Interesting
Rick Smith
The Week
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
What Ta-Nehisi Coates gets wrong about leftists
Since President Trump's upset election victory, perhaps no political writer has been more missed than Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has quit daily blogging. And so it ought to be no surprise that liberal readers eagerly devoured Coates' new article, "Donald Trump Is the First White President."
Coates' main argument — right there in the provocative title — is undeniably correct. In his combination of utter incapacity to be president and utter confidence that he deserves to be there, not to mention his utter political dependence on racist policies and rhetoric, Donald Trump is surely the most purely white president there has ever been. Without race, he is nothing.
But Coates wants to show not only that Trump's "entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president" — the 45th president being a racist backlash to America's 44th — but also that this white backlash is the only factor behind Trump's success. This argument fails — as does Coates' argument that leftists are not appreciating the roots of Trump's support.
For the last couple years, centrist Democrats have been putting forth an utterly preposterous version of recent history in which centrists have been the longstanding defenders of social justice, counter-posed against an imagined group of leftists who favor class policy only.
This is clearly incorrect. The actual program of the left is policies to address specific social injustice and economic policy to address broader social injustice expressed through class. Black Americans, for example, are both victims of particular discrimination (like police brutality and school segregation) and are clustered at the bottom of the economic ladder. They require both forms of redress. Leftists have attacked Trump's bigotry just as strongly as liberals have, if not more so.
Coates has unfortunately been partially taken in by this revisionist history, as can be seen by the selection of people he puts up as refusing to understand the racist nature of President Trump. For one, he attacks Bernie Sanders, the leftist mascot, for lacking "any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions," as evidenced by how Sanders lamented Democratic losses among the white working class, and chided a Latina questioner that simply being a woman wasn't enough to be a political success.
On one level, this is rather unfair. Coates does not mention that Sanders' racial justice platform was virtually identical to Hillary Clinton's, nor does he mention that Sanders' response to the Latina questioner also argued that increased representation for women and minorities was critically important. Sanders' was the basic leftist formula: identity politics and class politics. Still, Sanders is sometimes clumsy with his rhetoric, tends toward a laser focus on economic issues, and does have the politician's instinct to never insult huge swathes of voters, no matter how justified it might be. And he is, after all, an old white guy.
But more importantly, Coates implicitly, and wrongly, lumps Sanders in with three other writers who really have argued against identity politics recently. Mark Lilla, George Packer, and Nicholas Kristof are definitively not part of the leftist tradition — not by any stretch of the imagination. It's fair to whack Sanders for being insensitive or glib about identity politics. But it's simply incorrect to suggest he shares a political home with these three men.
Lilla, Packer, and Kristof are among the few remaining centrists who haven't gotten the memo about the new party line. The trail they propose following is the exact same one blazed by centrist liberals back in the 1990s. As Coates rightly notes, this basic agenda is actually identity politics for white people: Stop being "elitist," cater to their imagined cultural preferences, and stop kowtowing to notions of political correctness. This was exactly Bill Clinton's strategy in executing a brain-damaged black man and personally insulting a leftist black woman.
Since the election, centrists, liberals, and leftists have been arguing about what caused Democrats to lose to Trump. Centrists and liberals, for obvious reasons, tended to emphasize Russian meddling, FBI Director James Comey's shockingly irresponsible last-minute intervention, and racism. Meanwhile, leftists, while not ruling out those factors, also pointed to Hillary Clinton's inadequate economic policies — especially how she barely mentioned her own platform in her advertising, and how her long history of triangulation, buckraking secret speeches to Wall Street banks, and decades of living in hyper-elite circles made her a non-credible messenger for that platform in any case.
If the leftist analysis is right, it suggests Trump might have been beaten with a better economic program and a better candidate to sell it — without backing down a single millimeter on social justice policy. Coates argues that Trump had no real working-class appeal, because his support was strong up and down the white wealth ladder, and because the black and Latino working class mostly did not vote for him. This latter argument fails to account for the multiple axes by which people judge political platforms. Black people could see Trump's racism easily enough; they wouldn't vote for him regardless of his platform.
But white people have the luxury — and often the willful blindness — to be able to ignore racism and look at the rest of someone's platform. Many of them voted for Trump because of his economic promises. At a minimum, these people had to look past some truly gruesome bigotry. But it does not follow that there was no economic component to Trump's appeal.
It is also true that Trump posted his highest margins among middle- and upper-middle-class whites. But he also improved on Mitt Romney's margin among people making less than $30,000 by 16 points. Racism was no doubt part of that appeal. But Trump really did manage to get to Clinton's left on the economy, constantly repeating a vague but effective message that he would rebuild the country and bring back high-paying manufacturing jobs. (No Democratic slogan has ever been more limp, more false, or helped the other party more than "America Is Already Great.")
