Sobriety Week on Biden-Harris

That felt good. Now it's post-Biden-Harris Sobriety Week. Over at the blog Lawyers Guns & Money, Elizabeth Nelson writes, "let’s not interpret a Biden administration as an opportunity to indulge in cultural and political comfort food. Let’s not feel reassured or validated. There is nothing validating about 70 million votes cast for Donald Trump....This is not the time for upbeat “I knew we’d prevail!” indie rock. ...The anger should feel more acute now than ever. Per the GOP’s proven system, Trump will hand Biden a terrible economy and quite possibly an exaggerated winter of  I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-How-Many-Die response to the pandemic. Biden will be pilloried, vilified and obstructed from the moment he takes power. Let’s push back harder than ever." Yes, exactly.

Writing in the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom defines the pushing back as "radical responsiveness" to real US conditions. This means above all extracting full accountability for the Trump Administration: legal forensics into the damage Trump and his people did to public systems from the Dept of Justice to the Environmental Protection Agency to the misuse of executive branch paramilitaries in policing demonstrations in a way that created the illusion of leftist violence that Republicans took with them to the voting booth. There must be a calling to account. The attack on systemic racism that Biden invoked in his victory speech, the rebuilding of public health infractructure (including the disgraced CDC), energy conversion to renewables . . .everything depends on a militant reassertion of expertise, reality-testing, interpretative skills, the whole quantitative and qualitative set of knowledge practices that Trumpism voids. Liz Chatterjee and I have pieces in a forthcoming book (coedited by Anna Alexandrova, to be published by Alan Thomas) arguing that experts truly did earn popular mistrust by supporting policies that did systemic damage to majorities in both the US and UK. That said, the Biden-Harris admin will need to assert, with full militancy, the value of knowledge practices for solving social problems. This will require *investigations* and *prosecutions* of Trumpian corruption, including their deliberate epistemic sabotage. There should be the theater of congressional hearings and legal proceedings, tied to specific lessons to expand the "reality-based community in post-truth America," in Ian Masters' tag-line for his excellent show. Nothing could be worse than forgive-and-forget.

Cottom can be read in conjunction with Larry Elliott's Guardian column about economic troubles. Biden doesn't have an analysis of finance capitalism that can dig the US or anyone else out of the current hole--to the contrary, as Elliott and others point out, Biden is part of the Clintonian Dem establishment that got us here. What kind of worked in the 1990s is failing now, and real budget policy ("fiscal") requires a Congress that Biden-Harris don't control. As Elliott writes, "Monetary policy [via the Federal Reserve] is no answer to America’s need to renew its infrastructure or to make its welfare system more generous. To the extent that it does make a difference, [Quantitative Easing] works by pushing up asset prices and creating a feel good factor so it tends to be better for Wall Street than for the struggling communities in the less well-off states." This has been the play since Alan Greenspan took over the Federal Reserve in 1987, with unaffordable housing and low productivity growth (via low investment) being just two of many negative symptoms. (See French economist Cédric Durand's "Fictitious Capital" for an important analysis of asset-price opium and its damage to the real economy.) So we're going to need a radical rethink of US/UK capitalism, and that work is going to have to be done on a huge scale outside the Biden Admin, which won't touch it unless it grows into a movement.

I'm Going to Enjoy This As Long as I Possibly Can

I didn’t support Biden or Harris in the primaries, mostly trying to decide between two candidates I really did like- Sanders and Warren. Neither Biden nor Harris had policies strong enough to address the scale of the problems that we have. Nor, I thought, did they have the ideas that could mobilize the base. My friend 

Ricki told me I was wrong about the latter, that Harris’s status as first woman and first woman of color in either position would rally people—which did rally me along with tens of millions of other Dems—and also that people would respond overwhelmingly to Biden’s decency and non-reactionary policies. She was right! We all can continue to debate whether more progressive policies would have helped make the Dem margin bigger, including in House and Senate races. But there’s a massive, immediate victory for four issues:

1. racial justice, where overt racism won’t be sanctioned at the top. It’s only a start, but the Democratic win will end the demonization in Biden’s corrupt terminology of mainstream civil rights campaigns, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, queer people at that level of the federal government. The king of the Neo-confederacy has been beaten.

 

2. judicial corruption. The Republicans did pack the Supreme Court and the federal bench, but the removal of Barr from the Attorney General position will allow the Dept of Justice to function more professionally. This will help with civil rights enforcement, investigation of racist police departments, reduction of violence against indigenous peoples protecting water and land, and other basics. We can also again start to imagine enforcement of anti-trust and other regulations in relation to a Wall Street that has had a free hand to reinflate asset bubbles, invest against their own customers, etc. The same goes for the Department of Education on student debt and for-profit abusers, among many others. Rampant sexism no longer has a safe space in the White House, so gender equality can return to its status as a normal goal in the 21st century.

 

3. environmental regulation. Neither Harris nor Biden support the Green New Deal, but they can undo a ton of Trump’s gratuitous damage. They can be pressured into stronger, more adequate positions. and they’ll rejoin the Paris Accords.

 

4. Covid-19. Biden and Harris understand the concept of public health and the essential role of the public sector in operating a pandemic response. The country will get well much faster next year because the Democrats are back in the White House.

 

Other issues are up for grabs—education and higher education policy, labor rights, reproductive  rights, fiscal policy, transportation, infrastructure, the Middle East, China and foreign policy more generally. But i’m going to take a few days off from worrying about that.

 

And I’m very happy to have a community college professor as First Lady. It’s about time!

The Election Standoff: First Exit Poll Review

The blue wave never arrived, and as expected, Donald Trump declared victory--"frankly, we did win this election." He then demanded that ballot counting stop in the swing states where at 2:30 am ET he was ahead. Here's the full clip.

Both Fox and CNN denounced Trump's claim that continuing to count votes would be illegal. On Fox, Chris Wallace said, "This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match into it. He hasn't won these states ... the president doesn't get to say he won states ... there's no question that all these states can continue to count votes." On CNN, Jake Tapper declared, “what the president just said is undemocratic and false and premature."  

Now the battle begins, first just to complete voting counts, which will shift blue in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  And the Senate is still up in the air, with only the more predictable flips being called--a Dem loss in Alabama (I'm sad about Doug Jones, actually), and two Dem gains, in Arizona and Colorado. It's all especially terrible for those of us from states like California, where we are hostage, election after election, to the whims of a few perennial swing states, many of which are also bad at counting.

I have some early thoughts on the Edison Research exit poll posted at the New York Times. It confirms David Sirota's take, especially the first and last items, "Democrats' weak economic message hugely helped Trump," and "A large percentage of Americans have lost their minds."  

1. Let's start with the economy (Trump in red, Biden in blue)

Trump does not win the working class vote. I could complain about 40+ percent of the bottom income quartiles voting for an unvarnished plutocrat, but Trump doesn't get a majority until family income hits six figures, or the most affluent 25 percent.  Trump is the candidate of the white middle- and upper-middle class. (re the title of this, my ancient blog). 

This one is extremely annoying.

People whose main issue is the economy went with Trump by 4:1! These aren't necessarily the people who know the most about economics (obviously).   "The economy" seems to have become a proxy for pro-business ideology--tax cuts, deregulation, etc., rather than being a chance to evaluate policy performance. This is a massive failure for the Democrats, and confirms both of Sirota's points above.

No less absurd is the Republican vote for the guy who addresses public safety by endangering it. 

A bit more on the economy: incumbents always do very well with people who think the economy is good (for them). Covid-19 and economic inequality notwithstanding, over 40 percent of respondents say they're better off than 4 years ago.  The surprise to me is that only a fifth of respondents say they are worse off now.  A third of  even those people voted for Trump, again confirming the point that Biden didn't have a strong enough message to beat Trump with the 50 percent who think the economy is not so good or poor (below).

Finally, union households. They are only a fifth of respondents, and Trump gets a percentage of them that should embarrass Democrats, or unions, or both.  Forty percent of union families voted for guy whose appointees have done serious damage to the status of unions, quite deliberately.

2. Race and Gender

One story was that whites were still largely Trumpers but that white women had had enough. This was wrong. 55 percent of white women stuck with Trump.  For me, this is big surprise number 2.

At first glance, 1 + 2 = a confirmation of 2016 analyses that stressed Trumpers voted to keep their racial position rather than to overcome economic anxiety.  This is a depressing continuity.

3. College. 

Another story was the educational divide: non-college people were said to resent the rule of experts and B.A. know-it-alls. Trump was to lose the college crowd, especially women, but score big with the non-college crowd.

Trump hung on to white women and won a narrow victory with white women college grads.  College curbs but doesn't eliminate white enthusiasm for a president who so clearly elevates money and power over knowledge that he makes George W. Bush look like William Faulkner.  The most anti-intellectual president in modern history still gets half of white college grads -- and slightly more women than men. 

