Wolfgang Hampel. Founder of Betty MacDonald Fan Club and Betty MacDonald Society for Betty MacDonald Fans all over the world.
Wolfgang Hampel interviewed Betty MacDonald's family and other famous writers and artists.
Wolfgang Hampel's Betty MacDonald and Ma and Pa Kettle biography and Betty MacDonald Interviews are very popular all over the world.
Wolfgang Hampel is also famous for his satirical poems and stories.
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Wolfgang Hampel, Betty MacDonald, her friends and Farewell, America
Hello 'Pussy', this is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Hillary Clinton gets 2.7 million lead in the popular vote!
Should I remain in bed, leave my country or fight against the dragon?
( see also the story by Wolfgang Hampel, ' Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say ' )
Betty MacDonald's sister Alison Bard Burnett
Betty MacDonald's mother Sydney with grandchild Alison Beck
Thank you so much for sharing this witty memories with us.
Wolfgang Hampel's literary event Vita Magica
is very fascinating because he is going to include Betty MacDonald,
other members of the Bard family and Betty MacDonald fan club honor
members.
I agree with Betty in this very witty Betty MacDonald story Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say by Wolfgang Hampel.
I
can't imagine to live in a country with him as so-called elected
President although there are very good reasons to remain there to fight
against these brainless politics.
A week after the presidential election, Donald Trump spoke via
phone with British Prime Minister Theresa May, though it seems no one
prepared the president-elect on the basics of diplomacy. Trump
apparently told May, for example, “If you travel to the U.S., you should let me know.”
The casual invitation “left civil servants amused and befuddled.”
In Trump’s mind, the British prime minister might have plans to swing
by America for a visit, in which case, the president-elect hoped May
would give him a heads-up. What Trump doesn’t realize is that May would
only come if invited.
Electing a president who doesn’t know what he’s doing carries real consequences.
Don't miss the very interesting articles below, please.
The most difficult case in Mrs.Piggle-Wiggle's career
Hello 'Pussy', this is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
You
took calls from foreign leaders on unsecured phone lines, without
consultung the State Department. We have to change your silly behaviour
with a new Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle cure. I know you are the most difficult
case in my career - but we have to try everything.......................
Betty MacDonald was sitting on her egg-shaped cloud and listened to a rather strange guy.
He said to his friends: So sorry to keep you waiting. Very complicated business! Very complicated!
Betty said: Obviously much too complicated for you old toupee!
Besides him ( by the way the First Lady's place ) his 10 year old son was bored to death and listened to this 'exciting' victory speech.
The old man could be his great-grandfather.
The
boy was very tired and thought: I don't know what this old guy is
talking about. Come on and finish it, please. I'd like to go to bed. Dear 'great-grandfather' continued and praised the Democratic candidate.
He always called her the most corrupt person ever and repeated it over and over again in the fashion of a Tibetan prayer wheel.
She is so corrupt. She is so corrupt. Do you know how corrupt she is?
Betty MacDonald couldn't believe it when he said: She
has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we
owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.
Afterwards old toupee praised his parents, wife, children, siblings and friends.
He asked the same question like a parrot all the time: Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? I know you are here!
Betty MacDonald answered: No Pussy they are not! They left the country.
They immigrated to Canada
because they are very much afraid of the future in the U.S.A. with you
as their leader like the majority of all so-called more or less normal
citizens.
This
is incredible! I'll You get what you pay/vote for and Trump is the
epitome of this ideology. America I won't feel bad for you because you
don't need my sympathy for what's coming but I am genuinely scared for
you. 'Forgive them lord for they know not who they do' or maybe they do
but just don't care about their future generations who will suffer for
this long after the culprits have passed away.
Wise guy, North Pole, Svalbard And Jan Mayen, 9 minutes ago
Is the USA like North Korea where you can't trust other politicians?
That's it.
Put Ivanka in! Put Ivanka in! Put my whole family and friends in! ' What about Putin?
Or the leaders from China and North Korea?
Wouldn't it be a great idea to put them in too?
What about very intelligent and qualified Sarah Palin?
In 2006, Palin obtained a passport[88] and in 2007 traveled for the first time outside of North America on a trip to Kuwait. There she visited the Khabari Alawazem Crossing at the Kuwait–Iraq border and met with members of the Alaska National Guard at several bases.[89] On her return journey she visited injured soldiers in Germany.[90] That's the reason why very intelligent and brilliant Sarah Palin knows the World very well. Sarah and ' Pussygate ' will rule America and the World - what a couple.
Our next Betty MacDonald fan club project is a collection of these unique dedications.
If you
share your dedication from your Betty MacDonald - and Mary Bard Jensen
collection you might be the winner of our new Betty MacDonald fan club
items.
Thank you so much in advance for your support.
Thank you so much for sending us your favourite Betty MacDonald quote.
More info are coming soon.
Wolfgang
Hampel's Betty MacDonald and Ma and Pa Kettle biography and Betty
MacDonald interviews have fans in 40 countries. I'm one of their many devoted fans.
Many Betty MacDonald - and Wolfgang Hampel fans are very interested in a Wolfgang Hampel CD and DVD with his
very funny poems and stories.
We are going to publish new Betty MacDonald essays on Betty MacDonald's gardens and nature in Washington State. Tell us the names of this mysterious couple please and you can win a very new Betty MacDonald documentary.
The series premiered on September 3,
1951, the same day as "Search for Tomorrow," and ended on August 1,
1952.
Although it did well in the ratings, it had difficulty
attracting a steady sponsor. This episode features Betty Lynn (later
known for her work on "The Andy Griffith Show") as Betty MacDonald, John
Craven as Bob MacDonald, Doris Rich as Ma Kettle, and Frank Twedell as
Pa Kettle.
Betty MacDonald fan club exhibition will be fascinating with the international book editions and letters by Betty MacDonald. I can't wait to see the new Betty MacDonald documentary.
Ms Clinton suffered a crushing defeat in the electoral college,
but is on track for a mind-bending victory in the popular vote Getty
Hillary Clinton has 2.7 million more votes than
Donald Trump, despite losing the presidential election, and the number
is expected to rise. Ms Clinton is on track to get more votes than president
Barack Obama did in 2012. He won 65.9 million, and she is only about
400,000 votes behind him. The votes are being tallied by David Wasserman for the Cook Political Report.
Votes are still streaming in from states like California, New York and
Washington due to late counting of mail-in and absentee ballots.
Mr Trump swept to victory thanks to the centuries-old
electoral college system, which distributes electoral votes around
states and the candidate who wins in each state gets all of those votes. Larger states - like Pennsylvania with 20 electoral college votes and Michigan with 16 votes - went to Mr Trump.
Play Video
Play
0:00
/
0:00
Share
Fullscreen
Electoral College voting: How the United States decides its president
The 538 electoral college voters are convening in their
respective states on 19 December to officially declare Mr Trump as
president. At least seven of them, however, will be “faithless electors” and stage a protest vote for Ms Clinton or another Republican.
On 8 November, Ms Clinton won just 232 votes - a majority of 270 is needed - while Mr Trump reached 306. His entourage has filed a lawsuit to block a request for
a vote recount in Michigan, after successful requests were granted in
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All three states were crucial battlegrounds on 8 November
and went to Mr Trump with a small margin of victory. The recount started
in Wisconsin at midday on Monday 4 December. Mr Trump has been irked by his loss in the popular count,
and he said he would have won it if he had campaigned harder in a
smaller number of states.
The sun sets behind the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
America
died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand
via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our
values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our
sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that,
however tenuously, made a nation out of a country. Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7.
No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will
now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we
are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray
Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:
“Defenseless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.”
I hunt for that affirming flame. This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone
professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election
because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the
electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the
anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white
sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have
destroyed the values that have bound us.
We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone.
We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of
civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize
just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to
coexist. If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is
this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so
terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans
were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who
knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and
challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress
on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in
seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would
legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power?
Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t. This country has survived a civil war, two world wars and a Great
Depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we
will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other
to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or
progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend
that democracy works and that elections have more-or-less happy endings.
Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain
conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.
No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things.
The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism
disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for
decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate.
They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from
effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right
to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make
sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of
government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they
haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never
called them out on it. Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can
defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though
Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular
president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no
matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days
of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has
superseded governing. Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot
someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care.
It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election
never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or
even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their
grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He
is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact,
it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just
wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit
will be literal. The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to
get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he
was a media creation — a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on
magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired
and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him
not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently
from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his
shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his
interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they
suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president. Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy,
he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the
latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as
the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich
and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats,
conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so they could fill the
vacuum.
With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived.
Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that
after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no
longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact
dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like
Goebbels before them, conservatives understood they had to create their
own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and
in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump
can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian
sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out. With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective,
truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah
Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the
public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as
media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained
working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the
country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and
working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information — a
media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already
believe. With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for
which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take
on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to
play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will
surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Trump as a
candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may
even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And
in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch
him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous
guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to
fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be
whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth. What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press
into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel
protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff
Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have
reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC’s Katy Tur,
perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the
Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists
who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism
and intimidation from the white nationalist “alt-right.” For the press,
this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white
supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and
anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m
thinking.” It will be open season.
This converts the media from reporters to targets, and they have
little recourse. Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times
columnist David Brooks. Brooks is no paragon. He always had seemed to
willfully neglect modern Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no
longer incipient), and he was an apologist for conservative
self-enrichment and bigotry. But this campaign season, Brooks pretty
much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the
conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated
into spirituality. What Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a
bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and
neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than
trickle-down economics. He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a
prescription for rejuvenation. We have lost the country, but by
refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and,
more granularly, our own family. For journalists, Brooks may show how
political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the
Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one
considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only
on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual
well-being. In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we
need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must
bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know
what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how
disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a
way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which
they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness
and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and
Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact.
They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral
media to tell them. They will also need us. We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's
biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at
The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, and is
currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
A week after the presidential election, Donald Trump spoke via
phone with British Prime Minister Theresa May, though it seems no one
prepared the president-elect on the basics of diplomacy. Trump
apparently told May, for example, “If you travel to the U.S., you should let me know.”
The casual invitation “left civil servants amused and befuddled.”
In Trump’s mind, the British prime minister might have plans to swing
by America for a visit, in which case, the president-elect hoped May
would give him a heads-up. What Trump doesn’t realize is that May would
only come if invited.
Yesterday, the Republican had another chat with a foreign leader, and as the Washington Postnoted, no one prepared Trump for this conversation, either.
Pakistan’s Press Information Bureau on Wednesday released a readout
of a phone call on Monday between Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz
Sharif, and the U.S. president-elect, Donald Trump. The readout is
unusual in that it focuses almost entirely on Trump’s contributions to
the conversation, and reproduces them in a voice that is unmistakably
his.
The report from the Pakistani government is online in its entirety here,
and it really must be read to be fully appreciated: “President Trump
said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif you have a very good reputation. You
are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every
way. I am looking forward to see you soon…. Your country is amazing
with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most
intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you
want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding
problems.”
Of particular interest, the readout added, “On being
invited to visit Pakistan by the Prime Minister, Mr. Trump said that he
would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic
people. Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and
all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people, said Mr. Donald
Trump.”
Oh my. It’s worth
noting that Trump hasn’t always had such a friendly attitude towards
Pakistan. In recent years, Trump published tweets in which he insisted
Pakistan “is not our friend,” and shouldn’t be considered an “ally” of the United States.
But
more pressing in this situation is that Trump told Nawaz Sharif he’s
prepared to help resolve Pakistan’s problems and would love to visit
Pakistan in person as president.
Time magazine had a good piece on this yesterday, explaining why the president-elect’s comments were “reckless and bizarre.”
There are few foreign policy topics quite as complicated as the
relationship between India and Pakistan, South Asia’s nuclear-armed
nemeses. Any world leader approaching the issue even obliquely must
surely see the “Handle With Care” label from miles away, given the
possibility of nuclear conflict.
U.S. President-elect Donald
Trump, however, doesn’t seem to have read the memo, injecting a
pronounced element of uncertainty about the position of the world’s only
remaining superpower on this most complex of subjects in a call with
the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif…. Trump’s intervention could
have serious consequences for both regional and global stability.
Tensions between India and Pakistan have intensified, which leaves
the United States in an awkward position. The Obama administration has
made a concerted effort to strengthen U.S./India ties, while also delicately maintaining financial support for Pakistan.
Note, however, that President Obama is the first American president to ever visit India twice during his term, while Obama has not set foot in Pakistan.
Trump,
who probably isn’t aware of the diplomatic balancing act, apparently
signaled to Sharif a very different U.S. posture towards Pakistan – up
to and including a presidential visit to the country.
If Trump
does go to Pakistan, it risks alienating Indian allies. If Trump doesn’t
visit after telling Sharif he would, it will further complicate an
already difficult Pakistani relationship. And I can’t wait to hear what
this means: “I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to
play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems.”
Electing a president who doesn’t know what he’s doing carries real consequences.
Kellyanne Conway speaking to the media at Trump Tower.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Last
week when Donald Trump began his so-called Thank You Tour in
Cincinnati, he had yet another opportunity to be magnanimous and
conciliatory, to step beyond the division and acrimony of his campaign
and into the unity and healing necessary to be president of a strained
nation.
As
is his wont, he declined, instead gloating and boasting, playing to the
minority of American voters who chose him, relishing his own
impenitence.
He is choosing to push America further apart rather than bring it closer together.
And
be clear: It is not the job of the defiant to conform to a future
president who makes them completely uncomfortable. The burden of unity
lies with Trump, not his detractors.
“Just
wait and see.” “Give him a chance.” But what if what you’ve already
seen is so beyond the pale that it’s irrevocable? What if Trump has
already squandered more chances than most of us will ever have?
What
if Trump has shown himself beyond doubt and with absolute certainty to
be a demagogue and bigot and xenophobe and has given space and voice to
concordant voices in the country and in his emerging Legion of Doom
cabinet? In that reality, resistance isn’t about mindless obstruction by
people blinded by the pain of ideological defeat or people gorging on
sour grapes. To the contrary, resistance then is an act of radical, even
revolutionary, patriotism. Resistance isn’t about damaging the country,
but protecting it.
Photo
There
is no Electoral College clause that blunts ferocious opposition to the
demeaning of women and racial, ethnic and religious minorities in this
country; there is no Election Day reset on the coddling of white
supremacy.
Furthermore,
the emergence of Donald Trump as a political figure has threatened to
kill many of the ideals that we hold dear: decency and decorum,
inclusion and empathy, truth and facts themselves.
Trump
and his agents of idiocracy are now engaged in an all-out crusade to
exaggerate the scope of his victory, rewrite racial history, justify
their vendettas and hostilities and erase the very distinction between
true and false.
At
a fiery exchange during a panel at Harvard, Hillary Clinton’s
communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, rightly accused the Trump
campaign of emboldening “white supremacists and white nationalists.”
The
Trump campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, barked back: “Do you think I
ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform? You’re going to
look me in the face and tell me that?”
“It
did. Kellyanne, it did,” said Palmieri. Yes Kellyanne, that is exactly
what you did and no amount of personal outrage about being called out on
it is going to rewrite that history. Furthermore, everyone who sees you
should say that to your face at every opportunity.
Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter
Every
weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the
Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
Resistance
is not about some sort of clairvoyant condemnation of acts yet
uncommitted, but rather about the resilience of memory, the rigidity of
morality and the depth of wounds.
The
truest measure of a leader is as much about how he or she attains power
as how he or she wields it; while the latter is yet to be determined,
the former has been revealed in devastating clarity.
A Pew Research Poll
released last month found that “voters’ ‘grades’ for the way Trump
conducted himself during the campaign are the lowest for any victorious
candidate in 28 years.” The report continued: “For the first time in Pew
Research Center postelection surveys, voters give the losing candidate
higher grades than the winner.”
Furthermore, as Nate Silver responded
to one of Conway’s tweets, “Trump will soon become the first president
who failed to win a majority of the vote either in the general election
or in his primary,” meaning the Republican primaries. He added: “That is
to say, since 1972. Primaries weren’t widespread before that. 45/46% of
the vote can go a long way under the right circumstances.”
And there are disturbing signs about how a Trump administration will conduct itself, from the early diplomatic blunders
that signal a worrisome break in the continuity of protocol, to his
team nursing vendettas and continuing to dangle the threat of jail in
front of his opponents. Last week Conway appeared to waffle
on whether Trump or a federal agency during his term might still pursue
prosecution of Clinton; the Trump lackey Corey Lewandowski forthrightly
said of the executive editor of The New York Times: “He should be in jail.”
“One
thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is
that people that say facts are facts; they’re not really facts.
Everybody has a way, it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a
glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to
be the truth or not true.” She continued: “There’s no such thing,
unfortunately, anymore of facts.” Folks, Dimwit-ism is a disease easily
spread and denigrators of the absolutism of truth are its vectors.
This is why resistance isn’t only principled, but essential and even existential.
We
are not in an ordinary postelection period of national unity and
rapprochement. We are facing the potential abrogation of fundamental
American ideals. We stand at the precipice, staring into an abyss that
grows darker by the day.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks as Democratic
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton listen during the second
presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Sunday, Oct.
9, 2016. (Saul Loeb/Pool via AP)
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution earlier this week that’s being hailed as a ‘middle finger’ to President-elect Donald Trump.The resolution, which passed with nine votes in favor and zero against, was a response to the election and the incoming Trump administration.Here is the final version of the resolution:
WHEREAS, On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected to become the 45th President of the United States; now, therefore, be it RESOLVED, That no matter the threats made by President-elect Trump,
San Francisco will remain a Sanctuary City. We will not turn our back on
the men and women from other countries who help make this city great,
and who represent over one third of our population. This is the Golden
Gate-we build bridges, not walls; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That we will never back down on women’s rights,
whether in healthcare, the workplace, or any other area threatened by a
man who treats women as obstacles to be demeaned or objects to be
assaulted. And just as important, we will ensure our young girls grow up
with role models who show them they can be or do anything; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That there will be no conversion therapy, no
withdrawal of rights in San Francisco. We began hosting gay weddings
twelve years ago, and we are not stopping now. And to all the LGBTQ
people all over the country who feel scared, bullied, or alone: You
matter. You are seen; you are loved; and San Francisco will never stop
fighting for you; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That we still believe in this nation’s founding
principle of religious freedom. We do not ban people for their faith.
And the only lists we keep are on invitations to come pray together;
and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That Black Lives Matter in San Francisco, even if
they may not in the White House. And guided by President Obama’s Task
Force on 21st Century Policing, we will continue reforming our police
department and rebuilding trust between police and communities of color
so all citizens feel safe in their neighborhoods; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That climate change is not a hoax, or a plot by the
Chinese. In this city, surrounded by water on three sides, science
matters. And we will continue our work on CleanPower, Zero Waste, and
everything else we are doing to protect future generations; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That we have been providing universal health care
in this city for nearly a decade, and if the new administration follows
through on its callous promise to revoke health insurance from 20
million people, San Franciscans will be protected; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That we are the birthplace of the United Nations, a
city made stronger by the thousands of international visitors we
welcome every day. We will remain committed to internationalism and to
our friends and allies around the world-whether the administration in
Washington is or not; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That San Francisco will remain a Transit First city
and will continue building Muni and BART systems we can all rely upon,
whether this administration follows through on its platform to eliminate
federal transit funding or not; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That California is the sixth largest economy in the
world. The Bay Area is the innovation capital of the country. We will
not be bullied by threats to revoke our federal funding, nor will we
sacrifice our values or members of our community for your dollar; and,
be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That we condemn all hate crimes and hate speech
perpetrated in this election’s wake. That although the United States
will soon have a President who has demonstrated a lack of respect for
the values we hold in the highest regard in San Francisco, it cannot
change who we are, and it will never change our values. We argue, we
campaign, we debate vigorously within San Francisco, but on these points
we are 100 percent united. We will fight discrimination and
recklessness in all its forms. We are one City. And we will move forward
together.
And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny.
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic.
It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it
in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where
Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different
political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly
evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering
point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than
democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I
discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality,
where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a
lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more
democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality
spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of
any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and
multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country
like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.” This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the
fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced
to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over
time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of
elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and
identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually
uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and
informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are
despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you
arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no
kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or
expertise.
The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly
intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention
the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of
women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A
father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a
son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before
or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is
frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light
of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich
mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The
foreigner is equal to the citizen.
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time —
given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and
sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil
religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob”
and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his
appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further.
He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of
popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee.
Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of
democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled,
distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from
democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to
excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much
slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal
conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the
increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind
of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.
And so, as I chitchatted over cocktails at a Washington office
Christmas party in December, and saw, looming above our heads, the
pulsating, angry televised face of Donald Trump on Fox News, I couldn’t
help but feel a little nausea permeate my stomach. And as I watched
frenzied Trump rallies on C-SPAN in the spring, and saw him lay waste to
far more qualified political peers in the debates by simply calling
them names, the nausea turned to dread. And when he seemed to condone
physical violence as a response to political disagreement, alarm bells
started to ring in my head. Plato had planted a gnawing worry in my mind
a few decades ago about the intrinsic danger of late-democratic life.
It was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection
of our own hyperdemocratic times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical
character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics
ever written.
Could it be that the Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of
pro wrestling and New York City tabloids, via reality television and
Twitter, to prove not just Plato but also James Madison right, that
democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention …
and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been
violent in their deaths”? Is he testing democracy’s singular weakness —
its susceptibility to the demagogue — by blasting through the firewalls
we once had in place to prevent such a person from seizing power? Or am I
overreacting?
Perhaps. The nausea comes and goes, and there have been days when the
news algorithm has actually reassured me that “peak Trump” has arrived.
But it hasn’t gone away, and neither has Trump. In the wake of his most
recent primary triumphs, at a time when he is perilously close to
winning enough delegates to grab the Republican nomination outright, I
think we must confront this dread and be clear about what this election
has already revealed about the fragility of our way of life and the
threat late-stage democracy is beginning to pose to itself.
Plato, of course, was not clairvoyant. His analysis of how
democracy can turn into tyranny is a complex one more keyed toward
ancient societies than our own (and contains more wrinkles and eddies
than I can summarize here). His disdain for democratic life was fueled
in no small part by the fact that a democracy had executed his mentor,
Socrates. And he would, I think, have been astonished at how American
democracy has been able to thrive with unprecedented stability over the
last couple of centuries even as it has brought more and more people
into its embrace. It remains, in my view, a miracle of constitutional
craftsmanship and cultural resilience. There is no place I would rather
live. But it is not immortal, nor should we assume it is immune to the
forces that have endangered democracy so many times in human history.
Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the
Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the
tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed
large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of
power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and
vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an
Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various
states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with
two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the
more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with
two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist
passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by
the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that
might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution. This
separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls
against democratic wildfires.
Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have
been weakened or abolished. The franchise has been extended far beyond
propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through
popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the
national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were
accompanied by informal ones, as the culture of democracy slowly took
deeper root. For a very long time, only the elites of the political
parties came to select their candidates at their quadrennial
conventions, with the vote largely restricted to party officials from
the various states (and often decided in, yes, smoke-filled rooms in
large hotel suites). Beginning in the early 1900s, however, the parties
began experimenting with primaries, and after the chaos of the 1968
Democratic convention, today’s far more democratic system became the
norm.
Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president
anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public
office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or
Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively
selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly
imploded. In 1940, Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous
political office, won the Republican nomination for president, pledging
to keep America out of war and boasting that his personal wealth
inoculated him against corruption: “I will be under obligation to nobody
except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but
nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have proliferated, from
Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman Cain, to this
year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald J.
Trump. This further widening of our democracy — our increased openness
to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for
outsiders — is now almost complete.
The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to
choosing our president, are now almost nonexistent. In 2000, George W.
Bush lost the popular vote and won the election thanks to Electoral
College math and, more egregiously, to a partisan Supreme Court vote. Al
Gore’s eventual concession spared the nation a constitutional crisis,
but the episode generated widespread unease, not just among Democrats.
And this year, the delegate system established by our political parties
is also under assault. Trump has argued that the candidate with the most
votes should get the Republican nomination, regardless of the rules in
place. It now looks as if he won’t even need to win that argument — that
he’ll bank enough delegates to secure the nomination uncontested — but
he’s won it anyway. Fully half of Americans now believe the traditional
nominating system is rigged.
Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in
retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of
the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase
political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the
past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money
from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud. Barack Obama, whose 2008
campaign was propelled by small donors and empowered by the internet,
blazed the trail of the modern-day insurrectionist, defeating the
prohibitive favorite in the Democratic primary and later his Republican
opponent (both pillars of their parties’ Establishments and backed by
moneyed elites). In 2012, the fund-raising power behind Mitt Romney —
avatar of the one percent — failed to dislodge Obama from office. And in
this presidential cycle, the breakout candidates of both parties have
soared without financial support from the elites. Sanders, who is
sustaining his campaign all the way to California on the backs of small
donors and large crowds, is, to put it bluntly, a walking refutation of
his own argument. Trump, of course, is a largely self-funding
billionaire — but like Willkie, he argues that his wealth uniquely
enables him to resist the influence of the rich and their lobbyists.
Those despairing over the influence of Big Money in American politics
must also explain the swift, humiliating demise of Jeb Bush and the
struggling Establishment campaign of Hillary Clinton. The evidence
suggests that direct democracy, far from being throttled, is actually
intensifying its grip on American politics.
None of this is necessarily cause for alarm, even though it would be
giving the Founding Fathers palpitations. The emergence of the first
black president — unimaginable before our more inclusive democracy — is
miraculous, a strengthening, rather than weakening, of the system. The
days when party machines just fixed things or rigged elections are
mercifully done with. The way in which outsider candidates, from Obama
to Trump and Sanders, have brought millions of new people into the
electoral process is an unmitigated advance. The inclusion of previously
excluded voices helps, rather than impedes, our public deliberation.
But it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our
democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique
vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a
shameless demagogue.
What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now
blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form.
If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the
media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any
elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. The process had
its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The
rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political
effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized
every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s
readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry —
the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.
So much of this was welcome. I relished it myself in the early
aughts, starting a blog and soon reaching as many readers, if not more,
as some small magazines do. Fusty old-media institutions, grown fat and
lazy, deserved a drubbing. The early independent blogosphere corrected
facts, exposed bias, earned scoops. And as the medium matured, and as
Facebook and Twitter took hold, everyone became a kind of blogger. In
ways no 20th-century journalist would have believed, we all now have our
own virtual newspapers on our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines —
picking stories from countless sources and creating a peer-to-peer
media almost completely free of editing or interference by elites. This
was bound to make politics more fluid. Political organizing — calling a
meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely
laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a
single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.
The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media,
conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The
distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election
coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting; your Pornhub jostled
right next to your mother’s Facebook page. The web’s algorithms all but
removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news
abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we
really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In
the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic,
measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before.
And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared
about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than
reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become
personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin.
Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section
brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned
deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning
republic.
Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there
are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points
is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative
sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common
empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed
and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the
more supporters he or she will get.
Politically, we lucked out at first. Obama would never have been
nominated for the presidency, let alone elected, if he hadn’t harnessed
the power of the web and the charisma of his media celebrity. But he was
also, paradoxically, a very elite figure, a former state and U.S.
senator, a product of Harvard Law School, and, as it turned out, blessed
with a preternaturally rational and calm disposition. So he has masked,
temporarily, the real risks in the system that his pioneering campaign
revealed. Hence many Democrats’ frustration with him. Those who saw in
his campaign the seeds of revolutionary change, who were drawn to him by
their own messianic delusions, came to be bitterly disappointed by his
governing moderation and pragmatism.
The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less
restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an
ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV,
proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience
directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She
was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of
conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time
to come.
Trump, we now know, had been considering running for president
for decades. Those who didn’t see him coming — or kept treating him as a
joke — had not yet absorbed the precedents of Obama and Palin or the
power of the new wide-open system to change the rules of the political
game. Trump was as underrated for all of 2015 as Obama was in 2007 — and
for the same reasons. He intuitively grasped the vanishing authority of
American political and media elites, and he had long fashioned a public
persona perfectly attuned to blast past them.
Despite his immense wealth and inherited privilege, Trump had always cultivated a common touch. He did not hide his wealth in the late-20th century
— he flaunted it in a way that connected with the masses. He lived the
rich man’s life most working men dreamed of — endless glamour and women,
for example — without sacrificing a way of talking about the world that
would not be out of place on the construction sites he regularly
toured. His was a cult of democratic aspiration. His 1987 book, The Art of the Deal,
promised its readers a path to instant success; his appearances on “The
Howard Stern Show” cemented his appeal. His friendship with Vince
McMahon offered him an early entrée into the world of professional
wrestling, with its fusion of sports and fantasy. He was a macho media
superstar.
One of the more amazing episodes in Sarah Palin’s early political life, in fact, bears this out. She popped up in the Anchorage Daily News
as “a commercial fisherman from Wasilla” on April 3, 1996. Palin had
told her husband she was going to Costco but had sneaked into J.C.
Penney in Anchorage to see … one Ivana Trump, who, in the wake of her
divorce, was touting her branded perfume. “We want to see Ivana,” Palin
told the paper, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance
of glamour and culture.”
Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice,
he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The
conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was
something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment.
In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his
viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked
nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a
reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as
applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different
game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll
win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a
shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you
support them because they’re assholes.
In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951 tract, The True Believer,
he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of
the upheavals in Europe in the first half of the century, but the book
remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate
the source of all truly mass movements in a collective sense of acute
frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration
simmering with rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville
centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its
worst (say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but
the future seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery
finally gathers speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet
widespread that the anger begins to rise. After the suffering of
recession or unemployment, and despite hard work with stagnant or
dwindling pay, the future stretches ahead with relief just out of reach.
When those who helped create the last recession face no consequences
but renewed fabulous wealth, the anger reaches a crescendo.
The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find,
although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to
ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain
the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the
sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for
socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less
vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have
pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other
segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions
of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in
the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been
more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and
mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.
“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new
poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” Hoffer argues.
Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those
left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites
as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated
almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have
ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture —
but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and
despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded.
This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as
president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has
declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay
people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are
hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more
aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and
yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working class as an
afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous,
revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little
ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.
For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked,
their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated,
now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk
about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to
overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled
as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described
as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of
outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of
opportunity.
Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working
class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and
homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of
the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling
white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by
students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege
exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain.
These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they
not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the
ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the
broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if
directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words,
“disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”
And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of
the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of
racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of
the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never
intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural
marginalization. The Black Lives Matter left stoked the fires still
further; so did the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems
unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes. And as the tea party
swept through Washington in 2010, as its representatives repeatedly held
the government budget hostage, threatened the very credit of the U.S.,
and refused to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, the American
political and media Establishment mostly chose to interpret such
behavior as something other than unprecedented. But Trump saw what
others didn’t, just as Hoffer noted: “The frustrated individual and the
true believer make better prognosticators than those who have reason to
want the preservation of the status quo.”
Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a
“facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the
impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly
vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief?
What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching
across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government?
What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our
national debt through a global trade war? In a conventional political
party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be
laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility
disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor
of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become
icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very
impossibility is their appeal.
But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that
gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is
always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most
accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.” And so Trump launched his campaign
by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants a population largely of
rapists and murderers. He moved on to Muslims, both at home and abroad.
He has now added to these enemies — with sly brilliance — the Republican
Establishment itself. And what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the
history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than,
say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies.
It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.
And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then
vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They
have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people
didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer
scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail
boggles the mind. Worse, he emphasized, after the mass murder in San
Bernardino, that even the Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn
around and massacre you at any juncture. “There’s something going on,”
he declaimed ominously, giving legitimacy to the most hysterical and
ugly of human impulses.
To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in
some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly
lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of
foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and
Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what
can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion
in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion.
This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English
Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the
French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of
Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst
of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so
our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated,
angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.
His response to his third vaunted enemy, the RNC, is also laced with
the threat of violence. There will be riots in Cleveland if he doesn’t
get his way. The RNC will have “a rough time” if it doesn’t cooperate.
“Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along
great with him,” Trump has said. “And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay
a big price, okay?” The past month has seen delegates to the Cleveland
convention receiving death threats; one of Trump’s hatchet men, Roger
Stone, has already threatened to publish the hotel rooms of delegates
who refuse to vote for Trump.
And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one
would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty.
Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why.
He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is
attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats
and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled
out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity
venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts
in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the
crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out
on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the
presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be
disqualifying if our hyperdemocracy hadn’t already abolished
disqualifications.
And while a critical element of 20th-century fascism — its organized
street violence — is missing, you can begin to see it in embryonic form.
The phalanx of bodyguards around Trump grows daily; plainclothes
bouncers in the crowds have emerged as pseudo-cops to contain the
incipient unrest his candidacy will only continue to provoke; supporters
have attacked hecklers with sometimes stunning ferocity. Every time
Trump legitimizes potential violence by his supporters by saying it
comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for serious civil
unrest.
Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere —
not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a
demonstration effect. At his rallies he has recounted the mythical acts
of one General John J. Pershing when confronted with an alleged outbreak
of Islamist terrorism in the Philippines. Pershing, in Trump’s telling,
lines up 50 Muslim prisoners, swishes a series of bullets in the
corpses of freshly slaughtered pigs, and orders his men to put those
bullets in their rifles and kill 49 of the captured Muslim men. He
spares one captive solely so he can go back and tell his friends. End of
the terrorism problem.
In some ways, this story contains all the elements of Trump’s core
appeal. The vexing problem of tackling jihadist terror? Torture and
murder enough terrorists and they will simply go away. The complicated
issue of undocumented workers, drawn by jobs many Americans won’t take?
Deport every single one of them and build a wall to stop the rest. Fuck
political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter
at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s
no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And
therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you
all balls. Irrationality with muscle.
The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within
is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a
rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is
that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.
For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control.
Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early
hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants
and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape. Once again,
Plato had his temperament down: A tyrant is a man “not having control
of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and
love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or
moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who
“throughout his entire life ... is full of fear, overflowing with
convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar? Trump is as mercurial and as
unpredictable and as emotional as the daily Twitter stream. And we are
contemplating giving him access to the nuclear codes.
Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no
chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing
this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by
persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new
movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions,
and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only
reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external
events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the
months before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is
sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can
possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the
Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be
tyrant’s greatest ally.
And though Trump’s unfavorables are extraordinarily high (around 65
percent), he is already showing signs of changing his tune, pivoting
(fitfully) to the more presidential mode he envisages deploying in the
general election. I suspect this will, to some fools on the fence, come
as a kind of relief, and may open their minds to him once more. Tyrants,
like mob bosses, know the value of a smile: Precisely because of the
fear he’s already generated, you desperately want to believe in his new
warmth. It’s part of the good-cop-bad-cop routine that will be familiar
to anyone who has studied the presidency of Vladimir Putin.
With his appeal to his own base locked up, Trump may well also shift to more moderate stances on social issues like abortion (he already wants to amend the GOP platform to a less draconian position) or gay and even transgender rights.
He is consistent in his inconsistency, because, for him, winning is
what counts. He has had a real case against Ted Cruz — that the senator
has no base outside ideological-conservative quarters and is even less
likely to win a general election. More potently, Trump has a worryingly
strong argument against Clinton herself — or “crooked Hillary,” as he now dubs her.
His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core
question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That
sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her
opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton. After
all, she has been a member of the American political elite for a
quarter-century. Clinton, moreover, has shown no ability to inspire or
rally anyone but her longtime loyalists. She is lost in the new media
and has struggled to put away a 74-year-old socialist who is barely a
member of her party. Her own unfavorables are only 11 points lower than
Trump’s (far higher than Obama’s, John Kerry’s, or Al Gore’s were at
this point in the race), and the more she campaigns, the higher her
unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem.
The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years
can seem, at times, positively masochistic.
It may be that demographics will save us. America is no longer an
overwhelmingly white country, and Trump’s signature issue — illegal
immigration — is the source of his strength but also of his weakness.
Nonetheless, it’s worth noting how polling models have consistently
misread the breadth of his support, especially in these past few weeks;
he will likely bend over backward to include minorities in his fall
campaign; and those convinced he cannot bring a whole new swath of white
voters back into the political process should remember 2004, when Karl
Rove helped engineer anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendments
that increased conservative voter turnout. All Trump needs is a sliver
of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the
alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crack (especially without
Obama). Throughout the West these past few years, from France to
Britain and Germany, the polls have kept missing the power of right-wing
insurgency.
Were Trump to win the White House, the defenses against him would be
weak. He would likely bring a GOP majority in the House, and Republicans
in the Senate would be subjected to almighty popular fury if they stood
in his way. The 4-4 stalemate in the Supreme Court would break in
Trump’s favor. (In large part, of course, this would be due to the GOP’s
unprecedented decision to hold a vacancy open “for the people to
decide,” another massive hyperdemocratic breach in our constitutional
defenses.) And if Trump’s policies are checked by other branches of
government, how might he react? Just look at his response to the rules
of the GOP nomination process. He’s not interested in rules. And he
barely understands the Constitution. In one revealing moment earlier
this year, when asked what he would do if the military refused to obey
an illegal order to torture a prisoner, Trump simply insisted that the
man would obey: “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe
me.” He later amended his remark, but it speaks volumes about his
approach to power. Dick Cheney gave illegal orders to torture prisoners
and coerced White House lawyers to cook up absurd “legal” defenses.
Trump would make Cheney’s embrace of the dark side and untrammeled
executive power look unambitious.
In his 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair
Lewis wrote a counterfactual about what would happen if fascism as it
was then spreading across Europe were to triumph in America. It’s not a
good novel, but it remains a resonant one. The imagined American fascist
leader — a senator called Buzz Windrip — is a “Professional Common Man …
But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so
that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which
was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them,
and they raised hands to him in worship.”
