IMPORTANT READS

NEW GEOGRAPHY-She had it all -- the pliant media, the tech oligarchs, Wall Street, the property moguls, the academics, and the all-around “smart people.” What Hillary Clinton didn’t have was flyover country, the economic “leftovers,” the small towns, the un-hipstered suburbs, and other unfashionable places. As Thomas Frank has noted, Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.” No surprise, then, that working- and middle-class voters went for Donald Trump and helped him break through in states -- Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa ---that have usually gone blue in recent presidential elections. 

Trump seized on the widespread sense that American life was destined to get worse from generation to generation. Americans wanted opportunity for the next generation, not a managed decline. Democrats -- and I was one for over 40 years -- once offered this to the working and middle classes that have now deserted the party. 

More than anything, the Trump vote says “no” to oligarchies and ruling classes that not only hoard their wealth but also are convinced that they are morally superior. Trump may be as ostentatious as anyone in flaunting his own wealth, but compared with his garishness, the hypocrisy of the elites is infinitely worse. It’s one thing to be told that decline and future stagnation are your lot by, say, selfless monks wearing hair shirts or tough party cadres who live, like the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks, with the common people. It’s quite another, when the message comes from trustafarians writing for the New York Times or people who fly their own planes and own numerous homes. 

Concern about climate change galvanized the elites -- Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley -- but left Main Street cold. Wall Street placed its bets on Trump and, like many blocs within the new “progressive” constituency, reacted with shock that the American people hadn’t bought in to their investment. 

The map tells all. Clinton won by large margins in the Northeast and on the West Coast, and in states -- Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada -- where Trump’s intemperate comments roused Latino voters. But outside of Illinois, a whole swath of the country, from the hills of Appalachia to the fringes of the Rockies, went solidly for Trump. 

Why would that be? Start with basic economics. The economy in the nation’s interior relies on producing things -- an endeavor that the coasts have largely abandoned. Energy, manufacturing, and agriculture still define these economies, and employ many white-collar as well as blue-collar workers. If you live in Texas and Oklahoma, “decarbonization” is a much less attractive concept than it might seem in Manhattan or San Francisco. Trump swept the areas that keep the lights on and the motors turning -- Ohio, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, Wyoming, Idaho, Louisiana, and especially West Virginia, where he won by a remarkable 68 to 27 margin. 

Among other things, the media missed the fact that the middle of the country and the South continue to gain population. The “blue” model, for the most part, expels people, while, in contrast, the “red” one appeals, particularly to middle- and working-class families. Texas and Florida are now our second and third most-populous states. Once the pacesetter, New York is a mere shadow of itself as a determiner of elections, and California, no longer growing more quickly than the rest of the country, has perched itself on the Left fringe, with obvious bad ramifications -- high housing and energy bills, depressed blue-collar sectors -- for middle-aged, middle-class families. 

In contrast, Trump’s America presents an alternative model, which honors small enterprise, allows housing to meet demand, and does not see the United States as part of a global system to be managed. That there are xenophobic, and even racist, elements in the Trumpian ranks is undeniable -- but for most Americans, the true “deplorables” have been the self-appointed regulators and financial masters who seem determined to halt their upward progress, and that of their children. 

If our governing elites want to know how Trump happened, they need only look in the mirror.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. This perspective was posted most recently at New Geography.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRUTHDIG--The people Hillary Clinton derided as a “basket of deplorables” have spoken. They have voted out of the pain of their economic misfortune, which Clinton’s branch of the Democratic Party helped engender.

What you have is a defeat of elitism. Clinton’s arrogance was on full display with the revelation of her speeches cozying up to Goldman Sachs—the bank that caused this misery more than any other—and the irony of this is not lost on the people who are hurting and can’t pay their bills. This is a victory for a neofascist populism—scapegoating immigrants and Muslims—and if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrats’ candidate, I feel confident he would have won. We were denied the opportunity of a confrontation between a progressive populist, represented by Sanders, and a neofascist populist.

It’s a repudiation of the arrogant elitism of the Democratic Party machine as represented by the Clintons, whose radical deregulation of Wall Street created this mess. And instead of recognizing the error of their ways and standing up to the banks, Clinton’s campaign cozied up to them, and that did not give people who are hurting confidence that she would respond to their needs or that she gave a damn about their suffering. She’s terminally tone-deaf.

So too were the mainstream media, which treated the wreckage of the Great Recession as a minor inconvenience, ignoring the deep suffering of the many millions who lost their homes, savings and jobs. The candidate of Goldman Sachs was defeated, unfortunately by a billionaire exemplar of everything that’s evil in late-stage capitalism, who will now worsen instead of fix the system. Thanks to the arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership that stifled the Sanders revolution, we are entering a very dangerous period with a Trump presidency, and this will be a time to see whether our system of checks and balances functions as our Founding Fathers intended.

Make no mistake about it: This is a crisis of confidence for America’s ruling elite that far surpasses Nixon’s Watergate scandal. They were the enablers of radical deregulation that betrayed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s contract with the American people in the wake of the Great Depression. The people are hurting, and regrettably, Trump was the only vehicle presented to them by either major party in the general election to register their deepest discontent. The Trump voters are the messenger; don’t demonize them in an effort to salvage the prestige of the superrich elite that has temporarily lost its grip on the main levers of power in this nation.

Thankfully, the Clinton era is over, and the sick notion that the Democratic Party of FDR needed to find a new home in the temples of Wall Street greed has been rudely shattered by the deep anger of the very folks that the Democrats had presumed to represent. That includes working-class women, who failed to respond to the siren song of Clinton, whom the democratic hacks offered instead of a true progressive like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Yes, we need a female president, but not in the mold of Margaret Thatcher.

(Robert Scheer is the founder of TruthDig … where this commentary was first posted.) Graphic credit: Mr. Fish

-cw

THE MOURNING AFTER-Was your party rejected by the voters during Tuesday’s election? If so, here are two things you should know. 

1. You should be prepared to feel some intense emotional distress. 

2. But it should lift pretty much completely by this time next week. 

That mixed news comes from a study published last year. Lamar Pierce of Washington University, Todd Rogers of Harvard University, and Jason Snyder of the University of California–Los Angeles tracked Americans’ emotional reactions to the 2012 election, in which President Barack Obama defeated challenger Mitt Romney. 

They found evidence of the agony of defeat, but the thrill of victory? Not so much. 

“We find that the pain of losing an election is much larger than the joy of winning one,” they write in the Journal of Experimental Political Science. “Elections strongly affect the immediate happiness/sadness of partisan losers, but minimally impact partisan winners.” 

Pierce and his colleagues used data from CivicScience polls. Each day during the weeks immediately before and after Election Day 2012, an average of 210 Republicans and 111 Democrats were asked, “How happy are you today -- very happy, happy, so-so, unhappy, or very unhappy?” 

They found “little change in the likelihood that Democrats report being happy,” even after Obama’s re-election win. 

However, “immediately following the election, Republicans’ self-reported happiness drops from approximately 60 percent to 30 percent.” That represents “a strong negative effect on the baseline level of happiness” for members of the losing party. 

The researchers compared this drop with the effects of other events that caused distress: Specifically, the reaction of parents with children to the mass shooting at Newtown Elementary School, and that of Boston-area residents to the Boston Marathon bombing. 

Each of those events did indeed lower happiness levels in those demographics. But the plunge in mood was twice as large for partisans whose party had lost the election. 

“People’s social, physical, economic, and mental lives are shaped by their partisan identities, and these social identities are widely and deeply held,” the researchers note. Thanks to this intense personal connection, “winning an election is fine, but losing one is painful, at least in the short run.” 

Unhappy people can take heart in that last point. The data suggests that, “over the eight weeks before and after (the 2012 election), happiness is relatively constant, except for Republicans in the week immediately following the election.” This suggests their sense of well-being returned to its normal level within seven days. 

So if today it feels like the world is ending, keep in mind that this pain is temporary. And remember: the next election in LA is only four months away! 

Wait, now I’m getting depressed.

(Tom Jacobs writes for Pacific Standard Magazine where this perspective was firs posted.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-Any fair-minded person knows that fighting racism (and other forms of discrimination) is an important pursuit. But people harm that effort when they label as racist those people who are not.

In October 2013, President Barack Obama made a great, spirited and fair challenge to the Republicans.

"You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it.”

At the time, the Democrats had just lost control of the U.S. Senate. Several years earlier in his first term, they lost control of the House of Representatives. Despite that slide, the still-standing Obama courageously threw down the gauntlet.

Last night, with more help from the previously unknown campaign advisor Kellyanne Conway than from the Republican establishment, Donald Trump rose to the occasion and won.

Instead of acknowledging that Trump’s crystal ball had a better read on the American voting population than did Hillary Clinton’s, suddenly, sadly, but not unpredictably, some of those on (or disenfranchised by) the losing side of the scoreboard spent much of the night online labeling the outcome that which it is not: racism, misogyny and sundry other accusations.

From a friend: “We live in a racist country and now have a racist president. Next he'll go after Jews….Hitler got elected too.”

But the friend did not have an answer for this: Are you saying that the people who overwhelmingly elected Obama in 2008, and re-elected him in 2012, (except those who were too young to vote in those elections) suddenly became “racists” last night?

I guess, channeling Bill Clinton’s wordplay, it depends on your meaning of unfairness, discrimination, anti-Semitism, dishonesty, racism, sexism and misogyny.

• Was it unfair when former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, as proven by WikiLeaks, rigged the Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders?
• Was it discrimination or anti-Semitism when, as proven by WikiLeaks, the DNC plotted to use Sanders’ Judaism against him in the West Virginia and other primaries?
• Was it dishonest when Wasserman-Schultz’s successor, Donna Brazile, as proven by WikiLeaks, told Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly that she “did not receive any questions from CNN” that she leaked to the Clinton campaign?
• Was it racist when Brazile said in the same interview, “As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted because your information is totally false. 
• Was it sexist when Hillary described Bill Clinton’s assault accusers as a “Bimbo Brigade,” or when her longtime ally James Carville described their motivations as “(when you)…drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find.”
• Was it appropriate for Hillary to embrace Beyoncé and Jay Z at their concert this weekend teeming with racist, misogynistic lyrics? What if that was a concert for Trump?

If what happened with Trump’s near-solo victory over Clinton was motivated by racism, how does one explain the Republicans’ simultaneously retaining control of the Senate and House? Many of those candidates ran away from Trump during the long campaign slog.

In fact, were the 59,581,587 million Americans who voted for Trump in cahoots, but the 59,787,604 million who supported Clinton were not? That would be one crowded chat room! (The Electoral College gives those in every state a balanced voice despite the popular vote. Those are the rules of the game.)

Take out of the equation those who do harbor racist beliefs, because they exist on both sides. What you have left is still have a mass of good people who overwhelmingly elected, and then re-elected, Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. When you power-wash off the tabloid stuff, they decided that things were not working out, and that significant change was better than more of the same. That is all it is.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a contributor to CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640 and Huffington Post. He blogs on humane issues at http://ericgarcetti.blogspot.com/. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-At the risk of momentarily being labeled as a jingoist, the world’s stability is largely based on that of the United States. Election Day has finally arrived, so buckle-up amigas y amigos, your investment portfolio may be in for a wild ride until the world’s financial markets calibrate life with a new President, Senate, House of Representatives and the geopolitical mish-mosh that is about to ensue.

GUEST WORDS--As the Presidential election campaign ends, the smears and accusations have not let up. The Clinton forces accuse Donald Trump of fascist tendencies because of his dog whistles to white supremacists and support from what is now called the Alt-Right, an amalgam of racists and bigots. And, the Trump forces accuse Hillary Clinton of corruption based on her long history of collusion between private business interests and government. 

Unfortunately, both sets of accusations have a grain of truth, and in my view, under the right circumstances either presidency could react to a wide range of economic, political, and military crises with fascistic responses. 

I realize this prediction will strike many supporters of Hillary Clinton as far-fetched because they only see one component of fascism: extreme bigotry, and have therefore incorrectly concluded that a Clinton presidency would end the fascist threat from Donald Trump. 

But, in fact, fascism has many components, as I have previously written in City Watch, in particular foreign wars, authoritarian rule, mass surveillance, and police and (sometimes) vigilante political repression. As I hope to demonstrate through many links to supportive documents, these are all frequent historical components of U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy, regardless of the party in power at the White House, Congress, or even local government.

We do not yet know who the next President of the United States will be, nor what policies and programs the next administration will pursue. But, we do know the next administration will face crises large and small, and we also know that the toolbox that the administration will reach into to deal with these crises is filled with fascist implements.

One set of crises would be economic, and a look at recent booms and busts indicates that the Great Recession that began 2007 is hardly unique. Many more sharp economic downturns are on their way, and the only question is when. Likewise, military conflicts are widespread and increasing in the Middle East and Africa, as well as between the U.S. and China and the U.S. and Russia. Just like economic crises, the only unknowns are when, where, and how deadly. 

So what is in the tool box? 

Internationally, the United States spends over $1 trillion per year on military and security, which supports, among many categories, approximately 1000 foreign military installations. Our government also possesses an arsenal of 7000 nuclear weapons, for which it intends to spend $1 trillion to modernize. At the same time according to the U.S. State Department, the U.S. military conducts unclassified training operations in 137 foreign countries. 

Plus, the U.S. is actively involved in two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, which are now approaching 15 years, with little chance of ending in the foreseeable future, regardless of who is elected President. Their total cost is so far estimated to be $5 trillion, a truly staggering sum. In addition, the U.S. is currently engaged in drone warfare in at least six countries: Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya, with prospects for expanded drone warfare in more, not fewer, countries. 

If we look back, though, to the entire post-WW II era, the crisis-response toolbox has much more to offer, according to author William Blum. There is a long, sordid, and totally bi-partisan history of the U.S. government supporting regimes that are variously characterized as authoritarian, totalitarian, and fascist police states. This partial list includes 22 countries at present, as well as 67 countries in the past. 

According to Blum, the United States government also has ample experience with a vast array of fascist practices. Since 1945 our government has: 

• Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected. 

• Dropped bombs  on the people of more than 30 countries. 

• Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders. 

• Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. 

• Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. 

• Attempting 60 coups of foreign governments. 

• Since 1980, intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries: Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria. 

The Domestic Tool Box 

In the past century, the U.S. has had many domestic mass movements, including unionization movements from the 1890s through the 1930s, the anti-Vietnam war movement, Civil Rights movement, Ban the Bomb movement, student movement, anti-Iraq War movement, and women’s movement. In the past few years, new mass movements include Occupy Wall Street, which had over 1000 encampments throughout the entire country. There is also the Black Lives Matters movement, and related grass roots groups opposing police violence. 

The list of mass movements also include many that have a climate change and ecological focus, such Bill McKibben’s 350.com and the movement to stop the Dakota Pipeline in North Dakota. While we don’t know which new mass movements will emerge over the next four years, we do know the history of government responses to such movements. Occasionally they are co-opted through legislation, like the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968 in response to the Civil Rights movement and the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s. Many times, though, the mass movements are the victims of police surveillance, sabotage, and direct police repression, such as Occupy and the Dakota Pipeline.

Furthermore, the United Sates has a long history of repressive legislation, and many of these laws have distinct fascist overtones. They include the Espionage Act and Sabotage Act from President Woodrow Wilson to the first and second Patriot Acts after 9/11. Along the way, these laws have been complemented by anti-communist legislation, most originating with the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, including the Smith Action, McCarran Act, Subversive Activities Control Act, Internal Security Act, and Hubert Humphrey’s Anti-Communist Control Act of 1954.

Other notable government programs to disrupt domestic political movements include Cointelpro, which began under FDR, and Operation Chaos, both of which were widely used against the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. President Lyndon Johnson initiated Operation Chaos in 1967, and the program ended with a New York Times expose in 1974. 

The formation of SWAT teams has continued to grow in the United States from their initial formation by the LAPD in the 1960s to the present, when nearly every U.S. police department has established a SWAT team. The U.S. government has heavily militarized these SWAT teams, and local SWAT teams deploy at least 80,000 times per year. In recent years these local military functions have been boosted by anti-terrorist spying and surveillance sections added to local police departments, all linked to 78 regional fusion centers. 

In addition, the Department of Defense has and will set up an elaborate drone-spying network in the United States, as shown on the RPA Dod Ops Activities map below. Beyond the direct use by the military, local police and related agencies will also have access to these drones, including Stingrays to monitor cell phone conversations. Presumably, they will be used to augment the complete monitoring of all domestic and international telecommunications in the United States by the National Security Agency and other government intelligence offices, as exposed by Edward Snowden and other whistle blowers. 

In applying the above history to the Presidential election, the following implications should be carefully considered: 

First, the Hillary Clinton supporters ignore the historic role of mass movements, as opposed to voting in presidential elections, to block racist and fascist movements, such as the rise of the KKK during the Woodrow Wilson administration, and then again in recent decades. In both cases, anti-racist and anti-KKK movements lead to the demise of this domestic terrorist organization, even thought DW Griffith was able to spark a short-term revival of the KKK through the premier of his pro-Klan movie, Birth of a Nation, at the White house during the Wilson administration. Later, from the 1970s to date, there have been hundreds of grass roots confrontations to stop KKK and neo-Nazi rallies all throughout the United States. 

Second, the Hillary Clinton campaign has vastly overestimated the anti-fascist role of the Democratic Party. A quick look at the many fascistic programs supported by Democratic administrations’ domestic and foreign policies should finally put this belief to bed. After all, the Democrats are the party of the still active Espionage and Sabotage Actions, Cointelpro (FDR and Johnson), Operation Chaos (Johnson), Anti-Communist Witch Hunts (Truman), Korean War (Truman), Bay of Pigs (Kennedy), Vietnam and Laos Wars (Kennedy, Johnson), Cold War (Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton), "Peacetime" conscription (FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson), mass incarceration and welfare "reform" (Clinton), Bombing of Yugoslavia (Clinton), Escalation in Afghanistan and Libya (Obama), drone missile attacks (Obama), mass deportations (Obama), support of Saudi Arabia (FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama), support of the Shah (Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter), and support of Israeli settlements (Carter, Clinton, Obama). 

Third, the Clinton Campaign has also exaggerated the fascist menace of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. Unlike real fascists, he does not have support of the country’s business class or most of the press, does not have a mass movement of organized street thugs, does not call for aggressive wars, and does not call for subservience to the state. While all this could change, especially in response of to a sudden crisis, the same prediction applies to a Hillary Clinton administration. 

Fourth, both presidential campaigns have deployed slogans that can be used to build public support for a wide range of harsh government response to economic, political, and military crises. “Make America Great Again” echoes Mussolini fascist call to Italians to restore the glory of the Roman Empire, while “Better Together” parallels the Third Reich’s call for all Germans to unite through aggressive pan-Germanism.  

By the time some CityWatch readers check out this article, they will know who the next U.S. president is. If and when the crises and fascistic responses that have appeared in my crystal ball eventually emerge, I trust these readers will not only remember what they read here. The real response will be their support or participation in the many anti-fascist movements that will emerge in response to U.S. wars, repressive policing, spying and surveillance, and patriotic bluster. 

(Victor Rothman lives in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CAMPAIGN 2016--Remember Jeb Bush? You know, he was the guy, with the... thing? And our dear friend Martin O’ Malley! He held an event in Iowa in a blizzard. One guy showed up ― and he wasn’t really feeling it, as it turned out. 

So much has happened since we launched First To Last in January 2015. American politics as we understood it seems to have fallen apart. Jeb Bush folded like aHoberman sphere; Donald Trump stepped out from a puff of brimstone to sell America a monorail. Hillary Clinton, like The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” abides.

