Sinking In Donald Trump's Swamp.

Suckers! With every passing day it grows clearer that President-Elect Donald Trump has no intention of sending the wild rivers of white working-class wrath roaring through Washington’s reeking stables. Trump is no Hercules. He will not use the powers of the Presidency to slay the monsters of privilege and corruption. Trump is a creature of the swamp – and like recognises like.

 

SOME WEEKS BACK I penned an opinion-piece entitled “Looking on the Bright Side of President Trump”. Exactly how the unrestrained spirit of Pollyanna seized control of my mental faculties remains a mystery. My foolish decision to get blind drunk on her optimism was probably due to the fact that every sober attempt to come to grips with our Trumpian future left me waist-deep in a gloomy swamp of pessimism.

 

Unfortunately, Pollyanna’s 100 percent proof “Glad Game” didn’t help. A month has passed and now the whole world is waist-deep in the big muddy – and sinking fast.

 

Before he started naming his Cabinet, it was still possible to write: “That Donald Trump possesses an enormous ego is indisputable. The question is: will that ego be better served by becoming one of America’s truly great presidents – or one of its very worst?” Now we know that his promise to “drain the swamp” was a cynical inversion of his true intentions.

 

With every passing day it grows clearer that Trump has no intention of sending the wild rivers of white working-class wrath roaring through Washington’s reeking stables. Trump is no Hercules. He will not use the powers of the Presidency to slay the monsters of privilege and corruption. Trump is a creature of the swamp – and like recognises like.

 

Trump’s embryonic administration shows every sign of growing into a veritable Hydra of swamp-begotten evil. His pick for Attorney-General is the epitome of genteel Southern racism. His preferred national security team is the closest the United States has come in its 240-year history to being “protected” by a military junta. The man he is contemplating for Secretary-of-State is CEO of the oil giant Exxon – a man with whom the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, will have no difficulty doing business. How do we know? Because Rex Tillerson has already been there, done that, and has a bright, shiny Russian medal (the Order of Friendship no less!) to prove it.

 

In happier times, the moniker “Mad Dog” would’ve constituted a pretty big obstacle to being considered for any – let alone a major – presidential appointment. But these are far from happy times and Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis is Trump’s pick for Secretary-of-Defence. Why “Mad Dog”? Well, this is the man who told the Afghans: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you f**k with me, I'll kill you all.”

 

Mind you, if Trump continues to threaten Chinese exporters with a 45 percent tariff; and goes on talking blithely about turning Richard Nixon’s greatest foreign policy achievement, the One China Policy, into a readily expendable negotiating chip; then having a mad dog Marine General as your Secretary-of-Defence may turn out to be, as another mad dog Marine once put it, “a pretty neat idea.”

 

But even if (and it’s a very big “if”) Trump’s unintentional embrace of Nixon’s infamous “Madman Theory of Diplomacy” is enough to keep China’s nuclear missiles in their silos (remembering, of course, that we have nothing now to fear from the ICBMs of America’s new “very, very, very good friends”, the Russians) then that other global incinerator, Climate Change, is unlikely to start cooling down any time soon.

 

Trump’s pick to take over the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is a no-holds-barred climate change denier of such impressive ideological rigidity that even George W. Bush is decrying his appointment.

 

Dubbya’s opposition notwithstanding, Trump’s transition team has sanctioned the following media statement from the politician who has never received a “Big Oil” corporate donation that he wasn’t happy to bank:

 

“The American people are tired of seeing billions of dollars drained from our economy due to unnecessary EPA regulations, and I intend to run this agency in a way that fosters both responsible protection of the environment and freedom for American businesses.”

 

By “responsible” protection, Mr Pruitt presumably means the sort of protection afforded to the hen-house by the fox.

 

If the American Republic was anything like the Roman Republic, then the equivalents of Cassius and Brutus would already be sharpening their daggers against this combed-over Caesar. Indeed, it could be argued that all that stands between Trump and the imminent demise of American greatness is a handful of patriotic United States senators.

 

Roll on the constitutional Ides of March.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 December 2016.

Yes, He Can! Why So Many Americans Are Voting For Donald Trump.

