Palin – poured every available resource into supporting a female candidate, who seemed almost perfect for this district. 

Pediatrician Dr. Joan Perry was seen by even her detractors as a smart, personable candidate who rang the bell on virtually every conservative issue, from abortion and immigration to the sanctity of Donald Trump.  Yet her male opponent in last month’s primary election trounced her by 20 percentage points.  

According to the New York Times, Perry’s chief liability was her gender.  The paper quoted a typical voter, a 68-year-old man, saying that Perry was right on all the issues but that, “women, as you well know, sometimes get to be kind of emotional.”  Tapping into that sentiment was the virtually all-male House Freedom Caucus and its leader Rep. Mark Meadows, who endorsed Perry’s opponent on the basis that you “need a strong backbone” to stand up to the liberals. One of its TV spots portrayed Perry as “another lying Nancy Pelosi liberal.”

Research has shown that GOP women fare the worst as candidates in deeply Republican districts simply because of the dominance of Archie-Bunker-like gender stereotyping.    Hartwick College’s Laurel Elder found that the party itself, “and its increasingly conservative ideology . . . is the biggest barrier to women’s representation within the party.”  The real culprit, she said, is the deeply patriarchal culture in which Republican women play a subservient role to male leaders.

When it comes to gender equality issues, polling has demonstrated a gigantic perceptual gap among women in both parties.  For example, only 30 percent of Republican women see sex discrimination as a serious problem.  Among Democratic and Independent women, however, the vast majority see it as an extremely urgent concern.  Similarly, only 26 percent of Republican women  said there was a problem of unequal pay between men and women performing similar work.  

In a country where women make 80 cents for every dollar a man earns, and one that lags far behind other nations in terms of workplace gender equality, it’s not hard to understand the party’s lack of appeal to women.  Add to that the toxic masculinity of a Republican president who has rarely met a woman he doesn’t bully or abuse. Not to mention his policy portfolio totally void of any respect for human rights.  There is no mystery about the GOP’s estrogen deficit.  

Yet, the male leaders of this party (excuse the redundancy) still don’t get it. New York Congresswoman Elsie Stefanik resigned from the party’s congressional campaign committee, saying she wanted to devote her energies to recruiting female candidates and helping them win.  “We need to be elevating women’s voices,” Stefanik said, “not suppressing them.”  Amazingly, her words provoked a stern reprimand from her colleague, Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the GOP’s congressional campaign.  He accused Stefanik of playing identity politics instead of “looking for the best candidate” regardless of gender, race or religion.  In other words, stick with the pipeline of angry white guys.  

Emmer’s position, of course, is hardly new. The “best person” juggernaut has been used for time immemorial by white men to keep folks who don’t look like them out of the power structure.  Way too slowly, however, that insular approach of the white brotherhood has gradually dissipated in most group cultures.  Diversity and inclusiveness are now commonly seen as essential ingredients for organizational effectiveness.  The memo, however, obviously escaped the Republican leadership. Out of the party’s 200 House members, there are 13 women and one African American.  Yet, leaders like Emmer see no value in diversifying.  

Back in 1920, Republican women led the fight for suffrage and obtained the right to vote for the men who would speak for them.  You’d think that the next step in the process would have been for the party to fill at least a substantial number of elected offices with women who could then speak for themselves.  Sadly, that hasn’t happened in 100 years and is unlikely to do so anytime soon. 

DEMOCRATS’ INTERNAL DISSENSION BEATS THE ONE-MAN PARTY OF TRUMP

These times are not easy for any of us, but moderates from both parties seem to be experiencing their own special version of hell right now. On the one hand, they see Donald Trump plunging ever deeper into the hateful abyss of bigotry and division. And then they watch a horde of Democratic presidential candidates play to the party’s leftward flank, leaving them between an orange rock and a very hard place for them to go. 

“I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump,” wrote New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks.“So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?”  

Former Republican operative Rick Wilson begged Democrats, the party he is rooting for in 2020, not to “(rush) to the left with reckless abandon.” 

Mona Charen, a conservative author who worked in the Reagan White House, is disgusted with Trump but worried that Democrats will nominate some starry-eyed socialistic liberal unacceptable to “Republican refugees like me.”

This Never Trumper angst is shared with such prominent centrist Democrats as Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, as well as many of those seeking their party’s presidential nomination.  One of them, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper blasted his more liberal counterparts – Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – during last Tuesday’s debate.  Referring to their health care proposals and support for the Green New Deal, Hickenlooper said, “. . . you might as well FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”  

With a summer-and-a-half to go before we know the precise parameters of the 2020 presidential campaign, it’s easy to get lost in the noxious electability weeds of specious political prognostication.   We really need to chill, take some deep breaths, and remember that just four years ago we all saw Donald Trump as the most unelectable candidate in either party. The optics of a single moment do not portend a future outcome, particularly in a process as fluid as a lengthy presidential campaign.  

For those of us longing for an end to our Trumpian nightmare, this process will be filled with excruciating anxiety.  Yet, it has to play out. What remains of our democracy depends on it.  We are, after all, left with only one functioning political party.  Trump commandeered  the GOP and drained every last drop of process and policy out of it.  What was once the party of austerity, free trade and limited government is now the party of Trump, a nihilist cabal singularly committed to the insatiable ego needs of a lying, racist megalomaniac.   

When it comes to the basic building blocks of our political system, the Democratic Party has the only tent in the game.  And it has to be big enough to house everyone, from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, to the Bronx’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yes, the dialogue inside that tent will be acrimonious and contentious as we argue over whether to go with big, bold structural change or with steady incrementalism geared toward repairing the damage that Trump wrought. Yet, despite all the chaos churned out by this agonizingly protracted nominating process – or maybe because of it – the Democrats are giving voice to what it means to be a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”  The other party has muted the people’s voice in order that Donald Trump alone can rule this country.  

A year from now, the single most important issue of the 2020 election will be whether to take four more years of Trumpian disarray and dysfunction, or go with a candidate who will neither embarrass America nor tarnish its soul.  Sure, issues like health care, immigration, climate change, income inequality and foreign policy are vitally important. The only election prediction I will make is that, come November 3 of next year, the nuances of those policy matters will take a back seat to a referendum on the most excruciatingly toxic presidency this country has ever seen.

However, now is not the time to narrow the debate to a Trump versus Not-Trump dichotomy.  There are two dozen Democratic candidates, each with their own vision for a better America. We watched them battle it out over their ideas and resumes last week.  It wasn’t always pretty or elegant, but it was an extremely important part of the process.  Those candidates – at least most of them – are works in progress on the presidential stage.  And so are their ideas.  

In a normal campaign, there may be cause for alarm when primary candidates tilt too far to the left or right, since most general election voters lean toward the middle. But there is nothing normal about the 2020 election.  The only discussion on the nitty gritty of policy matters is taking place in the Democrats’ tent.  As they joust over Medicare for All versus a modified Affordable Care Act with a public option, Donald Trump has no healthcare plan and never did.  As the Democrats argue among themselves over approaches to immigration reform, Donald Trump has no plan other than his wall and putting children in cages.  The Democratic candidates have ideas – big and small – for wealth redistribution. And here, so does Donald Trump, but it is in the opposite direction: through tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor.

Centrists should lose no sleep over fear of creeping socialism, particularly given the composition of Congress and an abundance of gerrymandered conservative districts. To put this red scare in perspective, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, Congress’ two Democratic Socialists, have authored a bill that would cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent, hardly a stake through the heart of the bourgeoisie. 

The bottom line in this August of 2019 is that Democrats have just begun their process of nominee and issue development. A robust conversation over matters affecting our lives and our country’s future is essential to our democracy and to mobilizing the electorate.  Even a raucous, contentious debate stands in poignant contrast to the status quo, a government of Trump, by Trump and for Trump.  

TRUMP’S RACISM IS DIMINISHING AMERICA

These are the times that try America’s soul in ways that not even Thomas Paine could have envisioned. Since 1776, our country has struggled to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility. Then along comes Donald Trump. Suddenly those noble aspirations bit the dust. They succumbed to the autocratic ravages of hate and division.

The gruesome and bizarre Trump antics of the past week, although certainly not out of character for this pathological egotist, rose to such a level of alarm that it is hard not to worry about how this sad chapter of American history ends without lasting damage to the very fabric of our nation.  

Here was the guy who used his inaugural speech to decry the “American carnage (of) crime, gangs and drugs”, calling out four congresswomen of color for criticizing the country.   As everyone knows by now, not only did Trump call them out for “not loving America”, he dug out the old racist trope of “why don’t they go back to the countries they came from”.  All four of the women are U.S. citizens.  Three were born here.

For days, we were subjected to constant debate and analysis on the insipidly stupid question of whether the president’s words were racist.  That’s like asking whether Minnesota winters are cold. As a matter of fact and law, scores of employers have been found in violation of antidiscrimination laws on the basis of telling minority group employees to go back to where they came from. 

As for Trump, his overt racism has never been a close question.  He called Mexicans “rapists and drug dealers”, said all Haitians have AIDS and that Nigerians would “never go back to their huts in Africa”.  He claimed some neo-Nazis and former KKK members are “very nice people”.  He ended a federal grant for an organization that combats white supremacism. The list is endless.

Trump, of course, says there “isn’t a racist bone” in his body.  He also says “no one respects women more than I do,” despite his boasts of grabbing them by their genitals, and that 17 women have credibly accused him of sexual assault. Facts to this president are whatever he says they are. He could hold an orange in his hand and call it an apple. Yet it would very much remain an orange.  He tried that kind of trick last week by claiming that he attempted to stop a campaign rally crowd in North Carolina from chanting “send her back”,  despite video of the event showing Trump standing in silence for 13 seconds of such chanting.  

Although the story has had longer legs than most of this president’s cataclysmic moments, it will soon fade into the data bank of Trumpian atrocities. If it is still alive by mid-week, the Donald will simply threaten Iran with a nuclear attack or fire another cabinet secretary, anything to change the subject.  Yet, the national psyche will have taken one more serious blow. The cumulative damage from this presidency is unlikely to be healed anytime soon.

That dynamic was captured perfectly on a New York Times podcast last week by conservative columnist George Will.  Here is what he said, in a broader context, about the malignant impact of Trump’s words: “. . .you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for school boy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did.” 

Some of that damage has already been measured. Studies have found correlations between Trump’s presidency and various medical conditions, including cardiovascular issues, sleep problems, anxiety and stress and, particularly among Latinos, a high risk of premature birth due to stress.

Research by social scientists at Tufts University found a dramatic reversal in a 50-year trend of honoring a clear social norm of not openly making racist statements. Since Trump started making degrading comments about racial and ethnic minority groups, that norm has been blown to bits, according to researchers. One study showed that people exposed to Trump’s campaign quotes about Mexicans were “significantly more likely” to make similar offensive remarks about not just Mexicans but other identity groups.  They were simply following their leader.

Since Trump arrived on the national scene, there has rarely been a day without reports of racial incidents perpetrated in Trump’s name.  “Donald Trump was right,” said two Boston men convicted of beating and urinating on a homeless man because they thought he might be an immigrant.

Repeated surveys of public school teachers have demonstrated a steady increase in Trump-attributed racial taunts in the classroom.  In one study, 90 percent of the educators responding said their school climate has been negatively affected by Trump’s racist words and actions. The vast majority of them expressed the belief that the impact will be long-lasting. 

Because of a crude, mean spirited, bigoted presidential tweet, millions of young children of color will return to school next month only to be told by a classroom bully to go back to where they came from.  We have reached the point where a racial taunt and a presidential proclamation are one in the same.

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this country has slowly struggled to shape that more perfect union in the form of a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, one that would, at long last, deliver both justice and domestic tranquility for all.  The journey has had its low points (George Wallace) and its high points (Barak Obama).  On net, forward movement outweighed the backslides. Yet, in less than three years, Donald Trump has wiped out decades of progress. We now have miles and miles to go before we sleep.  We cannot let this president take us all the way back to where we came from.   

BUSING: AN UNCOMFORTABLE STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE

Busing to achieve school desegregation has poked its head out of the ash heap of history. Just when we thought the next 16 months would be consumed with the Green New Deal, Medicare For All and the Mueller Report, comes this ghost of issues past, an oldie-but-not-a-goodie. 

What was undoubtedly intended as a metaphor for the generational and experiential gap between two Democratic candidates – Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden – quickly mushroomed into something much more, namely the painful reality that America’s schools remain as segregated today as they were 50 years ago. 

Harris, in the first round of the party’s primary debates, went after Biden for his self-inflicted wound incurred by boasting about his good working relationships with long dead segregationist senators.  As the only black candidate on the debate stage that night, Harris made it personal, identifying herself as “that little girl” who was bused to a white neighborhood school 50 years ago in order to get a better education.  Had Biden and his old racist Senate colleagues had their way, Harris argued, she would have been stuck in an inferior segregated classroom.

The aftershocks from that debate are still being felt.  Biden eventually offered a rare apology for his remarks about working with the segregationist senators, but defended his position on busing, saying that he was never opposed to it on a voluntary basis, but abhorred the idea of the federal government forcing the practice on local school districts.  For her part, Harris noted how Biden’s defense was taken from the segregation playbook, the one that insisted the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. 

Yet, asked after the debate whether she would support forced busing today, Harris initially said she would if states failed to desegregate its schools.  Days, later, however, she modified that position by saying she supported only voluntary busing, a stance not terribly different than Biden’s back in the 1970s. Alas, busing has never polled well. Welcome to a strong jolt of déjà vu, at least for those of us old enough to remember the political perils of busing.  

Through the first half of the twentieth century, public education in this country was structured around race.  Black schools were mostly run down and dilapidated with inadequate and inferior resources. White schools, for the most part, offered a vastly superior education.  The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1954 landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, said such a separated and segregated system was inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.  And then for the next 17 years, nothing much changed.  In response to that inertia, the Supreme Court, in 1971, went a step further and said segregated school districts needed to bus students to other schools in order to achieve a racial mix.  

That’s when all hell broke loose. The reaction to the judicial edict made Roe v. Wade look like a walk in the park. It wasn’t just the schools that were segregated back then, it was virtually every neighborhood of every major city in the country.  Through decades of predatory real estate practices such as redlining and blockbusting, this country was literally and figuratively divided by race.  Yet, the courts were limited to remedies involving only the schools since that was the legal predicate of the Brown case.  

Many white northern liberals, who cheered the court decisions because they saw them directed at the segregated south, went apoplectic when they learned their kids were about to be bused into a black neighborhood school.  There was major turbulence, ranging from riots to recall votes of local school board members, in places like Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. Like Biden, many Democrats who supported busing as a concept quickly reversed course in response to constituent outrage.  

Eventually, as the makeup of the Supreme Court changed, and as the country’s angst over busing continued to grow, there came a series of partial reversals to court-mandated busing. By 1999 only 15 percent of the country favored busing for integration purposes. A few years later, the Supreme Court issued a decision that substantially reduced the circumstances in which local districts could use race as a basis of moving students from one school to another.  For all practical purposes, busing was nothing more than a bad memory of failed policy.

It was not, however, a failure for black children. The racial test score gap was cut in half for many black students. Longitudinal studies showed that black kids in integrated schools were far more likely to graduate from high school, get out of poverty and even live longer than their counterparts in segregated schools.  

Sadly, many of those educational improvements underwent severe setbacks as structured desegregation plans fell by the wayside. According to several studies, a number of school systems are more segregated today than they were a half century ago. Not only that, but black children are now more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods and have lower achievement test scores than back in the busing days. 

None of this is surprising. Neighborhood schools have long been touted as the shining exemplar of American public education. Busing was seen as the enemy of that system.  Ignored in such thinking, however, is this fact: The ugly underbelly of neighborhood schools is a funding mechanism – the property tax – based on real estate values.  We have chosen an arrangement in which the quality of a child’s education is based on the income of their parents. As a result, we are left with a bifurcated system every bit as separate-but-inherently-unequal as the one condemned in Brown v. Board of Education.

In a far more perfect world, the remedy for centuries of post-slavery racism and bigotry would have been deeper and broader than simply busing kids from one segregated neighborhood to another. How about integrating the neighborhoods themselves?  How about equal funding for all schools, regardless of local property values?  

As Joe Biden said last week, in his ongoing attempt to extract himself from his busing brouhaha, “There should be first-rate schools of quality in every neighborhood in this nation.”  Since we, as a country, have never come close to such a standard, maybe it’s time to ask this question in the next presidential debate:  Would you support federal control of public schools in order to assure that all students have an equal opportunity to a quality education regardless of race or family income?  If nothing else, it might make busing look more palatable. 

THE BEAVER & THE DONALD: DON’T LEAVE IT TO EITHER OF THEM

Remember how idyllic life seemed to be back in the Leave It To Beaver days? Good old dad, Ward Cleaver, was the family’s sole breadwinner who never failed to get home in time for dinner.  His wife, June, was a happy stay-at-home mom, constantly smiling, even while vacuuming the living room in a dress, high heels and a strand of pearls. Their sons, the Beaver and Wally, partook only in wholesome antics and said “golly gee” a lot.  The Vietnam War was percolating. College kids were dropping acid. Racial tensions were imploding all over the place.  But none of that ugliness ever entered the Cleaver household, or their lily white neighborhood.

This 1960s sitcom represents the imagery of the second A in MAGA.  Donald Trump’s promise to his base is to return the country to the fictional greatness of Leave It To Beaver. A more straightforward pitch would have been “Bring Back The Sanctity Of White Privilege And The Subjugation Of Women”. “Make America Great Again” fits better on a cap.

MAGA is all about the Cleaver family and an unambiguous emotional ecosystem in which everyone knew their place. Marriage was between a man and a woman. Husbands were in charge and wives were their obedient servants.  Minority group members, the oppressed few among the dominating white majority, were seen but not heard.   In the six-year run of LITB, there was only one appearance by a black actor. She played a maid in a single episode.

Much to the consternation of the MAGA crowd, the Cleaver days are now long gone, even though they were never anything more than the imaginary figment of a wistful writing staff. America is rapidly changing. Same sex marriage is the law of the land. Not only are rigid gender roles loosening, the concept of gender itself is now seen as amorphous. According to Axios, by the time today’s teenagers enter their 30s, there will be more minorities than whites, more old people than children and more folks practicing Islam than Judaism.  Not exactly Ward and June Cleaver’s America.

So along comes Trump and his MAGA time machine to take us back to the good old days.  The president has been amazingly effective in leading this backward journey.  Sadly, the old days being recaptured look nothing like a Leave It To Beaver rerun. 

Take abortion for example. Back in the early 1960s, aborting a fetus was a felony in 49 states – and a “high misdemeanor” in New Jersey. Countless women, mostly poor, died or were badly injured in black market abortions performed by sketchy characters under incredibly unhygienic conditions.  Since 1973, however, women have had a Supreme Court affirmed right to choose a safe and legal abortion.  Trump, in turning back time, has proudly engineered a court majority he hopes will reverse that 46-year-old decision by denying women the right to control their own bodies.  A number of state legislatures this week adopted draconian abortion bans, reminiscent of the 1950s, all aimed at providing the court with a vehicle to overturn Roe v Wade.  Under a new Alabama law, a physician performing an abortion on a rape victim would serve a longer prison sentence than the man who raped her. 

If there is anything resembling a coherent theme of governance in Trump World, it’s this reactionary retreat into the dark corners of our past.  Numerous studies have documented substantial increases in hate crimes since he took office.  No, Trump didn’t invent racism. He just made it look acceptable, allowing closeted bigots to climb out from under their rocks and go after people who don’t look like them.  The Anti-Defamation League has documented thousands of  racial assaults, intimidation and vandalism in which the perpetrators referenced the president in carrying out their attacks.  

Rarely a day passes without Trump finding some way to turn back the cultural clock on human rights. Earlier this week he scuttled plans put in motion years ago to replace slaveholder Andrew Jackson’s picture on the twenty dollar bill with that of anti-slavery icon Harriet Tubman.  The very next day he announced that his administration would make it easier for adoption agencies to reject same-sex couples and transgender people.  Previously, he rolled back LGBTQ protections in numerous areas, including health care, employment discrimination and military service.  

A number of commentators, including the Washington Post’s David Maraniss, have described the Trumpian zeitgeist of fear, demonization and attacks on free speech as eerily reminiscent of the red scare and McCarthyism days of the 1950s.  Back then, wrote Maraniss, “communists and their sympathizers were called un-American traitors. Now Muslims are disparaged as terrorists and Hispanics as ‘illegal’ and worse.”

In yet another instance of this MAGA retreat to an anything-but-great past, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta recently suggested that Trump’s position that he is immune to Congressional inquiry harkens back to 1859. In the White House then was James Buchanan, widely acclaimed by most historians as the country’s worst president, at least until Trump was elected.  Buchanan was being investigated by a House committee for possible illegal activity.  He unsuccessfully argued at the time that Congress was simply a band of “parasites and informers” who had no business poking its nose into the business of the executive branch.  “Some 160 years later,” wrote Judge Mehta, “President Donald J. Trump has taken up the fight of his predecessor.” In upholding the House’s right to subpoena Trump’s financial records, the judge said Congress has “sweeping authority” to investigate illegal conduct of a president before and after taking office. He ended his decision with this line: “This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.”

Unfortunately, this president is not only prepared to roll back that tide, he is obsessed with doing so. It’s the ultimate con by one of the most adept flimflam artists this country has ever known.  True greatness has never been achieved by turning our backs on the present and retreating into selective memories of the past.  Greatness comes only by looking ahead, not back, and always with an eye toward building a better future for all of us. Leave It To Beaver wasn’t real, and neither is Trump’s promise to create grandeur by going backwards. 

CRUISING THE ROAD TO TOLERANCE WITH MY MAGA COUSIN

I’d like you to meet my cousin Jaime. Frequent visitors to this space may have stumbled upon his occasional retorts (here and here) on my leftist pontifications. Jaime is a God fearin’, gun totin’, Trump lovin’ kind of guy.  If Hillary Clinton had ever met him, she would have quickly certified him as one of the deplorables. And Jaime would have worn it as a badge of honor.  

Well, Madam Secretary, I know Jaime Nelson.  We grew up together. Our fathers were brothers, and our families are close. Jaime Nelson is no deplorable. He’s a good man with a gruff exterior and a big heart. He is also a passionate supporter of Donald Trump and his policies, an agenda that many of us view as anathema to all that we hold dear.

This essay is neither a tribute nor a rebuttal to my cousin.  It’s an examination of a widening and dangerous fault line in our current combustible political culture. How do we – or, even, should we – maintain personal and familial connections with those whose world view so diametrically conflicts with our core values. 

We have never had a moment quite like this one.  The Gore-Bush debacle in 2000 was hard-fought, but did little or no permanent damage to family relationships. The reaction to Obama in 2008 was more visceral. Yet, as Republican pollster Frank Lutz told the New York Times, “With Obama, people hated him or people loved him. But you weren’t evil for how you felt.”  In recent polling, Lutz found that at least a third of those questioned said they had stopped talking to a friend or family member as a result of disagreement over Trump.

Carolyn Lukensmeyer is the director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a conflict resolution consultancy. During the 2012 presidential election, she said her outfit “got not a single message from anybody in the country about incivility.” Once Trump was elected, however, she said her business skyrocketed with pleas for help from clergy members, corporate CEOs and other organization leaders whose constituencies were at each other’s throats. “This is now deep in our homes, deep in our neighborhoods, deep in our places of worship and deep in our workplaces,” Lukensmeyer told a reporter. “It really is a virus.”

Unfortunately, there is no easy vaccine for this virus.  The divide over Trump and his policies cuts deeply through the bone and into the core of our marrow.  To many of us, Trumpism is a vile form of hatred, of women, of racial and ethnic minorities, of the LGBTQ community and others at the margins of our society. Jaime and his fellow Trumpers, however, see themselves marginalized by the political establishment. They have a sense of being left behind by a system that has little regard for native-born American white people who worked hard, only to be looked down upon and shoved aside by immigrants and diversity programs. They feel hated and ridiculed by many of us who resist Trump and his politics of hate and ridicule.

Here is the question: Can we passionately oppose Trumpism and still maintain a connection with the MAGA people in our lives?  Before answering, let me make this even tougher by using Cousin Jaime as an example. Here are two of his recent Facebook posts, both generated by a conservative site.  The first is a picture of an enthused and energetic Beto O’Rourke. The copy reads: “Obama: Now Available In Vanilla”.  Then there’s a picture of Obama and Hillary Clinton embracing under this heading: “This is the only time you will ever see a Muslim hugging a pig.”

Pretty vile, right? They go against everything we bleeding heart liberals believe in.  Why not hit the unfriend button?  Yet, after knowing Jaime for nearly 60 years, I have much more data about who this guy is. He is more than his Facebook page. He has showered my family with repeated acts of kindness over the years.  He’s also posted anti-bullying messages on Facebook, along with this sage piece of advice, attached for unknown reasons, to a picture of John Wayne: “Just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I hate you. We need to relearn that in our society.”

Yes, I cringe a bit at a few of his political posts, just as I do with some posted by fellow liberals. Like this one: “At this point, if you still support Trump you are either rich, racist or just plain stupid.”  Or this one: “Why I am not a Republican: I don’t hate women. I don’t hate minorities. I don’t hate the poor. I don’t hate gay people. I’m not greedy and I’m not a traitor.”

As for the question posed a few paragraphs ago, the answer is yes, I believe it is possible – and necessary – for us to maintain personal and family connections with those whose politics we abhor.  The basic tenets of liberalism are based on the values of treating people with kindness, dignity and respect.  One of the main reasons Trump drives us up the wall is that he dehumanizes large groups of people.  He sees Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He wants to ban all Muslims and black and brown people from “shithole countries.”  Writing friends and family members off on the basis that all Trump supporters are stupid or racist is playing a card from our opponent’s hand.

Obviously, every situation is different. I’m not sure I could sit down at the dinner table with a relative who donned a white hood and carried a tiki torch through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  But that’s not everyone in MAGA World.  I suspect Cousin Jaime disagrees with at least 90 percent of everything I have written in this space. Yet, his comments have always been directed at the substance of my content, never an attack on me. The fact that we can vehemently disagree about Trump but still care for each other is a rare ray of hope at a time of intense division and animosity.

In another context, we of the progressive persuasion, have stood steadfast in our belief that our country should build bridges to the world rather than wall ourselves off from it. Regardless of what happens in 2020, the eventual healing process for this virus of division is going to take a long time. Between now and then, we need bridges, not walls, in our relationships with those on the other side of this political divide. As my cousin says, we can choose to disagree without hatred.  For the sake of our country, our families and our own quality of life, that’s a far, far better road to follow. 

