Coalescence

The Reality of Our National Divide

Out of the shock, confusion and anger over the Trump win, the stages of mourning progress from anger, through bargaining to denial toward acceptance. 

President Obama, typically, was the most insightful, when he observed the way he had won was going to every fish fry in Iowa, a trenchant criticism of Hillary Clinton's failure to do that. She relied on outspending Trump 5 to 1, sometimes 9 to 1 on TV ads, on organizations for her "ground game" while Trump kept flying to rural areas, suburban areas, holding rallies for 40,000 people and then appearing constantly on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, everywhere on TV and radio and Twitter.

He and his team came up with a more 21st century campaign strategy, which bypassed traditional media, ignored debate preparation (which few of his voter's minded) and focused on the "forgotten."

Just look at the map of where his voters were and where Hillary's voters were.  While 62% of the population lives in urban areas along the coasts, the vast majority of the geography of the nation is occupied by the losers in our capitalistic game.His appeal went beyond the yokels of  "Deliverance," to a lot of people whose prospects are pretty dim for the rewards of "The American Dream" which is a stupid way of saying, "Acquiring wealth."

What It Meant for Clinton to Win Illinois

Visiting Cleveland once, I was struck by what my cab driver said about selections for the All Star baseball team, and how few Cleveland baseball players would be selected and how the New York Yankees always have lots of All Star selections: "Well, nobody notices Cleveland."
When the Chicago Cubs beat Cleveland in the World Series, I thought, "Uh-oh, there goes Ohio for Trump. Now the resentment is going to boil over."

When I left New York City, after 8 years of schooling there, I moved to South County, Rhode Island, a land of farmers and lobsterman and I looked around at the people living there and thought, "This is where the ragged people go," to quote Paul Simon. Look at that map. That is where the ragged people are. 

And yes, we well educated city folk do look with a certain contempt at these rubes, and that is not lost on the rubes. In some ways, the losers in this economic competition seem to embrace their status. I see twenty-five year old men every day, dressed in a football jersey or a hockey jersey, wearing blue jeans and a Red Sox baseball cap, and unlaced athletic shoes, looking like over grown eight year olds, and right next to them are a few kids dressed exactly as they are. It's hard to pick out the overgrown child who is the father, as they walk down the street. He's usually the one with the most facial hair. The wife, typically, looks like the only adult in the family.  She looks her age. Often, the wife accompanies this man/child to his doctor's appointments as she would be there for the visit to the pediatrician, because everyone knows the father/man/child won't be able to comprehend what the educated professional tells him. 

It's pathetic. It's prevalent. And it's a symptom of dysfunction. It's not that these men are stupid; they're defeated. They've given up. They've been told from grade school they'll never make it and they have become a self fulfilling prophecy.

And along comes Donald, a clear winner in his slick suit and his ties, and he tells them he knows how to make them winners. Just sign up for Trump U. Just vote for me. Notice he did not do the Mitt Romney dungarees and open neck shirt thing.  It would have looked like pandering. He is a billionaire and proud of it and he's gonna tell you how you can be a winner cause he's a winner and knows how. 

The slick part of the story is it took the ultimate city slicker to appeal to the dispossessed masses, the forgotten men and women. This is nothing new: Just watch day time Evangelical preachers who flaunt their wealth and tell their audiences:  Send me money and God will reward you with wealth. 

Yup, and that Red Slice Is Where Trump Focused

Much talk about whether or not we would be better off without the electoral college. It sure would change the number of people who actually vote--people in safe states would matter again. But, right now, people in Idaho have roughly 30 times the voting power people in New York have.  Of course, that's a rigged system. But isn't that the bone we tossed?  If we had a straight popular vote, then the government would not have to listen at all to people occupying the rest of the country, and when you drove from New York to Seattle, you would be passing through hostile territory, much as the wagon trains once did when those parts were occupied by Comanches. 

Well, maybe we haven't progress all that far, but occupying territory must count for something. 

Anyway, I'm pulling into the station of acceptance. Trump figure out how to disrupt the system and none of the smart guys at Harvard or 538 really saw it coming. In a capitalist, free wheeling society, that guy wins.

David Brooks on HItting the Emotional Pause Button

David Brooks, throughout the campaign, could not disguise his contempt for Donald Trump, an honesty for which I had to like him.
But now he says those who are dismayed by Trump should pause, and in humility, listen to those to whom Trump's  bombast spoke, to acknowledge they were the people hurt by the Ted talk disrupters who spoke of sea changes but never bothered to think about the people left behind.
They gave "exciting speeches about disruption but don't known anything about the people actually being disrupted."


He notes the voters of the "post truth" era to be concerned only about their own loss of financial security and comfort, enough to vote for a Trump (or a Hitler) as long as they can get their jobs back in the coal mine or in the factory, jobs which are concrete, not some vague promise of "retraining."
These are people who do not believe they are good for anything other than working in coal mines. They told reporters, "I'm 59. What can I learn new? I want my job back." That job was mining coal.
I heard a voter from Vepo County, Indiana interviewed this morning who was talking about how his county is filled with "real people," not the people you see on TV or in Hiliary Clinton ads.
He had voted for Obama and would have voted for Bernie, but he also thinks in terms of "real people," which, I took to mean, white, Christian people like him.
"It wouldn't kill us Trump critics to take a break from our never-ending umbrage to engage in a little listening."
Listening to what? To low information, ignorant people who don't care what coal does to the planet, as long as they can come home with their lunch pails and feel respectable again? I should listen to this guy who thinks Muslims, colored, Brown, Black, Hispanics are not "real" people.
Screw him and may he rot in his coal mine.

"The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia," Stephen Bannon says.
Of course, this is not true. The Trans Pacific Trade Pact might have created a middle class in Asia, by insisting the Chinese pay their factory workers more than slave wages, so we can pay our assembly line workers more than subsistence wages here in the USA. But so far, we have no such agreement and  all this globization has only enriched the factory owners, not the workers.
Globalization wasn't a plot by the international Jewish conspiracy to enrich itself and foreigners. That's the subtext of Mr. Bannon's conspiracy theory, when he talks about "globalists." This is the old "International Jew" thing dating back to Henry Ford and other conspiracy dwellers.
lobalization was a force which swept the globe when the internet and ships and airplanes tied the world together and made Hong Kong as close as Peoria. 
Hillary tried to say the coal miners, the steel workers could compete with the Asian factory workers, but nobody heard that.
"They took our jobs!"  screamed the Rust Belt yahoos.  It was like an episode of South Park.

So after we listen to these half wits, what to do?
For my part, if I were in Chuck Schumer's position, it would be total war.
Vote against anything Trump proposes, including the infrastructure program, which you can point out is simply a scam to enrich his rich friends, and will provide nothing but privately owned roads and bridges.
Vote against them when the try to "fix" Medicare and Social Security.
Get out of Washington and visit Iowa and Wisconsin and rural Pennsylvania every day and tell them they are getting screwed.

Let Bernie, the only Democrat with any credibility left, carry the message.
Hope Bernie is enough of a patriot to help groom his owner, younger successors.
But fight them on the beaches; fight them in the fields; fight them in the hills and never surrender. And if this country lasts a thousand years, future generations will look back and say, "This was their finest hour."

Feeling Great Again?

Margaret Bourke White

Today's big insight is Mr. Trump meant one thing to those who voted against him and different things to the coalition who voted him into office. 

The Good Old Days

For those who voted against him, this election was about values, about voting against a man who agitated today's version of the Ku Klu Klan at his rallies with chants of "Make America Great Again," which was widely heard as "Make America Hate Again" or "Make America White Again," a man who proclaimed Muslims hate us and "they" are chopping off heads, as if the Muslim grocery store owner in Dearborn or the Muslim physician in Massachusetts are all of a cloth with those head choppers in Syria and Iraq. This vote was a vote against a man who said women who have abortions should be punished (after he said he didn't think so.) This was a vote against a man who clearly had no regard for "truth" or "facts" in that he said Mexican wetbacks were rapists, only to amend that to say, well some of them are okay, but you know what I mean.  This is a man who said no judge, born in Indiana could impartially preside over his trial if his parents were born in Mexico. The list goes on, but you get the point. 

When America Was White

I could have included his "grab them by the pussy" remarks, or his birther assertions, and many others, but the essence of the man, is he is a business guy who really doesn't think much about any of these issues, but just latches on to whatever is convenient. So he was for the War in Iraq, but then said he hadn't really thought about it.  His initial response to transgenders in bathrooms was they could use whatever bathroom they wanted to, until he heard from his conservative backers.

And Everybody Had a Job

It all came down to the now famous remark, his backers did not take him literally, but they took him seriously.

And There Were No Worries

They took him seriously when he promised to open shuttered factories and mines to return them to the good old days (Make America Great Again. Make America the way it was, when we had a good life, a more secure life.)  He found out what they wanted to hear and he said that. 

And We Burned Coal

And they believed it because they wanted to and because Ms. Clinton did not make those promises. 
The Democrats took as an article of faith that the Blue Wall was theirs by entitlement, much as Ms. Clinton had earned the nomination by being a dutiful woman, who had waited her turn. She was the opposite of a disrupter.
Mr. Trump did not spend money on local state offices, TV ads, canvassers--but he got his message out more effectively than any of those old, 20th century techniques was able to do. 

And The Media Behaved Itself

And, for the most part, none of the "pundits" or "experts" could see it:  whether they were political scientists studying their flawed polls, or Mark Shields, listening to his friends at lunch in Washington, DC or any of the CNN panelists, could see or hear or understand what Mr. Trump was doing with his rallies, his Tweets, his constant presence on TV.

And The Goverrnment Knew Whose Side It Should Be On

So the disrupter undid the Democratic grip on the Mid West heartland. Like any good businessman, like Don Draper of Mad Men, he looked into the hearts and heads of those consumers of mass marketed messengers out there and understood what they wanted and spun the story they wanted to buy.
Advertising and marketing are not about what people ought to want; they are about what people actually do want, as selfish and small minded as that may be. 
And now we have the hyenas swooping in--Stephen Bannon, Jeff Sessions, General Strangelove.  When you buy the Kool Aide, you drink it.

We Had It Made!

NB: All photos (except  the last) are by Margaret Bourke-White

Trump You

Listening to the details of how Trump University operated sounded eerily familiar.
First you have this famous, rich guy saying, "I will tell you how to become rich."
Then he assures you, "I have hand picked each faculty member."
Then he says, "Just watch this free introductory video."
The video says, "Now pay $1,500 for the first course," which in fact is not a course but an infomercial to sell you on buying the next "course," but this one is for $15,000 and the next is $35,000, as you progress for your "degree," aided by individualized tutors, all hand picked by the big man.

I am not a crook.

And you have to wonder who could be this gullible, who could fall for this con, who would listen and nod when they are told to simply run up their credit card debt because within 6 months, you'll be making $50,000 using the secret lessons Mr. Trump wants you to learn on your way to wealth and happiness.

Who would believe this sort of obvious scam?

Who indeed?

Who would believe those factories are going to reopen and rehire all the workers and the coal mines are going to re open and sell all that coal?

We got trouble, big trouble in River City.

You can fool some of the people all the time

Just keep your government hands off my Medicare.
Don't worry, Paul Ryan's going give you a voucher.
You can use that when you have your heart attack, get hospitalized and get your bill for $500,000 for the five day stay and you can use that voucher, which ought to cover the meals and room for the first three days.

Oh, Barry, we hardly knew ye

Making America Great Again. 

Happy Days are Here Again: Trumpland Uber Alles

Driving in, listening to NPR reporters interviewing people in a small town outside Pittsburgh, Lafayette County, I was somehow strangely cheered to hear the voices of people who had always been Democrats, who had voted for Obama, then for Trump,  but they did not sound like those deplorables you saw at Trump rallies. They simply said they were coal miners and too old to be retrained to learn anything new and they just wanted their jobs in the mines back and in the factories. They didn't give Trump a deadline. They just clearly wanted to try something different, so they voted Trump.
There was a lawyer who is the Democratic Party organizer for the county and I remember when they interviewed him last Spring and he said he was not optimistic about his county going blue in the Fall election, because people wanted a change and Ms. Clinton did not look like change to them.  This time he said he didn't blame Ms. Clinton, but she was given the nomination because people thought she was next in line, but there would have been better choices if the Dems wanted to win his county.

Trumpland

So, it all made sense, at last. Part of the shock and depression of the news of President Trump is the sense of the surreal. How could anyone other than a Ku Klux Klanner vote for Trump? Well, now we know.


My many fans seemed to like the last poem, so here's another:

So long sad vibes

Get lost bad tribes

We are rid of all that bad gas

Just got what Trump prescribes

Feel swell from his jibes

All those down feelings are past.

Happy days are here again

The skies above are clear again

So let's all sing a song of cheer again

Happy days are here again.

Altogether shout it now

Heard it on the radio
There's no one who can show
Those jobs are not coming back pronto.


Coal miners going back to work now
Steel workers, soda jerkers and how
We'll be burning  coal again
Clean air's no longer a goal, no sin
Polluting things again
Happy days are here again.

Infrastructure's gonna boom

Gonna make the heartland bloom

Nobody has to learn anything new,

Heard it on NPR that's a clue

We went to red from blue

Finally the heartland gets its due

Happy days are here again.

No more factories in Mexico

Oh, oh, we're not letting our factories go

No more sending our jobs down below

Factory jobs

Are back in gobs

Bring out that banjo

No more Muslims coming in

No more Mexicans with brown skin

No more rapists flooding in

No more abortions anywhere

Terrorists just wouldn't dare

Mess with us again

Happy days are here again!

Why Citizens United Does Not Matter

 "First off, it’s the biggest election upset in the history of the American republic. Eric Cantor was the House majority leader and raised $10 million. He spent, between himself and outside groups, $8 million to hold a congressional district. He ran against a professor who was an evangelical Christian and a libertarian economist. He ran against a professor who raised in total $175,000. In fact, the bills from Eric Cantor’s campaign at a elite steak house in Washington, DC, was over $200,000. So they spent more than $200,000 over the course of the campaign wining and dining fat cats at a steak house in Washington than the entire opposition had to run."

--Stephen Bannon

Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump. Googling the actual numbers, it is not clear by what factor. Some estimate she spent as much as 50 times what Trump spent.

For years, the Koch brothers have claimed they spend on elections and outspend candidates and they lose.


If Democrats want to win another election, we had better figure out how that happens.
Steve Bannon is a Tea Party Republican. We have told ourselves the Tea Party collapsed. It just won the Presidency.
It won the House and the Senate in 2010 and never relinquished either.
Tea Party justices will soon sit in the Supreme Court.
These are people who are intent on destroying government.
In New Hampshire, they would be called Free Staters.

Of course, they have to deal with the President they elected, who, at least on some occasions believes in preserving Social Security and Medicare and who believes in spending government money on infrastructure.
That's the Republicans' problem.
What do you think is the problem for the Democrats?

Trump's Win Wasn't An Accident: Bannon Had An Insight

"The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of — we’re not conspiracy-theory guys, but there’s certainly — and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run."
Steve Bannon




Michael Moore tried to tell us.  Trump and Bannon were focused on working stiffs in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all along. They knew that "Blue Wall" was not impregnable, and in fact it was the Achilles heel of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, who had long ago lost the paycheck to paycheck crowd.


Look at the real election maps which the brilliant folks at the New York Times put together:
This is where the Clinton voters were:

This is where the Trump voters were:

This is entirely consistent with what we saw canvassing in New Hampshire, and what David Brooks reported from Idaho and what Anon reported from North Carolina: If you looked at territory, Trump signs and Trump voters held an enormous lead. All of Clinton's strength was concentrated, geographically in the cities.


But the electoral college is all about the geography, about territory and states. Thus Clinton is swamped by geography, even as she wins the popular vote.


America was designed by people from Jefferson to Hamilton who valued property and land more than individual human beings. In fact, only 3/5 of Black people counted, where the Constitution was concerned.


This was no fluke. This was a well conceived, well planned strategy.
And nobody, of all the talking heads on CNN, or MSNBC or PBS News Hour or even Fox could see the essential truth that Stephen Bannon and Trump saw: There are simply more white voters than there are Brown or Black voters. 


As a member of the White, East Coast elite, I was guilty of listening to "experts" who told me what I wanted to hear, who reinforced each other constantly but had no new information and who were intellectually lazy.


My brother had a cartoon in his office which showed a dozen little stick figures chanting "No! No! No!" In the second frame a big sun like figure rises over the horizon and says, "Yes!" the third frame shows all the little stick figures chanting, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" 


I've been wasting my time listening to those little guys.
Unless I miss my bet, Mr. Trump is a tabula rasa. Government, government policy has never really interested him. He's interested in making money and government only interests him to the extent government could  help him make more or would prevent him from making more money.
On some level, he knows he's a lightweight and he needs help. Nixon was like this. So Nixon turned to Kissinger to be his wise man, his shaman.
Trump is now turning to Bannon to play this role for him. He'll get cogent, pithy, convincing direction from this guy, and it behooves us to read everything we can about what Bannon thinks.  Patton read Rommel's books before he ever met Rommel on the field of battle. We ought to learn from that.