Lawrence Goldstone on White Supremacy and the Impeachment “Trial”

Goldstone emphasizes the white-supremacist character of the Constitution and of the current Republican Party:

Goldstone in The Atlantic

The elections of the affable, centrist, competent, and learned President Obama (but not without faults, of course) terrified White Americans. A backlash ensued. The collateral damage includes concentration camps at the border, a lunatic foreign policy, fealty to Putin, ignoring climate change, making nuclear conflict more likely than before, and permanently corrupt elections.  The Democrats and the alleged “New Left” don’t seem to have an antidote except to winning. Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Alienated from the Culture

The most serviceable definition of “culture” I’ve encountered came from an art history professor, Fritz Blodgett.  He defined it as “the sum of learned behavioral traits.” From this viewpoint, “culture” isn’t just high art like opera or low opera like professional wrestling, and it includes how or whether you use a fork to eat, for example.  Professor Blodgett encouraged us to see visual art in the context of the whole culture, not as a sequestered thing.

I find myself ever more alienated from “my” culture, chiefly because of aging but also because of temperament. The extent to which most people seem attached to their phones seems alien to me, but of course it is now mainstream behavior. For instance, I will see someone walking her/his dog and almost never losing contact with the phone. S/he’s either listening to it or texting on it. The immediate reality around her–trees, grass, traffic, sky, birds, etc.–is secondary. She must ignore it to live life as she wants to.

I’m also alienated from America’s gun culture, even though, having grown up in the rural Sierra Nevada, I was around guns a lot. But they were treated as tools to be used as needed–almost exclusively for hunting. When not needed, they were put away, and they weren’t discussed, and they weren’t linked to one’s sense of self or politics.  Now, of course, guns are everywhere, people display them, take them with them shopping, use them as a political symbol, and use them in massacres. Apparently a massacre-by-gun now occurs every 47 days in the U.S.  When I make an infrequent trip to the mall, I always wonder if this will be the day I get shot by a disturbed person further disturbed by online frenzy. America.

Also, death-by-police-shooting is now the sixth leading cause of death of young men–mid teens to mid-twenties. And this is all men, not just Black men, who of course have grown up in a culture that thinks they are expendable. (Alienation is nothing new for Black folks, obviously.)

The bad news is also the good news with my increasing alienation. I used to think I might have some role to play in changing things through activism. Not a chance, as I see now. The culture will go along on its merry way, a way that seems increasingly irrational and lethal to me, and I’m just one of 8 billion people. I assume Trump will be re-elected, and an essentially White Supremacist order of elites will continue to be ascendant, at least as far as power is concerned. The necessary critical mass of white folks doesn’t seem to be materializing to rip the guts out of White Supremacy once and for all. There are simply too many white women and men who require a myth of whiteness to go on.  They cling to it as the dog-walker clings to the phone. Accessories include enormous pickup trucks (their enormity not linked to job-requirements in trades) and guns and gun-decals on the mega trucks.

As I become more alienated every day, however, I’m blessed to be able to do things that are part of my personal version of culture: raising vegetables and flowers, watching this or that TV show from Europe, reading, writing, cooking.  Occasionally I will look at my phone, but I do not view it as a friend.  This is all good news to me. I rarely text  with it or even answer calls, most of which seem to be scam-related (another feature of our culture).  I find I don’t need a gun on my hip to pull weeds. Crazy, I know.

Why Is Trump Even Money to Win Re-election? That Would Be White People

Oddsharks and other betting sites have Trump at 50/50 to win (or steal) re-election. I find such sites to be more reliable than polling because their income and that of (most of) their users depends upon their accuracy.

Why does Trump, in spite of what he had said and done, a toss-up and not a long shot to win re-election? Because most White people like his views, policies, and ways of behaving. White people control those states, and districts within states, which will likely give Trump a second term. White people control Congress, particularly the Senate. And White people control the Supreme Court, which controls such things as gerrymandering and voter-suppression.

The truth  is that Trump’s policies aren’t that different from the USA’s policies pre-Trump.  The country has always favored more or less unregulated capitalism and thus put such things as environmental health and human health in jeopardy. The country has always been white supremacist and elitist at its core. It has also been anti-intellectual, and that characteristic features significantly in Trump’s popularity. Trump is gleefully ignorant, and although most politicians are required to be dishonest, his dishonesty and his dismissal of evidence have put him–and the rulers of the nation–in a fugue state of falsehood.

