I do not condone the violence on either side. But I’m sorry, when you have just elected a president who has given license to bullies and attackers for months, it is time for Trump voters also to say “this is not OK.”
Spectators applaud an LGBT pride march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
And if DT is really going to take his own “president for all Americans” election-night rhetoric seriously, he needs to issue a far stronger and more convincing demand to stop that behavior than the wimpy few words he reluctantly issued after a CBS reporter asked him directly to rebuke the attackers. And those who voted for DT for reasons that have nothing to do with the subjugation of women, people of color, and non-Christians need to speak out loudly and publicly. Hate crimes of any kind are not OK—and the Right as well as the Left both need to say so.
Trump voters who refuse to speak out and call for cessation of the violence are proving Hillary’s “deplorables” comment. The way to prove her wrong (and I think she is) is to speak out loudly that you, as a Trump voter, will not tolerate violence and threats against racial/religious/sexual minorities and women. That we as a country are better than this. That we can disagree and still be a democracy.
I am putting a safety pin on my coat as a sign that I am someone willing to intervene if I am a witness to a hate crime. I’ve been trained in nonviolence and conflict de-escalation (though it was long ago). If you’ve had some training, think about joining that movement. And if you haven’t, find a way to get that training. Google “nonviolence training” with your city’s or state’s name. And if DT actually implements his proposed Muslim registry, I will be part of a movement to flood that database with non-Muslim registrants so it becomes useless. These are personal risks I am willing to take. We have seen too many times what happens when good people do nothing while others perpetuate evil in their name.
I understand if those actions might be more than you’re willing to do; here’s one that’s totally safe: Sign this petition. Please note in the comments section of THIS that you’ve signed, or better yet, share your own personal letter that you’ve written to Trump.
Two kernels of wisdom to help us all understand what happened on Tuesday.
First, this story in the Boston Globe, “The red state no one saw coming.” A few things worth noting there. First, Hillary’s campaign has only themselves to blame for being complacent, for not shoring up a weak base in states, like Wisconsin, they took for granted.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
When Sanders trounced her by 13 points in the Wisconsin primary, she didn’t see the warning signs. She didn’t see that people were hurt and angry and demanding change. She didn’t bother to campaign in Wisconsin, while Trump visited five times in the past few months. She didn’t even start running ads there until the final week. And a thin wisp of a margin lost her the state. Rinse and repeat in other places, and you see the pattern. The Globe article notes that some Sanders voters switched to Trump, and this pattern (in my very unscientific observation via Facebook and elsewhere) shows up all across the country. Others, of course, stayed home or voted third-party.
Yes, there were those who voted for Trump out of bigotry. But according to Elizabeth Warren, in a powerful post-election speech, more of his voters were voting for economic change. They supported (she claims) the liberal parts of his agenda, such as trade reform, restoring Glass-Steagall (which I don’t remember him supporting), and rebuilding our country’s infrastructure while creating jobs. Undeterred by the lack of specifics and in many cases holding their noses over his character issues, they voted for a Republican with an old-line Democrat domestic agenda and an appeal to the racist populism that propelled the Democratic Party even into the 1960s. The above link takes you to the video. Full transcript: https://www.elizabethwarren.com/blog/president-elect-donald-trump. Watch or read it; there’s much to learn about how we frame this election and where we go from here.
The US election is tomorrow, and I’m hoping for a result that utterly repudiates the racism, misogyny, and general hatred spewing from the mouth and keyboard of Donald Trump. That hope got me thinking about a column that ran in our local paper this summer.
The writer is progressive and I usually agree with him. But when he wrote about his experiences as a counterprotestor at a Trump rally, tossing insults at the attenders with his child in tow, I had a growing sense of unease.
Children from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, D.C. help First Lady Michelle Obama plant the White House Vegetable Garden, April 9, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton)
He forgot Michelle Obama’s excellent advice at the Democratic Convention not to stoop to the level of those we oppose.
Yes, it’s very easy to get caught up in a temporary good feeling, hurling insults at Trumpsters and feeling like you’re striking a blow for what’s right and true. But it negates the other side’s humanity. It demeans people. It ignores the phrase popularized by 17th-century Quaker theologian George Fox, “that of God in every [hu]man.”
And it accomplishes the reverse of the desired goal! No one’s mind is changed by being insulted. If anything, when people are belittled, they are more likely to harden their hearts, reinforce their defenses, and stand resolute against what they perceive as the rowdy mob.
