America The Selfish

This meme was recently posted on a the very partisan Facebook page Stop the World, the Teabaggers want off and has really caused a stir with commenters. Mostly due to Nancy Reagan being dead... however she was still among the living when the meme was first created. I'm still not a fan of memes and wish there was a citation but you don't need to sift all the way through Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge to know that these charges are true. The real issue is deeper though. There is a severe lack of empathy in America, a deficit if you will, and it is not restricted to Republicans.

Maybe I have prattled on about Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal too much already, but his core argument holds here. The faction that controls the Democratic Party has a large empathy deficit about economics and working life in America. Unless I did not catch it, Frank made it through his entire book without discussing his concept of the "Liberal class" controlling the Dems without mentioning Noam Chomsky's theories about the eternal class struggle in this country. That's okay, Thomas Frank's history kung fu is far superior to mine and he has no need to lean on anyone else to make his argument. But that won't stop me from connecting the two great thinkers' ideas about class consciousness among the elite.

To paraphrase: The history of America is that a highly class conscious business elite is always fighting a bitter class war against working people to beat them down and win the subservience and quiescence of the low to the high. This is the never ending battle for the hearts and minds of men, and is fought in this country with a naked and ruthless aggression that makes the rest of the world gasp. Now, that business elite which held itself as the enlightened and progressive side of American capitalism has taken effective control of and entire political party even as the regressive and reactionary side has long held firm control over the other one. However, it is the Republican elite that has driven the empathy deficit to it's impossible depth today. First AM talk radio was taken over after Nancy's Alzheimer's ridden husband removed the firewall of relative fairness and paved the way for one-sided reactionary propaganda to colonize the airwaves, brainwashing millions of listeners over decades. Then Republicans pushed through the deregulation of news on cable TV, bringing the bitter fruit of Fox News to a much wider audience.

The effect was to polarize and atomize a vast swath of Americans, the right-wingers all understand that they are on the same team but are only connected to each other vertically through what they were exposed to through conservative media. Thus programmed, these lone wolf soldiers in the Republican war on American civilization are able to shut down any reasonable debate they can worm their way into. And family get-togethers and holidays have never been the same since. Another book by Thomas Frank explains then how the Republican base reorganized itself to shout down any possibility for solidarity after the housing collapse and financial meltdown brought on by that bastion of selfishness on Wall Street. "Hard Times Conservatism" is how he puts it in Pity the Billionaire and deftly shows how the mass indoctrination into the values of the business elite of both stripes can and will prevent us from trusting one another, probably forever.

Perhaps, little by little as the vicious authoritarians fall victim to life's tragedies including the ones mentioned in the Nancy Reagan meme above, they will experience an extinction burst and realize the depths to which they have been lied to but it will never go away on its own. "It can happen to you" should be our rallying cry to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and empathy for the struggles our neighbors and families face. Yes, you will probably get cancer. You will probably lose your job. You will probably experience divorce or death or betrayal by loved ones. No matter how much you believe in Trump, he will use you and abuse you. As will the next man on horseback. As will probably Hillary Clinton. We have to do it ourselves, but we can't until the cancer of lies and hate are still broadcast and pumped into society.

The "Liberal" Class: The Dark Side of Meritocracy

I just finished Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal on audio and am now depressed. Dr. Frank, as always, lays out the way it is and after several books analyzing the ideological underpinnings of Republican voters and their leaders he has turned his keen eye on the Democrats. It is not a pretty sight. Frank's book is subtitled "what happened to the party of the people?" His answer is that the Democratic Party has been taken over by a variety of liberal that holds itself as the highest expression of that ideology. Frank has termed this gaggle of professionals "the liberal class" and leaders like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are at the top. What distinguishes this faction within the party from others is their slavish devotion to meritocracy, which on it's face is a good thing, we need competence and expertise in government. But meritocracy values education above all else, which has led to disdain for all other pursuits, and therefore the "liberal class" has no interest in working people or their issues. This in turn has lead to the greatest explosion of inequality in America since the Civil War, or perhaps ever.

And that is a real problem, to put it mildly. This is basically what people are getting at when they complain that the two major parties in America are equally bad. This is also how the once proud "Party of the People" has simply become the "lesser of two evils". Usually, the word "spineless" was always at the forefront of criticism from the left, but cowardice is not the explanation Frank uses to describe how the Democratic elite abandoned it's traditional constituency of working people. Well, not abandoned completely, Frank points out in gloomy fashion that during the 2012 presidential campaign the issues of working class people were brought to the forefront to attack Mitt Romney but quickly faded away again.