We may also state the matter this way: IF most white people found Trump and his policies to be unacceptable, he would have no chance of winning re-election. At least up until now, it has always been white people’s choice as to what kind of country this country will be.  The country we have now tells us what their choice has been. We may also come at the issue with this question: If our only Black president had done or said what Trump has done and said, how would most white people have reacted? They would have found the behavior unacceptable, and impeachment would have been swift. At a rally, for example, Trump said that he and Kim Jong-un “fell in love.” What if Obama had said that? What if Obama had sided with Putin to weaken NATO? What if Obama’s policies had exploded the debt the way Trump’s have? What if Obama had bragged about groping women or been accused of rape? All the white terror of Black sexuality would have driven most white people homicidally insane.

As to Trump, then, it’s up to white folks. Again.

Fox “News” Is Politically Correct

And so popular media are once again in a kerfuffle about Tucker Carlson’s exhumed comments, which assert the appropriateness of  thoughtlessness, rape, pedophilia, racism, xenophobia, and so on. Add Jeannine Pirro’s McCarthy-like questions about a Congressperson’s hijab, and you have a pretty good Goebbels week for Fox.

Which, I assert, is one of the true sources of political correctness. I’ve long that that PC (not the computer kind) was a Goebblesque piece of propaganda injected into White men and the women who are enthralled with them so that neither would have to change their views of women, people of color, fake American history, language, and simple good manners. It came with an add-on: the ready charge of victim-hood leveled against anyone who disagreed with them. This is Old School propaganda, which accuses the “enemy” (after an enemy is invented) of doing what the propagandist is doing. In this case, policing any hint of change.  The Jews are destroying Germany, said Hitler, as he was destroying Germany, of which there was almost nothing left in 1945. In Carlson, Pirro, and Trump, we have a kind of apotheosis of humorless, cultivated stupidity that makes enraged, uninformed citizens more enraged and uninformed. It’s Orwell’s politics-poisons-language-which-poisons-politics scheme exempt of boundaries.  That is, if Trump could get away with killing journalists and putting immigrants in permanent concentration camps and killing them (well, that’s already started), he would.  No boundaries.

One amusing response to Fox News’s latest poison is the cluck-clucking query, “Why won’t Fox apologize?” I don’t want Fox to apologize. I want it figuratively destroyed–by boycott and any other non-violent means necessary. I wanted Disney pressured to dismantle Fox. I want Mueller and company to eviscerate Trump (figuratively), by any legal means necessary.

That said, I do approve of Speaker Pelosi’s temporary disapproval of impeachment because a) the votes in the Senate aren’t there,  b) it’s a nice bit of rope-a-dope against Trump, complete with “he’s not worth it.” Besides if voters and the Democrats can’t defeat Trump in Fall 2020, we’re definitely in a situation that his not unlike (pax Orwell) Nazi Germany.  These people are that odious, for real. And it all goes back to the rotten core of America, rotten from the get-go: White Supremacy driven by a political majority of White men. I have heard some progressives opine that this era is one in which White Supremacy is in its death-throes.  Wishful thinking. If Fox and Trump and Company continue to wield power, there may be nothing worthwhile left of the U.S. Alarmist? I wish.

The “Tribalism” Red Herring

Perhaps like me you’ve noticed this assertion becoming widely visible in the media: One of America’s chief political/social problems is that Americans have retreated into “tribalism,” thereby tearing the social fabric.  Let David Brooks stand in for others who make this claim. In the column, “Retreat to Tribalism,” January 1, 2018, New York Times, Brooks published this paragraph early on, with “That,” the first word, referring to said retreat:

“That’s essentially what is happening in this country, N.Y.U.’s Jonathan Haidt argued in a lecture delivered to the Manhattan Institute in November. He listed some of the reasons centrifugal forces may now exceed centripetal: the loss of the common enemies we had in World War II and the Cold War, an increasingly fragmented media, the radicalization of the Republican Party, and a new form of identity politics, especially on campus.”

One issue I have with this perspective is that it assumes a “we” that was together before tribalism creeped in, when in fact people who imagined themselves white and imagined that white is the de facto ruling tribe in the U.S. have always occupied the social and political center. By “center” I mean the controlling middle, not the center between Left and Right.  If one was, has been, or is on the outside of that group looking in, then the social fabric isn’t so much torn as it is hostile to threads that aren’t white (and Christian).

