Month: November 2020

Dying of COVID-19 after hosting too many family and friends is not the only thing Americans have to fear this holiday season. Nearly half of all unemployed workers’ receiving unemployment benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program passed in March could see their aid run out on Dec. 26. Additional help is stalled in Congress. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, wants us to know why we will have a Republican red instead of a Democratic blue Christmas.

If you want to know why COVID relief is tied up in Congress, one key reason is that Republicans are demanding legal immunity for corporations so they can expose their workers to COVID without repercussions.

Dems don’t want you to die for a check. That’s what we’re fighting over.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 24, 2020

https://t.co/4oVTRjqdi5

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 24, 2020

McConnell insists any new COVID-19 relief package contain  a five-year “liability shield” or the bill goes nowhere. Roll Call reminds readers, “Immunity from civil liability for negligence does not prevent harm or injury. It simply shifts the burden and costs to the person or group who has been injured — and all too often, to the taxpayer.” For Republicans, placing on taxpayers the costs of keeping businesses open during a pandemic is acceptable. Doing so to keep unemployed workers safe at home is not.

Once again we see Republicans holding Americans — out-of-work Americans — hostage to ensuring they cannot sue their employers over unsafe working conditions. Even as, like Proud Boys, Republican lawmakers “stand back and stand by” for Donald Trump as he files frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit in the wake of his election loss.

Another reason COVID relief is tied up in Congress is that Republicans and the lame duck Trump administration are already salting the earth ahead of the incoming Biden-Harris administration. Why wait for the inauguration to begin? But it is not as if they have to work that hard at it after the last four years.

“The president-elect is inheriting an economic mess from his Republican predecessor,” Medhi Hasan observes. “Kind of like the last Democratic administration.”

Why this lesson is not taught in textbooks by now is another mystery of modern economic theory.

Hasan invited Anand Giridharadas to share his views of where the Biden presidency might go.

Giridharadas noted how Biden ran in the primary as a centrist, restoration candidate, but rather than tacking to the middle as nominee he “evolved left.” Responding to nationwide protests in the streets, he began speaking about systemic racism. His environmental stance moved in a Sunrise Movement direction. The campaign began talking about FDR. Giridharadas thinks Biden is more likely to behave like LBJ.

“Whatever we may think of someone before they come into office,” he begins, “history provides some grounds for humility about what they’re going to actually be like when they’re in there.”

Obama appeared to be an outsider, not only because of his race but also his community organizer background. One might not have predicted the “relative conservatism of his tenure.” With FDR’s wealthy upbringing, his denouncing rich people is not something we might have expected either. Nor would LBJ’s history telegraph he would be the kind of president to pass the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts.

“So I right now feel like the nation is on a first date with President-elect Joe Biden,” Giridharadas says. “It is too early for cynicism. It’s too late to be naive. No one thinks that he is in his bones a progressive firebrand, but I still have hope that recognizing this moment, recognizing a country awash in pain, he will choose to be Scranton Joe who feels for people more than Delaware Joe, kind of connected and tied to the big company.”

Someone senior in the Biden orbit texted Giridharadas that that could only happen if the new activists do not sink back into their couches with Trump gone. Biden needs to be pressured. It was not something Giridharadas expected to hear.

He wrote at The.Ink on Tuesday:

The erosion of our democratic institutions demands #resistance. Money in politics demands #resistance. The assault on voting demands #resistance. The stacking of our courts demands #resistance. A Senate whose antiquated rules mean it can no longer really do the people’s business demands #resistance.

But in the times that loom, these worthy endeavors will lack for the galvanizing and clarifying antagonist that was Trump. To #resist Trump was one thing. To #resist what made him possible requires the resistance of diffuse systems, of blobs, of hyphenated complexes. It is one thing to challenge and protest people who are manifestly cruel and sadistic and indifferent to human life. The armies of the #resistance will now have to train their focus and scrutiny on people who seem decent and humane — but who are, nonetheless, entwined with the broken and corrupting systems that have defined this era, and who need to be pressured and held accountable if they are to change things.

Barack Obama also asked his activist base to pressure him to make change. But then he dismantled the organization he’d built to get himself elected. The #resistance that exists today is not built on any candidate’s massive, closely held email list, but on sweat and tears. With more of both we may yet see blue Christmases in the future.

UPDATE: Dropped ambiguous footnote.

Yeah, Paul Ryan is who we really needed to hear from. He gave a paid speech today and said that it was a bad idea to create all this doubt about the voting systems with no evidence. He said it was because of “democracy” but I’m reasonably sure it is really about not suppressing the Republican vote in Georgia next month (and beyond.)

And then there was this garbage:

“I personally think it’s in Joe Biden’s best interest — he obviously would not want to hear this — for us to win these Georgia Senate seats, because then he really does have divided government and he really does have to work with both sides of the aisle and you won’t have the building pressure from the left to try and jam the other side.

“And so assuming, and you cannot assume these things, we keep the Georgia Senate seats and we have divided government, Joe Biden knows how to work in divided government. He’s a good guy. He’s a very nice person. He keeps his word. Those of us who’ve worked with Joe, we disagree with each other but he’s not a disagreeable human being. So, he does know how to work in divided government. He does put deals together, and that will be made much, much easier for him to operate like that and bring sides together if we truly have divided government. If we don’t have divided government and they narrowly get the Senate, then frankly I think he’s going to be a much less successful president. I know that’s sort of contrary to conventional wisdom, but that’s just how I feel.”

Right. It’s for our own good to have Mitch McConnell dictate the agenda, which he will. I’m sure that there will be no problem whatsoever as long as Biden appoints Mitch’s choices for his government and nominates only federalist society clones for the bench. Needless to say there will be no major legislation except tax cuts. He didn’t do more than that even when the GOP had both houses of congress and Trump rubber stamping anything they did.

And the really good news is that when it comes to debt ceiling and appropriations negotiations, Mitch and his pals will insist that Democrats pay down their massive debts caused by tax cuts for the rich and insane military spending by creating even more suffering for ordinary people (which the Republicans will then blame on the Democrats.) It is going to be very ugly. Which is exactly what Paul Ryan and others like him are hoping for so they can point to Joe Biden and say how sad it was that he failed to bring people together like he promised.

Ryan is a slick operator who withdrew from the Trump years in order to create the impression that he was outside the maelstrom so he could preserve his viability for the future. But he is one of the architects of the modern obstructionist Republican party of scorched earth sabotage that made Donald Trump possible and nobody should forget that.

Good God:

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Nearly every supporter of President Donald Trump thinks otherwise, according to a new CNBC/Change Research poll.

As the president makes unsubstantiated claims about electoral malfeasance and sows doubts about vote tallies, only 3% of Trump voters surveyed said they accept Biden’s victory as legitimate, the survey released Monday found. A staggering 73% of respondents consider Trump the legitimate winner. Another 24% said they are not sure.

A mere 3% of Trump voters believe he should concede to Biden and start the peaceful transfer of power. Another 31% want the president to fight in court until states certify results. Two-thirds, or 66%, think Trump should never concede.

Does anyone think that Democrats can just “reach across the aisle” and GOP officials whose voters believe he cheated his way into office will reach back? Will the cynical opportunists of the Republican party refuse to use this as an excuse to obstruct everything and sabotage Biden’s presidency?

Please.

I am sorry to be pessimistic, but Trump has convinced around 50 million people that Biden’s win is illegitimate despite there being absolutely NO EVIDENCE that it is. They are brainwashed. And even if half of them eventually come to realize that he and the right wing media have been spouting lies for years, that will leave a vast number of people who will never believe this election was honest and that will give the GOP license to do their worst.

Remember, when the Democrats impeached Trump last winter, the Senate Republicans all said that the decision about what to do about Donald Trump should be left to the voters in November. Now it appears that’s not good enough either. In other words, they will only respect “the will of the voters” if it goes their way. This isn’t going to be last we see of this tactic. Trump has shown that you can simply declare that you won and your voters will believe you no matter the facts.

