Monday, August 7, 2017

Faustian Bargain

If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it.

- Senator Jeff Flake, Conscience of a Conservative

The big thing going on this week was a single story with two parts. Republicans in Congress have begun backing away from Trump, which I cover in "Was TrumpCare's Failure a Turning Point?" The other piece of that story is Trump going back to his base, scapegoating immigrants and minorities. That gets covered in "Returning to the Well of White Resentment".

This week everybody was talking about Trump's failures and his attempts to keep his base energized

That's what the two featured posts are about.

While I've got the topic raised, though, I wanted to say one more thing about the Statue of Liberty: Something we always forget about it is that it's a monument to the end of slavery. That's why there's a broken chain at Lady Liberty's feet. The statue was conceived in 1865, as the defeat of the Southern slave empire opened the prospect that we might actually become worthy of the fine sentiments in the Declaration of Independence. White nationalist may claim that they're getting back to the original purpose of the statue when they divorce it from Emma Lazarus' inscription, but they always forget that it commemorates the defeat of their idealized Confederacy.

and race

The NAACP issued a travel advisory warning for the state of Missouri. In addition to the longstanding problems that were made evident at Ferguson, the state just passed a law making it harder to sue employers for racial discrimination. You now have to prove that race was the primary reason you lost your job, not just a contributing factor. So a little racism in the workplace is OK, as long as you don't fire people primarily because of their race.


Procter and Gamble put out a video about racism called "The Talk". I had a hard time imagining why anybody would object to scenes of black people talking to their kids about racism, but that just showed my lack of imagination.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGod_R4rYWM[/embed]

I always hate to direct attention to bad examples, but if you have a strong stomach, look at Mike the Cop's response. Mike thinks one segment (where a black mother worries about how her new-driver daughter will handle being pulled over by police) is anti-cop, because not all cops are like that.

This is yet another version of the #NotAllMen fallacy that was answered by #YesAllWomen. It just doesn't matter that not all cops mistreat blacks. Enough of them do that just about every black has a police story. So of course, if you are a black mother, you prepare your children for the possibility of police abuse. If Mike wants to get upset with somebody, let him get upset with the racist cops that have given his profession such a bad image.


While we're talking about racism, Colin Kaepernick still doesn't have a job. He's the mixed-race quarterback who silently protested American racism by not standing for the national anthem before football games.

Kaepernick is not what football people call a "franchise" quarterback, i.e., somebody you can legitimately hope to build a championship team around. (If he were, some team would ignore his issues and sign him anyway. There are 32 teams and 15-20 franchise quarterbacks.) The 49ers thought he was for a while, and made it to the Super Bowl with him in 2013. But he lost his starting job in 2015, before his protest started.

Performance-wise, he's on the borderline between starting quarterbacks and back-up quarterbacks, which makes him way better than a lot of guys who have jobs in the NFL. But he's "controversial" now -- moreso than players who abuse drugs or beat their wives, apparently. So he's unemployed, too hot for any team to touch.

I still believe what I said when his protest started: Sporting events shouldn't be patriotic rituals to begin with. We don't "honor America" before movies or concerts; why do it at football games? So Kaepernick didn't start this; the NFL started it when it insisted that players begin each game by honoring a country that doesn't always honor them back. (The fact that he can't get a job now just proves his point, IMO.) Kaepernick protested in a minimally disruptive way, and should be respected for that.

but we should pay more attention to the bad turn 2020 skirmishing is already taking

Trump is already historically unpopular for a relatively new president, and Democrats have no obvious early front-runner (like Clinton was four years ago). So most pundits expect candidates to come out of the woodwork, creating a free-for-all that might resemble the Republican race in 2016. It's not hard to find 2020 speculation in the media: Will Bernie run again, or will he be too old? Is Elizabeth Warren serious when she denies she's running? Does Joe Biden have another run left in him, and would that be a good thing or does the party need a new face, maybe a non-white like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, or Deval Patrick? What about relatively unknown candidates coming from nowhere, Jimmy Carter style, like John Hickenlooper? Kirsten Gillibrand? Seth Moulton? Tim Ryan?

