Will conservatives break from Trump's GOP to form a new party? | Opinion
By Jennifer Rubin The future of the center-right is, to put it mildly, uncertain. It is not even clear there is a center-right in our era of polarization and ideological extremism. Over at least the past half-century the Republican Party has been the vehicle for political conservatism -- roughly defined as limited government, strong international leadership…
Slaveholding and the business of slavery undergirded the economy of British North America and later the United States. Historians long have demonstrated that the institution of slavery was central to the social and economic development of the northern colonies and states; and since the 1990s there have been a number of studies on how white northerners used slave labor and were key participants in the business of slavery—the buying and selling of people and goods that sustained plantations throughout the Americas. Nevertheless, there is little public knowledge or acknowledgement that the institution of slavery was socially accepted, legally sanctioned and widely practiced in the North. For many Americans, slavery was a southern institution. The divide between scholarly work on northern slavery and public knowledge can be in part attributed to a lack of public education. K-12 history classes often sideline slavery and when it is discussed it is presented as a southern institution. There are also few public memorials to slavery in the North.
Recently, a few colleges and universities, including Brown, have acknowledged historical ties to slaveholding and the slave trade. Slaveholders and traders donated land and dominated boards of fellows and trustees. Enslaved people were put to work constructing buildings or were sold to manage institutional debt. These “recent revelations” contrast sharply with the stories the stories that America’s leading institutions of higher education have told about themselves being places where our founding fathers began to question tyranny and form our most treasured ideas of freedom and liberty; spaces where the entrepreneurial spirit was nourished and our economic principles advanced. Administrators, students, and the general public struggle with reckoning with a history that for many generations has either been willfully disguised or unconsciously ignored. But the uncomfortable fact is that many of the country’s most valued institutions of learning were built on the backs of enslaved people of African descent. This truth is uncomfortable because it is part of an even larger uncomfortable truth—the nation was built on the back of enslaved people of African descent.
In 1764, in a report to the Lords Commissioners of Trade members of the Rhode Island General Assembly wrote “without this trade, it would have been and always will be, utterly impossible for the inhabitants of this colony to subsist themselves, or to pay for any considerable quantity of British good.” They were referring to the Atlantic Slave and West Indian trades. Rhode Island merchants provided the West Indies with slaves, livestock, dairy products, fish, candles, and lumber. The West Indian trade supplied the key ingredient, molasses, for Rhode Island’s number one export, rum.
Moreover, Rhode Islanders, who purchased African slaves with locally distilled rum, were responsible for more than 60 percent of all the North American traffic in slaves and by 1750 they held the highest concentration of slaves in New England. Ten percent of all Rhode Islanders were enslaved. A century later, in 1850, Rowland Gibson Hazard, a slave cloth manufacturer, stood in the state Assembly and said “I am by descent, by the interest of business and the ties of friendship, more closely allied with the South than any other man in this House or perhaps the state.” Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse cotton wool material made specially to minimize the cost of clothing enslaved African Americans in the South. Between 1800 and 1860, more than eighty “negro cloth” mills opened in the state. The West Indian and slave trades employed shipbuilders, sailors, caulkers, sail makers, carpenters, rope makers, painters, and distillers. Coopers made the barrels that stored the rum. Farmers used slave labor to cultivate foodstuffs for the trades. Merchants, clerks, scribes, and warehouse overseers conducted the business of the trade. The textile revolution depended on slave-grown cotton, which was manufactured into clothing for enslaved people. In Rhode Island, the business of slavery was the cornerstone of the entire economy: it was not just central to the economy, it was the economy. Rhode Islanders were engaged in the same economic activities that occupied their neighbors; however, the intensity of their involvement set them apart.
The erasure or marginalization of this history bolsters the myth that slavery was a southern institution. As a result, the experience of black people in the North has been erased. The business of slavery served to enslave black people, in the colonial period and to impoverish, alienate, and disenfranchise them in the New American Republic. Although Rhode Islanders were among the first to pass, in 1784, a gradual emancipation law ending hereditary slavery, they were among the last northerners to abolish the institution altogether, in 1842. Enslaved Rhode Islanders labored in distilleries where rum was made to purchase slaves, built the slave ships that transported enslaved Africans, served as the crew on those ships as they crisscrossed the Atlantic, and grew the food that sustained the enslaved. Yet, enslaved Rhode Islanders, like counterparts throughout the Americas, refused to be simply property; they ran away, stole, damaged property, formed families and life-long friendships. They also lobbied for their freedom, and strove to build full lives within the confines of slavery. So while the business of slavery may have defined the strictures of their lives it did not define their lives.
During the Revolutionary War enslaved people ran away in unprecedented numbers, volunteered for military service in exchange for their freedom, and lobbied their enslavers for freedom. In the new nation, in the North, most black people were free but they did not have liberty. They did not have the same protections and opportunities afforded to white people because neither the law nor mainstream white society recognized them as citizens. Black people responded to this multi-faceted marginalization by building their own institutions to bolster and protect their vulnerable communities. They fought for freedom and liberty in the name of the Constitution. They were patriots who demanded the country live up to its greater principles of liberty and justice for all. Ignoring and disregarding the experiences of black people and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that the North has no history of racism to overcome. Consequently, there is no need to redress institutional racism or work toward reconciliation.
Christy Clark-Pujara is Assistant Professor of History in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016).
Halloween is part of the Carnival tradition, a holdover from the traditional Catholic year full of commemorations of the lives of Jesus and his saints. As part of that tradition, Halloween should be a time when the world is turned upside down, when the powerful are mocked and those with less power play pretend games in which they imagine "what if" they ruled the world. This year however, our Carnival -- Halloween -- racist costumes that mock the powerless are worn by rich celebrities, and privileged young white men don blackface. Welcome to Trump-o-ween 2016.
Historically, the liveliest time of the year for inverting culture's structures was during Carnival, the week leading up to Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) was the last day to eat meat before the imposition of Lenten fasting, and in the "last blast" celebrations that took place, the spirit of chaos was celebrated. Historians who write about Carnival celebrations often refer to the work of Francois Rabelais, whose 16th-century series of works about Gargantua and Pantagruel feature scatalogical descriptions of the giants excreting or vomiting, and engaging in sexual activities.
Carnival was about the flesh: the indulgence of the senses. People ate, they drank, and they had sex, and in the parades and parties that marked Carnival days, not only were those activities indulged in, but the literature and artwork about those activities were themselves provocative. But Carnival was not only an indulgence of the senses: it was a turning over of the world order. The high became low. Kings became servants. Bishops did not ride donkeys to symbolize their humility; they were pictured being ridden by asses. And women were on top. Women were depicted as rulers of their husbands, just as kings were depicted not just as commoners, but as lowly servants in charge of the most menial of tasks.
Carnivals featured the revenge of the "weak." Not only were the powerful represented in ways that showed them now serving those over who they had dominion, they were depicted acting in ridiculous manners. A bishop being ridden by an ass was not only serving the donkey, he was also being shown in a position that would suggest that the donkey might sodomize him. Men who were depicting a king playing a servant might also play that same servant-king defecating, which brought the king down to his most basic, human level. By showing the king in the position of taking a shit, the power that the king held over his people was satirized, too. A bishop who has been sodomized by a donkey, even in jest, is a less terrifying figure than the man who holds the keys to heaven in his ability to excommunicate someone from the church of believers.
Halloween was part of this Carnival tradition. It marked the nights prior to the day marking All Souls' Day -- the day of memorial devoted to the Church's martyrs and saints. It was a night for marking the line between life and death -- and it supplanted the Celtic holiday of Samhain, as many Catholic holidays were adapted to replace local festival days -- it involved a large number of traditions. Not only was it a night for watching out for spirits who were said to walk on that night, but it was also a night when the rich gave food and money to the poor in exchange for their saying prayers for family members. It was a night of mischief and pranks and for telling frightening stories about the types of ghosts and various souls who might be looking for the opening between the worlds of the dead and the living. It was a night for mocking our own fear of the power of death and the unknown. It continued the tradition of mocking the powerful.
Halloween is not a night where those in power mock those who are without power. It's not a night where bishops or governors or mayors walk down a street celebrating their power over the rest of us. And yet, this year, perhaps because Donald Trump has told white people that their racism is nothing to be ashamed of, we are seeing cruel Halloween costumes. Despite the horror of police arresting Native Americans protesting #NODAPL and locking them up in dog kennels, reports are pouring in of white folks not only dressed in Native American costumes, but costumes that bear signs openly mocking those who are fighting to preserve some of the last bits of land they own. Students wear blackface, despite years of being told that this is not okay. This year, when #BlackLivesMatter has focused attention on the extrajudicial killing of black people by cops, wearing blackface is an overt act of bullying and terrorism rather than celebration. Students wearing sombreros or other "Mexican" gear are mocking those who are threatened by Trump's rhetoric that promises violence against immigrants.
The rightwing has its knickers in a twist because people like me take offense when Halloween costumes are labeled "inappropriate." They claim that it is something called "political correctness" run amok, although in all the years that I have been asking, the only definition that I have been able to find for "political correctness" is when bigots are told that it's not cool to be jerks. Donald Trump has told white people, especially white men, that those in this country who have been traditionally denied access to power, are in fact, in charge. That the reason that a white man can't get ahead has nothing to do with an American political economy that increasingly redistributes wealth to the wealthiest few, but rather because everything is now weighted to make certain that women, people of color, and immigrants are given everything ahead of white men. They are aiming their anger at the people who are in the same boat that they are in, but rather than mutinying against their crazy captain, they're trying to toss the rest of us overboard.
In the carnival foment of the politics of white resentment, this Halloween has become an opportunity to hold up to ridicule and mockery the oppressors. Halloween 2016 is yet another opportunity for Trump supporters to become the real monsters who walk the dark. The fact that Trump's supporters cannot see the oppressor standing directly in front of them has been one of the greatest puzzles of this election season.
It is a cliché by now that Donald Trump has run a reality show campaign — a series of gaffes, surprises, outrages, weirdnesses, explosions, revelations, and just every other ingredient that comprise the popular TV genre of faux authenticity. On reality TV, the subjects are seldom artists or entertainers or high achievers in any field. They are personalities. Their roles are their lives, which creates a Möbius strip. What do the Kardashians actually do besides being on their show, which has, of course, generated all sorts of commercial opportunities that almost make it seem as if they are doing something? What is their talent, other than the talent for self-promotion?
All of this was anticipated 54 years ago by historian Daniel Boorstin in The Image, in which he defined a celebrity as someone who is known for being well-known. In a previous post, I discussed how this applied to Trump, who seems a hollow man except for his fame.
But I am not sure that Boorstin’s tautology, clever as it is, is really accurate. I would submit that celebrity isn’t a status, nor is it a media anointment. I think celebrity is actually a narrative form played out in the medium of life and then broadcast by the traditional and now social media. One earns celebrity — to the extent that you can call it earned — by keeping one’s narrative going. You lose your celebrity not when you lose fame or attention, your well-known-ness, but when you lose your narrative, which is what got you the attention in the first place.
Donald Trump is the first celebrity candidate in both Boorstin’s sense and mine — Boorstin’s because Trump is less a builder of edifices than a slapper-of-his-name-on-other-people’s edifices. He is literally known for being well-known. And in mine because Trump has spent the better part of his life providing narratives to the press to feed its insatiable appetite for gossip and his desire for attention. There are many ways in which Trump is a unique presidential aspirant, but chief among them may be this: He is the first candidate who ran for president to feed his celebrity. The entire campaign is a plot point – a means to a larger end, which is not the presidency, but keeping his celebrity afloat. Relevance is an issue for all of us, but especially for a 70-year-old man who is accustomed to the spotlight.
I thought of this when The New York Times ran two pieces this week. One was the first of a series based on interviews with Trump conducted by biographer Michael D’Antonio and given to The Times by him. What the interviews reveal is that Trump’s primary obsession is a fear of losing his fame. In the interviews Trump reviles Arsenio Hall, a former talk show host and one-time Celebrity Apprentice contestant. “Dead as a doornail. Dead as dog meat,” Trump eulogized.
Everyone knows that Trump hates losing, so his put down of Hall won’t raise too many eyebrows. But when you read the interviews, you realize that Trump’s desperate fear of losing isn’t of the athletic variety, with which we are also so familiar. It isn’t the contest he is terrified of losing — or an election. It is his celebrity. That is why he despises Hall. Hall went from a somebody to a nobody. He lost his narrative. He didn’t provide anything for the press to write about or readers and viewers to care about. There was no drama. What Trump understood is that celebrity has to be stoked; it isn’t self-sustaining. It is like spinning plates on the end of sticks in a Las Vegas novelty act. As soon as one plate begins to wobble, you have to twirl it again.
As for the Hollywood connection, it was not just a way to keep his face before the public. Cameos are cheap and evanescent. Like those losers on “The Apprentice,” all of them folks who couldn’t keep their celebrity going (you don’t need to be Freud to figure out why Trump would confect a show out of that), cameos certify the loss of celebrity; they don’t advance it. Rather, what Trump saw is a way to integrate himself into Hollywood narratives — a way to use his fame to create his celebrity.
As the Times piece about Trump’s Hollywood connections tells it, he began talking about running for president as early as 1988. Why? Trump didn’t have any overriding sense of national mission. He doesn’t have one even now. Clearly, his ongoing, three-decades-long flirtation with the presidency was just a plot twist — a way of juicing the narrative when it was flagging. In that sense, it was no different than his affair with Marla Maples, his feud with Rosie O’Donnell, his nonstop lawsuits and everything else. The presidency was a publicity stunt. It still is. Viewed that way, nearly everything Trump does, most of which seems fatal to his candidacy, actually makes sense – just not political sense. He is running to continue being a celebrity. Bad politics, good TV.
The problem is that Americans are now so habituated to celebrity, so excited by it, that in the Trump campaign it has managed to overtake politics for many of them. Or put another way, the dull routines of politics pale before the unpredictable narratives of celebrity. More, celebrity neutralizes those routines. Take Trump’s now-famous pronouncement in the last debate that he might not accept the election results should he lose. You might note how he phrased that to moderator Chris Wallace: “I’ll look at it at the time. . . . I’ll keep you in suspense.” Suspense is a narrative staple. What critics saw as subversion of democracy, Trump and many of his supporters saw as another plot twist. More celebrity. And it did exactly what he intended, which was to create a Trumpian cliffhanger.
Politics, as I have written many times, has long been integrated with entertainment. The devices of the latter serve the ends of the former, and this has especially served conservatives: The X-Files fed conservative paranoia, 24 fed conservative xenophobia, every superhero movie feeds conservative American exceptionalism. But Trump has subordinated politics to his own narrative. He is the entertainment. We often hear that this election is about the future of America. Donald Trump has always seen it differently. For him, it is about the future of his celebrity and his fear of becoming another Arsenio Hall.
This election will not only settle the question of who next gets to sit behind the large desk in the Oval Office. It will also settle another question, formerly of interest mainly to scholars, but now, for obvious reasons, of concern to a broad audience: How gullible voters are in the 21st century.