I get what Brooks is reacting to: The Trump debacle, which has invited white supremacists, haters of women, haters of evidence, et al., to rise up boldly. This reaction helps account for the claim that the GOP has been “radicalized.”  In my view, if the GOP is now “radical,” it really hasn’t changed much since the Dixiecrats said goodbye to the Democratic Party and where then absorbed into the Southern Strategy promulgated by Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, Trent Lott, Mitch McConnell, and on and on. It was “radical” from the get-go. Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes all appealed to a racist base, one way or another.

There is no big difference between Trump and his base and the GOP and its enduring base.  Trump just happens to be a more outrageous white supremacist, misogynist, and ignoramus. He abandoned the dog whistle and just started shouting (and tweeting) horrible things. A lack of subtlety does not represent a radicalizing shift. The White Supremacist “Tribe” has been ruling the country from the beginning, with some relatively measured and hardly overpowering resistance from so-called liberals, civil rights activists, environmentalists, feminists, and labor-friendly politicians (and so on).

What is new is that a competent, affable Black man got elected President twice,  the White Tribe freaked out, and so it got a big crush on a lunatic con-man from Manhattan. The country hasn’t retreated to tribalism. White folks have simply become more lustily excited about the only tribalism that has ever really counted in the U.S.

By all accounts, roughly 90% of Republicans still support Trump strongly.  —After all that he has done and said. Trump is blatantly racist.  He scorns knowledge and evidence.  He oozes hatred for women, Latinos, African Americans, and those of Arab and Persian background. He is abjectly incompetent. He is an agent on behalf of Putin. He won’t do anything about glaring problems with environmental havoc, a decaying infrastructure, an obese deficit (thanks to the GOP tax-cut), and a chaotic healthcare system. And the Republicans love everything about this because Whiteness is back in charge.  And David Brooks has always supported the Republicans. Trump may make him queasy, but that’s more aesthetics than anything else.

I see one problematic tribe. I do not see a retreat to tribalism. If anything, the resistances to Trump are remarkably mixed in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender. Unfortunately, because they are inept, the Democrats will manage not to build on such solidarity, but that’s a separate issue.

We should note, too, that at the end of Brooks’s paragraph above, he gets in a shot at college campuses, which are allegedly more tribal. Nonsense. It’s just that occasionally some students make some noise about climate change, white supremacist statues, white supremacist visiting speakers, etc. Students aren’t supposed to make noise, just as presidents aren’t supposed to be Black.

“Evidence” of Mass Psychosis Outside Starbucks

Whereas social scientists and scientists are usually data-bound (not that it makes a difference to our current federal government), humanists like me are sometimes fond of “emblematic events.”  I witnessed one this morning outside my local Starbucks in Tacoma. I was walking out of the cafe with my drink, and there was another fellow standing outside drinking his beverage.  A third fellow had driven up and parked, and he had the door to his large truck open.  Miffed, he said to the other fellow, “Why would someone do that?”

Soon I realized he was talking about a rather large quantity of coffee with milk that had been dumped or spilled on the pavement right below his truck.  Although the quantity was large, the presence of such liquid in the parking lot outside Starbucks is not unheard of.  Sometimes people open their car door and pour out remaining liquid from their commuter cups.  I wouldn’t call it the ideal way to get rid of old coffee, but it’s more or less harmless.  The liquid evaporated rapidly; it isn’t toxic.

The man got out of his large truck. By this time I was moving on toward my car.  The other fellow, alas, was trapped. The man from the truck, in his late 50s or early 60s, had gotten out of his truck.  He said to the other fellow sarcastically, “God Bless liberalism!” This was follow-up to  “Why would someone do that?”

Immediately I grasped the chain of reasoning.  Starbucks is a “liberal” corporation is the first link.  Thus a liberal had spilled or dumped the coffee.

Right after Trump got elected, one fellow kept coming to my local wearing an enormous Trump button, as big as a saucer.  He was obviously on a mission to put the victory in the face of the “liberals” who visit Starbucks.  Of course, there is no sure way to tell what the politics are of the customers, as they represent quite a cross-section of Tacoma residents and visitors.  The customers merely ignored him the way most people used to ignore LaRouche folks outside post offices.

Another time–I think it was on a day that had been chosen by pro-gun activists–a fellow had come in with his family, ordered drinks, and sat down–and we all saw that he had strapped on a holster with a pistol in it.  It was a show-liberals-your-gun day. Like Mr. Saucer-Button, he didn’t seem to get the reaction he was looking for.

Anyway, the fellow offended by the spilled milk–and indeed, the volume made spilling, not dumping, the likely event–then walked closer to the fellow who was just trying to enjoy his beverage, and who simply nodded politely, if guardedly,  at whatever the other guy said.  The complaining man said, in a fabulous non sequitur, “I just heard that you’re supposed to say ‘chest’ when you really mean ‘tits.'”

