Republican Supreme Court Triumph Against Background of National Discontent

Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a new Supreme Court justice is a pyrrhic victory for the Republicans. It achieves a solid right-wing majority on court decisions, but reduces the legitimacy of these decisions in the eyes of the public and the legal system.

His ranting attack on the Democrats at the hearing removed all pretence of judicial impartiality – it “pulled the cloak off the Wizard of Oz” as law professor Stephen Gillers put it, shattering public belief in the Supreme Court’s independent authority. It also exposed the supposedly moderate Republican senators who capitulated when Kavanaugh “pivoted to a pure message of aggression, anger and promises to fight the recognized set of political enemies that bind him to his mass and elite supporters … Early Thursday afternoon, Kavanaugh’s nomination was on life support. He went full Trump. And it worked,” Josh Marshall commented. “A scion of the [Washington] beltway political elite who received the country’s finest elite education, he made his name in the Bush White House. He is the epitome of the pre-Trump conservative establishment. Yet we can see here how seamless the transition was to full Trumpism, as it was for all the Republican Senators who rushed to his side after his Thursday afternoon performance.”

The right-wing bias of the court is now decidedly out of tune with the public on many issues, nullifying its role as a moderating bastion of government. The New York Times reported: “Several priorities of the conservative legal movement already conflict with public opinion. The movement’s biggest target is Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified access to abortion as a constitutional right, yet a poll in July by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal showed an all-time high in public support for the decision, with 71 percent saying that Roe should not be overturned. The conservative wing of the court has also focused on upholding voting restrictions, gerrymanders and purges of the registration rolls. In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the same justices opened the door to a massive amount of spending to influence elections. Polls show, however, that more than 70 percent of Americans don’t like extreme partisan gerrymandering and want to overturn Citizens United.”

The importance of judicial appointments is clear from the pushback of some federal judges against Trump’s immigration laws and the separation of children from parents seeking asylum at the border. For this reason, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made the justice system a partisan battleground. According to the Washington Post, “he’s been very attuned to the power of the courts and made judges a top priority. He has described the 2016 blockade of Merrick Garland after Antonin Scalia’s death as one of his proudest achievements.” He is ready to push through 30 more lifetime District and Circuit court nominees before November’s mid-terms, though under Senate rules Democrats could delay them.

It is a dangerous moment in US politics because the Republicans have spent the years since Nixon encouraging a racist pushback against civil rights legislation, building an aggrieved and aggressive right-wing base that connected with white supremacist movements in the course of Trump’s election campaign. Josh Marshall sums it up: “The politics of aggression, norm-breaking, the penchant for conspiracy theories, the increasingly explicit white nationalism – these were all present in 2014, 2010 and in a more attenuated form in 2004. What Trump did was, through some malign and impulsive intuition, fuse these together into a workable politics. He took what was still the underbelly of Republican politics, which nevertheless provided it with the bulk of the GOP’s motive force, and made it the face, the brand.”

But what it also poses is how the public can claw back legal protections from state assaults. The guilty verdict on Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke for killing black teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014 shows a significant shift in public appreciation of state repression of African American youth. A dashcam video showing Van Dyke unloading 16 gunshots into the 17-year-old was allegedly suppressed ahead of the mayoral election in 2015, and mayor-elect Ralph Emanuel, a Democrat, together with the Chicago police department, was accused of overseeing a cover-up. In These Times reports: “In the aftermath of the video’s release, activists staged massive protests across the city, shutting down major business districts and thoroughfares. Soon after, then-Police Chief Garry McCarthy was fired by Mayor Emanuel. And later, States’ Attorney Anita Alvarez lost a high-profile election to reformer Kim Foxx. Last month, Emanuel announced that he will not be seeking re-election for a third term, meaning that the three most prominent officials associated with the alleged cover-up will soon no longer sit in their previous positions of power.”

The release of the video came after strenuous efforts of civil rights lawyers who challenged the city’s right to withhold it for more than a year. Together with civil rights organizers, “community members in and around Chicago refused to let justice die along with McDonald. It was not the notable activists and national leaders we see on television who ensured this story did not end like so many others before. It was the citizens who cared about their community and about justice being done,” writes the executive director for Human Rights Watch, Nicole Austin-Hillery.

