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Saturday, November 19, 2016

First, a few summary points, many drawing on my previous post-election piece:

• Hillary Clinton still has a popular vote margin over Donald Trump, one that currently stands at 1,322,095 votes, up nearly one million votes since I checked earlier, and up about 100,000 votes since I started this post. (I've seen a tweet that has Clinton's lead at 1.65 million votes.) Still, that's less than Clinton's margin in New York state alone (1,507,241), a mere 45% of her margin in California (2,904,526). In fact, California topped Hawaii as her best percentage state (61.78%; she won 90.4% in DC). By contrast, Trump's biggest popular win, in Texas, was 813,774, followed by Tennessee (651,073), Alabama (588,841), Kentucky (574,108), Missouri (530,864), Indiana (520,429). Trump topped 60% in 9 states (AL, AR, KY, NB, ND, OK, SD, WV, WY), but most were small.

• Clinton lost three states that she was heavily favored in by very slim margins: Michigan (0.27%), Wisconsin (0.93%), and Pennsylvania (1.24%). Had she hung on to those three states she would have won the electoral college. It's easy to imagine various technical shifts in her campaign strategy that might have secured those states and won her the election, even without any substantive adjustments to her platform. She was not a hopeless candidate, but was a flawed and for many people uninspiring one, and was not well served by a staff and organization built to flatter her.

• Voter turnout was down 1.2 points, to 53.7%. Trump was elected president with about 25% of the vote, and Clinton lost with just a hair more. As was widely reported, they were the two least approved candidates in history. Clinton maintained a polling lead throughout the campaign, but was never able to top 50%, her leads varying widely as Trump's numbers waxed and waned. Trump caught a break a week before the election when FBI Director James Comey re-opened Clinton's email troubles, and Trump avoided major blunders in his last week, so his win can be attributed to a lucky break.

• The Democrats gained two Senate seats and seven House seats, so the party as a whole was not swept up in a Republican tide. More likely she was a drag on down-ticket Democrats. I believe that one of the biggest tactical errors was Clinton's failure to run against what Harry Truman once called "the do-nothing Congress" (Democrats lost control of Congress in 1946, but recovered in 1948 with Truman's come-from-behind campaign). Ultimately we'll see that most of the bad things that happen in the next four years will originate in the Republican Congress, and most of Trump's own disasters will be tied to his forming an extremist Republican administration. The election would have been very different if Clinton had run not on Obama's "successes" but by blaming Republicans for his shortcomings.

• I think it's safe to say that Bernie Sanders would have been a more formidable candidate for the Democrats. What is certain is that we didn't have any of Clinton's sleazy vulnerabilities. Also that he was far enough removed from the Clinton-Obama mainstream he could have run as a credible change, and that he has shown the ability to rally large and enthusiastic crowds (which Trump did and Clinton did not). Maybe the Republicans could have come up with an effective set of slanders to undo him, but they wouldn't have had the benefits of 24 years of target practice against Clinton. Sanders' real vulnerability was that the Clinton-Obama Democrats would sandbag him (much as previous generations of Democrats did to Bryan and McGovern), but perhaps fear of Trump would have held them in check.

• Whatever divisions were thought to exist in the Republican party have vanished. The only thing Republicans really care about is winning and ruling, and they really don't care how ugly it looks. And while their current margins are extremely thin, that didn't impose any scruples on Bush and Cheney in 2000 -- another time when the presidential victor lost the popular vote -- and Republicans have only become more vicious and unscrupulous since then. (Trump, for one, never had to feign compassion.)

One thing that we should bear in mind is that many disasters take a long time to fully reveal themselves. That Republican Congress elected in 1946 has had an especially long-lasting impact. George Brockway, for instance, cited a banking "reform" bill that they passed as the first chink in the deregulation that finally sunk the economy in 2008. More obvious was the Taft-Hartley Act, which made it significantly harder to form and maintain labor unions. After that act was passed, the CIO gave up on organizing unions in the South, which left American businesses with an alternative to union labor in the North. That, more than anything else, gradually ate away at the Rust Belt, leading to this year's Democratic debacle.

