Month: April 2016

There’s just something about Ted

by digby

… that drives everybody crazy. Even Sean Hannity and he has a very high threshold for insanity:

Hours after New York Rep. Peter King said he hated Cruz and would take cyanide if he ever won the nomination, Hannity conducted a 14-minute interview with the Texas senator, almost immediately pressing him on his campaign’s delegate selection operation that has obliterated Donald Trump’s.

“You’re hoping to get to a second ballot. In other words, in a second ballot people that support Donald Trump or John Kasich or Marco Rubio, if those delegates are still relevant, can then switch their votes,” Hannity said. “So you’re in a process of talking to delegates, and it seems to be very extensive. Could you explain to people what’s going on?”

And so it began.

“Sean, with all respect, that’s not what people are concerned about,” Cruz responded, citing more jobs, raising wages and defeating Hillary Clinton in the general election as issues voters are concerned about.

“And the media loves to obsess about process. This process and this whining from the Trump campaign is all silly. It’s very, very simple…,” Cruz continued before Hannity interrupted.
Hannity argued that through social media and responses to his radio and television shows, voters are telling him that they find this process confusing.

“It’s more than a process question,” Hannity said. “It’s an integrity of the election question, and everybody’s asking me this question so I’m giving you an opportunity to explain it.”
A lightly chuckling Cruz said only hardcore Trump supporters would ask such a question.

“Why do you do this?” Hannity said, raising his voice. “Every single time I — no, you gotta stop. Every time I have you on the air and I ask a legitimate question, you try to throw this in my face. I’m getting sick of it. I’ve had you on more than any other candidate on radio and TV. So if I ask you, senator, a legitimate question to explain to the audience, why don’t you just answer it?”

“Sean, can I answer your question without being interrupted?” Cruz shot back.

Cruz went on to note that he’s won five elections in the last three weeks in Utah, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Colorado and Wyoming. “Over 1.3 million people voted in those five states. We won all five,” he said. “All of this noise and complaining and whining has come from the Trump campaign because they don’t like the fact that they’ve lost five elections in a row, that Republicans are uniting behind our campaign. So they’re screaming on Drudge and it’s getting echoed, this notion of voterless elections. It is nonsense. They are making it up.”

Cruz added that delegates are elected by the people, but Trump’s campaign doesn’t know how to organize. Cruz suggested the Republican presidential front-runner’s campaign passed out fliers asking supporters to vote for a list of delegates that included the Texas senator’s delegates and fired off an emergency email to Washington, D.C., supporters that were intended for supporters in Washington state days ahead of the state convention.

“I cannot help that the Donald Trump campaign is incapable of running a lemonade stand,” Cruz said. “My focus is on jobs, freedom and security, not this incessant whining from the other side. If you lose, don’t cry about it. Go back and learn how to win an election.”

Hannity maintained that most voters aren’t as knowledgeable about delegate selection and think the process is over after a state’s primary or caucus. He pressed Cruz again to explain what happens after the election.

“It’s a simple question. It’s not a Trump question. It’s a question about what’s going to happen,” Hannity said.

Cruz repeated that he’s winning elections and accused the real estate mogul’s campaign of panicking.
“They don’t know how to handle losing over and over again, so they’re screaming,” Cruz said.

“Every time the people vote against them, they scream the election’s been stolen. No, when people vote against you, it means you’ve lost an election.”

Cruz explained that the actual delegates are elected by supporters and remarked that every presidential candidate has been able to understand that.

“The Donald Trump campaign doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s a Kim Kardashian reality show,” he said.

What if the delegates selected don’t represent the will of the people, Hannity asked. “Sean, that’s why there’s an election,” Cruz answered.

“No, no. I mean — but if there’s a conflict. That’s why I’m asking. I’m — look, senator, I don’t know why you’re mad,” Hannity said. “There’s no — I’m asking. I’m just trying to understand it. I’m really having a hard time understanding why you’re getting angry at this.”

Cruz stressed that he isn’t angry but wants to focus on the issues rather than the “nonsense” from the Trump campaign.

“Senator, I’ve asked you those questions a hundred times,” Hannity said after Cruz recommended shifting the conversation to jobs and the economy. “I’ve asked you those questions a hundred times — more than anybody else.”

As my Dad used to say, “he’s slicker’n owl shit.”

It’s fair to ask why he’s so reluctant to explain what he’s doing. The fact is there’s nothing unethical about it — he’s not breaking any rules despite what Trump is saying.  But he wants to
preserve the fiction that his strategy isn’t to win the inside game persuading conservative local and state officials and activists to change their votes and support him on a second ballot. In this game, Cruz isn’t the maverick outsider he’s the guy working the system. And that makes sense. Cruz is a product of the conservative movement. But in this campaign, being organized in any fashion is seen as corrupt and venal so he has to be careful.

Cruz is a very smart, hard working, strategic politician and he may very well still pull this thing off. That race is anything but decided. But he’s got a huge handicap — a personality that makes people recoil in disgust. Surprisingly, that’s not a deal breaker in presidential politics — Richard Nixon wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy and he won two national elections (and came very, very close in a third.) But it doesn’t help, especially since he’s made so many enemies in his own party.

He’s testing the strength of the ideological conservative movement as an organized force within the GOP.  His success or failure will ultimately show if its now officially got the upper hand in the party.

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Nothing changed for Trump last night


by digby

…. but as far as cable news is concerned last night was a game changer. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

It’s a known fact that if you watch enough political news on cable TV you will eventually lose your grip on reality.  Each day brings a different breathless narrative of events and the conventional wisdom turns 180 degrees. And yet the basic facts have changed not at all.

For instance, we have all just spent the last two weeks listening to the pundits, advocates and anchors explaining in minute detail how Ted Cruz is successfully undermining Donald Trump with his wily strategy to seduce and persuade delegates to vote for him if Trump fails to win on the first ballot. Everywhere you turned, Cruz was the man with momentum, outfoxing Donald Trump who was flummoxed and confused, unable to compete in a game for which he hadn’t even bothered to learn the rules. His amateur campaign was is disarray, heads were rolling and it appeared he was in big, big trouble.

Then Trump won New York and he won it in grand fashion. And suddenly, last night,  the entire narrative changed.  Today the conventional wisdom is that Cruz made a fatal error by criticizing Trump’s “New York values” and it has resulted in total rout that even has sad sack John Kasich besting him for second place. He is in big, big trouble. On the other hand, Trump’s new team is fantastic, forcing him to be more presidential while still letting Trump be Trump. He’s on a roll and may very well win outright or at least come in close enough in delegates to persuade the convention to nominate him on the first ballot.  He’s got momentum and he may just be unstoppable.

Trump did surprise in one way. He gave a victory speech that did not include an infomercial for Trump steaks and vodka as he did after winning Florida. And he didn’t treat any of his endorsers like they were footmen waiting for instructions about when to bring in the next course as he did with Chris Christie. He didn’t even call Cruz Lyin’ Ted.  He called him “Senator Cruz”, giving him the respect he demands from everyone else when he insists they call him “Mr Trump”. Nobody knows exactly what his new head campaign strategist Paul Manefort is doing to retool the campaign but it appears that job one is to teach Trump some basic manners.

This speech was greeted with great kvelling and rending of garments by the TV pundits who proclaimed The Donald a reformed man. He showed tremendous growth as a statesman and a leader, projecting strength and leadership. Within 24 hours he’d gone from a clownish amateur losing out of his depth back to a powerhouse front runner on his way to the nomination.

All of this might make some sense if the win in New York last night was an upset and Cruz had been expected to win or even perform well.  But Trump was always expected to win New York and win it decisively. Cruz didn’t even really contest it beyond making some half-hearted gestures, raising some cash and then getting out of town to campaign in friendlier territory. In other words, nothing changed last night from what was expected to happen the night before. And yet, the entire narrative has shifted.

The exit polls did show a change in the electorate’s views since Wisconsin about how the race should be decided.  ABC reported:

More than seven in 10 New York GOP voters in preliminary exit poll results say the candidate with the most votes in the primaries should win the party’s nomination; a quarter instead favors a contested convention, saying that delegates should pick whichever nominee they think best. That’s less than half the level of support for a contested convention than we saw in Wisconsin, where just 43 percent favored going with the candidate with the most votes, while 55 percent said the delegates should choose. 

Of course, Wisconsin voters went big for Cruz and New York voters went big for Trump so those views are obviously self-serving. But despite all the breathless reporting the Republican race is still essentially a race between one campaign that’s playing an inside game and one campaign that’s playing an outside game. And we still have no idea which one is going to prevail.

Trump is trying to get to the magic number through the traditional means of winning primaries and collecting the allotted delegates for a win on the first ballot. It’s not going to be easy but he’s succeeded in tainting the jury pool enough, whether through threats of riots or simply whining about the system being rigged against him, that he may be succeeding in convincing the party that they cannot deny him if he comes close but doesn’t hit the mark. This piece in Politico observed that many in the party are starting to move in that direction, suggesting that Trump merely would have to woo the “unbound delegates”. (Yes, the Republicans have super-delegates too, they just have a different name.)

When the convention opens in Cleveland in mid-July, roughly 200 delegates will arrive as free agents, unbound by the results of primaries or caucuses in their states. Trump’s campaign is confident they can win as many of them as they must in order to get to 1,237 on the first ballot. 

“Trump has to get to 1,237, but there’s a lot of talk about, ‘What is the real number?’” said another RNC member. “Whatever half the uncommitted number is, that’s probably a reasonable number.” 

“I think a lot of people think if he gets within 50-100 [of 1,237], he’ll be able to carry it,” said Steve House, the Colorado GOP chairman, who is himself an unbound delegate and is already being courted by the Trump and Cruz campaigns.

Cruz is the inside player, having greased the skids for months in state parties and working the rules  finding ways to squeeze out enough delegates around the country to keep Trump’s margin too low to make that argument. One can assume that Cruz is assiduously pursuing those unbound delegates in advance as well.  He’s not leaving anything on the table.

So the Republican race is still going to go down to the wire just as everyone’s been saying ever since the earlier “Trump is bound to implode” narrative finally ran out of gas. Trump is betting that he can get close and then bully the convention into giving him what he wants.  Cruz is betting that he can keep him from getting close enough through skillful manipulation of the process. It’s not pretty.

And unlike most presidential primary campaigns we still have absolutely no idea how it’s going to come out. You’d think that would make for a sufficiently interesting story line but apparently it’s not good enough. Instead we are forced to endure a rather silly narrative of perceived “momentum” that switches back and forth without regard to the facts on the ground. This phase of the race is a delegate chase. One candidate is trying desperately to limp over the finish line and the other is desperately trying to set up roadblocks to trip him up. At this point “expectations” are beside the point.

After New York we can definitively say only one thing about the Republican nomination: either Trump, Cruz, Kasich or a player to be named later will be the nominee. Other than that everything’s still completely up in the air.  And that should be exciting enough for anyone.

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In a neoliberal’s garden with you
by Tom Sullivan

Something Gaius wrote on Monday grabbed me:

In the FDR-liberal world, the function of government is to provide services to citizens and protection from predators in the private sector. In the neo-liberal world, the function of government is to manage government services so the private sector is given the most profit opportunities possible.

Going back over some notes from the weekend, I recognized the echo of George Monbiot’s critique of neoliberalism in the Guardian. His How Did We Get into This Mess? was released yesterday. Neoliberalism, like many political enthusiasms, morphed from philosophy to religion with its practitioners hardly noticing. Not so for working people paying for neoliberal hubris. They noticed:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

Mix one part Calvinism with one part trickle-down economics, add a dash of prosperity gospel, and there you are. We’ve gone from government providing services to citizens as its raison d’être to government services interfering with God’s judgment on the least of them. We can’t have government picking the pockets of winners and squandering the Market’s blessings on nature’s failures. And when neoliberal policies fail?

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

As Naomi Klein revealed, the invisible hands behind this invisible doctrine prefer to remain invisible. The financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street threw a spotlight on them, but an alternative from the left is still wanting. Monbiot is not recommending a return to the New Deal. That would be a mistake, he writes:

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

In truth, the first is probably the strongest argument. Millennials do not seem interested in reclaiming past liberal glories; they want to chart a new path forward and a different vision. Working people by and large won’t be taking time from two to three jobs to ponder the 1970s. The environmental challenges ahead are products of the past. What the future demands is a new model. Not “innovation” (see Tuesday’s post) but a more equitable organizing principle than consumption. Lacking that, we will just get more of the same mess repackaged. So far, that’s all that’s on the shelves.

by digby

Hookay:

In case you missed what this is about …

Australia has very strict biosecurity laws to protect the health of our people, animals and plants. Everyone entering the country must truthfully declare if they are carrying any items listed on the Incoming Passenger Card. 

Ms Amber Heard appeared in the Southport Magistrates Court in Queensland on 18 April 2016 to answer charges alleging the illegal importation of her two dogs into Australia in April 2015. 

Ms Heard pleaded guilty to one count of producing a false document (her Incoming Passenger Card). 

Ms Heard also offered to publicly state her contrition with the support of her husband – this video is that statement.

Lyin’ Mitch

by digby

I wrote about Mitch McConnell’s cynical gaffe yesterday in which he said he was “optimistic” that there would be a contested convention. It was noticed apparently:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is clarifying his remark that he is “optimistic” that there will be a second ballot at the Republican National Convention in July.

McConnell told NBC News that the comment, which was widely interpreted to mean that the Kentucky Republican hoped that Donald Trump would fail to clinch the GOP nod, was “inartful.”

“What I said, somewhat inartfully, was is that we will have a nominee once we get to 1237 votes,” McConnell said, referencing the number required to secure a majority of delegates at the convention. “If that does not happen on the first ballot, there will be another ballot. And I hope that this process, no matter when it ends first, second, third or additional ballot, that we will have a nominee that will be appealing to the American people and can win the election.”

McConnell had told a Louisville TV station that he was “increasingly optimistic that there will actually be a second ballot,” noting that many delegates are bound to vote for a specific candidate on the first vote but are free to choose the candidate they support on subsequent ballots.

Maybe he was playing some 11 dimensional chess that I am too thick to understand. But it seems on the surface to be an incredibly dumb thing for a majority leader to say.

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QOTD: Cecile Richards

by digby

As my mom, the late Governor Ann Richards, would say ‘A woman voting for Ted Cruz is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.’

A far right vision realized

by digby

Here’s an interesting story about women’s rights in a far right country in today’s Washington Post Monkey Cage:

Since 1993, Poland has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe: abortion is only available in cases of grave fetal defect, rape/incest, or threat to the life of the mother, and only within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.  This law replaced communist-era laws that made abortion widely available for four decades, and was termed a “compromise” between the proponents of a total ban and those who wanted a public referendum on the matter.

But now a new bill, pushed by a pro-life foundation and the Ordo Iuris legal institute, would make abortion illegal in all circumstances. Doctors who performed an abortion could be punished with jail terms of up to five years. The only exception would be the “unintended” death of a fetus while saving a woman’s life.

The Roman Catholic Church in Poland (a country where more than 95 percent of poll respondents call themselves Catholic) publicly supports the initiative, and has repeatedly called for a total ban on abortion. The leaders of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has sole control of the government, Prime Minister Beata Szydło and party chair Jarosław Kaczyński, both spoke out in favor of the proposal.

Here’s the thing. It’s not really the Church that is leading the charge. And there’s a strong public backlash against it. What pushing this is partisan politics:

The right-wing governing party, PiS, has been controversial – verging at times on authoritarian — since it took office with an absolute majority in October 2015. PiS has undermined the Constitutional Tribunal, which is very roughly equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court, by packing it with its loyalists and imposing new constraints on the Tribunal’s authority. It moved to control public news media by firing public media officials and journalists and replacing them with party loyalists. The party has announced it would dismiss thousands of civil service servants, and hire only those loyal to the party. And it has appointed ministers in sensitive sectors (especially Justice, Foreign Affairs, and Defense) with extreme and divisive views.

However, now that PiS has the majority in parliament, the Church and pro-life organizations have forced its hand, publicly insisting that the ban be introduced and passed. PiS cannot hide behind either coalition politics or a claimed lack of votes: It is the only party in government and has a parliamentary majority. Having portrayed itself as a defender of religious values and the Church, PiS cannot ignore the initiative. It cannot simply reject the proposed bills, since it criticized previous governments for doing so. And because its other policies and actions have been so controversial, PiS needs the Church to ensure a loyal base of support.

The good news is that this could never happen here if say, Ted Cruz happened to pull off a win next November.

Right?

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The Donald: first responder

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

“Everyone who helped clear the rubble — and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit — but I want to tell you: Those people were amazing,” Trump said. “Clearing the rubble. Trying to find additional lives. You didn’t know what was going to come down on all of us — and they handled it.”

That modifier “a little bit” does a lot of work: Did he mean he picked up a few chunks of concrete? Sent staff to assist? It’s not clear.

Particularly coming in the middle of an exposition of the courage of first responders, Trump’s statement that he “helped a little bit” is an interesting one. The implication is clear: Trump was helping to clear the rubble, worried that damaged buildings surrounding the site were going to topple over “on all of us.” In a normal context, Trump would seem to be asking the listener to offer him some of the credit he’s giving to those that were on the scene. In the context of a presidential campaign? That becomes more fraught.

Donald Trump unquestionably went to Ground Zero after the attacks. New York Newsday reported on an appearance the previous day in its Sept. 14 paper.

The workers are so worn out that they barely glance at the sight of Donald Trump, every hair in place and impeccably dressed in a black suit, pressed white shirt and red tie, walking into the plaza with his cellular phone to his ear.

“No, no. The building’s gone,” he says into the phone.

I think he picked some lint off his suit so maybe that’s what he’s talking about.

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Trump the vigilante


by digby

I wrote about Trump and Schwarzenneger and the desire for an avenging angel for Salon today.

Today is likely to be the biggest day in Donald Trump’s short political career. All the polls have him winning the New York primary and winning it big. He’s always been a prince of the city but tonight he will be crowned the King. No matter what happens in the rest of this campaign, one suspects this will always be a high point. I can hardly wait to see what over-the-top victory pageant he cooks up for this one.

It’s not surprising that Trump would win his home state but it’s still interesting to ponder just how it is that the Republican Party, which for several decades now has been assumed to be deeply tied to the macho myths of the South and the West, came to elevate a wealthy, pampered New Yorker to the frontrunner for the presidential nomination. All these years we’ve assumed that such purveyors of effete, Big City values were anathema to the heartland values of Real America. Ted Cruz came right out and said it but it didn’t seem to bother all those fellows with the confederate flags on their pick-ups or even the evangelical values voters. What’s changed?

One of the modern conservative movement’s most insightful historians, Rick Perlstein, wrote about it in this piece for the Washington Examiner. He looks at the history of New York’s conservative political tradition going back to Klan marches in the 1920s and the huge pro-Hitler rallies in the late 1930s showing that Trump’s proto-fascist undercurrents aren’t foreign to his home state. He delves into William F. Buckley’s run for mayor, the Ed Koch years as well as the long-standing relationship between Trump and Roy Cohn, thuggish fixer and Joseph McCarthy’s right hand, and Nixon’s notorious dirty trickster Roger Stone. He describes them as “flashy, hedonistic right-wing operatives who gargle with razor blades and wear their shiny silver three-piece suits like armor.” That’s not something you see down in Texas.

And he homes in on something important about Trump that illuminates this race and our current political era:

[W]e locate the formation of Donald Trump’s mature political vision of the world, in continuity with America’s racist and nativist heyday of the 1920s, and within the context of a cultural world much more familiar to us: New York in the 1970s, that raging cauldron of skyrocketing violent crime, subway trains slathered with graffiti, and a fiscal crisis so dire that even police were laid off in mass—then the laid off cops blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, deflating car tires, and yanking keys from car ignitions.

Think of Trump coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell barking out “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during game two of the World Series at Yankee stadium as a helicopter hovered over a five-alarm fire at an abandoned elementary school (40 percent of buildings in the Bronx were destroyed by the end of the 1970s, mostly via arson—often torched by landlords seeking insurance windfalls).

Think of Trump learning about the ins and outs of public life in this New York, a city of a frightened white outer-borough middle-class poised between fight or flight, in which real estate was everywhere and always a battleground, when the politics of race and crime bore all the intensity of civil war.

He goes on to discuss one of the seminal movies of the period, “Death Wish” starring Charles Bronson about a liberal New Yorker whose wife was murdered and his daughter raped by street thugs. Unable to get justice, Bronson learns to shoot (in an Old West town!) and goes out in the streets looking for muggers so he can shoot them at point blank range. According to Perlstein’s book about the era, “The Invisible Bridge”, the movie packed in audiences all over New York in the summer of 1974. He makes this astute observation:

[T]he conservatism of avenging angels protecting white innocence in a “liberal” metropolis gone mad: this is New York City’s unique contribution to the history of conservatism in America, an ideological tradition heretofore unrecognized in the historical literature. But without it, we cannot understand the rise of Donald Trump.

Trump’s first foray into politics was his response to the Central Park Jogger case (which I wrote about for Salon here.) He took out a full page ad in the New York Times which could have been lifted directly from “Death Wish”. And in his campaign he’s explicitly evoked the Charles Bronson image. As I noted in this piece from last October:

On the stump last week-end, Donald Trump entertained his followers in the wake of the massacre in Oregon with colorful fantasies of him walking down the street, pulling a gun on a would-be assailant and taking him out right there on the sidewalk. He said, “I have a license to carry in New York, can you believe that? Somebody attacks me, they’re gonna be shocked,” at which point he mimes a quick draw.

As the crowd applauds and cheers, he goes on to say “somebody attacks me, oh they’re gonna be shocked. Can you imagine? Somebody says, oh there’s Trump, he’s easy pickins…” And then he pantomimes the quick draw again. Everybody laughs. And then Trump talks about an old Charles Bronson vigilante movie and they all chanted the name “Death Wish” together.

His answer to the problem of gun violence is always that there should have been bullets “going in the other direction.”

This is the essence of Trump’s appeal. He’s a TV celebrity who promises to be the billionaire avenger who will shoot first and ask questions later. He’s tapped into that paranoid piece of the American psyche that believes civilized society cannot protect people from the dangers they believe are lurking around every corner. And as usual, these dangers all seem to coming from foreigners and racial minorities.

After today, Trump will turn to the rest of the northeast primaries and it’s expected that he’ll do well there. But he’s going to be keeping one eye on the California primary all the way until June. If he has any hope of winning on the first ballot, he has to win big there. So, it’s worth wondering if this avenging billionaire act will have the same potency. There’s no reason that it won’t. After all, the other hugely popular vigilante films of the 1970s were the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movies which were set in San Francisco. The whole country was gripped by fear of rampant crime and corruption, even the beautiful city by the bay couldn’t escape it.

But there’s a recent example of the phenomenon in more explicit political terms in California. After 9/11 the whole country was gripped by a new level of fear. Crime in the streets was a parochial concern compared to terrorism. Indeed, it was so exotic and foreign that it seems to have felt to many people more like the alien invasion along the line of “The War of the Worlds” than any other threat in American memory.

In 2003, California came a little bit politically unhinged. The people decided that a hike in the vehicle registration fees was so heinous that it required the Governor to be recalled. What ensued was a spectacle even more ridiculous than the one in which we’re currently engaged.

The election drew a number of celebrities including Ariana Huffington and former sitcom star Gary Coleman. (This is nothing new for the state that produced Ronald Reagan, of course.) But the superstar who ultimately won it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, an actor closely identified with a character more terrifying than anything the mere humans Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood had played: the Terminator. This was someone people believed was equal to the task of fighting the alien invaders. He didn’t get a chance to do that during his time in Sacramento, but he did lower those vehicle license fees. With extreme prejudice.

These two odd candidacies, more than a decade apart, show that reverberations from 9/11 are still being felt among a segment of the American public, which seems to be yearning for some kind of violent anti-hero to fight off their terrors. Trump could even be said to be a symptom of delayed reaction, a late demonstration of bravado after the fear has subsided.

Schwarzenegger endorsed John Kasich so any hope of a Trump and Terminator tour of the Golden State seems unlikely. But we’ll soon be seeing both of them on our TVs when Arnold takes over “The Apprentice.” Trump has said that giving up the show was the hardest decision to make in deciding to run for president. (In fact, it’s unclear whether he’ll be more crushed if he loses the race or if Arnold gets higher ratings than he did).

The truth is that Schwarzenegger was better prepared for office when he ran than Trump is today but that’s not saying much. And if he hadn’t been born in Austria there’s every reason to believe that he would have beaten Trump to the nomination. And even with his Hollywood sex scandals, he would have had a much smoother ride. He could appeal to that thirst for revenge by simply saying “I’ll be back” rather than blathering on for hours about his poll numbers but more importantly, while Arnold may not be much of an actor he’s still better at acting like a leader than Donald Trump ever will be.

Perlstein noted in “Invisible Bridge” that the Charles Bronson character in “Death Wish” ended up on the cover of TIME magazine. If they remade the movie today is there any doubt that he’d be given his own reality show?

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The few, the proud, the “maintainers”
by Tom Sullivan

After spending several post-college months riding trains around Europe, I took the train from New York to Washington, D.C. where I’d left my car with my sister. Compared to the silky ride of the Deutsche Bahn, this sucker was rocking, rumbling, and lurching all the way. Thought I was going to die.

The experience gave me a gut-level appreciation for well-maintained infrastructure and the unsung people who keep things working so smoothly one only notices when they don’t. “Hail the maintainers,” write Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell for Aeon. “Innovation,” they believe, is overvalued:

At the turn of the millennium, in the world of business and technology, innovation had transformed into an erotic fetish. Armies of young tech wizards aspired to become disrupters. The ambition to disrupt in pursuit of innovation transcended politics, enlisting liberals and conservatives alike. Conservative politicians could gut government and cut taxes in the name of spurring entrepreneurship, while liberals could create new programmes aimed at fostering research. The idea was vague enough to do nearly anything in its name without feeling the slightest conflict, just as long as you repeated the mantra: INNOVATION!! ENTREPRENEURSHIP!!

The hucksterism behind it leads almost inevitably to social displacement and economic inequality, “a feature, not a bug of highly innovative regions.” What keeps the world turning often amounts to very old inventions used in novel ways and the infrastructure underlying those technologies.

Fortune‘s David Z. Morris commented on the Aeon essay, noting:

Vinsel and Russel argue that, particularly in the last twenty years, talk about innovation has become increasingly counterproductive. One key example is America’s ongoing infrastructure crisis, which they say can be blamed partly on a culture that celebrates investment in innovation over upkeep. Only a wave of train crashes, subway meltdowns, and poisoned water reminiscent of the developing world has pushed infrastructure maintenance back into public debate in the U.S.

Much of the dissatisfaction in evidence this election year is a result of innovations such as securitization, trade agreements, and disruptive technologies. We value technology. We value the economy. But we’ve delivered mankind into servitude to them. Plus, we are so enamored of the shiny and new, we’ve let the everyday crumble beneath our shoes. Vinsel and Russell write:

We can think of labour that goes into maintenance and repair as the work of the maintainers, those individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things. Brief reflection demonstrates that the vast majority of human labour, from laundry and trash removal to janitorial work and food preparation, is of this type: upkeep. This realisation has significant implications for gender relations in and around technology. Feminist theorists have long argued that obsessions with technological novelty obscures all of the labour, including housework, that women, disproportionately, do to keep life on track.

Writing for the Guardian, David Ferguson appreciates the work done by the maintainers:

I have endless respect for people behind the scenes keeping the world together. I remember the pride I once took in being a restaurant dishwasher. Yes, the job is, in some ways, at the bottom of the food chain. It’s typically the lowest-paid position in any restaurant, and yet there is a simple, satisfying power to it. To customers, you’re invisible, but you’re ultimately the person who is keeping them safe from germs and cross-contamination, an invisible lifeguard at life’s watering hole.

Each morning, you show up, put on an apron and then tackle the day’s mound of dirty dishes. It’s sweaty, sometimes backbreaking, work, but the core mission is always the same: make it all sparkle and put it back where it belongs. Keep everything moving. Everybody’s got to eat and if they’re going to eat, they’re going to need some dishes.

I have such a job. I help design and maintain the factories that make the products you use without considering where they come from or the thought and labor that went into them.

Consider this. It’s Primary Day in New York. Recent election failures have spawned conspiracy theories about political machinations by one major party or the other. They’re all the same, all corrupt, etc. But one thing most people voting today will fail to appreciate is the army of maintainers it takes for democracy to happen. Until things stop working, that is.

You go to your precinct on Election Day and see maybe five people working there (three judges and perhaps two assistants in NC). There are 2,700 precincts in this state alone. That’s 13,500 workers. Plus the election services staffs and Election Boards of 100 counties. Plus the state Election Board staff in the capitol. Approaching 15,000 in all. That’s well over a military division’s worth of manpower for democratic elections to happen in a single state. The precinct-level maintainers don’t come from Craigsist. They’re mostly party people recruited by unsung party functionaries no one ever sees, who attend boring meetings no one else wants to sit through. They work behind the scenes, year-in and year-out, and in off-years when no one is paying attention to horse-race media coverage. They make democracy happen. It’s not innovative. It’s not sexy or exciting (as John Oliver demonstrates below). It’s an effort of dedication.