We’ve seen Bernie Sanders ― who maybe didn’t think he was going to be in this race too long ― hang on through the entire primary, and influence the Democratic Party. We learned, the hard way, that winners don’t finish third. (Sorry, Marco Rubio.) And somehow, Wikileaks has gone from plumbing the secrets of the Deep State to being as obsessed with dumb campaign minutiae and horse-race politics as the establishment media it rebelled against. Who knew Julian Assange was destined to become Woke Mark Halperin? Seems a disappointment.

Seriously, what have we learned? Here are our Dirty Dozen takeaways. No time to be clever, people, the apocalypse is nigh. (Hey, that’s also Trump’s pitch to America!)

(Howard Fineman Global Editorial Director, Jason Linkins  Eat The Press Editor, and Lauren Weber  The Morning Email Editor, The Huffington Post … where this piece was first posted.)

-cw

ELECTION 2016--In an era of increasing dissatisfaction with and disengagement from governments, political parties, and much of the rest of the democratic establishment, it’s more important than ever that you show up and vote.

Suffrage is not a right afforded to everyone. Rather, voting is a privilege in the United States – and a hard-earned privilege at that.

At the beginning of the republic, only those white men with land were allowed a hand in electing our leaders and lawmakers. Later, under President Andrew Jackson, that decision-making power was extended to most white men. After a lengthy civil war – shedding a staggering amount of blood and treasure – successive amendments to the US constitution granting broader voting rights followed. Women, at this time, were entirely disregarded – until the 19th amendment passed in 1920.

Although some people of color were allowed to vote, many still faced disenfranchisement prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the recent gutting of that act by the supreme court, the systematic disenfranchisement of people of color is alive and well today.

Progress on suffrage has always tended to be incremental. And, far from being a closed chapter in our history, the fight to keep things moving forward continues to this day.

For every thousand people living in the US, seven are incarcerated. That population consists disproportionately of black and brown people, whether accused and convicted of crimes or held by immigration authorities.

Even when the incarcerated leave prison, they often return to our communities without the ability to vote. That means the people most affected by our political institutions and processes today often have absolutely have no say in how they are run. This group includes me. In Maryland, my state of residence, for instance, I will not be able vote until the year 2045.

Disenfranchisement and legal exclusion – whether by race, gender, class, immigration status, or otherwise – from our democratic institutions is one of the most significant failures of American society today.

One of the most contentious general elections in modern US history is in front of us. Next Tuesday, if, instead of making your way to the booth, you decide to go shopping, out for lunch or dinner, stay at home, play a video game, or whatever, just remember that many of us cannot vote but would dearly like to. While universal suffrage remains an ideal yet to be attained, if you’re lucky enough to be able to vote, don’t let that privilege go to waste.

(Whisteblower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) is the US Army Private (Pfc) who leaked military and government documents to the online media outlet Wikileaks which became the basis for the Collateral Murder video, which showed the killing of unarmed civilians by a US Apache helicopter crew in Iraq. Leaks made by Manning also resulted in the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and a series of embarrassing US diplomatic cables that became known as Cablegate. In 2013, was convicted by a military court or the disclosures and sentence to 35 years in prison. This piece was posted most recently at Common Dreams.) 

-cw

FIRST PERSON--It is impossible to fully express the devastation of sexual assault in words. But for millions who read the “victim impact statement” written by Emily Doe, the pseudonym used by the 23-year-old woman at the center of the Stanford rape case, the letter was a powerful recounting of the pain, anguish, anger, sadness, and strength of a rape survivor. Doe’s message went viral; as Glamour magazine notes, four days after it was publicly released it “had been viewed 11 million times; it was read aloud on CNN and the floor of Congress.”

Brock Turner, Doe’s attacker, was sentenced to a mere six months in jail. He ultimately served just three. The glaring injustice in the case, as in so many cases of rape and sexual assault, made Doe’s words resound even more loudly. Citing the importance of her message, Glamour magazine named Doe a Woman of the Year, and published her incredibly powerful followup essay.

“From the beginning, I was told I was a best-case scenario,” Doe writes. “I had forensic evidence, sober un­biased witnesses, a slurred voice mail, police at the scene. I had everything, and I was still told it was not a slam dunk. I thought, if this is what having it good looks like, what other hells are survivors living? I’m barely getting through this but I am being told I’m the lucky one, some sort of VIP. It was like being checked into a hotel room for a year with stained sheets, rancid water, and a bucket with an attendant saying, No this is great! Most rooms don’t even have a bucket.”

Despite all that, Turner would receive a slap on the wrist. Doe writes of how stunned she was by the leniency Judge Aaron Persky showed the rapist.

“[W]hen it was quickly announced that he’d be receiving six months, I was struck silent. Immediately I felt embarrassed for trying, for being led to believe I had any influence. The violation of my body and my being added up to a few months out of his summer. The judge would release him back to his life, back to the 40 people who had written him letters from Ohio. I began to panic; I thought, this can’t be the best-case ­scenario. If this case was meant to set the bar, the bar had been set on the floor.”

Just one day after the sentencing, Doe was contacted by Buzzfeed with a request to publish her statement. She agreed. Doe could not have expected the overwhelming response; she received an outpouring of thanks from people around the world who were moved by her words.

“I started getting e-mails forwarded to me from Botswana to Ireland to India,” Doe writes. “I received watercolor paintings of lighthouses and bicycle earrings. A woman who plucked a picture of her young daughter from the inside of her cubicle wrote, This is who you’re saving.”

She goes on to point out that blaming victims—suggesting women should get better at avoiding being raped, instead of telling rapists not to rape—is not a real solution. Dismantling rape culture starts with recognizing that rapists are responsible for rape, and demanding justice for survivors.

“If you think the answer is that women need to be more sober, more civil, more upright, that girls must be better at exercising fear, must wear more layers with eyes open wider, we will go nowhere.” Doe writes. “When Judge Aaron Persky mutes the word justice, when Brock Turner serves one month for every felony, we go nowhere. When we all make it a priority to avoid harming or violating another human being, and when we hold accountable those who do, when the campaign to recall this judge declares that survivors deserve better, then we are going somewhere.”

The entire essay, which can be found on the Glamour site, is well worth a read. As the outlet notes, you can support the campaign to recall Judge Aaron Persky by visiting recallaaronpersky.com. [[hotlink]]

(Kali Holloway writes for AlterNet. This piece was posted most recently at TruthDig.)  Photo credit: Valeri Pizhanski / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

-cw

GELFAND’S WORLD-Most everyone understands that Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president a week from Tuesday and will be sworn in on Friday, January 20 of the new year. Even now, Hillary and her staff are getting an earful about what she should do as president. May I offer a bit of advice? Hillary should take note of how Ronald Reagan acted when he was governor of California. 

That's right -- when he was governor, back in 1969-70. 

Back then, there had been lots of student protests and even a few incidents that led to the police using tear gas and clubs. Student riot was the colloquialism for demonstrations based on political speech and on the escalating war in Viet Nam. At the time, it appeared that California, if not necessarily the whole United States, was entering into a period in which student demonstrations would become more and more a part of society in general. Students closed down college administration buildings and whole campuses. Rebellious groups predicted that their movement would force needed changes not only in universities, but in society as a whole. The Peoples' Park rebellion in Berkeley led to prolonged strife, including violence between police and students. 

In response to the violence that had been and was yet to be, Reagan famously remarked, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." Reagan was not willing to acquiesce in what he saw as extortion over either public facilities or public policy. In his mind, you could not just close down a public resource because you had an ideological gripe. 

Perhaps you may have recognized a philosophical similarity between 1960s students and today's Republican congress. The students were headstrong, convinced of the rightness of their cause, and unwilling to engage in the kind of back-and-forth that negotiation requires. The students, not being trained troops, could just barely close down a small piece of publicly owned land in Berkeley. But if they could have, they would have closed down the whole United States government. Radical organizers pretty well said as much in public meetings all over the country. 

Twice now since the 1990s, we've seen that same attitude in a high place. A small group of people got together and forced the closure of the U.S. government. We call that group the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich was the early pioneer of this tactic in the years 1995-96 of the first Clinton presidency. We saw it again during October of 2013, in the fifth year of Obama's presidency. 

In each case, we saw a self-selected and extremely self-righteous group insist on imposing its own ideology on the rest of the country. In the latter case, the congressional Republicans decided that their ideological pursuits outweighed the benefits of maintaining the national government. 

"Shut it down" said the student radicals. 

"SHUT IT DOWN" said congressional Republicans. Shut it down, indeed. 

Looking back to the earlier events, it is obvious that Reagan had an overly circumscribed view of student thought. He was biased and narrow. But he was effective in maintaining some semblance of public order in the governmental setting. He did that by calling his opponents' bluff. 

We have had analogous conflicts over the past 20 years when we've had a Democratic president and at least one house of congress held by the Republicans. The Republicans have been willing to threaten shutting down the government, and they have been believable because they have been able to convince the rest of us that they don't care if the government continues or does not. In fact, some of them have been able to convince people that they truly relish the idea of putting federal agencies out of business. 

Democrats are philosophically and temperamentally opposed to government shutdowns. 

The new president will likely be facing a Republican led House of Representatives which will have nothing better to do than make mischief. We've already been told that congressman Jason Chaffetz intends to spend most of the efforts of his House Oversight Committee on investigating Hillary Clinton. Can attacks on liberal causes and even threats of impeachment be far down the line? 

Shutting down the federal government is part of this unwholesome package because it is the way that the Republicans try to enforce their warped ideas. They will complain about deficit spending and find some excuse (like the need to raise the debt ceiling) to make trouble. The threat of a government shutdown will be used in an attempt to extort favors. 

A counter-strategy is available, but Hillary and her congressional allies have to be willing to use it. As I've mentioned in these pages before, the most serious weakness of the congressional Democrats is their chronic failure to do payback when they are unfairly attacked. Reagan had his own way of dealing with recalcitrant Democrats. He threatened to go over their heads and take his case directly to the people. In earlier years, Lyndon Johnson could make life difficult for those who opposed him, and Richard Nixon developed the science of sneakiness and dirty tricks to a whole new level. 

Hillary Clinton won't have to go nearly as far as her predecessors in order to be toughly effective. All she has to do is withhold money from her opponents' states and districts. She doesn't have to make war on all Republicans, only those who make things personal. That word personal includes unmerited threats of investigations and it means threats to shut down the government. It also means threats to damage Planned Parenthood and other worthy social and medical programs. 

Let's think a bit about a threat to shut down the government. The so-called red states are, by and large, the old confederacy and the western plains states running from Oklahoma up through the Dakotas. Interestingly, they get more money from the federal government than they pay in the form of taxes. This makes them different from the blue states, which on the average pay more in federal taxes than they get back from the government. The red states gain a lot of income through military installations, NASA, defense plants, national parks, and national highways. 

Hillary's response to the extortionate threat of the Republican coalition should be taken from Governor Reagan: If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. If there is to be a government shutdown over raising the debt or over healthcare, then let's have it now. Make one thing especially clear: The people who will be hurt most are those whose congressmen are voting for this outrage, because they represent areas that get as much as two dollars back from the federal government for every dollar they pay in federal taxes. 

And one more thing. It should be whispered quietly to the red state congressmen that in the event of a shutdown, there will be some federal money that they will never see again. The chair of the senate Budget Committee, Bernie Sanders, will keep his blue pencil active every day that the shutdown continues. 

Part of the Democratic threat will include an officially nonpartisan commission on military base movements and closures, to be appointed by the president, whose real function will be to threaten red states with loss of federal income. Nothing brings out the willingness to compromise like the threat of losing local employment. 

In other words, the Democrats need to learn to play hardball politics because the Republicans have already made it their lifestyle. 

It's as simple as a television crime show. Mess with us? Then we mess with you. You want us to consider your governing philosophy? Then consider ours. We might eventually compromise, but we won't play the extortion game. There can be bargaining, but it has to be in good faith. And every day that the government stays shut down, your state loses ten million dollars off its military and governmental budget. Chairman Sanders will see to that. 

After three or four weeks of shutdown, the red state inhabitants who live off of government money -- directly through salaries or indirectly through selling goods and services to federal employees -- will be demanding that their Republican congressmen make a deal. At that point, and not until that point, the Democrats in congress will be able to bargain from a position of strength. 

Here's another way to think about this approach. There are now millions of people who are benefitting from the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Right now, the Act needs a little polishing in terms of adequate federal expenditures to maintain discount pricing on policies. But the millions who benefit by the insurance will be hurt by a legislative attack on the Act. Those people are spread all over the country, including in the bluest of the blue states. Their interests have to be protected, so we must create a new principle: Damage to the Affordable Care Act results in greater or equal damage to those states and congressional districts which vote to do that damage. 

One more thought, somewhat of a cliche, but still worth thinking about. Hillary should govern in her first term as if she was already in her second term -- that is to say, without concern for winning reelection. The people who vote for her this time around will love her for it, and the people who hate her aren't going to switch to supporting her anyway. She should forget any and all debts or favors she owes to anybody, including Wall Street, her fellow Democrats, and even president Obama. That's what being president is supposed to be about. 

We might also remember that when Reagan was governor of California and making his famous bloodbath remark, Hillary was a college student in an atmosphere of antiwar protest. She was also a leader in a generation that created the first inklings of the movement that was called Womens' Liberation. I'm thinking that maybe she can channel some of her 1960s idealism and directed anger towards worthy projects. And if she has to preside over a bloodbath, it will be different from Ronald Reagan's and it will be to a loftier end.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

NEW GEOGRAPHY-It’s increasingly unfashionable to celebrate those who made this republic and established its core values. On college campuses, the media and, increasingly, in corporate circles, the embrace of “diversity” extends to demeaning the founding designers who arose from a white population that was 80 percent British. 

In this American version of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” which tried to eviscerate traces of China’s past, venerable buildings are being renamed, athletes refuse to stand for the national anthem and, on some campuses, waving the American flag is now considered a “microaggression,” while English students at Yale want to avoid reading the likes of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer. 

Of course, some changes are justified. Asking anyone, particularly African Americans, to revere the Confederate flag or attend schools named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan is, indeed, offensive. But in our zeal to address old wrongs, we may also be sacrificing the very things that have made this republic so attractive to millions from distinctly different backgrounds for the last two centuries. 

Why we come here 

Just to clear the air, I have not a single drop of British blood in me. The closest ties I have to what I consider my cultural and political home country come from my great uncle Simon, who served in Gen. Allenby’s Jewish brigade in World War I, and that my wife, born in Montreal, came into the world a subject of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Career wise, I did work for a think tank in London for several years. 

But what ties most Americans to the founders is not race, but our embrace of a political and legal culture based on distinctly Anglo-Saxon ideas about due process, representative government, property rights and free speech. These proved infinitely superior to the divine right of czars, kaisers, emperors and other hereditary autocrats for generations of non-Anglo-Americans. 

This system, always capable of amendment, has allowed waves of traditional outsider groups -- African Americans, Latinos, women, Mormons, Jews and Muslims -- to join the economic, political and cultural mainstream. In some cases, as in the case of President Obama, they have also secured the highest reaches in the national firmament. 

The idiocy of ‘cultural appropriation’ 

The Maoist nature of the current anti-Anglo campaign is exemplified by the current notion of “cultural appropriation.” By this theory, writers and analysts are being told to stay away from topics that don’t resonate with their DNA. 

This approach undermines the very purpose of art as a means of transformation. Can we imagine reconstructing the realities of the antebellum South without “Huckleberry Finn?” Should all of the producers and directors responsible for “Zoot Suit” or “Roots” have been forced to submit to DNA screening? Do we kick Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones out of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame because of their “appropriations” from African American culture? 

When working well, a multicultural society works both directions. Think of the hit play “Hamilton,” written and conceived by a Hispanic, played largely by African Americans and adored by an entire generation of young theater lovers, many of whom are getting their first good taste of American history. By the standards of cultural appropriation, the Daughters of the American Revolution should be filing suit. 

The road to nihilism 

Cultures, and nations, get stronger when they can incorporate new elements into their existing narrative. The Roman Empire, by offering citizenship to non-Italians, extended its period of pre-eminence. “Rome,” declared the second-century Greek writer Aristides, “is a citadel which has all the people of earth as its villagers.” 

As in the case of the Roman Empire, America’s greatest achievement has been to incorporate other cultures into its mainstream. Despite the current racial discord, it must be noted that America has succeeded in welcoming, and integrating, vast numbers of Hispanics, Asians and Middle Easterners over the past half-century. 

Their growing success puts the lie to existing racist sentiments that have been fanned, in effect, if not consciously, by the candidacy of Donald Trump. Neither are our multicultural prospects made better by Hillary Clinton’s demeaning of largely white “deplorables” or her embrace of the Black Lives Matter politics of division and victimization. 

Both Clinton and Trump seem unable to acknowledge what America already is, or, more importantly, what it can be. On our streets, in our theaters, in our foods and in our music, we experience a rich commingling of cultures every day. Politicians may see advantages in stirring up enmity but America is becoming a profoundly less racist nation, and will be even less so in the future. For example, the percentage of Americans who approve of interracial marriages has grown from 4 percent in 1958 to 87 percent today. 

So let’s have more African Americans donning colonial garb to tell the national story while whites add black, Asian or Latino notes in their music, cooking and writings. This is a testament to the greatness of our Anglo founders’ vision, which should be embraced -- even by those of us whose lineage extends far from the British Isles. 

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org. This piece originally appeared on NewGeography.com. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams. 

TRUTHDIG--Tom Hayden and I happened to be on the same flight from Los Angeles to Sacramento as he prepared to begin his first year in the state Legislature in 1982. We sat next to each other and began to talk. For me, it was an unexpected treat. I always enjoyed the company of a man who, rather than talk about himself, seemed so interested in what others had to say. 

That, in fact, was one of his great qualities, rare in public figures -- especially in elected politics, the business Hayden was about to enter. He was nice to people, charming in an unassuming way.

On the plane to the capital, Hayden questioned me on how the Legislature worked. He wanted hints on getting along with his new colleagues, pitfalls to avoid, opportunities to do good. How would he, the famous antiwar radical, be treated by Sacramento’s conventional establishment? They were, after all, conventional politicians, including supporters of the Vietnam War he had opposed, and were still angry over the anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention. Hayden had been a leader in that protest. 

Here’s what happened after he got to Sacramento: While never one of the guys, Hayden compiled an impressive record in 10 years in the California Assembly and eight in the California Senate. He got millions of dollars for his district to improve the quality of Santa Monica Bay and rebuild the Santa Monica and Malibu piers. He helped delay University of California and Cal State University tuition increases. He led efforts that extended laws against sexual harassment. Also included in a long list of legislation was his Hayden Act, which extended the time shelters must keep abandoned animals alive, giving volunteers more time to find them homes. 

I got to know him best when he was involved in the frustrating work of local politics. I followed him around during his losing campaign for Los Angeles mayor in 1997. As a state senator, he campaigned through neighborhoods in an easy, relaxed manner, making some of his more controversial proposals sound palatable. Even when meeting with the editors of the Los Angeles Times, he passed the test of convincing his stuffy listeners that he wasn’t a threat to them and the city. 

These were mild efforts compared to his greatest Los Angeles crusade, taking up the cause of Salvadoran gang members in the abysmally crowded slums of a part of the city known as Pico-Union. The violent gangs were being targeted by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division anti-gang officers, some of whom turned out to be violent and crooked themselves. The public strongly supported the police, and anyone standing up for gang members was scorned and headed for political death. 

Caught up in all this was a Salvadoran gang member, Alex Sanchez, who served time in juvenile camps and state prisons for crimes including car theft and possession of weapons. A community leader, he was also trying to negotiate peace between rival gangs. It was clear, Hayden felt, that the Rampart gang cops and the immigration service disapproved of Sanchez’s leadership ability and peacemaking and were cooperating illegally to send him back to bloody El Salvador. 

