Trump has made it crystal clear how much he values money, power and praise. Seriously, he deserves credit for being so consistent about who and what he is. His narcissism knows no bounds and he makes no apologies. No one can deny this. Supporters can point to objective accomplishments during his time in office- tax cuts and SCOTUS nominations to name the most prominent and there have been some unique stances in foreign policy that may have long-lasting, positive effects- but they cannot dispute his nature and maintain any credibility as they do so. The unmistakable reality of Donald Trump has been more widely transmitted than for any other person in human history and nearly all of this has come from his own mouth, unbidden, unaided and unedited.

This essay will make it clear that Trump is his own creation. He prides himself on that fact. Sure there have been important contributors to the cult of personality around Trump, figures like Roger Stone, an odd, cartoonish man to whom no credible leader should ever listen. Building himself into a successful demagogue has been a deliberate process for decades and no one should be surprised about the unhinged actions of those under the thrall of his pied-piper tune. It has all been intentional and the madness won’t end, even with Trump out of office, until we fully recognize the malicious genius pulling the levers.

Trump may not have pulled the trigger but he loaded the gun and turned it over to a bunch of lunatics of his own making without any concern for what would predictably happen. Would he have preferred that they not violently crash the Capitol? Maybe. Did he care that they did, killing several people in the process? Absolutely not.

Despite the clear understanding we should have of Trump at this point, there are those amongst us that still claim that they did not see Trump’s inciting of insurrection coming. Too many have qualified, softened and excused the lies that our recently departed president started spewing well before his time in office and which culminated in the seditious rantings outside our Capitol on January 6th. All of those people were there because of the cult of Trump and because of the specific and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud that Trump had been making since the spring of 2020 before voting even began. He made the same claims in 2016 to create plausible deniability for a loss he was expecting.

In his defense this past 4 years, his loyal followers have often trotted out the classic dismissive: “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump.” You know, as if to say, “Don’t worry sweetheart, it’s all part of the plan…at least he cut our taxes.” 

Well, finally, Trump supporters and I can agree on something. That is Trump being Trump. And he has been that way a long time.

***

The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines demagogue as follows: “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.” 

For decades, Donald Trump has crafted a fictional persona to appeal to the mentally-addled types that broke into our Capitol. From his involvement in the Central Park 5 case in 1989 to his appearance on WWE to the interview he gave the penultimate purveyor of “fake news”, Alex Jones, Trump has consistently courted their support.

The “Central Park 5” case centers around the brutal rape of a woman in Central Park back in 1989. (https://time.com/5597843/central-park-five-trump-history/.) Just a week or so after the attack, Trump took out a now infamous full page ad in NYC calling for bringing back the death penalty. He wrote: “I want to hate the muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer…” 

For completeness, I have included the .pdf of his ad ⁽¹⁾. Trump did not specifically name the defendants but New Yorkers knew to whom Trump was referring and the influence he was trying to have on the legal process. To that point, the defense team eventually claimed that Trump’s efforts had exerted a prejudicial impact on court proceedings. The “wink and a nod” dogwhistling is clear: These were young black and Hispanic men after all. They couldn’t have been up to any good. It was an indirect but unmistakable call to convict them in the court of public opinion and execute them. 

After tremendous suffering and years of incarceration, the convictions of the five men were vacated in 2002 when a known serial rapist, Matias Reyes, confessed to having attacked the woman. His DNA was found at the crime scene. Instead of acknowledging the error of the position he took or expressing any remorse that innocent men had lost over a decade of their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit, Trump justifies his actions in 1989 by pointing to criminal activity completely unrelated to the rape case and for which these men were not even charged. When they were exonerated and released, Trump begrudgingly stated that the $40 million restitution paid to these men by NYC, after 13 years in prison for a crime they did not commit, was a “disgrace.” 

Donald Trump is a man willing to condemn men before the facts are in. A man who shows no regret even when proven wrong for having done so. Are these qualities we want in any leader let alone our president? 

How about Trump’s claims that he watched “thousands and thousands of people” in Jersey City, NJ cheer as the World Trade towers collapsed? Complete lie but its intent was to gather support by stoking racial fears. The reality is bad enough- we had just been attacked by Muslim extremists but it is wrong and completely counterproductive to claim there are “thousands” in the New York area celebrating. Innocent Middle-Easterners of all faiths could have died as a result of a backlash triggered by this lie.

What do we know about fans of professional wrestling? Certainly most know that what they are seeing is staged but don’t we also know that some WWE fans think it’s real and might these types be prone to taking Trump literally when he asks them to confront elected officials to overturn election results? Haven’t we seen these idiots break their spine jumping off houses to duplicate what they see in the ring? And even many of those who are in on the secret still chant, yell and clinch their fists as they watch the staged battles. When Trump made an appearance at a WWE event with his friend, Vince McMahon, in 2007, he again wanted to convey the image of a tough guy. A fictional image of someone who beats his enemies by force while the Thunderdome shakes and the red meat flies. 

“Lock her up!” “Build that wall!”

“Chum, chum, chum…”

With The Apprentice, NBC delivered the perfect platform for Trump to thrive in a fictional business setting. With scripted precision devoid of all the realities of the real business world, Trump was allowed to play the role of a tough-minded executive that everyone wants to impress. He is a genius with an unmatched eye for knowing what works. Nevermind the bankruptcies and the fact he is not worth nearly what he claims. 

Of course, most of us knew it was all bullshit but like some of the WWE fans, many in the TV audience were true believers and voted and rioted accordingly. 

If you remain unconvinced that Trump has intentionally courted the befuddled fringe of American voters, consider that he gave an interview to Alex Jones in 2015 to promote his candidacy. If you are not familiar with Jones, he runs a website called InfoWars where he routinely pedals complete insanity. Like the US government being involved in the planning of the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11. Or the classic conspiracy: NASA staged the 1969 moon landing in a film studio.

Like his claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting was a hoax; Jones was actually sued by parents of children murdered because of the awful things he said (https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/sandy-hook-families-are-suing-alex-jones-what-he-said-about-shooting.) 

Just like Trump, Alex Jones aims to take advantage of the soft-minded for financial gain. Jones puts the Trump interview along with similar garbage on his site, all the while selling iodine drops on his website that he calls “Survival Shield.” You know to use during the ensuing apocalypse he and other kooks like him have predicted. 

Our 45th POTUS gave this nut job an interview where he heaped praise on Jones for his brave, diligent journalism. 

Anyone tired of hearing: “You can’t make this stuff up?” 

No- you really can’t.

In 2014, Donald Trump effectively launched his bid for the White House as the champion of “birtherism.” Remember the shameful allegation that President Obama was not a legal citizen of our country based on the lie that Obama had been born in Kenya rather than Hawaii? In parallel with the myth of a stolen election, birtherism undermines the legitimacy of the sitting US president at the time, laying the foundation for “a revolution” to “Make America Great Again.” Got to take the country back from those who stole it, from those who don’t belong. 

How did so many miss what this guy was doing? It was in broad daylight, on TV, nearly everyday for 5 years! 

When he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in 2015, Trump called for a wall to shut out the “rapists” spilling across our southern border. He always has to stoke fear to gather support. Later in the campaign, Trump would take another swipe at President Obama, claiming that Putin, the dictator of a criminal oligarchy, is a better leader: “If he (Putin) says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him,” Trump said of the Russian president. “Certainly in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president (Obama) has been.” 

Transactional politics in stark outline. Cue the “that’s Trump being Trump” qualification. Cue all the intellectual knots his enablers have tied themselves in to explain and excuse what he actually means when he speaks. Obviously we are misunderstanding him. Obviously we have been brainwashed by the liberal media. 

Trump praised a ruthless man who cares not one iota for individual rights and freedoms, a man whose core being is antithetical to the foundational principles of the US. A man known to assassinate those who challenge him in the press and who has clearly taken aim at the US as its arch nemesis. Praising Putin while denigrating our sitting POTUS is completely f^&*ing unacceptable. It is the opposite of patriotism. No matter what you think of Obama, only a self-interested demagogue would say such a thing and there is no excuse, then or now, for not understanding what he was doing.

***

I hope I made it clear that there are no accidents here. No excuses. Trump intentionally sought the fervent support from the types of personalities prone to going haywire in the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Everyone needs to own what and who Donald Trump is. He is the textbook definition of a demagogue. He is selfish, greedy and amoral. He and people like him are a danger to the Republic.

And conservatives have legitimate reasons to have supported him. The “better than the alternative” justification for supporting Trump is an idea that I have not been able to refute. Half of the blame for our current predicament lies with the left and the anti-American policies and corrosive ideologies they are now embracing. 

To argue that Donald Trump was necessary for Republican success is one of the biggest rubs for a conservative like me. If a man like Trump is required to implement your agenda, you may need to meditate on your beliefs a little longer, perhaps adjust some attitudes or get into deep prayer. Because he is poison. 

Trumpism is too unstable. It is too personality-driven. It places too high a premium on revenge and spite and it is predicated on too many lies. Values are only a marketing item used in pep-rallies to motivate base passions. 

Trumpism is about Trump, nothing else.

