Last Sunday, I fell asleep at my desk, and when I awoke it was already 5 AM here on the West Coast, too late to scramble up even a quick APR, much less do all the reading that providing a decent variety of opinions requires. Mea culpa. I heard about my flub from a few people afterward, some of them clearly jonesing from lack of the latest edition in this addictive, long-running series invented by my colleague Greg Dworkin. They seemed to be looking for the pundit version of methadone. Again, so sorry.
Last Monday, the future looked so different that I began outlining an essay on how important it would be to keep nudging and cajoling Hillary Clinton on climate action, whom even most Republicans thought would be president-elect in less than 48 hours. Needless to say, the way forward on that front—not to mention a multitude of others—is going to look a whole lot different come January. And Trump doesn’t appear to be very nudgeable or cajolable in the matter.
Before turning to the opinion writers, here’ s an interesting tidbit from the Pew Research Center. The number are quite striking. Gretchen Livingston writes:
The U.S. is in the midst of a significant long-term shift in both the size and profile of its veteran population.
The share of the population with military experience – counting those who are on active duty or were in the past – has fallen by more than half since 1980. Then, 18% of adults were serving or had served in the military. By 2014, the share had declined to 8%, according to Census Bureau data, with an additional 1% serving in the reserves. Among U.S. men, the decline was even more dramatic, dropping from 45% in 1960 to 37% in 1980 and 16% in 2014. [...]
Despite the declining presence of veterans in the U.S., many Americans still have close connections with people who have served in the military. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that 61% of Americans had an immediate family member who served. However, this closeness to military personnel is fading among younger people.
Lindy West at The Guardian writes—Blaming political correctness for Trump is like blaming the civil rights movement for Jim Crow:
I’ll never forget the moment, in one of the 2015 Republican primary debates, when Donald Trump looked into the camera and declared that destroying political correctness was his No 1 campaign issue. His fans went berserk, both in the crowd and, especially, online. Oh my God, I thought, even then. He’s courting the troll vote.
Sure enough, over the subsequent year, I watched as wildly disparate groups of men from the slimiest corners of the internet – anti-feminists, antisemites, anti-choicers, white nationalists, gun fetishists, Islamophobes, rightwing talk-radio toadies, garden-variety good old boys – coalesced into one sprawling, frothing hydra behind Donald Trump. When mainstream news outlets started churning out thinkpieces about the mysterious “alt-right”, the wicked green engine of Trump’s base, I wanted to scream.
Feminists and other social justice activists already know what the “alt-right” is – it’s a roll call of the angry men who’ve been stalking, harassing, abusing and trying to silence us for years. The only thing they have in common is a fixation on the spectre of “political correctness”, a vaguely pejorative catch-all for post-Martin Luther King social activism, and in Trump they found their champion: the alpha male who was finally going to give these bitches what they deserve. (I can’t adequately convey how sickening it has been to watch groups of men who have posted my home address online, dug up photos of my husband and children, and threatened to rape and murder me lie and steamroll their candidate to the presidency.)
Rebecca Nicholson at The Guardian writes—At any other time, this Trump-Farage picture would be funny:
The sketch show Saturday Night Live gave up on comedy entirely, sitting Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton at a piano, performing a version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Rarely has the traditional “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” intro been delivered with such raw hurt and defiance. It was powerful. It was deeply emotional. But it wasn’t funny.
It’s hard to find much humour, either, in the picture of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage grinning as they meet at Trump Tower, the interim [ultra-right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party] leader having secured a meeting with the president-elect ahead of any British politician. It might have seemed comical a week ago, but now nothing is the same. Farage tweeted the image with some razor-sharp political insight into Trump’s impending term of office: “He was relaxed and full of good ideas. I am confident he will be a good President.” He used “good” twice, as if it’s all he’s got.