But then the Democrats haven't been passive observers to the destruction of their party's base. Harry Truman was so militantly opposed to worker strikes after WWII that he inadvertently validated the public opinion behind Taft-Hartley (a bill he vetoed, but his veto was overridden). And one can argue that the Clinton-sponsored NAFTA was the straw that broke the camel's back -- he's certainly the one who gets blamed, even though it was mostly Republicans who voted for the agreement.

On the other hand, the half-life of disasters certainly seems to be quickening, especially as public institutions become more and more corrupt, as wealth and income are distributed ever more inequally, as decades of bad choices slowly add up into harder ones. A lot of the links below concern the destruction of the middle class, especially in the Rust Belt, and raise the question of why even people who are still doing OK have become anxious about the economy. This can only remind me of a book published back in 1989, Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. And really, she wasn't way ahead of the learning curve. She was merely more perceptive than most people were. Recent books, such as the six recommended in the list below, focus more on those who have fallen, and who can't get up. But fear came first, and Democrats would have been better served had they recognized that, instead of blundering on and pushing more and more people down and out.

Here are a mess of links I've collected, thinking they may be of some interest (more or less alphabetical by author).

• Scott Alexander: You Are Still Crying Wolf: Title refers to a piece, Frank Bruni: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump, which complains that Democratic denunciations of "honorable and decent men" like McCain and Romney have inoculated many Americans against even more strident warnings about Trump (he cites an essay by Jonah Greenberg, "How the Media's History of Smearing Republicans Now Helps Trump"). Alexander argues that Trump did better than Romney among blacks, Latinos and Asians, then concludes: "The only major racial group where he didn't get a gain or greater than 5% was white people." He then goes on to argue that Trump isn't nearly as racist (i.e., no more than "any other 70 year old white guy") as people think, and that white supremacists -- at least as represented by people like David Duke (who got 3% in his Louisiana Senate campaign) or groups like the KKK (national membership in the 3000-6000 range) are extremely marginal. I think he goes too far in making excuses for Trump, but it does raise the question: given that Republicans have spent forty-some years "dog-whistling" race-charged themes, isn't it possible that Democrats have become hyper-sensitive to that veiled rhetoric? (And conversely, isn't it possible that much of the Republican target audience have grown so accustomed to it they no longer pay it any mind?) On the other hand, Alexander does stress how bizarre he finds Trump:

  16. But didn't Trump . . .

  Whatever bizarre, divisive, ill-advised, and revolting thing you're about to mention, the answer is probably yes.

  This is equally true on race-related and non-race-related issues. People ask "How could Trump believe the wacky conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya, if he wasn't racist?" I don't know. How could Trump believe the wacky conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism? How could Trump believe the wacky conspiracy theory that the Clintons killed Vince Foster? How could Trump believe the wacky conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz's father shot JFK?

  Trump will apparently believe anything for any reason, especially about his political opponents. If Clinton had been black but Obama white, we'd be hearing that the Vince Foster conspiracy theory proves Trump's bigotry, and the birtherism was just harmless wackiness.

  Likewise, how could Trump insult a Mexican judge just for being Mexican? I don't know. How could Trump insult a disabled reporter just for being disabled? How could Trump insult John McCain just for being a beloved war hero? Every single person who's opposed him, Trump has insulted in various offensive ways, including 140 separate incidents of him calling someone "dopey" or "dummy" on Twitter, and you expect him to hold his mouth just because the guy is a Mexican?

  I don't think people appreciate how weird this guy is. His weird way of speaking. His catchphrases like "haters and losers!" or "Sad!" His tendency to avoid perfectly reasonable questions in favor of meandering tangents about Mar-a-Lago. The ability to bait him into saying basically anything just by telling him people who don't like him think he shouldn't.