Those of us right of center who reject the man and methods still need to be open minded to successes in trade policy and the new awareness we have of China as our biggest geopolitical opponent. The Middle-East policies of Trump may provide long-term stability. Trump deserves credit on these issues. Otherwise, he simply repackaged tax cuts, border security and SCOTUS nominations. These are his biggest successes and ones that every 2016 GOP candidate would have enacted without the heavy price paid for supporting such a nasty person. There is no justification for giving Trump messianic status. He did not invent conservatism. For fucks sake he’s not even a conservative. He is a populist demagogue, amoral to the core. Trump has grifter’s instinct for whatever works and he saw an opportunity in the Republican Party. Trump is a transactional figure who understands the inherently hierarchical nature of conservatives, correctly wagering that the reasonable-right (perhaps no longer a coherent description) would bow to the new alpha in exchange for making their policy priorities a reality. 

Yet, at what cost? Trump has made our country into a chum-tank, a feeding frenzy of polarization and discord and of beliefs and actions predicated on garbage information. He has made the job of legitimate conservatism far more difficult than it was 4 years ago. He stained all of his successes. We can only hope that the reasonable portion of his supporters can see through the gore well enough at this point to understand what he has done to the conservative brand and to this country in general. That new insight is required to reshape the GOP. 

We don’t have to link ourselves to a bad man to accomplish good things. There is a better way.

A new fiscally-conservative, Libertarian-minded third party with a much more streamlined Federal agenda would be ideal. The American electorate has bought into an overwrought vision of the Federal government. We are a Republic. Californians should not be dictating to Mississippians who in turn should not determine the conduct of Virginians in their day-to-day lives. A smaller, more efficient list of priorities would facilitate consensus, strengthen the core fulcrum of the nation and bring stability. Ideally, this party should reject the culture wars, leaving beliefs, grievances and identity politics to the media-types that manipulate passions to sell advertising. 

Naïve but hopeful. It’s better than cynical acceptance of a dangerous and subversive figure like Trump. 

***

The following is a list of podcasts posted in recent weeks that to varying degrees relate to the essay above. The antidote to the current chaos is better information and this largely comes as long-form, commercial free podcasts by intellectuals and leaders who put ideas and values before party allegiance.

This is the intended format for future postings. A topic will be reviewed with an effort to list some relevant podcasts from the list of thinkers that I believe productively shape our conversations. More of these types and less Twitter, less Fox and CNN, is needed but is time consuming.

• Ben Shapiro: The Ben Shapiro Show
  • Episode January 7th, 2021: The Worst Day in Modern Amrican Political History
    • Shapiro’s work is not commercial free and is more partisan than the criteria listed above but he has the capacity to call balls and strikes regardless of his strongly held beliefs. I believe he makes it clear how unacceptable the riots of 1/6/21 were to his worldview and he called out (but still strongly supported) Trump for all of his bluster and nonsense throughout the last 4 years.
    • Beware- Voice is a bit shrill, Shapiro can be pretty snarky and he speaks faster than any human on the planet.
• Sam Harris: Making Sense
  • Episode #231: Crossing the Abyss
    • This is an amazing interview with retired General Stanley McChrystal and former Navy Seal Chris Fussell where they discuss the analogies between the Trump mob and Iraqi insurgents. Amazing and terrifying.
• Dan Crenshaw: Hold These Truths with Dan Crenshaw
  • Episode January 8th, 2021: The Truth About January 6th…
    • Dan Crenshaw is a GOP Rep. from Texas who has the capacity to be honest about his party’s failings and the role Trump played on 1/6/21. This episode has interviews with several Republicans reviewing the events of that day and Crenshaw makes it abundantly clear what he thinks of those who fomented violence and sedition.
• Bret Weinstein: The DarkHorse Podcast
  • Episode #62: Podcast with Jeremy Lee Quinn and Bret Weinstein: The Capitol Insurrection, A View from the Inside
    • Fascinating and horrifying, Quinn’s perspective, moderated by the most even-keeled, fair-minded voice I know of on political issues (Weinstein), is very informative. Listen to individuals whose sensibilities are naturally on the left discuss the motivations of the right in good faith. We need more of this type of open-mindness and fairness
  • Episode #63: Beg Your Pardon

This is the typical format of DarkHorse where biologist husband and wife, Weinstein and Heather Heying, give a fair and very detailed breakdown of the lunacy occurring on both sides of the political divide.

References:

⁽¹⁾ Source: PBS Frontline

I am the son of a Civil War enthusiast. My father was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on November 27th in the year of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He died in 1995 but I have a recollection of him proudly saying that he was born in a building with a cannonball lodged in the wall, a remnant of the great siege of 1863 for which the town is renowned. The year of his birth and formative years during the ensuing economic depression framed my father’s outlook and his hobby, throughout a life plagued by tragedy and poor health, was history. I have carted some 40 boxes of books with me from Jackson, MS to Houston, Texas and then to Oxford, Mississippi as proof.

