Category: Uncategorized

When discussing policy, we can divide the 10 credible candidates who participated in all three Democratic debates into three categories: The unabashed progressives are Warren and Sanders. The centrists who look left for solutions are Castro, Harris and Booker (and maybe O’Rourke). The centrists, all of whom seem to cozy up to corporate interested more than the other candidates, include Biden, Buttigieg, Klobochar and Yang (and maybe O’Rourke). If we want to include the 11th candidate to qualify for the fourth debate, Tom Steyer, we can place him with Biden and Buttigieg, only more enamored of the right.

Since I’m a progressive (actually a socialist), at this point in the campaign my main concern is who I and other progressives should support: Bernie or Liz. While their programs are very similar, they come from vastly different ideological starting points. Sanders is a democratic socialist, which means he wants a democratically elected government to control most of the means of production. Warren is a capitalist reformer, who essentially believes in capitalism, but wants government to reign in free market abuses and achieve an equitable distribution of wealth. In a real sense, Warren stands in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Barack Obama (the most conservative of this group) and Hillary Clinton. Like LBJ and unlike Obama and Clinton, Warren has absolutely no interest in using the free market to solve problems that the free market has created, which brings her much closer to Sanders than Obama or Hillary were on a variety of issues, including the environment and education.

I have put together the scorecard I used for evaluating the two most leftwing candidates running for the Democratic nomination.  The variables include electability, competence, ability to bring the party together for the fall campaign, debate skills, relative immunity from Trump’s smears, and possibility of getting something done once president. Their stand on issues is not one of the variables, because their programs are so similar. 

Electability

Rather than discuss the various elements that go into being more or less electable or rehashing the unproven speculation of the many mainstream media pundits, let’s head straight for the numbers. The most recent polls show both Sanders and Warren beating Trump way beyond the margin of error. As I wrote a few weeks ago, barring voter suppression and manipulation, Trump is probably doomed no matter which Democrat runs, mainly because the electoral stars are not likely to align perfectly for his election a second time around—no FBI investigation of his opponent’s email, no ignoring of three key states by his opponent, no long-standing, deep-seated hatred for the other candidate by large segments of the electorate, a more general knowledge of Trump’s history of incompetence, corruption and racism. Warren and Sanders, plus Biden, do better against Trump than other Democratic candidates do, so let’s call it a tie between Bernie and Liz, based on the polling numbers alone. 

Competence

Bernie Sanders is a very competent individual who has achieved a lot in his life, primarily by running as an outsider. But while he can excite crowds and win votes, no bill for which he was a primary sponsor has ever been passed into law. By contrast, Warren has always excelled working within the system to make the system fairer and provide more to the average person. For f—‘s sake, she virtually single-handedly created one of the departments of government! Both are among the most competent candidates to run for president in recent years, certainly with more on the ball than Trump, Bush II or Gore. I am reluctant to declare a winner in this category since both are highly intelligent, experienced and skilled. But then I think that one of the first jobs of whomever we elect to replace the Trumpster Fire will be to undo all the harm that Trump has inflicted on the government—restaff departments and reinstate regulations—all the small bore stuff that Warren knows so well. Let’s give Bernie one point and Warren a point and a half.

Likelihood to bring the party together

Once the candidate, which of the two will be able bring together the party after the fight for the nomination? Warren has always been a party animal. She enthusiastically supported Clinton and worked her butt off to help Democrats up and down the ticket in 2016 and 2018. By contrast, Bernie did the bare minimum to help the Democrats in 2016 and is known as an outsider. Warren’s demeanor is one of an empathetic cheerleader-school teacher, someone who encourages and guides. Bernie’s personality has been a veritable motherlode of jokes for Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and others, who have established Bernie’s image as a crotchety, if somewhat loveable, old eccentric, a variation on Larry David’s television persona. Clearly, Warren seems to possess more conciliation skills and can call on a deeper reserve of good feeling among those who didn’t support her. Moreover, because of her party allegiance, her personality and her disavowal of socialism, most of the many subsegments that compose the Democratic Party are likely to support her enthusiastically against Trump, except for the “Bernie Bros,” by which I mean those white men of the left who will never vote for a woman. Warren wins this category hands down.

Debate skills

Both have good debate skills. They both can turn a memorable phrase and both have command of the facts. Neither is going to back down to either Trump or a pro-Trump moderator such as Matt Lauer. My sense, though, is that with all that aging, if in Trump’s case probably enhanced, testosterone flying around, Sanders-Trump debates might devolve into a shouting match between two grump grandpas. Warren’s coolly passionate style may contrast more positively with the bombastic Trump than Bernie’s would. I give the point to Warren

Ability to withstand Trump’s smears

No matter who is nominated by the Democrats, Trump is going to spend a lot of time insulting the candidate, distorting their record and accusing them of all sorts of unsavory, stupid or unpatriotic nonsense. The big questions are whether the fact that Warren is a woman will make her more of a target, as it did Hillary Clinton, and whether the misogynistic segment of the electorate will be as big this time as it was in 2016. Apart from her sex, all Trump can do to smear Warren, or to make her look small and ridiculous, is to call her “Pocahontas,” which has the dual effect of issuing a racial invective while reminding us of the one small scandal on Warren’s record—the fact that her family always thought they had native American ancestry. On the other hand, Trump has three enormous cudgels with which constantly to beat Bernie: 1) He’s Jewish; 2) He’s a socialist; and 3) He’s old. Right or wrong, these are large wedges between Bernie and different parts of the electorate. Trump will lie to smear any candidate, but he doesn’t have to lie to call Bernie Jewish and connect with anti-Semites. He doesn’t have to lie to call Bernie a socialist and frighten the millions of people who have been fed negative propaganda about socialism for decades. He doesn’t have to lie to call Bernie old and thereby deflect attention from his own age-related mental enfeeblement and the fact that his heart is a ticking time bomb. That I find these potential smears against Bernie to be repugnant doesn’t prevent me from giving this point to Warren as well.  

More likely to get something done in office

Warren and Bernie present similar programs, especially when compared with other, more business-friendly Democrats. 

But if the question is which of the two would get further, faster in implementing their program, the answer is a no-brainer—It’s the candidate who has worked within the party and knows her way around both the federal bureaucracy and Congress. It’s the candidate who is owed big time by elected officials for whom she campaigned. It’s the candidate whose sunny disposition and friendly demeanor will make it easier for her to bring opposing sides together to work out compromises. 

Like most Democratic socialists, I love what Bernie Sanders stands for. But it’s time for him to yield the field to another leader of the progressives, one more likely to be elected and far more likely to implement key portions of the progressive program than Sanders ever could.

If Bernie Sanders really cares about the country more than he cares about his own power and self-aggrandizement, he will quit the race and throw both his support and his treasury to Elizabeth Warren.   

The way I ran across the very important article discussed in this column exemplifies how ideas disseminate in the age of social media. The article is a technical think piece by the very reputable Mark Z. Jacobson, the director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, on the website of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, which supports projects that address climate change and clean up the environment. The admirable and usually bullseye-accurate feminist writer Rebecca Solnit put it on her Facebook page, which my wife views on a regular basis. My wife downloaded a hard copy and gave it to me.

At first blush, the amazing thing is the series of interchanges that got the article from the author to me. In the past, one media outlet typically served as a conduit, although sometimes two or three were involved; for example, an article would first appear in a scholarly or industry journal, where a reporter for a major media outlet like the Washington Post, Economist, Week or New York Times would see it and decide to conduct an interview of the author, which then appeared in your local newspaper. Instead, Jacobson’s article went straight from the think tank to an influential consumer to the consumers she influences, all via social media, with no participation of traditional news media.

