Protesting on the sidelines

I found this status this weekend from an old Army buddy. He was one of the good ones, competent, strong leadership abilities, and always commanded respect from us because he actually cared about his troopers. He isn't normally political so it was surprising to see.

So I have a question if people are protesting the president how many of those protesters really voted, and if you are protesting the president are you also protesting the people of the United States who voted for him? If so you are also protesting the right to vote and who to vote for?

Now, under normal circumstances (i.e. from a known trump-supporting, republican troll) I would react pretty violently to this kind of baiting. But I will try to address this question calmly.

First of all, none of this is normal. You may hold some quaint nostalgic view of the Grand Old Party, but those of us who have been paying attention for the last couple decades (and those of us who have researched extremism) are quite aware that there is nothing "conservative" about the republican party today. Instead, it has much more in common with authoritarian banana republics and even darker fascist regimes and parties. The almost exclusively white base of the republican party rejects basic American values such as equality, the rule of law, a loyal opposition, and pluralism. Instead they embrace tribalism, scapegoating, eliminationist rhetoric and sometimes action, and the absolute rejection of legitimacy in political opponents. The office holders and candidates for the republican party preached a contradictory soup of free markets, small government, and strong national defense until recently that was completely turned on its ear. You basically need a decoder ring to figure out how their actions square with the historic platform that I will not go into here.

The appropriate question is not how many really voted, but how many wanted to vote but couldn't. This year the republicans succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in suppressing turnout. And we will never actually know if anyone's vote actually counted because most precincts use optical scan or touch screen voting machines. I won't repeat all the investigative work that election integrity advocate Brad Friedman has done over the years, I will just link to his work. So to skip ahead, the people who have demonstrated since the election are not protesting the right to vote, whatever that means, they want the right to vote and to have their votes count. Something that the Voting Rights Act was meant to address but has sadly passed into the dustbin of history.

Yes, people are protesting republicans! From this know-nothing Russian puppet doughface who now occupies the office of the president, to the obstructionist republican congress, to yes and absolutely yes we are protesting the republican voters. You Sarge of all people should know that ignorance is no excuse when it comes to fucking up. You also know that guilt by association and collective punishment is wrong but none of you differentiate between the handful of anarchists who broke some windows, etc. and the huge majority of demonstrators who did not. However, when you disregard the fact that the most horrible people in America such as the KKK and neo-nazis were enthusiastically supporting trump because of his racism and plans to discriminate and harm many Americans that should have set off warning bells, yes you are the problem.

Yes, the hateful jerks who voted for trump because of or in spite of his racism, misogyny, refusal to release his tax returns, and myriad other crimes against democracy and American values deserve to be protested. They are the problem, and you join their ranks if you do not see the problem with electing someone so bent on extreme vengeance for any petty slight, no experience or qualifications for office, and who lies with practically every breath. The 62 odd million morons who have no excuse for not knowing all of these things are a clear and present danger to the continued existence of the American republic. So yes, they were protesting you for putting us all in danger.

Finally, as an experienced, professional soldier you should know better than to believe what you hear without question. Ignorance is no excuse, simply googling the idea or claim made by remote or even anonymous people reveals the truth fairly easily if you can look past your prejudices. When, as some dingbat in the comments under your post claims that all those people protesting were paid by Hillary Clinton and George Soros, you encounter a spurious assertion it is not exactly taxing your civic responsibility to look it up and peruse a small number of the over 73,000 hits on the subject. 

I expected better from someone I respect on so many levels. But like so much in this world, if you wait a while it will always let you down. The damage you and your fellow republicans have inflicted will trickle down to you. It may be thrilling to see despised outgroups harmed first, but as Niemöller put it, eventually there will be no one left to stand up for you.

Buying Soda while on SNAP

Driftglass recently wrote about blackouts on progressive radio, yes in bigger cities there are left-leaning stations that actually broadcast progressive content, that dovetailed into a larger point he made on the podcast. He and Bluegal talked about how liberal podcasts and other media took a Christmas vacation while fox news was still in high gear and flogging a UUUGE STORY ABOUT FOOD STAMP FRAUD! Never mind that it was obviously fake, right wing media took a huge steaming shit in the mouths of their viewers that conveniently feeds into authoritarian stereotypes about handouts, fraud, freeloaders, and what skin tone the deviant "takers" possess. Right on time to feed into the "debate" about inevitable cuts, if not outright death, of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that will soon be taking place in the federal government. Or perhaps they knew that the New York Times would soon be publishing a story about those awful poor people buying luxuries like soda with food stamps, and the "fraud" frame would already be activated in the republican lizard brain.

The response to Anahad O'Connor's article in the NYT will get considerably less circulation that the original mugwump poor-shaming article, but The Center for American Progress did share it to their Facebook page, so hat tip to them because I never would have found it otherwise. Talk Poverty is a project of CAP that I had not heard of previously but under that byline Rebecca Vallas and Katherine Gallagher Robbins take the NYT to task for misrepresenting what the study actually said. I am presenting my comments on it in a vain attempt to draw more attention to the topic of contempt for the weak, which Umberto Eco included as part of point 10 of eternal fascism and which will continue to play the central role of our new white nationalist regime.

O'Connor's article is an attempt to discipline the poor, as Richard Hofstadter would have well recognized from his study of the Mugwump faction of the GOP during the Gilded Age. This is elite, shall we say "aristocratic", liberalism that wanted to take governing and legislating away from those icky partisans while forcing the working class to behave in a manner that the aristocrats approve of. Thomas Frank translated the idea of Mugwumpism from Hofstadter's study to today's heroic anti-tobacco crusaders and noble knights in the fight against sugary drinks by writing:

it reminds us of something about the patrician strain of reform he represents–that we have seen politicians like Bloomberg before. During the nineteenth century, a long string of saintly aristocrats fought to reform the state and also to adjust the habits and culture of working-class people. These two causes were the distinctive obsessions of the wealthy liberals of the day: government must be purified, and working people must learn to behave. They had to be coerced into giving up bad habits. They had to learn the ways of thrift and hard work. There had to be sin taxes. Temperance. Maybe even prohibition.

On the other hand, conservatives extol the virtues of junk food and sugary soda in particular. But only if you are hard-working and preferably white. Same goes for cigarettes, fast food, and alcohol. Like just about everything though, the contradiction is so wide you can drive a truck through it. If you are white and conservative, junk food is your reward for working. If you are poor, then you had better be dressing in rags, and eating nothing but bread and water. And how dare you mooch off the hard-working whites with food stamps. Again, this is the "don't breed 'em if you can't feed 'em" crowd who hates abortion, contraception, and family planning... for the poor. The corollary to Mugwumpism is "fuck you, starve." "Soon," the trump voter thinks, "those illegals, welfare queens, and big buck thugs will understand that their place is to serve me the fast food and bow their heads while doing it."


The point of the original article from the NYT was to spark outrage that poor people spend a greater proportion of their grocery budget (i.e. the money they steal from white conservatives in the form of SNAP) on soda. The title was In the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Lots of Soda

 and the accompanying pictures were a cart full of two liters and a presumably poor person standing in the soda aisle at a grocery store. But... the actual difference, what the USDA actually found... with empirical evidence? SNAP families spend 5% of their budgets on soda. Versus 4% for non-SNAP. Put that into perspective, if you spend $100 a week on groceries for your family, that's basically a 12-pack of soda.

But you can bet that this bullshit article will be cited liberally when it is time to start cutting spending to justify those tax cuts. And oh boy oh boy are republican governors and state legislators going to have a ball deciding what poor people are allowed to buy with SNAP when the USDA is firmly under republican control.

So, What is The Ceiling?

Is it alarmist to worry about the future? In the abstract, anything can happen to you tomorrow or next year. Lose a job, get hired, meet that special someone, get married, get divorced, have a child, get really sick, get injured horribly, default on debts, ruin, death. All these are possibilities in the best of times. But we don't live in the best of times. I have been having this recurring nightmare; Trump on the podium, recites the oath of office, turns toward the cameras and nods, sending the signal to his alt-right minions to execute Order 66. It may be unlikely, practically out of the realm of possibility but who or what exactly could resist an all out slaughter and reign of terror? If Dubya proved anything to the slave power aristocrats ("slave" is meant rhetorically), it is that the constitution is just a piece of parchment if no one can or will stand up for it. Norms and traditions are for small minds, and reality is determined by those with the power. The theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism states that nothing in Oceania need be efficient save the Thought Police. The threat to power comes from the middle, beginning with the opposition party and trickling all the way down to dopey bloggers like myself.

Does our society actually "need" all of the symbolic analysts or whatever the term is for the bulk of what formerly constituted the middle class in this country do? How about the bureaucrats who actually run things day-to-day? Journalists? Humanities professors? Librarians? Labor Union leaders and officers (the few that actually still exist)? Executives of goo-goo NGOs? I don't know, and neither do the fascists about to take over our country. But they sure hate liberals with the heat of a thousand suns (liberal being anyone who doesn't share their love of hate). Skeletal Ann Coulter let slip the plan once when she said they planned to keep a few liberals alive for display at a zoo. It was easy to laugh at that pile of shit, and everyone should still do so. But we are in completely uncharted territory for the United States. Sure we can study how fascism and authoritarian regimes played out in other counties, but are Americans exceptional in their inhumanity?

Even if only one percent of the trolls who claim they can't wait to start "crushin' libs" are not just internet tough guys and would actually pull triggers, that could still be a large Einsatzgruppe. I hope I'm wrong. But think about society from a Marxist critique of corporate capitalism for a moment. Sure most corporate executives are human beings with feelings of decency for their neighbors in real life, but in the boardroom they look at society as a market. Individuals have value only insofar as they contribute to profits for corporate America, those who do not are considered "superfluous." For regular sales it is up to some other sucker to pay a decent wage to their rental laborers so they can buy our stuff. Engels wrote about the British working class, that they were paid a "reproduction wage" to ensure that enough workers were able to have children and therefore provide a next generation of workers. In order to make a reproduction wage in America, many of the working poor require public assistance. So what will happen when Paul Ryan rams through his granny-starving budget and cuts off that tenuous connection to a subsistence lifestyle?

The other side of the superfluous equation is the "reserve army" of labor. A capitalist economy wants a vast pool of desperate proletarians to keep wages as low as possible. Indeed, they have succeeded to the point where wages have fallen below the replacement level that would be unsustainable without those horrible food stamps and rent assistance or medicaid that make everyone "dependent" on government. Reducing the reserve army could put pressure on wages, so our would-be Final Solution would likely have to stop short of that.

What would the ceiling be then? How high could the death toll reach without reducing profits for the worst, most amoral, business corporations in this country? Your guess is as good as mine. But this kind of macro-thinking might be worth entertaining the next time someone claims that "oh, they would never go that far" if you worry for your safety. If most of Trump's base are as committed to the eliminationist rhetoric as they claim; if Trump himself is as serious about "his enemies" and getting revenge as he has claimed then my nightmare is about as realistic as him suddenly respecting ethical guidelines and emerging as a presidential figure.

Again, I hope this doesn't come to pass but the future looks pretty awful and it is not alarmist to speculate about the possibilities. Nor does it normalize the depravity and inhumanity of a standard reactionary, authoritarian regime to imagine the extremes. The level of awfulness is completely unpredictable and no one should breathe a sigh of relief if all they do is cut taxes, yank away health care from millions, destroy the social safety net, jack up interest rates on student loans, and so on because that would still lead to an unacceptable death toll and misery.

Whatever happens, resist! It is never too early to start planning strategy and tactics for making the Final Solution and terror more difficult for them. I would take back everything I have ever written if the republicans in power now did nothing, just kept everything the same. It's not too late.

Twenty-First Century Reconstruction

It is hard to say what future historians will say of this moment in time, days before doughface donny is sworn in to usurp the office of president. Will it be the start of a great American awakening? When we finally realize that the republican party is not "conservative" as they and their enablers have asserted time and again but actually just traitors who want a white supremacist authoritarian dictatorship in place of the republic that they claim to be protecting from all those dirty hippies and brown people? Or is this the start of a reign of terror that will make the holocaust look quaint by comparison? It could be the beginning of a new phase in our everlasting civil war, a reopening of the actual military or guerrilla warfare campaign. It is impossible to predict what comes next, I hope that it is not violent but that ship has likely sailed, there will probably be blood spilled in the near future so perhaps I should restate that. I hope that O'Brien's vision does not come true, that the future is that of a boot stomping on a helpless face... forever.

After weeks of revelations about Russian interference in the election to boost the doughface and his ridiculous press conference, Donny's approval rating stands at 37%. So nothing is inevitable and it may be dawning on doughface donny and the republican elites, hence the extreme haste in firing those in government not personally loyal to the aristocrats and confirming loyalists. Reinhold Niebuhr often wrote that war is never inevitable, who knows? Maybe a real round of organizing and demonstrations could make doughface donny resign and the republicans think twice before hurting American more, after all congress' approval is still at 12% and only 13% among republicans. It's almost as if just making liberals cry wasn't enough, the "people" expect republicans to actually govern.

I first realized how applicable the doughface label was for donny when I had a revelation that the last eight years are a Twenty-first Century experiment in what would have happened if the Confederates had not seceded from the Union and simply waged political war on Abraham Lincoln instead. If you read any good books about the Civil War, what often stands out is not Lincoln's courage but his caution. At so many points the first Republican president approached southern treason and aggression with trepidation and conciliation, he had to be pushed quite far in order to finally realize that there was nothing he could do to persuade the planter elite. The slave power conspiracy, as it was called, had no intention of working in good faith with the first president, arguably in American history to that point, that they didn't control on the issue of the "peculiar institution."

The Civil War was a counterrevolution by slave owners in the South against Lincoln and the Republicans. Lincoln was actually pretty moderate, only calling for a halt to the spread of slavery into territory conquered from Mexico. This was basically traditional policy, numerous compromises and concessions were made to keep the South happy and slavery contained. James K. Polk oversaw the fulfillment of manifest destiny through war with brown people and compromise diplomacy with white people, Mexico in the former and Britain in the latter with the Oregon territory. Lots of political wrangling later and the Supreme Court plopped a steamer into the mix with their Dred Scott decision. This basically legalized slavery throughout the country, the slavers were ecstatic. This minority of a minority basically had democratic America by the throat. Slave owners had been waging a rhetorical campaign for decades to turn the peculiar institution from a necessary evil to a positive good and now it finally had paid off. Democratic American finally said "enough" and elected Lincoln.

Slavery may have been the central issue, but the driving force behind secession was the question of labor. Who labors and under what conditions? The North decided early on that labor would be contractual, an agreement between free (if not equal) actors about what the conditions, terms and compensation would be. Coercion, however, was at the heart of the Southern labor system, human beings as property would be forced to labor under whatever conditions the master saw fit.

The war ended the property aspect of the system, but not the coercion. First there were contracts, freedmen had to be under contract with a planter by a certain date or risk being imprisoned for vagrancy. Then there was what came to be known as the convict lease system, after you locked up a bunch of former slaves you couldn't just let them sit in idleness now could you? So prisoners, often locked up for "insolence" or some other made up crime, were leased out to work in mines, on infrastructure, or picking cotton. If you have no conscience this is a great deal, black people off the street and the rest living in fear, dehumanized laborers in dangerous work conditions, and the only money changing hands was from property owners to the state. It was slavery 2.0 and in many cases much more brutal, again if you have no humanity left in you convict leasing was basically free-range farming.

And that is where I fear the United States under doughface donny is headed. He has already made plain his intention to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Those immigrants were doing something here, not just standing outside of Home Depot or as donny put it "bringing drugs, bringing crime" or being rapists. Who will work the fields, process meat and poultry, build things? I have a shiny spot on the Supreme Court I will bet you on the answer. The trial balloons are already going up on using convict labor to "build the wall". (link here, it's to the Daily Caller and a million offensive ads, click if you have a strong stomach)

Aristocrat America hasn't been throwing African-Americans and Hispanics in prison for non-violent drug offenses for all these years just to have them waste away. That's a valuable resource, if you're a fucking Nazi. And now that public opinion has finally started to turn on the whole mass incarceration thing, it's time to slam the trap shut before all the set up is ruined. Kill two birds with one stone, round up and deport a bunch of brown people, replace them with black people. Win-win evil. And if a few million die in the process, fuck it, there are plenty more and we really don't need that many people to labor.

I hope I'm wrong, in fact please let me be wrong. But we have instances in our history of both rounding up immigrants and mass prison labor. If there would be an "American" fascism though, that would be it.

Donald Doughface

This year has seen the return of open racism and misogyny to American politics. It has come about because of one man, a vulgar talking yam who rode the vicious populist wave, voter suppression, and Russian intervention all the way to the highest office in the republic. While this has huge contemporary repercussions, it has also opened a clear view of the fact that for many people the Civil War never ended. Prior to that conflict there was a term for a Northern man with Southern sympathies, doughface, and it is time to reintroduce that name to a man who fits the definition so well, Donald J. Trump. The true battle line of the Civil War that preceded and succeeded the military campaigns of 1861-65 was between the democratic vision of America and the aristocratic one. Doughface donny lied his way into the presidency by appealing to the worst aspects of aristocratic America, not by promising the republican working class voters a better life but by promising to stomp on nonwhite and liberal America and all that it stands for without any restraint.

Two days before election day a little article was posted on the History News Network by the Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at Weber State University, Susan J. Matt that flew under the radar during that chaotic time. Titled This is What Liberals are missing about Trump's appeal Professor Matt presents a very detailed and in depth look at the pre-industrial concept of personal honor and shame that dominated Southern life even after the Civil War. Now that the industrial way of life has receded in so much of the United States this primitive lifestyle has experienced a revival unnoticed by all of us "elitists" in the city. What this looks like is described as:

Southern white men worried incessantly about how others perceived them. Any insult to their reputations needed to be quickly parried lest they lose face. Historian Keith Thomas noted that among English elites, the concern with honor “generated extreme touchiness, and hypersensitivity to any form of slight. As a result, honour was invoked as justification for almost any kind of self-aggrandizement.”

Some of that aggrandizement could be based on sexual prowess. Men could boast of their sexual exploits, for lust signaled virility and strength. Reputation also depended on outward carriage, for Brown writes, “honor was a state of grace linking mind, body, blood, hand, voice, head, eyes, and even genitalia.” Consequently, southerners were concerned with their own bodies as well as their ancestors’, for bloodlines and racial purity affected the ability to embody honor.

Those who believed in honor engaged in physical, sometimes violent displays of power to defend it. Historian Elliott Gorn found that to display honor, poor men had vicious brawls, gouging out each others’ eyes, as well as biting off ears and windpipes, while elites relied on duels as a more genteel way to defend reputation. To be honorable required men to take risks, display bravery.

Men were also supposed to risk their pocketbooks, for gambling too was a display of nerve. If men ran up debts, they must repay them, for those they gambled with were presumably honorable gentlemen; however, they need not pay back people below them on the social scale. William Grayson of South Carolina noted, “A gambling debt is a debt of honour, but a debt due a tradesman is not.”

Southern whites who subscribed to this cult of honor lived publicly, and when possible grandly, boasted about their sexual prowess and bravery, focused on outward appearances and reputation, and took forceful, even violent action when that reputation was assailed.

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164299#sthash.t9Y7fcRD.dpuf

This barbaric way of life persists in nearly any American community that is unencumbered by Enlightenment principles or even the industrial installation of bureaucracy or professionalism. The brutes may not be "biting off ears and windpipes" anymore but scratch the surface in any military base or impoverished small town and you will discover hypersensitive man-children endlessly bragging about their sexual conquests, the many slights suffered and punishments or humiliations dealt out, and the intricate web of hierarchy and domination forever being challenged and enforced. This system of honor has jumped the regional boundaries of the old Confederacy in much the same way that the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan after WWI found strength in states such as Indiana and Oklahoma. It has even jumped color lines as African-American gang members on the South Side of Chicago worry endlessly about their "rep" and answer slights from others posted online with physical confrontation and often bullets. The link between this system of honor and white supremacy, however, is the focus of discussing Donald Doughface.

Thus far I have only found one other blog linking trump with the term "doughface" and although poignant it does not go deep enough to understand the causal factors, the driving force that gives so much energy to the republicans who voted against every democratic impulse to make this doughface president. The right wing in America is driven by a primitive honor system, while it may have started in the South before the republic was even founded, today this plague has spread to all points on the American map. Anywhere ruin has been visited on the American proletariat, anywhere average people have been stripped of a decent living by plutocrats in corporate America and Wall Street, the vengeful honor system has flooded in to encourage vulgarity, racism, misogyny, and hypersensitive aggression.

Donald Trump, who will never be normalized on this page nor accorded with the title he and his confederates have stolen for him, is the epitome of of this (dis)honor system. A Northern man with Southern principles, ever ready to strike down anyone who opposes or slights him, ever ready to take anything he wants and react with self-righteous fury anyone or anything that resists, Trump is the violation of everything we Americans are taught in school about what we supposedly value. And yet, his awful values are long-standing, everything that is wrong with America from racism and white supremacy, to misogyny and sexual conquest of women, this is the Civil War that eternally haunts our nation. It is a war that can only end in the complete destruction of those primitive honor-related values. Democratic America has had several chances to deal a death blow to aristocratic America, the military Civil War and the Civil Rights era to name two opportunities, but we can never bring ourselves to strike fully to excise the cancer.

And now that cancer has consumed us. The third strike has finally dealt us a permanent ascendancy of aristocracy. We, the democratic nation of America, are an occupied people. To be continued...