Three eras interested my father the most: The Civil War, Medieval Europe and World War II. Obviously, the former interest is rooted in the place of his birth, a river city where his Scotch-Canadian grandfather, Malcolm Sawers, worked on a riverboat. My father tried to enlist for the Pacific theatre at age 17 but by November 1944 the war was winding down and at 5’7”, 115 pounds, the enlistment officer, who also knew my widowed grandmother and understood that she needed my father at home and alive, told the small teenager to go home and take care of his mother and younger brother. 

That is the history as I dimly recall my father’s telling of it. Told to me by a man who lost his father at age 11 and was of meager financial means until his middle aged years. 

Known to his family as “Jimmy”, my father was one of these southern gentlemen who framed the Civil War in romantic terms. Gone with the Wind was a favorite movie. His admiration for General Lee was immense and the valiantry and successful tactics of the far less numerous Confederate forces, facing insurmountable odds, was frequently lauded. Aged 46 and already in bad health when I was born, throwing the ball or doing anything most boys would find fun were not options for my father. Instead, trips to the Vicksburg National Battlefield were a favorite pastime. He was an intelligent man and he instilled in me an appreciation for long, detail-rich conversation. 

James Roland is buried, with his father of the same name, his grandfather Malcolm, his mother and two brothers who died in childhood, at Cedar Hill Cemetery that abuts the national park.

I adored my father, what little time I had with him. I realize, nonetheless, that his attitudes were racist. He did not have a silver spoon in his mouth at birth but I know he never fully acknowledged that a black boy born on the same day and with similar circumstances would have had a far harder time digging himself out of poverty and realizing his full potential. I doubt he ever realized that a man born on the same day, living in the same place and possibly having the same attributes would have been subject to immense cruelty simply on the basis of his black skin. I never heard of and cannot imagine him actively engaging in any violent or even unjust actions against black people but he did not embrace them as equals and his passive racism, like so many others of his generation, is a sin he took to his grave.

***

The October 2019 edition of the New York Times Magazine commemorates the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves to North America in 1619. Its introductory article, written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, provides a pointed chronology of the cruelty experienced by black Americans from oppressive, racist whites. As the key writer, Ms. Jones earned a Pulitzer for this work and spearheads the “1619 Project” as an effort to infuse public education in the US with the stark history of racism.

Ms. Jones directly sets the theme in her title: “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” 

Ms. Jones’ begins her article by describing how black Americans had been systematically denied opportunities to better themselves despite their skill sets and despite their patriotic contributions in the military. Seeing this discrimination, a younger Jones questioned why her father was so proud to fly the Stars and Stripes outside their house. She then provides her father’s answer: “He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.” 

Ms. Jones then states that the cotton industry, requiring enslaved men and women from Africa, put this country on the map as a global economic power. Past the end of the Civil War, Jones shows where hope emerged in the aftermath of each historical hurdle only to be dashed by the reemergence of racist laws and violent backlashes from the white population. In the interim between the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights era, much of white America embraced Jim Crow and even the US Federal government turned a blind eye until brave women and men, mostly of black skin, turned the tide in the 1950s and 60s.

If reminding us about the facts of racism and slavery were the goal, then there could be no objection. 

Unfortunately, Ms. Jones goes far beyond historical summary. Her thesis is that the United States of America has an irrevocably evil foundation, a nation she and her colleagues believe to have begun with the arrival of African slaves in 1619 rather than the date we celebrate, July 4th, 1776. She argues that our forebears were guilty of the worst human depravity ever to have transpired at that time: “one fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before.” Following this, Ms. Jones claims that these beliefs persist to this day and that our nation continues to cast its black citizens in a negative light: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity.” 

Ms. Jones leaves no part of our history unscathed: “We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens.” 

In his editor’s notes, Jake Silverstein states the intentions of the NYT even more plainly: ““The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history.” He and his colleagues feel that everything about our nation is tainted by racism and makes it clear that they believe this problem is still the prime directive of an actively racist system: “Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day.” 

This is no effort by the NYT to heal the wounds of racism: They want to rip the stitches out and throw in some acid. With Christianity as his guiding light, Dr. King taught us that the body politic of the US suffered from deep but ultimately healable injuries. These were self-inflicted by the moral failings of our founders and perpetuated by subsequent generations of white Americans. But these failings are not unique to white skin. Rather, as a Christian, Dr. King understood that these failings are inherent to the human species as a whole. 

In contrast to these teachings, Ms. Jones and the NYT likens racism in the US to an incurable, genetic defect. When he states that racial “hatred” is “endemic” in the US and continues to “plague it to this day”, Silverstein reinforces the “in the very DNA of this country” claim at the heart of the The 1619 Project. The net result of how Silverstein and Jones write is a predicate for concluding the worst about America, past and present, and Jones posits that Americans with black skin, uniformly, should be recognized as the “most American.” In the NYT economy of “Americanism”, individual facts and circumstances do not matter. Skin color is the prime currency and whites are racially inferior. 

