As a vindictive sociopath prepares to move into the White House, it's perhaps important to consider ways to protect your private communications and information about your whereabouts, especially around demonstrations and direct action protests. As a citizen of a country with the largest and most invasive surveillance apparatus in the world, you should think about how you use your mobile device, as it is capable of being used to monitor your most intimate communications and browsing habits.
Here is a very brief primer on how to make your text messages, browsing habits, and computer hardware more private. I would encourage you to dig deeper by visiting the Electronic Frontier Federation's Surveillance Self Defense site: https://ssd.eff.org/en
PRIVATE EMAIL:
We highly recommend Proton Mail for a free private and encrypted email account. Proton Mail is based in Switzerland and is therefore out of the legal reach of American spy agencies. Emails sent between Proton Mail users are encrypted end-to-end. You can go to https://www.protonmail.com to get a free email address.
PRIVATE TEXTING:
Signal is an encrypted SMS (ie, phone texting) service that has end-to-end encryption. Your messages are not saved on your cell phone company's server or on Open Whisper Systems' servers, so they cannot be subpoenaed or searched unless someone has access to your phone. It is available for both Android and iPhone, and is available in the Google Play store and the Apple App Store. Signal also allows for encrypted voice calls if both users have installed the application. https://whispersystems.org/
PRIVATE WEB BROWSING:
Tor is free web browser that helps you defend against anyone trying to track what sites you visit or monitor your communications online. Tor users connect to the internet through a series of virtual tunnels, thus allowing you to share information over public networks without compromising your privacy. There is also a mobile version available. Visit Tor here: https://www.torproject.org
We suggest using Tor alongside some sort of Virtual Private Network (or VPN) connection. We suggest either NordVPN (https://nordvpn.com/) or ExpressVPN (https://www.expressvpn.com/) as they are, like ProtonMail, based offshore and are therefore outside US Spy Agencies' jurisdiction.
BEST PRACTICES:
1. Encrypt the hard drive on your computer using the right protocol for your operating system. If your machine is stolen your data will be protected.
2. Do not take your mobile phone to protests or direct actions. Sophisticated surveillance devices now exist that can track your movements and communications via your mobile phone.
3. Use a PIN to restrict access to your mobile phone. If you'd like to go a step further, consider using your phone's ability to encrypt and password protect your data.
4. Use a password manager (like KeePass or LastPass) to generate and remember strong passwords. With a password manager, you only have to keep track of one password.
5. Disable location services on your phone until they are actually needed. This also extends your battery life, so that's a bonus.
5. Be vigilant for acts of racist, sexist, or other types of aggression against vulnerable people. Take a stand. Remember that one day you will likely be asked what you did when Trump came to power. Act with honor.
After one of the most divisive presidential elections in American history, many of us may be anxious about dinner-table dialogue with family and friends this Thanksgiving. There is no denying that the way we communicate about politics has fundamentally changed with the proliferation of technology and social media. Twitter bots, fake news and echo chambers are just a few of the highlights from this election season. Much of how we’re conversing online can’t – and shouldn’t – be replicated around the family table. We are getting out of practice at conducting meaningful, respectful conversation.
There’s not a quick fix. We need more empathic communication – the slow, deep (inter)personal discourse that can nurture identity and build and strengthen relationships. Yet contemporary communication platforms can make it harder to build empathy with conversational partners. Even the phrase “conversational partners” seems unfitting in the world of 140-character limits, followers, likes and shares. In many ways, our devices help us talk at (@?) instead of with one another.
Literally meaning “in-feeling,” empathy is a process of internalizing another person’s perspective. Empathy-building is unselfish; you suspend your own sensibilities and try to fully imagine and embrace those of someone else. You can gain empathy by learning about other cultures from different media, by experiencing what others have gone through personally, or by having deep conversations with others.
My research into cross-cultural communications has taught me that empathy is not only the key to feeling connected – “I understand you” – but also the foundation for changing our narratives about one another – “now I see we are not so different.” That’s an important point to remember after such a difficult political experience. Building empathy requires communication, specifically talking to one another. But, not just any talking will suffice – especially not the type of talking promoted by today’s highly popular communication technologies.
For an increasing number of us, feeling connected – to family or otherwise – is becoming more difficult. A review of empathy research from the past 30 years revealed that college-age Americans were less able to imagine others’ perspectives and feel sympathy for their plight. The trend has been accelerating since 2000. At the same time, the number of Americans who report that there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled, to roughly 25 percent of the population, between 1985 and 2005.
Technology may be part of the problem, making it harder for us to build and maintain strong relationships. It may be breeding increasing individualism, self-importance, loneliness, depression. The theories behind this link vary. In “Generation Me,” psychologist Jean Twenge argues that cellphone ownership – once a luxury for the elite – promotes illusions of grandeur. In “The Lonely American,” two psychiatry professors suggest that communication technology encourages us to remain physically isolated by providing remote connectivity. In “Alone Together,” social scientist Sherry Turkle offers that we are drawn to our devices more than to those in our presence. In “The App Generation,” information scholars Howard Gardner and Katie Davis claim that communication apps promote transactional rather than intimate exchanges.
Words matter
Talking is more than just exchanging information. Substantial personal communication can build empathy. Therapist Peggy Penn’s research has explored the power of language to connect family members in this way.
When you talk, or even write, you reflect on your own position. But, more importantly, you also reflect on the position of your audience: What is she currently thinking? How does my story fit into her experience? How might she respond? This is what Penn (referring back to philosopher Mikhail Bhaktin) calls “double-voiced” communication; it’s relational. Moreover, when you talk and write, you are crafting a narrative, even if a short one. Sometimes, you can surprise yourself when the words come out, gaining new insight into the meaning of your life and hers. In this way, talking can deeply change people, building and shaping mutual identities.
Yet, our written interactions through technology are increasingly short, with less sophisticated language or no language at all (think: Instagram). More and more, our thoughts are broadcast to everyone instead of intended for someone special. Back-and-forth exchanges can be difficult to engage in or follow. All of these may be playing into the tendency on social media to consume others’ content but not to directly communicate with friends one on one. The “double-voiced” communication that spurs empathy is short-circuited.
How to achieve empathy
We can improve our communication with each other, both face to face and via technology, if we focus on building empathy in the following ways:
Get personal. Make sure you are communicating in a private or semi-private space with one or a few dedicated others. This environment encourages self-disclosure and intimacy toward relationship-building. That’s different from seeking to impress others or be validated by them, as is often the case with social media postings. Further, in small groups or in one-on-one conversation, it becomes possible to imagine each others’ individual perspective. When your communication is focused on or intended for another person, it can catalyze empathic connection because you have to imagine and capture the other person in your text.
Write it down. Talking is great, but writing encourages more deliberate wording. Consider writing your thoughts out before you bring them up in conversation at the table. Or, if your face-to-face conversation did not go so well, consider writing a letter after the fact to better communicate your intentions. Personal writing is a form of self-reflection and narrative crafting. Simply writing your thoughts out can change them. This is why therapists sometimes recommend journaling or writing letters to your conversational partner as an intervention that encourages both partners to realign their perspectives.
Take your time. Whether you are engaged in a face-to-face dialogue or communicating through Skype or email, investing time into the conversation is important. The more time you spend in conversation, the more time you spend getting to know each other and the more able you are to share complex thoughts, relatable stories, or convincing arguments. From a linguistic perspective, without back-and-forth dialogue there is simply no opportunity to negotiate meaning and come to mutual understanding. For relationship therapists, without ongoing discourse, there is no way to try out new narratives, change your mind and theirs, and reconnect empathically.
When we have an opportunity to spend time with people who matter to us, we should embrace it, seeking to understand them and to present ourselves openly, to be understood as well. When we are apart, technology can be used to connect us. But, the types of technology we use and the ways we choose to use them really matter. When you’re at the dinner table this Thanksgiving, and especially when you go back home, keep empathy and the perspectives of others in mind.
President-elect Donald Trump is right: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a damaging deal and deserves to be killed off.
But he tells a half truth about why the trade accord among a dozen Pacific Rim nations is a bad deal. In Trump’s view, trade agreements like NAFTA have allowed developing countries to “steal” American manufacturing jobs and decimate the well-waged middle class. This is why he says that America should reject the TPP.
But shifting the blame for American joblessness and stagnant incomes obscures the more complex, largely home-grown pressures that led U.S. companies to offshore manufacturing production to low-wage jurisdictions. Promising to tear up certain trade deals and impose tariffs on imports (chiefly from China and Mexico) will do very little if anything to reverse the problem.
The real problem is that these agreements don’t actually do enough to support freer trade. We’ve been studying trade agreements and the political foundations of industrial competitiveness in the United States, East Asia and beyond - for decades. We have witnessed how so-called “free trade deals” have become less and less about opening markets and more about entrenching monopolies. Australia, where we’re based, is also a member of the proposed TPP and, like America, stands to benefit from the deal’s abandonment.
Who’s really to blame for America’s manufacturing decline?
When Trump blames globalization for having “wiped out our middle class,” he misses the point that the main actors behind successive waves of globalization since the 1990s have been U.S. corporations themselves. And when Trump blames China (or Mexico) for stealing American jobs, he misses the point that it is U.S. companies that have been most aggressively downsizing their labour force and distributing production abroad.
Blame shifting also misses the point. It’s American corporations themselves, the key drivers of globalization (which have been the chief beneficiaries of this “downsize and distribute” approach) racking up “super profits” from what is effectively rent-seeking. They do this by exploiting - and aggressively seeking to extend - generous monopoly rights granted to them through intellectual property laws.
While Trump rails against America’s growing trade deficit with China, the reality is that the largest category of imports from that country (about 28%) is electrical equipment (for example information technology (IT) products) very often generated (designed, outsourced or contracted) by U.S. companies. These companies, like Apple, hold the patents, copyright and trademarks.
This has paved the way for some serious distortions in accounting. For example, recent research has shown that the full value of the sale of iPhones in the United States (which are assembled in China) are counted against China’s trade deficit with America.
In reality, China contributes only around 3.6% of the value of iPhone sales in parts and labor, itself importing the remainder of the more (and less) technologically advanced parts (from Japan, Germany and South Korea and beyond). U.S. companies contribute only 6% to the total parts and labor of an iPhone, but Apple takes the lion’s share of the final sale price thanks to its patent and trademark ownership.
So when an iPhone sells in the United States for about $500, only $159 of this reflects content imported from China. The rest goes to American firms. And while that $159 is counted against China’s deficit with the United States, China itself only accounts for $6.50 of that value.
Seen in this light, we should not be surprised that 55% of the price U.S. consumers pay for goods imported from China actually goes to U.S. companies. Following from this, were Trump to make good on his promise to slap tariffs on imports from China, this would effectively penalize many U.S. companies.
The related problem is that decades of downsizing the manufacturing workforce and moving production overseas have gradually denuded America’s industrial ecosystem whereby the networks of equipment makers, suppliers and manufacturers needed to turn innovative ideas into products are disappearing. As one of us has shown in research, extreme offshoring is not only undermining skilled employment in the U.S. but also putting at risk the innovation that has underpinned American technological dynamism since the end of World War II.
Consequently, it’s increasingly difficult to find workers with the skills necessary to make the technologically sophisticated goods associated with the better-paid jobs of yesteryear. For example Silicon Valley, the home of most U.S. technology companies, is now a misnomer since very few semiconductors, which are primarily made of silicon, are produced there. Indeed, a more appropriate name today would be “App Valley” – and apps are not exactly the basis for a vibrant economy.
So why abandon the TPP?
Here’s where free trade deals do come into it.
Successive American administrations have further reinforced this extreme downsizing process by pushing trade agreements like the TPP that pay lip service to market access (free trade). In reality, these agreements entrench monopolies and tie the hands of governments that would otherwise take a more proactive approach to building new advanced industries and upgrading existing ones with new technology.
The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 marked the first major shift in international trade deals away from those that prioritize freer market access and towards those that entrench monopolies through the award of generous intellectual property provisions – even at the expense of economic and social goals like encouraging innovation and protecting human health.
Subsequent reforms to the WTO’s intellectual property agreement (for example the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) gave governments at least some scope to redress the organisation’s most economically and socially distorting impacts. And the WTO’s Doha round of trade negotiations sought (albeit unsuccessfully) to focus attention on the primary issue of trade liberalization rather than further extending monopoly rights.
But the improvements being made at the WTO level are sorely missing from most bilateral and regional trade deals, especially those being driven by the U.S. Many of these - from the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement to the now defunct TPP – have sought to further extend the monopoly rights of IP-protected firms. These are the very corporate actors that most aggressively pursue the “downsize and distribute” approach.
From Apple and Dell in the IT space to Pfizer and Merck in pharmaceuticals and Nike and Gap in clothing, America’s patent, copyright and trademark-rich businesses reap major rewards for their shareholders by aggressively reducing labor costs through outsourcing. They also do it through extracting monopoly rents from their patented and trademarked technologies and designs. As recent research revealed, this also has major, negative implications for corporate investment and wage levels in the United States.
A better approach to trade
Obviously, the promotion of rent-seeking by entrenching monopoly rights has nothing to do with free trade. But the reality is that, for the United States at least, this has become a primary goal of its “free trade” agreements.
This is why the United States should abandon the TPP – and why Australia should support its abandonment. Abandoning the TPP, and requiring our governments to focus their efforts on trade deals that take a prudent approach to market access and a tough line on rent-seeking - would be beneficial for both our countries.
We are a divided nation; that is an understatement. What’s more, we increasingly hear we are living in our own “bubble” or echo chamber that differing views cannot penetrate. To correct the problem, many are calling for people to reach out, to talk and above all, to listen. That is all well and good, but what are we supposed to talk about? We can’t hope to listen without a topic for finding common ground.
In my view, there are (at least) two prominent issues in this election that can serve as a bridge across our political divides. The first is that the political and economic system needs fixing because it favors those with special status or access. The second is that income inequality is reaching an intolerable level.
Might these two topics help mend the unpleasant Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners that many Americans are dreading? Instead of avoiding that unpleasantness, it may be a time to embrace it.
Period of flux
There is an opportunity before us right now. While unpleasant, we live in a period of flux when beliefs can shift. This is how social change happens – in fits and spurts – something I’ve studied in looking at how culture shapes public debates around climate change.
American physicist and historian Thomas Kuhn first described this process as moving between periods of stability and periods of chaos. In the former, one set of beliefs dominates all other beliefs as the “paradigm.” But, periods of flux begin when tumultuous events upset this paradigm and a chaotic search for a new paradigm begins. Social scientists call this process of rapid social change “punctuated equilibrium.” The key is to push for change when things are most chaotic.
Any corporate change agent knows that is easiest to push for change when things are at their worst. As Winston Churchill famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Try thinking about that over your Thanksgiving dinner.
We all live in worlds of our own design
Our country has broken into deeply divided tribes: left versus right, urban versus rural, the coasts versus the middle. We have become suspicious of each other, questioning motives before considering ideas.
Facts, it seems, have become less important than the political and ideological affiliation of their source. We seem to consider evidence only when it is accepted or, ideally, presented by those who represent our tribe and we dismiss information that is advocated by sources that represent groups whose values we reject.
This divide is ever deeper today because of social media, a relatively new force in our society. Social media has “democratized knowledge” because the gatekeepers for determining the quality of information have been taken down. But social media also creates the conditions for what has been termed fake news to run rampant.
Web-based media sites, and increasingly social media services Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, allow us to find information to support any position we seek to hold and find a community of people that will share those positions – a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. As a result, the internet doesn’t always make us more informed, but it often makes us more certain. We self-create what Eli Pariser calls our “filter bubbles.”
In one vivid illustration of this phenomenon, a research study of 250,000 tweets during the six weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm elections found that liberal and conservative populations primarily retweeted only politically similar tweets.
To engage is to not to acquiesce
A study by the Pew Research Center found that “49 percent of Republicans say they’re outright afraid of the Democratic Party, with 55 percent of Democrats saying they fear the GOP.” This part of the cultural divide is self-reinforcing: we fear the other so we don’t engage; we don’t engage so we fear the other even more.
To break this loop, we need to do what columnist Thomas Friedman calls “principled engagement.” While some may choose to sit on the sidelines or hope that one side or the other fails, there is too much at stake. Others may choose to stand resolute in their defiance of engagement, and in doing so, stake the “radical flank” and provide a constructive tension in the debates to come.
But some can choose to build bridges, accepting the mere act of engagement does not mean an acceptance, endorsement or even that we like the other side. It is merely a recognition that we have common concerns and interests. Standing in the middle of warring tribes is not easy as it invites attacks from both sides, but someone has to try by finding common ground.
Where can we start the conversation?
While not all experts agree that we have an income inequality problem, the numbers are sobering and, more importantly, many voters on both the left and right believe what they tell us.
Overall, between 1979 and 2013 the share of income earned by the U.S.’ richest 1 percent increased from 10 percent to 20.1 percent of the total economic pie. Between 2009 and 2013 the top 1 percent of U.S. earners captured 85.1 percent of total income growth. Within the 37-member Organization of Economically Developed Countries, the U.S. trails only Turkey, Mexico and Chile when it comes to inequality.
This is the source of the disgust and disaffection that many American voters feel – a vein that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders tapped into. At its core, it represents a distrust of our political and economic institutions. Some direct their ire at government, some at the corporate sector, and both hold great disdain for the seemingly corrupt relationship between the two.
So, what should you talk about over your holiday dinner? Well to begin, if there is absolutely no hope of common ground, stay away from politics and talk about football.
But if there is an opportunity to build bridges, maybe the topics of common concern to start the conversation include: the need to invest in upgrading our highways, bridges and transportation infrastructure; the corrupting influence of money in politics and possibilities for campaign finance reform; the practice of influence peddling and the proposal for time limitations on when government officials can become lobbyists; programs to increase opportunities for upward mobility like making college education more affordable; or programs to help ease the burden that workers feel when they are displaced by technology, automation, globalization or policy shifts. It may not be easy or pleasant at first, but it’s at least a start. And maybe you’ll be surprised.
One positive outcome of this election is that everyone seems to be engaged (even though a large percentage of Americans didn’t vote). We just need to find the right way to engage. In my religious tradition, it is said, “blessed are the peacemakers.” Whether or not you share my tradition, I think we can agree that we need more peacemakers.
Healing the country won’t come from Washington. It will come from each of us at our family dinner table, local Kiwanis Club, town hall, workplace and sports league. It will come from each of us as we work to open up our own individual bubbles and remember, in the words of the recently departed Leonard Cohen: “Ring the bells that still can ring; Forget your perfect offering; There is a crack in everything; That’s how the light gets in.”
By Andrew J. Hoffman, Holcim (US) Professor at the Ross School of Business and Education Director at the Graham Sustainability Institute, University of Michigan
In February of 1801, President John Adams faced much the same dilemma that Barack Obama faces now. Under the Federalist regimes of Adams and his predecessor, George Washington, the United States had made a great deal of progress in certain areas. The young nation had established the supremacy of the Federal courts over those of the states, reformed a defunct financial system, rebuilt the US military, and, perhaps most impressively, managed to remain neutral in the wars of the French Revolution that, under the ascendant tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte, were quickly spreading across Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Yet despite these accomplishments, the election of 1800 saw Adams and his party swept out of office by massive margins in favor of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, who promised an end to Federal control over finance, strengthening of states’ rights, and a pro-France foreign policy that threatened to engulf the still-fragile young Republic in an emergent world war.
In the face of this over-whelming electoral catastrophe, Adams worked swiftly to ensure that the Federalist legacy could survive. In the two weeks between Jefferson’s election on February 17, and his inauguration on March 4, the lame-duck president spent his days and nights appointing judges, tax collectors, diplomats, and other public officials from his own party, who, once approved by the out-going Federalist Congress, could stand as a bulwark against Jeffersonian populism. These measures, which have gone down in history as Adams’s “midnight judges,” enjoyed mixed success. Still, because of his efforts, the Federal judiciary and customs service continued to enforce Federal laws over states’ rights through the next two decades of Democratic-Republican rule, prevented the Jeffersonians from dismantling the Federalist tax collection system, actually strengthened the army, and forced the pro-France regime to remain neutral in the world, aside from the spectacular but relatively fleeting War of 1812.
While Obama does not have the friendly Congress that Adams had in 1801 to stock the Federal judiciary and bureaucracy, the lame-duck president nevertheless has the power to cement his legacy in the eight weeks remaining before President-elect Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. What follows are five areas where Obama can and should act to secure some of the progressive gains his administration has made, and to thwart efforts by Donald Trump’s incoming administration to pursue its xenophobic, militaristic, and authoritarian agenda.
1. Ramp up Detainee Transfers and Releases at Guantanamo Bay. Despite it being one of his earliest campaign promises, the president has yet to close the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Much of this is due to the continuing war on terror and Congress’s refusal to allow him to close the prison. .Still, over the past few years the administration and independent defense attorneys have made progress releasing and transferring prisoners, and as of this writing only 60 prisoners remain in Cuba. The president should ramp up these efforts, using Justice Department lawyers to aid defense attorneys and already working to free or transfer detainees, so that when Trump takes office as few as possible remain, leaving the facility an empty shell.Doing so will deprive the future Trump administration of an important symbol for his proposed expansion of the War on Terror and strike a blow against the President-elect’s proposed return to the illegal torture policies of the second Bush administration.
2. Demilitarize State and Municipal Police. Obama has already ordered the Department of Defense to limit its sales of surplus military equipment to state and local police forces. The president can go further, however by stopping this program altogether, and could go even further by enforcing training and maintenance regulations to take weapons already transferred out of the hands of police who abuse them. Such a move, while perhaps reversible in the long run by a Trump administration, would at least keep open a debate that that has raged over the past eight years on the over-reach of police power, and in the short term would deprive the Trump administration of a powerful tool in his agenda of fear and repression against immigrant and minority communities.
3. End the Crisis at Standing Rock. While the president and his Army Corps of Engineers have begun to consider re-routing the Dakota Access Pipeline to avoid potential contamination of Native American water resources, violent confrontations continue between police and a vast coalition of Native American protesters, or water protectors, at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation south of Bismarck, North Dakota. By law and precedent, the president has the authority, and the Constitutional responsibility, to intervene in disputes between states, private entities, and sovereign tribes. Obama should use this power to nationalize the North Dakota National Guard to protect protesters from the attack dogs, tear gas, and rubber bullets unleashed by out-of-control state and private security forces. Further, he should urge regulators to deny oil companies permission to build the DAPL on Army Corps of Engineers land, and to enforce the Sioux interpretation of the 1851 treaty that granted much of the land in dispute to the tribe. In the face of an oil-friendly Trump administration hostile to both Native American and environmental issues, such a move would set any pro-petroleum agenda back while setting a strong precedent for the Federal protection of Native lands.
4. Begin the Process to End Marijuana Prohibition. As of the 2016 elections, 20% of Americans live in states where recreational marijuana is legal for recreational use, and more than half of the states of the Union allow doctors to prescribe Marijuana to treat illnesses and chronic conditions. Still, the substance remains illegal at the Federal level. In the face of these electoral victories and numerous studies proving marijuana’s efficacy, Obama should urge Attorney General Loretta Lynch to begin the process of removing marijuana from the “Schedule 1” category of especially dangerous substances – an authority granted her under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Although such a move would require lengthy regulatory hearings, filings, and a bureaucratic process that probably will not be complete by the time Trump takes office, setting it in motion would discourage Trump’s Justice Department, which portends to be fiercely anti-marijuana under most of the leading candidates for Attorney General, from prosecuting people for using a substance legal in most states, at least until Congressional action can end prohibition once and for all.
5. Pardon Low-Level Drug Offenders and Non-Violent Felons. Perhaps the most powerful statement Obama can make is a mass pardon of low-level drug offenders and non-violent felons in Federal prisons . As of September 2016, over 83,000 people, mostly Black and Latino/a, were serving sentences in Federal correctional institutions for drug offences, most of which are non-violent crimes with sentences imposed by mandatory minimum laws passed in the 1990s and early 2000s. These make up 46% of the Federal prison population. If Obama were to use his executive power to pardon even a quarter of these inmates, it would make a powerful statement against a Trump administration that has promised to ramp up aggressive enforcement of drug and immigration laws and whose business connections have already begun to strengthen the prison-industrial complex.
While these moves may not be as dramatic as Adams’s “Midnight Judges,” President Obama’s actions in these areas and others would still help preserve some of his progressive legacy in the face of impending conservative control of all three branches of government. Further, it would give hope to the majority of Americans who voted for those progressive policies to continue and to grow. And, even though Obama sixty-five days left in office to Adams’s eleven, the clock is ticking.
Donald Johnson teaches early American history at North Dakota State University, where his research focuses on popular politics during the Revolutionary era. The views expressed here are entirely his own and do not represent those of the University in any way.
Mike Pence went to see "Hamilton" on Friday night, and because he is a horrible monster who has relentlessly dehumanized and opposed the rights of LGBTQ people and women, and will be the vice president in an administration that ran on a campaign of racial bigotry and misogyny, an administration that is now filling out with anti-Semites, racists, homophobes and Islamophobes, people booed him. The audience chose a completely reasonable and incredibly mild way to show displeasure with someone who has dedicated his political career to systematically disenfranchising millions of people.
At the play’s end, actor Brandon Victor Dixon, onstage with a cast that’s overwhelmingly made up of people of color, delivered a message to Pence, telling him Americans are deeply worried that the Trump “administration will not protect us, defend us and uphold our inalienable rights.” Dixon ended with a plea for Pence to “uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”
It was a respectful statement about the very real fears of millions of Americans who have been disparaged by Trump’s entire campaign and those who have been targeted in attacks carried out by his supporters.
In response, Trump tweeted the lie that the "Hamilton" cast had “harassed” Pence, and wrote that “the theater must always be a safe and special place.”
Not a single one of us needs to be scolded about the importance of safe spaces by an unhinged racist who has made this entire country an unsafe space for millions of people. This is the same guy who hasn’t made a single sincere effort to get his vicious and violent supporters to end their sustained campaign of harassment against people of color and other minorities. This is the same man who once said he’d like to punch a protester in the face; who encouraged people to attack reporters at his rallies; who told crowds that he longed for the days when peaceful protesters were “carried out on a stretcher”; who egged on his supporters' aggression by telling them he would pay their legal fees if they were physically violent with protesters; and who is accused of actually harassing many women going back 40 years.
It’s clear that Trump plans to gaslight us all for the next four years. When his bald face lies and hypocrisy are revealed, as they are being right now and will be many times again, let’s definitely not be fooled or let him get away with it without calling it out.
Trump’s tweet ended with the demand that the "Hamilton" cast apologize. Thousands of his supporters—probably people who chanted “kill the bitch!” at his rallies—retweeted his message with no apparent irony.
First of all, the "Hamilton" cast should not apologize. Trump hasn’t apologized for running one of the most immoral campaigns in U.S. political history and assembling one of the most viciously anti-American teams in recent memory. Someone should send the "Hamilton" cast a medal and the key to every city.
As for Trump supporters threatening boycotts of the play, "Hamilton" is a hip-hop musical that recasts the founding fathers as people of color who rap all their dialogue. The drop-off in ticket sales to Trump supporters is the least of the production’s concerns. What’s more, it already has a waitlist a gazillion years long. No one cares they won’t be attending that show they never planned to attend in the first place.
Let me add that the people trying to shame the "Hamilton" cast right now—the Trump supporters who keep demanding we stop protesting and respect this unprepared, know-nothing president who has stocked his Cabinet with racists and woman-haters—are the same people who cheered when Mitch McConnell said the main agenda for Republicans was to deny President Obama a second term before he’d even gotten into office. They are the same people who ate it up when total cretin and garbage person Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at the president during the State of the Union; when generally awful and immoral immigrant-basher Jan Brewer disrespectfully thrust her finger into the president’s face; when teabaggers were carrying protest signs displaying their racism or burning effigies in the president’s image. They just voted for a man who’s spent years and years disrespecting President Obama at every turn, usually by invoking the birther lie.
Sorry, but none of them gets to try to pretend to be a decent person now. The last four years have given us endless proof that they lack the moral standing to lecture anyone on how we should behave toward this soon-to-be—god help us all—president.
As for all the people on the left and the right suggesting that speaking out against the horrific things Trump and his base stand for is the kind of “political correctness” that put him in office, comedian Jeremy McLellan easily dispensed with that nonsense in a tweet today. McLellan wrote:
Remember this over the next four years when you hear the trope “this is why Trump won.” If you call his appointees racist, that’s why Trump won. If you boo Mike Pence, that’s why Trump won. If you protest in the streets, that’s why Trump won. If you insult him or his supporters, that’s why Trump won. Is a rhetorical tool for neutering resistance. Always ask what function it serves.
Every single day, without fail, the Trump campaign digs its way to a brand-new low. It has proven over and over that it is anti-women, anti-people of color and anti-progress. Booing Mike Pence was a minor incident and we should ignore Republican efforts to turn it into something bigger to distract from the important stuff. Still, it speaks to a larger principle. In ways large and small, we should be displaying our absolute opposition to Pence, Trump and this whole administration in the loudest voices we can muster every chance we get. They are unburdened by values or virtue, have shown callous indifference to millions, and are on the road to destroy this country and very likely—in ways direct and indirect—millions of lives within it.
This is no time for silence or complacency. Shame on us if we ever stop booing.
It has been one of the longest weeks in human history and the Trump presidency has not even begun yet. Any notion that reasonable, well-intentioned people should give him a chance—hey, maybe he was just kidding about all that hateful, bigoted stuff he spewed on the campaign trail—was immediately dispelled. One of his first official acts was to name Steve Bannon, the anti-Semitic mastermind of the racist, “alt-right,” fake-news website Breitbart, to chief propagandist and horse’s ass whisperer. The president-elect dodged the media, regained control of his Twitter account and proceeded to confirm all of our worst fears about him.
If it was not already clear, Trump plans to surround himself with sycophantic yes-men who share his racist views and will gleefully set about laying waste to civil liberties and justice. Also, his unelected children will be playing major roles in the new White House, it appears, while also running his businesses.
We won, he and his team have told anyone who disagrees with them. They have every plan to claim all the spoils. Here is a partial list of both the horrors and the mere affronts to decency Trump has visited upon us this week.
1. He tapped Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general.
Sessions has been rewarded for being one of the earliest lap dogs for Trump with one of the most powerful positions in the country, attorney general. The two men share a deep love of racist policing, hatred of civil rights and desire to roll back the clock to approximately the 1950s. That would place us well before the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Roe v. Wade and nationwide legalization of gay marriage. Sessions would also be perfectly positioned to undo some of the gains made during the Obama administration to reverse the worst effects of the 1994 Omnibus Crime bill that rained mass incarceration down on vast portions of the black and Latino populations. The two share a hatred and demonization of marijuana; Sessions once hilariously joked that he liked the KKK until he heard they smoked weed. Another piece of common ground, both hate immigrants, with Sessions saying in 2006 that no one from the Dominican Republic has anything of value to contribute to the United States.
Alabama Senator Sessions was deemed too openly racist to be a federal judge by Senate Republicans in 1986 after President Ronald Reagan nominated the then-U.S. attorney from Alabama. Former colleagues gave devastating testimony about Sessions’ blatant racism. But Senate Republicans are not what they used to be.
There’s no evidence that the years have dimmed Sessions’ racist views, which are apparently right in line with his new boss man. On Friday, Sessions praised Trump’s demand for the death penalty for the Central Park Five in 1989, saying it shows Trump has always been a “law and order” guy. The five men have been fully exonerated by DNA evidence and shown to have been victims of police railroading. Despite all this inconvenient truth, Trump has continued to stand by his earlier bloodlust, and now the nation’s likely top prosecutor has praised him for it.
That is some very twisted law and order.
2. His surrogate floated the Muslim registry idea and justified it by citing one of the most shameful eras in American history.
One of the more terrifying campaign ideas Trump floated was the idea of a registry for Muslims in this country. Undaunted by the comparison between this and treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, the president-elect has made it clear that this awful breach of human rights and act of outright religious persecution is still very much a possibility.
Carl Higbie, a prominent Trump backer and spokesman for a major super PAC that backed him, laid out the legal justification for this atrocity on Wednesday to a horrified Megyn Kelly. Higbie's argument was that the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was a “precedent” for Trump’s Muslim registry idea, and therefore a Muslim registry has “constitutional muster."
Kelly tried in various ways to express her utter shock and dismay that Japanese internment camps were being used as some sort of positive example of how the United States should behave today.
Higbie may just be a Trump-loving supporter with no official role, but word is that the Muslim registry is definitely being considered. A day earlier, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is an actual member of Trump’s transition team, said Trump’s advisers were discussing whether to send him a formal proposal for a national registry of immigrants and visitors from Muslim countries. Kobach, whose other claim to fame is crafting am Arizona law making it legal for police to profile Latinos, was said to be in line for the attorney general position. Now he’ll have to wait for another plum position, like czar of immigration.
3. He tapped insanely Islamophobic General Michael Flynn (Ret.) for top national security post.
There is every indication that Trump has great respect for fellow hotheads, as long as they are sufficiently sycophantic and Islamophobic. Retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s truly frightening pick for national security adviser, perfectly fits the bill.
Flynn served in Iraq and Afghanistan and was later tapped to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency. Obama subsequently fired him. It is unclear at what point he became a virulent Islamophobe with a shaky grasp on the truth, but that is who he is today. Ever since, he has been sounding the alarm about the threat posed by extremist Islamic groups and blaming Obama for “coddling” them to anyone who will listen. And Trump obviously listens to him.
What President Trump will likely hear from Flynn are variants on his recent tweet, “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” He has also said in interviews that he considers Islam—yes, the whole religion—a cancer that has metastasized. Another thing Flynn likes to say is, “Lock her up,” in reference to Hillary Clinton.
4. He invited his daughter Ivanka to a meeting with the Japanese prime minister.
Way before his election, Trump had shattered every norm of someone aspiring to public office, using campaign press conferences to promote his hotels, refusing to release his tax returns and ignoring the usual rules regarding conflicts of interest. Surprise: as president-elect, he’s still writing his own rules as he goes. Early in the week, he was said to be requesting security clearance for his kids and son-in-law.
He has promised to place his business holdings in a blind trust while he is president, and of course he always keeps his promises. The blind trust would also be run by his kids, so not really blind at all. Plus, his kids are part of the government now! They are part of the transition team!
As the week wore on, after confusing the hell out of the Japanese prime minister about when and where they would meet, Trump invited daughter Ivanka to attend. So far no word if she will be selling any of the items she wore to the meeting online.
5. He took credit for the fact that a Ford factory is not moving to Mexico when it was never moving to Mexico.
On Thursday, the president-elect tweeted that he got a phone call “from my friend Bill Ford, Chairman of Ford, who advised me that he will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky—no Mexico.”
He tweeted this because had he sent a press release, the mainstream media just might have (no guarantees, but might have) looked into it and found out that Ford was never going to close the factory in question. To get even more granular, the company had considered moving one production line to Mexico, but the move would not have cost any American jobs, and then it decided not to. Details, details.
But that did not prevent Trump from taking credit for it and calling it a win for him. And it did not prevent various fake news outlets from agreeing and perpetuating his false claim. And now he’ll say it a bunch more times, and the fake news outlets will say it a bunch more times and then it will become true.
That’s the way things work in the post-truth world.
6. He demanded an apology from the “Hamilton” cast.
On Friday night, our homophobic VP-elect Mike Pence went to see the smash hit Broadway musical "Hamilton.” There, in addition to being entertained, he was also booed. At the end of the show, cast member Brandon Victor Dixon delivered the message to Pence that many Americans are truly afraid and worried that the new “administration will not protect us, defend us and uphold our inalienable rights.”
This rather mild and completely true statement was termed “harassment” by our new commander-in-chief-in-waiting on Twitter the next day. It was so rude, Trump said, and he demanded an apology. Without a trace of the bitter irony that surrounds us every day, Trump invoked the notion of a “safe space” in his tweets about the incident. “The theater must always be a safe and special place,” he said.
Let the boos continue to rain down upon both of these deplorable men and their cast of horribles, forever.
Here’s the First 100 Days resistance agenda [with thanks to Alan Webber]:
1. Get Democrats in the Congress and across the country to pledge to oppose Trump’s agenda. Prolong the process of approving choices, draw out hearings, stand up as sanctuary cities and states. Take a stand. Call your senator and your representative (phone calls are always better than writing). Your senator’s number: https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/. Your representative’s number: https://www.house.gov/representatives/.
2. March and demonstrate—in a coordinated, well-managed way. The “1 Million Women March” is already scheduled for the Inauguration—and will be executed with real skill. See: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/15/counter-trump-women-are-mobilizing-massive-march-washington. There will be “sister” marches around the country—in LA and elsewhere. They need to be coordinated and orchestrated. And then? 1 Million Muslims? 1 Million Latinos? What would keep the momentum alive and keep the message going?
4. Letters to Editors: A national letter-writing campaign, from people all over the country, every walk of life and every level of society, from celebrities to sports heroes to grassroots Americans. In most papers, the Letters to the Editor section is the most-read part of the paper.
5. Op-Eds: A steady flow of arguments about the fallacies and dangers of Trump’s First 100 Day policies and initiatives, from name-brand thinkers and doers to ordinary folk writing for their city’s or community’s newspaper.
6. Social media: What about a new YouTube channel devoted to video testimonials about resisting Trump’s First 100 Day Agenda? Crowd-sourced ideas, themes and memes. Who wants to start it?
7. Website containing up-to-date daily bulletins on what actions people are planning around the country, and where, so others can join in. Techies, get organized.
8. Investigative journalism: We need investigative journalists to dig into the backgrounds of all of Trump’s appointees, in the White House, the Cabinet, ambassadors and judges.
9. Lawsuits: Our version of “Drill, baby, drill” is “Sue, baby, sue.” Throw sand in the gears. Lawyers, get organized.
10. Coordinated fund-raising: Rather than having every public-interest group appeal on their own, have a coordinated fund-raising program to fill the coffers of the most endangered and effective opposition groups. Is there a way to do a televised fund-raiser with celebrities raising money for the resistance?
11. Symbolic opposition: Safety pins are already appearing. What else? What more? Make the resistance visible with bumper stickers, a label pin, a branding campaign that has great language, great logo, great wristband (remember the Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” yellow wristband—it sold millions!).
12. Intellectual opposition: Take Trump on where he’s weakest—with serious ideas. I’ll try to do my part. You do yours, too.
13. Serious accountability: Establish performance metrics to evaluate his delivery on his campaign promises. An updated website of promises made and not kept. This is one especially suited to public policy students.
14. Your idea goes here. Call a meeting of family and friends this weekend. Come up with to-dos.
The First 100 Days Resistance Agenda. We’re not going away.
A friend of mine who has dual Israeli-American citizenship tells the story of entering an elevator in Jerusalem shortly after a bullying right-wing government had taken over the country.
The other passenger was ostentatiously puffing on a big cigar. My friend pointed to the no smoking sign and politely, in Hebrew, asked the man to douse his smoke.
“Eff you,” the man replied. “We’re in charge now.” Only he didn’t say, “Eff.”
Sound familiar? Well, it’s a tiptoe through the tulips compared to what’s going on in the United States right now.
Incidents of hate-related violence and other abuses have proliferated throughout this lovely land of ours. The presidential campaign and now the election results have further allowed the pinheads of society to let their racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic freak flags fly. Despite denials from many on the right and the Trump transition team, this is really happening — unlike that avalanche of fake news stories that have been overwhelming social media.
(And yes, I know have been scattered incidents in which Trump followers have been vilified on the streets, but far fewer.)
Just about everyone I know has a story or two or three from the last week and a half. My friend Deana tells of a part-Asian co-worker swung at by a white male who mistook him as being from the Middle East, of a friend’s boyfriend who was told to “Go back to Africa” on his Facebook page, of another friend’s middle-school-aged daughter and other girls who were pushed around by boys in her class, some wearing Trump T-shirts and shouting hateful things about women.
From the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC): “Between Wednesday, Nov. 9, the day after the presidential election, and the morning of Monday, Nov. 14, [SPLC] collected 437 reports of hateful intimidation and harassment… Venues of harassment included K-12 schools (99), businesses (76) and universities (67). Common also was vandalism and leafleting on private property (40) and epithets and slurs hurled from moving vehicles (38).”
A new report from the FBI states that last year, hate crimes were up 6 percent, with a two-thirds increase in attacks against Muslims. According to their statistics, “There were 5,818 single-bias incidents involving 7,121 victims. Of those victims, 59.2 percent were targeted because of a race/ethnicity/ancestry bias; 19.7 percent because of a religious bias; 17.7 percent because of a sexual-orientation bias; 1.7 percent because of a gender-identity bias; 1.2 percent because of a disability bias; and 0.4 percent because of a gender bias.”
Camila Domonosket at NPR notes, “The FBI report is based on local law enforcement data. It almost certainly understates the scale of the problem: In 2014, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated, based on victim surveys, that 60 percent of hate crimes are never reported to police.”
Here in New York City, the police department reports that so far in 2016, hate crimes have jumped 30 percent from the same period last year, “including a spike during last week’s hotly contested presidential election,” according to DNAInfo New York. “NYPD statistics show that anti-Muslim and anti-‘sexual orientation’ motivations were responsible for much of the rise.”
But what was Donald Trump’s response to the reports of the upswing in hate crimes after his election? “I am very surprised to hear that,” he told 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl. “I hate to hear that, I mean I hate to hear that.”
Lesley Stahl: But you do hear it?
Donald Trump: I don’t hear it — I saw, I saw one or two instances…
Lesley Stahl: On social media?
Donald Trump: But I think it’s a very small amount. Again, I think it’s —
Lesley Stahl: Do you want to say anything to those people?
Donald Trump: I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, ‘cause I’m gonna bring this country together.
Donald Trump: I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, “Stop it.” If it — if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it.
“Stop it.” Really? That’s all? You sounded like a parent telling the kids in the back seat to quit fidgeting. Make your condemnation swift, adamant and loud. We know you know how to do loud. Demand that it cease.
And while we’re at it, Mr. President-elect, the appointment of your campaign CEO Steve Bannon as counselor and chief White House strategist makes a hideous situation even worse. Cancel it.
This is, after all, the person who — more than a year ago! — Joshua Green at Bloomberg BusinessWeek succinctly described as “the most dangerous political operative in America.”
Julia Zorthian at TIME magazine writes that as head of the alt-right news website Breitbart, “Bannon has given voice to some of the unsavory forces floating around the conservative movement’s fringe, including a resurgence of white nationalism. His appointment has fueled anger, with critics decrying Bannon’s connections to racist and anti-Semitic views.”
In recent days, many of you have seen some of Breitbart’s’s headlines: “Bill Kristol: Republican spoiler, renegade Jew,” “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy,” “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?” and “Gay rights have made us dumber, it’s time to get back in the closet.”
Even The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, who cut Bannon some slack in a recent column, concluded that “he has been willing to strategically encourage people’s hate as a way of inciting them to action. How these methods will manifest themselves in the White House remains to be seen. But we can uncomfortably imagine that Trump under Bannon’s direction will do whatever it takes to get what he wants.” Swell.
So hate speech and Steve Bannon: a perfect pair. Donald Trump, you’ve let this evil genie out of the bottle. Set an example for a country so viciously torn asunder.
Use one of your two remaining wishes and end this madness.
In the winter of 1987, Pat Nixon was watching real estate developer Donald Trump on the Phil Donahue program. Trump had been invited on the daytime interview show not only to promote his book The Art of the Deal, but to discuss his thoughts on how to solve the problems that were ailing America. The former first lady was so impressed with Trump’s performance that her husband, former President Richard Nixon dashed off a quick missive to the multi-millionaire. In his comments, Nixon said that based on the enthusiastic observations of his wife, the 38th President of the United States believed Trump had a great career in front of him not only in business, but in politics as well. “Whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!” Nixon wrote.
