Yes There IS--Life After Trump

Time to close this blog. Not because the answer to 'What's left?' is 'Nothing whatsoever'--though some mornings it feels that way. There's plenty to work from (details to follow), but we're clearly in uncharted waters with the Trump presidency. So I need to rethink my approach before resuming.

Meanwhile, what is left after this disastrous election?

• First, some perspective. Clinton did after all win the popular vote by a lot (2.5 million? The number keeps going up), and though she hardly ran a 'Left' campaign, that's a lot of folks who didn't want Trump. They're still out there, many of them waiting to catch the next progressive wave.
• Furthermore, the primaries showed a startling turn to a genuinely Left Bernie Sanders, who would have won a more open primary, and buried Trump in the general. A lot of the populist anger out there is left-leaning, or at least amenable to arguments about reducing inequality, using government constructively to reshape labor markets, and building a stronger social safety net. Sanders is very much still standing, and his Our Revolution movement is too.
• Even more in view, as the apparent leader of a 'wing' of progressive senators, is my own favorite, Elizabeth Warren. I'm ready to sign on to her 2020 campaign (with her reelection in 2018 as an appetizer). Watching  her (with Sanders, Brown, Merkley, and others) spar with Trump's Deplorables may be one of the few pleasures left in the political sphere for the next few years.
• Another front: I read that President Obama and Eric Holder are intending to work for institutional reform around the question of redistricting after the 2020 census. I don't know what they plan to do, or what can be done, but the debacle of elections where the progressive majority is systematically excluded from power--presidential, congressional, and judicial--has become a demoralizing pattern, thinly disguised by the exceptionalism of Obama. Most of any progressive agenda will depend on a remedy for this intractable problem bequeathed to us by James Madison and brilliantly exploited by our retrograde cousins in the Republican party. This battle must be fought and won.
• Most importantly, there are the grass roots movements, thousands of them gathering up millions of good folks around immigrant rights, energy transformation, civil rights and protections, and all the other movements that will be all the more voluble as Trump and his colleagues put them under siege. 

About that latter group: these activist cadres are the token of something much deeper, and ultimately of the greatest importance. History progresses. It does not run on nostalgia and delusion. The concentrations of Democratic, progressive, diverse, modern, forward-looking, hopeful, often young people, of many colors, preferences, and persuasions, in the metropolitan centers where Obama, Sanders, and even Clinton got the bulk of their votes, is the social reality of our time, and of our future. That's where new enterprises are launched and good jobs created. That's where the formidable difficulties and contradictions of our global, post-industrial society will be addressed and perhaps resolved. That's where our nation will grow into its new identity.

.With the help of an antiquated misallocation of voting power, of skewed and mendacious media and outrageous tactics, of phony promises and blinding glitz, Trump and the Republicans have turned their backward-facing, poorly educated, blinkered minority of voters into a stunning electoral coalition. The implications of that turnabout are hard to predict. They may be sweeping, even catastrophic. But if a democratic system prevails, the progressive social forces I have tried to identify will gain power--the political power that matches their social dominance. Let's hope there is something left of the environment, of our republican institutions, and our diplomatic standing in the world when that moment arrives.

I intend to post here once more, to consider what's left of the Left in Europe. They of course must live with Trump as well, but the specific dynamics of their foundering Union, their rudderless Left parties, the series of elections that may produce results as dismaying as ours ... that's a topic for another post.

And finally, if there's anyone out there reading this, I'd love to hear what you think. Click on the comment button, please, and share a word or two.

Is Our President-Elect a Creepy Clown?

That's one theory. Malicious, mean-spirited, but at base just a clown, an entertainer who lives to arouse the crowd, lives to hear them chant his name. One of the few clues about the texture Trump's presidency will assume is his remark that he wants to have more rallies. That part was fun.

But no, after witnessing his iconoclastic but somehow superb electoral triumph, a person would be rash indeed to underrate Trump or write off his intelligence.  Let's try on another, more serious mask: the authoritarian hyper-president, the one who looks a bit like Mussolini. This Trump might really create that immigrant deportation strike force. He might push his attorney general to pursue Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization. He might dissolve alliances, abrogate treaties, instigate trade wars--all the crazy talk he indulged in at those rallies. Might that  be the real Trump?

Maybe, and those uncertain possibilities are what wake me up in the wee hours these days--Trump really could be that dangerous man with his finger too close to the nuclear codes, or more probably, too close to his Twitter account. And it's not just me--the leaders of our erstwhile allies are clearly waking up with the same anxieties, as Angela Merkel's admonitory letter to Trump makes all too clear.

But there's a third possibility, in its way more worrisome because the most plausible. As I look at the familiar faces of the Republican hierarchy lining up alongside the President-elect--Ryan and McConnell, Gingerich and Giuliani, the many rank-and-filers who came back to him despite all their misgivings--I realize that the control of both houses (and most State Houses), of judicial appointments including the swing vote on the Supreme Court, and most of all, the presidential signing pen will set in motion the biggest reversal of liberalism (and modernity) this country has ever experienced. Trump needs to do very little--there are already suggestions that he will delegate much of this legislative and deregulatory grunt work to Pence. He just has to remove the threat of veto, and the floodgates will open, sweeping away climate and energy measures, workplace protections, financial controls, 1st and 14th Amendment protections ... it's a long list. Angry voters wanted 'change' of a largely unspecified sort. They have put in place the most powerful reactionary assemblage of political power in anyone's living memory. It's not clear Trump intended anything of the sort, but it's pretty clear that the Republican leadership knew exactly what it was doing as it executed its valse hesitante with its nominee. Now the band will really play, and our heads, those of us living comfortably in metropolitan, coastal, post-modern America, will spin. Or roll.

Votin Day Blues

Them Vote for Hill'ry Blues

Goin down to vote for Hill'ry,
Hill'ry Clinton, she's my man.
Goin down to vote for Hill'ry,
Hill'ry Clinton, she's my man.
Anybody trump the racists,
Hill'ry Clinton surely can.

Well it couldn't go no lower,
Any lower an I'd cry.
No it couldn't go no lower,
Any lower fit to die.
When the bastards take it low--oh yes they do--
That's the time for we get high.

Oh, Jill Stein is a truth-teller,
Bernie Sanders, he is too.
Yes, Jill Stein is a truth-teller,
Liz'beth Warren,  she is too.
But when it's time to count the ballots--oh, Lord--
Hill'ry got to make it through.

She got POTUS at the right hand
She got FLOTUS up there too,
She got Jesus an the angels tell me,
Woman, got to vote for you

Down for Hill'ry,
Hill'ry Clinton, she's my man.
Ain't nobody else can trump that Trump--no they can't--
An Trump--he's a dirty low-down cheatin beatin kinda man.

Oh, Lordie, got them vote for Hill'ry blues

Truth to Power

[A few days since my previous post ...] All that hope for a Democratic Congress? Not gone exactly, but fading. Republicans are stubborn bastards, and it seems for the most part they think they get more votes, and hold more seats, by holding their collective nose and staying with their sexual predator/nominee. What an ugly picture! And all that talk about the GOP breaking apart, the first major-party realignment since ... 1932? 1872? 1854? You choose. But it ain't gonna happen.

True, Trump has exposed the faulty connections between a disadvantaged white working class base of social conservatives and a set of fiscal policies determined by an elite crew of plutocrats. But there is nothing new in this, and absent an intolerable blowhard as candidate, it works! Why? Here's my hypothesis:

That magic 40% who would follow Trump right off the cliff? They'd do it again, and again, and not because they're stupid. No, just misinformed. They have been told so many times by their only news sources--Fox News and squawk radio--that Hillary is a she-devil, Obama a Muslim terrorist, climate change a fraud, Mexicans rapists, etc. etc., that they can't see beyond this parallel universe. It has become their reality, and what the rest of us believe is lies. And as long as our balkanized media maintain this split-screen vision--and that could be forever--these low-information voters will vote for ignorance. And despite their better educations and superior information, their elected officials know it. And love it--it makes them so easy to stampede. Unfortunately Trump headed them off the edge of the flat earth, but they'll be more careful next time.

Which doesn't mean that the Democratic majority I envisioned is unobtainable. It just won't be as easy as Trump handing it to us. It will have to be earned, precinct by precinct, district by district, preferably before the next reapportionment of seats after 2020. Democrats--and more specifically Bernie's Our Revolution--will need to do the digging, just as Republicans did some 10 years ago, and lay the foundation for their base. There's room there to build it.

