The media-savvy combination from taking the lead peddling the birther conspiracy of our previous President as a Muslim [terrorist-sympathizer/traitor] in post-9/11 America, along with being fundamentally perceived as an anti-establishment leader is why Donald Trump remains unquestioned by his base.
Seeing how it was a former Washington bureau-chief and not former House Speaker Tip O’Neill credited with the saying, “All politics is local”, this is still true despite how interconnected we have become on social-media. Yet, indiscriminately homogenizing left or right as ‘all the same’, either in this budding era of online self-promotion or in person, keeps rendering communicating over increasingly serious matters to the point of unsustainable.
I’ve noticed I’ve stopped being followed on facebook by several acquaintances, friends, and even non-immediate family, along both sides of the ideological spectrum (not to mention, I would believe, temporarily dismissed by a life-long family friend). I know this sort of thing has happened to many of us. Nevertheless, I have always found it backwards to hear stories of people who put politics over family and friendship.
Many of us have had to take into account an unsavory amount of detached, politicized beliefs we have just in this country. My primary focus when addressing politics has always been to reach blue-collar people, since I associate with them more than anyone else; people who may one way or another feel dispassionate about paying attention to political matters. I have always been a thoughtful person with a strong pet peeve when it comes to misinformation; someone who cares about right and wrong but wants to be fair about it. Combined with finding the right voice in how to speak to both sides of the spectrum on any number of matters has always been enough of a challenge.
But, for the insurgence of people who insist that there is no outer space, that the Earth is flat, that scientists who appear on t-v are really actors, pro-choice women support female billionaires looking to take over the world, that Charlottesville was a Hollywood/media-produced hoax, that human-caused climate-change can still be a matter of belief, that punishment for any a nationalist-sympathizing musing or honest-to-God death-threats against a Jewish or Muslim-American in the name of a certain someone can be so erroneously chalked up to ‘political correctness’, among many other conspiracy theories or personal attacks, the right-wing goal of one way or another deliberately pissing off the other side for fun or self-gain is as bad as it can get, here (not to mention, the amount of people who so readily believe any of these theories).
There are a lot of practical issues to keep up with, as well as past and present information and reasonable, opposing points of view to gather, on top of getting out and seeing the world. Empowered ignorance, and the definition of “fake news” – since there is only one definition for how it has been redefined when applied to well-known, credible sources – never seems to be resolutely pressed. Right-leaning people are also flatly and openly often told to mistrust the other side. No one should ever fully, objectively trust just one side’s reporting or commentary.
The Trump family, for one, has a history of wantonly ‘misconstruing’ countries of origin, notably even within their own family. Either this is a bizarre genetic reading comprehension disorder specifically applied to birth certificates, or it is some pathologically pathetic sales technique. It would be easy to accept that Trump supporters are of a willful ignorance that is hopelessly beyond reach. But as I often hear it, as frustrated as any person by it, is that they ‘may be’ out of reach. Hence, why I am writing this.
The whole birther conspiracy and misinformation-campaign surrounding our 44th president being a Muslim[-terrorist-sympathizer/traitor] in immediate post-9/11 America marked a profound political tipping-point as for how this talking-point galvanized a nationalistic fear spread in large courtesy by right-leaning alternative-media. According to the latest poll I could find, from May of 2016, a considerable majority of Trump supporters persist on believing this long-debunked theory. Long before Trump so fully arrived on the political scene, in 2012, as the person having become most synonymous with chronically selling it, base-Republicans had already started hearing it – just as they had increasingly started to swear off mainstream/corporate-run (‘left wing’) media in favor of politically based information from very subjective radio, television, cable, and internet sources.
We have to talk with one another, to get back to reality. I know it is far worse on one side than on the other, but impersonalized media is a collective safe-space, laced with insecurity, lacking in nuance, where people can feel self-opinionated from a distance; where stigmatization is easier than conversation. We ought to be able to imagine communicating with one another online like we would, more naturally, face-to-face. At current trends, if the bulk of our national conversations are conducted online then the future doesn’t currently fill me with much confidence.
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The depth of one unchallenged perspective can abet the other. So, one thing I’d like to make clear here and now is that I have never found it pertinent to associate Donald Trump with political discussion. Politically speaking, he has clearly shown a lack of patience towards having much of a formulated, consistent long-view on many things. He is not really a conservative. He has proven to be a demagogue, a political entrepreneur with a very short attention-span for effectively selling political theater with the goal of using his highest profile position to enrich his and his family’s name. I only presume that most people, one way or another, remain aware of this.
We all well-know how this life-long salesman conducts himself on the big stage: more often than not rambling off the point, incoherently making stuff up, stretching mistruths and doubling-down on some fictional narrative, serially lying, constantly spinning, denying any and all facts he chooses to disagree with, chronically calling attention to his deflecting or defiance of responsibility, resorting to childish name-calling (the greatest of indicators he is in over his head), changing his expressed position on matters (and appearing almost completely detached when it comes to foreign policy), exclusively rousing his base, and clearly never learning from his mistakes but chronically insisting on defending himself as above-the-law.
It takes little savvy for this misperceived anti-establishment leader to know what certain people want to hear. Because, this decidedly spoiled, permanent adolescent continues to be allowed to run amok while being rabidly, indifferently, and plain altogether unpatriotically unquestioned by the vast majority of Republican voters both in and outside of D.C.
Scrolling through the interactive in that last link, he has either been the plaintiff or defendant in a whopping 4,095 lawsuits. Apparently confident that wealth and power can one way or another buy justice, his sense of order stems from a penchant to create self-centered chaos. George Will expressed how true conservatives love a certain sense of disorder, humbled by the small role each individual plays in our enormous collective. It is to do with how the world, the universe operates; the laws of unintended consequences – living in a sort of environment that allows the freedom of ideas to take on a life of their own, entrusted the ideas could result in positive outcomes. Obviously, this is not the sort of chaos that applies to the uniquely stingy and self-interested, erratically and politically disinterested Donald Trump. This amount of lawsuits confirms many things.
It confirms that, to him, anyone who likens to go by the book or isn’t mainly loyal to his/her own opportunistic needs is a chump, as he insists upon being a fraud, a cheat, a cheapskate, and a con regarding even the most basic services – while incredibly, apparently, not learning at all from the biggest ones. Obviously, it is confirmation of a person who does not care about social morality. No stable person would ever think to use the combination of words “extremely stable genius” (a laughable upgrade from “very stable genius”) to describe oneself. Unless, of course he is a raving drunk (and Trump doesn’t drink). This phrase all by itself should have been a revelatory deal-breaker, but no. Why did he supposedly threaten to sue his alma-mater should they have voluntarily released his grades during the 2016 campaign? But above all, this list is a glaring confirmation of a person who is not interested in wanting to be good or skilled at anything, but only about his privileged self, winning. He has proven to be a convincing enough salesperson, and it infuriates me when certain pundits continue to be suckered by the optics. (Generally speaking, but especially when it comes to the false equivalency that is the leader of this far-right eighth-grade administration, this is America, and we should avoid being hung up on a politician’s expressed beliefs, values, and actions based upon appearance or performance for terribly obvious reasons.) The vast majority of people – the influence of cumulative ideological beliefs aside – ought to find the very person of Donald Trump unrelatable.
So, with the way our ideological spectrum is right now the main point I’d like to make distinctly and abundantly clear is that whenever I speak critically of Donald Trump, I am not on principle being critical of all Republicans. Nor for that matter – because of how he conducts himself – should I be too readily kicked to the curb by those along the left over some differing point of view.
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There are Republican voters who genuinely still brand themselves as such, who have either changed their voting registration or to some extent disagree with Trump’s disingenuous tone, statements, or actions – and stand up for what’s right. Known conservative thinkers, and politicians, who show any public opposition to Trump find themselves unwittingly designated by his supporters as ‘liberal’. Point being, there are at least two types of Republicans these days: base/Trump supporters, and then every other type of Republican.
Polls continue to show over 80% Republican support for Trump. However, this percentage tends to be split between ‘support’ and ‘strong support’. The minority of this percentage always happens to strongly support him. So, it might be fair to argue that the remainder to a degree just rides along the current populist-wave, that their support stems from a set of interests or values the ‘R’ next to his name happens to represent.
Polls throughout the 2016 primaries showed plenty of registered Republicans having voted for a candidate besides Trump. In accordance with the record-high disapproval ratings of both presidential candidates in 2016, when it came time for the general election and many still wanted to vote, it could be further argued a number of these voters in their heart of hearts decided to stick with their best chance by blithely voting more against the Democratic contender’s fundamental set of ideals or values as opposed to in favor of their own. Maybe, then, being disassociated on social media is some quiet acknowledgement by some of my acquaintances that they made a mistake in having voted for him.
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Economically speaking, Donald Trump’s Republican Party has been rebranded into the party of identity-politics; of anti-immigration. (I get the sense some people forget being white or white and straight is also an identity, seeing how 64% of white, non-college-educated women and 72% of white, non-college educated men voted for Trump in 2016.) I say, ‘economically speaking’, because in terms of the xenophobia towards our southern neighbors, immigration is still an economic argument.
The current administration’s policies along the U.S.-Mexico border, admittedly initiated to serve as a deterrent, has to be perceived as one of those unbelievable explanations to the point of transparently, politically motivated. When immigration lawyers, upon visiting the detention-centers, call upon the United Nations to intervene for humanitarian-aid to be sent to the United States, who could have ever imagined this? This is totally backwards.
Fear, loathe – and not just the males – or in increasing instances be empowered in expressing hate as of late of whole migrant families and many children arriving alone at the southern border diligently wanting to depart horror-or-death scenarios that the worst-off in the U.S. could not routinely imagine for the opportunity of a life, here, in part due to the sell that they will take white working-class jobs away by getting hired for lesser pay. But, supporters on the phony overzealous sell of a supposedly successful businessman, who so very un-conservatively and outrageously claimed that he alone could fix everything, continue to point their fingers in the wrong direction.
The party that has more openly catered to the very rich over the past four decades has steadily managed to re-establish a new Gilded Age, largely responsible for shafting blue-collar workers over this time. No amount of swamp, whatsoever, is now being drained. This too-good-to-be-true, anti-establishment rhetoric on the Republican side is the latest con.
A run-through of some of Trump’s campaign-promises… He promised to bring down the trade-deficit, but that deficit of purchasing more than what we sell has hit an all-time high of $891 billion. He said during the campaign he would eliminate the federal deficit in eight years, but this deficit managed to increase more than a trillion dollars in 2018 and is projected to increase another trillion each fiscal year until 2020. He vowed to boost wages for American workers, including a $4,000 pay-raise for the average American family, but instead wages for American families, adjusted to inflation, have continued to remain stagnant. As per many a recent Republican predecessor, he idealized that corporations would invest their savings from the tax-cuts back into our economy, into necessary things like health, education, job-training, and infrastructure. Instead, in 2018 these private entities spent more in buying back shares of their own stock. He promised a tax-cut for middle-class families, but instead most Americans will pay more taxes by 2027. He promised to keep jobs in America and crack down on companies who ship jobs overseas. Instead, his tax laws have created incentives for these companies to expand operations overseas, and his insistence that ‘trade-wars can be won’ have, among other expected downfalls, encouraged companies like Harley Davidson to move their production overseas. And as to that very swamp, we have seen a revolving-door of well-established former Wall Street and oil executives and other mondo-rich, as well as D.C. lobbyists, persistently put in charge of numerous things in his administration when it comes to health, safety, and environmental protections at the expense of endangering most Americans and further increasing corporate profits. (How we have come a long way in a very short time since Republican Presidents Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and the amended Clean Air Act was signed into law in 1990 by a once Texas-based Republican.)
Economically speaking, the Republican Party now, or even during the 1980’s, has not been some aesthetic ‘Make America Great Again’-throwback to the Eisenhower Party of the 1950’s, for which it hypocritically likens to brand itself. Many along the left like to note how tax-rates during the 1950’s and early 60’s on Americans who made a gross income of, in today’s dollars, roughly $2 million, were required to pay 90% in federal income taxes. A recent study, however, indicates that in total taxes, significantly due to the loopholes and tax-breaks afforded to the roughly 10,000 Americans during the 1950’s and 60’s who grossed this annual amount, on average paid a cumulative rate no higher than 46% – not that much higher than the 39.6% established rate implemented during President Obama’s time.
President Johnson knocked the uppermost tax-rate down to 70%. President Reagan, upon taking office in 1981, signed into law three different, revised pieces of tax-reform. The first, the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), among other tasks lowered the upper-tier individual rate from 70% to 50%. But as a result of this first piece of legislation not faring recovery as well as imagined, Reagan (rather reluctantly), in the face of a Democratic-controlled Congress, signed into law the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) one year later. But it would be the Tax Reform Act of 1986 that subsequently lowered the top-tier individual rate from 50% to 28%, and the corporate rate from 50% to 35%. One of the more interesting and significant accomplishments of both TEFRA and the 1986 Act – astonishing by today’s Republican standards – was that they both eliminated some federal tax-breaks for big businesses and closed federal loopholes in the tax-code. In President Reagan’s words, by 1986, he wanted to “close the unproductive loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.” (Revisit, if necessary, the graph in the ‘A recent study’ link, above, indicating the cumulative tax-rate of what the wealthiest had paid over the mid-to-late 80’s.)
After the Roaring Twenties, the crippling Great Depression spurned an ostensible patriotic desire to economically pull together – supplemented as well upon our entering World War II. As a result of WWII spending, Congress lowered the income-tax limit, which made tens of millions of middle and lower-income Americans eligible to pay income-tax for the first time. In 1939, the IRS received just under 7 million tax returns from people earning less than $5,000 a year. By 1944, this number grew to over 44 million. Congress then voted to keep intact many of these wartime measures after the war ended in 1945 into a permanent tax system.
For the middle part of the 20th century, the vast majority of Americans were estimated to be middle-class. President Eisenhower was certainly not in favor of high taxes, but he believed they were necessary for the time-being in order to help pay down the national debt. President Reagan had an expressed desire to win the Cold War, yet in the process military spending helped implode the national deficit.
The amount of millionaires during the 1950’s and 60’s seem like the dinosaur age in terms of quantity and quality to today. And while a culture of individual greed may have been re-implemented in America at the start of the 1980’s by way of deregulated safeguards enacted during the 1930’s, under both sets of circumstances compared to today at least there was an actual show of bipartisan effort on the part of Republicans to put country over party.
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In 1965, the average CEO made about twenty times more in income than the average worker (see graph in Figure C). Adjusted to inflation, beginning in 1980 up until today this ratio had more than a few times – over both Democratic and Republican administrations – managed to escalate to over 300:1.
The big issue of pay-inequity over all of these years is a moral argument. This argument for some time has been over how to re-establish a more acceptable balance between the rich and not-so-rich under our current system of capitalism. When we argue over something like dramatically raising the federal minimum wage, popular thinking – even from people along the left – is that doing so will force small businesses to go out of business, create inflation, and so on. This thinking once again became ingrained into our culture, of the American Dream being defined as we should be entitled to make as much money as we want. How does a business-owner get to decide their financial worth – whether even the most successful should make $1 million, $30 million, $50 million, or anywhere over a billion dollars, per year? What of the capitalist culture of returning to the non-regulatory ideal of reasonable decency; through a once again peaceable, unified groundswell in collective bargaining to get wealthy entrepreneurs and CEO’s to pay their ‘fair share’ from what their businesses are already making in income back to the workers, and returning to a pay-ratio similar to the one aforementioned in 1965? (By the by, the criteria determined for this ratio was factored by a moderate study group. By way of comparison, more left-leaning research groups have this ratio at around 450:1.)
Some economists estimate that if the average worker’s salary, adjusted to inflation over the past forty years, were to have increased along with productivity-growth, the minimum wage today would be somewhere above $18/hour. (And this is the minimum wage.)
Classically, many lower-to-middle-class conservatives persist on believing that anyone who is currently on some kind of poverty-assisting program in the U.S. must be non-white and/or liberal. Hindsight alone ought to indicate based on the amount of people living in this country that this cannot be so conveniently true. Most benefit programs require recipients to work in order to collect. Take Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), where single parents receiving this grant must work at least 30 hours per week in order to be eligible, and two-parent families must work between 35 and 50 hours a week. Undocumented immigrants, mind you, in the U.S. are not eligible for any benefits except emergency Medicaid, even though according to the Social Security Administration about half to three-quarters of undocumented immigrants pay federal, state, and local taxes, including billions in Social Security taxes for benefits they will never see.
Again, if blue-collar workers were paid what they ought to be paid by current productivity standards, many who are currently receiving some kind of governmental assistance would not need it.
When President Obama was bandying about the so-called ‘Buffett rule’, named after multi-billionaire, Warren Buffett, after Buffett instigated his secretary was paying taxes at a higher individual rate than himself, there were ridiculous outcries asking whether Warren Buffett is a socialist. To ask whether a person who for some time has been one of the wealthiest human beings on the surface of the planet, with a net-worth of over $40 billion per year is a ‘socialist’, then I am a mermaid from Mars.
Being in favor of a 20 or even 30:1 pay-ratio – versus 361:1 – still very much makes me a capitalist. Let me repeat: I am still very much a capitalist. Given the level of risk, time, energy, passion, creativity, and sacrifice involved in starting and keeping a business competitive and thriving over a lifetime, I am definitely in favor of an entrepreneur taking in a greater share of that business’s income. On the one extreme, the evidence of greed is not something I advocate. As for the other extreme, a socialist would be in favor of an across-the-board 1:1 pay-ratio. I wish some of the newer crop of Democrats would do away with the term ‘Democratic-socialist’, if the majority of them happen to be capitalists. In terms of distribution of income, I am in favor of a more fair, moral form of capitalism.
Certain obvious issues, like human-caused climate-change, requires immediate attention. Paying down our national debt requires action. Infrastructure. Healthcare. Paying public school teachers, as well as an honest, livable wage for all workers. Our capitalist system is in need of structural reform, like breaking up monopolies and the big banks. Yet, protectionism coupled with more esteemed-than-ever gratuities to the rich as opposed to redistributing more buying-power to middle-to-lower-income people is obviously making us less great. The overall price-tag in order to re-establish better breathing room for all Americans, to grow the economy as well as pay down the national debt, depends in part upon closing tax-loopholes while establishing a very fair tax-rate for the top income-earners, as well as initiating and monitoring sensible regulatory reform from either a federal, state, or county level upon those who have grown obscenely wealthy over recent years. What ya reap…
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When it comes to fiscal matters, one side generally cares about being freed up by less taxes and less regulations. The other side cares more about ensuring more equitable opportunity.
More specifically, one side of our ideological spectrum is afraid government can get carried away with over-regulating, and their competence and management capabilities when it comes to the practicality and honesty of appropriating tax dollars for the purpose of procuring general security. The other side of the spectrum is particularly afraid of all too freely, improperly and unintellectually deregulated large private entities – chiefly, executives in the high-finance, pharmaceutical, health insurance, and energy industries – and their motivations to hoard greater wealth and political influence by way of one way or another paying less if any taxes at the expense of various things like the health of the planet, the physical and emotional health of lower income people, and certain civil rights.
Small government conservatives and anti-large corporate progressives are essentially leery of the same thing: entities that can get so big that its proponents can find ways to acquiesce to self-serving interests. Capitalism, communism, or socialism are each susceptible to corruption. Corruption happens when certain individuals, regardless of their ideological leaning, see ways to manipulate no strong check on their consolidation of power. Oftentimes, it is not the system or institutions that can fail us, per say, but the motivations of particular individuals involved should we not remain skeptical of these motivations and actions and choose to look away from holding into account. Over the past forty years, this country has overall become a right-of-center country. Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Jon Tester in Montana, and Doug Jones in Alabama, and former Senators Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota, Claire McCaskill from Missouri, and Joe Donnelly from Indiana are not ‘all the same’ as a Dick Durbin, Cory Booker, or Bernie Sanders (who is technically an Independent).
Like with anything else, those aforesaid ‘ism’s depend on the user(s). The historian, Joyce Appleby, once interestingly summed up our contradiction: “Capitalism really is amoral. But democracy is not amoral. Democracy is moral.”
In our current system of capitalism, Republicans still largely insist on cutting so-called entitlement programs which seek to benefit middle-to-lower income people (‘socialist’ things, like the A.C.A., Medicare and Medicaid, and Social Security). They persistently, falsely claim that these programs are the biggest drivers of our debt, as if the decided lack of tax-revenue or an unnecessarily high military budget have not a thing to do with it. Members of the other party are seeking to significantly reform these programs. Current Republicans insist on not wanting to close tax-loopholes for the wealthy, which afford them to pay an even less tax-rate than the current and already tremendously fair rate. Members of the other party would prefer to close these loopholes. Sixty corporations in tax year 2018 – double the amount from the prior year – including Amazon – paid zero dollars in corporate income taxes due to the loopholes afforded to them in the current tax-code.
A sizable majority of state governments are still either fully or partially controlled by Republicans, in large part courtesy of a surgical, gerry-jigsawing project called REDMAP conducted after the 2010 midterm results, per the constitutionally required census taken at the beginning of every new decade. Public opinion on the Affordable Care Act managed to sway towards a majority of support after the 2016 election, but current uncertainty over its potential reform lends now to mixed feelings over the law. One thing is for certain, the Republican’s lack of a better universal health plan is certainly not a risk people who need affordable healthcare are willing to accept.
Speaking of health, a viable resource which would require the help of tax-revenue is the reason it keeps being referred to as the ‘so-called’ war on drugs. Any ‘war’, in short, that is not taken seriously cannot be won. Very significantly beating back this war is going to take almost anything other than some transparently fictionalized, personally political ‘emergency’ at the U.S.-Mexico border, as overwhelming evidence indicates the heavy amounts of drugs being smuggled into the country are coming in through legal points of entry. This effort is going to cost.
I have been saying as far back as in 2008 that the Republican Party is going through an identity-crisis. They insisted during the 2008 presidential campaign on maintaining the idea of supply-side economics even as the country had entered another historic economic scare. Now I would say that one half of our two-party system is an off-the-deep-end, unidentifiable mess – with potential, still, for growing worse. Democrats have since caught on to remedying themselves, in so far as it appears every one (and though it initially appears to be too many, the amount of current outrage worth speaking to carries well into the right-of-center) of their party’s contenders running for President in 2020 are not allowing big banks, corporations, or federal lobbyists to hedge their bets by donating to both party platforms. With the monthly release of each campaigner’s financial disclosures we can keep tabs on who is staying true to their word. When will the Republicans catch on? The Republican Senate Majority Leader, for one, might as well be perceived as the Hillary Clinton of the Republican Party, as far as how he conducts himself as an unabashedly corrupt, obstructionist, self-servant operating at the behest of his wealthy, private donors.
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Democracy is profoundly beholden upon where people get their information. Truth is subjective, and so some natural bias from one reputable source to the next over what information gets reported (particularly, the moment news breaks) or how it gets written or discussed ought to be considered fair. A current norm, however, is how radio, cable-tv, and the internet are flooded with singularly hosted political commentary programs. As mentioned before, years before the arrival of Donald Trump, base-Republicans had already chosen to get their news from highly subjective and opinionated, so-called alternative-media, or fringe-media hosts. It is clear by how some of these radio, cable, online, and even some print mediates speak that they are strongly more interested in ratings (or worse, being useless provocateurs) than opining on objective truths. Anybody can just shoot their mouths off for a living. This is hardly a job. All that it requires is a certain degree of self-loathing manifested with a strong desire for attention. As the White House Communications Director from the show, “The West Wing”, put it to a foreign tabloid correspondent: “We’ve got people like you here, on cable and on the internet, and there’s no one anywhere on the ideological spectrum who doesn’t roll their eyes when their names are spoken out loud.”
I don’t know if I would be in favor of restoring something like a once forty-year F.C.C. regulation called the Fairness Doctrine. There have been a few attempts to make revisions of it into law by Congressional Democrats in recent decades. A change in tone of leadership can significantly help matters. But generally speaking, and based upon a lot of personal experience, as mentioned up at the beginning of this discourse I would expect the majority of voters along either side of the spectrum would very much welcome largely restored civilized conversation on any important matter – especially, when it comes to online conversations. I honestly keep fighting wanting to continue writing this piece. I feel a reluctance to share with a Trump supporter or regular Republican or libertarian something I had learned, say, on npr, suspecting it would instantly get dismissed as ‘biased’. Or, if I were to ask a Trump supporter how do they know a theory they just shared with me is true, their ‘proof’ might be, “How do you know it isn’t true?”? (As if reasoning like this could ever hold up in court?) If coming up with solutions to important issues is not our objective, and people (more so along the right than ever these days) refuse to accept basis of fact, then why bother refer to ourselves as a democracy?
Instead of for whatever the reason right now powerlessly asking, ‘What can I do?’, the best thing to try to do is talk with one another. We are in desperate need of some long, national conversations – on religion, restoring fact-based discussions itself, fair wages, slavery reparations – conversations we are just not having.
I have clarified and gained perspectives on major issues that I likely would have never thought to have been skeptical of on my own had I not looked them up on my own – as even some reputable sources have one way or another become even dicier, politicized terrain – or talked with people whom I considered at the time very different from me. I don’t know if I can speak for the majority of others on this. Left-leaning leaders appear to be in favor of balanced discussion, whereas right-leaning leaders appear quite frankly hypocritical about it. It can work. The most inexpensive way of course to go about re-enforcing a norm of civilized discussion on the airwaves would naturally be through public demand.
A former Senator famously said, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” One of my favorite professors, a history professor, would tell our class, “History is not the study of facts, but the study of the interpretation of facts.” The spirit of this doctrine would in fact be to encourage rather than restrain fact-based and responsible, free speech. Hiring qualified people in order to ensure it is another discussion.
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Naturally, the majority of extremely wealthy fiscal conservatives would be in favor of cutting taxes. History continues to show in this country that in accordance with the practice of what is referred to as supply-side economics, the resulting tax cuts all of us receive, for one, translate into greater take-home pay for the wealthy but chump-change for the rest of us. In simplest terms, the hope is a good percentage of the money from tax cuts and deregulation would get reinvested in businesses in order to increase supply, increase production, increase business, lead to an increase in wages, and so on. But there are holes in this economic theory – and not just legitimately cynical ones, as has been practiced – as far as entrusting entrepreneurs to do the ‘right thing’ with their money. Some of these super wealthy fiscal conservatives – and these days there are many – like the historically long-armed and deep-pocketed, extreme-libertarians, Charles and David Koch, have had a long and deeply dubious business history. David Koch ran as a vice-presidential nominee on the libertarian ticket in 1980, feeling that Reagan was not conservative enough. The Koch’s political network, aptly nicknamed ‘the Kochtopus’, reportedly raised an incredible near billion dollars for the 2012 general election campaign. By comparison, this amount was vastly disproportionate to any Democratic fundraising organization, or obviously individual donor.
Winston Churchill, a conservative, famously said, “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain.” Ronald Reagan was an FDR-Democrat before objecting to how much money he was paying in personal income tax upon becoming a success, and so became a small government Goldwater-Republican. Former Republican House Speaker John Boehner was a JFK-Democrat, before pretty much deciding the same. It’s a common track. I was nine years-old when President Reagan was inaugurated in January of 1981, and my idea of what a Republican still is today took shape from way back then. Over all of those years, and the economic stats resulting from either side in power, things have certainly been made easier in our culture for a Republican to want to be a Republican if one’s ultimate aspiration is to stay or become individually wealthy.