• Krishnadev Calamur: Donald Trump's CIA Pick Made His Name on the Benghazi Committee: That's Mike Pompeo, currently 4th district congressman from Canada, a district which includes Wichita and a half-dozen rural counties. Pompeo was first elected in 2010 when Todd Tiahrt ran for Senate (and lost to Jerry Moran). Tiahrt, who I had long regarded as the worst congressman in America, tried to take back his House seat in 2012, and lost to Pompeo -- at the time I characterized them as R(Boeing) and R(Koch), respectively. Indeed, the Wichita Eagle has an article today titled "Koch Industries, Pompeo's biggest backer, cheers his CIA nomination." In Congress, Pompeo has been a faithful defender of the Koch's brand of laissez-faire, but far more than that he's emerged as one of the House's most rabid neocons -- a fact that was recognized by Bill Kristol when he put Pompeo's name on his short list of vice presidential candidates. At this article points out, Pompeo's was one of the Benghazi Committee's most forceful foes of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, as CIA Director it wouldn't surprise me if he forgoes the Special Prosecutor and just "renders" her to a black site to be tortured until she confesses all. At least, nothing in that sentence violates his understanding of law or morality.

  Martin Longman has more on Pompeo (as well as Flynn and Sessions) here: Trump Makes Three Catastrophic Picks. I do have a bone to pick with one line: "What unites [Pompeo] with Mike Flynn is his outrage about Obama's firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal for disloyalty." Uh, McChrystal was fired for incompetence. If you go back to the Rolling Stone article where all this dirty laundry was aired, you'll find that Flynn was even more outspoken in berating and belittling Obama, yet somehow Obama looked past that to nominate Flynn to be head of the DIA. Sure, that may rank as the worst appointment Obama ever made, but you can't say it was because he was thin-skinned about criticism.

• Robert Christgau on the End of the World

• David Dayen: Beware Donald Trump's Infrastructure Plan:

  Does this sound familiar? It's the common justification for privatization, and it's been a disaster virtually everywhere it's been tried. First of all, this specifically ties infrastructure -- designed for the common good -- to a grab for profits. Private operators will only undertake projects if they promise a revenue stream. You may end up with another bridge in New York City or another road in Los Angeles, which can be monetized. But someplace that actually needs infrastructure investment is more dicey without user fees.

  So the only way to entice private-sector actors into rebuilding Flint, Michigan's water system, for example, is to give them a cut of the profits in perpetuity. That's what Chicago did when it sold off 36,000 parking meters to a Wall Street-led investor group. Users now pay exorbitant fees to park in Chicago, and city government is helpless to alter the rates.

• Elizabeth Drew: How It Happened: Some fairly dumb things here, including a metric comparing votes in counties that have Cracker Barrel vs. Whole Foods stores, and an assertion that the third party vote cost Clinton the election. Also includes this quote from J.D. Vance (author of Hillbilly Elegy):

  "People who are drawn to Trump are drawn to him because he's a little outrageous, he's a little relatable, and fundamentally he is angry and spiteful and critical of the things that people feel anger and spite toward," Vance has said. "It's people who are perceived to be powerful. It's the Hillary Clintons of the world, the Barack Obamas of the world, the Wall Street executives of the world. There just isn't anyone out there who will talk about the system like it's completely rigged like Donald Trump does. It's certainly not something you're going to hear from Hillary Clinton."

• Jason Easley: It Was a Union Contract, Not Trump, That Kept a Ford Plant From Leaving the US

• Barbara Ehrenreich: Forget fear and loathing. The US election inspires projectile vomiting: Pre-election piece (sorry I didn't link to it earlier). Still, this works fairly well as a post-mortem:

  [Trump's] supporters -- generally portrayed as laid-off blue-collar workers who, in the absence of unions, have devoted themselves to the cause of whiteness -- cheer on each of his macro-aggressions. To them, he is a giant middle finger in the face of the bipartisan political elite, and the crazier he acts, the more resounding this fuck-you gets. It doesn't matter that most of Trump's assertions can't stand up to fact-checking; ignorance has been enshrined by an entire alternative media, stretching from Fox News to Stormfront on the Nazi-leaning right.

  On the liberal left, tragically, we do not have Bernie Sanders, who would have dispatched Trump's populist pretensions with a wrist flick. But no, representing the side of tolerance, good government and cosmopolitanism, we have the very epitome of Democratic party elitism, a woman who labeled half of Trump's supporters "deplorables," a politician who is so robotic that any efforts to analyze her motives risk the charge of anthropomorphism.

• Liza Featherstone: Elite, White Feminism Gave Us Trump

• Matt Feeney: The Book That Predicted Trump: The book touted here is Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2012) -- I'm pretty sure those names are just historical bookends and not meant to imply a general vector of declining intelligence and coherence, as Robin's central thesis is that conservatism, whether you're talking about Burke or John Calhoun or Ronald Reagan or Trump is always pretty much the same thing, for the same reasons: to defend the privileged few against anything that might make us more equal.

  Speaking of books, the New York Times recommends 6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win:

  • George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  • Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press)
  • J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper)
  • Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company)
  • John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (Columbia Global Reports)
  • Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Viking)

  I've only read one of these -- Thomas Frank's critique of Clinton's Democrats, a legacy which needs to be critically reviewed by anyone who wants to rebuild the Democratic Party -- but the common theme here is the economic and social stresses felt by the vanishing middle class of white people.

• Kathleen Frydl: The Oxy Electorate:

  The number of people who cast a ballot in the 2016 presidential race was greater than in 2012, even though, as a state, Ohio recorded a net loss in turnout from the previous election. This pattern holds for nearly all opioid-ravaged counties. And not just in Ohio -- in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan as well, all of them crucial to the presidential election's outcome. In 9 of the Ohio counties that Trump successfully turned from Democrat to Republican, six log overdose rates well above the national norm. All of the Pennsylvania counties that chose Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 have exceptionally high overdose rates, averaging 25 people per 100,000; in none of these counties did vote totals fall.

• Kathleen Geier: Inequality Among Women Is Crucial to Understanding Hillary's Loss:

  In these white working-class communities, it is the women who have experienced some of the worst hardships. You may have heard of that famous study that showed that showed an unprecedented decline in longevity among white Americans who lack college degrees. But most media reports missed a crucial point: As the statistician Andrew Gelman pointed out, "Since 2005, mortality rates have increased among women in this group but not men." And in addition to economic insecurity and rising mortality rates, working-class women have suffered from another indignity: invisibility. During the campaign, there was a blizzard of articles about the concerns of elite Republican women and white working-class men, but practically nothing about female members of the working class.

• John Judis: Why Trump Won - and Clinton Lost - and What It Could Mean for the Country and the Parties: Quickie post-mortem, including some things that don't make much sense to me (like the anti-third term pendulum), but one thing I'm struck by is that immigration has different regional effects, and appears particularly threatening when used to break or undermine unions -- meatpackers in Iowa is a case in point. One conclusion I'd draw is that Democrats need to come up with better ways of talking about immigration, because the way this campaign played out they came off as reflexively pro, which raised legitimate questions of how much they cared about people who were born here. Theda Skocpol wrote a rejoinder which pokes a few holes without doing much to fill them in (partly because she feels the need to defend Clinton and to denigrate Sanders).

• Mike Konczal: Preparing for the Worst: How Conservatives Will Govern in 2017:

  Unlike 2009, the conservative policy agenda is designed to not require any Democratic votes. The idea that a conservative policy agenda would create a dysfunctional system is a feature, not a bug. And the hope that conflicting factions of the GOP will provide opportunities to break them apart are not likely to pan out. But there's some reason for hope, because their overreach and lack of preparedness will give us opportunities. [ . . . ]

  They aren't ready with a replacement for Obamacare. They aren't ready for the heat of privatizing Medicare, or weakening Medicaid. There are constituencies for both, and town halls can be flooded and people organized. Those who desperately wanted a change towards economic security are going to be surprised that the factories aren't coming back and that they signed up for a libertarian kleptocracy instead. But we should also be clear on the challenges of their policy agenda, and that the cracks won't appear by themselves.

  Konczal recommends a book (as do I): Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (2009) -- no mention of Trump, but lots of things you're going to be seeing. And back on Sept. 21, Konczal wrote a piece that provides useful background here: Trump Is Actually Full of Policy.

• Michael Kruse: What Trump Voters Want Now: Talking to blue collar Trump voters in Pennsylvania:

  "Your government betrayed you, and I'm going to make it right," Trump told a boisterous crowd at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena less than three weeks before Election Day. "Your jobs will come back under a Trump administration," he said. "Your steel will come back," he said. "We're putting your miners back to work," he said.

  The people here who voted for Trump want all that. They want him to loosen environmental regulations. They want their taxes to go down and their incomes to go up. They want to see fewer drugs on their streets and more control of the Mexican border. They want him to "run the country like a business." And they want this fast. So now comes the hard part for Trump -- turning rhetoric into results. Four years ago, the largely Democratic voters in Cambria County flipped on President Obama, disgusted that he had not made good on his promise of change. What's clear from a series of interviews with Trump supporters here is that they will turn on Trump, too, if he doesn't deliver. [ . . . ]

  But beyond flared tempers in the immediate aftermath of this ugly election, said Rininger and Daloni, the larger point is that this isn't going to work. There's next to no way, they believe, that Trump can deliver on his promises.

  "The infrastructure for the steel is all gone," Daloni said. "It just doesn't exist anymore in Johnstown. It did used to be a steel boomtown, but it was long before Obama was elected. It was decimated, really, before Bill Clinton was elected. The mills were going down in the '70s and '80s."

  The Trump voters say they want change, but Daloni and Rininger say the change has happened already. And despite what Trump promised at the downtown arena a month ago, they believe there's a real chance that Trump's solutions could make things worse. Incomes won't go up -- they'll go down. "I make $32 an hour, with good benefits, and that's because I'm union," Rininger said. "I wouldn't even be f--king close to that if I wasn't union."

  And jobs, they worry, won't come back -- they'll disappear faster. And before long, they said, the only work in Cambria County will be minimum-wage counter jobs at the familiar collection of ring-road fast food-joints. "The service industry, I'm afraid," Daloni said.

  "If Trump starts trade wars," Rininger said, "you hurt us. You hurt our plant" -- which is owned by Swedes, with a CEO from India. And the steel the workers do still make, Rininger said, is sold to Brazil. It's sold around the world.

  Charles Pierce comments: You Can Keep Studying White Working Class Voters, But We Know the Answers.

• David Leonhardt: The Democrats' Real Turnout Problem: Cites a study by Douglas Rivers of five east-to-midwest swing states that switched from Obama to Trump (plus Minnesota, which was very close):

  In counties where Trump won at least 70 percent of the vote, the number of votes cast rose 2.9 percent versus 2012. Trump's pugnacious message evidently stirred people who hadn't voted in the past. By comparison, in counties where Clinton won at least 70 percent, the vote count was 1.7 percent lower this year.

• Eric Lichtblau: US Hate Crimes Surge 6%, Fueled by Attacks on Muslims: I wouldn't call 6% a surge, but it turns out that's a gross "hate crime" count. The real bottom line:

  There were 257 reports of assaults, attacks on mosques and other hate crimes against Muslims last year, a jump of about 67 percent over 2014. It was the highest total since 2001, when more than 480 attacks occurred in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

• Ryan Lizza: Donald Trump's First, Alarming Week as President-Elect: Old history, now eclipsed by an even more disturbing second week (e.g., Michael Flynn, Mike Pompeo).

• Amanda Marcotte: Voter suppression helped make Donald Trump president -- now he'll make it worse

• Sophia A McClennen: Like a double dose of Dubya: Donald Trump's presidency will be like the George W. Bush disaster -- only worse

• Michael Moore: 5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win: This piece dates from July 21, 2016, so it counts now as prophetic, but was meant more as a warning, from someone who grew up in an industrial Great Lakes state and has spent much of his career chronicling the hard times his people have suffered. Here's the first point:

  I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes -- Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states -- but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it's because he's said (correctly) that the Clintons' support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich. . . .

  And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It's 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he's expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that'll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn't need Florida. He doesn't need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.

  And that was exactly what happened -- had Clinton held the line in the three closest states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania; forget Ohio) she would have been elected. She is, of course, one of the other four points, but more interesting is what Moore calls "the Jesse Ventura Effect":

  Finally, do not discount the electorate's ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It's one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there's not even a friggin' time limit. You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad. And in the same way like when you're standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the position of puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like.

  Of course, the polls told them that Trump didn't have a chance, that someone sane would catch them when they jumped. Moore also wrote another pre-election piece called 5 Ways to Make Sure Trump Loses, which included this bit:

  So many people have given up on our system and that's because the system has given up on them. They know it's all bullshit: politics, politicians, elections. The middle class in tatters, the American Dream a nightmare for the 47 million living in poverty. Get this straight: HALF of America is planning NOT to vote November 8th. Hillary's approval rating is at 36%. CNN said it last night: No one running for office with an approval rating of 36% has ever been elected president (Trump's is at 30%). Even in these newer polls, 60% still say that Hillary is "untrustworthy to be president." Disillusioned young people stop me every day to tell me they're not voting (or they're voting 3rd Party). This is a problem, folks. Stop ignoring it. You need to listen to them. Chastising them, shaming them, will not work. Acknowledging to them that they have a point, that Hillary Clinton is maybe not the best candidate, . . .

  The rest of the paragraph doesn't make a lot of sense, and maybe acknowledging your candidate's flaws won't convince many people to overlook them, but one way to approach this would be to refocus the campaign on electing Democrats to Congress, both to help her and to keep her honest. And the easiest thing in the world should have been running against our current batch of Congressional Republicans. Of course, it didn't happen, perhaps because the Clintons rarely concern themselves with any but the first person.

• Toni Morrison: Making America White Again: This is one of sixteen pieces the New Yorker commissioned as Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump's America. See especially Jane Mayer on Trump and the Koch network. Also this from Jill Leopre:

  The rupture in the American republic, the division of the American people whose outcome is the election of Donald Trump, cannot be attributed to Donald Trump. Nor can it be attributed to James Comey and the F.B.I. or to the white men who voted in very high numbers for Trump or to the majority of white women who did, too, unexpectedly, or to the African-American and Latino voters who did not give Hillary Clinton the edge they gave Barack Obama. It can't be attributed to the Republican Party's unwillingness to disavow Trump or to the Democratic Party's willingness to promote Clinton or to a media that has careened into a state of chaos. There are many reasons for our troubles. But the deepest reason is inequality: the forms of political, cultural, and economic polarization that have been widening, not narrowing, for decades. Inequality, like slavery, is a chain that binds at both ends. [ . . . ]

  Many Americans, having lost faith in a government that has failed to address widening inequality, and in the policymakers and academics and journalists who have barely noticed it, see Trump as their deliverer. They cast their votes with purpose. A lot of Trump voters I met during this election season compared Trump to Lincoln: an emancipator. What Trump can and cannot deliver, by way of policy, remains to be seen; my own doubts are grave. Meanwhile, though, he has added weight to the burden that we, each of us, carry on our backs, the burden of old hatreds.

  I agree that inequality infects everything, but would also have blamed war: it's impossible to spend fifteen years at war, even if it only rarely touches us personally (as has oddly been the case with this one), without it coarsening and brutalizing us, and that shows up in an increasingly bitter and violent campaign. Trump evinced by far the more popularly resonant stance, on the one hand disowning misguided conflicts like Bush's Iraq war yet on the other hand showing an unflinching will to inflict violence whenever threatened. Clinton, on the other hand, seemed to follow Obama in thinking that war can be compartmentalized and managed, something that can continue indefinitely without changing us. For more on this point, see: Tom Engelhardt: Through the Gates of Hell: How Empire Ushered in a Trump Presidency.

