All shock, but no awe.

America, at least the 25% of the electorate that voted in Donald Trump, did not express its better instincts.  Quite the reverse.  New Yorker editor David Remnick expressed the day-after dismay and sense of tragedy many of us feel in the starkest terms.  Frank Rich, as he always does, put it in clear perspective.  I cite them because they have said it better than I could, but also as examples of the many excellent post mortem pieces that have appeared in the last days.  (Isn’t “post mortem” the perfect term when we’re facing the probable death of so many positive initiatives.)  The problem is that we (Remnick, Rich and me in this post) are collectively talking to ourselves.  I live in Chapel Hill part of the liberal highly educated geographic Triangle bubble that in so many ways is totally cut off from, and out-of-tune with, what continues to be a very rural and conservative state.  You and I, like virtually all Americans of every stripe, essentially engage with and befriend (really and not in the Facebook sense) the like-minded.  In fact, we’re shocked, often outraged, by any in our circle who deviate from what we have set as the “norm” of group-think.  We dismissively characterize those glued to Fox News as narrow minded lemmings while being loyalty glued ourselves to the likes of NPR, New York Times and Washington Post.  This is not a value judgment of the media involved ¾ the NPR and Fox are in my view hardly equal ¾but rather an admission that we all live in our own self-congratulatory echo chambers.

Our elections, at least for those of us who vote, are evenly divided: currently 25% for Clinton, 25% for Trump.  Big surprise.  While it is probably too glib and simplistic to say so, each “side” has a different ¾ often vastly different ¾ world view and voice.  The media, often including the ones I follow so loyally, have often reacted to this numerically 50/50 split by slavishly giving “equal time” to each “side” which seems to assume moral equivalency.  That’s a fiction of course, on which is both misleading and even dishonest.  In its grossest terms during the campaign that meant often treating Clinton’s fact-grounded assertions and Trump’s documented lies as equal and, more damaging, as legitimate “news”.  We’re paying a high price for this kind of faux journalistic fairness.  The flip side of this, and speaking to our own echo chamber existence, is that we are not interacting or talking to those who live in what we see as an alternate universe to our own.  As Frank Rich wrote in his New York Magazine piece, “…nothing symbolized the culture gap of this election year more acutely than the stunt of a liberal Times columnist interviewing an “imaginary” Trump voter rather than a real one.”  Trump began his campaign talking about what we considered a mean spirited wall with Clinton, in contrast, increasingly speaking of bridges.  The irony is that we, on all sides, have built fortress-like virtual walls between “us” and “them” and have made little, if any, effort to build, much less cross, bridges.  There is no conversation, certainly no listening.  So we find ourselves blind sighted by Tuesday’s election results.  We were told over and over again, backed up by polls, that this could never be.  Right.

Donald Trump regularly campaigned in authoritarian and outrageous tones that were, to put it mildly, off putting and are now are nothing less than frightening.  Anyone who, like me, is a child of escapees from a brutal dictatorship can’t help feeling a sense of déjà vu.  At the very least, we see Trump as a modern day reincarnation of Huey Long or perhaps more to the modern point, the reemergence of the business tycoon turned Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi.  Neither are happy reassuring models.  Without doubt, some of those who supported him were characterized accurately by Remnick as people who buy into “…nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism”.  And Trump is truly a “…con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy.”  But we shouldn’t paint all of his supporters with that broad one-dimensional brush.  Nor are they all dumb.  Many may be misinformed but sadly that has become a pan-partisan characteristic.  Too many Americans across the board are disengaged and dangerously disinterested.

As I have written in earlier posts, many of those who supported and then voted for Trump are legitimately victims of a changing economic dynamic that includes globalism but perhaps more so automation, the necessity of reducing carbon output and being undereducated for our time.  Fact is, they have, beyond some lip service, been given far too little attention.  Lots of pious talk about the need to retrain but little done to make it happen.  While we may be rightly less sympathetic to the other side of their problem, it’s a fact that these largely white and often undereducated people, feel the life which they have been long promised and seen as their American entitlement is no longer.  Today they have to share not only with their own (which seems fair), but with the “other” whether they be of different skin color or national origin, people who figuratively or literally don’t speak their language.  Share their view or not ¾ which I don’t ¾ it is a real-life anxiety of real people.  Of course, it’s one that is not new or unique to our times.  It has been repeated often as America’s melting pot has expanded throughout our history.  As Ecclesiastes wrote long ago, “there is nothing new under the sun”.  True, but it doesn’t matter when it touches your life.

Wherever we stand on the political and social spectrum, there is one thing that probably all of us share in common.  We couldn’t wait for this election cycle to be over.  It was long and it was exceedingly ugly.  We all have some soul searching to do about both of those things and those of us who are Democrats have some real soul searching to do about our party.  Let’s be honest, we gleefully expected that to be the post-election problem of Republicans, but the shoe is now firmly on our collective foot.  Democrats, as has been pointed out in the wake of the ballot counting, took for granted constituencies whose changed situation or true needs were at best ignored and certainly were never addressed.  Surely a big part of Rust Belt’s problems stem from the systematic destruction of trade unions ¾ blame the   Republicans for that ¾ which decimated the middle class more than anything else.  But Democrats have often sat by watching it happen, taking union support but not fighting for its survival.  We also have a very thin and (even worse) aging bench.  The main two contenders for the presidential nomination in 2016 were Medicare qualified and one wasn’t even a Democrat. 

I have said and repeat here that Hillary Clinton was highly qualified, perhaps, as President Obama said, the most qualified candidate for the presidency in recent memory.  She is smart, tough and, in my view, right on most of the issues that face us.  I voted it “for her” with conviction and not “against him”, though it was hard not to do that as well.  She ran a generally content rich serious campaign, though some have suggested not as a “natural” campaigner.  She shined in the debates and delivered a polished and sometimes inspiring (at least in political terms) convention.  That said, I think it’s not unfair in retrospect to suggest that she was probably the wrong candidate for this time and this election.  She didn’t speak to what ailed Trump’s followers and, relative to the concerns of Bernie voters, never passed the optics smell test of being too aligned with Wall Street and easily earned (in her case speeches) big money.  While it never became the issue it was in 2008, the dynasty question always hung over her head.  Much of the burden she carried had to do with her sex, a very sad commentary on how far we still have to go.  But being a woman alone doesn’t explain it.  Back in early 2015 I wrote in a post about receiving mail headlined “are you ready for Hilary?”  In part because of the timing ¾ these campaigns go on far too long, a different subject ¾ my response was “not so much”.  I had mixed feelings about her, not the least the dynasty issue which played a significant role in supporting Obama over Hillary in ’08.

Perhaps discomfort is too strong a word, but I was reminded of it a few days before the vote in watching Vice President Biden speaking for her on the campaign trail.  He was compelling, not only in his case for Clinton which was strong, but in the way he made it.  I could not help thinking why not Joe, the title of a June 2015 post written when his potential candidacy was being actively discussed.  We’ll never know, but somehow he might have been the perfect baggage-free antidote to Trump in 2016.  No one is more plain spoken or carries it off with greater authenticity than Joe Biden.  His habit of sometimes speaking before he thinks exposes Trump’s so-called “candor” as an Emperor without Clothes.  It isn’t done for affect and it doesn’t depend on crass language.  Perhaps more important Biden is of the very people (if not their soured attitude) that once were the Democratic base and this year supported Trump.  He understands their problems including having to live within a modest budget, a man whose tax return’s only possible embarrassment lies in its humble numbers.  I’m not offering this as hindsight and I surely don’t know if Joe could have, would have, prevailed, but am not alone in posing the same question.

I won’t go into why Clinton lost in this post; others are doing that, many with better credentials and insights.  What can be said here is that the reasons are manifold and complex often differentiated depending on the voter.  The fact that she is held in such low esteem, albeit often very unfairly, by so many even in her own party can’t be discounted.  It certainly may have impacted turn out.  What I will say is that if we continue to avert our eyes, ears and minds from those who voted for Donald Trump, we do so at our own and the country’s great peril.  But that’s not all.  The years ahead are going to be tough and even brutal.  Sadly, that probably would have been the case even if Hillary had won, if for different reasons.  Different but also the same.  This polarization fostered in part by only talking to ourselves and more so by believing so emphatically in the echo conversation while shutting out any contrary view is killing us.  I think we will somehow survive, but only if we take a hard and honest look at the causes and the potential for self-destruction.  We better start doing something about it.   We have no choice in this time of shock without awe.

