HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Saturday, November 30, 2024
The New Matt Gaetz
It’s tempting to look at Trump’s announcement that he will appoint Kash Patel to be director of the FBI as just another attempt at trolling. Trump loves drama. Patel comes with a lot of baggage and so many detractors that much of the initial reaction is that he is not confirmable in the Senate.
It’s hard to believe Trump would nominate Patel just to watch him lose in hopes of appointing him to be the deputy director, a position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. For one thing, the confirmation battle is likely to be bruising, and Patel may end up like Gaetz, making videos on Cameo for $500 a pop. It would be a bad look to lose a second major nominee for the Justice Department. But January, when confirmations start, is a long way off, and there is still the matter of the current Director of the FBI, Chris Wray, who is midway through the 10-year term Trump appointed him to. Wray will have to either resign or be fired before a Patel nomination would be in play. It’s hard to fathom what Trump’s end game—if he has one—is here.
Kash Patel is a former public defender who worked in DOJ’s National Security Division for a time. That means he’s in the category of people who should know better and who understand how the rule of law works. But last year, Patel told Steve Bannon, who has been one of his big supporters, that they could get “rolling on prosecutions” by putting in “all American patriots top to bottom” and find conspirators in government and the media who he says helped President Biden rig elections. He talked about both criminal prosecutions and civil actions against folks he apparently considers enemies.
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Trump Attorney General Bill Barr rejected Patel for a possible role as deputy director of the FBI, telling Trump’s then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would be appointed over “my dead body.”
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An article in the Atlantic last summer characterized Patel as someone who was viewed as dangerous in the eyes of other Trump administration officials: “Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all—his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow.” It is a lack of judgment coupled with inexperience that creates a perfect storm of susceptibility to Trump’s whims. You wouldn’t take a lawyer with just a few years of experience as a line prosecutor and put them in charge of their division at DOJ, let alone the FBI. But Patel appears to be precisely what Trump wants, a no-questions-asked loyalist.
The Atlantic article is full of insight into Patel, if you find yourself with time to spare Sunday morning. One point among many: the author writes that “many of the nearly forty” of Patel’s former Trump Administration colleagues she spoke with for the piece would only do so if they could remain anonymous because they feared retaliation.
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The key, predictably, seems to be Patel’s loyalty to Trump. As the FBI geared up to investigate Trump’s retention of classified documents in 2022, it was Patel who floated the story that he was present when Trump verbally declassified scores of documents before he left the White House. That was the line of defense that Trump ultimately picked up on, despite officials who said they were unaware of any such order.
This, of course, led to Patel becoming a witness. In his first appearance before the grand jury, Patel took the Fifth. Subsequently, DOJ compelled his testimony with a grant of “use immunity,” which meant his testimony couldn’t be used against him, forcing him to testify because he no longer had a Fifth Amendment privilege to assert. Patel made it clear when he appeared before the grand jury this time that his appearance wasn’t voluntary and he had not made a deal with the Justice Department to testify against Trump. He remained a staunch critic of the classified documents case. It was in this maelstrom that Patel was asked on far-right host Benny Johnson’s podcast whether he would agree to be Trump’s FBI Director if Trump won in 2024. Patel responded that he was “all in with the boss.”
Apparently, he still is. In announcing Patel’s selection on Truth Social, Trump acknowledged that Patel is a fervent believer in the “deep state,” writing, “He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution.” Earlier this month, Patel said, “I'd shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen the next day as a museum of the deep state. And I'd take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.” All in all, not a choice designed to inspire confidence that the FBI will be able to focus on its mission or that their new director would have the respect of the men and women the country depends upon to keep them safe.
Trump has thrown down another gauntlet to the Senate. Their answer must be no. Kash Patel cannot be put in charge of the FBI any more than Matt Gaetz could be put in charge of the Justice Department. Once more, we watch to see whether the Senate will do its constitutional duty or whether the Senate will bend the knee.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
Stopping the Press
Stopping
the Press
After spending years
painting the media as the “enemy of the people,” Donald Trump is ready to
intensify his battle against the journalists who cover him.
