Why Progressives are the Real Conservatives

                The word ‘Conservative’ has become a reliable part of our political dialog.  Everywhere you turn there are appeals to ‘conservative values’ and ‘conservative principles’ without any thought about whether or not the people making those claims and the positions they have staked out deserve to be legitimized by being called ‘conservative.’  The implication is that the conservative movement in America is somehow trying to save what has made this country what it is by defending their brand of ‘conservatism’ from the change driven and thoughtless erosion of values by people they call ‘liberals.’  There is even a 24/7 cable news network committed to promoting a conservative agenda.  But to say one is ‘conservative’ in America demands some analysis of exactly what American values are being ‘conserved,’ and not just a knee-jerk assumption that one side of the political spectrum is inherently ‘conservative.’

                Today’s incarnation of conservatives claim a lineage going back to Goldwater and Reagan, which would be problematic enough, but their policies and actions contradict even these claims.  The ideas of limited government and individual liberty have given way to a massive surveillance state intruding into people’s lives in the most private and intimate matters.  The expansion of the vote and participation in democracy has been replaced with an open and cynical attempt to limit not just the number but the kinds of people who get to vote.  Responsible fiscal management has been replaced by tax plans drawn up on napkins that are draining the public coffers while creating the greatest unequal distribution of wealth in our history.  The commitment to infrastructure has been replaced by a protection of individual wealth that have left us with roads, bridges, and water systems that even third world counties would find unsatisfactory.  Finally, the decorum of traditional conservatism has given way to a bombastic and juvenile rhetoric of personal attacks and demagoguery.  While it is true that racism, misogyny, and xenophobia have always been part of our political discourse, when did promoting and preserving them become ‘conservative?’

                The so-called conservative agenda today amounts to little more than old, white, male privilege.  It is not inclusive.  It is not American, and it has no viable future.  It is led by men (and occasionally women) who doubt science, refuse to believe anything except their own phony talking points, and are immune to evidence from the outside world.  They have made it ‘conservative’ to not follow the constitution, shut-down the government and use congressional oversight to prosecute partisan politics.  None of these are foundational values in this country; in fact, they are exactly the opposite.  The values that have made America what it is are inclusion, economic fairness and equal protection under the law.  We have survived and triumphed by expanding the franchise and allowing more people to vote, by investing in public institutions and infrastructure and by making sure that the religious convictions of some do not deny others a chance to run their own lives as they see fit.

                There has always been a strain of American culture and politics that has been exclusive and exploitive.  The issue is not that this iteration is somehow more loathsome or un-American.  The issue is that ‘conserving’ those attributes is not what makes us great.  They are the attributes that we have had to consistently struggle against – and apparently still do – to be a great nation.  Celebrating them as our heritage or our core values debases what it means to be American.  It is worth fighting over this distinction.  If we can see what the current crop of conservatives is promoting as anti-American, we can stop lauding their patriotism and appreciation of the past.  Instead, we can see them as the small and pathetic people they are.  We can see this generation as perhaps the last gasp of what we were ever so fortunate not to become.

                Ironically, the only people in the political spectrum that are fighting for these values are called progressive.  They are often young, people of color and female.  They are the true ‘conservatives’ of the American political process.  They are the ones expanding on the foundation that makes us ‘American,’ and they are the ones preserving what this country promised it would be. Progressives are pushing the agenda that defines ‘American values,’ unless you think those values are about bigotry and exclusion.    The next time you hear someone talk about conservatism, think of them; they are the ones fighting to save what is best about us.

  And when you hear some politician touting their ‘conservatism’ you should hear white, male privilege writ large.

