A half-dozen things to consider three weeks after electocalypse

Here’s a 2600 word post in a six-bullet, tl;dr listicle:

• We don’t know yet which awful things will happen. Let’s stay focused.
• An audit of the vote won’t stop Trump.
• There is no mandate. There was no landslide.
• Drop “Trumpism”: don’t personalize this government.
• The term “alt-right” is a surrender to white supremacist propaganda.
• You have two choices: pitch in to resist the Republican program, or help enact that program.

And here’s an opening epigram from the close of Charles Blow’s 23 Nov Op-Ed in the New York Times, addressed to the president-elect:

For as long as a threat to the state is the head of state, all citizens of good faith and national fidelity … have an absolute obligation to meet you and your agenda with resistance at every turn.

Indeed. Details below the cartogram.

We don’t know yet which awful things will happen. Let’s stay focused.

There are portents aplenty in the president-elect’s (often contradictory, or since contradicted or walked-back) campaign promises, vicious bombast, and contemptible dog-whistling. There’s a lot to read into in his staff and cabinet selections to-date. There’s an appalling body of information being fleshed out about the conflicts of interest with which Donald Trump as a businessman will stain a Donald Trump presidency, and into how those conflicts have already begun flesh out what U.S. kleptocracy will come to look like, in Argentina for example -- with plenty more waiting in the wings.

Still. At this point, a forever-seeming three weeks since Election Day, nobody has a clear vision of how a G.O.P. led by the Trump administration will function.

Nobody knows yet what deals that administration will cut to appease establishment Republicans, who have for decades pursued policies in direct conflict with Trump’s stated ambitions; or whether and how a minority Democratic Senate will obstruct predatory, destructive, and inhumane Republican initiatives; or how well-funded advocacy groups (ACLU, SPLC, Sierra Club, et al.) will be able to tie up the G.O.P.'s signature deliverable -- regress -- in court; or what kinds and quantities of sand rank-and-file federal employees, from the National Park Service to the Postal Service to the Air Force, will throw into which governmental gears; or how powerful state and local governments, which are far more influenced by local mores and pressures than the federal government, will act decisively to curb the dismantling of progress and small-d democracy in the U.S. (starting with California and New York -- regarding climate change, for example).

What’s called for today is circumspection about predicting the future. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to prepare for. That doesn’t mean there aren’t appointments and nominations to oppose, duplicity to expose, and audits to demand. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lines to be drawn to corral the white supremacist deplorables who have been emboldened by the president-elect’s vicious campaign.

And it absolutely does not mean that anybody ought to stand down because the incoming government is in any way “normal” or because of any misguided fantasy that if we bury our heads in the sand “our institutions” can withstand the incoming government’s intended corrosion.

What’s called for right now is focus on the threats posed by the incoming government and what we can do about them. That’s different from predicting which are going to come to pass, and when, and in what form. Donald Trump’s narcissistic, bullying behavior is chiefly characterized by unpredictability used to sow dissention and maintain control. So what’s called for right now is attention, agility, responsiveness, and evaluation of long-term, strategic strengths and options.

Above all: focus. Tweets about a Broadway musical are not among our chief concerns, and paying attention to such twaddle is the antithesis of focus. Baseless twitter-tantrums about fictional voter fraud are not about the election of this month, they’re both a distraction from the evolving bribery-state and part of a long-term, coordinated, Republican Party assault on voting rights, the bedrock of (small-d) democracy.

Just because Donald Trump never met a squirrel he wouldn’t point at to distract from his own reflexive lying, cheating, ignorance, and selfishness, doesn’t obligate anyone to follow his misdirection.


An audit of the vote won’t stop Trump

Audits and recounts won’t stop Trump from assuming the office of President; and neither will the Electoral College or the emoluments clause. It’s not hard to understand the desire to disclaim him, even to sympathize with that desire ... but Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States come 20 January.

The recounts that Jill Stein is initiating will at best and at worst function as a kind of catharsis, and the Clinton campaign’s tepid, strictly-formal involvement now that Stein has gotten the ball rolling doesn’t change anything. The election’s outcome will not change.  While the popular vote matters a lot (see next section), it has nothing to do with who won the presidency earlier this month: no one is going to retroactively abolish the Electoral College.

Let’s be clear: no one in despair over the election of a strongman to the U.S. presidency -- for whom more than sixty million U.S. citizens cast their ballots, plus or minus the few tens or hundreds of thousands that any audit might possibly reallocate -- no one in despair over Trump’s election has any reason to be mollified by better bean counting. The U.S. is in deep, deep trouble following the 2016 election. Full stop. U.S. citizens will be struggling with the fallout of this month’s election for many, many years. Even if ...

