Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 693
August 10, 2016
Trump’s assault on legitimacy: His “Second Amendment” comment was an attack on our political foundations
Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)
Donald Trump’s campaign to debase himself and the party he represents continues to break new ground and find massive success. His latest innovation, which you’ve almost certainly heard about by now, was his remark during a speech this week that “Second Amendment people” might do something in response to President Hillary Clinton nominating judges. Trump and his people are energetically trying to spin his remarks as a plea to gun rights activists to organize and get out the vote in November, but that spin is belied both by Trump’s own words and the disorganized response from his surrogates. The Republican presidential candidate floated the possibility of a violent response to his rival’s election, and in doing so he made a pointed attack on the legitimacy of our political system.
Democracies retain their legitimacy by means of a compromise between opposing political factions: in basic terms, electoral losers consent to their defeat, while the winners “lament” the fact that victory comes with limitations to their power. Obviously it’s not a trade-off that leaves everyone happy, but it provides the bedrock of legitimacy for an elected regime and reinforces the idea that the proper means for transferring political power is through democratic elections.
Trump’s “Second Amendment” remark erodes both components of that trade-off. The premise he set up for his audience involved President Hillary Clinton behaving in a dictatorial or tyrannical fashion: “Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment,” Trump said. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.” Clinton has never said or proposed anything that can be credibly construed as a desire to “abolish the Second Amendment,” but here Trump has her doing exactly that, abusing her power and doing it in a way that leaves his supporters powerless. Having set up Clinton as a power-mad tyrant, he tosses out the anti-democratic remedy: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”
The situation Trump sketched out here represents a complete breakdown of political legitimacy. The first half – a tyrannical Hillary Clinton in office – he presents as a certainty. The second half – violence as a means to resolve to a political dispute – he offers as a possible outcome. And this remark follows a series of comments from Trump and his surrogates pre-emptively questioning the integrity of the coming general election and hinting at violence in the (extremely likely) event of a Trump loss.
It’s important to point out that Trump’s comments didn’t come from nothing. Republicans and the conservative movement have spent the past eight years trying to erode the political legitimacy of the twice-elected Democratic president. The campaign has taken various forms – from the fringe movement challenging Barack Obama’s citizenship by birth to the ongoing Senate Republican obstruction of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland – but the common thread has been the persistent undermining of political norms to try and prevent a politician from the other party from exercising the powers of his office.
His suggestion of gun violence as a remedy to government tyranny isn’t especially novel either. Republican senator Joni Ernst of Iowa used to tell gun groups that she carries firearms for self-defense, “whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.” Ted Cruz got into a fight with Lindsey Graham during the GOP primary after the Texas senator sent a fundraising email describing firearms as “the ultimate check against governmental tyranny.” High-profile Republican politicians allied themselves with low-rent insurrectionist Cliven Bundy during his armed standoff with federal officials over a cattle grazing dispute. Trump’s appeal to “Second Amendment people” was itself a callback to Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s invocation of “Second Amendment remedies” to “the Harry Reid problems.”
What makes Trump distinct from the rest of these people is that he has no real investment in the political system and no real understanding of how it is supposed to work. That ignorance and lack of buy-in makes him a uniquely dangerous force, given that he feels no need to consider the potential long-term impacts of what he says. He’s running this campaign for himself, and it’s in his immediate interest to encourage his supporters to doubt the legitimacy of elections and think about the need to commit violence as a response to the routine workings of American democracy.
August 9, 2016
Toxic white male nerd avengers: What’s really behind the “Suicide Squad” super-fan freak-out
Jared Leto in "Suicide Squad" (Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment)
It’s easy to roll your eyes at the “Suicide Squad” petition. In case you’ve been lucky enough to miss the news, fans of the new movie “Suicide Squad” have created an online movement to shut down aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes for posting predominantly negative reviews of their beloved film. Cue the inevitable jokes about how nerds need to get a life.
Is it really that simple, though? Over the past few years, it’s become increasingly clear that fans of pop culture properties — whether movies, TV shows, books, video games, or anything else — don’t merely view them as forms of entertainment, or themselves as consumers of said media. From Comic Cons to the nostalgia craze, it is clear that millions of people deeply identify with the culture produced by others, and many of them have developed a deep sense of entitlement that at its most innocuous is merely silly, but at its worst manifests itself in ugly bigotries.
The brouhaha over “Suicide Squad” offers a great starting point for tracing this evolution from the absurd to the sinister. While there is a highly unflattering whininess in those “Suicide Squad” fans who assume that critics are compelled to share their views, Rotten Tomatoes hasn’t exactly been victimized by their petition (no one believes it’s going to be effective). The same can be said of Ben Affleck, who three years ago was targeted by a petition to recast him as Batman before critics and audiences had a chance to see that he’d wind up being the best thing about “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Incidents like these can be safely lumped under the “silly” category.
But what about the female film critic who received misogynistic death threats from a comic book fan incensed over her negative review for “Man of Steel?”
The same entitlement that can cause DC Comics fans to complain about unpopular actors or unfavorable movie reviews can also, if they harbor certain prejudices, come across in more harmful ways. Because only 15 percent of major movies star female characters, it was easy for fanboys with a sense of entitlement to denounce the new “Ghostbusters” reboot in viciously misogynistic language for recasting the lead roles with female performers. Similarly, because video games have traditionally targeted white men as their core audience, movements like Gamergate can spring up when reactionary gamers hear feminists call for increased gender diversity in gaming. These sexist attitudes even appear around franchises where you wouldn’t expect it; just ask Anna Gunn, who has endured years of harassment for her role as Skyler White in the TV drama, “Breaking Bad.”
Unfortunately, the problem of nerd entitlement isn’t limited to misogyny. Last year a number of racists made waves with their movement to boycott “Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens” because it had cast John Boyega, a black actor, in one of the starring roles. A similar backlash occurred when it came out that Michael B. Jordan had been cast as The Human Torch in last year’s reboot of “The Fantastic Four.” Skip over to the realm of literature and things aren’t much better, as evidenced by the considerable number of “Twilight” fans who harassed indie pop singer FKA Twigs in vile racist language for daring to enter a relationship with the male star of their franchise’s film universe, Robert Pattinson.
These are only a handful of examples, but they all underscore a common theme. It isn’t simply that some consumers of popular culture harbor ugly racist and sexist views — because these kinds of fans personally identify with the properties in question, their inflated sense of entitlement over these products can make them quick to anger when that identity is challenged. This is why latent racism and sexism so often bubble to the surface among those members of the community community that think of these identities in terms of being white and male.
The underlying logic is fundamentally irrational: Because they’ve financially supported these industries their whole lives and received an embarrassing social stigma for doing so, these industries owe them. While being a fan gives you a legitimate emotional connection, the underlying relationship is still that of consumer with product. Any loyalty that a fan feels is a personal choice about how to invest time and money; any choice made by a producer, from corporations to individuals, is done to promote their own self-interest. Because that involves appealing to as broad an audience as possible, this means ignoring some fans who insist on exclusivist attitudes.
What can be done about this? More than anything else, we need to change the conversation that we’re having about pop culture in general. For better or worse, the fact that an entire generation holds pop culture on such a pedestal means that the cultural has become political. As a result, when a disproportionately large number of movies, TV shows, video games, and books feature white, straight and male characters at the expense of other groups, this is an inherently political act (deliberately or otherwise) and needs to be confronted. Indeed, when nerds react to calls for diversity with hostility, they are only demonstrating how true this is. There is a poignant significance to including non-white, non-male, and non-straight voices in cultural roles that were traditionally reserved for members of privileged groups. Conversely, it is terribly disheartening when the producers of entertainment refuse to recognize the cultural power they wield and utilize it in an inclusive way.
Beyond simply calling for diversity, though, we also must infuse our debate with an awareness that being a fanboy doesn’t entitle you to anything. The common thread linking the “Suicide Squad” petition to other nerd-based racist and misogynist incidents this decade is that, at their core, all of them betray an assumption that producers of popular entertainment are beholden to the nerd community. This misunderstands a basic principle of a free market society — while consumers have the right to invest or not invest their time and money as they see fit, they don’t have the right to demand that producers act as obedient servants to their will. It’s certainly nice when an author or actor or critic or film studio shows deference to the wishes of fans, but they are in no way ethically obligated to do so. Indeed, because many fans (like many people from all walks of life) harbor terrible social views, it is very often necessary for producers to disregard the will of the more vocal segments of their fanbases. Just because some gamers don’t want increased diversity doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen; just because a lot of moviegoers liked “Suicide Squad” (myself included) doesn’t mean the film critics aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes should agree.
At the same time, it’s also necessary for progressives to maintain an even keel about the greater significance of these cultural properties. The sexist backlash against the “Ghostbusters” reboot was certainly despicable, but that doesn’t justify alleging misogyny in every moviegoer who disliked the film (I personally thought it was good and worth seeing). While it’s important for progressives to stand up to problematic trends and tropes in cultural products, we still need to remember that they are ultimately just that — products. When we lose sight of this, we risk overreacting against those whose opinions and actions are based on an awareness of the fact that we too are acting first and foremost as consumers of entertainment.
I suspect that, years from now, future cultural historians will love to mine incidents like Gamergate and the “Ghostbusters” controversy for deeper meaning. There is a great deal to be said about a society that loves its popular culture so fervently that they will turn them into platforms on which greater social justice causes are fought. For right now, though, it behooves all of us to take a step back and recognize that there is an air of entitlement which makes all of this possible, and none of us look good so long as it remains unaddressed.
John Waters, revolutionary: “Multiple Maniacs” is much more than camp
Mink Stole and Divine in "Multiple Maniacs" (Credit: Lawrence Irvin)
John Waters might have been outraged if anyone had told him in 1970 that “Multiple Maniacs,” the Baltimore underground filmmaker’s deliberately offensive (and often hilarious) second feature, was a political statement. It was intended as something else, surely; as an anti-political statement, or an announcement that all the politics of that contentious era were shallow and stupid. This is a movie in which suburban housewives are lured into a traveling freak show called the Cavalcade of Perversion, where they watch “actual queers” kissing and a man eating his own vomit, before they are robbed and murdered. It’s a movie in which the character called Divine, played by the real person of that name — who today would be called transgender but back then was described with less sensitive terminology — has a lesbian sexual encounter in a Catholic church and is later raped by a giant lobster.
But from a distance of 45-plus years, “Multiple Maniacs” is unmistakably a political statement, in much the same way as Mick Jagger was making a political statement that year when he told us that we all needed someone we could bleed on. (This is difficult to remember now — and difficult for younger people to believe at all, no doubt — but the Rolling Stones were once dangerous.) It was an attack on everything that passed for normality and decency in 1970, and also on the banal peace-and-love ethos of the hippie counterculture. “Violence was this generation’s sacrilege,” Waters wrote in his 1985 autobiography, “so I wanted to make a film that would glorify carnage and mayhem for laughs.” One member of the Maryland Board of Censors announced that the garbage was too good a place for Waters’ film, and a print exported to Canada was seized and destroyed. Those were the days!
But in suggesting that the film’s only point was shock value, Waters is either selling himself short or not being entirely honest, both of which should be typical. Witnessed from the perspective of the culture wars and gender debates of 2016, “Multiple Maniacs” feels like a manifesto for a form of radical consciousness that would not exist for decades, and that was almost immediately commercialized and commodified once it reached the surface of the culture. I can assure you that John Waters was not a viable commodity in the 1970s, and that he and his friends didn’t shoot this movie (on 16mm, in black-and-white) with any expectation of making money or getting famous.
There’s almost no way to exaggerate the level of difficulty, or the degree of self-isolation, involved in the 1970s trash-culture underground that Waters helped create. There was no Internet; there were no zines. You heard about Waters, eventually, if you read the Village Voice or the Berkeley Barb; if you knew people who listened to David Bowie and Alice Cooper and the Velvet Underground.
I found out about Waters’ movies sometime around the end of that decade, after he had begun to accumulate a following of misfits, renegades and social rejects in major cities all over the country. If memory serves, he was well known enough by 1980 that the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley held a retrospective of his early work. But he had begun making films at the tail end of the ‘60s, several years before the punk movement emerged in New York and London — and he lived in Baltimore, then viewed as a cultural backwater that was 190 miles south of Manhattan and at least 15 years back in time. I was a big enough fan that Waters was at least part of the reason I attended Johns Hopkins in the ‘80s, and I’m still bitter about the fact that my scene as an extra in “Polyester” wound up on the cutting-room floor. (My brother, on the other hand, has an actual bit part in “Cry Baby,” alongside Johnny Depp.)
Waters had briefly attended New York University, but he didn’t respond to the Eurocentric pretentiousness of the New York art-film scene and went back home to Charm City. (He has said he was more inspired by “The Wizard of Oz” than by “Battleship Potemkin.”) He preceded David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino, and to a considerable extent his early films made their careers possible. His commercial and artistic aims were different, and he never aspired to the kind of auteurism or obsessive craftsmanship those three pursued. But it’s a mistake to view Waters’ movies as a series of random events or happy accidents. He wanted them to look that way, perhaps; he has joked that the new Janus Films restoration of “Multiple Maniacs” (now in theaters, and soon on home video) looks like “a bad John Cassavetes movie.” It doesn’t. It looks like a John Waters movie, which is to say it looks good and bad at the same time.
In his 1985 autobiography, Waters wrote that “Multiple Maniacs” remains his favorite among his movies, largely for its “meanness” and its “harsh documentary feeling.” I would go much further than that: Very few filmmakers this side of Luis Buñuel have been able to use amateur actors and sub-professional equipment to such liberating effect. It’s one thing to say that the homemade special effects and fumbled lines and broken-down cars and improvised locations are part of the point, but quite another to make it work. For the first 15 minutes, at least, “Multiple Maniacs” feels like an unwatchable mess. But by the time we get to Divine and Mink Stole in a church pew, finding imaginative uses for a rosary, this ludicrous tale of perversion and murder has developed its own rhythm and a sui generis sense of pathos.
Being far outside the cultural capitals of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco was central to Waters’ art, and to his extraordinary ability to pivot from the grotesque to the absurd to the seemingly sincere. “Multiple Maniacs” features jokes about the Manson family and the Tate-LaBianca killings only months after they had happened, which was guaranteed to offend all possible viewers in 1970. With its violent climax involving National Guard troops and a band of fleeing hippie protesters, Waters mocks every possible perspective: right-wing supporters of the Vietnam War, the sanctimonious antiwar movement and the moralistic conclusion demanded of all action movies about rebellious antiheroes.
Let’s face it: In putting Divine on screen with a gun, and making her both a sexual rebel and a survivor of sexual assault (only one of them involving an oversize crustacean), Waters confronted taboos so untouchable in 1970 that almost no one had language to describe them — while assuring us it was all a joke. Whether the unexplained and disturbing apparition of “Lobstora” toward the end of “Multiple Maniacs” is designed to convince us that Divine’s character has lost her mind, or to remind us that the movie itself isn’t naturalistic and never meant to be, is a matter of interpretation. What’s beyond dispute is that this good-bad film is a landmark work of homegrown surrealism from one of America’s true cultural rebels, who shifted our consciousness in ways we’re only starting to appreciate.
”Multiple Maniacs” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with a limited national release and home video to follow.
VOTE: What’s your favorite John Waters movie?
Pink Flamingos
Multiple Maniacs
Polyester
Serial Mom
Hairspray
Who the hell is John Waters?
Clinton now holds 10 point lead in Pennsylvania, new poll says
Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton (Credit: AP/John Locher/Reuters/Carlo Allegri/Photo montage by Salon)
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has opened up a sizeable lead over Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, but is locked in tight races with the Republican nominee in two other key swing states, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday.
In a two-way race, the poll found that Clinton leads Trump by 10 points in Pennsylvania. In Florida, the candidates are virtually tied, with Clinton holding a 46-45 percent lead. In Ohio, Trump trails Clinton 45-49 percent.
Clinton’s margins tightened when pollsters presented likely voters with third-party options. Clinton leads Trump 48-39 percent in Pennsylvania in a four-way race, the poll found, with Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein polling at seven and three percent, respectively. But in Florida, Trump and Clinton are tied at 43 percent; and in Ohio, Clinton holds a slim lead of 44-42 percent when likely voters were asked to choose among the major- and third-party candidates.
In an election that pits two of the most disliked presidential nominees in modern history against one another, many of those polled reported that their decision was based less on their support of one candidate than out of their disdain for the alternative. Over 40 percent of Clinton voters in all three states said the main reason they supported Clinton was their opposition of Donald Trump, and over half of Trump supporters in all three states said they were voting in opposition to Clinton.
Quinnipiac found that gender is a significant delineating factor in each of the three crucial battleground states. Clinton holds a significant lead among women in all three states, ranging from a 13 percent margin in Florida to a whopping 23 percent gap in Pennsylvania. More men support Trump in each state, but his leads are more modest, ranging from five percent to 12 percent.
From July 30 to August 7, Quinnipiac surveyed 1,056 likely Florida voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points; 812 likely Ohio voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points; and 815 likely Pennsylvania voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Another poll conducted by NBC News and SurveyMonkey, also released Tuesday, found that Clinton holds a 10 point lead on Trump nationally in a two-way race, and a six point lead in a four-way contest.
Did Trump just threaten Hillary?: Says “Second Amendment people” ought to influence Clinton’s SCOTUS nominees
In yet another rambling campaign speech on Tuesday — this time in Wilmington, North Carolina — GOP nominee Donald Trump sneaked in an apparent suggestion that “Second Amendment people” could strong-arm his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, into nominating Supreme Court judges friendly to conservative causes.
“If [Clinton] gets to pick her judges, [there’s] nothing you could do, folks,” Trump warned, inciting boos from the capacity crowd. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”
Critics are beginning to argue Trump’s comments insinuated or endorsed violence against Clinton.
So Trump called for an assassination AND assumes people who support 2nd amendment are okay with it. https://t.co/t2oJKmlHed
— David Nitzsche (@david_nitzsche) August 9, 2016
Trump inciting violence against Hillary as president.Says "2nd amendment people" can stop her. It's right here. https://t.co/FnIiEGZOG0
— the real chris beck (@SubBeck) August 9, 2016
Trump’s alleged insinuation is especially controversial as just weeks ago, the Secret Service began an investigation into comments made by campaign adviser Al Baldasaro, who said in a radio interview that Clinton should be “shot for treason.”
Watch below:
.@realDonaldTrump: Maybe "2nd Amendment people" can do something about Clinton picking SCOTUS justices. https://t.co/nNZn2umKbl
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 9, 2016
UPDATE: Trump’s campaign released the following response minutes after the conclusion of his speech:
Clinton campaign statement on Trump's comments pic.twitter.com/VJLOfgtSNo
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 9, 2016
Wal-Mart purchases Jet.com in yet another futile attempt to topple Amazon
Wal-Mart’s latest attempt to compete with Amazon for a share of the online retail market is a $3.3 billion deal for Jet.com, whose price-selection software the company believes can help make it competitive — even if it doesn’t send shoppers to Wal-Mart.
Jet.com is the 16th company Wal-Mart has added to its menagerie of online retailers in an attempt to unseat Amazon. The brick-and-mortar retailer’s online sales declined again in the first quarter, whereas Amazon is experiencing consistent growth, even if investors don’t seem to care about it. For the time being, Wal-Mart said both companies will operate independently, although it will be attempting to integrate some of Jet.com’s more popular features into its searches.
“Over time, piece-by-piece, we will end up running a business that is simpler and not completely independent,” Wal-Mart’s Chief Executive Doug McMillion said. “One of the things we really like [about Jet.com] is that the customer is even more in-charge of the price that they pay,” in part because they choose where to purchase an item from. That would difficult to accomplish if all links, however, led back to Wal-Mart — so for the time being, independence is the watch-word.
That, of course, makes it difficult to evaluate whether this is actually a good deal for Wal-Mart. As retail analyst Charlie O’Shea told Reuters’ Nandita Bose, even though Jet.com has added nearly 400,000 shoppers per month since it went live in 2015, the company is still vying for what will be, at best, the second most popular online retailer — which may sound like success to normal human beings, but doesn’t actually excite Wall Street.
Beware of the false reboot: Why Trump’s latest “pivot” is a mirage
Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer)
The last two weeks have been disastrous for Donald Trump. For those who need a review, I catalogued the cavalcade of errors last Thursday. Indeed, things got sufficiently bad that several Republicans in Trump’s orbit were reportedly planning an “intervention” of some kind. True or not, the reports suggest things are in a bad way at Trump Tower.
On Monday, however, Trump gave what a charitable person might call a “serious” speech on the economy. Although littered with false claims, the speech was an attempt at playing a presidential candidate. Trump talked about tax cuts for the middle class, infrastructure spending, trade deals, and his dream of doubling the pace of economic growth. It was an opportunity for the campaign to put out the political fires enveloping them. “We’re comfortable we’ll get the agenda and the narrative of the campaign back on where it belongs,” Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort told Fox News on Sunday. All of this came after Trump spent the weekend trying to “reset” the campaign at various rallies. Gone were the meandering improvisational speeches Trump tends to give and in were “hand-held scripts” and sober endorsements of fellow Republicans.
It’s not surprising that Team Trump is trying to change the conversation. He’s lost control of the narrative and after his PR flap with the Khan family, prominent Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins are publicly rebuking him. Worse still, 50 senior GOP national security officials, including former CIA director Michael Hayden, signed a letter stating that a Trump presidency would “risk our country’s national security and well-being.” “Trump lacks the character, values, and experience to be President,” the letter reads.
Hence the Trump campaign is right to signal change this week, but no one can or should take them seriously. We’ve been told countless times over the course of this campaign that a “pivot” was coming. When Trump says or does something outrageous, a surrogate emerges and says he’ ready (finally!) to dial down the hysterics. But it never happens. Instead, we see a marginally sane version of Trump for 24 hours or so, followed abruptly by a retreat into his familiar patterns.
Norman Ornstein, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told Salon that he’s “amused by the notion that Trump can pivot or reboot…There was no ‘reboot’ to policy with the so-called economic plan, with few details and numbers that don’t come close to adding up.” “Where we may see the semblance of a reboot,” he added, “is convincing Trump to stop making this an election about Trump and move consistently to making it an election about Clinton – uniting Republicans by pointing out their real enemy, and moving to delegitimize her.” Trump could easily have done this months ago, and yet he appears pathologically unable to do so. Which is why his impulsiveness feels contrived.
It’s possible – probable even – that Trump doesn’t want to reboot. His goal, as I suggested last week, may be self-sabotage. If the campaign is about brand promotion, as everything Trump does seems to be, losing the election without appearing to quit is the optimal outcome. It’s difficult to explain Trump’s behavior otherwise. The only other explanation requires at-a-distance psychoanalysis.
Consider how stupid Trump’s strategy has been: Rather than keep the focus on Clinton, an historically unpopular candidate, he has needlessly propped up bad storylines. And he’s done it despite numerous admonitions by those around him. There’s no reason to do this if the goal is victory. Against the backdrop of Trump’s premature complaints about a “rigged” November election, the case that Trump wants to lose is all the more convincing.
There is zero evidence of voter fraud or electoral misdeeds (the elections hasn’t even occurred yet), but saying it’s likely sets up the post-election narrative perfectly. As Ornstein put it, if Trump can’t “turn the polling numbers around in the next few weeks, he will come back to the election and system being ‘rigged,’ both to ignite populist fervor and to rationalize any defeat on his part.”
I asked Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally, why make these claims now? “Because the election is likely to be rigged through computerized voting machines,” he told me. Again, these are baseless claims, but floating them now tees up the victim narrative for Trump. From an entrepreneurial perspective, this makes plenty of sense.
If Trump can convince his supporters the election was stolen from him, he walks away with an army of loyal discontents, future customers who will imbibe whatever bullshit he peddles. Is there a better way out of this for Trump? He’s not prepared to be president and has shown zero interest in learning what he must. He also knows how badly he could lose and needs a face-saving narrative. The latest surveys from Fox, NBC/WSJ and Marist/McClatchy show Clinton expanding her lead to double digits over Trump. Perhaps Trump can see the writing on the wall.
“He is terrified of facing Clinton in the debates and of losing a general election possibly worse than any major party nominee in history,” GOP operative Cheri Jacobus told me recently. “He would rather feign anger at the GOP and hand the White House to Hillary Clinton as revenge for perceived slights or disloyalty than be humiliated by her in a traditional match-up. Then he will spend the rest of his miserable life trying to get attention with revenge rallies.”
I don’t know how “miserable” his life will be, but I suspect those “revenge rallies” will be great fodder for a reality show on the news network Trump is considering launching after he loses in November.
Trying to make America male again: Women control the ballot box — and angry, sexist Trump voters can’t deal
Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton (Credit: Reuters/Scott Audette/Mike Blake/Photo montage by Salon)
Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is drenched in layers of nostalgia. The slogan itself has been swiped from the schmaltz-fueled 1980 campaign for Ronald Reagan. The naked racism spewing from Trump suggests that the what he feels will return America to its mythical glory days is to embrace of the white supremacy of the past. His widespread support amongst bona fide white supremacists shores up this reading.
But this kind of nostalgia is also about gender, as the America of many decades ago was also one where men controlled the ballot box.
Women may have won the vote in 1920, but men were the majority of voters for the next six decades. That started to change in the early ’80s, when women started out-voting men. In 2012, 58.5% of women reported voting, compared to 54.4% of men. While most office holders are still men, women have quietly reshaped the nation’s political discourse.
The nomination of Trump — a loudmouthed misogynist who can’t seem to besides his own daughter — can be understood in large part as a reaction to this trend, a temper tantrum thrown by angry men whose idea of making America great again means wresting control of it back from women.
“It is women who decide elections,” Kate Black, the vice president of research at Emily’s List, said in a phone interview. “It’s women who show up.”
Source: Center for American Women and Politics
Women’s voting patterns helped reshape the Democratic party, explained Kelly Dittmar, a political scientist at Rutgers who does research for the Center for American Women and Politics.
Women “tend to be more vulnerable, still today, in terms of needing access to the social safety net, for their children and families, and for themselves,” Dittmar noted. In the past few decades, she noted, the Democrats have adjusted their messaging to be more responsive to women’s priorities, shedding the more conservative members of the party and sharpening their appeals to female voters.
“Democrats are really talking about the issues that women care about,” Black agreed, noting that these issues tend mostly to be “economic security issues”: Equal pay, paid family leave, job security, health care access.
“The conversation around women’s economic security issues certainly has increased over the past few election cycles,” Black added. “You used to see these issues siloed on candidate websites under the ‘women’s issues’ section. Now they’re front and center.”
All these efforts to tailor their message to female voters paid off for the Democrats. They consistently win the women’s vote in presidential elections, which is a major coup, considering that women vote more than men.
Source: Center for American Women and Politics
“Women are the Democratic Party,” Marcy Stech, the vice president of communications for Emily’s List, said. “We are dominating the conversation.”
But the partisan gender gap isn’t just the result of women moving to the left, Dittmar argued.
“A lot of the shift is men’s shift to the right,” she explained. As the Democrats became “a more progressive party”, male voters, who are more conservative on average than female voters, started moving into the Republican camp.
So, just as the Democrats have become both more female-centric and progressive, the Republicans have become more male-centric and conservative. The result can be seen not just in their voting bases, but in their elected officials. While the Democrats have been steadily adding to their female representation, the Republicans are backsliding.
As David Bernstein at Politico reported over the weekend, “Since 2006, the proportion of women in the House GOP caucus has dropped from 11 percent to just 9 percent today. Although there are now 247 Republicans in the House, up from 229 a decade ago, there are fewer women: 22, down from 25.”
None of this surprised the women at Emily’s List.
“If you look at primaries, Republican women can’t get through Republican primaries,” Black explained. “Typically, that’s because Republican primaries skew so far to the right that Republican women, who tend to be more moderate, can’t persuade those Republican primary voters to support them.”
“I think a lot of Republican women have tried” to get more women onto the ballot, Stech argued. “And they’ve been met with deaf ears by Republican leaders.”
Looking over the past few decades, one of the dominant political trends — perhaps the dominant trend — is that women are flocking to the Democrats, pushing them to the left, and in reaction, the majority of men are running to the Republicans and pushing them to the right.
This election season is the apex of this trend. It’s not just that the Democrats have elevated the first female presidential nominee for a major party. Hillary Clinton is also explicitly feminist and her campaign messaging is strongly centered around the economic security concerns that Dittmar and the folks at Emily’s List have flagged as the major draw for female voters.
On the flip side, you have Trump, a man who always seems on the verge of telling some woman to make him a sandwich. For men who resent the way women are amassing political power and shaping legislative priorities, supporting Trump sends a strong message: That a woman’s place is, to quote Trump directly, “dropping to your knees” instead of pulling the levers of power.
The dramatic contrast exacerbates the already significant partisan gender gap. An NBC News poll released Wednesday shows that Clinton has a whopping 24 point advantage with women over Trump, which is up from 14 points last week. Compare that to 2012, when Obama’s advantage over Romney with female voters was 11 points.
(Meanwhile, Trump is still besting Clinton by 5 points with men in this poll, though he is thankfully losing ground.)
But while this shift is extreme, it’s also the logical conclusion of a multi-trend of a block of progressive women gaining political ground while reactionary men flip out about it. Trump/Clinton isn’t an outlier of a race, but representative of the political forces that are shaping this country.
Part two of this examination of how gender is shaping the 2016 election will be published on Wednesday.
“I think that my temperament has gotten me here”: Stop waiting, there will be no “new” Donald Trump
Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer)
In her new op-ed outlining her opposition to her party’s presidential nominee, Maine Senator Susan Collins finally admitted what so many Republicans have loathed to concede — there will be no pivot from the outrageous antics of primary campaign to a more serious general election strategy for Donald Trump:
I had hoped that we would see a “new” Donald Trump as a general-election candidate — one who would focus on jobs and the economy, tone down his rhetoric, develop more thoughtful policies and, yes, apologize for ill-tempered rants. But the unpleasant reality that I have had to accept is that there will be no “new” Donald Trump, just the same candidate who will slash and burn and trample anything and anyone he perceives as being in his way or an easy scapegoat. Regrettably, his essential character appears to be fixed, and he seems incapable of change or growth.
Hours later, Trump confirmed just that. Despite months of promises of an upcoming “presidential pivot” for the untraditional and controversial presidential candidate, the businessman turned White House aspirant said he believed his primary strategy is the same strategy he plans to employ to win against rival Hillary Clinton in November.
“I think that my temperament has gotten me here,” Trump said on Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria” Tuesday.
“We beat a lot of people in the primaries and now we have one person left, and we’re actually doing pretty well there, but we’ll see how it all comes out,” Trump said. “This is the way I won in the primaries. I mean, I won the primaries by fighting all of these insiders.”
“I certainly don’t think it’s appropriate to start changing all of a sudden when you’ve been winning,” Trump explained.
Just in the past two days, 50 Republican national security officials have issued a letter denouncing Trump as a “risk” to America, a couple of Republican former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency came out against Trump, a Republican congressman quit his local GOP party in order to endorse Trump rival, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, and the Florida GOP lost its communication director over support for Trump.
“I think it’s going to work out well,” Trump assured host Maria Baritoromo:
Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com
Teaching kids empathy: In Danish schools, it’s … well, it’s a piece of cake
(Credit: Alasdair Thomson via iStock)
We all know what a Danish pastry is — that delightful caloric bomb of glazed breakfast deliciousness. But what about a Danish classroom cake? And moreover, how can this help teach empathy?
While researching our book “The Danish Way of Parenting; What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids,” my co-author and I interviewed numerous teachers and students across Denmark to learn how they incorporate empathy in schools and at home. Notably, in the Danish education system empathy is considered as important as teaching math and literature, and it is woven into the school’s curriculum from pre-school through high school.
The Danes’ highly developed sense of empathy is one of the main reasons that Denmark is consistently voted one of the happiest countries in the world (this year it is once again number one). Empathy plays a key role in improving our social connections, which is a major factor in our overall happiness.
What many don’t realize is that empathy is a learned skill that many of us miss out on in America. In fact, some studies show empathy levels have dropped up to 40 percent in the U.S. in the last 30 years, while narcissism is on the steady rise.
Why is teaching empathy so important?
Teaching empathy has not only been proven to make kids more emotionally and socially competent and greatly reduce bullying, it can also help them be more successful and high-functioning adults in the future. A recent study from Duke and Penn State followed over 750 people for 20 years, and found that those who were able to share and help other children in kindergarten were more likely to graduate from high school and have full-time jobs. Students who weren’t as socially adept were more likely to drop out of school, go to juvenile detention, or need government assistance.
We describe several empathy programs for younger kids in our book, but one of the most interesting programs, that starts on the first day of school at six years old up and continues until graduation at age sixteen, is called “Klassen Time” or “the Class’s Hour.” It’s one of the ways Danes become so skilled at empathy as they grow up.
“The Class’s Hour” is set for a special time once a week, and it is a core part of the curriculum. The purpose is for all the students to come together in a comfortable setting to talk about any problems they may be having. Together, the class tries to find a solution. This could be an issue between two students or a group, or even something unrelated to school at all. If there are no problems to be discussed, then they simply come together to relax and hygge — or cozy around together.
This is where the “Klassen Time kage,” or “the Class Hour cake,” comes in. It’s a simple cake that students take turns baking every week for the occasion. If they don’t want to bake, they can bring in any kind of hyggelige (cozy) snack to enjoy together after the talk. The “Class Hour cake” is such an integral part of Danish culture that it even has its own recipe.
During the Class’s Hour, the teacher brings up any issues they may have observed, in addition to what the students themselves mention.
“I remember when we were 10 or 11, we often talked about girl cliques,” says Anne Mikkelson, a Danish high school student from Strøer. “That was a common topic, and we would discuss it and try to solve it together. Sometimes that just meant the girls being more aware and trying to interact more with others, but it always helped us to talk about it together.”
“The important thing is that everyone is heard,” says Jesper Vang, a middle school teacher at Tingkærskolen in Odense.
“Our job as the teacher is to make sure that the children understand how the other feels, and see why the other feels as they do. This way, we come up with a solution together based on real listening and real understanding.”
While it isn’t clear what gets discussed each week, it’s clear that the Class’s Hour is teaching empathy and helping students learn to understand others’ feelings, not just their own. It is facilitating social connectedness rather than divide.
It’s interesting to think what implementing the Class’s Hour in the U.S. school system could do for our future. By dedicating an hour a week to teaching kids to put themselves in someone else’s shoes from the ages of 6 to16, and helping to find solutions together, what kind of changes could we bring about? Looking to the world happiness reports year after year, I can’t help but think that incorporating a version of the Danish Class’s Hour in our schools and improving empathy could literally be a piece of cake.
