Another Mass Shooting

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

It’s indicative of how inured we’ve become to mass shootings that one of the most salient comments on the one in Parkland, Florida February 14 was that after its death toll of 17 people Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, perpetrators of the Columbine High mass shooting in 1999, are no longer on the list of the top ten most lethal school shooters in the U.S. It’s an issue that has totally paralyzed American politics; so completely have we outsourced our whole public policy on firearms to the National Rifle Association (NRA) that any restriction on the “right” of people to keep and bear virtually any arms they wish, short of nuclear weapons or tank-mounted cannons, has become politically unimaginable.

I’ll state right up front: as a born-and-bred West Coaster, a lifelong Californian who’s lived his entire life either in the San Francisco Bay Area or San Diego, I don’t get “gun culture.” I have never in my life even held an actual gun (as opposed to the toy pistols and BB guns I remember playing with as a kid), much less fired one. Indeed, I’m so prone to bouts of depression that if I did own a gun, quite frankly the person I’d be most likely to shoot with it is myself. I don’t “get” guns. I don’t know why anyone would want to own one. Though I eat meat, and therefore I’m complicit in the killing of animals for their food, I fail to see the entertainment value in hunting, especially for people sufficiently economically well situated that they don’t need to bring down game in the morning in order to have dinner that evening.

But I’m also an American, and therefore I have lived my entire life in a country that ironically has internalized Mao Zedong’s famous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our founding myths as a nation involve guns: guns supposedly “tamed the West” and enabled a handful of white people who had them to steal this country from a whole lot of Natives who didn’t. Indeed, not long after I wrote the above I read an article, “Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment,” by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz in the January 2018 Monthly Review, which argued that the whole reason American rebels wanted to be free of British domination in the 1770’s was not only was the British government setting limits on the colonists’ “right” to kill Natives and take their land, but they were imposing the Stamp Act and other taxes on the colonists to pay the British soldiers who were protecting the Natives against them.

Our entertainment is full of stories in which the moral is he who has the gun, or the biggest gun, or the most guns, wins. For years, “Westerns” — stories of supposedly “heroic” acts of genocide white Americans committed against Native populations — were the U.S.’s most popular form of mass entertainment. Westerns have gradually faded in popularity but the whole idea that guns are the right way for people to stand up for their rights and get rid of the other people in their way is at the heart of much of our dramatic entertainment. The U.S. movie ratings board is notoriously easier on violence and harder on sex than its counterparts in Europe. As the late comedian Lenny Bruce put it, “Well, if the kids want to watch killing, that’s fine, but if they want to watch schtupping [Yiddish for ‘screwing’], they may want to do it some day.”

In a commentary in the February 19 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-lemieux-parkland-second-amendment-20180219-story.html), University of Washington political science professor Scott Lemieux explains the factors that make sensible gun regulation impossible in the U.S. “The relatively recent radicalization of the National Rifle Association and its capture of the Republican Party makes even modest gun control measures impossible at the federal level and in most states,” he writes. “And while public opinion supports most specific gun control measures, including bans on assault-style weapons, opponents of gun control tend to be better mobilized and organized. At the national level, there’s an additional structural problem, which is that both houses of Congress over-represent rural jurisdictions where support for gun control is relatively weak and opposition is particularly intense.”

At least part of that is built into the U.S. Constitution. The framers were openly hostile to democracy and so they created a republican structure under which no one in the general public would vote directly for any office higher than member of the House of Representatives. The President would be chosen by an Electoral College and the U.S. Senate by state legislators. What’s more, each state would get two Senators, regardless of its population — an imbalance the framers may have figured they could live with because when the U.S. Constitution was adopted the most populous state, Virginia, had nine times as many people as the least populous, Rhode Island. Today the most populous state, California, has 250 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming.

America’s smaller states tend to be more rural, living as farmers or ranchers along large stretches of land, and therefore more accustomed to the idea of needing guns for “protection” whether they ever have occasion to use them or not. Indeed, I’ve met people from even relatively cosmopolitan Western or Midwestern states like Washington and Ohio who’ve described growing up with guns as a rite of passage: one way you knew you were finally accepted as an adult was your dad took you to the back yards and taught you to shoot. The idea that any government should tell you that you can’t own a gun, or that you have to submit to a “background check” and thereby ask the government’s permission to buy one, is anathema to many Americans who don’t live on the East or West Coast and believe that citizens have a right to “protect” themselves instead of relying on police or other government agencies to do it for them.

Lemieux’ observation that those opposing gun regulation “tend to be better mobilized and organized” is pretty obvious when you look at the war chest of the NRA versus that of any gun-regulation organization. But it also hints at a deeper reason why the Right has consistently defeating the Left in American politics over the last 40 years or so even though polls show large reservoirs of public support for “liberal” policy agendas like sensible gun legislation, women’s right to reproductive choice and equal rights for Queer people. The American Right’s coalition consists largely of single-issue constituencies: groups of voters who will base their entire decision whom to vote for on their position on one issue.

The Republican Party has come to dominate American politics not only by successfully exploiting the anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution but by assembling a coalition of voters who won’t support anyone who isn’t an absolutist on the Second Amendment, voters who won’t support anyone who doesn’t want to ban all (or almost all) abortion, voters who won’t support anyone who doesn’t take a hard line against immigration (especially immigration, “legal” or not, by people of color), voters who won’t support anyone who endorses same-sex marriage or anti-discrimination laws protecting Queers, and voters who won’t support anyone who backs regulations to protect workers, consumers and the environment.

By contrast, Left-wing voters tend to have a wider range of issues and are less likely to ignore the rest of what a candidate stands for to focus on one issue and base their voting decision on that. Too often, progressive Americans won’t vote for a candidate unless he or she supports gun regulation and reproductive choice and liberal immigration policies and Queer rights and reduction in U.S. military spending and intervention in other countries and criminal justice reform and replacing private health insurance with single-payer and an end to the “War on Drugs” and making rich people pay more in taxes and aggressively addressing the human causes of climate change. Miss one of those checkpoints on the Left’s all too common litmus tests and you’ve lost the votes of a lot of so-called progressives (“alt-Leftists,” I call them) who in practice help the Republicans by voting against Democrats they see as wanting on one issue on the alt-Left’s laundry lists.

So it doesn’t matter how many outraged moms march in the streets demanding that their government do something to protect their kids from being massacred by deranged or thrill-seeking misfits armed with lethal assault weapons. It doesn’t matter how hard it gets for the NRA to continue arguing that this or that particular mass killing wouldn’t have been prevented by this or that proposed gun control bill. The virtually absolute freedom of Americans under the Second Amendment to own as many guns as they like, of virtually whatever type they like (aside from a few categories, like fully automatic machine guns, that were made illegal decades ago before the issue became so polarized and the NRA so absolutist) is as settled a political issue in this country as anything ever gets.

Indeed, one could argue that it was definitively settled back in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote for President but lost in the Electoral College to George W. Bush. Gore was not defeated by the partisan Republican Secretary of State in Florida, nor by the U.S. Supreme Court, nor by Ralph Nader splitting the progressive vote. He was defeated by the NRA, which launched independent campaigns against him in the swing states of Tennessee and West Virginia and thus swung those states to Bush. In an election that was otherwise razor-close, Gore became the first major-party Presidential nominee to lose his home state, Tennessee. Had Gore carried Tennessee, he would have won the Electoral College and Florida wouldn’t have mattered a bit. Instead he lost his home state, he lost the Presidency, and Democrats throughout the U.S. got the message loud and clear: “Don’t fuck with the NRA.”

And that history repeated itself in 2016, when another Republican Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, enthusiastically embraced the NRA’s pro-gun agenda, got an early endorsement from them, and won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote largely because his opponent was widely seen as “anti-gun.” A number of voters interviewed during the 2016 campaign told reporters that they were aware of all Trump’s negatives but were going to vote for him anyway because “if Hillary gets in, she’s going to take my guns away.”