The thing I have always wanted is what I would imagine the majority of Americans want: a fair-minded capitalist system, and a fair-minded two-party system of checks and balances. What we’re talking about is individual liberties applied to money. If a CEO or entrepreneur decides they are ‘worth’ a much larger amount on scale than what they pay their employees, if this business owner happens to have two homes, a boat, various other nice luxuries along with a family to support, yet says to the employees there is just not enough money to afford raises, or affordable health insurance, or other benefits, these owners are ‘free’ to act like this. But we cannot have freedom without responsibility. Supply-side economics can partially work – minus the definition of ‘partial’ right now meaning very impartial. Practical repercussions in this society are always inevitable. This economic practice, left too much on its own, depends too much on trust: in the owners, in deregulation, in competent leadership. And it’s the last of these factions right now proving to be deeply untrustworthy. Speaking as someone who if I lived to be 1,000 could never be bored, it would best to prevent too much unwanted chaos from happening in the first place.
So, the best answer to my above question is what this country has had in effect for decades is a growing wealthy elite whose goal is to get rich, stay rich, pay to pull strings, and seek to peddle misinformation and disinformation in order to distract and defend a legacy of wealth by getting the more humble(d) among us to point our fingers in other directions. The things that current, so-called ‘progressives’ have been talking about really do not seem all that radical, but reflects how radical things have become on one side. The country economically thrived in post-WWII America. Civil rights and pay-equity for minorities in the workforce have come a long way yet are still unfortunately major issues in today’s white-male-dominant America. Bernie Sanders, for one, claimed he could reach Trump supporters. Why not now challenge Trump to an informal debate on his own stage, at one of his rallies? Elizabeth Warren (born and raised in Oklahoma and who was a Republican/Independent until the mid-90s) has been visiting red states and has made very clear how she is a capitalist “to the bone”, interested in reforming capitalism, and generating support through a swath of ideas. Despite what some may say, campaigns are a good time for educating.
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The problem with Trump continues to be the inability to reach his base. His election win was an accident. We will never see the likes of a Donald Trump and his family in high public office again. He caught lightening in a bottle by latching himself onto the anti-establishment craze, and along with the nationalist/tribalist fear-inducing rhetoric this is what fundamentally helps sustain his seemingly impenetrable base-support. From right-wing evangelicals to more secular-sounding, vulgar white men, when it comes to the evidence of either him having an affair with and paying off a porn-star with hush-money or having bragged about getting away with sexual assault due to being a celebrity, there is no real value-system, no actual moral code that any of his strong supporters can really speak to, other than of self-interest.
Anti-establishment fervor is very powerful. It speaks to middle-to-lower-income people and backgrounds and reflects democracy at its purest. Blue-collar Americans love such a voice. Donald Trump may sound like the only anti-establishment voice for working-class voters who have always or just prior to 2016 ideologically leaned to the right, but he is not the guy.
It ought to be universally agreed upon, as the charge has been universally sweeping across this country, that rural/lower-income voters whose beliefs happen to be more right-of-center have, just as such left-of-center voters, for too long felt pushed aside, used, neglected, and lied to. Towns that are not located anywhere near a small or big city feel it more than others. It is these towns who may want the same niceties, opportunities, and maybe some of the luxuries that bigger towns and smaller cities across the country offer. It would have been ideal if Jeff Bezos, for instance, were to have established another Amazon headquarters someplace where people are notoriously economically hurting – like in West Virginia, or in perennially poor Mississippi, or in some crumbling inner-city – so that ideally other investors could develop around its monolith. Such a community could then in effect gradually become more multi-cultural, more pluralistic, more open to change, and generally feel more at ease with themselves, and dare I say the residents could feel relatively, reasonably uplifted by a sense of better opportunity in a place they desire to continue to call home.
Even though there is a word for people who choose to run a country like a business, and that word is ‘dictator’, I have never fancied Donald Trump to be one. Tyrants have to have some sort of ideological agenda, but Trump has repeatedly shown not to care to come up with any sort of consistent national or worldview (especially, when it comes to foreign policy). He has shown no desire to read the nation’s instruction-manual, or a willingness to accept our system of checks and balances or care about his role as public servant. Instead, he has very obviously shown to be a very privileged and hard-wired, self-aggrandizing salesperson whose underlying interest is to enrich himself and his family name through the high(est) profile position of power. Remove the anti-establishment notion from the equation and his base should be able to see him the same way as the rest of the world.
His penchant for committing numerous hypocrisies and repeating the same falsehoods and lies – even continuously over one particular subject – of the ten-thousand and counting that he has told country-miles beyond any other fact-checked Republican or Democrat in its history, ought to appear painfully clear how his doing this is not considered ‘lying’ to him, but selling. What kind of leader – let alone human – would without any shame ‘lie’ three different times about his father having been born in Germany when even that birth certificate clearly indicates he was born in New York? Or, claim that sound can cause cancer, or more than once go out of his way to meaninglessly clarify that he actually said “Tim (Cook of) Apple” very fast during a White House meeting of business leaders, or that written U.S. code, the FBI Director, polling conducted by his own people, or his former White House counsel who “lied” to make himself look good are the people who are all wrong, that trade-wars can be won, and on and on…?
A voting base is called the base for a reason. They are allowed to be sanctimonious, to a fault. I can understand how a sense of powerlessness can formulate from things beyond our control or how experienced setbacks can inhibit a person or a community over time, until things can get too opportunistic. That I can’t stomach. White, lower-to-middle-income people who identify more along the right in particular keep pointing their fingers down and side-to-side, and congregate with one another, rather than look up within their own vocations. So long as anyone in their disempowered mindset continues to allow themselves to be rhetorically preyed upon, like terrified children, and refuse to doubt their leaders, and established Republicans in power around Trump continue to enable him, then he will continue to feel full-license to sell, mislead, and deliberately misrepresent the truth.
