Complicity

Racism is not going to be my topic this week. But there are those who say that silence is complicity, so let me get this out of the way. Of course Donald Trump is racist. It could not be more obvious. It did not come out of nowhere when he made his comment last week about “shithole countries”. It goes back further than his statement regarding Charlottesville that there were fine people on both sides. It didn’t begin when he called Mexicans rapists when he announced his campaign. It wasn’t just a matter of Trump playing to his base when he promoted the birther myth about Barack Obama. Donald Trump is not simply playing to his base when he says and does these things. It is not an act. The record goes all the way back to his first public acts, discriminating against potential black tenants in his properties, even in defiance of an order from the Department of Justice. It took a second order to get the discrimination to stop, and this was forty years ago. The times when Donald Trump’s racism emerges are the few times when we are seeing honesty from this man, and his honesty is even uglier than his lies.

But that is all I want to say on the subject, because it has been covered by better writers than I. If you need to see more, you can start here. Also, being a lifelong resident of New Jersey, I count Corey Booker as one of my Senators. We have our differences, but he made me proud last week with this. Booker uses the word “complicity” several times, and that is the topic I want to address. Donald Trump can be openly racist because his Party does not mind. They make excuses for it and for him, in the name of serving their donors. Secretary Nielsen, the target of Corey Booker’s ire, has convenient memory lapses, but she is hardly the only one. And it isn’t just about racism either.

Consider the state of the investigations concerning the 2016 election and the Russian interference therein. Robert Mueller’s investigation continues apace, but the committees in the House and Senate have veered into dangerous territory. We are hearing the term “deep state” all over the place suddenly. The term has broader application, but the current usage in Washington comes from right wing media sources such as Breitbart, where Steve Bannon championed it. It is the basis of a conspiracy theory that says there are unelected officers, especially within the FBI, who are seeking to undermine the Trump administration. According to this idea, the Mueller investigation is biased, and is part of this supposed conspiracy. So now we have calls by prominent Republicans to investigate this instead of the Russian involvement in the election. Some of this is surely self defense, since it started when Mueller announced he was expanding his investigation to examine the role of the Republican National Committee in the possible compromising of not only the presidential race, but possibly Senate and House races as well. But the upshot is that committees which are supposed to be investigating the election are instead working to promote right wing propaganda designed to delegitimize Mueller and his investigation. This is not thoroughness on the part of these committees, and the Democrats on the committees rightfully want no part of it. No, let us call this what its: obstruction of justice. The Republicans promoting the “deep state” theory are seeking to interfere in and undermine an ongoing investigation. It is time for us as citizens to call on Mueller and other relevant authorities to call witnesses and bring charges if necessary against members of the House and Senate who are engaging in these tactics. We must send a clear message that these tactics are unacceptable. We must shut down calls for any investigation of the “deep state”, before this goes any further.

As I say this, I can hear the cries of “witch hunt”. I can imagine comparisons to the last time there was an attempt to root out “evil doers” in Congress, and the name Joe McCarthy comes up. But I am not calling for a new McCarthy era. If anything, the McCarthy era represented an earlier time when a “deep state” theory took hold, and became a basis for policy decisions. I am calling for a Constitutional remedy to stop this in its tracks. McCarthyism was ultimately halted in disgrace, but not before political enemies were subdued and important progressive voices were permanently silenced. With new energy on the left, the country is at a critical point. The Republican strategy for attempting to turn back the blue wave is beginning to reveal itself, and the “deep state” theory is the opening salvo. Now is the time to end this, while we still can.

For music this week, I will circle back to the topic of racism after all. Joni Mitchell’s brilliant collaboration with Charles Mingus produced this gem, which sums it up nicely:

Strategy and Tactics

From a bad start, the fight is going much better than I feared. The bad start was the election. By now, I hope everyone can see that corporatist Democrat Hillary Clinton, with all of her considerable warts, would have been far better than what we have now. We would not be arguing about the Moslem ban, or wondering how deeply the people who now govern us are in bed with Vladimir Putin, and that’s just for starters. Less appreciated however is the importance of the makeup of Congress. Democratic majorities in both the House and especially the Senate were within our grasp, but we could not make it happen. In practical terms, this has meant that Donald Trump has been able to nominate and get confirmed pretty much whoever he wants. The majority party also gets the majorities and chairmanships of all committees, meaning it will be that much harder to get Congress to investigate anything.

So what is going well? The Women’s March was a spectacular success in terms of getting a huge number of new people engaged. More important, people have stayed engaged. The airport protests against the Moslem ban were certainly not on the scale of the Women’s March, but they were great to see. Even more encouraging has been the organizing of the protests at town halls around the country. The Tea Party candidates swept into power within the Republican Party over the last eight years, but now we are reminding them that they are out of excuses. It’s time for them to show their voters what happens when they have to actually govern, and that may be their greatest weakness.

Having said that, there are two things we must understand and act on if we are to successfully resist Trump, and both were illustrated by events this week. The first is that there is a vast difference between the two major parties, as most clearly seen by the roll call on the Betsy DeVos confirmation. One more Democrat in the Senate, no matter who it was, would have meant her defeat. That show of strength might have also led to the defeat of Jeff Sessions. The second thing we saw this week was that we can and must find common ground where we can with people who voted for Trump, even if they say now that they don’t regret that decision. Maggie Magerko is the head of Lumber 84, and she has no regrets about her vote for Donald Trump. But her company created a commercial that Fox aired in edited form during the Super Bowl that is a powerful endorsement of the value of the sacrifices immigrants to this country make to get here. By all accounts, Ms Magerko herself was very involved in the message of the ad, and fought Fox to try to air the full version. Instead, you can see it online here. Magerko says she wanted to show the “big beautiful door” that Trump spoke of during the campaign, meaning that we would welcome legal immigrants to our country. But Magerko and her company created a powerful testament to the humanity of the people who seek to come here, and that should be the starting point of any conversation about immigration. This is someone who has the capacity to tell the difference between a refugee fleeing ISIS and someone who is actually dangerous.

So where do we go from here? The protests need to continue, and so do the phone calls to Senators and Representatives. There is and will be an overwhelming amount of mischief to keep track of, and we will miss some, but we must not allow fatigue to set in. There are many of us, and some can take up the slack when others flag. We do not have to do this alone. But the power of this will be limited, especially in 2017. That is because we are a population over all that has a history of not voting. To come into our power fully, we must vote in November of this year. Odd year elections are sparsely attended, so we can put candidates in office just by showing up. That is how the Tea Party was built, and we can do it too. More importantly, this election actually makes a great deal of difference. We can give governing experience to a large group of people who can become our farm team from which to field candidates for higher offices down the road. But we can also change the composition of state houses nationwide in time for the redistricting in 2020, and that is how we can defeat gerrymandering. Also, voting this year moves us from the category of unlikely to likely voters. That makes a huge difference to pollsters. Suddenly, the protests and the letters and phone calls gain great power.

As voters, and especially as new voters, we need to recognize that the two major parties are different. The right wing that has now given us Donald Trump has long promoted voter apathy through the myth that the parties are the same. I return here to the Devos roll call. Every Democrat opposed this nomination. Evan Bayh is as bad as Democrats get. He is a corporatist, and he is at least somewhat to the right of Hillary Clinton. He comes from Indiana, a state that thought having Mike Pence for governor was a pretty good idea. So we were not going to elect a strong progressive to the Senate in Indiana. But it was thought that Bayh had a good chance to win back his old Senate seat there. Progressives did not vote for him, however, and his Republican opponent won. I’m using Bayh as an example, but if he had won, Devos would not have been confirmed. If three Democrats like Bayh had won, the progressive caucus in the Senate would not have grown, but Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren might be heading committees in a Democrat-controlled Senate. In the fight against Trumpism, we must understand that even conservative Democrats are our allies. More, we can reason with them, show them our strength, and get them to work for and with us, far more easily than we can sway Republicans.

We can also find common ground with Trump voters. They voted for a truly ugly human being, but that does not mean they are just as ugly. Maggie Magerko can understand the human side of the immigration debate. Your most right wing friends, if you did not delete them all on Facebook, can be engaged on the issues. Keep the parties and how you voted out of it, and just ask them how we should go about telling the difference between a dangerous immigrant and the guy who runs the falafel truck. Ask them how they would screen immigrants from the countries Trump excluded from his ban. Ask them how they would design a better health care system, and how they would pay for it. Ask them about jobs and even guns. And then, as they answer, keep yourself out of the conversation, and just listen like crazy. You might hear some good ideas. You will almost certainly remember why you were friends in the first place. And most of all, you will find things we can work on together.

Today’s song: