Economically Anxious

For all those middle income, WWC voters who are gullible enough to believe that Trump "cares about me," I give you the latest immoral giveaway to the very rich.

But that's OK, Trump knows how to exploit their racism trigger the libtards, so it's all good.

Must Read

Ezra Klein summarizes the scholarship that shows that white racial panic is the most powerful political force in the country today.

I hate to say it, but I think the road for Democrats to take back the White House in a 2020 wave is a white guy.

Historical Illiteracy

One of the bloodsports on Twitter is watching Kevin Kruse dismantle Dinesh D'Souza.  D'Souza continues to make the ahistorical argument that because Democrats were the party of segregation and the white South, they are still the party of segregation and the white South.  Usually this argument ends some time around the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the early Sixties.  Similarly, we have E.J. Dionne fighting back against the idea that the GOP and Putin couldn't possibly be aligned, because Reagan won the Cold War all by himself, or some such twaddle.

D'Souza is simply a troll, but his argument seems to have some currency on the Right.  This completely ignores the nature of political parties in the New Deal Era (1933-1965).  They were broad based coalitions crossing ethnic, idelogical and racial lines. What happened when Truman embraced civil rights - however tepidly - was the fracturing of the party in 1948.  Kennedy lost electoral votes in the South because he was Catholic and percieved to be soft on segregation (which he was until King forced his hand).  After LBJ rewrote the Civil Rights legislation, the election of 1968 saw both the rise of George Wallace and the beginning of Nixon's Southern Strategy.  That strategy appealed to white Southerners on the basis of "law and order" which fundamentally meant keeping blacks in their place.  After 1968, the only Democrats to win the White House were a pair of Southern governors elected under unusual circumstances (Watergate/Ross Perot), because the South was largely lost to the Democratic party.

So D'Souza's argument is just fundamentally stupid and historically illiterate.

Similarly, the idea that Putin is somehow a Leftist because he is Russian is complete nonsense.  Putin is a revanchist nationalist who supports white supremacy throughout the US and Europe.  He hopes to create fissures in the West along the lines of bigotry towards minorities - Muslims in Europe and the US, African Americans in the US.  He's staunchly anti-LGBT and he reflects the fondness towards authoritarianism that has seemed to infect the American Right.

The GOP not only harkens back to an imagined past, their arguments are from that time as well.

Get Well Soon

The first vote I ever cast was for John Lewis for Congress (followed by Walter Mondale...that went less well).  Hope he returns to health soon.  He's a national treasure and a reminder that there is always a point to fighting for what is right, even if it doesn't pay off immediately.

Nothing Matters Anymore

Charlie Pierce points out that if Michael Cohen is believable, that he has evidence that Trump knew about the Russian meeting ahead of time...well, that should be ballgame.

However, that's just not true, given the dynamics of the modern Republican party.  A party that has shown more energy in wanting to impeach Rod Rosenstein than in holding the Swamp Thing accountable.

The Best People

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  And the apple apparently attracts worms.

Where Do YOU Live?

The Times has a nice interactive map where you can see what sort of people you live next to.  It burrows down to the precinct level, so you can really see some interesting aspects of voter turnout.  Every precinct should theoretically be the same size, yet certain precincts seemed to have fewer voters.  Also, we were chagrined a bit to see that our precinct was more heavily Trump than the small Georgia town that my mom lives in.  Four additional Clinton votes would have flipped Elberton, GA blue, whereas my town went to Trump by 1,000 votes.

Two things.  First, the map certainly drives home the idea that we have a country polity and a city polity. The cities are these densely populated islands of dark blue surrounded by swaths of pinks and reds.  Secondly, the one exception to this is the "Black Belt" of the South.

So, as a friend of mine says, "Vote like a Black Woman."  Or a city slicker.

The Family Values Party

The person mostly likely (apparently) to become Speaker of the House should Republicans hold on to the Speaker's gavel is a man credibly accused of ignoring the sexual abuse of students under his care.

In a party that supports Roy Moore, Donald Trump and the men of Fox News, this should hardly be a surprise.

However, white men are dicks.  And so it looks like women will have to save us this November.

Make America Corrupt Again

The paramount era of corruption in American history is the Gilded Age.  Corruption took on many different forms.  There was the outright taking of bribes and gifts by governmental officials, but there was also something that history textbooks call "patronage."  What "patronage" is was really "clientelism."  Patronage is simply personal relations where someone higher up the food chain nurtures and supports people below him or her and the underlings return that with loyalty.  Patronage can be corrupt, but it isn't corrupt per se.

Clientelism is something different.  I'm currently reading volume 2 of Francis Fukayama's book on political order and politial decay.  He is analyzing why some countries have good government and others don't.  In the Gilded Age, America did not have good government.  His theory is that America always had a weak state - it's part of our political culture to distrust governmental power.  Since America pioneered mass democracy, we developed electoral institutions before we developed a professional civil service.  This allowed for the creation of the "spoils system," whereby victors in elections staffed the civil service with their political supporters, who in return kicked back money and political support to the men at the top of the ticket.  The political machines in various cities were the most efficient and corrupt of these clientelist networks.

The advantage of clientelism is that it allows you to reward your political followers, and it encourges their loyalty to you.  You aren't just voting for your party, you're voting for your job.  You also do it at no "cost" to the party, since you are looting the government rather than your own pockets - what is called "rent seeking."  In the end, you are left with high levels of party loyalty and a terrible, inefficient and corrupt civil service.

The Progressive reforms very often revolved around improving the quality of governance in America.  Even Prohibition was an attempt to kill the central role the "saloon" played in nurturing the machines and their client networks.  Over time, especially after the New Deal, America evolved a professional civil service somewhat similar to those in similarly advanced European states.  (Fukayama notes that the profound dysfunction in Southern Italy and Greece is because they modernized their government without modernizing their social structures, keeping those clientelist networks in place.  The result is inefficent and corrupt governance, which is why tax avoidance is so high in those areas.)

The idea of enriching your supporters with government funds comes to mind when we read of the mind-boggling payment of $12 billion to American farmers potentially hurt by Trump's self-destructive tariff wars.  Trump is looting a program designed to ameliorate droughts or floods to compensate for his terrible, regressive and retrograde tariff policy.  Because rural areas are central to Republican electoral chances, unhappy farmers is not a winning strategy for November.  Therefore, Trump will simply pay off his Corn Belt supporters.  In return, presumably, they will vote for Republicans. 

This is the Gilded Age clientelism grafted onto a modern welfare state.  Trump has managed to embrace a 19th century economic policy - tariffs - and 19th century political corruption - clientelism - with 20th century federal power - New Deal economic stabilizers.  Again, this is not the way these things should happen.  Again, in any other administration, this would be scandalous.  Again, Trump simply washes one scandal away by starting another.

Having just read a massive book on the Gilded Age, it is tough to fully appreciate how awful things were for average Americans in that time period.  Enviromental catastrophes, urban poverty of a kind you can't imagine, racial demagoguery, wholesale corruption, terrible policy making, ethnic cleansing...the Gilded Age was a wretched time, even if it did produce remarkable economic growth. 

The modern Republican party is endeavoring to return us to the Gilded Age.  They began this clientelist corruption with their massive tax cuts for the wealthy, their deregulation of the economy and their revanchist positions on race.  Trump, once again, is simply saying the bad parts out loud.

Immoral

Stand Your Ground laws are immoral abominations.  They license citizens to murder one another.

Battleground

Ed Burmila, who I respect in a lot of ways, makes the case repeatedly on social media that can be boiled down to "Fuck Trump voters.  They suck and will never vote for Democrats." 

This is only somewhat true.  Trump voters represent a large and varied group of people.  Some were anti-Hillary voters or traditional Republican professionals.  That group includes people, presumably, like George Will or Max Boot who voted for Trump or Johnson.  There are people - mostly women - who are outraged by Trump, who might be "soft Republican" voters. 

Martin Longman offers the following: The midterms (especially in the Senate) will be fought on Trump's turf.  The battleground districts will be the suburbs.  In order to win back the gavels in the House and Senate, Democrats will have to win in districts that Republicans currently hold.  That's...obvious.  Yet, when Burmila suggests that we should just write off anyone who is Republican or leans Republican and try and mobilize the base, that neglects that there isn't "enough base" in those districts that Democrats have to win.

Some of this reminds me (hopefully) of the 1992-1994 electoral cycle.  For 150 years, Democrats held the South.  They did so, even as the national party moved left on economic issues and governmental power, because FDR and the Southern committee chairs brought the bacon back to the South. From 1933 through today, federal dollars flow south to promote economic growth.  But once the Democratic party really endorsed civil rights under LBJ, that deal began to fray.  However, the true "culture wars" really came about under Reagan.  Southerners were content to continue to elect Democrats to Congress, while supporting Republicans in national elections. 

Bill Clinton's election stripped that away.  Those Southern voters decided that they no longer wanted conserative or moderate Democrats, they wanted conservative Republicans. Clinton's social liberalism (gays in the military, abortion, health care) created a breaking point and they flipped their Congressional votes. 

Donald Trump has the potential to do that with suburban moderate Republican leaners, again, especially women.  He will never lose his Deplorables.  He could very well lose those women who are fuming at the constant chaos and cruelty on display in this White House.  Flipping them in November will have to occur in New Jersey, Long Island, the Pennsylvania suburbs, Virginia, California and even Texas.  This is the only work-around for the GOP natural and artificial gerrymanders.

If it doesn't happen, if Democrats can't gain control of at least one House, then we have a crisis of legitimacy in American democracy.  Despite a few brawls by Antifa, the left-of-center coalition has largely refrained from anything more than intemperate language.  Some of this is that the current left tends to eschew violence in general.  (Far right extremists tend to reach for violence more easily.  See Oklahoma City and various mass shooters.) 

Everything is riding on those suburban voters in November.

Meanwhile...

The GOP has two things to show for hanging their fortunes onto Donald Trump: Neil Gorsuch and a massive, regressive, deficit-busting tax cut.  Presumably, they will get another justice.

Let's take a look at the tax cut.  In a move that surprises no one who wasn't suckled on Ayn Rand's venomous teat, corporations have pocketed their massive tax cuts, turned them into dividends and stock buybacks.  Wages - unbelievably in an economy with "full employment" - are actually falling.  This is remarkable.  Trump's brewing trade wars - designed around a 19th century mercantile "understanding" of macroeconomics - will also cost jobs and wages.

Republicans have been running on one single fucking idea since 1980: Cut taxes for the rich and everyone (that they care about) benefits.  This has never been true.  The boom of the '80s was a post-recessionary, monetary policy boom.  Giving rich people more money is not a good idea.  It is never  a good idea, unless you are a rich person (or one of their lickspittle lackeys in the GOP caucus). 

In any rational world, the failure of the tax cut to do anything but line the pockets of corporations and Wall Street would be the end of the Trump coalition and the GOP.  All those "economically anxious" Trump voters who want the "swamp drained" would rebel against the lies they were told.  The already pissed off suburban moderates (who fretted over "her emails" until they talked themselves into voting for Trump) are already leaving the Trump Train.  That would leave the Deplorables, that we can reasonably be sure make up 27% of the population.

Meanwhile, on the Supreme Court front, the impact of Republican theocrats being able to possibly overturn Roe has led to it becoming more popular than ever. 

This is the part where every dedicated Democratic voter looks wearily at the mushy, non-voting populace who thought that Hillary was more corrupt than Trump and growls softly into their soy latte.

Evangelism

Reading this expose of a Baptist cogregation in a small Alabama town, it's hard to know exactly where to draw a line between the ignorance and bigotry stated by the congregants and their devotion to a literal intepretation of the Bible.  It's a fundamental way of seeing the world in a starkly literal way.  Their descriptions of heaven and hell and essentially childish and simplistic, lacking any theological dimension beyond, "I'm saved and whatever problems I have, everything will be as I want them to be once I die in the blood of the Lamb."

Once you've committed to one type of blind faith, why not another?  Why not believe that Donald Trump is an agent sent from God, like Saul/Paul?  Why not believe that he honestly does care about you, when all available evidence points in the opposite direction?

The GOP is essentially these theocratic fundamentalists.  Their reach extends to some small government libertarian types, but most of them are the people in this story, who have embraced a completely immoral narcissist, because he validates their own prejudices, especially about Islam, Mexicans and Blacks.

America was founded by Christians who were mostly unconcerned with questioning religious dogma.  Franklin, Washington and Jefferson all had somewhat complicated relations to faith.  But they were also - and more importantly - men of the Enlightenment, what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world.  We have millions of Americans who remain stuck in the enchanted world of biblical literalism, married to situational morality.

I don't know how you reach them, and maybe you don't.  Most likely, you can't.

ADDED: I just picked up Francis Fukuyama's book, Political Order and Political Decay.  In it, he describes the challenges that Greece and Southern Italy pose to the Eurozone and the general idea of "good governance."  Good governance usually results when the state seems itself as an impartial judge of all citizens, what we call the rule of law.  It has to overcome natural human tendencies to rely on kinship and communcal loyalties.  We naturally gravitate towards those we know and trust, but the state must not preference one group over another.  If you actively distrust the broader institutions of a state, you are simply not going to embrace modern governance and modernity as a whole. 

That seems to sum up the Evangelicals who fall back into their very local, very kin-based relationships in these small towns.

Stupid Watergate

The revelations that Michael Cohen recorded conversations with Donald Trump about squashing the story about Karen McDougal are simply the latest in a cascading incidents of monumental stupidity.  Donald Trump was never a bright man, and there is compelling evidence that he is suffering from precipitate cognitive decline.  What is striking is the incredible stupidity of those he surrounds himself with.  Some of this is his fragile ego that can't stand to be around someone who reminds him of his own striking limitations, and some of it is simply that he is a horrible human being, and intelligent people don't want to be around horrible human beings.

From what we can gather, Trump and Cohen were trying to reimburse the National Enquirer - owned by a Trump friend - for buying McDougal's story and then sitting on it.  While I'm not a campaign finance lawyer, that's beyond "shady" and reeks of outright criminality.

But, as always, the frustrating thing is that seemingly no matter what new information drops, it makes no difference to the MAGAts who refuse to admit that they elected a dimwitted vulgarian with the morality of Caligula and the acumen of Caligula's horse.   Therefore, the GOP majority in Congress will, once again, furrow their brows and ignore more evidence of rampant criminality in their own party.  However, one has to think that the constant barrage of bad news is having an effect.

As I've been saying for months: It's the corruption, stupid.

Political Culture

In our Comp Gov course, we talk a lot about political culture.  Basically - like most uses of the word "culture" - it's a very broad term for accepted political norms and behaviors.  Fareed Zakaria comes very close to acknowledging that Russian political culture is basically anathema to democracy, which is my position.

This does not mean that there are no Russians who want democracy in their country.  There are millions who do, mostly in St. Petersburg and Moscow, its most globally intergrated cities.  Most Russians, however, simpy don't see the "liberal order" as important.  That liberal order is not about how we define "liberal" in our political theater, but rather the idea of civil rights and liberties, the rule of law and the importance of representative government.  Russians simply don't seem to care about those things.  They care about strength.  Russia has always felt besieged on all sides by enemies.  Their incredibly long borders and flat, defenseless terrain has made their history a history of invasions and conquests.  The Russians still feel the scars of the Golden Horde. 

Britain and America, where this liberal order evolved, did not feel those pressures.  Britain was last successfully invaded in 1066, America was last significantly attacked inside its borders in 1814.  This meant little need for a standing, peacetime army and the large state apparatus needed to support it.  The absent need for a strong, domineering state meant that there was room for the respect for republican institutions, the rule of law and civil rights and liberties to grow.  France struggled to remain true to republican desires because of it's neighbors, running through four Republics before getting it right.  Germany, too, never really institutionalized democratic ideals until they were forcefully grafted onto them by the devastation of World War II and the necessity of US Cold War policy.

A certain political culture evolved for certain geographical and geopolitical reasons in Britain and her colonies.  Despite the Continental support for humanistic individualism, Europe had to solve its violence problem before it could embrace democratic political culture.

Which brings us to today.

Russia's political culture means that it can never really be "our friend."  We certainly screwed the opportunity up in the early '90s, but that was always going to be a long shot.  An analogous situation would be Germany after 1918.  Germany lost World War I, but like Russia in the Cold War, there wasn't the same devastating loss that required them to reassess their political culture.  So, Germany grafted the Weimar Republic onto a culture that still revered the Junker class of Prussian militarism.  Hitler exploited that in his rise to power. 

American political culture is being severely tested.  At least some of that, I think, is a legacy of 9/11.  America's historical security was punctured dramatically and on everyone's television.  The result has been that a certain segment of American society has gravitated towards a more militaristic and authoritarian political culture.  There was always a latent authoritarianism in certain parts of America, but the key was that it remained latent.  Wars could stir it up, obviously. Ask the Socialists of World War I, Japanese in World War II, Leftists in the McCarthy Era, peace activists during Vietnam... Wars are corrosive of the liberal order. 

Trump's rise is an expression of this new fearfulness in a certain segment of American political culture. His constant invocation of threat was the biggest consistent hallmark of his campaign.  "The Wall" was his policy prescription to this nebulous sense of threat.  It was stupid, because fear makes you stupid.  His supporters are fearful of Muslims, Mexicans, Gays, Hipsters, Blacks, Asians...because they no longer feel in control.  Some of this is the advent of a more dynamically diverse American population, but I also think 9/11 created some sort of psychological crisis in a certain group of people.  MS-13 is simply a shorthanded for not-white people coming to kill me.

In that environment, Trump's pompous, ridiculous bloviating strong man routine is going to find fertile ground. Willard Romney was never going to exploit that, nor was Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.  Fearful people want a bully.  The Russian people are fearful, so they want Putin.  The source of both Putin and Trump's legitimacy is their autocratic promise of order based on white supremacy.

There are essentially two kinds of racists.  The first are people who choose to hate, basically hateful people.  There is something fundamentally broken in these people, basically sociopaths.  The other types are created by the culture they are in.  I don't hold with the presentist pattern of expressing outrage at the racism of Woodrow Wilson or Thomas Jefferson, because you would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of white people during their eras who weren't outright racists by today's standards.  Acknowledging their racism should be more about acknowledging the racism at the hear of that time in our country.

Trump has the support of the David Duke first-type of racists.  The sociopathic neo-Nazis.  But he also has the support of the cultural racists.  That racism, I believe, comes from a place of fear.  Stoked and nurtured by Fox News, these people are saturated by stories about Ebola and MS13 and ISIS and pedophile human trafficking.  Their fear makes them susceptible to the bluster of a braggart, even (perhaps especially) when that bluster is empty.

Trump's performance this week has been disastrous, because it cuts across American political culture.  A third of the population will stick by him regardless.  They are so steeped in their fear and their need for an authoritarian Daddy that logic or facts simply won't penetrate their Fox addled brains.  The broader culture, however, is recoiling at this fundamental violation of America's political heritage and legacy.  This is why even GOP-friendly polling outfits like Rasmussen have Trump at a -9 approval rating, despite a strong economy and international peace.

