Five-alarm Fire

July 8, 2017

After Trump’s Warsaw speech on Wednesday and his love-fest with Putin at the G-20 on Friday, there is no shred of doubt remaining about where Trump’s loyalties lie or what his vision for America is. As @JohnJHarwood wrote in his CNBC column, Trump helps those who help him. As Putin clearly directed cyber-attacks aimed at getting Trump elected, Trump is eager to give Putin what he wants. He will ingratiate himself with Putin to ensure that Putin gives him (and the Republicans) the same help in 2018 and 2020. What goal could the Election Integrity Commission have, other than to make hacking easier by providing a central database of American voter information?

Whether or not Trump colluded with Putin, there is no doubt that the two share the larger vision of a society ruled by white men, where difference and dissent is violently crushed and the state’s only purpose is as a vehicle for the enrichment of an autocratic ruler and his friends and family. We need only look at how Trump has conducted himself during these scant six months in office. He has made such a mockery of ethical lines that Walter Shaub, the head of the Office of Government Ethics, is resigning five months early in disgust.

Trump’s Warsaw speech, with its repeated emphasis on whether the West has the “will” to prevail, is a deliberate echo of an ideology that sees the world through the lens of European Christian men vs. everybody else. Events of the past week portend a dire future for our country and we need all hands on deck to avert a headlong rush into fascism. Yet, if the articles published this past week in The New York Times are any indication, too many people are still fetishizing the 37% of the public who are hostile to the goal of an equitable, pluralistic society or busy railing at “identity politics” that refuse to center white men, to contribute meaningfully to defending our democracy.

Consider the unfortunate op-ed written by Mark Penn and convicted Ponzi schemer, Andrew Stein in The New York Times this week, entitled, “Back to the center, Democrats.” This backward looking mass of incoherence blamed Democrats’ electoral losses on an over-reliance on “identity politics” and an embrace of “socialist” proposals espoused by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Once again, for the C students, we must repeat that whiteness IS an identity and the phrase “identity politics,” is code for advocating for an end to anti-Semitism and discrimination against people of color, women, Muslims and LGBTQ people. Mired in the past, Penn and Stein fail to recognize that Democrats lost because centrist third way politics didn’t offer solutions for working class whites or people of color of any class. It is entirely possible to win on a vision of America that is hopeful, inclusive and progressive and offers a ladder of opportunity for everyone. Barack Obama did it twice.

Democracy and the rule of law are being incinerated in a five-alarm fire and Americans had better wake up to the emergency. White supremacy lite will not save us. Our fundamental principles and ideals as a nation are under attack from within by an unprincipled criminal aided by a hostile foreign power and a gang of cynical power-hungry Republicans in Congress. We had better be prepared to accept leadership from the marginalized among us, who have been clear-eyed about the threat we face from the beginning. If we don’t, we all stand to get burned.

#G-20; #RussianInterference