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Tag: social issues
Trump Drives Spike Into Culture War Politics

Trump Drives Spike Into Culture War Politics

Days before the Indiana primary, Ted Cruz paraded his two young daughters in matching pink dresses and spoke darkly of “putting little girls alone in a bathroom with grown men.”

This was a visual that, frankly, we could have done without. Thankfully, Donald Trump locked it in Ripley’s museum of the politically bizarre by trouncing Cruz in that conservative state’s primary.

It was Trump who had said that transgender people should use “whatever bathroom they feel is appropriate.” It was he who noted that there have been “very few problems” with transgender people using ladies’ rooms. Trump didn’t say — but could have — that men presenting themselves as women have been using women’s facilities for a long time, with the other occupants none the wiser or unconcerned.

So has Trump deep-sixed the culture war gambit in Republican politics? The formula is to draw votes by pounding on some controversy of little consequence to most people, preferably with a sex angle attached. The 2004 presidential election in Ohio was a textbook case. Placing a measure to ban gay marriage on the ballot probably gave George W. Bush — whose main game was tax cuts — a narrow victory.

Our friends the Koch brothers routinely give money to socially conservative groups to win over middle- or working-class followers otherwise not served by the family’s economic agenda. The brothers themselves have shrugged at gay marriage, saying they have no problem with it.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the working-class whites targeted by culture warriors don’t really care all that much about these issues — or care a lot less about them than they do about their falling incomes. Perhaps they’ve been voting all these years for an attitude, hitting back at the “liberal elites” who they feel rap them on the knuckles when they speak their mind. Trump’s magic potion involves adding attitude while subtracting threats to Social Security, Medicare and other government programs average folks depend on.

Trump has stomped on so many of the right wing’s most cherished wedge issues — while winning majorities among the Republican base — it gets you wondering how big that tide of moral umbrage really was. How much of it was a mirage pulled off with talk radio’s smoke and mirrors?

Abortion is a truly difficult issue. Your writer believes an abortion should be easy (and free) to obtain early in a pregnancy and limited later on. Others oppose abortion altogether, and it is this group’s genuine concerns that the right seeks to stoke.

As a result, it’s the rare Republican who will put in a good word for Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit that provides a variety of women’s health services in addition to abortions. But Trump praised the organization for doing the former without apology. And he won races in the heart of value-voter America — including the entire Deep South.

For liberals and moderates alike, Trump deserves gratitude for putting away Cruz. (Too bad about John Kasich, though.) It spared us from having to hear his running mate, Carly Fiorina, go on about Planned Parenthood’s harvesting “body parts” from a kicking fetus, a complete fiction.

Making things up happens to be a Trump specialty, so there’s some poetic justice in his volleying back some outright fabrications. His suggestion that Cruz’s father helped John Kennedy’s assassin is a classic of the genre.

Putting an end to culture warmongering as a political strategy — or at least dialing it back — could go down as Trump’s second-best contribution to the quality of America’s civic life. His best contribution would be to lose badly in November. Luckily, on getting himself not elected in the general, Trump has made a strong start.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: A demonstrator dressed as U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump protests outside the Trump Tower building in midtown Manhattan in New York March 19, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

It All Begins With The GOP

It All Begins With The GOP

Excerpted from political consultant and pollster Stanley B. Greenberg’s new book, America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation’s Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems.

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Bernie Sanders Bites Back on #BlackLivesMatter

Bernie Sanders Bites Back on #BlackLivesMatter

When Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley were onstage at the progressive activism conference Netroots Nation on July 18, they were interrupted by #BlackLivesMatter protesters, who asked them to say the names of black women who had died in police custody, a reference specifically to Sandra Bland, who had died of an apparent suicide on July 13 after being jailed for a minor traffic violation three days earlier.

Sanders, who has a history of involvement in the civil rights movement dating back to the 1960s, was criticized for appearing callous and condescending.

“Black lives, of course, matter…but if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK,” he said as protesters booed and shouted, while he transitioned to his stump speech on economic inequality.

Although both O’Malley and Sanders were seemingly caught off guard, in the aftermath they began incorporating the protesters’ questions and assertions into their rhetoric.

O’Malley apologized shortly after the incident.

Sanders went on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday to respond. He said that, to him, #BlackLivesMatter and economic injustice are intertwined, calling them “parallel problems.”

“We have to end institutional racism, but we have to deal with the reality that 50 percent of young black kids are unemployed, that we have massive poverty in America, that we have an unsustainable level of income and wealth inequality,” he told Chuck Todd on July 26.

“As Martin Luther King told us, we have to address both.”