Last week, if the politics of the two men in the picture repulsed you as much as they have repulsed roughly half of their respective nations, you might have said: look at the pair of clowns. Here’s Farage, usually pictured clasping a pint – your dad’s mate down the pub, the one who tells a rum gag through a haze of Embassy smoke that makes his friends laugh because someone else is the butt of the joke. And now he stands next to the president-elect of the United States, a man who got the job apparently because he wasn’t part of the establishment, because he wasn’t a politician, because he promised to break the system rather than play it.
Leon Wieseltier at The Washington Post writes—Stay angry. That’s the only way to uphold principles in Trump’s America. My heart doctor is likely to say that following the stay-angry prescription is not good for my blood pressure. But Wieseltier’s advice is exactly what is needed. There must be no normalization of Donald Trump and the despicable entourage he is gathering for his entry into the White House:
The demons that have haunted our society for decades and even centuries, the vile illiberalism that currently disgraces other governments in the West, will now inhabit the White House. Difficult times are giving way to dark times, and dark times require a special lucidity and a special vigilance and a special ferocity about principle. We must not lose our faith in moral progress and in social progress, but we must remember that moral progress and social progress are not linear and unimpeded and inevitable. [...]
The prettification of Donald Trump has begun. When a crushed Hillary Clinton graciously asked that Trump be given “
a chance to succeed,” I confess that I felt no such graciousness. This made me as small as Mitch McConnell, I know. But if Trump succeeds, America may fail; and it is America, its values and its interests, whose success matters most desperately to me. No cooling off, then. We must stay hot for America. The political liberty that we cherish in this precious republic is most purely and exhilaratingly experienced as the liberty to oppose.
On of the angriest people of prominence so far has been the Senate Minority Leader. Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly writes—On Harry Reid’s Moral Outrage:
Reading Harry Reid’s letter to the American people brought up such a mix of conflicting emotions. Mostly, though, I feel disbelief that this is reality. I cannot dispute a single word of what Harry Reid wrote. I can’t believe that we’re in a position where the Senate Minority Leader feels so morally outraged at the election of a new president that he feels compelled to respond this way.
Naturally I feel the sting of it. In any normal situation, calling the president-elect “a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate,” would be an inexcusable violation of norms and an actual threat to our democracy. I can’t even imagine the outrage I would feel if the shoe was on the other foot and Mitch McConnell said anything remotely comparable about president-elect Clinton.
There’s a powerful argument that the best defense against Trump is the strength of our history and traditions and system, and that the reality of the requirements of governance are the best bets for house training him and limiting the damage.
But there’s an equally compelling argument that the biggest danger is normalizing Trump in any way, and that making the traditional accommodations to a new president is an irresponsible abdication of moral duty.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Against Trumpian triumphalism:
To point out Clinton’s popular-vote advantage is not a form of liberal denial. It’s a way of beginning to build a barricade against right-wing triumphalism — and of reminding immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos and, yes, our daughters that most Americans stood with them on Election Day.
It is also not true that the emerging political coalition that elected President Obama died on Nov. 8. That alliance maintained its national advantage, as the popular vote shows, and came within a whisker in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan of delivering the election to Clinton despite an onslaught of partisan congressional investigations, Russian meddling and the last-minute political intervention of the FBI.
We dare not forget the power that was arrayed behind Trump because it is that power that must be resisted over the next four years.
Alec MacGillis at ProPublica writes—Revenge of the Forgotten Class:
Donald Trump’s stunning win Tuesday, defying all the prognosticators, suggested there were many more people like [43-yer-old Contessa] Hammel out there — people who were so disconnected from the political system that they were literally unaccounted for in the pollsters’ modeling, which relies on past voting behavior.
