The Golden Meanie

This letter to the editor appeared in an area paper recently:

Soon, America will devolve into a mean and ugly nation.  I blame the stupidity of Republicans and the cowardice of Democrats for our present situation.  When asked what kind of government the United States had, Benjamin Franklin's response was, "A republic, if you can keep it."  Most great Western civilizations were not conquered from the outside, but rotted from the inside.  Welcome to America 2025.

At about the same time I saw a post/ad from The Atlantic on Facebook, featuring a 2023 essay by David Brooks asking how "we" got so mean, and calling for a return to the "moral education" that used to be the American norm.

I can't say I'm surprised or incredulous that educated American adults are so misinformed about our history.  The United States has always been mean and ugly, from the Pilgrim Fathers who wanted religious freedom for themselves but not for Papists or Anabaptists, to the Declaration of Independence, to squabbles among the Framers, to the divisions over slavery, to Secession and civil war, to rebellion in the southern states after that war was over, to Jim Crow, to anti-immigrant sentiments and violence by and against labor, to fascist rallies and claims that FDR was a Communist Jew, and so on and on.  The people involved in these conflicts were also products of the moral education Brooks wants to exhume and inflict on the young.

But I imagine that the same people who wring their hands over our lost civility know all that history perfectly well, and would remember it if they thought they could use it for their own polemics. Generally they're old enough to remember such prominent political meanies as Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.  I have to conclude that they just don't care; honesty and accuracy are not in their job description.

Am I saying that it's okay to be mean and rude?  That's not the question.  Historically, most Americans think meanness and rudeness are just fine, as long as we're mean and rude to the right people.  Maybe we shouldn't, but we do.  My point is that this isn't some new development or devolution, it's an American tradition, and it's much older than America.  Think of Jesus attacking his religious / political opponents; think of the Buddha telling a soldier that if he were to "die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions."  Apologists try to explain away such meanness as righteous wrath.  I say it's just being mean and rude to the right people.  I don't think anyone really wants to get rid of meanness; they just want to be in charge of it.

Now You See It...

A few people may have noticed that this blog disappeared for a couple of days this week.  ("Few" because, due to my own laziness and scandalously infrequent posting, it gets so little traffic now.)  On Tuesday morning I got email from Blogger notifying me that someone had flagged the blog for review, so they removed it.  I was allowed to appeal, and I did. This morning I got another message, telling me that they'd re-evaluated and "upon review, the blog has been reinstated," so here we are.

Needless to say, I'm immensely relieved.  Seventeen years of writing had gone up in smoke, and like a fool I hadn't backed it up.  The first thing I did after the reinstatement was to do just that. Coming on top of the Republican victory on Tuesday, this episode left me stunned, and I walked around in a daze for a while.  Even if no one else had read it, this blog is my intellectual journal, allowing me to revisit my thoughts on a range of subjects over the past two decades - which highlights my carelessness in not having backed it up.  I hope I've learned my lesson.

So here we are.  Looking back at November 2016, I see that I had a similar reaction to Trump's victory then.  It's worse now, because he won the popular vote this time, and the GOP won back the Senate.  The outcome for the House of Representatives is still unsettled as I write.

I've mostly avoided the usual media, because I know pretty much what they're going to say.  My timeline on Facebook is also predictable.  I've seen it all before.  Eventually I'll have more to say, I suppose, though I also have a backlog of other topics I've put off addressing, and I intend to write about them for awhile.  For now, let me quote what an old Bloomington friend from the 1980s posted on Facebook.

I think the news media bares [sic] a lot of responsibility for Trump winning. News media is now primarily entertainment media. So they cover candidates who are entertaining. President Biden did not and will not offer a daily dose of entertaining "event"s because he is too busy doing his job as President and whose ego doesn't require constant validation. Whereas Trump is entertaining and will say anything to keep attention on himself. The current news media and Trump are made for each other. Sadly the entire world will now suffer the consequences.

I don't entirely disagree with this - I've criticized the corporate media harshly and often - but my friend overlooks a few things.  One is that despite the "current news media," Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, and Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020.  The Democrats also defied the odds and drubbed the GOP in the 2022 midterms, to the disappointment of most of the corporate media.  By my friend's logic, none of that should have happened.  So while the news media should be criticized, it seems to me that something else could have been involved; could it perhaps be issues?  Like many liberals, my friend assumes that the masses are just sheep who do what the Lying Media tell them to do.  (Not him, though - why not?)  But you don't have to remember very far back to know that they don't, not always.  And it wouldn't do to ask why.  Ironically, my friend is echoing Trump's demonization of the media here.

