The Trumpet Is Blasting--Wake Up!

Will the Trump candidacy finally cross one bridge too far and go down in shame? Will the Republican Party split out another candidate, under another party label, and perhaps restructure our two-party system after 150 years? Will Hillary--or Bernie!--cruise to the White House below the turbulence that has the whole Republican establishment in crisis mode? Or will Trump trim his sails just enough to accommodate some more reluctant followers, along with a throng of Obama- and Hillary-haters on his joy ride to a newer, whiter, more callous America? It is of course too early to know the answers to any of these questions, but what we know already should make us pause and reflect.

First, we know that this charismatic love affair between Trump and millions of voters is for real. It has survived and thrived on a host of gaffes, insults, lies, and blunders--just like the most passionate of abusive relationships. But to put it that way is to personalize it--Trump's game. Yes, the man weirdly fascinates throngs of spectators (while disgusting plenty of others like me). His is a singularly polarizing personality, the ultimate bully--a fit subject for what they used to call deviant psychology.

But the more profound truth lies in the invisible subsoil that has nourished this invasive plant. I mean the failed economy, the social and economic desperation that is the real crux of the Trump movement. This desperation has been building for 30 years or more of profit-hoarding by the rich, as many economists have now realized (a convenient summary can be found in this recent column by Thomas Edsall in the Times). A globalized, financialized, debt-driven, hi-tech, information-based, race-to-the-bottom economy--these are among the various ways to describe the profound changes that have left many working people struggling to maintain their standard of living and their self-respect. These people are angry. They are desperate. They are looking for scapegoats. And they love Trump because he incites the anger they feel. This is a stark reality, gestating here and there for decades on the margins of the conservative movement. It has now burst full-blown on the scene of our common political life. Whatever happens with Trump, it will still be there, festering.

Will it help if amid all the fuss Hillary Clinton triangulates her way into the presidency? A little, maybe: at least a centrist Supreme Court may act as a bulwark against certain excesses. Even if President Clinton II finds a way to work with the Congress, though, what would she do to redirect the economy to serve the marginalized legions of Trump? She is herself a pure product of the existing system. She proposes band-aid solutions, palliatives, adjustments, but hardly the sort of restructuring that could relaunch the American adventure and bring actual hope, not in a mythical past but in a reinvented future. Could the Sanders 'revolution' achieve this? Possibly, but I suspect that every victory would by pyrrhic, every triumph the occasion for more bitter resistance.

The problem is not just ours in America. Stagnating economies in all the older democracies have produced Trump-like figures named LePen or Wilders or Farage, demonizing immigrants and Muslims, calling for ethnic purity and 'telling it like it is'--i.e. demanding the right to racist defamation. In short, all of us constituents of this world-system have reached a common impasse, where our global economy will support only a fraction of its wealthier citizens in the fashion they have come to insist on. The rest are suffering, and in one political system after another they are showing they are mad as hell. Brexit, 'the Wall,' deportation, refusal of asylum--it's a global tidal wave of hostility and mean-spiritedness. And it's cresting, this movement, at the very moment when accelerating global climate change requires concerted, generous, far-sighted collective response.

Given the limited set of choices that confront us and all those other electorates, it may seem fatuous to call for radical reform, 'revolution,' a new kind of world-system, but frankly, dear readers, nothing less will do. We need to somehow engage ourselves, and our fellow citizens around the world, in that brilliant adventure to rebuild our energy systems, our agriculture, our cultures, our ways of living and our measures for happiness, success, well-being--a complete reversion from our defunct consumer and finance-driven economy into something sustainable, clean, cooperative, shared. No app will do it--this is the stuff of total revolution. The powerful (as Luke's Mary says, channeling Isaiah) must be thrown down from their high places, and the rich sent empty away. The time is now. Trump's poisonous blast is our warning cry, our call to action. For all its surreality, it's real, it's here, and it's happening. Don't wait to see who wins.

Blame Massachusetts

Citizens of a certain age will remember the smug bumper sticker that appeared on selected Volvos and dorm room walls in 1973: Don't Blame Me--I'm from Massachusetts. We alone in this state could claim to have conferred our electoral votes on George McGovern while the rest of the nation joined Richard Nixon in reviling him. Soon enough, Watergate blew up, Nixon went rogue, and his presidency ended up in history's ashcan. Weren't we smarty-pants, here in Massachusetts?