America has a large and diverse polity.  We contain Marxists, democratic Socialists, "sensible centrists", libertarians, theocrats and we contain those who crave a Strong Man to soothe their fears of a swarthy-skinned boogeymen who live in the fever swamps of their minds. 

The challenge of Trumpistan is to insure that the authoritarian roots being sunk into American political soil do not "take."  We are, in fact, fighting to keep America true to its historical culture as the bulwark of a liberal order that guarantees at least the promise, if not always the practice, of providing measures of both freedom and equality and the space in which that promise might be more fulfilled.

No pressure...

None Dare Call It Treason

Fred Kaplan makes a persuasive case that calling Trump's actions treason is counterproductive.  Certainly the actual crime of treason is very, very hard to prove, and that is a good thing.  Trump, as Kaplan notes, uses the word casually to describe people who don't applaud him sufficiently.

Dan Drezner steps back and takes a different view.  Trump's actions seem to flirt with treason, but probably don't rise to that level, since we are not actively engaged in hostilities.  Except...are we?  Russia is certainly no friend of ours, and they are credibly charged with leading cyberattacks on our country - not just the electoral process. 

Trump's bullshit denials based on double negatives or what the meaning of "no" is have only done what always happens.  Trump does something unbelievable from an American president.  Normal people force him to walk back from it, he then betrays his true feelings in subsequent appearances and tweets.  This fixation on Montenegro is a great example.  Montenegro sent troops to Afghanistan after 9/11.  Trump thinks we shouldn't offer protection to them, because of his antipathy to NATO (an organization that has provided unprecented peace in Europe). 

Guess who tried to overthrow the government of Montenegro recently? 

If Trump is laying the groundwork to betray our NATO allies...Is that treason?  The Framers of the Constitution certainly did not anticipate something like NATO, so what does that clarify for us?  Nothing.

As Drezner concludes:

Based on the actions of the Trump administration this week, reasonable people can disagree over whether treason is being committed. Let me repeat that: Reasonable people can disagree over whether treason is being committed by this White House.

I do not want to be writing those words. Much as I may have disagreed with previous administrations in my lifetime, I never doubted that the people in those administrations were trying to advance the national interest the best way they thought possible. After this past week, can that case be made with Trump and his national security team?

How is he wrong?

The Gilded Age

I just finished the epic Oxford history of the Gilded Age, written by Richard White.  It covers the period from the end of the Civil War until the election of McKinley.  It was, frankly, a depressing read, yet oddly hopeful. 

The Gilded Age and Reconstruction are fascinating period in our history, during which time the roots of modern America and 20th century American greatness can be found.  America's population doubled in size, our GDP close to tripled, America became an urban, industrial powerhouse, and the roots of reform movements that would redefine American life were sunk.

However...

Reconstruction failed.  It probably would have failed regardless of Andrew Johnson's perfidy.  White supremacy - as recent events suggest - is deeply entrenched in American culture.  It was even more deeply entrenched and common in the late 19th century.  In fact, it is difficult to find a single white person whose written comments on race did not reveal an astonishing embrace of white supremacy.  Even leftist heroes like Eugene V. Debs railed against immigrants and the Chinese.  Reform was tied to ideas of Anglo-Saxon purity, and the Progressive Era that sprung from the Gilded Age also was rife with racism. 

Industrialization made a lie of American ideals.  White ably shows that Americans in 1865 embraced the Republican party's ideal of free labor, the idea that every man should be able to work with a certain independence.  Every man should be his own master (and master over his wife and children).  By 1896, no reasonable observer could describe America this way.  Mass industrialization and laissez faire libertarianism in the Courts create a set of circumstances that led to an almost continual class-based violence.  Strikes were common and bloody. Industrial accidents were common.  Urban, working class neighborhoods were disease ridden slums.  Americans physically shrunk in size from 1800 to 1900 and their life expectancy dropped.

America was wedded to bad ideas.  Old notions of laissez faire libertarianism (classical liberalism) were inadequate to dealing with the complex social structures of an urbanizing and industrializing world.  The theory that underpinned it had been mugged by the facts, but comfortable middle class Americans rarely looked beyond the theory.  When they did, they were horrified and became the backbone of the later Progressive Era.  The theory of the gold standard created successive waves of major economic depressions, 1877, 1883, 1893.  The depression of 1893 was the worst in this country's history until 1929 (which was also shaped by the gold standard).  But the gold standard kept the rich rich.  It deflated the currency, which meant if you HAD money, you were in good shape, whereas if you had debt, you were screwed.

America built a society that was categorically racist.   After the Civil War Radicals like Thaddeus Stevens died out, the North turned its back on African Americans, only to turn their guns on Native Americans.  Even the architects of the ethnic cleansing of the West admitted as much.  Phil Sheridan, who seemed to take grim delight in killing Indians, noted that you could hardly blame them from rising up against white Americans, given how we treated them.  We committed and endorsed widespread violence and oppression against the Chinese.  We hated immigrants, saying they could not assimilate into American culture.

One of the tags on this blog is "New Gilded Age."  That was intended mostly as a comment about wealth inequality, which was appalling in those decades.  While wealth inequality remains a major concern, today's poor have a safety net - however badly frayed - that earlier poor did not.  The poor starved, they died deprived of basic sanitation and healthy living conditions. 

Like I said, it was a depressing read.  However, whenever I would read another of White's descriptions of some Gilded Age horror, it couldn't help occur to me that we no longer tolerate much of what the Gilded Age embraced.  Are there still white supremacists?  Of course.  But rather than glorify them, we condemn them.  Do we still embrace bad ideas?  Yes, but we push back against them, like the Trump tax cut. 

The horrors of the Trump/GOP maladministration are a product of bad ideas and racism.  But they are widely seen as such.  While the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Trump, they still have to apologize and walk back from his racist brain droppings.  There is a widespread agreement, even among a plurality of GOP lawmakers, that Trump's racism is not OK.  Yes, they are powerless to do anything about it, because they fear the racist 27% of the population that makes up their primary voters.  It's bad.

But it's not AS bad, and there is considerable evidence that there will be a reckoning.  Yes, Americans are still racist, but they can't admit as much publicly.  In the Gilded Age, they loudly proclaimed it.  Treating your workers poorly has not stopped, but we have legal and societal measures in place that prevent the sort of predatory behavior that typified the Gilded Age.

