2016 presidential campaign

The Trump Who Stole Christmas: Win or Lose, Donald Trump Has Ruined Everything

From the vantage point of November 2016, George Orwell’s famous image of the totalitarian future — “a boot stamping on a human face — forever” — bespeaks a certain failure of imagination. It’s not the violence of the image that seems wrong, exactly, as at long last we reach the finish line of the worst presidential campaign of American history. Women and Muslims and undocumented immigrants and African-Americans in urban neighborhoods have reason to fear a level of violence under President Donald Trump that will be more than metaphorical. But Orwell’s formulation is too naked, too unconcealed. It’s too clear. It has a clear subject and object: Someone is wearing that boot, and someone else’s face is being smashed. Nothing about our current dystopia possesses that level of specificity.

Trump is too canny to offer clear promises of jackboots and face-smashing. Those things are present only by implication, or in the joyous utterances of his less inhibited fans. When he’s not talking about having Hillary Clinton tried, convicted and imprisoned — not necessarily in that order — Trump’s rhetoric is overwhelmingly positive, as was Adolf Hitler’s. America will be great again; the border wall that will cost Americans nothing (and he’s right about that, because it will never be built) is always described as “beautiful.” He has also described the wall as “physical,” “impenetrable” and “powerful,” a puzzling collection of adjectives.

Trump seems to be telling his audiences several different things at once: The wall will exist in the real world (in other words, it’s not just an idea); it will be mighty and permanent, a thing that never changes in a world of change; and it will possess qualities not normally associated with walls — the qualities of a living thing, a technological device or a weapon. What he’s really telling them, of course, is that the wall is an impossible fantasy, but it’s not clear whether even he understands that.

As media critic Jay Rosen told my Salon colleague Paul Rosenberg (in an interview that will be published later this weekend), Trump’s ascendancy was enabled by a cultural atmosphere of generalized confusion, murk and opacity.

If people look at events and they can’t see any pattern — they look at the world and it doesn’t make sense; they try to pay attention to politics but all is opaque — they’re not going to participate. … An opaque society that remains opaque — opaque power-holders, opaque institutions — kills the desire for news at its root. Why would you need constant news reports if there’s nothing to be understood? That’s the way authoritarian societies work.

At various times in that conversation Rosen seems to channel Orwell, and at other times — as when he says that “an opaque society turns citizens into spectators” — he comes closer to French Situationist Guy Debord’s epigrammatic revolutionary tract “Society of the Spectacle.” Both are key points of reference in making sense of our current Trumpified predicament, although I know Rosen takes a more hopeful view of media and democracy than either of them. Or at least he used to; we have all been herded closer to the realms of darkness by the coming of the Orange Lord.

Orwell could not have envisioned a democratic or pseudo-democratic leader with Trump’s repulsive, clownish charisma — the Big Brother of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is a bland, avuncular figurehead who probably does not exist. Every mass-murdering despot, from Hitler and Stalin to Augusto Pinochet and Idi Amin, has trained himself to affect a certain statesmanlike gravity when required. Trump simply can’t pull it off; he seems more like one of the Three Stooges, who has accidentally been mistaken for the mayor and is trying to control the stolen chicken in his pocket.

Orwell’s mistake was to assume that issues of personality and performance would be removed from politics, as they largely were in the Soviet Union. It took the cultural-studies tradition of Debord and Roland Barthes and the Frankfurt School, and the media-criticism tradition that goes from Walter Lippmann through Joan Didion to Jay Rosen, to observe that personality and performance had replaced politics.

Donald Trump is less like Big Brother than like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Indeed, if he is elected president on Tuesday — and don’t tell me you don’t feel that looming possibility pressing down on you, like the gravity of an over-oxygenated alien planet — the theft will be complete.

Those of us who assumed all along that it could not possibly come to this will be left looking foolish once again, standing there by the fireplace like little Cindy-Lou Who, who had the excuse of being not more than two. “Trumpy Claus, why,” we will ask in our small, sad, bicoastal-liberal voices, “Why are you taking our Christmas tree? WHY?” We already know the answer: Because we deserve it. Whether we will be capable of anything like Whoville’s Christmas spirit, with President-elect Trump waiting in the wings, is open to doubt.

Even if Hillary Clinton wins the election on Tuesday, and wins it clearly enough that Trump concedes defeat without launching a civil war, it’s not a safe bet that Christmas is coming after all. Indeed, Donald Trump is not really the problem in America. He’s just a really scary symbolic manifestation of the problem.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Clinton or anything, but consider how far we have fallen: We’re all preparing to get down on our knees and kiss the pavement in gratitude if a highly knowledgeable policy wonk, who was secretary of state and before that a United States senator, can squeak out a narrow victory over a mentally deficient TV celebrity with an obvious personality disorder whose campaign is based entirely on implausible lies and hateful fantasies.

Trump hypnotized the media and devoured the news cycle, as everyone has noticed by now but no one has found a way to prevent. It also feels at times as if Trump has devoured all language and all thought, or at least has exposed how meaningless those things have become. Ideas and words wither and die in the glare of Trumpitude. It is nearly time to replace all nouns and verbs with Trumpness: Trumping a 108-year Trump with a stirring Trump-back, the Chicago Trumps Trumped the Trump Series on Trumpday night. Or as poet Ted Hughes almost put it some years ago:

Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the Trumpophone
Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the Trumpophone
The secret police of the Trumpophone

Trump’s virtual triumph, if it is not a literal triumph, represents the culmination and unification of the Orwellian and Debordian strands of dystopia. If Trump is no better than a ludicrous parody of great despots of the past, and if he embodies the decadent state of our republic in the dumbest possible fashion, that really doesn’t make things any better. On one hand there is the reduction of all political discourse to idiocy, and all political sentiment to hate. “The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice,” O’Brien the party apparatchik of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” tells Winston Smith. “Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy.”

Trump is not capable of articulating such a complex thought, but he communicates much the same sentiment in a purer, less intellectual fashion. I wasn’t around for Andrew Jackson and neither were you, but in living American memory there has not been a presidential candidate so clearly lacking in terms normal emotional range and mental capacity. It would never occur to Trump to propose the elimination of art, literature, science, laughter and sexual pleasure, as O’Brien does. He might dimly apprehend that other rich people like those things, for unknown reasons. But he transparently has no interest in them, and they play no role in the soul-sucking void that is the Trumpian spiritual universe. (I know what you’re thinking — but nowhere in Trump’s extensive history of objectifying, fetishizing and abusing women can one discern erotic pleasure as such.)

On the other hand, we have the society envisioned by Debord, in which show business and market capitalism have merged to create a “Matrix”-style simulation that has effectively replaced both work and leisure time. A Marxist philosopher of the 1960s could scarcely have imagined a world in which people who stare at screens all day long in the office also stare at them deep into the night, as well as on the train or bus going to and from work. But such a world could not possibly illustrate his precepts more vividly, and Donald Trump is both its ultimate symbol and its perfect commodity.

One of Debord’s key ideas is that capitalism subjects people to the “violent expropriation of their time,” first as workers and but second and perhaps more importantly as consumers. Even if Trump’s presidential candidacy has been a troubling and disruptive commodity, not entirely congenial to those who manage the society of the spectacle, he has expropriated more of our time than any of us would have believed possible. Debord reminds us that Trump’s claim to be an “outsider” is true only in the narrow sense of the political establishment — but not at all in terms of the spectacle, which forged and molded him, and which he manipulates masterfully. For “spectator” and “acting subject” in this passage, read the downtrodden or self-downtrodden white American voter; for “contemplated object” and “spectacle,” read you-know-who:

The spectator’s alienation from and submission to the contemplated object … works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him.

“I am your voice,” Trump told the Republican National Convention on the terrifying night he accepted its nomination. He might as well have said, I am the spectacle, which has appropriated your individuality and your desires. He is in fact no one’s voice and has nothing to say; like Orwell’s O’Brien, he believes only in power. He has ripped open the carcass of democracy and exposed the rot, which may have been Trump’s only act of public service. Win or lose on Tuesday, his ghoulish visage will haunt America until its day of judgment, which may come sooner than we think. Whether he stuffs the Christmas tree up the chimbley and flies away cackling remains to be seen.

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Outrageous False Trump-Clinton Equivalencies Dominate Corporate Media and Are Distorting the Election

As national polls released Tuesday show a tightening or virtually tied presidential race, voters are being deluged with new revelations about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that are far from equivalent measures of their characters and fitness for office.

On the Democratic side, the solo and apparently illegal decision by FBI Director James Comey to alert Congress that the agency wants to examine newly discovered emails from the ex-secretary of state has become a gut-punch to a campaign that was rising in the polls. There is no recent precedent for Comey’s action, which violates FBI rules of not commenting on investigations and interfering in elections. Yet Comey’s letter to Congress last Friday has cut into voter enthusiasm for Clinton, polls released Tuesday found, even though it is long on innuendo and short on substance.

On the Republican side, in contrast, a string of new evidence-based revelations about Trump this week reinforce a lifelong pattern of self-centered and deviant behavior that questions his fitness for any public office. There’s his refusal to pay a top campaign consultant nearly three-quarters of a million dollars owed, just as Trump didn’t pay hundreds of contractors when building his casinos. There’s Trump using now-banned tax-avoidance tactics to evade tens of millions of dollars in federal taxes, basically claiming his investors’ losses—other people’s money—as his own. There is Trump destroying emails and other legal records over decades of litigation, even as he hits Clinton for erasing personal emails. And most insidiously, there is a series of reports saying he has longstanding links to Russia’s government, which is seen as overtly and covertly helping Trump’s presidential campaign.

The biggest double standard is that the FBI has been investigating links between Trump and Russia—apparently going beyond this year’s hack into Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails. Yet astoundingly, Comey has said he did not want to tell Congress about that probe on the eve of an election, even though it raises serious national security questions; namely, what are Trump’s loyalties and debts to his Russian backers?

Let’s go through these false equivalencies and loose ends.      

1. The 'Comey Effect' tightens race, cuts enthusiasm for Clinton. The bombshell about the investigation broke last Friday, just before the latest Washington Post/ABC News tracking poll was conducted. That poll, whose results were released Tuesday, found Trump with a one-point lead (46 to 45 percent), which is a statistical tie. More insidious was its finding that Clinton’s base suffered a 10-point drop in supporters who are “very enthusiastic.” While no single poll can be seen as definitive—especially when 25 million people have already voted nationally—the unambiguous takeaway is that Comey’s disclosure has impacted the race and hurt a presidential frontrunner’s campaign.

It’s important to note that just because the FBI is examining emails from Clinton found on former congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop, there is no indication the agency will announce anything before Election Day. It’s very likely the FBI has already seen most of these emails, as it has examined the computers of Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, who is a top Clinton aide. Should the FBI find previously unseen emails, there’s no indication that any would contain classified material and not personal banter. Nonetheless, this new investigation is letting Republicans talk about something other than Trump, which is helping them.

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Donald Trump, Domestic Terrorist: The Man Who Tried to Kill Democracy - And Why We Had It Coming

A domestic terrorist is trying to destroy America. You can’t say we didn’t have it coming. Our arrogance and grandiosity and paranoia, and even our visionary sense of our own greatness, have brought us right to the precipice. Can America be saved from this orange-hued assassin, and from the nihilistic movement he represents, which is far more dangerous than the specter of “radical Islamic terrorism”? I don’t know — the poison has spread more widely, and altered our perception of reality more profoundly, than most of us are willing to recognize.

I can tell you one thing for sure: Donald Trump, the terrorist to whom I refer, is not the real problem. And defeating him at the ballot box, although preferable to the alternative, is not in any sense the solution. At most, Trump is the shaman who has invoked the American disorder in its nastiest form, and the channel through which it has expressed itself in this election. To use a famous metaphor once employed by the great 1960s filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, Trump is like a snakeskin full of ants — he appears to be alive and moving on his own, but it’s an illusion produced by the forces working through him.

Recently a British journalist asked me whether I thought the United States had become so politically paralyzed and ideologically divided as to be ungovernable. When we have a major-party presidential candidate, trailing in the polls, who threatens not to accept the election results, and a well-respected senator who vows to oppose any possible Supreme Court nominee put forward by the other candidate, the question answers itself.

I have argued all year long that it’s a dangerous mistake to assume that the madness afflicting American politics and American society has affected only Republicans or “conservatives” (a word that, along with “liberals,” bears almost no relationship to its original meaning). As the primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders should have made clear — the first Democratic campaign to be waged on fundamental ideological questions in more than 30 years — Democrats face the same internal struggle between their base voters and their Beltway leadership as Republicans, albeit in less overt and less acrimonious form.

But there are other and bigger errors at work behind that blithe liberal overconfidence, errors that I see as epistemological in nature, meaning that they have to do with what we know (or think we know) and how we know it. Electing Hillary Clinton as our next president is now both necessary and inevitable — there are literally no other options. I suppose I would suck it up and vote for her myself, if I lived in a state that anyone, anywhere, thought was likely to be important in the electoral arithmetic. But to believe that Clinton in any way represents a departure from the path of political entropy and paralysis, or that her victory will cause the ants inside the Trump snakeskin to crawl back into their underground nests, is willfully naive.

Those supposedly normal and sensible grownups who read the New York Times and recycle No. 2 plastic and attend parents’ night at the middle school with concerned but nonjudgmental expressions have seen the current polls and heaved a half-sigh of anticipatory relief. Now they’re reassuring themselves, Well, once we get past Election Day and all the right-wing wailing and gnashing of teeth that is likely to follow, maybe we can get back to some semblance of normal government. They are inhabiting a state of near-Trumpian delusion.

When was this mythical era of supposed normal government, exactly? Before the election of Barack Hussein Obama, an event that hit the bloodstream of the American right like a blend of Dr. Pepper, crystal meth and pure adrenaline? Before 9/11, and the disastrous Bush v. Gore election of 2000? Before the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and all the right-wing conspiracy theories depicting Bill and Hillary Clinton as criminal masterminds (rather than, say, shameless political opportunists)? Before all of the above, in the days when the bluebird sang o’er the lemonade springs on the Big Rock Candy Mountain?

Republicans who pine for the halcyon days of functional government at least have something to look back to: the Reagan era, when a newly empowered and energized American right set about slashing taxes on the rich, dismantling the welfare state and pumping up the Cold War, with the suspiciously eager compliance of a terrified Democratic majority in Congress. If the whole thing was an elaborate fantasy, the long-term consequences were horrendous and the damage may never be undone, you can’t claim that nothing ever got accomplished in Washington.

Democrats can’t even agree which version of the political past to mythologize; they’re all contaminated in one way or another. Bill Clinton’s legacy of financial deregulation, welfare “reform” and right-wing appeasement looks worse all the time, even as he prepares to coast back into the White House as the first First Gentleman of American history, a spindly ghost of his former self. Lyndon Johnson used his political power to force important systemic changes, in the process exposing the racist hypocrisy at the heart of the Democratic coalition that had dominated American politics since Woodrow Wilson, and also led the nation into the most disastrous foreign policy blunder of the 20th century.

When liberals accuse conservatives of indulging in misty-eyed nostalgia, more than a little projection is involved. Democrats’ view of their own historical use of power is highly selective, an incoherent series of images drawn from different eras: Sam Rayburn wielding the speaker’s gavel for 17 years, in the days when white men from Texas were Democrats by default; JFK and FDR, urging us to ask not what our country could do for us, and to fear nothing but fear itself; Harry Truman holding that famous newspaper. But not much about the devil’s bargain with Jim Crow, or the extensive series of CIA coups and assassinations, or dropping nukes on Japan to see what would happen.

I’m not arguing that American liberals are odious hypocrites and the United States is a uniquely evil imperialist power, and now we are having our crimes visited upon us in the person of Donald Trump. Or at least not exactly. (That kind of Chomskyite hyperbole, I would say, is a symptom of America’s grandiose obsession with itself more than a diagnosis.) My point is more that American politics have been in a state of slow decay for many decades and everyone knows it, even if the establishment caste of both parties has studiously pretended not to notice. Donald Trump is arguably performing an important medical function — he’s like the tumor or the boil that makes the disease obvious to everyone.

Trump is without doubt the most spectacularly ignorant and unqualified person ever to emerge as a major presidential candidate, and now is widely understood to be an abusive pig as well. Yet Hillary Clinton has been unable to shake him, largely because she represents that failed, decaying and paralytic political system I have just described and he doesn’t. Trump may represent something much worse — incoherent chunks of authoritarian, nationalistic fantasy super-glued together with hate — or may represent nothing at all beyond his own vacuous sense of greatness. But he does not represent the political establishment and cannot be described with terms like “conservative” or “liberal.” And like a stopped clock, he is right by accident a couple of times a day.

When Trump suggests that Democrats are “rigging” the election and that he might not accept the result if he loses, he is of course spewing a dangerous line of bullshit. But he’s also right, in a way. That is, he’s reflecting the widespread sense that American elections don’t matter and don’t accomplish anything — that they might as well be rigged because they have been drained of meaning. Trump’s steamy bromance with Vladimir Putin remains one of the most bizarre subplots of this election, and almost makes me believe the liberal conspiracy theories about a secret alliance between these globe-straddling manly-men. But he’s right that staging a needless confrontation with Putin over Syria is a terrible idea, even if his reasons are rooted in pre-World War II right-wing isolationism.

While it appears all but certain that Trump will lose the election, tens of millions of people will turn out to support him, many with unbridled enthusiasm. He will carry most of the states between the Appalachians and the Rockies, and without question will do better in the Electoral College than legendary losers like Barry Goldwater or Walter Mondale. (He might not do much worse than Michael Dukakis or John McCain.) All that for a man who has been self-evidently trolling democracy this whole time: a man who has no idea what the president does or how the system is supposed to work, and who has never presented even the vaguest outline of what he would do if he actually got the job.

Calling Donald Trump a domestic terrorist isn’t even a metaphor. A terrorist seeks to provoke a society’s worst impulses and expose its hidden weaknesses, and Trump’s terrorist assault on our so-called democracy has done that brilliantly. He’s like a funhouse-mirror reflection of America’s overweening pride and vanity, deadly sins for which we are now being punished. He is the ugliest possible American caricature, made flesh. We told the world we were a free-enterprise meritocracy where talent rose to the top, and that guy became rich and famous. We told the world we were the exemplar of democracy, a light to all the nations, and that guy almost became president. We deserve Donald Trump, and we have an opportunity to learn from him. But if we believe that stopping him just short of the White House can make the problem he so vividly embodies go away, we will deserve whatever comes next.

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Don’t Despair At this Painful and Terrible Election - Millennials Actually Offer Hope for the Future

I’m inspired by this election cycle, and it has nothing to do with any of the remaining candidates. I was feeling the Bern until it burned out. Hillary’s good with black talking points, but not good with black people. Donald Trump is incapable of inspiring anybody with an IQ that stretches past 10. I know about as much about Gary Johnson as he knows about Aleppo or foreign policy in general, and Dr. Jill Stein is barely polling at 1 percent. But still, there is hope — a beaming light of hope at the end of the tunnel, a light that is controlled, managed and directed by our young people.

My books and speaking engagements have given me the luxury of touring a few college campuses this fall, getting a unique chance to interact with countless millennials, the young people who will play a major role in choosing our next president. Every conversation begins or ends with “Who are you gonna vote for?”

As a black millennial myself and a person who was personally affected by that 1994 crime bill, I’m not excited about Hillary Clinton. I know she wasn’t the president back then, but she touted the bill as if it were her own. She was aware of the gross number of African-Americans who were unfairly targeted and incarcerated, and she still called it a success until it became politically unpopular. I can’t vote for Donald Trump, because he’s substance-less, even on top of the fact that black people weren’t allowed to enter many of his earlier rallies ­­– one was even punched in the head by some white geezer for showing up — and just like Hillary, he pivots whenever necessary. The rapper Nas had a great line to sum up a previous presidential election, that actually fits this one better: “Who you gonna elect — Satan or Satan?”

I sit with both small and large groups of students at these universities. It doesn’t matter if our political conversations are dense or if we trade lighthearted jokes about Clinton’s emails or Trump’s nonexistent policies. Nobody comes to either candidate’s aid, speaks up for them or gets even a little angry. Back in ’08, you could have gotten punched in the face for making an Obama joke. Bernie was the only candidate receiving that type of love from young voters this year — he was really their guy.

The working young and the college kids loved Bernie — who was obviously the most progressive of the bunch. He was the world’s first elderly millennial. “America doesn’t have enough social welfare, and the system of giving rich people tax breaks and expecting them to contribute under their own good will simply doesn’t work,” says Nick Casper, a sophomore at the University of Rochester who voted for Sanders in the New York primary, “Bernie has the progressive polices that are more in line with what I believe, the policies we need to move forward. Hillary just represents the past.”

Nick’s not alone; you can look around the campuses of liberal arts schools and the surrounding neighborhoods and still see campaign signs that make it seem as if Bernie were still running. His bumper stickers haven’t been peeled off of their cars yet. People still rock T-shirts with Bernie slogans and his face plastered across the front and the back, as if they’re hoping for a dramatic return. Mention his name and their eyes light up with grins that touch both ears — it’s similar to the way Klan members swoon over Trump’s “Apprentice” headshots! — and Bernie only got that love because he was real.

Bernie spoke to people, not at them. When he didn’t understand an issue, like when he was approached and challenged by Black Lives Matter, he was intellectually curious enough to listen, in an effort to solve the issue at hand. Young people respect that. They understand that the job isn’t easy, and that it’s going to take a diverse collection of voices to effectively solve our problems, not just a bunch of stump speeches and expensive TV ads.

Millennials aren’t stupid. They see Hillary taking credit for the positive things that came out of Bill Clinton’s presidency — and running away from anything negative. They don’t mind her claiming to be copilot during his reign, but when that plane crashes, they expect her to ‘fess up and admit that she was in the cockpit too. She’s plays perfect when she’s stating her case and we all know that nobody’s perfect.

It’s no better on the right. Young people know Trump has nothing to offer. They see other spineless politicians like Ted Cruz and Chris Christie talking trash about Trump and then following him like lost puppies, becoming little surrogates and campaigners for a guy who trashed their looks, their intelligence and their families. Millennials know it’s phony; they can spot the phoniness from a block away — and for me, that’s the most inspiring thing about this election.

This is the last time we will ever see a person who fronts like Clinton, or who has no real solutions or ideas, like Trump, be nominees of our major political parties. Millennials have access to too much technology — they’ll fact-check on the spot in 0.8 seconds and they don’t have the patience to be sold the same dream over and over again. No way a person who was caught in as many lies as Trump or Mike Pence will even stand a chance in 2020.

Innovation and the hunger for radical thinking will produce a new type of candidate who will be forced to perform. Millennials won’t let them off the hook, mainly because they know that factory jobs and many other industries aren’t coming back to America. They know that many of them will not be employed after college and our government is going to have to do something more than talk, collect money and start wars. Most importantly, the millennials who are living through this painful election will be the candidates themselves, sometime soon. What they’re learning right now is giving them the skills and understanding needed to move us forward.

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Donald Trump As a 'Gaslighter': What We Must Learn from His Manipulative Non-Apology

The moment Donald Trump’s 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape came out, the smart money knew it was all over. Whatever Trump’s response would be, with a month to go before the election there were bound to be more revelations, and things would only get worse. The burst of revelations over the past week was surprising only in its timing.