Freddie Gray and the Legacy of Ronald Reagan

By: Barry Alford

It’s tempting to look at Baltimore and think that this is an urban event, impacting the lives and futures of relatively few  who are relatively insignificant.  It’s convenient to think of a ‘riot’ as breakdown of civil society, but civil society broke down long ago.  The streets of Baltimore are the parallel to Reagan’s fantasy view of America.  They reflect a reality that in spite of the effort to hide and marginalize it won’t go away.  It proves that that no matter how much we try to argue otherwise, our collective fate must honor all those who are part of it, not just the few.  Freddie Gray wasn’t just murdered by the ‘depraved heart’ of the cop driving a police van; he was murdered by our collective ‘depraved heart.’  Reagan had a small view of America, one no more expansive than the wealth of his comfortable and intellectually limited circle of friends would allow.  His America is an America of fear: fear of each other, fear of change, and fear of our possibilities.  Freddie Gray is merely its newest and most well known victim.   There is no way out of Baltimore that doesn’t begin with rewriting the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Let’s start at the top.  The racism and police violence that killed Freddie Gray didn’t start with Ronald Reagan, but the governmental indifference to the poor and minorities that have militarized police departments and estranged members of the underclass in America did.  Freddie Gray (and Michael Brown etc.) are the legacy of the conservatism of Reagan that stopped the civil rights movements of the 60’s in their tracks and put us on the path that leads to the events in Baltimore.  Freddie Gray was killed not for violating a statute or breaking a law but for not knowing his place.  He was executed not by a public police force but by what amounts to a private security force dishing out ‘justice’ for imagined crimes and immunity to the rich and powerful.  The callous indifference, murder by depraved  heart, that leads to Gray’s death is a direct outcome of a  conservative movement that has redefined government as the protection of the few at the expense of the many.  A libertarianism that trumpets freedom of government intervention for the rich (and mostly white) and yet invests in the massive use of governmental force to suppress the rest of society.  This starts with Reagan.

                It was under Reagan in the 80’s that the attack on public education and the demonization of teachers begins.  It is under Reagan that the war on drugs takes on a strategy of mass incarceration of poor and minority males so the people driving SUVs in the suburbs, and consuming most of the drugs, can feel safe from this ‘menace.’  It is Reagan that drags us back into the gross expenditures on the military that drain social programs of the money to keep them going and create an America not only ready to go to war but itching to do so.  It was Reagan who took aim at unions and the rights they had achieved for workers as being too expensive.  It was Reagan who began the political movement to reduce taxes on the wealthy, ‘job-creators’ he called them, that left us with schools and roads more befitting a third-world country than the ‘shining city on the hill’ he romanticized.  In short, it was Reagan who crafted an America where some people matter a lot and most of us don’t matter at all, a nation where ‘murder by depraved heart’ is inevitable.

                This is precisely the time in America when ‘crime’ was reconstructed to mean something poor people did against the system.  It marked the beginning of aggressive police strategies such as ‘stop and frisk’ that brushed aside the constitutional rights of the poor and minorities in order to protect the privilege of the white and wealthy.  At first, these policies looked  populist, but 35 years down the road the gap between those that have and those that do not is greater than ever, and fewer and fewer people fit under the shrinking umbrella of government protection.  Crime was no longer against the commonwealth; stealing seventeen trillion wouldn’t even get you indicted.  In fact, the government would reimburse you for your trouble.  The idea of community policing was replaced by more and more aggressive policing, culminating in bringing the equipment of war into poor neighborhoods.  One of the signature pieces of this kind of policing was the ‘war on drugs,’ which still rages across the country.  Calling it a ‘war’ legitimized tactics usually reserved for foreign combatants.  Drug squads, many of them drug users themselves, used intelligence and surveillance techniques from the military to kick down the doors of the poor and minority populations in our cities, mushrooming the prison population.  That population, however, did not reflect America or even the people in America who used drugs.  Instead it reflected what the new conservatism in America sought protection from.  The internment of the Japanese in WWII involved far fewer people than the incarceration of black males in America.

Ronald Reagan constructed an America that replicated his infamous ‘kitchen cabinet.’  A white America, a privileged America.  It was a fantasy land, and like all fantasy worlds it blocked out any news or disturbance that challenged it.  It has been humming along for over 35 years spinning off a ‘conservatism’ that is less and less about conserving democracy or its public institutions and more and more about pampering the few.  A’ conservatism’ that has turned its back on the environment and government alike to promote an untrue and unsustainable view of the world.  A world where trees are responsible for pollution and no one can remember whether or not they authorized arms for hostages.  A world where not only do the ends justify the means, they justify fabricating the ends.  A lie told by a Twenty Mule Team Borax/General Electric huckster that spawned a generation of politicians who no longer even remember the original lies.  A view of America as it never was that helped propel it toward something it was never meant to be.

What is wrong in Baltimore doesn’t start or end in Baltimore.  What is wrong in Baltimore is what is wrong in all of us.  The ‘depraved heart’ that killed Freddie Gray is the denial at the core of our current politics that ALL of us are Americans.  ALL of us deserve justice, respect and opportunity.  Reagan never believed that.  His America was a nation divided between those who thought the 60’s had gone too far in enfranchising the marginalized and those who fought to open the nation to the promise it represents to all its citizens.  To do that, he began the process of turning away from reality and constructing an ideology impervious to fact, reason and compassion.  Thirty five years down that road,  Freddie Gray went for a ‘rough ride’ in Baltimore, and reality must now be served.

Flint

I grew up just outside of Flint, Michigan.  In my childhood Flint was a very different place than it is today.  Flint is where the middle class in America started; the 1937 sit-down strike that unionized GM happened here.  It used to be a city of blue collar workers surrounded by the cooperate affluence of high level General Motors staff.  It created a city that was as gritty as the factory floor but as elevated as the first class city library, Planetarium and symphony orchestra.  It was a city fiercely proud of its place in the world and dedicated to improving the lives of its citizens.  All of that gets lost in the narratives coming out of Flint today that make it seem like it was always a failed city.  It wasn’t.

When the lead poisoning story hit the news, I was drawn to it for a variety of reasons.  For me, it was ‘home town’ story (I still watch the news from Flint just like I did as a kid).  But it also represented a story that had no specific place of origin, a story of the slow decline of an America of democratic values and economic opportunity that projected a sense of justice and righteousness.  Where had that Flint gone?  Looking back, it seems all but inevitable that the children of Flint would suffer lead poisoning at the hands of a Republican governor who valued a few dollars more that their health and future.  It seems inevitable that we would be treating parts of America like a third-world catastrophe unfolding on the news right in our back yard but feeling like it was coming from far away.  Flint was no accident perpetrated by a couple inept water employees or state bureaucrats.  It is the predictable, and I would argue intentional, consequence of decades of urban policy and abandonment.   

The shift started when Nixon chose war spending over continuing the anti-poverty programs of LBJ.  It started in the “southern strategy’ of Lee Atwater and Republican politicians milking the racial and class tensions that progressive change was starting to address.  It matured under Reagan and the ‘golden age’ rhetoric of the ‘city on the hill.’  Whenever politicians talk about the good old days in America, they are talking about the good old racist, misogynistic, elitist days.  The country of opportunity and economic justice is not part of our national narrative without unions.  That narrative starts in Flint.  Almost four decades of failed economic and social policy by mostly, but not only, Republican politicians have lead us to poisoning 9,000 children to save a few bucks.  It has lead us to this crossroads as a nation that has to now consider its legacy.

 The people of Flint didn’t choose this future; it was chosen for them.  It was chosen by cooperate greed and tax policies that allowed the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the fewest number of people in history.  A recent headline said that two-thirds of cooperation’s haven’t even paid taxes in this century.  Would the city of Flint have ever gone into bankruptcy if GM stayed and followed through on its promises or the tax base of the city wasn’t gutted with giveaways to robber barons?  We are here today because we failed to follow –up on what the workers in Flint created in the 30’s.  We bought into the dream of consumer capitalism that preached the only important part of production is what it costs in the end.  We failed each other by abandoning the commitment to a larger community of workers and their wellbeing.

The unions lost their way; they lost sight of the larger community.  We continue this folly every time we walk into a Walmart to save a few pennies and drive another stake into the heart of shared prosperity and economic justice.  We continue it by voting for politicians who promise to save us a buck or two on our taxes while sheltering trillions of dollars of cooperate wealth from taxes.  We continue it by supporting policies that demonize and abandon the poor, accusing them of draining public coffers, while the rich rob us blind.  Flint is the future of every city in America if this doesn’t stop.   If you get bogged down in the argument about who we should blame or that we just need to replace a few pipes, ask yourself this question – what if they were your children?  If we don’t change course, they soon will be.

 Extractive Education:

                The current debate over educational policy is being waged on an unequal battlefield.  The assumption that drives much of the public conversation is based in the faulty assumption that this is a debate between two sides pursuing the same outcome through different means.  That is, the assumption is that both progressives and conservatives want to improve and save public education albeit following severely different strategies.  My contention is that that assumption is false.  The current policy debate over educational policy needs to be framed in a way that highlights the intentions of those attacking public education not as potential saviors but as intentional destroyers of those institutions.

In their recent book, Why Nations Fail ,Darren  Acemoglu and James Robinson introduce the notion of ‘extractive’ institutions, institutions that are run by elites to extract wealth or other social capital from a society for their benefit instead of distributing or expanding wealth for the whole society.  While their analysis is mostly focused on the way economic institutions play this role, the concept lends a clarity and precision to the plight of institutions of education in the current context.  In short, it makes it possible to see the practices and politics of education in America since the Nation at Risk fervor as intentional and not accidental in terms of the impact they have had on public education.  ‘Extractive Education,’ then describes education that feeds the status of the elite instead of benefiting the broader social context and most specifically, without benefiting the students in those institutions.

How else would we make sense out of the thirty year war on public education except to see it as a means for the elite to eliminate the social capital and mobility that education provided in the first decades following the Second World War?  The object of these policies, NCLB is the poster child of this effort, while couched in terms of educational reform have really been the deactivation of the role education plays in expanding social capital and providing meaningful access to non-elite students.  Critics of these measures site data and research that proves to anyone interested in a fair analysis, that the educational reforms and testing regimes of the last two decades are counter- productive, and the prevailing consensus in the research and reform community seems to be that the next study will finally and conclusively prove the failure of the educational policies in place.  The problem, as Acemoglu and Robinson make clear in their analysis, is that for the people directing the policy, the elites who promote and implement policy over the objections of the research community, the policies are not failing, they are doing exactly what is intended. Just as tax codes and financial regulations are used by elites to turn the markets into ‘extractive’ institutions, the educational policies of the last few decades are guaranteeing that schools will protect rather than challenge a cultural concentration of power and influence.

There are several characteristics of what an extractive educational system would look like.  The particular arrangements could vary, but the general trend of moving resources that used to be directed to broadening access and expanding the public benefit of the institution are being replaced by trends that shrink the benefits and restrict the access.  In recent years, the following trends have been evident and widely reported on in American education;

1.       System Participants are Restricted and Their Resources Reduced:  If you accept, as I do, that the assault on the educational system has nothing to do with improving that system, but is instead directed at transforming the educational system from an expansive and democratic system to an ‘extractive’ one, then attacking  the people who work in the system makes sense.  The attacks on teachers are not so much about improving education or even the much trumpeted idea of accountability as they are a systematic dismantling of public education.  Teachers have become the ‘welfare queens’ of this round of public hysteria.  Just as Reagan used the trumped up idea of the welfare queen to rip apart the safety net in the 80’s – and poverty has increased ever since – this attack on democratic inclusion has an equally fallacious villain : the bad teacher.  To be sure, there are bad teachers, but there are bad doctors, lawyers, and legislators, too,  and the country doesn’t seem to be on the brink of mass lynching because of it.  Teachers get singled out in this process for two reasons.  The first is that destroying their credibility is critical to destroying the credibility of the institution (think Wall Street bankers) and limiting their potential to save children in the system helps accelerate the move away from public and democratic educational institutions to private and restrictive versions.  Could teachers do better?  Sure they could, but reducing their benefits, cutting their salaries and limiting their freedom of practice hardly seems like a recipe for improving the profession. If it were, imagine what we could do with the aforementioned bankers.  It is impossible to conclude that the attack on teachers has anything to do with improving education.  The second reason for the attack is to limit their effectiveness.  The last thing the shift to an extractive version of education can tolerate is unexpected success.  However limited teachers might be, if freed from the restraints of invalid standardized testing and allowed to actually interact with their students, they would ‘save’ more children, and in an extractive model that is simply unacceptable.  Teachers have to be attacked and their credibility destroyed so that evaluative measures can be put in place that guarantee as little social mobility as possible.