He “was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and
in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.” “ ‘I know the Press only too well,’ ”
Windrip opines at one point. “ ‘Almost all editors hide away in
spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest … plotting
how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and
fill their greedy pocketbooks.’ ”
He is obsessed with the balance of trade and promises instant
economic success: “ ‘I shall not be content till this country can
produce every single thing we need … We shall have such a balance of
trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet completely
sound idea of from $3000 to $5000 per year for every single family.’ ”
However fantastical and empty his promises, he nonetheless mesmerizes
the party faithful at the nominating convention (held in Cleveland!):
“Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his audience,
looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in from the
highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that he was talking
to each individual, directly and solely; that he wanted to take each of
them into his heart; that he was telling them the truths, the imperious
and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.”
And all the elites who stood in his way? Crippled by their own
failures, demoralized by their crumbling stature, they first mock and
then cave. As one lone journalist laments before the election (he finds
himself in a concentration camp afterward): “I’ve got to keep
remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool.
He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there
is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy —
oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming,
we Respectables.”
And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has
presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent
9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed
financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now
so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional
democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance. The vital and valid
lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by
compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular
passion and brute force.
But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they
are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient
to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be
battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and
to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to
give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and
elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the
present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism
that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of
democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue
that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast
inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need
them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own
destabilizing excesses.
And so those Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton
landslide in November need to both check their complacency and
understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan
Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that. Those still
backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect
that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their
facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s
hands. That it will fall to Clinton to temper her party’s ambitions
will be uncomfortable to watch, since her willingness to compromise and
equivocate is precisely what many Americans find so distrustful. And yet
she may soon be all we have left to counter the threat. She needs to
grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of identity politics
that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that experience
and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the anxieties
of the white working class—and Democrats must listen.
More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to use the
long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this
monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain. This is not the
moment to remind them that they partly brought this on themselves. This
is a moment to offer solidarity, especially as the odds are
increasingly stacked against them. Ted Cruz and John Kasich face their
decisive battle in Indiana on May 3. But they need to fight on, with any
tactic at hand, all the way to the bitter end. The Republican delegates
who are trying to protect their party from the whims of an outsider
demagogue are, at this moment, doing what they ought to be doing to
prevent civil and racial unrest, an international conflict, and a
constitutional crisis. These GOP elites have every right to deploy
whatever rules or procedural roadblocks they can muster, and they should
refuse to be intimidated.
And if they fail in Indiana or Cleveland, as they likely will, they
need, quite simply, to disown their party’s candidate. They should
resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this
election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity,
unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to
sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.
For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a
riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre
working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and
analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of
our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an
extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as
such. *This article appears in the May 2, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.
China Sees New Ambiguity With Donald Trump’s Taiwan Call
President Xi Jinping of China, who considers Taiwan an integral part of his country.Credit
Pool photo by Nicolas Asouri
BEIJING — China’s leaders have been markedly reticent about what kind of leader they think Donald J. Trump will be. A pragmatic dealmaker, as his business background might indicate? Or a provocateur who tests the ways of statecraft?
By talking on Friday with Taiwan’s president,
Tsai Ing-wen, Mr. Trump answered that question in stark terms, Chinese
analysts said Saturday. Breaking decades of American diplomatic
practice, he caught the Chinese government off guard by lunging into the
most sensitive of its so-called core interests, the “One China” policy
agreed to by President Richard M. Nixon more than four decades ago.
“This
is a wake-up call for Beijing — we should buckle up for a pretty rocky
six months or year in the China-U.S. relationship,” Wang Dong, an
associate professor at the School of International Studies at Peking
University, said Saturday. “There was a sort of delusion based on overly
optimistic ideas about Trump. That should stop.”
Chinese
leaders covet stability in their relationship with Washington, and
perhaps for that reason, they have allowed fairly rosy assessments of
Mr. Trump to appear in the state-run news media. Many of those accounts
have depicted the president-elect as a practical operator devoid of
ideology, the kind of person China might find common ground with despite
his threats of a trade war.
In
the hope of maintaining a relatively smooth relationship as Mr. Trump
begins his administration, Beijing will probably take a wait-and-see
attitude despite his phone call with Ms. Tsai, said Shi Yinhong, a
professor of international relations at Renmin University.
Indeed,
China’s first official reaction, from Foreign Minister Wang Yi, was
fairly benign — though it was firm in reiterating the One China policy,
under which the United States formally recognized Beijing as China’s
sole government in 1978 and broke ties with Taiwan a year later. No American president or president-elect had spoken to a Taiwanese president since then.
Mr.
Wang blamed Ms. Tsai’s government for arranging the call. “It won’t
stand a chance to change the One China policy agreed upon by the
international community,” he said.
A
follow-up statement from the Foreign Ministry on Saturday, noting that
the ministry had filed a formal complaint with the United States
government, was similar in tone. It urged “relevant parties in the U.S.”
to “deal with the Taiwan issue in a prudent, proper manner.”
China’s leaders disdain Ms. Tsai, of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, who was elected president this year
after pledging to wean the island off its economic dependence on China,
a policy that won enthusiastic support from younger Taiwanese.
China
favored her opponent, Hung Hsiu-chu of the Kuomintang, which has sought
closer ties with mainland China. Before the election, President Xi
Jinping of China met with Ms. Tsai’s predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, also of
the Kuomintang, in the first encounter between the leaders of the two governments, a rapprochement that Beijing had long sought.
Mr.
Trump broke a Chinese taboo merely by using Ms. Tsai’s title. The
Chinese state news media refer to the Taiwanese president as the “leader
of the Taiwan region,” to indicate that Beijing regards Taiwan not as a
sovereign nation but as Chinese territory to eventually be brought
under its control.
A
basic tenet of the Chinese government is that Taiwan, where Chiang
Kai-shek’s forces fled in 1949 after losing China’s civil war, will be
brought back into the fold. According to Mr. Xi, Taiwan is destined to
become an integral part of his so-called China Dream, a vision of an
economically successful Communist China astride the world.
Mr.
Trump’s phone call also violated a longstanding principle of American
policy: that the president does not speak to the head of Taiwan’s
government, despite selling arms to it. “Interesting how the US sells
Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept
a congratulatory call,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter after the stunned reaction to his conversation with Ms. Tsai.
Though
Beijing vehemently protests the arms sales, it also warily acknowledges
them as part of long-established practice. Since the mid-1990s,
Washington has signaled to Taiwan that it will not support any military
effort to gain independence from China.
The
Obama administration’s last arms sale to Taiwan, in 2015, was
relatively modest — consisting of antitank missiles, two frigates and
surveillance gear, worth $1.8 billion in total — but it still provoked a
bitter denunciation from Beijing.
Douglas
H. Paal, a former director of the American Institute in Taiwan, which
represents American interests there, said it would not be surprising if
the United States sold arms to Taiwan early in the Trump administration.
Beijing’s reaction would depend on the price tag, the kinds of weapons
sold and how the administration informed China of the sale, Mr. Paal
said.
While
it broke diplomatic precedent, Mr. Trump’s conversation with Ms. Tsai
could be seen in some ways as following a pattern of Republican
presidents’ reaching out to Taiwan, although others did not do so before
taking office.
George
W. Bush, for example, was vocal in his support of Taiwan early in his
presidency, saying in a television interview that the United States
would do “whatever it took” to defend it. His aides said afterward that
the comment did not reflect a change in the One China policy. By the end
of his second term, Mr. Bush had helped to strengthen trade ties
between Beijing and Washington through the approval of China’s entry
into the World Trade Organization.
Though
Mr. Trump has received generally favorable coverage in the state news
media, some Chinese analysts have expressed irritation with him, and
some have suggested that his administration will offer China
opportunities to show strength.
Yan
Xuetong, a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University
and a foreign policy hawk, said the overall tenor of the China-United
States relationship in the coming years would depend a great deal on the
personal chemistry between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi. He said China, with
its growing military and the second-largest economy in the world, could
largely afford to act as it liked. “China is increasingly resilient to
the United States,” he said.
