Only Trying to Help!

One of my liberal Democratic acquaintances recently attacked people who criticized Cory Booker for voting against Bernie Sanders' amendment urging our government to allow Americans to import drugs from Canada and thus save money.  He was, as is his custom, inventing excuses out of thin air when he claimed that Booker had good, complex reasons for voting against the amendment.  If so, Booker didn't say what they were: he only offered the argument given by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

My acquaintance claimed that those who criticized Booker were "helping Trump."  That accusation is familiar enough from last year's electoral campaign, when anyone who criticized Hillary Clinton could expect to be accused by Clinton loyalists as helping Trump, wanting Trump to win, etc.  My acquaintance has had little to say, however, about the Democratic Senators, mostly liberals' darlings, who've voted for Trump's cabinet and other nominees.

So let's say it bluntly: Voting for Trump's nominees is helping Trump.  Making excuses for the Democratic hacks who vote for Trump's nominees is helping Trump.

So is this:

Sen. Blumenthal says Dems shouldn't obstruct Gorsuch confirmation:"We should not repeat the Republican wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right"

— Rebecca Berg (@rebeccagberg) February 1, 2017

As Glenn Greenwald remarked, "If you wanted to parody Dem politicians, this is what you would have them say, but in this case it's real."  The best way to deal with abject stupidities like this, I believe, is to dismantle them.  So, first, it isn't wrong to obstruct a nominee who is unsuitable or unfit for the position -- all the more reason to obstruct them, I'd say.  Second, Blumenthal confuses rejection of an unfit nominee with the Republican obstruction of certain of Obama's policies and programs, which was based not on their merits but on simple racism and partisanship.  If Trump is as bad as Democrats say he is (and he is), however, then it would make sense to dig in their heels and block him as reflexively as the Republicans did Obama.  If they want to be rational, however, they should be more selective and make sure that Trump isn't, by accident, pushing a good policy; it could happen.  So either Blumenthal can't tell the difference between principled opposition and mindless obstructionism, or he wants the public to be confused about it; in either case, he's helping Trump.

I expect to see a good deal more of this sort of thing in the coming months and years.  Any effective Democratic opposition to Trump, will evoke the popular (and also elite) nostalgia I saw during the debt-ceiling wars for the days when Democrats and Republicans were bipartisan instead of bickering and fighting all the time, and worked together for the good of the nation.  It should go without saying that voting for Trump's incompetent or bigoted nominees, or supporting his harmful policies, does not constitute working for the good of the nation.  But the Democrats are probably going to revert to their customary stance of collaboration with Republican efforts to do harm to most Americans; you can see its gravitational pull affecting them already.

Lesser Evil, Be Thou My Good!

Some right-wing frother (the brother of a friendly co-worker, as it happens) has been posting anti-Muslim propaganda on Facebook in support of Trump's highly selective Muslim ban.  (If Muslims are really so uniformly violent, why is Trump willing to let in Saudi, UAE, Bahraini, Egyptian, etc. Muslims?)  Today he posted a video clip of Bill Maher denouncing the supposed cluelessness of liberals about "radical Islam."   I knew I had seen some objections by Maher to the ban, so I did a little digging and found this one to toss at him, with a reminder that Maher is also vocally anti-Christian.  But how funny:

Will those who called Hillary "lesser of 2 evils"admit how wrong u were? Muslim ban, Betsy DeVoss, Pruit, Perry in charge of nukes...please.

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) February 2, 2017

Is Maher really as stupid as this tweet makes him seem?  Well, yes, probably, but leave that aside for the moment.  To say that Clinton was the lesser of two evils means that she wouldn't have done as many bad things as Trump is doing.  It also means that the person calling her a lesser evil intended to vote for her, and probably did.  It's hard to know what Maher and liberals mean when they throw tantrums over the term, but it appears that they think it means "exactly the same" or "far worse", and that is not what "lesser evil" means.  Democratic loyalists will even use the lesser-evil claim to try to persuade reluctant voters, perhaps chiding them for demanding perfection from a candidate, until a voter actually says the word "lesser evil," and then they stamp their feet and cry "The Devil told you that!"

Maher isn't the brightest pencil in the box anyway, and it's mildly entertaining (though also thoroughly depressing) to watch both the far Right and the near Right citing his foolishness to support their views.

