Let Them In

They’re here. We don’t hear much about them now that the mid-term elections are over, but the first waves of the famous migrant caravan have reached Tijuana, in plain sight of California across the fence. Hundreds have arrived in the last few days, already crowding shelters and facilities in this migrant depot, where several thousands wait their turn to seek asylum in the United States.

So what should we do with the new arrivals?

Let them in. Interview them first, if only to reinforce what we already know: that they are refugees from violence, poverty, hunger, crop failure, and a collapse of civil order all through the northern triangle of Central America. Check their identification, weed out the known criminals, verify where possible—and let them in.

Why? Because it is the right thing to do. Because these poor, bedraggled, obviously needy people are the huddled masses we inscribe on our Statue of Liberty. Because receiving the poor and offering them a new life is one of our nation’s most precious core values. Because they will reward us with their gratitude, their loyalty, and their labor. That’s what immigrants have always done. That’s what has made us a great country.

Why these, why now? Because they come from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, countries where the United States has flexed its muscles for more than a century. Our government has overthrown theirs, has sent covert agents and outfitted counter-insurgents when these peoples tried to better their lot through social revolutions.  And it goes on. The last government we helped overthrow was in Honduras, just nine years ago.

These people now face daily violence and exploitation of every sort at home. The gangs that carry out this violence frequently originated in Los Angeles, and were deported back to countries they hardly knew. Their civil governments are too often agents themselves of violence and corruption. We exported this problem, and we owe its victims some remediation.

They are victims as well of climate change. Irregular rainfall, too much or too little, has ruined harvests in much of the region for most of the last decade. These people are not the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions—we are. The wealthy nations of the world, led by the United States, have inflicted this agricultural crisis on these vulnerable agrarian societies. We owe them remediation.

But none of these arguments, valid as they may be, really cut to the heart of the question. Why should we offer these people asylum in our country? Because we can. We are rich. We have abundant means to offer them shelter, food, English classes, training, a job. We are a wealthy nation, more than 300 million strong. We will not be impoverished or overrun by a few thousand hungry campesinos. On the contrary, as our long history of immigration tells us, we will be enriched.

Enriched financially, yes, but even more enriched spiritually. Our religions teach us to welcome the stranger, to show compassion to the needy. If you have two coats, give one to your neighbor who has none. Treat others as you would wish to be treated. Love your neighbor. These are the values that make us great, that heal the soul. This is our chance to show that we are still a good and decent people.

As this desperate century unfolds there will be harder tests. Climate migrants are a recent fact, but millions more are on the way. Will we, the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases, simply tell those migrants to go somewhere else to starve or drown? Is that our spiritual destiny? Will it be worth surviving, as a nation and a species, if that is who we are?

Now it’s time. The caravan is here, waiting at the gates. Our world is broken, and we Americans have helped to break it. We need to help repair it. We need to share what we have, give what we can. We need to be better than we are, better than our president thinks we are. We need to embrace these migrants so they can help us discover our better selves. We need them. We need to let them in.

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?