Dear Commons Community,

Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire have a New York Times‘ op-ed today looking back at Betsy Devos contributions during the past four years that she has served as U.S. Secretary of Education under Donald Trump.  Their basic conclusion is that measured solely by policy accomplishments, DeVos was a flop.  However, they also indicate that given her failed assaults on public education that a new secretary of education under Joe Biden might be able to initiate major new policies.  Optimistically, Schneider and Berkshire conclude that “Betsy DeVos has actually given the next secretary of education an opportunity — to recommit to public education as a public good, and a cornerstone of our democracy.”

We shall see.  Below is an excerpt from the op-ed.

Tony

————————————————————————————————

Trump’s Longest-Serving Cabinet Official May Start a Revolution

By Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire

Dec. 1, 2020

Early on, her efforts to move a federal voucher program through a Republican-controlled Congress more concerned with taxes and deregulation repeatedly fell short. This year, she was forced to abandon a directive ordering states to redirect coronavirus funds to private schools after three federal judges ruled against her.

And significant pieces of Obama-era civil rights guidance that she rescinded — moves meant to protect transgender students, for instance, or address racially disproportionate school discipline — will be immediately restored by the incoming Biden administration.

Though Ms. DeVos has been mostly stymied, both by Trumpism’s policy indifference and progressive opposition, her legacy will still be far-reaching and long-lasting. This is not a result of what she made, but of what she broke: a bipartisan federal consensus around testing and charters that extended from the George H.W. Bush administration through the end of the Obama era.

For progressives, this shift hasn’t necessarily been bad news. In response to Ms. DeVos’s polarizing influence, moderate Democrats including President-elect Joe Biden recommitted to teachers unions and adopted more skeptical positions on school choice that were out of the question just a few years ago. Mr. Biden has pledged to exclude for-profit charter schools from federal funding, and he has proposed making larger investments in public education by using Title I statutes to double federal support for schools serving low-income students.

Yet Ms. DeVos has also elevated the education policy agenda of the far right, giving voice and legitimacy to a campaign to fundamentally dismantle public education. That campaign, pursued for the past few decades only in deep-red states, and often perceived as belonging to the libertarian fringe, has become the de facto agenda of the Republican Party.

So, while it is true that the Biden administration will swiftly reverse President Trump’s executive orders and administrative guidance from the Department of Education, Mr. Biden’s education secretary will still have to contend with extreme ideas that have suddenly entered the mainstream.

More than three decades ago, conventional Republicans and centrist Democrats signed on to an unwritten treaty. Conservatives agreed to mute their push for private school vouchers, their preference for religious schools and their desire to slash spending on public school systems. In return, Democrats effectively gave up the push for school integration and embraced policies that reined in teachers unions.

Together, led by federal policy elites, Republicans and Democrats espoused the logic of markets in the public sphere, expanding school choice through publicly funded charter schools. Competition, both sides agreed, would strengthen schools. And the introduction of charters, this contingent believed, would empower parents as consumers by even further untethering school enrollment from family residence.

The bipartisan consensus also elevated the role of student tests in evaluating schools. The first President Bush ushered in curricular standards in 1989 when he gathered the nation’s governors, including Bill Clinton of Arkansas, for a meeting in Charlottesville, Va. In a decade, George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation mandated accountability testing nationwide, tied to the standards that his father and Mr. Clinton had promoted.

The law was then modified under the Obama administration; still, the core logic of test-based accountability as a solution to closing the achievement gap was preserved. Arne Duncan, Mr. Obama’s education secretary, who was cool to teachers unions and spoke the language of markets, even threatened to withhold federal funds from California in 2013 if it didn’t test all its students.

Ms. DeVos, a critic of what she calls “the overreach of the federal government in education,” displayed no interest in this neoliberal compromise. Instead, she spent much of her time crusading for religious schools.

Curiously, the only time during her tenure that she prominently supported standardized testing was during the pandemic — a move seemingly intended to make public schools, which would obviously struggle to manage the task, look bad. And she surprised many last spring by backing a budget proposal with significant cuts in federal funding for public charters. To careful observers, this all made perfect sense, as Ms. DeVos’s chief aim has always been to move families out of the public system and to defund it.

Although Congress never took up her radical measures, such as a $5 billion annual tax credit for private school tuition, Ms. DeVos and her allies have made tremendous inroads at the state level. In Arizona and Florida funding for school choice programs has ballooned, with Florida taxpayers now spending more than $1 billion annually to send students to private schools.

And this past summer, the Supreme Court in Espinoza v. Montana declared that states could not bar religious schools from participating in state programs that provide scholarships to students attending private schools, clearing the way for further private expansion.