If things are worse than they were two years ago, they are immeasurably better than they were 132 years ago. What's more is they are better than they were 32 years ago. 

Arthur Schlesinger argued that America goes through cycles of reform.  That efforts to improve America ultimately lead to a backlash and a retreat into conservatism or reactionary politics.  Trump feels very much like the last gasp of Nixon's Silent Majority, comfortable enough middle class, rural and exurban whites who don't like the world beyond their horizon, who are still haunted by the turmoil of the Sixties.  Certainly, Trump qualifies.

I believe that what Trump has done is expose the central lie at the heart of Republican rhetoric about small government.  It isn't principled libertarianism and love of the free market. It's the same cocoon of wealthy privilege wrapped in racism that defined the Gilded Age.  But we are less enthralled with the bad ideas that fueled that former age, and we are better prepared to reclaim our common ideals.

This all presumes that Democrats win control of at least one house of Congress in November, and there is no evidence of foreign interference in our elections.  THAT is not something we had to worry about in the former Gilded Age.

Narrative

It's been somewhat heartening that the media narrative has coalesced so quickly around what happened at the #TreasonSummit.  There hasn't been a lot of pushback against the idea that Trump humiliated himself and the country. Even Fox and Friends on state television has pushed back a bit.  Yeah, Hannity is fluffing Trump and Carlson is raging against Mexicans, but the rest of the network is judt dumbfounded.  The rest of the media landscape is coherent and consistent.  Eventually, Fox News will find a way to exculpate Trump, but right now - as many have said - this is a Charlottesville moment of stripping away the bullshit.  Trump stands accused by his own words.

When Jon Chait published his Magnus Trumpus, laying out the case that Trump is more than just sympathetic to Russia, but actively compromised and working for them, there was a lot of "well, wait a minute, buster" hand wringing from Sober Centrists and Conservative Intellectuals.  If anything, Chait stands very much vindicated by the run of events.  Trump's behavior in Europe - with NATO, with May, with the EU and with Putin - makes the most plausible explanation that Trump does more than simply agree with Putin's style, but is actively pushing Putin's agenda. 

As I say, eventually Fox will find a way around this damning piece of evidence.  With Charlottesville, it wasn't a big deal, because who cares about racism, and aren't white people the REAL victims of racism and blah blah blah. This cuts to the core of Trumpism: America First, dominance politics...Trump looked like a beaten man sitting next to Putin.  The images simply don't lie.  Yet, somehow Fox will find a way.

Two suggestions showed up on Twitter for how to handle this as citizens.  First, there is no Trump, no Trumpism, without Fox News.  We need to launch nationwide boycotts against the network's advertisers.  This will be tricky, but if Fox - as I predict - starts to mirror Trump and Putin's rhetoric, then you can make the case that Fox is joining in these treasonous acts.  Second was the idea of a general strike.  Shutting down the nation for a day or two would be a powerful statement, more powerful than protest marches.

As Charlie Pierce writes, the crisis is upon us.  Fox News and the Republican Party won't save this country. Only its people can, and I'm not sure how we go about doing that without Republican help. 

Finally, fuck you Republicans for putting the nation in this position.

Donald Trump Is Unamerican

Jon Chait is one of dozens, perhaps hundreds if you count Twitter, voices coming out and calling Trump's behavior in Helsinki unbelievable and essentially corroboration of allegations that Putin has Trump's tiny little balls in his back pocket.

Trump's decision to essentially side with Putin over American intelligence agencies is unprecedented.  Whether it constitutes treason is hard to pin down.  Treason is very hard to prove in American jurisprudence, and rightfully so.  If we find that Trump is giving Putin active and illegal help, then it's treason.  We don't, as yet, have that evidence.

What we have is the stark and incontrovertible evidence that Trump is fundamentally un-American.  If we take "American" to mean a certain set of core values, we should probably delineate them.  Americans believe in liberty and political equality.  Americans believe in fair play and honesty.  Americans believe in hard work.  Americans believe in the goodness of their country.  Now, to be 100% clear, Americans very rarely practice these beliefs.  We struggle to reconcile liberty and equality.  We cheat and lie often enough.  We know our country isn't always good.  In fact, we know it's flawed, even if its flaws are seen differently on the Left and Right.  I come back to what Obama used to stress, that the Constitution enjoins us to create a more perfect Union, not that the Union is already perfect.  We continue to create America anew with each year and generation, but we do so under a vague set of ideals that we more or less agree on.

Trump represents none of these.  He doesn't care about freedoms and he is actively contemptuous of equality.  He derides fair play and is pathologically dishonest.  He is incapable of hard work.  And today, he demonstrated that he does not believe - even rhetorically - in the goodness of our country.  He routinely sides with dictators, autocrats and thugs over the institutions of American life.  He places his own fragile ego above the national interest. 

Trump actually is kind of Russian.  The worship of strongmen, the causual contempt for the truth, the indifference towards civil liberties, the contempt for the rule of law and gravitation towards corruption...all of these are hallmarks of Russian political culture.  So maybe Putin doesn't have incriminating evidence on Trump. 

Maybe he doesn't need it.

Oh, and fuck you, Republicans for foisting this treasonous fool on our country.

I Just....

According to Josh Rogin of CNN on Twitter:

Trump told the Finnish President Just now he enjoyed spending time with him at the NATO summit. Finland is not part of NATO.

I...Look...I...

For everyone who continues to defend Trump - and this includes essentially every GOP member of Congress and everyone at Fox News except Shep Smith - how can you justify supporting this buffoon?  How can anyone be OK with him sitting down alone with Putin? 

There is a popular meme spreading about doing self-destructive things to "own the libs."  Eating shitty Papa John's pizza to "own the libs."  Throwing away $70 of sushi to "own the libs."  Supporting a destructive trade war to "own the libs."

I guess we can add: Supporting a moronic narcissist in cognitive decline who is clearly under the influence of Vladimir Putin...to own the libs.

Sending Their Best

Today is the final of an outstanding and dramatic World Cup.  A very young France side plays Croatia's "Golden Generation."  Here is a picture of the French team.

You may notice that the players are not as...well, French looking... as you might have expected.  (In fact, I'm not sure when this picture was taken, but the guy on the end wearing the #10 was replaced by Kylian Mbappe.)  France has been opened up to immigration from some of its former colonies in the Francophone world, and the result is a French National Team that will be starting players with the names Pogba, Umtiti, N'Golo Kante, Matuidi and Mbappe.  (Croatia's team is almost entirely home grown.)  Other European teams had similar racial and ethnic make ups.

This is significant because of remarks that Trump made in his recent blundering tour through Europe.  He chided Europe for taking in so many immigrants, because it was "destroying your culture."  Cultural purity is some of the most obvious code for racism, in fact it barely qualifies as code.  In fact, urban Europe, like urban America, is a mix of races and ethnicities.  While soccer fans have a history of racist chants and nastiness, perhaps - like Trump - they are the last wails of a dying racist order. 

I picked France to win it all from the start, and I picked Germany and Spain to win it the last two Cups, so I have my streak riding on the line here.  But there are other reasons why I'll be rooting for Les Blues today.  They are the future of Europe.

Which Hunt?

Yesterday's indictments from the Mueller team is yet another example of reality crashing into the obstinate denial of Trumpistan and all its minions.  Mueller confined his indictments to Russians because he seems to be trying to avoid indicting close associates of Trump.  Roger Stone is pretty sure he's an unnamed co-conspirator and the indictment mentions a "candidate for Congress" who reached out to the Russians. 

Mueller clearly has much, much more dirt on the close associates of Trump and Trump himself.  I can't imagine a scenario where Mueller doesn't know much of Trump and the Trump Organization's finances.  If he doesn't have concrete evidence of money laundering at this very moment, I would be shocked.  If he doesn't have concrete evidence of substantial connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, I would be shocked.

The question is: What is Mueller waiting for?  It could be that he is waiting until the case is airtight.  He could be waiting to flip someone like Roger Stone or Paul Manafort, which is not impossible, but also not likely to happen.  My guess is that he knows he is vulnerable to a self-destructive Trumpian tantrum.  Firing Mueller would - in normal times - prompt an impeachment hearing.  Given the utter cravenness of the Congressional GOP, this is unlikely to happen.  If Trump fires Mueller with the GOP controlling the House, he will not be held responsible for this catastrophic assault on the rule of law...unless it happens right before the election. 

Could Mueller be waiting to launch an October (or late September) surprise?

"The GOP Is A Failed State, Trump Is It's Warlord"

The above title is paraphrased from Will Saletan in 2016 within the confines of this Josh Marshall analysis of the ongoing Jim Jordan scandal.  Basically, the idea is that the GOP has become more than a typical European ethnonationalist party; they have become a sort of right wing Venezuela: dysfunctional, insular and autocratic with no sense how the real world works.  As the real world is wont to do, the facts can sometimes overwhelm even the most stubborn set of assumptions.  The question that the future of American democracy depends on is whether the facts have penetrated the GOP Hivemind enough to swing the House and/or Senate this November.

There are some parallels between Jordan and Mark Foley.  Foley's behavior was obviously worse, in that unlike Jordan, he actually abused those kids.  This is why Foley wasn't re-elected.  The reason Foley became an additional anchor on the GOP during a tough re-election year was that the GOP rallied around him (including pedophile Denny Hastert).  Jordan is lying; as Marshall points out, it's pretty obvious at this point.  Jordan knew about the harassment.  And in scandals like these, there are always more incidents, more allegations.  It's the steady drip-drip-drip that gets you.

Can this penetrate the Fox News bubble?  Does it need to?  Where are the winnable votes?  I feel pretty strongly that the winnable votes are in the suburbs.  Doug Jones did reasonably well in the suburbs of Alabama, despite it being, well, Alabama.  If Democrats can flip the suburbs of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas and California...they are well on their way to a House majority.

The other question is what effect yesterday's Kangaroo Kourt had, if any.  Democrats are currently in the curious rhetorical space of denouncing ICE and embracing the FBI.  People looking for an excuse to reject Democrats will only hear the "Abolish ICE" chants, and not the defense of the FBI's integrity.  However, the bonkers hearing yesterday with Peter Strzok has to make some sort of impression. 

There are a fair number of Americans who live and breathe politics.  They are like obsessive sports fans, watching stat lines, reading prospect scouting reports, dissecting strategy. Most Americans simply watch the game if it happens to be on at the bar or tune in for the title game.  Every once in a while, a game is so off-the-hook that everyone tunes in.  That feels a little bit like the Strzok hearing.  Partisans already know how they feel about the FBI's conduct in 2016.  What will the uninterested mass of people think upon seeing those hearings?

(Also, the Democratic performance in those hearings was amazing.  Getting the gavels of these committees in Democratic hands is imperative.)

Between Jordan and the Strzok hearings, we were able to seejust how fully the GOP lives within it's Fox News curated bubble.  They actually seem to believe that repeating the lie over and over again makes it true.  Franlky, they have some reason to believe this.  As an electoral strategy it has worked. Hillary is more corrupt than Trump.  Lowering taxes on the rich is good for everyone.  The only racism in America is against white people.

Back in 2005, that ability to entirely within their fictions unravelled in the face of Social Security repeal, Terri Schiavo and Hurricane Katrina.  Hopefully it is happening again.

Trending

One thing the elicits groans, protests and eye-rolls from the MAGA crowd is the argument that Trump has unleashed a new vocal racism in America.  Some of this is that they just don't understand how racism works or even what it is. 

Anyway, we have the following issues. First, a rather conspicuous number of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and just plain old racists are running for office on the Republican ticket.  Second, we have increased expressions of racist sentiments, whether from law enforcement, private citizens or the makers of incredibly shitty pizzas.

It's clear that Trump didn't "cause" this. These people were always there.  The biggest lie the media told in 2008 was that somehow electing Barack Obama "ended racism."  If anything, it created rocket fuel for a select group of ignorant, hateful people, which combined with the dark corners of the Internet. 

One "friend" on Facebook (who doesn't even live in America anymore) liked to rant about Obama was so racially divisive.  Obama bent over backwards to diffuse every possible racist charge against him or his administration.  To the degree that he tried to address racial tensions, it consisted of anodyne measures like having a "beer summit" with a cop who arrested one of America's premier intellectuals on his own porch or noting that his son could have looked like Trayvon Martin.  That racist incidents have increased under Trump has to be conceded as a given, though I doubt the MAGAts will concede it. 

The Trumpenproletariat is essentially that people who think that whites are the real victims of racism, because their idiot child didn't get into Harvard or because the post-Reagan capitalism has blighted their towns and they blame "those people" who "get everything" from the state.  Those voters are lost to the 21st century.

They are deplorable.

"Abolish ICE"

I wrote about how I felt this was a misadvised slogan, because most Americans - at least white Americans - support the police.