Trump’s response was also not surprising: a wholesale denial, accusing everyone else of lying, secrecy and bad faith, thus creating an alternate reality and claiming it to be true. This is a behavioral strategy known as “gaslighting.” The term comes from the classic 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight,” in which a husband (played by Charles Boyer) manipulates a gaslight to dim and brighten alternately, while insisting to his wife (Ingrid Bergman) that it’s steady — the first of a whole series of deceptions intended to undermine her sanity, so that he can have her committed to a mental institution and claim her inheritance.

This is hardly the first time that Trump has resorted to gaslighting, or that some in the media have called him on it — but it’s still his No. 1 weapon of choice when the chips are down. At Vox, Emily Crockett wrote about Trump’s gaslighting in response to Megyn Kelly’s questions about his misogyny at the first Fox debate in the primaries. At the Texas Observer, Andrea Grimes wrote about the Trump campaign’s gaslighting in defense of Melania Trump’s plagiarism of Michelle Obama in her convention speech. And at the New Republic, Brian Beutler wrote about Trump’s gaslighting in trying to disavow his role in pushing birtherism, and his attempts to shift all the blame onto Hillary Clinton or her aide Sidney Blumenthal instead.

This current wave of denials is surely Trump’s most spectacular act of gaslighting so far. Because of that, we’d be well served to rewind the tape a bit to Trump’s brief online non-apology statement, which temporarily halted wholesale GOP defections and set the stage for the flood of revelations that followed. While countless commentators have poked holes in Trump’s so-called apology, no one came close to the brilliant dissection on Twitter by psychotherapist, activist and political analyst Leah McElrath, which included a specific identification of precisely where gaslighting entered the picture, along with other closely related dynamics.

“Trump’s statement is an eerie replica of psychological manipulations made by abusers after episodes of abuse,” McElrath began. “Let’s break it down.” That’s precisely what she did in 15 numbered tweets. McElrath’s clinical dissection was the only analysis I saw that left me, at the end, feeling completely free of all Trump’s slimy tendrils, with a perfectly clear understanding of everything he’s tried to do. She began by translating Trump’s statement “I’m not perfect” into what we might call its psychological meaning: Your expectations I behave like a human being are unreasonable. McElrath’s tweets continued:

2. “I’ve never pretended to be someone I’m not” = you fell in love with me so it’s your fault

3. “this more than decade old video” = it was a long time ago, why the fuss? you’re so unreasonable.

4. “these words do not reflect who I am” = the reality you just experienced didn’t actually happen (gaslighting)

5. “I said it … I apologize” = get over it already, I said I’m sorry, you’re being hysterical

Four crucial dynamics were highlighted here: self-excusing, blame-shifting, gaslighting and normalization of the abnormal or aberrant behavior. In a broad sense, all those interrelated dynamics could be used to describe Trump’s performance as a whole, but McElrath’s specificity is what makes her analysis particularly valuable and unusual. The tweets above highlight the appearance of those dynamics, while the remaining ones deftly track how they were elaborated, reinforced and interwoven.

9. “Let’s be honest” = you’re not being honest

10. “We’re living in the real world” = I’m sane and you’re crazy

McElrath also made a direct translation between Trump’s specific words and classic abusers’ scripts:

7. “grieving mothers … laid off workers …” = what are you complaining about? you have it good compared to others

8. “I pledge to be a better man tomorrow & will never let you down” = I’m sorry I hit you, it’ll never happen again

The clarity of McElrath’s sparse analysis was breathtaking. It was as if she had broken a spell. I no longer struggled to rid myself of feeling drenched in Trump’s excrement. I was completely outside of it, and wondering why it had taken so long. Trump is clearly aberrational, but our pre-existing institutional constraints hinder us from saying so, and from inquiring into how this is so. They favor the abnormal by normalizing how it is treated.

This normalizing begins with journalists, who have been at a loss all along about how to deal with Trump. As a result they have passively normalized his abnormality — his racism, his misogyny, his conspiracy theories, his proto-fascism, his entire spectrum of attitudes and behavior. The sheer volume and density of Trump’s lies, misrepresentations and false accusations has overwhelmed them in their attempts to present “balanced” coverage, when “balanced” coverage of such an unbalanced, abnormal individual so obviously distorts the truth beyond recognition — exactly as Trump himself wishes.

The strictures journalists normally work within — particularly what media critic Jay Rosen describes as “the view from nowhere” — impairs their ability to accurately describe Trump’s past and present actions. Furthermore, he has used those strictures against the press to his own abnormal advantage. Reporters and editors have labored to meet him halfway, and he teased them with language about fairness, and hints of praise. But anytime they brought up something he didn’t want to talk about, suddenly it was stony silence, accusations of corruption, or talk of “opening up” libel laws.

Comprehending Trump’s lies has been a particular problem — even though their sheer volume has long been recognized. But what to do about it?

There are two possible ways to move beyond this impasse, both of which have been problematic — in ways that are resolved by McElrath’s example. The first involves grappling with Trump’s lying itself, and the second involves confronting the entirety of his behavior.

Some have pointed out that Trump is a pathological liar — a liar without any social restraint. This is helpful, but only goes so far, as there appear to be different sorts of such liars. Others, myself included, have pointed to “bullshitting” as a broader way to grasp what Trump is about. I quoted from H.G. Frankfurt’s book “On Bullshit”:

[B]ullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.

Bullshitting covers a lot of what salesmen, promoters and hustlers like Trump do — with fair amounts of self-excusing and blame-shifting, whenever the need arises — and I’d argue it’s his normal way of operating, as a candidate or not. He switches to gaslighting when the heat is really on, as he did in the examples cited above.

In one sense, the two are quite similar. Both the bullshitter and the gaslighter can use both facts and lies, especially by playing them off each other and insisting that both have equal value. But the techniques differ in at least two crucial ways: First, bullshitting reflects a fundamental carelessness, while the gaslighter is very careful in crafting their deception. Second, bullshitting may serve any number of ends, while gaslighting is specifically intended to undermine the victim or target’s sense of reality and their trust in their own perceptions and sanity. With her detailed unmasking of Trump’s gaslighting, McElrath provides a concrete framework by which his other deceptions can be measured: The specificity of her analysis gives us a good model for viewing Trump more critically in other settings.

The second way past the impasse of what to do about Trump’s constant lying was to grapple with his behavior as a whole. At some point we began hearing people, including “Art of the Deal” ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, refer to Trump as a sociopathor psychopath. But psychologists and psychiatrists can’t say things like that, at least not in public. Under the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule,” shrinks are ethically barred from offering opinions about people they have not personally examined, arguably for very good reasons.

As McElrath shows, other possibilities are available. One doesn’t have to treat a psychopath, malignant narcissist or otherwise disturbed individual to develop expertise in recognizing and dealing with them. In the realm of sexual abusers alone, there are vast networks of people, organizations and institutions with decades of experience in responding to the damage they do — support groups, women’s shelters, therapists, prosecutors, specialized law enforcement units and so on. Many people in these networks have similar experiences with the damage done by similarly disturbed people.

This network has many different aspects, but its common thread is that of caring — a connected concern with the welfare of others. This stands in stark contrast with the journalistic “view from nowhere” and the canons of disembodied, disinterested objectivity from which it derives. In fact, the myth of objectivity tends to obscure the fact that all knowledge is arrived at by way of subjective experience, and is always subject to further revision. Manipulators like Trump are experts at exploiting how the mythology of objectivity can help shield them from the truth.

McElrath’s analysis was exemplary, but she does not stand alone. She represents an entire realm of insight, analysis and understanding that America’s mainstream press has almost deliberately avoided, even though we have badly needed it since at least the first Fox News primary debate, when Megyn Kelly asked Trump about his record of misogynistic verbal attacks and he gaslighted her extensively in response.

In fact we needed that kind of insight an entire election cycle earlier, when Trump flirted with running against Barack Obama in 2012 and pursued elaborate “birther” theories about the president’s eligibility for office. In both cases, crucially relevant expert knowledge — derived from survivors’ experience, testimony, history and point of view — was either ignored or treated as subjective opinion, in need of “balance.”

It’s important to remember the larger context that never quite registered in the mainstream media: Trump did not simply question Obama’s birth certificate, he questioned virtually everything about him. He said that Obama “came out of nowhere,” and that “the people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” These wild, unfocused claims were thoroughly debunked, without damaging Trump’s popularity or credibility. Even after Obama released his long-form birth certificate — which Trump at first declined to take at face value — the real estate tycoon continued to demand the president’s college applications, transcripts and passport records. For reasons never made explicit, a private citizen repeatedly insisted that the duly elected president of the United States present all his identifying paperwork to him.

As many African-Americans and others have observed, that situation was both insulting and profoundly racist: A white man with no official position demanding a black man’s papers, as if he had an inherent right to do so. This perception was surely informed by black people’s subjective experience, both individually and collectively, as well as their understanding of history. But the perception that Trump’s conduct was unacceptable was not “just an opinion.” It reflected a centuries-long, multi-continent practice by which white men, regardless of their social station, could demand that black men justify their presence and existence, on the basis of documents issued by white rulers.

So the “black perspective” on the historically racist meaning and significance of Trump’s birtherism was more than just some people’s opinion. It was a historical insight, available to any and all who have a desire to know the truth. Trump’s racism is as objectively indisputable as his misogyny is. The fact that the insight into objective truth comes most clearly from people who care about the damage it does is not a disqualification. To the contrary, it is a warning that disregarding knowledge that comes from caring impoverishes our grasp of the real world. This is even more true when the subjects of caring are those who have traditionally been marginalized, ignored or dehumanized.

The conventions of “he said, she said” media discourse are meant to ensure fairness, but can crowd out real-world truth. Experts exist only to be “balanced” by other experts. Exxon and its buddies have used this ploy to delay action on global warming for decades, when an ethics of care would have long ago required planetary life-saving action. It’s not that the tiny faction of climate-denial voices should be ignored or censored. But the real-world consequences (and probabilities) of each side being right or wrong should be weighed in the balance, beyond the reach of the bullshitters and gaslighters.

What we care about matters — not just in shaping who we are as individuals but in shaping the world we will share in the future. An aberrant personality like Trump cares nothing about other people or the world — very likely he cannot help it, and is beyond our help. But a free press that justifies itself as protecting and securing a free society should be capable of understanding the role of caring in guiding us toward a fuller grasp of the truth, and a better service to our common destiny. Journalism urgently needs to reform itself, in other words, and Leah McElrath has offered us an important lesson.

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Children’s Crusade: Trump’s 'Movement' Is a Bunch of Whiny, Frightened Infants Who Can’t Handle Democracy

For all their carping about political correctness, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s coalition of disaffected and delusional voters have demonstrated themselves to be the most terrified and fragile people on the planet. The frailty of the white ego, the inbred terror of the conservative and the nostalgia of the right-wing baby boomer have invaded and nearly conquered American politics.

Throughout the depressing circus of the presidential election, everyone has treated the Trump voter as parents would treat a child crying during a horror movie or screaming after waking up from a nightmare. Rather than trying to persuade the kid that there are no monsters underneath the bed or that goblins don’t live the closet, the parents simply embrace the infant, and provide reassurance that everything is going to be OK. We’ll make America great again!

The 2016 presidential race is less about issues than about an emotional conflict at the core of American culture. It is the battle between courage and cowardice. The multiethnic and multicultural constituency backing Democrat Hillary Clinton is comfortable with change, enthusiastic about diversity and democracy, and mature enough to realize that as the world’s nations become more interconnected, the United States will have to function as one wealthy, powerful nation integrated into arrangements alongside many other nations, large and small.

The Trump coalition, virtually all of it being composed of white people, is in a state of panic over immigration, trade deals, Muslims, crime, the evil intentions of the “globalists” and protest movements aimed at accountability for police brutality. Trump’s voters see change and want to run home to Daddy or, in this case, to a phony billionaire who offers imaginary solutions to manufactured problems, built on his transparent ignorance and pathological propensity for lying.

Many critics have rightfully indicted Trump’s default mechanism of giving simple answers to complex problems, such as his hilarious promise to not only “knock out ISIS” but also to “do it fast.” The gullibility of the Trump voter is certainly a worrisome harbinger for American political debate, but the real problem runs much deeper.

In 1999, sociologist Barry Glassner indicted the mass media and general public for collusion in the creation of “The Culture of Fear,” as his book is called. “Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded?” he asked before pointing out that Americans take “every happy ending and write a new disaster story,” while “compounding fears beyond all reason.” Through assiduous documentation, Glassner then showed that the various “crises” striking fear in the hearts of Americans were not crises at all. Crime, drugs and political correctness, to name three still-relevant phantoms, will not bring the country closer to Armageddon, no matter how many media commentators shriek about them or how many convulsions the voters experience.

Now many psychologists and journalists have returned to the phrase of W.H. Auden, calling the contemporary American moment “the age of anxiety.” That’s because 1 of every 9 Americans takes an antidepressant drug, and high percentages are paranoid and anxious about nearly everything imaginable, seeing threats around every corner. Illegal immigration is at a 13-year low. Undocumented immigrants comprise just 3.5 percent of the American population, but Trump is going to build a wall to keep the monsters away from our beds.

The likelihood that an American will die in a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 90 million, but “our country is under attack.” Poverty is at its lowest rate since 1968, and the U.S. has enjoyed 78 consecutive months of job growth. But according to Trump logic, America is a “Third World country” in desperate need of someone to “bring the jobs back.”

Facts can’t compete with feelings. Data and evidence are now meaningless in comparison to the cowardice at the core of Trump supporters, who increasingly see the world in simplistic, Manichaean terms. Everything is a disaster because the “global elites,” hiding in the shadows, hatching their diabolical schemes, have “rigged” the system against those who favor Trump. They are not responsible for themselves or their own problems. Immigrants, Muslims and the Chinese make for easy scapegoats, and if anything goes wrong, it is easy to circle back to conspiracy as explanation.

Trump did not really make an incoherent mess of himself in his debate against the much smarter, more mature and better prepared Hillary Clinton: The microphone was “defective” and the moderator’s questions were “unfair.”

When Trump presents America as the setting of a postapocalyptic thriller, where cannibals and killers roam the streets and scary Asian or Arab villains extinguish innocent lives from far off palaces, he does so not because it resembles reality but because it resonates in the shrinking hearts of his voters. According to several studies, Trump speaks at a fifth-grade level. He seems incapable of anything more sophisticated. But his juvenile vocabulary offers stylistic enhancement to the worldview he sells, and his constituents embrace that. It is the worldview of the frightened child.

The stakes of the election are profoundly high because democratic governance requires a self-assured public of informed people making rational choices and willing to accept the burden of participatory citizenship. Democracy, in other words, is for adults. It also requires courage. Fear incites a fight-or-flight response, and fearful Americans have taken flight into the arms of an authoritarian — a paternalistic figure who absolves them of responsibility by blaming immigrants and others and who eases their burden by promising to “fix it like no one else.”

The child-grown-old versus adult dichotomy lies at the heart of British author Christopher Jackson’s brilliant new book on the presidential race, “The Fragile Democracy.” There is always a risk of losing relevance by the second when addressing current affairs, but Jackson has succeeded in the elevation of his analysis to philosophy by anchoring it in the virtues of the Enlightenment — the very virtues that the Trump campaign has placed under attack. Jackson’s comparison of America’s turmoil with the recent Brexit referendum in his homeland demonstrates that it is not only Americans who are “suspicious of complexity” or “cruel” in their desire to simplify the world so that it will conform to their ignorance.