Is There Hope?

Kafka said: "There is hope, infinite hope in the universe--but not for us."

After Friday's disgraceful revelations, Saturday's upheaval, Sunday's debate, there is hope, more than before, that Donald Trump will sink like a rock in these troubled waters. And as Republican party operatives and officials agonize over what looks like his inevitable defeat, some abandoning Trump, others hoping to hold on to his rabid supporters, there is even some hope, more remote but real, that Hillary Clinton will take office with Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress. Unlikely still, perhaps, but no longer a fantasy. But would even that outcome give us hope?

Would President H. Clinton make use of this historic opening to move the country in a progressive direction? In certain ways, yes: she would be likely to break the deadlock in the Supreme Court with a liberal appointee, perhaps adding others within her term, thus preserving gains in LGBTQ rights, protecting Roe v. Wade, and sustaining efforts to preserve minority voting rights, among other pressing issues before the court. She would no doubt reinforce Obama's limited but important executive orders on energy conversion and climate change--the most urgent policy imperative of our time. These are not small matters for hope.

She might also act on the broader agenda sketched out in the Democratic Party platform--shoehorned in by Sanders supporters in some cases--, an agenda that would be dead on arrival at a Republican-controlled Congress. But even if she had a congressional mandate, would Clinton spend capital to implement a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition, expansive wealth taxes, and other elements of a progressive, anti-inequality fiscal program? It would take constant pressure from more progressive agents inside and outside the political establishment, but these things are not inconceivable.

More broadly, will Trump prove to be the last gasp of intolerant, racist, nativist reaction to the transformations at work in American society for more than a generation? I saw a map, produced by Nate Silver and his colleagues, a speculative electoral map of what a real Clinton landslide might look like. The bands of blue stretch from Maine to Florida (possibly skipping over Georgia and So. Carolina but just barely), from upstate New York to Minnesota and Iowa (missing only Indiana), and from Washington state to Colorado, hooking across from California through Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico: a permanent progressive majority. Delusional? Not really, just very, very hopeful.

And what would that large majority consist of? Two rising elements in our population: the metropolitans--modern urban people who accept the new realities of  the LGBT revolution, of new technologies, of essential transformations in energy systems, social systems, wealth distribution--and cosmopolitans--the rising tide of immigrants, Spanish speakers, global citizens, internauts, people whose horizon extends much further than America's. What this electoral map suggests--if not now, soon--is that the majority of Americans dwell in metropolitan areas, along the coasts and borders, where innovation and heterogeneity are increasingly the rule. The remaining red states are clustered in the middle, in the depleted zones of the lower midwest and old South--a dwindling remnant, dangerous as Trump is dangerous, but no longer able to conjure up a national majority.

Is there hope? Possibly, in the short to middle term, if this visionary electoral map produces a workable Democratic administration. Otherwise we will face more legislative paralysis under a mediocre, conservative Clinton restoration--with more, perhaps worse Trumpery to follow.

Why Jill Stein?

In some despair about the general run of the presidential campaign, I happened to visit the website of Green Party candidate (and old acquaintance) Jill Stein, where I found her platform (here). It was a very different experience from any other in this campaign season so far. Even Bernie Sanders's heartfelt exhortations didn't come close. What I found was (as I wrote on the site) "a rather precise description of the world I would like to live in, and would like my children and their children to inherit." It begins with a whole and comprehensive response to the climate problem and various climate justice solutions, but it doesn't stop there. It considers equity issues in the workplace, and calls for redistribution of wealth and resources at many levels in our society. Though thin on foreign policy, it envisions a major reduction in military expenditures, closures of bases, and a turn to diplomacy in place of warfare. It follows the old injunction to first see the change you want to bring about, and I feel deeply drawn to the vision laid out in this platform document.

Of course this poses a problem. As everyone knows, voting Green will help make Donald Trump our president. As a 2000 Nader voter, I heard this a lot, though I drew several different lessons: first, my Massachusetts electors were instructed to vote for Gore, and did, so my vote added nothing to Bush's (stolen) election. Secondly, the 5% of us in MA who voted Green helped put that party on the ballot, where Stein and others have added considerable wisdom to the public debate in numerous campaigns since then. And third, I was able to feel I had voted for an honorable candidate, rather than that shill Al Gore. Mutatis mutandis, I think these lessons apply pretty directly to the present case.

In particular, as we are still in the public debate stage, I would love to see Stein's platform become part of that discussion. Her ideas are both solid and creative, and deserve a whole lot more attention than they get. (I hope to add a more substantive critique soon.) Speaking of public debate, the Green and Libertarian candidates should all be included in the major televised debates. Why not? They broaden the terms of discussion, represent serious parties and doctrines, and offer real choice in an election where more than half of the voters say they really don't like either of the bigger party candidates. Stein's website contains a petition to include the Greens in the national debates. Go there and sign it. Now.

Of course as we approach November my 2000 experience will cause me to reevaluate. A Florida Nader supporter would have been well advised to make a strategic compromise in the voting booth, and I suppose the same thing could happen in various swing states this year. Then as now, I would have to say, if MA turns out to be a swing state, then there would really be no hope for a Democratic Party victory nationally. But I would take that calculation seriously.

Meanwhile I'm thinking that one of the best ways to expend my progressive political energies between now and November would be to promote Stein and the Greens, to encourage any and all to learn what she stands for, and make clear how far short Clinton's ideas fall. No, Jill probably won't win. Is that all that matters? She is saying what needs to be said, and seeing what so many refuse to see. I would like to hope that her campaign this year, if spread widely enough, will plant the seeds of a real victory--not just a default to some future Clinton--in some later, but (hopefully) not too late election. What other hope is there?

Michel Rocard and the End of Something

Have I got it wrong all these years? Was it always futile to think there was a possible alternative to the global market-based capitalist economy? Did socialism in all its forms die a slow death after 1945, and expire altogether when the Berlin Wall came down?

These thoughts arise with the death over the weekend of Michel Rocard, France's prime minister  from 1988-91, and leader of a third-way current within the Socialist Party. Rocard was by all accounts a profoundly thoughtful, intellectual politician, trained at the highest levels and introduced into France's leadership caste in the 1950s, a protégé of Mendès-France. Never a Communist though initially on the Marxist left wing of the socialist movement, Rocard became convinced in the 1970s that social democracy within the framework of civil society and a market economy was the only viable compromise for achieving the social benefits the socialist movement in its various forms aspired to. Popular, a straight-talking man of great personal integrity, Rocard with his adherents represented  the right wing of the Socialist Party formed under François Mitterand, and he and Mitterand had a famously hostile relationship. Mitterand nonetheless included him in his first cabinet in 1981, and kept him on through the disaster of that first government, where it became clear that Mitterand's classic strategies of nationalization, capital controls, an authentic state socialism, were completely untenable in a globalized economy. Rocard resigned eventually, in protest of Mitterand's dubious maneuver to introduce proportional representation into the Assembly--a move that damaged the conventional right by elevating the National Front (Thanks, Tonton).

After Mitterand won reelection in 1988, he selected the still-popular Rocard to run his government, and Rocard was able to advance a social democratic agenda, including a form of guaranteed minimum income--a modest but significant addition to the social safety net.

With Blair, Clinton, and Schroeder, Rocard can be seen as a late flowering of the socialist movement, or its moment of demise in the triumphalist 'end-of-history' euphoria of the 1990s. Mitterand fired Rocard in 1991 and sabotaged his attempt to run for president in 1995. Rocard remained an elder statesman and inspiration to a younger generation of Socialist Party conservatives, including the current prime minister, Manuel Valls.

I am inclined to view Rocard as the man who led an honorable retreat from the barricades--unlike Blair and Clinton, who crossed lines and fraternized happily with the financiers. Perhaps the very French identity of intellectual--a man of books and learning as neither Clinton nor Blair was, for all their education and intelligence--was lure enough for Rocard to remain honorably in his tradition. But his moment passed, and now he has too. What is left of the French and European socialist movement he lived in and inflected is a sorry spectacle at this moment--shrill, defeatist, rudderless. Rocard may represent the end of that tradition--certainly for the present. I would have placed myself in opposition to his moderating, social democratic ways, but maybe that's because his sense of history was more acute than mine.

After Orlando: Will We Endure?

One knew an event such as the Orlando massacre would happen. That foreknowledge doesn't make it any less sad for the victims, their loved ones, and indeed, all the rest of us who have to suffer the threat of sudden, senseless violence. We all live in a diminished world after Sunday's bloody horror.