There Are Two Kinds of People, and I Don't Like Them

I haven't been able to find a source for this quotation, but I guess it doesn't really matter much.  Even taking it at face value, my first reaction was to ask the friend who'd shared it what should be done when "good men" shout "ugly words of hatred."  My friend is more restrained than many liberals, who've been raving for the past several months against their political opponents in terms that I find indistinguishable from the right-wing Republicans they hate.  It's not a totally new phenomenon, of course, but it has gotten noticeably worse since Hillary Clinton won the Democratic presidential nomination.

I've been noticing Democratic loyalist/apologists already demanding that "we" (meaning other people, of course, not themselves) quit the blame game, stop dwelling on the dead past (i.e., a few months ago), and think about the future. While it is important to think about what we're going to do in the future, we can't do so wisely unless we have some grasp of what happened in the past. I'm not going to forget, however, that during the campaign, those same loyalist/apologists were screaming "Nader! Nader!"  Forgetting the past is for other people, not for them. And besides, I am watching the present and thinking about the future -- I'm watching the Democratic leadership lining up to collaborate with Trump.

Dividing humanity into "good men" and "evil men," sheep and goats, Us and Them, tribalists vs. non-tribalists, the Enlightened Few and the Superstitious Many, is a dishonest and harmful strategy, because it means that when those we've counted as "good" start doing evil things, many will refuse to criticize them.  They're One Of Us, after all, we have to give them the benefit of the doubt, pick our battles -- and besides, they are at least not One of Them.  This is why I'm skeptical about the authenticity of the King quotation above: most of the time he knew better than this.

This led me to ruminate more on a quotation I've discussed before, from the first-century philosopher Epictetus: "If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation."  As I wrote before, the person who 'provokes' (who, for the slave-born Epictetus, was probably his master, wielding the rod) is also complicit in the provocation. and his or her responsibility should not be erased. But I agree that one should calculate one's response, if only for prudential reasons.  Questioning the extent to which I myself am complicit in the provocation doesn't mean that I don't recognize that it was meant as such; what I have to do is think of ways to do something about the power that the other person has over me, how to undermine and if possible remove it.

Richard Seymour wrote a good piece discussing suggestions that the Trump gang

is playing us all for suckers. They expected these protests and the judicial opposition. They are testing the ground, seeking out their allies and smoking out enemies, exhausting public opposition, exaggerating their objectives in order to beat a safe retreat. We, pawns in their little game, are giving them what they want by demonstrating and raising as much vocal opposition as we can.

Which, when you think about it, is very close to the way that quotation from Epictetus is used:  It's useless to fight back against oppression or even to resist it, because then you're "complicit" with the oppressor.

Seymour continues that the argument

makes an assumption of omniscience. You may well claim that sizeable demonstrations and judicial and legislative opposition were a predictable response to hastily imposed executive orders, introduced without any consultation with state actors, and without even providing them with the information they needed to actually implement the policy effectively. However, no one anticipated that three to four million would protest during the inauguration weekend, nor that there would be protests (in many cases illegal) at airports all over the country. To have foreseen all this would indeed be to experience a kind of omniscience, accessing a total reading of all the tendencies, subjective and objective, unfolding at breakneck pace now, in a vast, intricate and unusually unpredictable social order.

Somewhat ironically, the suggestion (I'm not sure it amounts to a claim yet) that Trump and his minions not only anticipated but plotted the Resistance brings back memories of the fantasies of Obama's devotees that their hero was playing eleven-dimensional chess with the opposition, and that the sequestration was a rope-a-dope that would trap and deliver a final knockout punch to the stupid GOP.   One might also note that Clinton and her minions thought it would be a good idea to support Trump for the Republican nomination at first, because they thought he would be easier to beat than Cruz, Rubio, or Bush.  We all know how well that worked!

But this scenario is a lot older than that.  Think of Oedipus, of whom it was foretold that he would kill his father and marry his mother.  His father had him exposed to try to avoid this fate, but he was found by shepherds and adopted by another king and queen.  When he learned of the prophecy as an adult, Oedipus fled, only to kill a stranger at a crossroads (who turned out to be his natural father) and to marry an older queen (who turned out to be his birth mother).  You can run, but the gods will get you in the end no matter what.  Of course there are no gods, but people still try to cast powerful mortals in the same role, as omniscient plotters you can't outfox.  Democrats and Republicans alike live in this fantasy world, as you can see.  As Seymour noted in an earlier post, "There has been non-stop chaos in the American state since Trump took office. This is partly, but not primarily, a matter of incompetence. There is no doubt that these moves could have been prepared for a lot better by the incoming Trump team."  But they weren't prepared for them; the Trump team are not omniscient -- thank whatever gods may be, because otherwise there would be no hope.