We should also note that celebrity culture is implicated in many of the steps that brought the article to me. The DiCaprio Foundation deserves many kudos for its work, but it wouldn’t exist without the celebrity status of Leonardo. Solnit is not exactly a celebrity, which I define as someone who is known for one of the following reasons: being rich, spending garish sums of money on conspicuous consumption, being an entertainer, athlete or aristocrat, or just for being famous. Solnit has done something of substance that doesn’t involve vamping for the camera. On the other hand, her role in getting the article to me follows a process built primarily by interactions between celebrities and their fans. I hold nothing against either DiCaprio, a good guy, or Solnit, a seminal thinker in American culture. They are playing by the current rules as best they can and they work on the side of the angels.

But what does alarm me is the elephant not in the room: the mass media. Even in today’s shrunken pages, national media outlets should have found room for Jacobson’s ideas. For decades, the news media have been ignoring research that disproves their cherished myths. Research that proves unionized work forces leads to higher wages for all workers. Research showing that wind energy could generate all the world’s electrical needs. Research substantiating that lowering taxes on the wealthy does not stimulate the economy or create jobs. Research demonstrating that students in public schools learn more and perform better than their peers in private schools. Or sometimes the news media pulls out the wrong findings from research. One example: a few years ago the major media ignored that a study showed most women live in a romantic relationship outside of marriage sometime in their life, instead blasting out headlines that couples who live together first are slightly more likely to be apart 10 years after marriage than those who just get married.

When the media publishes a bogus study, it’s likely to support right-wing notions, as when they went gaga over a George Mason University finding a few years back that 50% of TV weather personalities don’t believe in global warming. The deception in the survey hinges on the fact that only about half of those who deliver the weather forecast are meteorologists and none are climatologists. In other words, they have no standing or expertise, except to the unknowing consumer or those addled by celebrity culture, since Weather personalities are often local celebrities, available to appear at 10K runs and charity auctions.

Technology optimists will celebrate that this article might never have reached me before the age of the internet and social media. The more cynical, however, will realize that the information is staying within the relatively small left-wing, pro-government intervention, pro-diversity, internationalist silo that comprises the social media networks of Jacobson, Solnit, myself and whoever else links or clicks to it. The centrists and social conservatives need to hear what Jacobson is saying, and unless his article somehow goes viral, they never will. Moreover, as little as the news media has traditionally covered scientific research that contradicts public myths, they do so less today than ever before, primarily because there are fewer media doing original reporting than in the day before the internet and social media. So while social media has given thinkers and analysts like Jacobson and Solnit (and myself) a new conduit to preach to the choir, it has severely obstructed the traditional channel to a larger audience.

The article, ”The 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change,” is straight-forward and very easy for the non-engineer to read. In it, Professor Jacobson refutes the growing number of scientists and environmentalists who believe that nuclear power represents our best short-term substitute for the fossil fuels with which we are rapidly destroying the Earth’s biosphere.

For each of the seven reasons why nuclear-powered energy will not solve our environmental problems, Jacobson does the math and cites important research or pertinent facts. Each of the seven is a good reason not to pursue nuclear but to go to wind and solar immediately. Cumulatively, they demonstrate what a disaster ubiquitous nuclear power would be:

1. There is a long lead time between planning and operations, from 10-19 years, which seems like a dawdling waste of time considering how critical the global warming crisis is and the continued rapid rate of development of solar and wind energy.

2. The cost is prohibitive, especially when you consider that after the plant closes, as all electrical generating plants eventually must, the owners will have to spend money for waste storage for hundreds of thousands of years after the plant’s revenue stream has ended.

3. The risk of weapons proliferation, which has happened in several countries that started first with nuclear generation of electricity.

4. The risk of meltdown. To date, 1.5% of all nuclear power plants have melted down to some degree. That disaster rate would be unacceptable for automobiles, airplanes, ovens, lawn mowers, assembly lines or any other product or production process.

5. The risk of lung cancer from uranium mining.

6. The carbon and other noxious emissions caused by mining and refining uranium and yes, operating power plants. Whereas nuclear power increases heat vapor flues into the air, solar panels and wind turbines reduce heat. Jacobson estimates that pursuing nuclear instead of straight wind and solar resulted in an additional 69,000 deaths from air pollution in China in 2016 alone!

7. The risk of pernicious levels of radioactivity escaping from waste storage, which to my mind is a deal-breaker all by itself. We need to develop storage for hazardous wastes that will outlast the danger of the radioactivity, or at least 200,000 years, roughly 20 times the span of recorded history. Only a handful of people alive today can read the first surviving handwriting of our ancestors. How can we expect to be able to warn people 180,000 years from now not to open a thick steel vault buried in a mountain cavern—that is if earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and other changes to the earth haven’t ripped it apart first.

In sum, nuclear energy costs from 2.3 to 7.4 times as much as onshore wind power, depending on the location and other factors. A nuclear plant takes 5 to 17 years longer to build than a wind farm. On average, nuclear powered electricity will generate from 9 to 37 times more carbon and emissions as renewables. All this bad stuff, and we don’t know how to safely store the waste!

The public needs to know this information, but paradoxically, while it is easier than ever to get it if you are seeking it or are part of the right social network, the likelihood of it distributing it into the more general public marketplace of ideas is lower than ever.

A human tide hit Earth’s beaches, prairies, desserts and mountains like a tsunami at about the turn of the 19th century and will subside only at the turn of the 22nd. That human wave is the population explosion that started in English-speaking countries at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but quickly spread to Europe, Asia, Latin America, and now finally to Africa.

But as British demographer Paul Morland details in The Human Tide, the expression “human tide” not only describes 300 years of unprecedented growth in the population of humans, but also the mechanism by which that growth was achieved. 

Morland begins by listing the limited number of variables that determine if a country’s population will rise or fall:

• Average number of children born to each woman
• Mortality rate of infants
• Average life span of individuals
• Immigration and emigration.

For centuries before the industrial revolution, human populations tended to grow extremely slowly, sometimes shrinking or stagnating. The population had hit its Malthusian limits, named after Thomas Malthus, an English theologian who postulated that population growth would always run into the limits imposed by Nature. Scarcity of resources would always lead to the misery of famine and poverty and thus place a natural limit on human population.

Of course Nature’s limits expanded tremendously when humans started to transition to the use of carbon power (coal, oil, natural gas and the electricity created burning these hydrocarbons) instead of human, animal or rudimentary forms of wind and water power. At about the same time, the increase and spread of scientific knowledge reached a critical mass leading to improvements in sanitation, medical care, transportation, tools, agriculture, engineering, safety standards and dozens of other aspects of human existence that gave people more material possessions while increasing their lifespans and decreasing the number of babies dying before one and five years of age.

Greater abundance leads to the human tide, first in Great Britain and the United States: the average life span increases and infant mortality declines while women begin having more children—in some countries, many more children, spurred on by society’s greater wealth. This rising tidal wave causes both the population and its rate of growth to soar, sometimes aided as in the case of the United States and Canada by large numbers of new arrivals from countries experiencing rampant population growth. The average age at death increases, usually by decades, but the average age of individuals declines. The population becomes better educated and the standard of living rises, sometimes marginally and sometimes in spectacular fashion. The country is more able to find soldiers for war and industrial workers for factories, and thus often sees its ability to project power regionally or globally expand. People begin to depopulate rural areas in favor of cities.

