Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Life is hard, pilgrim, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.

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Was just listening to the now notorious clip of Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte’s rant about Obama. First time I’d heard him speak. Very thick accent–I think that is Visayan? I know he is from Davao City in Mindanao. Anyway, he was off on some macho Pinoy riff–the dudes are always so tough, but the women run the show–about how he is the president of a sovereign country and not a colony and I was waiting for him to call Obama a sonofabitch when he slipped into Tagalog and oops, he didn’t say sonofabitch. SOB doesn’t quite capture it. Let’s just say it doesn’t translate well.

Apparently someone on staff immediately afterward reminded President Duterte that when he wants to play John Wayne with the Chinese over the South China Sea, the Philippine Navy’s battle fleet consists of four small frigates a half century old and a number of patrol boats. The Philippine Air Force has a grand total of two jet fighters. Yes, two. As in a pair. The Chinese have more than that.

Putang ina mo, indeed.

There’s a porn star on the telephone

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(written before some election or another)

Only in L.A. do porn stars leave messages on your phone. It was a dude porn star, so points off there, and he said he’s HIV positive, which kind of takes some of the romance out of pornography. Plus he was leaving the same phone message to zillions of other bewildered people at the same time. But still, only in L.A. do porn stars leave messages on your phone.

I’ve gotten a couple of these broadcasted phone messages lately, though not all from porn stars. One was from the governor. Another from Robert Redford. Another from some feminist that made me feel insecure. I can’t remember what she called about, but it was for my wife. I don’t think she listened though. Come election time we get calls from all kinds of celebrities. We live in Silver Lake and not only do celebrities live here and dine here and party here but they call everybody here and tell us excitedly about obscure bond issues that we don’t care about. I know we should, but I am being honest. I don’t always care about obscure bond issues.

I can’t understand what this porn star is saying. He’s talking too fast and the message is garbled. It sounds like he has marbles in his mouth. Or something in his mouth. Don’t they teach enunciation at the Porn Academy?

Outsourcing

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(2014)

outsourcingNo freaking kidding. Corporate employees work in an environment with the constant real or perceived threat of having their jobs sent overseas. The insecurity is palpable. And that is on top of the outsourcing already being done to companies within the country. Not to mention having entire departments converted to outsourced companies, where you keep your job but are employed by a different firm. Or having your position turned into a contractor position, where you retain your job but are converted to a non-employee contractor. Then there are consultants brought in to take over entire projects–a consultant firm bringing in their own employees to do work regular employees used to do. And companies not filling open positions but instead filling them with a series of long term temps, many of whom are laid off employees of the same company now bringing them in as temps.

Or there’s having your position reduced from 40 to 30 hours so you no longer receive any benefits (though as often as not the position still has a 40 hour work load, meaning a thirty hour employee winds up working an hour or so a day unpaid.) Or having your position taken over by the management company who owns the building, who in turn lets you go or brings you on as a contractor, often through yet another company, so you have been outsourced twice but still keeping the same position–but with no benefits and less pay. Or seeing an incredible amount of work done by unpaid interns who have to work 40 hour weeks and meet all sorts of job requirements that people were once paid for. Or staff working from home, which eliminates the need for so much support staff in the office. Or services that can be accessed online or over the phone that do many of the tasks once performed by company employees.

And finally finding all kinds of tasks once done by human beings that are now being performed by websites and apps, a process that increases by the day and has all by itself eliminated millions of jobs. And will continue to eliminate millions of jobs. The internet, by taking over tasks that once required people, has annihilated the middle class and reduced the working class to penury all by itself, more than all the others things I listed here put together.

Upper management is doing well, however. With pay, bonuses and promotion based on the quarterly report and share price, it’s all about saving money, cutting corners, reducing employee costs and cutting out benefits. That is how you get into the top twenty per cent of US income earners. And that is why that top twenty per cent has over 80% of all the wealth, and over 90% of the available cash in this country. You drive around the vast well off stretches of any American city–the westside of L.A., parts of the San Gabriel Valley, my own neighborhood of Silver Lake–and you’ll see areas that had once been middle class neighborhoods and are now upper class. One out of every five Americans lives in those neighborhoods. The rest of us don’t. People rail against the top one per cent as if the rest of the 99% are the victims. But it’s more than the top one or two per cent, it’s the entire fifth of Americans who inhabit the upper class. They are the money class, the wealthy class. The ruling class. They are the ones who didn’t get outsourced or laid off or have their benefits slashed. They are the ones who won the class war that was declared in 1980.