There are two broad schools of thought about this. One school, best represented most recently by historian David Greenberg in his book, A Republic of Spin, argues that voters are plenty savvy. Greenberg goes so far as to discount claims that the Bush administration manipulated public opinion in support of its decision to invade Iraq. After 9-11, he says, polls showed the voters were anxious to go to war. They were blood thirsty. In deciding on war, therefore, Bush merely gave the voters what they wanted.
For decades social scientists churned out books echoing this line with titles like The Rational Voter. For a time the belief that voters are indeed rational constituted the consensus view among social scientists. Even if voters lack hard facts, they can use heuristics (shortcuts) to compensate. The most obvious heuristic and the one most people use is voting their party. Even voters who know next to nothing about politics can still cast a rational vote in an election featuring the names of people they don't know by voting a straight party ticket.
These scholars had the advantage in the debates that took place for the main reason that their claims were consistent with what everybody wants to believe is true. Like V.O. Key, the dean of political scientists in the twentieth century, we want to believe "voters are not fools."
The other school held that voters in the main are grossly ignorant about public issues that come before them. The social scientists who held this position had a raft of disturbing statistics to point to. Studies undertaken at the University of Michigan beginning in the 1940s showed that a majority of voters cannot name the three branches of government, have no idea how much is spent on foreign aid (a majority think it's north of half the budget; it's actually less than 1 percent), and don't know that the Senate must confirm any president's nominee to the Supreme Court. In one study by the social scientists Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter it was revealed that about half the American people don't realize that the only country that has ever dropped an atomic bomb in wartime is their own.
Like the social scientists who believe the voters are rational, these social scientists also acknowledge that voters use heuristics. Alas, they don't take solace from this. While most political scientists like to point to the shortcuts voters use as evidence of their enlightenment, psychologists take exactly the opposite position. Heuristics aren't good, they're bad, reflecting a garden variety of biases: Voters pick candidates whose names are familiar; they favor people with square faces in wartime and round faces in peacetime; and worst yet, they let extraneous factors like the outcome of a football game influence their choices. (When their team wins they are more likely to stick with the incumbent.) Even the weather affects voter choices. Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen found that bad weather (floods and droughts) turned 2.8 million voters against Al Gore in the election of 2000. Bartels and Achen even discovered that shark attacks can affect voting.
These debates largely took place out of public view on college campuses and in scholarly journals and books with small sales. But this year the questions scholars debated in private have suddenly become an inescapable subject of public conversation.
Just how on earth, both pundits and even some leaders of the GOP, have wondered did we get where we are? While it's as yet unknown who will take the presidency, Donald Trump's success in winning the Republican Party nomination suggests that democracy failed during this election. Voters in the Republican primaries and caucuses cast a ballot for a man who seems on the face of it to be wholly unqualified to be president, not to mention that he regularly is caught lying and regularly makes bigoted, racist and sexist statements.
Voters might be forgiven for nominating Trump given the high level of dissatisfaction with the political establishment, but the evidence that something more disturbing is going on is abundant. Exhibit A is that his supporters have told pollsters they believe only Trump can be trusted to give them the truth. This is so laughably misguided it's hard to know what to make of it. Every time he opens his mouth the fact checkers catch him lying.
Why can't his voters see that? They don't want to see it. Once he had won them over by various means (anger, fear, xenophobia) they refused to revise their commitments. Like he said: His voters would stand by him even if he killed someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. To Trump this was evidence of their loyalty. But it's actually a clear sign that they were easily bamboozled by his histrionic appeals. Angry themselves, they felt a powerful bond with Trump when he expressed anger. Trump feels authentic to these voters because he traffics in emotions that are real. It's no wonder his voters say they can trust him. He seems authentic. And as one social scientists has argued, politicians like Trump who are unscripted lead many to think they are truthful.
I have been one of those who for years has complained that voters by and large are too ill-informed to fulfill their democratic responsibilities. For people like me Trump's nomination has been proof that skepticism about the public's capacity for intelligent debate is warranted. But so few voters participated in the primaries and caucuses that it can be argued that his selection didn't reflect the views of a majority. This wouldn't be the case were he to be elected in November. His election would be proof positive that I was right. Given what is at stake, I'd much rather be denied this one victory.
It appears from the polls that Trump is going to lose, perhaps in a landslide. That would be gratifying. But little consolation can be taken from these surveys. Most show that more than 40 percent of the country's voters are willing to cast a ballot for Trump despite his shameful history of nasty comments about Mexican Americans, blacks, and women. That's worries me.
Congress continues to resist decriminalizing marijuana even as a popular crusade to legalize its use state by state may soon mean almost a quarter of Americans can smoke up at will, not including the many more who can use the drug medicinally.
This has resulted in a patchwork of state laws alongside federal ones that have put the nascent industry in legal and financial limbo.
Voters in many states disagree. Presently, Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska permit the sale and consumption of social marijuana, Washington, D.C. allows its consumption but not its sale, and 25 other states have legalized its medical use.
On Election Day, many more may follow their lead. Voters in Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada will decide whether to legalize marijuana, while four other states will decide whether to allow medical use or ease restrictions. If the results of the legalization initiatives are all “yes,” about 23 percent of the U.S. – or 75 million Americans – will be able to use marijuana socially, up from 5.6 percent, or 18 million citizens, currently.
This conflict between state and federal law creates an unstable financial environment for producers and retailers of marijuana.
To get a better picture of the industry and the burdens imposed as a result of schizophrenic policies, a team of researchers from the University of Utah and the University of Michigan are conducting a survey of businesses that grow, process and sell marijuana in several states that have legalized it.growth
Preliminary results from Colorado suggest the conflict between state and federal policies is taking a severe toll on the industry.
Petition signature gatherer Peter Keyes, right, discusses a petition to legalize marijuana in Sacramento, California.
Rich Pedroncelli/AP
Taxed through the nose
How the federal government taxes cannabis companies is one of the biggest burdens the marijuana industry must bear in the current environment.
In particular, section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code prevents companies from taking any deduction or credit from a trade or business that consists of “trafficking in controlled substances.” In other words, they pay far more than other businesses because they can’t deduct most legitimate business expenses such as labor, materials and other costs of production. They can, however, take a small deduction for “cost of goods sold.”
Preliminary results from the survey suggest that businesses are paying effective combined tax rates of 40 percent to 75 percent. The wide range is likely due to the sophistication of the larger, more established companies that can afford both an aggressive tax-planning strategy and set aside money for a likely IRS audit. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, lack such resources and are more likely to self-file, which means the companies least able to afford the high tax rates are the ones paying them.
This exceedingly high tax burden leads to operating losses, discourages reinvestment and expansion and results in artificially depressed industry wages.
In addition, the level of taxation dampens the industry’s natural growth rate and distorts market transactions from customers in the form of higher prices, from businesses in the form of reduced profits and from states in the form of reduced tax proceeds due to reduced sales because of inflated prices.
Overall, the current federal tax design results in a large deadweight loss to all stakeholders in a state’s economy.
Matthew Huron, owner of two medical marijuana dispensaries and an edible marijuana company in Denver, examines a plant in his grow house.
Ed Andrieski/AP
The perils of banking
The other main burden for marijuana businesses is banking. And unfortunately, there’s even more uncertainty here.
The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 prevents federally chartered banks and credit unions from providing financial services to the cannabis industry, which is considered money laundering.
While the Department of Justice and U.S. Treasury have tried to establish some guidelines for financial companies, the CEO of the Colorado Bankers Association warned its members that only “an act of Congress” will allow banks to work with the industry without fear of criminal prosecution.
Preliminary survey results show that fewer than half of cannabis businesses in Colorado are involved in banking, which deprives them access to the normal services companies rely on to grow and operate efficiently. The banks and credit unions working with the industry tend to be small and local and doing business cautiously. In order to navigate working with a marijuana-related enterprise, the individual banks are responsible for making sure that a business is fully compliant with state law. Even then, banks may run afoul of federal regulations.
For example, in January a federal district court ruled against a credit union – set up to provide banking services to cannabis businesses – seeking access to the Federal Reserve banking system. Even though the guidelines suggested marijuana businesses might not be prosecuted by federal officials, the bank necessarily would be involved in illegal activities.
Although sympathetic to the dilemma of marijuana business owners without banking privileges, the judge said that courts couldn’t simply ignore federal law.
“In short, these guidance documents simply suggest that prosecutors and bank regulators might ‘look the other way’ if financial institutions don’t mind violating the law. A federal court cannot look the other way. I regard the situation as untenable and hope that it will soon be addressed and resolved by Congress.”
Congress, of course, has resolved the issue by not resolving it, and looking the “other way” is a poor substitute for policy in any case.
Cannabis businesses lucky enough to find a financial institution willing to work with them end up paying extremely high fees for an account that generally only allows them to issue checks or direct deposits to merchants and employees. They remain unable to apply for loans and access other financial services. This results in a high cost of business capital.
The unlucky ones without a relationship with a financial institution are either entirely cash-based or work with a payment processing company willing to provide services through its networks.
A customer pays cash for retail marijuana at 3D Cannabis Center in Denver.
Brennan Linsley/AP
Building a pro-pot business environment
Given the legal incoherence surrounding marijuana, producers and retailers of the drug are stymied by two related dilemmas: They have no access to legitimate banking channels and they are denied equitable federal tax treatment compared with other businesses.
Despite that, marijuana makes up a substantial and rapidly growing segment of the economy. A single state, Colorado, generated nearly a billion dollars in revenues in 2015 – and US$135 million in states taxes and license fees – up from $669 million in 2014. Revenues of that magnitude should be promoted rather than seriously wounded by tax policy.
The obvious solution to the federal-state conflict is to modify the drug schedules under the Controlled Substances Act by changing cannabis from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule IV or below. Schedule IV states that “the drug or other substance has a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States” and may result in “limited physical dependence or psychological dependence.” Under Schedule I, a listed drug has “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”
Federal action is unlikely in the foreseeable future. According to a recent study by pro-pot advocacy group NORML, “support for substantive marijuana law reform is far less pronounced among elected officials than it is among the voters they represent.” About 60 percent of American adults believe that marijuana should be legal, but only four percent of Congressional members received NORML’s “A” grade on the issue.
For the moment, sadly, the 1936 cinematic melodrama “Reefer Madness” – which depicted marijuana use as the pathway to rape, murder and insanity – is still playing at selected theaters inside the Beltway.
Since the late 1970s, American evangelicalism has been largely identified with right-wing politics. Conservative religious values entered the political sphere through movements such as Moral Majority and Focus on the Family that opposed gay rights, abortion, feminism and other liberal issues.
Evangelical leaders have influenced national elections and public policy. They have been instrumental in pushing the Republican Party toward increasingly conservative social policies. They have generally been the most consistent voting bloc within the Republican Party.
My research focus is on vibrant religious congregations. I am seeing the emergence of a new generation of evangelicals that has a very different view of what it means to be a “Jesus follower.”
This generation is abstaining from the political theology of the earlier generation and focusing their attention, instead, on improving the lives of people in their local communities.
History of evangelicals
The groundwork for American-style conservative evangelicalism was laid several decades before the rise of the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family movements. Evangelicals, and their forbears the “fundamentalists,” had long made education and mass communication a centerpiece of their efforts.
In the late 19th century, Bible training schools were set up.
Starting in the late 19th century, they established post-secondary Bible training schools and utilized various mass media outlets, such as their own magazines and radio stations to get their religious message out.
Even though these schools and media outlets were independent from each other, they were unified in a shared theological and moral perspective that served to reproduce evangelical culture and beliefs, and to disseminate the religiously tinged political message of the religious right.
Rifts within
This once-unified movement is now dividing over whether to support Donald Trump in the general election.
Old guard evangelicals such as the founder of the Focus on the Family movement James Dobson and Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Moral Majority founder and current president of Liberty University, are warning of dire consequences for the U.S. if Trump is not elected.
According to Dobson, without a Trump presidency, the U.S. will “see a massive assault on religious liberty,” which would “limit what pastors… can say publicly,” and would “severely restrict the freedoms of Christian schools, nonprofit organizations, businesses, hospitals, charities, and seminaries.”
But not all evangelicals are supporting Trump, even though they remain true to the Republican Party. These evangelicals are alarmed at what they see as the vulgar and immoral lifestyle that Trump exemplifies.
In the past, mobilizing this vast religious and political machinery would have resulted in overwhelming and unquestioning support for the Republican candidate. This was first seen with Ronald Reagan in 1980 who won the White House with widespread support of evangelicals, and has been repeated in each election since.
But this time, a call to support Trump has exposed deep divisions within evangelicals that have gone unnoticed until now.
The point is that Trump represents to many the very antithesis of the kind of moral probity that evangelical leaders have spent their lives defending.
Survey research and election polls have failed to differentiate the differences within the movement between whites, Latinos, African-Americans and Asians who all share the same basic evangelical theology, but who may part company over other social and moral issues.
For example, in most surveys and political polls, “evangelical” is limited to white believers, with others who may be similar theologically being classified into other racial/ethnically identified categories such as “Black Protestant,” “Latino Protestant” or “Other nonwhite Protestant.”
Further, as with all religious groups in the U.S., the evangelical movement began struggling to keep its young people in the fold. Recent research shows that among young adults who were identified as evangelicals as teenagers, only 45 percent can still be identified as such.
A new generation
At its most basic level, American evangelicalism is characterized by a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” encouraging others to be “born again” in Jesus and a lively worship culture.
This definition encompasses many groups that were not historically included in the old religious right. Thus, while Latino evangelicals believe the same thing about the Bible and Jesus as white evangelicals, their particular social context in many cases leads to a different political stance.
Youths sit under a sign at a baseball field during a gathering at dusk outside the Christian Fellowship Church in Benton, Kentucky.
David Goldman/AP
As these new and growing groups find their own voices, they are challenging the dominant evangelical perspective on political issues such as immigration and economic inequality.
In addition, younger evangelicals are increasingly coming of age in more diverse neighborhoods and schools, leading to an openness to other racial and religious groups, LGBT people and social justice issues in ways that older evangelicals strenuously opposed.
Further, while the educational successes of evangelicalism, through its many and varied curricula, have served to socialize young people into the “biblically based” moral world, it has also taught them how to read the Bible critically and to pay attention to biblical themes and narrative through-lines that resonate with their own life experiences.
According to a pastor of a church included in my research, he is seeing young evangelicals apply the interpretive skills they have learned in school and church to a broader range of biblical teachings.
“When you start to examine the teachings of Jesus, you’re going to end up seeing that justice matters, that we have a responsibility to care for the poor. Younger evangelicals are basically using those same hermeneutical tools to study the Bible and are saying, wait a minute, not only is there nothing wrong with caring about justice, there’s something wrong with not [caring].”
Thus, while young evangelicals in some ways still evidence a shared theology with their parents’ generation – for example, on biblical passages that would support a “pro-life” perspective – they part company through their engagement with passages that emphasize the believer’s responsibility for the poor.
View of social justice
The younger evangelicals that I’ve been studying are not taking the expected evangelical position in this election, such as supporting Donald Trump, or supporting a broader agenda as that promoted by evangelical leaders such as James Dobson.
Instead, the political activism that these younger evangelicals tend to engage in usually relates to issues like improving local schools, creating job opportunities, caring for the homeless and other activities that have been largely overlooked by American evangelicalism as it has been practiced over the past several decades.
