I just can’t right now, so I’m going with music
The Market has Spoken
We Hold the Line
As you all know, I try to stay out of domestic politics in my writing here, except where the foreign policy stuff that I focus on – such as the maskirovka series – crosses the boundaries. I also don’t think that despite my staying out of the domestic politics arena here there are too many of you wondering how I view domestic or foreign policy. So I want to focus a moment on where things go from here. What has to happen, what needs to happen going forward is that we need to hold the line.
We need to hold the line because America is an ideal, a set of ideas, that don’t belong to any of us specifically. Rather we hold them in trust for each other. If we give up on the ideal, if we refuse to continue to fight for it, then we have no reason to hold the line. Now is the time to hold that line. Now is the time to dig in and, amazingly enough be conservative – conserve and preserve as much of the status quo as possible. To stand and yell stop! We do this by holding everyone’s feet to the fire regarding that ideal. Ideas can’t be killed. Signals can’t be stopped. Unless we stop believing in them and transmitting them.
Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of anti-malaria sprays. One can’t fight an ideology; one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies. Yet this is done constantly. One side says, “land reform,” and the other side says, “better culverts.” One side says, “We are going to kill all those nasty village chiefs and landlords.” The other side says, “Yes, but look, we want to give you prize pigs to improve your strain.” These arguments just do not match. Simple but adequate appeals will have to be found sooner or later.
While I think many of us would agree that the ideas put forward by Secretary Clinton, even though they weren’t perfect, were, overall, the better ideas in this specific election, they weren’t received as such. And I think we all agree that we really don’t know what President Elect Trump’s ideas really are given how all over the map he and his surrogates have been over the course of the now completed campaign. What needs to be done, to fully embrace Fall’s strategic wisdom, is to figure out how to change the frequency, so to speak, so that better ideas are not only transmitted, but received. Right now that means holding fast to the understanding that America is a set of ideas, an ideal. And that those ideas, that ideal are worth fighting for within the political arena. That is the challenge for all Americans – liberal or conservative – who were concerned with Trump’s candidacy and are concerned with the potential coming Trump Administration. America has come through many dark periods bloodied, but unbowed. Now, as then, is the time to plant our feet, yell stop, take the political punch, and hold the line. We hold the line for our friends, families, for those we agree with and those we don’t, and for those yet to come who we hold America as an ideal for in trust.
I’m not a big believer in indispensable people or Nations, but right now – for good or for bad – a significant portion of the world depends on us. Not only are our own, but many other states and societies have their people in harms way, in contact with ISIL and other reactionary forces, and if we go to pieces we do none of them any good. Right now a lot of states and societies in Europe, as well as in Australia and Israel, are grappling with similar societal divisions, rancor, and acrimony. How we handle this transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration and how we hold the line to preserve the American ideal signals to them how to hold their own lines. Whether its in Germany or France, which are the next two European states up in this fight against reactionary nationalism and xenophobic isolationism. Or Montenegro that just fought off a coup believed to be supported by Russia. Or the people of Turkey who are themselves seeing a consolidation of power and authority within the hands of an increasingly autocratic and dictatorial Erdogan. And for our allies and partners in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia who are worried about Russian aims and expansionism. Falling upon each other and tearing ourselves apart will not do us or them any good.
As I put in a comment last night: my service, whether as a term appointed civil servant or a contractor, is to the Constitution and through it to the American people. This is the case for every single national security professional I have ever met – uniformed or civilian, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. We serve an ideal and a set of ideas on behalf of all Americans. An electoral majority of those Americans chose to elect Donald Trump as the next President. They’ve chosen to give him unified Republican control over the Federal legislature. If you disagree, if you think this is a mistake you have to respect these electoral outcomes if you ever expect, even if its a fool’s expectation, that your preferred electoral outcomes will be respected when they occur. For good, bad, or otherwise Donald Trump is our next President and he has, for now, unified GOP control over the Federal legislature. Now is the time to hold to the ideal of America. The ideas that are America. You want a more perfect union? Hold the line. You want to provide for the general welfare? Hold the line.
What Now?
I think the thing that gets me is that I knew full well that Trump would take WV- I’d been saying for a year he would take WV by 30 points, and the margin turned out to be bigger. What I don’t understand is how people were so wrong about other states. Did your state vote the way you thought it would?
Second, I don’t understand how future campaigns will work. Truth and facts and basic common decency clearly do not matter. Policy positions clearly do not matter. It honestly appears that the only things that matter are jingoism, race, and identity.
