On Twitter, users have the option of blocking other users, which prevents them from viewing the blocker’s tweets, getting notified when they tweet, and participating in the comment thread below the blocker’s tweets. Apparently, Donald Trump’s Twitter account has started blocking people who criticize him. As of yesterday, I’m one of those people.
Yesterday, the Knight First Amendment Institute, a new outfit with a hefty endowment at Columbia University, sent a letter to the President outlining why this practice violates the First Amendment and demanding that he unblock users. You can read the letter here, but the gist of it is that the President’s account operates as a “designated public forum” for the federal govnernment and that suppressing speech on the basis of people’s political beliefs in that context is illegal. (See coverage here and here, and an argument against this logic here.)
Here is Trump spokesperson Sean Spicer explaining that Trump’s tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States”:
Spicer: Trump’s tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States.”
My case illustrates how Trump created a public forum, used for official purposes, and then excluded me from participating in that forum on the basis of my political opinions.
When Trump was elected I made a case for “drawing a new line through the political landscape: for versus against Trumpism,” and oriented my political activity as a citizen accordingly. It turns out that the most efficient way I could get this message out was in the Trump threads on Twitter, by making simple memes stating opposition to Trump or mocking him. It’s not a sophisticated operation, but it didn’t take up very much of my time, and for the effort I think it had good results. (Maybe because my Twitter identity is “verified” or I have a relatively large number of followers, my tweets seemed to appear near the top of the thread if I posted them promptly.)
And I discovered that the Trump Twitter threads are a place to meet and argue with real people, strangers from other bubbles, about the most pressing issues of the day. Sure, most of the dialogue is pointless shouting and insults, which I am naturally way above, but not all of it, and for every person shouting there are many people reading along, who may be influenced by what they see. (For example, think of the young people living in Trump families described so well by Amy Harmon.)
My memes and statements were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, according to Twitter’s analytics, often appearing right below a Trump tweet. Clearly, this is not what the President wants, but just as clearly it is one small part of how democracy works these days. Here are a few examples of images I made and posted, or comments, with links for people who aren’t blocked so you can see them, screen images to avoid that (if you follow the links you can see the discussion in the threads).
You get the idea. Maybe putting up these memes feels like carrying a sign at a protest, but in this case it’s a political forum organized by the President and limited to those he selects based on their political statements. I don’t know how this legal argument will fare in the courts, if it gets there, but in this case as in so many others, his actions are bad for democracy.
These are both true. Racism, xenophobia, misogyny, suppression of dissent, these are not new. But Trump and Trumpism also represent a turn toward all that plus an assault on constitutional democracy. It’s the resurgence of the bad side of America plus a new authoritarianism that makes it harder to resist the normal bad. I don’t need to detail this here, but I’ll quote a little more from Gopnik:
Assaults on free speech; the imprisoning of critics and dissidents; attempts, on the Russian model, likely to begin soon, to intimidate critics of the regime with fake charges and conjured-up allegations; the intimidation and intolerance of even mild dissidence (that “Apologize!” tweet directed at members of the “Hamilton” cast who dared to politely petition Mike Pence); not to mention mass deportations or attempts at discrimination by religion—all things that the Trump and his cohorts have openly contemplated or even promised—are not part of the normal oscillations of power and policy. They are unprecedented and, history tells us, likely to be almost impossible to reverse.
So, what does that mean? I think it means we take Gopnik’s advice and act like this is 1934. And John Lewis is right. If that turns out to be wrong — a false-positive read on the catastrophicness of the situation — that’s a better mistake to make than the false-negative mistake of not taking it seriously enough until it’s too late.
It means we need new strategic principles. For me, that means drawing a new line through the political landscape: for versus against Trumpism.
Which side are you on
If you are against Trump, you are on my side. Not on my side in every way or every issue, but where it counts most right now. If you’re against abortion rights, against welfare, against environmental protection, I disagree with you on all those things, and I’ll say that when we get a chance to talk. But to the extent that you march against Trump, vote against Trump’s agenda, speak out against Trumpism, or give money to organizations that do those things, you’re on my side.
I want to focus on opposing repression of dissent, corruption (and Putin), police or military abuse, and assaults on democratic norms, especially with regard to freedoms and protection for racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants. If you accidentally say something racist or sexist while you’re speaking out against Trump, we can discuss it on the side. If you support policies I hate on other issues, but you are willing to vote against Trump’s nominees or his agenda, or candidates who back him, I will speak up for you. We will argue about the rest later. And if you’re only weakly against Trump, thank you. I encourage you to stick with it and try to bring someone else along with you.
On the other hand. If you’re poor and your community is being left behind by global capitalism, with rising mortality and drug addiction, disappearing jobs and crumbling infrastructure, but you support Trump and his movement — you are not on my side. I would love to support policies to help people in your situation, and work with members of those communities that oppose Trumpism. But if you’re marching or voting for Trump, or supporting candidates or organizations that do, or fighting against immigrants or democratic institutions, I’m against you. We can work on your problems later.
It’s really bad that it’s come to this, because it means less progress, and real regression, on important issues and policies. But it’s where we are, and the sooner we get out of here, alive, the better. I could be wrong, and I’m willing to hear why I am. I don’t think you can convince me that this is really business as usual, but I’d love to be wrong on that.
But I don’t want anti-Trumpism to be just another partisan talking point. I’m not calling him a “fascist” just because I don’t like him, or even because I really don’t like him, or because he’s going to sign a repeal of Obamacare. Sure, some Democratic Party partisans are just taking advantage of the panic over Trump to wrangle leverage over the usual issues. Glenn Greenwald is right that some are too credulous about the intelligence dirt on Trump, too trusting of the CIA. But this false equivalency from him shows that he doesn’t take Trumpism as an out-of-bounds threat:
…all of this [Democrats embracing the CIA stuff] illustrates that while the Trump presidency poses grave dangers, so, too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in their flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts to undermine it.
That’s like saying, “Trump’s Muslim registry poses grave dangers, but so, too, do liberals who think wearing a safety pin makes them awesome anti-racist allies.” That’s out of whack. There has never been a political or electoral majority in America without racists; we’re going to need to be on the same side with a lot of racists to beat Trump and Trumpism. (In the end, though, winning against this might give us a good push in the right direction.)
I know we will see a lot from Republican-controlled government that looks normal-bad, things I would be complaining about if Jeb Bush had won, too. But Gopnik is right to sound the alarm at the collapse of resistance to Trump among “respectable” Republicans. The political alliance between regular Republicans and Trumpist authoritarianism makes for a more powerful rush away from normal awful American politics and toward something that’s hard or impossible to come back from. These are not “the normal oscillations of power and policy.”
In normal times, it can be good strategy to pick fights within the more progressive party in a two-party system, because the majority coalition is all blandness and weak principles, and there’s a lot of room for debate within that. But now, like it’s 1934, we need as big a majority as we can get. That’s what it means to refuse to normalize Trump.
I’m told that one point of our electoral system is to ensure representation of small states. That’s why small states get two senators even if they have tiny populations, and why each state gets at least three electors in the electoral college (equal to the size of their Congressional delegation). You could make a case for finding ways to make sure small groups are represented, even over-represented, because otherwise they would be ignored. So you discount California voters to make sure Wyoming voters get to be part of the process.
Regardless of the history, which suggests the electoral college was created to protect the interests of slave owners, it’s now the case that Whites have more power in the electoral college, because they dominate the small states. As Lara Merling and Dean Baker show, Blacks have 5% less representation, Latinos have 9% less, and Asian Americans have 7% less representation than Whites.
So it is unfair in its results by the contemporary race/ethnic distribution, but that’s not a fixed quality of the system (it’s merely very durable). Underlying the premise, though, is the idea that the identities to be represented are geographic in nature. There are some issues that have geographic boundaries, like land use or climate-related questions, but the point of an analysis like Merling and Baker’s — like much of Civil Rights law — is that identities also adhere in demographic groups, by gender, race/ethnicity, and age. So the geographic system creates inequities according the demographic system. I don’t see why we should prioritize the geographic in our electoral system, now that geography is so much less of a defining feature in our communication systems and popular culture.
What if we redid the electoral system by the demographic categories of gender, race/ethnicity and age, and then let geographic groups complain if they end up underrepresented, instead of the other way around? Before you write to the governor (again) and demand that I be fired: This does not even rise to the level of a suggestion, it’s literally just a thought.
Here’s how it would look, if we divided 435 seats across 40 demographic identity states, using data from the 2015 American Community from IPUMS.org*:
Compared with the 114 Congress (the one finishing now), this one is more diverse, with 224 instead of 108 women, 56 versus 38 Latinos, 24 versus 13 Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 8 versus 2 American Indians. Only Blacks fare a little worse, dropping form 47 to 44. This also gives us a great improvement in age diversity, as the current average age in the House is 57 and this distribution implies an average age of something like 47.
For comparison, here is the Electoral College we would get under this system, which simply adds two electors to each of these House of Representatives districts, representing their Senate delegations:
Now instead of fighting over New Hampshire or Wyoming, presidential candidates would campaign for swing-groups such as middle-aged American Indians, or young Latinos.
This system would also have a built in version of term limits feature, as people who aged out of their districts presumably would have to run in the next age group up. People who changed gender or race/ethnic identity could also switch districts.
Someone could take some voter or opinion data and figure out how our elections would turn out with this (if someone already has done this, please add it in the comments).
* Because they rounded to zero, I added one House seat to old American Indian men and women, and took one away from middle-aged White women, the largest group. Note also that we might have to redistrict this when the race categories change, as they are expected to in 2020, to add Middle Eastern / North Africans (MENAs).
Everyone is at least a little racist. But hardly any Whites really actively want to hate Blacks and people from other racial-ethnic minority groups. And I bet that includes a lot of people who are thinking of voting for Trump. So this is for people who don’t want to be haters, or even seen as haters.
Think about it this way: Voting is pretty symbolic. Your individual vote is really not going to make the difference. But it says something about who you are, to yourself at least, and to anyone else who knows.
So look at these polling results for African Americans in five key states. Between 2 and 5 out of every 100 Black voters says they support Trump:
If you vote for Trump, because you’re angry about politicians who never get anything done, or you don’t trust Hillary, or you think it’s time for a change in Washington, think about this: do you want to spend the next four or eight years knowing that you voted against virtually every Black person who you will know or meet during that time?
Maybe they’re wrong. But I think, if you’re not the hating kind, it might gnaw at you, and you might feel better if you didn’t take that stand against them. I’m not trying to change your political views in a short blog post, but I do think we’ll get along better – and you will too – if you don’t vote for Trump.
These are polarizing times in America. And what better to understand that then a highly polarized measure?
I took the forecast margin of victory for each state for Clinton and Trump, as of today, on Five Thirty Eight. The scores range roughly from -28 to +28, and I reverse them to get the positive score for each candidate (I excluded DC). Then I asked Google Correlate what searches were most correlated with each list of state scores. All the searches here are correlated with the candidate margins at .83 or higher.
Here’s the map as of today:
The Clinton list is dominated by vegetarianism and yoga, Top Chef, and the kind of annoying movies that liberals just love (Before Sunset).
The Trump list is racist anti-Obama stuff, patriotism, and, mostly, the kind of guns you don’t use for hunting. Google gives 100 for each list; I deleted those that weren’t easily categorized. (You can see the full lists here and here.) Here are the highlights:
Really, you people are so predictable.
But what of the Before Sunset-lover working in the Obama Jokes town? The Biggest Gun husband and the Vegetarian Sushi wife with their Ayurvedic Massage therapist next door? Of course, this method will never show the nuances of social life, the moments when people reach out from their silos and grasp, however fleetingly, the hands of those whom the winds of fortune and arbitrary social divisions have attempted to sweep away from them forever. And it won’t show the big, messy middle, the people who do use guns for hunting, eat tofu but aren’t vegetarian, listen to Tom Tom Club and also learn country guitar. I’d be happy to see something about them out there today.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union has a great archive of women’s representation in parliaments in most countries, from 1997 to 2016. I made this figure using the numbers for the lower houses (or single houses, if only one), which in the USA is the House of Representatives.
From 1997 to 2016, women rose from 12% to 19% of House members. During that time, for 163 countries, the average rose from 10% to 21%. When I cut the list down to 137, arbitrarily excluding a lot of very small countries, the USA slipped from 54th place to 84th place. Here’s the breakdown of changes in those countries (click to enlarge):
At this rate, in just 36 more years the House will get to the level of women’s representation that Hanna Rosin said Congress was at in 2012.
[This was posted on July 27 and then revised on July 29 after Hillary Clinton’s speech]
It’s all harmless political shenanigans until a racist mob murders Vincent Chin.*
It’s amazing how the new figureheads of both major parties are now pretending to oppose globalization, outsourcing, and the corporate “free trade” agenda that they both have spent their professional lives furthering. It wasn’t long ago that I taught in my stratification class that this agenda was the one thing we could be sure both parties and the big money behind them wouldn’t give up. Never say never, but I’m still pretty sure that’s still true.
There are good reasons to oppose this agenda, but most of them aren’t in America. If you want to talk about slave labor, exploitation, and environmental degradation in the new manufacturing centers of the world, then I would be happy to listen to you talk about the harmful effects of those practices “here at home” too. But if you just want to bash China, then you’re a racist, and no thank you.
Case in point, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey at the Democratic National Convention the other day. Here’s his speech, followed by some of the text and my comments:
Casey quoted his father, the former governor:
“The sweat and blood of working men and women who built Pennsylvania forged the industrial revolution in our country, and outproduced the world.”
How touching, attributing the industrial revolution the efforts of the working class. It reminds me of when another brave Pennsylvania governor, Democrat Robert Pattison, reached across the aisle, helping out Republican industrialists by lending them the National Guard to put down the Homestead steelworkers.
I assume today’s Democratic politician will now go on to recognize the working class of today’s manufacturing centers, who, through their sweat and blood are outproducing the world and building the middle class in their countries. Oh right, Casey is American.
What about Donald Trump? Donald trump says he stands for workers, and that he’ll put American first, but that’s not how he’s conducted himself in business. Where are his, quote, tremendous products made? Dress shirts: Bangladesh. Furniture: Turkey. Picture frames: India. Wine glasses: Slovenia. Neckties: China. China! Why would Donald Trump make products in every corner of the world, but not in Altoona, Erie, or here in Philadelphia? Well, this is what he said, quote, outsourcing is not always a terrible thing. Wages in America quote, are too high. And then he complained about companies moving jobs overseas because, quote, we don’t make things anymore. Really? … [examples of stuff made in America]. Donald Trump hasn’t made a thing in his life, except a buck on the backs of working people. If he is a champion of working people, I’m the starting center for the 76ers! The man who wants to make America great, doesn’t make anything in America! If you believe that outsourcing has been good for working people, and has raised incomes for the middle class, then you should vote for Donald Trump. … We need to making good paying jobs for everyone here at home, so that everyone who works hard can get ahead and stay there.
Yes, the great conflict of our time is between “China” and “working people.” Maybe one we can all link arms and together put down striking Chinese workers to keep the price down on our iPhones and Wal-Mart junk.
The Democratic National Convention was very on-message. In Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech the next day, she said:
If you believe that we should say “no” to unfair trade deals, that we should stand up to China, that we should support our steelworkers and autoworkers and homegrown manufacturers — join us.
She gave no definition of what it means to “Stand up to China,” though her website says she will insist on trade deals that raise wages and create good-paying jobs (presumably meaning in the US). That’s not important — the important thing communicated to her audience is she’s against China and for American workers. Then she went through the same list of Trump production locations that Casey did, before concluding, “Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again – well, he could start by actually making things in America again.” The current U.S. trade deficit in goods (as opposed to services) is about $62 billion — per month. Virtually all Americans are dependent on imported goods (including, apparently, Clinton, whose Nina McLemore suits are made from European and Asian fabrics). No major politician is seriously against this. Trump hiring U.S. workers to make his ties would make about as much difference as Clinton buying clothes with U.S. fabrics, which is basically none. It’s just symbolism, and the symbolism here is China is bad. Unless you join this kind of talk with explicit concern for the (much greater, obviously) suffering and exploitation of Chinese workers, I think this just feeds American racism.
Decades later, Vincent Chin resonates with me. There is debate about whether racism was the real motivation behind Vincent Chin’s murder, and it wasn’t as simple as a random lynch mob. Despite the legend, it is not the case that the auto workers just killed him because they falsely believed he was Japanese. But a witness at the bar said they blamed him for them being out of work before they fought. She said:
I turned around and I heard Mr. Ebens say something about the ‘little motherfuckers.’ And Vincent said, ‘I’m not a little motherfucker,’ and he said, ‘Well, I don’t know if you’re a big one or a little one.’ Then he said something about, ‘Well, because of y’all motherfuckers we’re out of work.’*
After losing the first round, Ronald Ebins and his stepson, Michael Nitz, hunted Chin down and killed him with a baseball bat, a crime for which they ultimately served no jail time.
My 8-year-old Chinese immigrant daughter, who learns all about how racism and bullying are bad and MLK is great in her neoliberal public American elementary school, is routinely offended and hurt by the China-bashing she hears from Democrats as well as Trump (she supported Bernie but is willing to back Hillary to stop Trump).
Hillary says we should protect our children from having to listen to Trump’s nastiness — she even has ad on that, which I’ve personally witness liberals tearing up over:
So, what about the people making speeches at your convention, spitting out the word China! like it’s a disease? “What example will we set for them?”
If the new normal of politics is both parties bashing foreigners while they pretend to oppose globalization — and then pursue the same policies anyway, which, face it, you know they will — then what have we gained? It seems to me there is a small chance Clinton will negotiate better trade deals, to the benefit workers (U.S. or Chinese), and a much greater chance her rhetoric will stoke nativism and racism. As Trump’s megaphone has drawn the White supremacists out from under their rocks, the new fake-anti-TPP Hillary has given a bigger platform to this kind of obnoxious chauvinism.
* The 1987 documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin, which includes that clip, is worth watching (it’s online here, for now).