In my interviews, I’ve asked many of these younger evangelicals how their religious commitments relate to politics. Their responses show a simultaneous distancing from “politics,” and a desire to seek change in a way that is consistent with their beliefs. A good example of this kind of response came from a 20-something African-American young woman who told me,
“I also don’t care much for politics, because it’s so ugly. I just feel like, let’s commit to loving people. When I think about laws that unjustly affect minorities or the poor, that bothers me only because of the Gospel.”
Diverse world view
These evangelicals have staked out a middle ground that is neither Democrat nor Republican, liberal or conservative.
This is not to say that younger evangelicals are all in agreement with how their religious views should be applied in the world. Rather, they are opting out of the political identities and battles that have characterized evangelicalism for the past 40 years.
Their world is more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and religious beliefs. Their friends are as likely to be straight or gay, Christian or Buddhist, or black or Latino.
That has informed the way that they understand their religious beliefs and their political alignments. They are seeking to live out their faith in response to a world that is different from the world that leaders of the old religious right inhabit.
Over the past few weeks, millions of Americans have watched a tape from 2005, featuring Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women:
“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
When asked to explain this conversation, Trump claimed that his comments were just “words” and “locker room talk,” and that the video is “nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we are facing today.”
I would suggest that Trump’s reaction to the video is just as alarming as the conversation itself. His explanation implies that his words are normal and natural — just a way for men to joke around and bond.
Acting as if sexual aggression against women is normal and unimportant can have real and harmful consequences, as I have seen through my previous work with sexual assault survivors as a rape crisis counselor and my scholarship on sexual harassment and sexual assault.
The ways women are harmed
Anti-Trump protesters
AP/Rainmaker Photo
Here are four ways attempts to normalize these behaviors can harm women in very real ways.
1. Trivializes sexual aggression
Trump’s comments minimize the seriousness of sexual harassment and assault – something that affects millions of women in the United States.
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey estimates that 19.3 percent of American women have been raped and 27.3 percent have experienced unwanted sexual contact, like kissing or groping, in their lifetimes.
Studies estimate that 58 percent of women report having experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace.
Less “severe” forms of sexual harassment happen more frequently. These behaviors can include making crude or lewd comments and questioning a woman’s competence or ability to perform her work – for example, by saying, “This is no job for a woman.” Also included: calling women demeaning or denigrating names, like “bitch” or “Miss Housekeeping.”
Not taking the experiences of these women seriously can have devastating impacts. Not surprisingly, experiencing any type of sexual harassment often results in a woman feeling less satisfied with her job, coworkers and supervisors. Women who are sexually harassed also report lower mental and physical health.
Experiencing rape or sexual assault often has long-lasting consequences for women’s mental health, including post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, drug and alchol abuse, and suicidal thoughts. A women’s physical and sexual health can also suffer.
2. Spreads misinformation about the nature of assault
Following the release of the video, many women have come forward with allegations of sexual assault against Trump. Trump has claimed that these “stories have been largely debunked,” but most of these reports have not been objectively disproven.
Trump has tried to discredit his accusers by questioning their motives. For example, he said, “They get some free fame. It’s a total setup.” He also attacked their attractiveness: “Look at her, look at her words, you tell me what you think. I don’t think so.” and “Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.” The message behind such comments is that only an attractive woman could be a victim of sexual harassment or assault.
Feminist scholars have long argued against the myth that physical attractiveness is a main motivation for sexual predators. For instance, in the classic text Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller states: “the rapist chooses his victim with a striking disregard for conventional ‘sex appeal.’”
Recent research on perpetrators of sexual assault supports this idea. Perpetrators’ motivations for sexually assaulting women are often about power, control, and hostility towards women. For instance, one man in this study stated: “I basically used her as my personal f—box…she was just dead weight…she could barely open her eyes.”
3. Makes it harder for victims to report
Making light of sexual aggression against women makes it even more difficult for women who experience it to come forward.
Studies suggest that fewer than 25 percent of women who experience sexual harassment actually file formal complaints. Similarly, research finds that only 5 percent to 20 percent of women report rape to law enforcement. Rates of reporting also vary depending on the behaviors women experience. Seemingly “less severe” forms of sexual harassment and assault (like unwanted sexual contact) are rarely reported. Women are often reluctant to report sexual harassment and assault out of fear: fear of being blamed, not being believed, being ostracized or retaliated against.
In a recent example, former Fox News Host Gretchen Carlson, who filed a sexual harassment suit against Roger Ailes, described feeling hesitant to come forward about her experiences and worrying about the harm it could do to her career.
4. Models problematic behavior
Messages that normalize and trivialize sexual aggression are especially harmful when they are coming from someone who is aspiring to be the president of the United States.
We know that leaders can play an important role in shaping organizational and social culture around sexual assault. Research on bystander intervention programs find that when leaders model positive behaviors – for example, by recognizing the seriousness of sexual violence and stepping in to stop it when it occurs – other people are more likely to intervene as well.
One bystander intervention program trains student leaders on college campuses to act as “Peer Opinion Leaders” – who model positive bystander behavior for other students on campus. A research study, published in 2014, found that a college campus using this program had lower rates of sexual harassment than campuses that did not impliment this program.
On the other hand, leaders’ beliefs and actions that help foster sexist, hostile environments can increase women’s risk of sexual assault. One study examined data collected by the Department of Defense in 2002 and 2006, which assessed experiences of sexual harassment and assault among active duty service women. This research found that found that women who worked in an environment where sexually harassing behaviors were prevalent were 12 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than women working in an environment with no harassment.
Words that help to create a culture that tolerates and normalizes sexual harassment and assault can have devastating consequences.
When the Raw Story visited the Bundy bunch inside the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge they were calling for a revolution against the federal government. Rifle-toting supporters said, “ I’m here to fight for freedom and get our Constitution back,” and “I would support this to the death, literally.”
Now eight months after their occupation came to an end the government case has ended in a jury acquitting the two Bundy brothers and five other supporters on all charges but one, including the main one of conspiracy. The government failed to prove the Bundy Bunch “had engaged in an illegal conspiracy that kept federal workers — employees of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management — from doing their jobs.”
The jury’s logic is not known yet, but it is a double standard that almost certainly turns on race. If a group of heavily armed Muslim Americans or Black Lives Matter activists seized public facilities and land, the government would have rushed in with all guns blazing and anyone who survived would be locked up for life. The record of post-9/11 terror prosecutions is littered with hundreds of cases of entrapment, paid informants, and “fake terror plots.”
For more than a decade the feds have also prosecuted similarly flimsy cases against environmental, animal-rights, and Occupy Wall Street activists, known as the “Green Scare.” Numerous peaceful activists have been sentenced to prison for more than a decade for little more than conversations egged on by paid FBI provocateurs. Even in cases where violence was planned, no one was ever injured and it was often completely instigated and organized by the government.
But when it comes to the Bundys, they actively planned the illegal armed takeover. At least two months before the refuge occupation began Jan. 2, 2016, the Bundys visited local sheriff Dave Ward and warned him to prevent two local ranchers convicted of arson from going to federal prison. According to Ward, the Bundys said they would “bring hundreds of people to town [and] attempt to overpower or overthrow my authority as sheriff.”
Inside Malheur, in a two-hour conversation with Ammon Bundy in his pickup truck, when this reporter pointed out their intent was to spark a violent uprising against the government, he did not deny it. Militia members openly carried weapons on federal land, which is illegal, and the Raw Story witnessed the militia stealing and damaging government equipment, violating the law in tearing up sensitive archeological sites, and building barricades and bunkers for an apocalyptic showdown. The Bundys also set up a kangaroo court to indict, try, convict, and remove government officials from office.
