Delaware Liberal

The November 21, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

The kids are alright.

Thomas Friedman: “Steve Jobs and Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, starting the smartphone revolution that is now putting an internet-connected computer in the palm of everyone on the planet. In late 2006, Facebook, which had been confined to universities and high schools, opened itself to anyone with an email address and exploded globally. Twitter was created in 2006, but took off in 2007… In time, 2007 may be seen as one of the greatest technological inflection points in history. And we completely missed it.”

“Why? 2008.”

“Yes, right when our physical technologies leapt ahead, many of what the Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker calls our ‘social technologies’ — all of the rules, regulations, institutions and social tools people needed to get the most out of this technological acceleration and cushion the worst — froze or lagged. In the best of times social technologies have a hard time keeping up with physical technologies, but with the Great Recession of 2008 and the political paralysis it engendered, this gap turned into a chasm. A lot of people got dislocated in the process.”

“In the days since Hillary Clinton’s stunning electoral defeat to Donald Trump, the vacuum she left atop the Democratic Party hasn’t gone unfilled,” Politico reports. “Elizabeth Warren has moved aggressively to occupy the space, a timely reminder to the party and its most ambitious members that all roads to 2020 — not to mention 2018 — go through her.”

The New York Times quotes from Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, published in 1998, which predicted our current situation:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

President-elect Donald Trump “has turned the vital, but normally inscrutable, process of forming a government into a Trump-branded, made-for-television spectacle, parading his finalists for top administration positions this weekend before reporters and the world,” the New York Times reports.

“The two days unfolded like a pageant, with the many would-be officials striding up the circular driveway at Trump National Golf Club here, meeting Mr. Trump below three glass chandeliers at the entrance and shaking hands while facing the cameras. To build suspense, Mr. Trump offered teasing hints about coming announcements.”

“House Republican leaders, looking to jump-start Donald Trump’s presidency, have already begun to map out an ambitious agenda for early next year. On the early to do-list, according to leadership insiders: repealing a host of late-issued Obama administration regulations, muscling through tax reform and dismantling Obamacare,” Politico reports.

“House members and staffers can say goodbye to their three-day weekends and lengthy recesses — at least for a while. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who’s currently devising the 2017 House schedule, is likely to keep lawmakers in D.C. on Mondays and Fridays, a stark departure from the three-day weeks that have become routine in the chamber.”

That’s Alec Baldwin responding to Trump.

New York Times: “Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead surged above 1.72 million on Sunday night, with millions of votes still to count. At 1.3 percentage points, she has built a lead not seen in a losing campaign since Rutherford B. Hayes’ bitterly disputed election of 1876.”

“The 2016 results have no such disputes, however. Mrs. Clinton’s lead keeps rising on her strength in California, where her margin stands at 29 percentage points, up from President Obama’s 23 percentage points 2012. She has failed to close the gap in any of the swing states that she lost, though Mr. Trump’s lead in Michigan has dwindled to 11,612 votes, a bad night in Tiger Stadium.”

Patrick Eddington at Just Security writes—The Islamophobia Administration:

Trump, Bannon, Sessions, Pompeo, former DIA Director (and Trump National Security Adviser designee) Mike Flynn, and Trump transition team adviser and long-time Islamophobe Frank Gaffney are poised to further derange our counterterrorism policy. By increasing the demonization and stigmatization of Arab or Muslim immigrants, they will legitimize the ISIS narrative that America is at war with Islam as a whole—giving public relations oxygen to Salafist-oriented terrorist organizations from Africa to Southeast Asia, facilitating their recruitment efforts globally.

Even more ominously, if Trump picks similar Islamophobes to lead the Department of Homeland Security and fill out sub-cabinet positions with the Department of Justice, Arab- and Muslim-Americans will see still more of their tax dollars go to potentially fund the persecution of them and their families. Some key positions in DHS—namely the Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer and the head of DHS’s Office of Community Partnerships (the department’s “countering violent extremism” office)—do not require Senate confirmation. Some of Gaffney’s acolytes have already been floated as possible Trump national security team members in slots that the Senate will have no say over. The implications are truly chilling.

E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—What Democrats owe the country:

However attractive an old-fashioned let’s-pass-good-stuff strategy might seem, the alarming signals emanating from Trump Tower require more than politics as usual.

If Democrats do not issue very clear warnings and lay out very bright lines against the most odious and alarming aspects of Trumpism, they will be abdicating their central obligation as the party of opposition. This is not a time for ideological and factional positioning or for focusing on the 2018 elections.

Before they even get to infrastructure, Democrats and all other friends of freedom must make clear that if Trump abandons the basic norms of our democracy, all the roads in the world won’t pave over his transgressions.

In “Should Democrats Work With Donald Trump? Only under the following extremely stringent conditions,” Jim Newell writes at slate.com, “Since Election Day, Democrats of all stripes have signaled a willingness to work with the president-elect on issues of common concern. Specifically, they’ve broadcast their interest in helping Donald Trump follow through on his vow to fix the nation’s ailing roads, bridges, and grids….Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat representing Phoenix, said that Trump’s “infrastructure plan is really a privatization scheme, rife with graft and corruption, whose real purpose is to enrich the Trump family and his supporters.”…To whatever extent Democratic senators work with Trump on these proposals, they should work extra hard to block the rest of his agenda. They should fight mass deportations, hard. They should fight appointments, like Jeff Sessions’ for attorney general, hard. They should walk out of Congress if Trump moves forward with a “Muslim registry.” They should use all the leverage they can possibly muster in the appropriations process to block rollbacks of the social safety net. If they do it right, they can show that they’ll work with Trump on areas where he meets their interests, on their terms, while also making it known that they’re not, in any way, interested in seeing this president serve a second term.”

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