Why do Progressives believe that Donald Trump will not help unify the country?

Neither Progressives nor Conservatives are hopeful that the United States (its citizens, voters, or elected officials) is about to unify anytime soon. Divisive thinking is now pervasive in the culture and has become systemic. Systemic conditions are extremely difficult to change.

As an example, a business culture can become so systemic that even getting rid of some of the people in the organization and replacing them with others rarely changes the entire business culture. Often, the new hires (at any level of the company) evolve to conform to the existing culture. Changing the CEO to someone with very different behaviors (a new role model) and a set of articulated, new expectations can help, to the extent that the CEO is strong-willed and aligned subordinates can weed out employees (starting with managers) who won’t or can’t conform to the imposed culture. If the company is sufficiently large, this change can take 5+ years to happen. Meanwhile, the company will be quite divided. Consider Carly Fiorina during her tenure at Hewlett-Packard (a name which she strategically referred to as “HP.”) She was strong-willed and discarded most of “The HP Way,” a statement of values advocated by the founders and embraced by many employees. With Fiorina’s imposition of a new culture, employees left in droves as they were committed to those long-time values—some resigning, others fired. But Donald Trump cannot fire members of Congress. He cannot fire Progressives. Governing the U.S. is not reality television and it is not corporation management. Progressive thinkers have a vote.

Progressives have been watching and listening to Donald Trump’s direct comments and behaviors for a long time. Many believe that the best predictor of the future is the past. In a few ways (not many), President-elect Trump is not as extreme a Conservative as those who are becoming the new establishment, that is, the alt-right and Tea Party Republicans. If congressional Republicans decide their best hope for keeping their jobs is to line up behind Trump, there will be only a very few points of political policy on which there’s a chance for Progressives and Conservatives to find common ground. Mostly, the distance between progressive thinking and conservative thinking is growing as the alt-right cements their power.

Why would even moderate conservative politicians line up behind President-elect Trump’s political positions? They might hope that lining up would reduce gridlock in Congress. Voters are tired of congressional gridlock… and might actually come to realize that if they keep voting for Republican incumbents, that gridlock is not going to go away.

Those who voted for Trump in the primaries were clearly not disturbed enough by his personality and open bigotry to vote for another Republican primary candidate. And 47% of those voting in the general election chose Trump. (Well, actually, it’s the Electoral College, since Secretary Clinton received almost 3,000,000 more popular votes than Trump. But the point remains that 47% of voters chose Mr. Trump.) The division is with the voters. There are people who will accept having a man committed to discrimination and there are people who won’t stand for that in any elected official, much less the president of the United States.

Five days after the election, President-elect Trump announced that he will not totally rescind the Affordable Care Act. I guess he still doesn’t understand separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution, as such changes are the responsibility of Congress. But if he pushes for the ACA to be improved and not discarded entirely, Conservatives in Congress can line up behind that. They don’t have to be 100% opposed to the entire ACA anymore because it can stop being called “Obamacare.” Their congressional home base will not desert them. It remains to be seen who has the most to gain with the modifications: healthcare providers, healthcare insurers, or the populace.

It is on social issues of equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal treatment that Progressives are certain there is no possibility of finding common ground. Progressives know that Trump is closer to progressive beliefs in only a very few of his political positions and that he has been quite the bigot in his own professional life. Many Progressives believe that Trump mostly played to his base of bigots and misogynists to gain prominence with large, admiring crowds and that Trump wants to keep those bigots’ support for another presidential election in 4 years. Appointing Stephen Bannon, well-known white nationalist and alt-right spokesperson, to the position of chief White House strategist and senior presidential advisor says volumes about where Trump is headed on civil rights. It is not toward anything that even moderate Conservatives could support, let alone Progressives.

Trump is not a deep thinker (he has volunteered that he prefers shallow thinking), but he has street smarts and instincts for how to be top dog. Progressives’ biggest concern is that civil and human rights will regress under President-elect Trump’s leadership. Already, we are seeing more hate crimes and hate speech from other bigot, xenophobes, and misogynists who feel they’ve been empowered by Trump. Appointing a white nationalist to a senior position states clearly that President-elect Trump could not care less about being a unifier.

People of color, women, people with disabilities, non-Christians, and people with non-straight gender identities can expect to experience day-to-day discrimination that is more open and more pervasive. Enforcement of existing civil rights legislation and of the U.S. Constitution’s provisions for equality with respect to race, national origin, religion, and gender is not going to become stronger under Donald Trump and his chosen administration.  Will Progressives embrace this? These attitudes and behaviors are repugnant and antithetical to Progressives’ beliefs.  

Capturing the Voice(s) of the United States’ Society

The U.S. does not have “a society”; we have distinct cultures and belief systems. None of these cultures represents a majority of Americans. We are separated by our beliefs about the role of government, how to handle socioeconomic discrimination and the growing wage gap between the richest and poorest Americans, who counts in the list of those who are included in the Declaration of Independence preamble (“All men are created equal with certain inalienable rights”), the role of regulatory constraints in financial institutions and environment management (for example), and what it means for the U.S. to have international leadership. Many people identify with one position in one category but do not like another position that some might call part of the same culture. We can each speak for ourselves, but we cannot speak for an imagined single society in the United States.

Someone who claims to know what “American society” thinks and believes is likely talking just about his personal beliefs or his caricature of those who believe differently. For example, there are many people who voted for Donald Trump for some reasons but found some his beliefs, behaviors, and/or political positions wrong-headed or even reprehensible. Pundits talk about the desire of voters to stop governance by the political establishment. However, despite claims that people want to get rid of the political establishment, they voted for their establishment incumbents for the most part. (One must now include Tea Party politicians as their own establishment, of course. They’re not much different from any other politician demographic; they’ve become “established” too.)

We also have to consider that, in the 2016 presidential election, the popular vote was narrowly for Hillary Clinton. As far as the Electoral College goes, if we had proportional representation (the same number residents per electoral vote across states), the election outcome could have been quite different. For example, Wyoming has about 592,000 residents and 3 electoral votes. California has about 39,000,000 residents with 55 electoral votes. The country does not have a one person, one vote system for president. Wyoming has one vote per 197,000 people while California has one vote per 709,000 people. Of course, even the guidelines for how a state’s Electoral College representatives should vote varies and can be further evidence that we do not have a one person, one vote election process. This adds to a further difficulty in stating anything about our “society” based on who gets elected.

Believe it or not, our global climate is changing.

Talk is that there’s no proof that our global climate is changing much at all. Talk is that, even if the planet’s weather is changing, it’s only a natural variation—not caused or exacerbated by changes in human behaviors.  Some U.S. Congress members proudly say, “I don’t believe in science."-- as if modern scientific research were part of one huge, globally-coordinated conspiracy to trick people who aren't scientists. 

When it comes to a conversation about Earth’s climate trends, some talk show hosts and "news" media conspiracy theorists make their impressive incomes by creating sensational conspiracy theories about scientific research that capture the imagination of millions of conspiracy-lovers. Professional conspiracy theorists have everything to gain and nothing to lose by coming up with these unsubstantiated theories. These popularity-motivated cynics have picked up on something: Many people have so little understanding of science that it is easy to exploit them. Most theorists' followers have no clue about the statistical methods used (legitimately and correctly) to analyze data; nor could they understand those analyses. So, it's easy to imagine that something their target audience doesn't understand could be presented as "suspicious."

For those who don't understand the research to then claim that it's the scientists who are suspect is... well... shameful audacity. Yes, there are a few unscrupulous researchers who take money from, say, the fossil fuel industry, pharmaceutical industry, tobacco industry, or either side of the agricultural products debate and conduct fraudulent pseudo-research. The so-called news media disproportionately latch onto these exceptions, leaving some audiences to assume that these are typical examples of how scientists draw conclusions rather than sensationalized exceptions. We cannot discredit the vast majority climatology researchers just because there are some researchers in some science disciplines with unacceptable professional ethics. 

Here's the deal:

(1) Global climate is changing. Overall, it's becoming warmer. Overall, global weather is becoming more erratic. Climate change does not mean that every year in every location the weather will be worse than the year before. It means there is a measurable trend in the changes. 

(2) Greenhouse gases, regardless of their sources, are contributing significantly to these climate problems. As the planet warms, sea levels rise and more low-lying land areas flood. As sea temperatures increase, some species are not able to adapt quickly enough; toxic algae blooms are more frequent and widespread. 

(3) Some potential sources of climate change are out of human control. Climatologists and those in related scientific disciplines research and analyze the correlation of those sources, including how human-generated greenhouse gasses contribute. Reducing human-generated greenhouse gases is within our control. 

(4) Rather than bicker about the causes, governments need to prepare for continued ocean elevation rise, increased flooding, and other increases in severe natural weather disasters. Those melted glaciers and disappearing Arctic Ocean ice aren't going to spontaneously refreeze anytime soon. In fact, the melting rate is accelerating. Nations around the world have decided to prepare for that future and to reduce the amount of air pollution they produce in an effort to lessen the severity of future damage to the planet.

(5) Human efforts at greenhouse gas reduction probably can't reverse all the damage that's already been done, but they could reduce the magnitude of change in the future. Those efforts most definitely will help... if they are adequate. Look at one photo of smog in Los Angeles in 1960 and another of the same valley in 2015 to see how aggressive efforts to reduce human-caused air pollution can make a positive difference. Los Angeles could not do anything about the Santa Ana winds or the fact that there are mountains surrounding Los Angeles, but that does not mean they should have thrown up their hands and accepted the smoggy “fate” of the region. They tackled the human causes and people there breathe more easily now.

(6) Greenhouse gasses come from an accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gasses. That combination of chemicals traps heat in our atmosphere. This atmospheric condition has been building since the Industrial Revolution but has accelerated steeply since the 1970s. Ozone-layer depletion is already resulting in increased frequency of skin cancer, cataracts/eye disease, and weakening of immune systems, all of which have occurred with the greater transmission of UV radiation that ozone depletion causes.

(7) Burning fossil fuels is causing a severe increase in the amount of carbon dioxide, which in turn is causing ocean acidification, which in turn benefits toxic algae while harming or killing corals and shellfish populations. The entire aquatic ecosystem has been thrown out of balance.

(8) Some of the air, land, and ocean pollutants and ozone depletion are the result of our agricultural methods, not our fossil fuel use. But that does not eliminate fossil fuels from the air pollution equation. It means that human-managed agricultural methods also need to be improved.

(9) Science does not work in mysterious ways. Even if a person can’t understand statistical methods or how “big data” about Earth’s climate is analyzed, they can understand the fundamentals of the scientific method. This is the method that climatologists and those in related sciences use to explore climate changes. There is nothing about the scientific method that one either “believes” or “doesn’t believe.” One might question the data analysis of a particular experiment and, therefore, question the conclusion. But that’s a single experiment that is in question, not the entire body of research, and certainly not all of science.

What is constitutionalism?

When there is an actual dictionary definition for a term, I think the best practice is to use that definition. So, “constitutionalism” is adherence to a form of government based on an explicit constitution.

In most countries with a constitution-based government, the challenges come in what it means to “adhere.” Countries don’t want to be rewriting their constitution as major shifts in mores, culture, technology and such come about. It is up to the legislators to decide which of these shifts is to be respected enough to enact laws “consistent with” the nation’s constitution or for them to ratify an amendment to their constitution. What does it mean to be consistent with a constitution, though?

1. Strict adherence includes interpreting the statements in the constitution literally, despite changes in culture since the time of the signing of that document in interpreting each of the amendments (if there are any in a particular country) literally, as close to exactly as they were adopted. It acknowledges constitutional amendments. In the U.S., an example is that before the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 that gave women the right to vote, it was widely believed that “all men are created equal” did not mean that all women are created equal to men in terms of the right to vote. Strict adherence, then, required interpretation of court cases in a different context before and after that amendment passed.
2. Conservative adherence considers certain unavoidable changes in the interpretation of the constitution (including its amendments). For example, the U.S. does not have a constitutional amendment that makes clear what is constitutional regarding the use of technology, so conservative constitutional adherents have no choice but to draw analogies to conservative constitutional precedents in case decisions. Every effort is made to stay as close to a literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as is practical or feasible. Of course, conservative interpretations do evolve over time. The interpretation of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution for nearly 90 years allowed for “separate but equal” treatment of people of different races, including allowance of segregation. Of course, “separate” was rarely “equal.” But the dominant culture had its own interesting interpretation of “equal” that would eventually be seen as not at all equal. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Warren Supreme Court voted unanimously in 1954 to overturn the Plessy v. Ferguson 1896 decision, which had ruled that state-sponsored segregation was just fine. A change in “enlightenment” had occurred in those 42 years.
3. Liberal adherence considers a constitution to be a living document that must pay attention to evolving notions of morality and temporal context, among other things (such as, in the past 50 years, the rapid changes in technology). Liberal adherents require much less lag time between previous interpretations and current interpretations of a country’s constitution. As an example, in the U.S., the sentiment of the majority of adults (as Millennials have come of age) has somewhat rapidly changed to insist that people with a variety of gender identities should have equal civil rights, including the right to a legal marriage-- independent of specific religious beliefs to the contrary. Liberal adherents on the Supreme Court readily saw this moral revelation as a valid interpretation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, that all people are created equal. What has been interesting to witness is that at least one somewhat conservative justice saw this too— that this is a fundamental and literal interpretation of all people being created equal with certain inalienable rights.

Even nations that do not have a government based on an explicit constitution (e.g., Israel) have to deal with the degree and pace at which their nation will support changes in interpretation.  A country that is governed by religious teachings, for example, also has to make ongoing decisions about contemporary interpretations of their oral traditions and any religious documents that are part of their religious culture— the Talmud, the Q’uran, the Bible, the Vedas, the Tripitakas and Sutras, etc. As we are currently experiencing with radical Islam, a “nation” that is defined by a fundamentalist “strict adherence” caliphate means interpreting the Q’uran as the leaders imagine it would have been interpreted in the 600s C.E.

From these examples, it's easy to see that what constitutes "constitutionalism" is in the eye of the beholder.

Turning Anger into More Effective Action

So many of us are outraged at the way Blacks are treated by the American judicial system, by our public safety departments, and by any individual who stands by and does nothing to change this massive American cancer of discrimination. I’m angry and feeling powerless to bring about a change that has not occurred in the centuries since the first black people were brought to Virginia as slaves in 1619. It is the latter feeling that I must change in my heart and my actions.

Writing passionately about the problem has proven to be a waste of my time and words, except as a sane outlet for my anger. We are not powerless to bring about a tidal wave of change. But it will take all of us-- no matter our skin color or ancestry—to quell this 400-year deadly storm with the power that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. showed us we have when we unite; when we pressure our federal, state and local government at the ballot box and in accountability for their (lack of) actions; and when we hold our courts accountable for their disparate treatment of black people.

Dr. King showed us that the path to change does not include murdering those who represent discriminatory institutions. The path does not include violent, destructive acts as an expression of determination or rage. Those actions simply reinforce a false stereotype and delay the time when this becomes a nation where all people are created equal and treated as such, a time when black lives finally matter.

Book Review: Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

Literature-in-the-hyphen, with its characters who have culturally “hyphenated” identities, is now part of the mainstream American education curriculum, as well it should be. The best of such literature draws us in and offers us the opportunity to see the world with a culturally-distinct, binocular vision. The “-American” cultures that imbue these works with essential contextual nuance simultaneously serve as a stand-in for the overall American national cultural fabric. We are born into a culture that claims authority in the person of our family and we are propelled into a stereotype of a national culture that demands adoption.

Native Speaker’s first-person narrator, Henry Park, is the roughly-woven protagonist. The warp and woof of first-generation immigrants can initially produce a somewhat uneven intertwining. The threads of Park’s life tug against each other in ways that leave his blended fabric an awkward fit.

Park’s parents immigrated to the U.S. yet live within their more comfortable cultural community as Koreans first and as Korean-Americans second. His father’s strict adherence to the authoritarian ways of Korean families abrades Park’s developing mixed cultural identity. His resentment of his family’s preservation of Korean ways continues into Park’s adulthood when he feels the strain of his (attempted) adoption of American ways even more deeply. That contrast becomes more striking  with his marriage to an American-born white woman, Lelia. Their child, who has died before the story begins. The circumstances for this loss serve as a poignant trope for bigotry’s sometimes dire consequences. Lee sees that failure to support cultural and racial diversity causes serious rifts among its multicultural components-- rifts that are too often deadly. Henry and Lelia struggle in the wake of the loss of their much loved son. The question of whether their marriage has also died restates an ambivalence about cultural interweaving.  

Park-as-narrator is uncharacteristically open about his personality’s mismatch to the dominant American culture; his extreme reserve is ill-matched to the comparatively open and blunt styles of Americans (such as his wife). And while Park-as-narrator lays bare his wish, yet inability, to transform his personality to become more “American” (especially in his interpersonal relations), Park-as-character is an extraordinarily private man who operates in the dark shadows of a Korean (-American) underworld, working hard to reveal nothing about himself. He methodically adopts professional identities that serve his purpose, then discards them. But even in this, Park has great difficulty with the segregated dimensions of his identity. Again, there is danger-- even death-- if these distinct identities begin to integrate.

The integration of who we are is a challenge for all of us. As with all fine literature, Native Speaker speaks to this larger truth.

Freedom of Speech: us versus them

It was not that long ago that the U.S. electorate was not so polarized. There were very clear and significant differences between the two major political parties, but there was also an assumption that the job of an elected official was to understand other perspectives and to come up with solutions that edged the government closer to that elected official’s long-term goal while incorporating elements of “common ground” goals and negotiating compromises so that all parties would be able to support the resulting legislation.

This particular election cycle has become such a shouting match among certain candidates and voters that even if one wanted to understand diverse perspectives, those perspectives would be difficult to hear amidst the din of demonizing rhetoric.

Today, it appears to be to a politician’s advantage to demonize an opponent and even to instill fear in voters. Inspiring fear pays at the ballot box. Placing blame on anyone other than the voter pays too: Victims! Rise up against those who want to harm you! The psychological notion of “the other” has been at play in societies since before the time of human beings: What’s different and unfamiliar is to be feared. To maintain that fear in contemporary society we must focus on what is different, magnify the potential danger, and ignore all there is that is the same or quite similar. We now see those fears manifested within the populace as anger, echoing a few candidates’ visible, audible display of that emotion.

Because noticing differences is hardwired in our brains, it is the job of the society to remind us of what we have in common and why it’s in our best interest to cooperate (at least to some extent). When those with power in a society choose to fan fear-flames instead, “followers” instincts about fearing “the other” are magnified rather than tempered. Fight or flight? Follow the leader and fight against our fellow citizens. Winner take all.

In the U.S. mythology, people are entitled to their points of view, to what they consider to be priorities, to how they make decisions (through religion, science, deductive logic, emotional appeal, conspiracy theories, simple adoption of the opinions of others, a coin toss). But we also— consciously or not— believe that we are entitled to judge others’ views, priorities, and decision-making processes from within our own value system and approaches to problem-defining and -solving. This amounts to believing that (other) people are “entitled” to have “ignorant, un-American” opinions based on “lies.” While this kind of judgment takes a certain amount of hubris in many situations, it’s nearly impossible to avoid judging another’s opinions against our own hardened beliefs.

How far can we realistically be expected to bend in respecting someone else’s point of view? Even if we philosophically believe that others are entitled to believe what they believe, I think there are limits that most of us still have beyond which we simply can’t respect that person’s beliefs. And if we are convinced that all hope will be lost if another’s beliefs prevail, a certain desperation takes hold that leads to not even believing someone else is entitled to express those beliefs.

Ideally, we would neither shrug our shoulders and say, “You’re entitled to believe whatever you want” (then walk away) nor become enraged and say, “Believe what I believe because you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.” We’d insist on sitting together, without rage, and “seek first to understand then to be understood.” But you know what? People actually have gotten angry with me for suggesting that rage isn’t our best option as a society right now and claim that listening to someone with another point of view will just magnify their rage-- as if they have no control over their own emotional responses.

Because we all know that yelling at someone and making highly derogatory characterizations of him/her is not a convincing way to get that person to embrace different beliefs, it is clear to me that, right now, there is no desire to actually convince anyone to change their beliefs. I guess we're entitled to work that hard to prevent consensus, but from my perspective it's difficult to accept that we can't do better, perhaps quelling that din and dampening those flames with the goal of bringing that U.S. myth closer to reality.