Farewell to the Chief.

Barack Obama took to the stage in Chicago to bid us farewell.  He was following a tradition begun by George Washington whom he quoted.  Employing his unique oratorical skill, his message contained both an expected list of accomplishments, a sober discussion of the “state of our democracy” and a reaffirmation of his faith in the future.  “Yes we can.”  His words, and of course his style, stood in sharp relief against his successor’s coarse news event the following day.  So much has changed since the president began his term eight years ago.  A just released essay by Pew Research’s President Michael Dimok reviews and puts some statistical meat on the bones of what’s happened.  Some of those changes reflect the advance of technology (for example neither the iPhone or iPad existed when Obama started campaigning); some are products of a hardening partisan divide.

Obama hasn’t lost his hope, but is clear headed about where we stand and the challenges that lie ahead.  Some of them come directly from the ideological shifts that Dimok details, and also from the fact that we have yet to adjust to the social and economic impact of technology and wide scale automation.  A clear majority, 60%, of Americans expect that in the years to come robots and computers will be carry out much of the work now done by humans.  Obama underscored this saying, “…the next wave of economic dislocation won’t come from overseas.  It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes many good, middle-class jobs obsolete.”  Of course, this isn’t something happening in the distant future.  A recent NY Times article noted, “A century ago New York Harbor employed 40,000 longshoremen, who unloaded ships with hook and sling and brawn [think On the Waterfront].  Today, the entire workforce is just under 3,400 longshoremen, many perched behind the controls of cranes and straddle carriers.”  While obviously not happening all at once, the current workforce is less than 10% of what it was, a loss of 36,000 jobs just in one location.

Obama said this will require “a change in the social compact.”  Undoubtedly so, but instead of moving in that direction many people, encouraged by self-serving – and I believe irresponsible – politicians, are in denial.  Donald Trump’s promises to bring back manufacturing and touting his pre-inauguration successes completely bypasses the fact that, even if restored or maintained, those plants will employ far fewer workers than was once the case.  The longshoremen story is not an outlier but a reflection of what’s happening all over.  Just look at how technology has automated our own lives.  The computer on which I am typing and through which I receive my daily digital “newspapers” is a manifestation of that reality.  Welcome to my paperless life.  It’s been over twenty years since I employed a secretary.  I opt for self-check wherever it’s offered, pump my own gas, use an ATM to withdraw cash and my mobile phone to make deposits.  Like many of you, I purchase more books and goods on Amazon than from all the retailers in my area combined.  Sure Amazon employs a lot of people in their fulfillment centers but far fewer than might have been the case even a decade ago. It’s a trend that will continue.  Very soon a drone rather than a UPS driver will likely deliver to my doorstep.

Perhaps one of the most far reaching finding of the Pew study reflects on something will all sense anecdotally but whose impact we may not have given enough attention: super partisanship.  More than ever before people are lining up on virtually all issues along party lines.  That has trend solidified in the Obama years.  This doesn’t negate regional and economic factors entirely, but what my party says – and that tends to be fairly monolithic relative to issues – is where I stand.  We’ve all noticed that fewer legislators and executives share a common middle – there few if any liberal Republicans or conservative Democratic officeholders.  This suggests less, often no, compromise, but doesn’t totally explain why.  In former times a Congress member could veer away from the “party line” on individual issues.  She or he had some measure of independence because voters were diverse and broadly defined enough not to be threatening.  That’s no longer true as exemplified in the relatively new threat of them “being primaried” back home.  Today few dare to waver because their constituents have become so single minded.

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that we now face a polarization crisis.  Effective governance is predicated on the ability to compromise.  Obama’s presidency has been badly wounded by six years of increasing gridlock.  Donald Trump will have Republican majorities in both houses, but if he loses them or one of them in 2018 he, and most importantly we, will face the same problem.  Majority rule is clearly one of democracy’s attributes, but so too is giving force and voice to minorities, political and otherwise.  And to different viewpoints.  Obama included his concerns about this in outlining threats to our democracy, something that may be self-evident but, “have never been self-executing”.  Here is some of what he said:

 “For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles…surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.  The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste – all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable.  And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.”