Think about the mindset of a Trump supporter encountering a protestor hurling insults. Many of Trump’s supporters are already feeling attacked; that’s why they respond to ideas like building a wall to keep Mexicans out or blocking any Muslim from entering the US. When they get insulted, they’re going to feel even more attacked. Instead of changing their minds, they’re more likely to come away from an encounter with a name-calling protestor feeling more justified in their condemnation of protestors. Instead of being touched at a human level, they wall themselves into the gated communities of a mind that now finds more safety in Trump’s lies and empty threats.
He writes, “what became clear as we shouted back and forth is that there is no common ground whatsoever between Trumpistas and the rest of us.”
But I disagree. When we focus on our differences, on the “otherness” of our “enemy,” we lose sight of what binds us together—yet our commonalities are still there. We all want a word where we feel safe, can earn a decent living, and can raise our children to feel like they matter in this world.
Are there some Trump supporters who are attracted to Trump’s blatant racism and misogyny, the constant lying, incessant bullying and name calling, and all the rest of his hateful message? Of course. But I don’t think it’s anything close to a majority of his voters. He has learned the fine art of framing. Helped by a vitriolic, slanderous 20+ year campaign against his Democratic opponent in right-wing media, he has framed his opponents as crooked and incompetent liars, who are bringing this country down, and he portrays himself as the Messianic savior who can turn the whole thing around, even without clear policy positions—and he’s managed to get enough people to believe this to win the nomination.
Trump is a master of crowd psychology. He speaks to the amygdala, the “reptilian” part of the brain that doesn’t care about facts—and he knows how to work an audience. I’m guessing that he’s probably read many works on manipulating the psyche, including Neurolinguistic Programming. I’m guessing that he has carefully studied the methods the Nazis used to get elected in 1933. This makes his refusal to be bound by facts more understandable. Catch him in a lie and he denies he ever said it, or denies it means what it appears to—because to admit and apologize would pry loose his grip on the minds of his followers. If we mirror his nastiness, we fertilize the field where his metaphorical bacteria can grow. But when we take the high road, we defuse his manipulations with a powerful natural antibiotic: the truth of our common humanity.
Let’s not stoop to Trump’s level. Let’s honor Michelle Obama’s call to take the high road. Rather than call our opponents nasty names, we must win them over to the promise of a better world than Trump can offer: a world that helps them achieve our common universal desires—without stomping on the backs of others.
“When they go low, we go high.” Let’s go really high tomorrow, and show that as a country, we are better than that.
My friend Kathleen Gage posted a quote from Albert Schweitzer about people sometimes reacting with hostility or obstruction to your attempts to improve the world. And then she said.
So if you are doing good for praise and accolades, you are doing it for the wrong reasons and it is no longer a good deed. It is an act of manipulation. Do good because you are called to do good and for no other reason.
I’m going to gently disagree. I agree with the first two statements. But I disagree about “for no other reason.” I’m guessing that really what we have is different definitions of the concept of a calling—that mine is a lot stricter than hers. And that’s because, a few times in my life, I’ve experienced a genuine calling: a feeling that I was put into this place at this time to do something very specific—and that I had to do it.
We do good for lots of other reasons than because we are called to: to show your children what is possible. To make conditions better for others. To improve the lot of a group facing oppression that you don’t belong to–or that you do. To right an immediate wrong. Not all of these rise to the level of a calling. But all of them (and far too many more to list). I became an activist at age 12 and remain one. Five times, I have felt that calling—to:
1. Do what I could to stop the Vietnam war
2. Move the country away from a reliance on nuclear power (maybe the worst technology ever invented)
3. Protest publicly when the US bombed Libya (and I was the *only* protester on the first day, but by a few days later, there was a whole group of us out in front of the courthouse)
4. Save the mountain two miles from my house (with a massive outpouring of community support, won that one in just 13 months!)
View of the Mount Holyoke Range, showing the land saved by Save the Mountain in 2000.
5. My current mission of showing the business community how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—not through guilt and shame, but through enlightened self-interest
Yet these are only the tiniest fraction of thousands of actions I’ve taken for social change. The rest were not a “calling” but simply the right thing to do. They were not done for self-aggrandizement. If that had been my goal, I would have taken far faster and easier paths (like the Internet millionaire meme). Some of them were tiny and easy, like signing a petition. Others consumed years of my life, like the time I spent building what we now think of as the LGBTQ movement or my involvement in changing the politics of the city I lived in for 17 years, and the small town where I’ve lived for the past 18. Most were somewhere between, like serving on committees for grassroots groups or local governments.
That said, I gleefully share that my current calling is the most exciting and meaningful work I’ve ever taken on.
When have you felt a calling? What was it for and what was the result?
Here in Massachusetts, we get to vote on some interesting referenda.
Lifting the Charter School Cap
UPDATE, OCTOBER 6, 2016: I’ve been convinced in the intervening weeks that this particular charter school vote is not one I can support. I am not convinced of the motives of this bill’s supporters, and I see a greater threat to the public schools in the way this measure is structured. Below is what I’d written on September 18, before I was really aware of the issues with how this referendum is structured. All my other points about the other issue and candidate remain accurate.
One is on lifting the current cap on charter schools. These schools are publicly funded and privately run, funded primarily by a state per-pupil allotment. They range from liberal experiments in educational democracy to corporate-sponsored throwbacks to long-abandoned educational models promoting rote learning and obedience. At the moment, 32,000 Massachusetts students are on waiting lists for charter schools.
Preschool girl with a creative project. Photo by Anissa Thompson.
It’s important to separate whether the charter school experiment is a good thing from the funding formula. Bias disclosure: both of my kids attended charter schools for elementary through high school, so I’m a quadruple alumni parent. It’s also worth pointing out that my wife and I both attended the same New York City high school for gifted children. This was a public school, but in many ways the experience was closer to an academic-achievement-oriented charter school in today’s world.
The switch came for us when the public school second grade teacher insisted on teaching reading by lowest common denominator. Our daughter, who had always loved school through preschool, kindergarten, and first grade, very quickly started hating it. She didn’t want to sit through whole-class reading lessons using a book with two words on each page, paced to the slowest kids in the class–and the school administration was not responsive. We moved her to Hilltown Cooperative Charter Public School, an arts-based school that emphasizes love of learning through multiple modalities–and she thrived there.
We worried that my son, five years younger than my daughter, could have been a bullying victim in the traditional public school, as I was. He was a sensitive, feminine, non-sports-playing classical musician, avid reader, and a member of a tiny ethnic minority in our town. And our town’s school culture is heavily focused on sports. But he did well in the zero-bullying-allowed culture at Hilltown. Both of my kids went on to thrive in the performing arts charter high school they attended afterward (which was, incidentally, much more ethnically and racially diverse than our town public school). My son drew on that training to attend a major music conservatory for both his undergrad and graduate studies.
Hilltown also did its best to follow its mission and be a lab school for new educational methods, which it was eager to share with other area schools. However, the school’s outreach efforts were rebuffed over and over again. My wife was on the board for a while, and she told me how almost every outreach gesture was brushed away by the local traditional public schools.
I vote an enthusiastic yes for the idea of charter schools–but the funding formula borders on criminal IMHO. Removing resources from the traditional public schools just adds to the spiral of despair, increases bureaucracy, denies resources to kids who are in many cases already begging for more, and cuts off real learning.
Yet I will vote for more charter schools–because they were there for my kids when traditional public schools failed them–but reluctantly, because I think the funding formula strikes a blow against public schools with every student who leaves. And whether or not the vote passes, I think we charter school supporters have to be part of fixing that rotten funding formula. And as a vote to give a few of those 32,000 waitlisted students the same opportunities my children enjoyed.
Recreational Marijuana
I will also vote, reluctantly, for pot legalization, though I don’t like the way the industry is moving. I see it becoming another outpost that extracts money from the poor, uses questionable marketing tactics, and encourages people to detach from reality rather than step up to the plate and work for change. It’s also likely to concentrate clout in the hands of a few big players, squeezing out any mom-and-pop businesses. And I worry about fostering a culture of chemical dependence, and of course I worry about problems when people drive while stoned.
However, we already have all of that, with alcohol. And pot is actually a much more socially benign form of blocking the real world than alcohol. Pot smokers don’t get aggressive or violent, and don’t drive nearly as dangerously, as drunks. And criminalizing this behavior causes deep and lasting damage. It:
Ruins the lives of people who are using a much milder drug than many legal ones
Diverts scarce law enforcement and criminal justice resources away from crimes that actually hurt people
Causes a tremendous financial burden to taxpayers (it’s not cheap to keep someone in jail for several years) and contributes to prison overcrowding
Jacks up prices to levels that may lead to property crime
Once again, I’m voting for the lesser of evils. Criminalization is a failed solution.
The Presidential Race
And yes, dammit, I will vote reluctantly for a deeply flawed Democratic presidential candidate who in many other years might not get my vote, even though I live in a “safe” state where I could vote third-party, and have voted for independent candidates in the past.
I want such an overwhelming margin of defeat for Trump’s agenda of racism bullying, misogyny, lying, cheating his suppliers, suppression of the media, egomania, etc. that he never shows his face in politics again. Let’s compare Clinton and Trump:
She is far too likely to get us into another war. He would make us a puppet of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Her support of Israel’s ultra-right government is troubling. His support of anti-Arab and anti-black and anti-Latino positions is equally troubling. And his consistent egging his supporters on toward physical violence against dissenters is straight out of the Nazi playbook.
She has a history of standing up for the rights of women and children. He embraces racial stereotyping and stands up only for the rights of his own various business enterprises—including the “right” to cheat vendors and lenders out of legitimate payment.
She’s uncomfortable with the press. He actually bans reporters from media outlets he doesn’t like.
She embraces secrecy in ways that make me deeply uncomfortable. He says the first thing that comes into his mind, regardless of the implications–but is the first major party candidate in decades to refuse to release his tax returns, which makes me wonder what he’s hiding.
I could go on and on. If you want more, start with longtime political observer Adolph Reed’s article, Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It’s Important. And to those on the Left who say a Trump presidency would revitalize the opposition, I would respond that repression doesn’t often create a climate of change. For every success like the freedom struggles in South Africa and India, there are many more like Prague Spring being crushed by the Russians–where the hopes and reams of the people are squashed like bugs. We didn’t see a popular uprising during Reagan’s or even George W. Bush’s presidency; why would we suddenly see one under Trump and his suppression of the press?
In other words, I find myself facing the lesser-of-evils in three different votes on my November ballot. And while I can’t say I’m OK with it, I find voting for the lesser evil better than the non-action that triggers the greater evil. Better still: taking action to get voting reforms so we no longer need to vote lesser-evil.
Mind you, I share your distrust of electronic voting machines without paper backup. Yes, they can be manipulated. They likely were in 2000 and 2004.
Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/
But you will lose because you underestimate the decency of the American people. Your views AND your tactics are so repugnant that you even got ME to vote for Hillary Clinton—not because I’m so in love with her (actually, I have lots of issues with her), but because I want your margin of defeat to be so “yuge” that it dwarfs the margins of even Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern in 1972. I’ve voted third-party before, and there’s a third-party candidate this year that I could feel somewhat comfortable voting for.
You will lose because of your racism…your misogyny…your constant bullying and name calling…your attempts to shame people for being disabled, losing a son who defended our country, surviving years of torture and horrible conditions as a POW who stood true to his beliefs…your untrustable temper…your veiled threats of violence…your refusal to disclose your finances, which the New York Times called “a maze of debts and opaque ties…your 40-year history of cheating small business owners, lying, and showing your contempt for others.
You will lose, by a landslide, because you do not speak for the American people. The American people are better than you—and we deserve better leadership than you offer.
The two big messages of the Democratic Convention were Hope and Inclusion. Hope, of course, was one of the two themes (along with Change) that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008.
I have plenty of issues with both Obama and with Hillary Clinton—but government is supposed to be bipartisan, not spoil-sport-losers-blocking everything. The Democrats even allowed George W. Bush to govern, despite his awful, destructive policies from which the country is still recovering. That Obama has been able to get anything done in this climate (and as those two links above prove, he’s done quite a bit) is remarkable. That the Republican Party has thwarted the will of the people over and over again these 8 years is shameful.
Obama also has a tendency to “roll over and play dead” unnecessarily. To name one example, that he gave up so easily on filling the Supreme Court vacancy caused by Scalia’s death is shocking—and very bad precedent. As a former community organizer, Obama should have had a clue about how to break he deadlock—keep the apparatus that twice elected him president active, to deluge Republican legislators with calls and letters supporting particular pieces of Obama’s agenda—to keep people involved and motivated while at the same time disassembling Republican intransigence, making its revelry in being “The Party of No” politically difficult. Obama could have organized a backlash in the 2010 election and accumulated massive majorities in both houses. But he let his eager champions wither on the vine.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
Inclusion may not be as powerful as hope, but it’s a very strong meme nonetheless. This year’s Republican candidate openly embraces hostility to inclusion—attacking Mexicans and Muslims along with immigrants in general, mocking disabled people, and even attacking the patriotism of decorated war hero Senator John McCain. So it’s a good move for Hillary Clinton to reclaim the emotional territory she gave up to both Sanders and Trump during primary season—and in this case, I do think it’s genuine. The first night of the convention, especially, was all about outreach to those who’ve felt disenfranchised (including the millions of supporters of Bernie Sanders). Clinton’s good dose of Policy Wonk may also be the antidote to Trump’s sketchy sound-bite promises about how he would govern.