Millennials and old people

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(Number crunching, Spring 2016)

We don’t often realize that Millennials are the smallest group of 18-30 years old in proportion to the population in American history. As a percentage of the population, there are about one-third to one-half less Millennials today than there were Baby Boomers when Baby Boomers were 18-30 years old (mostly in the 1970’s and ’80’s). Millennial numbers are offset further by the fact that people are living a decade longer than they did a generation ago. Basically there are a lot more old people alive–most of them Boomers–and a lot less young people replacing them. And the proportion of white Millennials is much lower than it was in the Boomer era, with both white and especially black birth numbers way down in between 1986-1998 (the black decline due in large part due to mass incarceration of males, but that’s another essay…). This takes on particular significance when you figure in the fact that Hispanic Millennials, who are expanding dramatically as a proportion of the total 18-30 population, vote considerably less than white Millennials (a third to a half less). This has major repercussions, because all the great progressive political movements in US history have been driven by a large youth voting population, yet that youth population now is the smallest it has ever been as a proportion of the voting population.

There had been an enormous under thirty population in the 1930’s–perhaps because of the decline in child mortality since the 19th century–and when those kids grew up there they created another under thirty population bubble that came of voting age in the late 1960’s through into the ’70’s. That bubble got a late start because the birth rate plummeted in the depths of the Depression and then recovered only slowly, only to plummet again when all the young men were mobilized for WW2. It was ironically those children, the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964 (peaking in 1957) who created the current drop in the birth rate by creating so few kids themselves. Our parents gave us our political dominance by having so many of us, and then we have maintained that dominance well into our dotage by not having enough kids. 

As a result Millennial influence on the electorate already is watered down considerably compared to that of Baby Boomers. However, Boomers when they were 18-30 voted more conservatively than Millennials (Nixon and Reagan both won the 18-21 vote, in fact), so that more of the under 30 vote will vote left now than in, say, 1968, 1972 or 1980. Millennials are not splitting their votes anywhere near as much as Boomers did. But will they vote enough to offset the numbers of those thirty and up? So far, not so. They would have to have an 80% turnout to revolutionize the country. They are showing up about half that much. Not even Bernie Sanders can get them out in huge numbers. Kids under thirty just don’t vote much. Never have. 

What 18-30 year old voter strength there is will continue to decline as the drop in the birth rate decline shows no sign of reversing. The trend will probably be exacerbated in a generation as immigration from Latin America continues its steady decline (which I’m sure is also due in large part to lower birth rates throughout nearly all Latin America except in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala). First generation immigrant residents here (that is, the children of immigrants born here; my father was first generation) typically have smaller families than their immigrant parents. Second generation families (my mother was second generation) are smaller still. Without an explosion in immigration into the United States like that in the 1980’s the U.S. population will begin heading toward zero population growth. (Japan has already been at negative population growth, Germany getting there.) That means more older people than younger people.

At some point in the not so distant future, grumpy middle aged Millennials will outnumber post-Millennials, and yet another generation will be outvoted by their parents and grandparents. But it will be their turn soon enough, because unless people decide to start having four and five kids again, this cycle of outvoted 18-30 years olds is locked in. This declining birth rate over generations has been the trend throughout the rest of the western world incidentally (indeed, birth rates are dropping through out most of the world outside of Africa and a few scattered Asia states such as the Philippines, also an exporter of its own people like Latin America once was). The US has been the exception to the birth rate decline only because we have so many immigrants (far more than any other western country). The notion that the youth will revolutionize the US political system by voting as a bloc–Bernie Sanders’ plan–will fade as there will be so many more older people voting than younger people. Elections will be decided by the elderly (with a voting rate of well over 70%) and the middle aged (with a voting rate of 50-60%, increasing with age). If Millennials (who vote at 30-40%) are able to change the balance this year and turn the country left, it will probably be the last time it ever happens. From now on elections will turn on those middle aged and elderly voters, and soon the over 60’s voters will decide elections until most of the Boomers, at long last, have gone on to that Woodstock in the Sky.

It’s important to remember that while there are more 18-30 year olds today in sheer numbers than there were 18-30 year old baby boomers, that the population of Millennials today is less in proportion to the voting population. It’s true that the nation’s population has grown considerably since, say, 1968. Nearly doubled. (And grown nearly three times since Baby Boomers began being made in the 1940’s.) But the birth rate has plunged since the days that Baby Boomers were born and as a result the population today has aged dramatically. Lowering the voting age to 18 was offset long ago by the increased lifespan, health and extended political involvement of the over sixties population. It is immigrants alone–the vast majority of them Latin American and Asian–who have kept the US from approaching zero population growth. Indeed it is due to immigrants that we have the highest birth rate of any industrialized country. But immigrants simply do not vote in the same numbers as non-immigrants, and even their children vote less than non-immigrant children. Those children once they are 18-30 cannot make up for the declining birth rate of the rest of the population 18-30. It takes two or three generations for that voting rate imbalance to work itself out.

But as immigration from Latin America tapers off as it has been doing steadily since the 1980’s, those immigrants’ children (first generation Americans, in the jargon) will eventually have a birth rate will of 2-3 children per mother, which will not offset the increased lifespans of Americans. Boomers can expect to live into their eighties. That enormous age bubble will offset the Millennials’ youthful political exuberance completely. It’s the Leisureworldization of America. By the time that Boomers have finally died off in enough numbers, Millennials will be in their forties, voting now in greater number as middle aged people do, but also turning away from the Left and turning towards the center in large numbers, as middle aged also people do. In the meantime we Baby Boomers maintain such a stranglehold on American culture that when our rock stars die Millennials mourn, something we never did for our parents’ big band heroes and crooners. We laughed.

This year Millennials backed their candidate for the Democratic nomination by up to 85%, yet they were still unable to beat the over forty voters. And those were just Democrats. Add Republicans into the mix and Millennial voting strength is diluted even more. While a strong Millennial turn out can provide a winning margin, there simply are not enough 18-30 year olds to control the issues. Most of Bernie Sanders’ issues have disappeared as Hillary and Trump battle for the middle ground where Boomers are vacillating. Had the young Boomers voted in a bloc like Millennials do now, they could have had some powerful influence. But Boomers didn’t. We split our vote, a few more of us voting Democrat than Republican. In large parts of the country Baby Boomers were the soldiers of the Reagan Revolution. You don’t see that with Millennials. They are far more to the left as a bloc than we were. But there are not enough of them. Nor will there ever will be. The baby boom is a long lived demographic bubble that in sheer numbers keeps Millennials from initiating the changes they so passionately desire. By the time we boomers die off most Millennials will have lost the fire and sunk into their comfy chairs. Some will even become ardent conservatives. Will they go as far to the right as so many Baby Boomers did? Unlikely, you don’t veer that far from your young roots and a lot more Millennials are off on the Left now than there ever were Boomers on the left. But most voters do change with age, even middle age, they get less fired up, less fond of rallies, more fond of moderation and cautiously incremental approaches. Mature they call it. Under thirty voters call it other things. Yet the same transformation will happen to Millennials in a decade or so. Perhaps then the generation following the Millennials, whatever we will call them, will pick up the banner. Though there is nothing saying they will be as far to the left as their Millennial parents. Kids, you know.