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

CBS’s timing for the third revival of its other-worldly series The Twilight Zone could not have been more impeccable.  As we approach the precipice of a presidential election campaign, we are, indeed, about to enter another dimension. With apologies to the late Rod Serling, here is the introductory narrative:

Imagine if you will, a score or more of ambitious politicians, a horde of men and women of various shades of liberalness, all seeking their party’s nomination. It is, by and large, an honorable constellation of star candidates. Except for one thing. Each of them possesses a flaw. Although neither felonious nor disqualifying, these foibles haunt the presidential aspirants like a Dickensian ghost. Meanwhile, the other party has but one candidate, the incumbent president, an utterly immoral, soulless, bloviating shell of a man who routinely performs at least a dozen despicable acts before breakfast. What does it mean, you might ask, that a good candidate, even with a minor peccadillo, would not be a shoo-in when pitted against a deplorable bastion of evil?  It means that we are now in the Twilight Zone.

And we’d better get used to it. Between now and November of next year, this country’s quest to elect a president will be subsumed in a bizarre and preternatural odyssey unlike anything we have experienced.  The campaign will be void of symmetry, packed with irrationality and mired in a Byzantine battle of facts versus alternative facts.  

For the Democratic candidates, the focus will be on benign blemishes, things like having a faux American Indian identity, bullying staff members, being too close to Wall Street, dating a much older political figure decades ago, or having a rope line reputation for pressing the flesh a tad too much.

On the Republican side is Donald Trump, a rapidly growing malignant goiter on the body politic.  So far in 2019, he has clocked in at an average of 22 lies a day. He took migrant children away from their parents and caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. He said some neo-Nazis and Klan members are “very fine people”, and complained that Nigerians won’t “go back to their huts” and that Haitians “all have AIDS”.  He shared highly classified data with top Russian officials, and has sided with Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies.  

In just the past few days, Trump has outdone himself when it comes to unraveling. He threatened to close the country’s southern border, and then backed off and said he’d use tariffs to force his will on Mexico. Then he urged border patrol agents to force asylum-seeking immigrants to turn around and go home because there is no room for them, completely contrary to facts and law. He promised a top Homeland Security official a presidential pardon if he ignored the legal rights of migrants. His record is so bad on this issue that there have been at least 25 federal court rulings that have blocked nearly every move Trump has made on immigration.  

Clearly, no American president has stood for reelection with a record as odious as Trump’s.  Yet, it is very possible that he will win a second term in 2020.  He remains revered by his base as the Great White Hope in a country that has grown far too diverse for his supporters’ tastes. And he remains acceptable to many mainstream Republicans who may hold their noses privately while publicly applauding his tax cuts for the rich and appointment of conservative judges.  Besides, his acts of atrocity are so numerous and frequent, they have a way of fading into the ether to make room for their successors.  That leaves us with this bizarre, irrational and asymmetrical  environment in which the quotidian flaws of Democratic candidates have a staying power that outlasts the cumulative horror that has been Trump’s presidency. Not only that, the challengers’ flaws pale in comparison to Trumpian foibles in the same category.

For example:

AMY KLOBUCHAR has been accused of bullying staff members.  Trump routinely insults, demeans and verbally abuses not only staff but cabinet members, congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries.  

ELIZABETH WARREN has been unable to shake the criticism that she incorrectly claimed to be an American Indian.  As of March 17, Trump told 9,179 lies since taking office. One of them was that his father was born in Germany.

KAMALA HARRIS is constantly bombarded with reports that, as a young political apprentice, she dated – more than 20 years ago – a much older Willie Brown, former mayor of San Francisco. This barely even qualifies as a flaw but she has been getting flack on it. Harris was single at the time, although Brown was technically married but estranged from his wife. Trump’s alleged flings with a porn star and a Playboy Playmate, along with hush money paid to both, don’t even make the top ten list of his aberrant behaviors.

CORY BOOKER has been on the carpet for having close ties to Wall Street.  From day one of his presidency, Trump has catered to the moneyed class, filling his cabinet with Goldman Sachs alumni, rolling back regulations for the financial sector and cutting taxes on the mega rich.

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND has acquired the “flip flop” label as a result of becoming more liberal after she moved from a moderate House district to her current New York Senate seat. Trump has not only spent his life flip-flopping (abortion, gun control, LGBTQ rights), but lately, as noted above, he has been reversing himself on an almost hourly basis (border closing, health insurance, Special Olympics funding). A creative entrepreneur has had great success in selling “Presidential Flip-Flops”, sandals that carry Trump’s contradictory tweets on the straps of the footwear.

JOE BIDEN has run into problems with his habit of expressing affection with hugs, kisses and caresses that sometimes make people feel uncomfortable.  Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 23 women and boasted on the Access Hollywood tape of grabbing them by their genitals.

The good news in all of this is that any of the Democratic candidates would be head and shoulders above Trump. The bad news is that it does not assure electoral victory. That will come the way it always has, through good messaging and the hard work of voter registration and turnout. It’s either that or four more years in the Twilight Zone.

UNCLE JOE’S TOUCH IS . . . WELL, OUT OF TOUCH

I’ve been a fervent Joe Biden fan for most of my adult life. How do you not love a guy who blurts out stuff like: “This is a big fucking deal” into a hot mic? I even cheered with guilty pleasure when he said he wanted to take Donald Trump “behind the gym and beat the hell out of him”.  In a world of buttoned-down, circumspect politicians guided by focus groups, Biden has forever been one of a kind. But please, Joe, don’t run for president. 

I don’t say this because of the seven women (at last count) who have complained that he invaded their personal space by hair smelling, nose rubbing, head kissing, shoulder squeezing or prolonged hugging.   I say it because his most endearing quality – being himself – is out of sync with an evolving and younger world around him.