Shen
Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in
Shanghai, took a contrarian view of Mr. Trump’s call with Ms. Tsai: He
said it was not a problem because Mr. Trump had yet to take office. “He
is a private citizen,” he said.
But
if such contacts continue after Inauguration Day, Mr. Shen said, China
should end diplomatic relations with the United States.
“I
would close our embassy in Washington and withdraw our diplomats,” he
said. “I would be perfectly happy to end the relationship. I don’t know
how you are then going to expect China to cooperate on Iran and North
Korea and climate change. You are going to ask Taiwan for that?”
A version of this article appears in print on December 4, 2016, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: China Sees New Ambiguity in Trump’s Taiwan Call. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
So the US Constitution depends on a
Congress controlled by the President-elect's own party to rein in the
President-elect if he side-steps an element of the Constitution?
The very same GoP pols who have demonstrated their total dedication
to setting aside any qualms in order to crowd around a popularist
buffoon who has repeatedly made public statements that should have
disqualified him automatically from any elected office...
Seems like the US should sell its Constitution to some other nation
while it is still possible to fetch some sort of price. In a few months
it will be utterly worthless.
Anyone with
the capacity to remember facts for more than 8 seconds will already have
noticed how Trump's "policies" are nothing more than pieces of vomit
spewed up on Twitter resulting from the haphazard firing of his few
remaining functioning neurons. His infantile personality combined with
his total ignorance of practically every matter of importance means that
whatever he says can be disregarded. Trying to conjecture a future
real-world outcome based on Trump's blustering nonsense is an exercise
in futility. Erdogan will wander down the path of increasing nationalism a la
Putin et al while Trump will do the same thing in the USA. And we all
know where this leads us a few years down the road.
Donald Trump's Republican Fascist Party. Puppets for Putin.
Why I refuse to sit down, shut up and get over it
Nov 25, 2016 5:06pm
by
Libby Shaw This outspoken bigoted, xenophobic, misogynist fascist who lost
the popular vote by two million and counting will never be my President.
Period. I will never accept the legitimacy of Trump’s Presidency. Nor
should any of us.
This is not about sore losing, sour grapes or the lack of a sense of humor after a devastating, stunning travesty of an electoral injustice. The egregious, dog whistling reality is that twice in my recent
lifetime the Electoral College and Supreme Court (in 2000) elected two
Presidents that clearly lost the popular vote. In 2000 Al Gore
won 500,000 votes over W. who, as we all well remember, is one of the
most destructive Presidents in recent U.S. history. We can hardly forget
what happened under W.’s watch. Two unfunded wars, tax cuts for the rich, at the expense of middle
and working class Americans, and a global financial meltdown that nearly
matched that of the Great Depression in 1929 dealt a crushing
economic blow to the majority of us. Hard working Americans lost their
jobs, their homes while their retirement savings accounts went poof! College
graduates in 2009 and 2010 had a tough time finding well paying jobs.
Jobs that could sustain them as the recent graduates struggled to pay
off their college loans. The lack of economic opportunities forced too
many college graduates to move back at home with their parents. Who, by
the way, also struggled during the bleak W. years of unpaid wars and tax
cuts for the 1%. Meanwhile the GOP’s donor class, the rich, got richer. Its wealth
never did trickle down to the lower masses, a Republican fraudulent myth
that has been promoted since the Reagan Administration. There is no way in hell that I will roll over and passively watch the ensuing nightmare that
is about to unfold. The right wing shit show ahead promises to be even
worse than anything W./Cheney visited upon we the wee ones during the
dark Bush years. I will not get over it because Trump is a fraud. He may be a favorite play thing and puppet for Vladimir Putin,
global oligarchs and U.S. warmongers, but he's no President of mine.
Trump lost over 2 million American votes. And counting.
You are an aberration and abomination who is willing to do and say
anything — no matter whom it aligns you with and whom it hurts — to
satisfy your ambitions. I don’t believe you care much at all about this country or your party
or the American people. I believe that the only thing you care about is
self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. Your strongest allegiance is
to your own cupidity. I also believe that much of your campaign was an act of psychological
projection, as we are now learning that many of the things you slammed
Clinton for are things of which you may actually be guilty.
My sentiments exactly. And the real crook at hand turns out to be Trump, himself. Lock him up. Hillary Clinton leads by two million votes so far. But she is not our President. This should be appalling. We “sore losers” are literally terrified that Trump will make W. look
somewhat competent. There is already talk of dismantling Obamacare,
Medicare and Medicaid. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and
Dodd-Frank will soon be toast, no doubt. Wall Street will become a
venue for reckless gambling casinos all over again. And when the
casinos crash and burn, for they will, you and I will pick up the tab. And so it will go. Ironically and yes, sadly, Trump and U.S. House Speaker Ryan’s economic plans will punish Trump’s working class voters the most.
It is these very voters—less educated, struggling
to get by on low incomes—who will bear the brunt of unified Republican
government under Trump. The GOP Congress may give Trump his “infrastructure plan,” but that looks like it will consist of a bunch of tax cuts for investors to sink into toll bridges and toll roads. It will definitely give him the rest of his huge tax cuts, but those are skewed toward those at the top and won’t bring much relief to the “forgotten men and women of this country,” as he promised when campaigning. If the GOP repeals the Affordable Care Act, as it’s vowed to do
since it was enacted, many of these voters will lose their subsidized
health insurance. Block-granting Medicaid and privatizing Medicare will
dramatically increase these their economic insecurity. They’ll lose food stamps and Head Start slots. They’ll lose
access to reproductive health care. They can forget about a hike in
the federal minimum wage. According to one estimate, 20 million Trump voters will lose out on a big raise when Republicans kill Obama’s overtime rule. And if the GOP doesn’t get rid of it entirely, they’ll at least hobble the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
which reined in the kind of predatory lending schemes that often
indenture the working poor. It’ll be death by a thousand cuts.
Trump will not bring back working class jobs. Technologies will
continue to do the work of humans in most factories. For
unfettered capitalism thrives on personal greed for those at the
top. Jobs will continue to be outsourced to countries that exploit
cheap labor. Coal mines will continue with strip mining and mountaintop
removal that requires fewer workers than under the ground mining. CEO’s
will continue to receive huge bonuses on the backs of their employees.
Libertarian billionaires like the Koch boys will continue to influence
the destruction of labor unions that once protected workers. There will be no doubt some voter’s remorse pretty
soon when folks realize Trump conned them. We should not demonize
these voters. No one can blame anyone for voting to climb out of
minimum wage jobs, poverty and the misery it brings. Unfortunately, a
bait and switch con artist should not have been the struggling working
class’s main man. Donald Trump is correct when he bleated “the election is rigged.” That it is. It is rigged for Trump, thanks to the Electoral College. Our Founding Fathers apparently implemented this system in order to protect slavery in 1787 and 1803.
Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely
mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and
1803: slavery.
Right. As in when the South fought the civil war in order to protect
slavery. Slavery as in some human beings literally owning other human
beings is thankfully gone. The Electoral College should have been
abolished along with slavery since its original goal was to protect
human enslavement.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when
the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the
Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied
the presidency. Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01
against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the
electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the
extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern
states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a
majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas
Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of
slaves.
Disgusting. Nor does it help that Donald Trump has nominated three white supremacists into his administration (Bannon, Sessions and Flynn) for starters. White supremacists now replace former slave owners? How fitting. We are in for some very rough times ahead all right. But we cannot
curl up and hide under our beds for the next four years. While there is
talk about an election audit we’re likely stuck with Trump for now. We must stay engaged. For now is a time when none of us can afford to remain seated or silent.
Dan Rather is spot on correct in his assessment.
And the press usually takes a stance that the new
administration at least deserves to have a chance to get started - a
honeymoon period. But these are not normal times. This is not about tax
policy, health care, or education - even though all those and more are
so important. This is about racism, bigotry, intimidation and the
specter of corruption.