I don’t think Trump will be going away any time soon. He’s going to run again — or say he’s running again in order to start collecting money. But even if he fades away, the damage he’s done is incalculable.

Update:

Republicans are going to become more Trumpy not less:

After Trump began to strongarm GOP officials in the states to overturn the election, populist hero Josh Hawley (R-Mo) told the AP, “I don’t really have concerns with him talking about the situation with elected officials.”

Asked if Trump could overturn the election, Hawley was noncommittal:

“Anything’s possible.”

That isn’t noncommittal. It is saying that if Trump had been able to pull it off he would have backed the play without a second thought. As would all the rest of them. They kept their powder dry so they could add it to the bomb Trump was building to blow up the country.

And by the way, this alleged populist Hawley really is too much. If any of you are ready to embrace his phony “Bernie-esque” persona, think again:

Hawley, who is a fraud in general but a true #WarEnthusiast, was part of the Senate minority that voted to help the Saudis keep bombing Yemen last year https://t.co/de6R10cSLg https://t.co/FJrAGfTXPz

— Chase Madar (@madar.bsky.social) (@ChaseMadar) November 24, 2020

Add Marco Rubio to this cadre of unctuous frauds and bullshit artists:

Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools,have strong resumes,attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline

I support American greatness

And I have no interest in returning to the “normal” that left us dependent on China

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 24, 2020

Sadly, I fully expect a certain number of lefties to eagerly buy into these cynical ploys. There’s something about this combination of racist nationalism combined with “salt-o-the-earth” Real American rejection of liberalism that hits right at the sweet spot between left and right.

A word from a Los Angeles physician and professor of emergency medicine:

In my world, there is a lot of anger — most of it kept professionally hidden.

In emergency rooms and intensive care units across the country, frontline nurses, respiratory therapists and doctors like me have been in danger every day for eight months. Smothered in PPE, we’re doused in coronavirus every day while we take care of the very sick, the worried well and the dying. Some of the dead aren’t patients; some are colleagues, friends and our own families.

We are furious and we are exhausted. And now we face again the flooding of our hospitals.

We’re tired of seeing patients who got the virus after their kid’s “limited” birthday party or because they went out to a restaurant dinner with “close friends” or flew to a celebration in a state “that didn’t have much COVID.”

It didn’t have to be this way.

We bent the curve, then let it bend right back. Distracted and tired, our focus faded.

Fall is aptly named. People aren’t made to be perfect, but damn, we should be better than this.

What you do — how we ALL act in the next six weeks — will make the difference between an inconvenient fall and a disaster that will take years to overcome.

Until months AFTER the vaccines arrive, the same simple steps will be required. Not just in California, but also across our un-United States.

Wear a mask whenever you leave the house. Stop doing dumb stuff, like going to parties, destination weddings and the French Laundry. Stop listening to know-nothings who spout “science” on YouTube and Twitter.

Stop being crybabies about a little inconvenience. We already have more than 250,000 reasons to weep — and to be thankful we are alive and can still do something about it.

So avoid crowds. Wash your hands. Stay home. Why is this so hard?

You may have noticed that I’m a little bit on edge.

The problem is, people don’t understand the danger. Yes, you may have attended a party and you’re fine. You’re young, you’re healthy. What’s the problem?

If you don’t understand, go back and read a story by Karen Kaplan in this newspaper. She reported how a single wedding of 55 people in Maine infected 27 guests. None of them died and some didn’t even have symptoms. So, no big deal, right? Wrong. The infected guests went on to infect others, who in turn spread it themselves. Over the next 38 days, the wedding was responsible for infecting at least 176 people, and seven of them died.

Multiply that mistake thousands of times across our country and you have real trouble. You don’t have to get sick to transmit COVID. You can kill someone you’ve never met in another state, or their mother, or they can kill yours.

What you do matters.

We’ve reached that place in the movie where there are so many zombies we have to hide in the basement. Except the zombies are down there with us, fresh from an “essential” shopping trip, and now their kid has a cough.

So this column is a warning, a confession and a cry for unity — perhaps even patriotism.

If you come to me in the ER, you’ll never know what I’m thinking about you or your choices. Like the virus, I don’t care if you’re from Orange County or North Dakota. You’ll get 100% from me and my crew, no matter who you are or what you did — or didn’t — do. Even if you say this is a political conspiracy or a test of “liberty,” or you call us “sheeple.”

COVID doesn’t care how you vote, where you live or if you die. The fire burns all around us and we are dry grass, from sea to shining sea.

In my world, we are deeply disheartened to realize that, as a country, the United States can’t unite as other countries have, and that the work of crushing this virus turned out to be too complicated for our leaders and our neighbors. Now we are in danger of losing perhaps half a million people or more.

It makes front-liners like me feel as though our work doesn’t matter.

The way people, including the president, are behaving seems un-American. How can the world’s strongest democracy be unwilling to fight a winnable war on our own soil to protect our own lives and those of our neighbors? A lot of us won’t even don masks to aid the fight.

As I put on my PPE before a shift in the ER, I think of seasick WWII soldiers, riding toward a beach as other young men on shore tried to kill them in the surf. Compared to what they faced, what I do is easy.

Then, no one knew how long the war would last or if they would survive. People back home collected rubber and bacon grease for years, gave up countless liberties and luxuries, and no one ever called the war a hoax, even if they never saw a Nazi in their backyard.

We’re eight months into COVID. World War II lasted six years and a day. The Great Depression lasted 10 years. The 1918 flu lasted two years and two months.

Are we really that soft? That careless? That selfish?

It’s great news that a vaccine is likely to come soon, but don’t depend on it to save you and the people you love. Like the last man shot in war, you might get the virus before you get the vaccine.

There is still time to save lives. Stay at home, and when you have to go out, wear your mask everywhere. Break the virus chain. Do it for yourself. Do it for those you love. Do it for your country.

Come, be a hero.

I have said for years now that a new Democratic administration was very likely to let Trump off the hook for well … everything. After years of Trump’s “lock her up” chants being greeted with cries of “this is not a banana republic, we don’t jail our defeated political rivals!” it was inevitable that it would be thrown in any Democratic DOJ’s face if they decided to pursue Trump’s many crimes.

However, that should be ignored and I truly hope the new administration doesn’t succumb to the conventional wisdom and follows wherever the law takes them. This piece by Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman is spot on:

When the Biden administration takes office in 2021, it will face a unique, fraught decision: Should Donald Trump be criminally investigated and prosecuted?

Any renewed investigative activity or a criminal prosecution would further divide the country and stoke claims that the Justice Department was merely exacting revenge. An investigation and trial would be a spectacle that would surely consume the administration’s energy.

But as painful and hard as it may be for the country, I believe the next attorney general should investigate Mr. Trump and, if warranted, prosecute him for potential federal crimes.

I do not come to this position lightly. Indeed, we have witnessed two U.S. presidential elections in which large crowds have found it acceptable to chant with fervent zeal that the nominee of the opposing party should be jailed. We do not want to turn into an autocratic state, where law enforcement authorities are political weapons of the reigning party.

But that is not sufficient reason to let Mr. Trump off the hook.

Mr. Trump’s criminal exposure is clear. I was a senior member of the investigation led by the former special counsel Robert Mueller to determine whether Russia attempted to subvert our fundamental democratic source of political legitimacy: our electoral system. Among other things, he was tasked with determining whether Mr. Trump interfered with our fact-finding into this issue.

We amassed ample evidence to support a charge that Mr. Trump obstructed justice. That view is widely shared. Shortly after our report was issued, hundreds of former prosecutors concluded that the evidence supported such a charge.

What precedent is set if obstructing such an investigation is allowed to go unpunished and undeterred? It is hard enough for the executive branch to investigate a sitting president, who has the power to fire a special counsel (if needed, through the attorney general) and to thwart cooperation with an investigation by use of the clemency power. We saw Mr. Trump use his clemency power to do just that with, for example, his ally Roger Stone. He commuted Mr. Stone’s sentence, who was duly convicted by a jury but never spent a day in jail for crimes that a federal judge found were committed for the president. The same judge found that Paul Manafort, a former Trump campaign chairman, lied to us repeatedly, breaching his cooperation agreement. He, too, was surely holding out hope for a dangled pardon.

Mr. Trump can’t point to what the special counsel investigation did not find (e.g., “collusion”) when he obstructed that very investigation. The evidence against Mr. Trump includes the testimony of Don McGahn, Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, who detailed how the president ordered the firing of the special counsel and how when that effort was reported in the press, Mr. Trump beseeched Mr. McGahn to deny publicly the truth and, for safe measure, memorialize that falsity in a written memorandum.

The evidence includes Mr. Trump’s efforts to influence the outcome of a deliberating jury in the Manafort trial and his holding out the hope for a pardon to thwart witnesses from cooperating with our investigation. Can anyone even fathom a legitimate reason to dangle a pardon?

His potential criminal liability goes further, to actions before taking office. The Manhattan district attorney is by all appearances conducting a classic white-collar investigation into tax and bank fraud, and the New York attorney general is engaged in a civil investigation into similar allegations, which could quickly turn into a criminal inquiry.

These state matters may well reveal evidence warranting additional federal charges. Such potential financial crimes were not explored by the special counsel investigation and could reveal criminal evidence. Any evidence that was not produced to Congress in its inquiries, like internal State Department and White House communications, is another potential trove to which the new administration should have access.

The matters already set out by the special counsel and under investigation are not trivial; they should not raise concerns that Mr. Trump is being singled out for something that would not be investigated or prosecuted if committed by anyone else.

Because some of the activities in question predated his presidency, it would be untenable to permit Mr. Trump’s winning a federal election to immunize him from consequences for earlier crimes. We would not countenance that result if a former president was found to have committed a serious violent crime.

Sweeping under the rug Mr. Trump’s federal obstruction would be worse still. The precedent set for not deterring a president’s obstruction of a special counsel investigation would be too costly: It would make any future special counsel investigation toothless and set the presidency de facto above the law. For those who point to the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford as precedent for simply looking forward, that is not analogous: Mr. Nixon paid a very heavy price by resigning from the presidency in disgrace for his conduct.

Mr. Trump may very well choose to pardon not just his family and friends before leaving office but also himself in order to avoid federal criminal liability. This historic turn of events would have no effect on his potential criminal exposure at the state level. If Mr. Trump bestows such pardons, states like New York should take up the mantle to see that the rule of law is upheld. And pardons would not preclude the new attorney general challenging a self-pardon or the state calling the pardoned friends and family before the grand jury to advance its investigation of Mr. Trump after he leaves office (where, if they lied, they would still risk charges of perjury and obstruction).

In short, being president should mean you are more accountable, not less, to the rule of law.

Republican administrations have been pardoning their way out of criminal prosecution since Nixon. Trump may do the same. We’ll have to see if he tries that. If so, we’ll face a different set of questions. But there should be no shirking of the duty t get to the bottom of his crimes, whether Federal or State. If they don’t do it the next Republican president will be even worse.

Greg Sargent has an interesting piece today about how Trump has laid a dangerous landmine for the Biden team when it comes to white supremacist violence:

From beginning to end, Joe Biden’s campaign focused heavily on President Trump’s encouragement of white supremacy. His campaign launch video was all about Trump’s refusal to unambiguously condemn racist violence. At the final debate, Biden declared that Trump “pours fuel on every single racist fire.”

But, now that Biden is set to become president, he will have to act on these words. And therein lies a hidden trap that Trump has set for Biden, one that will present grueling political and policy challenges at the outset.

Biden vowed to “restore the soul of the nation” as president, meaning he won’t use the power and influence of the office to carry out a white nationalist agenda or to lend support to right-wing extremists and white supremacists, instead “uniting” the country.