There is no doubt that the man who signed the letter “RMN” would have appreciated Donald Trump’s electoral victory last week. Nixon would have found it fascinating that the new president-elect was successful in running a similar campaign to the one he ran nearly half a century before. Both Nixon and Trump were able to harness the anger of members of the white working class, who believed their concerns were not being addressed by elites in Washington. Trump was able to portray the economic and social problems that plagued the nation as being linked to an administration whose programs were ineffective in solving problems like job creation and income inequality. He also argued that White House policy makers had chosen to forsake working class communities in the Midwest and the Northeast in favor of those that represented the growing demographic of identity politics. Nixon had utilized a similar strategy during the 1968 campaign, in which he had characterized the policies of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” as being responsible for ineffective solutions to the problems of growing poverty and increasing levels of disorder in the nations metropolitan areas.
While one can contend Nixon and Trump each attended elite universities, followed by successful careers in law, business and politics, the two were able to portray themselves as not only political outsiders, but champions of the common man. The authenticity that caused their messages to resonate with their supporters can be attributed to the fact that over the course of their lives, both Nixon and Trump had to swim against the tide to achieve national legitimacy and acceptance, that only came when each won the presidency. It is certainly true that both men’s backgrounds and career paths were decidedly different. However, each was considered a striver who possessed a driving ambition, a willingness to work hard and a belief in doing whatever it took to win. That street fighting tenacity soon allowed each man to achieve national recognition. Trump became a renowned figure in the New York business community, by taking his father’s small real estate concern and transforming it into a multi-billion-dollar international brand. Nixon, used his great intelligence and political instincts to convert his early celebrity of being the man who brought down Alger Hiss, into becoming Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president.
But there were setbacks for both as well. Despite their individual successes Nixon and Trump were each viewed with mistrust and suspicion by those within the New York and Washington establishments. While Trump was perceived as a savvy businessman, he was frequently viewed as someone who did not always pay his debts and whose assets were consistently over leveraged causing a number of his businesses to file for bankruptcy. Trump was also known to possess an unpredictable temperament that often caused him to make provocative comments that frequently landed on the pages of the New York tabloids. That reputation caused him to be ridiculed and dismissed by social elites in places like Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Florida’s gold coast. Despite becoming vice president at 39, with an incredible grasp of international affairs, Nixon was viewed by many as an unscrupulous figure, who engaged in name-calling and other examples of underhanded campaigning in order to achieve his political goals. When he lost the 1960 presidential election followed by the 1962 race for governor of California, many within the American establishment were pleased to see him go.
Despite their personal and professional defeats both men refused to allow these financial and political circumstances to short-circuit their dreams of success. While Trump’s brand was often in crisis, the real estate baron was able to reinvent himself by capitalizing on the new trend of reality entertainment. Trump’s program, “The Apprentice,” allowed the charismatic New Yorker to portray himself to millions of viewers, not as a figure of questionable character or suspect business judgement, but as a decisive, no nonsense, innovative businessman who had risen from nothing (as he implied) to create one of the great industrial empires of the age. In using television as his vehicle, Trump became a mentor to those frustrated Americans desperate to solve the mysteries of financial success.
Nixon re-emerged as well. Following his two political defeats, the “New Nixon” who traveled across the country campaigning for GOP candidates and convening meetings with leaders around the globe during the mid 1960s appeared less combative and more thoughtful than the figure who told the media in 1962 “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” During the course of that period, the former Vice President presented himself to Republicans as one who was extremely conversant with the problems facing the nation. Many of those on the Right were willing to overlook Nixon’s more Machiavellian-like instincts in believing that the hawkish anti-communist Californian was the right man to turn the tide in Vietnam. Others also believed that Nixon’s encyclopedic knowledge of domestic policy in areas like tax and welfare reform would come in handy at at time when the liberal programs of the “New Deal” had become outdated and obsolete.
Over the last few years many have laughed at the idea of Trump running for president. However, since 2011, the businessman’s ongoing comments about the loss of jobs have resonated with those frustrated over Washington’s inability to find a solution for the sluggish economic recovery. Those attracted to Trump’s tough and brusque manner along with what the public perceives as a strong negotiating and business acumen came to believe that he was the person necessary to drain the Washington swamp as well as revive the country’s economic and national greatness.
In winning their elections nearly half a century apart, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump both displayed qualities that have been exhibited by successful political figures throughout history. Both men were able to capitalize on social and economic anxieties that were not being addressed by current policy makers nor by those who sought to compete with them for the presidency. Each positioned themselves as men of change, who were able to utilize hold up the dismissive attitudes of the media and political establishments as a badge of honor that gave them a sense of authenticity with those who believed they had also been dismissed by those who hold power. Finally, Nixon and Trump exhibited incredible grit and determination in being able to reach the heights of political success. Despite moments of doubt and defeat neither was willing to give up or give in until their goal had been achieved.
Laurence Jurdem is an independent scholar who received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from Fordham University. For more information, please visit the authors website laurencejurdem.com
Many presidents have assumed the reins of a divided nation, but we’ve never seen anything like the reaction to Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential election.
It didn’t happen to Richard Nixon while the country was bitterly split over race and war.
Half of the country believed Al Gore was cheated out of his shot at the White House in 2000, but the run-up to George W. Bush’s presence in the Oval Office offered nothing like what we are seeing now.
President Barack Obama, by turns believed a socialist and African national, among other things, was feared by some on the right, but didn’t face what the current president-elect now faces: a country whose division is exceeded only by Civil War-era America.
If we are to believe the emerging consensus, Trump won with the support of working-class white voters, people anxious about their economic prospects in a globalizing economy. The theory goes that the automation that has replaced workers, and the pull of capitalism that pushed manufacturing jobs overseas, squeezed the white working class. As a result, the white working class supported Trump and his promises to blunt globalization and curb free trade, moves that will preserve working-class jobs.
Hogwash.
Reasonable people may disagree on the definition of “working class,” but let’s agree that it resides in the US$30,000 to $50,000 range. Even if we add in those classified as poor – that is, households earning less than $30,000 – this group constitutes only about 36 percent of the electorate. Substantial, but not enough to hand Trump the election.
Especially not since Hillary Clinton actually beat Trump among poor and working-class voters: 52 percent to 41 percent.
So, where did Trump beat Clinton if income is the criterion by which we’re judging the election? Even if not by much, exit polling indicates he bested her among those earning at least $50,000 – that is, the middle and upper class.
But for the fact that much has been made of the white working class riding to Trump’s rescue, it’s not entirely shocking that the GOP standard bearer won the middle- and upper-class white vote: It’s been this way for some time, for several decades, in fact.
Instead, what’s most arresting is that middle- and upper-class whites voted for this particular candidate. College-educated whites tend to be more tolerant than those without a college diploma. In a nutshell, a college education is generally tied to a commitment to democratic values. But Trump’s brazen misogyny, racism and navitism run afoul of these values.
By the way, I’m not the only one to conclude that Trump’s victory had at least as much to do with support from voters who remain unencumbered by economic anxiety as those riven by it.
The real reason he won
If social economic status – especially education – is a gateway to a more tolerant, democratic society, why did middle- and upper-class voters back someone who represents the antithesis of such values?
It’s actually pretty simple, in my opinion. My reading of history suggests that the boundaries of American identity intersect with whiteness, patriarchy, xenophobia and homophobia. This means that anyone, any group that falls outside of such a definition of American identity, is considered beyond the political community; they’re aliens.
Rapid social change, which poses a threat to this truncated version of American identity, activates anxiety and anger on the part of those who lay claim to this identity. The America with which they’ve become familiar is changing too fast. Hence, the slogan for the Trump campaign: “Make America great again.” This suggests that America, in its present state, is defective in some way and needs to return some previous version of itself.
Let’s consider what could be “wrong” with America circa 2016.
Rapidly changing demographics means that America will transition to a “majority-minority” country no later than 2044. Women are now more visible in public life than ever. Three serve on the Supreme Court. One even ran for president – twice. Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. Last, but not least, we’ve had a black president for almost eight years.
With this in mind, many Trump supporters believe themselves to be losing “their” country, something that leads them to prefer a social milieu more consistent with days gone by – one in which primarily white, middle- and upper-class, heterosexual, native-born men reigned supreme.
It isn’t the first time America has witnessed something like this. Rapid social change spurred the growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the John Birch Society in the 1960s.
Ku Klux Klan members supporting Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, San Francisco, California in 1964.
Like Trump’s supporters, economic anxiety had next to nothing to do with why people supported the KKK or the John Birch Society. These people were relatively well off. Instead, it was the perception of existential threat that pushed people to join each. The KKK felt threatened by the “New Negro” and religious minorities; for the JBS, it was about the civil rights movement joining forces with the Soviet Union.
But we needn’t look back as far as the 20th century to identify the most recent example the reactionary sentiment that fueled Trump’s stunning victory.
As I have written elsewhere, the Tea Party movement formed in reaction to the election of the first black president. He represented social change in which 20 percent of white voters couldn’t believe.
When one considers the extent to which these groups overlap, these similarities come as no great surprise. My analysis of existing polling data suggests 83 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party also supported Trump’s candidacy during the campaign. In other words, Tea Party supporters are now Trump supporters.
More importantly, if the policy preferences of Trump supporters are even remotely similar to those who supported the Tea Party, progressives have reason to be concerned. Tea Party types are far less inclined to support progressive policies than establishment conservatives.
Still, a silver lining may exist. Trump’s victory, in light of all of his antics during the campaign, makes it all but impossible to deny the continuing currency of racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia in the United States. It’s on display for all to see.
This could be a good thing: It forces us to reckon with who we really are. Is America really about the democratic, progressive values professed in the founding documents? Or, are we really the small-minded, bigoted place Trump’s election represents?
If we hope to maintain a claim to exceptionalism, we must find our way back to the values on which this country was founded, ones that include equality and freedom.
If Trump and his supporters really wish to “Make America great again,” perhaps they should go all the way back to these founding principles. Only this time, they should leave behind the racism, sexism and nativism.
With the dust from the 2016 Presidential election now settling, Americans are shocked and unhappy and it appears that a re-alignment is on the way. Exit polling data revealed that both Trump and Clinton were viewed unfavorably by the electorate and a majority of voters stated that they distrust both candidates. A third of voters had serious concerns and reservations about their choice in booth and a quarter stated that their vote was in explicitly a protest vote in opposition to the other candidates.
None of this should come as a surprise. Before the 8th of November, only 37% of Americans believe that the two major parties do an adequate job representing the citizenry and concerns about the election and electoral reform along with dissatisfaction with the government closely followed questions about the economy as being the most important problem facing the country today. Division, angst, disgust, frustration, and polarization are words that are impossible to ignore when we think about our political climate today.
To many, the Golden State does not appear to be immune to polarization with regular talk of the effects gerrymandering and the need for open primaries as many see the parties moving away from the center and to the extremes. Academic studies have cited serious political dysfunction leading to an inability to pass legislation and govern in the state while other studies have found that California has the nation’s most polarized legislature with its left-right ideological distance greater than Congress in Washington, DC. Political parties are moving further apart and these divisions are reflected in the often cited inland/coastal divide with the coast being dominated by liberal, multicultural progressives in living a booming tech and media-based economy and an aging, struggling industrial and agrarian inland region which has become increasingly conservative over time.
The 2016 Presidential election map of California certainly appears to be deeply polarized. The coasts were firmly Democratic blue with the inland going Republican red and 76% of California counties were cases where one candidate won by 10 or more points. The average margin of victory for one candidate over the other across the 58 counties was 26 points. Clinton won 32 primarily coastal counties and carried an average of 62% of the vote in those counties, while Trump won the remaining 26 inland counties and averaged 58% of vote in those areas. Certainly, these election day data make a strong case of the polarization narrative coupled with a deep inland-coastal divide.
Despite all of this negativity, I have some good news. While California is not entirely immune to issues of polarization and division, the aforementioned deep cultural and political divides are simply not as pronounced or widespread as many observers and pundits would like us to believe. This is valuable nationally as California and its politics have become the harbinger of so many future national socio-political trends. 2016 may seem dire to many, but Americans are far less divided than it appears.
Some history is valuable here.
For decades, one of the most lasting regional spatial models of California is Wolfinger and Greenstein’s (1969) view that California of the 1960s was divided between the North and the South with San Francisco and Los Angeles representing very different ideological leanings and histories. The view was a natural outgrowth of an1859 movement by the California legislature to split the state in two that was eventually disallowed by the US Congress. Social theorist Carey McWilliams’ (1946) observational ideas on a north-south division are perhaps the most enduring to this day:
In the vast and sprawling state of California, most statewide religious, political, social, fraternal, and commercial organizations are divided into northern and southern sections…while other states have an east-west or a north-south division, in no state in the Union is the schism as sharp as in California. So sharp is the demarcation in California that when state-wide meetings are held, they are usually convened in Fresno, long the ‘neutral territory’ for conventions, conferences, and gatherings of all sort. (4)
Many observers and pundits alike have expanded on the McWilliam’s sentiments and continue to believe that Northern Californians tend to look down on Angelenos as uncultured, narcissistic hedonists while Southern Californian’s see northerners as smug, cabernet-swilling liberals in a provincial tech-bubble and self-congratulatory. Certainly, scholars and observers have posited numerous other models of California regionalism, but few have really endured in the public’s mind like McWilliams’.
In 2008, Dourzet and Miller exposed that the north-south model has not been empirically valid since the 1980s. In its place, is a newer model emerged and that is of an inland-coastal divide – 20 counties along the Pacific and San Francisco Bay and 38 counties inland. Korey (2008) argues that, “Generally speaking... as one travels from west to east in California, one also moves from left to right politically” and Drum (2013) postulates that, “So it's true: California really is two states. Not northern and southern, though. Unless water is involved, LA and San Francisco can get along OK. Basically, what this chart shows is coastal vs. inland. Most of coastal California is as liberal as its stereotype, while inland California is somewhere to the right of rural Georgia. Lately, the coastals have taken firm command of Sacramento, and the inlanders haven't yet figured out how to respond.” Douzet and Miller (2008) argue that there is “an increasingly prominent east-west partisan divide that in many ways replicates the recent national division of liberal “blue” states on the coasts and the upper Midwest from conservative “red” states in much of the interior West, lower Midwest, and South.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson has written that, “Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line.” He continued by noting that the inland and coast are “two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.” Hanson concluded that California can be characterized as, “a postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley, where the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern.”
Historical narratives of California and the United States consistently focus on deep divides such that some form of division seems to be the norm. In fact, Leo and Smith’s Two Californias initially released in 1983 and republished in 2013, makes the case that “Millions of people believe wholeheartedly that there are two Californias,” and “[t]hey feed off each other, enrich each other, push each other on. It is hard to imagine one without the other” (93)
So, while the present historical story appears to be one of division and where that division exists has changed, I am pleased to report that these accounts are overblown.
Empirical data can be very powerful here in really digging into these stories of disunion and the California Secretary of State just released its 2016 voter registration report and very few of the 58 counties in California are actually polarized, Democratic or Republican strongholds. The widely used metric for a polarized, “landslide,” county is when 60% or more of a county’s voters are registered for one party and in 2016, not one county met this standard.
In contrast, close to sixty-percent of California counties met this landslide standard in the 1960s. The number of landslide counties in California has plummeted since the 1960s and has hovered around the zero county mark since 2002. If we relax the standard to 55% for one party, 5 counties are partisan leaning and those happen to be the usual Bay Area suspects of Santa Cruz, San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin, and Alameda with the Los Angeles region notably absent. Expanding the definition to a simple majority, only 11 counties have one party with 50% or more of the total registration and – like the 60% landslide metric – the number of counties which meet the simple majority definition has deeply declined from almost ninety-five percent in the 1960s to a little under twenty-percent today. These numbers and huge declines hardly suggest a state with counties that are deeply partisan and growing further and further apart. The counties are not polarizing, they are moderating. The figure below presents this historical data and it is striking.
Landslide Counties in California by Voter Registration: 1962 - 2016
Of course, one could argue that counties are not ideal units to look at questions of partisanship due to gerrymandering. Even with California's "independent" Citizens Redistricting Commission, drawing such units where boundaries can and do change with very real political consequences remains a highly politicized process. Fortunately, the Secretary of State provides registration data by Congressional district as well. Despite concerns of manipulation to create safe districts for one party or another, only 4 of California’s 53 Congressional districts are “landslide” districts at the 60% level (three in LA and one in the Bay Area). At the 55% level, 7 districts are landslide and at the 50% level, only 13 are landslide counties by voter registration. Once again, it is hard to argue that California districts are heading off into different directions politically when only 8% of the Congressional districts are have 60% landslide partisan majorities before the 2016 elections.
This story of moderation goes deeper than just these important voter registration statistics. My own research has examined numerous other political and social questions that regularly present themselves to Californians and I have found little evidence that the state is pulling apart politically. In fact, when looking at decades of survey data, the surprising fact that emerges is that Californians who reside along the coast and inland see the political world in the same way. Attitudes toward government (its role in society and its effectiveness), abortion, economic policies, immigration, environmental regulation, gay rights, satisfaction with the political system, and electoral behavior and political engagement are practically identical across regions in the state.
For instance, over the past two decades, Californians have been asked which of two statements comes closer to their view: “The government should pass more laws that restrict the availability of abortion; or [2] the government should not interfere with a woman’s access to abortion.” Plotting the “should not interfere” position, both the inland and coastal regions have strong majorities—65 and 71 respectively—by 2014 and the positions not only tracked over 14 years, they barely moved and even converged in 2011 at 70 percent arguing for not interfering with a woman’s right to choose. Abortion has long been a central issue in the so-called culture wars, but it is barely a skirmish geographically in California.
Despite the clear fact that the voter registration data illuminates moderation away from extremes in Congressional districts and counties and decades of public opinion data which shows statewide parity on many issues and pragmatic views toward politics, it is understandable why so many still feel that the state is deeply divided.
When elite level politicians and organizations present polarized choices and candidates, citizens feel that their voices are not being heard and that they must select between the lesser of two evils. Consequently, electoral results can and often do appear extreme and small localized differences can make regions appear drastically different from one another. Localized party behavior in terms party organizing, framing of issues, outreach and mobilization, along with overall electoral competitiveness of the particular places distort reality and leave Californians stuck making choices that they do not like.
The new 2016 voter registration data from the California Secretary of State along with the public opinion data show that Californians are far less extreme and partisan in one direction or the other than data which only looks at electoral outcomes. By being able to opt-out of making a party decision, voter registration data reveals that California has not turned into a state with deep political-geographic divisions or has many counties or Congressional districts that are tilted to the extreme in either direction. While the historical evidence from the 1960s reveals that there were real political divides in the state, they have disappeared today. This is a perfect example of where some historical data can robustly speak to these analytic narratives and really show that not all are correct.
I believe that this data all reveals that Californians want reasonable and thoughtful politicians and policy proposals. Just looking at electoral results and choices distort the reality that clearly shines through in the registration data. Polarized choices in the voting booth that emanate from a polarized, primary process do not regularly reflect the interests of the masses and lead to the polarized outcomes that we just saw on Election Day. The question for now is when will Californians demand more from their parties and when will these political elites actually listen to their very own constituents? 2016 publicized the fact that candidates on both the left and right were out of touch with the people and the primaries illustrated how cracked these partisan bases actually are. There is a huge opportunity here for Californians need practical and pragmatic leadership. The party and candidates that actually represent these moderate ideas and listens to the people has a lot to gain after the craziness of the 2016 election cycle.
Samuel J. Abrams is Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY and Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
The recent U.S. election exposed two major intersecting fault lines in America that, if left unchecked, could soon produce an era of social and economic upheaval unlike any in our history.
First, it revealed deep divisions across racial, ethnic and gender lines that led to a surge in hate crimes last year, particularly against Muslims. Addressing this will require a sustained effort to heal these growing divisions and will be very difficult to resolve without strong leadership and a renewed willingness to listen to each other’s concerns.
The key to resolving this fault line – and the focus of this article – lies in mobilizing all sectors of society to work together to create good-quality jobs and get wages rising again for all. In short, America needs to build a new social contract based on mutual respect and attuned to the needs of today’s workforce and economy.
What do I mean by that? A social contract is what ties together the main stakeholders of an economy, its workers, business leaders, educators and government, and ensures each group meets it obligations to each other while also pursuing its own goals. Workers, for example, want good wages and careers and have an obligation to work productively and contribute to the success of their enterprise. Employers have to balance the expectations of investors, employees and customers.
Unfortunately, America’s social contract broke down in the 1980s when the gap between wage growth and productivity growth first started to appear, creating the conditions that spawned the frustrations we saw on the campaign trail this year. With the election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority in Congress, we should suffer no illusions that the process of building a new one will be led from Washington.
But as history teaches us, most social and economic shifts that improve lives don’t actually begin with a national policy anyway.
Thousands of spectators cheer as over a quarter million marchers show support for the National Recovery Administration (NRA) in a parade on Fifth Ave. in New York City on Sept. 13, 1933. AP Photo
‘Laboratories for democracy’
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously called states our “laboratories for democracy,” places where innovations and social movements are born and tested for their ability to address emerging tensions and show how to turn them into national policies.
That was how America’s last social contract, which grew out of the New Deal, began. The policies that composed it didn’t start with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s signature legislation establishing unemployment insurance, social security, disability pay, collective bargaining and minimum wages.
Rather, workers themselves laid the groundwork in the first few decades of the 20th century, when Sidney Hillman, then the leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, organized immigrants and developed the basic principles of collective bargaining.
States like Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New York, pressed by labor activists, enacted unemployment insurance, minimum wages and overtime protections. John R. Commons, who taught at the University of Wisconsin, has been called the intellectual father of the New Deal because he and his students helped shape and study these state-level innovations. They then went to Washington to help President Roosevelt write them into the laws that helped end the Great Depression and laid the foundation for an expanding middle class.
Changes like this rarely if ever begin in the corridors of power. They begin with just a few people, such as Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt, who led the suffragettes movement to get women the right to vote.
Unfortunately, the social contract broke down in the 1980s amid deregulation, attacks on unions, growing globalization and a deep recession that decimated Rust Belt manufacturing industries. The failure to replace it is a root cause, I would argue, of the wage stagnation, anger and political divisions the election brought to the fore.
President Roosevelt signed the Farm Relief-Inflationary Bill, which gave him extraordinary powers over monetary inflation as part of the New Deal, on May 12, 1933. AP Photo
Workers at the forefront
With the election in the rear-view mirror, it is now time to begin the long process of building a new social contract that fits today’s economy, workforce and society, one that gives a genuine voice to the frustrated and channels their anger into action.
The good news is we are already well on our way, with many grassroots innovations across society that, if accelerated and expanded, could identify and shape its key features. The workforce itself is leading the way, with the help of labor organizations, community coalitions and what we might call “worker-centered entrepreneurs.”
Consider the Fight for 15, referring to efforts to secure a US$15 minimum wage. Its first visible victory was achieved in 2015 in Seattle. The strong public support there sent shock waves around the country, leading another 18 states to increase their minimum wages, including four in last week’s election.
Other new advocacy groups like Coworkers.org are using information campaigns and social media and other technology-aided apps to induce companies like Starbucks to reform scheduling practices to provide more advance notice and certainty over work schedules.
Unions and worker centers around the country are battling wage theft (failure to pay minimum wages or overtime), expanding training programs to more women, minorities and immigrants and supporting efforts to promote “common sense” economic strategies that provide good entry-level jobs, wages and career ladders.
Finally, a number of entrepreneurial ventures are emerging around the country such as the Workers’ Lab, an incubator that supports start-up nonprofits that are specifically designed to build new sources of bargaining power for worker and contractors. For example, Uber drivers in New York City and Seattle are beginning to organize into unions and guilds to gain a voice in the terms governing their compensation.
Out of these and still yet-to-be-invented strategies may emerge a techno-savvy, grassroots labor movement for the next generation.
How business can help
Business leaders, for their part, are beginning to get the message that the era of prioritizing shareholders over all else needs to end. None other than JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, one of Wall Street’s most respected titans, said last summer that he would raise his employees’ wages because doing so is a good long-term investment.
He and his peers should use the same logic when they advise clients. By emphasizing long-term investing, they could help end the short-termism that has held back corporations from investing in workforce training and research and development – so essential to job creation.
Wall Street could also help lead the way and perhaps in concert with labor by creating infrastructure funds to help rebuild our roads and bridges, generating a good rate of return for their investors and the economy. Leaders from many groups – including President-elect Trump – recognize the need and value of repairing the nation’s infrastructure. This is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the power of bipartisanship, public-private partnerships and business-labor cooperation.
Some main street business leaders are already doing their part by competing on the basis of high-productivity, high-wage strategies that research shows achieve both strong profits and create and sustain good jobs for American workers.
The role of education
In today’s knowledge-based economy, education leaders need to be counted as among the key stakeholders critical to building and sustaining a new social contract.
They and some philanthropic leaders active in funding education innovations are embracing what evidence tells us: There is nothing more important to educational attainment than a good teacher. And in states as diverse as Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois, teacher unions and education leaders are working together to expand learning time, support teacher development and encourage online courses aimed at helping workers refresh their skills in a world of fast-paced change. These efforts should be extended across the country.
If knowledge is power, then these educational innovations will equip today’s and tomorrow’s workforce with the tools they need to meet the challenges they are bound to experience over the course of their careers.
Seeds of a new social contract
So these are some of the seeds I see growing into a new social contract that restores hope among the marginalized.
What’s needed next is to bring these different stakeholders together to learn about what works and how to inform national policymakers so that successes can be spread.
We are doing just that in an effort to make MIT a place where leaders of these innovations come together to share experiences, stimulate research needed to document their successes, failures and lessons, and figure out ways to diffuse those that work to broader settings.
We started a “Good Companies-Good Jobs Initiative” with the Hitachi Foundation and are supporting efforts to improve relations and better manage and resolve workplace conflicts, such as through meetings, workshops and online courses. Our aim, as we expand these efforts, is to serve as a catalyst for further innovation to show our leaders what a new social contract might look like.
More than anything else, we all should continue to encourage local activism, protest and innovation. If history is a guide, that’s what it will take to eventually get leaders in Washington to listen and do their part to address these problems.
