2009 and 2017

Kevin Drum had a pretty good blog post on Mother Jones yesterday. He compared the press headlines and stories in 2009 versus 2017. In 2009, on the federal level, Obama had won a very decisive victory and Congress was controlled by the Democrats. The narrative then--even in The New York Times--was that Obama was not reaching out to the Repubs enough (even though he was, but that's another story), and that this was some sort of failure. In 2017, by contrast, the narrative is a lot different. There is no expectation that the Repubs should "reach out".  In fact, it seems to be presented as a sign of strength that they are not.

If you have followed the press the last few years, this is not surprising, since it was pretty consistently presented--again, also in The New York Times--that this failure to compromise was the fault of the Democrats, and specifically Preident Obama. And this was true whether the Dems or the Repubs controlled Congress.

It's not worth whining about but I think it's pretty interesting. (Kevin Drum has his own idea on why this is so.)

Quote for Today

Some people are able to say things in just the right way.  I guess that's why we call them great writers.  Here is Philip Roth from the January 30 New Yorker:

“I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

Right on!

Popularity

Although there has been a recent reversal in some of the polls of President Trump's job approval polling (i.e., moving more negative), some people are puzzled that his approval rating has not been worse.

Well, I have lived most of my adult life with a good portion (maybe a majority) of the American people being wrong, so it doesn't really surprise me.

• The Vietnam War was very popular--until it wasn't.
• Bush II's Iraq War was popular--until it wasn't.
• Martin Luther King Jr. was very unpopular--until he was (well, at least a little more).
• Rights for homosexuals were very unpopular--until they became at least less so.

Okay okay, so this is way oversimplified.  But at the same time, all you can do is keep fighting and organizing and protesting and telling the truth.  It can't hurt.

Religious Liberty?

I fully understand that the latest leak of the draft Executive Order allowing Christians to break the law could just be a ruse to divert our attention from some other disaster that the Trump administration is contemplating (one a day it seems), but I want to talk about it anyway.

Although I am neither a trained historian nor trained theologian, I am a Christian and I am pretty comfortable with the following assertions:

The Religious Right is pretty adamant that some threat to Christianity is coming from the secular world. It bears reminding that "religious liberty" is not a biblical concept. There is nothing in the Bible that claims a right to religious liberty. In fact, for almost all of the 2000+ years of the existence of Christianity, the Church has been utterly opposed to the concept. We didn't have heretics burned at the stake and witch trials because the Church (in all its various formulations) was a champion of religious liberty. The Puritans didn't believe in freedom of religion except for the right to create a community that they could govern with their own version of Sharia Law.

On the contrary, religious liberty did not come about until countries were governed by secular principles. To the extent the we have religious liberty in America, it is because it is granted by a secular government and society. The places with the least religious freedom are those that are the least secular.

So don't ever be taken in by the whining of the Religious Right. They just want a license to disobey any law they choose--by the way, this is also very unbiblical--under the smokescreen of incorrect biblical teachings and a false notion of what religious liberty means. And they want to blame the secular society which is responsible for granting that right in the first place.

American Institutions Won't Save Us

I agree with Paul Krugman that American institutions will not save us from Trump. But here is an even more forceful article demonstrating that they never have. One excerpt:

This is a country that managed to enslave — to torture and drive unto death, both physical and social — millions of black men, women, and their children, for over two centuries, and then to reenslave them by another name for another century, not by shredding the Constitution but by writing and interpreting and executing the Constitution. This is a country that managed to mow down trade unionists and dissenters, to arrest and throw them into jail, to destroy vibrant social movements, to engineer a near-complete rout of American social democracy after World War II, to build and fill concentration camps, to pass legislation during the Cold War authorizing internment camps: all without a strongman; indeed, often with the collusion of some of the most esteemed voices of liberty in the country.

This is a country that in the last half-century has managed to undo some of the precious achievements of liberal civilization — the ban and revulsion against torture, the prohibition on preventive war, the right to organize, the skepticism of the imperial executive — through lawyers, genteel men of the Senate with their august traditions and practices, and the Supreme Court.

It's worth a read.

Trump Week #2 Addendum

Also, I am going to stop listening to strategic advice from the centrists and Third Way types (not that I did much anyway). They are big contributors to the mess we find ourselves in. Instead, I will be heeding politicians like Sanders, Merkley, Ellison, and Warren. And publications on the left like Jacobin, The Nation, and Dissent. And groups like Black Lives Matter, Moral Mondays, etc. We need to organize and resist.

Trump Week #2

• I think those that know me will attest that I am not prone to melodrama. (In fact I have been accused of being too much the opposite.)  But I will say this anyway:  The day that President Trump issued his anti-Muslim EO might be the day that the United States ceased to be a great nation.
• Interesting quote from a  NY Times article, quoting a German equity fund manager:

"China does not have free elections. China jails labor organizers, while lavishing credit on state-owned enterprises. All of this makes Mr. Xi an ironic choice as an icon for free trade. Yet Mr. Xi’s speech was so successful that it won the embrace of business people and world leaders alike.

At a lunch in Davos two days after Mr. Xi’s address, a Berlin-based private equity fund manager, André Loesekrug-Pietri, stood in a dining room full of more than 100 people and predicted the dawning of a new era.

“We heard a Chinese president becoming the leader of the free world,” he said."

• The Dems should obstruct and resist the Gorsuch nomination with everything they have. Screw the filibuster.  Keep the seat vacant for as long as possible. The 4-4 split is to our advantage.
• The Trump administration has already shown an extraordinary talent for making bad decisions and then executing them poorly (e.g., the anti-Muslim EO).  Yeah, kind of like GW Bush's Iraq War, isn't it?  And it looks like it might be the way a lot of things are going to unfold in the coming months.