Sanders, as mayor and then governor of a predominantly white state, would theoretically have an advantage with his 50-plus years of civil rights activism. Despite his bona fides, he has never needed to court a black vote — a fact he’s acknowledged. And that’s where the disconnect occurs.

As Barrett Holmes Pitner, a black journalist for The Daily Beast who interned for Sanders over a decade ago explained, his messaging has little appeal to black voters and, because he comes from a tiny white state, most don’t even know who he is. “…[B]lack voices question his credibility because he has never needed to prove himself to this community. Being a champion of civil rights within a bastion of white America holds little sway with black voters.”

But now it’s time to try.

On Meet the Press, Sanders affirmed his support for what the protesters stood for.

“The issue they raised is actually a very important issue…This is an issue of concern that I strongly share,” he said, though he rejected the notion that institutional racism and inequality were two separate issues, which is the crux of the debate among many activists.

As Ryan Cooper argues in The Week, race and class are not independent of each other:

Being poor is a known factor in about every social ill. Blacks do commit more crime than whites on a per capita basis, but this is largely explained by a poverty rate that is nearly three times greater. Thus, poor neighborhoods suffer both a lot of crime and crushingly heavy policing. When they are arrested, poor people often can’t afford bail, or to hire a decent attorney, leaving them defenseless before the incarceration machine.

Poverty means constant stress and exhaustion as people struggle to balance critical needs on a tight budget — and its disadvantage is transmitted through time. Family income is tightly correlated with children’s test scores, chance of college attendance, and future class position. Money, quite simply, is power.

And it’s power that the activists are fighting against; entrenched interests that have historically dismissed their concerns. That’s why #BernieSoBlack, a hashtag mocking Sanders’ comments at Netroots Nation, trended last week.

Incorporating the language of #BlackLivesMatter seems to be Sanders’ next move on this front. In addition to attending the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — a black civil rights organization whose first president was Dr. King — over the weekend, he toured Louisiana, which has the second largest black population in the country, holding rallies and fundraisers. But while he’s got the momentum among mostly white liberal voters, blacks — and other minorities — are still waiting to see if he can effectively understand them.

Photo: Bernie Sanders at Netroots Nation, July 18, 2015. yashmori via Flickr

Far More Republicans Believe In Climate Change And Evolution Than The Ever-Shrinking Deficit

Far More Republicans Believe In Climate Change And Evolution Than The Ever-Shrinking Deficit

A new Pew Research poll is getting a lot of attention because it shows the share of Republicans who believe in evolution has declined 11 percent since 2009, down to just 43 percent. In 2009, 54 percent said that human beings had “evolved over time.”

A quick poll of 2008 Republican candidates for president found that 7 out of 10 recognized the science of evolution. No such poll was taken during the 2012 GOP primary but not one of the eight candidates said he or she would be willing to accept a tax increase, even if it were paired with spending cuts at a rate of 10 to 1.

But in 2013, after the Bush tax rates expired, Congress voted to end the tax breaks for those earning $400,000, along with slightly higher taxes on capital gains and inheritances. The resulting increase in revenue along with budget cuts and the fastest growing job market since 2005 have resulted in a deficit that’s falling at nearly record rates.

The deficit was cut by $409 billion, or 37 percent, from the last fiscal year to $680 billion—$170 billion less than the Congressional Budget Office originally predicted.

While these numbers are still large, they’re even more impressive when you consider the key metric economists look at — deficit as a share of gross domestic product.

The White House presented this chart to illustrate how significant the reduction actually is:

deficitchart_v2_0

By actual dollar amounts and as a share of GDP, the budget deficit is falling — quickly.

Yet for some reason, the percentage of Republicans who believe deficit reduction is occurring is a fraction of those who believe in evolution or even climate change.

Only 12 percent of Republicans believed that progress was being made in reducing the deficit in a Pew poll released earlier this month — even though the deficit shrunk by more than a third!

12-19-2013-7

This matches a Bloomberg poll in October that showed two-thirds of Republicans, including 93 percent of Tea Partiers, believed the deficit was actually growing.

In an economy where millions are out of work, deficit reduction is most likely harmful. But the media goes out of its way to depict a deficit as inherently evil, while neglecting to make clear that it is actually shrinking precipitously.

When it comes to politics, most people are guilty of what Chris Mooney labels “motivated reasoning.”

Though climate change and evolution are theories that are accepted by the vast majority of scientists, they are still theories. The deficit, however, unquestionably exists. It was much larger the year before than it is now. Only 1 out of 10 Republicans is willing to accept this reality.

Before we start worrying about the right accepting scientific theories, let’s first try to get them to agree that facts exist.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr