The Art of No Deal

The AHCA, the health care monstrosity that Paul Ryan wrote and Donald Trump tried to sell to the House of Representatives, is dead. There are some delicious ironies here, but first some thanks are in order. Thank you to all of the activists who showed up at Republican town halls, and showed moderate Republicans that they risked their seats if they supported this. Thank you to everyone who wrote, called, or emailed your Representative with the same message. And thank you to the Democrats for staying united in opposition to this terrible legislation. A lot of hard work went into defeating this and saving the ACA, and it is appreciated. Next up is another round of equally hard work to defeat the nomination of Neil Gorsuch. We must draw strength from this victory, and bring it to the next fight, but we must also understand that this next battle can not be won in the same way.

It is worth looking at the dynamics of the House of Representatives that made this victory possible. Yes, the moderates let their misgivings be known, and those misgivings only grew as the bill got amended in an attempt to appease the Freedom Caucus. Irony number one here is that the only way Trump can get the House to pass a health care bill is to craft something that all of the Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans can support. Why then did Ryan try to save this bill by tacking to the right and not the left? That is irony number two. The death of the AHCA was brought about by years of Republican gerrymandering.

The Republicans have worked long and hard to create as many safe seats as possible for Republican candidates. These are convoluted districts that look ridiculous on a map, but have all but assured a Republican majority in the House for the foreseeable future. Swing voters, who might support either a moderate Republican or a Democrat, are not welcome here. As a result, these districts don’t just reliably elect Republicans, they reliably elect Republican extremists. These districts are won not in the general election but in the Republican primary, and moderates fair poorly. In other words, they elect the Freedom Caucus. This brand of Republican is an absolutist. They believe that compromise is weakness, meaning, as we saw this week, that they are completely unable to govern. They were not interested in the replace part of repeal and replace, seeking only to eliminate Obamacare, and not replace it with anything.

We won this battle by bolstering the moderate wing of the Republican Party, giving them cover to stand up against the extremists. We won also by giving the Democrats the strength to stay united. But it was and is the dynamic created by gerrymandering that made this a viable strategy in the face of a Republican majority. It is a dynamic we will be able to use again to our advantage, but it won’t work in the Senate. There we must give the Democrats the strength to stay united in opposition to Gorsuch, but it would be best if we could also find some moderate Republicans to cross the aisle and stand with us. It will be harder to find stories to tell of how this will affect us personally, but the special education community might be a good starting point. We came to accept many extreme positions as normal when Antonin Scalia served on the Supreme Court, so we will now also be battling against legal precedents that never should have been established. I believe we can win again, but the fight will be different. The goal here is to persuade a majority of Senators that supporting Gorsuch will endanger their chances of getting reelected. That means we need to get the voters to tell pollsters they oppose this nomination. It won’t be enough to say that Gorsuch and Trump would be stealing the seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland, although that is true. Instead, we must make the case that Gorsuch would hurt people like them. I believe that we can do this, and I look forward to the fight.

Tonight’s song is a new discovery for me, but it works in its own way:

Giving Us the Business

During last year’s campaign, one argument that was made for Trump was that his business experience would make him an effective manager of the country. In response, it was pointed out that he had filed for bankruptcy four or six times. But while we were debating his business acumen, we should have been discussing his approach to making money instead. The release this week of his budget proposal shows why this matters.

It is helpful to consider how a billionaire makes his money. Warren Buffet shows us one possible model. Buffet nurtures and tends to his fortune. He seeks to identify hidden value in the companies he acquires, and then he makes the best moves he can and waits for the results. He is patient, and he never gets involved in a business that he has doubts about. Buffet thinks in the long term. Donald Trump is the complete opposite of this. Trump is a money junkie, always seeking the quick high. He puts money into projects that have the potential to provide a quick payoff, and he doesn’t mind risk. His plan is based on the idea that he can monetize the failures in the form of tax write-offs, and his home runs can payoff enough to outweigh the strikeouts. This is a short term approach, with no patience for anything that does not pay off quickly, and the budget reflects this kind of thinking.

Where Warren Buffet might see investing in cultural programs as a way to produce a better educated and more well rounded workforce that would benefit the country over several generations, Trump sees money flowing out of federal coffers for no immediate gain. Likewise, Trump sees any money spent on programs for the poor as wasteful. He can not understand that these programs can boost consumer spending, eventually producing demand and then jobs. Military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy, on the other hand, produce immediate tangible benefits for wealthy people like him, and this is what Trump understands. The long term problems caused by income inequality are why Warren Buffet has spoken out in favor of an increased minimum wage, but Trump sees them as something he can personally dodge while continuing to monetize the here and now.

Trump also sees business as a battleground. Collaborative efforts for mutual benefit do not make sense to him. Instead, he views his gain as always somebody else’s loss, and he does not know how to be concerned about this. So scientific research and other government collaborations with the private sector get the axe; they are on their own. Companies, in his view, should be able to take the risks on their own, and he wants to clear the way for the winners to sort themselves from the losers without any government influence. This idea is also behind his zeal to deregulate.

As with so much else about Trump, his priorities here represent values that have guided the Republican Party more and more since at least the rise of Reagan. What has changed is that Trump makes no pretense now that he has the presidency of caring who gets hurt. This is also true of the racism and xenophobia that were so helpful to his campaign. The venality that represents the dark side of big business is now on full display, without the pretense of a Paul Ryan, for example. Trump makes no effort to explain how this will supposedly be good for the people who oppose him, and his surrogates flounder when they try to do so. There are no sops in the Trump budget proposal to make him look like a nice guy. This is unbridled greed, and Trump doesn’t care who knows it. It is, in his view, what has made him a winner. The rest of us lose, but that is how Trump believes the game is played. What has changed is that now he has the power to tilt the rules in his favor, and the budget proposal is his opening move.

So far, this is a pretty dark post, so let me close by offering some hope. Trump does not yet understand that a government is not a business. There is no board of directors, supposedly independent but actually pliant. Instead, Trump’s initiatives must be approved by Senators who must be answerable to their states, and by Representatives who are answerable to an even smaller group of districts. We can already see how local actions have slowed the march of “repeal and replace”, and the same thing must happen here. We must understand the hidden value and long term benefit of the programs that are currently threatened, and we must bring these arguments to our Senators and Representatives repeatedly. We must let them know that we are watching. The greatest danger we face is exhaustion, but our great offsetting advantage is sheer numbers. There are plenty of us, so nobody has to be the hero and do everything, as long as each of us does what we can.

I have been featuring music fairly regularly, because I believe it can help us keep our spirits up. When I can add a bit of humor, I will certainly do so. Hence, tonight’s selection:

A Plan for the Democrats

The Republicans who now control the White House and both houses of Congress have a problem, and it is the job of progressives in particular, and the Democratic Party as well, if they will only accept the challenge, to make that problem worse for them. The Republican Party as now constituted is dedicated to the proposition that government can only do harm, and never do anything good. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, flies in the face of that proposition, which is why from the beginning the Republicans set out to sabotage the ACA once they understood that they could not stop it. It was also necessary to amplify every problem that occurred during the rollout of the ACA, to promote the idea that the ACA overall was bad. One defense the Democrats pursued was to challenge the Republicans by asking what their alternative was. Now we know: it is the monstrosity known as the American Health Care Act, which I prefer to call Ryancare. At this point, it is not Trumpcare, because Trump had no apparent hand in shaping it, but he has said that he will try to sell it.

In trying to “repeal and replace” the ACA, Republicans ran into sharp opposition from their own constituents at emotional town halls. It turns out that people are discovering, when faced with the prospect of losing the ACA, that they really like and need it. Oddly, Ryancare is also opposed by the most extreme members of the Republican Party, who object to the fact that it fails to completely repeal the ACA. So it would seem that progressives would have nothing to worry about, because the Republicans will not be able to find the votes to pass Ryancare. This assumption, however, fails to take into account the extraordinary sales skills of Donald Trump. This is a man who could sell sand in the Sahara Desert. The last time we underestimated him, he became president. The Democratic Party is being too complacent at the moment, and not listening to their own advice. It is not enough to defend the status quo, to insist that the ACA must remain in place. Despite the exaggerations and outright lies of the right wing, there are real problems with the ACA that created the opening for Trump’s victory in the first place. For many, lack of insurance has been replaced by insurance that people can not afford to use. So, in order to make sure that Ryancare fails, The Democrats need to offer up their own plan, just as they insisted the Republicans do. Let me offer my idea of what that plan should be, and how to sell it.

The purpose here is to offer up a plan that highlights the inadequacies of Ryancare and the harm it will do. We also need to undercut Trump’s efforts to get it passed. So we need a plan that really does deliver on a promise that Donald Trump made, that he would deliver a plan that would save money and deliver better care than the ACA. That plan is universal health care. I have talked before about how and why Democrats have failed to sell it to the American people, but I want to go into more detail now about how to win this battle. Hillary Clinton tried to get universal healthcare in 1993, but her instincts are always to find a consensus solution to any problem. There is no consensus solution here, because there is no way around the fact that you are destroying a vital part of the insurance industry, taking them out of the very lucrative health care business entirely. Done properly, universal health care also hurts the pharmaceutical industry, because you should insist that the government has the right to negotiate for the best prices. So you need to stand up to some powerful lobbies to pass universal health care. That is why the best time to do it is during a severe economic crisis. Barack Obama had that opportunity in 2009, but he too was intent on government by consensus, so we got the ACA instead. Last year, Bernie Sanders tried a different approach, insisting that universal health care was a right, a moral imperative. It is, but Hillary Clinton was able to get him bogged down in the details of how to pay for it. She made him lose the same battle she had lost thirteen years earlier, and also managed to make him look unprepared to govern while she was at it. I believe this was a major reason why Sanders lost the primaries. Ironically, the answer to how to sell universal healthcare was at Sanders’ fingertips the whole time, but he never effectively put the whole package together for the voters.

Universal health care would give the American people cash to spend on other things, so it would provide a major boost to consumer spending. Money that now gets deducted from paychecks for premiums, or spent on copays and deductibles, would instead go directly into the economy, leading to a major boost in job creation. It would also make American companies more competitive, by reducing the cost of hiring, and freeing companies from the expense of providing retiree health benefits. To pay for it, we must first recognize that the current cost of the ACA and other government health programs would no longer be needed, so those funds would go here instead. On top of that, companies currently deduct $260 billion for employee health benefits. Add in increased revenue from all of those new jobs I mentioned. And then there is the kicker. Pair universal healthcare with a measure that costs the government nothing, and you suddenly need very little in the way of new taxes to pay for it all. That measure is an immediate increase in the minimum wage to $15, indexed to inflation. Right wingers like to make the disputed claim that increasing the minimum wage is a job killer, but pair it with the job creating aspects of universal healthcare and that problem disappears. Over time, the minimum wage increase promotes consumer spending, which also means more jobs, and more revenue to pay for healthcare. Bernie Sanders erred in failing to realize the powerful synergy between his two proposals. It even gets better. All those new jobs, plus increased pay for existing jobs, means a sharp reduction in the number of the working poor, meaning funds that had been spent on public assistance programs such as food stamps can be used to pay for universal healthcare instead. I am not an economist, but I think it is possible that this proposal could be sold as being revenue neutral. At the worst, it should be possible to claim convincingly that the only new taxes needed would be on the wealthy.