Americans — not all Americans, not even a majority, but enough highly dedicated and committed people to decide the issue — have decided that mass shootings are a small price to pay for the “freedom” to bear arms. They have decided to remain the most heavily armed country in the world, both in terms of their official military and weapons in private hands, because they believe it gives them “security” and “protection.” They vote according to the NRA’s wishes and repeat the mantra, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

Trump’s Feints Toward Reason

President Trump’s typical spew of often contradictory words and ideas about guns in the 13 days (as I’m writing this section of my article) since the Parkland shooting is all too accurate a reflection of the confusion and gridlock that has kept America’s lax gun policies in place throughout my lifetime and even before. If you don’t believe that, seek out the book The Real Bonnie and Clyde, published in 1967 by an author who thought the then-current film had glamorized them, and read the editorials from newspapers in 1934 that questioned just how the real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had acquired the huge arsenal they were found with when they were killed by Louisiana police, and dared suggest that maybe the government should do something to make it harder for outlaws to get guns.

As Los Angeles Times reporter David Lauter wrote on February 23 (http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-essential-politics-20180223-story.html), in the aftermath of Parkland President Trump offered four different policies aimed at preventing future mass murders at schools. “The first three of those ideas could put him in conflict with gun rights supporters,” Lauter wrote. “The fourth is the only one Trump has talked about at any length.”

The first three Lauter referred to are raising the legal age for buying assault weapons from 18 to 21, improving the background check system to make sure people with mental illnesses have a harder time buying guns, and banning the so-called “bump stocks” that turn legal semi-automatic assault rifles like the AR-15 used at Parkland into fully automatic machine-gun style weapons. Alleged Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz didn’t use bump stocks, but Stephen Paddock, identified by Las Vegas police as the gunman who opened fire at a country-music festival there October 1, 2017 and killed 58 people by shooting down on them from a hotel window, did.

Lauter and fellow Los Angeles Times reporter Christi Parsons, noted that any attempts to regulate who can buy firearms and under what conditions is going to crash into the usual wall of opposition from gun owners who regard any restrictions on gun ownership as the beginning of a slippery slope that will lead to repeal of the Second Amendment. (Frankly, repealing the Second Amendment is looking like a better and better idea every day. Without that troublesome and obsolete part of the Constitution defining gun ownership as a “right,” we could at least regulate firearms the way we do cars: you can own one, but first you have to pass a government-administered test to show you know how to use it properly and safely.)

In an article (https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-school-shootings-20180226-story.html) whose headline, at least in the Los Angeles Times’ print edition, used an odd gun metaphor and called Trump’s gun policy “scattershot,” Parsons and co-author Cathleen Decker quoted Michael Hammond, executive director of Gun Owners of America — a gun rights group founded in 1975 by people who thought the NRA was too willing to compromise on gun regulations — as saying proposals to end background check loopholes, outlaw bump stocks or expand the use of protective orders to take guns from mentally ill civilians would be tantamount to “the 2nd Amendment Repeal Act.”

It’s not surprising that in later statements, Trump has backed away from at least one of the sensible gun regulations he sorta-kinda endorsed earlier: raising the age for buying an assault weapon from 18 to 21. (If you ask me, it should be zero; there is utterly no justification for private individuals, even “sportsmen” who like to go out in the woods and shoot animals, to own military-grade firearms.) Instead, he’s offered a preposterous claim that if he’d been on the scene in Parkland he’d have been willing to go in there to stop the shooting, “even if I didn’t have a weapon.” And he’s doubled down on the fourth proposal Lauter referred to, the one that’s long been on the NRA’s wish list: “solving” the problem of gun violence at schools by arming teachers.

“Last Thursday (February 22), when Donald Trump proposed arming teachers as a response to the Parkland gun massacre, his suggestion was met with widespread horror and ridicule,” New Yorker reporter Jay Cassidy wrote on the magazine’s Web site February 27. “Teachers dismissed it. Lawmakers shied away from it. And critics pointed out that the idea had originally been proposed by the N.R.A. in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, in 2012.

“Yet Trump is nothing if not stubborn. During a meeting at the White House with a number of governors on Monday (February 26), he defended his proposal even in the face of strong opposition from one of his guests, Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington state. In initial news reports, the exchanges between Trump, Inslee, and several other governors were overshadowed by the President’s laughable claim that even unarmed, he would have tackled the Parkland school shooter. But the discussion of the merits and demerits of arming teachers is well worth revisiting.”

Inslee, a long-time advocate of gun regulation serving his second term, told Trump, “I have listened to the biology teachers, and they don’t want to do that in any percentage. I have listened to the first-grade teachers that don’t want to be pistol-packing first-grade teachers. I have listened to law enforcement who have said they don’t want to have to train teachers as law-enforcement agents, which takes about six months. Now, I just think this is a circumstance where we need to listen — that educators should be educators and shouldn’t have foisted onto them the responsibility of packing heat in first-grade classes. I just suggest we need a little less tweeting and little more listening, and let’s just take that off the table and move forward.”

Trump didn’t respond to Inslee — instead he called on several other governors from more gun-friendly states who said they liked the idea of arming teachers — but, as Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz argued in the Monthly Review piece I cited earlier, and at greater length in a recently published book called Loaded: A Disarming Look at the Second Amendment, the NRA’s dream of a totally armed citizenry of good guys with guns at the ready to blow away bad guys with guns has deep roots in American history. She points out that those “well-regulated militias” referenced in the Second Amendment had at least two important functions in pre-Revolutionary America that carried over after independence and well into the 19^th Century. One was to keep Native Americans from retaking the land white settlers had driven them off of, and the other was to enforce slavery by capturing and, if necessary, killing fugitive slaves.

At the time the Second Amendment was ratified as part of the Bill of Rights, Dunbar Ortiz states, not only did most states have similar guarantees of the right to bear arms, some states had laws requiring all able-bodied males to own guns and to carry them whenever they left home. A few states even offered financial assistance so people who otherwise couldn’t afford weapons could buy them. The end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 and the effective end of Native American resistance to white occupation, which Dunbar Ortiz dates to the killing of chief Crazy Horse in 1877, meant that these two purposes for a well-armed citizenry no longer applied — but the whole “pioneer spirit” and the idea that a responsible citizen is one who owns a gun, knows how to use it and is willing to do so lingers to this day among many Americans.

So is the idea that only “certain” — i.e., white — people should own guns. In D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a piece of racist propaganda glorifying the Ku Klux Klan and also artistically one of the finest movies ever made, the climax occurs when the Klan successfully not only drives Southern Blacks from the political power they’d achieved during Reconstruction but, even more importantly for the forces of white supremacy, takes away their guns. In a much less well-known film, Tim McCoy’s 1932 pro-Native Western End of the Trail, McCoy plays an U.S. Army officer who’s dishonorably discharged from the service for allegedly selling guns to the Natives; he denies the charges but says that since the U.S. has broken every treaty it has ever made with Native Americans, he can understand and sympathize with their armed resistance.

The Parkland shooting laid bare the contradictions within Donald Trump — and within a lot of Americans, including the minority who, because of where they were distributed within the country, were able to make him President. Trump is a coward who hates the sight of blood — on his February 26 MS-NBC program, Lawrence O’Donnell recounted an incident from 2008 in which Trump was confronted by an 80-year-old man who collapsed and nearly died at an event at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump’s main concern was this man was shedding all that disgusting red blood all over his resort’s marble floors — who styles himself a superhero. Not only did he say he would have personally intervened to stop the mass shooting at Parkland if he’d been there, but on New Year’s Day 2018 he triumphantly proclaimed that because of his leadership, there had been no fatal plane crashes in the U.S. in 2017.

When he’s not fantasizing himself so literally as Superman — intervening in active shootings because bullets will bounce off him, and magically keeping planes from killing their passengers — Trump is enthralled by the NRA’s vision of returning to the frontier days in which people trusted themselves, not law enforcement, to protect them and the public peace. The idea of a dog-eat-dog culture in which people at least figuratively, if not literally, have to kill each other in order to survive is very much a part of Donald Trump’s psyche. It’s how he ran his businesses; he was the sort of boss who hired people without giving them a clear idea of what he wanted them to do, then had them fight each other for his favor so he could reward the ones who flattered him the most and made him the most money.

This was also the role he played on the TV series The Apprentice, which was all-important to his success as a politician because it convinced millions of Americans that Trump — in real life a mediocre businessman with as many losses as wins in his track record — was a financial and business authority of perfect intelligence and sagacity. And it’s the way he’s run his White House as well, with shifting lines of authority and a clear preference for those who will flatter him instead of those who will actually tell him what he needs to know and get the job done.

Trump wants a country whose citizens are always at the ready, fingers on triggers, to fight each other for what they want — and the fact that he’s a physical coward who’s been protected from that sort of existence by his family’s money and has seriously compared risking getting STD’s from all the women he slept with to facing combat in Viet Nam makes his whole pretension that he would do well in the Hunger Games-style arena he’d like the rest of us to live in all the more bizarre. Of course, in his scattershot comments on post-Parkland policy he’s thrown out some of the Right’s usual targets — it’s all the fault of Hollywood and the media, all those violent movies and video games (which, as I argued at the start of this piece, really reflect America’s love affairs with guns and a dog-eat-dog view of the world) — but Parkland has really given us a Rorschach-like view of Donald Trump … and of ourselves.

The Left’s Sacred Cow

The Parkland shootings hooked one of the Right’s sacred cows — the belief that despite the thin veneer of civilization, and the military and law-enforcement institutions we’ve set up in the belief that they can protect us, ultimately it’s the individual’s responsibility to protect himself, and to arm himself so he can do so. But it’s also hooked one of the Left’s sacred cows: the long-established principle of the American judicial system that people can only be punished for the crimes they’ve actually committed, not those they might commit in the future; and the related idea that even when charged with a crime and put on trial, accused people are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

President Trump tweeted at 8:08 p.m. February 17, “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign — there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!” This statement was widely interpreted as an attack on the FBI and Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller for continuing to investigate whether Russian agents tried to influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and Trump’s campaign helped them. But it was more than that: in its plea that the FBI should have responded to “all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter” by incarcerating or otherwise punishing him in advance is a direct assault on the whole idea that people are presumed innocent and can only be punished for crimes they have actually done, not simply those they might do.

The presumption of innocence and the idea of punishing people only for their actual crimes have worn down in practice over the last few decades. Virtually everyone in prison today didn’t get there by a jury conviction; instead, they accepted a plea bargain with prosecutors and took a shorter sentence rather than running the risk of a longer one at trial. Indeed, many of the “tough-on-crime” laws of the 1970’s and 1980’s were designed to add more offenses with which an alleged criminal could be charged from the same set of facts, to give prosecutors more leverage in plea deals. And at the height of the early-1990’s mania over sexual abuse of children by adults — some of it real, some way overblown and some existing only in the minds of prosecutors and so-called “therapists” who asked kids leading questions in settings reminiscent of the Salem witch trials — Washington state passed a pioneering law, which other states later copied.

This allowed adults convicted of sex crimes against children to be kept in prison longer than their original sentences, until psychotherapists decided that they were “no longer in danger” of re-offending. The idea that people who committed crimes and served out their sentences could be kept behind bars, either in prisons or mental institutions, for crimes they might commit in the future flat-out contradicted the whole idea that Americans can only be punished for crimes they’ve actually done. But because of the heinous nature of the offenses, a lot of people — even those ordinarily supportive of due process and the presumption of innocence — supported such laws.

What Trump is suggesting is that people who merely fit the “profile” of someone law-enforcement and mental-health officials think may commit a crime in the future should be intercepted and incarcerated before they can do so. It’s an idea that has a lot of support in this country, not only from the Right but the Left as well. Indeed, many people who back this concept don’t even realize they’re doing so; they look at the pre-murder background of an alleged mass killer and ask, “Why didn’t we do something to stop it?,” when in fact there’s precious little we can do without violating the civil liberties not only of people who would go on to commit mass murders but also of a lot of people who won’t.

Certainly the profile of alleged Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz by Los Angeles Times reporters Matt Pearce and Jenny Jarvie (https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-school-shootings-20180226-story.html) seems so totally to fit the checklist of what, in the popular imagination, a nascent school shooter looks like one can imagine producers at Lifetime giving it to their writers as a guide for creating a fictional mass-killer character. Product of a broken home? Check. Adoptee who never really fit in? Check. “Pale and slight”? Check. Torture of animals? Check: “Cruz killed squirrels [and] poked sticks down rabbit holes,” Pearce and Jarvie reported. “Cruz would take his dog across the street to attack their neighbors’ pot-bellied pigs.” Perpetrator of minor acts of violence against neighbors and other kids? Check:

Pale and slight, Cruz caused alarm among neighbors not long after he moved in. A neighbor complained that he bit their young son’s ear, said Shelby Speno, a 48-year-old videographer who lives two doors down from the family’s former home. When Cruz was a little older, a neighbor accused him of stealing a check from a mailbox. In middle school, she said, he threw eggs at her husband’s car. Other neighbors complained that Cruz … picked fights with other children. One day, Speno said, she provided a statement to police after her daughter spotted him shooting their backyard neighbors’ chickens with a BB gun.

The problem with these categories is that a lot of children are adopted, have adjustment problems, hurt animals and pick fights with other kids without growing up to be mass murderers. Some even make bravado posts on social media, the way Cruz did, announcing that they’re “going to be a professional school shooter” and shooting selfies of themselves holding guns without ever planning to use them to mow down their former classmates and teachers. Too often, the call to “do something” about kids like Nikolas Cruz turns into treating alienation and being “different” as crimes — and as a kid who was bullied through much of my school career (though, interestingly, less so in high school than I’d been earlier because high school was bigger and there were enough people like me I could make friends and we essentially assembled our own Island of Misfit Toys), I’m especially sensitive to that.

If we want to stop school shootings before they happen, don’t pick on the kids who are “different” and make them feel even worse about who we are. (If any psychological intervention could  have helped Nikolas Cruz, I suspect it would have to have happened long before high school, while his age was still in single digits.) Get rid of the Goddamned guns! Get this country over its long love affair with its “pioneer” past of genocide against Native Americans and enslaving African-Americans, which according to Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz is why we have a Second Amendment in the first place.

I didn’t grow up to be a school shooter partly because I had a certain basic level of decency that made me express my differences from others in journalism and political activism rather than violence, but also because I didn’t grow up around guns, I didn’t know anyone who had guns, I never owned a gun and I’ve never wanted to own a gun. Only when we stop idolizing guns, and tell the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America that it’s time to put them alongside the advocates for slavery in America’s Hall of Shame, will we stop having people who think they can solve the brokenness inside them by shooting a whole lot of other people.

Armistead and I: Tales of Two Cities

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On New Year’s Day 2018, KPBS, the local San Diego outlet for public broadcasting, showed a couple of programs from 9 p.m. to midnight. One — the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s concert, featuring the music of the Strauss family and other light fare —was the sort of thing you expect to see around the New Year’s holiday. The other wasn’t: it was a film by Jennifer Kroot (she’s credited on imdb.com only as director but the actual credits list her as writer as well) called The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, a documentary about the life of the San Francisco-based Gay writer who created the long-running serial Tales of the City, first published in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper and then in a book, which begat another book, which ultimately became six books in all ending in 1989, plus a couple of follow-ups Maupin wrote years later.

I don’t know why I wanted to watch this. I’d never been a fan of Armistead Maupin. I’d never even read him, though I’d seen the 1993 mini-series of Tales of the City on PBS — parts of it, anyway. Indeed, my husband Charles told me several times in the early minutes of The Untold Tales that if I wanted to watch something else, he wouldn’t mind me either switching the channel or putting on a movie on DVD. “This is an important slice of Gay culture and history,” I told him, and the show stayed on and we watched it until the end. It was a weird experience, mainly because it flashed me back to my own adolescence and early adulthood in San Francisco and my coming to grips with my own sexuality, including the time I was attending San Francisco State University and simultaneously dating two of my fellow students — a woman and a man — and ultimately living with the woman for nearly five years before I finally decided it was time to come out as Gay.

What I didn’t realize about Armistead Maupin was that not only was he a Southern boy. He was born in Washington, D.C. but raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. His family was Southern in their orientation and even had a genuine Confederate war hero in their lineage: Lawrence O’Bryan Branch, a Confederate general killed in the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. (This was an especially noteworthy battle because it was the North’s first major victory, and it gave President Lincoln the political and military credibility he felt he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.) What’s more, Maupin got his first job in media at a TV station in Raleigh managed by none other than future U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, a deeply and viciously homo-hating man who once told Maupin that a homosexual was “the worst thing you could possibly be.”

Maupin grew up a hardline Right-winger and so intensely committed to the U.S. military that he volunteered for the Navy, served three tours (one of them in combat in Viet Nam) and only reluctantly left. In Kroot’s documentary, he ruefully admits that all the cute guys he could ogle there were one of the reasons he wanted to serve, though in the pre-“don’t ask, don’t tell” era when Queers were automatically banned from the U.S. military and there were periodic witch hunts to ferret them out, discharge them and give them “bad paper” that would make it virtually impossible for them to get civilian jobs later, he knew the rule was “look but don’t touch.”

He didn’t find his way out of either his political or his sexual closet until 1971, when he got a job with the Associated Press in their bureau in San Francisco. Though Kroot didn’t tell when or how Maupin came to grips with being Gay, his Wikipedia page says he knew he was Gay from childhood but didn’t have sex with a man until age 26 and didn’t definitively come out until age 30. In 1974 he began writing a serial about urban live in San Francisco for a weekly newspaper called the Pacific Sun, based in Marin County, just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. The Pacific Sun hired Maupin when they were attempting to expand into San Francisco itself, and when that folded he managed to place the serial with the biggest and most prestigious newspaper in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Tales of the City — a title invented by his editor at the Chronicle since the Pacific Sun owned its previous name, The Serial — raised eyebrows at the Chronicle because newspapers generally didn’t publish fiction. They had once, and in Untold Tales Maupin at least twice compares himself to Charles Dickens because Dickens’ books, too, were first published chapter by chapter in newspapers as serials. The installments created a sensation, mainly because they dealt frankly with the fact that there were a lot of Queer people in San Francisco, and the Chronicle’s Gay and Lesbian readers embraced the series because it gave them a chance to read about people like themselves. The stories’ central character is Mary Ann Singleton, a naïve young woman who moves from Cleveland to San Francisco, takes an apartment in a building run by an eccentric landlady named Anna Madrigal, and falls in decidedly unrequited love with a young Gay man named Michael “Mouse” Tolliver.

The stories got attention from Chronicle readers, who fought what would now be called “flame wars” in the paper’s letters-to-the-editor column. Some denounced Maupin’s story as utterly unsuited for a family newspapers, while others defended the series. In 1978 a New York publisher sounded Maupin out about publishing the serial episodes as a novel, and Maupin agreed. Tales of the City became a best-seller and Maupin wrote five more books in the cycle. It ended in 1989 with Sure of You, a decision Maupin says in the film he reached because he had made Michael Tolliver HIV positive and he didn’t want the cycle to end with a morbid death scene like virtually all previous fiction about Queer people. As people with HIV diagnoses began living longer and AIDS receded from being an automatic death sentence to what the medical business calls “a chronic, manageable disease,” Maupin resumed writing about Michael Tolliver in 2007 with a book called Michael Tolliver Lives, with him narrating the story this time instead of it being told in third-person.

One of the things that kept Maupin’s series popular and relevant was his inclusion of real-life characters, events and issues facing the Queer community. Oddly, Jennifer Kroot includes a segment in her film about the effect of AIDS on Queers in general and the San Francisco community in particular before her depiction of Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” anti-Queer campaign in 1977 — four years before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) first identified AIDS as a diagnosable medical condition. Maupin was one of the first fiction writers to address AIDS — in the fourth installment in the Tales cycle, Babycakes, published in 1983, at a time when a lot of people in the Queer community were hoping the epidemic would burn itself out and go away.

He was also one of the first to depict a Transgender character. He had had it in mind that Anna Madrigal, the landlady and on-site manager of the building where most of the characters live, would be a Transwoman and be revealed as such at the end of the first Tales of the City book. Realizing that he knew very little about actual Trans people, he sought out a Transwoman and interviewed her. When he asked her why she had gone through gender reassignment, he was stunned by her answer: “Because I wanted to be able to talk to women.” At a time when there was a good deal of anti-Trans prejudice in the Queer community — much of it from self-proclaimed feminists who thought Transwomen were embracing the attributes of “femininity” many Lesbians were consciously rejecting in the 1970’s — Maupin was once again a trailblazer in depicting a Trans character realistically and sympathetically.

Maupin mostly used the real names of actual people he incorporated into his story, but made an exception for a major movie star he called “_____ _____,” but who was obviously Rock Hudson — whom Maupin had tricked with a few times in the 1970’s, including one three-way with Hudson’s partner. When Hudson fell seriously ill in 1985 and his publicists put out various cover stories to try to keep people from figuring out he had AIDS, Maupin publicly stated that he knew Hudson and had personal knowledge that he was Gay, thereby “outing” him after decades of rumors and getting dumped on by a lot of Queer people who thought no one should ever be brought out of the closet against their will.

One of the most heartbreaking stories about the impact of AIDS in Kroot’s film comes from Maupin’s long-time friend, Chinese-American author Amy Tan. She first met Maupin when he came to do a book signing at a bookstore Tan’s family owned. It had a lot of Queer employees, attracted Queer customers and stocked books about Queers and their lives. As the AIDS epidemic progressed, Tan recalled, her employees started dying. Her customers started dying, too, and eventually so many of her “regulars” passed away that the bookstore lost business and was forced to close.

Kroot pretty much races through Maupin’s post-Tales of the City years. She does discuss two long-term relationships he was in, including one with a man named Terry from whom he had what Maupin calls a “cocktail divorce.” After the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver — held during a long period when it was impossible to hold the conference in the U.S. because Maupin’s former mentor, Jesse Helms, had pushed a bill through Congress banning entry visas for people who tested HIV positive — new therapies involving multiple drugs were introduced and people with AIDS or HIV diagnoses started living longer. This had the odd result that people like Maupin in so-called “sero-discordant” relationships — he’s remained negative but he says in the film that all his serious partners have been positive — found their partners wanted to leave now that they no longer felt they needed someone to support them through an imminent decline and death.

Maupin’s current partner — his husband, actually, though Kroot doesn’t mention that they are legally married — is Christopher Turner, a much younger former model and photographer who created the DaddyHunt.com Web site for younger Gay men interested in meeting and dating older ones. Maupin remembered looking at the site but not dating anyone from it; later he met Turner on the street and told him, “Didn’t I see you on DaddyHunt.com?” Turner then acknowledged that he’d created DaddyHunt.com because he’d wanted to meet older men. The two began dating and married in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on February 18, 2007.

One good thing about Kroot’s film is that, though she made it with the intent of getting it on PBS, it doesn’t shy away from the sad history of Maupin’s work on the network. Tales of the City was made into a miniseries on PBS in 1993, with the young, then little-known Laura Linney as Mary Ann Singleton and Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal — both of them are interviewed extensively in Untold Tales — and it was sensationally successful. It brought many PBS stations the best prime-time ratings they’d ever had, and in San Francisco Tales pulled in more viewers than the commercial networks.

Then disaster struck: the Republican Party gained control of both houses of the U.S. Congress and Maupin’s mentor turned nemesis, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, made Tales Exhibit A in his case for why the government should cancel all funding for PBS. The network caved and backed out of their deal to make another miniseries out of the second book in the cycle — and Linney, in Kroot’s films, vividly recalls her disappointment that she would not get to play the character again.

Maupin’s San Francisco — and Mine

I was born in San Francisco in 1953, making me nine years younger than Armistead Maupin. (By ironic coincidence, my husband Charles is nine years younger than I.) In 1960 my mother and stepfather (my dad and my mom had broken up when I was 1 ½ and I have no living memories of them as a couple) moved to Marin County and bought a home. I grew up in Marin County and suffered through some of my mother’s social experiments — including moving us to the so-called “gilded ghetto” of Marin City, where most of the county’s African-Americans lived — after she and my stepfather broke up in 1965.

Then in 1974 I moved to the East Bay to attend UC Berkeley, where I dropped out after two quarters. I stayed there until 1978, when I moved into a dorm at San Francisco State (where I’d started attending in 1977 less out of any burning career goal and more just to check “college graduation” off my list of life tasks) and then found a small studio apartment on Larkin Street, where my girlfriend and I lived until we moved to San Diego in January 1980.

There were a number of reasons we did that. She was from Southern California and felt more comfortable there than in San Francisco. I was already noticing my “roving eye” roving towards the men in our neighborhood, and I naïvely believed it would be easier for me to resist temptation and keep my straight relationship going if I got away from the large, politically influential and socially inescapable Queer community in San Francisco. Also the November 1978 murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk had to some extent soured me on the city of my birth. The fact that I had commonalities with both Milk and his killer, Supervisor Dan White — I’m Irish-American like White and Queer like Milk — made the post-assassination political state of San Francisco even weirder and less welcoming to me.

Needless to say, the hope that I could keep my straight relationship together in San Diego and not be tempted to stray back to my Gay side didn’t work — though I didn’t finally come out to my girlfriend until December 1982. (We remain close friends to this day.) I was certainly a late bloomer sexually — I didn’t have my first sexual experience with a woman until early 1973 (she was on the rebound from her breakup with a mutual friend who also turned out to be Gay; today we’re back in touch and are friends on Facebook) and didn’t have my first with a man until late 1977.

I was coming out of the student bookstore at San Francisco State when I was approached by a man who sidled up to me and said, in a voice I’m sure he thought was sexy, “I’d like to blow you away.” Never having consciously thought of myself as Gay — though I can look back at my life and realize there were certain boys in my life on whom I clearly had what I can now recognize were crushes — I was freaked out by this, though I let him give me his phone number. That night, I tossed and turned virtually all night, worried about the whole thing, until I finally told myself, “You’re going to call that guy and you’re going to make a date with him.” The next morning I did, leaving him a message which he returned at an almost cosmically right moment — I was in my room listening to an LP of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1938 recordings of the Act I Prelude and Act III Good Friday Spell from Parsifal, and he called right in the pause between the Prelude and the Good Friday Spell.

I had my first Gay experience in the back of his car, on a weekend morning in the San Francisco State parking lot. We dated for a while until I met my girlfriend, also at school, and that, I thought, was the end of that. But as a Bay Area resident in the late 1970’s, when Tales of the City appeared as a miniseries on PBS, I recognized many of the settings — and many of the kinds of people depicted, too. In fact, I found much of the series hard to watch because, as I explained to my then-roommate, “I didn’t like these people that much in real life — why would I want to watch a movie about them?” I wonder what I’d think about Tales of the City if I revisited it now as an historical document.

I know that the books about life as a Gay man I did read in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, like John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw and Larry Kramer’s Faggots, probably kept me in the closet longer than I otherwise might have lasted because they made life as a Gay man seem like a relentless hunt for sex on the most superficial level. I’ve written before apropos of the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus books that if its author, John Gray, wanted to test his theory that men and women approach sex differently, with women demanding that it have a romantic and emotional context and men more interested in the sheer physical sensation, he should have done what scientists call “isolate the variable” and looked at how people behave sexually when they don’t have to worry about the needs, desires and feelings of the other gender: totally Gay men and totally Lesbian women.

Certainly my own experiences as a Gay man — including being “out” for the past 35 years and having been through both “open” and “closed” relationships — lend credence to the idea that men can readily detach the physical pleasure of sex from any emotional or relational context. It also helps, of course, that Gay men can’t either get pregnant themselves or make their partners pregnant. When I was with my girlfriend I would frequently lose my hard-on during the laborious process of her putting in her diaphragm, which she had to use because she was allergic to pills and scared of IUD’s. When I came out I joked to her that I was finally practicing a form of birth control that was guaranteed 100 percent effective.

I can’t read a book or watch a movie about San Francisco in the late 1970’s without having twinges of nostalgia. I remember an establishing shot in Peter Berlin’s remarkable 1970’s Gay porn film That Boy that took us past the Wherehouse Records outlet in San Francisco, where I could remember buying the boxed set of Bruno Walter’s recordings of the complete Beethoven symphonies as well as quite a few avant-garde jazz items by people like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

When I watched — or tried to watch — the PBS miniseries adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City in 1993 I had a lot of those nostalgic twinges and said a sad requiem for the city I had once lived in, and the sort of community it had started groping towards before the Moscone/Milk murders, the rise of AIDS, and later the takeover of San Francisco by the dot-commers (briefly alluded to in Untold Tales when Maupin tells Kroot that he still loves San Francisco and refuses to protest things like the “Google bus” that spirits tech employees from their homes in San Francisco to their jobs in Silicon Valley) ended that set of possibilities.

San Diego is my home now and probably will be until the day I die — unless the relentless gentrifiers price me out of it and force Charles and I to relocate to a more isolated, more conservative but cheaper area for our final years. It’s not a place that exalts me the way the Bay Area used to, but it doesn’t disappoint me the way the Bay Area did either. But as the song says, I did leave my heart in San Francisco — or at least a piece of it — and cultural artifacts like Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City bring it back to me in weird and not altogether pleasant ways.

Donald Trump’s Great Year

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I have a lot of respect for MS-NBC news host and former Congressional aide Lawrence O’Donnell, but he was dead wrong on December 29 when he hosted his show — a year-in-review episode detailing all the mistakes President Donald Trump had allegedly made throughout 2017 — and read his list, liberally illustrated with clips from previous episodes, under a title reading, “Donald Trump’s Bad Year.”

The title couldn’t have been more wrong. Donald Trump had a great year in 2017. He’s been ridiculed for having said early on in his Presidency that he was doing more in his first year than anyone since Franklin D. Roosevelt took office during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, but he’s come damned close.

Trump has also been made fun of because it wasn’t until the end of the year that the Republican-dominated Congress passed, and he signed into law, a truly major piece of legislation. But that has hardly ever mattered less. Taking a page from the book of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, Trump governed from his first days largely by “executive orders,” simple this-is-the-way-it’s-going-to-be proclamations that he issued in huge leather-bound folders and signed with a huge Sharpie pen — as if, I joked at the time, any lesser writing implement wouldn’t be big enough for his … hands.

Between his steady flood of executive orders, issued with all the pomp and flourish of a Third World military officer having staged a coup d’état and ruling by decree, his wholesale deletions of government regulations, his judicial appointments and the revolutionary reshaping of American fiscal policy, Trump has achieved his goal of a “transformational” Presidency, one which will fundamentally change every American’s relations between him/herself and the U.S. government and ultimately achieve the Republican Party’s long-term goal of ending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and every other program that taxes the rich to help the not-so-rich.