***

 A hopeful reading of Ms. Jones could find a ray of light in her concluding statements: “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag. We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.” 

Perhaps instead of arguing for black supremacy in place of white, one could hope that Ms. Jones is suggesting that those of African lineage can now see their heritage as quintessentially American, as a story of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and embrace the founding principles of this nation even while remaining mindful of the moral failures of so many white Americans during the first centuries of our history.  

***

To be clear, the history of racism is crucial to understand but the editorialization of these facts by The New York Times negatively distorts the definition of what it is to be an American. The postmodern critique of objective truth and morality has infiltrated every corner of academia, of which the The 1619 Project is a downstream manifestation. Given how negatively these people view our country, and indeed the entirety of Western Civilization, why would Ms. Jones want black people to be “the most American of all?” What is going to be left of the US when the NYT finishes “reframing” our history?

It is not clear how Ms. Jones or Mr. Silverstein would answer these questions and that ambiguity should be a huge concern for any parent with children who may eventually see the NYT agenda materialize in their school curriculum. The The 1619 Project, with its broader connections to critical race theory and intersectionality, appears to propose an entirely new foundational narrative that overshoots the mark with its excessive criticism, editing the facts of history to suit woke ideology and produce similar effects on the left that white-washed notions of Uncle Sam and apple pie have on the right.

 So where do we take this conversation at this point? In the current environment of illiberal “wokism”, any counterpoint to Ms. Jones is considered by definition an example of “white supremacy”, a term so loosely applied that it has basically lost its meaning. Yet, in defense of this nation’s moral foundations, one need not adopt a starry-eyed, naïve view that ignores facts of history. We can acknowledge where our forebears were in grave, horrible error without damning every strand of our nation’s mortal coil. Abject meanness, greed and the lust for power are intrinsic features of human nature and understanding how these flaws have shaped history is indispensable to counterbalancing their damaging effects. We should reject ideological narratives that distort history regardless of their place on the political spectrum. In the current informational environment, these corrosive modes of thought are emerging exponentially and should be clearly identified and confronted.

Love of country need not be blind but it is required in large measure if the citizens of the US are to once again embrace shared aspirations. We should all open our eyes to what the NYT and the far left is selling. OurMortalCoil disagrees with Ms. Jones and Mr. Silverstein: Redemption is possible and we should not forget the strides that have been made this past 50-60 years. We need to help the NYT and those like minded see this more clearly and the nation as a whole should aim to make race and skin color the least relevant components of our identity.

We must fully acknowledge but ultimately forgive the sins of the past. Our fathers were all flawed, just as they are now and always will be. To be certain, when it comes to race in this country, some of our fathers have sinned more than others. Yet even as we acknowledge this, unloading the burden of history redeems us, giving us the insight and strength required to face the substantial challenges of the present. 

The most luminous figures in our history, particularly the one most Americans celebrate this holiday season, embodied this spiritual understanding. All Americans should remember this, independent of religious disposition or lack thereof. The guiding principles have never been wrong. We simply haven’t followed them well. 

Posted 12/10/20- Malcolm Roland

Everyone loves to vote, right? What is it that is so appealing, so satisfying about making a choice and then seeing the results? We don’t know either, but we love it so much that we have included a new Polls section. Pickings are pretty slim at the moment but that will change. So what are you waiting for? Head on over to the Polls and vote!

So, the cataclysm has past and the sun still rose in the east every morning since the election and, is reality sets in, I feel confident the sun will continue to dip below the western horizon at the end of the day. 

As none of the viable choices was going to be pain-free, there was only one truly bad scenario in this election: Questions of election fraud where the count is very slow and there is reason to suspect malfeasance.

Ah, yes. 2020: The gift that keeps on giving.

Some may think a post mortem analysis of the election is premature given the faint pulse left to the age of Trump as they press their case in the judicial system but I would like to cut into this rotten mess and dissect out the silver linings for both sides to see. 

Let’s grab a knife shall we? Or an axe?

Despite the likely loss of the White House, it seems clear that conservatives and Republicans are the bigger winners. The “huuuge” voter turnout suggests at first glance that a new level of citizen engagement has been achieved, which is a positive for democracy in general. However, an intense hatred of Trump motivated the deciding margin and this source of energy will not be available to the left going forward. Will the legacy media continue to keep anti-Trump sentiment stoked to inspire their base? Sure but it won’t be the same as covering every word and Tweet by Trump as breaking news. Will legacy media outlets continue to characterize all conservatives and any liberals who disagree with the identitarian madness occurring on the left as racists? Sure but by definition, “Never Trumpers” who voted blue no longer exist and if the GOP learns valuable lessons, namely that their policies actually appeal to the electorate and they simply need a better salesman, then the tide will shift decidedly in their favor. There is a small indication that Hispanics and African-Americans were more favorable to Trump in 2020 compared to 2016. More importantly, Republicans will likely keep the Senate and they narrowed the gap in the House. They are well positioned to regain the House in 2022 and we all saw how effective the parliamentarian McConnell was at thwarting Obama’s agenda. A few years ago I may have said that the level of gridlock during the Obama years was harmful to the country but this time I see it as a blessing. 