I am a realist. I understand that there is no chance that a Republican-controlled Congress would ever pass this. Even if they did, you can be sure that Donald Trump would veto the measure. But that is not the point. By offering up this proposal and selling it properly, the Democrats would guarantee the failure of Ryancare, and expose the callousness of the Republican Party for all to see. If anything, the fact that this proposal would not pass should help reluctant Democrats to rally around it, knowing that they would have to answer to their constituents in redder states only for an idea, but not a law that would be vilified in the right wing media. The minimum wage increase is a popular idea, and so is universal healthcare if the public can be made to accept that their taxes do not need to rise to pay for it. The Democrats need to show that they are better than the Republicans who could not come up with an alternative to the ACA for eight years, and this is how to do it.

OK, I admit the song this time is a stretch, but I couldn’t resist:

A Revolution of Storytellers

Donald Trump has been carrying out a campaign against the truth itself. It started when he announced that he was running for president, and it has only intensified since the inauguration. He seeks to make the American people doubt everything we are told, and to discredit our most trusted media sources. The antidote to this campaign is a campaign of our own, committed scrupulously to telling the truth ourselves. But that doesn’t mean fact checking everything, and rebutting as needed, although that is important. We have more important truths to tell, and it is starting to happen.

To understand why rebuttals are not enough, consider Trump’s claim that Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower. It’s nonsense of course. The clearest proof that it never happened is the fact that we don’t know what was discussed in the newly revealed meeting between Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and Sergey Kislyak. We also don’t know what other meetings may have taken place that have not yet been revealed. But what would happen if you confronted a Trump supporter with this appeal to logic? Couch it in the gentlest terms you can, but you are still calling anyone who believed Trump’s lie a fool and a dupe. You might even convince them that you are right, but they will not thank you for it. Likewise, we have Trump’s brag that he reduced the federal deficit in his first thirty days in office, while Obama dramatically increased it in his first thirty days. It does no good to ask a Trump supporter what actions of Trump’s can account for this, in a period when Trump spent as much taxpayer money on vacations in his first thirty days as Obama did in his first year. These facts are on our side, but they will not win us the argument.

Instead, we must tell personal truths. It is starting to happen. There was some great human interest reporting when the Moslem ban was announced, stories of how real people with real lives were devastated by this action. There are great videos of people standing up at town halls and talking about how the Affordable Care Act saved their lives, and there have been great stories on this in print as well. The words “Let me tell you a story” are the greatest weapon we have. This is how we can win hearts and minds. This is how we can bring people in instead of pushing them out. I told the story of my immigrant grandfather in a previous post. We all have such stories, although not for every issue. But together, we can find and tell the stories we need for any battle we will face.

It won’t always be as easy as it has been so far. Many people can tell stories of their immigrant heritage, and of their healthcare issues. But how do you fight threats to the environment? As I said, not all of us have a story for every issue, but together we can find these stories and make sure they get told. Environmental issues are usually abstract, but not to a family that can say what drinking the water in Flint Michigan has meant to them. The issue of abortion is one we usually lose, but we may know a mother or a grandmother who can talk about what it was like to have an abortion before they were legal, and can explain in personal terms why she took the risk. Many of us can talk about good and kind Moslem immigrants who have made a positive difference in our lives.

In telling our stories, we must be careful to just tell them, to avoid pushing them on people. Say what happened, but don’t give the moral of the story. Count on basic human decency, and assume your listener will find the moral for themselves. I know all of the horrible things Trump stood for in the campaign, and the fact that his supporters had to make their peace with the racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc., to vote for him. But if you assume your audience is deplorable, they will reward your expectations. Instead, what will hopefully happen is that they will want to tell you their story. When that happens, try to listen without judgment. It won’t always be easy, but success will mean a connection has been made. It will mean that someone new now cares if something Trump and his enablers do hurts you and yours. That is how you win a revolution.

Music is, of course, a powerful medium for telling stories. Paul Simon says it well:

How Not To Run For Reelection

Donald Trump is running for president. Less than a month into his administration, he has already held a rally to begin the 2020 campaign, and he is accepting campaign contributions. His speech this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, (CPAC), also found him, after 15 minutes of incoherent whining about the evils of the press, in campaign mode. The speech was full of boastful promises of all the wonderful things he would do if elected.

There are two problems with this that come immediately to mind. First, given that Trump is already being watched by the press and others for any concrete signs of conflicts of interest, soliciting donations this early only worsens the problem. But Trump’s speech also shows that he does not understand how a reelection campaign is different from an election campaign. Trump was able to get elected by making a series of promises, and by striking a pose as the champion of the little guy. Some of his promises were frightening, and his supporters would tell you that he wasn’t really going to do these terrible things. The wall, paid for by Mexico, to keep “bad hombres” out was an obvious fantasy, they might say, but it showed his concern about American jobs bleeding away to other countries. A total ban on Moslems entering the country was another obvious fantasy, they would tell you, but it showed he would be tough on terrorists. His supporters by and large had bought the story that Obamacare was the evil replacement for the Affordable Care Act, and Trump would replace it with something so much better.

When you run for reelection, however, you don’t get to run on just promises, and you don’t have supporters who can say you won’t really do what you have already done. You run for reelection based on what you have actually done, and how it has played out. Donald Trump is running for reelection at a time when he has accomplished remarkably little, and what he has accomplished has shown that the worst fears that his defenders tried to brush off are not just fantasies. On Tuesday, Trump will submit his first budget to Congress, but up to now he has sent no major legislation there, and there is no sign that he is ready to do so. Given the reported disarray within his cabinet, expectations for any coherence in the budget document are low. Meanwhile, Trump arrived in the White House thinking he could govern entirely by Executive Order, and he immediately tried to institute the Moslem ban. He was shocked to discover that our nation has a system that places checks on his power, and the ban was thrown out in court. The promised new executive order to reinstate the ban has yet to emerge, probably because there is simply no legal way to do it, but Trump keeps trying. He continues to brag about how he is going to get that wall built, but people are starting to understand that it will be the American people who will pay for it through higher taxes. Trump has also ramped up deportations of illegal immigrants. In this case, there has been some great coverage of the human cost of this policy. It becomes much harder to campaign on being tough on illegals when the press is reporting about hard working parents who fear that their children will be orphaned one day because their parents will be stolen from them. Stories of overreach by immigration officials, such as beloved children’s author Mem Fox promising that she will never again visit the United States, have also made the Moslem ban harder to campaign on. Trump is still trying to campaign on his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, but he has left Congress flailing away at how to do this, while he has failed to provide any direction or guidance. The town hall protests have brought out many stories in the press about how repealing the Affordable Care Act would harm real people, including many who voted for Trump. Trump his also tried to take credit for the performance of the economy since he took office, but it was immediately pointed out that this shows instead the success of Obama’s economic management. There has been no time yet for anything Trump might have done to have any effect on the economy, and even that budget won’t make a difference for another year.

Altogether, Trump has very little in the way of accomplishments to campaign on at this point, and what he has done has been shown to be harmful to real people who are telling their stories. So the empty promises and the 2020 campaign continue.Trump ended his CPAC speech with these words:

There is no dream too large, no task too great. We are Americans, and the future belongs to us — the future belongs to all of you. And America is coming about, it's, and it's coming back and it's roaring and you can hear it. It's going to be bigger and better. It is going to be, it is going to be. Remember. And it's roaring. It's going to be bigger and better and stronger than ever before.

I was chilled, thinking of this:

Government By Punk Rock

This is a political blog, and this is a political post, I promise. I will be talking about the here and now, but I need to start in the late 1970s, talking about punk rock. Bear with me.