As I survey the wreckage of Super Tuesday, alas, I have the uneasy feeling that we could have done it again, only this time, Massachusetts, we missed our cue. Here's why. With a shift of just 2% or so of the Democratic primary voters, yesterday's headlines would have read "Sanders wins Mainstream Blue State," along with his victories in the Minnesota caucuses, in New Hampshire, and his near-miss in Iowa. Instead of post-mortems on his insurgency, which they would now like to reduce to a symbolic tour, the Times and others would have had to face a crucial fact: while Clinton piles up delegates in red states that she will never carry in November, Sanders is igniting fires in blue states where it really counts.

Would it really matter, though, if we were waking up today to a narrow Sanders victory? Here's why I think so. Trump is beginning to raise the specter of a real threat--say "President Trump to yourself five times out loud--and the reason is fervor: for all the wrong reasons, people are turning out for him in historic numbers, new voters or usual stay-at-homes, galvanized by his unsavory aggressions. [I will return to the question of this perverse appeal in a future post.] Against what could become a juggernaut, Hillary Clinton is a disturbing counter-force. Not many voters really, really like her. But, you say, they will get highly motivated by fear of Trump. Maybe, but turnout to vote against someone is never as effective as voting for your hero. And the turnout on Tuesday showed just that: Trump's actual voter counts reached historic highs, while Clinton and the Democrats were turning out 30% fewer voters than Obama in previous cycles. Think about that: it's a disastrous number.

This is not the fault of Sanders. Everyone agrees he is bringing new voters into the process, importing the kind of true-believer zeal that carried Obama, and could carry Sanders in a general election. Hillary? Not so much. Will she benefit vicariously from all the excitement she squelched six months before the election? Don't count on it.

But all this is just a big what-if, because Sanders didn't quite make it in Massachusetts, and the mainstreamers, always eager to discount Bernie, will now have their way. Yes, Clinton could still stumble, and big delegate pools in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, California, and the other key states might still tilt Bernie's way. Unlikely, but possible. But IF ONLY Bernie had the momentum of winning a major, certified blue state like Massachusetts, instead of coming close but losing, that feat would be a whole lot less improbable. That's the shame of Massachusetts, and of voters like me who showed up for Bernie but didn't lift a finger to campaign for him. We missed our rendezvous with history, folks, and in November we could be paying big-time for our mistake.

Exclusive: Secret Transcript of the Republican Senate Caucus

Our Champion has died. What will happen to us now, and to the image we cherish of a better world, a world where all people are armed and white, where everyone engages exclusively in heterosexual, marital sex, and God sends us babies every nine months?

Who will preserve the sanctity of that world for us, now that our Champion is gone?

Not the Supreme Court. That Muslim terrorist who took over the White House is preparing to send another traitor to take our Champion’s seat—this time the sex-crazed, gun- and God-hating radicals will take control.

[ALL] No, no, no. We can’t let that happen.

But what can we do? The Constitution says—

Never mind what the Constitution says. We’re talking about protecting the legacy of our age’s great jurist, our textualist scholar, the inventor of Originalism. Ask yourself, what would He do if he were still with us?

You’re right. What did he do to defend our second amendment rights in District of Columbia v. Heller?

Well, he just ignored the first clause because he didn’t like where it was going, and interpreted the second clause with his usual textualist precision to make it say what he wanted. That was a jurist.

And in Gore v. Bush—he didn’t mess around with precedents and principles. He just decided who he wanted to win, and worked back from there.

And attached an ingenious ‘Don’t anyone ever try to do this again’ clause—

Because he cared about the Original Intent of the Constitution so much he wanted to preserve it—

Exactly—

Except when he didn’t.

So where does that leave us?

Well, as I see it we have two choices: we either just ignore the nomination clause, and deny that the President’s right to appoint justices exists at all—

Yeah. Who reads the Constitution anyhow?

Or we invent a precedent that says that the President only appoints justices before his final year in office, and never during it.