How many policy ideas can Donald Trump actually claim as his own, and not from some think-tank, a member of his senior staff, some partisan pundit on FOX or Twitter, or a member of Congress whose interests are still subservient to their wealthy donors? Preferring to run this country like a singular deciding businessperson is in more ways than one not remotely how our democracy was painstakingly designed. When any institution values loyalty over honesty and competence – as Trump keeps extraordinarily illustrating also with his ever-changing staff and cabinet – this is always an instant sign of trouble.
As far as being asked to explain the reason(s) behind their support at rallies, Trump supporters seemed to be pressed harder by comedy-news correspondents during the 2016 campaign than by the mainstream-media(interestingly enough, both correspondents in these here links appeared to be separately at the same rally in Wisconsin). It would appear to have been made very clear at this point that tenacious, on-the-level Socratic dialogue is necessary in pressing Trump supporters to get them to fess up to their contradictions. The burden of proof is on the person who expresses the belief. Otherwise, I am afraid we might lose them to some alternative reality.
The Socratic method is used by good parents all the time as for how one would speak with their child whenever s/he acts up. Since Trump has often been referred to, based on how he so often behaves, like a five-year-old in a seventy-three-year-old body, no good parent would ever allow their child to get the upper hand in such an argument. But, a child, being so young and not nearly as emotionally developed, would tend to fold pretty quickly under the weight of guilt and frustration. It is a similar approach in the case of these adults; with knowledge of the issues and current events, and honesty, one would have to be extra diligent and resolute in the objective pursuit of persistently questioning their contradictions until they fold.
Which leads us to the secondary part of his big sell: Trump supporters completely overlook the very character of the person selling the big idea. It is worth repeating a hundred-thousand times: personal character is everything in a leader. Pushing one another to challenge our inherent beliefs, unto our elected officials – and every individual’s ability to be receptive to whatever the current fact-based challenges – is what builds a national character. Character is destiny.
Everyone has had the experience of walking into a store and being approached by a salesperson who starts pitching a ‘great’ product, to the point where you may give the benefit of the doubt and follow the person to the product. At this moment, anyone’s b-s detector would immediately flick on. For millions of people it seems this moment has yet to happen with Trump. (‘Is this person truthful, honest, trustworthy?’) Since political candidates are essentially salespeople running for high-office, entrusted to make decisions that affect our overall livelihood, the pragmatic selling of ideas is the most important pitch of all.
There are three basic questions anyone can fall back on if debating a more aggressive Trump supporter. One, do you like Donald Trump or the idea of him? Where do you get your information? And, lastly, there is no way any Trump supporter can say they have never seriously called into question any one thing he has said or done since at least upon announcing his candidacy in 2015.
Curiously, every such base-supporter I would find myself in conversation with, online or in person, would always avoid answering to any of those three questions.
Of course, there is always just the two-word question: tax-returns? (Needless to say, this question also gets avoided.) Tax-returns cannot be audited forever. What’s the hold-up?
There are several things that to a greater or lesser degree I happened to disagree with, for one, over President Obama’s tenure. I felt his administration was weak in vying to pass legislation for universal background checks after the mass-shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. I despised how no executive was arrested for having knowingly committed the fraud which led to the housing crisis and subsequent major recession in 2008. His border and deportation policies were tough, though were a means of pursuing a grand bargain with Congressional Republicans at the time to include a path towards citizenship. His escalation in drone-warfare resulted in the killing of hundreds of Muslim civilians over West Asia. (Yet, a healthy percentage of Republican voters still insist on disparagingly labeling him a Muslim?) Despite being pleased with the overall gains he had made during his tenure, the biggest issue I had with him was how non-confrontational he was with the obvious increasing extremism in the Republican Party. The following link is to an article written back in 2012 by two scholars – one from a left-leaning think-tank and the other from a right-leaning one – who have been studying and writing about the problems with both Democratic and Republican policies for decades. This time, though, they both reached a decidedly different agreement.
The deliberative, non-ideological Washington-outsider I voted for in 2008 – in going back to the point of supporting one set of ideals or values over the other – who I had once heard express on an episode of “Meet the Press” while promoting The Audacity of Hope, of America being “a non-ideological society. When we operate in terms of pragmatism and common sense, we end up with better outcomes,” was a noticeably different person I voted in favor of in 2012.
What major things has Donald Trump actually accomplished that any Republican President could have been expected to accomplish by now? Economically speaking, cutting taxes and regulations is completely expected of a Republican administration upon obtaining power. The economy always initially improves. But no one ought to be surprised that upon cutting taxes and regulations, but not spending, the federal deficit has increased.
When you spend more money than you take in, this equals debt. The Trump campaign’s plan to cut taxes but not spending was sold all throughout the 2016 campaign, accompanied by the magical promise that job-creation by itself would not only off-set the lessened tax-revenue but ultimately balance the budget. The resulting increase in our national deficit should have been, again, as easy to foretell as the sun rising the next day.
The White House’s proposed budget for 2019 again happened to ask for increased military spending. I’d be willing to bet my neighbor’s home that Trump’s staff knew enough to not bother thinking of asking him to read this proposal. He had promised all throughout his presidential campaign that he would not cut funding to so-called entitlement programs, yet, lo and behold, cuts were proposed to each in this proposal.