No, the reason the Democratic Party abandoned working people and are all wrong about the overarching issue of the day, wealth and income inequality, is that professionals that make up the elite within that party don't care anymore. Education, namely the elite private university you went to and how well you did there, is the only thing that matters. Instead of the crude materialism of the right wing kleptocracy, we have an oligarchy of intellect and character. But neither one cares particularly about the needs of working people. Frank echoes Noam Chomsky a bit on this issue, though while Chomsky traces (or attempts to trace, he is not an historian after all) the meritocratic elite back to the founding of the republic, Frank located a specific moment in time when the Democratic Party killed the New Deal and sought the attentions of the highly educated.

The tumultuous political year 1968 has been brought up numerous times this election season, especially before Trump became the presumptive nominee and there was a very real possibility of a contested convention. Back then it was the Democrats who had a crazy (to put it mildly) convention in Chicago, and out of it came the McGovern commission that reformed the nomination process. These reforms ensured that delegates to the convention reflected the demographics of America but set off a series of changes locking organized labor and working people out of positions of influence, according to Frank. Who needs those uncultured racist, sexist, uneducated union types anyway? The new Democratic ideal was the highly educated professional liberal, the one that is inclusive of gender and ethnicity, all others need not apply.

When these elite professionals have gained class consciousness and deal only with each other it is not difficult to see how they would then condescend to their inferiors, which Frank goes over in excruciating detail. An article he wrote on billionaire liberalism over two years ago had stuck in my head and I was miraculously able to find it in the pit of despair that is Salon's archive. Here he describes the Mugwump by quoting and paraphrasing the great Richard Hofstadter. The Mugwump is as committed to cleaning up government as he is to disciplining the poor, fighting corruption and making the working classes behave, and he the Mugwump is in a privileged position of wealth and influence to make his will known. This is what people hate about "liberals", what Frank talked about with regards to Michael Bloomburg:

If that description hits uncomfortably close to home, well, good. We’ve returned to the Gilded Age, laissez-faire is common sense again, and Victorian levels of inequality are back. The single greatest issue of then is the single greatest issue of now, and once again people like Bloomberg—a modern-day Mugwump if ever there was one—have nothing useful to say about it, other than to remind us when it’s time to bow before the mighty. Oh, Bloomberg could be relentless in his mayoral days in his quest for sin taxes, for random police authority, for campaigns against sugary soda and trans fats. But put a “living wage” proposal on his desk, and he would denounce it as a Soviet-style interference in private affairs.

Gone are the campaigns to organize workers on the shop floor, in are the campaigns against smoking. Gone are the push for real laws to redress inequality, in are the glorious exhortations to free trade. Yes, the elite liberal wants those disgusting people at Wal-Mart to shape up. They naturally gravitate towards that bastion of professional greatness (ho ho) in high finance.

For the most part, Frank does not even go into how this problem of a Democratic elite on the wrong side of so many issues about inequality can be solved in Listen, Liberal. But this article at least lights the way. We, the working people of America, have faced this professional class betrayal before during the long Gilded Age before the New Deal. All we need to do is look at how working people got together before and fought for their rights and their piece of the American Dream. After all, this "liberal" class is but one faction within the party, there must be a way to peel them away from identifying with all the other factions that are killing the country and the economy. We have to go back to square one and learn what it takes to persuade our own leaders. If Bernie Sanders' campaign anything it was this.

Will they show up?

Lovely, more jargon to learn. This one might be worth it though. SINO: supporter in name only is definitely an issue that explains the weakness of political parties and other organizations in the age of social media. Chuck McCutcheon, writing at the Christian Science Monitor, used the term in describing big wheel officials that can make a difference in trumps campaign. I am actually interested in how the loose affiliation among regular voters will affect the alt right or hard right as a movement. 

http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Voices/2016/0606/Does-Donald-Trump-have-a-SINO-problem?cmpid=kw&kwp_0=161170&kwp_4=668258&kwp_1=342068

This was a problem for anti-war and civil rights activists in the sixties too, there were a few committed organizers and a lot of people who would show up for events and then disappear. But is it possible that the gaggle on Facebook and Twitter that talks a good fight will fail to show up when it counts?

Manifesto For the Feeble-minded

Yes, who are these ignorant bigots that support the vulgar talking yam? And why shouldn't we be surprised that their identity can fit in a meme? Who actually made this thing? I don't want to say where I found this but let's say it is not your typical rally goer. I don't know if that makes him a simpleton but is Quisling out really the best way to protect your masculinity and guns? When the Trumptergreifung  occurs do you really think "I'm on your side" is going to protect you from the Klan members or keep you out of a concentration camp? The lack of spelling errors or glaring grammatical mistakes makes me think this was a professional job but despite many different queries to the Google I could not trace this meme's progression.

Makes one think that there is some order to the flag encrusted bullet points if it was actually designed and not slap-assed together. Let's see: "hate", "repealed", "sick of", "fed-up with", "tired of", and a lot of "wants"; this is the whiniest document I've seen in some time. First off, you fascist pricks don't "hate liberal ideology" you hate liberals, your fellow Americans, and you want them disappeared. You couldn't define liberalism if you wanted to, beyond what Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have programmed you to recite on command, which bears no resemblance to real world liberalism. No, you hate liberals, which you define as anyone who disagrees with you. I'm surprised that hating Black Lives Matter didn't make this list, or would that have been too obvious?

Second, Obamacare repeal. Why? So you can go back to being at the mercy of insurance companies? The Affordable Care Act was based on a Republican proposal from the Heritage Foundation. Which part do you want back so badly, the one where your kids are kicked off at 18 or where the insurance company drops you or refuses to cover you because you might get sick? Or are you mad because poor people got some help paying their premiums? Just a good ole' punch down. But then you want "our vets taken care of", yes I do too, but who created all those vets who need care and then turned around and cut their benefits and funding VA hospitals? Yes that was George W. Bush, but he never existed in 'wingerdom so never mind that.

Hillary for prison? Yeah, I've seen that T-Shirt. Someone sure is raking in the dough from that one. Couldn't impeach President Obama for anything so it's time to up the ante some more. Please, by all means, hold your breath and stomp up and down, I'm sure eventually you can wish her to jail. From the looks of the Trump U case I'd say the vulgar talking yam ending up in prison is the more likely scenario. Corruption? Sure, I'm with you there but it takes a special kind of stupid to believe sending one of the most corrupt businessmen in America to the White House will do anything but ramp up corruption to Jupiter and back. Same with bringing jobs back, I'd love that too but again, Trump has outsourced so much of his own schemes is he really the one you trust to "renegotiate" trade deals?

Self-funded, now there is the ultimate exercise in self-delusion. First of all Trump loaned money to his campaign and expects to make it back with interest from all of you gullible idiots. Second, the first thing he did after securing the presumptive nomination was to declare that he was going to raise a billion dollars from all those special interests. The same ultra-wealthy owners of corporations that outsource jobs and hire illegal immigrants to push down your wages and standard of living. But hang on to that dream kiddies.

Time to Win it for the American People

It has been a long time coming but now Hillary Clinton is actually, finally the Democratic nominee for president. When I first heard the boogieman charge that she was going to run for president from talk radio blowhards in 2000 I wasn't scared. All of the stupid objections to having a woman as president, of which I won't recount, are just that, stupid. Is she going to be a perfect, wonderful embodiment of liberalism and perfectly represent the party of the people? No, probably not but she is eminently qualified to hold the office and be the Chief Executive of the country. I will vote for her and not hold my nose, and not only because the alternative is so unworthy and unqualified but because we deserve a decent and competent president.

Two coincidences cross in my opinion on the matter. The first concerns Bernie Sanders and the second concerns the Democratic Party. In the book review I just completed a major theme was the corrupting capacity of power and Bernie may have rode this wave a little too long. Chez Pazienza may be a little harsh in his characterization of Sanders:

Maybe Bernie Sanders really is a bitter, entitled crank, who at some point stopped running an eminently moral campaign dedicated to the issues and started simply being drunk on the thrill of being every Millennial's imaginary best friend.

Daniel Allen Butler described the rise of the Mahdi in late nineteenth century as beginning as a noble campaign to cleanse Islam of corruption and throw off foreign rule but ending as corrupt and power mad as the worst abuses he started out criticizing. Having a cause you believe in so passionately can spill over into excess, sometimes you have to step back and ask what you really want and what you really are doing. By past metrics of real left liberal candidates running for the Democratic nomination Bernie did incredibly well, pushing the conversation in the correct direction if we are ever going to straighten out the horrific inequality, insecurity, and poverty the majority of Americans struggle with every day. But through whatever function, the Sanders campaign pushed past that real game change and into quixotic territory.

