Not A Time To Celebrate

July 4 should be a moment to celebrate our country by remembering its founding document, the Declaration of Independence. But most Americans are not feeling good about our country now. Gallup’s recent poll found that 71% said they feel angry about the state of the country these days, and only 17% said they feel proud. Americans disapprove of the institutions of our national government, whose origins lie in the next founding document, the Constitution. Nearly three-quarters disapprove of the job that Congress is doing, and we know that nearly 60% disapprove of the President, because we are told that changing number every day.

I’m not happy with our country either, certainly not with our government, run by Republicans whose handling of the pandemic has been so incompetent, that tens of thousands of people have died unnecessarily. But I have hope for the government, the next government, because it appears that Trump will lose badly in November. We’ll have a government that at least tries its best to keep Americans alive. Certainly a minimal hope.

I have less hope for the large minority of our population who continue to enable Trump and his minions. Let’s pick one third as a rough estimate of those who were entranced by Trump in 2016 and still sing his praises, not despite, but because of what he has done. The recent Gallup poll found 19% who rated Trump as a “great” President and 18% as “good”. Even if they lose in November, they will remain an impediment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the rest of us.

They are ignorant as a conscious defense against those realities they don’t like. By refusing to believe that the climate is changing in ways that will cause massive crises in just a few years, they prevent actions which could mitigate the widespread unhappiness that a warming planet will cause. They treat scientific facts like the varieties of cereal at the grocery: pick some you like, leave the others behind. They have a long history of regarding science and scientists with suspicion. Evolution disproves the Biblical version of creation, so science is an anti-Christian conspiracy, as it was in Galileo’s time. The ridiculous notion that global warming is a hoax made it easier to say the same thing about the coronavirus.

They don’t care about most of their fellow Americans. They cheer their leader when he calls Democrats, the majority party in nearly every election of the 21^st century, traitors. They consider the majority who are not evangelical Christians to be immoral and want to impose their religious dogma on the entire country for our own good. They don’t care that rejecting masks endangers everyone they meet.

They applaud nastiness. Rush Limbaugh is blatant, Congressional Republican leaders are more subtle, and the President of all Americans uses his megaphone for unrelenting vituperation of the majority who disapprove of him.

Many of them are racists. But their self-regard goes beyond their white skin and its privileges. They believe that being American has conferred some special significance to their lives and ideas, which does not extend even to the white people of Europe, where white America originated. Nations which used to be our allies are now disdained, because they have managed to create more just and more equal societies. European success in the fight against the pandemic means nothing, because Americans are exceptional, meaning better.

Many tend toward violence. Not just police violence against people they deem unworthy, but also threats of personal violence toward people whose politics they don’t like, especially if they are Black. The videos are worth watching, because up to now the gun-wielders without badges have not started shooting.

They believe the most incredible fantasies of conspiracy inventers and reject one of America’s greatest institutions, the free press. Substituting the “news” from Breitbart, Drudge, and Infowars for reality prepared them for QAnon. Even a thoughtful writer for the “Atlantic”, Adrienne LaFrance, could not explain all of its fantasies. She could say what its followers disdain: “a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values.” QAnon honors Trump as the hero of an apocalyptic tale of good versus evil, whose Armageddon is near. The convergence with the political theology of many evangelical Christians allows easy passage back and forth.

These characteristics of many or most of the one third intermingle and reinforce each other. For example, when Pew Research asked if “powerful people” had deliberately planned the coronavirus pandemic, half of “conservative Republicans” said this was definitely or probably true. This belief, that important Americans are intentionally killing tens of thousands of other Americans, defines a certain type of believer: they believe that the most reliable sources of information must be rejected; that many or most Americans are hopelessly evil; and that everything must be interpreted in terms of political support or opposition to Trump. That half of conservative Republicans are loony, but also dangerous.

Travis View, who critically discusses QAnon in the podcast “QAnon Anonymous”, is “pretty confident that this is not something that is going to go away with the end of the Trump presidency.” The “Washington Post” writer Philip Bump offers this “possible future, a step past Trumpism: a GOP in which a broad rejection of authority and open embrace of wild, unfounded conspiracy theories are widely accepted, if not the norm.”

Polling and voting have shown that young Americans overwhelmingly reject the anti-gay, racist and sexist ideology of conservative Republicans. Gallup’s poll in June found Biden leading Trump 68% to 28% among those 18-29, whereas those 65 and older favored Trump 52 to 46. So perhaps in the distant future, when those young people and their children are the great majority and those of us over 65 are gone or senile, Trump’s brand of inhumanity and political irresponsibility will have faded away.

Again, a minimum to hope for.

I guess that too much of my hopefulness for America has been damaged since 2016.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 7, 2020

Nobody Can Explain What He Is Doing

On Sunday we spent all day packing. Monday was an 11-hour drive to northern Wisconsin. Today we cleaned nearly a year’s worth of mouse shit out of every drawer, pantry closet and shelf. Grendl the cat helped by catching two mice last night.

That’s an explanation of how life interferes with writing. It’s late Tuesday afternoon, so I’ll just say a few things about the strangeness of Donald Trump. He is 4 months away from the presidential election and nobody knows what he is doing.

It’s obvious by now that it doesn’t matter what he does, he will get the votes from his white base of somewhere between 30% and 40% of Americans. So his recent eruptions of racism are inexplicable, further turning off the 10% to 15% of voters in the middle who will make the difference in November.

Re-tweeting a supporter shouting “white power”, then claiming he didn’t hear that comment? Never saying that he doesn’t support people who shout “white power”? Of course, that would be his millionth lie, but not even to try? He retweeted a video of a white couple with guns threatening peaceful black protesters in St.Louis.

Chris Christie, former New Jersey Governor who failed to get any important position in Trump’s White House, said on Sunday, “He is losing, and if he doesn’t change course, both in terms of the substance of what he is discussing and the way that he approaches the American people, then he will lose.”

His closest aides say they can’t understand why he doesn’t seem to be able to control his impulses. He shows no interest in actually governing and has no plans for a second term. When Sean Hannity offered him a softball question about his plans for a second term, Trump could not name one policy he planned to pursue. Hannity asked a second time and got nothing again. Jonathan Bernstein, a Bloomberg opinion columnist, says, “My basic sense is that Trump isn’t nearly concerned enough with winning re-election.”

He desperately wants to hold rallies, but they don’t make his reelection any more likely, especially if the rally is a public relations disaster, as his Tulsa rally was from planning to low attendance.

Meanwhile his poll numbers have been plummeting for three months, and that plunge shows no signs of stopping.

That makes me very happy, but also confused. Has Trump had enough of being President? Has he figured out a way to lose the election, declare that he never loses, and then ride off into the sunset?

Does he know what he is doing? Has he ever?

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

June 30, 2020

Has Something Finally Changed?

My credit-card bank, Citibank, a huge global enterprise, sent me a message on June 5, and probably to all of their millions of customers. Given the history of corporate politics, the message was surprising. The CEO of Citi’s US Consumer Bank, Anand Selva, wrote, “I hope you know that Citi is an organization that champions equality, diversity and inclusion and is willing to stand up for those values when they are threatened.” I knew that Citibank paid lip service to equality and diversity, like all major organizations, but I also knew that the only value that Citibank had been consistently willing to stand up for was its bottom line.

The message also quoted two other high executives, who clearly stated that the racial status quo is not acceptable. Mike Corbat, Citi’s CEO, said, “The tragic and unnecessary death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing unrest are glaring reminders of the progress we need to make to have a truly equal and just society.” Jane Fraser, President of Citi and CEO of Global Consumer Banking said, “We must use this painful time as the turning point to a better future that embraces our common good by listening, learning and being committed to taking action to create a more equal and just society.”

Good talk, but what about action? In two surprising cases in recent days, financial giants have fired people for racist actions off the job. The story of Amy Cooper calling the police in New York’s Central Park on a black man, Christian Cooper, who wanted her to leash her dog, has become known around the world, and led to her being fired by Franklin Templeton. Less well known is a similar incident this month: a white couple saw a Filipino-American man chalking “Black Lives Matter” on a wall in front of his house and called the police. The cops recognized the man as the owner of the house and left. The white man, who had been a managing director in the public finance group at the wealth-management firm Raymond James, got fired. Raymond James issued a statement: “Raymond James has zero tolerance for racism or discrimination of any kind” and the man’s actions “were inconsistent with our values”.

Firing employees who attract national attention because of racist behavior is easy, although it seems to me to be a new phenomenon. Changing the culture that allowed those people to think that they could safely act out their racism in public is much more difficult. But perhaps Citibank and other corporate giants will actually do something “to create a more equal and just society.”

While it’s important to see that America’s white leadership seems to be shifting position, what really matters is what the rest of Americans think. Here’s my scientific study of popular attitudes. I participated in the Black Lives Matter Protest for Equality on Sunday, June 7, in Jacksonville, our very local piece of the nationwide protest movement that itself is remarkable. About 100 of us stood at a major intersection with signs, many about Black Lives Matter. I watched the stream of traffic for 2 hours. Hundreds of people displayed their approval of our demonstration by waving, giving thumbs up, flashing the peace sign, raising clenched fists, and of course honking. People in and on every type of vehicle offered support: pickup trucks, Cadillacs, motorcycles, guys driving semis, sports cars, and beaters.

I saw only five expressions of disapproval: a guy with thumbs down, 2 guys with a middle finger, and 2 guys shouting “All lives matter.” In a Republican town in the rural Midwest, that informal survey might indicate a broad shift in opinions about BLM and the larger issue of racial inequality.

Here’s a final piece of evidence for anyone who is waiting eagerly or apprehensively for November. I can’t help checking Trump’s disapproval rating on the website of 538 every day. I have written before that his levels of approval and disapproval have been remarkably steady since his election, steadier than any other postwar president. Since March 2017, his disapproval level has ranged between 52% and 57%, except for a few weeks during this March and April, when disapproval briefly dipped to 50%. His approval percentage has been between 37% and 44%, again except for those weeks, when it rocketed upwards to 46%. That was the only moment during his presidency that his approval got within 4% of disapproval.

That’s the background. Since that positive blip, his ratings have gone down, but there have been so many brief ups and downs over the past 3 years, that nothing seemed to actually change. But the fall in approval and rise in disapproval has continued for two months, and the gap is now more than 14%. During the past two years, that has only been topped during a short period in January 2019. At that level, the presidential election in November would be a landslide.

Just how much skin color does matter in America is made visual in a NYTimes article that graphs the differences between white and black lives in terms of employment, income, home ownership, college completion, and life expectancy. In Minneapolis, for example, where protests have been intense, the median household income in white neighborhoods is nearly $80,000, but only $30,000 in black neighborhoods.

Some enterprising and courageous reporters asked Trump supporters at the Tulsa rally this weekend about what they teach their children about Black Lives Matter. The usual response was some version of “The protesters are radical leftists. Trump is doing everything he can for blacks. We are color blind. All lives matter.”

The attitude that racism is not worth talking about, much less fighting, has predominated in white America for decades. It meant, among other things, that police brutality, exercised within a racist context, was broadly tolerated. Now maybe the rubber band has snapped.

We’ll see.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

June 23, 2020