Martin Longman makes the same point but better.

It's Not Even Coffee Break Yet

And so far today we have:

- Trump exploding against NATO leaders (all the while coddling Putin's balls in his tiny, tiny hands).

- The Border Patrol leveling politically charged accusations against an enemy of the administration.

- Trump is sending his incompetent son-in-law to meet with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the new Mexican president.

None of this is normal, unless you live in a patrimonial autocracy.

Do we?

Kavanaugh

In the end, because he was likely bored or uninterested in the details to begin with, Trump went with the Establishment GOP Safe Pick for Anthony Kennedy's seat.  There is some evidence that Kennedy negotiated Kavanaugh as his replacement.

Needless to say, Trump's appointment of another Federalist Society ideologue has created a circular firing squad on the Left.  Donnelly, Manchin and Heitkamp are all facing tough re-election campaign in Trump states (though I think Manchin is in pretty good shape).  They aren't going to be "bold" in their opposition to a judge that will most likely get confirmed anyway.  They are basically going to wait until Collins and Murkowski make up their minds (which are probably bent towards Kavanaugh, because...c'mon), and then they will follow suit.  If there are enough votes to block him, they will join those efforts, but if there aren't, then they won't.

The idea that any Red State Dem should risk his or her neck for a vote that will be largely decided without them doesn't make any sense when the 2018 midterm elections are so critically important.  If Democrats DO win back control of the Senate, it will be because Heitkamp and Donnelly win re-election.  And if they do win back control, they can slow or stop the Trump Era court packing that is going on. 

Josh Marshall is likely right that there are two avenues to attack Kavanaugh.  The first is Roe v Wade.  The second and more important one is how Kavanaugh feels about the ability to indict a sitting president.  He has flip-flopped on this issue depending on whether a Democrat or Republican sits in the Oval Office, and that is unlikely to sway Collins and Murkowski, because their allegiance is to themselves and the GOP - not the country.  The hearings should provide a platform to argue about whether A) you CAN indict a sitting president and B) whether a president should be able to name a Supreme Court judge to the Court who will rule on that very matter pertaining to him.

The battle to block Kavanaugh was lost in 2016.  It was lost in Pennsylvania - not only when Clinton lost, but when Katie McGinty lost by 90,000 votes out of 5,750,000 cast.  The idea that Manchin/Heitkamp/Donnelly represent some quisling fifth column is just bullshit analysis of the political realities facing those individual Senators.

Theologica Sum Trumpica

Jon Chait has created a well-researched, more or less authoritative timeline of Trump's involvement with Russia.  What is amazing is that despite it's length, it doesn't begin to cover all of the suspicious connections between Trump and Russia - especially the massive monetary connections between Trump and Russian interests.

Chait's work is important, because he flips the basic assumption that has guided most media analysis of the Trump/Russia story.  Namely, the media has largely refused to entertain the idea that Trump really is a Russian asset in the Oval Office.  That's bad political thriller material, not "serious journalism."  What Chait does is simply entertain the notion that perhaps Trump IS a Russian asset, and then look to see if the fact line up.  And boy do they.

Trump, ironically, has gotten a pass for his lack of intelligence, his narcissism and his ignorance of American governance, when perhaps he does know something: what Putin has on him.

I Mean...C'Mon

Martin Longman is right.  This bit of absolute 100% pure undistilled bullshit is Peak Trumpism.

What Kind Of Lockerrooms Do Republicans Hang Out In?

At least five wrestlers from Ohio State have accused their assistant coach, Jim Jordan, of knowing and ignoring that the team doctor engaged in sexual molestation and exploitation of the wrestlers in his care.  This is relevant beyond the sports page, because Jordan is considered a leading candidate to be the next Speaker of the House should Republicans retain control of the House.  Previously, Denny Hastert, former Speaker, was found guilty of molesting wrestlers when he was a coach.

As a wrestling coach myself, these accusations are doubly concerning.  Obviously, first and foremost, my concern is for the young men who were (allegedly) assaulted.  But as a wrestler, this impacts my sport, too.  Every fall, I have to try and recuit wrestlers from a student body that doesn't naturally produce wrestlers.  I don't get 14 kids in through admissions to fill my lineup.  Because of the nature of the sport - its close contact - and the uniform - a tight singlet - it can be hard to get young men to commit to a gruelingly hard sport with a whiff of sexual perversion about it.  In fact, I recently changed the uniform to accommodate reluctant athletes.

My sickened feeling over this is that not only were young men betrayed by the men who were supposed to care for their well-being, but someone has betrayed my sport. 

More broadly, we need to appreciate the fact that people are who they tell us they are - through their words and actions.  This incident is yet another example of the Republicans telling us who they are.  They are the party of the Old Boy's Lockerroom, where "those people" are excluded, where privilege is rewarded and protected, where little people are simply unimportant.  Jordan's own performance leaves little doubt of his culpability.  He has shifted his story a few times, and he is now falling back on the "lockerroom talk" defense that apparently worked for Donald Trump. 

The basic contours of the lockerroom defense is that there are places where men are allowed to be animals.  Certainly, men are coarser - broadly speaking - than women.  They express themselves more physically, they are less aware of how their remarks impact the hearer.  There is a strong case to be made that modern civilization has been an effort to strip away from of the violence and cruelty of men's culture from the culture at large. 

This has predictably led to a backlash that we see across men in America.  Men are fundamentally oppositional in their thinking.  "Don't jump of a bridge, Timmy," is inevitably followed by Timmy wanting to jump off a bridge.  So efforts to strip away the crueler parts of their culture have led to everything from Trump's 56% approval rating among men to the Incel movement to mass shootings.  Men - particularly those who have shut themselves off from education - have embraced the very cruelty that is damaging them and our society.

Jim Jordan is part of that movement. His behavior as coach was to protect the doctor over his wrestlers, to protect the powerful over those whom he was supposed to nurture and help grow.  Jordan did not molest his wrestlers.  But he embraced this idea of toxic masculinity that typifies so many men...at least 56% of them who have made a loud mouth bully the avatar of their rage and the President of our United States.

Trump Goes To War

We went to war last night.  It's a trade war, so you probably didn't see stirring footage on CNN.  Trade wars are almost always disasters.  Since World War II, the United States has led the way in creating an international business order that relies on reducing and eliminating tariffs.  The reason is that the history of tariffs is the history of exacerbating the "business cycle."  The best example of this is Smoot-Hawley tariff during the Great Depression. 

Most depressions are demand-based. With the absence of consumer demand, the economy slows, which reduces consumer demand, which slows the economy and so on.  Adding a tariff reduces external consumers.  If Americans aren't buying your goods, and then the Europeans aren't either - because of tariffs - your demand sinks further and the depression deepens.  The history of protective tariffs from the 1820s through 1945 is a history of global depressions.  With the increased productivity of the industrial revolution and the interconnectedness of trade, tariffs proved to accelerate local and regional economic downturns.

The "invention" of modern macroeconomics by John Maynard Keynes created the idea that demand was central to economic health, and free trade smoothed out and increased demand.  GATT was created after World War II as a response to the lessons of Smoot Hawley, a massive tariff that basically shut down trans-Atlantic trade in 1930. 

Since the creation of the global free trade regime by the United States, the advanced global economies have managed to avoid the crushing depressions that typified the late 19th and mid 20th centuries.  The closest we came was 2008, which of course was partially created by the globalization of finance since 1980.  Trump's trade war has nothing to do with the globalization of finance.

Instead, Trump has - as per usual - focused on solving problems that don't really exist.  Violent crime?  It's been decling for years.  Immigration?  Also declining for years.  Chinese currency manipulation? Stopped a few years back.  Now we can add trade wars.

As Ezra Klein notes, Donald Trump has bizarre polling numbers.  While they are as low as people like Reagan, Clinton and Obama at similar points in their presidencies, those three presidents had struggling economies in their second year.  Trump is presiding over the late stages of a long recovery and expansion.  Just yesterday, Bloomberg (I think) ran a piece about how full employment could force wages to rise.  (This prompted people in my Twitter feed to respond, "That's what's supposed to happen.") 

A trade war could create a wave of economic hardship that could force Trump's approval into the 30s.  Europeans, being more versed in actual policy, will target their tariff reprisals at "red state" businesses, like agriculture and heavy industries.  Of course, nothing will penetrate the Fox News/Deplorable bubble, but sufficient economic hardships could knock away one of the few traditional supports that Trump's popularity still enjoys.

As Good An Explanation As Any

Scott Pruitt, Ladies and Germs.

What Is Patriotism?

Gallup (or was it Pew) ran a survey and found a record number of Americans aren't "proud to call themselves Americans."  The survey has routinely showed that Democrats feel less proud, and that was true over time, roughly stretching back to the Iran War.  Democrats, or rather liberals, tend to be more comfortable with complexity and contradiction.  An honest assessment of this country has to accommodate the fact we have not always lived up to the ideals we claim to hold. 

I'm not a fan or presentism, and so when I assess the founding of the country, I don't denigrate the whole thing because so many founders were slave owners.  Yes, they were.  Assess that as part of their legacy.  Understand it.  Don't write it out, but it's not the end of the story either.  I was reading someone basically expounding at some length about how hypocritical it was for Jefferson to write that preamble while owning slaves.  Sure it was.  But that doesn't make the preamble any less true or inspiring.  It muddles Jefferson's legacy, but then again very few of that generation come though unscathed on the issue of slavery.

There's a broader argument (that I agree with) by Edmund Morgan that slavery, in fact, made mass democracy possible, because America didn't suffer the presence of an ethnic, white majority that had to remain disenfranchised in order to preserve the status quo.  Because all whites were equal through their race, all white men could vote. 

Our origins were steeped in the sin of slavery.  This is a fact.  We also fought a war to end it.  That's another fact.  We then tried to elevate African Americans to citizenship.  Another fact.  We then quit on the effort when it proved too hard.  Fact.  Only widespread prosperity and the pressure of the Cold War made us eventually relent and allow African Americans their rightful place at the table. And women.  And LGBT people.  And...well, you name it.

There are ample reasons to question whether or not America is a "deplorable" nation today.  I think roughly a quarter of the American population is profoundly ignorant, racist and ready to hand over power to a dictator who makes them feel protected as white people.  I think another fifth have decided that their hatred of Democrats outweighs their love of their country.  I am hopeful those numbers are changing.

Yeah, I get why you might not be proud of America right now.  But I also know that this chapter isn't finished being written yet.

This Actually DID Age Well

Jon Chait's piece from October 31st, 2016 still holds up really well.  While he predicts that Clinton "should" win, the rest is spot on. 

The question that goes begging in this piece is what happens if Trump does win?  Chait supposes that conservatives will stick with Trump, and this is true.  But what about those who are not ideologically conservative?  If Democrats can win the House in 2018 and 2020, and win control of important state legislatures to control gerrymandering...perhaps Trump can break the delusion that has gripped people who think they are voting for small government but are really voting for racist plutocracy.

Collins' Game

Susan Collins has said that she won't vote to confirm a SCOTUS justice who will overturn Roe v Wade.  Let's be extremely charitable and assume that she actually will follow through with this.

This promise is essentially meaningless.

First, the Supreme Court will not "overturn" Roe v Wade.  They will simply allow so many state level restrictions as to make the ruling effectively moot in large parts of the country.  This in turn will allow Collins to vote for someone who will allow these extreme restrictions to go into place. 

I once joked on Twitter that I would be fine with Mississippi, Alabama and so on revitising the idea of secession.  I was informed that this would abandon millions of people to poor voting rights, abortion restrictions and draconian civil rights.

At this point, better them than the rest of us.

How Do You Get Congressional Majorities?

Every time I decide to waste some time on Twitter, someone is making the case that the current Democratic leadership is "just like Clinton" and too cautious.  Inevitably, this is because Democrats aren't embracing the package of policies and messaging that the person tweeting feels is a sure-fire winner.

Inevitably, the analysis begins with the fact that Clinton lost certain parts of the Obama coalition.  Given how narrow the loss was in three states, there is a case to make that simply revivifying the Obama coalition will lead to victories.

Except the Obama coalition didn't hold the House. 

And the Obama coalition would seem to be motivated anyway.

There is also the idea that White Working Class voters are lost forever because of their implicit racism. 

The problem is that this assumes monolithic voting tendencies among Trump voters.  There is clear evidence that independents and college educated Republicans are deserting Trump, if not the Republican Party.  Those suburban voting Republicans are the key to winning the House and the Senate in November. 

Those people aren't interested in abolishing ICE, they just don't like tearing families apart.  They aren't interested in "socialism" whatever any individual thinks that means at any given moment. 

All the cautious centrism from Democratic leaders are about winning those suburban college educated Republican leaning women. 

But I guess the twitterati know better.