Emblematic indeed.  “Liberalism” is now expanded to include anything thought to be a transgression, like spilling/dumping coffee on asphalt. Second, one transgression may be linked randomly to another “liberal” disease, such as “political correctness.”  The fellow obviously was put out by “having to” (of course, no one was forcing him) say “chest” when he meant “tits.”  Misogyny doesn’t like “political correctness,” for it is “liberal” and therefore evil. Round and round the confused thinking goes.

And then there was the rage.  The fellow was ready to be angry at anything. And the entitlement: he obviously thought the man he made listen to him owed him an audience for his irrationality. And finally, the absence of satisfaction.  Electing Trump was not and could not be enough.  The rage and the pose of an aggrieved victim must go on.  They feel too good, I suppose. And although Starbucks is “liberal,” you still have to go there, I guess, because that feels good, too, in some perverse way.

It is a mass psychosis we are dealing with.  And the other guy and I just wanted to get and drink a warm beverage.

“Liberal,” “Conservative,” and Other Useless Terms

What good are the political terms “liberal” and “conservative”?  The patron saint of this blog, G. Orwell, championed clarity in prose and precision in terminology; from that point of view, the terms are as useless as money in the afterlife. Worse, they function as chutes through which to pass mind-numbing, rote discussions and debates, as well as profiles of mass mediated punditing.  The theater of oscillation between the terms is as mechanical as a metronome.  The Oscillator is THE mold into which most of our political discourse is poured.

Let us first stipulate that the two major political parties in the U.S. are corrupt and cult-like, ensconcing amphibians like McConnell and Schumer in atrophied institutions.  That said, “conservatives” represent evil in a way “liberals” usually don’t, although “liberals” distinguish themselves chiefly by their ineptitude and taking on such evil.

“Conservative” has nothing to do with preserving “values,” limiting government, preserving “individual freedom, and so on.  The Republican Party conserves White Supremacy through various means: the Southern Strategy, voter suppression, & de facto segregation of the economy, education, and neighborhoods.  It is more likely to blow up the budget than the Democratic Party.  It refuses to accepts the science behind global warming and thus conserves suicidal ignorance.  It has been Red-baiting and race-bating since the 1950s.  If you substituted “White Supremacist” for “Conservative” as you listen and read, you would achieve greater terminological clarity.

Thanks to the White Supremacist Party (GOP), “liberal” has come to connote intellectual interests (as a bad thing), support for government-located programs to help people (as a bad thing), environmentalism (as a bad thing), diversity (as a bad thing), and women in politics who aren’t Stepfordites (as a bad thing).  Liberals are antagonists in a drama produced and directed by White Supremacists. Remember Gingrich’s “tax-and-spend liberals” was of language?  Note that the Constitution constituted a government empowered to a) tax, and b) spend.

In reality, Democrats massage the interests of large corporations and the military-industrial complex as much as Republicans.  Little difference there. True, they are more likely to support Voting Rights, more likely to include and support people from a wide range of backgrounds (in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class-status); that they do this, when they do this, in order to hold power, not out of altruism, is a given. Still, it’s better than a sharp White Supremacist stick in the eye. Still, part two, “The Feckless” describes “liberals” better than “liberal.”

At the moment, the White Supremacists control all three branches of the federal government.  Among what they conserve is racism, environmental collapse, body- and sex-policing, poverty, addiction to war, torture, hatred of women, hatred of education, rampant death by guns, and hatred of empirical evidence.  I’m missing a few embodiments of evil here–including Christian hypocrisy raised to a fugue-state, thanks to the support of Trump– but you get the drift.  The Feckless enable this evil by various means. What amazes me (it shouldn’t) is the extent to which American political discourse, political self-identification, and policy rely on these this useless bifurcation of “conservative” v. “evil” and help make the country and the world more vulnerable to impulsive stupidity and a political culture dedicated to awful decisions, not to mention depravity. Dump these terms.

Some New Books About Racism & White Supremacy

We who are appalled and terrified by the election of Trump have our various preferences for helping to explain the catastrophe–and explaining is about all most of us believe we can do about the situation. In our more pessimistic moods, we wonder whether Mueller’s investigation or “the resistance” will have any effect, and whether the necessary effect–removal from office–will occur in time.  With the tacit approval of Congress, the U.S. has delivered the executive branch to insane, White Supremacist authoritarianism.

The locus I isolate to explain Trump’s ghastly rise is White Supremacy. I don’t prefer it to the exclusion of other explanations, but I do think that, without the continuing, intractable presence of White Supremacy in the U.S., there would be no Trump.  It is the link between the different classes and genders of white Americans who voted for Trump, it is the cornerstone of the Republicans’ base, and it is something Democrats address ineffectually, at best.  And in spite of the rationalizations about the white working class, (for example), some data suggest that racism far outweighed class and economic considerations with regard to the way the vote went.  A recent piece in the Nation referenced this data:

Nation article

As we wait to see what further hell Trump, Bolton, and the Republicans will inflict, we might try further to understand, if not disable or eradicate, White Supremacy–that homicidal, suicidal force that’s been a part of the American colonies and the United States from the get-go.  Some titles, then:

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Edo-Lodge, Bloomsbury Books. I’m a White man who teaches African American Studies, and I can relate in the sense that there seems little point in trying to educate white Americans who don’t already “get it” about White Supremacy. Too many of them root their identity in it, I often think (and this includes many academics), to make attempts at persuasion anything but a waste of time.

Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas, by Ibram X. Kendi. Nation Books.  A good companion to The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter, which with superb scholarship tells the tale of the invention of Whiteness and White Supremacy during, ironically, the Enlightenment, and of how White Supremacy has been perpetuated mercilessly.

White Rage: the Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson. Bloomsbury Books USA.  If we removed rage and a White Supremacist’s view of the world from Trump’s personality, what would remain?

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein.  Liveright.

The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, by David R. Roediger. Verso.

Good White People:The Problem With Middle-Class White Anti-Racism, by Shannon Sullivan. SUNY Press.

The Trump coup d’etat and What’s Not Getting Done

Of course, the United States has experienced reactionary spasms before; indeed, the country, arguably, has always been reactionary, with brief moments of progressive politics that get eviscerate quickly.

In my experience, the election of Reagan seemed re-start the unrelenting slide to the Right that Nixon’s election began, one effect being that the feckless Democrats have been dragged to the Right, too.

And the White Supremacy, racism, misogyny, and goofy economics have been a mainstay of the “Republic,” too.  As is the free ride given the GOP (and, earlier, the Southern Democrats/Dixiecrats) for its dog-whistling and Southern Strategy.  It has been a White Supremacist Party for decades. How White Supremacist? Well, consider that, according to  a relatively recent poll, fully 46% of registered Republicans in Mississippi believe marriage between African Americans and white Americans should be illegal:

Poll of Mississippi GOP

http://www.businessinsider.com/shock-poll-46-of-mississippi-republicans-think-interracial-marriage-should-be-illegal-2011-4

And over 600,000 people–most of them believing they are proper Christians–voted for the anarcho-segregationist and pedophile, Roy Moore.  His opponent won by only 25,000 votes.  Sick? Yes. Such Christians also get a free ride from the media and from Christian “leaders.”

What is new with the White Supremacist, hyper-stupid Trump coup d’etat is, perhaps, the scale of what’s not getting done: smart solutions to immigration-problems and ignoring immigration issue that are illusory; addressing mass-incarceration; addressing global warming (the GOP stance is akin to ignoring viruses responsible for plagues); addressing, as opposed to widening, the immense wealth-gap; heading off another economic catastrophe; constructing a health system that provides more-than-adequate healthcare for people who live in the U.S. (mere Sweden can do it, but Big Daddy U.S. can’t? Seriously?); and so on.

From this perspective, the GOP is committing national homicide-suicide.  The Democrats and other sources of power are accessories to the crimes.

Not co-incidentally, a recent book by Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of New Russia, applies aptly to the U.S.:

Government by Madness

Because the GOP is rooted in the Southern Strategy, reactionary Christianity, opposition to science (the human genome, global warming, economic data, etc.), trickle-down economics (which even The Economist, beacon of capitalism, mocks), White Supremacy (which informed the GOP reaction to a Black president and the election of Dr. Strangelove and continues to affect deeply the justice system), opposition to feminism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, opposition to learning (“Goddamn those ‘liberal professors’), and dedication to impracticality (look what they’re trying to do to healthcare systems), it must now reign through madness, so that even those who are probably rational must embrace a widespread denial of how things are and a nihilistic approach to how things probably ought to be.

Meanwhile, the Democrats orbit the insane GOP world like a timid moon, indulging in “explanation porn,” playing defense always, and forgetting to win elections while submitting colleagues to purity tests of one kind or another.

“Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”