November 30, 2024
Charles Dickens, a journalist of such Victorian energies
that he managed to write some fiction on the side, was a keen observer of human
vanities. Of a minor figure in “Our Mutual Friend,” he wrote, “Mr. Podsnap was
well to do, and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap’s opinion.” In our time,
journalists have been made to realize that they are widely viewed as Podsnaps:
privileged peacocks, stubbornly unreflective, “happily acquainted” with their
“own merit and importance.” Reliable outfits such as the Pew Research Center
report that the news media, which, in the middle of the twentieth century, was
among the most highly regarded institutions in public life, now dwells in a
dank basement of distrust, alongside the members of the United States Congress.
And yet there is a difference between
criticism and demonization. Donald Trump has spent years painting the press as
the “enemy of the people,” though he is hardly the first modern President to do
so. “Never forget, the press is the enemy,” Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger,
in the thick of the Watergate scandal. “Write that on a blackboard one hundred
times.” Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s lieutenants, compiled an “enemies list,”
which included the names of several dozen editors and reporters. (Richard Rovere,
this magazine’s Washington correspondent at the time, made the cut.) The
government tapped journalists’ telephones; two of Nixon’s Watergate henchmen,
G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, discussed plans to assassinate
the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.
Trump bears at least as much
resentment toward reporters as Nixon did, but his psychology is arguably more
complicated, because he was initially a creation of the media. In the
nineteen-eighties, as a real-estate hustler, he repeatedly called in to the tabloids
about his exploits, real or imagined. He was the Donny Appleseed of the New
York Post, tirelessly planting items in the soil of Page Six. More
recently, Trump’s obsession with the Murdoch press, particularly Fox News, has
grown so deep that he is attempting to fill crucial roles in his Administration
with Fox hosts and commentators.
Trump is keenly aware that the ecology
of the press has changed radically since Nixon’s day. Local papers have thinned
or vanished entirely. The Old Guard outlets are struggling for audiences,
subscribers, and ad revenue. So, while Trump finds refuge and amplification in
friendly ports––Fox News, Newsmax, Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk’s X–––he has
increasingly made plain his intent on doing battle with the rest from a
position of strength. He often threatens violence and humiliation. Two years
ago, at a rally held months after Politico published a draft of Justice Samuel
Alito’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump suggested a way to smoke out the
source of the leak: “The reporter goes to jail. When the reporter learns that
he’s going to be married in two days to a certain prisoner that’s extremely
strong, tough, and mean, he will say, he or she, ‘I think I’m going to give you
the information. Here’s the leaker, get me the hell out of here.’ ”
In his first term, Trump was so
agitated about his coverage on CNN that he reportedly pushed the Department of
Justice to block A.T. & T.’s acquisition of the network’s owner at the
time, Time Warner. (The Justice Department denied any White House intervention,
and eventually the deal went through.) Trump also is said to have urged the
doubling of shipping rates for companies such as Amazon, a move that would have
been onerous for Jeff Bezos, whose newspaper, the Washington Post,
had the irritating habit of committing journalism critical of the
Administration.
Media lawyers now fear that Trump will
ramp up the deployment of subpoenas, specious lawsuits, court orders, and
search warrants to seize reporters’ notes, devices, and source materials. They
are gravely concerned that reporters and media institutions will be punished
for leaking government secrets. The current Justice Department guidelines
mandating extra procedural measures for subpoenas directed at journalists are
just that: guidelines. They are likely to be shredded. Nearly every state
provides journalists with at least a qualified privilege to withhold the
identity of confidential sources, but there is no federal privilege, and Trump
has opposed a bipartisan congressional bill that would create one, the
so-called PRESS Act. “REPUBLICANS MUST KILL THIS BILL!” he
posted on Truth Social.
Retribution is in the air. “We’re
going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens,
who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections,” Kash Patel, a leading MAGA soldier, said on Steve
Bannon’s podcast. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Trump’s lawyers have already threatened or taken legal action against the Times,
the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, Penguin Random House, and others.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project
2025, meanwhile, calls for ending federal funding to NPR and PBS. It insists
that there is “no legal entitlement” for the press to have access to the White
House “campus.” Although Trump disavowed Project 2025 during his campaign, he
has selected one of its authors, Brendan Carr, who is also an ideological ally
of Elon Musk, to head the Federal Communications Commission.
A longer-range worry is that the
Supreme Court may weaken or even overturn the 1964 landmark decision New York
Times v. Sullivan. Sullivan limits the ability of public officials to sue
journalists for defamation, finding that the Constitution guarantees that, at a
minimum, journalists can write freely and critically about public officials, as
long as they don’t publish statements that they know to be false, or probably
so. Nixon regarded Sullivan as “virtually a license to lie.” Trump shares the
sentiment. The legal protections established between Sullivan and Watergate
have been eroding in recent years, and two sitting Justices, Clarence Thomas
and Neil Gorsuch, have been public about their eagerness to revisit the
decision. The Court might decline to take a Sullivan-related case and simply
let stand a state court’s or a federal district court’s limitation of it,
resulting in a de-facto patchwork of local standards for press freedoms.
All these threats and potential
actions are hardly the stuff of legal arcana or the frenzied obsessions of
self-involved Podsnapian journalists. They are the arsenal of a would-be
autocrat who seeks to intimidate his critics, protect himself from scrutiny,
and go on wearing away at the liberal democratic order. ♦
A Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education
A
Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education
Even on my first day, I
sensed dissonance between the campaign’s celebrity-inflected exuberance and the
raw divisions I saw in the streets.
November 30, 2024
In October, as a novice volunteer knocking on doors in
Pennsylvania for the Kamala Harris campaign, my task was to make sure that
committed Democrats voted, and to persuade undecided voters that Harris was the
better choice. I was told not to spend time talking with voters who were
clearly supporters of Donald Trump. But there was something about the way one
man snarled at me, “She’s evil,” as he was tending his front lawn on a quiet,
tree-shaded street in a suburb of Allentown, that made me stop.
When I approached, he seemed to shrink
back, but he recovered and told me that Harris was a moral and physical danger
to children because she supported public middle schools allowing students to
undergo transgender surgery without the consent of their parents. By this time,
after two months of canvassing, I had heard from several Trump voters some
version of this noxious innuendo. I shrugged, told him his concern was not
based on any reality I was aware of, and moved on to the next door on my list.
A few minutes later, another voter on
the same street opened his door to declare that he would vote enthusiastically
for Harris. He was a pastor in a local Protestant church, and he expressed
disbelief that Trump, after his attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020
election, his felony convictions, the court case that found him liable for
sexual abuse, and his increasingly erratic and crude behavior, was even close
to Harris in the polls. “How is this possible?” was the refrain I heard time
and again from Democrats.
Allentown is the most populous city in
the Lehigh Valley, a forty-mile stretch on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania
that follows the path of the Lehigh River. The city’s suburbs have a peaceful
veneer that belies the tensions on the ground. On a winding rural road, I met
an older woman, a registered Democrat, who had volunteered as a poll worker in
recent elections. She said that her whole family was under online siege
by MAGA militants who
were accusing her of preparing to subvert the upcoming count. Another volunteer
I met, who had come from Brooklyn with his two pre-teen kids, had been
confronted by an armed Trump supporter. The man had claimed to be in charge of
security for his neighborhood and said they were barred from entering.
My own presence in Allentown, where I
walked the streets with a green-and-pink shoulder bag carefully selected to
convey joyfulness and filled with Harris campaign literature, had followed an
abrupt life change. I’ve been a journalist for four decades, reporting on
immigration and other subjects for the Washington Post, The New
York Times, and, most recently, The Marshall Project. But, on June
27th, as I watched the debate between President Joe Biden and
Trump, I was overcome with dismay. That night, Trump unleashed a barrage of
lies about immigrants and asylum seekers. Biden failed to respond with any
corrective truths or positive portrayals of immigrant families. A few days
later, I resigned from The Marshall Project, as I felt I could no longer comply
with its rules proscribing partisan activity. I joined a voter uprising against
Biden, writing letters and making calls. My sense of relief when the President
stepped aside, on July 21st, became exhilaration when Harris sprinted out of
the gate the following day and assumed the Democratic mantle. Just as I was
being initiated into the world of political activism, I was presented with a
historic chance to help elect America’s first woman President. I started
canvassing on August 11th.
My induction took place in Bensalem, a
township northeast of Philadelphia, in a spare campaign office still announced
by a Biden-Harris yard sign. I received training on a mobile app that would
guide my steps, generating for each of my canvassing forays a street map with
dots showing the households of registered voters, who were identified by name,
age, gender, and party affiliation. The app meant that, when people opened
their doors, I could ask to speak with them by their first names. I recorded
their responses, indicating whether they were “strong” for Harris––definitely
voting for her–– “strong” for Trump, or were still in some murky terrain of
indecision, in which case I was on: I had a minute or two to launch my pitch to
sway them. I also received my first training in campaign messaging––a short
course on Project 2025 and the catastrophic perils it
posed for American democracy.
Even on that first day, walking around
in sultry heat, I began to sense a dissonance between the celebrity-inflected
exuberance of the Harris campaign and the bleak mood and raw divisions I
encountered in the streets. I canvassed a gritty apartment complex, with brown
grass in the green spaces, that surrounded a small pool, where several mothers
languished as their children splashed. They all scoffed when I asked if they
were Harris supporters. By the end of that afternoon, the warnings about
Project 2025’s plans for an “authoritarian, Christian nationalist movement with
broad control over American life”—in the words of a flyer I received as part of
my “lit pack”—felt too academic for a voter with gray and missing teeth who
told me she could not afford dental care. By contrast, just blocks away was a
curving street lined with colonial-style homes, with Volvos and S.U.V.s in the
driveways, where one smiling Democrat after another opened the doors. Here was
the class polarization that would later get so much attention.
As for the Trump voters who turned up
on my lists, I quickly understood that we were not operating on a plane of
shared facts. A retired police officer shouted me down when I asked him to
explain his support for Trump, given that the assault on the Capitol on January
6, 2021, had injured a hundred and forty law enforcement officers. “That’s a
lie!” he said, even though I had, at the ready, the latest Justice Department
report on the prosecutions of the rioters. Another voter insisted that all
Trump had asked for after the 2020 election was “a recount” of the national
vote, as if that were a remotely feasible, or legal, proposition. Others echoed
Trump’s dark visions of millions of criminal migrants rampaging across the
land, though there was little sign of them in northeast Pennsylvania. This is
what I was up against: Trump was broadcasting on some direct wavelength with
his followers, and he had drawn them into his alternate universe of looming
economic disaster, menacing migrants, and outrages perpetrated by Democrats
against their children, which only he was visionary enough to see and strong
enough to combat.
By late August, I decided to focus my
canvassing on Allentown. The city, the third most populous in Pennsylvania, was
once an emblem of American steel, but deindustrialization led to its decline,
several decades ago. (“Well, we’re living here in Allentown / and they’re
closing all the factories down,” Billy Joel sang in 1982.) In recent years,
Allentown has undergone an uneven revival spurred by the arrival of tens of
thousands of Latinos, many of them exiles from New York, who now make up a
majority of the city’s population. About half are Puerto Ricans, American
citizens who can vote in federal elections if they are registered in the
mainland U.S. Another large group are Dominicans, including longtime U.S.
citizens and first-generation immigrants. Most of these voters were likely to
be registered Democrats or Independents. I speak Spanish, and I concluded that
my most effective contribution would be to help run up the vote in Latino
neighborhoods in Allentown.
In a campaign office on Hamilton
Street, in the center of the city, I found a corps of young staffers who were
smart and vigorous, but perhaps not deeply experienced in the engineering of
campaigns, backed up by volunteers who were union members and other stalwart
Democrats. In the early days, after Harris’s choice of Governor Tim Walz as her running mate and her
spectacular performance at the Democratic National Convention, the buzz was
like a defibrillator bringing the campaign back from the dead. We were thrilled
to think we might be witnessing something akin to the history-making excitement
of Barack Obama’s first Presidential run, in 2008.
But what I encountered at the doors in
Latino neighborhoods were disaffected people under severe economic
stress—workers with little time to watch television and no consistent or
reliable channels for political news, who received scattershot information about
both Harris and Trump on their mobile phones, and were disgusted by what they
perceived as the nasty and pointless name-calling they saw there. I recall the
harried look of a Puerto Rican grandmother, one of three registered Democrats
in a walk-up apartment crammed with boxes and randomly placed furniture. She
was home with her grandchildren, a wailing toddler and a teen-ager, while their
parents were juggling day and night shifts at their jobs on a Saturday. She
wanted to vote for Harris, she said, if she could get to the polls on Election
Day. Often, my conversations started with voters telling me they did not plan
to vote because they did not see any point in it.
On September 7th, I attended a rally,
organized by Latinos con Harris and headlined by her husband, Doug Emhoff, in
the gym of a local high school. A d.j. from La Mega, the local Spanish-language
contemporary radio station, played thumping dance tunes. The crowd cheered
boisterously. Even so, the underlying distress was startling: two voters I
chatted with ended up in tears. A woman named Julie, who had a disability
caused by a car accident and who was living on a fixed income, said she hoped
Harris would do something to increase the value of food stamps, because she was
not getting enough to eat. A young Dominican mother, Melvis, carrying her
infant daughter, said she saw Harris as both an example and protector for the
little girl’s future. She said she deeply feared that Trump, a court-confirmed
sexual predator, would only encourage the rampant, unseen sexual abuse and
violence against women in her community.
Meanwhile, I sensed that Harris was
struggling to break through. She had an immense hurdle to overcome: the void of
communication from the White House about what, if anything, the Biden
Administration had done for Allentown and the larger Lehigh Valley. Voters
associated Biden with higher prices for basic needs and virtually nothing else.
They seemed to think that Trump’s term had ended with the stable economy of
2019, rather than with the pandemic and the steep economic downturn that
followed. With six weeks to go, Harris’s identity as the daughter of a working
immigrant mother and her proposals for an “opportunity economy” were barely
beginning to resonate. In all my weeks of canvassing, only one voter, a Black
Latina I met by chance in the parking lot of a Supremo grocery store, raised
the issue of women’s reproductive rights, a centerpiece of Harris’s campaign.
I set aside the campaign’s talking
points and improvised my own. I talked about what I remembered from 2020, when
friends were dying of COVID-19,
millions of Americans lost their jobs, and Trump suggested we inject bleach
into our bodies. (I found the bleach anecdote invariably sparked vivid memories
for voters.) I made a point of saying that Joe Biden was not on
the ballot. I created cards with bullet points on Harris’s child tax credit and
other family-friendly proposals, which even I had a hard time understanding and
explaining. I shared a video by the salsa star Marc Anthony, who said with grim
intensity that he had not forgotten when Trump blocked funds for Puerto Rico
after Hurricane Maria. I described the terrible harms of family separation that
immigrants would face from Trump’s mass deportations. I connected with more
than one Latina mother when I asked whether Trump, with his lying and
philandering, was the example she wanted for her children.