Coates argues that "leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism." But the leftist strategy was not tried in 2016. The Democratic Party ran the more conservative primary candidate, tried to win more upper-class votes (and succeeded to some degree), and lost.
Leftists have often darkly joked that Sanders would have beaten Trump, but the really strong counter to Coates' dour pessimism is imagining if Obama had been able to run for a third term. His job approval rating on election day was 56-42, compared to Trump's 40-57 approval rating, and Hillary Clinton's 42-55 rating. It is a virtual certainty that not only would Obama have won, he would have buried Trump by 10 to 15 points. And he would have put away that white business magnate just like he did the last one — by constantly hammering Trump's egregious personal abuses of working people.
Coates is wrong that Trump's victory is singularly about racism, just as he is wrong to write off the possibility of a cross-racial class alliance. After all, if all you have to do to win white votes is be racist, the Democrats are doomed for decades at least.
Rick Smith
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Rick Smith
New York Times
Sunday Review
September 17, 2017
Our Constitution Wasn’t Built for This
By GANESH SITARAMAN Opinion
Exactly 230 years ago, on Sept. 17, 1787, a group of men in Philadelphia concluded a summer of sophisticated, impassioned debates about the fate of their fledgling nation. The document that emerged, our Constitution, is often thought of as part of an aristocratic counterrevolution that stands in contrast to the democratic revolution of 1776. But our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.
There are other things the Constitution wasn’t written for, of course. The founders didn’t foresee America becoming a global superpower. They didn’t plan for the internet or nuclear weapons. And they certainly couldn’t have imagined a former reality television star president. Commentators wring their hands over all of these transformations — though these days, they tend to focus on whether this country’s founding document can survive the current president.
But there is a different, and far more stubborn, risk that our country faces — and which, arguably, led to the TV star turned president in the first place. Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.
From the ancient Greeks to the American founders, statesmen and political philosophers were obsessed with the problem of economic inequality. Unequal societies were subject to constant strife — even revolution. The rich would tyrannize the poor, and the poor would revolt against the rich.
The solution was to build economic class right into the structure of government. In England, for example, the structure of government balanced lords and commoners. In ancient Rome, there was the patrician Senate for the wealthy, and the Tribune of the Plebeians for everyone else. We can think of these as class-warfare constitutions: Each class has a share in governing, and a check on the other. Those checks prevent oligarchy on the one hand and a tyranny founded on populist demagogy on the other.
Continue reading the main story
What is surprising about the design of our Constitution is that it isn’t a class warfare constitution. Our Constitution doesn’t mandate that only the wealthy can become senators, and we don’t have a tribune of the plebs. Our founding charter doesn’t have structural checks and balances between economic classes: not between rich and poor, and certainly not between corporate interests and ordinary workers. This was a radical change in the history of constitutional government.
And it wasn’t an oversight. The founding generation knew how to write class-warfare constitutions — they even debated such proposals during the summer of 1787. But they ultimately chose a framework for government that didn’t pit class against class. Part of the reason was practical. James Madison’s notes from the secret debates at the Philadelphia Convention show that the delegates had a hard time agreeing on how they would design such a class-based system. But part of the reason was political: They knew the American people wouldn’t agree to that kind of government.
At the time, many Americans believed the new nation would not be afflicted by the problems that accompanied economic inequality because there simply wasn’t much inequality within the political community of white men. Today we tend to emphasize how undemocratic the founding era was when judged by our values — its exclusion of women, enslavement of African-Americans, violence against Native Americans. But in doing so, we risk missing something important: Many in the founding generation believed America was exceptional because of the extraordinary degree of economic equality within the political community as they defined it.
Unlike Europe, America wasn’t bogged down by the legacy of feudalism, nor did it have a hereditary aristocracy. Noah Webster, best known for his dictionary, commented that there were “small inequalities of property,” a fact that distinguished America from Europe and the rest of the world. Equality of property, he believed, was crucial for sustaining a republic. During the Constitutional Convention, South Carolinan Charles Pinckney said America had “a greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country.” As long as the new nation could expand west, he thought, it would be possible to have a citizenry of independent yeoman farmers. In a community with economic equality, there was simply no need for constitutional structures to manage the clash between the wealthy and everyone else.
The problem, of course, is that economic inequality has been on the rise for at least the last generation. In 1976 the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 8.5 percent of our national income. Today they take home more than 20 percent. In major sectors of the economy — banking, airlines, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications — economic power is increasingly concentrated in a small number of companies.