The themes of inclusion, hope, and competence were in tremendous contrast with the Republican Convention, whose dominant message was fear—expressed in xenophobia. The other message of the Republicans was “we don’t have to give a crap about people we can beat up”–a big rallying point for those who agree, but a big push-away for anyone who might be a potential victim–and that’s a LOT of people. This is essentially the message of fascism, and it scares me to see it coming out of the mouth (and Twitter feed) of a nominated major-party candidate for President.
And this is why I will vote for Hillary even though my own politics are closer to Jill Stein’s, and even though I live in a state that will vote Democratic no matter what. I am not thrilled about voting for Hillary, but I will vote for her. I consider Trump the greatest threat to democracy and liberty in my lifetime. His repeated use of Hitlerian memes is very troubling. And I think very deliberate. I want Trump’s margin of defeat to be so “YUGE” that we never see his ugly politics again.
Looking at the election as a whole, I’d bet that Trump, a master marketer for decades, has studied NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming—an extremely powerful approach to getting inside people’s minds through the use of deep psychological triggers) and is far better at getting his (loathsome) message across than Clinton is. The Republicans have been using sound bites that appear to be based in NLP techniques for over 30 years, but Trump has taken it much deeper. Clinton, by contrast, is an old-school politician who hasn’t quite figured out the 21st-century shift in marketing from push to interactive. And Sanders has probably not studied marketing but he’s a natural. His brand is wrapped in an integrity that neither party nominee can offer—and he has a long background in (and deep understanding of) community organizing as well as electoral politics. When he started as a politician, Vermont was not exactly a progressive hotspot. I believe he helped create the climate where his state is now among the bluest in the nation.
Interestingly, all three are around the same age, spanning from Clinton’s 68 to Sanders’ 74 (Trump just turned 70)—yet the oldest, Sanders, had the strongest appeal to youth. And the younger candidates, from O’Malley to Rubio, were all eliminated months ago.
Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Although I’m a strong Bernie supporter, I disagree with the article’s sanctimonious tone. Sometimes, you do have to suck it up and vote the lesser evil. I personally think this is one of those times. After California, Bernie has to accept that he made a really good run, but it’s over. He got farther than pretty much anyone thought he would, and I’m glad.
I’ve voted third-party before, and might do so again. But not this time. Yes, even though we’re faced with two secretive people, each with a history of serious ethics breaches, I will vote for the Democrat this time.
Clinton will be reasonably good on domestic policy (and will recognize that the Left brought her to power) if elected. As a consistent war hawk who can’t see any fault in Israel’s ultra-right-wing government, she’ll be horrible on foreign policy, which ought to be her strong suit–and especially bad on the Middle East. I predict another war during her term. She’ll be middling-poor on energy policy. These are issues that mean a great deal to me.
But she will appoint decent people, including to the Supreme Court. She’ll be socially liberal on a number of issues, and will likely do some good for poor people as long as it doesn’t bother her bankster friends. Ordinary people’s lives are likely to get better under her administration, as they did under Obama.
And most of all, voting for Hillary is the best thing we can do to prevent President Trump.
Trump and his very scary supporters smell like fascism to me. A Trump presidency will very quickly displace GWB (who I used to refer to as His Imperial Delusional Majesty) as the worst president in history. Trump will be far worse on energy, on poverty, on international relations (where he really doesn’t have a clue), on immigration, on minority rights, women’s rights, and almost every other issue you could name. He might be slightly less willing to go to war than Hillary, but when he does, it will be much uglier. And his response to international incidents will be belligerent enough that other people will start wars with us and he won’t have a choice.
And his thugs will roam the streets, enforcing their brand of nativism, attacking people who don’t look or think like them.
If the US had proportional representation, instant runoff voting, or any of the other reforms we’ve been working for over the decades, we’d have a choice. But in a faceoff between a no-ethics/me-first bullying fascist and an ethically challenged secrecy-loving corporate neolib, to not recognize the very real difference is slitting our own throats.
I want Trump’s margin of defeat to be so crushing that his movement goes away for 20 or 30 years. For that, I’m willing to hold my nose and vote for Hillary. This time.