Imagine -- for a moment, if you haven’t already -- the inconceivable possibility that some combination of vote audits and recounts and Elector misgivings push enough electoral votes into the Clinton column, and result in her assumption of the presidency in January. What happens then? Riots on the streets and in the statehouses across the South and the Rust Belt? Civil war, waged in Washington? Military uncertainty about which civilian is its commander-in-chief? Worse? It would be a different civil war than the one we face when Trump takes office, sure: but a civil war nonetheless. If, inconceivably, the election results were reversed and Clinton assumed the office of POTUS in January, she would accomplish little to nothing in her presidency beyond fighting opposition to her very occupancy of the office (which might have been the outcome even if she’d won the electoral vote in the first place). And that’s the best-case scenario.

Bottom line: no functioning crystal ball would dare forecast sweetness and light for 2017.

Is there a positive spin on audits and recounts? Sure. A conceivable good that might come of this effort is amped-up examination of what fair, (small-d) democratic elections ought to look like, how that differs from current practice in the U.S., and, consequently, the implementation of federal audit requirements on state boards of election (e.g., all votes must produce a paper record). Will Democrats will have to fight for that? I think so. Republicans are well-practiced and quite successful at winning office by gerrymandering and voter suppression: transparent elections would diminish their power, and they know it.


There is no mandate. There was no landslide.

Any statement to the contrary, by @realDonaldTrump or his minions, is bombastic rhetoric, false on its face. The sixty-some million Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton, a clear and significant majority, need to loudly and firmly ridicule that rhetoric. Third-party voters have a heightened responsibility to join in: they may not have voted for the only candidate who had a prayer of defeating Trump, but they didn’t contribute to a fairy tale “mandate” or “landslide” for the incoming president.

Donald Trump lost the popular vote. Donald Trump lost the popular vote even among the fraction of eligible voters who (a) bothered, and (b) weren’t denied their right as citizens to cast a ballot (the latter, most frequently, by ongoing, deliberate, and acknowledged voter suppression tactics employed by the anti-democratic -- small-d -- Republican party). That Donald Trump lost the popular vote is not going to change, no matter how anyone counts, recounts, or audits the ballots.

And his electoral victory? 306 to 232? In fractions, that’s 7/12 to 5/12, an arithmetical approximation in which rounding error overstates Trump’s lead.

Not a landslide. Not a mandate. Not by any stretch of the imagination.


Drop “Trumpism”: don’t personalize this government

What if we agreed to stop screaming sound bytes about who is or is not our president in some abstract, preferred moral space, and held the entire Republican Party responsible for the actual incoming government’s program, mendacity, and corruption? How about if we held the Democratic Party as a whole responsible for failure to resist Republican initiatives that threaten safety, health, civil rights, our shared environment, truthful transparency, democracy (small-d), and economic well-being?

It’s tempting to personify enmity because it lessens the need for difficult thinking about a complex political landscape, hard analysis, and risky strategizing. In doing so, however, personification neuters effective opposition. So let’s not take short cuts. They don’t lead anywhere we desperately need to go.

The dismantling of President Obama’s achievements will not be quick or easy. Many of the most corrosive promises of the Trump campaign will require congressional cooperation. The current POTUS (in an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker) has correctly stated: “as a practical matter, what I’ve been saying to people, including my own staff, is that the federal government is an aircraft carrier, it’s not a speedboat.” To effect agendas that Trump, his fellow Republicans, or both have articulated, the elected G.O.P. establishment will have to continue to cooperate with the Trump administration; the Democratic Party would have to abdicate or fail in its responsibility as opposition; a vast network of advocacy organizations would have to abdicate or fail in their responsibility to oppose Republican regress, from the courts to the streets; and countless federal employees would have to go along with the dismantling of the government they are sworn to protect.

It’s not just Trump.

Let’s all step up and shine a bright, unforgiving light on those who collaborate with the incoming administration, and hold them irrevocably accountable for their collaboration.

And let’s oppose -- with vigor and ingenuity commensurate with the truth that our physical, moral, and national lives depend on it -- the attacks the incoming government will wage on the people of the United States, in assaults categorized by novelist Barbara Kingsolver in The Guardian last week:

Losses are coming at us in these areas: freedom of speech and the press; women’s reproductive rights; affordable healthcare; security for immigrants and Muslims; racial and LGBTQ civil rights; environmental protection; scientific research and education; international cooperation on limiting climate change; international cooperation on anything; any restraints on who may possess firearms; restraint on the upper-class wealth accumulation that’s gutting our middle class; limits on corporate influence over our laws.

And -- special shout-out  to my progressive and radical comrades -- not one iota of fighting to retain partial, isolated, and/or incremental gains realized during Obama’s eight years in office and earlier precludes fighting for much, much more. But no magical thinking, please. First things first. You can’t rule the universe when you’re pinned to the ground by monsters holding spears to your windpipe.


The term “alt-right” gives in to white supremacist propaganda

Don’t let fascists set the boundaries of discourse. Why cave in to white supremacists? Call them what they are: white supremacists, fascists, neo-nazis. If you’re not personally certain what the “alt-right” is, who they are, what they want, how they act, watch a three minute video and get started judging for yourself.

Then refuse to call them “alt-right” and refuse to stand by when others do.

If the newspapers you read or your local TV news station calls white supremacists “alt-right,” write letters and make phone calls to object. Not just once but every time, until the supposedly-credible media tells the truth.

Matthew Phelan of Jacobin Magazine, writing earlier this month on the “alt-right” in a history of the “House of Breitbart” concludes that “terrifying as this coalition seems, it bears repeating how niche it really is. [...] The alt-right is quite literally a political sideshow.” Maybe yes, maybe no. In any case, calling scum what it is can only consign it more quickly and more certainly to the dustbin of history, where it belongs.

Note that this is a specific instance of every responsible person’s two-part duty to (a) amplify only credibly-researched, honest, thoughtful news and commentary; and to, (b) avoid spreading “fake news,” which too-frequently pollutes, diminishes, and distracts from longstanding, more-or-less responsible sources of information. In an age of distributed, social-media driven dissemination of information, nobody will fix this for us. Do it yourself, or we’ll all sink together in a swamp of distraction, misinformation, and outright deception.


You have two choices: pitch in to resist the Republican program, or help enact that program

There’s room for a wide spectrum of tactics, improvisation, and long-game strategies to resisting the corrupt and corrosive program of a Republican party that has selected Donald Trump as its leader.

Maybe you have an appetite for local, state, or national electoral politics (and yes, to stop the dismantling of our government and society, progressives need to step up and win political offices).

Maybe you can pitch in to organize the people in your own community: your neighbors, your classroom, the PTA at your kids’ school, your book club, your place of worship, or people who shop at your local grocery store.

Maybe you can organize your community to make phone calls, or write letters, or participate in marches, or support advocacy organizations in legal and legislative fights, or offer sanctuary to people under attack by the U.S. government or its emboldened vigilante wingnuts, or physically stand in the way of those attacks, or come out for mass demonstrations, or participate in boycotts, or attend city council meetings to advocate for what you believe is right and just.

Maybe the thing you’re best at -- or willing to get better at -- is talking with people who don’t agree with you about something important … face-to-face, not through the flattening, distorting lens of social media. Maybe you won’t convince anyone the first time you talk with them. So what? There aren’t any switches to instantly flip. By engaging with people who think differently from you, you’ll be laying a foundation for future understanding, empathy, and compromise among the vastly diverse people and interests that are all part of the cities, states, and regions in which each and every one of us shares a national fate.

All of that, all of the above, is necessary.

You need not (and you cannot) do it all.

Neither can you avoid doing some of it. Not if you want to stand tall, and look your kids (or your sibling’s kids, or your neighbors and their kids) in the eye and know you helped to save not just your own world, but theirs.

Barbara Kingsolver has some sound advice here -- again, from that piece in last week’s Guardian, Trump changed everything. Now everything counts:

We refuse to disappear. We keep our commitments to fairness in front of the legislators who oppose us, lock arms with the ones who are with us, and in the words of Congressman John Lewis, prepare to get ourselves in some good trouble. Every soul willing to do that is part of our team, starting with the massive crowd that shows up in DC in January to show the new president what we stand for, and what we won’t.

There’s safety in numbers, but only if we count ourselves out loud.

Be counted. Out loud.



Thanks to Professor Mark Newman of U. Michigan for the cartogram of 2016 presidential election votes by county (Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0); see Prof. Newman’s post for details about how the cartogram was constructed, and additional maps.


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Protest is dead. Resist, or be eaten.

The United States of America has demonstrated that Americans choose to live in an ungoverned country. I don’t mean a lawless country. I mean a country in which self-interest trumps [sic] the common good. Ungoverned, according to Merriam-Webster: “not capable of being governed, guided, or restrained.” Id über alles.

This choice is painted vividly on this morning’s electoral maps, on the front page of every newspaper and every news website. Considering the thin margin of 2016’s popular vote for president of the United States, no matter which candidate comes out a hair’s breadth ahead when the last ballot is counted, this choice is also evident among eligible voters at large, beneath the geographic, population, and demographic distortions of the Electoral College. In my view, the popular vote includes those who were eligible but didn’t vote: it would be foolish to pretend that standing aside has any meaningful effect other than to enable the decisions of that fraction of us who cast ballots.

One of many things yesterday’s national election implies is that protest is dead.

Protest is a tactic that presupposes the prospect of a critically-fragmented nation is unthinkable. If an incoherent society is unacceptable, the threat of social disintegration into ungovernability can force a political elite to dial back on issues that polarize and mobilize a significant population, even if that population is a numerical minority.

That’s what has made protest an effective tactic—not always, but sometimes—over the past century and change, from India to the United States to South Africa to Argentina.

But this tactic has only worked where and when and because the prospect of an ungovernable society was unthinkable.

Among Americans—in the aggregate, on 8 November 2016—that wasn’t the case.

It certainly hasn’t been the case for those Americans who, over the past quarter century, have continued to elect obstructionist legislators into office. It isn’t the case for anyone who cast a vote to send the president-elect—a loathsome, ignorant, narcissistic bully—to the White House come January 2017.

And it’s not the case for anyone who failed to act positively to prevent yesterday’s disaster at the polls. Individuals who didn’t bother? They could have voted, or voted differently, to put better candidates at the head of the Democratic and Republican tickets; and, having failed in that endeavor, to send that loathsome, ignorant, narcissistic bully selected by the G.O.P. down to reeling defeat.

Too late, folks.

Our physical world continues to spin. The planet’s polar ice continues to melt. Earth’s sixth extinction, the one properly called “Anthropocene,” proceeds unabated. Our military industrial complex continues along its poisonous, rent-seeking arc, just as President Eisenhower warned on his way out the White House door nearly fifty-six years ago.

Yet, come January 2017, there will be no national government in the United States of America against which effective protest can be mounted.

Either the government of those who refuse to be governed will be deposed, in a future election or otherwise; or the ideals of democracy, equality, and stewardship—to which the United States has long purported to aspire—will have failed.

Translation: while protest is dead, resistance and opposition are very much alive.

Robert Reich wrote last night, before the election was called but once it had become pretty clear where the finish was heading:

It was always going to be a contest between authoritarian populism and progressive populism, eventually. For now, authoritarian populism has won. But if we are united and smart, progressive populism will triumph.

In other words: all hands on deck.

We have failed to elect a national government that might have been influenced—albeit in limited areas, to an insufficient degree—while we continued to organize the conduct of social, political, economic, and environmental business in the United States differently.

So now? If we fail to neutralize the government we just elected, and fail to decisively trash it at the next electoral opportunity?

Then it’ll be time to kiss your kids’ futures goodbye.

Me, I don’t have kids. But I weep for yours.


This blog is cross-posted on Medium.com


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From the Sierras to the sea: Escape from Election 2016

I turned in my ballot a few weeks in advance of tomorrow (Election Day) three or four days before kicking off a vacation from work by attending the Bioneers 2016 conference (see What I learned at the 2016 Bioneers Convention, posted on 25 October). Voting didn't untether me from the "news" cycle, a hoped-for effect that I didn't actually believe would happen. The Bioneers, a few days in Yosemite National Park later that week, and an afternoon out on Tomales Point (in Point Reyes National Seashore) this past Friday were much more effective distractions.

I thought I'd share some photos and videos as a contribution to those who aspire to pull their attention out of the gutter of last-minute campaigning and early-voting hyperanalysis.

Yosemite Valley

Bridal Veil falls was flowing as we entered the valley, a bit wispy but that's it's nature, if long-ago memory serves. We stopped on the side of the road between the falls and El Capitan, and watched through curtains of golden-leaved oak trees, filled with sunlight.

The footbridge below Vernal Falls is only about a mile each way from the Park Service's nearest shuttle stop, though I have to admit that it felt like more after being bunched up in the car for four hours (the New Priest Grade on Hwy 120 above Moccasin had been an extra-special steering wheel gripper). Here are the falls:

And here we are at the footbridge, courtesy of a fellow hiker:

I hadn't been to Yosemite for about as long as it takes Saturn to circumnavigate the sun, and Matthew hadn't ever been. And it turns out that in all the times I visited the Valley as a kid and a much younger adult I'd never set foot in the Ahwahnee Hotel -- which everyone pretends to call the "Majestic Yosemite Hotel" nowadays, at least until a current (and maddening) trademark dispute is settled. Matthew and I had decided a few weeks beforehand to check it out by having dinner there, and had reserved a table. The (yuuuuuge) dining room was fully booked.

Yep. It was as good as it looks... That'd be seared scallops with a scallion pancake; onion soup; artichoke and spinach ravioli; and grilled swordfish.

The next morning we got on the waiting list for the bus to Glacier Point, but just missed getting seats. Instead of driving up ourselves, we decided to spend the day in the valley. Here's Yosemite Falls on Thursday morning; and a young buck foraging among the trees by the river, met on our way back to the road.

Check out the contrast between the flow of the falls on Thursday and Friday morning in these videos:






Pretty dramatic difference, eh? Thursday night it rained hard and steadily, then the rain continued intermittently into Friday. Hence the torrent pouring down the cliff on Friday morning. By the time we left the park in mid-afternoon, the Tioga Pass and the road to Glacier Point had been closed due to snowfall.

Of course, no catalog of a trip to Yosemite Valley would be complete without a dramatic photo of Half Dome, this one on a bright, clear afternoon following our hike up to view Vernal Falls.

And here's a farewell look back to the valley from Highway 120, through fog and rain:

I can't really explain what possessed me to wait nearly three decades to return to Yosemite Valley, but I'm glad I didn't wait any longer.

Point Reyes National Seashore

The week following our return to the Bay Area for the staycation half of my away-from-work program, I was assaulted by way too many furiously angry memes posted to way too much social media, and read many too many news and pseudo-news articles. My bad. I couldn't help it. And, no, I'm not the type that enjoys gawking at trainwrecks. The last days (apocalyptic connotation intended) ticked and tocked away in advance of tomorrow's election, and like pretty much everybody I know, it was driving me nuts.

I decided to head for the coast to clear my head, despite high surf warnings published in the SF Chronicle. I drove out the Tomales Point Road and hiked down a short trail to McClure's Beach for lunch, and to be mesmerized by the pounding breakers. The most aggressive waves were washing up just short of the steep cliffs: the ranger's warning at the visitor center -- not to turn one's back on the water -- turned out to be sound advice.

The trail to the beach was lovely as ever ...

Up the hill from McClure's Beach, a herd of tule elk were congregating high on a ridge, where I've often seen them grazing before, protected on the Tomales Bay side of the point from the ocean-side wind.

But my favorite and least-expected wildlife sighting came during the drive back to Point Reyes Station, as I salivated for an Americano from Toby's in which I expected I'd be able to stand up a spoon. Later that night, friends on Facebook responded to the photo below with stories about coyotes they'd seen lately in urban and semi-urban environments from Orange County to San Francisco to Vancouver ... but in decades of visits to Point Reyes (where I've seen elk, deer, a bobcat, weasels, bazillions of vultures and ravens, countless small birds, harbor seals, elephant seals, whales, and shoals of beached jellyfish) I've never before spotted a coyote.

This trip I saw two specimens of Canis latrans -- one away up on a hill as I rounded a curve in the road (no chance to snap a photo), and the one in the photo above. The coyote in the snapshot crossed the road about fifty yard ahead of my car, then ducked under a barbed-wire fence before pausing to vogue for a bit while I wrestled my iPhone out of my jeans. None of the shots through the open car window came out very sharp, but this one -- particularly if you click for the enlarged view -- has the virtue of looking a bit like Elmer Bischoff painted it.

The Americano in Point Reyes Station was perfect, as always. It kept me alert, if perhaps a bit less than serenely patient, during the interminable stop-and-go past San Quentin, approaching the Richmond - San Rafael Bridge.

So.

It's Monday.

And here we are, on the cusp of Election 2016. Perhaps you'll browse this travelogue today. Perhaps by the time you get to it the election results will have been called and ... well, and then the real work can carry on, inside government and out, assuming the U.S. sidesteps full-on apocalypse. For now.

Keep breathing, okay?



Thanks to Matthew Felix Sun for photos of Vernal Falls from the footbridge, dinner at the Ahawahnee Hotel, and Yosemite Falls on Thursday morning.


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