But what does all this mean in practice? It means many things, from purging immigration policy of naked bigotry to rolling out an agenda that takes systemic racism seriously to having a president who doesn’t actively encourage police and even vigilante violence.

But one of the most thorny problems Biden faces will be how to reverse the failures of the previous administration when it comes specifically to violent domestic extremism and white supremacy.

This is a complicated challenge that will entail action on many fronts. They include a look at whether federal law needs to be revamped to treat white nationalist and white supremacist mass killings as a form of domestic terrorism.

Another imperative, as former National Security Council official Joshua Geltzer points out, will be to take seriously the transnational nature of global white nationalist and white supremacist groups and ideologies. Numerous recent domestic mass shootings were inspired by white supremacist mass murderers abroad, and social media has created transnational networks espousing white supremacist violence.AD

All this would require determining whether this sort of law enforcement activity can be done — and this is absolutely crucial — without violating civil liberties. Only the pursuit of political aims through violent means should be the focus, and all violent ideologies must be targeted. Civil libertarian groups must be fully included in discussions of any legal reorientations.

This will also pose a big communications challenge to the new president. And here’s where the Trump trap comes in.

Trump’s own Homeland Security Department declared this fall that violent white supremacy is “the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” Trump’s own FBI director has testified to the same thing.

But all this came after Trump and his administration systematically downplayed (or actively encouraged) the white nationalist and white supremacist threat. Former senior Homeland Security analyst Elizabeth Neumann has revealed that officials vainly tried to get Trump to take right-wing extremism seriously for months.AD

What’s more, Neumann has suggested, Trump continued to make public statements lending tacit support to such groups despite surely knowing that this type of rhetoric encourages them, such as his infamous call for the extremist Proud Boys to “stand by.”

And a Homeland Security whistleblower revealed top-down pressure to downplay intelligence on the white supremacist threat. Numerous top Trump officials hyped impressions of organized leftist terrorism to eclipse right-wing violence in keeping with his reelection message.

Obviously, one big change will be that Biden will not make public statements tacitly encouraging or downplaying violent right-wing extremism. But the big problem Biden faces is how to successfully communicate and level with the public about the threat in a way that’s constructive, not destructive.

Mary McCord, a former acting assistant attorney general, told me that this challenge involves several components. One involves communicating to those vulnerable to violent right-wing radicalization that they have “another way,” McCord says, which entails giving them a stake in a larger “purpose” other than such causes.

“I see fear as motivating some of the white supremacist organizations and movements — fear of a loss of white privilege, economic and educational privilege,” McCord told me.

Another entails drawing careful distinctions between adherents of violent right-wing extremism and those who might be at much earlier stages of radicalization, to preserve the possibility of communicating with the latter. Still another entails dealing with online disinformation, but that’s a whole other massive problem.

Labeling the threat itself carries perils that Biden will have to avoid. Recall that in the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, a Homeland Security analyst produced a report on right-wing extremism that caused an explosion of controversy among conservatives. That led to a quick retreat on the topic.

It’s easy to see the same happening again. However Biden does seek to address the threat, we’ll likely see another effort by right-wing media to label it a tyrannical attack on conservatism.

This time, retreat is not an option. Trump has aligned himself with various strands of right-wing extremism. He continues to assert the election was stolen from him. He will continue to claim measures against the coronavirus pursued by Biden constitute tyranny (such measures may have partly motivated the plot to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer).

All this will be designed to keep a pro-Trump insurgency as active and as angry as possible. There may be all kinds of overlap between that violent white supremacist activity and continued resistance to the Biden administration and anti-virus measures on the invented grounds that his victory was illegitimate.

The trap Trump set is to activate this insurgency, making it more fiendishly challenging for Biden to make good on his vow to take the white supremacist threat far more seriously than Trump ever did. Biden will be tempted to retreat in labeling that threat in the interests of “unity.” But that would be a retreat on a core rationale of his victorious candidacy.

