THE TRIUMPHANT RETURN EDITION
Well friends, when last we met the Supreme Court had upheld the Affordable Care Act and struck down Arizona’s “papers, please” anti-immigrant law. That was a few years -- and a lifetime -- ago, it turns out. We now face a . . . different reality, and my typing fingers have been a-itchin’ to get back to TWIPN, as the saying goes (the saying I just coined). So I’m back, though I can’t guarantee the same regularity as before, given that I have, you know, a real job these days. But with your forbearance, we’ll sort through the cascade of shit coming at us together, with our usual vim and vigor, and with perhaps a dash more gallows humor than before. So breathe deep, and let’s dive in!
THE CONFLICT OF INTEREST THING IS A BIG DEAL: Donald Trump plans to enrich himself and his family through the presidency. There can be no doubt about that. He has patently refused to shut down his businesses or transfer his holdings to a blind trust; the greatest assurance of a separation between governing and profit is his promise to focus on the country while his kids run the business -- so a pretty meaningless separation, given that he has involved his children intimately in the whole running of the country thing. (And why not? After all, as Giuliani says, he can’t be expected to “basically put them out of work,” can he?) The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has an excellent run-down of the various conflicts Trump presents (scroll down in the article). This isn’t just a formality; it’s not just another norm Trump has smashed on his way to the White House. Chait tells us to expect the worst: “Given Trump’s business ethics, which run from refusing to pay contractors and daring them to sue to establishing a fake university to swindle his fans to using his 'foundation' to illegally donate to a politician who subsequently did not investigate said university, it would be surprising if he did not eventually accept outright bribery.” But guys, it’s fine; Donald Trump totally understands the issue and is taking it seriously: “The law is totally on my side, meaning the President can’t have a conflict of interest.” Oh.
UPDATE ON APPOINTMENTS: Trump continues to achieve great success in assembling a Team of Racists (sort of like a Team of Rivals, but more sinister). We know Steve Bannon has shown himself to be anti-Semitic, racist, and misogynist, and that he ran a website that promoted a white nationalist author who published articles like “Bill Kristol: Renegade Jew” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” That was last week’s news. Now we have Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as our new Attorney General, a man whose self-admitted racist statements (like calling a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race”) disqualified him from a federal judgeship in the 1980s but renders him a perfect fit for Trump’s team 30 years later. Next up is the Education Secretary. Granted, we dodged a bullet in that Trump did not name creationist religious reactionary Jerry Falwell Jr. to the post, as was rumored. Instead, he chose a woman whose major point of experience has been to give massive sums to the Koch brothers in a successful effort to tilt the nation right-ward. But Trump’s draining the swamp! Now comes word that Ben Carson as HUD Secretary. People act as though HUD is a nothingburger, but it is very much a burger. Under Obama, the Department has begun to successfully force cities to prove that they are affirmatively furthering fair and integrated housing. Last year, Dr. Carson wrote an op-ed decrying those measures as “mandated social-engineering schemes” and “downright dangerous.” And to think that less than two weeks ago, Carson suggested he was unfit to run a federal agency because of his utter lack of knowledge and experience. (And here’s a fun reminder that HUD presents unique opportunities for corruption!) Finally, there appears to be an internal schism about whether to appoint Mitt Romney as Secretary of State or whether to fill the post with someone more “loyal” to Trump. Romney, recall, was pointedly critical of Trump: “Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. . . . He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president and his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.” But apparently Romney’s willing to serve in Trump’s administration because hahahahahahaha nothing means anything anymore.
RAGE OVER “IDENTITY POLITICS”: Since Hillary Clinton won 2 million more votes than Donald Trump, the Democratic Party is in the middle of an internecine war about how desperately we must change absolutely everything about the party. By now you’ve likely seen the scurfuffle around Mark Lilla’s Sunday New York Times piece, urging the party to prioritize the desires of white male working class and rural voters (those mainstays of the Democratic coalition). There have been many thoughtful rejoinders to this piece; my favorites are from NY Magazine’s Rebecca Traister, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, and Slate’s Michelle Goldberg, who reminds us of the true peril that the people of color that make up the Democratic base face in the Trump era. As she put it, “The focus of left-of-center politics in the dark years to come must be on protecting the groups of people who are targets precisely because of their identities. To sideline their interests is to accede to a backlash that has just begun and will only get worse.” At my office, we had a long email debate about Lilla’s piece; I have included at the end of this week’s newsletter my take on the article and the question of “identity politics”. Here’s hoping we can move past this debate soon and start focusing on building the Democratic Party’s next generation of leaders at the local and state levels, areas we have neglected to our peril for far too long.