While much of the debate has been on the moral or economic consequences of economic inequality, the more fundamental problem is that our constitutional system might not survive in an unequal economy. Campaign contributions, lobbying, the revolving door of industry insiders working in government, interest group influence over regulators and even think tanks — all of these features of our current political system skew policy making to favor the wealthy and entrenched economic interests. “The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest,” Gouverneur Morris observed in 1787. “They always did. They always will.” An oligarchy — not a republic — is the inevitable result.
As a republic descends into an oligarchy, the people revolt. Populist revolts are rarely anarchic; they require leadership. Morris predicted that the rich would take advantage of the people’s “passions” and “make these the instruments for oppressing them.” The future Broadway sensation Alexander Hamilton put it more clearly: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people: commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
Starting more than a century ago, amid the first Gilded Age, Americans confronted rising inequality, rapid industrial change, a communications and transportation revolution and the emergence of monopolies. Populists and progressives responded by pushing for reforms that would tame the great concentrations of wealth and power that were corrupting government.
On the economic side, they invented antitrust laws and public utilities regulation, established an income tax, and fought for minimum wages. On the political side, they passed campaign finance regulations and amended the Constitution so the people would get to elect senators directly. They did these things because they knew that our republican form of government could not survive in an economically unequal society. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.”
For all its resilience and longevity, our Constitution doesn’t have structural checks built into it to prevent oligarchy or populist demagogues. It was written on the assumption that America would remain relatively equal economically. Even the father of the Constitution understood this. Toward the end of his life, Madison worried that the number of Americans who had only the “bare necessities of life” would one day increase. When it did, he concluded, the institutions and laws of the country would need to be adapted, and that task would require “all the wisdom of the wisest patriots.”
With economic inequality rising and the middle class collapsing, the deep question we must ask today is whether our generation has wise patriots who, like the progressives a century ago, will adapt the institutions and laws of our country — and save our republic.
Ganesh Sitaraman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, is the author of “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic.”
Rick Smith
ago Tribune
Monday, September 11, 2017 10:55 AM
'Fantasyland' author Kurt Andersen on how Americans believe what they want
Christopher Borrelli Chicago Tribune
Actual Americans believe astronauts never landed on the moon. Not many actual Americans — according to a 1999 Gallup poll, only 6 percent believed this, a figure that had climbed to a modest 14 percent by 2015, according to a “60 Minutes”/Vanity Fair poll — but still, that’s 14 percent, more than one out of every 10 people you pass on the street. There are reliable polls that have been conducted in this country in recent years that found 29 percent of all Americans believe President Barack Obama was a Muslim; that more than 80 percent of conservative Republican voters believe climate scientists can’t be trusted to provide accurate information on climate science; that more than 15 percent of Hillary Clinton voters believed her campaign had ties to satanic worshipers. Her own voters.
Then again, most “reliable polls” are manipulated by the media, right?
Americans believe what they want.
That’s the heart of “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History,” the new book by Kurt Andersen, the novelist, longtime Studio 360 public-radio host and co-founder of Spy magazine, which famously spoke irony to power in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He begins with Old World colonists seeking to forge a New World based on self-determination and freedom of thought, and ends with Donald Trump. In between, he draws a line from Thoreau to Kanye West, from the “Do your own thing” 1960s to casual Fridays, with time along the way for 17th century evangelism, UFOs and Oprah Winfrey. He offers not so much a diagnosis of a country alienated from its values but a second opinion. As Andersen pointed out during a recent phone interview, he’s not a “declinist” — he’s not saying in “Fantasyland” that the country is inevitably headed for irrelevancy.
But, he said, if you believe the former president was born in Africa, and a secret Muslim, and if you think you are owed a serious hearing-out, perhaps Americans have become too accommodating to belief. The following is an edited version of a longer conversation.
Q: Considering there are so many reasons in the past 20 years why you might have started this book — when did you start this book and why?
A: I have been thinking about it for a long time, particularly in the past 15 years. How entertainment merged with everything in our culture, how creationism met evolution in public schools — all those things were sparks. But I think that famous Karl Rove quote from a dozen years ago, about the “reality-based community” — that was a wake-up call.
Q: It’s a great phrase.
A: It’s an amazing phrase. And sinister. He was serious, but he was saying it in a sarcastic way. I sort of figured I would finish the novel I was working on then do this. That was 2013, and my publisher said, no, put the novel aside, this is timely. Who knew how timely? I spent a year doing mostly full-time research then I started writing in 2014.
Q: But why are the last 40 years in particular, according to the book, so pivotal? Why has the rational side of the country — the side that could be relied on to serve as a check against the more fantastic, conspiratorial side — fallen behind?
A: Why did our keepers of reality abandon ship? My whole case is not about the 1960s, but I do think what happened in the 1960s, in many ways, was that everything was destigmatized; your reality was your reality, believe whatever you want. That was true in Shamanistic countercultural ways and in extremist Christian circles. When you say, “Oh, we can’t say our science is better than the magical ways of these ancient tribes,” it is suddenly permissible to assail empirical reality. The 1960s were key, but as soon as we had the internet, alternative facts and fiefdoms could find each other and create their own reality and news, and we were off to the races. My argument here is not that the political right are terrible, but on the right, since I was a child, you’ve also had the John Birch Society pushing overheated theories that ripened and burned in American culture for generations — by the ’90s, ideas like theirs, kept from the mainstream by the gatekeepers in political parties and media, they could no longer be kept back. So it’s a perfect storm of technology and a certain kind of American epistemological tradition.
Q: But the early 20th century is as important in this regard.
A: Yes, there are cycles. The media and entertainment establishment was founded in the ’20s. We had the Scopes trial (about the teaching of evolution). Pentecostalism was formed. Fundamentalism, in its modern form, was seen. The first 20 years of the 20th century can be read in large measure as backlash against modernism.
Q: You write that we eventually refused to let our epiphanies stay obscure.
A: I am a big fan of coincidence and synchronicity. I am a connoisseur of them. But I don’t take them to mean God is signaling me. “I’m in my backyard, the sun is my face, all is right in the world” — OK, leave it there, have that moment, leave your feeling mysterious. Don’t suddenly say it means this set of things about my supernatural understanding of the world. I’m not saying rationalism and empirical science is everything, but there has to be a starting point. Otherwise you have a culture based in superstition and intuition. It’s a matter of balance, and as a culture, once we encourage people to abandon our shared facts — to say “this is just what I believe” — we’re in trouble.
Q: Your argument about gun culture — you seem to wonder if people who regard any amount of gun control as bad actually believe what they say. Are you saying they understand that if you repeat something enough it’ll come across as truth?
A: The power of negative thinking. It’s a good question and it came up as I was working on this. Did Joseph Smith really believe? He probably did. Did L. Ron Hubbard really believe? Maybe sort of — at the beginning (of Scientology). The temptation among secular elitists is to assume nobody really believes, but there are true believers, and there are degrees of belief. The scary thing about the gun case is, yes, I think millions of people have convinced themselves, and been convinced by gun lobbyists, that Hillary Clinton really wanted to come to your house and take your gun. I don’t think they are all pretending. But does (the NRA’s) Wayne LaPierre believe this? That’s a good question.
Q: Some people say the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary was a hoax.
A: Exactly. But 20 years ago you didn’t have an Alex Jones (of Infowars) on the air several hours a day telling millions the Sandy Hook massacre was staged. Crackpots always existed. They just weren’t national figures with the ear of the president.
Q: Is this a uniquely American trait? Are we easy marks compared with the rest of the world?
A: I’m comparing us to international peers in terms of GDP, educational system — the sort of benchmarks we used to designate a so-called developed society. In that sense, we are outliers. Are we suckers? Yes, but it’s not just that. That puts too fine a point on what I am saying. We’re not idiots and victims. It’s about us as a people, compared with, say, Canadians, believing whatever we believe because, well, we’re Americans, we feel this way without regard for what scholars and scientists say. If you consider just how religious we are compared with the rest of the developed world, our outlier status is more staggering. But remember, we invented modern show business, so it’s not coincidental to have this quality of believing and conceiving the unbelievable.
Q: You admire this quality.
A: I do. I am proud to be American. We wouldn’t have our big dreams without this quality, but if we can’t agree on the shape of reality, when a White House, on the second day of a new administration, is arguing for alternative facts, that’s problematic.
Q: Are we becoming two cultures — one devoted to facts and one that favors to see a subjectivity in all things?
A: That’s my sense. Which is not to imply half the country is purely rational and the other are relativistic nutcases. There are plenty on the political and cultural left who are not reality-based either. If Clinton had been elected president, what I’m saying in this book wouldn’t be any less true. I started this book before Trump entered the election. I had always been fascinated with P.T. Barnum, and how he understood that feeling of “I don’t know if I believe what’s being said, but it’s entertaining!” But Barnum was more frank than Trump. Hucksterism is a bad spin on American entrepreneurial moxie, and Trump is an embodiment. I went through every thread of every argument I make in this book and applied it to Trump and he fit almost every one — except, he’s not religious.
Q: You have a parody coming, “You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump,” written with Alec Baldwin. Are you worried you’ll be co-opted by reality?
A: Final updates went in last week. But yes, as Alec and I wrote, we had to figure the right lane to drive in — the fiction-like reality of the Trump administration, or the SNL version where Steve Bannon is Death himself? It’s out in November, and unless World War III breaks out, we found a way to mitigate most problems with reality.