Striking A Pose: Those narrowed eyes, that tilted head, the jutting jaw: so reminiscent of Benito Mussolini. Donald Trump has never held elected office and has no record of public service upon which to build his candidacy. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this outsider status that draws so many Americans to him. They are not looking for someone who understands the system. They hate the system. The President they're looking for must be a wrecking ball!

 

WHAT LEADS THE MAN who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 to come out for Donald Trump in 2016? What prompts a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat to re-register himself as a Republican – just so he can vote for “The Donald” in the Florida Primary? Obviously it’s about disappointment. About “change we can believe in” turning into the same old Wall Street shuffle. About “yes we can” somehow acquiring the rider “but not quite yet”. Equally obviously, however, it’s about hope. If the eloquent graduate from Harvard Law School couldn’t, then maybe – just maybe – the ebullient, trash-talking property billionaire can.

 

Can what, though? That’s what’s got New Zealanders puzzled. Trump offers very little in the way of carefully considered and thoroughly costed policy. Indeed, a rational case for electing Donald Trump president is difficult to make. The man has never held elected office and has no record of public service upon which to build his candidacy. And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this outsider status that draws so many Americans to him. They are not looking for someone who understands the system. They hate the system. They’re not in the market for a constructive candidate, they want a President who’s ready to go after the system with a wrecking ball!

 

The Republican and Democratic parties have only themselves to blame for Trump’s extraordinary run of primary victories. For three decades they have either crudely inflamed, or, loftily dismissed, the people they call “Trailer-Trash” and “Rednecks”: the very same people who are now turning out in their tens-of-thousands for the man who openly proclaims that he “loves” the “poorly educated”.

 

Are you going bald? Does your beer-gut spill over your belt-buckle? Do you work at a dead-end job for the minimum wage? Yeah? Well, guess what? The Donald loves you guys – and he wants your votes. Why? Because your votes, and the votes of those assholes up at the Country Club carry exactly the same weight. That’s right: exactly the same. And you know something else, fellas? There are way more of us than there are of them!

 

It’s taken these folk a while to work out that all the promises the Republicans made about abortion and gay marriage were only ever intended to keep them away from the Democrats. Not that they needed much persuading – not when the Democrats had already written them off as Bible-bashing misogynists, unreconstructed racists and gay-bashing homophobes. But now they have woken up. Now they know that the politicians in Washington have about as much interest in their welfare as their old employers did when they laid them all off, shut down the factories, and opened up new ones in Mexico or China.

 

That’s why they have no interest in Senators, or Governors, or any other representatives of the established order. That’s why they’re flocking to the man who’s so rich he doesn’t need to go cap-in-hand to the Koch brothers (like “Little Marco” Rubio). The man who “gets” what’s happened to people like them. The man who knows that the TPP is nothing more than a thieves’ charter, something cooked-up by and for the big corporations. The man who, like them, knows what it means to be ridiculed, excluded and hated – and isn’t afraid to say so out loud. The man who wears the scorn of the Establishment as a badge of honour, and who revels in its all-too-obvious fear.

 

When asked by journalists (“disgusting people”) what his reaction would be if the Republican Party grandees attempted to deny him the nomination, he didn’t answer them directly. What he would do was not something he was prepared to discuss. What he did tell the news media, however, along with the rest of the political class, was what his followers would do: “There’ll be riots in the streets.”

 

Moderate America – Hillary Clinton’s America – recoiled in horror. This was without precedent in the nation’s recent history. A presidential candidate had just warned the nation that his followers would not shrink from unleashing civil disorder – if that is what it took to secure their objectives.

 

Nothing less than the future of the American Republic is now at stake. Its fate in the hands of a social formation filled to the brim with the same reckless disdain for established order that drove the bluff burgesses, sturdy artisans, and unruly apprentice boys of Boston in the 1770s. The revolutionaries who concluded that if the Royal Government in London could offer them nothing more than the constant abrogation of their rights, then they would devise a way of governing themselves.

 

Two-and-half centuries later, the role of King George is being played by the Federal Government in Washington. Not for nothing did these latter-day rebels style themselves “The Tea Party”. They may not be historians, or political science graduates, but the imagery of the armed citizen stepping forward to confront tyranny is burned ineradicably into their political imaginations. Nor are they strangers to the grim business of securing their nation’s objectives by force. A great many of Trump’s followers are veterans of America’s most recent wars: the men and women who were “rotated” in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq far too many times. Not only are these good ole boys and gals ready to fight for their version of the United States of America – they know how.

 

Donald Trump, with a political empathy bordering on the fascistic, has made himself the leader of these disregarded Americans. He “gets” them in ways that Hillary Clinton (and even Bernie Sanders) cannot hope to emulate. Like every successful purveyor of nationalistic populism, he first stokes and then validates his followers’ anger. Because they have been cheated by those who claimed to be their friends.

 

But that’s all over now, because he, the Donald, will never cheat them. He will be their wrecking-ball. And, together, they will “make America great again”.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 21 March 2016.

Black Brothers And Good Ole Boys: Bernie Sanders' Winning Margin?

Rooting For The Wrong Team: Dumb, racist, Bible-thumping, gun-loving, working-class white males living in the American South began voting for the Republican Party when the Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Bill into law in 1965. The Republican Right has been playing them like a fiddle ever since. If he's to become President, Bernie Sanders is going to have to persuade these good ole boys to vote the same way as their black brothers.

 

IF BERNIE SANDERS is to win the US Presidential Election he’ll have to win the support of two crucial demographics. The first group to win over are working-class blacks. The second, and arguably the more important, are working-class whites. Because, right now, the Sanders campaign is a paradox: it offers America a left-wing programme, but the voters who have , so far, responded most enthusiastically are not the black, white and Latino working-class Americans who would benefit most from its content, but the young, well-educated children of America’s white professional middle-class – and some of their parents.

 

As the primaries head South and South-West into South Carolina and Nevada the Sanders campaign must find a way to counter Hillary Clinton’s popularity among African-American voters and Latinos. If he does not find some way of detaching a significant number of black support from the Clinton juggernaut in South Carolina, he risks getting what Barack Obama calls a “shellacking”. Being beaten by 40-50 percentage points in the Palmetto State would damage the Sander’s campaign very seriously. A narrow loss (10-15 points) on the other hand, would indicate that he just might come out the other side of “Super Tuesday” with enough delegates to keep on fighting.

 

[The phrase “Super Tuesday” refers to the Tuesday in February or March of a presidential election year when the greatest number of states hold primary elections to select delegates to national conventions at which each party’s presidential candidates are officially nominated. More delegates can be won on Super Tuesday than on any other single day of the primary calendar; accordingly, candidates seeking the presidency traditionally must do well on this day to secure their party’s nomination. States participating in this year’s “Super Tuesday” (1 March 2016) are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming. – Wikipedia]

 

Sander’s position in Nevada is of less concern than his situation in South Carolina. The Nevada polls put him within striking distance of Clinton, which suggests that, whoever wins there, the margin will be relatively narrow. If it’s not, and Clinton racks up a big Nevada win, then the Sanders campaign will find itself holed below the waterline.

 

In Sander’s favour, however, is the endorsement he has received from the “Black Lives Matter” movement. This mostly young activist group has broken ranks with the ageing veterans of the 1950s and 60s civil rights leadership – nearly all of whom have come out strongly for Clinton. Black youth, who have grown up in the post-civil rights activism era, are drawn to Sander’s unequivocal condemnation of Police racism, and are as enthusiastic as white youth about his promises of free tertiary education and universal, publicly funded and provided health care.  If Sanders attracts the support of young black working-class voters across the South (where most of the Super Tuesday primaries will be taking place) then Clinton campaign’s progress will be severely impeded.

 

But, even if he heads off Hillary to claim the Democratic Party’s nomination, Sanders cannot become President of the United States without re-claiming for the Democratic Party a significant chunk of the white working-class’s current support for the Republicans.

 

In the states of the old Confederacy, and especially among voters with only a high-school education, the formerly rock-solid grip of the Democratic Party was broken as long ago as the late 1960s. The poor, ill-educated, deeply religious working-class white males of the Old South never forgave President Johnson (a Texan goddammit!) for passing the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It made them easy meat for the Alabama Governor, George Wallace, in 1968; Richard Nixon, in 1972; and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

 

By skilfully practising the dark art of “wedge politics” the Republicans have by-and-large held on to these angry and alienated “good ole boys”. Culturally impoverished, Fox News watching, minimum wage workers comprise the core of evangelical Christianity in America; hold deeply conservative views on most social issues; love their guns, their families and their flag; and have precious little that’s good to say about Blacks (welfare scroungers!) Latinos (illegal immigrants!) Muslims (terrorists!) or “Big Government”.

 

Can Sanders – a socialist Jewish-American – win back these good ole boys? That depends upon how forthright and uncompromising he is willing to be in sheeting home the blame for working-class America’s woes to where it properly belongs. Deep down these voters know that they’ve been suckered by the country-club set, and that, as Sanders declares over and over again, the game in America is rigged against the ordinary working stiff – no matter what colour or creed he may be.

 

Only if he is able to convince both the black and the white working-class that a vote for the Democratic candidate is a vote to break through to the surface and once again breathe free American air, can Bernie Sanders hope to become the 45^th President of the United States.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road  of Saturday, 20 February 2016.

The Price We Pay For Civilisation

A Winning Team?: Phil Goff and David Cunliffe (with a great deal of help from David Parker) have seized the high moral ground on fiscal policy. The 2011 General Election has finally become a genuine contest.

LABOUR’S TAX POLICY is as much a moral declaration as it is an economic statement. It speaks to our notions of fairness and equal treatment every bit as directly as it addresses the investor’s love affair with real estate.

This re-focusing of the electorate’s attention on the revenue-gathering aspects of fiscal policy is as timely as it is necessary. For far too long politicians of conservative mien have pretended that the only good tax is a dead one. That governments can go on blithely emptying-out the revenue side of the public ledger, (or, as they prefer to characterise it: “putting money back in the tax-payer’s pocket”) with impunity.

Not that they believed a word of their own propaganda. Even the densest conservative politician must have been aware that drastic cuts in revenue would, eventually, have to be balanced by equally drastic cuts in expenditure.

Nor were the more conservative sorts of politicians ever truly averse to a fiscal policy of slash and burn. Indeed, there are many on the Right who regard slashing and burning as the whole point of the exercise.

 

“MY GOAL”, boasted the far-Right American lobbyist, Grover Norquist, “is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Nor was this idle rhetoric on Norquist’s part.

As anyone who follows American politics knows only too well, Norquist and his corporate sponsors have been as good as their eliminationist word. All over the United States, federal and state expenditures are being slashed, and tens-of-thousands of public servants laid-off.

And, in America, these firings have moved way beyond “the back office”. The United States’ once proud system of public education is being systematically starved of funds while massive sums are being voted to the corporate providers of private education in so-called “charter schools”.

To undercut the inevitable resistance from aggrieved public-sector workers, Republican Party governors have stripped the public-sector unions of the right to organise, strike, or engage in any effective form of collective bargaining.

So crazed has the American Right become since the onset of the global financial crisis, that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is threatening to pull the plug on the US Government’s ability to pay its bills. Unmoved by the warnings of Wall Street that such a move would cause the United States to default on its debt – plunging the world into a new and exponentially more serious global crisis – the far-right “Tea Party” faction of the Republican Party refuses to be swayed.

Unless President Obama agrees to reduce federal expenditures by more than a trillion dollars, congressional permission for his administration to exceed the “debt ceiling” – i.e. honour America’s debts – will be refused.

That expenditure cuts on this scale would effectively dismantle what remains of the United States’ anaemic social-welfare system, far from restraining the Tea Partiers, explains why they have so far rejected every one of the President’s attempts at reaching a compromise. As one American pundit put it: “The Republicans are refusing to take ‘Yes’ for an answer!” 

THIS, THEN, is the logical end-point of the tax-cutting, expenditure-slashing, “austerity” mania currently gripping the Right – not just in the US but also here in New Zealand.

That’s why Labour’s embrace of a Capital Gains Tax is so important. It signals that a line in the sand has been drawn by the Labour caucus.

On one side stand all the democratic achievements of the New Zealand people: the public provision of health, education and welfare services; the State’s active engagement in the provision and maintenance of New Zealand’s basic infrastructure; it’s guardianship of our natural environment; its stewardship of our culture.

On the other side stand all those commercial interests slavering to turn these collective achievements into opportunities for private gain. The ideologues who would drown our state – along with all that it stands for and protects – in Mr Norquist’s bathtub.

The Norquists of this world see the welfare state as an unnecessary evil. But, in its place they would raise something even more malign: plutocracy. A state in which a citizen's worth is measured exclusively by their wealth, and where the only truly punishable crime is poverty.

It was the US Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said: “Taxes are the price we pay for civilisation.”

Labour agrees.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 July 2011.

Re-defining Empathy

Barack Obama: "The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor."

IT was one of those throwaway lines that sets an alarm-bell ringing in the back of your mind. A sneering, belittling tone which makes you wonder. "What was that all about?" Or ask: "Who rattled his cage?"

The line in question appeared in an article by William Langley, a conservative political correspondent for the right-wing British newspaper, The Sunday Telegraph. He was writing about President Obama’s nominee for the US Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, and how she exemplifies the human quality the new American President prizes most: Empathy.

"The word – ", wrote Mr Langley, "a longstanding pop-psychology and self-help manual standby – has been heavily in play since Obama last week proposed Sonia Sotomayor, a New York appeals court judge, as his first Supreme Court pick."

"Whoa there, Billy Boy!" I thought to myself, as I read those words. Since when has "empathy" connoted something as frothy and ultimately superfluous as "pop psychology"? And who, exactly, has decided that the moral impulse which lies at the root of all the world’s great religions; the defining quality of the most exalted human behaviour, should be downgraded to the status of a "self-help manual standby"?

I didn’t have to read much further to discover the answer. According to the man who scripted most of the George Bush Jnr presidency, Karl Rove: "Empathy is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and moulded in whatever form justices want."

Aha! So that’s the caper. President Obama, in the tradition of America’s greatest presidents, is attempting to infuse his countrymen’s’ political discourse with a moral language more nuanced and sophisticated that the Bush Administration’s crude division of the world into a Manichean "Us" (the good guys) versus "Them" (the evil-doers).

This sort of language:

"We need somebody whose got the heart, the empathy, to recognise what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges."

Good Lord! No wonder the Right is all a-twitter. For the past thirty years they have enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the use of religious rhetoric. Never mind that it was Old Testament rhetoric – full of "thou shalt nots", and trailing the fire and brimstone of the Pentateuch God. So long as the Left refused to plough this most fertile of all political fields, the Right couldn’t lose.

But President Obama is only too happy to toil in the fields of the Lord, and to confront the Republican Party’s Old Testament rhetoric, with the emancipatory and, yes, empathic language of the New.

It’s there in his Inaugural Address, when he talks about the contribution of the men and women "obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long rugged path towards prosperity and freedom".

Who can hear those words and not be reminded of Christ’s: "straight is the gate and narrow is the way, that leadeth unto life, and few there be who find it"?

Consider, too, President Obama’s Georgetown University speech, in which he draws explicitly from the Sermon on the Mount:

"We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock."

The President’s New Testament rhetoric strikes at the heart of the Right’s political project in a way that is peculiarly American – and peculiarly effective.

In a nation whose visceral fear and hatred of "Godless Communism" is legendary, Christ’s liberating theology of love and justice has long supplied the American Left with a potent alternative to the class-ridden rhetoric of Marx and Lenin. When that great American revolutionary, Dr Martin Luther King, made out the case for racial emancipation and social solidarity, he did so using the language of the Bible – not Das Kapital.

Empathy – the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes – is fundamental to President Obama’s redemptive project. By recruiting Jesus to the Democratic cause, and setting him against the Republican’s Jehovah, The President has forced the Right into a theological and political battle it cannot win.

Unless, of course, it first persuades us that empathy – the attribute without which we cannot truly be called human – is nothing but "pop psychology" and a "self-help manual standby".

A version of this essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 5 June 2009.