But does that make any sense? I mean, his term is four years—

Who cares? It’s our position, and we have a majority. Are you on this team, or what?

Yeah, I guess. But suppose that sneaky Obama tries to sneak someone onto the courts when we aren’t looking, the way he got that Communistic Affordable Care Act past us? How can we stop a crypto-Communist like that?

I know—we’ll keep the seat filled till we get a President who understands us. We'll stick in somebody like … Ted Cruz here.

[All] No, no no. Not that asshole.

Or somebody else. Maybe one of those nice Bushes.

[All] No, no, not another one.

Well, how about Trump? He’s got the votes. Isn’t he one of us, deep down?

[A pervasive silence]

Hmmm. Maybe not. Well, we’ll figure that out later. The main thing is, how do we keep the seat from going vacant in the meantime?

Yes, who can possibly fill our Champion’s seat in his absence?

No one—that’s the problem.

Well, OK, desperate times call for desperate solutions. Here’s what we do: we’ll keep the Champion in his seat. We’ll have him stuffed—

Like Trigger—

And keep him there, glaring down at plaintiffs and the Solicitor General, till we can get a decent replacement.

But what about his wit, his warmth, his humor, his derogatory remarks and insulting questions? He won’t be able to say anything at all…

Yeah, he’ll be another Clarence Thomas.

Yes, but even dead, he’ll be paying more attention. It’s the best we’ve got.

You’re right—we'll say it's Habeas corpus. Now let’s go find the body …

Two Long-shots, Same Struggle?

Last week Jean-Luc Mélenchon announced his candidacy for the French Presidency in 2017. This event passed with no notice at all in the US, and very little in France. Mr. Mélenchon (JLM in the French mode), will be a somewhat quixotic candidate, representing no party despite having founded the Left Party and organized the Left Front. Under the latter banner in 2012 he won 11% of the vote--a significant number, placing him 4th in France's multi-party system. But the Left Front (an affiliation with the vestigial Communist Party, certain Greens and other Left organizations) has largely sundered, JLM's Left Party has atrophied somewhat, and any candidacy to the left of the increasingly conservative 'Socialist' François Hollande will be seen as delivering the Presidency to the Right--to the despised Sarkozy, if not the more feared Marine LePen.

So one can say, condescendingly, that JLM soldiers on, except that such a phrase does a grave injustice to a remarkable figure. His campaign in 2012 was electrifying, especially to the young and alienated (the first of a number of parallels I will make to the current Sanders campaign). His speech in Marseille, looking out over the Mediterranean and evoking a multi-colored, multi-cultural France whose destiny lies more with North Africa than in the NATO alliance, was one of the great speeches in France's long Republican tradition. JLM is a proud bearer of the legacy that, as he often reminds his audiences, stretches from the Revolutions of 1789 and 1848 to the Paris Commune and the 1936 Popular Front, from Robespierre to Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum. It's a glorious legacy, and speaks to my own Jacobin instincts.

But JLM's candidacy is far from a museum piece or theatrical revival. His announcement evoked the need to rebuild a sustainable economy, with a re-imagined, decarbonized energy sector, support for localized, humanly-scaled agriculture, a reinvigorated maritime sector, and more. In short, his eco-socialism understands that in view of the grave crisis of the climate, only a massive overhaul of the economy--undertaken by the public sector because the private one is too entrenched in its old, unsustainable ways--can build a prosperous future. It's a program I find more rational, more contemporary than any of its more fashionable rivals, either in France or the US or any of the other old democracies.

JLM's ability to see a new world, democratically arising on the ashes of the old, reminds me in many ways of Bernie Sanders's 'political revolution.' JLM's economic transformations are more structural than Sanders's, but both share the goals of decarbonized sustainability, increased employment through opening new sectors for development, and justice through redistribution of unequally consolidated wealth. JLM imagines the vehicle for sweeping change to be a new  Constitution: a 6th Republic, with more popular accountability through referendums and a reduced Presidency. Sanders would achieve a comparable, though quite different structural reform by taking the US political process back from the billionaire donors. Both imagine a newer and more democratic politics, which helps explain why both have such appeal for young adults.

I don't think either of these men will be inaugurated President in 2017--but in many ways that's a tragic prediction. We need some measure of revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. Our political systems are decrepit, sclerotic, and our needs are urgent. Neither of these radicals--each a quite distinct product of his own political culture--is exempt from the charge of naiveté, and both receive more than their due of scorn. At the moment Sanders is riding high, JLM not so much, but fortunes change rapidly in our media-driven politics. They say you need to see the change before you can make it. Both of these candidates help me to do just that.

The 1%, the Point-1%, the 10-20%, and All the Rest

Before Occupy Wall Street no one was talking about the 1% and the 99%. Now those totemic fractions have come to occupy center stage in the Presidential campaign, and we should never forget how much we owe the Occupy movement--and some admirable economists like Piketty and Saez--for making this possible.

But the question needs refinement. I tend to think that the real profiteers, the ones pulling unconscionable amounts of wealth out of our common economy, are the .1%ers and the .01%ers--that is, the deca-and centa-millionaires, who can't possibly justify having 'earned' the wealth they enjoy. Mere millionaires, 1%ers? Not so much.

Now that Bernie has made it acceptable to direct ethical challenges to these hoarders, and Hillary has thought it prudent to follow suit, and even some Republicans are trying to get in on the act, it becomes possible to reflect on just how harmful such egregious inequality is to the social fabric--and to consider policies for taking some of it back. Right on!

But it's not as simple as that: 1/99, them vs. us. There are other ways to slice the pyramid, so to speak, and in some ways the more important distinctions may be between the 10% or the 20% who still have access to middle class norms, affluent American norms and expectations, and the rest: the 50% in the middle, who used to be the middle class but can no longer buy a house in a coastal city like Boston, or send their kids to private universities or even public ones without incurring disastrous debt. Who can't raise a family on a median salary, or save a dime for retirement (and thus will plan to work till they die). Who juggle major expenses and credit card debt and pray that somehow things will change.

And this doesn't even begin to address the remaining 30% or so, 'the poor' but also--if you consider not just income but wealth--the excluded, the African-Americans historically barred from acquiring home equity over generations, the immigrants, with or without documents, who can't participate in middle class life, the unfortunate who become ill with inadequate insurance, and on, and on.

What is true for both of these groups--the struggling middle and the out-the-bottom--is their dependance on the public sector, its schools and clinics and subsidized housing, its libraries and teen centers, its social workers and youth workers and public health workers and all the other publicly-supported service providers. The vaunted 'global economy' will not provide these folks--let's call them the 80%--with the means to live decent lives. The highly skilled, privileged professionals who settle into the upper 10-20%--many enjoying the subsidy of accumulated family wealth--will do just fine, even if they resent the excesses and vulgarities of those much wealthier than themselves. But the rest are sinking in a morass of unpayable debt, unrealizable aspirations, unaffordable necessities. The anger one hears on all sides of these Presidential campaigns is the sound of these people, going under.

 My impression is that candidate Clinton really doesn't get it--though she's trying to sound like she does. Parallel to their political careers, she and her husband have worked relentlessly to reach the .1% or perhaps the .01%, and it's just too hard from that vantage point to see the little people and their struggles. None of the Republicans are even trying to see--though they are pretty good at choosing scapegoats and fanning the flames of anger.

Bernie Sanders is a less-than-ideal candidate, whose grasp of foreign affairs seems sadly limited and whose irascible tone will finally not wear well. But he alone in this field of candidates really does see the social catastrophe inequality is causing. His tepid socialism is the only plan in view to build up the public sector so it can at least try to support the immiserated 80%. I don't think he'll get to be President (though I may be wrong), but he already has earned the job of Prophet. Like other prophets he will be the target of much abuse in the weeks to come. But that's because what he says is the urgent truth.

Primaries and Primaires

I'm not the only one who thinks the Democratic Presidential primary has gotten mighty interesting. It's not just that a victory lap has turned into a horse race, though yes, I'm feeling that who will win has become an open question. In an age of mega-donors and scientific campaign management, can an insurgent campaign, on behalf of a maverick, fired by a few million small donors, actually compete and win? Maybe not, but Sanders has at least brought that idea into the realm of possibility, and that in itself is big news.