Brokered convention

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(Predictions for the nomination races written in early December, 2015)

The last time the GOP had a brokered convention was 1976, when the delegate count was so close a credentials vote–over whether Mississippi’s Ford or Reagan slate of delegates would be seated–was required to break the impasse. Ford’s slate won the vote, but just barely, and he was renominated. But the damage was done and Carter won that year. It was the last gasp of the old Eisenhower GOP, by 1980 Reagan conservatives, embittered by their loss at the 1976 convention, swept the party and convention and the liberal wing (that had been so essential in getting Civil Rights, social security, welfare and environmental laws passed over the objections of Southern Democrats–all of whom are Republicans now) ceased to be. The moderate Republicans clung on longer but are mostly gone. By now the GOP seems split between conservatives and flat out crazy conservatives. So brokered conventions seem to have lasting consequences. The last time the Democrats came close to a brokered convention was 1968 and the repercussions followed into 1972, when the left, furious at the treatment in Chicago in 1968 (tear gassed, among other things), gamed the process and got McGovern nominated. Alas, he was no Ronald Reagan as far as vote getting went, instead he was our Barry Goldwater.

So what does all this mean? Well, the odds of a brokered Democratic convention are near nil, Bernie will be beat solidly and early in the primaries. [Ha! Now there’s a prediction…. Yet Bernie was, actually, he was stomped on early and regularly thereafter, but no one knew in 2015 that he’d be able to raise 200 million dollars online and keep indefatigably pressing on, if never catching up, till the bitter end, and making an exciting and ideologically passionate race of what most of us political junkies thought back then was sure to be a snoozer. But I digress….] And the chances of a brokered Republican convention? Maybe, maybe not. Yet with Trump and now Carson both going mad dog and threatening to bolt the party should it appear there is a party establishment effort to block them, the results for the GOP are dire at best. Right now they are more interested in saving the party–the old Reagan GOP, this time–from being seized by crazed Trump revolutionaries. After all, Reagan’s people had seized the party the same way in 1980, and they know what it means for the old order. But the GOP has been riding Trump’s crazy beast for years now, kissing Rush Limbaugh’s ass and giving in to the extreme right at every opportunity, now suddenly and inexplicably it has turned on them. The GOP had thought all along they could control the reins and there was no danger of anyone Rush Limbaugh-like could ever have a shot at the nomination. But Trump has proven them wrong. There are more Republicans now who think of Trump as one of them than there are not. And if there’s anything a typical Republican hates it’s a RINO (Republican In Name Only), and suddenly all these Trump loving Republican voters consider the party itself to be RINO. As the race develops these next couple months the only thing a Trump voter will hate more than Moslems is another Republican.

Well, maybe. It’s early, and we have no idea what will happen. But keep you eye on Super Tuesday, that is March 1. There are a dozen primaries and caucuses that day, including Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. If Trump is as popular with Republican voters in those southern and/or Bible Belt states as he is right now in South Carolina (which votes a week earlier), then he could well sweep them all. Toss in some of the other states that day and Trump will come out of Super Tuesday with a juggernaut, and he can pile on southern states Kentucky and Louisiana on March 5, Mississippi on March 8, and three of the five states in the March 15 primary Florida, North Carolina and Missouri. By that date, almost every state south of the Mason-Dixon line has voted in a presidential primary. The north and west dominate the next two months, not that it matters much. Candidates who sweep the south tend to win the nomination, as every single southern state has their primary in the first six weeks of the primary a schedule. It’s one of the ways that southerners control the Republican nomination process, and it’s one of the ways that the Republicans have been driven so far to the right. Trump knows this, and has positioned himself to sweep those nativist southern republicans voters off their feet. The more he yells about Muslims, the more they love him down there.

And once he nails every one of those states–as he probably will–there might well be nothing left to stop him but back room deals at a brokered convention. Provided there are other candidates who have won enough delegates to keep Trump from coming into the convention with enough to win the nomination outright. And then there’s this…”a new Republican National Committee rule that requires any GOP nominee win a majority of delegates from eight different states”. Which guarantees a mad scramble as candidates beg other candidates to withdraw and release their hard won delegates to them. Imagine the promises made during those conversations. It’s impossible to figure out ahead of time how many delegates a candidate will get…each state has their own method of allotting them. Even if Trump wins every state I mentioned it does not mean he gets all the delegates. He’ll get most, but not all. But somebody besides Trump will have to win at least eight primaries and have access to enough delegates to keep Trump from winning the nomination before the convention even convenes. Not only to stay in contention, but to keep Trump from winning the number of delegates he needs before the primaries are even over. As it looks now, Trump doing just that is a likely scenario. If there are any more attacks like in San Bernardino, that likelihood becomes all the more certain.

But here is the Republican establishment hope: that the anti-Trump vote in the Republican primary is high enough so that he did not quite get the number he needs for the nomination, and that those anti-Trump delegates would do anything but vote for Donald Trump, and that one candidate besides Trump manages to win a minimum of eight states. Those are high hopes, but they are feasible. Then (and only then) is there a possibility of a brokered convention. Of course that also means Donald Trump very likely storming off in a huff and announcing a third party bid, and of the Republican Party, at least at a presidential level, flushing itself down the toilet. They might even lose Congress.

But what the hell, they got the state legislatures and governorships sewn up. We handed the states over to the GOP and have paid for it ever since. So even the worst possible outcome for the GOP in 2016–a split party and a Democratic blow out–leaves them with a solid base to rebuild from. Donald Trump is a one time freakout. The GOP will revive.

This was originally an endless Facebook post about this CNN story: http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/10/politics/rnc-brokered-convention-preparation/

Bleeding Kansas

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“KSN News Poll shows Donald Trump losing ground in Kansas” says a stunning little article from a Kansas media site.

“The poll showed that Donald Trump would get 44 percent of the vote followed by Hillary Clinton with 39 percent. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson had eight percent. Nine percent of those polled were undecided. The margin of error is 4.2 percent.”

That’s right–Kansas, solidly Republican Kansas, edging toward Hillary Clinton. And while I wouldn’t bet real money against the GOP in Kansas, not ever, but the fact that Hillary is gaining and is within a few percentage points in the state really shows just how bad off Trump is nationally, for now anyway. The last time a Republican presidential candidate lost in Kansas was in 1964, when Goldwater scared even Kansans. Before that you have to go back to the Dustbowl years when FDR took it twice (beating a Kansan in 1936, Alf Landon, in fact). Before that it was when the Republicans tore themselves apart in 1912 and Kansas voted for Woodrow Wilson (by a plurality) and then voted for him again in 1916, with war looming. Before that it was 1896, when William Jennings Bryan, from next door in Nebraska, gave such an extraordinary acceptance speech (“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”)[ at the Democratic convention it swept even Kansans off their Republican feet. And before that is was never. Kansas was quintessentially Republican even then.

In fact, it’s hard to find a state more Republican than Kansas. After all the state had been born bloody, in 1856, with pro-slavers–Democrats all, in those days–from Missouri beating and burning and massacring the Kansas Territory’s free soilers, soon to be Republicans all, trying without success to chase them out and bring Kansas into the union as a slave state. Kansas was also where John Brown had done his killing, his sons massacring some local pro-slavers with swords, hacking them to pieces. It was an eye for an eye response to a massacre of local free soilers by pro-slave ruffians. Politics was a murderous affair in Kansas then, with some voting and a lot more shooting and burning and death threats and beatings, and we forget that John Brown was a Republican martyr. “John Brown’s body lies mouldering in the grave”, went the hugely popular song of the time, “but his truth goes marching on!” The lyrics were later transformed into the Battle Hymm of the Republic, a Republican Party anthem till the party turned southern in the Reagan years.

We forget too that what gave birth to the abolitionist Republican party had given birth to Kansas, indeed the struggles between good and evil in Kansas in the 1850’s helped to create the Republican party. Forgotten almost completely now is how those former pro-slavery Democrat ruffians from Missouri morphed into Confederate guerillas and came back to Kansas on a sunny day in 1863 to slaughter a couple hundred unarmed men and boys in the town of Lawrence, merely for being free state Republicans. Jayhawkers, as they called the free soil militias who fought the pro-slavery Border Ruffians, were incorporated into the Union Army and took their vengeance on Missouri many times over. That bitterness must linger in a zillion little ways even today. Certainly small town Kansas and small town Missouri seem like very different places. And as Kansas seems to drift blue, Missouri has shifted dramatically red. The strife had enormous consequences at the time. Bleeding Kansas, as they called it in the 1850’s, helped birth the Republican Party, but also sundered the Democrats into Unionist and Secessionists and utterly destroyed the Whig Party. The bloodthirsty politics of Kansas in the 1850’s foretold the American Civil War, just as the American Civil War foretold the politics of the century to follow.

Now it seems, a century and a half later, that the Tea Party experiment in the state’s governance–Kansas is its laboratory–has completely failed and the state’s electorate is planning on voting more Democratic than it has in over half a century. In most states that might not be that big of a deal. But this is Kansas. You could not find a single example on the electoral map this year that shows more clearly how catastrophic the nomination of Donald Trump could be for the Republican Party. Foretelling the future again? Who knows. People yell, people scream, people jump about excitedly and say crazy things. You can never tell who among us is making any sense till later, when our time now is history and most of us are dead and things so confused today appear so much clearer. Perhaps Trump is a one time thing and Kansas and the rest of the red states will return to their perennial rock ribbed Republicanism. Or perhaps, like the Whigs we can scarcely remember anymore, the Republican Party will break up on the rocks on Kansas and throughout the once quiet backwaters of Republicanism and new parties will emerge from the wreckage. That, after all, is how the Republican party was born.

Do I think so? No. My money is on the GOP recovering nicely. After all, the party recovered swiftly from the Goldwater debacle, gaining 47 House and three Senate seats in the 1966 midterms and retaking the presidency in 1968.  And it seems likely that today there is more than enough Republican solidity at the state level for a quick, phoenix-like reemergence in just a couple years. But then in 1852 I would have bet on the Whigs lasting forever too. Hadn’t they just elected a president in 1848? By 1856 what remained of them aligned themselves with the Know Nothings and disappeared.

In 2012 Ted Cruz told the New Yorker that without Texas

the Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’

Cruz was referring to Texas turning blue because half of the state’s population is now Hispanic and the Republicans were doing all they could to alienate them. But it’s not Hispanics (about 6% of the population) giving Kansas its blue tinge this year. It’s Republicans and independents. White people. Donald Trump is scaring his own kind.

Preston v Sumner

Congressman Preston Brooks, left, Democrat of South Carolina, debating Kansas politics on the senate floor with Senator Charles Sumner, right, Republican of Massachusetts, 1856. Sumner had just delivered his fiercely abolitionist Crime Against Kansas speech, two hours of vituperative elegance. Brooks objected. And you thought things were hostile now. This beating, incidentally, caused an instant media furor (news was telegraphed then almost as fast as we tweet it now) that helped to turn the Republicans into the dominant party of the north. The Civil War did the rest. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that the Democrats retook control. And it wasn’t until the sweeping electoral victories of Ronald Reagan that Republicans became dominant again, by basically abandoning the world view of Senator Sumner and taking up that of Representative Brooks. OK, I exaggerate. But Donald Trump does have far more in common with Preston Brooks than with Ronald Reagan. Something changed. Perhaps politics is much more immutable down south, ancient beliefs lasting generations. When the GOP shed it’s northern skin and became based in the south, it began to take on a lot of ancient southern ideologies as well. Ideas and notions have staying power south of the Mason-Dixon line, while up north they come and go with the generations. John C Calhoun is still a living presence down there, and we up north and out on the coast can barely remember the name Henry Clay.

 

Immigration and the fate of the Republican Party

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(from an email in September, 2012)

The GOP’s national base is old white people. They also score among white males in general, but not as strongly as they do among older white people. And that GOP demographic is shifting upward in years…it’s not that  everyone over 55 turns, it’s that the people that were 55 and Republican fifteen years ago remain Republican, while there are far less 55 year old voters now than there were  15 years ago. (We’re talking percentages here…as their population grows the absolute numbers will shift upwards, obviously). Basically, the people that voted for Nixon and Reagan will vote for Romney…just like they voted for McCain and Bush. The ease with which Obama maintains a lead now (in September 2012) is just due to the fact that there are that many fewer of that age group left alive to vote for Romney. The same thing that allowed for Reagan–the aging FDR vote–will doom the current GOP. Their era is over. They are dominated by the Tea Party and its average age is above 55. The elderly have pushed the average younger voter out of the GOP. They’ve sealed their fate.

