Is Donald Trump A Demagogue?: He Might Aspire To Be One—But He Doesn’t Have The Chops
Unless you live under a rock, you know Donald Trump is thinking about running for president. His sensational public endeavors—pushing the White House to release President Obama’s long-form birth certificate and, most recently, questioning the authenticity of the president’s academic record—have met with astonishment, outrage, and dismay. A recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover featured a photo of Trump in mid-rant with the one-word headline, “Seriously?” Journalists, commentators, and even Jerry Seinfeld (who recently canceled an appearance at a Trump fundraiser) have taken to calling Trump a demagogue.
In recent decades, this powerful term, traditionally a scalpel for taking apart dangerous leaders, has become blunt and ineffectual through overuse. I’ve been thinking and writing about demagogues for a decade. I’ve been watching with a mix of bemusement and concern as Trump strains to elevate himself into an actual political figure, rather than the ego tornado he’s been for decades. But one of the lessons of history is that, while it’s easy to underestimate demagogues, it’s also easy to overestimate them. For the time being, I’ve concluded that Trump is not a demagogue. He lacks both the common connection and the lawlessness of classic demagogues, whether Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez today or, in the past, figures ranging from Benito Mussolini to George Wallace to Joseph McCarthy. Instead, call him a quasi-demagogue: a political figure with the desire, but not the chops, to manipulate the masses.
Demagogues are part of the natural life cycle of democracy. So much so that the Founding Fathers designed our various checks and balances and circuit-breakers in part from their mortal terror that a predatory mass leader—a demagogue—would convert popular adulation into American tyranny. James Madison, for instance, explained that “provisions against the measures of an interested majority,”such as an independent judiciary, were required to control “the followers of different Demagogues.” This doesn’t mean, however, that demagogues haven’t popped up throughout the country’s history.
During my years studying and watching demagogues, the one lesson that has stuck with me is this: Many politicians could become demagogues if they wanted to. They could choose the gross emotional appeal, the naked ambition, and the cunning blend of vulgarity and artistry that is the true demagogue’s métier. They don’t because most of them are governed by an ethic of shame. Where others blush and quail, the demagogue happily blusters ahead—crossing boundaries, coloring outside lines, toppling walls.
Demagogues often look most ridiculous to the people they’re most uninterested in impressing. When the colorful, autocratic Louisiana Governor Huey Long was sworn into the U.S. Senate in 1931, it was precisely his clownishness that gave him such political amplitude. He prompted a firestorm of controversy when he met a German naval commander paying an official call in a pair of green silk pajamas and a bathrobe. One scholar writes, “[T]he lesson he learned from the incident was less the importance of diplomatic niceties than the value of buffoonery in winning national publicity.” With these techniques, Long soon attracted more attention from the press than his 99 Senatorial colleagues combined. He would have challenged FDR for president in 1936, had he not been assassinated by the son of a political opponent in 1935.
You might think that Trump’s own clownishness puts him in the class of a Huey Long. But let’s take a closer look. As I argued in my book Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies, a true demagogue meets four tests. First, he presents himself as a man of the people, rather than the elites. Second, he strikes a very strong, even overpowering emotional connection with the people. Third, he uses this connection for his own political benefit. Fourth, he threatens or breaks established rules of governance. This fourth test is the most important, distinguishing a demagogue like Huey Long (who routinely used the National Guard to intimidate or brutalize political opponents, for instance) from populists like William Jennings Bryan (who, as rambunctious as he may have been, tended to play by the rules).
For Trump, let’s take the four tests in turn. With his Theater of the Absurd hairdo and his massively knotted silk ties, his Manhattan address and his glitzy brand, Trump is hardly a man of the people. True, he’s employing incautious bluster as a proxy for common appeal. “Authenticity” has become the coin of today’s reality-television realm, and there is a mass appeal to his straight-talkin’ persona—this is why his recent use of the “f bomb” plays to his curious political strengths, even while appalling elites. But for Trump to swap his fancy persona for that of a commoner would require him to blow up the brand he’s spent decades building, a task for which he is probably not constitutionally capable.
Second, Trump does not have the broad emotional appeal to the masses that marks the classic demagogue. Over the last decades, Trump has enjoyed billions of dollars of both paid and earned media exposure. He couldn’t be better-known by the American people. Yet he is consistently polling under 20 percent right now among Republicans and right-leaning independents (a recent CNN poll has him at only 14 percent), giving him a base of well under one in ten among the general voting population. The emotional surge for Trump among the very hard-core Tea Party right should certainly be noted. But it’s more likely this brushfire halts at a particular firebreak: the general American public’s hostility and suspicion to the Tea Partiers.
On the third test, it’s very unclear whether Trump is interested in actual political power, or just in increasing his personal brand and wealth. Even now, we can’t tell whether he will run—and keep running, after the glitz of the initial launch wears off—for president. Even if he gets into the race, will he slog through the hard work of an 18-month campaign, including getting on the ballot in all 50 states, participating in debates, developing policy positions? And, if he drops out, will he really have an interest in putting his shoulder to a real political end? Time will tell, but the initial signs are that this is mostly about Trumpery rather than government.
The most important test is the fourth—that demagogues, unlike populists, bend or break the rules. Trump clearly has no inhibition about lying for political benefit. But real demagogues go much further. Look at Joseph McCarthy, who used his selected issue of anti-communism to demolish people’s personal and professional lives. It’s hard to imagine that Trump really wants to encourage threatening behavior. But, if he ever started to ask his followers to test boundaries of lawfulness, to “challenge authority,” our hackles should quickly rise.
None of this means Trump isn’t worth taking seriously. To the contrary: Where Trump is succeeding in his demagogic appeals, he’s also illuminating shadowy corners of the American public. And we have to take a hard look at how this is happening. Demagogues, like nightshade, have always flourished in dark places of extreme economic or social distress. The 1920s were the last great era of American demagoguery, when Huey Long and the Detroit “radio priest” Father Coughlin rallied millions of terrified Americans against elites. It’s been no surprise that the 2010s, a time of similar distress, have fostered divisive figures from Sarah Palin to Glenn Beck to Trump.
The lesson here is that today’s restless, upset public needs reassurance—and vigorous economic policy that addresses their concerns. But we also need the media to exercise some discretion. In today’s fragmented, 24-7 echo chamber, where 500,000 nightly viewers qualify you as a pundit and one persistent blogger can take over a news cycle, the media has more responsibility for steering the ship of state toward calmer waters. Trump—as quasi-demagogue—is a creation largely of the media. The real conspiracy isn’t Trump’s mania du jour; it’s hundreds of news editors, assignment editors, reporters, and bloggers whom he’s playing like fiddles.
More broadly, though, history shows that the only real antidote to demagogues is an alert, vigilant civic culture. The ancient Athenians, exhausted by a series of vicious demagogues, passed a law exiling anyone who “proposed a measure contrary to democratic principles.” We probably don’t need to go so far, though some watching Trump today doubtless wouldn’t mind moving him to Canada. America, after all, is the land of the civic mores the visiting Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville chronicled and admired. And we almost always eventually turn on demagogues. The stars of Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, and David Duke all rose for a time, but, when they fell, they crashed hard.
We can never be complacent about our constitutionalism, and the Trump phenomenon bears careful watching, lest the little fires he’s clearly capable of starting spread into a larger conflagration. But, in general, Americans have shown they’ve got what it takes to nip even quasi-demagogues in the bud. Take note of Palin and Beck’s recent fates: Under heavy fire from the public for their own excesses (a persecution complex in Palin’s case, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in Beck’s), they both are retreating to the sidelines.
We’re early in Trump’s political career, so I offer these judgments cautiously, but my suspicion is that Trump, too, will burn out, like a hot fuse on a cold rocket. This may already have started. When President Obama took the stage last week in his stunner of a press conference to take on Trump’s birther attacks, he declared, “We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.” A hilarious tweet I received shortly after said that carnival barkers were protesting that the comparison with Trump was giving them a bad name. And, of course, the president easily made Trump look both inane and irrelevant when the coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death interrupted “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
There’s also a final thing Trump himself should remember, before he goes farther down what is likely a dead-end road to demagoguery: History remembers Joseph Welch’s famous question to McCarthy—“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”—as well as it remembers McCarthy himself. Trump has shown he doesn’t take criticism well, sending an angry retort to Vanity Fair and appearing openly thin-skinned after jokes were made at his expense at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He will likely realize soon, if he hasn’t already, that his brand, not to mention his ego, will not sustain the sort of historical thrashing that will inevitably follow any furthering of his demagogic aspirations. Indeed, in the end, The Donald’s self-love might just be his own best friend.
By: Michael Signer, The New Republic, May 7, 2011
Is Obama “American” Enough For The Far Right Now?
Now that President Obama and his national security team have proven their mettle in pursuing and finally eliminating the supreme Islamic terrorist, a question arises: Will the not-insignificant chunk of voters who have rejected the president’s basic legitimacy — expressing skepticism about the circumstances of his birth in the face of conclusive proof that he was born here — be more likely to view Obama as “American” now?
On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” over the weekend, Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson suggested that the birther movement may not be about race. She compared the buzz around the issue to those conspiracy-minded individuals who tied Bill Clinton to the “murder” of Vince Foster in 1993 — an observation that other have made as well. It just seems too easy to describe the ruling passion of those who label President Obama a secret Muslim (or, to recall Mike Huckabee’s infamous slur, a Kenyan revolutionary), as strictly racist. History, though, yields enough clues to suggest that journalists who look for alternative explanations are wrong.
Birtherism has a distinctive history. If you go to the birther.org website, you will find a history lesson along with their creed: “The Birthers: Dedicated to the Rebirth of the Constitutional Republic.” Much like the Tea Partiers, birthers have linked themselves to America’s founding fathers. Their fealty to the Constitution is centered on a single phrase in Article II that requires the president to be a “natural born citizen.”
What does the all-important phrase mean? Birthers interpreting Article II say that “the president must above all else be loyal to this nation.” It is a “self-evident” truth that such loyalty is drawn from nature–and they are quite explicit about what that means: “kinship, our most primitive and natural form of citizenship, from blood”; a nativity which comes “from the soil,” or “place of birth.” It is an ideal of kinship that energizes the birther movement—the transmission of civic identity by descent, through bloodlines, from parents to children.
The website also makes it clear that, for birthers, a natural-born president must have natural-born parents, and that civic identity only exists in a homogeneous population. “If the parents were split in their loyalties,” the website declares, “the child would be split in loyalty to America.” Mixed heritage is thus a liability, for it undermines proper patriotic breeding. Indeed, for the birthers, the breeding question is inextricably linked to a person’s genetic vulnerability.
President Obama was raised by his white, midwestern mother, and her parents. But his actual upbringing matters not a bit to birthers. For most of them, Obama is his father’s son, because kinship is measured though the traditional order of the father’s line. To make their claims stick, birthers have had to erase President Obama’s mother from the fanciful narrative of his African birth. Just as Glenn Beck indelicately declared that Obama had an instinctive hatred of white people, birthers divorced him from his mother’s family. The father he hardly knew remains the dominant force in his life; the president cannot be an American because he is loyal to his patriarchal line, that is, to his father’s race.
Not surprisingly, the birthers have the Constitution all wrong. The delegates who attended the convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were not much concerned with the president’s nativity. In establishing the chief executive’s qualifications, the initial proposal focused on age and duration of residency, and said nothing about his being a “natural born citizen.” The founders made no mention of any requirement that the parents of the president be natural born citizens either. Nor, for that matter, did they require the president to be a Christian. Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president, referred to her daughter-in-law, Louisa Catherine, who married John Quincy Adams, as a “half blood”; by this cultural (though not legalistic) designation she meant that one parent was American, the other English. In sum, the founders could easily have specified that the president have “natural born” parents. But they did not. The reason is obvious. Any talk about kinship and bloodlines bore the taint of aristocracy and royalty, a caste system the founders had rejected during the Revolution.
The convention delegates did, however, vigorously debate the requirements for senators and representatives. Some delegates expressed fears of “foreign attachments”; future vice president Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts indulged in some wild conspiracy mongering when he proposed longer residency requirements for House members to prevent the possibility that foreign governments (he meant the British) might send spies to infiltrate the federal government. He hoped that, in the future, only the native-born would be eligible to serve in the House.
Yet even Gerry could never have imagined the 21st-century birther conspiracy, the most extreme versions of which evoked the “Manchurian Candidate,” a plot so cleverly devised that the institution of the presidency could be subverted by placing a secret Muslim in the White House. In fact, the deepest fear the founders expressed had nothing to do with the president’s qualifications. Instead, it was the military powers with which the Constitution endows him. They worried that as commander-in-chief, he might be bought off by a foreign government and drawn into unnecessary wars at the behest of an ally to whom he felt personally indebted. To counteract their fear, the framers insisted that Congress alone be authorized to declare war.
Despite all their efforts, the birther movement cannot look to the founders for its inspiration. Their ideas grow out of a traditional obsession with the legal status of free blacks and mulattos in the decades before the Civil War. When a firestorm of debate flared over Missouri’s admission to the Union in 1819-1820, northern and southern congressmen tangled and principles yielded to racial prejudices. Missouri’s proposed constitution barred blacks from entering the state who were not the legal property of white men. While northerners argued that free blacks were not “aliens or slaves,” but “free citizens,” opposing politicians and jurists twisted the law to justify the argument that native born free black Americans could be denied the same constitutional protections that native-born white Americans claimed. In the years before the South finally seceded, judges issued decisions in which free blacks were described as “our wards” or “strangers to our Constitutions.” Mississippi’s highest court categorized free U.S. residents of African descent as “alien strangers.”
The question of how to define a natural-born citizen reached the Supreme Court in the notorious Dred Scott case of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (appointed by unapologetic slave-owner Andrew Jackson) argued that free blacks were never contemplated by the founders as part of the national community. Insisting that African Americans were not recognized as citizens in any state, before or after the Revolution, he dismissed all contrary evidence. To Taney, as with the birthers, facts were irrelevant.
Taney’s goal was to restrict citizenship to one of two processes: naturalization or biological inheritance. Blacks had been explicitly excluded from citizenship in the federal Naturalization Act of 1790, he noted. Even more telling, according to constitutional historian James Kettner, Taney wished to ignore “volumes of judicial precedents emphasizing place of birth without regard to ancestry.” Taney thus transformed “natural born citizen” into a racial category.
The birthers have the same idea in mind. Ultimately, they don’t really care what it says on President Obama’s birth certificate, short or long form. For these modern-day Taneyites, Obama’s citizenship is questionable because his civic identity is tainted by descent — he is, unmistakably, the son of an African man. The birthers, like Taney, believe that a natural-born citizen must be possess the right pedigree: he must descend from the same race as the founders, or be born on U.S. soil in the image of the founders. For Taney, the national community was a closed community. Even if they haven’t gone so far as to say so explicitly, for today’s birthers the presidency is an exclusive club.
Their obsession with placing Obama in Africa at the moment of his birth was a means to diminish the influence of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Republican hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee deliberately circulated the strange story that Obama’s politics can be traced, genetically, to the anti-colonial revolutionary rhetoric that once existed in his father’s homeland.
But what about the equally ridiculous claim that Obama’s paternal grandmother testified to her grandson’s birth in Kenya? Why did that idea capture birthers’ imaginations? Here, historical precedent may again shed light. In 1907, a law was passed in the United States stating that any natural-born female who married an alien automatically lost her citizenship. She was expatriated without her consent. Compare that to the law that prevailed from 1855 to 1922, by which any alien woman who married an American citizen immediately became a citizen, bypassing the normal naturalization process.
It was a longstanding tradition in American history that a wife’s civil and political rights came through her husband. Under the law, marriage made husband and wife “one person.” The argument that citizens cannot have two allegiances was applied to wives: her first allegiance was to her husband. She could not vote or exercise political rights, because she had no independent civic identity. Her husband acted as her political proxy, voting in her stead. Recall that women did to receive the right to vote until 1920.
The birthers, too, in recurring to antiquated racist assumptions, assume that President Obama cannot have dual allegiances. Either he is all-American or else his true loyalty resides elsewhere. Birthers have made Obama’s mother a cipher all over again. Her political identity was subsumed into her African husband’s. In effect, he “voted” for her. Because she is deceased, it has been easy for birthers (not to mention the hubristic Donald Trump) to erase the president’s mother from the picture. She was never able to testify. And her World War II hero father presumably had no need to; his service to his country should have spoken volumes.
At the time of the 1907 law, women who married aliens were considered unpatriotic. Until 1967, interracial marriages could still be considered illegal in most southern states. What matters to birthers, subconsciously or otherwise, is the taint of foreign blood, the taint of African blood, Obama, Sr.’s alien status. Stanley Ann Dunham had made an unnatural and unpatriotic choice of a husband.
The racism of the birther movement, then, is not just a wacko conspiracy. Adherents of this new old cause have a large following because of our country’s troubled history. Of course, Americans are by no means the only culture to rationalize discrimination on racial and gender grounds. It happens on every continent, constantly. In the modern age, anxiety over what makes a “real” American is most often tied to wartime, or “Cold War time”; but in this case, it was the “national emergency” of a person becoming president whose physiognomy tapped into vestigial fears.
Finally, there is the newly hatched probe (thank you, once again, Donald) into the president’s educational pedigree. For hardcore birthers, President Obama cannot possibly deserve his office. There must be a catch somewhere. How, akin to “uppity” free blacks past, did he move into elite circles from which black aspirants were traditionally barred? The world has been turned upside down for birthers.
The term “birther” has always sounded idiotic. If they want a more legitimate-sounding name, they should call themselves “descenters.” For what they really seem to be defending is that every child inherits his nationality from his father, just as he inherits his surname: Barack Hussein Obama II instead of Barry Dunham.
In their campaign to unearth the secret life of President Obama, birthers make descent more important than consent — the republican principle that Americans choose their officeholders by popular election. For them, nature trumps consent. According to their logic, natural-born presidents have natural-born American parents. And by nature, they mean the traits passed down from one’s ancestors to his rightful heirs. We’ve seen this logical construction before: it worked for something known as the “divine right of kings.” Loyalty to the sovereign? Didn’t we, at some point, declare national independence in order to move beyond that sort of thinking?
So maybe those who suggest that it’s not just racism that motivates the birthers really are on to something. Maybe it’s something that really is un-American..
By: Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Salon War Room, May 4, 2011
Guns Don’t Kill People: Cowards and Lobbyists Do
Like many people who have come forward to speak or write about the Tucson massacre, I know and adore Gabby Giffords. It is virtually impossible not to adore her. She has a presence and graciousness that light up a room.
That she survived a shot from a semi-automatic at close range is remarkable. Yet the trauma she has endured — psychologically and neurologically — is not one that ever leaves a person untouched. The only question at this point is how much of that radiant light anyone who knows her has seen in her eyes and her smile will return. And for that, we can only hope, pray, and wait for her brain to heal itself.
We know little about the events that led to her shooting, to the deaths of at least six people, and to the massacre that left 14 others injured on the ground. But we do know three things.
The first is that the man witnesses have identified as the shooter, who did everything he could to destroy the brains of his victims, was likely himself the victim of a damaged brain. Even before reporters started to interview his professors and college classmates who were frightened by his erratic behavior in class last fall, the three YouTube videos he left as testimony to his mental state left no doubt that he is delusional and probably in the midst of a psychotic episode (a fancy way of saying that his brain is no longer functioning so that he can tell reality from unreality — even by Tea Party standards).
We know a great deal more about illnesses such as schizophrenia than we knew when our laws on “insanity” evolved. Perhaps most importantly, we now know that the kind of conceptual and linguistic incoherence in Jared Loughner’s YouTube videos is the result of a broken brain — more “madness” than “badness,” although we do not yet know enough about him to know how clear the line between them is, in his case.
Allowing someone who is clearly paranoid, delusional and incoherent — in the midst of a psychotic episode — to have a semi-automatic weapon in his hands is like putting a car in the hands of someone in the midst of an epileptic seizure during rush-hour traffic. Should Loughner turn out to be psychotic and brain-diseased, as appears to be the case, he will be no more genuinely culpable for the acts he has committed, regardless of what the law says, than a person who had his first seizure while driving through a crowded Tucson intersection. Less can be said for our political leaders — a point to which we shall shortly return.
Second, the fact that the shooter is mentally ill does not mean that his mind and brain exist in a vacuum. When Bill O’Reilly and his ilk on Fox began their attacks on “Tiller the Killer” — George Tiller, the physician who provided legal abortions until he was gunned down in his church in the name of Jesus — they fired the first shots in the uncivil war that has just claimed six more lives. To make the claim that the constant propagandizing against Tiller by a television network — including the publicizing of his whereabouts — played no role in the events that led an assassin to choose him as his target would be as psychotic as Loughner’s YouTube diatribes. Surely a deranged killer could have found someone else to target among the over 300 million people who call this country home.
But the fact that the causal link between Fox’s jihad against an American citizen and his ultimate assassination at the hands of a religiously motivated terrorist never became a topic of widespread discussion except on a couple of evening shows on MSNBC, that it prompted no change in the way the right-wing propaganda machine has vilified American citizens, and that it prompted little more than one or two brief written statements from our top elected officials, is a profound indictment of both our media and our political system.
And now we have seen the same thing play out again.
The quasi-delusional rantings of media personalities such as Glenn Beck and the cognitively impaired candidates and elected officials we have come to accept as part of the American political landscape in the 21st century, like the hate-mongering of Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, are part of the political and psychological air a psychotic shooter like Jared Loughner breathes.
Did prominent personalities like Brewer (or Sarah Palin, who literally put Gabby Giffords in her “crosshairs”) cause this attack? No, any more than Bill O’Reilly and Rupert Murdoch caused the jihadist attack on a physician who had violated a terrorist’s religious sensibilities — or, for that matter, any more than jihadist Web sites that publicize the “blasphemies” perpetrated by the United States cause alienated young men to become suicide bombers against us or our allies.
Did Beck, Brewer and crew contribute to the conditions that created the latest assassinations, irrespective of the prayers and pieties they and Republican politicians like John Boehner are now lavishing on the people they have encouraged their fellow citizens to hate (those with their “job-killing” and “baby-killing” agendas — which they apparently pursue when they aren’t setting up “death panels”)? Try reading alleged shooter Loughner’s rants about government, the terrorists who have seized control over it, and what they are doing to our Constitution and argue that he was not breathing in Foxified fumes and Brewer’s bigotry.
Third, although the political context was different, we have seen this movie before in yet another sense. Columbine, Virginia Tech, countless shootings in schools and churches — what do they share in common? Deafening silence from those who call themselves our leaders.
Since the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in that terrible summer of 1968, over a million Americans have died at the wrong end of a firearm.
This was not the first time Gabby Giffords — or countless other lawmakers, candidates and elected officials, including President Obama — was confronted at a campaign rally or town-hall meeting by gun-toting bullies, whose primary goal — at least until this time — was intimidation. That bringing a weapon (in Arizona, concealed) within that proximity to an elected official could be legal in the world’s longest-lasting democracy is both surreal and shameful — and now it threatens that democracy.
Whether they are owned and operated by the NRA, too cowardly to take on the NRA for fear of being defeated in the next election, or misled into believing that the average American is as psychotic as the man who opened fire in Tucson (i.e., that most Americans can’t tell the difference between hunting deer and hunting people, or between a hunting rifle and a semi-automatic), our leaders have either faithfully served the interest of Smith and Wesson and the gun lobby or failed to oppose them. The result is that the country has shifted to the right on gun safety, which is what naturally happens when the right is vocal and the left is frightened and silent.
But even today, if you simply speak to ordinary Americans in plain English, they do not believe in the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. Americans are, if nothing else, strong believers in common sense, and the same people who willingly walk through metal detectors at airports and other settings understand the importance of metal detectors for protecting their elected officials — just as they support them for protecting their kids if there’s any chance they could be harmed at school.
Consider a message colleagues and I tested with two large national samples of registered voters, which beat a tough conservative anti-regulation message on guns by 20 points with both the general electorate and swing voters:
Every law-abiding citizen has the right to bear arms to hunt and protect his family. But that right doesn’t extend to criminals, terrorists, and the dangerously mentally ill… We need to use some common sense in deciding what kind of weapons we want on the streets. I don’t know any hunters who keep stockpiles of munitions in their basements, and I don’t think the Founding Fathers had AK-47s in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment.
Another message beat the conservative message by 40 points with Independent voters, by beginning with a simple statement of principle with which voters across the political spectrum agree if they simply hear it enunciated:
My view on guns reflects one simple principle: that our gun laws should guarantee the rights and freedoms of all law-abiding Americans. That’s why I stand with the majority who believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns to hunt and protect their families. And that’s why I also stand with the majority who believe they have the right to send their kids to school in the morning and have them come home safely.
Or consider yet another message, which began as follows:
“Every law-abiding American has the right to own a gun to hunt and protect his family… But you don’t need an assault weapon to hunt deer, and if you do, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a gun.”
Americans get it, if you just speak to them like adults.
None of these messages is a “hard left” message on guns — a message that might better fit the sensibilities of (and be more appropriate for) New York City, Connecticut, Massachusetts, or much of the West Coast. But these are messages that win all over the heartland — and even win in some unlikely places, like the Deep South and the West — because they aren’t about taking away the rights of law-abiding gun owners. They are about protecting the rights of law-abiding citizens, whether they own a gun or not.
We used to be the arsenal of democracy. With the events of this weekend, our arsenal has been turned against our democracy.
If our elected officials are in the pockets of those who would allow the shooting of their colleagues with semi-automatic weapons with no legitimate civilian uses — while mouthing platitudes about their concern for their colleagues — it’s time to call their bluff.
Guns don’t kill people. Cowards and lobbyists do.
By: Drew Westen, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University-AlterNet, January 10, 2011
Climate of Hate: Who Could Not Have Seen This Coming?
When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?
Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.
Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.
Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.
And there’s not much question what has changed. As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.
It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.
The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.
And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.
Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.
And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.
Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.
But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”
So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?
If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning.
By: Paul Krugman: Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times-January 10,2011
“We the People” are Bald-Faced Hypocrites
Let me get this straight…. First, we want to reduce the size, scope and power of government at all levels, and on all issues, AND oppose increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level AND for any purpose. When asked, “What is the role of government”, we respond “No role”. We say that government that governs least, governs best. We want the government to keep its hands off our Medicare and Medicaid. We want the federal government to keep its boot heels off the throats of Big Banks and Wall Street. We say “Drill Baby Drill”. We say that our freedom and liberty are seriously threatened or has even been abolished in some cases. We want everything under the sun but we don’t want to pay for anything. What raise my taxes? Forget it. We feel that if only I can portray myself as being more angry or can just shout louder than the other guy, either through distortion or just outright lying, no matter the circumstance, I win. For those in the media, you circle the wagons whenever one of your colleagues is questioned or chastised when they are called out for endorsing or propagating half truths or capitalizing on individual’s personal pains, sufferings and tragedies.
Now there is a massive oil leak corrupting the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. This leak is a catastrophic event that will cause devastating results for generations to come. And now, you say that the government’s response to this Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill has been too slow. Others say that the response has been completely non-existent. The federal government has not solved this problem. All I hear now is “I want the government to end my nightmare”. All of a sudden, we want “Big Government”, that same government that many of you have been hell-bent on abolishing. I have heard criticism from Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, James Carville and Donna Brazille on the Left, and Billy Nungesser, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour to wackoo’s Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh on the Right. Many of these criticisms have been outright lies and distortions. I say “We the People” are bald-faced hypocrites.
For anyone who has an interest, fact based information is readily available and can easily be obtained. Any media outlet worth its weight, could have and should have set the record straight on the time-line of the government’s response to this disaster. No. Instead, none of these people really want to recognize the fact that a major disaster has occurred and all forces must be brought to bear to resolve the problem. Some have suggested that the government kick BP aside and take over all aspects of the operation. So much for “freedom” from the government…. and exactly what do you think that would accomplish? Someone even suggested that we just send divers down and plug the hole. This one has to be my favorite. Unless you are a Sperm of Bluenose whale, good luck with that stupid idea. For anyone to suggest that the federal government, our federal government, is not taking this catastrophe seriously or is not bringing all forces to bear to completely resolve and recover from this event is terribly misguided and obviously has their own agenda.
Until the leak is stopped, we are all in this oil-slicked boat together. Posturing and playing politics is not helping nor is it going to help….not one iota. So for all of you, who still believe that you can stake out a long term position for furthering your political agenda, padding your wallet or trying to increase your ratings, strap on your life-vest and jump out of the boat. Once you start gulping oil and gasping for breath, it’s going to be very difficult and quite slippery trying to get back in, if you survive that long. I’m betting that you won’t make it. When it comes to having “freedom” without government or even “freedom” from government, small or large, be careful what you wish for….you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
In our efforts to develop solutions, we should strive not to become part of the problem. If nothing else, we should realize that we are not in a position today or in the foreseeable future to continue to pursue off-shore oil drilling.
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