What's bugging me right now, though, is not how premature this all is, but the fact that the campaign is already taking a negative turn. Way-too-early presidential campaigns are supposed to be idealistic and full of hope. It's one thing to start getting excited about somebody years in advance, but why start running people down? For example: This Salon article attacks Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and The Week's Ryan Cooper adds Deval Patrick to the objectionable list. Numerous articles have made something sinister out of Harris' meeting with some wealthy Democrats, as if they should be barred from looking for someone to support.

The Shakesville blog's founder Melissa McEwan objects to Cooper's bifurcation of Democrats into "big money elites on one side and Sanders Democrats on the other". Genuine progressives, she argues, might favor an incrementalist approach to progress.

Part of the reason that Black voters and non-Black voters, especially white voters from marginalized communities, joined to deliver crucial victories to Hillary Clinton across the Southern U.S. during the primary is because Sanders' message of revolution, which centered on upending rather than refining the system, failed to resonate. And contrary to pervasive narratives, it was not because voters in those states are too conservative or were too uninformed to appreciate Sanders' big ideas.

It is precisely those communities living on the edge, she argues, that have the most to fear from tear-it-down-and-start-over visions.

It is a privilege, in many ways, to be able to "think big." To have the space and safety where one can imagine seismic shifts that don't come with the risk of falling off the edge. We don't all have that luxury.

Washington Monthly's David Atkins warns both sides:

The worst elements of both sides are engaging cynically in the ongoing civil war. Some Sanders supporters eagerly want to see him run again in 2020, and are actively seeking to kneecap every potential challenger to him–especially those who might be able to more easily secure Hillary Clinton’s coalition of older and minority voters. ... On the other hand, establishment moderates since the early days of the Democratic Leadership Council have sought a marriage of the much-vaunted “Emerging Democratic Majority” with an educated, upper-middle-class fiscally centrist donor class. This has been to the detriment of the economy as a whole, and to the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party in general. They have no intention of taking a sharper stand against the predatory financial sector, and actively seek to use ideologically aligned women and minority candidates as a wedge against more radical activists who might threaten to alienate the wealthy donor class they have sought to woo away from the Republican Party since the Reagan era.

... If the fault lines once again pit more moderate minority candidates against more economically progressive white candidates, the resulting warfare will create the worst of all worlds: watered down economic policy that fails to win back disaffected white working class voters, combined with a bruising primary trading insults that could demotivate both class-conscious millennials and identity-conscious older women and minorities, depending on the eventual victor.

and you also might be interested in ...

Two weeks ago I adapted Kipling's poem "If" to reflect what it means to "be a Trump, my son", and back in March I turned "Casey at the Bat" into the saga of TrumpCare's initial failure in the House. Well, these days the Trump administration is inspiring a lot of people to take up poetry. Thursday night, Steven Colbert rewrote Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus" (the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty) to match the Trump immigration proposal: "your huddled MBAs yearning to be tax-free".

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUdKb79reJk[/embed]

But the one that really got a belly laugh out of me was "American Rhapsody". People have been asking for weeks whether Scaramucci can do the fandango, but this was the first extended parody I've seen. ("Transgender no! We will not let you serve.")


Lying about trivial things has gotten to be business-as-usual in the Trump White House. Twice last week, he claimed to have received phone calls from people who say they never made them: leaders of the Boy Scouts (who were supposed to have told Trump his speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree was the best one ever) and the president of Mexico (who supposedly thanked Trump for his enforcement of the border).

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later admitted neither of those phone calls happened, but bristled at the suggestion that Trump had lied. But it's hard to see what else to call it: Unless he's delusional or suffers from dementia, Trump had to know the phone calls never happened, even as he was saying that they did.

Meanwhile, transcripts of calls Trump made to the Mexican and Australian leaders in January leaked to The Washington Post. (How do these things happen?) One thing we learn is that Trump seemed not to care whether Mexico would actually pay for the wall or not. He just didn't want Mexico to say so in public.

and let's close with something surprising

From one angle, this church looks very solid.

From another, it's barely there at all.

That's a little like theology: Come at it from one angle and its arguments seem very solid. Come at it from another and you don't understand why everybody doesn't see the holes.

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