Jackson believes that the current presidential race is about “enlightenment versus chaos.” What is lost on Trump supporters is that as authoritarians attempt to make the world simpler, they make it more chaotic. No one — not a theocratic dictator nor a megalomaniacal mogul — can control the events of the world and reduce the complications of life. As authoritarians try to exert their pull, the world slips further out of their grasp and they are forced to take more drastic measures. Such measures inevitably result in misery and catastrophe.

“Reason is still the best lamp against darkness and difficulty in the world,” Jackson argued. The celebration of reason is the adult perspective that scaffolds democratic governance. The Trump coalition rejects reason, caring little for the consequences.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is far from a perfect candidate, but she is an adult and as such vastly preferable to Trump. More important, the constituency that her victory would empower is much more conducive to the long-term survival of American democracy than the freakish collection of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists and ignorant tribalists that Trump has unleashed.

For all the contempt that Trump deserves, he has provided the invaluable if troublesome service of exposing certain unpleasant truths. There is now no doubt that large numbers of Americans, with a childlike resistance to diversity and democracy, are proud of their prejudice and willing to act on it. They hope to inject it, like a carcinogen, into the lungs of the body politic, eventually choking it.

Clinton’s election, if it happens, will not cause the anti-democratic forces on the march to turn around or reform themselves. For all the reasons to remain hopeful (the expansion of liberty and protection to more groups of Americans, the progressive orientation of most younger people, the increased focus on disparities of race and gender), our democracy remains fragile, largely due to the cowardly urge of many Americans to escape their lives and responsibilities. It has absorbed worse blows and prevailed in tougher times, but its survival demands vigilance — and adult supervision.

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The Alpha Dog that Wouldn’t Hunt: How Trump’s Ludicrous 'Alpha Male' Act Is Destroying Him

When Salon’s Brendan Gauthier recently wrote about the alt-right’s reaction to Donald Trump’s humiliating performance in the first presidential debate, he included the following quote from a 4chan user defending the Republican nominee’s alleged stiffing of contractors:

“As an alpha [Trump] has no problem with asserting his will. You beta cucks wouldnt [sic] understand because when the waiter brings you the wrong order you are too busy shoe gazing at your cell phones to dispute in front of your step-sons mom [sic].”

This definitely isn’t the first time that “alpha male” rhetoric has been used to describe Trump by his radical right-wing supporters. Indeed, it’s pretty obvious from Trump’s hyper-masculine rhetoric that he views himself as an alpha-male figure — or, at the very least, that he wants to convince others this is the case. That’s why we need to remind ourselves that alpha malehood isn’t just a myth; it’s an Achilles’ heel that has been far more of a weakness than a strength for Trump and his supporters, and will inevitably doom their mutual quest for power.

It’s helpful to start by recognizing that the scientific literature that popularized the term “alpha male” is outdated. “The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature at least partly because of my book ‘The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species,’” explains L. David Mech, one of the scientists whose aforementioned text helped bring the alpha-male concept into conventional use. After pointing out that the last 40 years have revolutionized scientific understanding of wolf social hierarchies, he goes on to write that “one of the outdated pieces of information is the concept of the alpha wolf. ‘Alpha’ implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack.”

Of course, even if the lupine origins of the alpha-male trope weren’t obsolete, the notion that the term can even apply to human social structures is inherently absurd. As many scientists have noted, human beings generally inhabit a number of social circles rather than simply one, and each of these subgroups contain complex and varied hierarchies (assuming that they’re hierarchical at all instead of egalitarian). Individuals who may be the top dog in one circle could be quiet and unassuming in another, or even the so-called “beta male.” Just as important, the traits commonly associated with alpha malehood — violence, self-absorption, controlling behavior — have not been found to correlate strongly with professional and sexual success. In fact, researchers have found that assertiveness, confidence and pro-social behaviors (like sensitivity and the capacity to learn from one’s mistakes) are most likely to yield results for people of both genders who wish to lead accomplished lives.

This explains why Trump’s overblown machismo, though lapped up by his alt-right fanboys and many of his other supporters, has been met with controversy instead of widespread applause. When Trump talks about the size of his manhood or describes an opponent as a “pussy” or says another opponent (female) is too ugly to be president, he may be delighting his base while alienating at least as many others. These behaviors may seem dominant to those who subscribe to the alpha-male mentality, but to the rest of the world they come across as not just boorish but also transparently insecure. Because we live in a society that believes in civility, the instinct is to condemn a candidate who demeans his adversaries and brags about himself with playground taunts and boasts. Similarly, because we value intelligence and discipline in our leaders (or at any rate many of us do), Trump’s habit of chronically interrupting and being rude toward Hillary Clinton during last week’s presidential debate came across as uncouth rather than manly.

These observations can also be extended to the hyper-masculine rhetoric used by Trump’s supporters themselves. Take the 4channer that Gauthier quoted, the one who insulted Trump’s critics by calling them “beta cucks.” The term “cuck” is very telling here, as it harkens back to one of the alt-right’s trendiest slurs, “cuckservative.” A cuckservative, in their lexicon, is a conservative who betrays his race and gender by supporting gender equality and condemning racial bigotry, in effect allowing his white masculinity to be cuckolded by women and minorities through subservience to progressive ideals. By contrast, the right-wingers who brandish terms like “cuckservative” have rallied behind Trump because, to quote the prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer: “a) he is a tougher, superior man than ‘conservatives’ (which isn’t saying much), and b) he seems to grasp the demographic displacement of European-Americans on a visceral level.”

Precisely the same qualities that have made Trump so alluring to the right-wing fringe, however, are also likely to prove fatal to his quest for power. Sure, it helped him emerge as the victor in a Republican presidential primary whose electorate was hopelessly fragmented between more than a dozen candidates. Nevertheless, Trump has done serious damage to his reputation as the result of his behavior during this campaign, and it’s unlikely that future presidential candidates will look at his record-high unfavorable ratings and wish to emulate the methods that put him in this spot. Likewise, although Trump has done well in polls against Clinton when the latter’s own scandals are front-page news, Monday night’s debate demonstrated that his “alpha male” traits fail him when he’s forced to compete one-on-one with Clinton’s more polished and professional manner.

Ordinary Americans may not be well-versed in the science that discredits alpha malehood, and may not consciously recognize that Trump turns them off because he is appealing to it. That doesn’t mean they can’t discern the deeper implications in his behavior. While I’m not optimistic enough to believe the naked racism and sexism peddled by the Trump campaign will die with his political defeat, it’s hard to imagine how the cartoonish attempts by Trump and the alt-right to impersonate alpha men can possibly survive the ordeal of this election. Like the titular character from “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” their inflated male identity depends on an understanding of human behavior that is scientifically inaccurate — and on an approach to the art of politicking that, even under the freakish conditions of this election season, simply doesn’t work.

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Behold the GOP’s Not-So-Secret Plan to Dismantle Government Services: Defund, Degrade and then Privatize

One side effect of the three-ring circus this presidential campaign has become is the distraction it provides so that other damaging agendas can be advanced with little or no attention. Take for example, the Republican Party’s long-standing efforts to dismantle America’s internationally modest, but still crucially important welfare state, which helps keep tens of millions of Americans out of poverty. Social Security and Medicare have both been top targets via various schemes over the years, and this budget cycle is no exception, regardless of what noises Donald Trump may make.

The need for Social Security staff services has increased as baby boomers begin to retire. Instead, these services have been cut back since 2011. And in late July, as theAmerican Federation of Government Employees noted, “the House Appropriations Committee cut President Obama’s proposed budget for the Social Security Administration (SSA) by $1.2 billion. If they get their way, SSA will be forced to operate on $263 million less than it does now — even though it’s already struggling to meet public demand.”

These congressional cuts would even force workers to take a two-week furlough. Crippling Social Security’s ability to function just when it’s needed most is the epitome of what Republican public policy has become. It’s part of a familiar right-wing strategy to degrade the quality of government services, then use that degradation to argue for privatization.

Not only does Social Security lift tens of millions of retirees out of poverty, but in 2014 3.2 million American kids directly received Social Security benefits, mostly in the form of survivor benefits. Another 10 million disabled workers were covered as well. But it’s not just these many millions of people who benefit: Retirement security for grandparents means more money for parents to invest in their children’s future. Security for orphans and disabled workers have similar spillover benefits as well. So attacks on Social Security really are a threat to Americans of all ages, now as well as in the future.

Those attacks are already well under way, thanks to the austerity measures imposed since the Tea Party first arrived in Washington with the GOP congressional wave of 2010. (The money comes directly from workers — not from the overall Federal budget — but Congress controls the spending.) During the current budget cycle, the attacks are getting worse, even as baby boomer retirements continue to swell the rolls. This erodes confidence in the system, thereby weakening it for even further attacks, privatization and dismantlement — the true conservative dream.

In a June report for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Kathleen Romig wrote, “The Social Security Administration’s (SSA) core operating budget has shrunk by 10 percent since 2010 after adjusting for inflation, even as the demands on SSA have reached all-time highs …. Budget cutting — due mostly to the 2011 Budget Control Act’s (BCA) tight appropriations caps, as further reduced by sequestration — has lowered SSA’s operating budget from an already low 0.9 percent of overall Social Security spending [far less than any private system] to just 0.7 percent, forcing the agency to do more with significantly less,” a situation summarized in the following figure:

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The cuts have hampered SSA’s ability to perform its essential services,” Romig wrote,“such as determining eligibility in a timely manner for retirement, survivor and disability benefits, paying benefits accurately and on time, responding to questions from the public, and updating benefits promptly when circumstances change.”

Among the impacts already felt, Romig listed:

  • A hiring freeze in 2011, leading to “a deterioration in SSA phone service that the agency has only partially reversed,” with average hold times of over 15 minutes on SSA’s 800 number, and nearly 10 percent of callers getting busy signals.
  • Cuts to SSA field offices, “where people can apply for benefits, replace lost Social Security cards or report name changes.” Since 2010, 64 field offices and 533 mobile offices have been closed, with hours reduced at the remaining offices. “Before the budget cuts, more than 90 percent of applicants could schedule an appointment within three weeks; by 2015, fewer than half could.”
  • Disability Insurance applications and rejections rose dramatically during the Great Recession, but SSA lacked the resources to cope with with appeals. Between 2011 and 2016, the average wait for a hearing rose from 360 to 540 days, with more than 1 million applicants waiting, “an all-time high.”
  • Understaffing has delayed critical behind-the-scenes work needed to pay benefits accurately and on time (awarding widows’ benefits, adjusting benefits for early retirees and disabled workers with earnings, etc.). Wait times now average four months for these tasks.

Unless you’re one of the people affected — and there are millions of them — all these might seem like minor inconveniences, but the underlying aim is to destroy the system: death by a thousand cuts … or in this case, by millions upon millions of them.

As Social Security Works recently wrote:

The majority of Americans visit SSA’s field offices at critical and, often, stressful moments in their lives. Many are preparing for the important, life-altering decision of applying for retirement or disability benefits. Some are contending with the death of a working spouse. And others, faced with poverty, are applying for SSI. At these moments in their lives, Americans depend on in-person service from staff members who have a detailed understanding of Social Security, and who can offer knowledgeable, personalized and compassionate assistance.

It’s not as if delaying any of these vital services actually saves money in the long run. To the contrary, “Failing to invest in customer service is penny-wise and pound-foolish,” Romig says, going on to quote Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue (a Bush appointee) telling the Senate in 2012:

At some point, we will have to handle every claim that comes to us, every change of address, every direct deposit change, every workers’ compensation change, every request for new or replacement Social Security cards. The longer it takes us to get to this work, the more it costs to do.

Now Republicans in Congress just want to make matters worse, with cuts that will require 10 furlough days — which equates to a two-week shutdown of Social Security. “Government doesn’t work,” they’re saying, “Watch, we’ll show you how to make sure!” The amount of money involved is trivial — about 7 cents for every $100 of benefits paid. And it all comes out of money that recipients have paid into the system themselves.

Bear in mind, this is what the “responsible Republicans” in Washington are doing — more of what they’ve been doing since the 2010 midterms gave them control of the House. Trump, of course, has nothing to say about it. Yet this is the epitome of what he repeatedly rails against — the way elite politicians treat hardworking Americans with disdain. The fact that it’s happening in the middle of a campaign when Trump is supposedly repudiating GOP austerity and fighting for the working class only sharpens the irony.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Back in May, Joshua Green reported for Bloombergon Trump’s courting of the GOP establishment. The meeting with Speaker Paul Ryan was well worth recalling:

According to a source in the room, Trump criticized Ryan’s proposed entitlement cuts as unfair and politically foolish. “From a moral standpoint, I believe in it,” Trump told Ryan. “But you also have to get elected. And there’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, ‘We’re going to cut your Social Security’ and the Democrat is saying, ‘We’re going to keep it and give you more.’”

So there it is, as clear as day: Trump will be happy to sign off on Ryan’s agenda aftergetting elected. He just knows damn well it’s not what the American people want. The core of the agenda is first cuts, and then privatization. But slashing services in the meantime is key to souring the public on fighting against what’s coming next.

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Real Washington Corruption? Not Hillary's Latest Emails, but Bush-Cheney Ties to Iraq's Wartime Profiteers

The latest flurry of right-wing consternation over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while Secretary of State has crossed over into the ludicrous.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that in a year dominated by Donald Trump’s excess the Wall Street Journal’s editorial team and others would parse through the latest batch of emails obtained through federal Freedom of Information requests by longtime Clinton foes at Judicial Watch and fabricate outrage over her State Department staff’s deliberations over granting access to businessmen, pop stars and foreign leaders who previously donated to the Clinton Foundation.

Beyond the fact that in most cases Clinton's State Department staff said no—frustrating fundraisers at a foundation whose primary work was global humanitarian missions—there’s a bigger point to be made other than calling out these fake moralists when it comes to protesting the oldest game in Washington: working the channels of political access. (This week, the AP also reported that 85 of 154 foundation donors from outside government also met with Secretary Clinton, which her campaign said painted a false picture of innuendo when some of those cited included Nobel laureates and philanthropists and were a fraction of the 1,700 meetings she had.)  

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Trading Places: If the Democrats Are Now a Coastal Elite Party and the GOP Are the Populists, Trump Is Only the Beginning

Are the two major political parties in America trading places, in demographic terms? Are Republicans becoming a populist party of the downtrodden and disenfranchised, while Democrats become the political home of the up-market urban elites? That may seem like too big a leap amid the intense divisions of 2016, when the Donald Trump distortion effect has so thoroughly warped the political landscape. But such a phase-shift has happened before, and there’s considerable evidence that it’s happening again.

Now that the aftermath of the political conventions has settled down and Trump’s campaign of self-sabotage has shifted into a new and spectacular gear, we once again confront the possibility that Trump himself will be nothing more than a bizarre footnote to the story of this extraordinary year. In his own limited and vainglorious fashion, Trump understands that: “I am your voice,” he told the GOP gathering in Cleveland. He is a ludicrous outrider of the apocalypse, not the thing itself. From here, it looks like our nation is on the verge of a political meltdown, and a political realignment, whose long-term consequences are unknowable.

I have a message for Democrats who look at Trump’s sliding poll numbers, in the wake of the Khan family feud and “Obama is the founder of ISIS” and “let’s try Americans at Gitmo,” and tell themselves that the nightmare is almost over and everything will soon return to normal. You are whistling past the graveyard. Hillary Clinton will very likely win this election, and it could end up as a blowout, although I’d be reluctant to bet the ranch on that. But what kind of “normal” are you so happy about? The paralysis and dysfunction of the entire last decade? To pretend that such an outcome — the candidate who is widely disliked and mistrusted defeating the candidate who is widely feared and despised — does anything at all to address the structural and ideological crisis that is eating away at both parties and the bipartisan system represents an epic level of denial.

You know who you are, oh nice people who feel vaguely wounded right about now! Despite the Bernie Sanders insurrection and the fact that the Democratic Party has been electorally eviscerated between the coasts and has hit a historic low point in terms of voter self-identification, you have somehow convinced yourselves that nothing fundamental has gone wrong and it will all be OK. I mean, yours is the party of good government and rational foreign policy and tolerance and diversity, right? Once you get past this unexpectedly ugly (and unexpectedly disturbing) election and park Hillary in the White House, the future is secure.

Just because the news cycle will be almost exclusively occupied with Trump and Clinton for the next 11 weeks, and one of them will apparently end up as president, it doesn’t follow that they’re the most important people on the stage. Clinton’s supposedly major economic address this week was especially awkward: She did her best to finesse her way around an entire career of supporting free trade, globalization and financial deregulation, in a year when those things have suddenly become toxic. No one should ever believe the vague economic promises made by presidential candidates, but even by those standards Clinton’s second-rate Bernie Sanders ventriloquist act was unconvincing.

The conventions I recently attended in Cleveland and Philadelphia reflected parallel institutions in different stages of internal decay and discord, but both were profoundly troubled events, dedicated to fending off certain unpleasant aspects of reality. The real protagonist of 2016 has been the American electorate, which was confronted with a set of unpalatable choices and has made a series of decisions that may have been incoherent or self-destructive but were not entirely irrational. It has expressed its widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, at the very least, although there’s nothing even close to a collective sense of what to do about it.

From the beginning of this electoral cycle, I’ve been fascinated by two emerging and interconnected phenomena, both of which are essential to making sense of this crazy year. One is that the Republican Party has suffered an ideological implosion, despite its near-total stranglehold on Capitol Hill, and that the Democratic Party is not far behind. The other is that the Sanders and Trump movements, despite their opposing ideologies, share a perspective on the oligarchic nature of power in America and have exposed what Lenin identified a century ago as a central contradiction of “bourgeois democracy.”

Capitalist society, the Bolshevik founder observed, produces a “liberal” understanding of individual rights and tends toward legal and political equality for all its citizens — equality in the marketplace, in other words. Along with that comes the implication, and often the direct promise, that such marketplace equality will ultimately produce greater levels of social and economic equality as well. But the opposite is true; the two species of equality are in opposition, not in harmony. Unfettered market capitalism concentrates economic power in the hands of a few and dramatically worsens inequality, producing an atmosphere of political and economic crisis that Lenin would have called a “revolutionary situation.”

There’s no Leninist “vanguard party” in place to take advantage of such a situation (whatever they may claim on Fox News), nor am I advocating such an approach. What we have instead are two political parties in profound crisis. One of them has been compelled, however reluctantly, to confront the fact that its electoral coalition has collapsed and that its downscale white voters and zillionaire corporate funders have entirely different desires and goals. The other one is simultaneously in better shape and worse shape: It has won electoral pluralities in five of the last six presidential elections, which has allowed it to ignore the crisis or pretend it doesn’t exist.

Hillary Clinton and her wing of the Democratic Party represent Lenin’s contradiction, and still deny that it’s a contradiction. They stand for women’s rights and LGBT rights and combating “systemic racism,” and there’s no reason to doubt their sincerity. But as Thomas B. Edsall wrote in the New York Times this week, the Democrats are no longer a “class-based coalition” with an economic agenda, but a loose coalition of “upscale well-educated whites” and African-American and Latino voters in big cities. Some connection is assumed between the culture-war and identity-politics issues at the heart of the party’s current identity and universal economic progress, but its precise nature is unclear and essentially metaphysical.

Edsall’s column flew through the political discourse almost unnoticed; it had nothing to do with Trump’s outsize personality or his outrageous utterances. But it might be the single most far-reaching journalistic analysis of this mad summer season. There has been a total “class inversion” among white Democratic voters, he writes, since the era when Hillary Clinton’s husband ran for president. In 1992, Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush by large margins among voters making less than $50,000 a year and among those with high school educations or less. Bush won narrowly among college-educated voters, and carried those making $100,000 or more by 16 points.

In an Aug. 1 CNN poll of this year’s Trump-Clinton race, that 1992 situation has been turned upside down: Clinton wins 57 percent of college grads and 55 percent of voters with incomes above $50,000. She and Trump are in a statistical dead heat among less affluent voters and those without college degrees, and it’s safe to conclude that Trump is far ahead among whites in those categories. I can feel Democratic loyalists converging around the idea that racism and xenophobia are the primary factors, and perhaps the only factors, driving support for Trump among working-class white Americans, and that the sense of dislocation and disenfranchisement those people feel is either imaginary or irrational.

No one should discount the role that bigotry has played in this election. Republicans have preyed on racial fears and culture-war conflicts for decades, and the Trump campaign has forced those issues to the surface. Racial resentment and flag-waving jingoism are the unifying flavors in Trump’s secret sauce. But were poorer white Americans less racist 24 years ago, when most of them voted for Bill Clinton? Blaming downscale whites for retreating into prejudice is a transparent effort to evade the obvious fact that the Clinton New Democrats gutted the FDR welfare state (“the era of big government is over,” Bill told us) and “abdicated too easily to market fundamentalism,” in the words of Harvard scholar Dani Rodrik.

But the Democrats’ predicament goes beyond the fact that they jettisoned class-based economic populism in favor of a whole package of free-market policies aimed at liberating the global flow of investment capital, and that the carnage of that Bill Clinton-era decision is all around us. As Edsall says, the party is becoming “increasingly dependent on a white upper middle class that has isolated itself from the rest of American society.” That’s what I perceived in Philadelphia: a party with an agreeable multicultural roster, almost pathologically devoted to the proposition that nothing was wrong with America that a little upbeat dialogue couldn’t fix. If Trump voters perceive the Democrats as “the party of the winners,” a cosmopolitan coastal coalition with no cultural, geographical or social connection to working-class America, they have a point.

If the party of the winners is likely to win this November, largely by default, the question of what lies ahead is murkier. Partisan reversals and inversions are hardly unknown. As we know from history, the Democrats were the pro-slavery party (or at least the non-anti-slavery party) in the 19th century, and the white supremacy party well into the 20th. They represented the “less educated” — the white immigrant working classes in the North, white farmers and small business proprietors in the South.

Republicans, on the other hand, were the party of the affluent Northern elite and Midwestern middle-class Protestants; they were “liberal” on trade and economic policies (as opposed to protectionist or interventionist) and vaguely supportive of women’s rights and civil rights. Until at least the Great Depression, the small proportion of black Americans who were allowed to vote almost unanimously supported the party of Lincoln. It’s not coincidental that the first woman to be elected to both houses of Congress (Margaret Chase Smith) and the first African-American elected to the Senate (Edward Brooke) were both New England Republicans.

Democrats shed the white South some decades ago, and have almost completely absorbed the old Northeastern Republican establishment. You could argue that Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party effectively is the old Republican Party, translated into the cultural and demographic terms of the 21st century. That has left an immense political vacuum at the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder, where left-wing populism and right-wing populism — Bernie Sanders socialism and Donald Trump nationalism — will fight for the future. Hillary Clinton’s economic ventriloquism can’t fill that vacuum. The real danger that lies beneath Trump’s Republican revolution is not Trump himself, but the more adroit figure — the less Trumpian Trump — who is sure to follow.

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The Republican Party platform is a wish list for what Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump would like to impose on America. What’s surprising is that it goes further to the right than what’s even been heard on the campaign trail from Trump as he has promised to build a wall along the Mexican border and embrace the religious right’s long-held tenets opposing abortion, LGBT rights and more.

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