The Times was investigating the Rampart cops intensely. Hayden wanted us to also dig into the Sanchez case. By then, defense of Sanchez had become a movement extending beyond Pico-Union.

Hayden came to the paper with a few other Sanchez supporters to meet with me and other editors. He recalled our meeting in his book “Street Wars.” Hayden said we editors “sat sphinxlike listening to our tale. I wondered if we were becoming too emotional, too conspiratorial.” But Hayden convinced us, and we quickly put reporters on the Sanchez story. 

Police continued their efforts to get rid of Sanchez. He was charged in 2009 with taking part in a 2006 gang murder. At this point, Sanchez was a well-respected leader in efforts to stop gang violence. It took three more years, but in 2012, charges were dropped in what prosecutors admitted was a flawed case. 

This was not a cause that attracted national attention. Helping the immigrant community organize was tough, gritty work for Hayden. It took him to Central America on an arduous trip to meet gang members in their homelands, where they had been deported, visiting the prisons where many of them were kept. 

In recent years, his health was failing. He looked older and thinner. But he persevered, just as he had during the Vietnam War protest era and the civil rights movement. That activism and his leadership in the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests helped shape national politics.

But Tom Hayden will also be remembered for his other, less well-known accomplishments -- by many in the still crowded Pico-Union slums, by swimmers and surfers at the Santa Monica beach and in shelters where volunteers seek homes for the abandoned animals that his Hayden Act helped save.

(Bill Boyarsky is a columnist for Truthdig, the Jewish Journal, and LA Observed. This piece was posted first at Truthdig.com.) Photo: Steve W. Grayson/AP. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

VOICES--In watching a recent Frontline presentation covering the respective lives of 2016 presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it dawned on me that while voting for Hillary might have reasonably been construed as only just the latest example of my 48 year voting history of either holding my nose and voting for the supposed "lesser of two evils" or alternatively wasting my vote by voting for a Jill Stein-esque candidate, that had objectively no chance of winning. 

Voting for Hillary next month might actually be my best chance of being part of a sea change away from what has been a male chauvinist American politics that Donald Trump's continuing crude comments and candidacy prove is regretably still alive and well. 

In this morality play, Hillary represents the every(wo)man who has had to suffer the humiliation of a lying and philandering husband, who in what would be his new role as "first lady" would now have to live under the same historically humiliating role he and other presidents have put their undervalued wives into in the past. 

It would also serve as a final repudiation of a male chauvinism that Donald Trump is clearly the posterboy for and whose successful candidacy in capturing the Republican presidential nomination shows is still regretably alive and well in too many places in this country. 

The ultimate revenge and substantive 2017 reality of a Hillary presidency is to say that it's no longer business as usual at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Just as Barak Obama's presidency has made one think in a whole new light about what will never again be the "white” house, Hillary Clinton as president will irrevocably challenge and change what has been the negatively stereotypic roles of both president and "first lady.” 

Hopefully many other American societal roles that continue to undervalue women and others at a time when we need the best of all our people if we expect to survive the contradictions that have brought down great societies in the past. 

Be a part of a political sea change. Vote for Bill as ‘first lady.’

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected])

-cw

HULLABALOO--I wrote about some possible secret votes for Salon today:  

One of the emerging themes of the last weeks of the presidential campaign is the resurgence of the right’s “unskewed polls” theory, which holds that when Republicans are behind it’s because the pollsters are sampling the wrong people.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-As we head to the last weeks of the most contentious election cycle in my memory, I’ve come to realize that our choice is much bigger than who will reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Certainly, we need to consider party platforms, candidates’ views on the economy, foreign policy, SCOTUS nominations, immigration, and civil rights. We need to look at which candidate is best qualified to serve as president. 

Perhaps it’s neither irony nor a coincidence that in the first election where a woman is on top of a major party ticket, her opponent has a decades-long history of sexual objectification and attempts to humiliate women. This election is a referendum on feminism and the way we see women in a fast-evolving world. 

For decades, Donald J. Trump has included his “bad boy” objectification of women as part of his brand. He’s made countless guest spots on Howard Stern, where their shtick typically included rating, ranking, and discussing female celebrities in graphic sexual terms. In December 2004, Trump initiated a discussion about then 18-year old Lindsay Lohan that was capped by his observation that “deeply troubled women are the best in bed.” He approved of Stern referring to his daughter Ivanka as “a piece of ass” and jokingly agreed when Stern’s sidekick Robin characterized him as a predator.

Trump shares his ideas about women whether or not he believes the mic is hot. In 1994, he told Primetime Live’s Nancy Collins that “putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing,” blaming the demise of his first marriage to putting wife Ivana in a management position at one of his Atlantic City casinos. 

Three years earlier in May 1991, he was quoted in an Esquire magazine profile about bad press, “You know, it doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass. But she’s got to be young and beautiful.” 

The Republican candidate’s Twitter account has been his arsenal to disparage the looks of any woman who criticizes him, from Arianna Huffington to New York Times columnist Gail Collins, as well as a Who’s Who of celebrities. 

Trump’s surrogates and campaign staff appear on cable news panels and interviews to defend his words as “entertainment” but his words denote his character and he has escalated his M.O. since he first declared his candidacy. Many of us watched Mr. Trump taunt Megyn Kelly when she asked him during a primary debate about his insulting attacks on female celebrities. He’s come to the defense of Roger Ailes and Jeffrey Epstein as “nice guys” and said if a woman is sexually harassed at work, she should find a new job. On abortion, Trump has backpedaled on his statement that any woman seeking abortion should receive “some sort of punishment.” 

By now, we’ve all heard the 2005 tape where Trump (“egged on by the host to say bad dirty words,” per Melania) bragged how his fame allows him to grab women’s vaginas or kiss them without consent. Trump, along with Melania, Rudy Giuliani and other surrogates, have attempted to minimize his words as “locker room talk” or what happens when two teenaged boys get together. 

In a recently shared Entertainment Tonight report from 1992, Trump jokes about a ten-year old girl on the escalator at Trump Tower: “In ten years, I’ll be dating her.” 

As of this article, at least ten women have come forward alleging Trump had touched them without their consent, a list that includes People’s Natasha Stoynoff. Trump has denied all allegations, shouting at his rallies that the women weren’t “hot enough” for him to assault. “Have you seen her? She wouldn’t be my first choice.” 

At the second debate, Secretary Clinton brought up Alicia Machado, the Miss Universe Trump taunted with names and had subjected to a humiliating personal training session in front of members of the press. Mr. Trump’s early morning tweets challenged followers to watch her “sex tape.”

And of course, at the third debate, Trump muttered under his breath, calling Secretary Clinton a “Nasty Woman,” which has become the rallying cry for feminists. 

Secretary Clinton spoke what many of us have been thinking each time Mr. Trump attacks women. “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity, their self-worth and I don’t think there is a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like. So we now know what Donald thinks and what he says and how he acts toward women. That’s who Donald is.” 

We do need to examine the issues and the platforms to determine which candidate we believe aligns with our ideals for our country. That’s the responsibility we all carry as participants in a democracy.

But beyond this, our vote may serve as a strong message to every man who has touched or grabbed us without our consent, to every classmate, teacher, husband, partner, colleague, boss, family member, and stranger who has attempted to humiliate us in order to boost his own ego. Our vote is a message to every man and woman who has downplayed the importance of rape, who has unfairly victim-blamed, and who has referred to aggressive references to sexual assault as “locker room talk” or “boy talk.” Assuming all men are rapists waiting for opportunity is a tremendous insult to men, as well. As Howard Beale screamed in Network (1976), “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” 

Our vote can also deliver the message that women can be intelligent, accomplished, educated, and strong. And maybe one of us can even be the president.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

URBAN PERSPECTIVE-The race for the White House is effectively over. Hillary Clinton will be the 45th president of the U.S. The question now is what can Americans expect from a Clinton White House? She has laid out pages after pages of policy wonk positions on civil and women’s rights, civil liberties, taxes, jobs, the economy, health care, education, military preparedness, and combatting terrorism on her campaign website. Most of them are the almost obligatory positions that Democratic presidential candidates have taken on the big-ticket issues. 

However, it’s one thing to spell out an agenda on paper and another to get any of it through. She’ll almost certainly kick things off by trying to make good on the pledge that she made in a speech at a Michigan auto and aircraft parts manufacturing plant near Detroit in August, 2016. She promised a big spending plan to the tune of nearly $300 billion on a vast array of infrastructure building and repair projects -- roads, bridges, airports schools, sewer systems and so on. The projects would create new jobs for thousands. 

Clinton made it clear that she expects the rich to foot much of the bill by demanding hefty tax hikes on them. She added the final FDR touch to her big spending plan by promising to plop the legislation on Congress’ table within her first 100 days in office. 

Clinton knows full well the perils ahead. The biggest threat is the Congress that she’ll have to go to with her big spending package. A GOP-controlled Congress will be as hostile to her big budget and tax increases as it was to Obama’s. 

With a big White House win, Clinton is on far more solid ground when she tries to follow through with the pledge. This will give her the breathing space needed to get parts of her jobs, education, health care, and infrastructure overhaul programs through. 

A Democratic take-back of the Senate is absolutely a must be when it comes to the Supreme Court. Arizona Senator John McCain has openly saber rattled for the GOP to block any Clinton high court pick. Clinton almost certainly will have the chance to pick one, two, or even three more justices to the bench. The judges she will choose will be in the mold of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. They will not be radical ideologues of the left. They will be judges with long standing court experience, solid legal credentials, and the highest ratings from the ABA and other legal groups. They will deliver safe and predictable votes on everything from women’s and civil rights to stemming environmental abuses.

Clinton can’t and won’t try to avoid the problem that has been perennially the single biggest tormenting lightening rod for black-white discord, namely, wanton police violence against blacks and minorities, and the astronomical numbers of blacks in America’s jails and prisons.

Her Oval Office to-do list is a mix of old and new proposals on police and criminal justice reform. They will meet with a wall of intense opposition, stonewalling or disregard by conservative Democrats and GOP congresspersons and state legislators, police and prison unions, and victim rights groups. To get one or more of her justice initiatives through Congress she’ll need a lot of help from Democrats within and without Capitol Hill. She’ll get lots of help here from civil rights groups and criminal justice reformers. 

Clinton’s policies on foreign affairs, military security, the fight against terrorism and checking Iran’s nuclear ambition, will be more muscular than Obama’s. She won’t send in troops to Syria. But she’ll be tough on sanctions, and enforcing a no-fly zone there. She will back with weapons and logistical support any faction with a pronounced tilt toward the U.S. that purports to be any kind of real alternative to ISIS and the Assad regime. 

She’ll rigorously monitor Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal, cut not a penny from U.S. military financial backing to Israel, while making the obligatory nod on paper to a Palestinian state. She will take the hardest of hard lines on Russia’s saber rattling in Eastern Europe and other hot spots. But this is still a far cry from a big ramp up in the U.S. military presence in Iraq or Afghanistan as Obama did. 

President Clinton will be pulled and tugged at by corporate and defense industry lobbyists, the oil and nuclear power industry, government regulators, conservative family values groups, conservative GOP senators and house members, foreign diplomats and leaders, and in turn, LGBT, women, civil rights and liberties, and environmental watchdog groups. They all have their priorities and agendas and will vie to get either White House support for their pet legislation, or to kill or cripple legislation that threatens their interests. 

Clinton’s entire political history, if anything, has shown that she will keep a firm, cautious and conciliatory eye on American public opinion when it comes to making policy decisions and determining priorities. That’s what presidents, all presidents, must do and President Clinton will be no different.

(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of What We Can Expect from President Hillary Clinton (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network. Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY--For progressives, the gloating is about to begin. The Washington Monthly proclaims that we are on the cusp of a “second progressive era,” where the technocratic “new class” overcomes a Republican Party reduced to “know-nothing madness.”

To be sure, Trump himself proved a mean-spirited and ultimately ineffective political vessel. But the forces that he aroused will outlive him and could get stronger in the future. In this respect Trump may reprise the role played another intemperate figure, the late Senator Barry Goldwater. Like Trump, Goldwater openly spurned political consensus, opposing everything from civil rights and Medicare to détente. His defeat led to huge losses at the congressional level, as could indeed occur this year as well.

Goldwater might have failed in 1964, but his defeat did not augur a second New Deal, as some, including President Lyndon Johnson, may have hoped. Instead, his campaign set the stage for something of a right-wing resurgence that defined American politics until the election of President Obama. Pushing the deep South into the GOP, Goldwater created the “Southern strategy” that in 1968 helped elect Richard Nixon; this was followed in 1980 by the victory of Goldwater acolyte Ronald Reagan.

History could repeat itself after this fall’s disaster. People who wrote off the GOP in 1964 soon became victims of their own hubris, believing they could extend the welfare state and the federal government without limits and, as it turned out, without broad popular support. In this notion they were sustained by the even then liberally oriented media and a wide section of the “respectable” business community.

Three decades later a similar constellation of forces —- Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street—have locked in behind Hillary Clinton. But it is the transformation of the media itself both more ideologically uniform and concentrated more than ever on the true-blue coasts, that threatens to exacerbate Progressive Triumphalism. In this election, notes Carl Cannon, no Trump fan himself, coverage has become so utterly partisan that “the 2016 election will be remembered as one in which much of the mainstream media all but admitted aligning itself with the Democratic Party.”

 Progressive Triumphalism may lead the Clintonites to believe her election represented not just a rejection of the unique horribleness of Trump, but proof of wide support for their favored progressive agenda. Yet in reality, modern progressivism faces significant cultural, geographic, economic and demographic headwinds that will not ease once the New York poseur dispatched.

Successful modern Democratic candidates, including President Obama and former President Clinton, generally avoid openly embracing an ever bigger federal government. Obama, of course, proved a centralizer par excellence, but he did it stealthily and, for the most part, without the approval of Congress. This allowed him to take some bold actions, but limited the ability to “transform” the country into some variant of European welfare, crony capitalist state.

Hillary Clinton lacks both Obama’s rhetorical skills and her erstwhile husband’s political ones. Her entire approach in the campaign has been based on creating an ever more intrusive and ever larger federal government. Even during Bill Clinton’s reign, she was known to be the most enthusiastic supporter of governmental regulation, and it’s unlikely that, approaching 70, she will change her approach. It seems almost certain, for example, that she will push HUD and the EPA to reshape local communities in ways pleasing to the bureaucracy.

Yet most Americans do not seem to want a bigger state to interfere with their daily life. A solid majority—some 54 percent—recently told Gallup they favor a less intrusive federal government, compared to only 41 percent who want a more activist Washington. The federal government is now regarded by half of all Americans, according to another poll by Gallup, as “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003 only 30 percent of Americans felt that way.

Nor is this trend likely to fade with time. Millennials may be liberal on issues like immigration and gay marriage, but are not generally fans of centralization, fewer than one-third favor federal solutions over locally based ones. 

Due largely to Trump’s awful persona, Hillary likely will get some wins in “flyover country,” the vast territory that stretches from the Appalachians to the coastal ranges. In certain areas with strong sense of traditional morality, such as in Germanic Wisconsin and parts of Michigan, notes Mike Barone, Trump’s lewdness and celebrity-mania proved in the primaries incompatible with even conservative small town and rural sensibilities, more so in fact than in the cosmopolitan cores, where sexual obsessions are more celebrated than denounced.

Yet Trump’s strongest states, with some exceptions, remain in the country’s mid-section; he still clings to leads in most of the Intermountain West, Texas, the mid-south and the Great Plains. He is still killing it in West Virginia. This edge extends beyond a preponderance of “deplorables” and what Bubba himself has referred to as “your standard redneck.”

Exacerbating this cultural and class discussion is the growing division between the coastal and interior economies. Essentially, as I have argued elsewhere, the country is split fundamentally by how regions makes money. The heartland regions generally thrive by producing and transporting “stuff”—food, energy, manufactured goods —while the Democrats do best where the economy revolves around images, media, financial engineering and tourism.

Energy is the issue that most separates the heartland from the coasts. The increasingly radical calls for “decarbonization” by leading Democrats spell the loss of jobs throughout the heartland, either directly by attacking fossil fuels or by boosting energy costs. Since 2010, the energy boom has helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the heartland, many of them in manufacturing. At the same time, most big city Democratic strongholds continued to deindustrialize and shed factory employment. No surprise then that the increasingly anti-carbon Democrats control just one legislature, Illinois, outside the Northeast and the West Coast.

Trump’s romp through the primaries, like that of Bernie Sanders, rode on the perceived relative decline of the country’s middle and working classes. For all her well-calculated programmatic appeals, Hillary Clinton emerged as the willing candidate of the ruling economic oligarchy, something made more painfully obvious from the recent WikiLeaks tapes. Her likely approach to the economy, more of the same, is no doubt attractive to the Wall Street investment banks, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, renewable energy providers and inner city real estate speculators who have thrived under Obama.

Yet more of the same seems unlikely to reverse income stagnation, as exemplified by the huge reserve army of unemployed, many of them middle aged men, outside the labor force. The fact remains that Obama’s vaunted “era of hope and change,” as liberal journalist Thomas Frank has noted, has not brought much positive improvement for the middle class or historically disadvantaged minorities.

The notion that free trade and illegal immigration have harmed the prospects for millions of Americans will continue to gain adherents with many middle and working class voters—particularly in the heartland. We are likely to hear this appeal again in the future. If the GOP could find a better, less divisive face for their policies, a Reagan rather than a Goldwater, this working-class base could be expanded enough to overcome the progressive tide as early as 2018.

The one place where the progressives seem to have won most handily is on issues of culture. Virtually the entire entertainment, fashion, and food establishments now openly allied with the left; the culture of luxury, expressed in the page of The New York Times, has found its political voice by identifying with such issues as gay rights, transgender bathrooms , abortion and, to some extent, Black Lives Matter. In contrast, the Republicans cultural constituency has devolved to a bunch of country music crooners, open cultural reactionaries and, yes, a revolting collection of racist and misogynist “deplorables.”

Yet perhaps nowhere is the danger of Progressive Triumphalism more acute. Despite the cultural progressive embrace of the notion that more diversity is always good, the reality is that our racial divide remains stark and is arguably getting worse. As for immigration, polls say that more people want to decrease not just the undocumented but even legal immigration than increase it.

And then there’s the mountain rebellion against political correctness. Relative few Americans have much patience with such things as “micro-aggressions,” “safe spaces,” the generally anti-American tone of history instruction whose adherents are largely concentrated in the media and college campuses. Fewer still would endorse the anti-police agitation now sweeping progressive circles. For some, voting for Trump represents the opportunity to extend a “middle finger” to the ruling elites of both parties.

Yet Trump’s appeal also represented something of a poke in the eye for the old-school religious right; Trump has actually helped the GOP by embracing openly gay figures like Peter Thiel. He may have caused many bad things, but the New Yorker succeeded, as no Republican in a generation, in making the holy rollers largely irrelevant.

The dangers for the Democrats lie in going too far in their secularism. As recent emails hacked by WikiLeaks have demonstrated, there is widespread contempt in left circles for most organized religion, most importantly for the moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, even under a more progressive Pope. Some Democrats may argue that irreligiosity will remain “in” among millennials. Yet this was also said about boomers and turned out to be wrong. Few sociologists in the 1970s would have expected a religious revival that arose in the next decade.

Simply put, millennials’ economic and cultural views could shift, as they become somewhat less “idealistic” and more concerned with buying homes and raising children. They could shift more the center and right, much as Baby Boomers have done.

No matter what happens this year, the battle for America’s political soul is not remotely over. Trump may fade into deserved ignominy and hopefully obscurity, but his nationalist and populist message will not fade with him as long as concerns over jobs, America’s role in the world, and disdain for political correctness remain. If Hillary and her supporters over-shoot their nonexistent mandate and try to impose their whole agenda before achieving a supportable consensus, American politics could well end up going in directions that the progressives, and their media claque, might either not anticipate or much like.

(Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org. This column was posted most recently at New Geography.)

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GELFAND’S WORLD--I am not by birth or upbringing a fan of the Chicago Cubs. But I know a few. For them, it's been a life of tragedy. Some of them have moved here to Los Angeles and have found it extremely odd that local baseball teams can win pennants and even on occasion the World Series. They don't know how to react or what to say. For the native Chicagoan, doom is the normal order of the universe, at least when it comes to National League baseball. Come to think of it, it's also pretty much the case for American League baseball, but White Sox fans (World Series victories in 1906, 1917, and then nothing until 2005), haven't had the kind of public relations that the Cubs (aka "cubbies") had. 

That's because the Cubs had Mike Royko as a fan and observer. It didn't hurt that Mike Royko was the Vin Scully of newspaper columnists, albeit a sarcastic and argumentative version. As an example of his 7500 published columns, here is one that got a lot of play at the time, a wry take on the corporate MBA takeover of once family organizations. Royko spun out newspaper columns the way Scully spun out play calling, with the right train of words and without shouting. 

Royko wrote for a series of Chicago newspapers. What the Sun Times and the Tribune had in common was a restaurant called the Billy Goat Tavern, known colloquially as Billy Goat's. It is in an odd location, underneath Michigan Avenue. Billy Goat's is a long flight of stairs down from the avenue, but an even longer way above the Chicago River. That's the way the river crossing was designed, with the Wrigley building set high above the water, back along the northern end of the bridge, with Chicago's version of Rodeo Drive to the north, and with a lower level and its own road in proximity to the newsrooms of the day, back when newspapers were flourishing. And along that road, there is the tavern. It was a hangout for writers and printers and typesetters back in the days before automation. 

Billy Goat's was memorialized by comedian John Belushi in the early days of Saturday Night Live. On the show, it was the fictional place made famous by the words "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger." The phrase wasn't a Belushi invention, but was taken from the real life lunch counter. 

In the next few days, sports fans will be hearing about Billy Goat's curse ad infinitum. Billy Sianis was a Greek immigrant to Chicago who founded the tavern. The story goes that Sianis went to the 1945 World Series at Wrigley, taking his pet goat with him. The goat was ejected, ostensibly for smelling like a goat, and Sianis was annoyed. He cast a curse of Wagnerian proportions on the Cubs, and they never got to another World Series ever again, throughout the remainder of the millennium. 

Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to rid the Cubs of the curse, but to no avail. You have to understand that curses of this magnitude are hard to abolish. After all, in Richard Wagner's ring cycle, ridding the world of its curse required the death of the gods and the destruction of Valhalla. Now that was a curse. 

As to Billy Goat's curse, I have a theory, as Royko had his. My theory goes like this: Just like Purdue University went to the Rose Bowl once in the preceding millennium and then once more in the current millennium, the Cubs are absolved of the curse for at least one World Series appearance between now and the year 3000. Maybe even a couple more. The millennium broke curses, at least on midwestern sports teams. 

Royko had a different slant, being a Chicago native, friend and patron of the tavern and its Sianis owners, and a deep social observer. In his very last column (March 21, 1997), just before succumbing to a massive stroke at a relatively young age, Royko wrote a piece titled, It was Wrigley, not some goat, who cursed the Cubs. As Royko explained, the Cubs went through World War II with a team populated by players who were rejected by the army. They were good enough to get into the 1945 World Series because most of the other teams had lost a substantial amount of talent to the armed services. After the war, the other teams brought back the talent and Wrigley kept his team of 4F's. As Royko explained, the Cubs could have beefed up their postwar lineup by following in the footsteps of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had desegregated baseball in 1947. 

Wrigley wouldn't do that, and the very white Cubs floundered for a few more decades. (It's a story not unlike that of the Boston Red Sox, who continued to lose under racist ownership throughout much of the modern era.) 

Times have changed, and Chicago baseball is now competing on a more even level. It's been a while since the Cubs won a World Series -- it was last done in 1908 -- and I don't have enough fingers and toes to count off the time lapse. Back in 1908, the movie capitals of the world were New York, Paris, and London, and even the existence of Hollywood was known to only some. There were a few cars at the time, and there were steam powered locomotives. Radio had been invented, but it was dots and dashes, and ships at sea communicated by Morse Code. There were a few airplanes, mostly crafted of wood and canvas, and the Wright brothers went public with an airplane that could carry a passenger.  

And that's the last time the Cubs won a World Series. 

So here's to the Chicago northside, to Steppenwolf Theater and the Second City, to the Parthenon restaurant and the Lyric Opera, and to a World Series victory in this, the new millennium. 

Epitaph 

Tom Hayden died on Sunday. He personified one wing of 1960s youth radicalism which he turned into a productive career in California politics and later into political education. There will be long articles written about him. Those who had a chance to chat with him at Democratic Party events will remember his remarkable wit.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw

GOD BLESS OUR INDIRECT DEMOCRACY--Suppose we ask all Americans to vote on whether anyone whose first name starts with the letter “A” should pay an extra tax, giving everyone else a tax break. The appalling measure would probably pass. 

From the perspective of us A-listers (sorry, couldn’t resist), that would amount to a classic case of the kind of “tyranny of the majority” our Founding Fathers were so eager to avoid, illustrating why certain filters, or brakes, on direct democracy are desirable. The idea was that people shouldn’t legislate themselves, but instead leave that up to their representatives. 

And even if the people’s representatives get carried away, our political system has other checks and balances to insulate it from too much democracy: Congress itself is split into two bodies; unelected judges protect the Constitution from lawmakers; our nation’s monetary policy is set by an “independent” (undemocratic, that is) Federal Reserve Board. We’ve also developed a stable of technocratic agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to govern areas of American life at a dotted-line remove from the democratic process.

All these checks on democracy, together, constitute the genius of American democracy. We pride ourselves on our freedom to do as we damned please, but at the same time we’ve locked away all the chocolate and given the key to a friend, and warned him not to listen to us if we call to ask for it urgently late some night. Of course we then complain about how the system doesn’t work, about how we can’t binge on chocolate whenever we want. 

Such complaints are the fuel of the term “populism.” The word wasn’t current in the era of the Founders, and it remains vaguely defined in ours, but it’s precisely what our republic’s designers were intent on protecting against: The danger that over-indulging majority passions could overwhelm and subvert the system at any given moment. 

This is the election year of mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore populism (to cite the Howard Beale character from the classic Network movie), with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump railing against how bankers, Washington, the Federal Reserve, foreigners, and conspiring elites are holding back “the people.” Those are familiar rants, yet, there is something novel about the threat posed by today’s populism: The real threat nowadays is a potential tyranny of an agitated minority, more so than a potential tyranny of the majority. 

The two dangers are easy to confuse because agitated minorities can look very much like a majority now that they can mobilize via once unimaginable communications technology and dominate wall-to-wall cable TV news coverage. Who knows how far William Jennings Bryan or Eugene V. Debs would have gotten with a Twitter following, a YouTube channel, and the ability to call into CNN? 

Let’s tweak our imagined tax referendum to illustrate what a tyranny of the minority looks like. Suppose that instead of asking Americans whether people whose first name starts with an A should pay more taxes, we ask them to vote on whether A-listers should be exempted from ever again having to pay any taxes. 

This measure, if uncoupled from any other balloting in a low-turnout vote, might conceivably pass. Why? Because we A-listers would turn out to vote in droves, and most everyone else would have little incentive to vote, or to speak out against the measure. 

The real threat nowadays is a potential tyranny of an agitated minority, more so than a potential tyranny of the majority. 

It’s an extreme hypothetical, but too much of American political life has become vulnerable to hijacking by intensely motivated and agitated minorities. It’s why teachers unions can control school board elections, why the gun lobby can punch above its weight in Washington, and why we haven’t fixed our broken immigration system. 

The danger of not appreciating the threat posed by an extremely motivated minority, as opposed to an untrammeled majority, is that our society is enabling the former threat with its overzealous vigilance against the latter. So, for instance, while a bicameral Congress and the separation of powers that allots the executive a veto and the courts judicial review are good brakes on majority rule, the Senate’s filibuster rules and the so-called “Hastert Rule” observed by House Republicans go too far in empowering agitating minorities. 

The Senate’s longtime filibuster rules were infamous in delaying the adoption of needed civil rights in the 20th century, long after a majority of Americans were ready to go along. This was a case of an aggrieved minority—white Southern Democrats—subverting the will of the majority to protect said minority. 

The Hastert Rule in the House is a more recent, and less formalized, tradition in the House of Representatives that has similarly served to block immigration reform favored by a majority of Americans, and by a majority of their representatives in Congress. The policy, enunciated by Dennis Hastert when he was the Republican Speaker of the House (long before he was revealed to be a child molester), and loosely followed by some predecessors and successors, is that proposed legislation should not be brought for a vote on the floor of the House unless it is supported by a majority of the party’s own caucus. 

As speaker in recent years, John Boehner set aside the rule at key times to allow for bipartisan votes to keep the government open when some far-right Republicans were threatening to close it down, and that’s one reason Mr. Boehner is no longer in office. But he did not allow the House to vote on a sensible immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in 2013, which would have legalized the status of the millions of undocumented workers in this country. The bill could have passed in the House with the support of Democrats and more moderate Republicans (as it did in the Senate), but the Hastert Rule stood in the way. 

The Founding Fathers intended for both chambers of the Congress, as well as the president and the judiciary, to all wrestle with thorny issues like immigration—balancing the will of the people with the Constitution. It’s a perversion of their design for one faction within the House to hijack the process, and allow for an agitated minority of anti-immigration nativists to become the arbiters of what constitutes a proposal worth voting on. 