We also know that these sorts of attacks will happen again--here, in Europe, in Africa and the mideast, wherever. It is instructive to think that the Orlando massacre was the work of a disaffected Muslim, who felt some sting of prejudice and some pull of jihadism, but also (apparently) a deranged and contorted homosexual, who hated his own attraction to the LGBT culture he attacked.

From this I draw two conclusions: first, there are many complex patterns of causality behind this, and probably every other mass terrorist attack, and we go wrong when we try to assimilate them into a simplistic, linear narrative. And secondly, in such a maelstrom of psychotic crosscurrents, the deranged party will find the means of violent destruction if he chooses: a military-grade automatic weapon if he is American, a homemade bomb if he has internet, a knife if he is Palestinian and thus deprived of every other weapon. These discouraging conclusions are by way of preparation for those recurrences which are now an ineluctable fact of our contemporary, mediated, globalized, highly-powered civilization.

These sober realities do not make it inevitable that our nominally democratic political systems will collapse into fascism--but they give a strong push in that direction. That is a shocking remark--I am shocked to see it on my screen--so let me try to justify it with some very recent particular facts.

• Lies and falsifications are remarkably easy to let loose in our mass media. Thus Donald Trump calls the Orlando shooter an "Afghan" when he is really an American. Restrictions on Muslim immigration would have prevented this tragedy, Trump tells us, but the perpetrator was not an immigrant. "Hundreds of thousands" of such immigrants are admitted "without screening" he tells us, but no, intensive screening can take up to two years. And so on. 
• Such amplified Big Lies threaten to delegitimize our civil order. Trump himself has delegitimized the Obama administration for years by denying Obama's claim to citizenship. Tens of millions of Americans have been persuaded--on the basis of no evidence whatsoever--that he is right. Their visceral hatred of the President, their absolute refusal to acknowledge his presidency, has made the country ungovernable in some key respects.
• And now, for me the most shocking instance of the delegitimizing Big Lie: Trump, speaking as nominal head of the Republican Party, accuses Obama, through a screen of veiled but perfectly legible innuendo, of colluding with global terrorists to bring about attacks such as the Orlando massacre. 

This despicable gutter rhetoric would make the author of Mein Kampf proud. It will only get worse. We are after all still early in Trump's 'campaign'--really less an electoral campaign than a media-platformed March on Rome. Can this juggernaut of poisonous rhetoric, fueled by the hate-filled nightmares of psychotic terrorists world-wide, be averted? Is there room for 'good speech' to overwhelm and neutralize this tainted sort? That will be the challenge of the Clinton campaign, the respectable news media, and all of us as we try to survive this bitter electoral season in a world coarsened by unspeakable violence.

Bern It Forward

That's it. With yesterday's results in California and elsewhere, the Democratic nomination phase of Bernie Sanders's campaign--whatever he and his diehard supporters may say--is over. I voted for him, I like him a lot, but I have to say it: after the primary voters have decisively chosen Clinton, there is no justification for claiming 'foul,' for demanding that unelected super-delegates should switch their support to Sanders, or for bringing any of this adversarial rhetoric to the convention. That part is over.

But the Sanders campaign itself isn't over and musn't end. The issues he has brought to the surface--and some others he hasn't--will not be fully addressed by candidate or president Clinton, and the energy and enthusiasm Sanders has generated needs to move forward in pursuit of those issues. The best way to do this is NOT to argue about procedures in Philadelphia, smear Clinton, and undermine her general election campaign.

What then? On June 17th, 10 days from now, a People's Summit will convene for three days at the McCormick Center in Chicago. (I wish I could be there but I can't.) The goal? To bring together all the activist groups on the Left, including Sanders campaigners, to organize an integrated campaign going forward. There are so many fronts in this campaign: the $15 minimum wage, the incarceration epidemic and brutal law enforcement, the need for free college, health, and secure retirement, immigrant rights, women's pay equity, financial regulation and taxes on speculative profits. And overarching them all, the need to build a new, sustainable, job-rich green economy--fast! All these movements are actively in the field, but separately. The Sanders campaign has brought many of their adherents together around a visible, immediate goal. Now they have to stay together to lobby candidate Clinton, and then put pressure on President Clinton. This fight is just beginning. Integration of these many issues around a singular, holistic vision for a new society is key.

[Parenthetically, one can see that vision, more articulately expressed, in the campaign of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. I only wish it would make tactical sense to vote for her, as she is by far the most articulate and impassioned candidate in the field. Perhaps it will.]

Last night in California Bernie Sanders was not the most gracious loser--but who would be at that moment, after all he's done? I give him maximum credit for his combative determination--but I also hope that after a short respite he will see the futility of pursuing the nomination fight. But what I really hope is that he will lend his enormous charisma and prestige, not just to Clinton's general election campaign, but more especially to the ongoing work of the People's Summit, and the many interlocking struggles to which he has given voice this past year.

The battle is over, Bernie & comrades. The war continues without a pause. If you can make it to Chicago, be there!

Some Missing Scenes from "Hamilton: the Musical"

Scene 1: It's 1782. Hamilton, after recovering at home from his madcap bayonet charge at Yorktown, has left his family in Albany and joined the confederation congress, the new nation's governing body, in New York. Big problems: the confederation owes a lot of money to a lot of people, but can only raise it by begging from the states, which have their own debts to worry about. Member of congress Robert Morris has two problems of his own: first, as committee chair the national debts are his responsibility. Second, most of the war debt is owed to him personally. After reading up on Hume and others on the public finance question, quick-study Hamilton attaches himself to Morris, and they make a plan.

The continental army is encamped up the river at Newburgh, 10,000 men and 500 officers. The war is over but they don't want to go home without being paid. A certified military hero, Hamilton contacts some former comrades and suggests that a threat of mutiny--and a march on the congress--might focus congress's attention. Hamilton through intermediaries suggests to General Gates--who always thought he himself should have been commander in chief in place of Washington--that he might want to direct the mutiny. He then writes to his old friend General Washington, warning him of the army's restiveness. Washington gets it--he hastens to Newburgh, unhorses Gates, and lets the congress know how urgently things stand. Morris then proposes a generous settlement: the officers can be decommissioned with large, fully funded federal notes, along with the national creditors (like himself)--all included in the same blue-ribbon tranche. The private soldiers will be given much smaller sums of non-negotiable paper, which they sell off at large discounts before going home, broke and dispirited, after winning independence ... so that men like Morris and Hamilton can move forward with their plutocracy. Crisis averted, debt refinanced and consolidated to guarantee stronger taxing powers when the new constitution is written.

"We won the war. What was it all for?"

Scene 2: 1794. Hamilton, still secretary of the treasury, has coaxed his program through Congress: federal assumption of national debt, creation of a national bank, and--most delicate--imposition of a domestic tax, the first such, on whiskey distillers. With his passion for detail Hamilton has studied the distilling industry, domestic and foreign, and realizes that consolidation of small independent producers into large industrial ones is in the air. He carefully structures his tax to benefit these large producers, and thus imperil the only cash commodity produced by many western farmers, who lack the means to sell their grain to the eastern market in any form except whiskey.  These westerners, already dubious about the strengths of the new national government, refuse to pay the new tax, organize militias to repel the federal agents, and threaten secession. Hamilton persuades Washington, in his second term as president, to mount up and lead a large army--10,000 strong--over the Alleghenies to put down the rebellion. Hamilton becomes field commander as Washington returns to his executive duties, and leads a brutal campaign, arresting and detaining hundreds of the resistors without any legal or constitutional authority. Many are marched back to Philadelphia, where the courts release them. The battle has been won though: federal authority over local democratic bodies, industrial production over small decentralized homesteads, big finance over the land banks and easy credit that historian William Hogeland calls populist or egalitarian economics.

"Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?"

Taken together, these scenes represent two of Alexander Hamilton's greatest triumphs, moments when his vision of the new nation was built into the foundations of the national economy. Are the repercussions of these scenes with us today? You bet, from the self-dealing legislators and bond-holders to the misguided and ineffectual but fundamentally democratic resistance, both left and right, to our governing system of finance. Just listen to the current presidential campaigns. Hamilton is with us, not the awkward but well-intentioned young striver of the musical, but the steely man on a white horse, the friend of big capital and enemy of popular sovereignty. It's a different drama, and one worth staging.

"What's Your Name, Man?"