I strongly disagree with his evaluation of Joe Biden's ego, which led him to seek re-election and to hang on to his candidacy no matter how unpopular he became.  His dogged support for Israel's crimes also hurt him, as it did Harris.  In general US media support Israel too, no matter what, so they can't be blamed for the public's revulsion against the atrocities in Gaza and the Occupied Territories.  On the other side, Trump's notorious laziness didn't keep him from doing a lot of harm during his first term, and I expect his second term to be even worse.  I'd hoped that the Democrats would control Congress, which would have impeded Trump's agenda somewhat, but that didn't happen.

One correction I want to make to yesterday's post.  I thought that "the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling," and I was flat wrong about that.  From what I've read and heard, voter turnout this year was the highest it has been since 2008, and while some of that involved voters who opposed Trump and the GOP, it wasn't enough to counter Trump's highly motivated supporters.

P. S. A correction to the correction: a reader tells me that voter turnout wasn't as high as I thought.  He thinks 2020 was higher.  I'm not going to dig into it, because it's certain that Trump's base went to the polls in sufficient numbers that he won the popular vote this time.

Rejoice, For the 2028 Presidential Campaign Is About to Begin!

What more is there to say?  I don't think it's just my advancing age that has made this election cycle seem worse than its predecessors.  If so much weren't at stake, it could have been entertaining: the progressive deterioration of Biden and Trump on live television, the antics of party and personal loyalists as reality kept throwing banana peels in the path of their dreams, the incompetence of most of the Beltway news media, the fecklessness of administration spokespeople trying to defend the indefensible, and so on and on.  Watching State Department spokesperson Matt Miller smirk helplessly as he runs interference for Israeli atrocities, or White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre roll her eyes like a bored teenager at impertinent questions would strain credibility of satire, but it's all real, which makes it no fun at all.

Some Biden dead-enders are still fuming that "They stabbed that man in the forehead," though most quickly jumped on the Harris bandwagon.  I still see some complaining that Harris was 'forced' on the voters without a primary, though the immediate flood of support she received, both verbal and monetary, ought to be evidence enough that there was massive uneasiness about Biden at least among the Democratic rank and file before he was pried loose from his candidacy.  Some continued to lie for months that it was too late to replace Biden's name with Harris's on the ballots in various states, though this was propaganda from the Trump campaign.  Even funnier were MAGA complaints about all the campaign material with Biden's name on it that had become useless overnight - all that money wasted, so unfair!

Myself, I felt enormous relief when Biden finally abdicated.  I was not, and still am not, an enthusiast for Harris.  Her choice of Tim Walz as running mate was probably her best high-profile move.  I think it's fair to call her handling of opposition to US support of Israel a misstep, though it's impossible to say how it will affect the election, especially since Trump is even worse on Israel/Palestine than she and Biden have been. Among her supporters there's a tendency to talk as though criticism and opposition come only from Arab-Americans and Muslims, though that is certainly not true.

I think the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling, though again it's impossible to say by how much.  One thing that sticks with me is that, in the small town where I live, whose government is dominated by Republicans, the local GOP office did not have a Trump sign in its window until he secured the nomination: instead there was a De Santis sign, which was removed when he ended his campaign.  For several weeks, the only signs in the window were downticket candidates.  I saw fewer Trump-Vance signs than Harris-Walz signs around town until the past week or so.  This bespeaks a lack of enthusiasm for Trump in an area where I expected him to be much more popular.

The abortion issue is going to be important, and may bode well for Democrats at all levels. That's been clear since the 2022 midterms, and Republicans are running scared.  Even Trump is trying to distance himself from it, which isn't going to win over many voters and has alienated some forced-birther Republicans.

I wanted to write this before Election Day, just out of guilt for not having weighed in before.  One thing that reinforced my sloth was that when I looked at my posts during previous election cycles, I saw that I'd said before everything I wanted to say this time.  But I feel bad because in the future I won't be able to look at what I've written this year as a kind of journal, which I can do for campaigns in 2008 and later.  I won't be following Election Night coverage this time, any more than I have in years past.  One previous post I do want to refer to concerns the likelihood that we won't know who's won for several days.  I remember that this maddened many mainstream journalists in 2020, and it's likely to be true this time around as well.  But we'll see, and one lesson we all should have learned this year is that events can surprise us.  However, I don't think most people have learned that lesson at all; many are determined to know what will happen, what we can expect, in advance anyway.

One prediction I will make with some confidence, though: as they wait impatiently for the results to come in, commentators will be asking: What does this mean for 2028?