Building mass opposition movements is important, but so is the battle for control of the state – as the sustained efforts of right-wing Republicans demonstrate. It has to be fought on all fronts. The Democratic base is furious at Kavanaugh’s appointment, but this has to be directed at mobilizing those who do not usually vote to come out in the November mid-term elections. That could overturn the Republican hold in both the House and the Senate, allowing the possibility of a renewed investigation into Kavanaugh’s misleading testimony and his potential impeachment.

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Judge and Fury: Kavanaugh’s Rage Exposes the Festering Politicization of Justice

For the last few days, America has been transfixed by the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The entirely believable testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford was contrasted with Kavanaugh’s aggressive, blustering, and enraged response at her accusations’ damage to his shot at a lifetime Supreme Court judgeship.

The Court is the highest and most visible part of the justice system which is theoretically independent of the legislature and the executive branches of US government. Whatever happens with Kavanaugh’s appointment, the Court’s independence and the Senate’s legitimacy are now facing intense public scrutiny. That is why, after voting in favor of Kavanaugh on committee but then being confronted in an elevator by two angry victims of sexual assault, Senator Jeff Flake brokered a week-long delay on the final Senate vote in order to allow the FBI to conduct an investigation.

The Washington Post reported: “After this [hearing], public perception is going to increasingly be that it’s more a political body than a judicial one,” said Benjamin Barton, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who studies the federal judiciary. “To me, this will be a disaster for them.” Added Jonathan Peters, a media law professor at the University of Georgia. “The court is a political institution, yes, but as much as possible it’s critical for the justices to be — and be regarded as — impartial, trustworthy and above the political fray. The justices have reason now to be concerned.”

Republican support for Kavanaugh is only the latest in extreme partisan interference in the normal workings of the justice system, with Senate leader McConnell delaying and frustrating Obama-era appointments until Trump’s election enabled them to fill hundreds of lower-court vacancies with conservative judges. The transformation of the judiciary into a weapon of mass incarceration is a project more important to the Republican leadership, it seems, than their success in the House and Senate mid-term elections.

The New York Times commented: “Party leaders have concluded that supporting Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination, in the face of sexual assault accusations against him, will all but ensure that Republicans lose control of the House in November even as their fortunes may improve in some tough Senate races. … Even as Mr. Trump and Senate leaders acceded to an F.B.I. investigation into the accusations against Judge Kavanaugh, Republicans say they did so grudgingly. Privately, they are determined to press ahead with the confirmation process despite the political risks and the possibility that Republican senators may still defect and oppose the nomination in the end.”

The Republican Senate committee members attempted to blame the Democrats for disrupting their staged confirmation by raising Dr. Ford’s objections. Kavanaugh himself raged: “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups,” which apparently impressed Trump enough to tweet his support.

But the Democratic representatives are voicing a muted version of public hostility to the corruption of the political system that has been festering for many years before Trump took office. Kavanaugh is closely connected to this corruption: in earlier hearings, he lied skilfully about his involvement with formulating the legal justification for torture under the Bush administration, about his extreme partisanship during the Starr attempt to impeach Clinton, and the 2000 Supreme Court verdict that gave Bush the presidency.

The Democrats on their own could not prevent Trump and the Republicans from shifting the Supreme Court sharply to the right, endangering the Roe v. Wade decision and civil rights generally. But the glare of the spotlight on the raw machinations of power may well force a retreat on Kavanaugh’s elevation – who, despite the revelations about his character, will remain in an influential position on the Washington D.C. Appeals Court.

In any case, the Republican party has now clearly branded itself the party of white male entitlement, attracting those railing against the modern world that they believe “is hostile to their individual rights, political power and social status.” But in doing so, they are alienating themselves from the mass of people who don’t regularly vote, and may well be inspired to do so in November after the hearing’s demonstration of exclusive class privilege and of hostility to women.

Parkland Students Tell Politicians: Represent the People or Get Out!

Last Saturday, upwards of 300,000 school students and supporters packed Washington DC for a rally to demand politicians enact gun control. “Vote them out!” was the most common chant on the “March for Our Lives,” as the protestors pointed to the inaction of Congress after each tragic mass killing. A consciously diverse platform of school age speakers displayed the range of the movement’s support, which was replicated at hundreds of sibling rallies throughout the country. Reportedly, nearly a million people joined the protests worldwide.

The speakers, aged between 11 and 18, spoke with a passion and fearlessness that expressed a defiance of their own vulnerability, and demanded the government take responsibility for their safety by taking common-sense gun control measures, such as banning access to assault rifles. The active shooter drills that they are subjected to in schools across America have made even the youngest children sensitive to gun violence and the threat to their lives. They are responding to the public’s disaffection with the political system by taking things into their own hands.

