Trump’s Speech: Triumph of the Will

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Comparisons between any modern-day political figure and Adolf Hitler have become decidedly unfashionable. Michael Lind pote Politico post from March 8 called “Quit Comparing Trump to Hitler!” (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/trump-hitler-comparisons-213711) that essentially said people who did that were making Trump seem decidedly worse than he really is. Like others who have questioned the validity of any comparison between the New York developer and the Nazi Führer, Lind trotted out George Orwell’s quote from 1946 — just after his native Britain and its allies had beaten the real Nazis at a terrible cost in blood and wealth — that “the word ‘fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” (By the early 1950’s that would be true, at least in the U.S., of “socialism” as well.)

Hitler comparisons are designed not to facilitate rational debate, but to short-circuit it. Anyone who compares a political opponent to Hitler is saying that this person is so evil we can’t even afford to take their ideas seriously, much less let them anywhere near political power. So I don’t make the comparison lightly, but after watching a good deal of the Republican convention in Cleveland July 18-21 I couldn’t help but be reminded of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will. Made in 1934 at the Sixth Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, Germany, Triumph of the Will is one of the two greatest Right-wing propaganda films ever made (D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation from 1915 is the other) and a movie that still chills today not only because it was made under Nazi auspices but because it shows them as they wanted us to see them.

Riefenstahl was relatively uninterested in what the Nazis actually had to say. What attracted her to them was they had promised to end the destructive partisan feuding and street violence that had sandbagged Germany’s previous attempt at democracy, the Weimar Republic of 1918-1932. Throughout her film she surrounds Hitler with a godlike aura as thousands of young men, marching in strict formation and looking as much alike as possible, pay tribute to him en masse. Like many of Hitler’s supporters, she responded to his portrayal of himself as “a man of destiny,” an embodiment of Germany’s “racial will” and someone uniquely suited to overcome the humiliation of losing World War I and having the “hard peace” of Versailles imposed on it. Though he may not have used these exact words, virtually every piece of rhetoric out of Hitler’s mouth was a promise to end the influence of Jews and others he considered evil, and single-handedly “make Germany great again.”

What I saw during the Republican convention seemed in many particulars — especially when Trump was giving his 78-minute acceptance speech and the hall, half full at best on previous nights, was packed — like a remake of Triumph of the Will. Of course, there were obvious differences. The C-SPAN cameras were being positioned by functional directors instead of a visionary filmmaking genius like Riefenstahl. We were also seeing the event in real time instead of two years later (Triumph of the Will, filmed in 1934, wasn’t released until 1936 because Riefenstahl spent that long on post-production).

But what we were seeing — and, even more, what we were hearing, especially from the seemingly endless procession of speakers named Trump, not only the man himself but virtually all his adult children — sounded themes that were totalitarian in general and Nazi in particular, notably the cult of personality consciously being built around Trump and the sense that he, personally — not anything he stood for or said he would do — was being presented as America’s one and only chance for salvation. As Trump himself said, during a speech that was mostly a description of hell on earth and a presentation of him as the only person who can bring it salvation, “I alone can fix it.”

While Left-wing dictators — Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chávez — have also built cults of personality around themselves, it is the Right’s totalitarians who have presented themselves as literally the embodiment of the state they intend to govern. This goes back even farther than King Louis XIV of France, who famously said, “L’etat, c’est moi” — “I am the state.” As German scholar Michael Rademacher argues in an essay comparing the Nazis to the fictitious state of Oceania in George Orwell’s novel 1984 (http://www.verwaltungsgeschichte.de/hitler.html), “Hitler was not only presented by Nazi propaganda as a ‘savior,’ from reading [Hitler’s book] Mein Kampf one can get the impression that Hitler indeed thought of himself as a Christ-like savior figure.”

It’s this overlay of quasi-religious belief and fervor that marks the Right-wing dictator and sets him (and it’s almost always a him, not a her) apart from totalitarians of the Left. In his convention speech, again and again Donald Trump presented himself as a unique authority figure, one whom the universe had brought into being because his country was so beset by existential crises only someone with his unique set of powers and gifts can make things right. As Carl Martz of Redlands mentioned in a letter published in the July 23 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-donald-trump-speech-readers-20160723-snap-story.html), “There was one glaring omission in Trump’s speech: He never mentioned Congress.”

Ironically, given how many of the other speakers at the Republican convention condemned President Obama for governing by executive order instead of asking Congress to approve his actions, Trump presented his presidency as a sort of plebiscitary dictatorship in which, once elected, he can do just about anything he likes. Trump offered himself to the nation not as a democratically elected leader, subject to the limitations of a Constitution of which Trump is so ignorant he doesn’t know how many articles it has, but as a Führer. As Martz put it, “He seemed to view American government as consisting of the president with unlimited powers and Supreme Court justices whom he will control. Congress? Democrats? Compromise? Filibusters? It’s as if they do not exist.”

And the cult of personality Trump has created around himself is echoed in the way his most loyal, committed supporters feel about him. In a June 21 Los Angeles Times article called “The Church of Trump” (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-manseau-trump-religious-movement-20160621-snap-story.html), Peter Manseau argued, “The appeal of Trumpism for some Christians, as well as for many who claim no faith at all, might be that it functions as something like a religion in its own right. Indeed, if we consider his movement as fundamentally religious, in the broad sense of the term, rather than strictly political, his otherwise surprising success begins to make a lot of sense.”

Manseau cited French philosopher and sociologist Émile Durkheim (1857-1917), who preceded both Hitler’s and Trump’s movements but predicted a lot about them and their faith-based appeals. Durkheim argued that religion, in the broader sense, was a system of beliefs and practices that united a community by bringing it a sense of “collective effervescence” which “often reaches such a point that it causes unheard-of actions. … The passions released are of such an impetuosity that they can be restrained by nothing.”

“That Trump sees the world starkly in terms of winners and losers has become shorthand for his simplistic thinking, but as he uses these terms they also map neatly onto Durkheim’s categories,” Manseau argued. “He gives his followers access to the sacred — winning — while offering protection from the profane influence of Muslims, Mexicans and low-energy losers.” And though Manseau carefully avoided making the Hitler-Trump comparison, giving his followers “access to the sacred — winning” was what Hitler did, too.

As Hitler himself put it, “The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.” And like Trump’s, Hitler’s drama had not only its hero — himself — but also its villains from whose “profane influence” he would offer his followers protection: Communists, Gypsies, Queers and, above all, Jews.

Hillary Clinton as the Wicked Witch

Besides such broad scapegoat groups as Muslims, Mexicans and “low-energy losers,” Trump’s convention offered the faithful a Satan figure in the person of his principal political opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s indicative of how much the appeal of this year’s Republican party is fascistic rather than democratic in nature that the speakers seemed to spend more time demonizing Hillary Clinton than praising Donald Trump. More than one commentator on the convention noted that the only people who seemed to be saying positive things about Trump — not just negative things about Clinton — were Trump’s kids.

And what’s more, just as the arguments for Trump at the convention were framed not in terms of anything he would do about specific issues facing the U.S. but on the sheer force of his personality, so were the arguments against Clinton. They were less about what she would do as President than about who she is. Part of this was just smart politics — the polls about Clinton show that a majority of Americans regard her as competent but an even larger majority simply don’t trust her — but it seems also an inextricable part of the heroic mythos with which Trump is surrounding himself that his villain, too, must be larger than life. Just as Beowulf needed Grendel, St. George needed the dragon, Siegfried needed Fafner, Frodo Baggins needed Sauron and Saruman and Luke Skywalker needed Darth Vader, so Trump the avenging hero, the redeemer, needs to imbue his villain with equally far-reaching power so his final triumph over her will have the mythic power it needs to justify setting aside American republican democracy and replacing it with the Rule of Trump.

In Hillary Clinton, Trump has lucked out big-time. Both she and her husband have been hate objects for America’s Right for so long Trump and his surrogates don’t have to do much bell-ringing to get the rank-and-file of the Republican Party to drool over the prospect of her vanquishment. I’ve pointed out several times before in these pages that the American Right once literally depicted Hillary as a witch (a crude caricature of her looking like the stereotypical wicked witch used to adorn the subscription solicitations of the American Spectator magazine). More recently, at the Republican convention Ben Carson, one of Trump’s former opponents, accused Hillary Clinton of being in league with Lucifer (a.k.a. Satan, a.k.a. the Devil) because she’d written her 1969 college thesis on community organizer Saul Alinsky, and in 1971 (two years after Hillary wrote about him) Alinsky published the book Rules for Radicals in which he wrote, “The first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

Hillary is hated by the Trump faithful both for who she is and what she’s done. Who she is: an independent woman who made her own career and was so uninterested in being an appendage to her husband that for a time she tried to establish herself under her original last name, Rodham, instead of using his. A woman who came to the White House with her husband, was given control over his health-care reform program (“Before it was called Obamacare, it was called Hillarycare,” she said over and over during the Democratic primary debates, thereby associating herself with an earlier, failed attempt to accomplish what’s probably the most viscerally hated program of Obama’s administration), and who after Bill Clinton left office ran for Senator from New York, then got appointed Secretary of State and tried to encroach on the all-male preserve of the Presidency … twice.

And what she’s done: instead of questioning her on policy issues or her ties to Wall Street, the case against Hillary Clinton at the Republican convention was based on a foul stew of conspiracy theories the Right has been cooking since her husband’s presidency: the “murder” of Vincent Foster, her alleged “enabling” of her husband’s adulteries, the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya and, above all, the e-mails. One of the lowest points of the convention was when the widow of one of the four diplomats killed at Benghazi said, “Hillary Clinton, how could you do this to my husband?” — as if Hillary had pulled a gun on him and shot him herself.

As for the e-mails, like Clinton’s principal rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, I’m sick and tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Trump raised a legitimate point against her when he pointed out in his speech that before she turned over 30,000 e-mails she’d sent with her private server while U.S. Secretary of State, she and her staff unilaterally deleted 33,000 of them on the ground that they were “personal,” with no independent third-party verification of whether they were actually personal or whether some of them may have contained government information.

And I think FBI director James Comey got it right on both counts when he announced that he was not going to seek an indictment against her but her handling of classified information had been “extremely careless.” Those are words a more responsible Republican Party could legitimately use to undermine one of Hillary’s principal arguments for herself: that because of her long record of government service as well as her previous status as First Lady she’s well prepared for the Presidency and would be far more competent in the office than her opponent.

But this year’s Republican Party — and this is one respect in which the Trumpified Republicans of this year are not fundamentally different from the Republicans of the last quarter-century — is not inclined to make rational arguments about much of anything, especially about the Clintons. The Republicans have regarded Bill and Hillary Clinton as founts of political evil ever since Bill emerged as a Presidential contender in the early 1990’s. David Brock, former Right-wing hatchet man who now runs a pro-Hillary super-PAC, wrote in his book Blinded by the Right that “when Hillary Clinton said there was a vast Right-wing conspiracy to get her and her husband, I knew she was right — because I was part of it.”

The American Spectator magazine — the one that was drumming up subscriptions by sending out mailings adorned with a picture of Hillary as a witch — was funded by a multi-millionaire named Richard Mellon Scaife who also underwrote something called “The Arkansas Project.” This was an attempt to dig up as much dirt on the Clintons as possible, and in practice it uncovered just about everyone in Arkansas who had a grudge against the Clintons and had some derogatory information about them — or, if they didn’t, were willing to make some up.

The result was to make Bill Clinton only the second U.S. President in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives and put on trial in the Senate. The first, Andrew Johnson, was impeached and tried in 1868 for reasons that at least made logical sense: he had done his damnedest to sabotage Congressional Reconstruction and keep African-Americans as virtual slaves. The best they could come up with against Bill Clinton was that he’d had sex with a White House aide and had ham-handedly and ineptly lied about it.

The venom with which Hillary Clinton was attacked at this year’s Republican convention — not only the chants of “Lock her up!” but the preposterous “indictment” read against her by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (who, as a former prosecutor, should know better) and the call-and-response cries of “Guilty!” he got from his audience — makes it seem virtually certain that if she’s elected she will be the third President who will be impeached. And if she isn’t elected, Donald Trump will move heaven and earth to make sure she’s indicted for the e-mails and whatever else he can dream up, no matter how much violence he has to do to the Constitution and its guarantees of due process and the presumption of innocence to put her behind bars.

White Restoration: Trump’s Deeper Racism and Sexism

Donald Trump has often been called racist and sexist, but most people who’ve used those terms for him have focused only on the most superficial manifestations of those attitudes. His now-infamous statement that undocumented Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists” got him slammed by progressive activists and the mainstream media — which, paradoxically, only fed his supporters’ image of him as a man who can be counted out to tell the “truth,” however much it may be “politically incorrect.” So did his attack on Megyn Kelly of Fox News, who in one debate asked Trump about insulting statements he’s made about women and ended up on the receiving end of a Trump insult directed against her as a woman: that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, or her wherever.” (One would think a man who’s had three wives and five children wouldn’t be so appallingly ignorant about how women’s bodies work.)

But Trump’s superficial attacks on women, people of color, people with disabilities and others he considers “weak” are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s revealing that before he ran for President in 2016 his principal political effort was promoting the so-called “Birther” myth that President Obama was born not in Hawai’i but in Kenya, and was therefore ineligible for the presidency under the constitutional requirement that the President be “a natural born Citizen.” More recently, he’s referred to the judge in the case against Trump University, Gonzalo Curiel, as “a Mexican” and said that by that fact alone he is incapable of presiding over the case impartially (though he hasn’t asked his attorneys to file a motion to disqualify the judge for cause), and he referred to the alleged shooter in Orlando, Florida, Omar Mateen, as “an Afghan” — even though both Curiel and Mateen were born in the U.S. and it was their parents who came here from Mexico and Afghanistan, respectively.

What that suggests is that Donald J. Trump, in his heart of hearts, simply does not believe that people of color can ever be real Americans. He’s added a mental footnote to the Constitution that says only white people can be true, first-class citizens. His attitude would move the U.S. away from its historic position that you gain American citizenship through coming here, working hard and joining the American community. Instead Trump’s ideas would impose a “blood citizenship” requirement similar to that which bedevils Trump’s own ancestral homeland, Germany, where immigrants from Turkey and elsewhere whose families have been in Germany for generations can’t become German citizens — while people of German ancestry whose families haven’t seen German soil in decades can become instant “Germans” just by moving there and establishing residency.

Trump’s racism is deeper than most people realize, and it’s fitted him to become what he is in the upcoming election: the candidate of white male restoration. So is his sexism: his defense against the charge that he hates women is to point to the women who are in positions of power in his business organization. This suggests that Trump has use for women only if they fit one of two categories: either they can make him richer, in which case he hires them to do just that; or he would want to have sex with them, and they with him, in which case he … well, he used to boast of his prowess as a cocksman and an impressive list of “conquests,” until it dawned even through his thick skull that a man who publicly boasted of his adulteries just might have a hard time being taken seriously by the self-proclaimed party of “family values.”

I vividly remember when the Republican Party regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2010 election, and the sense of relief many Republican officials showed when interviewed by the media. They had been forced for the previous four years to see the “People’s House” governed by a woman, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from San Francisco, and there was a sense among Republicans not only that they had regained the House majority but that the proper order of the universe would be restored when a white male, John Boehner, got the usurping Pelosi out of there and took his place at the head of the House. Likewise, if Trump wins, a lot of his supporters and Republicans in general will feel that the proper order of the universe has been restored by having a white man in the White House instead of that, ugh, whatever Obama was.

And if Trump loses, their sense of grievance will only be intensified by seeing the Black man step out of the Oval Office … and a woman replace him. It’s not just that Hillary is a Clinton, wife of one of the most thoroughly demonized Presidents in U.S. history and herself such a long-term target of abuse that after this year’s Republican convention a 20-year-old article called “Hating Hillary” got so many hits it soared to the top of the New Yorker’s Web site. It’s the mere fact of her femaleness.

The root of Donald Trump’s support lies among white men, and in particular working-class white men who didn’t go to college because, when they came of age, they didn’t need to. Many of them had decent-paying blue-collar jobs available to them, often in company towns where once you were out of high school, you could stop at the employment office on Friday and be told, “You start Monday.” Ironically, given their former holders’ current politics, those decent-paying blue-collar jobs existed because of decades of progressive organizing that had won those workers union representation, minimum wages, laws to protect their health and safety, relatively high wages and good benefits, including health coverage.

For about 25 years of American history, between the end of World War II and the recession of the early 1970’s, a relative degree of labor peace existed in the U.S. Many large corporations were run by people who grudgingly realized that capitalism could be a win-win-win situation: companies made quality products and paid their workers enough to be able to afford them; consumers had access to reliable, durable goods; and investors profited through keeping their stock in healthy companies and reaping their rewards as dividend payments.

Then attitudes hardened, especially among the 1 percent. In the early 1970’s corporate leaders got the idea that they had been short-changed in the economic transformations wrought by the 1930’s Depression and World War II. Also a new school of economists, headed by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, proclaimed that “maximizing shareholder value” was the sole purpose of corporate governance, and any suggestion that executives had responsibilities to anyone else — their workers, their consumers, their communities — was “socialism.”

At the same time capitalism was evolving the way Karl Marx said it would; as it became harder to maintain the same level of profits, companies responded by merging. Fewer companies meant less competition — less of the “invisible hand” that was supposed to keep capitalism honest — and it also led to a bewildering maze of holding companies and hedge funds that bought large corporations and used them essentially as gambling chips.

If they could make money by keeping the businesses going and the workers employed, they would. If they could make even more money by closing down U.S. factories and relocating them overseas where wages were a fraction of what American workers expected — and there was no government-required nonsense about protecting workers’ health and safety, or maintaining the environment — they’d do that, too. If the all-important maximization of shareholder value meant closing down huge businesses and selling the remains piece by piece, they’d do that, too.

American workers found themselves in a bind not that different from the one German workers had been put in by the economy-destroying reparations payments imposed on Germany by the victorious Allies in World War I and the destructive policies the German government pursued to keep their economy going — including the horrendous hyperinflation of 1922-23. They were told over and over that they couldn’t expect to live as well as they once had, and their children couldn’t expect to live as well as their parents had. And, by the German Right in general and the Nazis in particular, they were told who they could blame for that.

The Jews. Jewish capitalists had, Nazi propagandists said, wantonly destroyed the German economy. Jewish Communists had fomented phony revolutions to make the plight of the workers even worse. If anybody asked a Nazi how the Jews could be both the capitalists and the Communists who were ostensibly their sworn enemies, the Nazi would say, “They’re Jews. They destroy things. That’s what they do.” The Nazis not only sold this bill of goods to the German people, they believed in it themselves enough that they set out to rid the world of Jews, continuing the Holocaust even when the resources expended on killing Jews hurt the German war effort and contributed to their ultimate defeat in World War II.

It doesn’t take much analytical skill to perceive the similarities between the way Adolf Hitler talked about the Jews and the way Donald Trump talks about Mexicans and Muslims. And Trump has one advantage over Hitler. Whereas Hitler’s people had to fake the “Jewish atrocities” that supposedly justified the Holocaust, Trump can point to real people all over the world — in New York and Washington, D.C. on 9/11; in Boston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Paris, Nice, Munich — who have been murdered in cold blood by terrorists proclaiming themselves as agents of Islam.

Hence the apocalyptic fervor with which Trump spoke to the Republican convention on July 21. Hence the grimness on his face as he delivered his speech and the fierce scowl which he interrupted just to the minimum degree necessary to be able to talk at all. In the August 2016 Harper’s (http://harpers.org/archive/2016/08/don-the-realtor/), Martin Amis published a comparative review of Trump’s first book, The Art of the Deal (co-written with Tony Schwartz, who gave an interview to The New Yorker about the experience: see http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all), and his latest, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, which revealed that the grim, non-smiling countenance of Trump’s face was no accident. As Amis put it:

“Some readers,” writes Trump sternly in his opening sentence, “may be wondering why the picture we used on the cover of this book is so angry and so mean looking.” Only the other day, he “had some beautiful pictures taken” — pictures like the one that bedizens The Art of the Deal — in which he “looked like a very nice person”; and Trump’s family implored him to pick one of those. But no. He wanted to look like a very sour person to reflect the “anger and unhappiness that I feel.”

So Donald Trump offered himself to America on July 21 as the righteous spokesperson for an America — especially non-rich white male working-class America — that has seen its economic position systematically destroyed by the country’s de-industrialization and its social position ridiculed by decades of Left-leaning propaganda in academe and the mainstream media that its attitudes towards women and people of color are “politically incorrect.” He came across as the scourge of all the forces that are tormenting the decent working-class white men who built this country, and — without specifics — said that he alone, by the sheer force of his personality and will, could make it all better for them.

At times he came off like an Old Testament prophet issuing scathing attacks on the “Establishment” of their day. At other times, especially when he started talking about Mexicans and Muslims, he sounded like Adolf Hitler. At still other times — most noticeably when he started making weird little gestures to ask the crowd to stop cheering or chanting so he could continue his speech — he looked less like the real Hitler than like Charlie Chaplin’s parody, “Adenoid Hynkel, the Fuhi of Tomania,” in his 1940 film The Great Dictator. In the middle of Trump’s most blatantly racist tirade of his entire speech, my husband Charles remembered the scene in The Great Dictator in which the microphones themselves recoil at the ferocity of Hynkel’s blast — and the urbane-voiced official translator who’s rendering Chaplin’s vaudeville-German double-speak in English politely says, “The Fuhi has just made reference to the Jewish people.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of Trump’s 78-minute speech was the way it ended. Somebody on his staff must have told him it couldn’t be all gloom-and-doom. Someone remembered how Ronald Reagan in 1980 had ended his big convention speech with soaring rhetoric about America being a “shining city on the hill” whose best days were ahead of it, not behind it. The end of Trump’s speech contained a few phrases that apparently were intended to create a similar sense of uplift — but his heart wasn’t in it. Every time his script gave him something more or less optimistic, he immediately undercut it with yet another jab at Hillary Clinton or the Democrats in general or just about anybody from the long, long list of people he doesn’t like.

And Trump’s far greater comfort with the role of attack dog than inspirer-in-chief came roaring back the next day, when he responded to Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the last man standing in the primary battle against him, who had said in his own convention speech July 20 that Republicans should “vote your conscience” and concentrate on winning the down-ballot elections for Senate, House and state government. Trump not only said he wouldn’t accept Cruz’s endorsement if Cruz offered it, he renewed one of his most scurrilous attacks on Cruz from the primary campaign, suggesting that Cruz’s father had known Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s alleged assassin. His source was a photo published in the National Enquirer — and Trump got in yet another insult against legitimate journalists, one of his favorite targets, saying that the Enquirer should be winning Pulitzer Prizes for its exposés.

It’s easy to write Donald Trump off as a pathetic buffoon — but then a lot of German liberals and progressives in the 1920’s and early 1930’s who should have known better wrote off Adolf Hitler as a buffoon, too. Trump is not Hitler; despite some similarities — the egomania, the racism, the warmongering and the bizarre fanaticism they’ve been able to induce in their followers — a Trump-governed America would look a lot different from Hitler-governed Germany. But Trump has shown an astonishing instinct for “reading” the mood of white working-class male America and getting millions of people who’ve been reinforced in their bigotry and prejudice by talk radio and Fox News to put him at the edge of winning a Presidential election.

After his convention speech the sound system at the Republican convention played three really peculiar song choices: Free’s “All Right Now,” the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing.” After a convention whose theme had been “Make America Great Again,” it seemed odd — to say the least — that all the songs were by British bands, and that “All Right Now” was a song about a sexual pickup and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (one of my all-time favorite Stones songs because of its world-weariness) a song whose moral is, “You can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometime, you just might find/You get what you need.” Was Donald Trump trying to tell us that Hillary Clinton was who we wanted but he was what we needed?