The main surprise here is among white men, where college cuts their Trump support two-thirds to under half.

4. Party Identity. 

The red state / blue state dichotomy is a tedious cliché. That doesn't make it wrong.  What seems to be happening is that D v. R isn't about parties anymore, but breeds of American.

Note two things. First, the major parties each only have a third of the electorate.  Second, they each had nearly 95 percent candidate loyalty.  There are not so much two parties as two Americas. I dislike writing that stupid sentence but it seems to be true.

The question for Trump gets the same numbers: the other party's candidate inspires concern or fear in 90 + percent of either party. And that's true even for an "Uncle Joe" moderate like Biden. 

A silver lining is tentative vindication of people like Sanders and Warren who tried to talk the Democrat establishment out of their faith in moderation and the centrist voter.  There's going to be hell to pay for the strategists who spent millions on white "persuadables" instead of on first-time Latinx voters, for example.

Party also beats region.  West and East are more Democratic as we already knew, but not by a landslide.  Biden got nearly half of the South, the same as his score in the Midwest.  We now have country  vs. city parties--confirmation of a trend people have analyzed for years.

5. Pandemic politics

This exit poll confirms that in America, there is no independent reality--only a party line.

We see the same 90+ percent correlations between perception of Covid-competence and party membership. This is a huge embarrassment for a country that prides itself on can-do realism.

Equally embarrassing is the failure of rocketing Covid infection rates to make many people rethink Trump's performance. The same goes for the split on reopening vs. containment.  Democrats did not break through the wall on the basic point that if Covid isn't contained the economy won't rebuild. There's lots of bad news here about the country's epistemic competence.

This polls has huge gaps on issues and better data will be flooding out.  And as of noon in London the count is far from over.

 

 

The Longer Arc of Covid History

The short story of the U.S. 21th century is the tale of four disasters.  The first was the response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001--the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ensuing era of permanent war and suffering in the greater Middle East.  The second was the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: that's Kanye West at left intoning his immortal line, "George Bush doesn't care about Black people."  The third was the 2008 financial crisis. The fourth is unfolding now--the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic depression likely to ensue.

The failed response to these disasters has a common element. It is the Republican party and its world view.

George W. Bush ignored intelligence warnings about the activities that led to the attacks, which caught the enormous US military completely off guard. Military solutions made the situation worse, and were overcompensations for the initial failure.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 became a human catastrophe, particularly for Black residents of New Orleans and southern Louisiana, through the Bush administration's then-astonishing failure to manage basic disaster relief.  FEMA was run by a political crony.  Much talk of reform ensued, but the structural problems persisted and then got worse under Trump, leading to the failures of 2020 that we are living through.

The 2008 financial crisis was created by Republican economic policies, which always center on tax cuts, government starvation, deregulation of business and banking, the continuous priming of equity markets with low interest rates and other tools, and asset securitization and other financialization processes that attracted capital out of production and non-financial services.

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic will be greatly worsened by another Republican administration's refusal to prepare for it.  A comparison to a competent public system like Germany's is profoundly painful. Why can't we do that here? The U.S. is now a formerly-1st world country, not a leader in any domain that requires cooperative skill in the use of large-scale structures.

Why have Republicans presided over all of these disasters - 4 out of 4? Bad luck? My selective reading? (true, I forgot Benghazi!)  Neither.  It's because their core belief is that "government isn't the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Government isn't something that creates and orchestrates common goods. Government is a piñata to hit with the political bat until the candy falls out for you.

To rehearse: Step 1 is to appoint political allies rather than competent professionals--allies you control.

Step 2 is to neutralize regulatory power or independent oversight. The knowledge-creating function of government agencies is silenced if not destroyed.  The same goes for unvarnished communication with the public.  (Attacks on a still-independent academia are part of this.)

Step 3 is to turn the government agency into an extraction pipeline that siphons public money into private pockets.  Mineral leases on federal and/or Native lands are one example; subsidies for fossil fuel but not renewable development are another.  The result of this structure in the pandemic is a war of all against all for masks, ventilators, and other basic equipment, like what you'd expect in a run-of-the-mill dictatorship.

Step 4 is Orwellian denial that the leadership has failed or manipuled reality-- as when the Department of Health and Human Services rewrote their webpage in the hours after "the president's ignorant son-in-law" falsely stated that the purpose of federal emergency stockpiles is not to help the states, to confirm his falsehood.

