What Does It Take?

I thought some of Trump’s cult following might finally come to their senses when he abdicated all responsibility for the pandemic, labeled it a hoax, said it would disappear, and urged defiance of precautions established by the medical and scientific community.  His actions were clearly a cynical ploy to protect the economy he felt was the key to his re-election. The irony is that it led to his downfall.  There is no way for any reasonable person to view his handling of the pandemic as anything but corruptly incompetent. 

I understand that religious and free market zealots love the fact that he littered conservative justices throughout the judiciary.  I understand that being told constantly by Trump that we had the greatest economy in the history of the universe before the pandemic hit is enough to convince his fan base, even though every serious economist considers it a gross exaggeration.  I understand that his inept foreign policy moves can somehow be interpreted as ‘putting America first’.  I even understand that some of his absurd tweets and speeches, with their paranoia, mean-spiritedness and immaturity, can, in gymnastic feats of rationalization, be understood as standing up to elites and political correctness.

But the pandemic!  The President of the United States, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, allowed a virus to kill 250,000 and what will certainly be 350,000 people or more, while other nations in Asia and Europe were able to meet the challenge and limit deaths to a tiny fraction of that number.  There is no excuse imaginable for this failure in leadership.

And now, the world looks on in a mixture of horror, schadenfreude and pity, while the nation that since its founding has been the strongest advocate for democracy spirals into banana republic style election denial with a sad, pathetic dictator wannabe holding the nation hostage.

What does it take?

In Defense of Wokeness

After the election, the dismal fact that almost half the American people voted for Trump caused a massive soul-searching and self-flagellation by the left and various progressive or moderate pundits.  A culprit was quickly identified – wokeness!  The left had overplayed the wokeness card and provoked an otherwise sane half-portion of the electorate to throw in their lot with a corrupt, tinpot dictator wannabe.

But what is ‘wokeness’ really?  The Cambridge dictionary definition is:  'a state of being aware and attentive to issues of racial and social injustice'.  Sadly, both of those terms have now become anathema to the right.  Social justice equals ‘socialism and Marxism’ and racial justice equals ‘defund the police’.

Wokeness has now displaced ‘identity politics’ as the new poster child description for political correctness and liberal fragility – the self-righteous liberal wielding a cancel culture sword, seeing everything through the lens of racism or social injustice.  There is now an oft-heard self-criticism that democrats have alienated many independents and middle-of-the-road voters by emphasizing and focusing on wokeness.

The BLM movement, which reawakened much of the country in the spring to racial issues, began with a large support base (the Pew Charitable Trust estimated overall support at 67% in early June 2020), and the broad participation in protests led many to believe that we had reached a seminal moment in our society regarding race relations.  Many who had previously discounted concerns about continuing racial inequities began to acknowledge that a problem did indeed exist.

But as protests continued and the media focused on the sporadic violence and rioting that occurred in parallel, the support dropped significantly among white Americans (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/16/support-for-black-lives-matter-has-decreased-since-june-but-remains-strong-among-black-americans/ ).  Highly exaggerated descriptions of an antifa threat became a staple of right-wing media.

The slogan ‘defund the police’, a pithy yet ill-chosen phrase for a complex topic, allowed the media and the Trump administration to frighten a large swath of the previously supportive public.  Images of rampant crime and unanswered calls to 911 were employed energetically in the four months leading up to the election.  How many independents and borderline voters were persuaded to return to the Trump fold because of this is hard to estimate, but it is not difficult to believe that it had a strong effect.

So yes, in one sense, the effort to make America ‘woke’ at least partially backfired.  And the effort to use soundbites like ‘defund the police’ to spark a discussion about funding priorities and police reform was a big mistake in retrospect. 

To the extent that ‘woke’ people become self-righteous and puritanical and heap contempt on anything that does not meet their definitions of political correctness, there is certainly room for criticism.  The culture wars have become so acrimonious that we all need to take a deep breath and relax a bit. 

But the fact remains that 55 years after the major civil rights’ acts of the 60’s we still have a race problem in the U.S.  Black people are behind in almost every area of quality of life – education, family stability, incarceration, income, wealth, life expectancy.  To ignore this deeply troubling truth is not only inexcusable from a moral and ethical viewpoint, but also foolhardy in terms of self-interest.  This problem will continue to fester and become a hideous open wound with serious implications for our society if we do not address it.

There is a similar dynamic at play in the broader sense of social justice.  The income and wealth gaps in our society have become so large that they are threatening to unravel the delicate fabric of our civil order and send us back to the worst days of the gilded age or create in our land another third world plutocracy.  The populist movement that supports Trump is at least in part fueled by these income and opportunity gaps, though like the fascist cult leaders of the 20’s and 30’s, he has transformed economic anxiety into cultural animus, xenophobia and nationalism.

So, the themes of ‘wokeness’ are not some liberal fantasy.  It is more a problem of form than content.  It is true that the efforts to engage these concepts and associated new ideas for societal change are sometimes too shrill and provocative, but these issues are at the very heart of America’s challenge for the 21^st century and cannot be swept under the rug.

America has always been a land of two minds with inevitably slow progress laboriously achieved through compromise and debate.  Those who wish for America to live up to its best ideals and dreams must be relentless, but also less combative.  Being ‘woke’ is the long game, and it must be played with passion, but also with patience.