Which brings me to the second coincidence. I just finished Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal book and after the initial bout of extreme despair have come to see that the exact same problem of succumbing to excess applies to the Democratic Party as well. I was skeptical of Frank's thesis at first, and really felt that now was not the time for a burning magnifying glass to blister and fragment the one adult party left in US politics but yeah, it's true that the professional ethos has taken over official liberalism and left the majority of us behind. So while ultimately unsuccessful in having a millennial course correction of the national Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders did give that insular professional class enough of a shock to maybe loosen them up a bit. It remains to be seen of course, and ultimately we liberals with an eye towards the New Deal ideas have no choice but to stick with the rogue's gallery of professionals now running things. The alternative of enthroning the mob and vulgar talking yam combined with the tea party fanatics ready to burn the whole country down at a moment's notice is not something to contemplate lightly.

So congratulations Secretary Clinton, soon you will be president. Can you do more than fend off the authoritarian reactionaries and give the rest of us a reason to believe in you? I, for one, really hope so. I want President Clinton to be the decent and competent Chief Executive we need. But I also want her to prove Thomas Frank wrong about the calcification of professional liberalism and begin to reclaim the Democrats as the party of the people.  

Book Review: The First Jihad

Recently the movie Khartoum, starring everyone's favorite NRA figurehead Charlton Heston, was on TV. I was suddenly filled with the desire to know more about this event in history and looked it up on the public library's website. The first, and I believe most recent, entry was this book by Daniel Allen Butler so I put it on hold. Mrs. Kraken laughed a little when I told her I wanted something to read that would be a little more light-hearted and said that only someone as weird as me would think that this was light reading. But nevertheless, I finished it in less than three days and found it overall an accessible narrative of a real life adventure. The First Jihad is a light, fast read; and as far as I could tell is a valid account of the tale with accurate descriptions of actors and events. That said, this book was crying out for an editor or at least a better one.

The dust jacket described the author's education at fancy sounding universities, his eight years in the Army with six of those in the intelligence division, and his hobbies. The book seemed to have a hard time finding a classification, was it history, military or political science, commentary on militant Islam past and present? First and foremost this book was not scholarly, meaning it is basically useless for academics, there were no footnotes or endnotes but the bibliography did contain a variety of sources including primary ones so that is a positive. Butler seemed to want to use the story of the Mahdi and Islamic uprising in the Sudan to inform the present day war on terror, but couldn't commit fully to the task. Nor did he bring any new interpretations of existing scholarship on the Mahdi or Gordon.

Second, editorship. Good grief I don't think I have ever read a book that contained so many typos and grammatical errors. Of course, compared to a blog post or one of those fly by night websites that take and publish mostly freelance political commentary articles The First Jihad was practically spotless, but actually printing a book on paper with a hardcover and dust jacket that can't be edited once it leaves the press should be held to a higher standard. It was jarring and distracting to read "there" when it should be "their" or a simple word is misspelled. And it breaks up your focus and rhythm of reading when a sentence is badly constructed and you have to back up to try and make sense of it. Maybe it is just a little thing, but the publisher should have spent a little money to hire more or better editors to make sure there aren't glaring mistakes.

Third, Butler made some real historical errors in his prose. I cannot speak to the events in and around Khartoum in 1884 as that was the subject I was trying to learn more about. But in surveying the history of Islam and branching into the Crusades Butler wrote that Sultan Mehmet renamed Constantinople Istanbul after capturing that last remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453 when the city did not change names until after the First World War nearly five centuries later. There were other examples but that one stuck out to me. And the mistakes were not confined to Medieval history, in a section referring to the war on terror and George W. Bush's infamous phrase about "smoking the terrorists out of their holes" Butler then used the British idea of "winkling the other fellow out of his hole" as though the two ideas were equivalent. They are not, "winkling" is trying to get an enemy to surrender while "smoking" is to either kill the enemy in their hole or flush him out into the open where he can be killed.

Even with these problems though the book was enjoyable. I'm probably just jealous that I did not try to write a book like it. Or angry that while we both served in the Army, Butler seems to have not internalized the attention to detail that I did. Little things to be sure, but those are some sloppy errors that stood out to me. So, with those in mind hopefully you can enjoy the book a little more should you ever go through the same steps I did of seeing Khartoum on TV and wanting to get a more detailed picture of the actual history. Happy Reading!