Immigration and international trade feature prominently in this election cycle’s populist discourse, but it’s inaccurate to portray these issues, as the media often does, as pitting elites against “the people.” Opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans view trade in a positive light and favor immigration reform along the lines of what the Senate passed three years ago (as opposed to mass deportations and a wall). It’s easy to lose track of that reality, though, given the asymmetry of passion and interest between supporters and opponents of immigration and free trade. 

Richard Nixon’s odes to the concept of a “silent majority,” whose support he cherished, were often mocked by pundits in his day but it’s a concept worth revisiting. Today there is a silent majority that thinks it’d be insane to deport millions of hard-working, law-abiding immigrant workers. But, like many other insane ideas out there, this one isn’t going to keep most people from going about their daily business. It’s the supporters of the insanity who likely consider immigration THE ISSUE of our times, and can be found screaming at rallies and pestering their members of Congress, threatening to have them “primaried” if they work with Democrats on the issue. 

The dangers posed by agitated minorities are not merely an American phenomenon. They are wreaking greater havoc in other western democracies, like Colombia and Britain, that have ill-advisedly put big questions to a public vote in 2016. Elites in London and Bogotá were seeking additional legitimacy for their decisions to stay in the European Union and reach a final peace settlement with a vanquished narco-insurgency by engaging their silent majorities in the process. In the end, sizable impassioned minorities prevailed.

Trump’s populist campaign narrative of elites pitted against “the people” is off. Today’s politics is pitting elites and a silent (or quieter) majority against a loud, angry, mobilized faction of people susceptible to a populist pitch. The question on November 8 is whether the silent majority makes itself heard, or whether it will cede the electoral battleground to the more clamorous minority.

(Andrés Martinez is the executive editor of Zócalo Public Square. Primary Editor: Joe Mathews. Secondary Editor: Sara Catania. Photo by Brynn Anderson/Associated Press.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.)

GELFAND’S WORLD--This week, the nation's press and pundits are all aflutter about Donald Trump's response to a question that came up in Wednesday's third and final presidential debate. Trump refused to agree to accept the results of the November 8 election. His answer is being quoted by every commentator: "I will look at it at the time," but it might just as well have been, "I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it." My view is that the editorial writers are taking a rather pessimistic view of the American people in treating this one remark as the most newsworthy event of the evening. 

First of all, let's make the point that a Trump loss without a formal concession speech would not be the worst outcome ever for an American presidential election. Consider one previous election back in the 1860s, when the state of South Carolina attacked a federal fortification and seceded from the United States. They didn't even wait until Lincoln's inauguration. 

So when Trump loses, it hardly matters whether he makes a gracious concession speech, engages in fiery rhetoric, or says nothing at all. It's not going to lead to a civil war. The fiery rhetoric would actually be better for his reputation, because his failure to say anything would just mark him as a pouting loser. 

Perhaps I'm being a little naive here, but I took Trump's response to be an attempt at his Trumpian form of standup comedy. His follow up line, "I will keep you in suspense," made that point. What he may have been trying to say in effect was that we are all getting a little tired of the pomposity of debate moderators, so take this question and shove it. 

Of course turning the presidential election into one big joke is not what normal people expect, but it's in line with the entire Trump campaign. I suspect that the long-term interpretation of that response eventually will be that Trump came unprepared for this question -- unprepared in the deeper political sense -- just as he has been unprepared on so many other topics. 

This is my day to be optimistic about American democracy (fueled in part by the substantial repudiation of Trump's answer by so many well known conservatives). Assuming Hillary Clinton wins, which is becoming ever more likely, the majority of the American people will accept the result as legitimate. It's true that some will refuse to accept the result, but that would be the case whether Trump concedes or not. Most of us will tune in to the inauguration on January 20 and watch the peaceful transfer of power. Those who have some grasp of world history (and particularly European history) will be thankful. 

As to the debate itself, a few points are worth making. Let's start with the lesson of Richard Nixon and John Kennedy from their initial debate back in 1960. Historians love to tell us that people who heard the presidential debate on the radio either called it a draw or felt that Nixon won marginally. But television viewers got a favorable view of John Kennedy and an unflattering view of Nixon when picture was added to sound.  

Somehow, Donald Trump didn't get the memo. In contrast to Hillary Clinton's poise, he couldn't keep himself from twitching, frowning, smirking, and interrupting. He did a little better job of holding back on the interruptions during the first half hour or so, where he appeared to be scripted and rehearsed. His answers were plainly arguable from the intellectual standpoint, but he had his words in grammatical order and his attacks followed one another in some semblance of structure. 

In this, he seemed to have help from the moderator, who has paradoxically been praised for his performance in a lot of places. It's true that he asked real questions and largely stayed away from Bill Clinton's sex life, but his economic biases came through. Particularly when he brought up the national debt, his question, you might say, was questionable. One commentator on the Daily Kos website who writes under the pseudonym dcg2 summed up the moderator's approach deftly.  The moderator took it as a given that a mounting national debt is a bad thing, even though some serious economists point out that we don't, at this time, have an economic problem based on the debt. 

And yes, it's true that the questions thrown at the candidates were filtered through the conservative perspective, without raising real world worries such as climate change or the continuing loss of union power. This had two opposing effects, one negative and one positive. The negative effect was to force the more liberal candidate to recite a few conservative platitudes such as creating a deficit-free federal budget. The more positive side is that it allowed Hillary Clinton to present the liberal argument on topics such as Planned Parenthood, Roe vs. Wade, and social security, all without some obnoxious talk show host constantly interrupting her. There are not all that many opportunities for the liberal side to tell its story to conservative viewers, and Hillary made use of this one.

Speaking of interruptions, the Donald managed to hold himself in check for that first half hour or so. Perhaps he shouldn't have agreed to participate in 90 minute debates, because he obviously cannot maintain self control for more than a few moments. His style of interrupting with the word "wrong" escalated through the evening, leading to his most serious mistake of the evening, his interruption with the phrase, "Such a nasty woman." Perhaps Trump was trying to play to those who have been propagandized against the Clintons for decades, but the remark will reverberate against him for the remainder of the campaign. 

After the debate, I chatted with a few people to get their take. One view struck me as perspicacious: Trump comes across as somebody who is used to talking to underlings. In that context, he can interrupt, insult, and be dead wrong, and he doesn't expect to be corrected. In short, he expects to be treated as the boss. Some of this came out earlier in the campaign, when he complained about debate moderators such as Megyn Kelly. He expects subservience from most everyone, and goes ballistic when he doesn't get it. 

In the world of the corporate board meeting, the CEO presides not as an equal, but literally as the boss. There is a big contrast in candidate debates, where no candidate has the right to rule over the others. Trump understands this at some intellectual level, but his lifelong habits, now ingrained as instincts, keep pushing him towards the boss role. He appears unable to help himself, and keeps succumbing to his instincts by making irritating interruptions. 

Some of the deeper thinking pundits are beginning to understand that Hillary Clinton is not just the passive beneficiary of Trump's ineptitude. She, along with her otherwise invisible campaign staff, have played Trump like a violin, and he has cooperated in his own downfall. 

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

PUFFED UP POLITICS-In a few more weeks, on the heels of a final Presidential decision by voters, and after the punditry and handwringing recedes, we may get a breather from the spew that has shredded this election season’s political discourse. This is neither the first nor last battering that will be visited on democracy’s dented carapace, but rather another in a long series of assaults born of ignorance, profit-seeking, appeals to outrage and delight in cheap and cheesy titillation. 

Those who pitch their political wares from such a low view of the world are regrettable, but expected features of the human landscape. They often rise higher than their deserved station on the back of moxie, materialism, vanity, and cultural division. This election cycle we have experienced a species of this parasitic ilk that personifies incivility. We’ve borne witness to a kind of acting out that sunders civil discourse and rejects a shared sense of mutuality and reciprocity. Instead of a striving vision for a common future, we’ve received a “gonna-tell-it-like-is” tough-guy, sneering and dog-whistling to the very darkest beliefs and urges in those who see themselves as losing out to everyone else. 

Highly visible figures, especially those inclined to preen in their own perceived exceptionalism, tacitly approve and effectively uncork ideas and actions in people who occupy the more impulsive margins of society. They stir the latent anger, rage and pent-up hatreds of society's discontents, too often at the peril of people who prefer to behave – and live alongside others who behave – in more civilized and tolerant ways.  

Community grows at the epicenters of tolerance and civility. Chaos threatens when those willing to pull the strings of a distorted public imagination grant their adherents permission to act in concert with base, even violent instincts, no matter the cost or collateral damage to others. There's nothing inherently wrong with alternative views, outright protest, angry demonstration, competing ideologies, and even nonviolent rebellion that challenges the status quo. We see these in all forms and permutations, often contained in the places where American civil society and nonprofit organizations offer a social safety valve to blow off steam and channel discontent productively. Problems arise, however, when putative leaders ignite righteous passions and then turn their backs on or disavow responsibility for the consequences of the rebellion they incite.  

Unbound, the “tell it like it is” mantra becomes “do as you please, it’s okay.” That’s when people end up getting wounded, further disaffected or abandoned. Surely a large part of the American electorate, called to take up electoral arms, will suffer political abandonment in the months and years ahead. Those who have chanted racist, sexist, anti-immigrant and other vicious incantations will resort to simmering and stewing, some feeling validated enough by their so-called democratic engagement to abuse and damage civility even more. Others will see loyalty and devotion rewarded by their crass commodification as the next audience for a low-brow television series or as customers for more worthless crap hocked their way. 

The degree of abuse visited on American democracy this election season has left civility punched in the face and momentarily knocked senseless on the street. We’re owed a refund, I believe, but it’s one we are never likely to collect because professed leaders obsessed with merely their own grasping, groping needs think not a jot about what happens next, nor do they care for the collective who.  

It is up to those who care about strengthening democracy to see demagoguery for what it is, to name it, to call it out and, in so doing, to sustain the vigilance and struggle that counters chaos and strives toward civil society. 

(Paul Vandeventer is President and CEO of Community Partners.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.)