Monthly Archives: July 2018

Democracy? What Democracy?

I grew up thinking of America as the best country in the world. That was considered, by me and everybody else I knew, to be an indisputable fact. We were the “land of the free, and the home of the brave”. I grew up in the period starting about a decade after the end of WWII, a time when we were flush with the money from a war economy, employee labor unions were strong, the middle class life was accessible to anybody with a high school education who stayed out of trouble and was willing to effin’ work, as one of my shop foremen so delicately put it (without the defanging euphemism). I still think I was correct, but over the past 40 or so years, things have changed in our country, and not for the better.

Starting in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, a different kind of America started to emerge, an America where money is king and capitalism is to be celebrated and not restricted, and scant attention need be paid to those who, for whatever reason, can’t raise enough money to elevate themselves out of poverty. Reagan declared there to be a “morning in America” where government is not the solution to problems, it is the problem. So guess what government does well, better than the private sector? For one thing, government can handle health insurance (single payer). For another thing, it can handle food and cash disbursements to the poor, elderly, and sick. So the focus started to turn away from helping those in need, and toward helping those who are not in need, under the guise that the upper class could create jobs and lift up the lower and middle classes. It has never worked out that way, but that hasn’t stopped House Speaker Paul Ryan and his ilk from continuing to promote it.

Twice in the last 20 years, Republican presidents have been elected without having the majority of the vote. This has been made possible largely because of the Electoral College system, which empowers rural and midwestern states at the expense of populous states and cities, and subverts democracy. W got appointed president by the Supreme Court. Trump got appointed president by the Electoral College. I don’t know if we ever needed the Electoral College, but as it stands now, it is an antidemocratic institution. If you live in California or Massachusetts, you might as well not bother to vote because it won’t move the needle toward your candidate. Hillary won by millions, but lost the election to a traitorous demagogue. Regardless, what’s a few million votes between friends anyway, right?

And as if that wasn’t enough, we have the antidemocratic Citizens United decision, which allows unlimited dark money to influence our presidential elections. Hey, money talks, stuff walks, right? That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.

So now we are at the mercy of a traitorous, mendacious Republican president, and a Republican congress that has ensured its survival by gerrymandering voting districts and voter suppression by voter roll purges and ridiculous, unnecessary voter ID laws. As well as closing down voting sites in poorer minority areas (read Democratic) and making it more difficult for people to get the required ID to vote by closing down DMV offices and the like.

I didn’t bother putting in any links to other material this time. These are well-known facts. If you believe them, you don’t need the links, and if you don’t believe them you won’t read them anyway, and most likely you don’t even care. Just like you don’t care that we have an ignorant, dangerous traitor as our president, and you don’t care that he got elected by the Russian government, which incidentally is going to do the same thing in the midterms in a few months, as well as the 2020 election.

The party of law and order and patriotism has ceased to exist. In its place is a cult of personality that reveres Donald Trump, and excuses or justifies everything he does.

God save the democracy of the United States of America

To the Victor Go the Spoils

Here we are, roughly a year and a half into Donald Trump’s presidency. I agree with what so many columnists have said: There is definitely a sense of outrage fatigue. Any one of the hundreds of major scandals that have rocked the Trump presidency would have taken anybody else down. Anybody. Else. I said this to my cousin and his son, who are temporarily living here before going back home to the Netherlands: Nobody else could have done what Trump has done. After I said that, I was thinking that I was a bit presumptuous in saying such a thing. But no more. There is nobody on God’s green earth that could do what Trump has done: Completed a hostile takeover of one of the major two political parties in America. Trump has the precise mix, and it is precise, of shamelessness, narcissism, showmanship, and a gut instinct, a visceral knowledge, of what the real fears and resentments of white America are. You could say that he knows many of us better than we know ourselves. He isn’t stupid, he just has a very specialized form of brilliance. The man is functionally illiterate. He lies brazenly, even though his lies are easily disprovable in this age of video. And he knows he can get away with it. But I have a feeling that he is even smarter than that. I think that Trump is working for the Russians, specifically Vladimir Putin. I think that Trump is a Manchurian president who has allegiance to one of our international enemies, and he is successfully implementing Russian President Putin’s agenda.

On the domestic side, President Trump has done since he began his campaign for the presidency has been in service of his master, Putin. He has divided our country into red and blue. Not that he started it; the division was well underway before Trump came on the scene. But he took the division and turned it into opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. He has been a virulent racist right from the start, with his well-known lie, which he didn’t invent but was the chief promoter of, that former President Obama was born in a foreign country. And Trump knows his rubes. He knows that there are many people in America who are either overt or covert racists who want to believe the worst of our first black president. Trump took the African-American football players’ quiet, Constitutionally-protected right of free speech, that of taking a knee silently instead of standing for the National Anthem, and ginned it up to the point where the NFL found it necessary to send a letter to NFL team owners asking them to come to a consensus about how to defuse the controversy, which resulted in a policy change requiring all players to stand during the anthem. Trump really couldn’t care less about this issue. He just has a way of knowing which buttons to push that will rile up his base and alienate virtually everyone else. So it really doesn’t matter what he does as long as it serves his purpose: to divide America along racial, class, education, and geographic lines. So now we are the United States in name only. In truth, we are now the Divided States of America. Thanks largely to President Putin and President Trump.

And isn’t it more than a little strange that Trump never, ever says a bad thing about Putin or Russia? Every time it is pointed out to him what Putin has done, Trump comes up with some false equivalence, like when he told a Fox interviewer, when the interviewer suggested that Putin had killed journalists, that “America isn’t so innocent”.

There is an article in the New York magazine by Jonathan Chait that makes the case much better than I can. When you have the time, read it.