Elena González, who survived the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, named all seventeen victims to humanize them and underline each individual tragedy. She then held the entire crowd for over four minutes of silence – not even requesting the audience to observe it – ending only when she had been on stage for six minutes and twenty seconds, the time it took for the gunman to shoot 17 people dead. Through her own mute stillness on stage, she was able to exert a moral authority unavailable to politicians of any political party. As the Guardian pointed out, “That a teenager unknown to the country until a little over a month ago could command such quiet respect and deep introspection among a rally of this size illustrates just how powerful the student-led movement to rise from the Parkland massacre has become.”

A key theme for all the speakers was to name shooting victims who went unrecognized by the authorities to celebrate their memory, and by extension assert the importance of their own lives. Many said they were there to represent their community and those who had died: they refuse to allow members of their generation to be treated as a statistic. Sam Fuentes, who was injured in the attack and still has shrapnel in her face, led the crowd in a rendition of Happy Birthday in honor of Nicholas Dworet, who was killed in the shooting and would have turned 18 on the day of the rally.

Edna Lizbeth Chávez, a high school senior from South Los Angeles, said that gun violence had become so normal in her community she learned to duck bullets before she could read. She spoke movingly about her brother, who was shot dead while she was a young child. “Ricardo was his name. Can you all say it with me?” she asked. And she ended by saying: “Remember my name. Remember these faces. Remember us and how we’re making change.”

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne commented: “The unmistakably political character of this movement is another change. No phony bipartisanship. No pretending that everyone approaches this issue with goodwill. Thus the importance of ‘Vote them out.’ Thus the imperative of casting the NRA as the adversary and all who welcome its money and support as complicit … this march established the gun safety alliance as multiracial and intersectional, reaching far beyond its traditional base among suburban white liberals. Few voices echoing from the platform were more powerful than 11-year-old Naomi Wadler’s. She declared that young African American women who were victims of gun violence would no longer be seen as ‘simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential’.”

She also said: “People have said that I am too young to have these thoughts on my own. People have said that I am a tool of some nameless adult. It’s not true. My friends and I might still be 11, and we might still be in elementary school, but we know. We know that life isn’t equal for everyone and we know what is right and wrong.” She added, “And we know that we have seven short years until we, too, have the right to vote.”

Another survivor of the Parkland massacre, David Hogg, declared that they would make gun control a major voting issue. “We are going to take this to every election, to every state and every city. We’re going to make sure the best people get in our elections to run, not as politicians, but as Americans, because this—this is not cutting it. … Now is the time to come together, not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans, Americans of the same flesh and blood, that care about one thing and one thing only, and that’s the future of this country and the children that are going to lead it.”

He was evoking a different America from the right-wing fantasies of Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association; he was evoking the memory of John and Bobby Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, symbolically underlined by the appearance of King’s granddaughter Yolanda Renee King on the platform. She told the crowd: “I have a dream that enough is enough. And that this should be a gun-free world, period.”

The students have succeeded in shifting the political dialogue in a way that had previously seemed impossible. Republican politicians, especially in suburban districts, are coming under increasing pressure to act on gun control. At a town hall in Denver, Colorado, Republican Congressman Mike Coffman faced a barrage of questions — his district includes the town of Aurora, the site of a deadly 2012 shooting at a movie theater. “We’re done with thoughts and prayers!” shouted out one constituent during a moment’s silence for the Parkland victims.  Other attendees held signs that noted the National Rifle Association’s contributions to Coffman’s campaign. One woman identified herself as the wife of a first responder who was at the scene of the Columbine high school shooting, also in Colorado. Her son had planned to see a midnight showing of the new Batman movie the night that the gunman attacked the audience in Aurora. Yet, she told Coffman, she hadn’t spoken out until watching students from Parkland campaign for new gun laws. “An avalanche is coming to Washington, sir, and it is going to be led by our children.”

Republicans have made gun ownership an ideological point of purity as part of a culture war against Democrats, championing primarily rural and white constituencies that want fewer immigrants and more access to guns. As a result, the NRA has a political influence out of all proportion to its real support in the country. But the message of Saturday’s rally is that the organization’s time has ended. The protestors’ practical focus is to “vote them out” in November’s elections. As Cameron Kasky, another Parkland student survivor, told the rally: “To the leaders, skeptics and cynics who told us to sit down, stay silent and wait your turn: Welcome to the revolution. Either represent the people or get out. Stand for us or beware. The voters are coming.”

