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Can the USA Survive Trump?

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The United States is facing the largest threat to its continued existence as one nation-state since the Civil War. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration: I have extensively studied the Civil War and American history as a whole, and we are in dangerous waters. As I see it, the threat is a massive leadership vacuum coming from the Washington and Donald Trump.

The problem with the vacuum is that far too many states, cities, and people are not content to just twist in the wind regarding health care, global warming, and immigration. The American people and their state and city representatives are going to step up and fill that vacuum, leading to a potential clash between state and national power the likes of which have not been seen for well over a century.

Even some Liberals are skeptical of the Trump-Russia connection, but if Vladimir Putin made a wish for the United States when he blew out his birthday candles last October, he’s already gotten most of what he wanted. There has been a massive erosion of faith in the American government, the media and even factual, objective reality as a whole; the USA has largely relinquished the leadership role it has held since the end of World War II and is more isolated than any time since just before the War. Now, with the recent G-20 Summit and Trump’s decision to quit the Paris Climate Accords, the rest of the free world openly mocks us. And most troubling of all going forward, our nation is splitting at the seams as the political, cultural, ideological, and economic ties that have bound our nation together for so long are ripped apart.

And the end of our nation may be coming sooner than later. Donald Trump has less legitimacy and political capital than any president in American history, and it isn’t even that close. We already see individuals, states, and cities rising to fill the leadership vacuum, but I believe the real problem will come to a head soon as a result of 2 potential sequences of events, both involving Trump’s role as Commander-in-chief.

1.) Trump grows angrier and angrier over the increased resistance to his rule and to approval ratings lower than intestinal parasites and he and his advisers decide that military action will cause the American people to line up behind him out of patriotic duty. Now, recent history (Iraq) should show him and his advisers that this approach is flawed in the extreme, but Trump neither knows nor cares about recent history. In 2002, President George W. Bush labeled Iraq, North Korea, and Iran an ‘axis of evil,’ and Iraq, the ‘easiest’ target of the 3 is no longer on the list. That leaves the nuclear-armed North Koreans, and Iran, a nation of 80 million people (for comparison, Iraq had 26 million when we attacked in 2003) that will achieve nuclear arms pretty quickly once we tear up the deal that we – along with the UK, France, China, Russia, and Germany – made with them in 2015. Not only will any pre-emptive US attack on those nations devastate our allies and further isolate us more than Trump already has, but there will be many in our armed forces who will not risk their lives for an aggressive war that will be transparently political. For maybe the first time in American history, those who protest the war at the start or who refuse to fight will be those celebrated as patriots.

2.) The more likely scenario as I see it. Trump grows angrier and angrier over the increased resistance to his rule and to approval ratings lower than genital warts, and he finally decides he can’t ‘allow’ protests anymore (First Amendment be damned), and he orders either the National Guard or regular military to disperse the most high-profile and disruptive protests; he does not order them to use deadly force but to use all force short of lethal. It is again easy to see many refusing to follow such orders, which is the very type of situation at the start of many revolutions throughout history.

When the US faced the greatest crisis in our history, we had an almost perfectly designed leader to handle it in Abraham Lincoln. When the Great Depression threatened to end our democratic republic, we had an almost perfectly designed leader to handle it in Franklin D. Roosevelt. We are now at the precipice of national disaster just as we were in 1860 and 1932, but instead of having Lincoln or FDR, we have an erratic, petty, angry, ignorant, short-sighted, dishonest, and probably mentally ill man standing where those two giants once stood. There is no easy answer for this type of situation in the Constitution: we have to find it our selves, and we must identify, elect, and follow leaders in our states, cities, and towns, because there is a vacuum in Washington right now, and we have to recognize it, and decide whether or not it is fatal to the United States as we know and understand it.

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Trump the Bad Neighbor and Fighting His Lies

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Allow me to present a metaphor that I feel may help explain the way I look at the situation Americans currently face in a Trump Administration that lies more often, more frequently, and about more things than any Administration in US history.

You leave your house and walk down your driveway where your neighbor stops you and begins to talk. He tells you that the tree in your yard is not really a tree, but is actually a crashed alien escape pod that will open any day to reveal alien monsters who will kill and eat your family. You calmly point out that this is not true. You walk him over to the tree and inspect it with him. You show him pictures of other trees of the same species and type, and present detailed facts to prove that, it is indeed a tree. Your neighbor is not very convinced, and walks away. The next day, your neighbor is back, and he again says that the tree is a crashed alien escape pod. You are puzzled and exasperated, and while you don’t have the same enthusiasm, you again walk him through the overwhelming evidence that yes, it is just a tree. Your neighbor presents you with information that describes why your evidence doesn’t convince him. Your neighbor angrily stomps off, while you sigh and go to work; while at work, you read the information he presented you with and find that it is nonsensical ramblings that might even make you laugh if you did not know how serious your neighbor took it, or hear the echoes of fear-driven hatred and violence behind it.

The next day your neighbor’s back at the foot of your driveway. He again says that your tree is a crashed alien escape pod that will open any day to reveal alien monsters who will kill and eat your family. You are annoyed, and explain to him that the arguments he shared with you have no basis in fact and you feel he should discard them. He says that you are either a naïve tool who cannot detect that you are being lied to and hypnotized by some vague frightening entity (maybe it is a world-wide conspiracy, maybe it is ‘the media,’ maybe it is scientists, maybe it is minorities, maybe it is ‘elitists.’) or that you are actively in on ‘it,’ and you’re simply a liar. This is too much for you after the last few days; you explode and tell him off for being a hateful, stupid, disgusting bigot. He then smiles in triumph, “That’s how it is with you and people like you: you don’t have facts on your side, so you simply call me a racist or a bigot. You can’t beat me by argument, you sink to attacking me!” The debate you had been having has now become about name-calling and whether or not you crossed the line, and your initial point about your neighbor’s conspiratorial paranoia has been obscured; your neighbor leave and you head to work fuming and at the end of your patience with this person.