Bernie Sanders said two things worth noting the other day, at the same event. When asked at a Town Hall meeting how to convince Bernie supporters to vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee, he responded, “it is “incumbent on her” to win over his supporters. Specifically, he pointed out that he doesn’t exercise control over his supporters and nor should he, and that many have a deep suspicion of a candidate with such close ties to Wall Street. He even gave her a road map: endorse his Medicare-for-ALL healthcare plan.
At the same event, he announced that he would do “everything in my power to keep the Republicans out of the White House.”
She still does not get that Bernie is not a politician in charge of a machine in the old style of politics. He finds himself at the forefront of a people’s movement that he does not control. Bernie can endorse and I’m sure will endorse Hillary if she is a nominee, but that doesn’t mean he is able to overcome his supporters’ massive and justified skepticism of her belief systems and her actions. Once again, he has spoken the truth; she does have to win them over.
And Hillary needs these people. Independents and left-leaning Democrats will be major factors in November. If they stay home, we get whichever monster emerges from the Republican convention. If they show up, we get a Democrat.
I have serious issues with Hillary Clinton, and particularly her foreign policy. I worry that she’s too much of a war-hawk and way too comfortable with the worst excesses of Israel’s ultra-right government. I don’t love her cluelessness about people’s movements and her coziness with Wall Street. And while she’s obviously extremely smart, she’s done some really dumb things over and over again. I don’t expect any significant progressive shift under a Hillary Clinton administration.
In the past, including in 2000, I’ve voted 3rd party. Of course, I have the luxury of living in a state where my vote doesn’t count anyway. Knowing that Massachusetts was safely Democratic made it easy to vote my conscience and cast my vote for Nader.
Yet, if she’s the nominee, I will hold my nose and vote for her. The prospect of either a Trump or Cruz presidency is so distasteful that I want the margins of victory to be enormous; this year, I want to be counted in that victory margin, and not pushed off to the side with a Green Party vote that nobody pays any attention to. Under Clinton, I would expect some attention to economic policies that help poor people—as a sop to Sanders supporters, if nothing else—and some good stuff on women’s issues. I would expect excellent Supreme Court nominees.
And, unfortunately, I would expect once again to be out in the streets with thousands of others, doing my best to keep us from being sucked into whatever war HRC would get us into.
The US presidential race is full of outsiders this year. Trump gets lots of attention in the media–but Sanders seems to be having more of an impact on policy questions, and on bringing disenfranchised-feeling voters in from outside the electoral process.
There are many parallels between Sanders on the left and Trump on the right–both of them attracting attention for being firmly OUTSIDE the mainstream, and both waging far more successful campaigns than the pundits predicted. And they both look and sound like the New Yorkers they are.
But in many other ways other ways, of course, they’re completely different: Unlike Trump, Sanders is…
1. Seriously concerned about making things better for those who are not wealthy, and basing this on a 50-year record of activism (vs. concern only about making things better for Trump and a few others of enormous class privilege).
2. Thoughtful, willing to engage on issues, analyzes more deeply than most candidates with charisma.
3. A populist fundraising champion who does not fund his campaign with–and thus is not beholden to–corporate money or party money, but from millions of ordinary people. I don’t think this has been done before on this scale (vs. Trump self-funding out of his personal fortune and claiming that this makes him honest because he’s the one doing the buying of politicians instead of being bought by them)
4. Someone who tells the truth (Trump has been caught in more lies than any of the others).
5. A successful coalition builder who has a track record of working well with people who think differently
But even Cruz and Rubio (and certainly dropouts Carson and Fiorina) are outliers too. It is scary to see the Republican Party start to coalesce around the very scary Ted Cruz, who only looks rational because Trump is so far in right field that he moves the public perception of what’s mainstream. When Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (a slasher of the safety net) is considered a centrist, we have a serious distortion in perception vs. reality.
So the big lesson I take away is this: when four out of the five most popular candidates this year are outside the mainstream, the mainstream had better look at why, and what they can do about it. With the exception of Clinton, all the mainstream candidates are out of the race–even presumptive GOP nominee (as of last summer) Jeb Bush.
Me? I agree with at least 80% of what Sanders says, and was happy to vote for him in our March 1 Massachusetts primary.
Oh yes, and let’s not forget the role of the media in king/queen making and unmaking. One of Sanders’ other strengths is in engaging millennials who are good at creating their OWN (social) media–while defeating the myth that a self-declared socialist can’t run a serious campaign for national office in the US.