As a 69-year-old retiree who had to turn to Google for a definition of the word “woke”, I feel his pain. Yet, one of life’s most important choices is when to leave the party. Particularly after the past few days, now seems like the time for Joe to call it a night. He can flash that disarming trademark smile, take his bows, and lend his considerable wisdom to the diverse and growing cast of Democratic candidates seeking the one office that has forever eluded him.

Because of my affection for the guy, I initially vacillated on the question of whether he should run as the women’s stories began to emerge last weekend. The media frenzy – both social and mainstream – didn’t help. As each woman complaining about Biden’s touchy-feely behavior stressed, this wasn’t about sexual assault or harassment.  Many news stories, however, failed to make that clear, as they trotted out #MeToo background references to men who were accused of assaultive or harassing behavior. Even the esteemed Washington Post, in its Tuesday print edition, ran a cutline saying “Bidden denied sexual misconduct charges”.  

So much of the response to this story has been predictably hyperbolic and tribal.  Fox News has had a field day with “Creepy Uncle Joe” stories. The other side has questioned the political motives behind the accusations.  Social media has been inundated with variations on the social construct that Biden’s hair kissing is de minimis compared with Trump’s pussy grabbing, an assertion that is at once factually correct and a lousy basis for selecting a president.  

Finally, after several days of insisting he never acted inappropriately and had no intentions of causing discomfort, Biden issued a video statement yesterday that was filled with his charismatic charm and empathy, along with a promise to change his behavior. He said he recognizes that “social norms (have) shifted, and the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset, and I get it.”

I watched the video three times, warming to Biden’s embrace of human connection as a vital force in life and in politics.  But what really got to me was the fact that he still doesn’t get it.  The boundaries of personal space have not changed.  What has changed is that women have become more empowered to speak out about men who enter that space without consent.  As long as 50 years ago, about the time Biden entered politics, academic researchers put a microscope to tactile communication. They found it to be powerfully constructive if used correctly, but also cautioned that it is far more susceptible to misinterpretation between sender and receiver than verbal or other nonverbal communication. Particularly problematic, they said, is the matter of touch initiated by someone in a position of power over the recipient, as in the case of a professor and a student, or a vice president and a campaign volunteer. 

 In my career as a union representative, I rarely encountered a female worker who didn’t have at least one story of an overly tactile, Biden-like boss. It wasn’t sexual harassment per se, but the managerial touches left them uncomfortable. Because of the power imbalance, the vast majority opted not to complain.  The only thing that has changed over all these decades is that many women are now objecting when they feel their personal space has been violated.

If Joe really got it, yesterday’s statement would have included an apology. With his characteristic authenticity and warmth, he could have said:  “It pains me to no end to think that I made some women uncomfortable. Because we are now in a new era where women – thankfully – feel comfortable in telling us when they are uncomfortable, I know now that I crossed a line that I didn’t know existed. I am so sorry.  I get it now and I will immediately change my behavior.”

Joe Biden, to use his own terminology, is one hell of a decent guy.  But he is of a different era, and it is not easy to adjust to change. That’s why, in a recent speech, he referenced 23 people by name and only three were born since 1961.  That’s why, in another appearance, he blasted the “younger generation” for complaining about how tough things are, and then listed all of the accomplishments of his generation.  That’s why he told a New York gathering that he regrets that he “couldn’t come up with a way of getting (Anita Hill) the kind of hearing she deserved,” a reference to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing he chaired in 1991.

I know well the pain of comprehending that your best years are behind you.  Growing old and being – at least a little – out of touch is a natural life rhythm. But it is not a useful predicate for a presidential campaign. The Democratic field for 2020 is packed with unprecedented diversity, in gender, race, age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, as well as new thinking and ideas.  It’s hard to imagine how the enthusiasm in all those constituencies carries over to the general election if the eventual candidate turns out to be an old white guy trying to defend everything he has done since 1972.  For the country’s sake, and for Joe’s sake, I hope that doesn’t happen.

WHAT DEMS NEED TO WIN IN 2020: A BIG TENT AND A SHIFT TO THE LEFT

Pay no attention to the tortured handwringing over the alleged foibles de jour of the Democratic Party. Yes, it’s lurching to the left. And yes, its internecine squabbles can be a tad unseemly.  The fact of the matter is that you can’t have growth without growing pains.  And without growth and change, we are left with the party of 2016.  In case you forgot, it didn’t end well.

I understand the anxiety. If Democrats blow it in 2020, we’re stuck with the worst Groundhog Day of our lives: four more years of Trumpian nuclear winter.  So our blood pressure soars when we see a headline like the one in the Washington Post the other day:  “Pelosi struggles to unify Democrats after painful fight over anti-Semitism”.  Ditto for the almost daily prognostications that “socialist” concepts will assure defeat on election day (here, here and here). 

Best to take a collective deep breath and recognize three basic truths:  The election is more than 18 months away; the depth and breadth of our current problems transcend the reach of centrist ideology and Clintonian triangulation; and, the occasional chaos in the House Democratic Caucus is the very positive result of expanding the party tent to include more than white men. 

For sure, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have preferred to have spent the past week doing something other than mediating an internal party battle between the comparative evils of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  It’s safe to say that no other House speaker has faced that challenge.  That’s because the new Democratic House majority looks substantially different than its predecessors of either party.  There are record numbers of women, people of color and millennials. Of the 43 non-white women elected for the first time, 22 are African American, six are Asian Pacific Islanders, 12 are Latina, two are Native American and one is Middle Eastern/North African. 

In the good old boys’ club days of Congress, freshmen were to be seen but not heard.  With this new big tent group, however, social media savvy has chipped away at the seniority system for determining prominence in Washington.  At 29, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York became a super star months before her election to Congress, a fete fueled largely by her Twitter following. Falling closely behind her is Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American from Minnesota, who was at the center of last week’s flap.  Omar has frequently criticized Israel with language that borrows heavily on anti-Semitic tropes, setting off a furor that remained at the top of the news feed for the past week. 

As an old white guy, judging linguistic nuances of Jewish and Muslim criticism is beyond my pay grade and life experience. It strikes me, however, that the conflict hardly diminishes Democrats. Instead, it is a byproduct of their vision of diversity and inclusiveness.  If you want a big-tent party, expect and accept some rambunctiousness. If you are more comfortable with politicians who look, act and think alike, vote Republican. 

The other inane anxiety attack that some Democrats are having ( to name a few: Ed Rendell, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown) is that the party is swinging too far to the left. They are quaking in their centrist boots over selective red-baiting by a president who owes his election to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin troll farm.  It is beyond absurd to label proposals for single payer health insurance, free college tuition, meaningful climate change precautions and higher taxes on the mega rich as the destruction of capitalism.  Although it is highly unlikely that any of those goals will be fully adopted anytime soon, the Democratic Party would be indulging in malpractice if it failed to push strongly in a leftward direction right now. 

Our government has spent the past several decades helping the rich at the expense of everyone else, resulting in a level of economic inequality not seen since the late 19th century.  That is the observation of the New York Times’ David Leonhardt who went on to note that the really radical approach would be to do nothing, or to make inequality worse, as Trump’s policies have.

Peter Beinart, a political science professor at the City University of New York, writing for The Atlantic, observed that the left has not traditionally had much influence on the Democrats. Yet, he said, there were two critical times when it was able to push its programs onto the table: the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s.  Both occasions involved circumstances very similar to what we are now facing. 

Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal legislation was the result of intense agitation on the left from forces like Huey Long and Francis Townsend. Their populist movement, according to Beinart, drew support from millions of people who demanded labor rights, easy credit and nationalization of banks and industries. As those very non-centrist aspirations won mass appeal, Roosevelt and many Congressional Democrats moved leftward, producing one of the most liberal legislative programs in history:  a pro-labor law, higher taxes on the rich, Social Security, unemployment insurance and aid for low income families.  Most historians have observed that those sweeping changes would not have happened without a mobilized left wing.

A similar dynamic played out in the 1960s.  Julian E. Zelizer, in his book The Fierce Urgency of Now, writes that John Kennedy had no intention of taking up the cause of racial inequality and the plight of the poor.  He was focused on tax cuts and, according to Zelizer, did not want to waste political capital on social justice issues that he thought had no traction in Congress.  His thinking changed dramatically, however, after two years of intense civil rights struggles and sustained pressure from the left.  After his death, Lyndon Johnson picked up Kennedy’s progressive agenda, resulting in the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act, federal aid for education, food stamps, job training, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid. 

There has not been anything even remotely close to that kind of progressive legislative reach since. Clearly, now is the time for a third wave of bold, sweeping changes to address profound social problems.  But that will not come from a Democratic Party beholden to Wall Street and the status quo. Polling shows significant public support for so-called socialist concepts like single payer health insurance, free college tuition, tax increases for the rich and sweeping steps to combat climate change.  

Just as in the ‘30s and ‘60s, the left is unlikely to capture the entirety of its agenda.  But without forcefully pushing it and agitating for it, none of it will see the light of day.  In this moment, the center of the road is an unproductive and lonely place to be.      

TOO MUCH TRUMP? HERE’S A PAUSE TO REFRESH

Oh what a year it’s been in Trump World.  Among the 2018 memories:  shithole countries, nuclear button sizes, a very stable genius, porn star hush money, an unexecuted order to fire Robert Mueller, a presidential declaration that Steve Bannon lost his mind, and a three-day government shutdown.

And that was just January.

Fear not, dear readers, the other 11 months will not be summarized in this space.  Given our current environment, the journalistic masochism of year-end reviews constitutes cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by Article VIII of the Constitution. Besides, there seems to be an intense desire for a  break from Trump overload.

For all the false superlatives he spouts about himself, this one is true: the American people have taken more breaks from thinking about, watching or listening to Donald Trump than they did under any other president.

Trump Fatigue Syndrome was the Urban Dictionary’s top definition of the year.  Google it and you will see millions of testimonials from folks suffering from too much Trump.  Hundreds of celebrities and others have shared their agony of the “Trump 10”, a reference to weight gain brought on by Trump-induced stress eating.  Media outlets cranked out endless reports of people dealing with Trump fatigue by invoking cold turkey news blackouts (here, here and here).  It has been reported that House Speaker Paul Ryan decided to leave public office largely because of Trump fatigue.  Even Kanye West, a rare celebrity to embrace the president, ended the year taking a break from Trump news, saying it was “all too much”.

And therein lies the predicate behind the decision to take a brief break from producing this blog.  Melissa, my editor and wife, and I are headed south for a month or so.  Barring unforeseen circumstances, I anticipate a return to this spot in early February.  It’s not that I’ve succumbed to Trump fatigue.  For reasons only a good shrink could dissect, I can’t take my eyes off this train wreck.  Its every facet fascinates me.  

What I want to avoid at all costs is reader fatigue. And so it is, on the theory that a brief absence may make the reading fonder, that I bid you adieu for a spell. Thank you for following me, or at least checking in every once in a while.  Our connection means a lot to me.   Happy New Year!