2.       Limiting Social Mobility:  If we understand that the purpose of extractive institutions is to benefit an elite, then it should be no surprise that the elite wants to keep their numbers small.  One way to look at the pitiful results of the standardized testing diaspora of American  education is to say that too many children are failing, but from the perspective of an extractive set of practices that is precisely the result desired.  What gets reified and replicated in this version of extractive education is the status of the elite.  Time after time, what the test results show is that the socio-economic status of the parents is the best predictor of testing success.  It is such a stable component of test results that is  impossible to see it as a coincidence or an accident.  Instead, it makes far more sense to see it as the desired outcome.  Standardized testing creates an invalid measure of student learning in so many ways, but it creates one desired outcome that is essential to extractive education: it reifies the social status of the elites.  How else can we understand the politics of continuing a testing regime that has so many problems and limitations.  It helps, of course, that by putting our money in testing we are supporting private and not public interests, but the main value of this approach is that it makes it harder for teachers, students, and parents to engage in an educational practice that might help their children move upward or change the distributional schemes of the society. This is not to say that every use of standardized testing is invalid, but when they are used in high stakes assessment to rate teachers and schools there is little or no validity.   Add to this the lurid and absurd spectacle of charter school lotteries and the admission practices of elite institutions, and we have a perfect picture of how education becomes a scarcity instead of something that the whole culture can partake in and benefit from.

3.       Extracting Resources: The obvious consequence of extractive educational practices is that resources that used to be dedicated to a public institution will be reduced or diverted to private business interests.  This step is so obvious that it needs little commentary except to point out that the rhetoric surrounding these moves is not about educational reform.  The hidden winner in this type of policy, even more than vouchers and charter schools, is the money diverted from public education to standardized testing.  The millions upon millions of dollars being spent to develop, administer, and score standardized instruments that have little validity, even just in a parallel sense, is spent not to enhance education but to produce and reify predictable data points that validate the rest of the political agenda of extractive educational policy.  Not only does the money support the political and economic agenda of extraction, but it now goes into business and not schools.  The end result of these policies, of course, is the complete destruction of public  education and the creation of a private educational system for elites.  This will limit the access of marginal classes and free the elites of the tax burden of public education. These ideas were first developed by the Mackinaw Center in 1986 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  They also helped pioneer the use of shoddy data to under estimate the success of public education and over-hype the success of private charter initiatives to spin the public debate over the effectiveness of public education.

4.       The Triumph of Elite Institutions:   The end result of extractive educational policies is return education to the practice of credentialing and benefiting an elite that can then culturally dominate the rest of society.  Prior to the last part of the 19^th century which ushered in the revolution of the American university, education beyond wage earner status was restricted to the upper class or the people Gramsci called “the hundred at Eaton.”   The changes in the economy after the Civil War required the change in educational policy as a new managerial class emerged to run the capitalist empires of the robber barons.  The post WWWII wave of democratized higher education marked by the GI Bill and the growth of Community Colleges saw an even greater expansion of access and mobility.  It is precisely this expansion that the move to extractive educational practices is intended to roll back.  The current globalized economy, based as it is in financial transaction and not labor based production, is not only not aided by an expansion in educational opportunities, it is threatened by it.  Perhaps for the first time since the demographic pressure of the Black Death gave the concept of skilled labor a foothold into economic prosperity and brought the feudal economies of the Middle Ages to an end in the Renaissance, the surplus of labor is so great that it is a burden and not an asset to the kind of wealth produced in the current economic system.  Add to that the fact that the productivity of individual workers keeps increasing, and the picture for ‘work’ in the future economy is nothing short of dire.  The lessons of the collapse of 2008 is not that job growth is difficult but that for the people who run and benefit from an economy based in financial markets it is completely unnecessary.  That fact will translate to educational policies designed to shore up the elite institutions at the expense of public education.  An early example of this can be seen in the recent move by the SAT to offer early testing to students who are recommended and can afford $5000 for an intensive three week prep course.  In this scenario, even the pretext of equal opportunity and participation is gone.