At times, our tools seemed excessively
intrusive. In addition to the door-knocking, voters were bombarded with
phone-bank calls and text messages. On my turf lists, most of the voters were
not home, and I would leave flyers for the Democratic candidates tucked in
their doors. I wondered if they felt uncomfortable that a stranger, presuming
to know their political inclinations, had been lurking at their front steps.
There were times, too, when I questioned the campaign’s tactics. At one point,
I was told that paid canvassers had been hired to fan out across Allentown’s
Latino neighborhoods. Fired-up volunteers (including me) were prohibited from
door-knocking there. A major issue seemed to be the information flow, which
moved entirely in one direction: from the candidate to the voters. With such an
abbreviated campaign, there was little time to collect and respond to the
concerns that people were raising at their doors.
Nevertheless, by mid-October I noticed
a distinct shift. On the weekend of October 19th, thousands of volunteers
flocked to the Lehigh Valley, coming from all over the East Coast in convoys of
buses and cars, armed with no specific battle plan but determined to answer
Michelle Obama’s call to “do something.” Campaign staffers, pale from
exhaustion, deployed these volunteers across the region. Harris and Walz kept
up a blitz of rallies. Harris seemed to be growing into her campaign,
articulating more specifics on her “to-do list” for everyday Americans.
Then came Trump’s closing rally,
at Madison Square Garden, on October 27th, where
the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe committed the epic unforced error of calling
Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” When I returned to Allentown the
following Wednesday, Puerto Rican flags were flying on porches. Residents suddenly
realized that Trump’s demeaning rhetoric about Haitian and Venezuelan
immigrants could extend to them. At one household, where my mobile app told me
the family included four registered Democrats, the eldest member saw my
Harris-Walz button and shouted to the street, “Fuck Trump!” The four had agreed
they would go together to cast their votes for Harris on Election Day. On
Monday, the last day before the election, Harris finally came to Allentown for
a whistle-stop rally. Thousands of people stood in four-hour lines to attend, a
more diverse crowd than I had seen at any previous event. The Puerto Rican
rapper Fat Joe opened for the Vice-President, exhorting his gente:
“Where’s the orgullo? Where’s the pride?”
As the vote totals rolled in during the early morning of
November 6th, Lehigh County remained a patch of blue in a plain of red that
spread across the state of Pennsylvania. We won a fair share of suburban voters
and alienated Republicans, and we held off the flight of Latinos to Trump,
revealing the fallacy of commentators who had attributed an over-all trend to
voters as different as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Pennsylvania and Mexican
Americans along the border in Texas.
But for Harris, I now see, it was
never really an even fight. Trump commands a movement that he has been fuelling
with dark delusions and unapologetic bigotry since he first entered politics,
in 2015. Harris was a talented candidate running a modern professional campaign
that was just reaching full speed by Election Day. In the middle were millions
of voters who merely wanted some relief from the demoralizing strain of life on
the economic edge. In all my time in Allentown, I never saw any sign of a Trump
ground game like the one the Harris campaign organized. It turned out Trump did
not need it.
What Democrats needed to win was a
movement of their own. Harris seemed to recognize this at the end, when she
gave a closing speech at her alma mater, Howard University, saying, “While I
concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign:
the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all
people.” In the wake of a sweeping defeat, instead of vivisecting Harris’s
performance as a candidate or concluding that electing a Black woman to the
White House was unrealistic, Democrats should be thinking about how to channel
the energies of the supporters who turned out for her, to wage the fight from
the ground up.
From walking my Allentown turf, I
learned that not even the most disciplined campaign could bridge, in one
hundred days, the enormous disconnect between Harris and the voters who might
benefit from her proposals. Door by door, with the blunt methods of a
traditional campaign, canvassers were reëstablishing, very belatedly, a
dialogue that had lapsed. After years of reporting on immigrants and the
essential optimism of their hope to prosper in the United States, I reject the
idea that, to mobilize working people, the Democrats need to imitate Trump’s
demonization and demagoguery. But building a movement will require better
systems for communicating with potential voters and listening, anew, to what
they need to make their lives easier.
I have been thinking of the last voter
I spoke to in Allentown on Election Day. Charles is a Black man and a Democrat
who worked for most of his life as a tile layer. I had met him a few weeks
earlier, while canvassing. He suffers from debilitating arthritis and, when I
knocked, he had limped to the door with a cane and a pillow under a sore arm.
He told me he needed home health care, affordable medications, and confidence
that his social-security benefits would sustain him. I followed up with him,
because he had told me he needed a ride to the polls. I picked him up in my
car. At one point, while waiting in line, he bent over and began to weep in
pain, but he was determined to cast a vote for Harris as the first woman
President. I’m sorry he did not see her win, but I’ll be keeping his tenacity
in mind. ♦
CREEPS AND CHEATS
Trump: 5 kids from 3 women -- cheated on them all
Hegseth: 7 kids from 3 women -- cheated on them all
Musk: 12 kids from 3 women -- cheated on them all
And all three men—credibly accused of rape & sexual abuse—are lecturing us about conservative & strong family values?
The hypocrisy is the point.
Friday, November 29, 2024
DANA MILBANK
Democrats don’t have a working-class problem. America does.
Extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power gave rise to
FDR’s New Deal — Democrats should be no less ambitious now.
By Dana Milbank
November 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
It’s that time again. Every election that ends in a
Democratic defeat seems to produce the same breathless analysis: Democrats have
lost the working class!
In 2004, we heard that
“working-class Americans, once the core of the Democratic Party, are voting
Republican.”
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biggest questions
In 2016, we were told: “Democrats
once represented the working class. Not any more.”
And now, inevitably, headlines over the past three weeks
have been revealing the same startling discovery all over again:
“Democrats’ working-class exodus sets
off reckoning within party.”
“Why Democrats lost their
working-class coalition.”
“Is This the End of the White
Working-Class Democrat?”
This is getting tedious.
It’s not that the conclusion is wrong as much as it is
woefully outdated. Working-class voters, roughly defined as those who aren’t
college educated, haven’t been reliable Democratic voters since the New Deal
coalition dissolved — decades ago. So why do political analysts keep concluding
that the Democrats have, all of a sudden, lost the working man and woman?
I asked someone who has studied the voting attitudes of the
working class as much as anyone alive: Michael Podhorzer, the former political
director of the AFL-CIO and a prominent figure in progressive politics. He said
political analysts have been claiming that Democrats have just lost working
people “every election for the last 50 years,” based on the “idiotic
assumption” that all workers without college degrees, or nearly two-thirds of
the adult labor force, can be lumped together into a single category — “working
class” — with the expectation that they have a shared identity as workers and
will vote accordingly.
“The idea that working people would vote for Democrats goes
back to the New Deal era, when being a worker was an actual identity that
[Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the Democrats appealed to by saying that when
corporations want to do bad things to you, we’re on your side,” Podhorzer
notes. Back then, Democrats did get about 80 percent of the working-class vote,
because Democrats emphasized the class conflict. But “in the current two-party
structure, where both parties are dominated by billionaires and corporations,
there isn’t an actual place for working-class identity.”
They no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast
ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away
from Democrats between 2020 and 2024 — but so did many different groups across
the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden
administration’s performance on inflation.
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning
Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening
to them, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a
political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem —
but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly a half century, and particularly over the past
two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and
income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax
enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules,
hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their
wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership,
which peaked at one-third of the workforce,
shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay
has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared,
earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed,
unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are
surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to
dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of
communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” writes
University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial
collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic
only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s,
reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the last 10 federal
elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate
or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent
party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years
later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring
wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th
century where there have been so many knife’s edge elections,” Podhorzer tells
me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine
tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to
message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it
ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that
voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of
labor unions and New-Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of
the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free-market
that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued
in his 2023 book, “Tyranny Inc.,” that the current “domination of working and
middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the
asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated
massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated
and powerless.”
In the short term, Democrats could change nothing and
they’d still probably do well by default in the 2026 midterms as disenchanted
voters once again punish the incumbent party. President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t
have much of a popular mandate: The latest figures show he got below 50 percent of the popular vote,
Harris lost by about 1.6 percentage points and Democrats may have actually
gained a seat or two in the House. And he’s already overreaching with
outlandish nominations and announced plans to start a trade war with Canada,
Mexico and China.
But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake
— for the party and, more importantly, for the country. We are, in some ways,
back to the extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power over
workers that gave rise to the modern labor movement in the 1930s and the New
Deal’s government-regulated capitalism, which led America to three decades of broadly shared
economic prosperity after World War II. What’s needed to
relieve workers’ pain this time is no less ambitious.
Ahmari called for government to encourage “a labor market
in which most sectors are unionized, while workers in those few industries that
resist unionization enjoy higher minimum wages.” And this conservative thinker
waxed nostalgic for the New Dealers: “Those leaders left behind a political map
for building a better economy and a more authentically free society. They
guided us, above all, to workers’ countervailing power: the indispensable lever
for improving the lot of the asset-less and for stabilizing economies otherwise
prone to turbulence and speculative chaos. The supreme challenge today is to
forge a similar left-right consensus.”
Of course, that won’t be happening anytime soon. Trump
channels populist anger, but he directs it at migrants and foreigners instead
of corporations. The billionaire president-elect has chosen a billionaire commerce secretary,
a billionaire interior secretary and a billionaire education secretary and has
tapped the world’s wealthiest man to run his government-efficiency task force.
This oligarchy is planning to impose more of the same policies that caused
workers’ problems in the first place: extending tax breaks for the rich and
further rolling back business regulation, employment law and union rights.
As Bernie Sanders can attest, Democrats, too, have long
resisted a return to their populist roots, going back to when President Bill
Clinton signed NAFTA and his Democratic Leadership Council recruited corporate
donors to fund the party. But this moment could be different. Gallup’s latest polling shows that approval
of labor unions is at 70 percent, up from 48 percent 15 years ago, after the
financial crash. Sixty-one percent say unions mostly help the economy, up from
39 percent in 2009. The favorable impression of unions has grown at the same time
Americans’ confidence in most other institutions — business, church, the media,
the presidency, Congress — has been going the other way.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) issued a memo last
week with polling from his home state showing that 82 percent of people —
including large majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents — agree
that one of the biggest problems facing the country is that corporations and
economic elites hold too much power and government is doing too little about
it. “Democrats have the opportunity to call Republicans on their bluff and
prove to the American people that we are the ones on the side of the workers,”
he wrote. “But that’s only possible if we have the courage to pick fights with
powerful corporations and billionaires and fight against the status quo.”
That is a gigantic “if.”
The consumer advocate Ralph Nader, through his third-party
presidential campaigns and his hectoring, has tried for years to push the
Democrats toward a $15 minimum wage, a return to the progressive tax system of
the 1960s, a revival of private pensions and the National Labor Relations
Board, a hike in Social Security benefits paid for by higher payroll taxes on
the wealthy, and much more. But at this point, he tells me, he has no optimism
that the party can change itself: “They’ve drained it out of me.”
I understand the cynicism. For ages, Democratic leaders
have tried to have it both ways, calling for marginal improvements to the tax
code but shying away from anything that might repel the corporate interests
that are also in their coalition. But, at some point, the worsening suffering
of tens of millions of workers must convince them to take the risk.
And — who knows? — maybe if Democrats take that risk it
will free them, and all of us, from the dreary cycle of the past two decades in
which frustrated voters turn from one party to the other and then back again,
never finding the change they are seeking. And then, for the first time in
decades, maybe working people will again vote reliably Democratic, because
Democrats will have restored their working-class identity.
Or maybe such an effort will fail. But isn’t it better to
do the right thing for the country regardless of what it does to the party?
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