Third, I hear a lot of “we need to stay strong and fight,” and we do, but at the same time, we need to sit back and reassess. The Democratic party is in shambles. I’m going to occupy myself with the new house and my daily life, and see where we go from here. Acting out now would just be pointless and accomplish nothing.
On the other hand, I did give 50 bucks to Planned Parenthood this morning.
Everything just feels so upside down right now.
Secretary Clinton Concession Speech Live Feed
Here’s the live feed for Secretary Clinton’s Concession Speech. It is scheduled for 10:30 AM EST.
Secretary Clinton Concession Speech Live FeedPost + Comments (116)
White Before Black, Men Before Women
To get things out of the way: the way I feel right now is exactly the sensation — body and mind — I’ve only felt before when I got news that someone close to me died unexpectedly. I’m basically paralyzed, and my brain is moving…not much, and not in any coherent sequence.
That said, I’ve only one thought to add to all those below. I’m completely down with the core themes others have already written here: la lucha continua, the struggle continues, and in days like these the kindness we show each other is paramount. And I agree with the hints at a post-mortem below.
My sole notion is that whatever her formidable strengths and her evident vulnerabilities, Hillary Clinton ran right into an absolutely familiar trap. American politics is hostile to women. We saw it in Massachusetts recently enough. Martha Coakley was all kinds of not-great (read, terrible, especially her first time out) as a candidate for senator and governor. But in both cases she started up with a sixty pound rock on her back male candidates don’t have to carry. Massachusetts had, until Elizabeth Warren came along, never elected a woman to the top offices. (And it’s notable that Warren also seems to face a woman tax as measured in approval ratings, at least as compared with her perfectly solid but unspectacular male colleague, Ed Markey.) Several tried, but it’s clear that while women can aspire to state treasurer or AG or a House seat, gunning for the top slots engaged the fear/loathing-for-powerful-women, leading to the results we see.
That’s true nationwide, I believe. The old line goes white men before everyone else (got the vote in 1783); then other males (black men got the vote in 1665); then women (who got the vote in 1920), with, of course, white women gaining access to power and agency ahead of women of color.
Whatever else we may conclude about the Clinton campaign and this terrible outcome, one thing it reveals is that racism still powerfully motivates the revanchist white right, to a depth I certainly didn’t forsee. It also reminds us that misogyny strikes deep within our body politic. One more thing to deal with, as best we can.
One afterthought. Typing that sentence about racism above, I’m reminded of the ways privilege so subtly seeps into one’s bones. Y’all know my politics, I think, and I’ve come by them through life-long engagement from a childhood in Berkeley in the 60s. But I’m white, male, working in the elite, pretty secure, still pretty damn white-and-male setting that is an R 1 university. I’ve got a good friend , a Latino writer who has some of the same cocoon now, but certainly didn’t come up within those comforts and protections. He’d been freaking out about Trump’s rise, especially after the Comey ratfucking, and I kept reassuring him with the polling internals and the early vote stuff and all that.
I emailed him this morning to tell him the obvious: he’d been right and I wrong. He wrote back saying he’d known that disaster was looming — and that is was time to fight. On that last, of course, he’s right. It was the first half of that response that pulled me up, because I realized in that moment what should have been obvious: a nice liberal white guy like myself, whatever my politics and however deep my convictions doesn’t have the deep knowledge my friend does of just how much pure racial hate and resentment is out there. I can get glimpses, and through my friends can get to empathy (I certainly hope), but the truth remains: I don’t live in daily direct confrontation with that hate. And that, I think, as much as anything else, led me to miss whatever signs there might have been that our disaster was upon us.
As noted, that’s a penetrating glimpse of the obvious, of course. But it’s also key. I have no idea at this moment how to climb out of the deep hole we’re in. I hope its not a grave. But whatever else we do, we have to out work and out number the reserves of awful that have proved so potent this year.
And that’s all I got, rambling away, on this grim morning. To end mindful of Tim F.’s injunction, I’m deeply grateful for all who make Balloon Juice a community, from Blog Leader John (and animals) to all the rest of us. I’m going to try to duck away from the ‘net for a while, just to get my head clear. I’ve already deleted the Twitter app from my phone and iPad, and I’ll be trying not to surf anything more exciting than Sports Illustrated for a while. But I’ll be checking here, even if I don’t plan to post much, if at all (what’s new w. that — ed.). Jackals you/we may be. But we’re our jackals, and I love you all.
Image: John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit 1882.
Approximate Mood
On the upside, it appears my several decade devotion to the Fallout video game series is going to come in handy.