I have recently been listening with enormous pleasure to the soundtrack from "Hamilton: An American Musical." I know I'm coming late to the party, but this one is going to be with us for a while--folks in Boston are scheming to get tickets for the traveling show a YEAR or TWO from now--so I think there's still time to get down with it. And it's easy to like. The lyrics, especially the rap ones, are brilliant and irresistible, the sing-through format has unstoppable energy, and the actual story--Hamilton's improbable and tumultuous life--contains the elements of great drama: war and politics, romance and tragedy, larger-than-life characters straight out of history but personalized by the show's pop idioms. Great stuff!

And what a story the work itself is: Lin-Manuel Miranda, 1st generation American, picks up Ron Chernow's doorstop biography of Hamilton by accident, sees immediately not just the dramatic possibilities but the connections to his own Caribbean-American background. Obama feels similar affinities and helps launch the project at a White House soirée. Soon the whole world is rapping about the "ten dollar founding father with no father/Got a lot farther by working a lot harder/By being a lot smarter/By being a self-starter," and the rest is, as they say, history. Miranda's work is even keeping Hamilton on that ten-dollar bill where he belongs.

Like most miraculous birth narratives, though, this one leaves out the more questionable truths in favor of the glorious ones. Yes, Miranda deserves his genius grant, and I can hear in one run-through why the show is winning all those emmys, grammies, or whatever. But the fact is, "Hamilton" is just the culmination of a 20-year neo-conservative campaign to reshape our national story around the unlikely figure of Alexander Hamilton, who was an under-appreciated Founding Father for a reason.

The re-invention of Hamilton actually starts, as far as I can tell, with reactionary icons William Kristol and David Brooks, writing in the Weekly Standard in the 1990s, and publishing a seminal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 1997. Chernow's very accessible biography--called a 'hagiography' by professional scholars--comes along a few years later, just as the New York Historical Society relaunches itself with a blockbuster Hamilton exhibit in 2004. That exhibit, underwritten by the Society's ultra-wealthy supporters at the Gilder Lehrman Institute, attracts big crowds but also a fair bit of controversy from scholars, who resent the obvious right-wing bias of curator and Hamilton biographer Richard Brookhiser, in whose vision Hamilton becomes the patron saint of modern global capital, as well as the exemplary case of meritocratic individualism.

On this platform, Miranda's spirited work adds a captivating aura of romance to a figure who otherwise lingers in the shadow of his once-admired adversary, Thomas Jefferson--and in the shadow of his violent death at the hands of the ineffable Aaron Burr. Miranda's musical manages to humanize Burr while caricaturing Jefferson, a two-fer that clears the way for Hamilton to join Washington at the apex of our national pantheon.

Revision also means exclusion. We see Hamilton's undisputed heroism at Yorktown, but not his scorched-earth suppression of revolt in western Pennsylvania, the only Secretary of the Treasury who ever led an army into the field against tax evaders. We hear a lot about his immigrant status, but not so much about his anti-immigrant politics. And the breezy evocation of his epochal dispute with Jefferson--industry vs. agriculture, capital and trade vs. homesteading and slavery--disguises Hamilton's strong beliefs in inequality and his support for a financial elite. We hear the farewell address he wrote for Washington but not his famous 6-hour speech to the Constitutional Convention on behalf of monarchy.

In short the astonishing success of "Hamilton" is not just artistic but political. As I pursue my researches I hope to return to this compelling question: why? Why is Hamilton such a ready-made fit for this America, right now? The answers will I hope prove enlightening.

New World Rising

A few days ago I posted about the decline of left parties in France and Europe generally, along with the rise of myopic right-wing nationalisms both there and here. I want to follow up by signaling this valuable article by British left-wing activist and journalist Neal Lawson, who looks at the decline of social democracy all over Europe but then offers a much more detailed vision of how a new progressive phoenix might arise from those ashes. Some key ingredients:

• Lawson first of all embraces the new post-modern realities, including what he calls "new solidarities in a digital world," such as: cooperatives, the sharing economy, on-line activism and newly networked political parties; shared work and reduced working hours, basic income guarantees; and radically participatory decision-making;
• he rejects 'growth,' i.e. ever-expanding consumption, in favor of a new roster of social 'goods': leisure time, public space, a cleaner, carbon-reduced environment, workplace democracy, and guaranteed necessities such as basic income, health care, and housing;
• he imagines progressive governance not as the domain of a social democratic party in power, but rather an alliance of parties, movements, social change organizations, a new form of power-sharing facilitated by internet connections.

In short, rather than working through Labour or various Socialist parties or even the Sanders/Warren wing of our Democratic party, Lawson imagines a new and more radically democratic 'golden age.' That new political formation will make use of the new technologies and networks to build new forms of social solidarity more flexible and far-reaching than the older party-driven politics. And he imagines new social forms based on sustainability (he says "de-growth, not green-washed growth" but I would argue that authentic green growth, within limits is possible and indeed, essential), a reinvented workplace, and a renewed public sphere.

We are already seeing elements of this vision, often framed as private entrepreneurialism (the so-called 'gig economy') with its flexibilities and libertarian styles of governance or regulation. And we see that in that form it greatly accelerates social inequalities while seeming to enhance 'personal choice.' Lawson want to socialize the best parts of that vision, and tie them to social movements that are egalitarian, democratic, and grounded in solidarity. Though Lawson doesn't mention them, I would argue that the Occupy movement, the Indignados, and Nuit Debout are precocious versions of the solidarities he is calling for.  It's an epochal vision, and a discussion we should all be having.

Vive ... What, Exactly?

American observers have often looked at France, particularly its leftist legacy, with an eye roll, as if this venerable republican tradition, which gave us, inter alia, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, were the work of a precocious but unruly adolescent. Now it's eye roll time again, as on Thursday a Socialist Party insurgency fell just two votes short of passing a no confidence motion that would have brought down its own Socialist government. Even the French were surprised: "That's something unbelievable," sputtered centrist scholar Gérard Grunberg. "We've never seen that before."

But bemused incredulity is not an adequate response to this byzantine event. At issue is France's proposed labor reform law, which is intended to lower rampant unemployment by offering employers greater flexibility: hiring and firing, work hours, overtime pay, many of the highly structured worker protections in France would be relaxed. In itself the law is perhaps not the bogey man it has been made out to be: French unions would still wield real bargaining power, and many protections would remain. But the precedent that a Socialist government with a substantial majority would promote a rollback of workers' rights is for many on the Left--including 56 Socialist deputies--a red line that must be defended with protest marches, the Nuit Debout occupation of many public spaces, and now perhaps the demise through schism of the Socialist Party François Mitterand brought to national power 35 years ago.

But is this just France's problem, which we can dispatch with a wink? No, I would say, it is rather the most advanced and articulate version of a struggle that is happening all over the developed world. In America we have Donald Trump making ridiculous promises to launch a global trade war that will 'make America great again.' And we have Bernie Sanders earnestly gathering support, especially among the young, for a 'revolution' that will lead us out of the impasse keenly felt by our most promising young people. In France, but also in the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Denmark, and indeed most of Western Europe you find nationalist parties growing rapidly on platforms that are nearly as bigoted and ignorant as Trump's. Free trade agreements that define the 'global economy' are particularly under fire, as are the tax havens and other lucrative perks that make the financial sector's domination of the global economy such a repugnant reality. The crisis signaled by these various manifestations of revolt or discontent constitute a civilizational impasse, and France--with its traditions of rational discourse and an articulate left-wing alternative--is merely taking the lead in a debate the rest of us can't obfuscate forever in personality contests and demagogic outbursts.

The crux of the debate--improbably signaled by this rather modest French labor law--is something much bigger than its technical details. What kind of society are we building? Will there be job security? Or a ceaseless shuffle among independent contracts (gigs, to use that offensive buzz term), low-wage service jobs, part-time, short-term expedients, unpaid internships, with a minority of high-paying high-tech jobs for the lucky few? Can these new forms of employment generate mass satisfaction, as the old ones did for a generation? The social unrest that is surfacing everywhere in no-nothing political movements suggests not.

On the other hand, I don't think the French or any of us can hold on to that previous system in a world that really, like it or not, has become globalized. The race to the bottom has already been won--and the working classes in the once-dominant economies have lost. What remains in countries like France, Italy, or the US, is the darwinian struggle to claim one of a diminishing number of winner slots, or accept the second-class status of the hustler ('gig') economy. Not the sort of choice that will fend off the Trump supporters for long.