Even more than George W. Bush, who once complained that his critics have “misunderestimated” him, Donald Trump has been a far more brilliant and savvy manipulator of people and events than he usually gets credit for being. The alleged “chaos” of his administration reflects deliberate policy on his part: a long-time management strategy, which he used as a businessman well before he entered (or even thought of entering) politics, of deliberately setting his employees against each other and promoting the ones who win while firing the ones who lose. (It’s essentially the self-image he projected on his TV show The Apprentice.)

Jonah Goldberg, a Right-wing opinion columnist who was one of the last from his side of the political fence to acknowledge and at least grudgingly support Trump, published a column in the December 26 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-goldberg-column-20171226-story.html) detailing the achievements of President Trump’s first year in office: “A record number of judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice, the defeat of Islamic State, repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate, tax reform and major rollbacks of various regulations, from arctic drilling to Net Neutrality.”

One of the reasons Trump has been so “misunderestimated” has been his low standing in public opinion polls. Generally his “approval” rating in such polls has hovered between 32 and 38 percent, lowest for any American President in the history of scientific polling. But that doesn’t matter as much as a lot of people think it does. One reason, I suspect, is that Trump has a sort of reverse version of the “Bradley effect” going for him. The “Bradley effect” was the alleged unwillingness of Americans to tell survey researchers they weren’t going to vote for an African-American candidate because they had racist prejudices but didn’t want to admit those to people polling them.

It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who in 1982 ran for Governor of California against Republican George Deukmejian. He was ahead a few points in the last pre-election polls but lost the election by a few points, and the 5- to 10-point difference between those last-minute polls and the actual results became known as the “Bradley effect.” President Obama’s election in November 2008 was largely thought to have ended the “Bradley effect,” but in fact his support dropped off from the last polls to the actual result just as the “Bradley effect” predicted: he was ahead 10 percentage points in the last polls and he won by five. So Obama was harmed by the “Bradley effect” just as previous African-American candidates had been; he was just so far ahead he won anyway.

I think Donald Trump has a reverse “Bradley effect” going for him: a 5- to 10-percent margin among Americans who support Trump precisely because he is so openly racist, sexist and generally bigoted, but are too ashamed to admit that to pollsters. This was one of the main reasons he won the election; not realizing that Trump would always score 5 to 10 points higher than his poll numbers would indicate, Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff and her supporters generally couldn’t imagine they could possibly lose Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania … until they did. So those who are hoping Trump’s Presidency would implode because of his low approval ratings in polls need to look up and face the facts. Trump actually had a 36 percent approval rating on November 7, 2016 — and he won the election with 46 percent of the vote. So it’s reasonable to estimate the hard-core Trump “base” as about 40 percent of the electorate, 10 percent more than his lowest poll ratings.

A Decades-Long Campaign

In his article, Jonah Goldberg attributes Trump’s successes to the way he’s let the established institutions of the Republican Party largely take over the government, despite his protestations that they are part of the mysterious, shadowy “Establishment” aimed at sabotaging him. “Trump’s success (such as it is) is less attributable to sudden mastery of the issues than staying out of the way of rank-and-file Republican policymakers, activists and bureaucrats,” Goldberg said.

The truth is actually broader than that. Ever since the late 1930’s, there has been a Right-wing movement within the Republican Party that coalesced in the first place around opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s and the Democrats’ “New Deal” — and, later, their foreign policy. For a quarter-century this tendency battled with the more moderate, centrist “business Republicanism” of the party’s East Coast-based establishment.

Business Republicans wanted to put brakes on the New Deal and the Democrats’ penchant for using the power of the U.S. to determine events throughout the world, but they basically accepted those doctrines. They were willing to sustain at least some investment in social welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare because for people who grew up in the 1930’s the alternative seemed to be economic chaos. They were also willing to tolerate organized labor and to reach out to communities of color, especially since the Democrats, with their base in the “Solid South,” had historically been the party of slavery, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan and organized racism in general.

Business Republicans continued to dominate the party until the mid-1960’s, when a series of events put the hard Right in control first of the Republican Party and, eventually, the entire country. First, a coalition of liberal Northern Democrats and business Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, thereby flipping the two parties’ historic positions on civil rights for people of color. The Democrats established themselves as the party opposed to racism, while the Republicans moved to capture disillusioned Southern Democrats and working-class Northerners put off by the Democrats’ increasing identification with the African-American cause and also by the counter-cultural movements among young people in the 1960’s.

The Republicans first sought to take advantage of this so-called “white backlash” when they nominated their first hard-Right Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, in 1964. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act and thereby gave himself and the Republican Party “cred” among racist and culturally conservative voters disgusted by the Democrats’ alignment with young people and people of color. Though Goldwater lost, he carried five Southern states, spelling the end of the “solid South” for the Democrats and permanently changing the balance of power in American politics from the Democrats to the Republicans.

The next step forward for the hard-Right in the Republican Party was Richard Nixon’s open embrace of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) in his 1968 Presidential campaign. Anxious to blunt the threat that racist Alabama Governor George Wallace’s independent Presidential campaign would split the Right-wing vote and allow Democrat Hubert Humphrey to win, Nixon and Thurmond concocted the “Southern strategy” by which the Republicans would take over from the Democrats as the party of cultural conservatism and racism. Between them, Nixon and Wallace won 57 percent of the Presidential vote in 1968 to Humphrey’s 43 percent, indicating that the days of the “New Deal coalition” was over and there was now a permanent Right-wing majority in Presidential politics that would last until the 1990’s.

Nixon won in 1968 and scored a landslide re-election victory with 61 percent of the vote in 1972, and though he ultimately fell from grace after the various stratagems and “dirty tricks” he had pulled to win that sweeping victory, collectively known as “Watergate,” were revealed, the Right-wing majority in American Presidential politics survived him. Democrat Jimmy Carter won in 1976, partly a reaction to Watergate and the disgrace it had heaped on the Republicans, and partly due to his status as the first major-party Presidential candidate who was also an evangelical Christian. Evangelicals who had previously stayed away from politics joined in the Carter campaign and believed he would govern according to their culturally conservative values.

He did not, and the reaction of the evangelical community to what they considered Carter’s “betrayal” helped shape the next step forward for the radical Right in their ultimate takeover of American politics: the successful campaign of Ronald Reagan, the first hard-Right nominee for President actually to win, in 1980. Unlike Carter, whose administration’s pro-choice position on abortion and tentative overtures to Queers (including issuing an executive order banning discrimination against Queers in non-military federal employment that remains in effect) had alienated his fellow evangelicals, Reagan delivered for the so-called “Christian Right” up to a point. In particular, he imposed the infamous “gag rule” barring U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations working abroad from even mentioning abortion as an alternative for pregnant women.

Reagan was more concerned with delivering on the economic agenda of the hard Right than the evangelical social agenda. He put through two huge tax cuts in his first two years in office that, contrary to the optimistic predictions of so-called “supply-side economists” that they would actually increase government revenue by stimulating economic activity, in fact tanked the economy and led to a recession in 1982. He also followed a policy Adolf Hitler called Gleischhaltung — one of those indigestible compound words Germans love to create that doesn’t have a good English equivalent, though I’ve seen it rendered as “rectification” — which means blunting the effect of government agencies charged to do something you don’t like by appointing people to run those agencies who fundamentally disbelieve in their missions.

Reagan’s most flagrant and notorious example of Gleischhaltung was appointing a woman named Anne M. Gorsuch to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) despite — or, rather, because of — her opposition to governmental attempts to protect the environment. The way the American radical Right is tight-knit not only ideologically but personally through generations is illustrated by the fact that one of Donald Trump’s most spectacular first-year triumphs was to get Gorsuch’s son Neil onto the U.S. Supreme Court for life.

Trump, of course, has used Gleischhaltung even more systematically than Reagan. As his EPA head he appointed Scott Pruitt, who in his previous life as attorney general of Oklahoma repeatedly sued to have the EPA declared unconstitutional and whose attitude towards the environment makes Anne Gorsuch look like a charter member of the Sierra Club by comparison. To run the Interior Department he picked Ryan Zinke, who’s apparently never looked at a wilderness area he hasn’t wanted to see drilled or mined. To run the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) Trump chose Mick Mulvaney, a former Republican Congressmember on record as saying the CFPB should be abolished.

With appointments like that, Trump doesn’t need to get the Republican Congress to pass legislation. All he has to do is put hard-Right people in charge of various agencies and tell them to dismantle as many regulations as possible so he and other 0.01-percenters can have a free hand to manipulate government in order to make themselves even richer. He also has had an advantage in that in 1994 the Republican Party finally broke the 42-year Democratic monopoly on control of the House of Representatives, and the House has been Republican for all but four years ever since.

The Hard-Right’s Master Plan

The American hard-Right has spent the last several decades pursuing a meticulous and carefully strategized master plan that has relied on the huge financial resources of a handful of mega-rich donors and the construction of an alternative set of media that keep voters in line by pumping out hard-Right propaganda masquerading as “objective” news. President Reagan took the first step in creating the American hard-Right’s media arm when in 1987 he and his Gleischhaltung appointees at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which had required broadcasters to represent multiple political points of view in their programming.

Without the Fairness Doctrine in the way, owners of radio stations were able to program hard-Right propaganda from talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin and Roger Hedgecock 24/7. Within a few years virtually the entire AM radio band was dominated by hard-Right talk-show hosts, spewing out a daily propaganda line meticulously set out for them by weekly meetings organized by hard-Right activist Grover Norquist. In 1996, nine years after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, multinational media owner Rupert Murdoch and long-time Republican campaign operative Roger Ailes brought the talk-radio sensibility to cable TV by launching Fox News. With their constant demonzation of the “liberal media,” talk radio and Fox News prepped their audiences to believe anything they heard from them and discount any news or information from sources that weren’t part of the hard-Right network.

The first step in the hard Right’s takeover of the U.S. media was Reagan’s abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. The second step was the establishment of Fox News in 1996. The third and fourth steps are taking place right now. Earlier this year, Ajit Pai, Trump’s appointee to head the FCC, pushed through a rule change to abolish so-called “Net Neutrality,” the legal obligation of Internet service providers (ISP’s) to treat all data equally and not arbitrarily censor some Web sites or slow them down to discourage people from using them.

Most of the coverage of the end of “Net Neutrality” has been centered around the ability it will give major ISP’s like AT&T, Comcast and Spectrum to make money by pushing consumers to content Web sites they own or control, by making sure those sites get transmitted rapidly and without glitches while sites they don’t own are slower and glitchy. But there’s a more insidious danger to the end of “Net Neutrality”: the degree to which it allows ISP’s the ability to censor the Internet by barring their customers from accessing Web sites whose political content they don’t agree with.

Already AT&T has been caught restricting its users’ access to Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice sites, and the CEO of Comcast once called his users’ Internet connections “my pipes” and said he didn’t see why he should have to allow political content he disagree with to be transmitted over “my pipes.” Without Net Neutrality, ISP’s have essentially attained the legal status of “publishers” under the First Amendment, with the full legal right to decide what political points of view their customers can access and which they can’t. And since virtually all ISP’s are owned and run by people with hard-Right politics, it doesn’t take two guesses to figure out how they intend to use that power.

Hard-Right multibillionaires are also increasing their investments in so-called “legacy media.” A group bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, multibillionaire brothers whose family made their money in fossil fuels and who have used a good chunk of their fortune to advance the political fortunes of the hard Right, has just concluded a deal to buy Time magazine from the Time Warner conglomerate. Another group of hard-Rightists associated with the management of the hard-Right Libertarian Orange County Register recently bought the alternative newspaper L.A. Weekly and promptly fired the entire editorial staff, obviously intending to replace the progressives who used to work there with people who can be trusted to toe the hard-Right media line.

The hard Right’s long-term plan is to make sure they monopolize the U.S. media so no political or social points of view opposed to or critical of theirs get expressed in mainstream communications channels. The hope is that Americans will automatically adopt hard-Right politics since their media will no longer allow them to be aware that other points of view exist. The hard Right can leave the First Amendment guarantee of “freedom of the press” technically in place because they will have achieved censorship, not by government action, but by private economic power. As the late A. J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” — and the hard Right is using its money and its clout to make sure no other Americans get to own one.

The hard Right’s master plan extended to far more than using the media to win total support of a hard core of about 40 percent of the population (which they have achieved). Their multibillionaire backers also funded a wide array of think tanks like the Hoover Foundation, the American Heritage Institute and Americans for Prosperity to determine just what policies government should enact to fulfill their goal of making the rich richer, making everyone else poorer and abolishing all programs aimed at taxing the rich to help the not-so-rich. One of the key organizations in this network is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), in which hard-Right organizers and corporate funders sit together and actually write the laws which will fulfill their policy goals, then hand them over to sympathetic legislators at both the federal and state level to get passed into law.

Another key organization is the Federalist Society, which identifies up-and-coming hard-Right law students and gives them a leg up in their careers. The ultimate goal of the Federalist Society is to get their protégés appointed to be judges in both federal and state courts, so that any attempts to stop hard-Right legislation or policies in the courts will fail because the judges will be committed members of the hard Right and will rule on these cases on ideological grounds. Jonah Goldberg noted that Trump had essentially “outsourced” his judicial appointments to the Federalist Society — as did the last previous Republican President, George W. Bush — and the importance of the Federalist Society’s success at “working the ref” and making sure supposedly “objective” judges are actually hard-Right activists who rule ideologically cannot be overestimated.

That’s one reason why Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) made it one of his major priorities, once the Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate in 2014, to hold up not only President Obama’s last attempt at a U.S. Supreme Court appointment but virtually all his appointments of federal judges. McConnell deliberately set out to make sure that if a Republican replaced Obama he would have at least 100 vacancies on the federal courts to fill with lifetime appointments — and Trump has followed suit. While Trump has been notoriously slow in appointing officials to the rest of government, he’s speeded through the judicial process, getting 90 new judges on the bench in his first year — three times as many as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama got through in their first years. The goal is that even if the Republicans lose control of the executive and legislative branches, they’ll have “packed” the judiciary so well that anything the Democrats try to do in the political branches will be thrown out as unconstitutional.

Taxation as Class War

The most recent success of the hard-Right’s long-term ideological project to achieve permanent control of American politics and skew public policy in their direction is, of course, the tax bill recently passed by the U.S. Congress on strict party-line votes and signed into law by President Trump. The tax law increases the U.S. budget deficit by up to $1.5 trillion in order to give huge tax cuts to corporations and wealthy individuals and their families. It sabotages the Affordable Care Act (ACA), so-called “Obamacare,” by repealing the “individual mandate” that everyone in the U.S. had to have health insurance or pay a penalty tax, which will likely mean a drastic increase in the cost of health insurance for every American who has it, whether they got it from their employers, through an ACA “exchange” or some other way.

The tax bill also encourages state and local government to slash their social budgets. By drastically scaling back the ability of middle-class people to reduce their federal tax liabilities by deducting the taxes they pay to state and local governments, the bill will make it politically tougher for even the most liberal “blue” states like California, New York and Massachusetts to maintain their states’ current levels of social services. They’ll be able to do that only by raising their own taxes to economically and politically unsustainable levels. The goal — and some Republican Congressmembers were quite honest about this — is to end the so-called “subsidy” of more generous states by less generous ones and to force down the level of social insurance in places like California to the level of places like Mississippi.

The tight discipline and unity with which the Republicans in both houses pushed through the tax bill shows just how wrong the pundits who keep talking about a “civil war in the Republican Party” are. Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who had received nationwide plaudits from progressives, liberals and moderates for their votes against the bill to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, voted for the tax bill. (Murkowski’s vote was essentially “purchased” by slipping in a provision allowing oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge — thereby putting another piece of bad public policy in the bill.)

Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), who’d been hailed by the liberal punditocracy for some vague remarks about how President Trump had not yet shown the maturity and judgment to be an effective leader, voted against the tax bill on its first go-round in the Senate — he said he didn’t want to be a party to any increases in the budget deficit. But he voted for it on final passage after language was inserted directly benefiting major investors in real estate like Senator Corker and President Trump. Senator Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), who’d been praised for writing a book called Conscience of a Conservative that attacked Trump, voted for the bill. So did his Arizona colleague, John McCain, who missed the final vote because his terminal brain cancer had flared up, but voted for it on the first go-round despite the fact that the process used to put together the bill made a mockery of McCain’s call for the Senate to resume “regular order.”

The tax bill passed with a vote of 51 to 48 in the U.S. Senate. All the votes for it were from Republicans; all those against it were from Democrats. My friends in the “alt-Left,” the increasingly out-of-touch moralists or just plain crazies who still insist there is “no difference” between the two major parties, please take note. As I pointed out in my last commentary, the tax bill is a Right-wing revolutionary act whose intent is not merely to give huge tax breaks to the rich at the expense of everybody else and the country’s long-term economic health — though it is certainly that. It’s also a weapon in the current Republican Party’s drive to impose a hard-Right Libertarian ideology on the U.S. and wipe out all government programs that help people who aren’t part of the 1 percent.

As House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) — a thoroughgoing Libertarian who reportedly gives copies of Ayn Rand’s Libertarian manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, to his new staff hires to tell them what he wants from them — said almost as soon as the tax bill was passed, the next step was going to be “entitlement reform.” That’s Republican-speak for deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The Republicans in Congress intend to pay for the $1.5 trillion their tax cut for the rich will cost by gutting these vital social insurance programs, in line with their Libertarian ideology that says the government has no business ensuring that people will have a retirement income or access to health care.

It’s true that President Trump promised during his campaign that he wouldn’t cut Social Security and Medicare, but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, a man who regards words as weapons to achieve what he wants and simply doesn’t care about whether what comes out of his mouth is true or not, as long as it advances his agenda. If you believed Trump would protect Social Security and Medicare against the people in his party who want to destroy them, you probably also believed you could become a multimillionare real-estate tycoon just by attending Trump University.

One MS-NBC promo spot features one of their anchors asking just what the Republican Party’s plan for America is. It’s to return the U.S. to what it was in the 1880’s — the decade Ayn Rand named as the one in which she thought America was truly “great” — in which corporations and their owners openly bought political influence (and in some cases, most notoriously California Senator Leland Stanford, the Donald Trump of the 19^th century, directly bought political office) and used it to make their already huge fortunes even bigger.

In the 1880’s labor unions were illegal, white Americans reneged on the promise of racial equality that had been made during Reconstruction and imposed segregation on African-Americans, women were essentially the property of their families until they got married and their husbands afterwards, cities actually pointed with pride as to how polluted their air was, and the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. became more unequal than ever before or since in our history … until now. That is the decade when Trump and the Republicans believe America was “great,” and to which they want to return to “make America great again.”

Only One Way to Stop It: Vote for Democrats!

And as I’ve pointed out in these pages before, there’s only one way to stop the Republican agenda of economic Libertarianism and social conservatism — the party’s peculiar but nonetheless enduring consensus that the true role of government isn’t protecting people against corporate greed or ensuring that people have a right to survive, but micromanaging their sex lives — and that is to vote for every Democrat on every ballot in every election in 2018, 2020 and in between. Despite its many failings and shortcomings, the fact is the Democratic Party is the only force in the U.S. standing in the way of the complete conquest of the American political and economic system by the Republicans in their Right-wing revolution.

Goodness knows, the Democratic Party has its flaws. While the Republican Party has become an ideologically consistent machine, the Democrats are still trying to be a “broad-tent” party encompassing everyone from conservative Senators like Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) to progressive Senators like Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). At least since the 1896 Presidential campaign, when William Jennings Bryan successfully challenged incumbent President Grover Cleveland for the nomination on a platform combining economic progressivism and social conservatism — a combination virtually unimaginable today — the Democratic Party has historically been split between moderates who want to suck up to Wall Street and the financial interests, and progressives who want to run the economy in the interests of the 99 percent.

The split within the Democratic Party seems to recur every time the party is out of power — between Cleveland and Bryan in 1896, between William Gibbs McAdoo and Al Smith in 1924 (that was the year the Democratic convention deadlocked after 103 ballots and ended up nominating John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer whose last public act was arguing for racial segregation at the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education), between Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy in 1968, between Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson in 1984, between John Kerry and Howard Dean in 2004, and between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016. I harp on this because a lot of commentators seized on the Clinton-Sanders race as if the conflicts between the two — and the corrupt role of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in rigging the race for the nomination for Clinton and against Sanders — were something new. They weren’t.

I don’t go as far as Los Angeles Times op-ed contributor Conor Friedensdorf, who on December 27 published a column (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-friedersdorf-vote-better-20171227-story.html) saying that in 2018 progressives should stop mounting street protests and demonstration against the Trump/GOP agenda and concentrate on electing Democrats in 2018. It seems to be a peculiar delusion of the American Left these days that the choice between electoral activism and direct action in the streets is either-or. In fact, it’s impossible to achieve social change just through elections and it’s impossible to achieve it just through street protests. It takes both, and I want to see people continue to demonstrate against Trump and the Republicans, not only because it builds public awareness of the depths of depravity to which the Republicans have sunk but because once we do elect Democrats, we will have to continue to demonstrate to keep them honest and make sure they serve the people instead of Wall Street and the corporate “interests.”

But Friedensdorf is right when he says, “Beyond the greater oversight and accountability that divided government brings, a decisive defeat of the GOP is the only tool voters have to repudiate Trump, in particular his tendency to stoke animus against minority groups to gain power.” As long as Trump or another Republican is President, and the Republicans control both houses of Congress, they will continue to be able to eviscerate all economic, social and regulatory protections against unsafe workplaces, financial scams, environmental destruction and racial and gender discrimination. They will continue on their current course of jamming through major legislation without any public hearings or input from the people who have to live with its consequences.

It would be nice if the U.S. had a parliamentary system with proportional representation, like Germany’s, where it made sense to organize the Green Party because once it got more than 5 percent of the national vote, it got a share of seats in the national legislature and a shot at real power and influence. But we don’t. We have an electoral system based on single-member legislative districts and winner-take-all elections, and that makes organizing alternative parties futile, counterproductive and a waste of time, energy and money. While the battle for social and economic justice in the U.S. will require both electoral activism within the system and street protests and demonstrations outside it, to the extent that the struggle has an electoral component it will have to be waged within the Democratic Party.

Electing Democrats won’t be a panacea. Anyone who’s lived through the successive disappointments of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama knows that well. But the Republican Party has become so ideologically consistent and so implacably dedicated to a far-Right Libertarian vision of America’s future, that it has to be stopped — and the only force within the political system that can stop it, like it or not, is the Democratic Party. People who dismiss the Democrats as the “lesser of two evils” need to see that sometimes the greater evil is so evil that you have to do anything within your power to stop it. That was the case in Germany in 1932 — when the pointless conflicts between the Social Democrats and the Communists split the Left and helped the greater evil, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, take power — and it’s also the case in the United States in 2018.