The blowback against the Republican Party’s rightward shift on education, however, is creating an opportunity for Democrats to move in new directions. In 2018, voters in purple states like Arizona, Michigan and Texas, and in red states like Kentucky, punished Republican candidates perceived as hostile to public education. And this fall, Arizona voters approved a measure to raise taxes on wealthy residents in order to increase funding for public schools and teachers — a move antithetical to the school privatization agenda that arguably helped turn the state blue.

To capitalize on voter dissatisfaction with education policies in the coming years, Democrats can no longer lean on maligning Ms. DeVos. As Republicans continue to work to defund and privatize school systems, both Democratic governors and the incoming Biden administration can draw a sharp policy distinction, boldly defending public education in a way that resonates with voters.

And while Mr. Biden’s expansive (and expensive) education plans will confront the harsh reality of partisan division in Congress, he is guaranteed a powerful megaphone — one that he’ll share, not just with the next secretary of education, but with a former high-school teacher and current community-college professor, Jill Biden.

Through her attention-attracting assault on the public education system, Betsy DeVos has actually given the next secretary of education an opportunity — to recommit to public education as a public good, and a cornerstone of our democracy.

Georgia Senate Candidates – Kelly Loeffler, Raphael Warnock, David Perdue and Jon Ossoff

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s attacks on Georgia’s Republican state officials and the state’s election system, is causing concern among the GOP leadership.  As reported by various media.

Some establishment Republicans are sounding alarms that President Donald Trump’s conspiratorial denials of his own defeat could threaten the party’s ability to win a Senate majority.

The concerns come ahead of Trump’s planned Saturday visit to Georgia to campaign alongside Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who face strong Democratic challengers in Jan. 5 runoffs that will determine which party controls the Senate at the outset of Biden’s presidency.

Republicans acknowledge Trump as the GOP’s biggest turnout driver, including in Georgia, where Biden won by fewer than 13,000 votes out of about 5 million cast. That means every bit of enthusiasm from one of Trump’s signature rallies could matter. But some Republicans worry Trump will use the platform to amplify his baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud — arguments roundly rejected in state and federal courts across the country. That could make it harder for Perdue and Loeffler to keep a clear focus on the stakes in January and could even discourage Republicans from voting.

“The president has basically taken hostage this race,” said Brendan Buck, once a top adviser to former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Especially fraught are Trump’s continued attacks on Georgia’s Republican state officials and the state’s election system, potentially taking away from his public praise of Loeffler and Perdue.

“Trump’s comments are damaging the Republican brand,” argued Republican donor Dan Eberhart, who added that the president is “acting in bad sportsmanship and bad faith” instead of emphasizing Republicans’ need to maintain Senate control.

The GOP needs one more seat for a majority. Democrats need Jon Ossoff to defeat Perdue and Raphael Warnock to defeat Loeffler to force a 50-50 Senate, positioning Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking majority vote.

Trump on Monday blasted Gov. Brian Kemp as “hapless” for not intervening to “overrule” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s certification of Biden’s win. A day earlier, Trump told Fox News he was “ashamed” he’d endorsed Kemp in his 2018 GOP primary for governor. Kemp’s office noted in response that state law gives Kemp no authority to overturn election results, despite Trump’s contention that Kemp could “easily” invoke “emergency powers.” Meanwhile, Raffensperger, a Trump supporter like Kemp, has accused the president of throwing him “under the bus” for doing his job.

Perdue and Loeffler have attempted to stay above the fray.

They’ve long aligned themselves with Trump and even echoed some of his general criticisms of the fall elections, jointly demanding Raffensperger’s resignation. But the crux of their runoff argument — that Republicans must prevent Democrats from controlling Capitol Hill and the White House — is itself a tacit admission that Biden, not Trump, will be inaugurated Jan. 20. And at one recent campaign stop, Perdue heard from vocal Trump supporters who demanded that he do more to help Trump somehow claim Georgia’s 16 electoral votes.

Republicans see three potential negative outcomes to Trump fanning the flames.

Some GOP voters could be dissuaded from voting again if they accept Trump’s claims that the system is hopelessly corrupted. Among Republicans more loyal to Trump than to the party, some could skip the runoff altogether out of anger at a party establishment the president continues to assail. Lastly, at the other end of the GOP spectrum are the moderate Republicans who already crossed over to help Biden win Georgia and could be further alienated if the runoff becomes another referendum on Trump.

Josh Holmes, a top adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said Republicans “haven’t seen any evidence of lack of enthusiasm in the Senate races.”

But none of those potential bad effects would have to be sweeping to tilt the runoffs if they end up as close as the presidential contest in Georgia.

“We’ll see how it plays out. It changes day by day and week by week. But so far, so good,” Holmes said.

In Georgia, any Republican concerns are more circumspect.

Brian Robinson, a former adviser to Kemp’s Republican predecessor as governor, said Trump should “drive a strong, forward-looking message” about what’s at stake for a Republican base that “is fervently devoted to him.”

“The best thing he can do for the party,” Robinson said, “is to talk about the importance of having a Republican Senate majority to project his policy legacy and to make sure the Democrats can’t reverse a lot of what he has put in place that Republicans support.”

Asked what Trump should avoid, Robinson circled back to what he believes the president should say.

Former U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Trump ally, downplayed the potential for GOP splintering, framing an “inner-family squabble” as a sideshow to the “incredible” consequences that define the runoffs.

“Followers of Trump will follow Trump, but they’re not blind to the huge stakes. And neither is he,” Kingston said. “He knows to keep his legacy. He’s got to get these people reelected.” Trump, Kingston argued, is “keeping the base interested,” a necessary component of any successful runoff campaign since second rounds of elections often see a drop-off in voter participation.

Robinson added that Democrats face their own challenge in replicating record turnout for Biden.

“What’s the best motivator? Fear,” he said. Before November, Democrats dreaded a second Trump term more than Republicans feared Trump losing, Robinson reasoned. “Republicans have reason to be scared now,” he said, because of the prospect that Democrats could control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

“That could make a difference in turnout” beyond anything Trump says, Robinson concluded.

 The runoff election in Georgia is going to be huge!

Tony

Sean Hannity

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump “needs to pardon his whole family and himself” as he walks “out the door” of the White House, Fox News host Sean Hannity said on his radio show Monday.

“I assume that the power of the pardon is absolute and that he should be able to pardon anybody that he wants to,” Hannity declared as he interviewed nutjob lawyer Sidney Powell.

Powell was bounced from Trump’s election legal team earlier this month after spouting bizarre conspiracy theories claiming that Venezuela, Cuba, “antifa,” George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and the deceased Hugo Chávez, among others, were responsible for shifting November’s presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Hannity did not specify what criminal charges Trump or his family could face.

He insisted Trump needs to pardon himself and his family to protect him from unspecified “witch hunts.”

Powell told Hannity that she didn’t know the details of Trump’s “authority to pardon himself.” But she insisted it wouldn’t be unnecessary because “the president is going to get another four years in office” — despite losing to President-elect Biden.

Generally, someone granted a pardon has been convicted of a federal crime and has shown remorse or made reparations. Pardons typically are granted after an application is presented five years after a conviction or release from prison and is approved by the Department of Justice’s pardon attorney.

A president has never pardoned himself. In 1974, former President Richard Nixon was pardoned after his resignation by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Trump last week pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was represented by Powell, after Flynn had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about secret calls with Kremlin officials as Trump was coming into office.

Flynn was granted a “full and unconditional pardon” from “any and all possible offenses” arising out of the investigation into possible Kremlin collusion by former special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump pardoned Flynn after the Department of Justice failed to get his case thrown out in court.

Surely Hannity’s suggestion raises questions as to what Trump and his family have to fear.  A lot!

Tony

Scott Atlas

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Scott Atlas, a science adviser to President Donald Trump who was skeptical of measures to control the coronavirus outbreak, is resigning from his Whitehouse position.

Atlas,  a Stanford University neuroradiologist, who had no formal experience in public health or infectious diseases, resigned at the end of his temporary government assignment.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“Atlas joined the White House this summer, where he clashed with top government scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, as he resisted stronger efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 267,000 Americans.

Atlas has broken with government experts and the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community to criticize efforts to encourage face covering to slow the spread of the virus. Just weeks ago, on Twitter he responded to Michigan’s latest virus restrictions by encouraging people to “rise up” against the state’s policies.

His views also prompted Stanford to issue a statement distancing itself from the faculty member, saying Atlas “has expressed views that are inconsistent with the university’s approach in response to the pandemic.”

“We support using masks, social distancing, and conducting surveillance and diagnostic testing,” the university said Nov. 16. “We also believe in the importance of strictly following the guidance of local and state health authorities.”

Atlas defended his role in his resignation letter, saying, “I cannot think of a time where safeguarding science and the scientific debate is more urgent.”

Atlas was hired as a “special government employee,” which limited his service to government to 130 days in a calendar year — a deadline he reached this week.”

Goodbye and good riddance!  He advised Trump on what the President wanted to hear to the detriment of the American people, especially those who contracted and died of coronavirus.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

NBC News yesterday released data showing that Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 25 of the 30 counties in which he held a campaign rally.  On the other hand,  research has also linked his rallies to hundreds of COVID-19 deaths.   As reported:

“President Donald Trump’s largely maskless campaign rallies may have boosted the spread of COVID-19, but they didn’t serve Trump well at the polls,  according to a ballot analysis by NBC News.

In an overwhelming number of cases, Trump came up short of his 2016 victory margins in the counties where he held rallies in the two weeks before the election, NBC reported. In a significant number of cases, he either increased his negative margins or lost the counties to rival Joe Biden that he won the last time around.

Trump held 30 campaign rallies the final two weeks before the election in states from Arizona to Nebraska to Pennsylvania, NBC noted. Trump won larger victory margins than he did in 2016 in just five of the counties. In the rest, his negative margins grew and his positive margins shrunk, so much so that some counties flipped blue.

NBC cautioned that Trump may have done even worse in some cases without the rallies.

But the findings present a clear warning against gauging national, or even state, popularity based on rally turnouts, which tend to draw those who would vote for a candidate in any case. The rallies also represent a minuscule fraction of the vote.

Trump and his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have repeatedly expressed astonishment that Trump lost the election, given the president’s campaign schedule and the enthusiasm of people attending his rallies.

Eric Trump is perplexed that anyone could believe the results, according to a tweet he posted Saturday. People responding informed him that rallies are not necessarily a reliable barometer of voter support and that votes and rally attendance are not the same.

What the rallies did accomplish was to increase COVID-19 infections, according to research from Stanford University. The research conservatively tied Trump’s rallies to at least 700 deaths — and counting. Some 30,000 people became sick with the virus because of the rallies and may face lifelong health problems. Communities that hosted Trump’s events “paid a high price in terms of disease and death,” the researchers concluded in a working paper.

Few of those attending Trump’s packed rallies wore masks and clearly did not observe social distancing guidelines. In a number of cases, Trump angrily ignored COVID-19 regulations and pleas from local officials not to hold the dangerous rallies as COVID-19 cases surged.”

It is a travesty and disgrace that Trump infected his most ardent supporters at these rallies.

Tony

Alastair Sim in a Movie Version of “A Christmas Carol”

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times this morning has a featured article entitled,  Bah Humbug!, How Theaters Are Saving “A Christmas Carol.”  It describes theaters throughout the country that will continue their traditions of staging Charles Dickens’s novella.  Here is an excerpt:

“For all his flaws, that cranky old miser Ebenezer Scrooge has been a godsend for American theaters. Through recessions and blizzards and other upheavals, he has drawn small children and big money to his redemption story in “A Christmas Carol.”

Stage adaptations of the tale, which generally run between Thanksgiving and year-end, have been a tradition and a lifeline for troupes big and small, professional and amateur. But now, after decades in which the Dickens classic has sustained them, this year theaters are sustaining Dickens.

Gone are the large-cast extravaganzas playing before cheery crowds in packed venues. Instead, theaters are using every contagion-reduction strategy they have honed during the coronavirus pandemic: outdoor stagings, drive-in productions, street theater, streaming video, radio plays and even a do-it-yourself kit sent by mail.

Many of these theaters are willingly running the long-lucrative show at a loss — they are hungry to create, determined to stay visible and eager to satisfy those “Christmas Carol” die-hards who don’t want to miss a year.

“It’s absolutely an obligation, in the best sense of that word,” said Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company, in Providence, R.I., which has staged “A Christmas Carol” each holiday season since 1977. “The story felt more urgent, and more necessary, than it has in many years.”

A filmed performance by Mr. Mays will be streamed this year to benefit regional theaters, and a second version, with more special effects, will be marketed next year to streaming services. 

A primer for those who don’t know a Cratchit from a Fezziwig: “A Christmas Carol” is an exceptionally durable novella, written by Charles Dickens and published in 1843, about the transformation, via a series of ghostly visitations, of a wealthy businessman (that’s Scrooge) from mean and miserly to caring and charitable.

Dickens himself performed readings of the story for more than two decades, with stops in America as well as Britain, until his death in 1870; it has been repeatedly adapted for stage and screen, and the story, in one form or another, has been a seasonal staple of the American regional theater since the 1970s. Last year a critically lauded adaptation from England’s Old Vic theater reached Broadway; this year, it will be livestreamed from its London home, fully staged but audience-free.

“‘A Christmas Carol’ does everything we talk about when we talk about theater — it builds community, and it tugs us toward our better selves,” said Joseph Haj, the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, which has staged the story since 1975, last year selling 57,900 tickets to the show. This year, the Guthrie will stream a retelling by four actors; it will cost $10 to watch, and will be free for schools.

Mr. Haj doesn’t expect to make money on it. Nor does Leda Hoffmann, artistic director of the Contemporary American Theater Company in Columbus, Ohio, which, for $20 per device, will stream a contemporary reimagining with Ebony Scrooge at its center. “This is very likely a losing proposition, but we’re telling the story because we want to tell it,” she said.

The financial implications are enormous, especially for those that have opted not to charge at all. Ford’s Theater in Washington last year sold $2.5 million worth of tickets to “A Christmas Carol.” This year, it is releasing a free audio version on its website and on public radio, paid for by corporate sponsorships and donations. “Hopefully it will come back to us in other ways,” said Paul R. Tetreault, Ford’s director.

The money “A Christmas Carol” usually brings in allows theaters to perform more challenging work at other times of the year.

In Raleigh, N.C., where Ira David Wood III, the artistic and executive director of Theater in the Park, has been playing Scrooge in a musical adaptation since 1974 (he missed one year, when he had open-heart surgery), the money earned from the holiday show “enables us to do ‘Uncle Vanya’ and play to maybe 12 people,” he said.

Like many major regional theaters, Providence’s Trinity Rep is enormously dependent on the show, which accounts for half of all annual sales. This year, its one-hour streaming version looks still to be popular — in the first 72 hours, 75,000 people from 46 states signed up to watch. But ticket revenue, which last year topped $1.7 million, will be zero, because the video is being aired for free.

“This thing has kept American theaters alive for decades and decades,” said Charles Fee, the producing artistic director of Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. “Without ‘Christmas Carol,’ our company would almost certainly have failed.”

I personally love the ending of Dickens’s tale:

“The visit to the future ends as Scrooge faces his own mortality in the form of a tombstone inscribed with his name. He asks the Ghost:

    “Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the  

      shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be..?”

The Ghost continued to point downward to the grave by which it stood.

      “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said

       Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you   

       show me!” (Dickens, 1843)

Amen!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News host Eric Shawn yesterday debunked election disinformation that President Donald Trump shared on the same network only an hour earlier (see video above).

Trump unloaded a stream of baseless claims about a rigged election in his first televised interview since the election to his devout Fox News ally Maria Bartiromo, who encouraged the allegations and allowed them to go largely unchallenged.

But Fox weekend anchor Shawn pointed out on “America’s News Headquarters” that Trump’s campaign has failed to prove any of his accusations in court.

“In fact, your government, election officials, experts and others ― many of them Republican, including Trump appointed officials ― say that the president’s claims are false and unsubstantiated,” he told viewers.

He invited Axios political reporter Hans Nichols to help dismantle many of Trump’s claims, including that ballots counted after the initial tallies on election night were somehow fraudulent.

“Every swing state that we’re talking about, and they did these massive dumps of votes,” Trump said. “And all of a sudden, I went from winning by a lot to losing by a little.”

“Well, officials say these are not illegal dumps,” Shawn said. “That’s just the counting of the many mail-in ballots that are entered into the computer system.”

Biden overtook Trump in several battleground states where Trump initially led on election night as absentee and mail-in ballots were counted in subsequent days, a standard and legitimate procedure.

Trump also asserted that President-elect Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have received more votes than former President Barack Obama.

“It seems that we have a president who, he can’t wrap his brain or mind around the fact, he can’t process the fact that someone who he thinks is so inferior to him won the election,” Shawn said.

Trump’s allies at Fox News, including Bartiromo and prime-time opinion hosts, helped him amplify false claims of election fraud. But some members of the network’s hard news division pushed back and fact-checked the unsubstantiated assertions.

Shawn participated in a similar segment two weeks ago after Bartiromo gave airtime to Trump lawyers who peddled conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Congratulations, Eric, for telling the truth which isn’t the long-suit of Trump and some of his enablers at Fox News!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Will Wilkinson, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, has a piece today entitled, Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump?  He does a good analysis of the strategy of  the Democrats depending too much upon the ills of the pandemic while Republicans were exploiting displaced workers who desperately needed a paycheck.  Here is an excerpt:

“Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them. Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.

Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.

The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?

Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons.

The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.”

The entire article is below.

Wilkinson provides excellent insight – Listen up Democrats!

Tony

 —————————————————————–

New York Times

Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump?

By Will Wilkinson

Contributing Opinion Writer

Nov. 27, 2020

President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation.

Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins so thin in the states that clinched his victory? And why did the president’s down-ticket enablers flourish in the turbulent, plague-torn conditions they helped bring about?

Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to show up or cross over.

But they should understand that there was really no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better.

This shocking strategy worked for Republicans, even if it didn’t pan out for the president himself. Moreover, it laid a trap that Democrats walked into — something they should understand and adjust for, as best they can, as they look ahead.

How could a president responsible for one of the gravest failures of governance in American history nevertheless maintain such rock-solid support? Democracy’s throw-the-bums-out feedback mechanism gets gummed up when the electorate disagrees about the identity of the bums, what did and didn’t occur on their watch and who deserves what share of the credit or blame.