So, as I said, we begin in the late 1970s. Popular music had burst at the seams with creativity in the previous decade, and the range of ideas that popular music could express similarly exploded. But, in the 1970s, the record companies began to realize that this music could make serious money, and they turned major label music into a product. There were still artists and groups who wanted to say something real, but it became harder for such artists to get signed. Albums became more and more crafted: where the Beatles had made 19 albums in 6 years, now 6 albums in 19 years would be closer to the mark for someone like Michael Jackson. The music sounded like it was three years in the making as well. Pop music became dominated by artifice, by emotional poses rather than the emotion itself. An awful lot of bad music came out of this, as well as some extraordinary art that I personally needed many years to learn to appreciate on its own terms. But the immediate sincerity of the music of the 1960s got lost along the way. Punk rock emerged into this setting as the antidote to all this. It was deliberately uncrafted. It was a badge of honor amongst groups like the Sex Pistols that they could barely sing or play their instruments. The Circle Jerks rammed the point home with a cover of The Gilligan’s Island Theme that was more of a deconstruction. Punk rock was supposed to be a revolution, the overthrow of corporate rock. The problem was that the revolution was doomed to fail. Any group that stayed together too long began to learn to play and sing; they then had the choice to either pretend they still had no talent, or to keep their honesty by revealing what they had learned. Both the Clash and XTC were groups that started as punks, but no longer were by the release of their third albums. Neither group ever lost the fire that initially fueled them, but now they had become artists.

Politically, our situation now reminds me of the early days of punk rock. The current wave of the politicization of fear began when the 9/11 terrorists provided George W Bush with the opportunity to become a national hero by showing his toughness in a war with Iraq. But Bush was still a product of corporate politics, representing a Republican establishment that wanted to govern their way, but wanted to govern. The Republican brand of punk rock started with two related developments during the Obama presidency: the decision by Mitch McConnell to refuse to pass anything Obama proposed; and the rise of the Tea Party movement. These developments had in common a determination to overthrow the current order. Tax cuts, which had been a Bush triumph for his wealthy backers, became instead a means of destroying the government and its “bloated” programs. A right wing media environment grew up to support these ideas. It gave a voice to the fears and hatreds of supporters who had grown weary of the coded messaging of establishment Republicans. The genius of Donald Trump was to recognize that blatant racism and xenophobia would be a badge of authenticity to this audience. The outrageous and ugly things he said during the 2016 campaign were proof to this crowd of his genuineness. He was punk.

Just as the punks had to prove their authenticity with their lack of musical ability, Trump began to build his cabinet with a group of people whose complete lack of knowledge of how to govern was a badge of honor. But now there is a problem. A Republican Party and a Tea Party movement built on overthrowing the government now controls it. The forces arrayed to destroy our government must now govern, and we see that there was never a plan for what to do if this day ever arrived. They know what they were against, but they have no idea what they are for. The time has come for the punks to learn to play their instruments.

Not all of the punk rockers ever did become musicians. Many lived in a haze of drugs that prevented their talents from emerging, and also killed many of them. Similarly, we have started to see scandals claiming the political lives of some of the political punks. Andrew Puzder and Michael Flynn are gone, and their replacements are establishment Republicans. While I am sure that some hardline Republicans will never be cured of the ideological psychosis promoted by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, there will be others who will actually learn to govern. To quote another pop culture reference, they will learn that with great power comes great responsibility.

The Republicans have already begun to sort themselves into factions, one that truly wants to figure out what to do with this prize they have won, and another that wants to retain their punk authenticity at all costs. Which faction comes to dominate the next four years, if either one does dominate, will be determined by how closely the rest of us continue to watch them. The scandals are our best hope of weeding out the bad apples, which means we must continue to protest, and we must also continue to support honest media sources. Most important of all, we must build a team that knows how to govern for when our turn to do so comes around again. That means winning local elections, and building from there. When our turn to govern at the national level comes again, we must be ready to show the American people the benefits of knowing how to do it. We must learn to play our own instruments.

There has to be a song to close this one, and this seemed like a good choice:

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: