Hope Amid the Ruins

        Along with the violence wrought on so many—including planet Earth—by the Trump Administration, the last four years have brought us one bitter irony after another. A recent one was the giddy celebration over the passing of 2020. Bye bye 2020. Good riddance. See you in the rear-view mirror. The Internet vibrated with farewell memes. Then came the precursor to and aftermath of January 6, 2021. Hello 2021: The death-throes of the Trump administration, and the eruption of a white supremacist insurrection—the ugly, terrifying reality of what many Americans thought was a fringe element, escorted into prime time by an increasingly desperate and deranged president.

        So much has been written about the last four years that there’s not much I can add, except, perhaps, a few observations.

        The insurrection of January 6 has rightly been condemned as an assault on democracy, an appalling event where the Capital was defiled and people lost their lives. But we need to remember that there have been assaults on our democracy from the beginning, racist policies and practices in every sphere of American life, systemic and sanctioned, from housing to healthcare to voting, and these assaults are intimately connected with economic inequality, which has been widening over the last several decades. A whole lot of people in the United States have been living with—and their ancestors have lived with—threats to their dignity and well-being more pernicious and long-lasting than the tumultuous desecration of the Capital, which, shameful as it was, could be cleaned up and at least some of the perpetrators held to account.

        My second observation concerns “the real Donald Trump,” if I can borrow his (former) Twitter handle. As Donald Trump’s behavior became more erratic and bizarre—culminating in his Big Lie about the 2020 election and the inevitable result on January 6, 2021—increasing numbers of commentators, and finally the deplorable Mitch McConnell himself, condemned him and his paranoid fantasies. But every quality Trump displayed through his four years in office was evident during the 2016 campaign: Certainly the racism and xenophobia and sneering disregard for anyone in the path of his ascendence, but, too, the attack on foundational institutions and any means of verification other than his own word. One phrase I’ve heard as Trump has become more delusional is that he lives in an alternate reality (remember Kellyanne Conway’s “alternate facts”?). Why this surprises anyone is a mystery to me, for since his early days he has been fabricating an alternate reality through shady deals, lawsuits, non-disclosure agreements, bankruptcies, and lying, lying, lying. His genius, if I can sully that word for a moment, was realizing the role media could play in the creation of this alternate reality in which he was the starring character, the dazzling centerpiece.

        In an interview a few years ago, legendary editor Tina Brown was reflecting back to her first encounters with a young, brash Donald Trump in the late-1980s. She was at the helm of Vanity Fair and Trump had recently published his ghostwritten The Art of the Deal. Ms. Brown wrote a diary entry noting that Trump had “a crassness I like. There is something authentic about Trump’s bullshit.” Reading The Art of the Deal “you’re nose-to-nose for four hours with an entertaining con man and I suspect the American public will like nothing better.”  Brown would eventually sour on Trump, but with the help of the New York press, he was already in full gear of self-creation.

        It’s chilling to read Ms. Brown’s entry now, for it reflects some of the intersecting obsessions in our popular culture that were hospitable to Trump and his brand of American authoritarianism: Our fascination with celebrity and the grasping for it, with glamour, fading glamour, and bling, and with spectacle—all amped-up and accelerated by the Internet. I tried to get at some of this in earlier posts (“Donald Trump, Celebrity Culture, and the White Working Class” 11/30/16 and “The Tawdry President: Donald Trump, the Public Library, and COVID-19” 4/21/20), the first post written three weeks after the 2016 election, concluding with: “Welcome to electoral politics in the Age of the Kardashians.” We know now that a white supremacist proto-fascism would also be welcome. A thought for the next generation of journalists, editors, and publishers: The next time you encounter someone who reeks of bullshit and clawing desperation, close your laptop and run the other way.

 

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        I’m writing this post on January 22, two days after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as the 46th President and Vice President of the United States. What lies before them is daunting beyond belief. Our country is severely damaged, both by the long-standing violations of human dignity I mentioned earlier and because tens of millions of President Biden’s fellow citizens do not believe he was legitimately elected. I wish I could believe in the healing so many are calling for. Or unity. Or appeals to people’s “better angels.” I can’t. I just don’t see it. But I also want to commit to possibility, to hope, for without it, we descend into a despair that leaves us powerless. So here, for what it’s worth, are some sources of my hope.

        It occasionally happens that history creates the conditions for a person to rise to the moment, to display unexpected character and talent. I hope that this flawed man Joe Biden who has been on the wrong side of consequential issues and events—but on the right side of others—becomes one of those people, that this is his moment, his and Vice President Harris’, and the cadre of competent people they are choosing. The early signs are good: A flurry of executive orders on COVID, climate change and the environment, immigration, the Census, and more—and an ambitious immigration bill sent to Congress. This is hopeful.

        The Republican Party is in the midst of a monumental internal struggle that as elections loom will yield a colossal bloodletting. I hope that in the midst of the melee, GOP leaders see it in their own political best interest (there is no appealing to “better angels” here) to not stonewall the entire Biden/Harris agenda. Again, the historical moment with its COVID misery and catastrophic economic effects might force at least an occasional political alignment. One can hope.

        Hope personified: Amanda Gorman.

        My strongest source of hope is in the extraordinary success at voter registration and follow-up efforts to get out the vote. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would likely not be in office without this work, and certainly Georgia would not have elected two Democratic senators. This is long-haul, slow, grinding, unglamorous, tedious labor. A decade-long campaign in one region, one community is not unusual. Do whatever you can with your time or your money to support these efforts. Street by street, door by door, they create hope.

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Politics, Disillusionment, and Despair

This blog will not make me many friends. It is addressed to those who are so disillusioned by the 2020 election—perhaps intensified by the first Trump-Biden debate—that they might sit out this November or not cast a vote for president. And this blog is addressed to those who see no purpose whatsoever in electoral politics, for they witness no change in their lives or in their neighbors’ lives, regardless of what politician or political party is in power.

It’s not my intention here to debate these positions. I simply want to make an observation that many others have made but that is worth repeating now in a time of profound disillusionment when so much is at stake, from health care to the health of the planet.

Disillusionment and despair and all their first cousins — cynicism, ­­­disengagement, withdrawal — might be seen as a rejection of politics but in fact are freighted with political significance and are used by those in power as much as raw force to keep people subjugated and to block social change.

Fostering disillusionment with the political process has been a key strategy in Mitch McConnell’s nihilistic playbook for some time — at least since 2010 when he stated his paramount goal to make Barack Obama a one-term president. The result has been a level of legislative stonewalling and gridlock that yields an 80% disapproval rating of Congress. People throw up their hands in disgust and condemn all politicians as culpable and ineffectual. It is on this rubble of governance that McConnell and Company exercise their power, destroying the chamber they live in to control it, passing tax cuts that benefit the wealthy and loading the courts with strongly conservative judges. The stage bereft of hope and principle is set for a demagogic anti-politician.

 Enter the tawdry, braying Donald Trump who greatly outdoes McConnell in raw spectacle as we recently saw during the debate, sabotaging the event and sullying both his opponent and the moderator. Over the past four years, Trump in totalitarian master-strokes has delegitimized not only Congress, but also the press, regulatory agencies like The Food and Drug Administration, scientific bodies like The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the courts, the post office, even voting itself. God knows, these institutions have over their history violated their very purpose and principles. But they also have a history of visionaries working within them to make them more humane and truly democratic. We just lost two such people in Justice Ginsburg and Congressman Lewis. 

Social change from within institutions or outside of them does not emerge from disillusionment or despair, but from directed anger at injustice, from a sense that change is possible even against great odds, from hope. “Hope… is not calm or static,” writes essayist Erin Aubry Kaplan. “Hope is vigilance. It is also fury.” Hope is the organized fury of the march and demonstration and the quiet fury of the ballot. 

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Some Modest Advice to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from Someone Who Has Never Run a Political Campaign … But Is Apprehensive About This One

An article in the Boston Globe written right after the end of the Republican National Convention captures the anxiety a lot of us feel who desperately want Donald Trump voted out of office. Even though Biden leads in the polls, we are “wary of a 2016 repeat.” “Trump looms like some horror movie villain,” writes journalist Jim Puzzanghera, “Who just keeps coming no matter how much is thrown at him.”

This wariness is not simply a case of free-floating political anxiety, for Trump and Company are doing everything they can to suppress the vote by crippling the postal service and spreading lies and sparking fears about voting by mail. And in some states led by Republican governors or legislators there are a host of efforts to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters and to make voting difficult.

The further concern I have is the enthusiasm gap between Trump’s base and a wide swath of likely Democratic voters. Let my offer two recent spots on NPR that reflect the extremes of this gap. What I’m doing is selective and anecdotal, I realize, but though not systematic, I think the two spots offer probes into some of the beliefs and emotions running through the 2020 presidential campaign – and voting, as endless studies demonstrate, is a highly emotional phenomenon.