When Barack Obama was nominated for President by the Democrats in 2008, the slogan his crowds chanted was, “¡Si se puede!” — “Yes, we can!” When Donald Trump was nominated by the Republicans eight years later, their slogan was not “Yes, we can!” but “Yes, he will!” Likewise when Ronald Reagan used the phrase “make America great again” in his 1980 campaign, he prefaced it with “Let’s” — implying, as Obama did, that the task of bringing America the change it was seeking was everybody’s, not just his. But Trump’s slogans say he will do it all. What we’re being called on to do is simply to stand on the sidelines and not get in his way as he personally, through the sheer force and triumph of his will, makes America whatever he means by “great again.”

 

Impassioned Black Minister Harris Kicks Off Pride in Style

Army Secretary Fanning Also Featured, but Rev. Shane Harris Steals the Show

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Rev. Shane Harris

Eric Fanning

Jennifer Restle and her service dog

Mike Dee

Lily Rubenstein

Joan La Barbera

Community servants or drug pushers? The PrEP T-shirt

(Pride staffer Fernando Lopez in background)

San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus

San Diego Pride Youth Marching Band

San Diego’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride weekend kicked off big-time with a well-attended rally Friday, July 15 at 6 p.m at the Marston Point main stage at the Pride festival site near Sixth and Laurel in Balboa Park. The keynote speaker was supposed to be U.S. Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning, the first openly Queer person appointed to head a major branch of the U.S. military, but the show was stolen by the impassioned church oratory of Rev. Shane Harris of the San Diego branch of the National Action Network.

Citing not only the murder of 49 mostly Latino and Queer people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida but police killings of African-American men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, the shooting of five Dallas police officers by an African-American gunman during an otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in that city, and the latest alleged terror attack on a civilian population in Nice, France, Rev. Harris called on the Black and Queer communities to “stand together to fight for gun reform and police reform.”

Rev. Harris, whose group was founded by the controversial New York Black minister Rev. Al Sharpton, said, “It’s time to break down the walls between the church and the LGBT community once and for all.” He cited the examples of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the little-known Viola Liuzzo, a white woman who came down to Selma, Alabama to register Black voters in 1965 and was murdered, as people who “fought for the voiceless.”

He made it clear that, while other African-American ministers often say the Queer rights movement “stole” their tactics from the African-American civil rights movement, in his view “the LGBT community fought the fight and learned from the civil rights movement. It’s time to bring the movements back together.” Rev. Harris said he’s called out other Black ministers who called the Orlando shootings an “act of God” and said the victims got what they deserved for being Queer. “That is not the love of God,” he said. “I slammed those pastors and said we will not represent that kind of hate.”

Rev. Harris said the demands the Black and Queer community should unite around include gun reform and police reform. “What happened in that club (in Orlando) should not have happened,” he said. He also criticized police officers who are — or claim to be — so scared by African-American men they feel a need to shoot them six times even after they’ve already been subdued and are on the ground.

The impassioned oratory of Rev. Harris somewhat overshadowed the rally’s final speaker, U.S. Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning. He joked about being an Army man bringing a message of Queer pride to a Navy town, and said that including not only active-duty servicemembers but also reservists and employees of private contractors, the U.S. Army includes about 1.4 million people.

Fanning recalled that he first joined the Army’s staff at the Pentagon in 1993 — the same year the U.S. Congress imposed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and then-President Bill Clinton signed it into law. “I didn’t see many people like me, and there didn’t seem to be many opportunities in national security,” Fanning said. “Now there are many opportunities to live and serve with dignity.”

Though he admitted the Pride celebration seems “bittersweet” after the events in Orlando — which happened during Pride weekend in Fanning’s home town, Washington, D.C. — along with Dallas, Baton Rouge, St. Paul and Nice, Fanning said, “We respond to acts of cowardice with acts of confidence and pride.” Fanning mentioned two of the Orlando victims, Tony Brown and Angel Cordelaro, who were active-duty servicemembers in the U.S. Army — and another Army man who courageously intervened and saved seven other people’s lives during the attack at Pulse.

When he was invited to speak at San Diego Pride, Fanning said, “I thought about why it was important for me to be here to promote the acceptance the Orlando shooter tried to destroy. Orlando was an attack on America. Citizens here come together to comfort those left behind. It’s important to remember that we’re all in this together. To keep this country secure we have to draw on all our communities.”

Fanning also said the U.S. military has a civil rights record of which it can be proud. He noted that the military ended racial segregation in 1948 — “16 years before the Civil Rights Act was passed” — and in 2011 San Diego’s Pride contained the first-ever contingent of active-duty servicemembers, who marched even though “don’t ask, don’t tell” was still in effect and they risked discharge. The next year, the services not only allowed the contingent to go forward but let the participants march in their uniforms.

Bisexuals Finally Included

This was also the year San Diego Pride finally acknowledged the Bisexual community — the largest but also the most ignored and marginalized group within the “LGBT” community, both by straights and Queers — by inviting an “out” Bi speaker to address the rally. She was Jennifer Restle, who also represented the community of people living with disabilities; she’s blind, and before she could start her speech she had to work with her guide dog to get the animal to sit and hold still so she could talk.

“Imagine a glass that can hold 16 ounces and has eight ounces of water in it,” Restle said. “This is my disability. The glass-half-full people see me doing ordinary tasks and raise them to major accomplishments, and the glass-half-empty people see my life as tragic because I’m blind. Why can’t it just be a glass with liquid in it?”

Restle used a similar metaphor to describe her sexuality. “Let’s pretend I’m attracted to both genders equally,” she said. “Some people would say I’m half-straight, some that I’m half-Gay. My question is why can’t it just be a glass of liquid, not cut up into pieces of homo- and heterosexuality?”

Despite the pretense of inclusion implied by the inclusion of “B” in “LGBT,” Restle said mainstream Queer organizations are often hostile to Bisexuals and refuse to help them. She also said the sense that Bi people aren’t welcome in either the straight or Queer communities contributes to them having “the highest rates of suicide, depression, poverty and abuse by relationship partners” of anyone in the Queer community.

(For further information on how Bisexuals are in many ways the most discriminated-against members of the Queer community, see http://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2015/07/b-forgotten-letter.html. For information supporting Restle’s claims about the adverse health effects of anti-Bi discrimination, see http://www.news-medical.net/news/20150701/Rice-University-study-reveals-that-Gays-Lesbians-and-heterosexuals-have-better-health-than-Bisexuals.aspx?.)

Other speakers included Mike Dee, president and chief executive officer of the San Diego Padres baseball club, who said he had arranged the first “Pride Night” outreach to the Queer community by a major-league baseball team during a previous stint in the Padres’ organization in 2001. Dee had to work hard to mend fences with the Queer community when at the 2015 Pride Night, the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus was brought on to sing the national anthem at the start of the game — but a sound person cut them off and instead played a record of another non-Queer performance of the anthem.

Dee’s speech ignored the Pride Night anthem controversy (though Pride director Stephen Whitburn, introducing him, mentioned it) and focused on the team’s outreach efforts. “In 2015 we pledged with the San Diego Unified School District to promote the best of athletics by making peole feel respected on and off the field,” he said. “Major League Baseball is the first professional sports league to name an openly Gay person as a director of social outreach: former San Diego Padre Billy Bean. He came out in 1999 after his professional career ended. I know Billy personally and he’s a major ambassador for professional sports and the LGBT community.”

“Pride unites us,” said Lily Rubenstein, 16-year-old Transgender activist and member of the Mayor’s LGBT advisory board. “It’s always been our community’s secret weapon. We have Pride to let LGBT’s know that there are people to support them. Pride celebrations are landmarks. Think back to the time when Pride was something you had to fight for. Pride is the culmination of dedicated fighting.” She praised the California board of education for just having authorized teaching of Queer history in the state’s public schools.

The rally was kicked off by Queer historian Joan La Barbera of the San Diego LGBT Archives, who presented an orthodox “it all started at Stonewall” version of Queer history that typically ignored earlier Queer activism. Though the first known Queer-rights organization in the U.S. was founded in Chicago in 1926 and America’s history of continuous Queer activism started with Harry Hay and four others founding the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950, La Barbera’s presentation and the name of the event itself — “Spirit of Stonewall” — enshrined the pernicious myth that the entire U.S. Queer liberation movement started when patrons at the Stonewall Inn dive bar in New York City in June 1969 fought back against a police raid. (Full disclosure: two of my closest friends, Leo Laurence and Pat Brown, were among the leaders of militant Queer-rights demonstrations in San Francisco in early 1969, months before the so-called “beginning” of the movement at Stonewall.)

“Stonewall was not a peaceful protest,” La Barbera conceded. “It was a riot against police harassment, and it was led mostly by Trans women of color who are in fact our foremothers.” (The “it all started at Stonewall” myth is often used to hail Transgender people as the real founders of the Queer movement, and thereby to marginalize the participation of Queer Leftists like Harry Hay and others in launching U.S. Queer activism. It doesn’t marginalize the courage Sylvia Rivera, Marcia P. Johnson and the other Trans people who fought at Stonewall to set the record straight and acknowledge that just as the women’s movement was birthed from women’s responses to sexism within the American Left, so was the Queer movement partly a response to Leftist homophobia and a challenge to the Left to live up to its promise of liberation for all people.)

Awards to Drug Dealers

As in previous years, part of the business of the Pride rally was to hand out “Spirit of Stonewall Awards” (the myth strikes again!) to various individuals and organizations in the Queer community. The event MC asked for a particularly supportive response when members of a group calling itself “#Be the Generation” was given the Service Awards. Though they weren’t as big a presence in this year’s rally as they were the previous year — when far more attendees were wearing the “#Be the Generation” T-shirt — they showed off their four-part response to AIDS, which while no longer epidemic in the Queer community is still endemic and hits us harder than any other population.

“#Be the Generation” allegedly highlights four responses to the continuing presence of AIDS and the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) which supposedly causes it in the Queer community: “FIGHT: Stigma, Fear and Shaming. TEST: Know Your HIV Status. TREAT: Get Undetectable. PROTECT: PrEP and Condoms.” According to the group’s propaganda, the campaign is aimed at young people to get them to “be the generation” that stops the alleged “transmission” of HIV and AIDS once and for all.

But the nub of the campaign lies in the reference to “PrEP” in the fourth point. “PrEP” stands for “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” a highly controversial campaign originally approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2012 — though the groundwork for it had been laid as early as the Berlin AIDS conference in 1993 — to get people who test HIV negative to take anti-HIV drugs anyway, despite their high cost and potentially ferocious toxicities.

The principal PrEP drugs are Truvada and Genvoya, made by Gilead Pharmaceuticals — whose extortionate prices for hepatitis C treatments Horvani and Sarvoldi made them poster children for pharmaceutical company greed. A 2015 study claimed nearly 100 percent effectiveness for Truvada in preventing HIV transmission from positive people to their negative sex partners — but like many other studies in the history of U.S. AIDS research, it was stopped early before the drug’s side effects had a chance to kick in.

Later research (http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/hiv-prevention/hiv-prep/5434-eacs-2015-modest-bone-loss-seen-in-young-men-taking-truvada-for-pre-exposure-prophylaxis) confirmed a severe risk of bone loss in patients taking Truvada. But neither the risks involved in “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” the ultra-high cost of the drugs nor the whole preposterousness of giving these powerful medications to people who, even by the standards of the AIDS establishment, aren’t sick stopped the Pride organizers from hailing the drug pushers of “#Be the Generation” by giving them a community service award.

Other community service award winners included Tita Viveros, cross-border activist with the Queer community in Tijuana; Denise Williams and Dana Toppel as “Inspirational Couple,” Dale Kelly Bankhead as “Friend of Pride” (an award given for the straight person who has done the most for San Diego’s Queer community, and one Bankhead has won so many times they probably ought to retire it for her); Sue Reynolds as “Champion of Pride” for her work trying to develop affordable housing for San Diego Queers; an organization called MARYAH for “Philanthropy” because they raised money for the Sunburst group home for Queer and other at-risk youth in Golden Hill; and Michael Moore, current board chair of the Stepping Stone program for people with alcohol or drug issues, as Community Grand Marshal.

The rally kicked off with the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and ended with the San Diego Pride Youth Marching Band playing cheerily amateur renditions of “Over the Rainbow” (signature song of Judy Garland, whose death in June 1969 just days before the Stonewall riots is partly credited with having sparked them — Queers were a large part of her fan base and a lot of them felt pushed over the edge when their bars were raided while they were still in mourning for her) and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”

Presidential Primary Post-Mortem

I Don’t Like It Either, but Voting for Hillary Is Our Only Choice

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Well, it’s finally over. The mountain has moved and brought forth two mice. Two of the most widely and viscerally hated people in the entire country, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, will be the major-party nominees for President of the United States in the November 8 election. Comedian Mort Sahl used to make a joke about the so-called “progress” of American politics, changing it only to update the names in the punchline: “In the 1790’s we were a nation of 30 million people and we had George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Today we’re a nation of 320 million, and the best we can come up with is Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? Darwin was wrong!”

The primary season started out with at least 22 more or less substantial candidates for President of the United States: 17 Republicans and five Democrats. It also began with the widespread assumption by the mainstream corporate media and the Washington punditocracy that the eventual nominees would be Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush (remember Jeb Bush — or “Jeb!,” as he futilely tried to restyle himself?). That would have been an even bigger snooze-fest than the 1988 Presidential election between Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush, both so bland one Los Angeles Times cartoonist joked, “You wanted a Presidential election that wouldn’t be about personalities? You just got it.”

The D.C. “experts” who get paid more money per year than I’ll probably see in a lifetime just to blather on and on and on in front of cable-news cameras, and who always remind me of Oscar Wilde’s marvelous line about the woman who “could state the obvious with a sense of real discovery,” kept telling us, “Clinton v. Bush, Clinton v. Bush, Clinton v. Bush,” as if they could hypnotize primary voters into making it so. Meanwhile millions of Americans thought, “Clinton v. Bush — didn’t we have that election already?”

When Hillary Clinton was running for the Democratic nomination against Barack Obama in 2008, I wrote an editorial that said one of the reasons I thought she would lose was what I called the “Groundhog Day” factor, after the Bill Murray movie in which he has to keep reliving the same day over and over again. I didn’t think that many voters would really want to cast their ballots so the sequence of Presidents from 1988 to 2012 would read, “Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton.” And quite frankly I’m not that sure all that many American voters are going to be thrilled about a sequence that reads, “Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Clinton,” either.

Instead the Republican primary process was taken over by an orange-haired real-estate developer and “reality” TV star from New York named Donald J. Trump. He zoomed to the top of the Republican field from the moment he announced his candidacy in June 2015, when he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting.” 

The pundits told us that America wouldn’t stand for a Presidential candidate who was not only racist but so blatantly open and seemingly proud of his racism. They were wrong: Trump zoomed to the top of the polls for the Republican nomination and never lost his front-runner status. The next month he insulted 2008 Republican Presidential nominee John McCain for having been a prisoner of war in North Viet Nam. “He’s not a war hero” said Trump. “He’s a ‘war hero’ because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Again, pundits said Trump would get sunk by the military-loving voters of the Republican party for insulting a man whose courage in the face of imprisonment and torture had become legendary and inspired millions of Americans, including many who disagreed with McCain’s politics.

Wrong again. And the pundits were wrong again when he responded to Fox News debate anchor Megyn Kelly’s question about his demeaning remarks about women with a demeaning remark about her as a woman, saying that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, or her wherever.” Not only did his poll ratings soar, they soared even higher among Republican women than Republican men. Throughout the Republican primary campaign, Trump kept spewing out bigoted remark after bigoted remark, including his demand for a “temporary” ban on Muslims in America — and his political stock soared ever higher.