And to my concern he added, “…without a willingness to admit new information, and concede that your opponent is making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, we’ll keep talking past each other, making common ground and compromise impossible.”  I’ve written about this before, about our becoming religious-like political fundamentalists, claimers of the singular and only truth.  If we continue to buy into this self-focused vanity, you can kiss all progress goodbye.  Add to that learning which involves and depends on a broadening of ideas and an inquisitiveness that super partisanship seeks to undermine and ultimately crush.

Don’t misunderstand, I am not suggesting that there aren’t some things about which we can’t or shouldn’t compromise, some values that aren’t worth fighting and even dying for.  The point is that not everything, in fact a very limited number of things, fall into that do or die category.  Political scientists and ultimately historians will be dissecting the reasons for this ultra-polarization.  Each of us can make our own list, but I don’t think we have the luxury of time in addressing the why.  We urgently need to focus on what we can and must do about it.  We won’t be helped very much by the incoming president who seems more interested in widening the divide than in, to use Lyndon Johnson’s words, “reasoning together”.  Nor can we depend on the current class of elected officials, particularly legislators, who have succumbed to the kind of ugly partisanship that has become the problem.

Moving toward the conclusion Obama gave us some direction.  “It falls to each of us,” he said, “to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.  Because for all our outward differences, we all share the same proud title:  Citizen.  Ultimately, that’s what our democracy demands.”  We know what’s happened here, and only we can address and fix it.  Voting is important  -- no it’s essential – but opening up a dialogue outside our bubble and listening as much, if not more, than talking is perhaps the only way forward.  I’ll deeply miss President Barack Obama both for who is and for the huge step forward that he represented on taking office and beyond.  For certain much of his legacy is under immediate threat, but his words, including those in his farewell address cannot be erased.  They should not be forgotten and, speaking for myself, they never will.

Here we go again.

He considered any publicity good.  He “spun one narrative after another that was palpably untrue, [finding it] …next to impossible to say anything that is not in some crucial way untrue.”  “He [didn’t] let anybody get too close.  …Those who worked with him found him curiously elusive.”  He had no interest in briefing books.  “No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed.”  Sound familiar?  This is how the distinguished historian and UNC Professor Emeritus William Leuchtenburg described Ronald Reagan in his 2015 book, The American President.  So what Gerald Ford might have aptly called our current “Nightmare” isn’t entirely new.  Here we go again.

I couldn’t help being struck by the similarities between the Gipper and the Donald.  Reagan was sworn in at age seventy, so too will Trump.  Being six months older he will be the oldest ever.  Both disregarded facts on the stump and beyond.  Periodic fabrication and outright lying is something Reagan took all the way through his tenure.  It reached its peak late in his second term when he denied both selling arms to Iran and funding the Contras.  Leuchtenburg contends that his actions – trading with an enemy and unauthorized arming – constituted impeachable offences.  Only because Democrats (who controlled Congress) feared having to face George HW Bush as an incumbent in the upcoming election did he escape prosecution.  Reagan represented the then radical right of his party much as Trump represents an extreme today.  We Americans have a short memory and may have forgotten how ominous we thought the Reagan presidency would be.  We survived.

Survived, but Reagan, the GOP mythical icon, had a profound and lasting impact on the country’s direction.  So much so that twelve years on, Bill Clinton, despite liberal inclinations, determined his only path to the presidency lay in pulling his party to the right of center, to govern as a New Democrat.  That produced, among others, “an end of welfare as we know it”, (after pushback from the military) “don’t ask don’t tell” and “three strikes”.  It wasn’t enough for the opposition.  Tokened by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract” the right never lost its focus on regaining power and extending Reagan’s conservative “revolution”.  Barack Obama moved further left but met bitter resistance from the start.  His progressive legislative initiatives had no Republican support and others had to be accomplished by Executive Orders, many of which can – probably will – be reversed by Trump.  Democrats are said to be the majority party – Hilary Clinton outpolled him in November’s election – but that “majority” has proved ephemeral.  Republicans, dominated by the hard right, hold the executive mansion in a majority of states and beginning in January will control all three branches of the federal government.   We will survive Donald Trump, but not without paying a significant price.  The Supreme Court, especially, is likely to skew conservative for decades to come.

