Resist

Time for some additional reading:

From The Atlantic.  Emma Green writing.  The Ideological Reasons Why Democrats Have Neglected Local Politics.

From Vox. Theda Skocpol writing. A guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party, from the ground up.

From Indivisible.com.  This last one is a group effort of former congressional staffers.  Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.

Is the Media Waking to Authoritarianism?

During the campaign Donald Trump often attacked and ridiculed the media.  He would hold rallies and have the media sectioned into pens.  He would hurl insults at them and invite his followers to do so.  The media for some reason decided that this was acceptable and it appears felt that once the election was over that things would change. This week Trump summoned them to meetings.

According to the New York Post the television media were summoned to Trump Tower in New York.
Per an unnamed source who attended the meeting:

“The meeting took place in a big boardroom and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said. 

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful, dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room, calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said. 

“Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate — which was Martha Raddatz, who was also in the room.” 

The stunned reporters tried to get a word in edgewise to discuss access to a Trump administration.

The New York Post reports "NBC’s Deborah Turness, Lester Holt and Chuck Todd; ABC’s James Goldston, George Stephanopoulos, David Muir and Martha Raddatz; CBS’ Norah O’Donnell, John Dickerson, Charlie Rose, Christopher Isham and King; Fox News’ Bill Shine, Jack Abernethy, Jay Wallace and Suzanne Scott; MSNBC’s Phil Griffin, and CNN’s Jeff Zucker and Erin Burnett."  So that's the list of people who received special attention from Trump.  Anyone reading the article can easily see it for what it is, an attempt to intimidate the media and put them into their place.  The media are self appointed elite and Trumpism has steadily attacked elites, so to expect the media to be treated as something special was a stretch.

Given how they were treated on the campaign trail it isn't surprising to me that Trump would seek to bully them post-election. I'm only partly surprised that the media didn't see this coming because the media has a sense of entitlement calling itself the "Fourth Estate."  That they would be taken in by an authoritarian clown and abused is pretty easy to see.  Anyone should have been able to see it coming.  The media didn't because they are too full of themselves and their own self importance.

Margaret Sullivan writing in The Washington Post comments,

Brandon Friedman, a Virginia-based public relations executive, offered his theory on Twitter: “They walked into an ambush, agreed not to talk about it, then Trump went straight to the Post with his version.” 

Then it was just a hop, skip and jump to a big headline on the Drudge Report, with its huge worldwide traffic: “Trump Slams Media Elite, Face to Face.” As Business Insider politics editor Oliver Darcy aptly put it, that is “how a lot of America will see this.” 

The result for the president-elect: He once again was able to use the media as his favorite foil. Having a whipping boy is more important than ever now that the election is over and there is no Democratic opponent to malign at every turn.

Sort of sums it up there.

Christiane Amanpour of CNN wrote a commentary entitled "Journalism faces an 'existential crisis' in Trump era."  Amanpour writes, "I actually hoped that once President-elect, all that that would change, and I still do. But I was chilled when the first tweet after the election was about 'professional protesters incited by the media.'"  She continues, "As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison -- and then who knows?" Amanpour gets it.  She really does.  The question is do her bosses at CNN get it?  I doubt it.  CNN was turned over to false equivalence panel shows a long time ago.  They chase ratings.  Same is true of CBS, ABC and NBC.  They are all in business to gain ratings which translate into ad dollars which means profits.  They area all profit centers for their parent corporations.  At the end of the day will any of them listen to Amanpour and pursue truth to power or will they all fall into false equivalene, normalization and access.

I have no faith in the broadcast media.  Access and ratings are all they care about.

But then Trump had a meeting scheduled with The New York Times.

The New York Times meeting went down entirely different.  The Times refused to make the meeting off the record.  They also asked questions and got answers.  They weren't there to have their egos stroked and they weren't there to supplicate before the altar of Trump.  They were there as reporters.  The New York Times Editorial Board wrote a op-ed and they state that his answers were flexible, but lacking any in depth thought which to me would seem to indicate a total lack of conviction.

The New York Times Editorial Board ends with, "Ronald Reagan used to say that in dealing with the Soviet Union, the right approach was to "trust, but verify." For now, that's the right approach to take with Mr. Trump. Except, regrettably, for the trust part."

You Can Collaborate or You Can Resist

Masha Gessen writing for The New York Review of Books produces Autocracy: Rules for Survival.  

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, TheNew York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.
He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted “Lock her up!” They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.
To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.
Of course, the United States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.
The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.
The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign – when, for example, the candidates argued, in essence, whether Muslim Americans bear collective responsibility for acts of terrorism or can redeem themselves by becoming the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement. Thus was xenophobia further normalized, paving the way for Trump to make good on his promises to track American Muslims and ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.
Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done—or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. Nongovernmental organizations, many of which are reeling at the moment, faced with a transition period in which there is no opening for their input, will grasp at chances to work with the new administration. This will be fruitless—damage cannot be minimized, much less reversed, when mobilization is the goal—but worse, it will be soul-destroying. In an autocracy, politics as the art of the possible is in fact utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.
Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.

The Consequences of President Trump

I do not believe at this time that I can sway minds in this election.  You've made your decision.  You are voting for who you are voting.  Whatever I write here in this space will not change your mind.  If you are voting for Trump, Johnson or Stein then you own the consequences.  This post is about the consequences of those votes because those votes add up to the statement "I'm fine with Donald Trump being President" and if you feel that way, then you own the consequences and I'm going to lay out some of them for you.

Donald Trump is an authoritarian.  I've had arguments with people if he rises to the level of fascism.  He is a fascist.  The oligarchs in America will do quite well with President Trump.  One of the traits of fascism is that the people who support it do well when the government hands out contracts and spending.  And they will do well.  Donald Trump has already called for slashing taxes on the wealthiest Americans and his tax cut plan involves handing 99% of the benefits to the 1% in America.  He is an authoritarian who has said he will sue news sources and he has said he would put Hillary Clinton in jail if he wins.  Think he's bluffing?  When has Donald Trump forgiven a slight?  When has he not sought revenge when it was available.  He may not be a Hitler, but he is certainly a Mussolini or a Franco.

Paul Ryan's budget framework for the Federal Government will pass.  No one thinks the likelihood of the House of Representatives turning Democratic with this election to even be worth mentioning.  It is highly likely that if Donald Trump wins the election that the Republicans will retain a Senate Majority.  That means Paul Ryan can start passing his budget plan and it will be signed into law.  What's in that plan?  Tax cuts for the wealthy and Trump is already on board on that.  Restructure of Medicare devolving authority to the States and pushing the funding to the states in the form or grants.  The other offing for Medicare would be simple privatization at the Federal level.  Either way your parents Medicare is under the axe.  Obamacare would obviously be repealed and no there is no Republican alternative.  Social Security would be back under the threat of privatization.  Trump said he would save it, but didn't say how.  The Republican plan for "saving" Social Security has always been about privatization and it would likely take the form of 401k-type plans funded by payroll deductions in which Wall Street gets to start extracting management fees.  In order to pay for those tax cuts without cutting military spending social programs will have to be cut deep.  Dodd Frank which created a watchdog committee to monitor abuses by financial firms will be repealed.  They will also continue to dismantle regulations on other industries.

Donald Trump has also decided to end Federal support for Global Warming preparation and spending on renewable energy.  The US would pull out of the current global accord on climate change.  The accord likely would collapse.  A few degree world wide warming is going to cause droughts on the land and rising sea levels with coastal areas flooded.  None of that will be immediate, but will take decades.

The Supreme Court has a vacancy.  It will be filled by someone who will support the Republican agenda.  There are at least two more liberally leaning SCOTUS Justices who will retire in the next four to eight years.  The Republican Party and President Trump will hold a majority on the Supreme Court for another twenty years.

We've seen a great deal of work at the state level to suppress the voting blocks that traditionally support Democratic politicians.  That will continue and with the Supreme Court solidly in Republican hands for a generation and the Legislature and Executive branches we will see no attempt at the Federal level to stop these attempts.

These are some of the consequences of allowing Trump to become President.  There is one candidate who is in a position to stop this and she is Hillary Clinton.  None of what I describe above will come to pass while Hillary is President.  So there's your choice and there's your consequences.  Don't say you weren't warned.

Protesting Donald Trump

Activists in Chicago protested a Donald Trump rally and shut it down. I don't entirely understand the point. Yes, you can rally and shut down a Trump event.  But what's the end game?

Donald Trump is running as an authoritarian leader over a group that is afraid of change and also feels that it's been attacked by outsiders.  So protesters are now showing up and providing the evidence that Trump's followers are indeed under attack.  The protesters have shut down what he had to say and to his followers that just proves that his enemies don't want his voice heard.  Trump is under attack in reality the way his followers have always known they are under attack. They aren't allowed to say the things that they believe and now the same people who silence them are trying to silence Trump.

