“Why Trump is Likely to Win Again”

From Naked Capitalism.

“Why Trump is Likely to Win Again” [Thomas Greene, Noteworthy]. “Trump will not be defeated by educating voters, by exposing his many foibles and inadequacies. Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has positioned him as a tragic force-multiplier on a scale that few could have predicted, and the result is verging on catastrophic. Still, that might not be enough to prevent his re-election. Workers now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other — is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing. I’d rather not see four more years of Donald, but I understand the impulse to use him as a cat’s paw.” ¨• Anger is, of course, completely transgressive inside the Beltway, and in the PMC generally (except as when directed at social inferiors, like servers). But another view is possible–

 

“The Art of Losing” [James Pogue, Harpers]. • This is a long-form report from Kenosha: “‘You’ve got a group of people out there, and a fairly large group of people, that are angry, and they feel like they’ve been left behind,” said [Democratic mayor, John Antaramian]. ‘I don’t know if NAFTA was reversed they would come back. I think it’s not policy but root policy.’ By root policy, Antaramian was talking about offering ordinary people a sense of meaningful participation in public life. And even though I hadn’t seen much outright anger, I thought I knew what he meant—that the anger he saw wasn’t so much rage against elites or ethnic resentment or a hankering for lost industrial glory as it was a desire for an America that was actually responsive to their voices and input.” Pogue concludes: “In the long run, a Democratic Party that wants to govern is going to have to respond to this feeling, not by offering incremental reforms in policing, or tweaks to existing health care laws, but by beginning a real transformation. It will require new structures—we have not yet tried to govern a metropolis without a police force, but we soon might—as well as a recommitment to things that the Democrats have abandoned, like organized labor. It will take admitting that the morass we’ve ended up in was not created by accident. It will take naming the people who brought us to this point, and it will take a willingness to confront them and to make enemies—something Republicans have long been happy to do. It will, finally, take a political project that can match the feeling of participation and excitement that the Trump movement has offered. Democrats picked a candidate who has promised to return the country to normal. That may end up being the most dangerous choice of all.” • It was written before the Kenosha riots — good call, Harpers editors! — and although it’s far superior to the hardy perennial “old white guys in the diner” piece, there are not nearly enough Blacks quoted. The piece is still well worth a read. The Midwest remains a mysterious place. (There’s no hint in the text that the article title is an allusion to “One Art,” a wonderful poem of Elizabeth Bishop: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master…”.)