Family Planning Doublethink

I'm still amazed at how often the sort of meme above still appears now that the "conservative" movement has gone full racist in their breathless approval of Donald Trump. We will dispense with providing examples of racism from Trump and his supporters, i.e. the Republican base, and move on to concept of holding two contradictory ideas in your head at once and accepting both as true. I found this one at the bottom of a reply thread posted by an epic troll calling himself "Dindu Nuffins". Sanger never said this, Snopes dot com debunked an even more spurious claim that she included Latins, Slavs, and Hebrew immigrants. I have been writing about Eugenics for three years now (example here), Margaret Sanger and the family planning movement in America has not been the focus of my research but it takes a few clicks to find that this is a fabrication, misattribution, or a lie; take your pick. The doublethink on the part of Trumpeters is holding the idea that black people are bad and that somehow a progressive movement headed by Sanger sought to exterminate black people which was also bad. That Planned Parenthood clinics are somewhat more common in poor neighborhoods that serve minority populations also means the existence of a systematic campaign to control or eliminate reproduction by those minorities through voluntary contraception and abortion services. Even that is not true, and the fact that 'winger's heads don't explode when they suppress the thought of "wait a minute, I'd actually really like it if welfare queens couldn't have kids" demonstrates a mastery of holding two contradictory ideas at once and using one's true desire to smear your opponent.

Just as a refresher I found this concise definition of doublethink as introduced in George Orwell's 1984.

In 1984, the Party used doublethink as part of its large-scale campaign of propaganda and psychological manipulation of its leadership and the public. Doublethink is the ability to hold two completely contradictory beliefs at the same time and to believe they are both true. Early in the book, doublethink refers to the ability to control your memories, to choose to forget something, as well as to forget about the forgetting process. Later on in the novel, as the Party implements its mind-control techniques, people ultimately lose the ability to form independent thoughts. Eventually, it becomes possible for the Party to convince the public of anything, even if it's the exact opposite of what the public already knows to be true.

Orwell defines doublethink as, ''To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy is impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy. To forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.''

Is it just conscious trolling to have right wingers say that all African-Americans are criminal, lazy, awful parents in one breath and then clutch their pearls over the insidious plot by liberals and Planned Parenthood to wipe African-Americans out? Or can they really put everything they said about "thugs" and "paid protesters" away, forgetting that they forgot? Robert Altemeyer described the ability of right wing authoritarian followers to compartmentalize their thoughts so that no matter how contradictory the ideas were they will never touch and spark cognitive dissonance in the individual. Or is it actually simpler than that? Is it just that when 'wingers are presented with an opportunity to "get" liberals or Democrats, they take it and don't really care what the contradiction is? In an online discussion with liberals, trolls put aside their racism to take a swing with something as absurd as the meme above just because they hate liberals more. It would be nice if they were honest with their bigotry, but this is where we are.

If you have the guts, I suggest checking out one of the new white supremacist sites to see the dichotomy. Those guys are for real, they really hate minorities and mean it. Most trolls I have encountered seem to see racism as a hobby, pointing out bad behavior by African-Americans or other minorities is just another tool to attack Democrats and liberals such as the oft-repeated line about Democrats being in charge of big cities where riots occur and crime is rampant. Yeah, that Rahm Emanuel is such a Progressive. Or when they whip out the "straying off the plantation" line. But that one is usually followed up by an exhortation to get off welfare, get a job, marry your baby momma, etc. So the partisan Republican racism is usually just way to get under the skin of liberals no matter what color it is.

Maybe it is a bizarre form of outreach to African-American Democrats by Republicans. After all, the two main sources of the myth of genocidal Margaret Sanger has come from Black Republicans. Ben Carson and Herman Cain tried using the fantasy of Planned Parenthood being out to get them in their respective presidential runs. I think the line got more rebuttals than support though; Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, Bob Cesca on the Daily Banter, and Martha Raddatz of ABC all debunked the tenuous grasp of reality that Messrs Cain and Carson had on what Planned Parenthood does or even what Eugenics is. I wrote about it at the time of Carson's mumblings too. But why would 'winger trolls care about facts, empirical history, or even logic? Basically what 'winger trolls who paint Sanger and Planned Parenthood as evil and by extension any Democrat who supports PP are saying is "come over to our side black brothers and sisters, we only want to put you back in your proper place in society, the Democrats secretly want to exterminate you." The conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones may buy every rumor about evil Progressives and their social engineering and secret breeding programs, but it appears that African-American voters are not as gullible.

It is a strange though epic projection for 'wingers to claim that their liberal enemies are the ones who want to exterminate African-Americans. And it seems to be only the desire to not sink to that level that liberals defending PP and birth control don't point that out. Whether it is true doublethink, mere compartmentalization, or the fact that these are sociopathic liars who just don't give a damn that what they spew makes no sense makes very little difference. The past is still with us, it isn't even past. As Hillary Clinton slowly and inexorably moves toward the White House, this kind of woman-hating and racist bullshit is going to get worse and worse.