Like most members of this community the outcome of this election all
but destroyed me. My husband I reeled in shock, unable to eat for two
days. I skipped a class that I take at Rice University. I cancelled a
swimming date with a friend on Wednesday. Both of us were afraid we’d
sink to the bottom of the 7’ deep pool and never re-emerge. My
siblings, relatives and friends from New York City to Seattle are
still speechless. Some of us among Texas bloggers were too shocked to
write for several days after the election. It took me over two weeks.
When I learned that a few Catholic members of my large family voted for
Trump b/c the right to lifers got to them, I wanted to scream. When I visited my mother in Cincinnati days after the election I saw
Trump/Pence and Choose Life signs in too many yards. These are
neighborhoods with a large Catholic population. My mother knows that her
daughters are highly upset with her. Our Catholic mother is 91 years
old. I had to say “No one will blame you for voting for your religion,
Mom.” She hated voting for Trump, she admitted, but she felt she had to
because of abortion. I sucked it up and hid my tears out of love and
respect for our mother. None of us felt so hopelessly ravaged before because we know this
election has gone terribly wrong. We didn’t lose to a McCain, Romney,
Jeb Bush or John Kasich. Though we would have been distraught and
disappointed, we could have moved on because these men don’t terrify
us. But we “lost” (not) to a plain spoken hate master, bigot, misogynist,
xenophobic, self-serving narcissist and fascist instead. Who
essentially said a President can do anything he wants and get away with it. As if he is a King or CEO. Moving on and getting over it are not viable options. Playing the blame game at this point in time is counter
productive. No more talk about Bernie vs. Hillary. We are well past
this point in the political dialogue. We are down to the basic survival
of our country’s democratic process. Citizen bloggers like me and members of our community must
continue our activism, no matter the challenges. Our local Democratic
Parties must stay focused on and shout out about the forthcoming abuses
of power as well as an era of unsurpassed government kleptocracy and
intimidation. We should make sure to donate to organizations such as the
ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
For these are groups that can put the legal brakes on the right wing
shit show that lies ahead.
But as I stand I do not despair, because I believe the vast
majority of Americans stand with me. To all those in Congress of both
political parties, to all those in the press, to religious and civic
leaders around the country. your voices must be heard. I hope that the
President-elect can learn to rise above this and see the dangers that
are brewing. If he does and speaks forcibly, and with action, we should
be ready to welcome his voice. But of course I am deeply worried that
his selections of advisors and cabinet posts suggests otherwise.
Birds of a feather flock together. Trump has chosen three
white supremacists to serve in his government so far. Non-Christians
have much to fear in a Trump administration, as well.
To all of you I say, stay vigilant. The great Martin Luther King, Jr.
knew that even as a minority, there was strength in numbers in fighting
tyranny. Holding hands and marching forward, raising your voice above
the din of complacency, can move mountains. And in this case, I believe
there is a vast majority who wants to see this nation continue in
tolerance and freedom. But it will require speaking. Engage in your
civic government. Flood newsrooms or TV networks with your calls if you
feel they are slipping into the normalization of extremism. Donate your
time and money to causes that will fight to protect our liberties.
Many of us became political activists during the Bush
Administrations. The results of the 2000 (stolen) election had stung so
many of us to the core. In my case, while working for a private
academic institution in Houston, a colleague courageously sent an email
to those whom she thought would be open to serving as grassroots
activist watch dogs of the Bush Administration. Sarah had reserved a
conference room on campus and about 30 of us met there for a couple of
hours. We met once a month. Sarah and another colleague are well
seasoned organizers (supporters of the former Kucinich progressive
movement) and they got us started. We joined our neighborhood’s
Democratic clubs and Civic Clubs. If we had kids we ran for PTO school
board posts. We became voter deputy registrars in our home counties. We
joined forces with our local party as well as with Battleground TX in
2014. Some of us are bloggers. We know how to use social media. The
good news in this ongoing horror show is that Hillary swept
Houston/Harris Co. The Tea Party has been put to bed. For now. The fight never ends especially for those of us who live in
Republican controlled states. The US government is about to become
another Koch boy owned Kansas if we don’t fight back. The battle ahead is like none other so far. We are
literally fighting for our basic democratic rights as well as for our
country’s future. I must add, in the sixteen years that I have served as a political
activist I never cease to be amazed by voters who will routinely vote
against their best interests. I understand how it happens (right wing
media, online fake news sites, religious beliefs, dog whistles, the
fear, the evil doing “other” cards) but what will it take, finally, to
wake folks up? And when will hard working Americans end their romanticization and worship of billionaires like Trump?
Billionaires like Trump don’t give a damn about anyone but
themselves. Nor will Trump, et al allow their vast wealth to trickle
down to a bunch of “undeserving, dumb morons” who are poor and lazy.
Former President Ronald Reagan’s demonization of the “welfare queens” is
still in play within the Republican Party.
Mr.
Tigerli in China Copyright 2016 by Letizia Mancino translation by Mary Holmes All rights reserved
Yes Betty, either or it seems he wanted to fly only with
Singapore Airways.
Boeing or Airbus, it’s just the same
isn’t it? Aren’t they both just fat birds with 500 passengers?
Yes, but Singapore Airlines has the
most beautiful airhostesses: delicate, fine, graceful…Mr. Tigerli had looked forward to the flight
so much!
So the little man was disappointed?
You just can’t imagine how disappointed
he was.
But thank God one of the hostesses was a
pretty Chinese girl. Mr. Tigerli purred loudly but she didn’t hear him because
the purring of the Airbus 380 was even louder.
The poor cat!
You’ve said it Betty. Mr. Tigerli was
in a very bad mood and asked me for a loud speaker.
I’m sure you can get one in 1st
Class.
“”Russian Girl” had even heard you over
the roar of the Niagara Falls” I said to Mr. Tigerli. “You are a very
unfaithful cat. You wanted to get to know Asiatic girls. That’s how it is when
one leaves one’s first love”.
And what did he say to that?
“Men are hunters” was his answer.
Yes, my dear cat, a mouse hunter. And
what else did he say?
Not another word. He behaved as if he
hadn’t heard me.
The Airbus is very loud.
I told him shortly “Don’t trouble
yourself about “Chinese Girl”. There will be enough even prettier girls in
China. Wait till we land in Guilin”.
Did he understand you?
Naturally Mr. Tigerli understood me
immediately. Yes, sweetheart, don’t worry. They will find you something sweet
to eat.
And he?
He was so happy.
No problem going through the immigration
control?
Naturally!Lots of problems. How could I explain to
customs that the cat had come as a tourist to China to buy shoes?
Fur in exchange for shoes…
Don’t be so cynical Betty!
Cat meat in exchange for shoes?
I said to the officials. He isn’t a cat, he is Casanova.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club, founded by Wolfgang Hampel, has members in 40 countries.
Wolfgang Hampel, author of Betty MacDonald biography interviewed Betty MacDonald's family and friends. His Interviews have been published on CD and DVD by Betty MacDonald Fan Club. If you are interested in the Betty MacDonald Biography or the Betty MacDonald Interviews send us a mail, please.
Several original Interviews with Betty MacDonald are available.
We are also organizing international Betty MacDonald Fan Club Events for example, Betty MacDonald Fan Club Eurovision Song Contest Meetings in Oslo and Düsseldorf, Royal Wedding Betty MacDonald Fan Club Event in Stockholm and Betty MacDonald Fan Club Fifa Worldcup Conferences in South Africa and Germany.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club Honour Members are Monica Sone, author of Nisei Daughter and described as Kimi in Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald's nephew, artist and writer Darsie Beck, Betty MacDonald fans and beloved authors and artists Gwen Grant, Letizia Mancino, Perry Woodfin, Traci Tyne Hilton, Tatjana Geßler, music producer Bernd Kunze, musician Thomas Bödigheimer, translater Mary Holmes and Mr. Tigerli.