Trump’s NeoFascist Treason Attacks the Foundation of U.S. Democracy, E pluribus unum

Saturday’s Women’s March for America mobilized 125,000 protestors in Boston

Donald J. Trump’s inaugural speech on Friday proclaimed himself as the sole representative of the authentic American “people”– which is why he was so enraged by the comparison of the size of his inauguration crowd with that of Obama’s, and by the mass demonstrations against his presidency on Saturday. When he asserts “America first,” he reserves for himself the right to decide who to include in the category of “American,” and that definitely is not anyone who is brown or black or Muslim.

He commenced his presidency with a flurry of executive orders aimed at reversing Obama’s policies which, while meaningless without Congressional funding, have the effect of giving direction to the federal bureaucracy. The appearance of speed at getting things done is a two-edged sword: while enthusing his base, he is also provoking mass opposition to the attempt to unravel the social contract that has been constructed over the last 50 years, and evolved from the foundational idea of the United States: E pluribus unum—out of many, one.

Trump’s order to “build the wall” along the Mexican border, along with new anti-immigrant measures, signifies to his white nationalist supporters that he will restore and restructure the racial hierarchy with Muslims at the bottom and Latinos just above them; it’s understood that African Americans and Jews will soon be joining them. Trump’s rhetoric about Mexico paying the billions of dollars it will take to construct the wall is so obviously phony that, as Josh Marshall points out, his intention is really to create the appearance of dominance and humiliation at Mexico’s expense. “After all the promises about his strongman power, … [he] now is sticking taxpayers with the cost of his nonsensical promises about how we’re just ‘fronting’ the money. He got owned. He lied. And now he’s resorting to the same ‘oh you’ll get paid later’ flimflam he’s used to rip off countless investors over the years.”

The swift rollout of these orders has sparked defiance at state and local level: the Mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, called Trump’s executive order to strip federal funding from sanctuary cities (where local law enforcement and city agencies generally refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities) a “destructive and unAmerican threat” and “a direct attack on Boston’s people.” “I will use all of my power within lawful means to protect all Boston residents — even if that means using City Hall itself as a last resort,” he said. “If people want to live here, they’ll live here. They can use my office. They can use any office in this building.” He was joined in his rebellion by Bill DeBlasio of New York, and the mayors of Chicago, Washington, San Francisco and Seattle.

In New York, the city of immigrants, thousands of protesters streamed into Washington Square Park on Wednesday evening for an emergency rally after leaked documents showed Trump is preparing to sign an executive order blocking visas from being issued to anyone from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Gothamist reported: “Throughout the course of the night, elected officials, faith leaders, organizers, and activists called for solidarity with immigrants and Muslims, and spoke about the importance of maintaining New York’s status as a sanctuary city. … Fear of Trump’s agenda – and recognition of the need for multi-ethnic solidarity in fighting that agenda – seemed to be a driving force in bringing out those who’d previously shunned political protests. Meret Openheim and Susan E. Meret, longtime members of the LGBT synagogue Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, said that while they’d not previously considered themselves political, Trump’s victory had left them with little choice but to join the protest movement. … ‘We have a country that is [over] 200 years old, and it could be gone in an instant if we don’t stand up for it,’ added Openheim. ‘I think that’s politicized a lot of us’.”

The spontaneous upsurge of opposition to Trump’s presidency on Saturday reached  small towns that Clinton lost badly, like Wichita, Kansas, reported the Washington Post. Sizable crowds gathered “in red states and small towns across the country — in villages on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, in conservative pockets across the heartland, in rural towns in states like Virginia, and down throughout the South. In Anchorage, thousands of protesters gathered despite an unforgiving snowstorm and 10-degree temperatures, holding signs with slogans such as ‘My body. My rights. My choice.’ Farther north, in Fairbanks, thousands were undeterred by the extreme temperature, which approached minus-20 degrees. At the same time, thousands marched outside the Idaho Statehouse in Boise as snow fell over them. Even in rural Onley, Va., dozens of men and women gathered along a highway in solidarity with the larger Women’s March on Washington.”