When party affiliation becomes a central source of meaning and self-definition, reality itself becomes contested and verifiable facts turn into hot-button controversies. Elections can’t render an authoritative verdict on the performance of incumbents when partisans in a closely divided electorate tell wildly inconsistent stories about one another and the world they share.

Mr. Trump has a knack for leveraging the animosities of polarized partisanship to cleave his supporters from sources of credible information and inflame them with vilifying lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save his bacon, which suggests that polarization hasn’t completely wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order.

However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.

But the president’s catastrophic response to Covid-19 threw the economy into a tailspin. That is where it gets interesting — and Democrats get uncomfortable.

Mr. Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden onto states and municipalities with busted budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors — especially Democrats — who refused to risk their citizens’ lives by allowing economic and social activity to resume.

He spurred his supporters to make light of the danger of infection, made the churlish refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy to steal power by damaging the economy and his re-election prospects.

He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.

But Democrats weren’t destined to get quite as tangled in Mr. Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way to avoid it, but they could have been hurt less by it. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.

Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them. Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.

Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.

The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?

Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons.

The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.

Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.

And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization. Conservatives needed a way not to get spun by the president’s destabilizing act of disloyalty, so they steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot. They were voting against a personal crisis of identity, not the Green New Deal.

Democrats might have done better had sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions not misled them into believing that backlash to indisputably damning Republican failure would deliver an easy Senate majority — but not much better. Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8DGRHN4YZs

Dear Commons Community,

Sarah Fuller made history yesterday when she became the first woman to participate in a Power Five conference football game when she kicked off for Vanderbilt to start the second half at Missouri.

“I just think it’s incredible that I am able to do this, and all I want to do is be a good influence to the young girls out there because there were times like I struggled in sports,” Fuller said. “But I am so thankful I stuck with it, and it’s given me so many opportunities. I’ve met so many amazing people through sports, and I just want to say like literally you can do anything you set your mind to.”

Fuller kicked with a holder rather than using a tee in a designed squib kick, and the senior sent a low kick to the 35-yard line where it was pounced on by Missouri’s Mason Pack. Fuller didn’t get any other opportunities in Vanderbilt’s 41-0 loss to Missouri.

Coach Derek Mason made clear that Fuller kicked for the Commodores due to need, not for history or publicity. COVID-19 protocols and restrictions left Mason with very few options, prompting him to reach out to the soccer team for help.

Fuller, a 6-foot-2 goalkeeper, decided she was up for the challenge.

“I’m not about making statements,” Mason said. “This was out of necessity. You look at our week. Our students had gone home. The ability to have access to students and tryouts was almost nil in terms of like what’s available. … That just happened to be the most viable option.”

After Fuller’s kick, she went straight to the sideline, where she high-fived some of her new teammates and swapped some elbow bumps. Fuller’s parents watched and cheered from the stands along with her boyfriend and best friend.

Fuller practiced with the Commodores this week after helping the Commodores win the SEC Tournament last weekend. Fuller said her longest field goal in practice was 38 yards.

She wore “Play Like A Girl” on the back of her helmet. The senior will get to keep the No. 32 jersey she wore Saturday, the same as her number when playing soccer.

Fuller even gave a halftime pep talk, which she usually left to her soccer teammates, telling her new teammates that Vandy won the SEC soccer tournament title by cheering for each other whether on the field or the sideline.

“We had a different mindset coming out the second half,” quarterback Mike Wright said.

After her kickoff, reaction poured in on social media. Fuller was the No. 2 trending topic on Twitter, followed by Vandy. Her soccer team wrote on Twitter: “Glass. Everywhere.”

As in glass ceiling.

No woman had appeared in an SEC football game or for any Power Five team. Liz Heaston became the first woman to score with two extra points for Willamette in NAIA on Oct. 18, 1997.

Katie Hnida was the first woman to score at the Football Bowl Subdivision level with two extra points for New Mexico on Aug. 30, 2003.

April Goss was the second, with an extra point for Kent State in 2015. Tonya Butler was the first woman to kick a field goal in an NCAA game for Division II West Alabama on Sept. 13, 2003.

“Welcome to the club, (at)April Goss and I are waiting with snacks!” Hnida wrote on Twitter on Friday.

Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz visited with Fuller before kickoff and repeated a message that Fuller has heard a lot in recent days. The father of four daughters told Fuller it was incredible they watched her make history.

“I’ve had girl dads come up to me and they’re like, ‘You’re inspiring my little girls, and I want them to know that they can do anything and you’re proving that point.’ And I think that has been the coolest thing,” Fuller said.

Fuller also made clear she’d be up for continuing to help the football team if needed. She believes she can refine her timing and technique with more practice.

Vanderbilt (0-8) visits No. 13 Georgia next week.

“If she wants to kick and she’s available, we’d love to have her,” Mason said.

Congratulations Ms. Fuller!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.  As the jacket cover states, “Beyond race, class or other factors, a powerful caste system influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate.”  She links the caste system in the United States to those of 1930s Nazi Germany and India.  She uses stories including her own personal experiences to support her thinking and positioning of caste as a dominant social phenomenon in the three countries.  Some of her stories, especially those in the American South, are riveting and bring to light  the legacy of racism that has existed and continues to exist in our country. 

I had read her earlier work, The Warmth of Other People’s Suns, and was so taken by it that it is recommended reading for students in my graduate courses at Hunter College.  However, as interesting as her stories in Caste are, I had trouble with her comparisons of the American version of caste to those in Nazi Germany and India.  In my view, racism in the United States surely exists but I don’t know that it is similar to those in 1930s Germany and India.  To me, racism and slavery in the United States was based originally on the economic exploitation of African Americans, who served as the foundation of our agrarian economy. And here in the United States, to this day, we have never adequately addressed our problem with race and skin color.  In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler used the persecution of Jews as a mechanism to create a fervor for hate and his warped sense of Aryan superiority.  In India, caste has been in existence for thousands of years and is culturally ingrained in the Hindu religion.  

I have read several reviews of Caste and the one that resonates best with me is  by the anthropologist, Arjun Appaduri that appeared in The Wire in September.  He struggles with the comparison of caste to race and also questions whether there are similarities of the American, German, and Indian versions.  His entire review is below.

Caste is surely an important book and makes for good reading, but its central thesis about caste can be questioned.

Tony

————————————————————————————

The Wire

Comparing Race to Caste Is an Interesting Idea, But There Are Crucial Differences Between Both

Arjun Appadurai

12/Sep/2020

Isabel Wilkerson’s book ‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’ uses anecdotes and allegory to advance her thesis, which however does not stand on a strong structural foundation.

In my early twenties, I was a graduate student working on my doctorate at an obscure but prestigious department at the University of Chicago called The Committee on Social Thought. The programme required all students to read a small list of ‘Great Books’, usually 12 or 13, which we called the ‘Fundamentals’ and our course work was intended to help us master the right way to read these books.

According to our teachers, that way was to read the books in as close to the original as possible (even if in translation) and to avoid (at all costs) the vast secondary literature of commentary, criticism and interpretation which surrounded them. We thus confronted Plato and Augustine, Machiavelli and Marx, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, all in the raw, without any friendly secondary assistance.

This method is what I adopted when I read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, without wading through the luxuriant forest of reviews of it that have already appeared, several by writers I know and admire. Accompanied by Oprah Winfrey’s hailing of this book as a work for the centuries, the nomination of Kamala Harris as running mate to Joseph Biden, as well as the renewed rage about race and racism sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement, Wilkerson’s book was pre-sold as a bestseller.

So, let me say right away that reading it was a strange experience. From the very first few pages, which describe the deadly effect of a heatwave on a nomadic population in Siberia, I sensed I was in a genre I knew but did not quite recognise.

As I read on, through a series of allegories about climate, animals, and epic battles between mythic groups, as well as of metaphors about houses, foundations, roofs, sills, and more, I gradually realised that I was experiencing a pedagogic genre of writing. This book is about big, bad things like race, caste, cruelty and torture presented as a series of modern epics. Wilkerson’s book is a guide to race and racial brutality in the US, told through the allegory of caste, the latter viewed as the skeleton under the flesh of black-white relationships in the 400-year history of what became the US. Its primary audience seems to be the mass liberal reading public of the US.

Once I understood the genre, I had no trouble understanding why every chapter, often every page, contained facts, anecdotes, reports and examples with which many of us are already familiar. This is not a book which claims to be based on original research. It is a polemical and pedagogical work, the single-minded aim of which is to show that what we mistakenly think of as race in the history of the US is, in fact, better thought of as caste, an underlying code, programme, skeleton, or structure which accounts for racist behaviour and institutions, which are simply its primary instrument and expression.

The place which exemplifies caste is India, and Wilkerson succeeds in marshalling many descriptive and analytic verities about caste in India that we have heard for a century: its rigidity, its fixity, its tyranny, its permanence, and the quasi-religious foundations which define both its foundation and its reach over daily life.

I cannot resist the temptation to criticise Wilkerson’s book from the vantage point of a specialist in the anthropology of India, who has spent the better part of four decades poring over hundreds of books and essays about caste. That might seem both too easy and somehow beside the point for a book in which caste is mostly a device to offer a new picture of the racialised world of the US.

