“The Lives Of America’s ‘Others'”: Requires A Reassessment Of American Values And A Realignment With Reality Today
American discourse often splits along enduring fault lines: Republican and Democrat; majority and minority; citizen and foreigner. Yet our newest fault line is more troubling, intractable, and toxic.
Over the last year, America’s politics and social discourse have grown increasingly unsettled as an array of cracks and fissures became evident in the country’s social contract. Across a wide range of issues, Americans today are confronted by the vocal demands or concerns of “Others,” those sitting outside the cultural and political status quo who feel abandoned, ignored, or attacked by the country’s stakeholders.
These Others are not a cohesive group, nor do they necessarily have anything in common with one another, but their presence and the uncomfortable nature of the issues they raise has fractured the general national dialogue.
Prominent Others include the #BlackLivesMatter protestors challenging police brutality in inner cities and the students taking over college campuses to protest unfair racial norms. They include the Planned Parenthood employees targeted with violence and invective for doing their jobs. And they include Syrian refugees, fleeing a vicious, self-destructive war, who seek to build new lives in the U.S.
The shift in focus this year is uncomfortable for everyone who identifies themselves as being on the inside of the status quo, because it is not a matter of finding a legislative solution or developing a public-private partnership. Americans and our elected leaders would prefer to confront and debate generically universal issues such as unemployment, economic competitiveness, homelessness, and access to education, rather than issues defined by differences in identity, skin color and religion.
The schism wrought by the Others requires a reassessment of American values and a realignment with reality today. But except in isolated instances, we are failing to address these issues in a substantive, productive manner, choosing instead to retreat into to the warm security blanket of a prosperous status quo.
Nowhere is this unwillingness to understand or engage with the Other more starkly evident than in the Republican presidential primary, which has become a populist weather vane for blaming and demonizing the full array of “Others” for America’s ills. Complaints once aired exclusively on the Rush Limbaugh Show have now become talking points to denigrate legitimate concerns and grievances.
Yet pointing fingers at Republican politicians and primary voters alone is a partisan copout. Mainstream America–literally encompassing everyone who has succeeded within the current status quo, including President Barack Obama–is struggling to comprehend and keep up with the upending of a tacit agreement to avoid full-blown confrontations over the needs of Others. The historical passivity and tunnel vision perspective of America’s problems explains why we were caught off guard by the intensity of #BlackLivesMatter and related movements, by the continued existence of anti-abortion terrorists, and by the renewed rejection and demonization of an entire religion.
As recently as last year, firmly establishing a group as an Other made it easier to justify ignoring their needs or rejecting their American-ness. We cannot ignore this array of unrelated challenges to our social fabric; but we must recognize that there are no simple, easy solutions to any of these problems–we waited for them to resolve themselves and that didn’t happen.
In a Midwest restaurant last week, an Indian-American friend was derided by a stranger as a terrorist because of his skin color. The bigot who made the comment didn’t know that my friend was a lawyer. Or a military officer. All he knew was that he seemed like one of the Others. The consequences to keeping groups of people on the outside of the status quo extends far beyond the incomplete debate that ensues; it eventually trickles down to affect even those who are established within American society and do not see themselves as Others.
We are reaching a contemporary inflection point where a significant number of Americans or people who dream of becoming Americans no longer feel welcomed or understood in this country. There is a prevalent sense of alienation among many who could be categorized as Other. And it won’t be dealt with by a partisan sound bite, by giving in to fear and hatred, or by sticking our heads in the sand.
Confronting the wants and needs of Others is uncomfortable. It doesn’t necessarily end with full-blown agreement. We cannot expect to achieve racial harmony, social accord, or multicultural interfaith cooperation. But the comfort currently provided by the status quo will prove to be futile and fleeting if too many Americans or aspiring Americans believe the country refuses to look out for their needs and interests.
We don’t need to solve everyone’s problems. Some problems may not be ours to solve. But we do need to accept that the existence of these Others and their concerns is not itself a problem. Their issues should be mainstream issues. If we truly seek, in the words of Donald Trump, to “make America great again,” the lives of Others must once again become the lives of Americans.
By: Brian Wagner, The National Memo, December 2, 2015
“But Is It Too Late?”: The GOP Is Finally Emerging From Trump Denialism
The contours of the outsider-as-favorite Republican primary began to take shape this summer, when the candidates without establishment support, led by Donald Trump, consolidated half of the vote in national polls.
The news for GOP elites has grown consistently worse since then. And only now, as those contours stretch far enough to squeeze the establishment entirely out of contention, are the party faithful emerging from their state of Trump denial. They’re beginning to reckon publicly with the calamity of this campaign, and are grasping to reassert control over the process. The only questions now are whether they’re too late, and whether they can defeat Trumpism without acknowledging and atoning for their complicity in his ascent.
A few months ago, Trump and his fellow outsiders were a clear threat to the party, but it took several of them—Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina—to amass 50 percent support, with Trump contributing the lion’s share.
Today, they eclipse it easily. In some early-state polls, Trump and Ted Cruz alone enjoy the support of more than half of all likely voters, while the outsiders combined enjoy the support of more than two thirds of all respondents.
This presents the GOP with a new nightmare scenario. Earlier in the year, Republicans could take solace in the likelihood that the field of elected officials would winnow and that the party would coalesce around a single alternative to the insurgents as it did in 2008 and 2012. They were sure it would come down to a frontrunner against two or three formidable conservative challengers who were splitting the activist vote among themselves.
That winnowing hasn’t happened. And now, if and when it does, it’s conceivable that the combined forces of the party will only be able to marshal about one-third or less of the overall vote—not enough to guarantee victory even if Trump and Cruz battle it out beyond Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And even that assumes supporters of candidates like Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie don’t defect to Cruz or Trump instead of Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.
Whether motivated by this particular analysis or not, party elites are snapping to attention. John Kasich’s SuperPAC is promising a multi-million-dollar anti-Trump blitz. A more concerted effort, spearheaded by GOP operative Liz Mair, is called Trump Card LLC, and operates on the premise that “unless something dramatic and unconventional is done, Trump will be the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton will become president.”
Prominent surrogates for leading candidates have embraced the notion, first propounded by liberals, that Trump is a “fascist.” But the principals they back won’t go near the term. Some, like Rubio and Cruz, won’t criticize Trump at all, and Cruz in particular is a Trump sycophant—“a big fan.” Which raises the question of whether a party that enables Trump and Trumpism can effectively root out either.
Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush aide who now writes an opinion column for the Washington Post, acknowledged that “Trump has, so far, set the terms of the primary debate and dragged other candidates in the direction of ethnic and religious exclusion. One effect has been the legitimization of even more extreme views—signaling that it is okay to give voice to sentiments and attitudes that, in previous times, people would have been too embarrassed to share in public.”
With the denial fading, Gerson asks, “Is it possible, and morally permissible, for economic and foreign policy conservatives, and for Republicans motivated by their faith, to share a coalition with the advocates of an increasingly raw and repugnant nativism?”
The answer appears to be “yes.” As much as they want Trump vanquished, the problem for the other Republicans in the field is that they’ve all pledged to back the GOP nominee, no matter who wins. John McCain, a man of the party who nevertheless agreed to place Sarah Palin in line for the presidency, says he will support Trump if faced with a choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
That’s not the Breitbart crew talking. It’s the RNC, the entire primary field, and one of the party’s most recent presidential nominees. Which is why when writers like National Review’s Kevin Williamson lay the blame for Trump’s ascent at the feet of conservative movement jesters Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, and shrug that nothing can be done—“as a matter of culture, Trump is—unhappily—right where a great many conservatives are: angry, sputtering, lashing out. Trump may not last; Trumpism will.”—it rings hollow.
As much as they’ve awakened to the threat that Trumpism poses to their party, Republicans and the conservative intelligentsia lack the self-awareness—or perhaps the temerity—to acknowledge that though they now resent it, they’ve been courting it all along.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, November 25, 2015
“Oh No He Didn’t!”: Black Pastors To Trump; Our Meeting Is Not An Endorsement
Several members of a group of prominent African American ministers scheduled to meet with Donald Trump Monday are making clear that they have made no commitments to endorse the real estate magnate. Their public declarations of non-endorsement come after a press release from the Trump campaign announced a coalition of 100 African American religious leaders will appear with the real estate mogul shortly after the meeting to endorse him.
Bishop Clarence McClendon, a Los Angeles-based minister who was invited to the Monday meeting with clergy, posted to Facebook after the Trump campaign announced the coming endorsements.
“I am not officially endorsing ANY candidate and when I do you will NOT need to hear it from pulpitting courtjesters who suffer from intellectual and spiritual myopia,” he wrote.
Bishop Corletta Vaughn, the Senior Pastor of the Holy Spirit Cathedral of Faith in Detroit, posted a message on Facebook after she said her inbox was “blowing up with inquiries” after her name was included on a list of pastors meeting Trump.
“Let me be clear,” she wrote. “I was invited to attend a gathering of clergy to listen to Mr. Trump on Monday November 30. I respectively (Sic.) declined as I do not support nor will endorse Donald Trump.”
“I was asked 2 meet with Mr Trump too but I refused because until he learns how to respect people you can’t represent me thru my endorsement,” Bishop Paul Morton, a prominent pastor in Atlanta tweeted on Friday.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about which ministers will endorse him on Monday.
In fact, of the pastors scheduled to meet with Trump earlier in the day, so far only one, Pastor Darrell Scott, has said he will attend the press conference to endorse Trump.
In an interview with the Daily Beast on Friday, Scott said that he had organized Monday’s meeting between Trump and black clergy, but that his invitation was for them to meet with Trump, not to endorse him.
“Some of these pastors have never even met Trump yet,” Scott said. “They told me, ‘I don’t know if I’m ready to endorse yet. I want to see him and I want hear his heart.’”
Some might not endorse Monday, he said. Some might not endorse at all.
“All of these guys are my friends and they know me,” he said. “ I let them know I am endorsing but that doesn’t mean you are endorsing.”
The Trump camp’s own announcement that 100 black ministers will endorse Trump has been greeted in the black faith community with a combination of confusion and anger, particularly after a week in which Trump has mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability, suggested that a black protester who was kicked and punched at a Trump rally in Alabama “deserved it,” and when Trump himself has suggested Muslims be surveilled at certain mosques.
Recent polls show Trump getting between three and 10 percent support from African Americans. Trump has assured his crowds he will win the black vote.
“The 100 pastors they say are endorsing Donald Trump? I don’t know where those 100 are coming from,” said Rev. Jamal Bryant, a prominent AME pastor based in Baltimore. Bryant, who earlier this year ran for Congress as a Democrat, said he had spoken with a number of the pastors attending the Monday meeting who were taken aback by the Trump announcement about the endorsements. “I don’t know what policy these pastors could mobilize around. I can’t find a strand of any policy he has that the larger black community would respond to.”
Bryant said that he finds Trump’s larger message to minorities to be disturbing and troubling. “It’s a cross between Archie Bunker and reality television,” Bryant said. “It’s frightening and unnerving that the Republicans would be at this point with him as their frontrunner.”
Scott said he expected there would be “a number” of pastors endorsing Trump, but did not know who or how many. He described his own reasons for endorsing Trump as personal, political, and spiritual.
He considers Trump a friend and said that his message resonates with him personally. Scott also said that Trump has never offered him money, as many have suggested, nor would he accept it.
“If God raises up somebody who can speak the word of God to Trump who he will listen to, and God feels I can help provide an avenue for him to have a dialog with African American, then I embrace that position,” Scott said. “If that does happen, it’s God that did it.”
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, November 28, 2015
“Who In GOP Will Finally Stop Trump?”: Do Any Of The Party’s Leaders Have The Stones To Do It?
I’m still not sure it’s 100 percent clear that Donald Trump really understands that he’s a neo-fascist. He may not know enough history to be fully aware of the now-undeniable odor of his rhetoric and campaign. He may think a member of a racial minority being beat up and called a “n***r” by his racial-majority supporters at a rally, and his own joking about it, is just a little incident; something for which there’s no larger historical context. I know he allegedly had the book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed, but I still think he’s doing most of this on instinct rather than with intellectual intention because I doubt he knows enough about fascism for it to be the latter.
But stop and think about this: I just wrote a paragraph musing on whether the leading candidate for president of the United States from one of our two major parties is knowingly fascist. We’re at the point where we’re debating whether the Republican Party frontrunner is or is not objectively a fascist.
His admirers would surely take issue with the term, but I should note that it’s not just liberals using it. A Jeb Bush adviser posted a tweet using the word. Erstwhile presidential candidate Jim Gilmore referred to Trump’s “fascist talk.”
Gilmore’s willingness to say what’s what is admirable, but let’s face it: He’s running 17th in a field of 17. And an aide is an aide, at the end of the day—and to boot, he’s an aide working for a flailing campaign. Who’s really going to listen to them?
And that brings us to the question: Who in the Republican Party is going to step up here? Because this is A Moment for the GOP, make no mistake. It’s a historical moment, and when your leading candidate is joking about his supporters beating people up at rallies and musing about religious ID cards for around (ahem) 6 million of your citizens, it’s time to say something.
Reince Priebus, after the last election, called on his party to be more inclusive. Is this what you had in mind, Reince? How about the other leading candidates? Is this where you want your party to be taken? Karl Rove and others in the professional political class—will they say anything, if not out of moral principle then at least to try to protect their party’s candidates from down-ticket disaster?
And most of all, what about the party’s graybeards and elder statesmen? Looking at you, John McCain. How about a little “Straight Talk” now, about a man who proposes to come into your state, where there are an estimated 300,000 or so unauthorized immigrants, and break up families because one of them’s illegal and the other is not?
I would suspect that this week we’ll start to see a little of this. Marco Rubio might make a statement that’s very carefully worded, as most of his statements are. Lindsey Graham may have it in him to say something interesting and semi-honest. But for the most part, I’d suspect that what we’re going to hear will be the rhetorical equivalent of wallpaper—they’re going to try to cover up the ugly exposed surface and nothing more.
And why would they do more? If they admit that Trump is a fascist, they’re calling one-third of their voters fascist. Will they do that? And this predicament raises the interesting question of how one-third of their voters came to admire a neo-fascist and open racist in the first place. Gee, it can’t have anything to do with the kind of rhetoric and “harmless jokes” about the current president and about the 47 percent that Republican leaders have winked at for seven years, can it?
There’s precedent for the courageous path, should anyone choose to take it. On Feb. 9, 1950, Joe McCarthy gave his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, charging that communists were working in the State Department. The months that followed were very much like these last five months of the Trump ascendancy, as the official party stood mute in the face of the hysteria created by one of its number.
Then in June, one Republican senator said “enough.” Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was a freshman senator, having taken her husband’s seat. She took to the Senate floor and gave a 15-minute speech (PDF), which has gone down in history as her “Declaration of Conscience,” that all of us, starting with leading Republicans, ought to be reading this week. Two choice excerpts:
“As a Republican, I say to my colleagues on this side of the aisle that the Republican Party faces a challenge today that is not unlike the challenge which it faced back in Lincoln’s day. The Republican Party so successfully met that challenge that it emerged from the Civil War as the champion of a united nation—in addition to being a party which unrelentingly fought loose spending and loose programs.”
“The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people… Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
Six of her Republican colleagues signed with her a statement of principles that began: “We are Republicans. But we are Americans first.” So that’s what people can do in the face of extremism, if they want to.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how much history Trump knows. All that matters are his words and the ugly actions his words encourage. I don’t expect him to know history. But we have a right to expect certain others to. It’s time for the GOP to choose.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 24, 2015
“The Perils Of Circus Politics”: Circus Politics May Be Fun To Watch, But It’s Profoundly Dangerous For America And The World
The next president of the United States will confront a virulent jihadist threat, mounting effects of climate change, and an economy becoming ever more unequal.
We’re going to need an especially wise and able leader.
Yet our process for choosing that person is a circus, and several leading candidates are clowns.
How have we come to this?
First, anyone with enough ego and money can now run for president.
This wasn’t always the case. Political parties used to sift through possible candidates and winnow the field.
Now the parties play almost no role. Anyone with some very wealthy friends can set up a Super PAC. According to a recent New York Times investigation, half the money to finance the 2016 election so far has come from just 158 families.
Or if you’re a billionaire, you can finance your own campaign.
And if you’re sufficiently outlandish, outrageous, and outspoken, a lot of your publicity will be free. Since he announced his candidacy last June, Trump hasn’t spent any money at all on television advertising.
Second, candidates can now get away with saying just about anything about their qualifications or personal history, even if it’s a boldface lie.
This wasn’t always the case, either. The media used to scrutinize what candidates told the public about themselves.
A media expose could bring a candidacy to a sudden halt (as it did in 1988 for Gary Hart, who had urged reporters to follow him if they didn’t believe his claims of monogamy).
But when today’s media expose a candidates lies, there seems to be no consequence. Carson’s poll numbers didn’t budge after revelations he had made up his admission to West Point.
The media also used to evaluate candidates’ policy proposals, and those evaluations influenced voters.
Now the media’s judgments are largely shrugged off. Trump says he’d “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, round up all undocumented immigrants in the United States and send them home, and erect a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexican border.
Editors and columnists find these proposals ludicrous but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Fiorina says she’ll stop Planned Parenthood from “harvesting” the brains of fully formed fetuses. She insists she saw an undercover video of the organization about to do so.
The media haven’t found any such video but no one seems to care.
Third and finally, candidates can now use hatred and bigotry to gain support.
Years ago respected opinion leaders stood up to this sort of demagoguery and brought down the bigots.
In the 1950s, the eminent commentator Edward R. Murrow revealed Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy to be a dangerous incendiary, thereby helping put an end to McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.
In the 1960s, religious leaders and university presidents condemned Alabama Governor George C. Wallace and other segregationist zealots – thereby moving the rest of America toward integration, civil rights, and voting rights.
But when today’s presidential candidates say Muslim refugees shouldn’t be allowed into America, no Muslim should ever be president, and undocumented workers from Mexico are murderers, they get away with it.
Paradoxically, at a time when the stakes are especially high for who becomes the next president, we have a free-for-all politics in which anyone can become a candidate, put together as much funding as they need, claim anything about themselves no matter how truthful, advance any proposal no matter how absurd, and get away bigotry without being held accountable.
Why? Americans have stopped trusting the mediating institutions that used to filter and scrutinize potential leaders on behalf of the rest of us.
Political parties are now widely disdained.
Many Americans now consider the “mainstream media” biased.
And no opinion leader any longer commands enough broad-based respect to influence a majority of the public.
A growing number of Americans have become convinced the entire system is rigged – including the major parties, the media, and anyone honored by the establishment.
So now it’s just the candidates and the public, without anything in between.
Which means electoral success depends mainly on showmanship and self-promotion.
Telling the truth and advancing sound policies are less important than trending on social media.
Being reasonable is less useful than gaining attention.
Offering rational argument is less advantageous than racking up ratings.
Such circus politics may be fun to watch, but it’s profoundly dangerous for America and the world.
We might, after all, elect one of the clowns.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, November 17, 2015
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