This may be the most acutely dangerous of Trump’s landmines, but the truth is that the entire administration is facing this. Biden offered “unity” and bipartisan comity and Mitch McConnell and his henchmen will do exactly what they did when Obama came in promising bipartisan comity: they will obstruct everything, gin up their brainwashed base with disinformation from their propaganda arm and then innocently point at the president saying “what a shame he was unable to deliver on his promise to bring everyone together.”

I am fairly sure that Biden actually believes he can win over the Republicans which is very worrying. But it’s possible that the people around him have learned from experience and will not put any store in that belief and will act otherwise. I hope so anyway.

This romantic moonlit scene in RUDY: THE RUDY GIULIANI STORY absolutely murdered me. I am dead. pic.twitter.com/eRZuxM0iMI

— Marie Bardi-Salinas (@mariebardi) November 24, 2020

Ok. The world no longer makes any sense to me.

Eugene Robinson devotes a few paragraphs TV crews won’t to understanding “the inscrutable Joe Biden voter.” Fair is fair. “I’m pretty sure television crews did, in fact, bring us reports from every single diner in the contiguous United States — at least, those where at least one regular patron wears overalls.” And supported Donald Trump:

Never mind that nearly 3 million more of us voted against Trump four years ago; no one seemed terribly interested in our inner lives, our hopes and dreams. This time, however, the gap is too big to ignore — Biden, the president-elect, beat Trump by more than 6 million votes and counting. He won back the heartland of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He won Georgia, for heaven’s sake.

What could those voters be thinking and feeling about out in their America? “What makes them tick? Is it culture? Tribalism? Race? How did they come to their worldview, and why do they cling to it so passionately? What do they mean for the future of American democracy?”

“Venture out of your bubble, Trump supporters,” Robinson urges. He provides a reading/viewing list.

If Trump supporters want to understand why Trump’s margin of support declined, albeit just modestly, among voters 65 and older nationwide, they can visit any of the media websites that track the covid-19 pandemic. Imagine how many of these older voters will have to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas without seeing their grandchildren except via FaceTime or Zoom.

It turns out “the Biden voter” isn’t so mysterious and unknowable after all. “I, too, am America,” wrote the poet Langston Hughes. And if you haven’t read him yet, add him to the pile, too.

A contentious exchange of Election-Day posts at emptywheel led Marcy Wheeler to ponder what we need to salvage what is best about this creaky republic. Is our slavery-tainted Constitution a bit long in the tooth? In need of upgrades? Sure. But there are elements of our culture and diversity not born of that document that are worth salvaging, she argues.

“We need a new story about America,” Wheeler writes, explaining “the fracture of the myth of American Exceptionalism made Trump possible.”

In May 2016, she wrote:

But underlying that Donald Trump problem is a desperate insistence on clinging to the myth of American exceptionalism, with its more offensive parts even embraced in the mainstream. For the sake of the white men who’ve relied on those myths for their sense of dignity, but also to prevent future Trumps, it is time to start replacing that exceptionalist myth with something else.

And in April 2016, she wrote:

It is absolutely true that American workers and middle class, generally, have been losing ground. And it absolutely true that whites may perceive themselves to be losing more ground as people of color equalize outcomes, however little that is really going on. It is, further, absolutely true that large swaths of flyover country whites are killing themselves, often through addiction, at increasing rates, which seems to reflect a deep malaise.

They have lost faith in the gauzy image of America and their preeminent places in it that gave them a sense of purpose and pride. Trump promised a restoration through worship of an orange idol and his condemnation of Others 30 years of Limbaugh and Fox News taught them to blame. Especially, the people the myth-making conveniently excised from the American story but who now demand equal roles in it. Including but not limited to those the original Constitution treated as three-fifths of persons.

Wheeler writes:

Nevertheless, out of that document and a whole bunch of myth-making, we created a story that has worked to get Americans to believe in common cause for two and a half centuries. The process of that myth-making is critically important: It involved a belief in a virgin land that disappeared native people. It involved a belief in self-determination that disappeared the slaves. It came to include a notion of Manifest Destiny that excused our own imperialism.

Why that process worked is critically important too: All those disappeared people — Native Americans, Blacks and Latinos, immigrants, women — never held enough sway, collectively, to unpack the lies that our collective imagination relied on. That was why Barack Hussein Obama, seemingly the embodiment of American Exceptionalism, posed such a threat to it. And having failed to radically alter the means of power that exploited that founding myth, Obama left the ground ripe for a resurgence of white supremacy, the reality that long masqueraded as exceptionalism though its process of disappearance.

Today, in significant part as a result of four years of Trump, any premise of a common cause, of a shared American story, is utterly shattered.

Huge numbers of Republicans either believe or claim to believe that the only way to save the nation is to ensure, at all costs, that Democrats are not permitted to effectively govern. Those Republicans are willing to do real damage to this country — they’re willing to see a quarter of a million Americans die, many deaths of which were preventable, they’re willing to discount the votes of their neighbors and co-workers based on the most outrageous legal hoaxes — rather than joining together with their Democratic neighbors for a common good.

In days ahead, if we are to save the idea of America and prevent it from becoming an authoritarian behemoth, we need to find a new common story.

If you have read this far, sorry to disappoint you. She does not know what that story looks like any more than I. Rather than making America “great” for his followers, Trump has shredded what was left of the old myth both here and abroad. God help Joe Biden’s diplomats as they try to convince the rest of the world Trump’s America will not return to trash the china shop again after four to eight years of Democrats trying to restore it.

Over at Daily Kos, Bob Creamer of Democracy Partners offers “Sixteen Progressive Priorities to Defeat Trumpism.” He prefaces them by explaining:

 We will not defeat Trumpism or other right-wing, “populist” movements by lecturing, or “educating” Trump followers. We will defeat Trumpism by addressing their legitimate grievances – by creating an economy that delivers for all working people.  Or as President-elect Biden says, an economy that rewards work, not just wealth.  We must create an economy that delivers for the people on the streets of Scranton, not just Park Avenue.

This does not mean that Democrats should do more to “compromise” with the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party. Just the opposite.

Aside from ending the pandemic, there are lots of useful-sounding, progressive-y things in Creamer’s list: labor reform, infrastructure spending, a public option, a $15 minimum wage, making American government more democratic, etc. Things that if Democrats deliver will improve the lives of Trump voters as well as their own.

People weigh their well-being relative to those around them. There is strong evidence that whites often oppose actions against inequality because of “last place aversion,” the desire to ensure that there is a class of people below oneself. 

—Sean McElwee of Demos, 2015

What Creamer’s list misses: Trumpers don’t want them. Their “legitimate grievances” are not primarily economic but social.

They want the country put back the way it was, as Jesus intended, with white, male Christians at the top of the social order. It is why I get peeved when friends complain that conservatives are “voting against their best interests.” Progressives think they are showing off their clear-eyed perspective when what they have proven is they haven’t a clue what conservative voters believe are their best interests. And they are not economic.

Finding out the Earth was not the center of the universe was a rude awakening. It meant humanity was not the center of creation after all. Globalism, multiculturalism, and migration to the cities have stripped many Americans of a dignity built on the exceptionalist myth that stood them at the apex of American society (and on others’ backs). Paying them $15 per hour will help them, sure. The problem is if it will help equalize the status of others they perceive as a threat to their already shaky social positions, they will oppose it. Vigorously. They will not be placated with baubles. Trump’s faithful would rather go without than lose any more ground in a game they see as zero-sum. For others to gain status means they lose, and they are not having that. As the “Stop the Steal” protests demonstrate, they will burn the place down first.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

—LBJ to Bill Moyers, then on Johnson’s staff, 1960

The toothpaste is not going back into the tube. America’s “disappeared” are not going back into the shadows. Appeals to the common good will be unpersuasive — short of foreign or alien invasion — with people whose identities were defined by an exceptionalist myth that no longer pertains. America’s national identity as a beacon of democracy and stability lies in tatters as well. The question is: what if anything can replace it?