Paul Mason writes in The Guardian: “The DC hotel I stayed in turned, on the eve of the Women’s March, into an organising base for 200 low-paid cleaners and care workers. Spanish, Filipino and Caribbean-English words began to drown out the chatter of journalists and politicos. …Winnie Wong, a key figure in organising the march told me: ‘The beauty of the Women’s March as a fledgling movement, which is now both decentralised and already global in scale, is that it will be very hard for any one institution to co-opt the messaging’.” He commented: “It is not only by obliterating truth that the authoritarian beguiles the masses, but by constant recourse to drama: the midnight speech, the military parade, the unexpected deal, the overnight invasion or the extrajudicial killing of an enemy. But the Women’s March showed us the gestural power of mass action.”

Saturday’s marches were powerful in their diversity, as an unprecedented and preemptive show of force against Trump. They also presented a moral challenge to Democratic legislators to fight tooth and nail to block Trump’s policies; but as Robert Reich points out, “Democrats also need to fight for a bold vision of what the nation must achieve—like expanding Social Security, and financing the expansion by raising the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes; Medicare for all; and world-class free public education for all.”

This is an unprecedented moment in American history, and the average person is conscious of Trump’s attack on the founding idea of the country. The left needs to join with and learn from this spontaneous outburst of resistance. It faces a challenge to develop political concepts that will enable it to orient itself and facilitate pluralist alliances in a common struggle to defeat Trump’s neofascist onslaught.

Waking Up to the Minority Vote, the New, Decisive Force in Post-Obama Politics

The South Carolina Democratic primary voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate, by a margin of 50 percent over Bernie Sanders. Rather than analyzing the meaning of this vote, the media and the campaign professionals immediately turned to the candidates’ prospects on Super Tuesday, when a large number of states hold their primaries.

However, there are some important messages here which are obscured by a narrow focus on the political process. African Americans in South Carolina turned out in unprecedented numbers to participate in the primary – 6 out of 10 voters were black. And of those, 83 percent voted for Clinton. The Associated Press reported that in exit polls about 7 in 10 voters said they wanted the next president to continue Obama’s policies, indicating ideological agreement with Clinton’s strategy of building on his legacy.

The first thing to note is that the result should be seen as a class vote against the possibility of a Republican president. The relentless media reporting of Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim propaganda, together with the pronounced right-wing rhetoric of the Republican debates, are perceived rightly as a threat to black workers. Trump has succeeded in making abundantly explicit the racist basis of the Republican party, empowering extreme white supremacists, and making the Republican brand anathema among minorities. This goes a long way to undermining the Republican strategy of delegitimizing Democratic presidents and may lose them the Senate.

African Americans voted pragmatically for what they saw as the best candidate to defeat a Republican, and specifically, Trump.  Janell Ross commented in the Washington Post: “Black voters in South Carolina cast 6 in every 10 Democratic primary votes, according to CNN’s exit poll data. That ratio is huge — and sets a record-high in South Carolina black voter participation rate. The previous high was 55 percent, set in 2008, when the first black president was on his way to being elected. … these are its outcomes when black voters are convinced of their ability and authority to fundamentally shape American democracy. It is a result that should begin to crush the popular and often repeated myth that black political behavior in 2008 and 2012 was nothing more than a blip, a fleeting kind of emotion-only engagement inspired by a singular and history-making black candidate.”

Second, although a number of prominent black intellectuals like Michelle Alexander and Cornel West are highly critical of the Clintons’ record of legislation in the 1990s that led to mass incarceration of African American men and the dismantling of poverty programs, that message hasn’t reached the black working class. The history that black people remember is the vilification of Bill Clinton by the Republican Congress over the Monica Lewinsky affair, and, as Toni Morrison indicated by calling him the “first black president,” identified with his being hounded by the establishment.

Third, most black workers get their politics from their local churches and mainstream Democratic party leadership. And that was pro-Clinton and anti-Sanders. “A host of well-known, influential and well-connected black elected officials and leaders of civic and religious institutions have made their support for Clinton quite clear. And they have done everything possible to identify themselves as people opposed to a Sanders candidacy. … And, almost as if to say that the shooting death of an unarmed black person is the modern uber-black experience, the Clinton campaign has collected endorsements from several grieving black relatives. The mother of Trayvon Martin has even stumped for Clinton and explained her pro-Clinton voting rather logically in some detail. … Clinton [frames] issues like childcare and the gender wage gap, voting rights and criminal justice and gun policy reforms in ways that make their importance to black voters clear.”