Liberalism: the challenge.

Liberals were thrilled when 2012 Massachusetts voters sent Elizabeth Warren to the US Senate.  Her victory was particularly sweet both because she defeated the once Tea Party darling Scott Brown and that she reclaimed the seat held for decades by Liberal Lion Ted Kennedy.  Perhaps Senator Warren’s victory signaled a shift in the political landscape.

If the Warren vote seemed a ray of light for liberals, the 2013 election of Bill DeBlasio as New York’s first Democratic mayor in twenty years made it only brighter.  An unabashed liberal, his Tale of Two Cities campaign theme resonated in a city where income inequality stands in such sharp relief.  The new mayor’s predecessors — Republican Rudy Giuliani and poster person of the 1% Michael Bloomberg — had come to office with very different backgrounds and philosophy.  Further evidence of a shift in the political landscape?

Perhaps, but some words of caution are in order.  Warren won in a pretty reliably blue state, the only one captured by McGovern in 1972.  Despite the concentration of wealth in Manhattan, New York is hardly a bastion of the Right.  Also, and this should really give us pause, DeBlasio was elected with the city’s lowest ever (24% of eligible voters) turnout.  That is most troubling especially when so many elections today are pretty much pre-decided in the primary season.  All too often only a fraction of the population determines how, and by whom, we are governed.  While DeBlasio’s low turnout may be attributed to polls projecting a no-contest blowout, we should never accept that as an excuse for not meeting our citizen obligation.

It is remarkable how quickly things can change in this connected age.  In the public arena, the best example is the stunning and unexpected pace with which marriage equality is spreading across the land.  But we should not be fooled by this anomaly.  Shifting widespread electorate sentiment is something else entirely.  Here the status quo is so deeply embedded that real change still moves at a snails pace.  Add to that the success that conservatives have had in discrediting the word “liberal”.  DeBlasio proudly stood under its banner but most candidates/officeholders are loath to do so, even when liberal fits their ideology and actions.  Being thought of as a “centrist” is so much less controversial, so much safer.  Think Bill Clinton.  The really sad and frustrating thing is that while rank and file liberals like to talk (and criticize), they often shun activism or even their responsibility to cast votes.  The Right has its Tea Party movement; the Left has none or at least none that grows or sustains — think Occupy.

So the Warren and DeBlasio votes are only small first steps, signs of a possible shift that need to be tested if they are to be expanded.  In that context, despite the national stage on which senators play, the DeBlasio vote may be more important or more telling.  To say public offices are not the same may be stating the obvious, but there is a huge difference between being a legislator and being a chief executive officer (president, governor or mayor).  Senator Warren is one among one hundred.  From time to time legislators pass laws (remember those days) and they do engage in oversight or constituent service.  But what they do most is talk, regularly (in the Senate) to a camera and largely empty chairs. What they never have to do is deliver on that talk in the sense of making the trains run on time.  Senators, whether named Warren or say McCain, can freely express their (and often our) views in the most direct and ideologically pure way.  We love (or loathe) them for it, but we have little idea of what they might do if charged with getting those trains going.  Almost without exception, they are destined to disappoint if and when taking on that task.  This isn’t because their overriding views necessarily change, though that sometimes happens, but that talking about the rails and keeping cars on the track are two different things.  Purity goes out the window when the nitty-gritty of execution sets in.

Just days in office, Bill DeBlasio has already discovered this reality.  Removing snow from the streets of a huge spread out city is a challenge.  For years people in New York’s outer boroughs or living on narrow streets, DeBlasio among them, have complained that their area wasn’t getting equal attention.  Well, New Yorkers were complaining again, this time residents of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a haunt of the 1% unused to inattention.  They complain and more importantly they read into what’s not happening (or what is).  In this case, the streets were snowbound because the new liberal mayor is against the rich.  Right.

Bloomberg, a Republican at the time, was the object of similar complaints as have been mayors of all cities throughout our history.  Citizens, having voted or not, are unsparing in judging those who govern.  Governors and presidents are similarly held accountable (think Bush and Katrina), but their portfolio is larger which usually provides them with some degree of cover.  Not so with mayors.  We expect our garbage to be picked up and we know who is at fault when it isn’t.  As an avowed liberal, DeBlasio faces a special burden in the context of a larger environment where liberalism has been so discredited.  Snowstorms aside, sure a successful businessman like Bloomberg can manage and deliver, but can a liberal?  Not only his city but the country will be watching.  I don’t envy him either the messy task of running New York where I spent most of my adult life or the visibility.

And without overstating it, the symbolic stakes are high.  So are the risks.  I have noted in earlier posts how this difference in campaigning and governing has impacted Obama.  He came to office being perceived of as a liberal, though he didn’t run under that banner.  Calling for change — yes we can — in the face of a conservative incumbent let us fill in the blanks.  But effective governing requires a kind of pragmatism that, aside from the mechanics that produce victory, is largely absent from campaigns.  And as I have written before, liberals and all Democrats face a special burden in proving not only that they can run things but that they are not soft on, for example, national security.   DeBlasio campaigned against stop-and-frisk but he will be expected to keep crime in check without it.

The new liberal mayor has also decried development in Manhattan and elsewhere that is skewed toward the wealthy and is pricing out both the middle class and poor.  Walk through New York today and you’ll feel the city is one uninterrupted construction zone.  And speaking of zone, the Bloomberg administration was successful in changing the zoning of many areas which previously had limited such development.  Redirecting that building boom to allow for greater affordable housing will be very difficult.  With permits in hand and zoning changed, developers will unlikely reconfigure their plans much less stop.  The election of a liberal mayor can’t change that and as Barack Obama recently reminded the New Yorker’s David Remnick, executive power is far more limited than one might think.  DeBlasio supporters near and far, especially the purists, will at times be disappointed.  In the end, he is likely to be judged not on whether he could turn a huge ship stuck in a narrow straight but if he managed the behemoth reasonably well and, yes, got rid of the snow.  Meeting that test will help move the cause for liberalism further.

There is talk of Elizabeth Warren running for president.   A chance for an avowed liberal to take on the big job.  We certainly know what her ideology might be expected to bring to the office, but have no idea how she would actually perform.  That can be said of all would-be presidents.  She may be some liberals' hope, but there seems to be a growing groundswell by the liberal establishment to finally crown Hillary Clinton at the 2016 convention.  When it comes to selecting candidates, parties behave more like sitting mayors, governors and presidents than legislators.  They tend, or try to be, pragmatic — not what someone says or her/his ideology, but who they think can win.  They also, and this is especially true for Republicans, often give the nod to those who paid their dues — ran unsuccessfully for the nomination before and are now entitled to the grand prize.  That doesn’t always work out so well (Dole, McCain, Romney and John Kerry).

Leaving aside the question of dynasty, Clinton is more a credentialed centrist than a liberal.  Despite finally disavowing the Iraq war and being our lead diplomat, she remains at heart more hawk than dove.  She generally lobbied for intervention and escalation.  A tireless traveler and effective relationship builder, her substantive accomplishments at State were limited.  If Secretary Kerry is successful in any and certainly all of his bold initiatives, that modest record may not stand up well in contrast.  While a big if given the odds, one would hope hard fast commitments won’t be prematurely made.  Will I vote for a Clinton nominee, and with a high degree of confidence and enthusiasm?  I will.   The choice I made for Obama over Clinton was a hard one, not the least because I believe we are way overdue having a Ms. President in the White House.  Will her nomination or victory advance a resurgence of liberalism in America?  Not so much, or not as much as I and many others would like.  That said, the obvious Democratic bench is small (in large measure do to the assumed Clinton ascension), so we may have to wait a little longer.  After all, losing the presidency would be much more costly and not only for liberalism.