But then something funny happens. Educated women tend to have fewer babies, so the average number of births per woman falls, often under the level at which the population starts to shrink. Infant mortality and life expectancy rates stabilize. Population growth stops and even turns negative. Meanwhile, because generations of an expanding population are followed by generations of a declining population, the overall population ages. The result: the population no longer expands and in many cases starts to contract. Only nations that continue to have large numbers of immigrants continue to grow after native-born women start having fewer than the replacement number of children, e.g., the United States from the 1970’s until the installation of the Trump anti-immigration project. 

The human tide thus consists of precipitous population growth which creates a much younger nation followed by stabilization and decline of the population, now much older. The later in history a population experiences the tide, the faster it plays out: it took much longer in the United States and England than it did in Russia and Germany, which likewise underwent a chronologically longer wave than China and Latin America have.

BTW, Morland reports good and bad news about an aging population. The good news is that an aging population is less likely to go to war and will usually experience lower rates of crime. The bad news is that older populations tend to produce fewer innovations. Morland, among others, also worries needlessly that taking care of a very old population is a major challenge to society; these so-called experts don’t seem to realize how easy it is to reroute working adults from taking care of children to taking care of seniors. Almost as easy as rerouting people from oil fields and coal minds to solar panel and wind turbine manufacture, installation and maintenance. All it takes are the funds and the collective will to educate and reeducate—something the United States had after World War II and China seems to have now. 

According to Morland, the human wave—a large increase in population followed by stabilization and some decline—explains much of the history of the past 200 years, for example, the global rise and fall of Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan, the current tensions in the middle East and the looming rise of China, Brazil and Africa, the last continent to experience the wave.

In The Human Tide, Morland labors to make sure his history doesn’t come across as supporting the view that Europeans and Americans are superior to other people because of their technologies and values. Anyone who takes the long view of human history knows that Europeans have dominated politically and economically only over the past 200 or so years and that the rest of the world has almost caught up, and done it faster than it took ancient Rome to catch up with Greece, or Europe to catch up with the Arab world and China in medieval and early modern times. It’s a bit of a challenge, however, to argue against European superiority if you limit your history to 1800-2016. Morland succeeds, and that’s to his credit.

Unfortunately, Morland falls victim to that other great irrationality proffered by right-wing pretending to present well-researched truth: he believes in the invisible hand of the marketplace, which he extends to population growth. Morland reveals his bias inadvertently when discussing China’s decades’ long efforts, now apparently ending, to limit its population by mandating a one-child policy. 

Morland berates China both for the one-child policy and it harsh implementation, which evidently included jail time, taking children from parents and forced abortions. His argument is that the invisible hand of the human tide would have lowered the population without China’s draconian policy.

Two enormous logical errors. The first is easy to explain—if China had not enforced a one-child policy, its human tide would have lasted longer and crested higher. The policy did work, although it has resulted in the same problems faced by all rapidly aging nations. 

The second error has to do with the very idea of the “invisible hand,” whether in economics or in the natural growth of human populations. Let’s first remember that if we postulate, as right-wingers always have, that the invisible hand emanates from the natural order of things, then we have to conclude, based on the evidence of paleontology and the laws of physics, that the invisible hand’s goal is the extinction of humanity. After all, upwards of 95% of all species ever to exist are now extinct, thanks to the invisible hand of evolution. Moreover, the laws of thermodynamics predict a state of complete entropy in which it would be impossible for life to exist. So instead of accepting any invisible hand, humans should intervene to protect and extend our species, for example through population control or laws that offset the unequal distribution of wealth that all unimpeded markets quickly produce.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the human tide has washed across the shores of different nations in different ways precisely because of dozens of interventions made by societies and their leaders: Build up an army or not? Support rising fertility or support population control? Outlaw or encourage abortion and birth control? Educate women or not? Welcome immigrants or shut the borders? Negotiate trade agreements or invade other countries? Make masses of people move or engage in ethnic cleansing? The invisible hand consists of many conscious efforts, which is why the human tide has not played out the same way everywhere, the way in which an experiment involving the release of a heavy and a light object from a tower would always yield the same results.

China had the right idea. We should promote one-child policies everywhere, although I am opposed to any kind of physical coercion like jailing or forced abortions. Rather, societies can encourage lower birth rates as follows:

• An active campaign using all media and public education advocating a one-child policy
• Continued education of women and their integration into all levels of the economy and government.
• Free birth control and abortion and the removal of most restrictions on abortions.
• Financial penalties for ignoring the one-child policy. I would propose that when a woman gives birth to more than one child, both the woman and the father of the baby should be assessed an additional 5% on their gross income and an additional 5% on their net assets from the birth of each additional child until it turns 30. 

If every woman had one child only, the population would be cut in half in one generation, which would go a long way towards solving many of the world’s problems, including the global environmental disaster we face. I know I’m an extremist, but we are seriously taxing the carrying capacity of the Earth and if we fail to reduce the human footprint, the four horses of the Apocalypse—natural disasters, famine, epidemics and war—will surely do it for us.

The problem with any kind of population control strategy, be it extreme or mild, is that most economists have refused to consider how to structure a growing or stable economy delivering a high quality of a life to all when the population is shrinking. Economists have also refused to consider how to make sure that the hidden costs of economic actions are assumed by the producer, the seller or the buyer; think of the medical cost to treat people suffering from diseases caused by air pollution as an example of a hidden cost unpaid by manufacturers or car owners.

Morland fails to take a stand on whether the enormous growth in the population of humans over the past 200 years represents a threat to the continued existence of the human species. Maybe he hopes that by the time the world stabilizes its population at nine or ten billion people we will have developed the technologies needed to sustain such a heavy load of wide-screen TVs, private motorized vehicles, plastic straws and air conditioning. Of course to think otherwise would require him to admit that the invisible hand of the human tidal wave has to be controlled and directed, as does the invisible hand of the marketplace.

Those seeking to put the Trump phenomenon in a broader context will usually point out that his rhetoric and actions typically stay within the margins of 21st century Republican thought, especially as it concerns taxes, regulation, healthcare insurance, women’s health issues and white supremacy. Sometimes Trump has extended those margins with more outrageous versions of standard Republican fare. Others label Trumpism as the American version of the movement throughout the West to embrace ultranationalist, anti-immigration autocrats.

As insightful as these analyses are, they miss Trump’s cultural significance. Not only does Trump represent the bitterly racist and classist endgame of Ronald Reagan’s “politics of selfishness,” he also is the apotheosis of our cultural decline into celebrity-fueled consumerism. Remember that in the real world, Trump was a terrible and unethical businessperson who drove companies into bankruptcy six times; had at least a dozen failed business ventures based on his most valuable asset, his brand name; lost money for virtually all his investors; often lied to banks and governmental agencies; and has been sued by literally thousands of people for nonpayment or breach of contract. 

But while Trumpty-Dumpty was engaging in a one-man business wrecking crew he managed to get his name in the newspaper for his conspicuous consumption, his attendance at celebrity parties and his various marriage and romances. His television show was a hit, which reaped him even more publicity. But make no mistake about it, before he started his run for political office by promoting the vicious, racially tinged lie that Obama hails from Kenya, the public recognized Trump primarily for the attributes he shared with the British royal family, the Kardashians, Gosselins, Robertsons, the housewives of New Jersey, Atlanta, South Beach and elsewhere, Duane Chapman, Betheny Frankel, Paris Hilton and the rest of the self-centered lot of rich and famous folk known only for being rich and famous and spending obnoxious sums of money.

Trump’s celebrity status always hinted at his master-of-the-universe skills in business and “The Apprentice” never missed an opportunity to reinforce that false myth. Thus, whereas the business world recognized Donald Trump as the ultimate loser, celebrity culture glorified him as one of the greatest business geniuses in human history. It was this public perception of Trump—completely opposite of reality—that gave him the street cred he needed to attract unsophisticated voters. Trump is completely a creation of celebrity culture.

When we consider the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era—the Zeitgeist, which in German means the “spirit of the age”—we often focus on defining events such as presidential assassinations, Woodstock, the moon landing, 9/11, the election of the first non-white president. But a Zeitgeist comprises thousands upon thousands of specific events, trends and personal choices. 

Which brings us—finally—to the subject of this article, AARP the Magazine, the semi-monthly slick magazine of the American Association of Retired People (AARP). The magazine usually uses celebrities and celebrity culture to give tips on personal finances, health, careers, relationships, retirement and lifestyle to its members, people over the age of 50. Because AARP membership rolls is so enormous, I have no doubt that AARP is one of the four or five most well-read periodicals in the United States.

Now AARP the organization must have many qualms about Trump and Trumpism. Trump has already rolled back consumer protections that prevent seniors from being taken advantage of by both big businesses and small-time con artists. Trump is vowing to dedicate his second term to cutting Social Security and Medicare, two programs of utmost importance to the well-being of AARP’s members. The leadership of AARP certainly understands that Trump’s cruelly aggressive effort to end immigration from non-European countries is the main cause for the growing shortages of the home care workers so vital to many if not most people in their final years. They must also realize that a tariff war affects people on fixed incomes the most.

What AARP leaders—of the organization and magazine—show no signs of understanding is that they played a role in creating the monster. The focus of AARP the Magazine and the other AARP member publication on promoting celebrity culture helped to create the playing field that Trump dominates—that shadow land of aspirations for attention and materialism in which all emotional values reduce to buying and consumption and our heroes have either done nothing to deserve their renown or have worked in the mass entertainment industries of TV, movies, sports and pop music.  

As an example of how celebrity culture permeates and controls the aspirational messages of AARP the Magazine, let’s turn to the feature on the last page of every issue, something called “Big5-Oh”: Big5-Oh always has a paragraph story with photos of a famous person who is turning 50 sometime during the two months covered by the issue. The bottom third of the page consists of one-sentence vignettes with head-and-shoulder photos of famous people turning 50, 60, 70 and 80. The copy typically describes something the famous person is doing that demonstrates she or he is continuing to thrive and do great things despite advancing age.

I’ve seen Big5-Oh in every issue of AARP I have ever read, and I have perused each issue for about 18 years. And in every issue, the famous people mentioned are virtually all celebrities, by which I mean actors, pop musicians, sports stars and those known only for being known like the Kardashians and Snooki. Only quite rarely a film director, popular writer or scientist sneaks in.

The latest issue, covering August and September 2019 exemplifies the celebrity-driven approach that hammers home the idea that only celebrities matter (since it’s only their birthdays and ages that are seemed worth memorializing). The featured person turning 50 is Tyler Perry, an actor and writer-director. The smaller features include four actor, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jason Alexander, Richard Gere and Lilly Tomlin, plus the athlete Magic Johnson and the rock star Bruce Springsteen.

Not one scientist, not one historian or sociologist. Not one civic leader, politician, physician, novelist, poet or classical or jazz musician. No astronaut, architect or engineer. I did a little cursory research to come up with a reconceived Big5-Oh for August and September 2019: The big feature, always about someone turning 50, could be the chess player Ben Finegold, the best-selling but much scandalized popular writer James Frey or the filmmaker Noah Baumbach. That’s pretty much a wash with Tyler Perry. If I were editor of this feature, I would probably still pick Tyler Perry over this competition. 

But when we get to people who turned 60 and 70 during these months, you realize how much celebrity culture guided the editor’s choice of subjects: ignored are the designer Michael Kors, the current governor of Virginia Ralph Northam, the distinguished Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, the even more distinguished journalist James Fallows, the important literary novelists Jane Smiley, Martin Amis and Jonathan Franzen, the leader of the Irish Green Party, astronaut Scott Altman and Beverly Barnes, the first woman to captain a Boeing 747. All these people are non-celebrities and all have made more significant and lasting contributions to America than the people the column’s editor selected, with the possible exception of Magic Johnson and Bruce Springsteen. 

What’s more significant, though, is including some of these people instead of all celebrities would make an important message about what we value in our society. It would say that we honor the intellectual contributions of our writers, scientists, knowledge professionals and civic leaders. The fact that AARP always selects celebrities for Big5-Oh and tends to build other stories and features around celebrities makes the opposite message about value—that all that matters is the gossip surrounding celebrities and the promotion of celebrity culture.  

Now AARP shares the blame for our culture’s emphasis on shallow consumerism and superficial celebrities with many of our cultural organizations and educational institutions. For example, the political reporting of the mainstream media reduces all political discourse to celebrity terms—name-calling, who is feuding with whom, who’s winning in the polls, the skeleton-closet scandals of the candidates’ families, which celebrities love and hate them, zingers and misstatements, the candidates’ theme songs and other main themes of celebrity culture. Notice that Trump is as much a master in these endeavors as he is an inexperienced and ignorant buffoon in matters related to governance such as policy, history, the inner workings of the government and the scientific research informing governmental decisions. Note, too, that based on how much ink and space is given to endorsements by the media, in the hierarchy of value, celebrities rate above elected officials who rate above unions, business and scientific organizations and luminaries in fields other than entertainment. 

AARP the Magazine is thus a small part of the giant propaganda machine that created the celebrity culture that created Donald Trump. It took from the first stirrings of consumer culture in the 1890’s until the 21st century for the focus on celebrity to pollute our marketplace of ideas enough for a toxic algae boom like Donald Trump to emerge (with apologies to algae blooms worldwide!). But unlike cleaning up the environment, saving our political discourse is conceptually easy—all the news media has to do is dedicate more of its feature coverage to those whose accomplishments can’t be measured by money made or spent, and cease to cover every issue like a reality show featuring celebrities. Not one big action, but a bunch of little actions are needed to stem the tide of celebrity culture. AARP could do its part by working into the mix a healthy share of scientists, historians, civic leaders, activists and literary figures into Big5-Oh and other parts of the magazine.

The argument of former vice president Joe Biden and his wife Dr. Jill that he is the most electable Democrat running puts the emphasis on what is an increasingly trivial concern. Recent polls show all of the front-running candidates beating Trumpty-Dumpty. 

Trump has energized minorities, women, sexual minorities and those offended by racism by his statements and actions to campaign and vote against him no matter what. The threat of an imminent and deep recession caused primarily by his tariff actions will hurt Trump’s chances for reelection. Now that they have their tax cut and the gutting of thousands of environmental, safety, labor and other regulations, the moneyed classes have nothing more to extract from Trump and may no longer be willing to hold their noses and vote for their useful, and cunning, fool. The tar from the Epstein scandal won’t wash off as easily as that from the “Access Hollywood” tape and the accusations by 19 different women of harassment or assault by Trump. When it’s children under the age of 18, people are not so forgiving of the powerful male perpetrator.

Moreover, while Trump and his factotums will try to sling personal and political mud at whomever the Dems select, none of the current candidates carries the long-time baggage that Hillary Clinton had to tote around.  

But beyond these secular concerns is the simple fact that the Electoral College has suddenly tilted against the Trumpster. In 2016, Trump always had a narrow path to victory, based on a number of unlikely occurrences such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan all voting red by miniscule margins. Everything broke right for Trump in 2016. As the results of the 2018 mid-term elections demonstrated, political and social changes have made it much less likely, if not impossible, for Trump to follow the same path to victory in the Electoral College. 

Trump’s losing hand in 2020 plays out in six states. Three consist of the former blue wall of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. They are all now in the hands of Democratic governors, meaning that it will be much harder for minority voter suppression activity to occur in those states, all won by very narrow margins by Trump in 2016. The Democrats completely ignored Wisconsin in 2016, and that won’t happen again. The various trade wars are having a particularly adverse effect on the manufacturing sectors so important to workers in these three states. Trump should lose at least one and maybe all three of these states.

A battleground state that the Republicans usually seem to win is Florida. In 2018 Florida voters voted by an overwhelming margin to restore voting rights to ex-convicts, adding more than a million potential voters to the Florida voting rolls, most of whom are expected to lean Democratic. The Republican-controlled state legislature passed a de facto poll tax law mandating that, before getting voting rights back, ex-cons had to repay all court fees owed to the government. People are now assuming that the ex-con effect won’t tip Florida to the Democrats. This analysis, however, ignores the fact that 200,000 ex-cons have already paid off these fees and are eligible to vote. If every Floridian votes as she or he did in 2016, only 57% of these new voters will have to vote Democratic to place Florida’s 29 electoral votes in the blue column in 2020. 

The final two states spelling doom for Trump are Georgia and Texas. An influx of minorities and educated young people is inexorably turning both states purple. And in 2020 the voter turnout efforts by Democrats in both states figure to be aggressive. Latinx, women, sexual minorities, African-Americans and environmentalists all have strong reasons to vote for any Democrat over Trump and most of those populations are growing rapidly in Texas and Georgia. The Dems don’t need Texas or Georgia: if the Democratic nominee takes Florida and only one of the old “blue wall,” she or he wins the Electoral College. But the fact that Dems now have excellent chances in these two former bastions of the Confederacy will cause the GOP to dissipate resources there and increase the Dems odds of winning the Electoral College.

In short, Trump needs another series of miracles to win reelection. Virtually any Democrat should beat Trump. Biden’s electability—based more on his name recognition than on his policies—doesn’t really matter, since in the vast scheme of things, Warren, Bernie, Harris and Buttigieg are all equally as electable, and perhaps Booker and several others as well.

Instead of focusing on electability, the Dems should focus on these criteria:

1. Who has the best vision and the most realistic plans?
2. Who is the best campaigner?
3. Who is most likely to stand up to Trump and any hostile moderators (such as Matt Lauer was in 2016) in debates?
4. Who is willing to devote the most resources to registering Democrats and getting out the vote?
5. Who is most willing to campaign everywhere to help all the downcard candidates so that Dems can keep the House, take back the Senate and make inroads in many state legislatures?

On at least two of these criteria, campaigning and debating, Biden rates among the worst of all the Democrats currently in the race. His positions are about as rightwing as a Democrat gets, which may prove to dampen support among millennial progressives. I really don’t think Dems need to pander to any-one-but-Trump centrists-who-lean-right, which Biden appears to be doing. These voters will have nowhere to go but blue in 2020 and will likely only be scared off by the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders. Trump showed everyone the importance of strengthening your base (a principle he probably did not pick up from the chess genius Nimzowitsch, for whom strengthening your strength was a key strategy). Virtually every Democratic candidate speaks more to the Democratic base of minorities, millennials and the educated than Biden, except Delaney and perhaps Mayor Pete.  My own choice is Elizabeth Warren, who to my mind rates first or tied for first in all five criteria I listed. But really, any Democrat. Which I believe is the mood of the country. Anyone but Trump, which in the United States means any Democrat!

Let’s close with what I predict will be the enormous irony of the 2020 elections. If my analysis is correct, the only way that Trump can win in the Electoral College in 2020 is if he cheats—if someone like the Russians hack into the voting machines in closely-fought swing states, as many conspiracy theorists think happened in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2016. But let’s assume that Russian interference does not unfairly give the election to Trump and the Democrats triumph. In that case, Trump has given every indication that he will call into question the legitimacy of the election. Thus, while the only way for the cheater-in-chief to win is to cheat (again), if the cheater loses, he will call the winners cheaters. And that could lead to a constitutional crisis.

A signed New York Times editorial by Alex Kingsbury over the weekend presented the false assumption that even after outlawing automatic weapons, these weapons of mass destruction will be on the streets for at least another century.  

The piece, presented as the lead editorial in the print edition of the Times only several days after it appear online, is titled “It’s Too Late to Ban Assault Weapons.” It makes the false assumption that there is nothing we can do to get existing guns off the streets, so we will have to live in a gun-clogged nation for generations to come, even if we ban assault weapons and pass other gun control laws. 

Kingsbury’s harrowing factual beginning sets us up for his false premise: “With proper care and maintenance, an AR-15 rifle manufactured today will fire just as effectively in the year 2119 and probably for decades after that. There are currently around 15 million military-style rifles in civilian hands in the United States.”

So what. 

If we can pass a law outlawing the sale of military style (assault) weapons, we can also pass a law making possession of one a federal crime, with penalties including a steep fine and jail time. 

Don’t scoff at the power of such a law: if it were in place, when local police investigated a case of domestic violence and found an assault rifle, they could take custody of the weapon and the owner. We could create a computer program that goes through the rolls of every gun seller who does background checks to identify everyone to whom they ever sold an assault weapon and contact that individual to arrange the surrender of their now illegal weapons. A gun call-back program would represent no invasion of privacy, since at the time of sale the gun owner voluntarily surrendered his information for the purpose of registering the purchase. 

The federal government could also provide funds for local task forces to stop illegal sales of the weapons that have been outlawed. 

On the softer side, a law banning assault weapons could mandate and subsidize gun buyback programs. I am fairly certain that many large corporations would fund the buyback, either in hard cash or in gift certificates. About twenty years ago, deep in the heart of rural upstate New York, my public relations firm developed and coordinated a gun buyback program in Syracuse that was a joint effort of the Syracuse Mayor’s office, the police department and my client, the largest supermarket company in upstate New York at that time, P& C Foods, and its parent company Penn Traffic. P&C provided the buyback premium–$100 gift certificates, good in any P&C store. The results blew away our goals for the program, and also the P&C’s budget. The company didn’t mind, though, as the good will with both the public and municipal officials was very important to the company. In total, people handed in 316 weapons, a lot considering the small size of Syracuse and the fact that there was no legal mandate to surrender the weapons. 

Imagine an assault weapons buyback with a premium of $250-$500 versus the authorities discovering you have illegally kept possession of your AR-15 and fining you $5,000 and throwing you six months in jail for six months.

There can be no doubt that no matter how many of these “fixes” we establish to make sure that outlawing assault rifles actually gets these horrible weapons off the streets, we will never collect all of the weapons out there. We can also assume that those already prone to commit crimes will be more likely to break the new law and keep their AR-15s.

Again, so what?

We should never make the impossible-to-achieve perfect the enemy of the achievable good. A combination of public relations, education and aggressive law enforcement will harvest virtually all of assault weapons out there. All research tells us that the more guns in a society the more people die or are injured by gun violence, and conversely, removing guns from society reduces those killed and injured. Thus, if a law outlawing the possession of assault weapons is passed and aggressively enforced leading to the collection of 12 or 13 million assault rifles it would assuredly reduce deaths and injuries.

Kingsbury ends his signed editorial with another typical Times effort to blame the “left” for pushing too hard and not understanding the mentality and needs of the rest of the country. He uses a classic club-the-reformer formulation: “Perhaps if gun control advocates frankly acknowledge that military-style rifles are going to be present in American society for many generations to come, it will help assuage fears of mass confiscation and give gun owners the space they need to support sensible safeguards that will save lives.”

Note the conflation of “gun” owners” with assault weapons owners; and the corresponding conflation of confiscation of assault weapons with “mass confiscation.” A mere one-third of the adult population owns guns—and not all of them own assault weapons. When surveyed, most gun owners are in favor of banning military style weapons. They are also in favor of increased background checks and other gun control and safety legislation. Once AR-15 are outlawed, the next step of getting them off the streets shouldn’t be that hard for responsible gun owners and the rest of the population to stomach. Keep in mind that after winning the battle to prevent the sale and possession of AR-15 and their ilk, the momentum will be on the side of gun control advocates. As long as hunters, shooting range enthusiasts and rural inhabitants who feel they need a firearm to protect their homes have other options, I don’t they are going to care that much about others having to surrender their illegal firearms. 

Instead of giving space to hand-wringing and pessimism in way that is tantamount to saying “we might as well do nothing,” the Times should publish more information on the implementation of gun safety laws. Once gun owners see how convenient and easy it will be for responsible gun owners to register their legal weapons and once they understand how universal gun checks, a robust national no-gun list, the banning of AR-15 and the end of open carry and stand-your-ground laws protect everyone, including their families, most will “have the space they need to support sensible safeguards.” The National Rifle Association gains its power because of lies and loosey-goosey rhetoric. Instead of taking that rhetoric for granted, the Times should join in the battle to correct NRA mendacity. It should be helping to prepare the country for a program to confiscate assault weapons instead of assuming it’s impossible to implement.

The proposed Trump Administration rule to deny entry into the United States to immigrants who would likely need public assistance—the so-called means test—is an incredibly dunce-headed policy change for the simple reason that it will not accomplish its objective. 

The objective—unstated, but understood by everyone—is to keep non-Europeans AKA non-whites out of the United States. But this mean-spirited attempt to make America white(r) again will never work. Why would anyone from Europe want to come to the United States? Sure, taxes are a little lower in the United States, but most “white” countries offer cradle-to-grave healthcare; inexpensive and sometimes free college and vocational training schools; great unemployment and employee benefits; and decent pensions. In the 21st century, there is more socio-economic mobility in virtually all other “white countries,” meaning someone from the middle class has a better chance of getting rich in Europe than in the United States. Only the very rich in European countries could possible find the United States an attractive place to live. For everyone else already in the middle class, it just doesn’t make any sense.

Odds are that the effect of the new rule may thus be to increase the number of middle class coming from autocratic countries in Africa and the Middle East, plus the overspill of educated workers in India and the Far East. In other words, more non-whites, albeit with more financial means than refugees from Central America and Syria.

The meanness and small-mindedness of the new policy are closely intertwined with the racism of Trump, Steven Miller and others supporting it. Racism creates a lesser class of humans. Because they are “lesser,” we don’t have to apply the same rules of jurisprudence or civility to them. We can treat them with cruelty, because they are no longer “poor people,” whom the Jewish and Hebrew bibles tell us to cherish and protect. No, they aren’t poor people, because they aren’t people at all, but something other and inferior. The difference between the goodness of a “poor person” and the badness of a “poor other” was underscored when Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, made the contrast between the poor Italians—his ancestors—who once came to the United States with nothing and our current stock of immigrants. 

Like establishing the tariffs against China, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Accord and publicly hammering the Federal Reserve Board, adding a means test to the requirements for immigration to the United States strikes a heavy blow to the American economy. The economy depends on a supply of workers at every level, and for a long time—certainly since the end of slavery—immigrants have supplied large numbers of our lowest paid employees. Many farmers are already complaining about not having enough workers to pick crops. Recent reports also highlight a growing shortage of home health workers in many metropolitan areas. Impoverished immigrants are a major part of the workforce serving the construction, home care, home cleaning, agricultural and hospitality industries. That’s a pretty large chunk of the economy that will suffer from worker shortages and increased labor costs. Note that many of these jobs consist of doing things that most people don’t want to do—hauling debris away from construction sites; changing great grandma’s catheter; picking grapes and lettuce in hot fields; cleaning the vomit off the walls and floors of hotel rooms left by binge-drinking guests.   

As usual for the Trump Administration, this new policy not only is not based on facts, it goes against what we know to be true. Studies show that immigrants end up contributing more to the American economy than the cost to process and care for them. What they pay in taxes far outweighs what the country spends on social welfare spending for immigrants. To be sure, every year, a group of recently arrived immigrants cost their local and the federal government money. And there must be some number of immigrants who never successfully integrate into our economy and remain a burden on American society all their lives. But overall, immigrants—rich ones and poor, both legal and undocumented—are essential to the American economy.

One common theme underlies many Trump economic actions such as trade policies, support of dying industries like coal instead growth industries like solar and wind power, cutting the flow of immigrants, and giving the wealthy a tax break paid for by cutting programs and deficits. That theme is shrinkage. All will tend to shrink the base of the economy. Our current economic leadership is the most ill-informed since at least the Hoover Administration. Their headlong rush to lead us into a severe recession is mind-bogglingly dim-witted.

They are, in short, stupid people blinded by their prejudices.

That is, unless Trump, Mnuchin, Ross, Kushner, et. al. are secretly buying up puts, selling stocks short and loading up on cash to take advantage of a crash of financial markets. 

Idiots or traitors? Doesn’t that always seem to be the final two choices when considering what Trump and his entourage do? 

One thing that we can be sure of though: whatever the goal, the motive and driving principle behind Trump is usually racism.

It’s inaccurate to blame Donald Trump’s racist spewing for the latest mass murders in El Paso and Dayton. As incendiary as Trump’s words have been, it’s not his fault.

Nor is the white supremacist ideology professed by both Trump and the El Paso killer to blame. 

Nor can we blame racism in general.

As for those—mostly rightwingers—who want to put the blame on the mental illness of the perpetrators of the 255 mass murders that have occurred in the United States so far this year, they’re barking up the wrong tree and they know it.

Quite obviously, the culprits identified by cultural wingnuts such as violent video games, homosexuality and a decline in church attendance are not to blame.

No, it’s none of these things that is the primary cause for El Paso, Dayton, et. al. 

Only one place to point the finger for virtually all mass murders: guns. Or should I say, the large number of guns in our society and the ease at which people—including religious fanatics, crazies and racists—can get them.

Every other country has mental illness. Many other countries have seen an uptick in racism over the past few years. Many other countries have leaders who make divisive remarks that are de facto calls for violence. 

What’s so different about the United States? Only that it has loose gun control laws and is already awash in weapons, many of them military grade.