The silver lining is much dimmer for the Democrats. Liberals have their woman in place. The former senator from the left coast checks all the diversity boxes and she is smart and formidable. Yet, the notion that they have positioned Harris as a mid-term replacement to Biden is a shameful undercurrent to the enthusiasm for the incoming administration. Remember, VP-elect Harris did not win the party nomination. Biden had a centrist appeal that she lacks and while California has a lot to be proud of as a state, the country as a whole does not want to follow their direction. Kamala Harris would not have pulled the thin margin of victory in swing states to get the Democrats their win in 2020. 

It’s not that she could not win because of her minority background or the fact that she is a woman. Harris has some of that same viper-mentality of Trump and is clearly motivated by personal ambition. I invite everyone to go review her questioning of then SCOTUS nominee Bret Kavanaugh and some of the other committee inquiries. Perhaps then Senator Harris is simply doing the partisan-job expected of her but her role in a very regrettable period of SCOTUS history sticks with many of us as does the disrespect she showed her running mate during the Democratic nomination process.  

There is nothing wrong with being tough, smart and ambitious but a uniter she is not. 

The lesser of two evils was again the deciding factor in our presidential election. There was never going to be any clear winners in 2020. Our two party system and the backroom oligarchy of technocrats that run it still rule the day. Trump was never going to be a leader for all Americans and made it pretty clear he had no desire to be so. 

But many feel that Trump, as crude and distracted as he was, may have loosened the grip the unelected ascendant has on the reigns of power. Trump sympathizers see him as a rough instrument to break the status quo. The fact that he did so primarily for his own benefit is debatable and there can be no doubt that he alienated a lot of voters who would otherwise mostly support the issues on the conservative side of the ledger. He came to duke it out but threw too many haymakers in too many directions to be effective. 

Regardless, the short term future appears brighter for conservatives and Republicans, especially if lessons can be learned and they take from Trump’s example a renewed ability to communicate their views confidently and clearly while leaving out the demagoguery and bombastic rhetoric we have seen this past 4 years.

***

There are many voices out there with a similar analysis. One that comes to mind is Matt Taibbi. His alienation from both parties is similar to this writer’s. You can hear him discuss some of this with Megyn Kelly on her podcast of the same name, released Wednesday November 11th. 

Written by: Malcolm Roland

Republished from The Conversation

American suburbs radically changed over the decades – and so have their politics

Jan Nijman, Georgia State University

Editor’s note: Suburban voters in a number of areas are considered critical swing voters. The growing political stakes reflect the dramatic changes that have happened in American suburbia in recent years, says Dr. Jan Nijman, director and distinguished university professor at the Urban Studies Institute, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. He edited the book, “The Life of North American Suburbs,” which examines how the once homogeneous suburbs have become far more diverse and varied from one other.

Three major trends converge in suburbs

The United States was the birthplace of the 20th-century suburb. After World War II, the archetypal “sitcom” suburb of the 1950s – white, middle-class households with male breadwinners and traditional gender roles, in single-family homes – assumed near-mythical proportions. They were seen as a settled, stable place where middle-class families had “arrived.” Change was not a part of that dreamy constellation.

But suburbia proved far from stable, because of three major trends: the rapid growth of suburban populations, growing diversity due in part to immigration and economic changes that brought increasing inequalities. If you add up these trends, the result is the increased sorting of populations into highly diverse suburban patterns.

By the year 2000, the suburban U.S. population exceeded that of central cities and rural areas combined. Today, there are many more types of suburbs than, say, 30 years ago. While cities are said to be diverse, they are really sorted into various types of suburbs where different types of people live in a sort of suburban bubble. If today somebody tells you they live in the suburbs, it does not tell you a lot. Rather, it raises the question “What suburb?”

Enormous contrasts and inequalities

Suburbs now are definitely not all white, middle-class or dominated by families with traditional gender roles. They vary a great deal in terms of well-being, race and ethnicity. The distinction between central cities and suburbs has blurred. This is due to the suburbanization of previously excluded lower-income groups and ethnic minorities, and to the gentrification of large parts of central cities – more wealthy people (often whites) moving back in. Suburbia continued to grow, but increasingly because many lower income people didn’t have anywhere else to go. For some of the less expensive, far-out suburbs, it was reflected in the phrase “Drive till you qualify.”

Since 2000, poverty in the suburbs has grown much faster than in central cities. By 2010, well over a third of the suburban population in the U.S. was nonwhite. The majority of African Americans now live in suburbs, and certain suburbs have also become the first and primary destination for foreign immigrants.

What really stands out are the enormous contrasts and inequalities between suburbs. For example, in metro Atlanta, where I am based, one of the suburban areas to the north has a life expectancy of 84 years – as high as Switzerland’s – and household incomes twice Atlanta’s average, and the residents are mostly white. Compare this to an inner suburban area west of downtown, where life expectancy is only 71 – comparable to Bangladesh – incomes are less than half the Atlanta average, and most residents are Black Americans. You could drive from one world to the other in 15 minutes.

‘Swing suburbs’

The 2020 elections are sometimes referred to as a battle for the suburbs, for good reason. In recent elections, while urban areas have generally been strongly Democratic and small towns and rural areas have been predominantly Republican, it is in the suburbs where things are more dynamic. Especially in the all-important swing states, the outcomes tend to revolve around “swing suburbs.”

For instance, if the state of Georgia turns Democratic in 2020 (which may be a stretch), I think it will be decided in suburbia. Fayette County, an Atlanta suburb with about 60,000 voters, could be especially interesting. In past times, Fayette was overwhelmingly Republican (and white). In 2012, Romney beat Obama by a landslide, with 31.4 points. In 2016, however, Fayette showed the narrowest win for Trump of all 29 counties in Greater Atlanta, though still a considerable margin of 19.1 points (57.0–37.9).

In the 2018 gubernatorial vote, Fayette again had the narrowest Republican win of all similar-size counties in the state – but the margin was down to 13.2 points (56.0–42.8). It would require a large shift for Fayette to turn Democratic in 2020, but the changing demographics suggest a possibility: The estimated share of nonwhites since 2016 has increased from 36.6% to 40%, and the share of population whose first language is not English went up from 10.3% to 15%. If it happens, Fayette will follow the example of another Atlanta suburb: Cobb County in 2012 was won by Mitt Romney with a 12.6 margin, but in 2016 it went to Clinton by 2.1 points; and in the 2018 gubernatorial elections the Democrats extended their lead in Cobb County to 9.6 points.

A more likely large swing suburb in a more critical state is Seminole County (about 200,000 voters) in Florida, which covers a good part of the northern suburbs of Orlando. In Seminole County, the 2016 electoral margin in favor of Trump was the tightest of all major suburban counties in Florida, at just 1.5 points (48.1% to 46.6%). And in the gubernatorial elections of 2018, the county flipped Democratic, with a slender lead of 1.8 points (48.5% to 50.3%). In the last four years, Seminole’s estimated nonwhite population has increased from 38% to 42%; the foreign-born population went up from 12.6% to 15.2%; and the population whose first language is not English increased from 21% to 25.8%.

Suburbia is not what it used to be.

Jan Nijman, Distinguished Professor of Urban Studies and Geosciences, Georgia State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Republished from The Conversation

How state courts – not federal judges – could protect voting rights

Steven Mulroy, University of Memphis

A jaw-dropping deluge of election-related lawsuits is already working its way through the nation’s courts, but some lawyers are taking a different tack than usual: ignoring federal laws and instead focusing on state constitutions and state laws, as interpreted by state courts.

That could be a smart move: The U.S. Constitution
gives the states’ primary responsibility for regulating elections, including federal elections. Almost all the voting procedures at issue are matters of state law. And almost all state constitutions guarantee a right to vote.

Federal courts also handle voting rights cases. But in recent years, there has been an increasingly clear pattern of lower-level federal trial courts ruling to expand voting rights, only to see those rulings overturned by federal appeals judges, many of them appointed by President Donald Trump.

The research I conducted for my recent book, “Rethinking U.S. Election Law: Unskewing the System,” and my experience with a voting rights lawsuit in my home state of Tennessee, show that the state court path may be more effective at protecting voters’ rights – and a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling hints that way as well.

A new dynamic in federal courts

During the civil rights era and for decades afterward, the federal courts were the guardians of voting rights, a refuge from states’ discrimination. In recent years, though, that has changed.

Now, voting rights cases in federal court face uncertainty. For example, in Texas this year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott declared that each county – some of which had already set up 10 or more drop boxes for voters concerned with mail slowdowns to deposit their mail ballots in – could instead have only one drop box. This one-per-county limit did not allow exceptions for counties with large populations or areas to cover.

In response to a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, a federal trial court found that Abbott’s limit was an unreasonable barrier to voting – but a three-judge appeals court panel, all Trump appointees, overturned the lower court and upheld Abbott’s limit.