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America is a great idea. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, represents the very worst of this idea. He is not your typical, spoiled, never-do-well, empathetically detached, stuck-up metropolitan, race-baiting, latest powder-keg campaigning on racism, womanizing, terminally privileged, old, white guy. No, he is more unique. Our ‘leader’ is one amoral, duplicitously disloyal, greedily opportunistic, mentally lazy, fundamentally lawless, Islamophobic, xenophobic, completely self-centered around wealth and celebrity, socially fractured, scared of non-social-media/actual confrontation, bitterly petulantly divisive, bizarrely pathologically lying, life-long inept businessperson and profoundly empty-headed salesperson to walk contemporary American ground.
So very many along the pride-swallowing right, like Lindsey Graham, Mitch Mulvaney, and Kellyanne Conway still surely, privately agree.
If the Donald Trump as we know him hadn’t been born a millionaire, but rather some every-day, second-rate grifter, he would have long ago found his way in prison. Granted, the street can have a way of making one receptive to doubting his/her impulses. Yet, that might still be a toss-up considering someone as stubborn as he. At this point, I am under the impression that whenever he speaks he doesn’t know much of anything about anything, but believes he can sell that he does.
He reminds of one line from “Macbeth”, a story written over 400 years ago, where Malcolm, the grieving son of the murdered king at Macbeth’s hands, very cleverly uses reverse-psychology to assure the patriotism of his fellow countryman by defining leadership: “But I have none, the king-becoming graces, as justice, verity, temperance, stableness, bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, devotion, patience, courage, fortitude, I have no relish of them but abound in the division of each several crime, acting it in many ways.”
It is plainly obvious, a bona-fide truth, a fact in and of itself that if one is going to resort to conspiracy theories, highly subjective sources of information, made-up sales-pitches, or crisis-acting, if a person can flatly insist on disregarding the importance of facts in order to deflect and deliberately hide the most obvious proof(s) of their corruption, in this country, I don’t care how big the cult of personality such a person can never realistically be expected to either sustain support or win over anyone new.
It is worth mentioning one significant side-reason why any base’s thinking can seem impervious is because once they feel one of their own is in the majority they feel they can relax to some degree from caring to pay attention as much as when they were not. There is a head-spinning amount of examples to reflect this regarding the current administration. Chiefly, how is it when U.S. athletes take a knee in protest during the playing of the U.S. National Anthem, to call attention or show solidarity to the disparity in police aggression towards blacks in this country versus whites, when we consider the outspoken leader of the counter-protest, this whole thing continues to get successfully spun as the athletes who are being ‘disrespectful to our military’?!
A nation’s flag is a major symbol. This symbol can have multiple meanings – per the sum of its parts. The U.S. flag is the central symbol in the country’s National Anthem, a metaphor for what “gave proof through the night…” the morning after a patriotic battle. Multiple meanings can evolve from this metaphor; meanings worth calling legitimate and peaceful attention to, at whatever applicable time, which ought to be maturely understood and recognized.
If someone wants to be a conscientious objector, fine. If you want to dodge the draft for a b-s reason, let that be on your conscience. But Donald Trump – ever the impulsive, petulant five-year-old – does not have a conscience. Never forget the fact in 2015 this draft-dodger had the incredulous nerve to subsequently dump on a former P.O.W., a soldier who had voluntarily declined release from torture at the hands of his captors out of solidarity with his fellow P.O.W.’s, as not being a war-hero. (Resurfaced news-footage actually showed Trump stating this belief back in 1999.) In 2015, a war-hero was suddenly redefined as “I like people who weren’t captured.” This is the factual moment where Trump’s invulnerability as a political figure became frighteningly real to me. Of all the things that should have morally and politically disqualified his candidacy during the campaign, his so-called patriotic supporters barely if at all blinked even at this one.
And now the latest excuse, to boot, even after McCain’s death, is because the man had voted to save millions of people from losing their healthcare seeing how the Republican Party did not have a more cost-effective universal healthcare plan to replace the A.C.A.? The moral standard: what, where on Earth is it, Trump supporters? Millions voted for him before, and millions are looking to vote for him again.
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The disinformation, obstructionism, hypocrisy, and political extremism practiced by established Republicans over these recent years had given way to the rise to their ‘anti-establishment’ Republican, Donald Trump. But Trump, given his greater disinterest in politics (I would make him read the Constitution a hundred times) and all of his broken economic promises to the base that he so predominantly sells to, allows himself to be enabled by the same-old established-Republican agenda. This is what should be highlighted during the 2020 campaign, to challenge working-class Republican voters to decide between authentically anti-establishment and establishment. Established Republicans are now even more emboldened to resort to heavy gerrymandering or attempts at voter suppression in order to cheat, themselves, to win elections. It’s a lose-lose scenario. They speak and act in constant fear of losing primary races to a Trump-like, hyperbolic fear-stoking, anti-immigration, wealth-procuring contender, and for the most part acquiesce to whatever Trump says at the expense of our morality and Constitution. Because, at the same time, they (but, a small few) lack the courage to fess up to how corrupted they are by wealthy special interests, as this is the obvious reason the Party as a whole chooses not to be more unified in morally, publicly denouncing this character. So long as they get to appease the anti-establishment base yet remain very established in refusing to reveal how corrupt they continue to be, all of the players are able to carry on like politics as usual?!
To hell with that.
When it comes to facts and certain values, right is right and wrong is wrong. Call me old-fashioned, but a leader is someone whose heart is supposed to be tried and fundamentally honest, whose abilities we are supposed to look up to.
Trump supporters, stop letting ill-informed politics cloud your judgment.
Since Election Day, 2016, I knew Donald Trump would end up a social and political nightmare for the Republican Party, but in the way he may still inadvertently expose it for being in dire need of reform.
Until we do a better job of being informed citizens, and do our homework, and vote accordingly under whatever the current circumstances, we can again actually make progress as a society.