 One conceivable option is an older-style socialist one: capture some of that excess profit lolling offshore and use it to create a minimum income floor for everyone, to reduce at least the worst forms of poverty and social exclusion. Such a program is finding supporters among conventional liberal theorists, and may appear in Elizabeth Warren's platform in 2020 or 2024. I have my doubts, but I can't say I've looked at it in depth.

The other, less formed but infinitely more promising alternative, is the one I call by its shorthand name: eco-socialism. This points to a new sort of economy, powered by green energy, grounded in local, sustainable production, building social forms around cooperation and solidarity, with localized democratic control. Very scattered forms of this brave new world--co-ops of various sorts, sustainable agriculture, a 'shared' economy--are appearing here and there. It lacks mass support or a global theory, but 'horizontal' experiments in power-sharing such as Occupy Wall Street, Los Indignados, and now Nuit Debout are early rehearsals for such a transformation. Is it feasible? I don't know. But if the alternative is authoritarian retrenchment behind a Marine Le Pen or a Donald Trump, sign me up for a test drive to a different future. Please.

All Power to the Soviets

Even with his convincing victory in Indiana, we have to admit, Bernie has Burned his Bern and Roared his Roar, but no, he's not going to be the Democratic nominee. He is absolutely right, I think, to  stay in through California, to take his issues to the convention, to give his voters, as he says, the chance to show their preference for him. And to point the way to bigger victories to come.

The French protest movement Nuit Debout, which has been equally inspiring in its way (see previous posts), may be reaching its term as well. Alliances with the unions and the immigrant citées have failed to materialize, and though some see the increasing tension and scuffling with police as a next stage, I suspect the creative, open-ended, 'horizontal' phase will be hard to sustain, just as Occupy Wall Street was, after a while. The many voices who say that Occupy was futile, though, are simply wrong: it has borne much fruit in the BlackLivesMatter and $15 wage movements, not to mention the Sanders campaign--and Nuit Debout, which has inspired much poetry, may prove equally consequential in the longer run.

Ours nonetheless remains a time of retrenchment: we Americans will be asked in November to choose between a center-right conservative and a demagogic, racist, misogynist, xenophobic asshole. Most of the European social democracies aren't doing much better. Syriza seems trapped in a blind alley, Podemos hasn't made the leap to governance, Labour is confronting some ugly skeletons in its closet, and Left parties all over Europe are abandoning their social goals. Politics in the formerly social democracies is increasingly reduced to a contest between upholders of the corporatist status quo, and far-right nationalists. Not a pretty sight.

But we go on because we have no choice. Deep down we know that Big Corporations and Big Finance will drive us over the cliff, promoting ever grosser inequalities on the way  to environmental disaster. There is an emerging eco-socialist alternative, at least in theory and sometimes in local practice. The young people in the place de la République are trying to invent new forms of social organization. So are all those people at Bernie rallies, and in thousands of other movements, projects, and initiatives all over the world. Green energy, local sustainable agriculture, cooperative and shared economic structures--a new world is taking shape here and there. The young get it--they know their futures are at stake. Even in this cold rain there are signs of spring.

Still Standing

I vowed a few weeks ago to keep an eye on the singular protest movement called Nuit Debout (Up all night) that has been variously amusing or annoying the French populace for a month now. And so I have, though it's not easy, as there is very little in the English language press. What there is isn't all that helpful either: analysts make comparisons to Occupy Wall Street or Los Indignados in Spain, but Debout continues to prove elusive. Its 'horizontal' or leaderless structure, its refusal to engage in ordinary political struggles or make demands or promote candidacies or place itself anywhere really in France's overcharged political landscape has left the conventional commentators puzzled and skeptical, to say the least.

One observer, reporting today in Slate.fr (here, in French), describes two distinct gatherings, each occupying a different quadrant of the vast place de la République. On one side, the 'real' deboutistes, with their daily popular assembly, their informational booths and rallying points, a collection of 'students' or at least young, well-educated, mostly bourgeois Parisians, fed up with their dysfunctional government, their sluggish economy, the lack of prospects for the young, and the failure of imagination to invent alternatives. But across the plaza this reporter sees quite another group: all-night partyers, some homeless, some Roma, rappers from the banlieue looking for some exposure, drinkers, dancers, a rowdy group of the disaffected. Being French, the reporter understands this as the dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the Head and the Belly, and a host of other tropes.

To this dualism the reporter adds a third: the smaller group, led by philosopher Frédéric Lordon and other intellectuals from Le Monde Diplomatique who actually launched the movement on March 31st and are now trying to give it content as they stage their own occupation across town at the Bourse du Travail. Lordon has himself gotten considerable attention for his unequivocally radical social vision, as has filmmaker François Ruffin, whose documentary film "Merci Patron!" ( a French take on Michael Moore's breakout film "Roger and Me") has been screened at République and has become a sort of leitmotif of the movement. But has the Debout movement left the station with these intellectuals still waiting on the platform?

Philosopher Jean-Claude Monod, reporting sympathetically in yesterday's Libé (here, in French), doesn't think so. Rather, he feels the movement is still trying to find itself, in place. As he describes talking with an enthusiastic colleague, also a philosophy instructor, he is willing to grant that the deboutistes have identified a momentous fact: many of the French middle class no longer believe their society has governance, direction, or much hope in its present configuration. But they haven't found a coherent alternative either. Hence all the coy talking around, the endless debates, the desire to hear everyone's ideas rather than choose.

Interestingly, neither of these reporters has much to say about a fourth venue, which was of considerable interest to the deboutistes at République just a week or two ago. At that time the big question was, can the movement spread to the banlieue, the vast public housing cités, full of the poor, the unemployed, the alienated children of immigration. It was there that riots broke out ten years ago in response to police violence, and where French eyes look with fear at the possibility of ISIS cells. Attempts were made to launch Nuit Debout events at many of these locations outside Paris, and notably in the crowded, disaffected cités in the north of Marseille. With little success: the banlieusards apparently find little common ground with the more privileged deboutistes, and the connections haven't been made (as far as I can tell at this distance, with limited press coverage). So the prospects for a real insurgency, within the most disaffected populations with little to lose, is apparently far from being realized at this moment.

It is nonetheless a significant fact that Nuit Debout has shown the staying power it has. More politicized versions such as the Indignados movement in Spain and Syriza in Greece have stumbled against the realities of entrenched power. The young who flocked to Bernie Sanders are discovering the same thing here. How they will respond--either withdrawing from the stage or accepting the realities of Clinton's candidacy--will be a large question in coming months. The fortunes of the Debout movement will respond to different vectors, but the movements are integrally related. Our overripe societies are not offering sufficient opportunity or satisfaction to rising young adults. Something has to happen. Something is starting to happen. Stay tuned.

Exodus

This Friday Jews everywhere begin their 8-day celebration of the Exodus from Egypt. 'Exodus' is a funny word, part-Greek, part-Latin, suggesting 'the road out.' A better translation might be 'the Book of Migration,' and indeed the story is a migration narrative, fraught with all the ambivalences and hard choices migrants face. Take Pharaoh: he can't decide whether to hold onto his low-wage migrant labor force, or deport them. And the people of Israel themselves, like migrants everywhere, are unsure whether to put up with the misery they know or risk the unknown. So the story has a contemporary, timeless quality, and in that light I've been thinking about four particular Red Sea situations that trouble our world right now.

The best known is the Aegean, whose waters parted last year to allow a million or more Syrians, Iraqis, and others to reach the Promised Land of Germany or Sweden or some other European receiver. Those waters closed over some thousands of others whose boats weren't sea-worthy, and now Pharaoh Merkel may be changing her mind about letting these people go. And I say that with respect--like all politicians, she has no easy choices when it comes to migration. This Exodus story has received quite a lot of attention, and we Americans have been occasionally reminded how our reckless invasions have precipitated much of the upheaval in the region.

We hear less than we should, though, about a second migrant crisis for which we bear almost total responsibility. I refer to the Holocaust taking place in slow-motion in the northern half of Central America, with murder rates more than 50 times (!) those in our most dangerous cities. Thousands of migrants have taken their chances and headed north, despite uncountable murders along the route, despite the fact that as many as 90% (!) of the women and girls on that migratory route are raped or sexually enslaved. Despite the fact that our Red Sea--the Rio Grande, I suppose, though it's really the whole border--doesn't open willingly if at all. When our present Pharaoh and all the Pharaoh-candidates talk about stabilizing the border and developing a comprehensive immigration policy, these Central Americans fleeing their local holocaust are the ones being talked about. And let's be clear: not only is this Central American crisis a direct consequence of 100 years of American intervention, subterfuge, exploitation, and violence, but the gangs that have made life no longer worth living in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were formed in Los Angeles, their members deliberately deported by our government to wage their reign of terror 'back home' in countries where they had never lived.

A third Red Sea, about which we hear even less, is the Timor Sea, where migrants crossing from Indonesia are routinely intercepted as they reach Australian territorial waters by naval vessels that transport them to offshore detention centers in places like New Guinea and Nauru. There, facing mounting threats of hunger and disease, they will wait forever, as Australia vows not to admit a single boat-borne refugee, regardless of circumstance. Many of these refugees are fleeing Syria and Iraq, though some are Muslims fleeing terror and ethnic cleansing in Burma, and others are climate migrants from Bangladesh. Australia's Liberal [sic] government not only rode to power on this rigid policy, but is widely marketing it to European politicians, who are listening with interest.

And a fourth Red Sea, probably the most deadly, is the slip of Mediterranean Sea that divides the coast of Libya from the Italian island of Lampedusa. For a time this route declined in use as the Aegean one looked more promising, and the EU tried to put more controls in place, but with the closing of the Aegean--and in the absence of any effective Libyan governance--the Libyan exodus is expected to resume with full force. While these migrants are coming from all over Africa--North, sub-Saharan, Horn--as well as the Middle East, it is worth noting that some fraction of them are in the first wave of what will gradually become a huge swell of climate migrants. Diminishing rainfall, along with rising coastlines and other agricultural displacements, will become a major theme of this century, on a timetable we don't quite know. All the other migrant crises already in process might come to look like dress rehearsals for this big one.

So what should we learn from our retelling  of the Exodus story? I would suggest that migration, exodus, always poses difficult and dangerous choices. We as a species are moving inexorably, whether we like it or not, toward a vast decision, taken perhaps in many stages, but it's the same fundamental choice: are we a global species, all 7 or 8 or 12 billion of us, interdependent and mutually accountable for our collective and personal welfare? Will we address the migration question globally, as one people, one species? Or will we fall back into our separate clans and groups, fortify our borders and violently defend them, keeping the Other out at all costs? It's worth recalling that the Book of Exodus concludes with horrific accounts of conquest and ethnic cleansing--no easy answers there. But if we can see ourselves as the migrant, the stranger, the pilgrim in search of milk and honey, corn and wine, perhaps we can see others, ALL the others, that way too.

Up All Night

For the past two weeks a strangely amorphous protest movement called Nuit Debout (Stand Up All Night) has been disturbing the streets of Paris at ungodly hours, conducting all-night open-air assemblies in the iconic Place de la République, and generally making known its dissatisfaction with the state of things. It all started back on March 31. For several months a more recognizable Left had been protesting France's proposed liberalization of its labor laws, and as often happens, Paris's students, both lycée and université, joined the marches. Then on the 31st, at the end of a big march in the pouring rain, a group, of young protestors decided to continue the protest by camping out at République--and never stopped. Sometimes a few thousand, sometimes a few hundred, they have been there for fifteen days and counting. They debate and dance and listen to music. They hold assemblies and vote on procedures and address organizational questions. They give lots of speeches and think up better ways to run society.

Comparisons with Occupy Wall Street have naturally been proposed. The improvised but very open democratic forms, the chaotic and all-inclusive rhetoric, the naive goodwill all resemble those days and nights in Zuccotti Square before Bloomberg called the cops. A closer parallel is perhaps the Indignados movement in Spain a few years ago: the protest against inequality and especially the deplorable unemployment that plagues young adults in Spain and France and most of Europe is a common theme. But while the Indignados formed a political party and scored a modest success in Spain's elections last winter, it's not clear that Nuit Debout aspires to that sort of official clout. 

Perhaps the clearest precursor, as many of the debouters themselves are saying, is the May 1968 movement, when radical students and their allies came close to bringing down the 5th Republic. Debout is just a tiny speck compared to May '68 (though all such movements start small), but both are partial to expressing rather generic utopian desires, rather than any specific program. What strikes me most about the interviews with young people in République is their rather inarticulate diagnosis of the ills they protest, and the absence of clear solutions. Anything and nothing seems to be on the agenda--a general notion that life as it is is insufferable, so that even a night in the rain, with hundreds of comrades, is preferable to just going home. 

Is this another step in a sequence of inchoate, anarchic resistance to global capitalism, from the G-7 protests and social forums to Occupy in all its manifestations, to the Indignant movements in various European cities? Or just a spring outing, a fad that will soon go its way? The New York Times has recently acknowledged Debout's existence--a benchmark of sorts. More seriously, there are some efforts underway to bring the movement to the cités, the huge suburban housing projects where the children and grandchildren of immigrants, many of them Muslim, have far more serious grievances than the labor laws or the malaise of Paris's jeunesse dorée. A protest, much less an uprising like the 2005 riots in the banlieues, particularly in this climate of terrorist threats and state of emergency, would be serious indeed.

So I'm not sure what to expect of Nuit Debout, though I think it's worth keeping in view. To my American eyes it suggests affinities with the "Feel the Bern" surge among young people here, where the practical outcomes may be similarly elusive (though the program--elect Sanders--is far more coherent). But maybe the really important thing is still in gestation: the refusal of a rising generation of post-industrial, post-modern, post-political activists to accept the givens of inequality, climate destruction, and a certain anomie. Among the many destabilizing forces at work in France, the US, and all over, this one may represent an imaginative and resonant call to action.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

So it's a trivial incident, what the French call a fait divers, but it has lit up the social media in France, for good reason. I refer to the recent remark by French Minister for Families, Children and Women's Rights Laurence Rossignol, who decried the decision by some high-end clothing manufacturers to market hijabs and other traditional Muslim women's apparel (the modest bathing suit called the 'burkini,' shown here, for example). Rossignol went on to suggest that Muslim women who freely choose such traditional cover-up clothing were like certain "nègres américains qui soutenaient l'esclavage."

First, the linguistic angle: Rossignol's remark was widely--and polemically-- translated across the internet as "American niggers who supported slavery." This is a fair approximation--the word 'nègre' is widely recognized as insulting, and decent people don't normally use it (the minister apologized for the term, but not the sentiment). Then the the English-language press adopted the sanitized term 'negro,' perhaps to defuse what had become a storm of protest in Muslim social media. As it happens, the anti-imperialist cultural movement called 'Nègritude' embraced the term Nègre' (as I learned in this quite interesting article) specifically because--unlike the more genteel word 'noir' or 'person of color'--it was the slur widely used to refer to black laborers throughout the French colonial gulag. Cultural radicals decided to make it their own much as the LGBT community has appropriated the slur 'queer' as a badge of honor. Nonetheless, Rossignol's slip made visible the festering nexus, just below the surface of the French governing elite, of racist feeling directed at blacks, Muslims, and all the other not-quite-French.

But apart from Rossignol's unfortunate word choice, the larger question is one that Europe, and perhaps the US, can't really avoid. Is Islam, particularly in its fundamentalist or Wahabbist forms, compatible with liberal western society? The venerable French feminist Élisabeth Badinter has called for a boycott of the Muslim-accommodating clothing manufacturers. Like Rossignol, she sees the hijab, the niqba, all the items of women's clothing that sequester the female body, as inherently offensive to liberal society. Muslims in the West simply have to accept a view of gender equality that gives women the right--and indeed, the obligation--to display their bodies. After all, as Badinter doesn't say but strongly implies, female bodies are meant to be sexually provocative, inducements to pleasure and procreation, and the refusal of this life-affirming display can only be the result of oppression, of restrictions on freedom that are intolerable in liberal society.

Some Muslim women are no doubt simply, silently accepting the patriarchal rules that keep them from full membership in civil society. This is problematic, for sure, though western liberal society got on pretty well with comparable restrictions on women's freedoms until about three generations ago. Other Muslim women are actually pretty articulate about why bikinis and other hide-and-seek women's fashions are actually more objectifying than liberating. (These are the self-hating, internally-oppressed Muslim 'nègres' Rossignol was quick to dismiss.) I expect fully liberated, westernized women share a wide range of feelings on this question, though for Badinter and other French feminists there is clearly only one right answer.

Does this tiny tempest have relevance for the much bigger questions, the 'clash of civilizations,' the increasingly global incidence of Islamist terror, the challenge to diversity one hears from politicians all over the West? Frictions like the one captured in the photo, above, are indeed part of the larger picture. European nations in particular, with much higher ratios of Muslim residents than the US, really do have to find some common ground--non-pork options in school cafeterias, acceptance of religious-identified clothing, public support for mosques to the same degree as temples and churches--or risk the exacerbation of tensions and alienation that are driving young Muslims toward desperate solutions.

And yes, ministers who use ethnic slurs, even 'by mistake,' should be fired. And so should presidential candidates who promote discriminatory policies. Islamist terror, and the Wahabbism that promotes it, need to be fought with stronger weapons, in other venues. But there's no excuse for allowing public figures to foment hostility and misunderstanding at home.

Spring Training

Sports arenas are microcosms, little moral universes where the rules are exceptionally clear and the consequences--winning, losing--unambiguous. Perhaps it is that simplified, stripped-down quality that has attracted me over the years to spring training, professional baseball's annual six weeks ritual of rejuvenation. It is a sign of spring: the news photos of fit, agile young men, tossing baseballs under blue skies across the deep-green grass. The new faces, rookies and recent draft picks, the eternally reawakened hopes of making the team--it all has the lustre of renewal, a secular sort of Easter, a promise of things to come.

Spring training is always optimistic. Every team, it seems, could be a contender; for every young player this could be the year. And it is mostly high-spirited: there is time for card games in the clubhouse, golf on the off days, and the whole experience is routinely referred to as "camp." Camp for young adult millionaires.

And every year there are stories--endless stories. When I was little, I read deeply in the genre of sports fiction. A lot of the drama unfolded at training camps--and it happens in real life too. Last spring the big Red Sox story was how no one was replacing traded pitching ace Jon Lester because all the pitchers were aces. (It wasn't true--they bombed.) This spring it was about veterans and newcomers: last year's rookie surprise, Travis Shaw, has apparently seized third base from the once acclaimed (and overpaid) veteran Pablo ('Panda') Sandoval, while it seems touted newcomer Rumney Castillo can't hit fastballs (they pitched slower in Cuba, where he made his name), and is headed for bench-warmer's limbo. Ageing star Allen Craig failed to make the comeback in exhibition season that would keep him in the game, while last spring's injured rookie, catcher Christian Vazquez, has bounced back from surgery and should be in the swing by mid-season. You could find half a dozen sports novel plots just in the Red Sox camp this season.

Unfortunately for me, the pleasure of pro baseball has for some time been compromised by the dollar signs stuck all over it. Soon the real season will start, with hundred-dollar seats at Fenway Park, cable-only broadcasts, and sports stories that talk endlessly about free agency and contract options, how much David Price gets paid per pitch or David Ortiz per swing. Championships become commodities, and team-building an exercise in venture capital. Even the spring training competitions like Shaw vs. Sandoval is framed in terms of use value vs. exchange value. The long arm of financialization has reached into baseball's pockets--bringing along its nerdy cousin, Big Data or sabermetrics--and the joy of the game is now heavily mediated by this nexus of statistical and financial calculation.

Still, for six weeks in late winter, as the last snows melt away in Massachusetts, the new crop of players pops up in Fort Meyers like crocuses: new faces, new hopes. It's camp. Players are loosening up, getting ready to play the game. If you squint and block out all the scouts, executives, and middle managers, it could look like the vanished sandlot of my youth. It could look like a bunch of ball players, having fun.

Resurrection

I've just finished my annual binge of Holy Week services, starting with Tenebrae on Wednesday evening, then Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and finally the Great Vigil that starts at 4:30 on Easter morning with the lighting of the New Fire, a long series of lections that trace the human relation to God through Creation and Flood, Exodus, Captivity and prophetic promise, followed by the first Eucharist of Easter. Three hours from dark to dawn. Holy Week done right demands an immense investment of time, emotion, and imagination. One relives the events of the Passion, but then we are asked to imagine the unimaginable: Christ rising from death, and ourselves living on as resurrected people in a world marked by sin and death. It's a long journey.

Jesus began his life as a homeless refugee, as we recalled last December on Holy Innocents, just three days after Christmas. King Herod, like President Assad, chose to murder the next generation of his subjects rather than risk loss of power, and Jesus's family, like so many today, fled to the precarious safety of exile. Jesus's ministry started in the shadow of his cousin John, whose outspoken calling-out of power got him beheaded by Herod's successor. Jesus made a practice of breaking laws and customs, dining with tax collectors and healing on the sabbath, overturning the tables of currency traders and slighting local power-brokers. His entry into Jerusalem seems to have been misconstrued as an insurrection, and his execution was a triumph of Roman and priestly power, working in collusion to preserve the uneasy status quo of military occupation and theocratic authority. We know about these things from today's headlines.

 When Jesus advised a disingenuous questioner to "render unto Caesar" what was owed in taxes, he was misunderstood, then and now, as urging a kind of quietist acceptance of that status quo. But the real force of his message was the second part: "render unto God what is God's." If his executioners mistook him for a secular Messiah or revolutionary, they missed the point: Jesus is telling us that what we see--the world we live in--isn't Caesar's at all, but God's. Seeing that truth is one way to understand what it means to live as a resurrected person. It may seem like the world belongs to the billionaires and the imperialists, the Trumps and the terrorists, the powerful and the possessive, that whole cohort of Caesar's henchmen. But no, all that is the detritus of sin and death.

We are invited to discard all that and be reborn, with Jesus, into a new kind of world. That's where we need our imaginations. We need to learn to see the world in a new way, not for what it seems to be but what it could be, a world characterized by acts of kindness, compassion, and love. It's not easy--Caesar's folks make it hard to see beyond the deadly realities to that better place--but we are called to try. I'm not very far along that road, which I think of as the road to Emmaus. If you know that story, which happens the day after Easter, you know that a couple of disillusioned followers of Jesus are walking from Jerusalem to a nearby town when a clueless stranger joins them, the only man in Jerusalem who doesn't seem to know about Friday's execution. But he knows a lot of other stuff, and enlightens them about the Scriptures as they walk along. Then as suppertime arrives he blesses their bread and wine--and vanishes! They are left with a body of doctrine, a sacramental meal, and the impression that the resurrected Jesus was there, really, but then he wasn't. That's how I feel about the Resurrection.

It seems odd to be posting--on a blog that is largely political, no less--about something as personal as religious faith. But the personal is political, as the women's movement taught us long ago, and so is Jesus's teaching and example. In response to an irreparably fallen world, he chose death. In the face of rampant injustice and inequality, environmental desecration, brutal intolerance and massive dislocation of peoples, the tiny fixes that pass for political solutions in our paralyzed governmental systems are desperately inadequate. I may go on about Bernie Sanders and the French far left and the need for a revolution in sustainable energy production, but at the end of the day I often feel that our only realistic, pragmatic hope is to live the Resurrection. As we Christians like to say, He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Shock Waves from the Brussels Bombing

I've never visited Brussels--just passed through a couple of times. But I feel as though I've spent a portion of my life there. You see, for many years the European Union has been a sort of fantasmatic object for me: the large, progressive, ultra-civilized super-nation that would someday take its place--take our place--as leader of a more humane free world. Climate policy, aid to developing nations, refugee asylum, diplomatic instead of military interventions--in all these ways I imagined an EU that was already taking the lead, or soon would, in building a more suitable version of western civilization. Capital of the EU, Brussels was also for me the capital of this hallucinatory vision.

Except in very selective instances, of course, that humane, progressive EU has never really existed. The Union has been governed more from Frankfurt or Berlin anyhow, and has been the engine for inequality, a financialized economy, German economic imperialism, and the disastrous imposition of the euro on fragile member-states. For every progressive law emanating out of Brussels, it seems that two or three silly bureaucratic rules are bound to follow. Even before its inept responses to crises in Greece, Ukraine, and the migrants on its borders, the EU seemed headed for disunion.

But Brussels remains a potent symbol of something like my own fantasmatic ideal of a progressive West. As such, along with Paris--the cultural capital of that derealized empire--it is therefore something of an ideal target for the Islamist forces that would like to destroy that culture and that empire. Secular, democratic, libidinal, innovative, and yes, infectious--the West is no doubt incompatible with the static, authoritarian, 7th-century fantasm the Islamists would like to replace it with. Something has to give.

I don't know where this will end. Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission, published on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack, offers one possibility: a denatured, listless West that simply surrenders to a more vigorous, ascendent Muslim culture. I don't expect that to happen soon, though its converse--a violent authoritarianism à la LePen or Trump, leading to some sort of Armageddon-like struggle--doesn't seem as remote now as it did a year ago.

Somewhere in the ideal middle between those extremes--a sort of Brussels of the mind--lies the possibility for a tolerant multi-culturalism, democratic in form but protective of religious and cultural prerogatives. Would such a thing 'fix' the problem? No--it would also require some evolution in the retrograde Islamic quarters that are feeding this existential struggle. There I bow out--my ignorance prevents me from having any useful suggestions. But in the meanwhile all of us in the beleaguered West need to make sure that events like the Brussels bombing are heard as a call for tolerance, understanding, and increased support for Europe's (and America's) alienated young Muslims. Hard as that may seem, the alternatives are much, much worse.

Brown Shirts

To be clear: I don't think Donald Trump will be our next president. I don't rule it out, however, in part because Hillary Clinton's is a candidacy with many vulnerabilities. I still think Sanders would be the stronger candidate, undercutting Trump's faux outsider status in many ways--but that point now looks moot. Trump as we see him still seems clownish, void of any substantial policy ideas, and almost incapable of lucid speech. But all that could change, if and when he becomes the Republican nominee. A Trump 'makeover' into a more conventional, even respectable candidate--while retaining the belligerent, insulting rhetoric and directing it against Clinton--could be more formidable than many now think. I'm frankly nervous about what could happen this fall.

But even if we're spared the worst--and 'treated' to a Clinton presidency, with all its ambiguities and compromises--Trump has already impaired our democratic legacy in so many ways it's hard to know where to start. Here I want to focus on just one aspect: his strategic use of violence and intimidation. It began with his response to hecklers, denouncing them and inviting supporters to 'punch them in the nose.' Trump made his position even clearer when he offered to pay legal expenses for a supporter who flagrantly attacked a protestor in North Carolina. Last week, Trump rallies seemed poised on the edge of violence. And now Trump has suggested his supporters would 'riot' at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland if he fails to gain nomination.

Like so many of Trump's most objectionable qualities, this one merely amplifies a tendency already visible in the Republican party. We should recall that in November, 2000, planeloads of Republican operatives were flown in to Miami from Washington to stage a riot at the Dade County elections bureau; their actions successfully halted the re-counting of ballots until the Supreme Court was able to halt it by injunction and award the election to Bush. The fact of a putsch--which is what this combined action of rioters and Court amounted to--was obscured by the Court's official language, Gore's feckless surrender, and the public's willingness to move on behind a new president they regarded as moderate. But it was a putsch nonetheless.

Now Trump seems to be incorporating violence as part of his campaign rhetoric: his belligerent remarks directed against foreign powers, but also his direct calls for mob violence against protestors and opponents. And more seriously, he seems to be threatening to bring violence to the electoral process, specifically at the nominating convention. But as with so many things Trump, how seriously should we take this?

My answer: very seriously. We aren't in Weimar territory yet, but the chronic economic stagnation we face is very real, and so is the anger it is eliciting. Our political process has reached near-paralysis in the Congress, and the majority party in the Senate is openly flouting its constitutional obligation to confirm justices, in a way that will paralyze the judicial branch and undermine the Constitution. Trump's generic 'punch 'em in the nose', his vague claims that government as such no longer works, his calls to delegate all powers to a strong man such as himself--all this has appeal in direct proportion to the dysfunctions of the federal government, and that dysfunction is beginning to look as permanent and structural as the economic stagnation.

I'm no scholar of German history--or Italian, or Spanish--but I fear that we are looking at the early stages of fascism. We may as a citizenry and an electorate pull back from the precipice and elect a 'safe' president this time around. But the breaches in civility and civic process that have happened in the Trump campaign will stand as precedents in any case. The intransigent social problems that have given rise to this movement are unlikely to resolve in a 'safe,' moderate administration. The Pandora's Box of brown shirtism has been opened these last few weeks and months. Our Republic is in a dangerous place.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Class Consciousness and Love Downton Abbey

One of my indulgences of late has been binging on various long-form TV series--first The Wire, followed by Mad Men and Tremé, Friday Night Lights, and a host of others, sampled and discarded--but to my great surprise the one that has given me the most pleasure is the one that just ended on Sunday: Downton Abbey. My attraction makes no sense: I am no anglophile, certainly no fan of producer/writer Julian Fellowes's tory politics; in 'real life,' jacobin that I am, I would have confiscated Downton through taxation before it reached its second season. And yet I join the millions of fans on both sides of the pond who hung on every word, and wander about, now that it's over, in a state of displaced grief. Why?

It's not an easy question, as countless critics have shown with their facetious resumés of the predictable plot lines, their facile parodies of recurrent gestures and clichéd dialogue, their painstaking notice taken of every inconsistency or improbability of plot. Has any 6-season wonder ever received such relentlessly acerbic criticism? And it's all true, of course--the whole upstairs/downstairs Great House setting was already hackneyed before Fellowes wrote his pilot, and even a frequently inspired writer such as he is will be overreaching at numerous moments in the 59-episode run. Yes, it was easy to laugh at Downton, and many did.

But I somehow joined the milllions who didn't laugh long, and came eagerly back for more, though I still find my affection for the show--for almost everything about the show--something of a mystery. But the task of analysis is to shine light on those dark places in the psyche, so here goes.

What most characterized Downton, both the show and the world it represented,  was its consistency, stability, predicability, its conformity to fairly strict rules. There was security in those starched outfits and the knowledge that the characters would for the most part leave them on. Security in knowing that the Crawleys would remain Crawleys, despite internal blood-feuds, sudden deaths, unwise investments, and unwelcome pregnancy. That absolute loyalty to family, class, and social position may be preposterously out of date--one recalls for example the House of Lords futilely intervening  against the ecologists and animal lovers to preserve fox hunting--but the values of family and loyalty on display transcend the particular reactionary politics of Lord Grantham and reflect a timeless value: very few of us aspire to be the 7th Earl of Grantham, but most of us would love to have families who protect our interests as the Crawleys protect theirs.

Love really is the operative word in Fellowes's world, saccharine at times--though we see plenty of jealousy, resentment, disquiet, and even a little anger. In the end, though, Downton returns to its utopian condition, a place where everyone finds shelter (variable in quality depending on one's station, but shelter nonetheless), and always will. Even the outcast Barrow finds redemption and returns with grace in the final episode. Outside forces assail this little fortress--from the accident of the Titanic to the vast tragedy of the Great War, from petty snobbery to the intrusions of homicide investigations, and most of al, the specter of change as Labour forms a government, government agents visit the estate's pig farms, and a chamber maid turns secretary and then philanthropist--but through it all the bonds of love are only strengthened until at the end absolutely everyone is paired with someone or something to love. Is it any wonder a person of sensibility would like to spend at least an hour a week in such a place?

Yes, yes, yes, I know it's all about fantasy and escapism. but the psychological face-offs are nonetheless realistic in the best sense more often than not. Mary's snobbism, for example, is hardly a revelation (though it's magnificently acted by Michelle Dockery), but the late moment when she and the footman Barrow recognize each other's propensity for misery, recognize each other in their arrogance as profoundly semblants--is brilliant. Likewise the pairing of Lord Grantham and Carson, the ways they share Lady Mary as proud fathers. Or the inadvertent revelation, après-coup, by Gwen the returned chamber-maid of how nobly Lady Sybil assisted her in her mobility--and the way this accidental stranger thus reshapes the vision Sybil's dearest family will now carry of her. Such moments are the work of a brilliant novelist of the old school.

Real dramas, real conflicts, even a little real history, played for the most part with credible accuracy but contained within the utterly secure enclosure of a timeless and invulnerable world--that's the magic formula. For several seasons I wondered how Fellowes would handle the inevitable dissolution of Downton, as he gave us glimpses of other Great Houses and great families giving up their estates and joining bourgeois society. Toward the end I realized that such would never happen to Downton. What we treasured was its impossible determination to stand against time (unlike that flower petal that falls, time after time, in the opening sequence, to tease us with the possibility of demise). And stand it does in the final episode, each character soldered into place, ready to withstand whatever new buffetings come its way. In and against our own world, poised on the brink of disaster, devolution and decay, could any place of refuge be more desirable than Downton Abbey?