I like the protests that followed Trump's executive order barring entry to the US by people from select majority-Muslim states, and I like them better because unlike the women's marches and other demonstrations that followed Trump's Electoral College victory, they have a focus and a goal.  The protests are not mere "virtue-signaling" as one blogger pundit sneered -- that would better describe the previous demonstrations. They are also not the whole story, as the ACLU and other organizations fight the order in the courts, and citizens pressure their representatives in Congress.  As scary as the Trump gang are, they aren't omnipotent any more than they're omniscient.  But we must also think about what we want to replace them with: more Democratic retreads will just mark time until the next Republican strongman comes along.

The Trouble with Normal

We all have certain words or phrases that rub us the wrong way.  High on my list is "I. Can't."  Or better yet, "I. Can't. Even."  I first noticed these in the Facebook posts of some post-structuralist multiculti feminist academics on Facebook, used as commentary on egregious right-wing misbehavior, and since then they've turned up among some male leftists as well.  With the best will in the world I can't see them as anything but liberal whining, a First World Problem fueled by privilege.  Can you imagine someone in, say, Yemen responding to the latest horrific Saudi/US bombing with the Arabic version of those words?  Or an Afghan feminist writing it in Pashto about a Northern Alliance attack on a teenaged girl for going to school?

But that's by the way.  The Word for this week in liberal-Democrat social media appears to be "normalize."  Okay, I know that it was used during the campaign, but it looks like it's taking off as a way of trying to put limits on political discussion.  If you point out continuities between Trump and Obama, Clinton, or the Bushes, you're "normalizing" Trump.

Look, it's really too late to worry about that.  I still feel like throwing up a bit in the back of my mouth when I remember that Donald Trump is now the President of the United States.  Even if his regime goes down in flames, even if he's impeached and removed from office (Hello, President Mike Pence! -- a thought which also makes me want to throw up) Trump will still be in the public record and in history books as an American President.  But I remember feeling the same way when George W. Bush became President, and Ronald Reagan before him.

And I'm annoyed when our gatekeeper media are unable to find "Trump voters interviewed" who were unhappy with the man.  As Jim Naureckas tweeted, "46% voted for Trump. He's got 36% approval. If you don't find unhappy Trump voters, you're not looking hard enough."  Or again, when the same media "express amazement that Republicans in Congress seem to accept Trump’s ideas—most of which are longstanding GOP policies."  Something about writing "President Trump" evidently shuts down many journalists' and editors' critical faculties.  He's POTUS, you have to respect him! You can't just go out and start screaming in the streets like a dirty hippie.

Pointing out that much of what Trump is doing constitutes continuity with Obama, Bush, Bill Clinton and Reagan brings on accusations of trying to "normalize" him, and I'm not sure why.  Of course it wouldn't do to recognize how many awful policies Obama, especially, could get away with without a peep of protest from most liberal Democrats, and often with celebration of his greatness.  Even when Obama took those policies, such as endless war, the surveillance state, and erosion of civil liberties, from Bush, loyalists didn't just ignore the continuity, they denied it.  So it follows that Trump's continuity with his predecessors must also be ignored and denied. It's in the interest of both his allies and his enemies to ignore it.

I was thirty years old when Ronald Reagan became president, so I remember that period very well, and I see the similarities: in the way the Religious Right celebrated Reagan's advent as their Vindication; in Reagan's cabinet of crony capitalists and reactionary crazies; in his chest-thumping, bellicose foreign policy; in his record of hostility to social programs and Civil Rights legislation.  (Clarence Thomas, one example of a Reagan legacy that keeps on giving, was appointed to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission deliberately to undermine and bring it down.  But there's also a resemblance in their shared media backgrounds -- Reagan's in Hollywood and TV, Trump's on TV -- their fondness for recreational lying, and gleefully provocative (but ostensibly playful) bigotry.

Jon Schwarz pointed this out at The Intercept, recounting some of Reagan's greatest hits.  He recommended "the truly essential 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor by comedy writer Paul Slansky," which is available online at a really ugly web page, but it starts in 1980; I prefer to point to Mark Green and Gail McColl's There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error (Pantheon, 1983), which provides numerous examples of Reagan's all-American bullshit from the 1960s.  That's important, because when Schwarz tweeted the article this weekend, the reactions were revealing.  "Normalizing Trump" was the least of it.

For example:

@tinyrevolution @theintercept Reagan was senile.Trump has a certified mental disorder.Quite different, & far more dangerous.Can’t mitigate.

— FUD Buster (@FUDbuster) January 25, 2017

The claim that Reagan was senile, or suffered from Alzheimer's, recurs in the replies to Schwarz's tweet.  I'm not sure why it's less "dangerous" for someone with senile dementia to have access to the nuclear codes than for a supposed narcissist.  I say "supposed," because despite a great deal of remote armchair diagnosis, it's not clear to me that anyone has actually proven that Trump is a narcissist by the American Psychiatric Association's criteria.  Notice FUD Buster's claim that "Trump has a certified mental disorder"; what Buster presumably means is that narcissism has been "certified" by virtue of being listed in the APA's DSM-IV manual.  It doesn't mean that Trump himself has been "certified" as clinically narcissistic.  As a homosexual who was "certified" mentally ill by the APA until 1973, I tend to take such diagnoses with a grain of salt.

It also seems unimportant to me, because any person who runs for high office, especially for the American Presidency, should be suspect from the get-go as narcissistic.  The DSM-IV criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder seem to me to fit both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, yet Democratic loyalists never connected those dots.  Consider, for example, "(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations" -- doesn't that describe Clinton's conviction, shared and enabled by her fans, that she was entitled to be the Democratic candidate, and ultimately the President?  Or "(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others"; that is recognizably Obama joking about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones (to say nothing of those in the audience who laughed at his wit), or defending the mistreatment of Chelsea Manning (via).  The rest can be left as an exercise for the reader.

Reagan was a professional liar and fantasist long before dementia got him, which is why I point to There He Goes Again, with its examples of Reagan in his prime.  But he was also canny.  Gore Vidal wrote in 1983 that when he said "how odd it was that a klutz like Reagan should ever have been elected president," a California journalist who'd covered Reagan as governor told him:

He's not stupid at all.  He's ignorant, which is another thing.  He's also lazy, so what he doesn't know by now, which is a lot, he'll never know.  That's the way he is.  But he's a perfect politician.  He knows exactly how to make the thing work for him.

... You see, he's not interested in politics as such.  He's only interested in himself.  Consider this. Here is a fairly handsome ordinary young man with a pleasant speaking voice who first gets to be what he wants to be and everyone else then wanted to be, a radio announcer [equivalent to an anchorperson nowadays (G.V.)].  Then he gets to be a movie star in the Golden Age of the movies.  Then he gets credit for being in the Second World War while never leaving L.A.  Then he gets in at the start of television as an actor and host.  Then he picks up a bunch of rich friends who underwrite him politically and personally and get him elected governor twice of the biggest state in the union and then they get him elected president, and if he survives he'll be relected.  The point is that here is the only man I've ever heard of who got everything that he ever wanted.  That's no accident.*

The correspondence between Reagan and Trump isn't perfect, of course -- Trump, unlike Reagan, was born into money -- but there are enough similarities to be worth noticing.  (Such as that "narcissistic" trait that I put in bold.)  I wince when I see people denouncing Trump as "stupid," and "idiot," "crazy," not because it's rude but because they're underestimating him.  (And overestimating themselves.) That his enemies underestimated Trump is why he won the nomination and the election.  We cannot afford to do that anymore.

The writer Mark Hertsgaard showed in his 1988 book On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) that Reagan and his team began courting the media as soon as he was elected, and Reagan enjoyed an unusually positive relationship with the press despite his blatant dishonesty and even inaccessibility.  If Trump had shown similar cordiality to the media, he'd be having an easier time of it now, but I wouldn't assume, given most Americans' hostility to the press, that being criticized by the liberal media will really hurt him with his base.

I'm noticing more and more liberals calling Trump "mentally ill" as an epithet, very much the way right-wingers used to hiss "Barack Hussein Obama."  To treat mental illness as a moral evil is itself a moral evil (though not a mental illness).  If Trump really were mentally ill, which I doubt, liberals should treat him with compassion rather than condemnation.  Why not simply condemn him morally? The English language has a fairly abundant vocabulary for moral judgment, so why do liberals find it necessary to throw in accusations of mental illness, of overweight, of the size of his hands and penis.  At least I haven't noticed them calling him retarded.  I can only suppose they haven't thought of it yet.

The irony in the fuss about normalizing Trump and trying to defend Ronald Reagan is that Reagan inspired the same apocalyptic warnings when he became president.  Liberals quickly adjusted, of course, and indeed hid behind Reagan to justify their own sexism, antigay bigotry, racism, and classism.  It wasn't that the country "swung to the right," as many pundits claimed; it was government and media elites who did so.  The Democratic Leadership Council, which gave us Reagan Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton, was intended to normalize Reagan's policies and assimilate them to the Democratic Party.  Barack Obama followed suit, claiming that Reagan would have been too liberal to win the nomination now, and praising what he thought Reagan stood for.  We can expect the Democrat leadership to do the same for Trump.  It won't be the left who will "normalize" him, it'll be the sensible middle.

The furious, concentrated response to Trump's executive order restricting entry to people from seven majority-Musim countries is an encouraging sign.  But we have a long haul ahead of us.

* Gore Vidal, "Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures," originally published in the New York Review of Books; as reprinted in United States: Essays 1952-1992.(Random House, 1993), pp. 986-7.  Boldface added.  On those rich friends who helped Reagan's political career, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (Norton, 2009).

Those Who Think They Remember History

A friend posted this to Facebook today:

Oh myyyy, as George Takei would say (but probably wouldn't, since he likely agrees with it).  Like I haven't heard liberal Democrats saying basically the same things about the media whenever they didn't like what the media were reporting.  If Hitler did denounce "the lying media," it wasn't because he was a Nazi, it was because he was a politician.  Like I haven't heard liberal Democrats demanding laws which would allow (require) the government to rule on whether the news being reported was "true," and to punish unruly media for "lying." (Meaning, again, saying things that the liberal Democrats didn't want to hear. As often as not, those things were true, like the revelations about Hillary Clinton during the campaign. But the truth hurts. And "lie" doesn't mean "what I don't want to hear.")

And like the media haven't discredited themselves by collaborating with the government, acting as stenographers for the powerful, passing on Bush's and Obama's (and their predecessors') lies.  I have to admit, though, the widespread unpopularity of the media in the US has little or nothing to do with the media's dishonesty or corruption; I'm not sure exactly why the media are unpopular -- which doesn't keep people from tuning in to them, either. But it hasn't got anything to do with their "corruption." Most Americans, like most human beings, are perfectly comfortable with corruption, at least the corruption of their own factions and buddies, and from what I see, most Americans wouldn't know whether what they saw in the news was true or not.

The same friend also shared this meme today:

My first reaction was that this was an accurate description of mainstream American politics over the past century and more.  It describes conditions under the Obama regime no less than under his predecessors or successor.  Outside our borders, American politicians and corporate leaders have liked, praised, supported, and protected right-wing dictatorships, including those with fascist or even Nazi leanings.  The US war with Nazism was an anomaly; at that, it wasn't until Hitler actually attacked the US that our elites were willing to fight him.  After World War II was over, the US supported Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese collaborators, using them to crush the socialists, Communists and Jews who'd led and fought in the resistance.  (Which is one reason why seeing the word "resistance" used by liberals to refer to their opposition to Trump sets my teeth on edge.)

Then I realized why the meme seemed oddly familiar to me: It was very much like, and perhaps even based on the "Communist Rules for Revolution" things that the fascist American right circulated when I was growing up.  We didn't have memes and Facebook in those days, but we did have mimeographs and photocopiers, and the propaganda mills of the Right took advantage of the available technology.  I'm often amazed, in fact, when I remember that the available media included the mainstream corporate media, but corporate bigwigs have always been happy to subsidize right-wing wackery.

Here's one version of the Communist Rules, allegedly codified by the Reds and discovered by Our Boys in Uniform in Germany in 1919:

1. Corrupt the young, get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial. Destroy their ruggedness.

2. Get control of all means of publicity.

3. Get people's minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books and other trivialities.

4. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.

5. Destroy the people's faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and obloquy.

6. Always preach true democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.

7. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit and produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.

8. Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders, and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward such disorders.

9. By specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues, honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.

10. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the populace helpless. 

Like whoever composed the Early Warning Signs of Fascism, whoever wrote this simply made a list of current trends they disliked, and attributed them to the official enemy they wished to attack.  It could be seen as a subset of apocalyptic literature, in which someone attributes an account of recent history to a prophet who lived centuries before.  Here's another recent example, with the element of projection brought to the forefront:

Let’s say somebody were [in the White House] and they wanted to destroy this nation. I would create division among the people, encourage a culture of ridicule for basic morality and the principles that made and sustained the country, undermine the financial stability of the nation, and weaken and destroy the military. It appears coincidentally that those are the very things that are happening right now.

In any case, the resemblance between the incipient Trump regime and the supposed characteristics of fascism is due to fascist and proto-fascist sympathies and trends in America that have always been with us.  Those sympathies and trends have also always been opposed and fought, but that opposition has mostly been against the American mainstream, as exemplified by its leaders, business elites, and official media.  Donald Trump is frightening because he wants to extend and confirm those trends, but in so many respects -- his hostility to media, his love of big business, his disregard for civil liberties and civil rights, his embrace of state violence, and so on -- he represents continuity with his recent predecessors, including Barack Obama, and his defeated opponent Hillary Clinton.

One doubt nags at me, though: Do people really need to know accurate history in order to oppose and work against Trump?  I suspect not.  Sometimes I think that lies motivate and mobilize people more effectively than truth.  Could people oppose Trump effectively if they admitted the ways in which he simply continues many of Obama's policies, as Obama continued so much of the legacy of George W. Bush?  I don't know.  Maybe it makes no difference, but I think it could make a difference in what the Resistance would do if they defeated him: a kinder, gentler, less uncouth Trumpism, most likely -- but that means Obama and Clinton.

#She'sNotWithYou

A quick* postscript to the last post, inspired by some reactions I received to it.

I may have come across as more dismissive of the Women's Marches than I am.  To repeat: the global turnout was no mean accomplishment, and such demonstrations give the participants an exhilarating feeling of connection and community.  It's important for people to have that feeling, especially if they don't have everyday access to it, if they don't know many like-minded people where they live.  Despite the popularity of social media, most people know the difference between reading Twitter or Facebook and being with a huge crowd of human bodies that share politics and aims.  Certainly my Facebook feed has been crowded with participants exulting about how good it made them feel.  Which is fine.

My reservations concerned where the participants will go from here; nor was I alone in my concern.  (Gosh, I feel empowered!)   I compared the marches to evangelical revivals, which have the same problem: it's one thing to gather a crowd and get them Full of the Spirit through preaching and singing and dancing in a crowd, and quite another to build organizations that last beyond that initial rush of feeling.  Billy Graham's Crusades, I've read, came under criticism from fellow fundamentalists for just that reason: he would come to town, get people excited, and move on to his next stop without helping build churches, which is a lot less exciting.  Substitute "organizations" for "churches" in that sentence, and you can see what I mean, I hope.  I've written about this before, citing Sarah Sobieraj's book Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism (NYU Press, 2011).  Movement-building for the long haul is a lot less glamorous than organizing even a huge international rally, but the rally is useless if it doesn't foster and support movement-building.

P.S. I see that I must still not have made myself clear, because I received a very civil and helpful e-mail from a reader who informed me that "If a million people can march, then a million letters can certainly arrive at the WH" and supplied me with a list of online ways to "stay involved," so I would know that "people ARE willing to stay active after January 20."  I don't doubt that a million letters can arrive at the White House; my question was whether they would arrive, and my correspondent didn't address that matter.  Nor do I doubt that people are "willing to stay active after January 20"; I was asking whether willingness would translate into action.  That remains to be seen, along with the effectiveness of online activism generally.
 
People are making much of the huge numbers of people who turned out for the Women's Marches, and to repeat in hopes I'll be clear, they're not wrong to do so: those marches were a considerable achievement.  But what comes next?  The Internet reminded some of us yesterday about huge marches that have been forgotten by the fickle collective memory, such as the Million Women's March of 1997, which drew 750,000 women to Philadelphia -- or maybe not 750,000.  The numbers, like all numbers for such events, are contested.  But there's no doubt that it was big.  Yet it's nearly forgotten now, no doubt because it was a march by women, and by black women at that.

I'm also concerned about what you might call the content of the marches, and I'm not alone in that either.  Yves Smith wrote at Naked Capitalism yesterday:

... the protests against Trump and the Republicans look unlikely to succeed since it’s the same coalition, people from upper middle income groups and/or people living in blue cities, that already managed to lose a winnable election to traditional Republicans and the Trump base. And this loss came despite the presidential campaign sucking resources and dollars out of down-ticket races, with the results that the Democrats continued to bleed losses at all levels of government. 

Worse, much of the messaging is all about stirring up hatred, too often on dubious claims, with Russia scaremongering one of the biggest, while underplaying serious, legitimate causes for concern, like the rise of oligarchy and the threat to gut regulations on a widespread basis.

That many marchers and their supporters may have used the word "love" of their motives and attitudes means nothing; religious bigots of the Right do the same.  As a big hater myself, I think hate is just fine.  What isn't fine is pretending that your hate is love.  Self-deception is not, it seems to me, a good driver for a movement; but what do I know?  Like Freddie DeBoer, I think that what matters is not "hate" or "love," but what you intend to do with your hate and love.

Then, this morning, I saw this fine article by Lizzy O'Shea for Salvage:

As impressive as the protests were, many of the slogans on display were less than promising. Predictably, there was a bulk of #ImWithHer sentiment, referencing Clinton’s victory in the popular vote. It is a fair point, but in the context of a mass mobilisation, it seems rather limited to direct energy towards a woman who was at the inauguration festivities and conspicuously absent from the protests. The limitations of her centrist, establishment politics surely had something to do with bringing us to this threatening nadir. There was a strong current of alt-centre-style hostility to, and scapegoating of, Russia. This trope, offered as a ready-made anti-Trump meme by an increasingly frantic media, has cast a long shadow over our collective capacity to come to terms with Trump’s political appeal.

But the anti-Russian animus also indicated a deeper problem. Shepard Fairey’s majestic portraits of women, commissioned for the march’s placards, notably included a woman in a hijab that was also an American flag. The ACLU’s placards proclaimed ‘Dissent is Patriotic.’ Signs demanded that ‘Make America Smart Again’ or ‘Make America Tolerant Again’ or ‘Make America Kind Again’ – which, like a similar Daily Show skit, begs the question: when exactly was America any of these things?

Liberal patriotism is a bad strategy for building a resistance movement.

You may be #WithHer, but she's not with you: she was with her buddies at the Inauguration.  Though I did rather like this sign, which played on the Clinton slogan in an intelligent way.

I think my reservations are supported by various Democratic Congressional leaders' collaboration with Trump in the past few days.  Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown voted to confirm Ben Carson -- Ben Carson! -- as HUD secretary.  All but four senators voted to confirm Nikki Haley as Ambassador to the UN, and Warren was not among the four who voted against her.  As I've said before, Democrats are the collaboration party, not the opposition party.  As Jake Bacharach said this morning:

*Well, maybe not so quick.

Zombie Liberalism

Last night I watched the 2016 Korean film Train To Busan, newly out on video.  I'm not a fan of horror movies, let alone zombie movies, but I've seen my share of each type, and this one made an impression on me.  Though it wasn't intended to be, it worked as an allegory of Trump's America.  (But don't worry, it's primarily a fast-moving action film; I'm just imposing my post-modernist, deconstructionist mindset on it.)

So someone I know liked a post on Facebook, and it showed up in my feed.  The writer is a woman of color; her post in full:

I'm so sick of de no slut shaming Melania shit Michelle Obama had to have degrees many of them let's face it if she were a model or an escort or a hooker or sex worker or gold digger or whatever it would never have happened nada nothing no Obama Black Presidency-zilcho. Anyway I saw Hidden Figures tonight and I'm feeling empowered ????

Bigots are always "so sick of" being told not to bigot.  If you have any exposure to right-wing opinions, you've seen the same complaint from them many times.  If this is an example of the "empowerment" that comes from seeing Hidden Figures, then Cthulhu help us.  (I haven't yet seen Hidden Figures, but I read the book, and it's excellent.)  And it's far from the only example I've seen in the past week from liberals justifying behavior they attacked, rightly, when Republicans indulged in it.  But now they invoke Republicans as role models, and they're imitating them very well.  I can hardly tell the difference; only the names of the guilty have been changed.

Someone else responded to my criticism on this point:

You can criticize my guy all day because regardless of your opinion about how the country is run, the results can be quantified. The same can't be said about asking when an 11 year old is going to get her first abortion. If that make me a hypocrite, well, Hi, Hypocrite, party of 1.

That was exactly what I'd said.  You can, and should, criticize and attack Trump on his policies and behavior -- it's not as if he hasn't given potential critics plenty of fodder for criticism -- without slut-shaming, fat-shaming, being racist, being misogynist, etc.  It's not really that difficult.  Plenty of people have done so, from ordinary citizens to published writers.  That many liberals and self-styled progressives prefer to fall back on these old reliables says a lot about how deep their principles go.

Now, I don't know this latter person, so she may be an exception, but in general I have not found that liberals are okay with criticism of their guy on his policies -- very much the opposite.  This may be partly because they're as ignorant of their guy's policies as any Tea Party Republican.  The best that can be said is that they are really comfortable with abusive personal attacks on their guy and his family, because they know how to react to those: Oh, how can you say such awful things? You're a terrible person, etc., followed by abusive personal attacks in kind.  Like their right-wing opponents, they're on comfortable ground here because it requires no knowledge, no ability to construct an argument, just ragegasms.  Confronted with principled criticism of their guy from the left, they are helpless, assume the critic is a Republican, and fall back on what they know best, namely personal attacks.  As I said of the right after Obama's election, personal attacks are the best they have to offer.

Ironically, this stuff is proliferating just a few days after Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Many of the same people who piously celebrated King's legacy are now pissing on it. (Well, they have a good role model for that in President Obama, after all.)  It's perfectly legitimate to reject King's legacy, of course, to repudiate his methods and style; but paying lip service to him while behaving in exactly opposite ways is not.  (I can imagine people replying that King lived in a different era, and faced different obstacles and dangers.  That's true: the America he lived in was even more dangerous for people of color than the one we live in now.  Yet King took the high road, instead of wallowing in pigshit with the White Citizens' Councils.)

The word "unprecedented" turns up a lot in liberal discourse about Trump.  I'm not so sure of that myself, but what I want to point out is that the same word was common coin in Bush and Obama's War on Terror: We face an unprecedented enemy, so we cannot be bound by outdated scruples and limits on our conduct of this war.  This trope was used to justify torture and other crimes against humanity, though of course the US was never really constrained by those supposed scruples and limits before anyway.  It seems to me that invoking "unprecedented" with regard to Trump has a similar function: to excuse and justify unethical, irrational, dishonest speech and behavior by his liberal opponents.  I would have thought, when I was younger and more naive, that if you face an unprecedented threat, the proper and natural response would be to think carefully and rationally rather than to panic and resort to abusive, destructive methods from the past.  Now I know better.

I was impressed by the international women's marches that took place around the world this weekend, but I wonder what will come of them.  So does Ian Welsh, who wrote today:

Trump doesn’t need to be popular with everyone. It doesn’t matter that the women’s march produced more people than his inauguration, despite his squealing about it: it is irrelevant because those people couldn’t produce enough people in the right states to with the election AND, as with previous great protests, nothing appears to have been built on top of the protests. It’s nice they all showed up, but they aren’t being asked (and organized) to do things that matter in the future, for all the talk of “the resistance”. If you wanted power, you’d want to be able to get one-fifth that crowd to show up when needed to oppose specific bills and actions by Congress, for example.

Mass demonstrations are useful for producing a feeling of community, that one is not alone, and they can be used to build organization.  But they're also old-fashioned, reflexive responses -- basically, they are religious revivals -- and if Trump is an unprecedented threat, shouldn't people be coming up with unprecedented tactics and strategies to fight him?  I've become skeptical of the actual usefulness of such demonstrations since I saw how ineffective the South Korean candlelight vigils were in stopping the corrupt neoliberal regime of then-President Lee Myung-bak several years ago.  And that was in a society with plenty of organizations at all levels, where the mass protests really represented groups that could worked after the protests were over.  Vigils on the same breathtaking scale have taken place to call for the removal of current President Park Geun-hye, whose corruption and lawbreaking have been even more egregious than Lee's.  It remains to be seen if the prosecutors will be able to follow through.

For example, how's the abolition of the Electoral College coming along?  A few weeks ago liberal Democrats were up in arms about it, but I haven't heard much lately.  The last I saw on Facebook was a political cartoon of the Founders deciding to set up the EC in order to prevent a "fucking moron" from becoming President; the person who shared it thought it was very clever, though they apparently overlooked the small detail that by their standards, the Electoral College had just put a "fucking moron" in the White House.  I don't blame people for having short attention spans, or for lacking the stamina for hard, day-to-day political work; that's me to a T.  But the posturing and strutting, the waving around of words like "Revolution" and "Resistance" by people who think that wearing pink "pussy hats" for a day in Washington DC is a revolutionary act, doesn't make me feel hopeful.