But Hammel was far from the only person I met in my reporting this year who made me think that Trump had spurred something very unusual. Some of them had never voted before; some had voted for Barack Obama. None were traditional Republican voters. Some were in dire economic straits; others were just a notch up from that and looking down with resentment at the growing dependency around them. What they shared were three things. They lived in places that were in decline, and had been for some time. They lacked strong attachment to either party at a time when, even within a single metro area like Dayton, the parties had sorted themselves into ideological, geographically disparate camps that left many voters unmoored. And they had profound contempt for a dysfunctional, hyper-prosperous Washington that they saw as utterly removed from their lives.
These newly energized voters helped Trump flip not only battlegrounds like Ohio and Iowa but long-blue Northern industrial states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin — without which he would have lost to Hillary Clinton. Nationwide, his margin with the white working class soared to 40 points, up 15 points from Romney’s in 2012.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—Trump Slump Coming?
...power has fallen into the hands of a man who definitely doesn’t suffer from an excess of either virtue or prudence. Donald Trump isn’t proposing huge, budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations because he understands macroeconomics. But those tax cuts would add $4.5 trillion to U.S. debt over the next decade — about five times as much as the stimulus of the early Obama years.
True, handing out windfalls to rich people and companies that will probably sit on a lot of the money is a bad, low-bang-for-the-buck way to boost the economy, and I have my doubts about whether the promised surge in infrastructure spending will really happen. But an accidental, badly designed stimulus would still, in the short run, be better than no stimulus at all.
In short, don’t expect an immediate Trump slump.
Now, in the longer run Trumpism will be a very bad thing for the economy, in a couple of ways. For one thing, even if we don’t face a recession right now, stuff happens, and a lot depends on the effectiveness of the policy response. Yet we’re about to see a major degradation in both the quality and the independence of public servants. If we face a new economic crisis — perhaps as a result of the dismantling of financial reform — it’s hard to think of people less prepared to deal with it.
William Rivers Pitt at Truthout writes—The Fascist in November. Not many people have been saying that description—“fascist”—overstates the case:
I remember where I was when the Challenger exploded. I remember where I was when the Towers came down. I remember where I was when Shock and Awe turned Baghdad into a bowl of fire. I do believe I will also remember, to my dying day, where I was when the people of the United States elected an unabashed, bull-throated fascist to the office of the President.
Yes, we are talking about a fascist, one with many fascist friends who are loud and proud about their menacing white nationalism, a fascist gleefully endorsed by a Ku Klux Klan that traded in its bedsheets for power ties a long time ago and seized the ultimate prize in the early morning hours of November 9, 2016. A fascist Mussolini would have recognized on sight, for it was Mussolini's movement that coined fascism in a barn nearly 100 years ago, calling it the merger of state and corporate power. What is that, if not President-elect Donald J. Trump? [...]
Mr. Trump molded his entire campaign around hate, vengeance and violence. In doing so, he unleashed a monstrous tide. The people who pummeled protesters and elderly women wearing oxygen tanks, who screamed "Lock her up" while wearing shirts that read "Grab her by the pussy" at rallies, and who menaced people of color who were trying to vote -- they are his true master now. Nobody fears the Brownshirts more than their leader, because he is all too aware of what they are capable of doing.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes—The Media Blew the Election. Now They’re Blowing the Transition to Trump:
The situation that confronts us is extremely dangerous, and not just for all the civic dissension Trump has inspired, or for his erratic, unpredictable nature. Apart from all the hiring Trump would have to do anyhow, his offensiveness and grotesque unfitness for office is likely to lead to an unusual number of civil-service departures. Relatedly, most decent, honorable professionals are not going to want to work for the Trump administration. At a nuts and bolts level, much of the federal government is going to be run by goons or not at all. This is on top of the fact that of all the basic things the president is required to do on a day-to-day basis—listen attentively, read closely, speak carefully—Trump lacks the intelligence and composure to do any of them.
This would be a combustible situation contained to itself, but in addition to the internal pandemonium, the Trump administration is likely to be tested, as new presidents often are, by hostile foreign actors. If and when that happens, Trump will be reliant on low-rent advisers and his own unstable temperament. This is to say nothing of his actual policymaking, which could include variants on mass expulsion, stop-and-frisk policing, and a de facto Muslim ban—all things his feral supporters continue to demand and expect.
Kathleen Geier at The Nation writes—Inequality Between Women Is Crucial to Understanding Hillary’s Loss:
Racism was certainly an important factor [in Donald Trump’s victory]. A slew of studies have found that Trump supporters rack up high scores on measures of racial resentment. Sexism, too, is part of the story. Hillary Clinton was subjected to a nonstop barrage of ugly misogynist attacks by Trump, his supporters, and users of social media. [...]
But as is the case with every election, Tuesday’s outcome was multi-causal. I would like to identify an additional culprit: economic inequality, or more specifically, economic inequality among women. Women of color supported Clinton by wide margins–understandably so, because the Democrats have historically cared a lot more about their interests than the Republicans have. White women, however, flocked to Trump by a substantial margin and were crucial to his victory. Yet not all white women supported Trump: There was a yawning class divide in their vote. One widely used proxy for the working class is adults who lack a college degree. And while white women who are college-educated supported Hillary over Trump by 6 points, their white, non–college educated counterparts chose Trump by a margin of 28 points. That added up to a cavernous class gap among this group—34 points, 10 points more than that record-setting gender gap.
Class differences among women are an all but taboo subject. But scholars such as Leslie McCall have found that economic inequality among women is just as large, and has been growing just as fast, as economic inequality among men. This economic divide among women has created one of the most significant fault lines in contemporary feminism. That’s because professional-class women, who have reaped a disproportionate share of feminism’s gains, have dominated the feminist movement, and the social distance between them and their less privileged sisters is wide and growing wider.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—Keith Ellison Is the Leader the DNC Needs:
The DNC needs a chair who has an intersectional and activist organizing vision like that of former Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, who taught us that “There is an elementary aspiration which undergirds the humane impulse in our history and our culture and binds us together as political activists. This is a simple, irreducible, indisputable aspiration. It is the ‘dream of justice’ for a beloved community, in which the level of terror in people’s lives is sharply reduced or maybe eliminated. It is the belief that extremes and excesses of inequality must be reduced so that each person is free to fully develop his or her full potential. This is why we take precious time out of our lives and give it to politics.” [...]
Wellstone’s vision lives on with those who worked with him on behalf of economic and social justice and peace—and on behalf of a grassroots-focused and boldly progressive Democratic Party. One of Wellstone’s allies was a young lawyer from Minneapolis named Keith Ellison, who would become a congressman and is now emerging as a potential front-runner for the chairmanship of the DNC.
Pema Levy at Mother Jones writes—These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming: And they warned the Clinton campaign that trouble was brewing:
Like labor unions everywhere, the local Plumbers & Pipefitters union in Ohio's Mahoning Valley—a historically Democratic bastion due to the influence of labor—endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in September 2015 and urged its members to vote for her. But unlike in years past, when Roland "Butch" Taylor briefed about 200 members on the union's support of Clinton and the prospective benefits of a Clinton presidency in May, the meeting didn't go well. "I got a lot of boos," he recalls. "I got a lot of chatter back. And out of the group, only one person came up and asked me for a T-shirt."
"Right then and there, I knew something was wrong," says Taylor, who retired a few months later. "I thought, 'Well, maybe it will change as the campaign moves forward.'"
Chris Hedges at TruthDig writes—It’s Worse Than You Think:
Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.
Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle.
Fascism, as historian Gaetano Salvemini pointed out, is about “giving up free institutions.” It is the product of a democracy that has ceased to function. The democratic form will remain, much as it did during the dictatorships in the later part of the Roman Empire, but the reality is despotism, or in our case, corporate despotism. The citizen does not genuinely participate in power. [...]
We face the most profound crisis in human history. Our response is to elect a man to the presidency who does not believe in climate change.