Most recently, he’s attacked the judge in the San Diego fraud case against Trump University — a crash course in real-estate expertise that’s alleged by the people suing him to have been a pyramid scheme — saying that because the judge is “Mexican” (actually he’s the U.S.-born son of Mexican immigrant parents) and Trump wants to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, he can’t fairly judge Trump in the case. That’s given cold feet to the Republican Congressional leaders who had just begrudgingly bowed to the inevitable and endorsed Trump — House Speaker Paul Ryan called it “textbook racism” (a first for me: I can’t recall ever having agreed with Paul Ryan before!) — but it plays just fine to the people who’ve been Trump’s base from day one of his campaign.

Throughout the campaign, pundits have been wrong about Trump. They’ve kept saying about his latest outrageous remark, “This will be the thing that takes him down” — and instead he’s soared ever higher. They’ve said he could win Republican primaries but he’d never get more than about 35 percent of the vote — until his vote totals started reaching 40, 45, 50, 60 percent. Now they’re saying, “O.K., he was able to win Republican primaries by appealing to the Republican base. But now he’ll be running in a general election, and he’s going to have to broaden his appeal.” That’s how a Presidential race usually works — you mobilize your partisan base to win a primary campaign and then move to the center to convince non-partisan or less partisan voters to vote for you too — but it’s not how Trump is likely to campaign, and there are very good reasons for him not to.

Donald Trump has three things going for him as the general-election campaign begins. First, he’s built up a reputation for “courage” for saying things other candidates may believe but don’t dare say — and in the process he’s given a lot of people, especially older white voters whose incomes have taken a bath as America has deindustrialized, a sense of pride in bigoted, racist attitudes they’ve been told by more conventional politicians and the media they ought to be ashamed of. Second, his policy statements — to the extent he’s made any — don’t fall along a simple, easy dividing line between “Left” and “Right.” His racism, sexism and religious bigotry and his overweening pride in himself and his money mark him as a man of the Right, but he’s also taken positions — like pledging to preserve Social Security and Medicare, and opposing the so-called “free trade” agreements that have sucked away America’s once-strong industrial jobs base — that are generally thought of as Left.

Third, and most important, Donald Trump is incredibly rich. Just how rich he is remains a matter of dispute; when one of the major economics magazines aimed at Trump’s fellow 1-percenters estimated Trump’s net worth at $4 billion, he called to complain and said it should have been $10 billion. When they asked him where the extra $6 billion came from, he said, “That’s the value of the Trump name.” But he does have a lot of money — enough to have so many homes in so many places it’s hard to keep track of him all. My joke about Mitt Romney in 2012 that he’d be assured of the election if he could only carry all his home states is true of Trump as well. And unlike the last politically inexperienced CEO the Republicans nominated for President (Wendell Willkie in 1940), Trump is running in a country brainwashed by decades of conservative pro-capitalist propaganda to revere money per se.

As I noted the first time I wrote about Trump in these pages, the cult of the general in American politics has given way to the cult of the CEO. We haven’t had a President who was a general since Eisenhower and we haven’t had a president who served in the military at all since the first Bush. Years of glorification of CEO’s through memoirs, fawning documentaries and “reality” TV shows like Trump’s own The Apprentice have trained many Americans to regard CEO’s as superior individuals whose very wealth is a sign of their intelligence and sagacity.

It’s not a new idea. It dates back to John Calvin, the founder of Puritanism, who believed that only a handful of superior people (the “elect”) were going to Heaven and God’s way of showing the rest of us who they were was their material success in this world. But when the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc in eastern Europe collapsed in the late 1980’s the U.S. Right sold millions of Americans on the idea that this showed not only the superiority of capitalism, but the superiority of capitalists. Willkie had the bad luck to run for President when America was still coming out of the Great Depression and trust in the U.S. business community was at an all-time low; Trump has the fabulous luck to be running in an era in which many Americans equate money with genius and think, “He must know how to run the country — he’s rich!”

There’s one more thing about Donald Trump that a lot of people don’t realize that makes him an incredibly strong Presidential contender, especially to the base of disgusted working-class men, victims of the systematic deindustrialization of America over the last four decades. He sounds like the voices they already trust to explain the political world to them: the voices of talk radio. Nation writer David Bromwich argued in a recent review of Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money (http://www.thenation.com/article/the-soul-of-the-tea-party/?nc=1), an account of how rich people on the radical Right, David and Charles Koch in particular, built the Tea Party movement into a massive force that largely took control of American politics, that her analysis had neglected the importance of talk radio and Fox News.

I think Bromwich himself ignored how much the Right’s money had to do with those. Fox News is a creation of radical-Right media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who’s used to using both his money and his media outlets to move politics in his native Australia, Great Britain and the U.S. dramatically to the Right; and major talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh stay on the air through the money of corporations run by radical-Right CEO’s even if more mainstream businesses drop them. But Bromwich is right about both the rhetorical style and the influence of talk radio and its hosts on the slice of America that has become Donald Trump’s political base.

“Many reversals that have surprised the Democrats in the last seven years would not have surprised someone who listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, or Michael Savage, and to the people who call their shows begging for political guidance,” Bromwich writes. “Trump was a favorite golf partner of Limbaugh’s, who promoted his candidacy with a high good humor that has turned to serious advocacy — and he was a lively and frequent interviewee for Hannity on the subject of Obama’s birth certificate.”

One can hear the voice of talk radio full-blown in Donald Trump, just as one can hear them in embryo in the surviving recordings of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the legendary Red-baiter of the early 1950’s: the booming voice, the halting cadences (just to make sure everyone in the audience “gets” what they’re saying), the appeals to “common sense” over intellectual complexity (which, in the talk-radio world, is just a way the bad guys have of confusing people), the bellicose wise-guy tone, the pride they take in their racism, sexism and other bigotries, and the Manichean ideology which not only divides the world into 100 percent good guys and 100 percent bad guys but assumes that the “truth” of what they’re saying is so obvious no one could possibly have a good-faith reason for disagreeing with it. Everyone who disputes the gospel according to talk radio must be part of a vast conspiracy out to destroy America. Donald Trump has the votes of the up to 30 percent of all Americans Bromwich argues are part of the Tea Party because he’s the first modern-day Presidential candidate who sounds like a talk-radio host.

So don’t automatically assume that Donald Trump can’t win the Presidency. There may be a limit to the amount of outrageousness he can get away with before it reaches a critical mass that turns off enough voters so he loses, but he hasn’t hit it yet and no one knows what it is, or even whether it exists. To people who tell me they can’t imagine a country like this one electing that orange-haired thug, I say, “I’m sure there were a lot of similar conversations in Germany in the early 1930’s: ‘We’re a civilized country. We’d never let a freak like Hitler come to power.’”

Bernie Sanders and His “Army”

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, an unlikely challenger emerged to the supposedly inevitable “coronation” of Hillary Clinton as the nominee. Through much of 2015 the group of activist Democrats that variously describes itself as the “Left,” “Progressive” and “Democratic” wing of the Democratic Party had been putting intense pressure on Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to run for President. When she decided not to, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders stepped into the race. His first campaign appearances had the air of an understudy taking over a role from an indisposed star — “Senator Elizabeth Warren will not appear this evening. Her part will be played by Senator Bernie Sanders” — and that wasn’t the only, or even the biggest, strike against him.

First, Bernie Sanders had never run for office before as a Democrat. He’d spent 30 years in elective office — first as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city; then as Vermont’s sole member of the House of Representatives (since it isn’t big enough to have more than one); then as a U.S. Senator — but he’d always run as an independent. Indeed, a number of Democrats were making a to-do about Sanders never having registered to vote as a Democrat — until it came out that Vermont’s election law doesn’t contain party affiliation: everyone who registers to vote in Vermont does so as a non-partisan.

Second, Sanders proclaimed himself a “democratic socialist” in a country in which that very combination of words has long since seemed oxymoronic. Both the sorry examples of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and the self-styled “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe — the repression, the terror, the Gulags — and the way Right-wingers had exploited them for propaganda had convinced most Americans that socialism is automatically tyranny. As things turned out, though, Right-wingers have so overdone their anti-socialist propaganda that the word “socialist,” though still negative, has lost the kiss-of-death status it once had in this country. From day one of Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans have been denouncing him and everything he stood for as “socialist” — which I suspect led a lot of people, especially young voters who’d supported him, to think, “Hey, I like Obama, so if Obama’s a socialist, I must be a socialist too.”

Sanders, it turned out, had a lot going for him that virtually nobody in the media or the punditocracy realized. First, he’s an infectiously energetic campaigner. Second, he became one of those unlikely older figures that inspires young people, His attacks on the corporate aristocracy that really rules America no matter who gets elected to political office, his demand to smash the power of organized money over the political system and his holding up Hillary Clinton, with her six-figure speaking fees to Goldman Sachs and the potential conflicts of interest between her role as Secretary of State in the first Obama term and the Clinton Foundation, resonated less than what he specifically proposed to do. To young people stuck living with their parents so they can take advantage of the provision of Obamacare that they can stay on their parents’ health plan until they’re 26, and even more concerned about spending their entire adult lives paying off a six-figure student loan debt, Sanders’ calls for universal health care and free public-college tuition resonated because those were things that would immediately benefit them.

But Sanders, with his foxy Jewish-grandpa persona (he got compared so often to comedian and Seinfeld creator Larry David that when Saturday Night Live started parodying him they hired David to play him), offered young people more than just a few tangible benefits like access to health care and free college. He also offered them a sense of hope, a sense that there’s a way out of the horrible mess they’ve been born into. Before young people embraced Sanders en masse, I had thought the overwhelming majority of America’s youth thought about politics pretty much along the lines of The Hunger Games. In Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, the existing system sucks, the one the so-called “revolutionaries” want to create sucks almost as much — maybe a little bit more — and the only healthy alternative for people who want to live a decent life is to drop out altogether, live as individuals, have as little to do with politics as possible and literally cultivate their gardens.

Like Occupy Wall Street five years ago, the Sanders campaign pulled back the curtain and showed America’s young people a glimpse not only of a better future but a way to get there. My hope is that they will continue to build the “political revolution” Sanders called for and build a progressive electoral movement, within but not of the Democratic Party, that will contest elections at all level — and simultaneously build a Tea Party of the Left, an organized movement outside the electoral system and put pressure on elected officials, especially Democrats, to keep their promises to the people who elected them to pursue a progressive agenda instead of doing what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did — and what, absent this kind of pressure, Hillary Clinton is likely to do as well if elected — which is gravitate towards the center and pursue only as much “change” as the 1 percent will permit.

My fear is that the young who turned out in droves to support Sanders will slink back into their closets, just as many of them did after the Occupy camps were closed down (the few Occupy movements that remain viable, like Women Occupy San Diego, were the ones made up mostly of older people). Unable to make political change in the first electoral campaign they tried it in, a lot of the Sandersistas might just give up on the system altogether and revert to the view that both big parties are corrupt and therefore we shouldn’t have anything to do with something as dirty, messy and slimy as (ugh) politics. Indeed, one of my biggest disenchantments with the Hillary supporters is they are pissing away the energies of the young people they need to rebuild not only the Democratic party but the progressive movement as a whole.

Instead, they’re backing an old Establishment war horse whose supporters keep telling America she’s the “most qualified” candidate ever to run for President. And Clinton herself, putting forward her experience and her résumé as the big reasons we should vote for her, seems clueless about how much the American political landscape has changed, to the point where experience seems to be a negative in the minds of many voters on both Left and Right today. If I were Hillary Clinton about the last thing I’d want (or want my surrogates) to do is prattle on about my “experience” and how it makes me “qualified.” By those standards, probably the most “qualified” President in U.S. history was William Howard Taft — who made such a hash of his one term that when he ran for re-election in 1912, he placed third. And one of the least “qualified” Presidents, Abraham Lincoln  — whose whole political experience before 1860 was three terms in the Illinois state legislature and one term in Congress — did a pretty good job defeating the racist, slaveholding South and holding the country together.

How Trump Could Win

I actually started writing the above a month ago, after the primary season was more or less over and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had emerged as the presumptive major-party nominees. I wrote most of what you’ve just read before the galvanic events of the past month: before the massacre of 49 patrons of the Pulse Gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida by a screwed up young Afghan-American who claimed “allegiance” to ISIS (and to al-Qaeda, and to a martyr who belonged to al-Nusra — three groups that hate each other almost as much as they hate “infidels”). Before subsequent terror attacks in Turkey and Saudi Arabia — including a suicide bombing in Medina, Islam’s second holiest city, of pilgrims on the most sacred Muslim rite, the hajj — which makes one wonder why these supposedly super-devout Muslims are so outrageously flouting Muhammad’s injunction in the Quran that Muslims must never kill other Muslims.

I also wrote it before the so-called “Brexit,” the vote in Great Britain — well, England (aside from London) and Wales, anyway — to leave the European Union (EU), and the virtually complete meltdown in British politics that resulted. When I heard about the fallout from “Brexit” — the resignation of pro-EU Conservative Party prime minister David Cameron; the sudden withdrawal of the person who seemed like his likely successor (pro-“Brexit” Conservative Boris Johnson); the resignation of Nigel Farage, the closest thing to a British Trump, from the leadership of the openly racist and xenophobic UK Independence Party; and the effort of leaders in the Labour Party to unseat their party chair, Jeremy Corbyn (essentially the British Bernie Sanders) — I started joking that if things kept going that way, Queen Elizabeth II might have to pull rank on everybody, declare the British electoral system a failure, and rule not as a “constitutional” monarch but a real one.

And I wrote it before the bizarre mixed verdict from FBI director James Comey after the year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business while Secretary of State, and whether she broke the laws regarding release of classified information. Comey’s report offered balm for both Republicans and Democrats; he called Clinton’s practices in particular (and the State Department’s in general) “extremely careless” and discovered 110 out of 30,000 e-mails that had been marked at some level of classification while Hillary Clinton sent, forwarded or attached them. (He also found 2,000 e-mails that weren’t classified when sent but were classified later.) But he also said there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute Clinton because there was no showing that she intended the unauthorized release of classified material.

The terror assaults and the “Brexit” vote don’t guarantee Trump the Presidency, but they do make his election quite a bit more possible. “Brexit” indicates that a modern-day electorate in a cosmopolitan country can be swayed to vote against their interests by an openly racist appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment and a factually false but emotionally appealing argument that “foreigners” are taking money that could be spent to help “real” Americans/Britons/Germans/Austrians/French/whomever. Also, the more people are scared by terrorists in general and ISIS in particular, the more they’re going to vote for the strong man (emphasis here on man) and against the woman who’s pledging to continue the policies of President Obama, whose measured, nuanced responses to terrorism and political turmoil in the Middle East and the Muslim world in general just make him seem “weak.”

In this, as in so much else, Hillary Clinton is following the blueprint of the women who ran for head of state in various countries in the 1960’s and 1970’s — Indira Gandhi in India, Golda Meir in Israel, Margaret Thatcher in Britain — who were obsessed with the idea that they could be just as “tough,” just as butch, just as warlike as the men who’d run their countries before them. She’s running as Obama’s political and ideological successor but also on the historical record that when she was Secretary of State there were a lot of opportunities to put American troops into harm’s way in the Middle East and elsewhere that she wanted to grab — and Obama wouldn’t let her.

The fact that there’s another way for a woman to run for head of state and succeed escapes Hillary Clinton. The currently most powerful woman in the world, German chancellor Angela Merkel, has emphasized consensus and “soft power,” and presented herself not as an ardent anti-terror warrior (given Germany’s history, that sort of thing from a German politician scares a lot of people, including a lot of Germans) but as a rather colorless technocrat. Indeed, one could argue that Merkel has pulled off by purely economic means what Otto von Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler failed to achieve by force of arms — to make Germany ruler of Europe — and she’s done it without either the machismo posturing of German-descended Donald Trump or the just-because-I-don’t-have-a-dick-don’t-think-I-can’t-fuck-you attitude of Hillary Clinton.

Trump could very will win the election on three issues: his pledge to do anything, regardless of international law, to rid the world of ISIS and its ilk (down to restoring waterboarding and killing their members’ families); his promise to restore America’s industrial base and bring back the good-paying blue-collar jobs that allowed white ethnics to rise and become middle-class in the 1940’s and 1950’s; and his pledge to preserve Social Security and Medicare for “real” (i.e., white) Americans by shutting the borders and building walls to keep out Mexicans and Muslims. The Republican Party in general isn’t worried about the so-called demographic shift of the country — the growing numbers of poor people, young people and people of color — because they hold control of so many state legislatures, where the rules of how America’s elections are win are set, they can pass so-called “voter fraud” laws that make it impossible for people who’d vote against them to vote at all.

There are other weapons, secret and not-so-secret, Trump has going for him. In virtually all the Republican primaries he did better than the polls said he would, which suggests there’s a kind of reverse version of the “Bradley factor” working for him. The “Bradley factor” was a phrase coined when Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American, lost an election for governor of California by 2 ½ points when the final polls said he’d been ahead by that much. Political experts realized that about 5 percent of the people polled were too racist to vote for a Black candidate — but too ashamed of their racism to tell a pollster that they wouldn’t. I suspect that Trump has a “Bradley factor” of his own working for him — a lot of people who are going to vote for him but realize that’s not the “politically correct” thing to say to a pollster — and he’s likely to do about 5 percent better in the actual election than he is in the polls.

But the biggest factor Trump has going for him is the creaky way America elects its presidents. The people don’t elect a President; according to the Constitution, that’s done by something called the Electoral College, which consists of 538 people — the number of each state’s members of the House of Representatives and Senate, plus three to represent the District of Columbia, which didn’t have the right to vote in Presidential elections until the early 1960’s and still isn’t represented in Congress. Since Electoral College votes are winner-take-all by state, Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote but Donald Trump could win the election. How could that happen? Hillary racks up large vote margins in big “blue” states like California and New York, but Trump ekes out narrow victories in the Rust Belt states and places like Pennsylvania that have been hit especially hard by America’s systematic deindustrialization.

Why You MUST Vote for Hillary Clinton

The simple fact is, given the way American politics is structured, with virtually all offices elected on a winner-take-all basis by district, there is no room for alternative political parties. Organizing the Green Party made sense in its original home, Germany, where if you get 5 percent or more of the national vote you get that percentage of seats in the national legislature. It did not — and still does not — make sense to set up a Green Party in the U.S., where aside from a few local offices that are officially “nonpartisan,” alternative parties are blocked out from actually electing anybody by both law and custom. So anyone who, under some sort of twisted conception of political or moral “virtue,” rejects the Clinton vs. Trump choice and casts a ballot for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party or any of the myriad of other nominal Presidential candidates of alternative parties, Left or Right, might as well not vote at all.

And the biggest reason to vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump is that if Hillary Clinton wins in 2016 there will be another Presidential election in 2020. If Donald Trump wins, that is far from certain. It is quite likely, knowing what we know of Trump — that he’s a vengeful paranoiac with a sense he’s been eternally persecuted and a determination to lash back at his enemies even when he’d be better off rolling with the punches and leaving them alone — that he simply will not take no for an answer. If Congress doesn’t give him what he wants, he’ll simply rule by executive fiat (as some Republicans already accuse Obama of doing). If there’s another terrorist attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11 or the November 2015 attacks in Paris, I suspect Trump will call a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, if they sign on and thereby put the power of the U.S. military at his sole disposal, he will simply suspend the Constitution and become a dictator, ruling by decree.

And if no terrorist attack actually happens, I wouldn’t put it past Trump to stage one. I never believed the 9/11 conspiracy theories — the idea that the George W. Bush administration staged the attacks to justify asaults on civil liberties like the USA PATRIOT Act and foreign policy adventures like the war in Iraq — because they seemed too much like Left-wing versions of the “birther” myth (that Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be President) Trump did so much to propagate. But though I never believed that George W. Bush was capable, either morally or intellectually, of ordering a phony terrorist attack to justify moving his political agenda in authoritarian ways, I would have no problem believing that of Donald Trump.

There are other more logical, less speculative reasons to prefer Clinton over Trump as President. One big one is the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court. There already is a vacancy on the Court — thanks to the Senate Republicans’ refusal even to consider an appointment made by President Obama — and there are likely to be at least two more in the next Presidential term. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is in her eighties and in poor health, and Justice Anthony Kennedy — normally a hard-line Right-winger (he wrote the second most loathsome Supreme Court decision in U.S. history, Citizens United) but one who departs from the Right-wing reservation on juvenile justice and Queer rights, and recently provided key votes to sustain affirmative action and women’s right to reproductive choice — is also getting up there.

Trump has already released his short list of 11 potential appointees to the Court (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/us/politics/donald-trump-supreme-court-nominees.html?_r=0) and challenged Hillary Clinton to do the same. Among the names on his list are Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, who according to the New York Times article by Alan Rappeport and Charlie Savage cited above “previously worked for the Bush White House’s office of faith-based initiatives and later in Texas government, where he pushed to keep a monument of the Ten Commandments on public property and the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance, issues he has promoted on his Facebook page.” Another is 11th Circuit federal appeals judge William H. Pryor, Jr., “whose appointment Senate Democrats had tried to block,” wrote Rappeport and Savage, “in part because, in his previous role as Alabama attorney general, he denounced Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, as having manufactured ‘a constitutional right to murder an unborn child.’”

So if Trump gets elected, goodbye to religious freedom in the U.S. for anyone who isn’t Christian or Jewish. Goodbye to women’s right to reproductive choice. Goodbye — especially if he gets to replace Anthony Kennedy, who’s written all the Court’s opinions expanding Queer rights — to any legal protections for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people, and hello to sodomy laws, police raids on Gay bars and a legal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman (period). And goodbye to any meaningful attempt by the judiciary to rein in Trump’s excesses or to protect the due-process rights of detainees in the “war on terror.”

On issue after issue, the Democrats aren’t as progressive as they should be, but compared to Trump they’re infinitely preferable. The Democrats acknowledge that human beings are causing climate change — though their proposed actions hardly match the magnitude of the potential crisis — but Trump thinks human-caused climate change is a hoax invented by Chinese propagandists. (I’m not making this up, you know.) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spent a lot of time in the primary debates arguing over whether the U.S. minimum wage should be raised to $12 or $15 per hour; Trump said during a Republican debate that U.S. workers are overpaid and need to make less so they can compete with workers making the starvation wages employers pay in China, Viet Nam or Bangladesh.

It’s time for all those people who still repeat, mantra-like, that there is no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties to wake up and smell the bitter stench of reality. The Democrats are hardly as progressive as they should be (if they were, we would be writing “presumptive Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders”), but the Republicans are an ideologically libertarian party dedicated to eliminating all social programs, all workers’ rights (including the minimum wage as well as occupational health and safety), all labor unions, all public education, all regulation of businesses, all environmental protections and all limits on the “right” of corporations and wealthy individuals to buy elections. If you don’t believe me, look at what they’ve done in state after state — Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, North Carolina and others — where Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. If you still believe there’s “no difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties, I’ve got a bottle of contaminated water from Flint, Michigan to sell you.

The bottom line is that if we want to preserve any hope of a progressive America in the future, we need to elect Hillary Clinton President in 2016 and we need to return Congress to Democratic control. We also need to be in the streets constantly to push her to honor all the progressive promises she made in the primary campaign, and to do the same with other elected Democrats. The electoral Republicans and the Tea Party activists have worked together brilliantly to move the center of gravity of American politics quite far to the Right. We need to do the same. We need both an electoral movement and a street protest movement to bring it back again and take America forward instead of letting it revert to the past when Donald Trump says it was “great” — when African-Americans and other people of color were still on the back of the bus, women were still in the kitchen, Queers were still in the closet and the richest Americans’ rule was absolute and unchallengeable.

I’ll end this long article with a quote from my long-time hero and my first choice for President this year, Bernie Sanders: “Hillary Clinton on her worst day would be a better President than any of the Republicans on their best day.” He said that in at least two Democratic primary debates, and he clearly believes it. So do I.