Nobody Asked Me But……This is Why Hillary Lost and a Fraudulent Narcissist Became President

With the release of Hillary Clinton”s book What Happened a predictable media firestorm has erupted riddled with press pundit’s punishing her once again for daring to speak her mind.  Much of the critiques of her book devolve around the premise that she should just “shut the hell up and get out of the way“.  My sense is that perhaps our press pundits are uncomfortable to have the 2016 election revisited because of their own complicity in electing a thoroughly unfit and deranged person to our nation’s highest office.  While certainly Hillary was not my favored candidate as this link shows, in comparison to voting for a racist fraud,  there was never an alternative for a sensible person.  Yet lose she did and while her biggest problem was her own inability to understand the mood of the electorate, or the real issues that disturbed people, her loss came about for many reasons that were unconnected with her own failings.

She was a wife who stood by her adulterous man

Despite the attempts to impeach Bill Clinton and the pious, pusillanimous pornography of the Starr Report, President Clinton left office a very popular person. In contrast, Hillary his wife was viewed with disdain because she chose to stay with him.  This was sexism in action and  many Americans never got over it.

There was a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy against the Clinton’s that continued up to and past the 2016 election.

It is convenient for the corporate press in America to ignore the salient fact that a group of Right Wing Billionaires, led by the Koch Brothers , has spent untold millions in influencing the United States electoral system on all levels, because of their own culpability in enabling it.  This conspiracy has worked to attack any liberal candidate with a viable chance of election and Hillary was a main target in their sights.

The Beltway Talking Heads found that disparaging her got them bigger headlines than praising her.

Even her biggest political supporters would acknowledge that Hillary is not an exciting political figure. Her insistence on discussing the detailed nuances of policy issues requires too much effort for the headline hunters to expend and make for boring headlines.  However, when it comes to lurid scandals and undocumented, wild allegations, those pundits who pretend insight get the headlines, bylines and the cable news appearance fees.

The Washington Press Corps never liked Hillary, consistently focused on her faults while ignoring her strengths, so they aren’t happy she brings it up.

As Joe Conason puts it in: Why the media wants Hillary to shut up:

“everyone knows that the Washington press corps dislikes and distrusts the former Democratic nominee. After all, several of its most eminent members have admitted their herd’s prejudice against her. But the nearly unanimous demand for her to be silent—often presented in the form of blind quotes from her alleged “friends”—cuts against normal journalistic curiosity, let alone the usual lust for fresh gossip……….

Nobody in the media is eager to hear Clinton’s perspective on that catastrophic election cycle—especially not the part about them and their performance. They would rather not reflect on why her “damned emails” were so ridiculously overemphasized. Or why Trump enjoyed constant and groveling promotion as a television spectacle. Or why journalists produced so many misleading “investigations” of the Clinton Foundation, yet so very few examinations of Trump’s longstanding connections to organized crime. Or why vital policy differences between the two candidates received a tiny fraction of media attention.”

The estimated $2 billion worth of Trump press coverage gave the aura of legitimacy to a demagogic candidate.

As the President of CBS Les Moonves put it: “Donald Trump’s candidacy might not be making America great, CBS Chairman Les Moonves said Monday, but it’s great for his company.

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump’s presidential bid.

“Most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates,” Moonves said, noting, “[t]here’s a lot of money in the marketplace.”

The 2016 campaign is a “circus,” he remarked, but “Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.”

“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” Moonves went on. “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

The political lessons that gave her husband two presidential victories no longer worked 20 years later and were actually counter productive to her campaign.

The Bill Clinton strategy of triangulation where he moved to the Right of Center politically and adopted Republican memes that then undercut their message against him were quite effective in the context of the previous 12 long years of Republican Presidents dominating the national political debate. By the time 2008 came around the situation in America had changed radically. Our country was involved in two never-ending wars, our economy had become lopsided with the wealthy garnering the lion’s share of economic benefits and people longed for change.  When Hillary ran for the nomination against a seeming political neophyte who promised change she lost by remaining a dedicated small government centrist.  Obama’s election was accompanied by a devastating financial crisis and he abandoned change, in favor of economic centrism.  While the country recovered greatly under Obama, the disparity between the One Percent and the rest of America worsened. Hillary felt constrained to run on the Obama record in an election cycle that demanded a new approach.

Hillary won the nomination by taking an insurmountable lead in State Primaries in States that would never support her.

The earliest Democratic Presidential primaries take place in States that invariably vote Republican. Clinton won these States handily and so the impression of her inevitability suffused the press and her campaign.  Hillary seemed to have been anointed as the nominee and this led to her over-confidence in the centrist thrust of her campaign.  The head of the Democratic Party Debbie Wasserman Schultz had her thumb on the scales to assure a Clinton nomination, which added to the Clinton camp’s false sense of her inevitability.

Hillary won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College

The Electoral College was a facet of the American Constitution created to diminish the power of the majority vote in a Presidential Election, because the framers had little trust in the will of the common people. It is essentially an undemocratic scheme that gives enormous power to some of the more rural and less populous States. Hillary’s campaign strategists seemingly ignored the necessity to capture the electors believing somehow that these States would be overwhelmed by the votes in the larger States.  By over confidently assuming that certain States were “in the bag” for Clinton her strategists narrowly lost crucial States and that cost her the College and the election, even as she overwhelmingly won the popular vote nationally.

The phony “Benghazi” and “E Mail” controversies hurt Clinton’s candidacy.

When it came to both those phony scandals there was actually “no there, there” and they were pushed exhaustively by the Right Wing media and so taken up by our corporate press in their usual pretense of even-handedness via false equivalency.  Such was the clamor in the press for investigations of these empty scandals that the FBI Director mistakenly believed he urgently needed to intervene to assure they were being investigated.  At the same time the obvious criminal associations of the Trump cohort, his fraudulent history and his Russian connections were mostly ignored. In the end those real Trump scandals wee ignored, his history of bankruptcy and incompetence overlooked. Our country elected a racist demagogue over an unexciting, yet highly competent centrist,  who had for years been unfairly slandered because she simply wasn’t exciting enough for our over-privileged and jaded American Press Corps. The fact she was also a woman, in our still sexist country, merely adds to our national despair and disgrace.

You’re Dead to Me Heidi Heitkamp With Your Losing Bi-Partisan Ways

To my mind the ideal of Bi-Partisanship that many purported Democrats and most of the Washington Beltway Pundits cling to is stupid and self-defeating.  Repeating themselves time and again throughout 2016 and now 2017, are news media pundits longing for the olden days of “bi-partisanship”. This is happening as we have a mentally disturbed, intellectually unfit President in charge of our nation and a Republican controlled Congress lusting over how high a tax break they can provide for the oligarchs who own them.  The Republican “Big Lie” about wanting “Tax Reform” is merely the cover they use to disguise that for them “Tax Reform” means lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans and the Corporations.  “Tax Reform”  is a reward for the One Percent for maximizing the gap between themselves and the rest of America. In the end it will always ends up costing the rest of us dearly in order to ensure that the One Percent are “rewarded“.  We know that the Corrupter-in-Chief really favors the “Tax Reform” Republican wet dream, especially because he and his corrupt family of kleptocratic desires will financially benefit.

Heidi Hetkamp hitched a ride with Trump on Air Force One today and was introduced warmly by him to a crowd in Minot.  Thus she served as a Trump stooge and he noted her presence in this manner:

“Both of the Reagan tax cuts were passed by a Democratic majority in the House, a Democratic speaker, and the vast majority of Democrats in the Senate, including a Democratic senator from the great state of North Dakota,”

As a leftist, political activist, I get at least 2 dozen E Mails daily from Democrats seeking campaign donations, even if I had no contact with their campaign.  I’ve been regularly getting requests for money from the Heitkamp team ever since she was elected in 2013.  Knowing her record and her Centrist leanings I have never responded, nor donated. To me and many others, Resistance means not cooperating with this unfit and traitorous President in any way, so as never to provide him the cover of legitimacy.  From now on her money please will go directly to spam.

Some might see my position as childish and self-defeating, arguing that cooperation is needed for government and to them my answer was given in the December 2016 post:

Knife to a Gunfight: Explaining Why We Lost:

From my perspective we need to simplify our analysis of what happened to US this time and distill it down to its’ essence.  The battles that have been fought over the soul of this country, have been waged in earnest by the representatives of aristocratic and corporate wealth since the Goldwater loss in 1964.  They represent a well-funded strategy to disseminate propaganda undermining a sense of national community and perpetrating Right Wing mythology to such a degree that it eradicates history and become accepted as fact.  While the issue of a small federal government and an antipathy to taxation have be recurrent themes in American History, it took the Right Wing Billionaires fed up at Goldwater’s debacle to hire some of the best advertising and merchandising minds to craft the mythology of “evil liberalism” coupled with the accusation that the minorities without power were inexplicably in control of everything.  With Trump’s election this strategy has reached almost complete fruition.

However, even more important in the battle between the American Right and Left Wings has been the tendency by Liberals, Progressives and Left Wing radicals to be hoisted on their own  petards of pretense.  That pretense has been that America is a Democracy under a semi-divine Constitution and that if only the country can follow the forms laid down by our Founding Fathers all will be well.  I’ve written many times, in many different ways that this is an illusion that has little to do with the real state of affairs in our country. I’ve also written about the false narrative of history that we on the Left have incorporated into our psyches to such a degree that most of us too function in a “bubble” of diminished comprehension.

Following that false narrative causes too many in the Democratic Party to rely on institutional wishful thinking like the Rule of Law,  that dictate we play by the “rules of the game”.  Yet for many of us that means existing in a psychological state of denial because deep down we Know, or we suspect the truth that this battle is a war for the well being of the many versus the autocracy of a few. A brief look at past history confirms the fact that the other side plays dirty, while we stupidly play by the “rules”.

• Nixon won election by secretly interfering with the Paris Peace Talks and prolonging the Vietnam War.
• The Watergate Scandal came to light when Nixon attempted to “bug” the Democratic Party
• Gerald Ford made a deal to pardon Nixon in order to become President
• The findings of the Church Committee that the Intelligence community was interfering in the political process were ignored.
• Reagan partisans interfered with Jimmy Carter getting the hostages released by promising arms and other benefits in what became The Iran Contra Affair.
• Bill Clinton was maneuvered into confessing adultery, after first perjuring himself by an elaborate, well financed sting operation.
• George W. Bush became President after dubious Florida voting tactics run by his brother Jeb and a SCOTUS decision unprecedented in our history.
• George W. Bush won re-election based on voter suppression and voter fraud in Ohio and John Kerry’s refusal to fight on.

By dint of a combination of voter suppression, Russian Interference,  FBI corruption,  overt racism and the “Big Lies” of Trump,  we have elected perhaps our most malevolent President. As his cabinet is formed from some of the worst elements of corporate greed, aristocratic elitism, and anti-democratic fascists,  most of us are threatened economically and socially.  the Trump and the Trump Cohort are in effect making war upon an overwhelming majority of Americans.  Yet for many in the Democratic Party establishment their response to this dire threat is to maintain the belief that in the end reason will win out over the doings of a narcissistic pathological liar.

Of the many flaws I observed in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, perhaps the most damning was the belief by her political strategists that all they had to do was to emphasize the historical nature of her candidacy and counter point it with Trump’s sexism and misogyny.  They overlooked the fact that this country is for the most part sexist (why the wage disparity?) and that many Fundamentalist Christian women believed only a man should be President.  Meanwhile,  this putrid Billionaire, whose money comes from selling an upper class brand,  was allowed to position himself as the economic savior of the middle class.  Virulently untruthful Republican campaign ads were met by cleverly bland  and obviously ineffective Democratic ads mainly showing Trump contretemps, racism and misogyny.  Never once did it occur to the Clinton Team that in truth a sizable minority of this country is sexist and racist.  The appeals to people’s higher natures fell on deaf ears.

The sad irony of all of this is that Trump ascended to the lead in the nomination battle by appealing to the racism and sexism of the Republican base.  With the nomination secured Trump actually adopted the message that Bernie Sanders had such success with, that many in the media disdained as a “populist” message.  You see just as Bill Clinton’s winning mantra was “‘it’s the economy stupid”, so Sanders had identified that the key issue in this election was exactly the unfairness of the American economic situation.  Hillary, belatedly moved towards Bernie’s position to secure her nomination, but then in the giddiness of positive polling numbers, began to retreat to he comfortable “Centrism” ,incorrectly believing she could reach out to that non-existent political cadre the oxymoronic Republican Centrists and the even more non-existent “undecideds”.

My upshot is this.  I see the battle for political power as a war between the “haves” and the “have nots” over the resources of the country.  We all know instinctively that when it comes to human affairs, “money and power” are fought for by warlike means, with no holds barred and the understanding therefore all tactics are acceptable as long as they result in victory.  Most Left Wingers,  myself definitely included, see the human condition as a need for harmony and community.  This is the thrust of most of our political action. However, when you are fighting a war against an enemy of implacable fortitude; contemptuous for the normal rule of law; and without qualms or compassion for the innocents hurt as collateral damage;  to respond to that enemy,  you mustn’t allow yourselves to be bound by chivalrous behavioral norms.

We can’t win a war with the antediluvian Conservative Corporatists by dint of weaponry, or violence, because they are already fairly violent and well armed people.  The battle to be fought is with the deadly weapon of propaganda and in Trump’s peculiar case ridicule.  This “war” needs to be fought by creating effective memes and by crafting a mythology that makes people despise our enemies.  The motto of my college was “the truth shall make us free”.  While that is a noble aspiration, we have seen in this election that the  “truth” is malleable to pathological liars and that “love does not conquer hate”.  My take on this, though many might disagree, is that “when they go low, we go lower”.  If we lose the battles to come in the next four years,  we will inexorably lose this country to a Fascism every bit as virulent as that practiced by Hitler and Mussolini. The stakes are high and they’ve got the guns.  I have to believe though that we’ve got the intelligence and the wit to prevail in the “War of Ideas”, but we need to unleash it ruthlessly, without regard for the niceties of comity.

A metaphor for my mindset is this iconic movie clip below and the surprise ending, that really shouldn’t be a surprise.  Let’s be sure we’re the ones bring a gun to the knife fight of the next four years.

 

Paul Ryan, Teddy Roosevelt, Adolph Hitler and Eugenics

Congressman Paul Ryan said: “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work. There is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” 

In a letter to Charles Davenport, a leader of the US eugenics movement and head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the epicenter of the movement, Theodore Roosevelt said: “I agree with you…that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind…Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen type of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

In the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives,” Holmes wrote. “It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices [ i.e., forced sterilization], often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Referring to Carrie Buck, the plaintiff in the case whom the state intended to sterilize, and whose mother and daughter both had been suspected by doctors to be afflicted with “feeblemindedness”, Holmes added: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The Eugenics Movement which developed in the United States in the 19^th Century and continued into the 20^th Century inspired many including Adolph Hitler: “Adolf Hitler himself had followed the eugenics movement in this country for years. In 1916, American attorney, conservationist, and arch-bigot Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, a landmark work of scientific racism that exalted people of Nordic ancestry. Hitler called the book his “Bible,” In fact after World War II the 1927 SCOTUS case was known in NAZI Germany: “Hitler was also aware of the 1927 Supreme Court ruling that gave legal sanction to eugenic sterilizations (a ruling, by the way, that’s never been overturned). Nazi leaders would later cite the Court’s decision in their own defense at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals.”

Charles Darwin’s conceptualization of evolution in his book “The Origin of the Species” sparked a scientific revolution that caused great debates in more than the scientific community. As with many great new insights, the intellectual progression that flowed outward in others thought processes sometime had consequences that were not quite what the author intended. Such was the Eugenics Movement in the United States which is the subject of this piece. Echoes of that discredited movement still exist today as illustrated by the quote above from Congressman Paul Ryan and other “Conservative” politicians and activists. Let’s look at the beginnings of the Eugenics Movement to see how it influences us even today.

“Adolf Hitler read racial hygiene tracts during his imprisonment in Landsberg Prison.[10] He thought that Germany could become strong again only if the state applied the principles of racial hygiene and eugenics to German society.

Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream.[11] These had to be removed quickly. He also believed that the strong and the racially pure should be encouraged to have more children, and that the weak and the racially impure should be neutralized by one means or another.[citation needed]

The racialism and idea of competition, termed social Darwinism in 1944, were discussed by European scientists and also in the Vienna press during the 1920s. Where Hitler picked up the ideas is uncertain. The theory of evolution had been generally accepted in Germany at the time but this sort of extremism was rare.[12] In 1876, Ernst Haeckel had discussed the selective infanticide policy of the Greek city of ancient Sparta.[13]

In his Second Book, which was unpublished during the Nazi era, Hitler praised Sparta, adding that he considered Sparta to be the first “Völkisch State”. He endorsed what he perceived to be an early eugenics treatment of deformed children:

“Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics

We see that Hitler was influenced by a movement that began in our country and in fact influenced some of the most important Americans in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries. Much of this movement was thought of as science and its originators were regarded in their time as scientists. Let’s look at how this came about:

Eugenics, as a modern concept, was originally developed by Francis Galton. It has roots in France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States in the 1860s-1870s.[5] American William Goodell (lived from 1829 to 1894) advocated castration and spaying of the insane.[6] Mortality rates from “Battey’s operation”, the surgical removal of healthy ovaries, was as high as one in five deaths at the time, but the surgery kept being performed.[7]

Francis Galton had read his half-cousin Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution, which sought to explain the development of plant and animal species, and desired to apply it to humans. Galton believed that desirable traits were hereditary based on biographical studies.[8] In 1883, one year after Darwin’s death, Galton gave his research a name: “eugenics”.[9] Throughout its recent history, eugenics has remained a controversial concept.[10] As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century. At this point in time, eugenics was practiced around the world and was promoted by governments, and influential individuals and institutions. Many countries enacted[11] various eugenics policies and programmes, including: genetic screening, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and segregation of the mentally ill from the rest of the population), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, and genocide. Most of these policies were later regarded as coercive or restrictive, and now few jurisdictions implement policies that are explicitly labelled as eugenic or unequivocally eugenic in substance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

Though the Eugenics Movement took hold in many countries and infamously Germany, our own country was greatly influenced by the Eugenics Movement. Not coincidentally the movement’s history in the U.S. coincided with the end of slavery and the massive immigration’s needed for America’s industrial revolution.

“Eugenics, the social movement claiming to improve the genetic features of human populations through selective breeding and sterilization,[1] based on the idea that it is possible to distinguish between superior and inferior elements of society,[2] played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States prior to its involvement in World War II.[3]

“Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany[4] and U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter.[5][6][7] Stefan Kühl has documented the consensus between Nazi race policies and those of eugenicists in other countries, including the United States, and points out that eugenicists understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their goals and demands.[5]

A hallmark of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th century, now generally associated with racist and nativist elements (as the movement was to some extent a reaction to a change in emigration from Europe) rather than scientific genetics, eugenics was considered a method of preserving and improving the dominant groups in the population.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

After seeing the horrors of World War II, the popularity of the Eugenics movement waned in the U.S.. However, the upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement, with its offshoots branching into dealing with other oppression of people deemed “different”, aspects of “eugenicist” ideas crept in using coded words like “crime”, “urban” and “inner city”. The election of our first Black President was so traumatic for segments of our population that they have even begun to drop the use of “code” and are openly bemoaning the possibility of the loss of dominance by the “White Race”. Politicians of the “stature” of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul though, with higher political aspirations, still talk in “code” as they appeal to those groups such as the “Tea Party” who are motivated by racial privilege. However, in earlier times in America code was “less coded”.

“The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton, which originated in the 1880s. Galton studied the upper classes of Britain, and arrived at the conclusion that their social positions were due to a superior genetic makeup.[8] Early proponents of eugenics believed that, through selective breeding, the human species should direct its own evolution. They tended to believe in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples; supported strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws; and supported the forcible sterilization of the poor, disabled and “immoral”.[9]

“The American eugenics movement received extensive funding from various corporate foundations including the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune.[6] In 1906 J.H. Kellogg provided funding to help found the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan.[8] The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was founded in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1911 by the renowned biologist Charles B. Davenport, using money from both the Harriman railroad fortune and the Carnegie Institution. As late as the 1920s, the ERO was one of the leading organizations in the American eugenics movement.[8][10] In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard, Harry H. Laughlin, and the conservationist Madison Grant (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the “unfit”. Davenport favored immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods; Goddard favored segregation in his The Kallikak Family; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.[11] The Eugenics Record Office later became the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.”

Some of the wealthiest Americans and their corporations provided the wealth to empower the Eugenics Movement, just as today some of the wealthiest Americans and their corporations funded the movements to neuter Barack Obama and to impose upon the U.S. their views on ensuring that the “mob” doesn’t rule. Then too were those in the early Progressive Movement who also endorsed the Eugenics view:

“Others who supported eugenics included Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist and progressive activist who was the first woman to run for president; the inventor Alexander Graham Bell (who later moved away from the movement); foundations connected with the Carnegies, the Harrimans and the Rockefellers, which donated large sums toward eugenics research; professors at leading universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins; and editorialists of the New York Times. Bruinius also fingers Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate who founded the American Birth Control League, the predecessor to Planned Parenthood, as having sympathy for eugenics; though Sanger did say many suspect things, her closeness to the movement has been questioned and rejected by her supporters. Then there was Theodore Roosevelt, who, in a letter to the eugenicist Charles Davenport in 1913, hoped that “Someday we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/

Theodore Roosevelt had always seemed to me to be a great President. He was the political leader of the Progressive Movement in the U.S. And as the history I learned in school taught me fought against corporate interests. The history I learned in High School though, was hardly the most in depth history available. My disillusion with Teddy Roosevelt became concrete when I read a book by Richard Slotkin called “Gunfighter Nation” in the early 1990’s and have since re-read it three times:

In Gunfighter nation: the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America (Atheneum, 1992), the concluding volume of his highly acclaimed trilogy, Slotkin draws on a wide range of sources to examine the pervasive influence of Wild West myths on American culture and politics. In the third of a three-volume study in the development of the myth of the frontier in US literary, popular, and political culture from the colonial period to the present, Slotkin covers the expression of the frontier myth in such popular culture phenomena as dime novels, Buffalo Bill‘s Wild West, the formula fiction of 1900-40, and the Hollywood film. Covering historiography, Slotkin also discusses the exploration of the significance of the American frontier experience in Theodore Roosevelt‘s The Winning of the West and Frederick Jackson Turner‘s The Significance of the Frontier in American History. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Slotkin#Gunfighter_Nation

Slotkin in delineating how the “myth of the Cowboy” so influenced our country, writes extensively about TR’s theories influenced by the author Frederick Jackson Turner. Roosevelt believed that the “Anglo-Saxon” race was the most highly developed of all the “races” and that it was their duty to assume “stewardship” over all the more inferior racial types. The links I’ve provided thus far and the links below I think make my case very well and I encourage the reader to follow them because much of the information might be new, as it has been for me.

What is my point though? I believe that “eugenics” was never the result of true scientific inquiry. What it was instead was a means for intelligent people to rationalize their own prejudice and for self interested people to rationalize their own selfishness. America is and has been a country where prejudice against the “other” has played a central role in our political dynamics. I voted for Barack Obama because I felt he represented my personal political interests. As his terms  played out for the most part I’ve been disappointed because in truth he represents he kind of moderate republicanism that I grew up disgusted with in the 50’s and 60’s. When I see the various “conservative” forces criticize him as a “communist”, “fascist”, “commufascist” and dictator” I know that what is really in play is that he is a Black man. In truth he is a moderately conservative, fairly ineffective President of the Bill Clinton stripe who has caved in to most of the principles that got him elected. The hatred of our President is so deep among so many because of the color of his skin, because other than that conservatives should be delighted with him.

Beyond the obvious racism though there is another strain. A strain that runs through the minds of many who are in the elite of this country, just as it was in the minds of those like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Bell and Roosevelt in the 19^th Century. They saw themselves then and they see themselves now as the “worthy elite” destined by fate, or God, to rule over the “masses”, whose lowlier position is the result of their own innate inferiority. The distinction so ofter raised between “the producers” and “the takers” is an expression of this. When Mitt Romney “privately” said to a group of wealthy donors that 47% percent of the population paid no taxes, with the implication that they were a “burden” on his class, that was an expression of the attitude that gave birth to eugenics. Naturally, neither Paul Ryan, nor Teddy Roosevelt are comparable to the monster Adolf Hitler, but they endorse and endorsed policies that make/made it possible for a person like Hitler to capture the public imagination in times of stress. American eugenic “scientists” worked with the infamous NAZI Dr. Joseph Mengele http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mengele known for his disgusting “scientific” experiment at Auschwitz. As my father used to say: “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions”.

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/hitlers_favorite_american_biological_fascism_in_the_shadow_of_new_york_city/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439×2468536

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism_in_the_United_States

http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/

http://traditionalliberalism.blogspot.com/2011/10/progressive-era-eugenics.html

Fighting the Thugs For the Future of Our Country

Politics throughout the 5,000 years of known human history has always been a brutal battle for dominance,  where the only rule is win or die.  I know that this is an awful state of affairs,  especially for those like myself who dream of a harmonious humanity.  Yet by not recognizing this underlying dynamic, those of us on the Left Wing of the political spectrum, are at an extreme disadvantage in our political struggles.  Here on the Left, we are bound together by the belief that humans can live together in a society of legal equality and economic fairness, celebrating the  beauty of our own complex diversity.  We believe that given the right conditions humanity will act in harmony for the common good.  We Left Wingers believe this, despite humanity’s six millennia of violence and warfare resulting from struggles for dominance.

Those on the Right Wing of the political spectrum share a pessimism about the good in humanity.  They embrace the notion that all life is a struggle for dominance and so the only true measure of an individual’s life is the wealth and power they have achieved. Their belief is not without some substance, given recorded history’s sagas of people destroying each other in bloody struggles for domination, waged with genocidal fervor.

Thus those on the Right can fairly be said to be the political skeptics and cynics. While those on the Left are in the main political idealists.  If the Right’s perspective is valid, then what flows from it is the belief that society should be governed by those who have risen to the top of the “social ladder” despite how that status has been achieved. If the Left’s perspective is valid, then the governance and the fruits of society should be shared by all.  Now obviously those are simplistic formulations and the tremendous diversity and complexity of political philosophies across the spectrum provides the evidence that is the case. However, as I see it these simplistic explanations of the political differences between Left and Right Wingers can be helpful in understanding the chaos of our American political system.

An article at Alternet demonstrates the reality that our American political Right Wing is only interested in winning power in order to advance their agenda.  The fact that The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory By Thom Hartmann, should come as no shock to those paying close attention to the American political scene. in the present, most of us are still in a state of shock caused by the continuing revelations of how Trump became President abetted by Russia,  the FBI Director and a cacophony of falsehoods about Hillary Clinton spread by billionaire oligarchs such as Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch. As the Alternet article shows, fraud and deception directly led to the elections of Republican Presidents,  at least since Nixon covertly sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks. Those talks might have ended the War in Vietnam in 1968 saving the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians. The case made by Thom Hartmann  is irrefutable because it has become generally accepted history born out by subsequent Congressional investigations.

Add to the above, the massive Right Wing efforts to De-legitimize the past three Democraticis Presidents and the solidity of the Republicans in Congress actively refusing to cooperate in governing with them. Perhaps the two most egregious and thuggish examples of this Republican intransigence is the stealing of a Supreme Court Justice and the ongoing, concerted efforts to destroy a Health Care Plan, that is actually the creation of a Right Wing think tank.  In the former we have a Republican controlled Senate that refused to even give a hearing to the Obama Supreme Court nominee, a Judge who most Republicans actually thought highly of.  In the latter,  the Affordable Care Act,  a plan implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and developed by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation think tank was vehemently vilified simply because it was proposed by a Democratic President.

The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this is that the representative of Right Wing politics in America,  the Republican Party, is interested more in achieving absolute power, than in positively contributing to the governing of these United States.  The Republican political philosophy glories in a belief that “the end justifies the means” and that “end” is certainly the accelerated accretion of wealth and power by the top “One Percent“, the American Oligarchs. From my perspective the only way to characterize those who believe that “the end justifies the means” is as “Thugs“.  When the word “Thug“  is used in English it connotes a violent criminal, unbound by the normal conventions of society.  The translation  into politics yields individuals who are more than willing to go outside of the legal boundaries for gaining elective office in America and who are willing to violate the political norms that have been established throughout the 241 years since the American Revolution began.

The overwhelming majority of the Republican politicians today are either actively “Thugs“,  or cowardly individuals afraid to tarnish their own political fortunes by opposing the “Thugs” who lead their party.  That is how that fraudulent epitome of a “Thug“  became President,  with the large majority of Republicans in Congress pretending that he is somehow “normal” and a leader to emulate and respect.  If you accept my premise, than those of us committed to RESISTING Trump the Thug and his cohort of Republican thuggery,  desperately need to  understand that these goons will use our own dedication to fairness against us.  We are Liberals, Progressives and Socialists directly because we Do Not Believe that “the end justifies  the means” and so it does appear that we are “bringing a knife to a gunfight”.

I believe that the answer Does Not lie in abandoning our moral compass that ”that the end DOES NOT justify the means” nor does it lie in appeasing these “Thugs” via the blissful ignorance of bi-partisan cooperation.  The path of our Resistance must be trod with our understanding that we are opposing a movement that will always descend to Thuggery when victory is at stake.  We can oppose this while remaining true to ourselves and to our beliefs. Let me present an example of a missed oppportunity that derives from our still painful political history.

“In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency – Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for the law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did.  (No Thomas recusal, either.)

And more than a year after the election – a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount in Florida – manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year – and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.

Why? because the 9/11 attacks had just happened – and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already in crisis.

And none of that even considered that Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s rolls just before the election.

So for the third time in 4 decades – Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances.  Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one.

And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.” Here.

What we tend to forget about that sad moment in American history is that not only did Al Gore give up the fight too soon, he could have won it decisively since as Vice President he could the have continued the fight:

“On January 6, 2001, a joint session of Congress met to certify the electoral vote. Twenty members of the House of Representatives, most of them Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rose one-by-one to file objections to the electoral votes of Florida. However, pursuant to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, any such objection had to be sponsored by both a representative and a senator. No senator would co-sponsor these objections, deferring to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Therefore, Gore, who presided in his capacity as President of the Senate, ruled each of these objections out of order.” See Here

Gore’s mistake and indeed the continuing mistake of most Democratic Party politicians is that that believe their Republican counterparts should be treated as colleagues, rather than as the “Thugs” that they have become in the last 53 years. Their “thuggery” is the result of their selling out to a group of Radical Right Wing Oligarchs bent on destroying the last vestiges of democratic governance in our Republic and willing to use any means to bring this about.

Our task in our Resistance must be to maintain our ideals, while simultaneously understanding that our foes are ruthless in their determination to achieve power and so we can never yield to them by pretending that they are engaging in normative politics.  Al Gore should have never acceded to the “thuggery” of a stolen election and to the chicanery of a SCOTUS ruling by justices of a partisan stripe.  Yes that would have caused a Constitutional Crisis, but can we allow the blackmail of a threatened Constitutional Crisis, give power to illegitimate authority? The incompetent mountebank Trump gained office by colluding with a hostile foreign power, by widespread purging of voter rolls and with the help of a media too afraid to expose his checkered history. Our Resistance must Never accept that this fraud is a legitimate President and we must oppose all efforts to cast him as anything other than an illegitimate fraud who stole the Presidency.

While I have never been a fan of either Hillary or Bill Clinton,  I nevertheless voted for her in the November election because there was simply no alternative for any thinking person and it was no contest that she was the only qualified candidate.  In this disastrous aftermath, we see  Hillary chided by mainstream pundits for her continuing to assert the obvious that this was a stolen election.  She and WE must continue to voice the truth about this fraudulent past election and about the continuing efforts of these “Thugs” whose aim is an Aristocratic Oligarchy, rather than a democratic government.

 

American Oligarchy, Over and Over Again

It occurred to me a long time ago that part of the problem we are dealing with in this country is the fact that our America is and has been an oligarchy, rather than the democracy, that we all pretend it is. This link is a key to much of what I have written about this idea through the years: https://elephanttail.wordpress.com/?s=oligarchy. While I certainly see myself as prescient, I have no illusion that my views are unique, nor am I the first to have had this perspective. Today at Alternet.com I read an article that articulates the truth about our beloved country, which I think is a must read, because we who are committed to resisting the Right Wing assault upon America, must understand who really is the enemy and what is their strategy.  Here is a reprint of the article:

The Greatest Story Too Rarely Told: America Is an Oligarchy

Our nation is controlled by corporate power and the individually wealthy, and the major press is in on the con. OK. Enough. It’s time to quit being balanced or whatever other euphemism the elite establishment media uses to justify ignoring the two biggest elephants in our national living room.

After Trump was elected there was a lot of concern about allowing his idiocy to become the “new normal.” But in truth, we’ve been accepting an unacceptable level of insanity in our national body politic for decades now.

Elephant number one is the fact that the Republican Party has come unhinged and it’s dragging us back to the Dark Ages.

Literally. To be a Republican today you have to have complete disdain for facts, reality, empiricism, the scientific method, or any of the other underpinnings of the Enlightenment. This isn’t merely a difference between two legitimate philosophies as the press insists on portraying it; rather, it is a self-limiting time bomb that is destroying any hope of a prosperous economy or a functioning society, not to mention our country’s standing in the world and the habitability of our planet.

The evidence is overwhelming. For starters, there’s the insane denial of climate change when records are dropping like stones.

February 2016 was an astounding 1.35 C (2.43 F) warmer than the average temperature for February based on the period from 1951 to 1980. That smashed the previous record for a monthly temperature increase by .21 C, another record. Oh, and that previous monthly record? It was set in January. February’s 1.35 C increase was dangerously close to the 1.5 C increase that most scientists agree is as high as we can go without incurring serious and irreversible consequences.

Meanwhile, 16 of the hottest 17 years on record have occurred since 2000. The last three decades have also set records for the warmest decade on record, and this decade is on track to exceed them.

Or consider that the National Snow and Ice Data center announced that in 2016 and 2015 the Arctic sea ice maximum set a record for the lowest it’s been since records have been kept, both breaking the previous record which was set—you guessed it—in 2014.

To deny the existence of climate change in the face of this kind of data is irrational. Saying so is not partisan or biased, it’s simply an accurate description of their behavior. The same is true of the GOP’s position on health care, national budgets, state budgets, and tax policy. In all cases their policies are counterfactual and counterproductive.

Doubt that? Consider the collapse of the economy in Kansas after they adopted supply-side and trickle-down-economics. Or the fact that the three biggest economic collapses in U.S. history followed periods when the Republicans were in control and they’d implemented their destructive laissez-faire economic policies. Or watch as they fumble with health care, literally threatening death to hundreds of thousands in the process, and leaving 22 million more Americans uninsured.

But the press still covers all this in a way that is “balanced,” rather than accurate. Oh, yes, they will often point out that the Republican “perspective” is opposed by most scientists, or that economists and health care specialists take issue with their proposals, but they don’t point out just how at odds their rhetoric is with reality. And that’s the real story here. It’s not that there are two different perspectives on climate, or the economy, or the consequences of taxation and fiscal policies or health care. It’s that this Party is behaving as if it were literally insane. And that should be newsworthy. Throw in Trump’s irrational, self-destructive and contradictory tweets, and the press should be running above-the-fold headlines and lead stories sounding the alarm.

Which raises the question, why aren’t they?

Well, they’re wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate America, that’s why. That’s who this four-decade long scam benefits, at least in the short-term. They get to liquidate the earth and the environment for fun and profit with nothing but he-said/she-said stories from the elite establishment media.

Which brings us to elephant number two—the Democrats’ embrace of the raw deal over the New Deal.

The idea that there is a party representing the left (or the people, for that matter) in the U.S. is ludicrous. We have a right-wing party representing the oligarchy—the Democrats—and an insanely right-wing party—the Republicans—that represents an extremist fringe of the rich, including folks like the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos etc. More about this in a moment, but back to the Democrats for now.

Back before Bill Clinton brought “triangulation,” centrism and corporatism to the Democratic Party, about half of all eligible voters claimed to be Democrats, while only about 25 percent identified as Republican. Today, only about 29 percent identify as Democrat, and too many of them don’t bother to vote because the choices are so abysmal.

In a race between those appealing to the passionately ignorant with contentious wedge issues and those paying lip service to progressivism while governing for plutocrats, the passionately ignorant will always win.

Now back to those rich folks who have created the right-wing revolution. In what has been the least reported, but most important issue of our times, a group of wealthy individuals essentially purchased the press and both parties.

The bones of the takeover can be found in a memo drafted by Lewis Powell, dated Aug. 23, 1971. In it, he outlined a systematic approach to turning the country to the right and making it more business friendly. He focused on the long term, on institution building, and on influencing education at all levels, including what kind of textbooks should be allowed. He noted that most media outlets were owned by corporations, and thus, could be made to represent the perspective of corporate America. Powell’s manifesto repeatedly used the terms “fair” and “balanced.” Ring a bell?

Of course, any good coup needs resources, and that’s where the right-wing fat cats come in. A cadre of uber-wealthy ultra-conservatives including Richard Scaiffe, Adolph Coors, the Koch brothers (as well as their father, who helped fund the John Birch Society), Alice and Jim Walton, John Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and Betsy DeVos helped fund think tanks, foundations and endowed university chairs designed to carry forward their assault on government, a mindless celebration of the free market, and a system that rewards the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. They also fostered measures designed to initially roll back laws designed to assure the media functioned in an impartial manner and ultimately, once those laws were rolled back, to purchase it outright.

Today, there is a virtual army of think tanks that are paid to make the crazy sound sane, to lend legitimacy to the illegitimate, and to tamp down any signs of reason among the citizenry with a mixture of fear, hate, greed, blame, and xenophobia.

But the coup remains the greatest story never told, and the pretense of a left/right political dialectic goes on, with useful idiots like Democratic “strategist” Mark Penn suggesting we take the middle ground between the extreme right wing and the merely right wing, compromising ourselves into the Dark Ages.

Written By:  John Atcheson

Republican Racism Made Trump Their Logical Choice and So Opposing Racism is a Key Element of Resistance

One dominant theme of American politics, often its’ most dominant theme is racism. This is particularly true as it applies to those Americans we call “Black“,  an appellation which itself reflects a bigoted pseudo-science Eugenics.  The history of our America, rising to its’ position of economic and military world dominance, owes much of its’ success to the cruel enslavement of African people and its’ genocidal destruction of Native Americans. This is a fact so obvious and true that I won’t reprise the arguments for its’ truth that I made in more than 100 posts I’ve written and made available at this Link.  For the dominant White European culture in America, it has been hard for many to acknowledge the truth that their country was created through the work, upon the backs and with the genocide of those we viciously abused to sustain our White Privilege.  The 2016 Election, that gave us a despicable con man as President was primarily due to the racism so few Americans are willing to openly acknowledge.  While many pretend that Trump’s nomination and election were due to other less sensitive factors, like the economic insecurity of White Blue Collar workers,  the election was won because of the candidates’ racism conflated with his religious bigotry.

Although the Trump candidacy was presented as an anomaly by much of the main stream media and Republican stalwarts, the truth was that Trump was the inevitable result of a conscious decision of the Republican Party to capture the Southern States from the electoral hold of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, Party of the “Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln,  far from being the “principled purveyor of Conservative philosophy” has become since Richard Nixon’s election, the party of racism and its’ doppelganger xenophobia.  The emphasis must be put on racism though, because the Nixon “Southern Strategy” that won the South for the Republicans for five decades up to now,  was covertly, yet overtly racist.

Now “Ronald Reagan, The Gipper believed that conservatism was a three-legged stool, consisting of religious conservatives, national security conservatives, and economic/libertarian conservatives. For Reagan, each one of these legs was integral.” Here.

What Reagan’s “conservative belief” was really,  according to one of his speech-writer’s,   “putting lipstick on a pig” (using a “Palin-ism”), to disguise the truth that the Republican Party is the party of racism.  The base of the Republican Party are the inheritors of the old southern racist traditions, hidden under a plethora of code words used to dissimulate,  a patina of conservative “respectability,” to add philosophical pseudo-gravitas and a deconstruction of Christian mythos presenting Jesus as a capitalist entrepreneur. Ronnie Reagan presented himself as a devout Christian, while never bothering to go to church and was idolized by evangelicals for seeming to speak their language. Reagan was devoutly militaristic, yet had spent World War II comfortably making military propaganda shorts, while fellow Hollywood stars served in harm’s way. Reagan was a one-time union President who sold out many of his members by becoming an FBI informant rooting out communists. Reagan,  was an intellectually shallow man, whose core “philosophical” beliefs were expressed in “the speech” known as “A Time for Choosing”,  which he probably crafted with the help of  GE(General Electric)’s public relations department.

“On October 27, a week before the [1964] election, the Goldwater campaign ran a national telecast of an address called “A Time for Choosing” that Reagan made on Goldwater’s behalf. If the pundits had been blessed with a crystal ball, they would have ignored Goldwater’s defeat and studied every syllable of that speech, every camera angle, every facial expression. For The Speech is one of those uncanny cultural artifacts that contains within it not just words, gestures, and ideas, but a future.

Reagan had been delivering The Speech, in various versions, for years—for General Electric. The company had hired him to do an unusual double job: to host its weekly TV show, General Electric Theater, and to tour the country making motivational speeches to its 250,000 employees. GE was no ordinary company. It carefully cultivated its image as a bastion of free enterprise and as a loyal corporate community. It saw its mission as selling not only lightbulbs and appliances but an entire way of life—one for which Reagan himself became an advertisement. GE fitted out his Pacific Palisades home with the latest electric gadgets— and also fitted Reagan out as a spokesman for its free market, anti-union, anti-Communist, anti-welfare creed. Reagan spread GE’s conservative gospel to the company’s employees, and also to community groups, Rotary Clubs, and schools across the country.

It was a perfect job for Reagan. Although he had been a union leader in Hollywood, from 1947 heading the Screen Actors Guild through the most fraught years of the cold war, he was by temperament and belief a company man. His bitter fight with unionists who he was convinced were Communists, trying to take over Hollywood on orders from Moscow, had led him to fear for his life and to work as an FBI informer. So Reagan tirelessly crisscrossed the country for GE, polishing his speech, convincing workers that they were part of a big, happy family, honing anti-government punch lines that would appeal to business leaders.”  See here.

Perhaps the most telling nuance about where the Reagan team was coming from was in the fact that directly after his nomination at the Republican Convention for the Presidency in 1980, his campaign’s opening speech was given in Philadelphia, Mississippi where 16 years before “was the scene of the murders of activists James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker, also from New York. Their deaths demonstrated the risks that activists took to secure the constitutional rights of African Americans, but many more blacks than whites had been killed in the struggle.

Ku Klux Klan members (including Cecil Ray Price, the deputy sheriff of Neshoba County) released the three young men from jail, took them to an isolated spot, and killed them. They buried them in an earthen dam. It was some time after they disappeared before the bodies were discovered, as a result of an FBI investigation and national media attention.^[5] The national outrage over their deaths helped procure support for Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The murders and related conspiracy gave rise to the “Mississippi Burning” trial, United States v. Price.

The opening lines of Reagan’s speech that day were: “I believe in states’ rights … I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.”  Given the history of Philadelphia, Mississippi, given that this town was a backwater except for its infamy in those three murders,  could there be any clearer statement of the racism and bigotry behind Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party that now embraces him as their guiding Saint?

So returning to the present,  Trump ran a campaign with no specifics other than the demonization of Latino’s,  support for the police via the murders of Black people and the promise of reprisals against Muslims both in the U.S. and overseas.  This was the key to Trump’s success and that key had little to do with his Conservative ideological fervor,  nor with his embrace of religious principles.  Trump even received more evangelical votes in Indiana then did Ted Cruz, demonstrating that religious bigotry and Christian bigotry are inter-related.

What of those doyens of Republicanism who are currently eschewing Trump, by labeling him  with the “not conservative” tagline?  Their angst seem to me to be “Crocodile Tears”. Surely they don’t hate Trump because of  bigotry, because if that were true, how can they explain the bigotry of the party they’ve supported all these years since Nixon.  What these conveyors of conservative civility are really upset about is that Trump blows the cover off of the covert racism that has held their party together all these years and is the source of their strength in their “Red” States.

While Bill Clinton was hated and anathematized by Republicans,  their leaders in Congress nevertheless worked with him behind the scenes to pass legislation. That most of that legislation represented Clinton’s forsaking Democratic Party principles, I’ve dealt with elsewhere.  However, Republicans in Congress did work with Bill Clinton, yet they steadfastly refused to do so with Barack Obama.  Anyone who believed that Barack Obama is politically much different from Bill Clinton hasn’t been paying attention.  Purportedly the opposition to Obama was because Obama was alternately a dictator, a Nazi, a Communist, Muslim, or a native born Kenyan.  The truth, which is so obvious is that Barack Obama is a Black man and as such from the Republican perspective, unfit to be President.  While the nonsense of the “Birther” movement raged,  the leadership of the GOP was loath to come to the defense of our President.  When the “Tea Party” took the reins from the “birthers”,  there was also a strange, strained silence from the Republican Establishment, as that faction played out the same vitriol against our Black President.

Now as the man who wrested the leadership of the “Birther” movement away from its founders, has achieved the Presidency,  the bigoted hatred of our country’s first Black President moved clearly out of the shadows. It gave lie to the racist, bigoted Republican code words of the last 50 years and places the Republican’s squarely in the overt racist camp. A spate of recent articles about how racism was the key factor in Trump’s election was touched off by political science Professor Thomas Wood at the Washington Post in writing this piece: Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism,  who concluded that “Racial attitudes made a bigger difference in electing Trump than authoritarianism.”

An article by Amanda Marcotte in Slate:  New election analysis: Yes, it really was blatant racism that gave us President Donald Trump extensively quotes:

“Sean McElwee, a policy analyst for Demos and frequent contributor to Salon, published a statistical analysis last week, based on data collected by the American National Election Studies that clearly demonstrates that racism, rather than economic insecurity, was the primary factor that helped push Trump over the top. This is just the latest in a growing body of research demonstrating that Trump’s racist appeals were what moved his voters. “Economic anxiety” may exist to some degree, but it was not what drove so many white people to vote for Trump in November.”

The Washington Monthly,  a centrist news-site’s piece The Strange Role of Racism in the 2016 Election concludes:

“The election was lost because low income/rural white voters who voted for Obama decided to vote for Trump. Ironically, racism played a big role in the flip even though almost everyone expected the opposite to happen (that without a black candidate, the Democrats would do better with the racists).”

The battle to be faced by those of us who are determined to RESIST  Donald Trump and his Republican Party,  will not be about economics per se, but about the racism that still permeates this country after so many struggles to eradicate it.  Once again we are again fighting for the “soul of OUR nation”.  I wish I was more optimistic about how it will all turn out,  but nevertheless I am committed to the struggle.  Let us be perfectly clear though, the keystone of this struggle is about the racism of Trump and of his Republican Party.