Those who respond that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns have it wrong on two levels. In theory it would seem as if outlaws would go to great lengths to get weapons, but that doesn’t explain the small number of mass murders—and all gun injuries and gun deaths, for that matter—in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Japan, the Philippines and just about the rest of the world. The plague of mass murders has really only stricken the United States. The real world shows that when guns are outlawed, fewer outlaws have guns. When there are fewer guns in society, there are fewer guns for outlaws to steal, buy black market or do what most of them do now, just pick one up on the Internet without a background check.  

The “when guns are outlawed” argument has a second message to it—that non-outlaws can and should use guns for protection. But again, statistics disprove the idea that citizens are safer when they own (and carry) a firearm. Year after year, studies show that the number of lives saved because a citizen was carrying a gun is a miniscule portion of the number of civilians killed or maimed by friendly fire. Whether nonprofessionals can learn how to use a gun well enough to protect themselves remains an open question. What is not open is the undisputable fact that owning or living in a household that contains a gun puts one in more danger of injury or death than not owning one.

Many Republicans are getting behind a “red flag” bill to keep guns out of the hands of people identified as nut jobs. What a convoluted and inefficient way to stem just one of the many reasons people commit mass murder. Looking for mental illness won’t identify the religious fanatic, the racist, the white supremacist or the anti-government activist. 

The single most important piece of legislation for reducing the number of mass murders in the future would be to ban military-style weapons, assault weapons and conversion kits. They are the weapon of choice for the American mass murderer. If, however, we want to reduce gun violence, injury and deaths ubiquitously, we would institute a national licensing system as strict as drivers’ licensing, requiring all gun owners to have an up-to-date license. It goes without saying that 21 would be the minimum age for license eligibility. We should also require gun owners to carry gun insurance and modernize and expand our national registry of those not allowed possess firearms. A 10- or 15-day waiting period for all gun sales seems reasonable, as would banning all Internet sales of guns and ammo.

Surveys have shown that virtually all Americans agree with those proposals. I personally would go further by limiting gun ownership to those with a need, which essentially means people in rural areas for safety reasons. Cities and most suburbs are well enough patrolled and densely enough inhabited so that people are safe without guns. Hunters and target shooters only need weapons when in pursuit of their hobby, and so could rent firearms at gun lodges and shooting ranges. 

By all means, everyone, and especially the 20 Democratic candidates for president—should vociferously call out Trump for his odious racism. But to paraphrase a standard bromide piously proffered by National Rifle Association factotums after every mass murder, Now is too soon to condemn Trump regarding El Paso.

No, now is the time to raise our voices as loudly as possible in favor of stronger gun control laws.  

The second round of debates between the Democratic candidates for president demonstrated how imperfect the presidential debate system is. The candidates basically repeated the talking points that they had mouthed in the first round. Important issues such as taxation of the rich were all but ignored, while issues such as healthcare and immigration tended to focus on distortions that left out important facts, e.g. Medicare coverage is much better than most commercial policies or seeking asylum is not a crime. There was the usual amount of deviousness, most specifically the focus on the cost of Medicare for all—the more rightwing candidates such as Biden and Bennet focused only on the increase of what would be taken out of pocket A without considering that it would cost less money to society overall.   

The inability to drill down to the facts and truth of any issue had nothing to do with the large number of candidates and everything to do with the decision not to have topic-specific debates. Topic specific debates would solve all but one of the structural problems that the debate system currently has. Individual debates could cover immigration, climate change, foreign affairs, the economy, social issues and wealth inequality. By focusing on one topic, the viewers and the American public would get more information about what the candidates will really do. We would also get to see how similar all 20 Democratic candidates are on most issues, with differences only concerning the speed with which each wants to move ahead. Candidates would have time to dismantle the false rhetoric of their opponents on an issue instead of merely trading slogans. 

In a single topic debate, we would also learn which candidates have only talking points and which have an in-depth understanding. Candidates with detailed plans, such as O’Rourke and Booker on immigration, Inslee on the environment, Harris on health care and Warren on everything, would have time to explain them. Other candidates could disagree on specifics, or get on board.

The one problem not solved by going to a one-topic-per-debate format is the desire of the moderators to create arguments and magnify differences. That seems to be the motivation behind Tapper’s insistence on spewing bad math by asking candidates whether they supported raising taxes on the middle class to pay for single-payer healthcare insurance. The question was inflammatory and wrong-headed, since under a single payer system premiums, and maybe even deductibles and copays, would disappear to be replaced by taxation resulting in a lower total cost to society that would translate to lower costs for healthcare than most people currently pay. Tapper knows these facts, but like most of the mainstream news media, he poses questions based on Republican message points. It also was a trivial detail in the grand scheme of things—the main point is that virtually all 20 of the candidates want some form of universal health care.

Talking from the Republican playbook certainly is behind the disdain that the mainstream news media retains for straight-talking, truth-telling Bill De Blasio. New York’s Mayor certainly made the best points of the second night. He reminded everyone of the fairness of and necessity to raise taxes on the wealthy. He also pointed out how inadequate health insurance coverage is for most people, the ready answer to those who are worried that people with commercial insurance won’t want to have Medicare instead. 

If the constant interruption by the moderators when candidates’ time ended seemed especially irritating this round, it was because in an overwhelming majority of the cases, the candidates already knew they were running out of time and were obviously winding down their remarks. While we would never want a Trump-like demagogue to take control of a debate, it seems to disruptive not to give a candidate an extra 5-10 seconds to complete her or his thought.

As to the debates themselves. Warren and Bernie won the first night, with no other candidate really distinguishing her or himself. The second night featured a much stronger set of secondary candidates—I could imagine Castro, Gillibrand, Yang and especially De Blasio being excellent presidents, but can’t say the same for O’Rourke, Delaney, Bullock or Ryan. Forced to declare “winners,” I would give the second night to Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. 

Biden showed himself to be gracious and good-natured, but did not distinguish himself as either an issues wonk or a brilliant speaker. The contrast with the other “Silent Generation” candidate—Bernie Sanders—was stunning. Bernie maintains the energy, sharp wit and enthusiasm of a young person; Biden looks ready to sign whatever order his advisors put in front of his face without reading it to be followed by nine holes of golf. To be sure, a Reagan or Bush II type of disengaged leader managing a Democratic administration would be a lot better than a sociopathic, ignorant, mendacious racist who surrounds himself with yes-white-men. But I like the person in charge to actually be in charge, and I’m not sure that would be the case with Biden anymore.

The biggest losers were O’Rourke and Buttegieg, because the debates tested their superficial appeal and they failed to show anything special under the charisma. Unless Buttegieg can turn a little of his horde of money into support in the polls, what could have been a Big Five or a Big Six rolling into the primaries and caucuses is already down to just a Big Four: Biden, Bernie, Warren and Harris.

For the record, my first choice at this point is Elizabeth Warren, followed in order of preference, by Inslee, De Blasio, Harris, Castro and Bernie. I would like to say that Biden, Beto, Williamson, Delaney, Bennet and Bullock are absolutely unacceptable, but I would vote for any of them over Donald Trump (or most other Republicans). Today, more than perhaps any other time in U.S. history, the party matters more than the candidate. The biggest lesson from these first two rounds of debates is that to save the country and the planet—literally—we must vote straight Democratic for every office from president down through dogcatcher.

