It's Not the Economy: Structures and the Deeper State

We live in structures and, rightwing conspiracies notwithstanding, the deeper formations of the state as culture and ethos will determine who we are. Who do we want to be is a difficult question because it takes time and thought and effort to think about what that means. So first a few facts.

Wages are not going up appreciably and there are jobs, lots of them unfilled in sectors from crops to pick to engineering and medicine. From 2012 through 2016, the Obama presidency presided over steady growth in jobs---about 214,000 per month. Trump inherited this "tortoise process" that he of course claims now is his miracle, but it's all partisan babble. The rate of job growth has not really let up much since he took office---about 189,000 jobs---and it's taken a long time since the Republicans last crashed us with their brilliant ideas to come _back_ to growth (that is, from 2008-2012). Thank you again, Obama. These are just the facts and I think we have almost as much luck using astrology as we do the numbers to predict what will happen next. No one here doubts how I feel about astrology. So?

I want to make two points. First, it wasn't economics that elected Trump. Second, it's structures of culture that will determine our future. That is, if we have a future be that a planet fit for humans orif the democracy can withstand an authoritarian pathological liar and his toadies. That remains to be seen. The deep state of the State needs to change if we want something other than our current irreconcilable differences and partisanship. For now, I say, live with that conflict as the issue at hand. Structures involve deeper matters.

There was enough misunderstanding, false blame, memory loss, and the rest to move people to vote Trump but what moved people wasn't economic catastrophe, like what W produced. What moved them was the feeling that their structure is failing---because it is---and that this imbecile is their savior. They got this wrong on all counts but that's due to structural facts too. Most of the people who voted Trump had a job and however they are squeezed by wages and costs (insurance, no retirement, etc.) they weren't on soup lines.

What moved people was structural facts and cultural values---do remember that racism and sexism are facts and values as much as fighting against them. The keys to the election were to match these facts and values to deeper underlying motivations and to season them with fear, anger, resentment, and grievance. The key to current Trump rallies is still anger because it's the conduit between success and failure. When you are really just failing, anger doesn't work as well. Anger is key when you already _have_ a job because when things get _really_ bad people are more desperate and sad and fearful and less likely to rally. It's easy to rally when you're mad; harder when you're just trying to survive. Think of what happens after a hurricane and think of how people forget to vote. Anger comes later, after you think about survival, then much later what you really want, not just how to deal with the loss. You don't have to be Kubler-Ross to see this unfold.

Structural facts make for structural problems. But structural problems are deep and difficult to solve because the structural facts are not easily changed and are sometimes foundational to culture.

America the land of the "free" was founded on the structures of racism and sexism as much as it was on any other ideal or set of values like opportunity and liberty. Our ideals aren't rotten. But they are corrupted when we don't know how to incorporate shadows. That conversation has never really begun in America and there are no signs it will anytime soon.  So when we have structural racism and sexism this manifests in different kinds of injustice, inequality, health care access and costs, etc. These are the _problems_ and the questions we ask involve us in deciding what we are willing to do about those problems. No one like sacrifice. No one likes to feel they are not getting their share.

White people tolerate key elements of these founding structures when they are useful to them, when they don't impact them more than the problems they create. White people would prefer to deny their historical place in the structures that gave them their privileges; Republicans simply deny these structures are keys to their white privilege. Go to a Trump rally, ask around. Or ask someone in the 'burbs who believes everything they have they earned without privilege. Structures create and support us, or they fail in various degrees until you are one of those structurally disadvantaged. Some people are born with structural disadvantages that they inherit from the culture: that's why it's structure, not individuality alone that matters. Individuals can make their way through, like Neo gets out of The Matrix but not by themselves, nor Neo. Making people care about those structurally disadvantaged is no small matter, even if you are one of them.

To see this play out loo at the demographics of rural/urban as today's basic keys. More education, lots more diversity, better economic opportunities, less religion, all of these add up to blue dots. The exception to this ^^^ m.o. is in richer white exurbs where we find urban resentment and tax resentment, the get off my lawn resentment peeps who vote R. And it is here that the gender divide is finally going to cost Republicans. Why? Because cultural divisions, which include _structural_ misogyny, are finally making a real mark---white women who are not all voting R with their R husbands. The assault on women, which has always been a matter of men controlling women's lives in rural worlds by religion and cultural values, has an embodiment in Trump and his toxic toady Pence. Two incomes may be required to pay the mortgage now but that freedom to work has brought structural family stresses too.

I think in the _short term_ America's hope is with women, even rural women who will see at last that they are being manipulated to severe disadvantage within structures that they've supported in the past. New voters? 108 million who didn't vote? Republicans will do everything they can to make sure that these people never vote. A change in demographics does little to change the map. Will Texas, AZ, FL, GA go blue enough to turn them around? I remind you that NC was going blue until rural whites decided that wouldn't do and elected a gerrymandering posse. We are headed to a non-majoritarian Senate as far as the eye can see unless those "purple" States give us blue senators---and what sort? Manchin? Heitkamp? If they vote for Kavanaugh, they merely support the structures that represent the old order. That old order is white and uses religion and money to keep women and minorities just where they want them.

What's at stake are changes in values. Only that can alter the shape of a structure over the longer term. What happens now and next will decide where we go. As Lyndon Johnson said, you can't have a great war and a great society at the same time---something has to give.

The Alternative "Arc" and the Avalanche

Let's start here: there is no arc of justice bending towards justice, there is no promise or guarantee that rights will not be oppressed, ignored, or reversed. You can _believe_ in that arc bending or you can ask for a more honest, likely less "faithful" view.  We're at a turning point.  The oligarchs and authoritarians have the power in ways that will reshape the future.  Those rights you thought you had?  Do you really think that can't be taken away?  They don't.  So how about a different metaphor?

It's snowing, always, and there's an avalanche every moment: how much of that do you notice? When is it important enough to cause catastrophe in your life?  Do you care about the catastrophe in another's life?  What exactly do you think you can do about that, any of that?  The crisis is on-going and it's not going to let up, much less "get better."  What it's going to do is create situations that keep challenging hope, promise, or stability.  When it affects you, you might act, but it might be too late.  Things don't get better, we create better.  It's gonna cost you and it's not going to let up.  Remember.  It's snowing.  (This is almost always true where I live...)

There are some who will weather it all better and have the means, and even if that's you of good conscience, you will not relinquish or even share without some kinda' fight.  It's only natural to want to survive and, dare I say, want to flourish?  What more does the evidence show?

Let's go back to the arc.  (No one likes my avalanche, do they?) What could we learn?  That that arc does not bend, that it is forced, that justice must be made to happen and kept that way or even pushed forward because people insist, when they are willing to live and die for their rights. Even then, there is no arc, there is just effort.  If this sounds like Marx it's because you've read this before.  Does that disturb you?   One person's justice is another's idea of oppression.   If we don't want to be crushed by the avalanche of oppositions we're going to have to do something about it all before it's too late.  Someone is going to have to win or dare to compromise.  Who likes compromise?  Since no one does that means living with things you don't really like just to live.  How willing are we to do that?  What about all that money and the ways it can be used to manipulate people?  If you think that love is a more powerful motivator than fear or anger try the idea that this difference may not matter as much as what people really do.  Ask Susan Collins.  She'll tell you anything.  You can feel better for a minute about those you regard to be the "reasonable opposition."  Then watch her vote for the next Gorsuch and the next tax bill.

Not one iota of social justice has ever happened without struggle and vigilance, to say nothing of frustration and loss and some very sad violence. Those who would oppose progress to keep their power will say and do _anything_ and anything to stop change.  They are more honest than Susan Collins and no less dangerous for it.  They have no compunction about violence. So, how much will you take? They want the status quo, reversal, spite, or nihilism at least as much you want progress. Rules? Civility? Play to conscience or compromise? What are your honest alternatives?

Gandhi relied on the fact that his opponents could be bent, that they had at least as much conscience as they had vindictive hate. Gandhi forced as did King by appealing to human feelings, to empathy. So what happens when that doesn't work? When 89% of Republicans support Trump and the border policy too? They are willing to make their deal with that? What then? I think we are at that bottom. Reason is long gone. We thought that incarcerating babies would be the emotional charge but you know what, all that had to change was the news cycle. Short attention span plus our opponents don't really care. Ask Melania. She told us exactly what she thinks.  It was a fashion statement too.

So what's with all the faith in the arc of justice? Why it is so important to so many? It could be that the pain, the oppression, the terror, the arc of history has made it necessary to believe that there is such a thing---because you know all too well that there isn't.  The need to believe is a survival strategy; it's an important part of religion's sham or its consolations, depending on how much you need it not to be sham.  However you believe to get through, that's your religion.  Mine rejects certainty with a big dollop of irony on top of things that look all too certain.

Everyone wants someone else to give them an answer because no one likes that the questions we face don't have certainty, finality, or often any answer but the strife to stay in the question. What the powerful and the charlatans know is that this is an easy shakedown, that people will be manipulated with promises, with faith, with hate, with anything that gives them what they want or tells them that there is an answer. No one wants to live in a reality where the crisis is perpetual ---because that's real---and living that way is _hard_, it will exhaust you sometimes, you'll wish it were easier.  But life is a few meals or one long night without sleep from crisis and only two days from much worse. We act as if it isn't because we do, because we must? Because life is hard and we just wish it weren't. Justice is harder than any one life because power never prefers to give up what it can keep. So what do you keep?

Faith is what you keep when you wish for a world that isn't the one you're really living in. Maybe you need some just to survive. Maybe we all do or we just have to look away for a moment to keep going. There's almost an alternative. That would be to embrace the strife, refuse to lose, not let them win, reject certainty, and rage on, calmly as you can.

Morning Note to Self

Six Faces of Muruga
A Look in the Mirror, at Least for this Morning

1. Trump isn't changing America, he's showing us who we have always been. Rejecting that with "but not me" is also true. Now, look around you. Really look. See?
2. Justice is a shakedown, as we used to say in the neighborhood. That means that the man, the money, and the power will do anything to win and usually does. Know that, get used to it even if you want it to change.
3. When I'm no longer angry, I'll even stop riding my bike. Never. Break my bones. So what. Death will have to stop me. It will. Not today, with any luck.
4. Continue to do the things you love and care about, no matter what other people think or say or do. I plan on playing a lot more piano and writing some books. I've never been particularly good at either. Don't stop.
5. Never underestimate the con you tell yourself either. You'll find out who cares by who shows up when it matters. Be prepared to understand that not everyone who really cares _can_ show up. We never really know another's pain. The Buddha was dead-on right about that one.
6. There's no nirvana.

Religion, Not Merely the "Misuse" of Religion

Who are these people who can incarcerate and traumatize children, debase our society, and claim it the proper interpretation of the law? That it is God's law that gives them authority?

It's important to note that Trump and his sociopaths are deliberately and self-consciously using religion to justify their behaviors. Sessions and Sanders cite the Bible, Kelly Anne Conway declares herself a Catholic in defense of this shameless evil, and they _mean_ it. They are not merely "using" religion, they are _being religious_. This is not (NOT) some "misuse" of religion, as if there were such a thing as "good" or "real" religion. This is their religion. And this one of the most important things religion does for people: it allows them not only to justify their behavior but to claim that it is divine, incontrovertibly authorized, beyond any criticism.

That these people are evil is a real facet of their use of their religion. They are not hypocrites, these are _pious religious people_ for whom religion is their preferred instrument of mendacity, cruelty, and self-superiority. Religion isn't about goodness: it's to whatever purpose people decide and so authorize and claim their power. We should detest their religion, not make excuses for those who claim they are poor representatives. If there are those who claim Christianity as their religion and find _this_ Christianity repulsive I am happy to listen. But let us not fool ourselves: religion can be just as much an instrument of evil as it can be an invitation to goodness.

The Light of Liberty and The Shadow America Refuses to See

At the core of America's history, in the armature of the collective social structure, are the issues of race and class. If the light is justice, liberty and opportunity, the shadow is race and class. Built as we were on slavery, a civil war, and failed reconstruction, the civil rights movement brought the conversation forward: Obama's presidency suggested how far we have come and Trump's how we have utterly failed.