Must Read of the Week: Yes, we dodged the bullet on Rudy Giuliani being appointed as AG. But he is still in the running for many other cabinet posts. Even if you think you remember why Giuiani is a truly terrible, frightening politician, you really, really don’t. Read Radley Balko’s piece reminding us all why the idea of this man coming within 10 miles of power is terrifying.
And introducing our two new weekly features:
Apocalypse Watch of the Week: Matt Yglesias: We have 100 days to stop Trump from (permanently?) systemically corrupting the American political system.
My take on the Lilla article:
I really, really disagree with this article. I think it gets a remarkable amount wrong. It defines "identity politics" as that representing minorities and oppressed people, and seems to argue that we should just get back to the old fashioned default identity of white male interests, which somehow doesn't count as an "identity." Most absurdly, it asks the Democratic party to turn away from the policies and the people that form the raison d'être of the party--income inequality; civil rights and liberties for minorities; legal protections for the weak; a government bulwark against oppression by majority -- and become, what? A party that looks for support among disaffected and uneducated unemployed coal miners? This is not the path forward.
The article's thesis was shaky from the start, but truly lost me when it bemoaned the focus on non-white-male Great Men in high school history classes. Really? Our problem is the half-day lesson spent talking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton? We don't talk about the Founding Fathers enough? That's really his argument?
And how is it "ridiculous" for college students to be concerned about oppression, big and small, of their friends and peers whom this society has routinely overlooked? It may be a theoretical fight about "damn bathrooms" to straight white men like this author, but it is a fight about personhood and dignity for thousands of young trans people and their allies all over this country. If Anthony Kennedy can understand how one's dignity is tied up in issues of sexuality, then surely the Democratic party can.
And since when it is it a terrible idea to celebrate "the first X to do Y"? Aren't those the stories that uplift us, inspire us, repeatedly show us over and over how America is the greatest nation in the world (as the conservative-forced incantation reminds us)?
The author insists that we need to move to a set of policies that "affect a vast majority" of Americans. Of course, that is what the Democratic Party already stands for: health care for all; tax policies that benefit the vast majority rather than the richest few; environmental regulations that ensure the continuation of this planet as we know it; health and safety regulations to protect us and our surroundings; labor rules that ensure that workers are treated fairly and paid adequately. It is the GOP that strives to protect the interests of the few over the majority -- but because it wraps itself in the language of the white Christian male identity, it is seen as protecting the "default" and purportedly "majority" population (though of course white Christian men are NOT the majority any longer). But the Democratic Party also, crucially, stands for protections and benefits explicitly for the minority, against the majority: for the rights of Muslims against a reactionary and fearful majority; the rights of criminal defendants against a powerful state; the rights of gays, lesbians, trans people against an ignorant mob that sees them as less than human; the rights of women who have been shut out of this country's civic society for hundreds of years; the rights of the disabled; the rights of African Americans who have been systematically oppressed, slaughtered, scorned, beaten, driven away from the very moment of conception of this country up to the present day. These fights are not sideshows; they are not distractions from the cause. They are the reason we have politics. These are the highest and most noble purpose of the State, the reason our Constitution exists and is exulted. To shove these fights to the side -- to engage in them "quietly" -- is a betrayal not only of those groups (that maligned term) but of the principals that supposedly animate this country and that have always inspired the forces of progressivism. A "proper sense of scale"? These are people's lives.
I'll end just by saying that the predictability of those ready to throw overboard the interests of minorities for temporary political gain among white people makes it no less depressing or enraging. We must -- we must -- fight against this instinct.
(Also, are we really going to credit an author who makes mention of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as models for effective politics and stays silent on Barack Obama?)
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