Now that the initial stench of Donald Trump’s racist comments about four freshman Democratic female Congressional representatives has lifted, most analysts are discussing this series of racist tweets as if they represented an overall election strategy: make these four progressives candidates the “face” of the Democratic Party. This gambit—if it is one—attempts to take the focus away from the inherent and obvious racism of the comments and place it on presenting the Congresswomen’s views as radical and un-American—“socialism” and “communism” are the words being bandied about by Trump, Mark Meadows, Lindsay Graham and the usual gang of idiots (apologies to the soon-to-be-defunct Mad Magazine). 

In my view, calling a series of disgusting tweets the beginning of a strategy of identification is just typical Republican backfill of their leader’s stupidity and virulent racism. It’s a silly idea to base the election strategy on making Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar and Tlaib—known as the Squad—the face of the Democratic Party for two big reasons: 1) As soon as the Democrats have a nominee or an unbeatable frontrunner, she or he will be the face of the Democrats, no matter what the GOP wants.  2) The more times that Republicans label as “socialist” positions that most people agree with such as universal healthcare insurance, support of government action to address global warming, cheaper college and making the rich pay their fair share of taxes, the less people are going to care about what you call it. Recent surveys show this process kicking in, especially among millennials and Gen-Zers. Many people are happy to call it socialism, as long as they get healthcare.  

The mainstream media has been happy to go along with the idea that making four minority Congressional representatives the face of the Democratic Party constitutes a strategy because it plays into their current obsession with splitting the Democratic Party into two warring factions—the crazy left-wingers and the centrists. On most issues, all that separates these two groups is the speed with which they want to get to the ultimate goals and their willingness to piss off entrenched interests. The real internal problem for the Democrats, of course, is that the large funders of the Party have a slightly different agenda than do Democratic voters and small donors. The Dem fat cats are happy to clean up the environment, provide good healthcare to all and raise wages—as long as they (the big donors) don’t have to pay for it, or can make money from it, as in the case of union-busting charter schools. 

Even those pundits who have kept their aim zeroed tightly on the obvious racism of Trump’s remarks—another in a long line of crude Trump attempts to create an us-versus-them mentality among his core—have missed the target to a certain degree. The real point of the Trump anti-Squad remarks involves not just racism and economic issues, but misogyny and fundamentalist Christian values as well. As University of Arkansas professors Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields point out in their recent The Long Southern Strategy, from its inception after the Supreme Court declared segregation illegal in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Republican “Southern Strategy” has combined racism, sexism, revivalist-tent religion and right-wing economics in almost equal measures. 

The goal of the Southern Strategy has always been to change voting patterns in the south from straight Democratic to straight Republican. This multi-decade strategy has involved pandering not only to racist views, but also to old-fashioned ideas that women should stay at home cooking and raising children and to an extreme religiosity based on accepting the words of the Bible without interpretation. The GOP infused these long-time core “southern” values with its brand of small-government capitalism by attaching racial code words to discussions of government efforts to help the poor, aged and down-trodden, to make racist voters believe that social welfare programs primarily benefited minorities. As Maxwell and Shields write, “Poor southern whites have long been conditioned to forfeit a personal battle in the service of winning an imagined war from which they do not benefit.” In this historical context, Trump’s anti-Squad tweets, full of venomous lies, e.g., that these women said they hate Jews, is not the beginning of a strategy, but another tactic in the GOP’s long southern strategy.

Maxwell and Shields take a complicated approach to their telling of history. Instead of a straight chronology, each chapter follows a single theme from the 1950’s until today and then presents a series of recent studies that show how different the south is from the rest of the country and how open the south was to receiving the racist, sexist fundamentalist message spouted to a larger or smaller extent by Goldwater, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes, McCain, Dole, Romney and Trump. The themes include southern racism, southern white privilege, the myth of a post-racial country, traditional southern sexism, the southern white patriarchy, the gender gap in voting, the revival-tent roots of contemporary southern religion, southern white fundamentalism and the myth of the social conservative.

The professors analyze literally hundreds of surveys and studies on attitudes and beliefs. The surveys show what we always knew: There are racists, misogynists, Christian fundamentalists and economic right-wingers everywhere, but in all cases, there are more in the south. What is eye-opening, however, is the degree to which these four social characteristics are correlated, among both southerners and northerners. Some examples: The more likely people are to believe that blacks are inferior, the more likely they are to think that women should not hold elective office. The more likely they are to be against the Equal Rights Amendment, the more likely they are to think that whites are currently discriminated against because of affirmative action. Those who believe in fundamentalist religion tend to express greater racial resentment and sexism. These many connections between strands of belief create a tightly woven culture, resistant to change.

The economic aspect of this nexus of beliefs is particularly weird, as it has become a mask for racism even as GOP economic policies have hurt virtually all Americans, especially its large army of southern white voters. As it turns out, the 2016 decision of a majority of Electoral College voters to cast their ballots for Trump in and of itself immediately assuaged the feelings of economic insecurity among Trump voters. Several surveys show white perceptions of competition from minorities and general economic anxiety among whites decreased dramatically just by virtue of Trump assuming office. It’s the perverse mirror image of the emergence of the Tea Party movement almost within days of Obama’s inauguration. As Maxwell and Shields write, “The economic masks the racial so much so that many do not even see it.” The economic positions become a coded substitute for racial ones, which explains why those who manifest racist attitudes so often vote against their own economic best interest.

Trump’s strategy for reelection in 2020 is the same as his strategy was in 2016 and the same as the strategies of every other Republican candidate for president since Goldwater in 1964—summon a large turnout by a core of supporters throughout the country defined by the traditional values of southern society: the inferiority of non-whites, the subservience of women to men throughout society and a fundamentalist religion that enforced both misogyny and racism.  It’s the long southern strategy that has seen the south flip from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican in the course of a lifetime.  

The one thing that Trump has added to the mix is his virulent anti-immigration stand that he has racialized by only going after immigrants and refugees from non-European countries.  Reagan and Bush II in particular had much more humanistic approaches to legal and illegal immigration, and all the former Republican presidents and presidential candidates steered clear of racializing Muslims, although many other Republican office holders and candidates have not refrained from virulent anti-Islamic rhetoric. The anti-Squad tweets and follow-up thus make for a great reinforcement of the long southern strategy. 

The flaw in Trump’s campaign to add people from the Middle East and Central and South American countries to the legion of the despised, inferior, un-American “other” is that it has more than doubled the size of “America’s internal enemies.” That also means more voters in opposition to the Republican program, including not only the Latino and Muslim minorities, but the many industries that depend on immigrant employees with a variety of educational backgrounds, the families into which these minorities marry and the communities where they have established deep roots. It might even convince a number of upper middle class and wealthy voters who supported Trump solely to get tax breaks and regulatory relief to now vote against what has been for them a useful rouge. 

That doesn’t meant that Trump is destined to lose the 2020 election. Voter suppression laws will still keep many Democrats home. Russian interference may include fixing the ballot box, as some believe happened in Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania in 2016.

But by including immigrants in the southern strategy, Trump has hastened the process by which the majority of Americans embrace both diversity and western European social democracy. As immigrants from everywhere and educated young people fill thriving cities and high tech capitals throughout the country, Virginia has already turned from red to blue, while Georgia, North Carolina and Florida are purple with Texas headed in the same direction. The future of an American democracy lies only in a diverse mixed economy with lots of government regulation and programs and a highly progressive tax system. Note that I wrote “the future of an American democracy,” and not “the future of America.” Those who support an economy tilted towards those already wealthy and the 21st century version of the nexus of southern values—AKA Republicans—have shown time and again that they care less about having a democracy than they do about imposing their will on American society.