Yet, it is important to point out a few differences which make a difference, between caste and race. Caste crystallised over several millennia of Indian history, primarily as a cosmology which allowed pastoral and agricultural colonisers from the Northwest of the subcontinent to gradually colonise thousands of groups and communities who were previously not organised into castes. The new framework allowed many locally dominant groups to organise their local subordinates into a system which conflated rank, occupation and purity into a single status system. This is very different from the creation of whiteness as a category of domination in the context of the colonial and later independent US.

Then, there is the matter of purity and pollution, also discussed by Wilkerson, which many of us see as the driving source of caste ideology in India, whereas in the US, the polluting status of black Americans is an effect of racialised ranking and not a cause. Also, the Indian caste system is geared to an infinity of caste ranks, and many Indian villages have 30 or more hierarchically ranked castes (jatis), all keenly aware of who is above them and who is below.

Finally, while the top of the Indian caste system, usually composed of Brahmins, is permanent, closed and unquestionable, the bottom, which is certainly defined by Dalits (Untouchables) is strangely porous, since every Indian caste, including the lowest, has someone or some group, usually in a neighbouring village, who performs polluting services (like cremation, scavenging and hair-cutting) for them, and is therefore lower than they are. In short, no group in India, however low, lacks a group beneath them that lets them feel purer. This is very different from the exclusionary logic of race, which is binary (black versus white) and lacks any cosmological basis for one black person to feel racially superior to another black.

For these reasons, mobility at every level has been part of the history of caste in India, (contra the myth of its rigidity) and here the semiotics of pigment in American race relations is a massive obstacle to such mobility, actual or aspirational. Even in the past 50 years in India, the entry of Dalits into Indian political parties, elections and in the bureaucracy has been both numerically impressive and irreversible, even if the upper caste backlash against this mobility, in terms of rape, arson and public humiliation of Dalits has also intensified.

Wilkerson is right to note the flow of ideas between Dalits and African Americans, involving figures as different as Martin Luther King, W.E.B. Dubois, Angela Davis, Ambedkar and groups such as the Black Panthers and the Dalit Panthers. This is one of many cases of such mutual admiration in human history among both oppressors and oppressed. The mutual identification of various kinds of proletariat in the long period of socialist internationalism is a major example of such traffic. But such mutual admiration cannot be the basis for the sort of deep structural comparison that Wilkerson is keen to make.

I must raise one other question, since Wilkerson expends a great deal of effort to show why the similarities between caste in India and race in the US are so striking, so relevant and so much more important than the differences. My question is this: if caste in the US is a kind of code, which is buried deep under the surface of race (and of the brutal etiquette and institutions of race and racism), how can we compare it to a society like India, where caste is both the code and the everyday reality? Put another way, either India has no underlying social programme, grammar and theory, and its social world is simply caste all the way up and down (something I doubt) , or Wilkerson’s dramatic unearthing of caste under the surface of race in the US is just a literary device to tell a familiar American story in an unfamiliar way, and is not based on a genuine similarity.

I lean towards the latter reading.

And then there is the joker in the pack, the case of Nazi Germany and its appearance in Wilkerson’s book as the third example of the value of caste as a lens into a story which is not normally discussed in caste terms. The objections here have been made by others but they are crippling: the relative shortness of the dominance of Nazi ideology; the entirely different history of antisemitism in European history, by comparison with colourism in the US and casteism in the Indian subcontinent; the Nazi wish to truly exterminate Jews, rather than to simply exploit, degrade and isolate in the Dalit and African-American cases, as cogs in some sort of economic machine.

The value of Wilkerson’s book is in the dignity of her narration, her refusal to vent excessively about her personal wounds as an African American writer and thinker, her clarity about the ethics of structural racism, and her highly accessible style.

But the biggest challenge that Wilkerson does not address, speaking from my vantage point as a social scientist in 2020, is one about race and caste as social constructions. Wilkerson is at pains to show, in stunning detail, that the ideology and practices of racism in the US are crafted, built, shored up, repaired, restored and updated, on a continuous basis: in short, they are socially constructed.

The puzzle that I and many others would have loved to see Wilkerson tackle is hardly touched on. And that puzzle is why some constructions acquire the sort of durability that resists all counter-evidence, all discovery, all qualification, all falsification, while others are as fragile as a flower and as quick to disappear as a rainstorm. Caste and race are monsters of resilience, and for this we need some third point of leverage for a truly powerful explanation.

Meanwhile, we can be grateful to Wilkerson for reminding us of their affinities.

Arjun Appadurai  is an Indian-American anthropologist and theorist in globalization studies.  He teaches in New York and Berlin. His most recent book, co-authored with Neta Alexander, is Failure (London: Polity Press, 2019)