Incidentally…when the US virtually shut down immigration in the 20’s it allowed the original mostly WASP population to regain control of the political process by cutting off the supply of immigrants and their children who tend to be pro-government, pro-welfare, and pro-labor. By the time the third generation kids–baby boomers–of that wave took over they slid comfortably into conservatism. Think the upstate Italian Republicans in New York. I remember as a kid how few kids I knew who were first generation…we were all second and third generation.  When the US loosened up immigration in came a flood of Democratic votes. And when the U.S. lost control of the southern border and several million emigres poured in today’s democratic majority was formed…since every baby born in the US, even by illegal parents, is a citizen..and nearly all of them become Democrats (or lean that way.) In response the Republicans went crazily nativist–due to its base who grew up in an era when immigrants were rare–and doomed themselves. The Federalists in the early 19th century went out the same way….

Back in 1965-66 Richard Nixon pulled the Republican Party together after 1964’s Goldwater debacle by going liberal on social issues (compared to Goldwater) and then appealing to the southern whites. It was cynical, but politically ingenious, the GOP had a lot of smart people then. I wonder about now.

Of course, Nixon’s Southern Strategy has been its undoing, we can see that now. And if southern blacks would ever start voting in numbers matching their tuirn ouit in the rest of the country (which is as high as white turn out), the southern base of the GOP would begin to disintegrate. I wonder if we’ll see that in our lifetime? It’ll be interesting to see if there’s been an upsurge in the black vote in the deep south. It has in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida…

Funny how it was the Democrats who did the Whig Party thing. Just as the Whigs were torn apart by slavery the Demos were torn apart by the Civil Rights movement, and then the northern half was then torn apart by Viet Nam. Watergate saved us, because the Nixon coalition included the Liberal Republicans. When the Democrats won in 1974 and ’76 liberal Democrats swept out most of the liberal GOP, which gave an opening to the neo-Goldwater people to put Reagan in and purge what few liberal Republicans were left. If If you read the first Making of the President, the political structure Ted White described in 1960 had been virtually banished by 1984, so transformed that it was unrecognizable. But that GOP coalition in 1984 was dependent on a population that was either WASP or third generation immigrants. The demographics have changed, and in a dozen years the political structure that voted for Reagan will be long gone. The GOP has never been a flexible institution. And they aren’t dealing with this well at all.

Silenced

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So a Berniecrat wrote a long and beautifully composed Facebook post yesterday complaining about the condescending attitude of those among us who condemn him for planning on voting for a third party this November. It went on and on with considerable eloquence and fire.

So can I put you down as a vote for Trump, I asked.

He responded with a long and angry and beautifully written paragraph explaining how stupid my statement was. It went on and on in eloquently outraged prose, nearly as long as his original post, and even more passionate. He explained his original points in university level English, to make absolutely sure I understood.

Now you’re being condescending, I said.

That bought forth his angriest paragraph yet, full of outraged long words and beautifully placed fuck yous.

But I was joking, I said.

Nothing came in response. Not a peep. Not even a barfing emoji.

Silenced.

A supporter of former Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wears tape across her mouth in protest on the floor at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia

 

Bernie or Bust

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Somebody who gets mad at everything, gawd love him, got mad at me on Facebook for posting some of the wackier comments from the Bernie or Bust webpages. He thought I was making fun of Bernie supporters. But this was not about Bernie supporters, this was about the Bernie or Bust people, who were more often than not quite, uh, zany and confused. Their posts were really funny. After all, these are people who sat inside the convention hall staring into their iPhones completely oblivious to reality all around them. Posting that the evil Hillary forces had cancelled the roll call while that roll call was actually happening. That is funny. There is no way that isn’t really funny. And I saw that a dozen times. These raging space cases, out to save the world and completely oblivious to that very world. They are a funny bunch, a lot of them, passionate and clueless.

But my favorite Bernie or Bust moment, hands down, was the white guys chanting “Black Lives Matter!” as Cory Booker spoke. I swear he did a double take.