If the people who want to augment and improve public education want even a chance at success, they must reposition their arguments and their policies on a broader economic and political strategy.  There is no way to save public education in the midst of economic and political policies that favor a smaller and richer elite at every turn.  Indeed, there is no need to do so.  The political system will not produce results contradicted by economic reality.  Progressive defenders of public education and the role it plays in a democratic society must come to grips with the fact that the defense they pose also requires at least a somewhat democratic economy.  The war waged on public education, as well as other public institutions, by an isolated and extractive elite  is not new and will not stop at charter schools.  If democracy matters then public education must be part of that formation.  Losing the battle over public education makes it highly unlikely that any other democratic institutions will survive. Those fighting on the front lines over the future of education should understand the scope of the battle and not be distracted by proposals that, whatever their individual merit, are part of the agenda to dismantle the link between public education and democratic mobility.  As it stands, America has become one of the societies with the least economic mobility – only Great Britain is worse in the industrialized world.  Educational policy alone will not reverse that trend, but the dismantling of the public education system will guarantee that it will not be reversed in the foreseeable future. 

  

Combatting Trump

We’ve all been watching the Trump campaign in slow motion, wondering when the train will finally jump the track and plummet into the abyss.  The problem is that we’ve miscalculated just what kind of event we’re watching.  We have tried, Hillary has tried, the punditry and media has tried to frame the Trump campaign as a ‘political’ event, and it’s not.  ‘Politics’ is a frame we use to privilege a rational and policy driven enterprise which is largely, but not entirely, run by elites.  Most people don’t really participate in it (except to vote every now and then) and really don’t care for it that much (which probably says something inherently positive about them).   Trump is none of these things.  Trump is ‘molar.’

In their seminal work, A Thousand Plateaus, the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Felix Guattari describe word orders as existing in two types.  The first is molecular – a stratified and solidified kind of order that is stable and predictable.  There is an affective domain inside of it, but the way we talk about it walls that off and leaves only the rational traces of the event.  Our ‘politics’ is a molecular word order, and most people recognize the limited dynamic at play.  The other kind of word order is ‘molar.’  Molar events “flow” because they have broken out of the static confines of their rational containers and are sent pouring out into the culture breaking down the word orders and practices that used to stabilize them. (I know this analysis would get a D at best on the midterm).   I think the only way to understand the Trump phenomenon is recognize it as a ‘molar’ event, all affect and emotion.

For months the Democrats, the media and even a good number of Republicans have been waiting for the ‘normal’ rules of politics to kick in and stop Trump.  The problem with that is that Trump could never exist if those word domains were intact.  Trump can only exist when the linguistic structures around politics have been breached by something too intense and too emotional to qualify as ‘political.’  Molar flows are ‘nomadic,’ seeking a new constellation and a new order, and they cannot be contained or understood from the molecular standpoint that they broke away from.  The ugly emotional content of the Trump campaign doesn’t need reason or logic or even consistency to validate it.  The people who believe are validated by the simple fact they believe.  This emotional stew has always been a part of American politics, even being hinted at occasionally by unscrupulous politicians who use ‘dog whistles’ to signal their followers.  In a normal political season, that’s as far as they can go.  The emergence of Trump means that the dam broke and that we have gone from a normal political campaign to something very different and much more dangerous.