Yet according to the jury the government did not prove a conspiracy. Meanwhile, halfway across the country in North Dakota, a huge force of police and private security are viciously attacking Native Americans peacefully protecting their land from the ravages of the oil and gas industry.
The Bundy case is more proof of the well-documentedracial bias embedded in the jury system. The notion that an armed militia with snipers stationed in the watchtower, blockading all road into the refuge and vowing to die for their cause did not impede federal workers from doing their job is as absurd as it sounds and is an indictment of the deep racial biases in America.
The silver lining is the Bundy brothers and their father still face trial for their violent confrontation in Nevada with government officials in 2014 over their refusal to pay $1 million in overdue grazing fees on federal lands.
The Bundy acquittal will embolden violent right-wing militias to seize other public lands, especially West of the Rockies where there is a movement funded by the Koch Brothers to undermine federal control of huge swaths of land.
Undoubtedly these violent militias will be aided and abetted by legions of Trump’s supporters calling for a “violent revolution” if Clinton wins the presidency as expected. The government’s hands-off approach toward the militia movement is a failure. This isn’t a call for more repression as used against Muslims, African-Americans, and left-wing activists. It’s a demand the government protect the public and its lands from the growing threat of right-wing terrorism.
Arun Gupta contributes to The Washington Post, YES! Magazine, In These Times, The Progressive, Telesur, and The Nation. He is author of the forthcoming, Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction: A Junk-Food Loving Chef’s Inquiry into Taste, from The New Press. Follow him @arunindy or email at arun_dot_indypendent_at_gmail_dot_com.
By now, we at Raw Story's OMG Is This Still Happening desk feel fairly confident in saying that everyone in the country is ready for this election to be over.
Like a long, ugly, particularly persistent panic attack, the constant parade of outrages, assaults to common sense and blatant absurdities have left many Americans feeling psychologically battered, overstimulated and stuck with a feeling of creeping dread and horror that won't go away.
Here is a list of a few things to look forward to that should hopefully help get you through the last awful days before we drive a stake through the heart of the 2016 election and watch it crumble to ashes.
7. Fewer surrogates on the TeeVee: As Media Matters' Carlos Maza noted, Trump's army of double-talking campaign surrogates have committed vicious crimes against rational thought, the English language and the profession of journalism by becoming the TV equivalent of "facehugger" baby aliens.
All reasonable conversation comes to a halt, everyone starts shouting and the truth dies screaming in a fire.
There will no doubt be a healthy amount of grumbling and moaning after Nov. 8, but hopefully by Christmas, Jeffrey Lord, Kayleigh McEnany, Scottie Nell Hughes and Cory Lewandowski will all climb into Kellyanne Conway's minivan and go hurtling off a tall cliff somewhere.
Raw Story spoke with the word "surrogate," which said it very much looks forward to returning to its work with mothers and families and getting off the campaign trail.
When asked if it plans to do more "sexual surrogate" work, surrogate said, "That never really took off."
6. Goodbye, Tofu Palin: Worthless media sop Jill Stein will return to obscurity for another four years and go back to band practice and showing up at other people's birthday parties to demand a share of the presents.
No doubt, sometime in 2020, she will re-emerge, smiling blandly and warning us all about the hidden dangers of supermarket laser scanners contaminating our food. I have every faith that Stein will run -- again -- as a liberal spoiler against Pres. Hillary Clinton, and have another go at selling shiny, substance-free, feel-good eyewash politics to liberals the way Sarah Palin serves them to the right.
5. People will return to not giving two shits about Wikileaks: WankyLeaks has played an invaluable role in getting John Podesta's risotto recipe and Land's End receipts out to the world, as well as revealing the hidden hypocrisies -- and credit card numbers -- of elite Democratic donors who committed the heinous crime of supporting a Democratic candidate for president.
Beyond that, however, Julian Assange's "radical transparency" organization has failed to move the U.S. election much one way or the other. Maybe when he from his Ecuadorian hosts, Assange can send out some resumes for temp jobs or IT positions.
4. The Trump brand is ruined forever: Sensing the shi(f)t in the wind, Trump Hotels Inc. CEO Eric Danzinger announced last week that new hotels built by the company will not have the word "Trump" in the name, but will rather be called "Scion" hotels. Danzinger rightly foresees that in the wake of Donald Trump's hateful, time-wasting, money-hemorrhaging disaster of a losing presidential campaign, the Trump brand is about to become completely toxic around the world.
Women are already boycotting Ivanka Trump's clothing line and the stores that sell it. Bookings are down at Trump hotels around the globe. In his grasping, sweaty-palmed run at the big brass ring, Donald Trump has made himself into a global punchline. Yay.
3. No more Donald, Jr. and Eric Trump: There is an old southern saying that I just made up that goes, "The little shit never falls far from the big asshole." That could not be clearer than when you observe these two slicked-up morons on camera, babbling with the slightly wild-eyed, sweaty-faced vehemence of a college sophomore with his first-ever 8-ball of cocaine all to himself.
Like a pair of terrarium-raised grubs dressed in matching serial-killer haircuts and aggressively tight collars, Eric and Donald, Jr. show us that while inherited wealth can make a person spoiled, useless and ridiculous, inherited inherited wealth can make you into a good example of why aliens should reduce the Earth's surface to molten glass. Just kill every living thing and start over in a couple million years.
2. Hello, Trump TV: A lot of people I know have been wringing their hands about Trump's plan to launch his own network with the help of Breitbart.com CEO Steve Bannon.
Allow me to try and put whatever fears you may be harboring to rest: Trump TV is going to be a disaster, a cartwheeling fireball of failure. Everything else that the notoriously feckless businessman with the attention span of a particularly stupid fruit fly has turned his tiny orange hand to has ended up in flames on the side of the road or lodged in bankruptcy court.
Equally kooky right-wing howler monkey Glenn Beck is currently watching his glorious dream for a far-right TV network burn down around his ears. It will be fun and exciting to watch Trump TV do the same once the former Apprentice star stops paying his employees and the whole mess devolves into chaos, just like Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump Ice bottled water and Trump's short-lived lifestyle magazine.
How long will the network actually broadcast? Will the lights actually go out during a broadcast? How much damage will Trump TV inflict on Fox News before it folds? These questions make me -- in the words of the Rocky Horror Picture Show's Frank N. Furter -- quiver with anticipation.
1. Less Donald Trump, period: For better or worse, once he loses the election, Trump will probably be a regular fixture in the media for a few weeks, but eventually we will see less and less of his bloated orange face and hear less and less of his horrible, whiny, overgrown 8-year-old's voice and his puny 200-word vocabulary.
Donald Trump is an assault on the senses. Satirist H. L. Mencken could have been talking about Trump when he described the writing of Pres. Warren G. Harding: "It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."
He is an affront to the eyes with his bizarre skin colors, hideous hair and boxy suits. His me-first, you're-a-poopyhead style of debate and oration is an assault on the mind. One can only imagine the horror endured by the dozens of women who Trump has groped, grabbed and inappropriately touched. His little hands, one guesses, are probably constantly clammy and feel like hot, damp starfish through your clothes.
All of this, yes, all of it will eventually go away. Trump will no doubt have a big baby meltdown tantrum on November 9 and then slowly and steadily go gently into that good night as he retreats to ideologically friendly outfits like Trump TV and wherever Sean Hannity will be setting up a card table and an iPhone camera.
Above all, chickens, we at Raw Story would like to remind you that this election will end. While a part of your mind may be shrilly screaming and crouching in the corner of your skull convinced that we have all died and this is Hell, one day soon we will be able to go a full 24 hours at a time without hearing, talking about or even thinking about Donald Trump. Blessed be.
Picture this scene. You have been in a terrible accident and are being rushed into an emergency room. Though barely conscious, you can still mouth a few words. Before the trauma team puts you under, you look up from the gurney and spy a physician examining you with great concern. Her worried look sends a clear message that you are in grave danger. The last words you are likely to utter are, “Get that doctor out of here. I want someone from outside the medical profession to attend to my injuries.”
Consider this scenario. You are boarding a jumbo jet for a cross-country flight. As the plane taxis to the runway, you see the cockpit door open. The pilot emerges and walks down the aisle to an empty seat. As he sits down and makes himself comfortable, a flight attendant takes the controls the pilot had abandoned. You hear the engines roar in preparation for takeoff, yet the pilot doesn’t budge. It’s becoming increasingly clear, the flight attendant is going to pilot the aircraft. Are you feeling good about that?
Or contemplate this situation. You’ve been informed by the IRS that you are going to be audited. Some complex financial dealings you had during the past year have raised red flags with the feds. You know little about tax law, but your accountant assured you months earlier that all your deductions are allowed. When you inform that same individual of your impending review, he confesses that he was too busy during tax season to prepare your return, so he left that task to his intern. Do you begin to wonder how you will look in prison garb when you are incarcerated for tax fraud?
All of the above seem far-fetched. And maybe they are. For who would want someone other than a medical professional caring for one’s wounds, or anyone but a pilot flying a plane, or somebody other than an accountant preparing taxes? Yet for some reason, many Americans feel perfectly confident electing an outsider to the presidency. When it comes to governing the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, many believe experience is more of a hindrance than a help. It’s assumed by some that the skills and knowledge necessary to lead the United States can be appropriated by almost anyone doing almost anything. For those folks, statecraft is no more difficult than riding a bike or chewing gum. It takes no special abilities, except perhaps bravado and an unbridled ego.
Why is that? What is it about politics that makes some people think it takes no formal preparation? Why are so many willing to put an outsider into the White House? Perhaps it’s the nature of government itself. It has been said that politics is the art of compromise. It requires give and take, making demands as well as concessions, getting something though not everything. Or as Otto von Bismarck put it in the mid-19th century, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best.”
But the idea of only getting half a loaf, as it were, leaves many Americans feeling short changed. For them, anything less than total victory is a defeat. So politicians who wallow in the arena of give and take are viewed with disdain. If they cannot win all of the time, they are unworthy of support. But the outsider, who has not had to negotiate and compromise, appears as a refreshing change. The outsider can promise the world because he’s never had to deliver a thing. The outsider can guarantee to make everything better, because he’s never had to make anything better.
This is not a new phenomenon in American politics. It antedates Donald Trump’s promises of winning “bigly.” Jimmy Carter ran as an outsider in 1976. But forty years ago being an outsider didn’t mean outside of politics, it simply meant outside the Washington beltway. When Carter first announced his candidacy, few Americans had ever heard of him. “Jimmy who?” many jeered. But a nation chastened by the Vietnam War and disgusted with Watergate hungered for change. The outsider, “born again,” peanut farmer from Georgia seemed to be the answer.
To be sure, the Carter administration had many victories. The Camp David Accords, the historic agreement between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, still stands as a monumental step towards securing peace in the troubled Middle East. The Panama Canal Zone Treaty too, while decried by some at the time, did much to improve relations between the United States, Panama, and our other southern neighbors.
But Carter’s efforts to address the energy crisis proved less than successful. And that was in large part his own doing. While Carter should be applauded for encouraging Americans to conserve energy and consume less, his attempt to craft an effective program failed abysmally, though not for lack of ideas. He sent to Congress a comprehensive package, addressing every aspect of energy policy from exploration to production to conservation. But Carter made it clear that he wanted Congress to accept it all as presented. He seemed little interested in negotiation or accommodation with the folks at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Carter wanted a whole loaf, instead he received only crumbs.
This was not because of partisan divisions; the Democrats controlled both House and the Senate. However, having run and won as an outsider, Carter never bothered himself with the inner workings of Washington. Neither Carter nor his staff seemed interested in reaching out to the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. House Speaker Tip O’Neill noted that even after three years of the Carter presidency, he could not recognize Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief aide, because Jordan had never bothered to introduce himself. Ironically, Carter’s successor Ronald Reagan, the Speaker’s ideological opposite, would have better relations with O’Neill and the Democrats in Congress than Carter. The lesson is clear. Being an outsider can have great appeal when voters are angry, frustrated, and hungry for change. But little change will come if the outsider doesn’t learn how to operate inside the beltway.
Donald Trump has taken the role of outsider to a whole new level. He prides himself as not being of the political establishment of either party. He claims to know more than the “career politicians” because he has never sullied himself in the dirty world of negotiations and compromise. He even “knows more than the generals,” who have devoted their entire lives in service to their country. He would have us believe that he and he alone has the answers to all of the nation’s problems. All voters need to do is put this outsider into the White House. I’m guessing he even thinks he can perform emergency surgery and fly a jumbo jet. There is considerable evidence, however, that his accountant is a whiz at preparing taxes.
Timothy Lynch is a Professor of History at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio.
As the madcap, ugly 2016 election nears its end, one thing is clear: most Americans don’t trust either of their main choices for president. Between Hillary Clinton’s serious trust deficit and Donald Trump’s ever darker unpleasantness, this election cycle is increasingly marked by voters’ indifference and disgust.
It all feels rather like the situation four decades ago, when Americans’ faith in government was at one of its lowest ebbs. By the mid-1970s, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had all but dashed the hopes of a progressive era; instead, Americans lived through Vietnam and endured a government that treated its people with contempt, culminating in the national scandal of Watergate.
Against this crisis of spirit, and with an unpopular incumbent in Gerald Ford and a paucity of inspiring Democratic candidates, the 1976 election was all set up to be a morose affair. But then, as if out of nowhere, along came a former peanut farmer to shake things up.
It’s hard to overstate just how much of an “outsider” candidate Jimmy Carter was before the 1976 election. Despite being governor of Georgia, he was a virtual unknown nationally. But for most of 1975, he managed to gradually build momentum with a personal style of campaigning – and after vaulting to the front of a crowded field of primary candidates by winning the Iowa caucuses, he eventually managed to secure the Democratic nomination for president.
Turning in solid performances in three televised debates, Carter managed to oust Ford by a narrow margin and became the US’s 39th president. A recurring slogan of his campaign was “Why not the best?” – and he genuinely did intend to give his best to a country that sorely needed it. But his presidency didn’t go to plan, and public opinion has been cool to say the least ever since.
But with the US once again mired in a not dissimilar sort of malaise, it’s time to reassess what Carter meant to his country.
Trouble abroad
Carter was the first president to put human rights at the forefront of his foreign policy. “I know how easy it is to overlook the persecution of others when your own rights and freedoms are not in jeopardy,” he later wrote, referring to his upbringing in segregationist Georgia. “To me … moral principles were the best foundation for the exertion of American power and influence.”
Carter officially disdained dictatorships in Central and South America whether they were capitalist or communist, a truly unprecedented move for a postwar president. Previously, the US had often blindly supported far-right dictatorships and insurgencies to offset communism, and it would do so again; both the Vietnam War before Carter’s presidency and the Iran-Contra affair after it are testament to the shortsightedness of this approach.
Carter’s government emphasised rights for all, not just for Americans, and his administration was defined by the quest for peace rather than military superiority. With his vigilance and determination, the seemingly impossible Camp David Accords were signed between Egypt and Israel. The resulting Framework for Peace in the Middle East created a secure relationship between the two countries, and was the first time Israel truly acknowledged Palestinian rights.