The same dynamic shows up in recent cases brought by Democrats in swing states like Wisconsin and Ohio. The Wisconsin case involved an attempt to extend deadlines to return absentee ballots. The Ohio case involved an attempt to expand the number of mail ballot drop boxes. In both cases, early federal trial court wins for expanded voting rights were overturned on appeal.

This pattern worries those like me who think it should be easier to vote – not harder – and especially so during a pandemic.

Similar cases with different results

That’s why I got involved in a state court lawsuit in Tennessee, which was one of only a handful of states that did not expand eligibility for absentee voting at the beginning of the pandemic. States that did so said they wanted to make it easier – and safer – for people to cast their ballots in local, state and national elections, including presidential primaries that were slated to happen through the spring and summer of 2020.

In May 2020, I helped a bipartisan group of voters in Tennessee file a state lawsuit seeking a judge’s order that the state expand mail voting in time for the August primary election. Around the same time, several national civil rights organizations filed a federal lawsuit seeking a similar order.

Though the cases were based on similar principles and sought nearly identical outcomes, they proceeded very differently. The federal lawsuit was assigned to a Trump appointee and proceeded very slowly over many months. The slow pace prevented the case from expanding absentee voting generally, and the court rejected claims to make it easier to distribute absentee applications and fix problems with absentee ballots. But the judge did issue a ruling in September allowing many first-time voters to vote absentee.

By contrast, our state court case resulted in a ruling that all Tennessee voters could cast their ballots by mail for the August election – and the decision came down within 30 days of the suit being filed.

Because the two cases pursued distinct legal strategies, these outcomes did not conflict with each other.

A strategy that is spreading

When we filed our suit, we did not make any claims under the U.S. Constitution or federal law. We kept our focus only on state law and the right to vote under the Tennessee Constitution.

We thought our case was strong enough without invoking federal laws, and we knew that invoking federal law could allow the state, which we were suing, to shift the case into federal court. We feared – and the outcome of the parallel federal case confirmed – that the case would be less successful before a federal judge.

In Texas, voting rights advocates are pursuing this same strategy in another attempt to overturn Abbott’s restrictions on drop boxes, by using only provisions of the state constitution and laws. That way they may avoid ending up in federal court, where the appeals court already ruled in Abbott’s favor.

Judges’ politics may make a difference

State courts may be less difficult for voting rights cases than federal courts are at the moment. Most federal appeals courts are now dominated by Republican appointees. More than 25% of federal appellate judges were appointed by Trump, a group that is conservative even by Republican standards.

These Republican-appointed judges show a marked pattern of ruling against voting rights plaintiffs, a recent study shows.

Of course, Republican appointees not only control the federal system’s top court, but with the swearing-in of Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court now has a lopsided 6-3 conservative majority for any post-election litigation.

By contrast, in some swing states, like Colorado, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Democratic nominees enjoy a majority of the state supreme court. In other swing states, it may be more mixed, or tilted toward the GOP.

But even in those states, the judges are often elected, which may add another factor in a judge’s consideration. Public opinion may constrain judicial enthusiasm for decisions that could overturn the clear will of the voters. That contrasts sharply with federal judges, who have life tenure.

That popular opinion dynamic may have played a role in my Tennessee case. That was such a high-profile, politically charged hot potato that the Republican National Committee filed a brief opposing our case, even though Tennessee is a decidedly Republican state no matter how many people vote.

When our state trial court victory was appealed to the conservative-majority Tennessee Supreme Court, that court did trim back the scope of our win, but not by much. It allowed mail voting in November for anyone who has an underlying medical condition making them vulnerable to COVID-19, or who is a caretaker or co-resident of such a person. Together, those groups cover more than two-thirds of Tennessee voters.

Ending up in federal court anyway?

Of course, no strategy is foolproof. Even if advocates carefully focus on making claims about state laws in state courts, there is always a chance the case could end up in federal court anyway. The other side could complain that the state court’s ruling violates federal law or the U.S. Constitution.

That’s what happened in Bush v. Gore in 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a vote recount violated the Constitution. That case ended Florida’s recount, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush.

The Pennsylvania GOP tried a similar move in October 2020, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision extending mail voting deadlines. The federal justices declined to take the case by a split vote of 4-4, which lets the lower court ruling stand. But new Justice Barrett could conceivably break the tie and bring the state case under federal review. Perhaps sensing this opportunity, the Pennsylvania Republicans are trying again.

And on Oct. 26, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the extension of mail-in voting deadlines in Wisconsin. Chief Justice John Roberts explained that the difference between the two cases was that the Wisconsin case came through a federal court, while the Pennsylvania suit came from state courts – which is where he said voting rights issues should be decided.

Steven Mulroy, Law Professor in Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Election Law, University of Memphis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.