---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Date: Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 7:22 AM Subject: Re: ans -- addendum to Election Summary To: Kim Cooper <kimc0240@gmail.com>
This was sent to me by one of our readers. It's a good summary of where we are now with respect to the vote in 2018, and what to watch for.
I don't know where she got it.
--Kim
WASHINGTON — In every midterm election since the Civil War, the president's party has lost, on average, 32 seats in the House and two in the Senate.
In next year's battles, Democrats need only 24 seats to flip the House and two to take the Senate.
"History says we're going to lose the majority," said Cory Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a major Republican super PAC. "Our job is defy history."
Rarely has a president alienated so many Americans so quickly as Donald Trump.And after nearly a year of total GOP control in Washington, voters say by double digits they'd rather have the Democrats in charge on Capitol Hill.
Dems hold lead going into 2018; can GOP rebound?8:30
"There's a lot of buyer's remorse out here," said Tim Waters, the political director of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers union. "People have gone out of their way to give these guys a chance, and it just hasn't paid off."
But the GOP majorities are defended not just by incumbency and super PACs, but by structural advantages in both chambers.
"We remain in prime position to defend our majorities in 2018," said Republican National Chairman Ronna McDaniels, in a statement to NBC News.
In the Senate, the battleground offers far more liabilities than opportunities for Democrats because the 33 states in play next year are redder than average.
"We're going to have a headwind, there's no question about that," said Rob Jesmer, the former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "The question is, does the map bail us out?"
And in the House, Democrats will need to win the popular vote by an especially wide margin to overcome GOP gerrymandering and Democrats' own natural geographic handicap. That basically means Democrats can't take the chamber without a landslide.
For instance, in 2012, House Democrats won about 1 million more votes nationwide than Republicans, but that wasn't big enough to put them anywhere near retaking the chamber.
Experts disagree on exactly how big of a landslide Democrats need in the House — estimates range from as little as 53 percent to as much as 58 percent of the national vote — but they agree a narrow majority like 2012's won't cut it.
Meanwhile, Republican voters are typically more reliable than Democrats in non-presidential elections, making it less likely to see the kind of collapse Barack Obama suffered during his two midterm elections in 2010, when his party lost the majority in the House, and in 2014, when they lost the Senate.
"The problem is Trump is still very popular within in the Republican Party, like it or not," said Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio. "It's hard to have a wave if the intensity with the incumbent is high."
Things can and will change. An unexpected and quickly forgotten Ebola scare, and dissatisfaction with the Obama administration's handling of the crisis, dominated the final weeks of the 2014 midterms and gave a boost to Republicans.
The Senate
What to watch:
Anti-establishment vs. establishment GOP primaries
Democrats on defense in states Trump won: Indiana, West Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania
Minnesota (Tina Smith, who will be the successor to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., will be running to fill his term)
Democrats on offense: Nevada, Arizona
Will unexpected states get competitive? Democrats are keeping an eye on Tennessee and Texas
Two countervailing forces — Democratic energy and a GOP dream map — are expected to largely cancel each other out this year and leave the GOP majority intact. But with Republicans defending a thin majority, down to just two seats after Doug Jones' surprise win in Alabama, even small changes could reset the chamber.
"The political structure of some of these states will allow us to save a majority in what will be a very difficult year," said Jesmer, the former top GOP Senate operative.
Only a third of the Senate's 100 seats are up for grabs in any one election, and with this set, Republicans lucked out.
Democrats have to defend 10 seats in states Trump won, including in five where he won by double digits and where he remains popular. That leaves them with just two solid pickup opportunities — in Nevada and Arizona.
Tina Smith, Minnesota's lieutenant governor, who is replacing retiring Sen. Al Franken. Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters file
Nonetheless, there are still a few wildcards that could shake up the stalemate.
Republicans in several key states, including Nevada and Arizona, are locked in divisive primary battles egged on by activists like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, which could produce flawed or far-right nominees.
"If we nominate fringe candidates who show they aren't ready to govern, we're going to sacrifice seats," said Alex Conant, a former adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
Senate Democrats have become adept at quietly sidelining candidates they think are unelectable and clearing the way for favored ones.
Meanwhile, two senators are facing serious health issues, including one, John McCain, R-Ariz., from a competitive state, and another, Thad Cochran, R-Miss., whose vacancy would trigger a potentially nasty GOP primary.
Former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen speaks at a ceremony in Chattanooga on Oct. 29, 2015. Erik Schelzig / AP file
Democrats are also hoping to expand the map and get lucky with more strong candidates like former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who thrilled his party by jumping into the race for an open Senate seat.
"The lesson from Alabama is, if you field the right candidate and the environment is right, that nothing is in the realm of the impossible," said Lynda Tran, a founding partner of the Obama-aligned 270 Strategies.
The House of Representatives
What to watch:
The suburban revolt against Republicans
Democratic primaries
Republican retirements
The magic number for Democrats: 24
With control of the chamber — and the potential impeachment of the president that could come with it — on the line, the House will upstage its big brother in the Senate this time around.
There are so many rosy data points for House Democrats it's hard to know where to begin. Democratic challengers are out-fundraising,out-polling and out-recruiting both their own records and their GOP incumbents, 32 of whom have already decided to retire rather than run for re-election (compared to 16 Democrats).
Polling, wrote analyst Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight, shows "Republicans in worse shape right now than any other majority party at this point in the midterm cycle since at least the 1938 election."
Preparing for a wave, Democrats are putting as many proverbial surfboards as possible in the water, targeting 91 congressional districts (compared to 36 for Republicans).
Patrick Ryan is running for New York's 19th Congressional District. Pat Ryan for Congress
"The Democratic enthusiasm here is unprecedented. I've never seen anything like it," said Pat Ryan, who is running against a Republican incumbent in an upstate New York district that swung from Obama to Trump.
Ryan, a West Point graduate who did two tours in Iraq before starting a small IT business, is indicative of the bumper crop of quality candidates Democrats have managed to recruit this year.
"You are seeing credible candidates in races that we've never been competitive in before," said Charlie Kelly, the executive director of House Majority PAC, Democrats' primary House super PAC.
To defend their majority, Republicans are reaching for a familiar playbook.
"We're going to put Nancy Pelosi on trial and prosecute the case," said Bliss, the GOP super PAC boss whose groups plan to spend over $100 million this cycle. "Every morning at CLF (Congressional Leadership Fund), we take a moment of silence to appreciate Nancy Pelosi and thank her. We hope she never retires."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi holds her weekly news conference on Nov. 30, 2017 in Washington. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Such attacks worked against Jon Ossoff in Georgia's special congressional election this year, but they may also be Republicans' only card to play.
Republicans' don't dispute that there's an enthusiasm gap, but they see a silver lining in the competitive and potentially damaging Democratic primaries across the country.
Jim Hagedorn, a Republican running in a Democratic-held Minnesota district considered one of the GOP's best pickup opportunities, has watched happily as he says the seven candidates vying to be his Democratic opponent trip over themselves to adopt "goofy left" positions on guns and abortion, among other issues.
"The people are not so much in favor of what the Democrat party has transformed into in the past 30 years," Hagedorn said. "It no longer stands for farmers. It no longer stands for union members. They've become very left-wing."
Democrats are likely to make gains in the kinds of educated and affluent suburbs that seem turned off by Trump's brand of Republican politics. Places like Orange County, California, suburban Chicago and northern Virginia are fertile ground for Democrats.
But to get the majority, they also need to win back traditionally Democratic districts of working-class whites in the Midwest and Rust Belt, where Republicans believe they can make gains.
Governors, State Legislatures
What to watch:
Run-up to redistricting
Primaries in both parties
While often overlooked, these races will determine who gets to control the map in the upcoming redistricting process after the 2020 Census for both Congress and state legislatures.
"Redistricting is as important as any presidential election," said Waters of the United Steelworkers, which was heavily involved in Alabama.
The Obama era was dreadful for Democrats in state capitals, leaving them with just 16 out of 50 governorships and down nearly 1,000 fewer state legislative seats. Republicans used the gains from the 2010 wave to set up a decade of policy victories, supported by favorable new maps in key swing states.
But that failure now begets opportunity as the Democrats have a chance to win back territory in friendly states like New Mexico, Illinois, Maryland and Maine.
"Democrats have nowhere to go but up," said Jennifer Duffy, who tracks governor races for the non-partisan Cook Political Report. "Republicans have nowhere to go but down. And their job here is to minimize their losses."
But Democrats will first have to get through a number of potentially painful primaries everywhere from Georgia to Maryland to Ohio to Minnesota and more, which will test the party's fissures on race, gender and ideology.
"These Democratic primaries to me are the showcases of the divisions in the Democratic Party. You've got a lot of candidates trying to be the most progressive," said Duffy.
Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., speaks to NBC News from the Capitol, Wednesday June 14, 2017. NBC News
Republicans have to mind their own primaries, too, as the wave of governors elected in 2010 starts to be forced out by term limits. In Florida, for instance, Trump made a surprise endorsement of conservative Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., instead of supporting front-runner Adam Putnam, who is favored by many Florida Republicans.
The range of possible outcomes is as wide as the map — 36 states will elect governors in 2018 — and Democrats are feeling bullish enough to compete in most of them, including in Southern states like Georgia, South Carolina and Oklahoma.
"We definitely are in a position to do well in Tennessee in 2018," said Karl Dean, the former mayor of Nashville, who is now running as a moderate Democrat for the state's top job.
Meanwhile, Democrats are just 13 seats away from flipping seven closely divided state legislative chambers in November.
Democrats already grabbed 33 GOP seats in 2017. And in dozens of under-the-radar state legislative races, Democrats on average performed about 13 percentage points better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 and 10 points better than Obama did in 2012, according to an analysis by Daily Kos, the liberal website.
If they can maintain those advantages through 2018, it could be enough to make gains in surprising places.
Still, it will be tough for the party to make inroads in places they have ignored in recent years. In Georgia, for instance, Clinton won multiple state legislative districts where Democrats didn't even have a candidate.
Bob Trammell, the new minority leader of the Georgia State House, said he's thrilled by the quality of Democratic candidates and energy he's seeing, but under no illusions about the difficulty of the task ahead in getting people who are used to voting Republican to consider switching sides.
"It takes a lot to get people to switch to Coke," he said, "if Pepsi is what they've been drinking their whole life."
This is from a Christian website, so it has a Christian viewpoint, but if you have ever heard right wing folks say that the government shouldn't be taking care of the poor because the churches should do it, you will want to read this.
Church or Government: Whose Job Is It to Take Care of the Poor?
Whenever you see a left-leaning Christian talking to a conservative about poverty, it turns into a question of who should be taking care of the poor. I found myself in a debate about this the other day, and the gentleman I was talking to fell back on the argument that it was the church's job to take care of the poor, and not the government. But is that really true?
Whose "job" is it to take care of the poor?
My first thought whenever I hear this argument is, "who gave the church this job?" Obviously, the implied answer is God. After all, Jesus does talk a lot about his followers' responsibility for taking care of the downtrodden, poor, and oppressed. If you read his parable about the sheep and the goats, it's easy to walk away with the impression that eternal life rests entirely upon whether or not a person cares for the poor. It's pretty obvious that Jesus intends for the church to be in the business of serving "the least of these."
But does that mean that he's delegated that responsibility away from non-faith communities and governments? That seems a little silly. To tell his followers to be mindful of a particular group doesn't necessarily preclude the rest of humanity's responsibility to each other. If I tell my kids to pick up their trash, I'm not sending a message to every other parent on my block that their kids can litter because my kids will pick it up.
Christ's major point is that he cares about what happens to the those on society's bottom rung. It would be irresponsible for Christians to not encourage everyone to do all that they can to protect them.