While the accords were a model example for Middle East negotiations for years to come, they were never going to win Carter votes. He knew this perfectly well; his motivation was doing what was necessary to advance the interests of global peace. In his moral crusades, Carter was unwavering – and he expected the same of the American people.
A crisis of confidence
Domestically, Carter’s administration was dogged by an unprecedented energy crisis. From his first week in office, Carter made it clear that America’s reliance on foreign oil left it vulnerable to blackmail, and that alternative sources had to be developed if Americans were to prosper.
Carter made many televised addresses to the people emphasising the importance of looking to renewable alternatives for the nation’s energy, but average Americans seldom took him seriously. Unable to rally public support, Carter lacked the political capital to pressure congress into enacting his energy bills.
While he managed to reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil, pursuing renewable energy sources by investing billions in research and development, the energy issue continued to fester. And by the summer of 1979, America found itself in the depths of the very energy crisis that Carter predicted.
In 1977, Carter walked from his inauguration to the White House, the first president to do so for years.
Jimmy Carter Library
With the country losing faith in him, Carter took to television to give his most famous address, the so-called “crisis of confidence speech”. In this address, Carter asserted a need for Americans to now pull together if they were to defeat the energy crisis, acknowledging that the people had developed an apathy towards their government thanks to the events of the 1960s and early 1970s.
The speech had its limitations as a piece of oratory, but it was a bold and honest move. Nonetheless, it would prove to be Carter’s political undoing in his 1980 re-election campaign.
Dubbed the “malaise speech” by Carter’s Republican opponent Ronald Reagan, it was used to frame Carter as an out-of-touch president with little faith in the American people. Coupled with Reagan’s patriotic platform and the continuing Iranian hostage crisis, Carter’s prospects for re-election shrivelled. Reagan ultimately scored a landslide victory.
Looking back at his four years in office, Carter came through on his slogan of “Why not the best?”, but perhaps not in the way Americans were expecting. Carter made America a moral force under his tenure, mediating some of the world’s most fraught tensions and fighting for peace and freedom for all. He was open and honest with his people; as he famously said in a campaign commercial:
I will never tell a lie. I will never make a misleading statement. I will never betray the confidence any of you has in me.
Carter’s presidency wasn’t a success on all measures, but it set a remarkable standard for decency, honesty and justice. The US would be lucky to have such a person running for president in 2016.
The hugely popular TV show Game of Thrones has two seasons to go; already the showrunners, David Benioff and Daniel Weiss, are speeding towards the endgame. But providing a satisfactory conclusion to a show that has multiple, interweaving storylines and which incorporates both realist and high fantasy elements is no easy task.
George R. R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series on which the show is based, is also obliged to invent endings for narratives within an even more complex storyworld. Can Benioff and Weiss – and Martin – wrap things up in a way that will satisfy the fan communities and make narrative sense?
One of the pleasures of both show and books is the multiple genres that they encompass. Detective story, horror, sci-fi have all been invoked: who killed Jon Arryn, and why, was a pressing question in the first and fourth seasons.
Horror tropes are activated when the zombie wight army and the White Walkers loom into view; meanwhile discredited Maester, Qyburn, is reinventing himself as Victor Frankenstein in his laboratory down in the Black Cells. The genres of epic, comedy, myth and tragedy offer different possibilities for closure to the stories of the Targaryens, Starks and Lannisters – and the rest of the Known World.
Daenerys, played by Emilia Clarke: will she win the Iron Throne?
A comic ending - in the sense of Shakespeare’s comedies - is attractive. In this scenario, Daenerys wins the Iron Throne, marries Jon Snow, has lots of children to perpetuate the Targaryen dynasty, and everyone in King’s Landing lives happily ever after.
One of J.R.R. Tolkien’s plots within The Lord of the Rings came to just such a conclusion; Aragorn became king and ruled wisely and well for a hundred years. Martin has expressly criticised the conventional nature of Tolkien’s comic ending though, and this solution would leave a number of questions unanswered, even if the Starks become Wardens of the North once more and Tyrion is Hand of the Queen.
Epic, meanwhile, is a public and political genre, concerned with the rise and fall of empires. An epic scenario would expand on the comic version by offering global solutions to the narratives. In this scenario, I’d expect more focus on the Essos plots, closing down the saga of Slavers’s Bay with the restoration of the slave-trade. The city of Volantis, the regional super-power, would intervene to restore the status quo. Peace would be restored throughout the Seven Kingdoms, thanks to Daenerys and Jon’s combined wisdom and firepower. These turbulent few decades in Westeros and Essos history would come to a satisfying end.
Comic or epic endings don’t solve the North’s most pressing problem however: Winter is coming, but a winter unlike any in living memory. How can the Westerosi combat or call off the implacable White Walkers?
A heroic ending?
Now that Benioff and Weiss’s vision has gone beyond the plot material in Martin’s published works, they are free to opt for a heroic-mythic ending. The fan community would certainly like to see a titanic battle between the forces of fire, embodied by the dragons, and the petrifying antithetical figures of the White Walkers/Others, along with their Army of the Dead.
A heroic ending would mesh with the prophecy that the legendary warrior, Azor Ahai, will be reborn in order to overcome the existential threat to the Known World. Jon and Dany (representing Azor Ahai as male and female principles) could sally forth on dragon - back to battle against the blue-eyed ice-demons.
But if they are to save the Seven Kingdoms, their triumph will surely come at a cost. Fans have speculated that, by virtue of his Stark ancestry, Jon could become the new Night’s King, the White Walkers’ leader, and negotiate a peace on their behalf with the southern humans. That would put paid to his chances of sitting on the Iron Throne, but his sacrifice might be worth it.
Finally, there’s the tragic possibility. As those relentless assassins, the Faceless Men frequently remind us: Valar Morghulis “All Men Must Die”. Martin’s title, A Song of Ice and Fire may allude to Robert Frost’s short poem “Fire and Ice in which Frost explicitly figures the world’s end either in fiery conflagration or as a new Ice Age.
Apocalypse may be on the cards, a ragna rök like that described in the Old Norse poem Völuspá (The Seeress’s Prophecy), composed around 1000 CE. In this terrifying vision, flame leaps up and consumes the heavens and the earth sinks into the sea from which it once arose. Humans, gods and giants perish and the great World-Tree shudders.
This eschatology wouldn’t fit with Martin’s hints about a "bitter-sweet” ending, however. The destruction of the Known World would be bitter indeed for fans, and there would be no consoling sweetness to temper the shock.
Benioff and Weiss could be tempted to blow their CGI budget on an almighty annihilation of everyone and everything; the show that staged the Red Wedding and the destruction of the Great Sept might not shrink from such a bold conclusion. In the final verses of Völuspá, a new world arises from the ocean, the eagle hunts fish on the mountainside and a fresh generation of gods and humans appear. So there can be hope on the other side of apocalypse.
Still, Benioff and Weiss have about 14 hours of screen-time in which to finish up and they may not be able to close down every single storyline in a satisfactory way.
George R.R. Martin, author of A Song of Fire and Ice: likely to go for a heroic-mythic ending.
Martin has two more books at least, and although the critic John Mullan has recently suggested that the author has literally lost the plot, Martin has more leeway to dream up multiple endings for his different narrative arcs, just as Tolkien did. Reflection on how medieval and modern genres work would help him in that challenge.
An educated guess
My guess is that the show will take the comic option, contenting itself with a marriage between Jon and Daenerys and finding some quick fix for the White Walker problem. The dragons will surely help.
Martin will go for a heroic-mythic ending, fulfilling the messianic prophecies in circulation about Azor Ahai and the even more mysterious Prince That Was Promised. Jon will sacrifice himself, unafraid to die once again, and Daenerys and her human children will rule wisely and well for generations to come. We’ll just have to wait and see.