White working class people took the racist bait as the majority always has (and since the Nixon shift of the political parties) and rather than align their economic interests with others suffering similarly went with race over class. In effect, the plantation owners, especially in the form of Wall Street, convinced under informed whites to side with them economically and appealed to their basest racist instincts to seal the deal. You gotta hand it to Republicans, I mean the way they made their case without being so _explicitly_ racist as to make their exurban voters feel uncomfortable and then con them with "class warfare", tax cuts, fear of the socialists, and the rest. You gotta hand it to Democrats for being so astonishingly inept, tone deaf to their own messages, and so incapable of making their own case, both on social justice grounds and pocketbook classism.

With Trump doing rallies for 2018, Republicans are invited to take the shameless road to racism, no dog-whistling required: we are the party of white people, those other people are for "them." The argument among Democrats is whether to expose this racist Republican narrative plainly for its moral depravity or to pivot on class issues. To wit, do they appeal to white working class people by telling them this is not who they are or who they want to be as human beings or do they try to tell them they are getting conned, ripped off, and not helped by incompetent Republican government that does not share their economic interests. It's not quite this simple since so many are driven by their particular peeve that determines their pet: guns, Jesus, the flag, you pick, but it is a not insignificant fact now that Trump, Rosanne, and the rest are out doing their job.

You would think that shame and decency would have a pull on white Protestant society, especially on those who share a non-mainline church heritage given their religious claims as "Christians." But I think we underestimate how religion has been used to foster racism and particularly the ways in which Christianity has been used in America to bolster and justify the very core of Trumpism in all its various forms of unabashed and debased immorality. Evangelical Christians are not being hypocrites, they are doing what _they have always done_. They are using religion to advance white supremacy both explicitly and nowadays more implicitly because that's what's required.

During the Civil War the Confederacy and northern Democrats (then the party of explicit racism) both argued that liberating the slaves would bring the moral ruin of the nation and used "miscegenation," a term in fact _invented_ for the purposes of creating racist fear, as their _policy_. To wit, _those_ people will come, they will steal your children, marry into your families, take your culture--- this Trumpist argument, now the Republican Party, is _not new_. Democrats today are not by any measure free of racism but +may+ represent at least an effort to acknowledge and address it.

I might also remind you that the Abolitionist arguments and the calmly reasoned decency of Frederick Douglass and others were like voices in the wilderness. They were so very correct in understanding the issues and pointing out the moral depravity that suffuses the public's views and actions, but they did not win a majority. They fought for justice _knowing_ that they could not win the majority on social justice grounds: that the religion of their opponents would justify their racism. This is an important fact as we approach 2018 where the _only_ argument is whether Trumpism will be given the same license it now enjoys.

How to win?
In certain places Democrats must run towards the arguments of conscience _and_ economics, reminding women in the suburbs and their own constituencies that they are the party of moral decency _and_ economic opportunity. But elsewhere, like what we saw in western PA, they must understand that racism is _structural_ and that the moral argument against Trump will be understood as a personal affront to their choice to vote for him. Democrats _might_ win on class economics and while whites may warrant being called racists by any serious analysis, they can still be won over by greed, personal interest, money first, what we like to call "pocketbook issues" because calling it more honestly doesn't feel good.

None of these strategies for victory addresses America's sins and the conversations we need to have. But America refuses to be serious about...most everything, especially things that require thought, education, and reflection. I am not sanguine this will ever happen. I am sure I don't want anymore Trumpism than we must endure. Vote them to the margins. To do that requires winning some votes.

Vote Blankenship or Why No Persuasion Matters

Living in the wild with Trump voters I can assure you that _none_ of the Giuliani mayhem makes any difference to them. In fact, it serves a principal purpose: to put everything in terms of a partisan "witch hunt" that is nothing more than Clinton-like scandal contrived to defeat Trump. The key is there: to defeat Trump is to defeat their Lost Cause. It cuts that deeply, whether his supporters are aware of the connection or not. (And they largely are not.)

A few obvious facts--- most Trump voters not of the monied class pay no attention or watch only Fox. That 40%-ish is impenetrable, cast in stone, and so malignantly ignorant that they would volunteer for Trump's Fifth Avenue Shooting. What's more interesting to ask is why. The reasons are not new and what Trump/Giuliani are doing is as old as Jim Crow. It's plain as day, let's make it plainer.

Obama was right: they cling to guns and religion, which is a euphemism too for their grievance culture that has lost obsolete jobs, blames anyone but themselves, and knows quite well that their time has passed. The roots are far deeper than the Reaganomics that caused their financial decline and exacerbated their misery by redistributing wealth upward. The genius of Reagan was to convince white working class people that redistributing wealth via tax cuts to the rich was good for them. They have never been dissuaded, never understood "trickle down," and every time it fails, Republicans blame Democrats for taxes and spending on "those people." That brings us back to the Those People problem, which is an easy sell to white rural Americans.

Trump and Giuliani will create the distraction and disinformation (worthy of Goebbels) that is certainly important. it allows them to turn a legal set of facts into a political circus. But there is a far more serious cultural connection to post-Civil War southern policies that carried forward into resentment of the Great Society and ultimately Obama's Hope.

We are a nation that is half MLK and half KKK--- and the KKK half is in power and will burn down the republic to see to it that the MLK dream fails. I think we are just about evenly split between the MLK Party and the KKK Party. The uber-wealthy side with this Klannists because they can fleece them and everyone else, driven by pure greed and indifference.

Sting sold his duplex last weekend for 50 million bucks. One of the old Rockefellers landed 40 million more--- because there's nothing a Rockefeller needs more than 40 million more. But this is just a consequence, not the cause. The rich have already got theirs and will do what it takes to keep it that way---nothing new here. That is Old Republicanism.

The New Trumpism is the New KKK. Dedicated to local mob rule as the plantation owners tell their poor white neighbors who's _really_ to blame for their plight. Blankenship in WVa is that poster boy. The way to defeat them is to make sure that Trumpists do not use robes and masks to conceal their true intentions. Of course, that victory may yet be a tough road in WVa, even when they understand that the Klan needs instead to conceal itself more deftly in it's own grievance religion culture that allows the hate to look like a Fox show.

The Pride of Ouachita Baptist University

Trump lies, Guiliani rants, Hannity squirms, and poor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the pride of Ouachita Baptist University Ouachita Baptist University (2004), suffers

the little children and the press because she finds out watching TV that everything she has been told is a lie. It's a shame she didn't come to that conclusion in the pews about twenty years back. But, alas, Sarah is the Believer, the Trump voter. Not the only sort, because there are even more venal and ignorant sorts, but the kind that has proven the most loyal, the Evangelical.

Trump was right yesterday when he declared America "a country of believers." What he knows is that a significant percentage of people, and all of his 89%, will believe anything that soothes their need to believe. People have a need to believe that far exceeds their abilities to assess the facts or address them rationally.

What we have always known may cause Sarah to shake and even stumble a bit, but it won't matter. It won't matter anymore than it does to, say, Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell who know it's fraud but are merely determined to fulfill their commitments to wealth redistribution. Nothing will move this Congress to act: no lie, no breach of decency, no report from Mueller. Nothing. They don't need Sarah's faith because they can add: the Kochs will provide their future. But what about the believers? Count on them to believe.

Of course, Trump has no plan. There never was any credibility. This is all simple fraud. But it's a lot harder to see when you have been raised to believe the machinations of Bronze Age goat herders telling tales of rising from the dead. You're well-primed in the will to believe whatever you are told when you have never questioned faith itself. For those with even a marginal grip on the implications of science, faith can be part of a complex art of the possible, a component in the making of a future by using predictive values to create change. What has happened allows you to believe in what might happen. But for the truly faithful, faith itself supplies the delusion; faith nurtures hope not in what is possible but rather in the assurance and consolation of what is not.

An incompetent narcissist is making it up as he goes along. And just like his entire bid for the presidency, the whole matter is the continuation of a publicity stunt gone awry. It's a circus act, a carnival tent with barker and charlatan preacher. It must have been quite the usual scene at Ouachita Baptist University.

Sarah Sanders wants more daddy, a savior who can't be wrong, who has her interests at heart, who will take on those intent on undermining her faith in faith itself. She wants to believe and nothing like the facts, deceptions or lies, nothing at all will change her faithful heart. Like so many Americans, reality is just too hard and faith is the necessary delusion to make it through until the next lie, the next huckster preacher tells her to rejoice because her reward will be great in heaven. It would be merely pathetic if it weren't bringing the country to ruin.