Her political positioning as a champion of African American workers was prefigured in the Nevada primary. Clinton’s victory there was mainly due to the votes of casino workers in Las Vegas, who thanks to the efforts of Nevada senator Harry Reid were given time and opportunity to caucus at their places of work. In These Times contributor Steven Rosenfeld reported from one of the casinos: “Calvin Brooks, a Louisiana native, has been a bellman for 19 years in this hotel. Speaking slowly and deliberately, he explained why Clinton was his choice. ‘This is a union state. This is a union city. The president that we need today is somebody that will stand with us, to keep us together as a whole,’ he said. ‘My mind is made up for Hillary, someone who has been in the White House, not around it’.” Erlinda Falconer, an African-American women and blackjack dealer at the casino for 18 years, told Rosenfeld: “The majority of us realize how serious this election is and the impact it will have on our country and state. This is very, very important. There’s a lot on the line This isn’t a popularity contest. This is trying to get back on track.”

While earlier in the campaign Sanders took on board the criticisms of Black Lives Matter activists, he was too late to the party. Radicalized black youth may have challenged Clinton over her role in the 1990s, but they haven’t influenced the older majority. On Wednesday she was confronted at a fundraiser in Charleston by Ashley Williams, a Black Lives Matter protester, who demanded she apologize for the consequences of her husband’s 1994 crime bill and for having called black youth “super-predators” in a 1996 speech on crime.

Moreover, white progressives have difficulty dealing with race. Sanders’ attempt to reduce racial issues to economics are in line with his social-democratic outlook. But this perspective is inadequate to deal with the complex interrelations of class and race in America. The Washington Post commented: “Clinton doesn’t shy away from race. Sanders talks about race, too, of course. But he seems to do so at a remove, and his attempts to make a convincing link between his economic message and race continue to fall short. … Clinton openly talks about the necessary role that whites must play in healing and bridging the racial divide.” This has resonated with African Americans who resent being told that they are responsible for dealing with white resistance to acknowledging the role of slavery and the defeat of Reconstruction in American society.

Whoever wins the nomination and presidency, the social, cultural and demographic changes in the US are asserting themselves in the elections. The narrative of an “anti-establishment” vote is being superseded by a class consciousness that empowers African American and Latino voters. The realities of class struggle in America today require tackling racism head-on, something that the left has not attempted since the 1930s when the American Communist party sent members into the South to organize black and white workers into unions, risking their lives in the process.

Rather than tying the fortunes of the left to Sanders’ coat-tails, it needs to address the movements that have built up around this election and build an inclusive and pluralist movement that takes the heritage of the Occupy movement into new territory.

Trump and the Young Americans: Do You Remember Your President Nixon?

According to the media, the most significant political event of 2015 was the meteoric rise of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primaries. Trump kicked off 2016 with a new campaign ad that ramped up fearmongering to new levels, featuring his demand to halt entry of all Muslims into the US, together with a mash-up of photos of the San Bernardino killers, Islamic State fighters, a US warship firing cruise missiles, exploding buildings and footage of migrants supposedly crossing a desert border.

Stoking up fear is as central to Trump’s strategy as it is to the Republican leadership’s. It enables him to promote himself as a Bonapartist strongman: too rich to be corrupted, able to overcome Congressional deadlock with his no-nonsense “management” skills, and capable of directing arbitrary acts of military retaliation. US News & World Report’s Mort Zuckerman comments: “He swoops in on his helicopter and proudly asserts, ‘Hey, I’m rich.’ Why pretend? His wealth conveys the impression he is incorruptible and thus above our campaign finance system which now allows politicians to garner unlimited funds from unidentified wealthy donors and corporations. … The public likes Trump’s self-description as a strong leader who will take charge, rip up opponents and make the big problems go away.”

The sensationalist media reporting of terror attacks energizes his supporters’ xenophobic resentment at demographic change that reduces their privileged access to resources and opportunities. And this resonates with the Republican base. The Washington Post found that the threat of terrorism was the most important political issue for 39 percent of Republican voters, outranking by far domestic issues like tax policy or healthcare, and half of all Republicans named Trump as the candidate they would most trust to handle it. Commentator Josh Marshall noted that December’s Republican primary debate was marked by “repeated invocations of fear, the celebration of fear, the demand that people feel and react to their fear. This was logically joined to hyperbolic and ridiculous claims about ISIS as a group that might not simply attack America or kill Americans but might actually destroy the United States or even our entire civilization.”

But it’s not only the Republicans. Since so many Americans live precariously from paycheck to paycheck, the disruption of a symbol of civilizational stability – like Paris – creates the fear of a descent into chaos, a breakdown of order, endangering life and property. Muslims are then demonized by the authorities as the unreasoning, nonhuman embodiment of this scenario. Tom Engelhardt notes that in 2015: “Hoax terror threats or terror imbroglios shut down school systems from Los Angeles to New Hampshire, Indiana to a rural county in Virginia. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, citing terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, cancelled a prospective tour of Europe thanks to terror fears, issuing a statement that ‘orchestra management believes there is an elevated risk to the safety of musicians and their families, guest artists, DSO personnel, and travelling patrons’.”

The other side of this heightened fear is the increased political influence of minorities and women, codified by Trump and other Republican candidates as “political correctness.” One of his supporters, a retired college administrator, explained how her frustration with political correctness connected with her hostility to minorities. “When we wrote things [at her college], we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone,” she said. “And you look at these people who have never worked and they’re having babies and they’re getting free rent and free food stamps and free medical care. … Something has to be done because we’re shrinking, we’re being taken over by people that want to change what America is. You can’t say it nicely,” she added.

Sometimes political correctness campaigns in colleges can be disproportionate and teachers’ speech needs to be protected; however, as well as sometimes showing a lack of judgment, youth are proving they want to tackle deeply-rooted racism and sexism and insist on real changes in what is socially acceptable. Protests at the University of Missouri over the racial insensitivity of the administration forced the resignation of the president and chancellor in November; the dean of students at Claremont McKenna in California also resigned after an email she sent to a Latina student saying she would try to better serve minority students who “don’t fit our CMC mold” surfaced. At Ithaca College in New York State, protesters accused the college president of responding inadequately to an incident where an African-American graduate was repeatedly called a “savage” by two white male alumni.

The heightened militancy of college students over institutional racism is closely connected to the rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. According to Al Jazeera, “Jonathan Butler, the Mizzou graduate student who went on a hunger strike to bring about Wolfe’s resignation, has said that the former college president’s demise started with ‘MU for Mike Brown,’ a Black Lives Matter-affiliated student group formed in solidarity with the uprisings in nearby Ferguson over the shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. At Boston College, student organizer Sriya Bhattacharyya has also cited the importance of BLM: ‘At the core of all these [campus] movements is the unifying belief that black lives matter’.”

Al Jazeera also pointed out that the media has ignored activism at the high school level. After the white police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner were not indicted, “high school students across the country organized solidarity protests in Seattle; New York; Denver; Oakland, California; Minneapolis and Boston. In February, about 250 high school students in Santa Fe, New Mexico left school to protest constant testing and the state’s new mandated exam. In June, Milwaukee high school students walked out of class to protest against the county executive takeover of low-performing schools. And this fall, high school students in Allentown, Pennsylvania, organized a district-wide student walkout demanding the resignation of the superintendent, the inclusion of a student representative on the school board and summer youth employment opportunities. There were also student walkouts in Chicago; Berkeley, California and Philadelphia that occurred this fall.”

Whoever the candidates are in this year’s presidential election, 2016 is going to be all about the growing power of these young Americans and their determination to fight unprosecuted police killings of young people of color. To quote David Bowie: “We live for just these twenty years. Do we have to die for the fifty more?”

The Racist Fury Behind Trump’s “Make America Great Again” Campaign Will Break the Republicans

Donald Trump’s increasingly inflammatory statements have caused consternation among the political establishment and fear among minority groups. His media coverage, however, is out of all proportion to his actual influence in the country. He has a vociferous following of white voters, and polls continue to show him leading the Republican presidential primaries. But even after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino, his call to exclude Moslems from the United States is opposed by most Americans.

What Trump has succeeded in doing is to bring outrageous ideas like internment camps into the political mainstream. His speeches are legitimizing racist attacks on minorities and Scalia’s open dismissal of integration in colleges. His support has crystallized out of a layer of white, non-college educated workers who have lost jobs and houses through two recessions and are now facing a downward slide into poverty. They are animated by resentment of immigrants and minorities, and by hostility to government, which they see as corrupt and in the pockets of big business. This is the same demographic that between 1998 and 2013 saw a marked increase in the death rate from suicide, drugs and alcohol poisoning, while that for all other groups declined.

New industries that require semiskilled labor of the kind that in the past elevated many Americans into the middle class are no longer being created in the US. Trump references a time when the lack of a college degree was not a barrier to well-paid industrial work – and when white skin implied social privilege. In These Times writer Walid Shaheed comments: “His high poll numbers among white voters in the Midwestern rustbelt show his appeal to people in this region who have been dealing with an economic collapse that has completely changed how millions of people live their lives. As those who came before them, these white voters blame their woes on immigrants and people of color who are ‘taking over the country.’ When Trump declares he will ‘Make America Great Again,’ he appeals directly to the heart of this demographic.”

It’s important to realize that Trump didn’t create his following from scratch: his bombast has gained traction because he was able to pick up the racist subtext of the Republican party’s rhetoric and make it explicit. Political commentator Josh Marshall pointed out: “What Trump has done is taken the half-subterranean Republican script of the Obama years, turbocharge it and add a level of media savvy that Trump gained not only from The Apprentice but more from decades navigating and exploiting New York City’s rich tabloid news culture. He’s just taken the existing script, wrung out the wrinkles and internal contradictions and given it its full voice.”

However, in doing so he is also voicing and legitimizing the suppressed prejudices of people who feel themselves losing an imaginary past cultural unity because of the growth and increase in political influence of the nonwhite population. The New York Times commented: “He harnessed feelings that long predated his candidacy — feelings of besiegement and alienation, of being silenced — and gave them an unprecedented respectability. … America is living through an era of dramatic changes: its demographics shifting, its middle class contracting, its institutions grappling with the pressures of the networked age.”

His supporters come from the most rightwing Republican voters. According to CNN: “A recent poll found that three quarters of Trump’s supporters are in favor of deporting all of the 11 million-plus undocumented immigrants and banning any Syrian refugees from seeking shelter in America. In contrast, Marco Rubio only has 5% and Jeb Bush 6% of those far-right voters.” The Washington Post explains: “Trump draws strong support from the kinds of voters who see illegal immigration as eroding the values of the country and who might worry that their jobs are threatened by the influx. About half of those Republicans who favor deporting immigrants who are here illegally back Trump for the party’s nomination. These are also the kinds of voters who agree most with Trump’s call to ban the entry of Muslims into the United States until security concerns are laid to rest.”

This is by no means a majority of Republican voters, likely less than a third of them, located in areas that have been hit hardest by the economic downturn like the South and Midwest. After years of dog-whistle campaigning by Republican politicians blaming minorities and immigrants for crime and lack of jobs, this social layer is angry and contemptuous of its political leaders for their perceived inaction. It has the potential to break the Republican party apart.

Surveys show that “white working-class Republicans made clear their conviction that government policies favor minority and immigrant interests over their own, and that the nation — its economy and its culture — has gone into decline as, and because, it has become more racially diverse. It’s those beliefs that have driven a large share of the white working class into Donald Trump’s column rather than Sen. Bernie Sanders’s, even though its members plainly agree with Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s perspective that the economy is rigged to favor the wealthy and big business. … years of talk radio, Fox News and now the Trump campaign have tapped into and built a right-wing populism that focuses the white working class’s blame for its woes downward — at the racial other — rather than up.”

On the other hand, there is bipartisan agreement on whose interests the government is acting for. The same survey found “Ninety-three percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Republicans said it tended ‘very’ or ‘somewhat well’ to the interests of the wealthy; 90 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans said it did the same for big corporations.” By nearly a 2-to-1 margin Americans believe their “vote does not matter because of the influence that wealthy individuals and big corporations have on the electoral process.”

Support for Bernie Sanders among the public is actually a lot greater than for Trump, although you wouldn’t know it from the media, which has devoted 80 times more airtime to Trump than Sanders. He has the challenge of making his presidential candidacy believable to the electorate, despite the pundits’ claims of Hillary Clinton’s inevitability, and of generating enough excitement among new voters to get them to the polls. He continues to advocate a $15 hourly minimum wage and free college education, but, like Corbyn, finds it difficult to get traction for a rational policy on terrorism.

If the Republican vote indeed splits over a Trump or Cruz presidential run, this presents Sanders with an opportunity to win national support on a left populist platform that extols the contribution of immigrants and minorities to the country and advocates stringent controls on foreclosures and Wall Street speculation. He has to foreground policies that will win the less prejudiced sections of the white working class away from supporting corporate billionaires against their class interests.