But the more interesting question is substantive. As others have noted, this primary campaign has become a debate about change: the incremental, process-driven, insider's approach Clinton represents so effectively vs. the 'political revolution' Sanders proposes, a major realignment of power away from the financial titans and entrenched corporate interests, a resurgence of support for popular issues like higher wages and workplace benefits, affordable health and education, and the exclusion of Big Money from political dominance. Can we even imagine a political system organized along the lines Sanders proposes? Many still can't, but he has already succeeded in raising the question.

Just how interesting is this? One answer is to compare our process to France's. Despite some major differences, there are significant similarities: like the US and all other developed economies, France has been in a decades-long funk of sluggish growth, declining living standards, troublesome un- and underemployment, and the inevitable scapegoating of 'Others' such as immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, who steal 'our' jobs and drain our social welfare budgets. The rise of Marine LePen's National Front bears some resemblance to the Tea Party's rise to prominence, and to the faux populist nonsense of Donald Trump which has found such a surprising audience.

And France being France, a significantly more leftward response to this larger social and economic malaise has tried to assert itself. France's political traditions place the Socialists in the mainstream--a battle Sanders still needs to win--and include functioning Green and Communist Parties, so a Left Primary would already be a more diverse affair than competition within wings of the Democratic Party. Furthermore, France doesn't have a history of primaries like ours: the closed process of selecting a Presidential candidate within the ranks of a small number of party insiders gave way on the Left for the first time in 2007 to a more open election, in which any self-identified Socialist could vote. The results--first Segolène Royal, then François Hollande--were more democratic but arguably a disaster for the Socialist Party and the nation.

Will France's Left repeat the primary experiment this year, to select a candidate for the 2017 Presidential election? Negotiations are in progress, but so far the prospects look dim. Some Socialist insiders want a process that will simply renominate Hollande, faute de mieux, while others, like Prime Minister Manuel Valls, are no doubt hoping for some closed-door process that will operate like a decorous putsch to remove Hollande and replace him with a new insider ... such as M. Valls. Such a process, whatever the result, will produce the equivalent of Hillary Clinton, a fully vetted professional, a safe candidate of the center or vaguely center-left.

But what about all those insurgent voices on the Left who can see that traditional incremental fixes aren't working, and insist that a 'revolution' of the Left is the only way to fend off the populist retrenchment of the Right? If that is roughly what the Sanders campaign is doing in the US primary season, there are certainly candidates to do the same thing in France: the Communist senator Pierre Laurent, former Green Party leader and minister Cécile Duflot, and Left Party candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in particular. Their parties have coalesced from time to time as the Left Front, and Mélenchon won 11% of the national vote in the first round of the 2012 Presidential election.

But here's where the French system--which always seemed to favor more parties, more varieties of position, more flexible opportunities for alliances and coalitions--is looking less supple than our clunky American two-party system. In other cycles the free-for-all first round of French elections invited a broad spectrum of parties to compete, and then broker deals to win a two-person second round that tended to look like a Left/Right, Democrat/Republican US election. In the upcoming election, though, this may not work. If all the various Lefts challenge Hollande (or Valls, or some other 'official' Socialist) in the first round, the Left will have no candidate in a second round. The election will be a face-off of the Right (perhaps even the dreadful Sarkozy) against the Far-right LePen--whose die-hard support all but guarantees her one of the two finalist spots.

What France's Left does not need is a lackluster candidate like Hollande, urging leftists to vote for another term of rightward slide because it's the least bad alternative. What France, like the US, could really use is a spirited competition on the Left, to debate whether serious structural changes, a 'political revolution,' is necessary. Such a debate has galvanized the young in America and brought new life to the political process. But it takes time for an outsider movement like Sanders's to grow: from last fall's awakenings to the winter face-offs in Iowa and New Hampshire and on to the next two or three months of competition in different regions and venues. If France had such a prolonged primary season, would a more dynamic change in leadership be possible? Would Mélenchon win over enough dissatisfied left Socialists to gain a plurality, or Duflot or someone else emerge as a new face? We'll never know, because 1) they won't compete in a simple winner-take-all primary, and 2) if they did, there would be no time for the momentum Sanders has achieved over many months of campaigning.

The hard truth, I think, is that the political process in the US, in France, in all the old democracies, needs such a galvanizing movement. The young are seriously alienated from the old political ways, and the allure of simplistic authoritarian solutions is a present danger. Old-style leaders like Hollande or Clinton will not deliver what's needed--they are too beholden to vested interests to bring about real change, and too predictable to interest the outsider elements that need to be brought into the political debate. Sanders is pointing to something much bigger than his own candidacy, and he has found a hearing among a talented and engaged mass of young people. People all over the world, and particularly in France, who believe in democratic process and political renewal should be paying close attention.

Updated to reflect the first French Left primary in 2007 (not 2012).

'Revolution'? Or Revolution?

I very much like and respect the work of Paul Krugman. I suspect we share similar values about what we would call a 'good society,' based on greater equality, opportunity, and shared public facilities and amenities. That is, we're both sort of 'socialists,' despite the troubled fortunes of that term. Anyhow, I take it seriously when Krugman questions both the credentials and electability of Bernie Sanders while offering support for Hillary Clinton. And when Krugman offers a link to an article by The American Prospect's Paul Starr in Politico, laying out the fuller case against Sanders, I follow the link--and you should too.

What we find there are some predictable apprehensions: Bernie would be awfully old, no one can get elected under the socialist label, he's just too improbable, too narrow in his experience (foreign policy especially). Fine. But Starr goes on to suggest that Sanders's social policies are unrealistic because they can't be funded--that is, the vast wealth consolidated in America's .1% just can't be tapped--fuhgeddaboudit. And banks that are too big to fail? No, says Krugman, it's the shadow banks, stupid, as Hillary says. (Of course it's both, as Bernie knows.) But the point Krugman and Starr and all the other liberal policy wonks are making is, Don't try to rock the boat--it'll capsize. That could be Hillary's slogan.

Where this becomes most transparent--and shocking--is in Starr's argument against Sanders's 'Medicare for all' single-payer health proposal. Starr acknowledges that universal care would have been a good idea--back in Truman's day--and yes, we pay too much for the care we get now. Quite an understatement when you see how a rich state like Massachusetts is practically in bankruptcy paying hugely inflated health costs, and how France, the UK, Canada, you name it get equal or better care for half or less the dough. Starr denies none of this.

What he does say is, "Decades of skewed incentives have created the system we have ... 'Medicare for All' implies withdrawing an enormous amount of the revenue that hospitals ... are counting on (for example, to meet bond payments)." And there you have it: we simply MUST go on overpaying for health care, impoverishing ourselves and the rest of the public sector, in order to lard those skewed incentives (read deca-millionaire surgeons, hospital CEOs and big pharma execs). Why? The bond-holders have to get their profit. A familiar refrain, one we heard when it came to bailing out banks or pauperizing Greece. If you want sensible, meaningful change, you can't have it--because the financial structures require us to go on privileging the privileged, returning profits to the bond-holders while the rest of us scramble to pay our deductibles and avoid foreclosure.

Which brings us back to Bernie Sanders, and his cherished term 'Revolution.' He says it a lot, and I'm sure he means it. But what Krugman, Starr, et al. help us to see is that revolution doesn't happen by electing a new President, even a 'socialist' one, or passing some new laws (even if Congress wasn't wholly owned by the wealthy and incapable of passing anything useful). No, Revolution, the kind that makes it possible to rationalize our health care system and pay sensible costs, to tame our financial institutions and remove their vast bribes from the political process, to get clean energy when we need it (NOW) and not when it can make some energy executive very rich--that sort of Revolution won't happen at the ballot box. (It won't happen in the streets either, at least not yet.)

But when you hear Bernie say 'Revolution,' remember those bond-holders, making us pay double for our skewed healthcare. Remember that Revolution would mean we foreclose on the bond-holders, not homeowners. That we confiscate the vast wealth of the .1%ers to build our new society. That's the only revolution that would mean anything, and not even Bernie is going to take us there. Not yet.