• Charles P Pierce: I Am Sure of Nothing Now: Concludes with this quote from Hunter S. Thompson on the 1972 election, the first time I was as grossly disappointed by American voters as this time (not that there haven't been a couple more times sandwiched between):

  This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it -- that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes . . . understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose . . . Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

• Sean T Posey: How Democrats lost the Rust Belt in 2016:

  In 1964, 37 percent of Ohio workers belonged to a union; that number fell to 12 percent by 2016, and incomes for the working class tumbled in tandem. It's a similar story in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Republican policies are largely responsible, but Democrats have done little to address the precipitous decline of the working class.

  When Hillary Clinton famously referred to half of Trump's supporters as a "basket of deplorables," it rang hollow for voters who had waited in vain for her to acknowledge their economic plight. Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. However, for working families, the economic hangover of the post-industrial era never went away. Clinton's campaign failed to fully appreciate their pain.

  A couple years into the "recovery" it was reported that 97% of the gains had been reaped by the 1%. Maybe that number has inched down a bit since then, but that translates as a windfall for the very rich and no recovery for most people.

• John Quiggin: The dog that didn't bark: One of the most glaring results from the election is that virtually none of the Republicans who had been so critical of Trump early on failed to vote for him in the end. Perhaps that's because socially liberal, economically moderate, or libertarian Republicans have become urban myths -- even though Clinton wasted a lot of time courting them (she did seem to be doing better among the neocons, but it looks like they'll do quite nicely under Trump).

• Sam Stein: The Clinton Campaign Was Undone by Its Own Neglect and a Touch of Arrogance, Staffers Say

• Steven Waldman: Did the Decline of Labor Finally Kill the Democrats? Uh, yes.

• Gary Younge: How Trump took middle America: Lead-in: "After a month in a midwestern town, the story of this election is clear -- when people feel the system is broken, they vote for whoever promises to smash it."

• Steve Bannon: 'we'll govern for 50 years': A boast that only seems modest next to "Thousand Year Reich." From the cited interview (more of a profile piece than tete-a-tete):

  When Bannon took over the campaign from Paul Manafort, there were many in the Trump circle who had resigned themselves to the inevitability of the candidate listening to no one. But here too was a Bannon insight: When the campaign seemed most in free fall or disarray, it was perhaps most on target. While Clinton was largely absent from the campaign trail and concentrating on courting her donors, Trump -- even after the leak of the grab-them-by-the-pussy audio -- was speaking to ever-growing crowds of 35,000 or 40,000. "He gets it; he gets it intuitively," says Bannon, perhaps still surprised he has found such an ideal vessel. "You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don't speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids."

  Oh, then there's this final quote: "I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors."

As I was putting this post together, I started reading Corey Robin's Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), and noted this quote (p. 59) on the asymmetry between left and right, on how hard change is for the former, and how easy reaction is for the latter:

Where the left's program of redistribution raises the questions of whether its beneficiaries are truly prepared to wield the powers they seek, the conservative prospect of restoration suffers from no such challenge. Unlike the reformer or the revolutionary, moreover, who faces the nearly impossible task of empowering the powerless -- that is, of turning people from what they are into what they are not -- the conservative merely asks his followers to do more of what they always have done (albeit, better and differently). As a result, his counterrevolution will not require the same disruption that the revolution has visited upon the country.

My main worry about the Sanders campaign wasn't that he might get slandered and lose his appeal, but that there wasn't a strong enough movement under him to deliver on his promises. And that mattered, of course, because his promises mattered. By contrast, all Trump voters had to do was to put their guy in power. After that, go back to work, and let their new right-thinking leader do what needs to be done. I've never had any inkling why they would trust him with that power, but then I don't think like they do: I learned early to question all authority, and found that when you give a greedy monster more power he only becomes greedier and more monstrous. But in a way, the great appeal of the right is that it offers simplistic solutions, wrapped in a little virus of paranoia which allows them to be used again and again, regardless of their repeated failures.

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