Another Explanation of Why Trump Won

I've mentioned Arlie Hochschild's book, Strangers in Their Own Land, a few times, though I haven't read it. Many of the articles I've seen find it to be an astute depiction of Donald's America, especially Hochschild's point that the people she talked to feel as though they're standing in line to reach the American Dream, while others cut in ahead of them.

Today's MinnPost contains an interview with family therapist Bill Doherty, who has been thinking and working on our great divide as it manifests within families. He's read Hochschild's book and, after recounting the line-cutter metaphor, added this, which I had not heard before:

She asked people “What percentage of the American workforce do you think work for the federal government?” She looked up the numbers. It’s one and a half percent, two and a half percent if you add the military. The average answer was 40 percent. People thought that 40 percent of the American workforce work for the government. So you have all of this misinformation about the government, and you have this tremendous sense of unfairness, particularly from the white working class, about these people cutting in line who are being sponsored in line by the federal government. And then Trump comes along and says, “I’m with you. You’ve been getting screwed. Those guys are doing it.”

She went to a Trump rally and she wrote it almost like a novel. It was this feeling of, “Well all these other people have a movement. The black civil rights movement, the American Indians, and the federal government is all behind them and they’re stopping us and making life harder for us.” And along comes somebody who is a success story in America who is saying, “Follow me and I’ll restore your dignity.” (emphasis added)

This combination of misinformation and Trump's use of his celebrity businessman cachet to create a sense of unity is right on, I think. These are the same folks who think foreign aid makes up a significant part of the federal budget, when it's actually .6%.

Both parts are necessary, though, to give us the result we're living with: not just the misinformation, but the celebrity appeal, bent to a purpose with all the vigor a narcissist can bring to making himself feel good.

What Is to Be Done (re: Rural America)?

Today I read two interesting articles on what can be done about the urban/rural divide that gave us President Donald J. Turnip.

First, from Pacific Standard, Why aren't rural Canadians in favor of Trump? The writer reports on the people of the Change Islands in Newfoundland, who are culturally similar to rural Americans but who don't like Trump and support Justin Trudeau. The difference, she says, is that they know their central government has given them lots of things they rely on since they joined Canada around 1950: electricity, roads, bridges, a ferry.

She contrasts this with the rural Louisianans studied by Arlie Hochschild in Strangers in Their Own Land, who believe "they" get nothing from Washington and others are cutting in line ahead of them on the way to the American dream.

What can any of us do about it?

People and organizations who want to offer an alternative to Trump can take a page from the Canadian book by going beyond Trump’s symbolic support to both symbolically and materially invest in rural communities, such as the $1 trillion infrastructure program recently proposed by Senate Democrats. But such support is not limited to new governmental programs; local and state governments can also make efforts to remind rural residents of what they are already doing for them. Political action groups can canvas rural communities’ needs and visibly go to bat for them. Volunteer groups can do work projects in rural communities. There’s a lesson to be learned from Newfoundland: that even communities facing dire times will remain invested in a shared political project if they feel that the country is also invested in them.

I try to visualize how that would work in Minnesota. Groups of Twin Cities volunteers go up to the Iron Range to do what, exactly, that would compensate for not mining the Boundary Waters Canoe Area? Or we descend upon southwestern Minnesota to somehow help farmers not pollute the water with field runoff? Hmm.

The second article, This is why Democrats lose in "rural" postindustrial America, is from the Washington Post. Its main point is that Democrats don't lose the towns and small cities of rural America: it's just that voter turnout is significantly lower there than in the completely rural or suburban areas.

That means if Democrats could turn out voters (and register nonvoters) in the somewhat denser areas of Red America, it would make a big difference. Even county-level data is deceiving, since these towns and cities are surrounded by ruralness, so Keith Ellison's call for not just a 50-state but a 3,007-county strategy is right, but not fine-grained enough.

How bad is the turnout split? According to the article, whose author did detailed analysis of counties in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, it's as bad as 30 vs. 60 percent turnout in Terre Haute and Muncie and their surrounding areas, or 50 vs. 75 percent in parts of Pennsylvania.

Mid-September Tabs

The browser tabs are crushing and crashing yet again.

I think I'll start with a post I read a little while ago, and that keeps popping into my head. How to be polite. So little goes so far.

Which makes me think of this post by Anand Giridharadas, who tried to politely engage a respondent named James who thinks Giridharadas is a rebelliously-haired man/boy who should shut his cultural-Marxist mouth if he can't assimilate into James's idea of America. Then it turned out James's parents had been Christian missionaries in Japan, and Giridharadas couldn't help pointing out the irony:

When your parents went to Japan, did they assimilate into local religious traditions, or did they try to get people to celebrate the new they were bringing? Just wondering.

James replied that his parents' case was different, of course, since they went to Japan for the express purpose of changing the Japanese view of things, while immigrants to the U.S. are not doing that. (Irony number two:  Giridharadas was born in the U.S. and James was born in Japan.) Giridharadas replied,

Your missionary/immigrant distinction makes no sense, because it is designed for self-justification. By your logic, a missionary is a category of immigrant who is entitled to bend local culture to his or her tastes, and a plain old immigrant is any non-missionary person not entitled to do so. So basically a missionary is an immigrant who auto-exempts himself or herself from the duty (as you see it) to assimilate. This goes to show that the missionary position is not only boring but also sometimes wrong.

Giridharadas followed that line of reasoning with this: "What culture did the early colonial settlers discover in America, and do you believe they were bound to assimilate into it? And did they?"

Then there was this triad of good energy news stories:

• The Holy Grail of energy policy is in sight as battery technology smashes the old order.
  
• Which pairs up well with this from Dave Roberts at Vox: The key to tackling climate change: electrify everything.
  
• Engineered bacterium turns carbon dioxide into methane fuel. From Scientific American.

And this less-good news on the reality of confronting climate change, also from Dave Roberts at Vox: Is it useful to think of climate change as equivalent to a world war?

Switching topics, I got a lot out of reading Reaganomics killed America's middle class, by Thom Hartmann on Salon. High taxes on wealth lead directly to greater equality and an expanded middle class, but this also happens, according to Hartmann:

When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.

The right-wing legacy of Lewis Powell and what it means for the Supreme Court today. From Truthdig. (This isn't the first time I've mentioned Justice Powell.) Powell is the architect of the modern business-funded think-tankocracy and had a hand in the Court's 1970s decisions that money equals speech, the necessary forerunners to make way for Citizens United.

Trump's blood libel against immigrants and the press's failure. By Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. The best summary I've seen of Trump's misrepresentation and exploitation of the immigrant crime "problem."

And here's a post I love by education writer Paul Thomas, because it combines biking/transportation and social justice: "Share the road" is about more than bicycles and cars:

It is a message to be heeded every moment: See the other in a way that is listening to the other, in a way that honors the dignity of every human being. Driving a car as if only your life matters reveals a great deal about the driver, but the consequences are often suffered by the innocent other.

McMansions 101: What makes a McMansion bad architecture? Unbalanced massing, too many voids, no notion of rhythm or proportion... From the aptly named site, Worst of McMansions.

You may have already seen this, but I have to save it for posterity: the recent XKCD comic showing 22,000 years of global temperature change and history, and just how anomalous the past 100 years have been (I'm showing only the most recent years here, but please view the whole thing if you haven't already):


Here's another thing we've been lied to about since the beginning: what happened at Attica in 1971. That's according to a new scholarly book, Blood in the Water, based on suppressed New York State documents. "Several reviewers have noted that they had to stop reading at several points, to breathe and to wipe the tears from their eyes."

If, like me, you've managed to avoid knowing there is such as thing as Sandy Hook trutherism... I'm sorry to report New York magazine has posted a grim but gripping account of people who think it was all a fake so Obama can round up the guns. Yes, that includes thinking parents of the dead children in Connecticut never had those kids in the first place.

Should the emails of government employees be treated as if they were printed letters or as something less formal, like a phone call? Matt Yglesias at Vox argues for the latter.

We passed the 20th anniversary of the date when Bill Clinton "ended Welfare as we know it." There were a lot of good articles on the aftermath:

• Everything you wanted to know about the 1996 welfare reform law but were afraid to ask, from Talk Poverty. One key fact: TANF's state block grants are flat dollar amounts that have not increased since 1996. And because the block grants are loosely controlled, only 25 percent of the money even goes to poor families; 75 percent is used to fill other gaps in the states' budgets! (In contrast, 95 percent of SNAP/food stamp money goes to poor families.)
• The welfare reform disaster, from Jacobin.
• Black women were too lazy to find work and four other myths of welfare reform, from The Root. When the law passed, "the Clinton administration did not require the General Accounting Office to systematically track what happened to people once they got off welfare. This facilitated evaluating the legislation’s success by shrinking caseloads and employment rates among single mothers (not necessarily welfare leavers), which did not adequately capture what was happening to most poor families."
• Welfare reform is 20 years old and it's worse than you can imagine, from Mother Jones.
• A welfare reform syllabus from Melissa Harris Perry at her Anna Julia Cooper Center, Wake Forest University.

Another topic that got a lot of attention was what some people call "white trash," a group of people who are much in the news because they are perceived to make up a large chunk of Donald Trump's voting base. Here are some of the stories that appeared:

• Trump: tribune of poor white people, from American Conservative. An interview with the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
• White trash: the original underclass, from Pacific Standard. And another story with the same name from Politico, which includes a critique of Hillbilly Elegy.
• Coding "white trash" in academia, from Auntie Bellum.
• Trump voters: where they're coming from, where they're going, from the Weekly Sift by Doug Muder. Summarizing data from the huge Gallup poll that found some surprising info on Trump's supporters, and findings from Arlie Hochschild's book Strangers in Their Own Land. And including Muder's own thoughts on how anti-political correctness may actually be a reaction to perceived but mislabeled classism. Interesting stuff.

Finally, there were (as always) a bunch of interesting posts from Pacific Standard on a range of topics:

• How prisons overtook schools as the foremost American institutions. Yikes!
• Patients are supposed to recover in rehab hospitals but many who are sent to them suffer additional harm from the care itself, according to a new government study.
• Here's how to get the IRS ready for a tax war on poverty. Explaining why administering the Earned Income Tax Credit is a bad fit for the IRS and how it could be improved.
• Should you really call the cops? People who report crimes to the police are less likely to be victims of future crimes, but the effect is smaller for African Americans.

Meet Leopold II

Belgium is a small, beautiful country that's doing a lot of things right.

On a recent visit, though, I kept seeing indications of what it did very wrong in the past, and how it (or its people) don't seem to recognize that fact. I'm speaking of one of its kings, Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909. Here's an example, where he's honored in the name of an apartment building:


I think that sign indicates this is the 11th building named for him.

We are not taught about his heinous crimes in school (or at least I wasn't), but I had heard through social media that his victims outnumber those of Hitler. Here's what the Wikipedia has to say about that:

At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 the colonial nations of Europe authorized [Leopold's] claim by committing the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the native inhabitants. From the beginning Leopold essentially ignored these conditions. He ran the Congo using the mercenary Force Publique for his personal enrichment. He used great sums of the money from this exploitation for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period. He donated the private buildings to the state before his death, to preserve them for Belgium.

Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forced labour from the native population to harvest and process rubber. Under his regime millions of the Congolese people died. Modern estimates range from one million to fifteen million, with a consensus growing around 10 million (emphasis added).

European colonialism is not surprising, but this was possibly the most egregious form of it in history: the Congo was "given" to Leopold by the other monarchs of Europe as his personal property, not as a colony of Belgium. Ironically, Leopold named it the "Congo Free State." Free for him to do what he wanted, I guess. More from the Wikipedia:

To enforce the rubber quotas, the army, the Force Publique, was called in and made the practice of cutting off the limbs of the natives a matter of policy.... [after decades] News of the abuses began to circulate. In 1904, the British consul at Boma in the Congo...was instructed by the British government to investigate. His report, called the Casement Report, confirmed the accusations of humanitarian abuses. The Belgian Parliament forced Leopold II to set up an independent commission of inquiry. Its findings confirmed Casement's report of abuses, concluding that the population of the Congo had been "reduced by half" during this period.

These inquiries led to turning over control of the Congo to Belgium itself in 1909, which made a difference on paper but not much in practice. The governor-general remained in office and much of his administration as well. They permitted no political activity at all and enforced it with the armed Force Publique.

Belgians, the Wikipedia informs me, think of Leopold as the "Builder King" because he commissioned many prominent public buildings in Belgium, including the beautiful train station in Antwerp:






This building, and others such as the Royal Museum of Central Africa near Brussels and several parks in Brussels, was built with the blood-money extracted from killing 10 million people in the Congo. He also built a scad of private palaces and parks for himself and his family, and had them turned over to public use when his reign was ending. More from the Wikipedia:

On the boardwalk of Blankenberge, a popular coastal resort, a monument shows a pair of colonists as heroes protecting a desperate Congolese woman and child with "civilization". In Ostend, the beach promenade has a 1931 sculptural monument to Leopold II, showing Leopold and grateful Ostend fishermen and Congolese. The inscription accompanying the Congolese group notes: "The gratitude of the Congolese to Leopold II for having liberated them from slavery under the Arabs."

While there, I also came across this monument in Antwerp's equivalent of Central Park:


This is the plaque at the base:


Which reads: "In the presence of King Leopold II, the Chamber of Commerce celebrates the combining of Congo to Belgium, June 6, 1909."

All of this makes me think of how exploitation allows a few to have beautiful things or achieve great feats, while others live in abject miserableness or die outright. Belgium is Omelas (as is the United States, of course).

There was only one reference I saw to Leopold that seemed appropriate during my time in Antwerp. It was within the excellent Museum aan de Stroom (MAS, opened only recently, in 2011). Ladies and gents, I give you King Leopold's toilet:




It's part of an exhibit called Antwerp a la Carte, about food (and therefore waste) in the city over the centuries. It's a great exhibit, and this was a sly poke at a ruler who is best remembered for the shit he generated.

__

Facts to know:

• The current Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire, among other names) is the second-largest country in Africa, equaling the combined areas of Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Norway.
• King Leopold's Ghost is a popular history by American journalist Adam Hochschild, which, perhaps not surprisingly, was turned down by nine out of 10 publishing houses, despite Hochschild's well established retuptation at the time of its writing in 1998.

Meet Bob

Someone I know posted this to Facebook in the past couple of days, after the election of Tom Perez as DNC chair.

[In the original, the writer used the term "Bubba" to refer to a particular kind of Trump voter. I have changed that to "Bob" because I think the other name distracts from the good points he makes. He is unapologetic in his elitism, but I don't think that matters for the main argument as much as he thinks it does.]

So, here are my thoughts. This comes after watching the nomination, and eventual election of Tom Perez to the DNC. These thoughts go beyond the election of Perez and are, more generally, what I’ve been thinking since the atrocity of Donald Trump.

As, essentially, a lifelong Democrat and most certainly a lifelong progressive; as Democrats we do tend to sound elitist and we do tend to “miss” a connection to the everyday, blue collar, and low-income WHITE voter (this includes those who are working three jobs and on food stamps and the completely unemployed AND those on the dole). You see, if we don’t recognize that, and start to figure out how to communicate with these folks, we’re never going to restore sanity and intellectual prowess to the position of President of Unite States (when I was a kid it was predominantly believed that the President and other elected officials should be of high intellect -- kinda like Obama or Kennedy).

Our newly formed message has to find a way to make Bob (let’s call the voters we need to find a way to communicate with “Bob”) feel like we’re on his/her side and talking to him/her directly. You see, even though Trump actually lost the election, his message resonated with Bob and ours did not. Let me be elitist enough, and show enough hubris, to say that I think I actually understand Bob. I’ve been managing blue-collar workers for decades now. These workers have been both people of color and of various ethnic derivations ALONG with desperately white, high school and near high school graduates (both in unions and non-union). I have been both a front line supervisor and the manager of front line supervisors in charge of the productivity and hiring-and-firing of these Bobs.

What isn’t said, outright, by the conservative, alt-right, Republican (call them as you wish) is that they speak to the Bobs out there. They do it through the understanding of this:

Low income white men/women, those that are making something around $50,000 or less, hear: “Transfer of wealth” but really hear this:

A transfer of wealth means that those “other” people, you know the ones of color or those illegal immigrants (or in other words, the ones that don’t look like me) will have an advantage over me because those “other” people will be the ones that “get” the redistributed wealth. Their understanding is that ANY advantage will never be theirs, it will always be for someone who “deserves” it less than them. Even those who receive some type of assistance believe that if there was a redistribution of wealth that, somehow, this would benefit “others” before it would benefit them.

They are taught this by the alt-right; listen to the radio/TV broadcasts of these propaganda specialists. If you carefully instruct each lower social strata to be suspicious of the next lowest strata you get the entire lower tier to vote against their own self interest. It’s fascinating. And this doesn’t have to be the lowest of low income. This is also prevalent amongst certain civil service positions such as police, fire, EMT etc. (I’ve run security divisions who employ retired big city police officers, they are all Bobs, afraid that the "others" - people of color or lower social strata - will get more than they deserve)

I have one actual, real life, story that gets to my point (at least for me). In a management role I had an employee who was working in the U.S. on a green card and was about to become a citizen. I enjoyed this person because he was interesting and REALLY good at his job. I would discuss politics with him and this is what he would say: No one from his country should be allowed into the United States after he becomes a citizen. Here was his reasoning, all of the “other” people from his country were lazy and unworthy of admittance. He also had two additional people on his staff, one was from a country near his and the other was a low-income American from the inner city. He would tell me that these two individuals were lazy and unworthy, his basis was soundly formed from his view that only he was truly competent. It also illustrated that at this lower level of income that each was trying to figure out how they could be better positioned than the other. That is to say, there’s a hierarchy of who's better off, even if this is just a slight advantage; even the color of your skin. You might despise this fact but believe me, it’s true and it’s the core of the Bob view of the world.

If Democrats can’t find a way to communicate to [the Bobs] and to assure them that the “transfer of wealth” we are talking about is simply taxing the rich more than taxing everyone else, we will never regain political dominance. They will always think that the Democrats want to make the poor rich at the expense of all else. How do we change this narrative?

Also, it has been my experience that the Bobs of the world greatly distrust their first line, middle, and senior level management. I’ve had the more brazen of my employees tell me, directly to my face, “Oh, so you’re smart, that’s how you’ve got ahead.” They do this with obvious contempt in their tone and visible in their body language. They equate intelligence with deviousness towards THEIR position. I find this aspect fascinating because as a professional, a “knowledge worker,” I’ve been driven my entire career by those who I have believed are smarter than me. I’ve always respected their intelligence and position and have used the envy of their position to propel my own career and grow my knowledge base. The Bobs of the world have a completely opposite view. How do we communicate with those who are not "driven" to continually improvement?

If we (Democrats) don’t get this and then start to get our party to figure out how to reach the Bobs and speak to them on terms they understand, we are doomed. (emphasis added)

Clearly, this meshes well with the findings of Arlie Hochschild about Trump voters perceiving others as "line-cutters" getting ahead of them on the way to the American dream. It also fits with race theory, which says whiteness was used to give poor whites something they could have and hold over black people. It's what Matt Bruenig calls last place avoidance.

I find the Facebook writer's last point, about Bob distrusting intelligent people, the most interesting of all the things he said. This way of thinking was mentioned to me recently by another friend, who reads a lot about cognitive science. He told me there's a self-protective (maybe from evolution?) basis to anti-intellectualism, because less intelligent people may think a more intelligent person will take advantage or manipulate them, and is therefore a threat. And they aren't really wrong about that (Thank You for Smoking).

Wish I could remember where that bit of enlightenment came from, but now my friend is having source amnesia and we can't pin it down.

Vavilov and Lysenko

I learned about Larmarckism (and Lysenkoism) in high school biology class, some time in the 1975-76 school year. I was not a fan of biology class generally, and I managed to make it one of the last science classes I ever took. But even I could see that Lamarckism was utterly without merit.

As I remember understanding it, Lamarckism was the belief that living things inherited traits from their parents that the parents acquired during their lifetimes. The example my teacher gave was a rat-parent whose tail was chopped off having babies with short tails. I think she gave us some background on Lysenko's adoption of this perspective, and on Stalin's role in this, but I don't remember any details of that.

I've learned more about Lysenkoism over the years, but the chapter in Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses puts it together in a fairly neat, if excruciating, package (pages 131–141).

It also brought to the forefront Lyskeno's heroic inverse in Soviet science, Nikolai Vavilov. (Gary Nabhan's book about him, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine, has been sitting in my Future Favorites sidebar for years!)

Vavilov had collected food crop seeds from five continents and 64 countries, trying to improve food production. He established the world's largest seed bank, in Leningrad, which he directed from 1921 to 1940, and which he famously helped to protect from the starving hordes of people during the 872-day siege of Leningrad.

But Lysenko promised Stalin easy answers in the midst of food crises, while Vavilov was working with real genetics, which take longer than magical thinking and fakery. Lysenko's anti-science, combined with bad weather and brutal policies beginning in 1929 and going into the 1930s, killed about 5 million people through starvation in the "terror famine," mostly in Ukraine, where most of the wheat farms were located.

Show trials began in 1936, then purges and airbrushing of photos to remove leaders as if they had never been. Solnit quotes writer Adam Hochschild's book The Unquiet Ghost as saying historians estimate Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people between 1929 and 1953. (I assume that doesn't include the deaths of people from World War II.)

In 1936, the scientific geneticists tried to debate the Lysenkoists at a public conference, which led to a dozen geneticists being arrested and executed. Vavilov was not touched for a while, though he had denounced Lysenko. But in 1940, after a final argument with Lysenko, Vavilov was abducted during a field expedition. He was interrogated for almost a year, called a spy, and accused of causing the famine. He was sent to a prison camp, where he died of hunger in early 1943, given only frozen flour and cabbage to eat.

Lysenko became an even greater force after Vavilov was removed. Orwell, Solnit tells us, had pasted this headline into his journal in December 1949:

"Wheat can become rye" — Lysenko

It's hard not to see how this method of distorting truth relates to our present in many ways. On page 139, Solnit writes,

Stalin was intent not just on liquidating his potential rivals...so that he could rule unchecked but on destroying them and their credibility in ways that terrified everyone else into silence and deference. As Orwell would convey more powerfully than almost anyone before or since, one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue (page 139).

Richard Florida on Devolution

The 2016 election results—not just the presidential result as sieved through the rural-state-biased Electoral College, but also the close margin in Minnesota and the fact that both our state house and senate are now Republican-controlled—have been on my mind.

Today’s Star Tribune op-ed section included an interview with Doug Peterson, one of the last farmer-legislators in our Democratic Farmer Labor party, about how Democrats can better connect with rural people. The front section also included a long piece on Becky Rom, a woman from Ely, Minnesota, who has fought the battle to keep our Boundary Waters Canoe Area free of mining, logging, and motors, generally, a stance opposed by as many as 99 percent of her rural and small-city neighbors, but approved by majorities in the Twin Cities.

This divide between urban and rural (discussed with different emphases by Arlie Hochschild and Catherine Kramer) was the subject of a 30-message tweetstorm by geographer Richard Florida today. Florida, at least since the election, has been calling for what he calls “devolution”—transforming the American way of government into more state and city control and less federal control.

Here are Florida’s thoughts; I’ve removed most of the breaks between tweets and combined his words into fewer paragraphs.

We are undergoing several nested transformations at once that are causing incredible disruptions of the economic social and political order.

The first is the shift from natural resources and physical power/labor to knowledge—where the mind has become the means of production. This shift advantaged roughly a third of the workforce/population while 66% falls further behind.

The second shift is toward clustering as the source of innovation and economic advantage. This massively concentrates talent and economic assets in a handful of super-star cities and knowledge-tech hubs. The world becomes spikier and spikier, across nations, across regions, and within cities.

This clustering of talent and economic assets also makes the city/metro the new economic and social organizing unit, undermining two core institutions of the old order: the large vertical corporation and the nation state.

I would suggest this transformation is perhaps the most disruptive in human history—the clustering of knowledge > physical labor. But in contrast with claims of American "decline," the U.S. is perhaps best positioned of any place to succeed/compete in this new age. The U.S. has the research universities, the startups, the clusters, the open immigration...I could go on.

But many Americans look at this transformation and perceive that their old world is being torn apart and they are being left behind. The right has played this exactly as should be expected, promising to bring back a bygone era of American Greatness. And of course preying upon national, racial, ethnic, gender divisions...exactly as would be expected.

The great failure of our time is the failure of the left to outline an inclusive future in this new age of urbanized knowledge capitalism. That does not mean reaching backward to placate the forces of reaction, but creating a vision of a diverse, inclusive and prosperous society.

At the very top of the list that means a vision of how the 70 million members of the low-wage, multi-racial service class can prosper. It means a new social compact for the urbanized knowledge economy. It also means taking on the out-sized power of the nation-state and the imperial presidency and devolving power to the local level. The devolution of power and empowering of cities and local areas may be something that can be organized around in the short-term.

It is now clear that our economy and politics are completely out of sync. Like it or not, blue states and blue metros power the economy. They are very expensive to operate—research universities, public transit, affordable housing, addressing inequality. There is now ZERO change of national investment.

Red state economies and outlying areas require different strategies. Devolution and local empowerment would enable blue state/metro economies to invest their own resources and others to do the same. It would respect local differences, local desires and local needs. Importantly, it could enable blue and red America to mutually co-exist. We cannot go through this every four years.

More importantly, it would start to shift power away from the dangerous anachronism of the nation state (and the imperial presidency).

Florida has long called for much better pay for service workers, so that much is consistent in his thinking. But I think this turn toward devolution is recent. I don't know how he envisions this happening, since much federal influence (sometimes control) on states and cities comes in the form of federalized money returned to states and cities, from highway and street construction dollars to Medicaid and SNAP dollars. Does Florida mean the feds should block-grant those latter programs? Does he want to get rid of federal road money altogether, or somehow turning those dollars back into local taxes?

As everyone knows, most of the red states (of recent elections, if not 2016) are "taker" states, so how does devolution help those states, other than to make them face the fact that they are takers?


Map from Talking Points Memo, 2012.

Tabs Worth Saving

There are still too many tabs, still backing up into the email. But clearing out just a few of them helps, right?

When I question how all of this could have happened, how we could have gotten to where we are now, how so many people can be convinced that they are best-served by leaders with policies so clearly not in our interest, I think of the Koch brothers and kajillionaires like them who have been corrupting things behind the scenes for decades. So it's useful to listen to this recent MPR session with Jane Mayer, who wrote the book on the Kochs. Depressing, but you have to know your enemy.

In case you missed the two Vox stories about people in rural Kentucky who voted for Trump and now realize they'll likely lose their health insurance, here they are: the longer piece and the side bar about one particular woman. I believe people are right to be angry that premiums and deductibles have gone up incredibly (I am!), but those problems are caused by Republican unwillingness to ever modify the ACA in ways that could have made it work. Now, if they repeal it, it will be interesting (in the Minnesota sense of the word) to see what if anything they replace it with.

I know there were a lot of reasons why Clinton lost, not least of them the Comey letter, Russian email hacking, and the media coverage thereof...


(Graphic by Gallup)

...but the reason why all that could even work was that enough people in key states were willing to vote for Trump despite his bedrock awfulness. And I come down on the side of writers who argue that racism and sexism — sometimes taking the form of discomfort with a rapidly changing America and "those people" getting things "they" don't deserve — are at the base of that willingness. Aside from the work of Arlie Hochschild, which I've discussed earlier, here are a few pieces that make the case:

• The dangerous myth that Hillary Clinton ignored the working class. Derek Thompson, writing for the Atlantic.
• Even this Christian Science Monitor article, headlined The Trump Voters You Don't Know, makes the case while thinking it's disproving it.
• Dave Roberts, writing for Vox, does an amazing job of including everything that contributed to Trump's win, but when it comes down to it, he says, it was white resentment, which equals racism for anyone who knows racism is a lot more than burning a cross in someone's yard.

I may never get over the fact that the Russian hack of John Podesta's emails only worked because a DNC staffer wrote "legitimate" when he meant to write "illegitimate." I wonder if he was using Siri and she misheard him saying "illegitimate" as "a legitimate"? From the big New York Times story on December 13.

And now for something really depressing: one scholar, Walter Scheidel, taking the long view, says the only thing that has ever decreased inequality is violence. This fits pretty well with Thomas Piketty's findings, but runs counter to people like Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature. From the Times review:

Many social scientists [and DN3!]...would like to believe that there are ways to push back [against inequality]: higher minimum wages, perhaps a universal basic income to help curb poverty; sharply higher income tax rates for the rich along with a wealth tax; a weakening of intellectual property rules, curbs on monopolies and coordination of labor standards around the world; maybe a dollop of capital given to each citizen so all can benefit from the high returns on investment.

Dream on. As Professor Scheidel bluntly puts it: “Serious consideration of the means required to mobilize political majorities for implementing any of this advocacy is conspicuous by its absence.”

So what does this leave us with? Another world war, with or without thermonuclear weapons? Let’s hope not.

One of those leftist social scientist ideas for countering inequality (and winning back the working class) is the idea of full employment. Here's an essay from Jacobin on that topic and how it could work.

One piece of good news from the election: Governor Pat McCrory lost in North Carolina. This article explains why, and shows how it provides a path for those of us who want to counter Trump and other Republican insurgencies, as we now have in Minnesota.

I've already shared Richard Florida's thoughts on devolving power to the states and particularly the cities in the age of Trump. Here's are some more thoughts along those lines from the Nation: All resistance is local—a plan of progressive action in the Trump years.

(Too bad about the move toward state legislatures making preemption their number-one goal, following in lockstep with ALEC. That could mess with this idea pretty well.)

This may have been on your mind, as it has been mine: If Trump's voters got their way, why are they still so angry? The writer of this piece from Salon analogizes it to the attitude of Southern slavery-supporters in the Civil War. Lincoln said his opponents wanted the North to "cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right." Today,

It’s not enough for them to win. Those who opposed Trump must stop opposing him. We must agree that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, agree we should torture and kill suspected terrorists and their families, agree immigrants should be rounded up and deported, agree there should be guns in schools, agree women should be punished for having abortions and agree to all the rest of it. Until we stop resisting completely and declare that we are “avowedly with them,” they will continue to believe that “all their troubles proceed from us.”

I keep meaning to pick up a copy of The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist. Maybe reading this excerpt (titled "America's economy was built on slavery, not white ingenuity—historians should tell it like it is") will get me to finally do it.

George Lakoff, linguist and sociologist, has been putting out lots of think pieces on Trump's rhetorical strategies and how to counter them. This one is almost too-thick with ideas. But it includes the suggestion that those who oppose Trump should frame him as a loser and a minority president, a betrayer of trust. All of these are things that are antithetical to the "strong father" role Trump tries to play, and that appeals to the conservative mindset (as Lakoff has explained in earlier works).

That's all I have the energy for today. But at least a few more tabs are gone!