I reach back to Reagan’s election and our survival as a reassurance, but that doesn’t mean we should be sanguine about the immediate future.  Quite the contrary.  The fact that there are similarities between Trump and Reagan doesn’t mean they are the same.  I ran into Bill Leuchtenburg here in Chapel Hill a few days before the election and we shared our dismay in watching the 2016 campaign.  I said that to my knowledge, there had never been anything like it, never a candidate like Trump.  He concurred, and of course from the perspective of a scholar who, unlike an opinion blogger like myself, actually can back up his assessment with a lifetime study of the presidency.  I’m privileged to live in the same community and to have him as an acquaintance.

In significant ways, Donald Trump is very different than Ronald Reagan.  Professor Leuchtenburg describes Reagan’s politics as “divisive”; Trump’s are polarizing.  While being “grossly ill informed” relative to earlier presidents, Reagan had served as governor of our largest state.  Trump has zero government experience, which makes him not merely ill informed but inexperienced and totally unprepared.  Like Reagan, Trump is a performer who knows how to move and indeed manipulate a crowed, but unlike him he has shown himself to be an obsessive misogynistic and xenophobic narcissist.  Also, while Reagan worked within a clear ideological framework and surrounded himself with experienced people, Trump seems to function with no such compass, relying on loyalists, some with no credentials for carrying out their assigned job.  Perhaps most important, Reagan may have been a rightist ideologue, but was never mean spirited.  His persona didn’t give license to the kind of audience hate speech that often was heard at Trump rallies nor did he give an essential White House role to the likes of the alt-right Steve Bannon.  We know what Reagan did as president, we don’t yet know what Trump will do once he is sworn in on January 20.  His actions since November 8 are hardly reassuring, in fact they point to our worst fears not our best hopes.  His continued use of tweets, the latest to claim that absent millions of fraudulent ballots he would have won the popular are frightening.  But we’ll have to wait and see.

Our first and still relatively primitive car “GPS” systems offered us less than perfect turn by turn directions from here to there. To say that the resulting trips were often circuitous, even torturous, would be an understatement.  Following such directions once took me on an hour long drive to a destination I discovered upon arrival was just fifteen minutes away.  The American story is very much like those circuitous road trips; the opposite of a straight line.  More often than not, that means two steps forward and one back or even one step forward, two back.  President Obama likes to refer to our democracy as “messy”.  It can be very frustrating, even unnerving.  Mirroring the human condition, it is complex not simple.  We should keep that in mind when characterizing this past (or any) election and those who drove its perplexing outcome.

Trump voters, and indeed voters in general, are not a monolith.  One vote can reflect current views and emotions, but long term it can’t change fundamental facts.  For some, this election represented a white person’s rebellion against a change in our racial and ethnic balance – of who is in control – but it can’t alter demographics.  Some voters may have expressed discomfort with growing secularization or marriage equality.  That won’t alter the views or practices of the upcoming generation.  Some – more than would admit – simply didn’t want a woman in the Oval Office.  But that will come to pass, must come to pass.  Some, as evidenced by a rise of hateful speech and actions, are simply bigots.  They represent not only something reprehensible but also a real danger that dare not be underestimated or overlooked.  It will present a test for the new president’s own identity and intent.  Much, perhaps most, of the vote expressed frustration about the economic and social stalemate that has come to characterize their lives and, worse, spell a dismal outlook for their children’s future.

One thing is for certain.  None of us, regardless of how we affiliate or how we voted, should either over read or under read the results.  Warning signs were and are present for both Republicans and Democrats, for the right and the left.  Whoever is up at bat, should understand that at present “all is not well in Mudville”.  Victory parties and loss wakes should not be read as more than they are, another fleeting moment in time.  Work will be required to repair our still imperfect union, step by often painful step.  We’ve seen much in the past, ups and downs.  Here we go again on another roller-coaster ride, but let’s not allow ourselves to be either complacent or cynical.  What comes after this is not inevitable, but rather lies in our hands.  If many like myself were deeply disappointed, indeed shocked, by the election results, I believe many of those who voted for Trump, who believed his unrealistic promises, are destined to be deeply disappointed by what is to come, what is not to come.  We’ll have to find a way of coming together if we want to move forward.