What happened to the Christian nation?
In America, there's a lot of talk about being a "Christian nation." Typically the people who are the most concerned with viewing the nation as Christian are the same people who don't believe it's the government's job to take care of the poor. And while I don't believe that a nation can even be Christian, I'm often left scratching my head at what the words "Christian nation" mean to these people.
When I tell them that the word "Christian" isn't an adjective that you can simply tack on to random nouns, they tell me that "Christian nation" means that the country was founded on Christian principles and its laws were based on Judeo-Christian values. But if that's the case, then taking care of the poor would be one the country's primary objectives.
Think about it. When God was running a theocracy out in the desert, welfare was baked into his laws:
Tithes were collected and this was a provision for the Levites, as well as immigrants, widows, and orphans.
Farmers were not to pick their fields clean so that the poor could come through and glean.
Every seven years, creditors had to release their neighbor's debt.
Every 50 years all of the wealth that the rich had amassed was redistributed to its original owners.
Reading the Pentateuch gives you a real understanding of how particular God was about taking care of the poor. It seems irrational to me to say that a country is based on Judeo-Christian values and then argue that spending tax dollars on the helping the poor is "wealth redistribution" or robbery through taxation. I mean, taking what the rich have accumulated and giving back to the original owners every 50 years seems like an actual example of wealth redistribution—and it was sanctioned by God.
I fear that too often Judeo-Christian values are simply as laws that require "Christian" morals in others but are expected to keep themselves away from my belongings.
Christians do have a responsibility to the poor
There's no question that the church has a responsibility to the poor. If Christians gave even 10 percent of what they earned to the church—and it wasn't being squandered on nonsense—we could actually make an enormous impact. But can the church afford to take care of all the poor's needs?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported that the average household income in 2014 was $51,939. Now if the population in 2014 was 318.9 million and 83 percent claim to be Christian, that means there are 264,687,000 Christians in the U.S. Now, let's adjust that for the average family size of around 3.14 people. That leaves us with about 84,295,222 Christian households. If they all gave 10 percent of their $51,939 income, that would come to about $438 billion dollars. That's a lot, right!? Except the government spends upwards of $668 billion a year on 126 different welfare programs— and that doesn't meet all the country's need.
We're not even close, and that's not counting the fact that:
The number of committed Christ followers is dramatically smaller than the number of people claiming to be Christians
On average Christians only give 4 percent of their income to the church
We haven't factored in the finances required to keep church doors open, lights on, and staff paid (not to mention the extravagant spending of a lot of American churches)
Christians are called to feel a sense of responsibility for the poor, but they're not called to live in a fantasy world. The church simply can't take care of all of society's needs, so part of caring for the poor requires that we are to be the conscience of the state. If we want to live in a "Christian nation" we'd spend more time advocating for charitable spending and combat the percentage of our national income that goes to trusting in horses and chariots (or in our case, drones and bombs).
Put your money where your mouth is
When push comes to shove, this discussion frustrates me because I know how little the average Christian gives. As I said earlier, on average, people give about 4 percent of their income to the church. But let's be honest—that average is only that high because a lot of benevolent Christians are giving so much more.
When I'm having a discussion with a Christian who's telling me that it's the church's job to take care of the poor and not the government, I'm always wondering how much they give. There's no way for me to know the truth, but if a Christian truly believe it's the church's job to care for the poor, I would hope that they're giving sacrificially.
I mean, if you're a Christian who wants to argue with me that poverty is the sole responsibility of the church, you'd better be giving your fair share. Otherwise, this is really an argument about protecting your hoard and not really about God's concern.
Whenever you see a left-leaning Christian talking to a conservative about poverty, it turns into a question of who should be taking care of the poor. I found myself in a debate about this the other day, and the gentleman I was talking to fell back on the argument that it was the church's job to take care of the poor, and not the government. But is that really true?
Whose "job" is it to take care of the poor?
My first thought whenever I hear this argument is, "who gave the church this job?" Obviously, the implied answer is God. After all, Jesus does talk a lot about his followers' responsibility for taking care of the downtrodden, poor, and oppressed. If you read his parable about the sheep and the goats, it's easy to walk away with the impression that eternal life rests entirely upon whether or not a person cares for the poor. It's pretty obvious that Jesus intends for the church to be in the business of serving "the least of these."
But does that mean that he's delegated that responsibility away from non-faith communities and governments? That seems a little silly. To tell his followers to be mindful of a particular group doesn't necessarily preclude the rest of humanity's responsibility to each other. If I tell my kids to pick up their trash, I'm not sending a message to every other parent on my block that their kids can litter because my kids will pick it up.
Christ's major point is that he cares about what happens to the those on society's bottom rung. It would be irresponsible for Christians to not encourage everyone to do all that they can to protect them.
What happened to the Christian nation?
In America, there's a lot of talk about being a "Christian nation." Typically the people who are the most concerned with viewing the nation as Christian are the same people who don't believe it's the government's job to take care of the poor. And while I don't believe that a nation can even be Christian, I'm often left scratching my head at what the words "Christian nation" mean to these people.
When I tell them that the word "Christian" isn't an adjective that you can simply tack on to random nouns, they tell me that "Christian nation" means that the country was founded on Christian principles and its laws were based on Judeo-Christian values. But if that's the case, then taking care of the poor would be one the country's primary objectives.
Think about it. When God was running a theocracy out in the desert, welfare was baked into his laws:
Tithes were collected and this was a provision for the Levites, as well as immigrants, widows, and orphans.
Farmers were not to pick their fields clean so that the poor could come through and glean.
Every seven years, creditors had to release their neighbor's debt.
Every 50 years all of the wealth that the rich had amassed was redistributed to its original owners.
Reading the Pentateuch gives you a real understanding of how particular God was about taking care of the poor. It seems irrational to me to say that a country is based on Judeo-Christian values and then argue that spending tax dollars on the helping the poor is "wealth redistribution" or robbery through taxation. I mean, taking what the rich have accumulated and giving back to the original owners every 50 years seems like an actual example of wealth redistribution—and it was sanctioned by God.
I fear that too often Judeo-Christian values are simply as laws that require "Christian" morals in others but are expected to keep themselves away from my belongings.
Christians do have a responsibility to the poor
There's no question that the church has a responsibility to the poor. If Christians gave even 10 percent of what they earned to the church—and it wasn't being squandered on nonsense—we could actually make an enormous impact. But can the church afford to take care of all the poor's needs?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported that the average household income in 2014 was $51,939. Now if the population in 2014 was 318.9 million and 83 percent claim to be Christian, that means there are 264,687,000 Christians in the U.S. Now, let's adjust that for the average family size of around 3.14 people. That leaves us with about 84,295,222 Christian households. If they all gave 10 percent of their $51,939 income, that would come to about $438 billion dollars. That's a lot, right!? Except the government spends upwards of $668 billion a year on 126 different welfare programs— and that doesn't meet all the country's need.
We're not even close, and that's not counting the fact that:
The number of committed Christ followers is dramatically smaller than the number of people claiming to be Christians
On average Christians only give 4 percent of their income to the church
We haven't factored in the finances required to keep church doors open, lights on, and staff paid (not to mention the extravagant spending of a lot of American churches)
Christians are called to feel a sense of responsibility for the poor, but they're not called to live in a fantasy world. The church simply can't take care of all of society's needs, so part of caring for the poor requires that we are to be the conscience of the state. If we want to live in a "Christian nation" we'd spend more time advocating for charitable spending and combat the percentage of our national income that goes to trusting in horses and chariots (or in our case, drones and bombs).
Put your money where your mouth is
When push comes to shove, this discussion frustrates me because I know how little the average Christian gives. As I said earlier, on average, people give about 4 percent of their income to the church. But let's be honest—that average is only that high because a lot of benevolent Christians are giving so much more.
When I'm having a discussion with a Christian who's telling me that it's the church's job to take care of the poor and not the government, I'm always wondering how much they give. There's no way for me to know the truth, but if a Christian truly believe it's the church's job to care for the poor, I would hope that they're giving sacrificially.
I mean, if you're a Christian who wants to argue with me that poverty is the sole responsibility of the church, you'd better be giving your fair share. Otherwise, this is really an argument about protecting your hoard and not really about God's concern.
The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.
Donald Trump and today's Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised "NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs." George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.
The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of "fake news." They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.
"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed," Hannah Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism."
The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is "going to get killed" by a tax bill that actually will save him and his heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit—only there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual evidence, that "this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses."
Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that "public lands will once again be for public use." When environmentalists denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism "a false narrative."
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the internet, says, "[T]hose who've said the internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong. …We have a free internet going forward." And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as "evidence-based" and "science-based" are banned.
"The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior," psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in "The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing." "They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience."
When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton's belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," Voltaire warned.
The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.
"Thus all our dignity consist in thought," wrote Pascal. "It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality."
We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.
This moderately short article hints at a solution. Here's what he says:
"This is not a call for appeasement, only for efficiency. If dwelling on scandal too much can be counterproductive, then the focus must be elsewhere. Again, I believe it should rest on understanding and emphasizing with the grievances that brought Trump to power (wage stagnation, cultural isolation, a depleted countryside, the opioid crisis). Trump's solutions may be imaginary, but the problems are very real indeed. Populism is and has always been the daughter of political despair. Showing concern is the only way to break the rhetorical polarization."
President Trump at the White House in December. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Almost a year later, Donald Trump is still president. Powerful men in entertainment, media and even politics have seen their public lives implode under scandal almost instantly for months now, but Trump holds on.
If you're among the majority of Americans who oppose Trump, you can't understand why. And it's making you furious. I saw the same thing happen in my native Venezuela with the late Hugo Chávez, who ruled as precisely the sort of faux-populist strongman that Trump now loves to praise. Chávez's political career (which only ended with his untimely death) seemed not only immune to scandal, but indeed to profit directly from it. Why? Because scandal is no threat to populism. Scandal sustains populism.
Pundits have been predicting Trump's fall since before he won office. It should have been October 2016, when the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape was released. Or January, when former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. testified in a Senate hearing that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in an attempt to get Trump elected. Or in February, when Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser for his undisclosed communications with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. Or in May, when Trump fired FBI director James B. Comey for failing to halt his investigation into the growing Russian scandal. Or in August, when he failed to plainly criticizewhite supremacists for the Charlottesville protests that led to the death of one counterprotester. Or when we learned early this month that four people with senior roles in the Trump campaign have been indicted in connection with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation. Search for "Trump impeach" on Google, and you will find that every month of 2017 brought about new, different predictions of his imminent political death from all sides of the public spectrum.
Sure, his overall approval rating has dwindled to below 40 percent, but his base — the only people Trump appears to think he needs to answer to — still loves him. In one November poll, only 7 percent of his supporters from last year said they'd vote differently if they could. Which is to say, in the face of all this scandal, Trump is not even close to collapse. He and his supporters are simply grinning back at you.
If you want to fight Trump effectively, you have to learn to think like they do and give up altogether the prospect that scandal will one day undo him.
Washington Post Opinion writers tackle the tax bill, Fox News' cuckoo "coup" and Twitter's latest purge in this episode of "It's Only Thursday."(Zhiyan Zhong/The Washington Post)
To do that, take a step back and analyze the news cycle from outside the daily ups and downs, the tweets, the Fox News defenses. Once we leave behind the moral outrage, the sense of injury, the distinct cadence of each scandalous speech, it is clear that 2017 Trump is not very different from 2016 Trump on his way to power. Everything he's done in the White House is more of the same: An enemy (the unpatriotic minorities, the lying liberal media, anyone not part of his Manichaean vision) is being cartooned, blamed for all of society's evils and offered in sacrifice as a scapegoat to the United States' problems. The purported solution is still simple: Shame them, silence them, build a wall around them. The basic premise that the restoration of the country lies in the destruction of its enemies remains.
The only difference is that Trump, now in power, paints himself as a fighter under siege — even more so than as last year's outsider candidate. The Russia scandal, the occasional betrayal by members of his own party, the condemnation of so many of his acts are all attempts to "stop" him. What you call scandal is only a sign that he is fighting back. Indeed: that he is fightingyou. To his supporters, this is no scandal at all — he's doing exactly what he promised he would do.
It does not matter that he is eroding the nation's democratic institutions. That this combat is dangerous, hypocritical, built on lies. That you, after all, are innocent. His supporters are convinced that you are to blame. Until you can convince them otherwise, they will cheer him on. The name of the game is polarization, and the rookie mistake is to forget you are the enemy.
Normal politicians collapse in the face of scandal because the scandals show them dozing on the job or falling back on their promises. To get elected, they offer a bargain: "Vote for me: I will make you richer/fight for your rights/assure your progress." Scandals reveal they can't do that, and thus, they tumble. However, like all populists, Trump offers a much different deal — "Vote for me: I will destroy your enemies. They are the reason you are not rich/have less rights/America is not great anymore." Scandal is the populist's natural element for the same reason that demolishing buildings makes more noise than constructing them. His supporters didn't vote for silence. They voted for a bang.
So where you see Mueller making progress at getting to the truth of Russian interference last year, Trump supporters see an altogether different scandal. When Trump's aides are indicted, but Hillary Clinton isn't, the probe serves as proof that the system is corrupt. Or when the Muslim travel ban is not enforced, it means the "Deep State" is plotting some sort of coup.
That's how populism works. As long as Trump is still swinging back, scandals help him to polarize the country further. The scorn of his adversaries, in the eyes of his supporters, proves that he's doing exactly what they voted him for to do: dismantling a rigged system that they believe destroyed their hopes.
I know how you feel. You are outraged. What did you ever do to these people to deserve their hate? What can possibly be going on? How can they, for example, make sense of so many former Goldman Sachs men in the Trump Cabinet? Weren't the bankers supposed to be the enemy? Not to mention Russia? All your senses (and your Facebook friends) tell you that, with all this hypocrisy, justice demands that Trump be impeached, indeed it should have happened long ago. For your sake and for his supporters' sake, too. Instead, it continues, and each day that goes by, it makes less sense to you. As Venezuelans used to tell one another: Chávez te tiene loco. Trump is making you crazy. Making you scramble for ways to make this end.
Look, I've been there. And I still don't have all the answers; Chávez is dead, but chavismo lives on. But I do know that before trying to convince Trump supporters that he is a hypocrite who must be impeached, that the news is not actually fake, that your statistical charts and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are in dire need of their attention, before you try to persuade them that they are being racist, or worse, ignorant by believing in Trump, you should ask yourself: Will this help convince them that I am not their enemy? Because what can really win them over is not to prove that you are right. It is to show them you care. Only then will they believe what you say.
This is not a call for appeasement, only for efficiency. If dwelling on scandal too much can be counterproductive, then the focus must be elsewhere. Again, I believe it should rest on understanding and emphasizing with the grievances that brought Trump to power (wage stagnation, cultural isolation, a depleted countryside, the opioid crisis). Trump's solutions may be imaginary, but the problems are very real indeed. Populism is and has always been the daughter of political despair. Showing concern is the only way to break the rhetorical polarization.
Finally, there is indeed a place for your legitimate moral outrage: not the dining table, but the voting booth. Just ask Alabama Democrats.
So as the second year of Trump's administration approaches, stop. Take a deep breath. Let all the hatred circle from afar. Don't let it into your echo chamber. Try to hush it, pause it. Don't let it close your eyes and tear your own society, your own family, apart. Because remember: There's more to life than politics. And scandal does not end in conflagration. It ends in silence.
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