 

 

The Electoral College Must Go

I have searched the Internet for both the history and the current justifications for the electoral college.  The history is interesting but does not have much relevance for our current situation.  In early times, the ability to effectively and accurately gather a full popular vote was doubtful.  There was also the question of population differences in the slave and ‘free’ states.  The slave states imposed their will and it is no coincidence that four of the first five presidents were Virginians (Virginia had the largest percentage of slaves and the largest overall population in that time).

The main arguments today for keeping the electoral college revolve around the idea of giving a minority of voters with a regional concentration the ability to check an out-of-control majority.  Some also claim that it gives small states more of a say in presidential elections. These are specious and convoluted arguments that make very little sense upon close examination.

The two recent elections that elected presidents who won the electoral college and lost the popular vote (Bush and Trump) were not decided by small states, but rather large midwestern states and Florida.  The vote in these states was extremely close in both cases.  The decisions were a result of complex (and absurdly expensive) election campaigning in a small number of states and the random nature of voter distributions rather than any glorious cause of a repressed minority.

In the Clinton/Trump election, the margin of popular vote was over 3 million in favor of Clinton, yet Trump became president.  That kind of result is an insult to the voters and has the potential to seriously erode faith in our election process.

The only reason some go through painful logical contortions to justify the electoral college is the changing demographics of the country, which in the current state of the political debate ensure that the popular vote will lean democratic.  It would be wiser and healthier in the long term for conservatives to modulate their political platform to tune into the new demographics than to look to the hail Mary of the electoral college.

The simple fact is that the USA is supposed to be a democracy.  Yes, it is also a representative democracy, but that is a practical matter, established to allow elected senators and representatives to make decisions, budgets and laws rather than putting everything to a popular vote, which would be impossible. 

Each representative is chosen by a popular vote.  The most important representative, the president, should also be chosen by a popular vote.  Having electoral ‘representatives’ choose the president places that decision one very significant step further away from the people.

Every voter should know that his or her vote goes directly toward the election of the president.  Currently, if you vote against the candidate that wins in your state, your vote is meaningless in the overall election of the president.  There is no mystery in the fact that the USA generally has a lower percentage of voting than most other democracies.  Why vote if you are fairly certain your vote will not have any meaning? 

Tabulating a national vote is no longer a logistical problem, though clearly it could be done better and in a more timely manner.  If the USA is truly a democracy, and every vote should matter, then there is absolutely no excuse for making the election of the most important representative of our government an indirect, frustrating exercise that denies the true power of the vote to almost half the population.

Thoughts Before the Election

 

I continue to be mystified by the fact that over 40% of the electorate is willing to support Donald Trump.  I would be less troubled if most of the support were begrudging - a strong distaste for the man but a willingness to overlook his character flaws to achieve certain conservative goals.  But sadly, this does not appear to be the case.  The greater part of the support appears to be full-throated and deeply emotional.  I find it quite frightening.  It is a form of brainwashing that is terribly disturbing.

I believe Biden will win, though nothing is assured, and polls are definitely not to be trusted.  The reason that I am optimistic is that it appears the number of people voting is much larger than in 2016.  I suspect that these additional voters are more likely to be people that have been disgusted by Trump’s presidency and will vote for Biden, especially young and minority voters who are probably not responding to poll queries.

The future is uncertain.  Even if Biden wins, much will depend on whether the Senate has a democratic or republican majority.  A republican majority will mean stalemate, with little chance of significant measures to combat our basic national problems.  The only area that will see improvement will be the pandemic, as Biden can mobilize resources and work with responsible scientists and clinicians to provide relief.

There is no assurance that the pandemic will be easily vanquished though, and the economic woes associated with it have not really been felt yet by most Americans. The country will face a long period of malaise no matter who wins, and the president will encounter a large backlash because of it.

When Obama became president in January, 2009, the Great Recession was just beginning.  His first two years were an epic struggle to prevent a complete collapse of the economy, the financial system and major American industries such as the auto industry.  The 2010 elections resulted in the House becoming republican, primarily due to the economic travails and the rise of the Tea Party.  Obama and the democrats were given little or no credit for rescuing the country from what could have been more drastic consequences.

For the next president, hopefully Joe Biden, there will be a similar set of circumstances.  The impact of climate change, racial tensions, manufacturing doldrums, rural stagnation and other ills will plague the country for the next several years.  The big question is whether the people can somehow unite in recognizing the challenges we face and work together to help solve them.  This seems highly unlikely in the current political climate, though perhaps once the depth of our national crisis becomes apparent a common spirit of can-do humanity can slowly emerge.

Our national problems and divisions are emblematic of a growing incivility across the world, as populist, authoritarian and nationalist movements grow rapidly and governments struggle to contain the explosive forces under the surface.  The pandemic, climate change, refugee and immigration movements and religious turmoil threaten the great gains that the world has made since the end of the cold war.  If nations do not quickly learn to work for the common good and people do not recognize their common humanity, then we face perilous years ahead. 

But human beings are often at their best when great tragedies threaten, so I will defer to hope as we face this election and the future. And I will do whatever I can to promote it and contribute my resources and energy to its service.