Pointing out Trump’s flaws, besides being a never ending activity, is largely useless.  Everyone who is using normal political reasoning to calculate their vote has already done so.  If truth or logic or competence where the answer, the race would already be over.  The fact that it is far from over, means that it is time to realize what is happening and combat it in the only effective way we can, with a molar event of our own.  Hillary and her surrogates were at their best during their convention.  They waved flags, gave emotional speeches, and brought people to their feet.  Khizr Khan moved a nation with his direct and indignant rebuttal to Trump.  Then Hillary went back to being Hillary, perhaps the perfect embodiment of a ‘molecular’ politician.  I don’t mean that as a slight, but she is not an emotional politician (and given the sexism in the electorate, may not be able to afford to be one).  But the answer to Trumpism is not rational or policy driven – the answer is to call on the potential molar powers that the convention displayed with powerful effect.

The campaign is in the home stretch and a lot is at stake.  Even if you have, as I do, reservations about Clinton’s connections to crony capitalism and the overly militaristic view of the world she seems to promote – the list could go on – this is no time to quibble.  As Bernie himself said, there is really no viable alternative to Hillary becoming president.  She has to find a positive and emotional message and forsake the notion that Trump can be held accountable in a traditional political calculus.  The media has to stop chasing every new shiny thing Trump says and does and focus on the themes that make us a democracy – although one certainly at peril.  If they can’t stop fixating on the carnival and focus on the larger issues, the media, and the political establishment will be swept away by the pyroclastic flow we call Trump.

Is Mitch McConnell a Terrorist?

                Calling someone a terrorist is problematic on any number of levels, not the least of which is that it has become such an overused label that it is often little more than name calling.  Even so, some characteristics of terrorism have remained clear.  Terrorism requires the intentional act of someone of extreme and dogmatic character; someone willing to inflict pain, suffering and even death on the innocent to achieve their own ends.  We usually attribute that sort of orthodoxy to religious beliefs, but there is no reason that the extremism cannot be politically motivated.  Using this broad definition, it is time to ask whether or not Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should be considered a terrorist?

                The initial response to this question is probably to assume that it is a flippant and hyperbolic overreach to equate a political figure like McConnell to a terrorist.  I think a careful analysis of the damage the Leader’s actions have created, however, make it a matter of serious consideration.  I contend that no one has done more to harm the democratic institutions that this country is founded on than McConnell.  No matter how gruesome and horrendous the attacks of terrorist networks have been, none of them have threatened the American political system more than the Senator from Kentucky.

                McConnell has led an assault on the very foundations of American democracy by refusing to let those institutions function as they were intended.  Terrorists who attack buildings and people pose a threat to those buildings and people, but they don’t inherently challenge our form of government.  In fact, attacks from the outside can even strengthen the government, forcing petty and patrician issues aside to focus on more important threats.   McConnell and the rest of the Republican leadership has done exactly the opposite.  They have taken the radical and extreme partisanship of a small minority of their party and used it to bring the federal government to a complete standstill.  The Congress can’t pass a budget, keep the government running or pass funding for natural disaster or the Zika outbreak without the drama of extreme political dysfunction.

                A democracy requires compromise, and this iteration of the Republican party refuses to compromise.  Instead, they offer only the most extreme ( and often already debunked) ideas and use the procedures of the congress to insure nothing ever happens.  I don’t think this is a coincidence.  While making sure nothing happens is bad for the majority of the country, it suits the interests of the Republican donors just fine.  The utter failure of this congress to do anything is the only way that the people supporting the Republicans can stay in power.  They need our energy policies to stay focused on the hopeless expansion of fossil fuels, and they need our economic policies to continue to benefit the very richest tenth of one percent for them to keep their power.  McConnell has even gone so far as to violate his constitutional duty to participate with the duly elected chief executive to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court.