So what' the point of protesting Trump and shutting down his rally? Is it to make a point that his politics are toxic? Because we know that.  Those of us who aren't voting for him know this already. Is it peal off his support?  The support that feels under attack and now has proof that their leader is under attack?

I get that protesting is a form of First Amendment action. I just don't understand the goal in this one. This sort of protest against Donald Trump is just the wrong strategy. You want to stop Trump?  Vote for someone who isn't Donald Trump. My preference is that you vote for a Democrat.  You think Trump is bad?  Trump is vocal.  Cruz scares the piss out of me.  Voting is the strategy to trip Trump. Confrontation isn't the approach that will work.  Trump and his supporters want confrontation and it only serves to firm up their beliefs and support.  Responding to anger with anger is not a solution. You respond to anger with reason.

#NeverTrump

Last week the Republican Establishment went full bore into it's anti-Trump attacks.  They rolled out Mitt Romney in an anti-Trump speech on March 3rd.  The New York Times published the text of the speech and you can read it yourself. Mitt Romney as you remember was the Republican Nominee in 2012 who lost the election to President Barack Obama. After Romney's loss one of the critiques was that he was insufficiently conservative. So who does the establishment roll out, but Mr Establishment himself who was dismissed by many conservatives for failing to be sufficiently orthodox. There was also some discussion and I don't know how serious it was of drafting Mitt for a dark horse run as a last ditch attempt to counter Trump. Somewhere over the last week the hashtag #NeverTrump was spun up on the web.

I don't know who started #NeverTrump, but I really have no clue what that means. A few strategies to get there have been floated.  The one that is currently underway has been to support a candidate and try to get voters to support that person.  As mentioned previously the establishment backed Marco Rubio once Jeb! Bush dropped out. Since then we've had two batches of primaries with Rubio doing poorly in both.  He finished second or third on Super Tuesday and then on Semi-Super Saturday he finished third across the board. Rubio made a big splash in Florida when he ran for Senate and he was a Tea Party darling in those days. Ted Cruz did really well on Semi-Super Saturday coming in first in two caucuses and second in two others. So I'm wondering how much the establishment label is hurting Rubio, but if you were holding out for Rubio to be the #NeverTrump solution you probably need to look elsewhere.

There's Ted Cruz as the #NeverTrump candidate and based on Semi-Super Saturday it may be that some people are voting for him, but the establishment and elites in the Republican Party hate Cruz with a passion. They view him as an opportunist who will do anything to get to advance his career. So from an establishment point of view Cruz like going from the fire into the frying pan; you won't get burned, but you are still cooked. Cruz is however a palatable alternative for authoritarian evangelicals with an anti-establishment bent. The two states Cruz won are Kansas and Maine and I'm not going to put much weight on either of those states with states with much higher populations that do actual primary elections and not caucuses coming up.

Another option for the #NeverTrump faction is the concept of the contested election.  In this strategy you don't have to win the nomination in the primaries, but you just have to make sure that Trump doesn't.  When you get to the convention you won't have a clear winner and then the wheeling and dealing can begin and the establishment can engineer someone else to be the nominee.  There's a huge danger here. Imagine what Trump's followers are going to think. They are angry because they feel that they've been screwed by just about everyone and they are incredibly anti-establishment.  They are going to view this as the establishment stealing the election and invalidating them and their votes. And then who gets the nomination?  The establishment doesn't like Trump, but it also doesn't like Cruz.  If Cruz has the second highest number of delegates what happens?  The establishment is pretty much screwed here.  They could get #NeverTrump, but end up with Cruz or an emasculated Rubio or Kasich and an open civil war in the party.

The last option I can see is that Trump wins and the establishment runs a third party option in the general election. I don't see this happening, but it is an option. This is where Mitt Romney might come back into the picture or maybe Michael Bloomberg.  There's really only a couple people who could fill the role, but basically it's splitting the Republican vote.

My opinion is that the people who say #NeverTrump are either not thinking things to the end of simply throwing a tantrum. #NeverTrump means finding another candidate to beat Trump out right in the primary or splitting the Republican vote in the general election.  If you split the Republican vote in the general election you are giving the election to the Democratic Party.  So win the primary outright or throw the election to Hillary Clinton.  That's really what #NeverTrump means and I bet most people are either not thinking it out or are simply locking onto a catch phrase and lying to themselves.