How did we get to this place--this place where the U.S. isn't operationally competent anymore? It's barely second rate in various measures of public health, disaster relief, housing, general education, and is worse than second-rate in other things like infrastructure. I can't imagine the U.S. increasing the number of intensive care beds by 50%  in 2 months, as Germany did. My hope a couple of weeks ago that UC medical centers would come to the rescue of California's infected people, offering lots of tests, tracing, beds in MASH-style hospitals, is sad to remember.

So there's the Republicans' phony non-state state in Ruthie Gilmore's term that hollows out government capacity to provide core human services--health, housing, and education--and to do this equitably, meaning without regard for ability to pay, as democracy theoretically demands.  But Republicans didn't take over the federal and most state governments at gunpoint--they were fairly elected (mostly). How'd they get there and stay there?

Some of it is dirty tricks and highly organized, intelligent strategy, plus excellent propaganda skills.  The roles of voter suppression and Fox News are well known.  But this doesn't change the fact that Republicans are there because white middle class voters keep them there.  Whites majorities still vote Republican even under Trump; he has lost many college whites but has kept non-college white middle class voters.  For decades, whites have voted overwhelmingly for conservative Republican policies on housing, health, education, taxes, voting, and civil rights.  Running through white flight, property tax revolts and opposition to busing, the paleomammalian cortex of the white middle-class decided to dismantle the common goods that created it rather than share them with people of color. 

This statement is pretty obvious to Black people: see, for example, this good explanation that historically-informed Black distrust of educated whites led them to support for Biden over Sanders in the South Carolina primary. There's also more awareness of this issue in the white middle-class than was the case ten or thirty years ago, but it hasn't changed anything--voting patterns haven't shifted enough to insure Trump's defeat in November.  It's this white expert discourse, even when officially anti-racist and enlightened.  Experts are as likely to tell people they have to go without things they want and need--like free college or public housing--than to form plans for social reconstruction.  Trump and Boris Johnson belong to parties that have openly sabotaged expert advice and expert institutions, so their failures to deliver affordable health care and higher ed are not mainly the experts' fault. And yet experts as a group, and their universities, neither offer big plans for nor systematically expose the anti-professional right as ruining the country.

In part because of professional class passivity, neither non-college whites nor people of color look to universities, professionals, or college degrees as reliable sources for progressive politics.  They aren't seen as institutions hellbent to build shared resources and infrastructure for all. This is one reason why even Dem support for college is more obligatory than passionate.  For example, one poll showed majorities of all groups, especially Latinx parents, saying that college is important for their children (p 15).  And yet they are far more likely, in California, to say public colleges are doing a "good" than an "excellent" job (p 10). "Good" and "not so good" together have close to 3/4ths of respondents.  I interpret this to mean that college isn't building a better world for people. It's mostly holding out the promise of a half-decent job.

The only solution is for experts and their white middle class base to map out the complete reversal of anti-government neoliberalism.  I say this although it is so entrenched, and the national opposition (Democrats) so compromised, that it is unlikely to happen without a political revolution.

Given its failure to reform its self-dealing neoliberalism, the white middle class will be one of this revolution's targets. The war on college-educated experts started long ago, and is now being waged enthusiastically by the Trumpian right.  The white middle class, since it turned on the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and fought busing and property taxes in the 1970s, has sided with the inflation of asset prices over equitable development, including living wages for the multi-racial working class on which it depends. It has voted for people whose explicit program has been to cut taxes on business and the wealthy, give public lands to extraction companies, suppress unions, wages, and worker influence in their workplace, purge reproductive rights, and massively increase economic inequality, but but what the hell--these Republicans won't raise property or income taxes, pass rent control, or integrate the schools, so we'll just ride asset inflation up the steep slope of inequality. 

And with Covid, the Republicans will allow tens of millions to lose their jobs instead of paying companies to keep them employed, because that policy, adopted even by Boris Johnson's Tories in Britain, wouldn't treat workers as disposable.  Facing the Great Depression 2.0, borne of the right's hollow state and hatred of mass security, the middle class can either side with the multiracial workers of the country it fake-helped through Clinton-Obamanomics while keeping its assets growing, and redeem expertise in the bargain.  Or it can chose its overpriced property economy, and be crushed by the sultanistic oligarchy the Trump Party yearns to deliver.