                This extremism has led to the lowest approval rating ever recorded for congress.  It has led to a generation of millennials vital to the future of our country to turn away from the political system, and who can blame them.  It is naïve to assume that this is not the intended outcome.  McConnell and his backers can only succeed if the system fails and the young voters stay home.  McConnell isn’t just ‘playing politics,’ he is destroying politics.  In doing so he is striking at the heart of what makes us a democracy.  No plane, no bomb, no gun can do that.

                If you think it is blasphemy to equate politics to terrorism because it somehow doesn’t honor the memory of the 3,000 or so people who died on 9/11 or the brave civilians and veterans who have died fighting terrorism, I offer this response.  Over 30,000 people a year die in gun violence in this country and at least 60,000 people die from the effects of environmental pollution.  Where is the honor in their deaths?  Mitch McConnell has become the face of a party willing to knowingly kill its own people for the sake of ideological purity.  If that isn’t terrorism, what is it?

The Day After the Election

We are heading into the most contentious and ugly election in our lifetimes.  It is almost devoid of serious issues and is dominated by a 24 hour news cycle detailing the latest high wire failure of the Trump circus.  The day after the election, America will face a choice that has never been directly confronted by the campaigns.  The day after the election, we have to tell a new story.

It is obvious that what Harari has called the “imagined order” that we refer to as America is broken.  This is not to suggest that both parties are equally guilty.  Hillary and the Democrats are running on a theme of ‘stronger together,’ but in the end it’s clear that we’re really not all that together.  Obviously, a Trump presidency would be disastrous in ways that are even hard to imagine, but regardless of who ‘wins,’ the problem of who we are remains.

This is not a question of policy or programs.  This is a question of narrative.  What is our story about who we are and what we intend to be?  We already have a nation gridlocked and polarized by parties that don’t just disagree on the details; they disagree on reality.  The worldview of Trump supporters doesn’t just disagree with what Hillary’s supporters believe, it negates it. There is no longer any starting point for a dialog that both parties could agree on.  In 2016, ‘facts’ are whatever anyone wants them to be.  Climate change is a good example.  No one who understands science (by that I mean that they realize that there is always some dissent among scientists) doubts that climate change is real and that human activity plays some role in it.  But we have a major party who simply refuses to acknowledge that.  The same can be said for any number of critical issues facing the country – from economics to education.  We no longer share a reality – an “imagined order” – that can serve as a default setting to ground our disagreements and diverse perspectives.

The campaign will only make that worse.  Aided and abetted by a media establishment only interested in the horserace, one that refuses to call out even the most transparent and obvious lies, the narratives of the campaign are only going to move further and further apart.  Words such as America, patriot, and democracy are going to thrown around by people who assume they have a common meaning, but, of course, they don’t.  We don’t just vote in separate parties; we live in different worlds.  Assuming we avoid the utter catastrophe of electing the most unqualified candidate any of us has ever seen, we will still be left with a self-described policy wonk who is anything but inspirational..  In some ways her story and the reality of the first woman president is inspiring, but how will she lead.  She will undoubtedly purpose solid policy initiatives, but she will do so to a divided and gridlocked congress who is no more ready to work with her than they were Obama.  There is little hope that the divide opened up during the campaign will be healed by the politics that follow.

In some ways, we are like people caught in a relationship that was on the skids but was barely holding itself together.  In this election, we dropped the pretense of the relationship and started yelling and name calling.  The convenient fiction that we were one people is now gone.  I don’t think it can be pieced back together.  I think we need a new narrative, a new “imagined order.”   We need on that can truly embrace diversity, unlike the old one that paid it lip service but never quite figured how equal and diverse went together.  We need a narrative that embraces uncertainty and pictures America as a partner in the world not the alpha male.  We need one that realizes that ‘knowledge’ has to created by the people who live it and not by ‘experts’ who don’t.  We need that and so much more.  It is hard to imagine how a political leader can do that in the political context we live in.  Even the most gifted orator I have ever seen failed miserably, in spite of a heroic effort.

On November 8^th we’re going to elect a president.  Turns out, what we really need is a story teller.