The next day, your neighbor is back at the foot of your driveway and ready to resume the fight, but you have no more stomach for this debate; you know that nothing you will say can possibly convince him, and that you will likely wind up screaming at him again, and that you’ll get nowhere. “Whatever,” you say, “Just leave me the hell alone,” and you go off to work. You don’t want to keep having these confrontations because they are negatively impacting your quality of life: you are angry and stressed all the time and you dread simply walking to the edge of your driveway because you expect that if you do, you’ll wind up in an endless, un-winnable argument. You become withdrawn and you cede more and more ground to your neighbor because you don’t want to have constant fights about what you consider to be simple good sense and objective reality. You and your neighbor were actually friends before he began spouting nonsensical lies, and you enjoyed talking about sports, movies, and pop culture, and you both genuinely care for each other’s families. Now you don’t even want to be in your yard if he’s outside because you don’t want to be around him; there are no more ‘safe’ topics because your neighbor thinks that you are stupid, naïve, and blind to reality while you think that he is being dangerously misled, believes in crackpot conspiracy theories, and that he has become a mean bully. You feel that the less you see him and have to deal with him, the better.

Other neighbors who are your friends and know that your tree is just a tree are puzzled because they no longer see you standing up for what they know is common sense and sanity. They know your tree is a tree, but now that you’ve ceded the argument to your neighbor, they’re not going to contradict your neighbor either. Your neighbor has convinced almost no one, but he has succeeded in muddying the water in the eyes of many in the neighborhood. People still don’t believe your neighbor when he comes out a few days later and tells the person who lives across-the-street that her swimming pool is filled with water poisoned by the government to turn swimmers homosexual, but you have already decided to stay away from your neighbor, and each day and with each ridiculous new assertion, fewer people are fighting back even against things that they know are demonstrably untrue. Objective reality in the neighborhood is no longer agreed upon, and people start to avoid one another because it is as if the neighborhood has been littered with invisible landmines, that will explode if someone walks over them. The neighborhood is now less safe, less civil, less sane, less kind, and tension is lurking everywhere, as people struggle daily in a figurative fight to keep from having a literal fight.

Forgive me for perhaps stretching this metaphor a bit far, but if Donald Trump is our bad neighbor, how do we fix that situation? How do we save our own national neighborhood from his lies and his hate? How do we stand up for objective reality, and build a safer, happier place for ourselves, our children, and their children?

Donald Trump has been president for just over three weeks, but he has already bombarded the nation with an avalanche of dishonesty and disinformation so thick and powerful that he has actually weakened the idea of objective reality! Even for someone such as myself who always looks to history for precedent to make sense of current events, Trump is moving in a direction that is unprecedented in our nation’s history. His assault on the truth and reality itself has grown out of a massive explosion of hyper-polarization unlike anything the nation has seen since directly before the American Civil War. Until relatively recently Republicans and Democrats agreed on many issues but disagreed and debated the ways to deal with those issues, but that all changed during the Barack Obama Administration. Under President Obama the two Parties no longer debated about what was the best plan to deal with problems like how to fix our health care system, our immigration system, or to counter global warming, instead Democrats continued to propose solutions to what they believed were serious problems, while Republicans offered no competing proposal because they denied that there was anything wrong with health care and immigration in the first place, and they claimed that global warming was a hoax. Conservatism and Republicanism became defined not by adherence to an ideology – not even to the old ‘small government,’ orthodoxy that was at the heart of Republicanism from 1980 to 2008 – but by opposition to President Obama and the Democratic Party.

The new Grand Old Party’s disdain for President Obama led to an atmosphere where literally nothing the President said or did – not even the legitimacy of the President himself – would be accepted at face value. This was seen in a Republican Party that refused to believe falling unemployment numbers in 2012 because those numbers were bad for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign, refused to believe numbers that violent crime was down, refused to give any credit to Barack Obama for approving the operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, and refused to believe that neither the President nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not personally to blame over the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 that resulted in the death of 4 Americans. Republicans were so certain that Obama or Clinton did something wrong in Benghazi that they conducted 7-tax-payer-funded investigations into the event that cleared both President Obama and Secretary Clinton; when the GOP disliked that result, they refused to believe the findings of their own Congressional investigations.

But the real seed of the legendarily dishonest Trump Administration was in the racist ‘Birther’ lie that held that Barack Obama was not really the president of the United States because he was not born in Hawaii, in the USA, but in Kenya. While much of ‘Establishment’ Republicans, from Speaker of the House John Boehner to Mitt Romney and Republican 2008 presidential nominee John McCain loudly distanced themselves from the myth, a large part of the Republican and Conservative base refused to believe that Barack Obama was the legitimate president of the USA. One of the public faces of this racist lie was Donald Trump, who flirted with a presidential campaign in 2011-12 based almost entirely on the issue of ‘Birtherism.’ Trump publicly proclaimed that Obama was not born in Hawaii and that he had hired a team of investigators that was producing irrefutable evidence that Barack Obama was not an American. President Obama believed that he had successfully answered this nonsensical claim in 2008, and reluctantly released his ‘long form,’ birth certificate in 2011 to shut down the myth for good. Trump’s burgeoning campaign fell apart when his lie was exposed, but he never admitted that he had lied and that he was wrong. It was the first of the many lies of Donald Trump the politician, which have included lying about personally witnessing ‘thousands’ of Muslims celebrate the 9/11/2001 terror attacks, lying about why he would not release his tax returns, lying about his admission that the Birther Lie was a lie, lying about having publicly come out against the Iraq War, lying about his business career, and on and on and on.

Of course, President and President-Elect Trump did not abandon his lies when he won the election last November. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, 66 million to 63 million, Trump is unable to accept that he received 3 million fewer votes than Clinton, so he lied (and continues to lie) that he actually won the popular vote because ‘3-5’ million people voted ‘illegally.’ He lied about the crowd at his inauguration and the weather that day; he lied about stepping down as the head of the Trump Organization and putting his assets in a blind trust. He lied that he would release his tax returns after the election, and that Mexico would pay for the wall. He has lied about his Muslim travel-ban. Donald Trump now represents the United States of America both at home and abroad, and not even a month into his Presidency there appears nothing too big or too small for him to lie about. It can be overwhelming to try to contend with an Administration that is spreading new falsehoods every day. Trump is using the strategy of the bad neighbor in the metaphor above: muddying the water around every single issue and challenging the validity of everything that he dislikes or disagrees with. This is so that the resistance to his authoritarian regime is disorganized and divided, and so that each group or individual trying to sift through the river of bullshit that Trump’s Administration spews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week cannot possibly keep up. Trying to address single lies, whether the biggest or the smallest, means that some are getting through every day because it just isn’t possible for any one person to stop them all.

But there is hope for those who will fight for truth and objective fact – there is a way forward. We have tools that the victims of past authoritarian regimes did not possess, and thanks to the Internet, we are more connected than ever before. If we work together we can stand against hatred, ignorance, dishonesty, fear mongering, cowardice, greed, and short-sightedness. Just because the task before us is difficult, and the way is unclear does not mean we will fail. The first thing we have to do is organize ourselves. It is almost impossible for one person, regardless of his or her intellect, to combat every one of Trump’s lies, so what we need to do is work together and organize strike teams. One team can fight his lies about the popular vote and push back his naked attempt at voter disenfranchisement; another team can fight back on lies about crime and criminal justice reform; another can work on his lies about immigration and anti-Muslim lies; another on digging up his tax returns and keeping track of his ties to foreign governments. Maybe we can’t fight Trump’s lies as individuals, but we have the advantage if we can organize together.

Besides mobilizing together, there are some other things that we can do that will help us save our democratic republic from an authoritarian coup.

1.) No matter how warranted it may be, we must never shout names and allow Trump and his lying followers to try to get us to act out, because the facts, evidence, and morality are all on our side. We should say ‘here’s proof that Trump lied’ to Trump’s followers instead of saying, ‘Trump and his orders are racist and stupid, so you are racist and stupid too!’ which will just lead to the old Conservative standby of ‘you called me a racist! That is just what Liberals do when they can’t win an argument!’ Fighting even the most egregious lies or hate speech by attacking someone who believes the lies will get us nowhere, since it will turn the debate into an argument about racism itself, leaving the initial topic completely forgotten in the dirt. You are now arguing about insults and not about Trump or his actions.

2.) Don’t take the bait if/when a Trump supporter says that you are biased and that you believe that President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or some other Democrat or Liberal was/is perfect. This is another trick, and the Trump supporter is trying to bait you into listing your own (likely legitimate and fact-based) reservations about a Liberal politician, and whether it be Obama, Sanders, or anyone else, the topic will no longer be what Trump has done or said and why it is wrong; it is now about the flaws of Obama/Bernie/whomever. And if you think that the Trump supporter is reasonable and he/she will then say, ‘Well, I have reservations about Trump, too, and here they are,’ then you’re likely going to be disappointed with the result. You are now arguing about Obama/Bernie/a Liberal politician and not about Trump or his actions.

3.) We cannot have any more arguments about hypocrisy or alternate realities where we say things like ‘If Obama was as cozy with Russia, as Trump is, the Republicans in Congress would move to impeach him,’ because they don’t matter. Many of the biggest Trump supporters and Trump himself are hypocrites – in one of the alternate scenarios we should cease to use going forward, try to imagine Trump and his supporters’s reactions if Hillary Clinton had been the one who received 3 million fewer votes than Trump did, yet she won by the exact same numbers in the Electoral College – but it doesn’t matter. How the Republicans may have reacted to Obama or to Hillary doesn’t change the fact that now Trump and the GOP hold the power, and many of the highest-ranking Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (as seen in his recent comments about how shocked and upset he is about Democratic obstruction in the Senate of late), either have a complete and total lack of self-awareness or have no shame or integrity. McConnell in particular is responsible for creating a new Senate operating procedure where the Senate Majority Party will no longer allow the president who is of the opposing Party to fulfill his/her Constitutional duty to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court. The new reality apparently is that Democratic presidents will be denied that duty if the Republicans hold the Senate and if he/she does not nominate the identical person that a Republican president would nominate. McConnell has done unprecedented and as yet unquantifiable damage to the Judicial Branch of government and in particular to the highest court in the land, and we’ll have to wait and see if that damage is fatal or not to the Judicial Branch as it currently exists. The point, however, is that the fact that McConnell is a hypocrite is not important right now, all that is important is stopping him and Donald Trump from stealing our democracy out from under us.

4.) No lie, no matter how big or small, can go unchallenged. We need to be organized well enough that we have people able to respond to any and all lies – if Donald Trump says it is 68 degrees outside and it is really 66, we need to counter it and share the truth.

5.) No more politeness. We must follow rule one and never engage in ad hominem attacks (no matter how justified we may be), but it is vital that we stand up and argue for what we believe in. We need to publicly respond to every Trump lie, but we also need to call out lies in our own lives, too. If a friend says that Trump actually won the popular vote, explain why that is untrue and wrong. If you hear a total stranger in the supermarket say that Barack Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, do not let it go unchallenged. Pointing out the lies of strangers is both uncomfortable and impolite, but we need to fight for the truth and for objective reality. I have always hated the phrase ‘history is written by the victor,’ because the Confederacy lost the Civil War but, after the period of Reconstruction ended in 1876, the North stood aside even as the South taught its students the ‘Lost Cause’ Mythology that lied about the War and its causes and helped perpetuate Jim Crow segregation for almost another century. We cannot allow history to be written by the person who yells the loudest simply because we find it too inconvenient to argue even when we know we are right.

6.) We must seek the acceptance of potential moderate Republicans who either did not vote for Trump or who voted for him just because he was not Hillary Clinton. The idea that moderate Republicans are going to support Democratic candidates or Liberal policies/ideas is unrealistic, but only the most committed Trump supporters believe in his core lies, like that 3-5 million people did vote illegally and that Trump is the true winner of the popular vote. Only the most committed Trump supporters agree with every word of Trump’s Executive Order on immigration. To protect the very idea of objective reality and honest governance, we are going to have to work alongside people who we disagree with on about 7 issues in 10, and even though we fought against them in November and will fight against them tomorrow to defend Medicare and Social Security, right now the overriding concern must be the marginalization and removal from power of a regime that does not view George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cautionary tale of the nightmare of unchecked authoritarianism, but as a blueprint from which to operate. We will never give up our desire to expand Medicare, achieve single-payer health care for all Americans, and fighting for a more Progressive, open, free, and inclusive society, but right now the most important battle is the one against a Trump White House that says 2 + 2 = 5.

I may come off as preachy or hyperbolic, but I assure you that I am sincere and I believe this is an incredibly important moment for the state of California, the nation, and even the world, and it is not the time to do nothing. Fortunately I am not the only one who has been motivated to act, and I have been humbled to watch and work alongside some of the most capable, empathetic, intelligent, generous, hard-working, dedicated, tireless, and just all-around incredible people that I have ever met or hope to meet. I am inspired every time I see the level of commitment from these people, the vast majority of whom are unpaid volunteers, and who have jobs and families, yet somehow find spare time that they use to fight to make the lives of others better. The majority of people in just my town, let alone the county, city, state, or nation will probably never know the sacrifices that are made every single day in their names.

Whether in my metaphorical neighborhood or in the real world, by encouraging people to stand up to this government, I know that I am asking them to take on potential risks in their personal and professional lives, and even asking people to do very uncomfortable or unnatural things like arguing with strangers if we hear them spreading lies. However, I vow to you that I will never, suggest that other people should risk anything if I am not also willing to pay the same price myself. I was born with the joint disease Arthrogryposis (which is coincidentally the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski was mocked by Trump for having in December 2015), having in December 2015) and the spinal condition Scoliosis, and I have had several major spinal surgeries and spinal fusions throughout my life. I have not spent even one solid hour out of intense back pain since September 1998, and as such I must always weigh the impact any particular action might have on my back, but I will endure extreme agony to fight for our nation, for the truth, and for freedom. My most recent surgery took place during Barack Obama’s campaign for the Presidency in 2008, and I did phone banking for the then-Senator from my hospital bed. I am ready and willing to pay this price, and I hope many are willing to join me in this uncomfortable, inconvenient cause. And know that I will gladly stand and march and fight even for those who will do the same against me, and I’ll endure days of recovery time and of bitter pain for you, too. This is about more than Republicans and Democrats, and more than Right and Left. This is about right and wrong, and if you choose to defend and propagate lies and tyranny, history will not look at you very kindly, and if I live long enough, I’ll be the one to write it down so our children and their children will mark down those who stay seated and silent alongside those who fought to propagate dishonesty, corruption, and meanness, and not with those who stood against an autocrat and risked the consequences.

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Trump’s Moral Price

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I was speaking to my cousin John about the most recent New York Giants game the other day when their kicker, Josh Brown, missed a 53-yard field goal attempt. Brown had just returned from serving a one-game suspension for domestic violence charges against his wife, and I expressed dismay when he missed the field goal. John correctly pointed out that 53-yards is far away for any kicker, and that Brown’s miss was understandable. However, while I acknowledged that kicking from such a distance is difficult, I explained that the Giants are paying a high moral price to employ someone as ethically questionable as Brown is, and that because of that cost, Brown does not have the luxury to be held to the same standards as the average kicker. For the Giants to justify Brown’s spot on the roster, he has to be a great kicker, and great kickers make 53-yard field goals, and while I personally do not believe that any performance, no matter how great, excuses domestic violence or other crimes, professional sports teams obviously disagree with me. The Giants are keeping Brown because he is good at what he does, the Pittsburgh Steelers have kept quarterback Ben Roethlisberger in spite of being accused of multiple rapes, and the Los Angeles Lakers kept building their team around now-retired superstar Kobe Bryant for a decade despite rape charges of his own. It seems that there are few crimes and moral outrages that will compel a sports team or a business to cut ties with its best players/employees as long as those players produce at a high level or make their businesses lots of money.

After the conversation, it occurred to me that such a standard could be applied to other aspects of life, and I immediately thought of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump has spent 70-years as an ignorant, lying, bullying, xenophobic, sexist, bigoted, racist, narcissistic, anti-semitic, buffoon, and has amply demonstrated his utter unfitness to become the President of the United States of America. For someone to cast his or her ballot for Trump in November, he or she must love other things about Trump so much that he or she is willing to shrug off all those other horrible things about the man. So I am asking Trump supporters (literally, this is not a rhetorical exercise): what is it that you like about Trump so much that you can suppor him in spite of all the frightening things he has done, said, stands for, and plans to do in the future? Is it Trump’s proposed economic plans? How about his stated environmental plans? Do you believe that his ‘wall,’ between the United States and Mexico will make things so much better here in America that his other flaws do not matter to you? Are you willing to put up with his past attitudes towards women, minorities, and people with disabilities (and pretty much everyone else on earth who does not share his last name, or is not Vladimir Putin) because you feel that he will make America stronger and more respected abroad?  What about him personally do you like so much that you want to vote for him in spite of all I mentioned before?

Trump on Economics

When President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he made America’s rapidly growing national debt a major campaign issue, but even at the time economists and critics, including his leading opponent for the Republican nomination in ’80, George H. W. Bush, (who would be Reagan’s Vice President, and eventually his successor as president) who famously called Reagan’s supply-side economic theory, ‘voodoo economics,’ during the campaign, correctly protected it would greatly expand the national debt. Of course, Reagan’s policies did explode the debt at unprecedented rates  due to the not-so-shocking problem that if you take in $10 and spend  $15, you wind up deeply in debt, and his policies devastated American manufacturing by making it easier than ever before to outsource jobs overseas. We have now had over 35-years of evidence to suggest that former President George H. W. Bush and other critics were correct: ‘trickle down’, ‘Reaganomics,’ were horrendous for all but the ultra rich.

As a whole, the American public has been paying atention to the real cost of trickle down, which is part of the reason that the Democratic Party’s nominee for president has defeated the Republican candidate in the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Trump seems to understand the widespread distrust of the efficacy of huge tax cuts for the rich benefitting the middle class and the poorest Americans, and he has responded by speaking like a populist who is for bringing back American manufacturing jobs and undoing the free trade policies that have been supported by every president from Reagan through George H. W. Bush , Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and up to Barack Obama. But in spite of the language he used, the economic plan that Trump has proposed is just Reaganomics repacked in populist language, and not only is the core of his plan a new massive tax cut for the wealthiest American, but according to CBS, his economic plan would add $5.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plan would add $200 billion. And while I happen to share the belief of economists like Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that neither a budget deficit nor national debt is necessarily a bad thing, many of those who today worship at the Cult of Reagan, and who take it on faith that  ‘trickle down’ economics always works and profess to care so deeply about the national debt that they support a Constitutional Amendment mandating a balanced federal budget, intend to vote for Trump even though the economic policies he has announced publicly and on his own official campaign website lay out an economic policy that will further explode the debt and continue the pace of outsourcing more American jobs. So, if you truly care about the deficit and you are against free trade agreements like NAFTA or the TPP, then why are you voting for Trump? Trump may attempt to cloak his re-packaged trickle down economic plans in populist language, but what about his entire life history has convinced you that he would govern by populist policies? Why do you believe his populist talk when the plans on his own website prove what his actual intentions are? Can you really trust him on the economy?

Trump on the Environment

Once upon a time, environmental conservation was a non-partisan issue, with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act created and signed, respectively, by Republican President Richard Nixon, but those days ended long ago. Today the Republican Party is largely united by, at best, severe skepticism about climate change – especially man-made climate change – and at worst a total hostility to climate change and the very ideas of conservation and environmental protection. Trump’s environmental plan places him firmly in the ‘hostile,’ wing of the Republican Party, and he has declared an intention to abolish the EPA and dramatically weaken or totally abandon all environmental regulation in the United States. Combatting climate change is perhaps the most important issue to Millennial voters, and Trump is on what most of those voters consider to be the wrong side of it.

If protecting the environment matters to you, then why would you vote for Trump in November? Hillary Clinton’s policy is far easier to nail down, and is the most progressive environmental position ever staked out by a major Party nominee, and commits both Secretary Clinton and the United States as a whole to fighting to minimize the rapidly unfolding catastrophe (environmental, human, and economic) that has already begun. The Republican Party, many of its largest donors, and even some on the Democratic side of the aisle have tried to muddy the water – and compared to what some of the corporations on the anti-climate change side of the issue do to water every day, mud would actually be an improvement – on this issue by acting as if there is widespread disagreement within the scientific community about climate change. In reality, there is no real disagreement among scientists, who are in almost universal agreement about the threat that our nation – and our world – faces. If you care about this issue, then why would you vote for Donald Trump?

Trump on National Security

Our nation faces many threats, and simply having the most powerful military in world history does not eliminate all dangers to our nation. In today’s world, the idea of conventional warfare, with one nation-state at war with another, seems almost quaint. We have made ourselves so powerful that no nation has the ability to wage a conventional war with the United States, but that does not mean that we do not have committed enemies. The Islamic State in Syria, or ISIS, is one of these threats, and while under President Obama we have degraded and punished the group to near annihilation, but ISIS, like al Qaeda, is more about an idea, and as such simply killing their leaders (and we have) or taking their territory and weaponry (and we have) does not insure our safety. That we face such threats and others, including the cyber threats we are currently facing from Russia, makes the Presidency as important now as it has ever been. Not only has Donald Trump shown himself to be unworthy of the massive charge of being Commander in Chief, with his lack of temperament and tendency to fire off and attack all of those who criticize him for even the most trivial things, he has shown himself to be unwilling to criticize or stand up to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s strongman dictator.

If that does not raise any red flags with intended Trump voters, what about the fact that the man is actually running on a pro War Crimes platform! He has declared his intention to violate the Geneva Convention not only by torturing human beings, but he has proposed capturing the civilian families of terrorist suspects and either imprisoning, torturing, or killing them in an absolutely despicable attempt to keep their family members from attacking the USA. All the things that Trump admires about Putin are the things Trump wants to project about himself, but he has an inability to realize that just projecting strength does not make one strong. Putin grandstands and invades neighboring nations, and tramples democracy, but nothing that he has done has restored Russia to the superpower status once held by the Soviet Union. Trump sees Putin as his role model, his exemplar of strong leadership, while he continually attacks President Obama for perceived weakness. And yet, Obama has been the one to degrade ISIS and to kill Osama bin Laden, and Obama has killed more terrorists than any other president in American history. And while Russia’s economy has gotten weaker under Putin because his bullying invasions have led to economic sanctions, when Obama came into office in January 2009, he inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and has pulled us out of that fire. Yet Trump admires Putin, not Obama; is that not a red flag in and of itself?

I can understand why some people don’t like Hillary Clinton, but for me there are more than enough things that I can find in her readily accessible and detailed policy positions on the environment, minimum wage, foreign policy, and more that I whole-heartedly agree with, which allows me to support the former Secretary of State even though I feel that she often acts entitled (as if rules do not appy to her), is seemingly allergic to transparency, and is too closely aligned with the financial powers that reside on Wall Street. Of course when she is compared to Trump, with his flat refusal to either release his income tax returns or any legitimate health records, the notoriously guarded Clinton might as well be running her campaign from within a glass house under an electron microscope. But to support Trump, one must truly love something about his positions, since it is hard for me to understand how any non-racist, non-hateful/fearful person can tolerate Trump’s racism, bigotry, sexism, dishonesty, xenophobia, attacks on people with disabilities, homophobia, Islamaphobia, bullying, narcissism, megalomania, and ignorance just because he or she hates Hillary Clinton. If someone does not love Trump’s stated positions, and trust that he will hold to them if he is elected, then how can he or she give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s not really an anti-semite in spite of having Alt-Right, Breitbart hero Steve Bannon, as his campaign manager or flirting with David Duke (who has made no secret of the fact that he believes his chance has come again because of Trump)? That he’s not really a racist in spite of his nakedly racist championing of Birtherism? That he’s not really a bigot when he calls all Latino immigrants rapists and drug dealers? That he’s not really a sexist when he calls women dogs and pigs? That he’s not really a bully when he mocks a journalist for having a physical disability? That he’s not a liar when he claims that he saw hundreds or thousands of Muslims across the Hudson River in New Jersey celebrating as the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11th, 2001? That he’s not classless and temperamentally unfit to be the President of the United States when he questions the impartiality, loyalty, and even citizenship of an American judge, Gonzalo Curiel, because he ruled against Trump’s bogus university, or attacks the Khan family because they were critical of him? That he’s not a demagogue trying to turn Americans against each other when his initial response to the deadliest mass shooting in American history was to brag about his plan to ban all Muslims from traveling to the United States?

It is cliché to say it, but neither this election nor any other has ever taken place in a vacuum. Hillary Clinton is not running against a perfect candidate who will be the best possible choice and with whom one can agree on every single policy position: she is not even running against Senator Bernie Sanders, her opponent for the Democratic nomination. Instead, former Secretary Clinton is running against Donald Trump, and regardless of whether or not one decides to support either Libertarian candidate, former Governor Gary Johnson, or Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, neither of them is going to be president on January 20th, 2017, and if anyone says otherwise, and concocts a scenario where either Third Party candidate, or someone else entirely, will be the 45th president of the United States, then that person is not telling the truth. It will either be Hillary Clinton who, warts and all, has shown the intelligence, skill, capacity for hard work, and temperament to do the job, or it will be Donald Trump, a dangerous demagogue who has shown ignorance, hatred, bigotry, an unpredictable temperament, displayed extreme narcissism and megalomania, has a notoriously short attention span, and has lied more often and more easily than any major Party candidate in history. If you love Trump’s stance on immigration, crime, the environment, the economy, and foreign policy so much that you are willing to live with endless stream of offenses he has committed just since he entered the race in June of 2015 (not to mention all the horrible actions and statements he’s made in the 69-years he lived before last June), then perhaps voting for him makes sense to you, but remember also that there are plenty of people in this nation – people who deserve to be called ‘deplorables,’ as former Secretary Clinton recently called them – who are voting for Trump because he is a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, insults the disabled, is a bigot, a liar, a bully, a narcissist, and has surrounded himself by anti-Semities and White Nationalists who believe Eugenics is a real science and that ‘less desirable,’ people should not be allowed to reproduce so that they do not ‘pollute,’ or ‘contaminate,’ our bloodstream. Perhaps you love his policy proposals so much that you honestly don’t care about any of this, but you would have to have chosen willful ignorance to pretend that there are not plenty of people voting for him because of his most vile views and the despicable Nazi-wannabes like Bannon who now have his ear.

And if you really do abhor the grotesque things that Trump has said and done, but you are going to vote for him anyway because you hate Clinton and hope and expect that a President Trump’s most dangerous and vile tendencies would be kept in check either by the job itself, the other branches of government, social norms, his top advisers, or some other mitigating factor, please remember that such logic was precisely the reason that many educated, intelligent Germans elevated Adolf Hitler to power in 1932/33. I despise comparing anyone or anything to Hitler and the Nazis because some people tune out as soon as the comparison is made as it is over-used, so I do not do it lightly, but it fits here scarily well because the things those Germans knew better, and were personally disgusted by Hitler’s views on Jews, Communists, eugenics, and more, but they supported him anyway because they felt his most harmful, hateful, and deadly tendencies could be contained. If one cuts out all the noise and analysis and just reads everything Trump has said and done in this campaign concerning Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, women, people with disabilities, soldiers, war heroes, Jews, and more, and simply decided to take him at his words, it should be impossible to support the man with a clear conscience. Put another way: unless Trump starts kicking field goals from 99 yards away and makes 30 of them each game, he shouldn’t have a place on our national team, and I would honestly feel dirty if, outside the election, he simply  purchased any of my four favorite pro sports teams, but there is not enough soap in the universe for me to feel clean with Donald Trump as my president.

 

2016 Presidential Election, American Politics, Climate Change, College, Congressional elections, Democratic Party, Elections, Electoral Cynicism, Health care, Liberals, medical reform, Medicare, Money in Politics, Obamacare, Plutocracy, Politics, Poverty, Public School, Republican Party, School, Science, Society, U.S. Government, US Domestic Policy, US Economic Policy, Voter Suppression, Voting, Welfare

Bernie the Revolutionary?

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I think it is time for Bernie Sanders to stop speaking of a ‘political revolution.’ I have encountered both fear and cynicism – even by some Liberals – in response to Bernie’s call. But none need fear, for when Senator Sanders speaks of a political revolution, what he really means is simply increased participation and engagement in our political system.

The hard truth is that we the people are largely responsible for the widespread anger that led to the rise of a neo-Fascist demagogue like Donald Trump – our failure to participate in the political system made Trump possible. The presidential election of 2008 is considered a high-turnout election, as it saw a popular candidate in Barack Obama combined with the deeply unpopular George W. Bush Administration, and Obama received almost 70 million popular votes to around 60 million for Republican candidate John McCain, but in reality only 63% of eligible voters cast a ballot. In 2012, now President Obama won reelection by defeating Republican Mitt Romney 65 million to 60 million, but turnout declined to just under 58%. Voter turnout in mid-term elections, like those in 2010 and 2014, see even less engagement. Many Republican controlled states (many of which only turned Republican due to the small turnouts of those 2010 and 2014 elections) have engineered highly sophisticated voter-suppression efforts to keep turnout down – and they were aided when the Supreme Court undid much of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had been the definitive end to Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement of Black voters – but no anti-democratic attempt can fully explain the fact that about 40% of eligible voters stay home every November.

Polls and data have consistently proven that increased voter participation almost always benefits Democratic candidates, and poll after poll has shown that the vast majority of Americans already support most of Bernie’s platform. Americans are with him on getting money out of politics, free public college, universal health care, addressing income inequality, climate change, and a whole host of other issues, and if we can simply get more political participation/engagement, we’ll be able to make the kinds of changes that most of us want to see. Those who stay home are at best passive witnesses of the theft of our democratic republic and at worst accomplices in that theft by a small group of wealthy individuals and corporations who have transformed us into a plutocratic oligarchy. It is perhaps cliché to say that all the people who are fully able to vote and choose not to do so are insulting the Americans who came before us and often died to protect that precious right, but whether the non-voters realize it or not, they are also insulting those who come next, because those future generations must live in the nation and world that we leave them.

When Bernie is talking about a political revolution, he is not speaking of something bloody or new, he is speaking of greater engagement with and participation in the political process of our country. He wants to get as many people involved in our democracy as possible, and any who might say that Bernie’s just being cynical because he knows he would do better if more people were involved should stop to realize what they’re admitting by saying that: that Bernie and his policies are preferred by a majority of Americans, and that the closer to 100% turnout we get, the better Bernie would do.

The real revolution here is to stop thinking of voting as a right and instead view it as our duty as Americans: perhaps the least we can do to show our appreciation for our nation and its past, present, and future.

American Politics, Bipartisanism, Climate Change, Conservatives, Democratic Party, GMOs, Liberals, Republican Party, Science, Science-Denial, Vaccines

The Spread of the Anti-Science Movement in American Politics

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Elected officials and politicians have staked out positions that are unsupported by facts, and the reality that the vast majority of scientists have proven those positions to be indefensible does not seem to matter to those who refuse to alter their views regardless of the ample evidence that disproves them. Instead of looking at the mountains of verifiable data, these science deniers choose to cherry pick ‘evidence’ from the microscopic segment of the scientific community that simply reaffirms what they already believe in. In the deniers’ point of view, if just 1% of scientists back up their positions, they have been vindicated and the near unanimity among the rest of the scientific community is cheerfully ignored; they hold that even if 99% of scientists agree that the deniers are wrong, that 99% is entirely comprised of the lying tools of corporations and other rich boogeymen committed to maintaining the status quo at all costs. Any who do not hew to the Party orthodoxy concerning science denial are branded as heretics and viewed with mistrust, and their failure to display rigid obedience can lead to exile from their political Party and even political death. Meanwhile, Americans who believe that the best way to govern is to use evidence-based, scientifically sound data to form the foundation of policy, are learning to steer clear of these anti-science zealots and the Democratic Party that they call home.

After reading that, one might be thinking that I have it wrong and it is Republicans who are spitting in the face of the global scientific consensus because of their Party’s position on climate change and their drive to make decisions on women’s healthcare without even the most basic understanding of the female reproductive system, and one would be right to think that. However, science-denial is now a bipartisan affair. Many of the same Liberals who arrogantly mock conservatives for believing that many policies that impact human lives should be based on blind religious faith rather than hard data are themselves firmly committed to the anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements. While Liberals have the scientific community on their side on the issue of climate change, they are in the opposite situation concerning both GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and the benefits of certain vaccines. Many Liberals appear unaware of the inconsistency of contending that to question the overwhelming scientific majority on climate change in any way is the mark of a fool, a liar, or a tool of Big Oil, while simultaneously claiming that, when it comes to GMOs and vaccines, the majority of scientists they celebrate concerning climate change are the stooges, liars, and tools of big business. And just as Conservatives claim that the sliver of a minority of scientists are the only ones ‘brave enough’ to stand up to their peers by refusing to accept the mountain of data (or, as the Right sees it, refusing to subscribe to the hoax of climate change that the scientists are trying to force on the world) that proves climate change is real, Liberals hold that the few scientists ‘brave enough,’ to ignore the data on the safety of GMOs and efficacy of vaccines are the ones who have it right. Liberals have long scorned many Conservatives for using whatever facts support their deeply held convictions as validation those beliefs, while willfully choosing to ignore any ‘inconvenient truths’ (thanks Al Gore) that disprove those convictions in order to hold onto their preferred viewpoints, but now the Liberals are doing it too.

A major problem for political discourse about science is that it is not enough for one Party to claim that the scientists who disagree with its views are incorrect, but the ethics, motives, and intelligence of those researchers must be attacked. Again, this troubling trend is unfortunately bipartisan, and while Republicans try to eviscerate the reputations of any economists who show that there are now 35-years of evidence that tax cuts for the rich do not lead to a general prosperity for all, Democrats try to destroy those who favor things like nuclear power as a cleaner alternative to coal and oil-burning power plants. Those who disagree with one side or the other are not honest people who believe that there is a better way to do things, but is a greedy enemy of all that is good and decent. In some ways this is even worse on the Liberal side, as decades of pointing to factual evidence because it has supported Democratic contentions has led to a hyper-arrogance that, long aimed at Conservatives, is now being redirected inward.

One of the best exemplars of this kind of Liberal arrogance is Bill Maher, who spends a large part of his time ripping the religious to shreds, and who now takes time to compare Monsanto to the Nazis, and to tear down any who have the audacity to question whether genetically modified crops are 100% bad. Monsanto does not warrant a vigorous defense, and it is absolutely guilty of most of the same crimes that other gigantic multinational corporations engage in on a regular basis; it is committed to its shareholders and not to the well-being of anyone else, the same as almost all other multinational corporations. That said, Maher’s exaggerated claims that the company is ‘evil’ in ways other corporations are not, or somehow equivalent to Nazis reveals a powerful cognitive dissonance where Maher, a man who has made his living mocking those who choose to believe in something (like religion) without a scrap of evidence, in this case chooses to side with those who are producing the scraps, and he has done so without sacrificing his normal smug self-righteous shtick. Maher casts everything in terms of black and white, good and evil, but he is just the symptom of a political culture that is largely shaped by cable news stations and a media that wants everything to be placed into the box of good or bad because it is more exciting and therefore more likely to attract viewers and readers. Every issue is presented as having two sides that are equal in merit; everything must be presented as black or white, and nothing is gray because gray is boring.

Unfortunately, discussing whether or not the majority of vaccines are beneficial and necessary (and most are) does not make for good TV. The anti-vaccination contingent argues that the pharmaceutical industry or ‘Big Pharma’ is peddling vaccines it knows to be either needless or even harmful, the truth is that Big Pharma would probably make more money if they refused to produce vaccines: if they did not produce vaccines, the industry would then be able to sell the cures for many illnesses (such as mumps, measles, and more) that are largely eradicated, making a huge profit. The anti-vaccine movement is largely the consequence of the work of one man: Doctor Andrew Wakefield of the United Kingdom. In 1998 Wakefield published a paper hypothesizing a link between certain vaccines and autism, and his work was quickly debunked by his peers while his evidence was found to be largely fraudulent. However, by the time it was debunked the idea was unfortunately catching as if Wakefield’s quackery was itself a contagious disease. Celebrities and others who should have known better bought everything Wakefield said, and as a result the USA, the richest nation on earth, is seeing a return of viruses and diseases that have been stamped out even in the most impoverished nations on earth. In 2010 Wakefield even lost his license to practice medicine in the U.K. due to the fact that his irresponsible and unsubstantiated claims led to such a panic, but it was too late. Wakefield’s crackpot theories have refused to die and who knows how many will pay, some no doubt with their lives, for his irresponsible work before the USA and the world at large finally shake off this literally unhealthy skepticism of vaccines.

The movement against genetically modified organisms is another part of the building anti-science wing of the Democratic Party. The anti-GMO movement mostly comes out of a fear of things that are not perceived as ‘natural’ and the corresponding belief that all things that ARE natural are inherently good and anything that anything that is not considered natural is bad. Around 52% of Americans believe that GMOs are bad for them, and this belief persists in spite of the fact that, according to the nonpartisan American Association for the Advancement of Science, 89% of scientists worldwide agree that GMOs are safe for human consumption. Crops like corn (by far the most common genetically modified crop in the USA), are modified to make the corn resistant to certain pests and herbicides, and a majority of scientists not only believe that GMOs are safe, but that genetically modified food may be the solution to potential food shortages and famine. Scientists take the more desirable traits of things like corn and cotton and replicate them to make them better and more plentiful. And yet, the public fear of GMOs is very real, and it is why supermarkets like Trader Joes and Whole Foods are moving away from GMO foods and why the restaurant chain Chipotle recently announced that it would be doing the same. These actions and the reputation of Monsanto and others have made the job of scientists speaking the truth harder and harder, and they are left without their usual allies – Liberals and Liberal intellectuals – and therefore they have struggled to convince the public of the truth.

The strain of science denial that has become so prevalent on the Left these days is just as pronounced as that on the Right, but it comes from a very different place. While much of the anti-science part of the Republican Party comes from the most religious members of the Party, the Liberal fear of vaccines and GMOs comes from an ingrained belief that everything that comes from nature is inherently superior and better for human beings than anything that has been shaped by human beings. To this group ‘organic’ is synonymous for ‘good’ and non-organic food is ‘bad.’ Of course, this view ignores the countless ‘natural’ things on earth that are dangerous or even deadly to humanity, or that laboratories have produced medicines and food that have saved millions and millions of lives. It is a black and white view that fails to realize that these particular issues are too complex to fit into that narrative, and It is the kind of fear that had led to things like the gluten-free movement in spite of the fact that unless a person has a specific allergy to gluten, there is no harm at all in eating it. The main beneficiaries to the anti-gluten movement have been many of those same multinational corporations that so many Liberals hate, as an uninformed American public rushed to spend millions of dollars for over-priced and utterly unnecessary gluten-free food. And now we see big businesses rushing to exploit the anti-GMO fad, charging consumers more money for many products that are considered by 89% of scientists to be no healthier than their cheaper and ‘evil’ GMO counterparts.

While it may seem cynical to say so, experience seems to show that the raw data on the efficacy of vaccines and the safety of GM crops won’t matter much to the anti-science wing of the Democratic Party any more than the unanimity of the scientific community regarding climate change has mattered to the Republican Party. But it is the Democratic Party that will likely be more damaged by the growth of the science-denial among its ranks because a fact-fueled arrogance long ago infected the Liberal community and has remained even in the face of growing anti-science sentiment. It is the kind of arrogance that Bill Maher says only exists in religion, a certainty whereby someone believes in something so strongly that there are no numbers or facts that can possibly impact the person’s world view. And while the Liberal confidence regarding its opposition to vaccines and genetically modified food does not have religion at its roots, it may be every bit as resistant to facts as the religion-driven certainty of the Conservatives. And yet, if there was some vaccine that could cure the Democratic Party of its slide toward an unhealthy skepticism of science, how could one get the infected Liberals to take it?