The first NPR spot is an interview with three voters who are considering or are committed to backing Joe Biden. The interviewer, Mary Louise Kelly, doesn’t say how the three were selected, but does note that “they are different ages in different parts of the country, all voters of color.” Carl Day is a 35 year old African American pastor in Philadelphia (a Democratic city in a crucial swing state); Parul Kumar is a 20 year old Indian American woman in Chicago; and Adrienne Smith Walker is in Atlanta and identifies herself as “a Gen X Black woman in her 40’s.” Asked by Kelly to rate their enthusiasm for Biden on a scale of 1 to 10, their answers range from 0 to 3. The selection of Kamala Harris as a running mate did not positively affect Pastor Day’s or Ms. Kumar’s opinion, seeing the selection as a “surface level” or “pandering” move. When pressed by Kelly as to whether they would vote for Biden come November, Ms. Smith Walker was firm in her commitment to vote for him but because “if Trump wins, our democracy will fail.” Both Pastor Day and Ms. Kumar in different ways express pessimism about national-level politics making a different in the lives of common people and rather see either local politics or activism as the path to social justice. They both leave open the possibility of voting for Biden, but, as Ms. Kumar puts it, want to demand more of him first. 

The second spot is a report on Trump’s rally on September 3 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a city of about 8,000 in a deep red Trump county. According to the reporter, Scott Detrow, who has been covering Trump’s rallies since 2016, “this crowd seemed even more intense about the president…than what I saw four years ago.” Detrow interviews three attendees, a dairy farmer and his wife and an aerobics instructor. Though the farmer has taken a financial hit because of Trump’s trade polities and the aerobics instructor has been unemployed since COVID hit Western Pennsylvania, they are gushing about the president – the aerobics instructor is close to ecstatic. Pennsylvania matters hugely in this election, and these people will vote for Trump if they have to crawl over broken glass to do it.

As with all elections, turnout will be key on November 3, 2020. By all accounts, Trump’s base has not grown, but it remains solid and highly motivated. Democrats will need to execute a first-class get-out-the-vote effort – in a pandemic. And in the face of multi-pronged voter suppression.

Trump will continue to use his office in every way possible to campaign and will continue to ignore public health restrictions to hold the rallies that allow him to create himself anew and fire up his base.

Biden and Harris are trying to fashion another approach. In the last few days we’ve seen several promising examples of that approach, and I am heartened by them. And just-released huge fundraising numbers for August instill hope. In the spirit of what I see emerging and with all due respect to people who know way more than I do about this business, let me offer some suggestions to the Democratic candidates.

***

Dear Vice President Biden and Senator Harris:

You have to be more than the Not-Trump. You have a number of proposals that will make people’s lives better. State them and explain them in brief, memorable language.

Please do not just refer us to your website. The digital divide is as wide as ever. And even if it weren’t, we don’t want to go to yet another glowing screen – especially now. We want to hear from you. And often. 

Yes, Trump is a “threat to the soul of the nation.” But for many people that threat is an abstraction. They face more immediate threats daily, from housing and food insecurity, to limited educational opportunity and medical care, to physical danger because of the color of their skin, or their place of worship, or who they love. Tell them how you will help them.

Be the Educators-in-Chief about Trump’s policies. He has lied so often, and created such a haze of chaos and falsehood, that many people don’t realize how directly they are being harmed by this man. Start with health care.

Beware of the technocratic enchantments of the digital. You have to get out on the road from now to November 3, in whatever ways are safe. You have started to do this with visits to Pittsburgh, Kenosha, and Milwaukee. Please continue to hit the campaign trail, separately and together. Don’t follow Trump. Get out ahead of him. Out do him. You won’t be holding reckless rallies in Trump fashion, but press conferences and ceremonial events. Even if you are only videotaping campaign ads, you are doing it in Phoenix, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Manchester. It matters to people that you are setting foot on their soil.

While in these cities, shine a light on local community groups doing laudable work. You did this during your visit to Kenosha. I received an email asking for donations to the Social Development Foundation and United Migrant Opportunity Services, without a dollar going to your campaign. This is a worthwhile and laudable thing to do on its own, and it might demonstrate to younger (and not-so-young) progressive voters who are disenchanted with your candidacy that your talk about social justice is not just political-rhetoric-as-usual but is connected to vulnerable peoples’ local struggles.

You are both skilled retail politicians, a talent constrained by COVID, because, unlike Trump, you believe in the basics of public health. There is a great challenge before you, and I hope all the bright campaign people around you are focused on it: How to integrate the potency of human encounters on the campaign trail with the communication possibilities of virtual technology. Unfortunately, you have to solve this problem while the campaign is in high gear, steer the boat while building it. But if you can do it, you will make history – and reclaim what remains of our democracy.

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To readers: If any of the above has merit in your eyes, would you please email or Tweet a suggestion or two to the Biden/Harris campaign?

I want to acknowledge a long, rich conversation with two of UCLA’s wonderful graduate students, Earl Edwards and Elianny Edwards, that helped me think through the issues in this blog. Of course, they cannot be faulted for any lapses in good sense, which are entirely my own.

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