ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from."
-- William Faulkner, from Light in August

1.

This is a story about dead folks, or more accurately a dead era, although it might be said that anything this dead has no damn business being so very much alive, right now, in the year 2020. The retelling itself has proven difficult, and a definitive rendering eludes me.

I’ve read all about humankind’s past pandemics and those famous plagues of old, and assumed these lessons were clear to me, but the part they don’t teach you is the way seismic public health crises peel back the layers of your soul – or, in my case, what passes for one. Atheist with souls? Nah, surely not.

To begin this beguine, let’s go back to the beginning.

2.

These many years later, the way I remember it is that much of my father’s self-worth revolved around good, old-fashioned hard work.

In another place at another time, he might have been an enthusiastic Stakhanovite, a term originating in the Soviet Union to describe “workers who modeled themselves after (epic farm-near-me/">mining hero) Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state.”

We’re Americans, of course, or so we are told by the looters, and it’s all bound up into a different set of precepts. Unraveling these many motivations decades after the fact wouldn’t be easy in the best of times – and as you may have noticed, these aren’t.

It remains that my father was ideally suited to socialism. He just never realized it. A military veteran, working man, salt of the earth, the common folk, Joe Six Pack; my father was eternally suspicious of concentrated wealth and hoity-toity, over-educated elites.

By his own admission drawn to the underdog, he did not cheer for the New York Yankees or US Steel. My father died in 2001, and yet I can imagine him turning the air blue upon learning that Greg Fischer proposed to award Amazon half the city of Louisville (and a state park to boot) in order to lure the company’s headquarters to Louisville.

Conversely, and the hard part for me to accept, is that my father quite likely would have been enamored of Donald Trump’s bait ‘n’ switch brand of cynical populism. That’s because he always was drawn to charlatans, like a moth to the light fixture.

Ross Perot was great, at least until he proved to be an utter flake. Ronald Reagan? A godlike figure, except when those two presidential terms concluded, my father was disillusioned when he realized the rich had gotten far richer; trickle down, but treasure up.

Before them, there was another recipient of my father’s political affections, a passionate straight talker who spoke to the people, not the snobs, and understood what needed to be done to make the nation great again.

He was George Corley Wallace (1919-1998), seeker of the presidency from 1964 through 1976, although most convincingly in 1968 and 1972.

3.

My unanticipated journey through childhood days began innocently enough with a book, the title of which aptly conveys the essence of its content: Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (James Shapiro; 2020).

The second prompting came during a chat with a friend, who mentioned a 1968 television appearance by Wallace, soon to become a presidential candidate as an independent: "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Wallace Crusade" (1968).

I watched the episode, and was strangely disquieted. Something began to stir. Concurrently, I started reading another book called Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (George Yancy; 2018).

At this point, little things began nagging at me. Something was troubling, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the culmination of six months spent largely at home, contemplating humanity, pandemics, racism and presidential politics – numerous strange disturbances coming together at the crossroads amid tumultuous news cycles.

Soon it became clear that the specific flash point came with the introduction of Wallace into the narrative; moreover, it flared after watching the Alabamian in peak crusading form on "Firing Line." Watching it made me physically uncomfortable, something uncharacteristic for a history buff with a customarily strong stomach.

It became apparent that I needed a more comprehensive refresher course on Wallace and his epoch, which came courtesy of a PBS "American Experience" documentary film titled "George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (2000).

It took far longer to absorb than the three-hour running time because at the start, I couldn’t endure more than five minutes at a sitting. I studied the bathroom mirror. Could someone please explain why I was having such a visceral reaction to this?

4.

George C. Wallace was a four-time Alabama governor whose failed presidential candidacies in 1968 and 1972 functioned as grandiose overtures to the ensuing civil rights flip-flop of America’s two main political parties.

Wallace, who began as a New Deal “liberal” in relative terms, became etched in the minds of Americans as a racist bogeyman; his presidential platforms were swallowed whole by Richard Nixon and co-opted into the emerging “Southern strategy.” Black America subsequently deserted the erstwhile Party of Lincoln for the Democrats, now the presumed defenders of social justice, while Republicans scooped up the South’s (shall we say “reactionary”) electoral votes.

The ambitious Wallace’s political career was like an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. He told his children only two things mattered in life, money and power – and he didn’t care about money; friends remarked that Wallace’s muse was the thrill of the campaign chase, and he became bored quickly when relegated to the day-to-day grind of governance.

And yet in 1958, when Wallace mounted his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign, he did so as a populist champion of all poor and working class residents, black or white, only to be badly beaten in the Democratic primary (the race that mattered; at the time, a Republican was lucky to get 35% of the vote in the fall).

A humiliated Wallace had an epiphany in 1958, and it brings us full circle, back to the opening exchange from the "Firing Line" of 1968.

Buckley … highlighted Wallace’s 1958 gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, a race which Wallace lost and which led the young politician to claim that he would never again be outmaneuvered on the issue of segregation. Moderator C. Dickerson Williams had his hands full as Wallace attacked numerous peripheral details of Buckley’s comments, such as whether he really uttered terms like “out-segged” or whether he picked his teeth with a dirty toothpick, as the New York Times supposedly claimed.

“Out-segged.”

Hearing these words on a 52-year-old broadcast that I’m sure I didn’t watch as an 8-year old nonetheless struck me like a baseball bat to the cranium. On the face of it, they’re perfectly accurate words in the context of the discussion, but upon hearing them, I immediately guessed that something important was missing.

Wallace denied Buckley's attribution, openly sneering: “There’s no such expression as ‘segged’ in the vocabulary of southerners. I have never heard of the word ‘seg’ or ‘segged.’”

Duh. Of course he hadn’t.

Wallace was telling the whole truth; as you may already have guessed, and as the documentary film corrects the normally accurate Buckley, what the failed candidate actually said was this: “I was out-niggered, and I will never be out-niggered again.”

This may seem like a minor point given the slur. However, Wallace had already mastered the sort of coded language and dog whistles that have remained a valued component of the right wing’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge vocabulary to the present day. Buckley afforded Wallace a euphemism, but should he have done so?

Consequently, this had the effect of reminding me that the “N” word was explicitly forbidden in our household during the days of my habitation there.

As an ex-Marine, my father was a walking encyclopedia of creative profanity, but he doubled as family censor. THIS obscenity was okay to use in front of your mother, sparingly, but never THAT one. And the “N” word? Not at all; never. Soap, meet mouth.

Have I mentioned that my father was a strident, outspoken, sign-planting supporter of George C. Wallace in 1968 and 1972?

Ding, ding … ding.

Clearly this accounts for the dissonance in my Swiss cheese of a soul. Now, what’s to be done with it?

5.

I was born in a New Albany, Indiana hospital and spent the first 25 years of my life in or near the presumably anodyne settlement of Georgetown, less than ten miles away from the city, situated a few hundred feet above the Ohio River flood plain.

My guess is townies at the time would have denied Georgetown was a “sundown town,” just a law-abiding Mayberry clone utterly devoid of diversity even before white flight suddenly animated dozens of new subdivisions to sprout like noxious weeds, filling the former pastures of farms, all of it exploding into existence in the wake of Louisville’s 1975 desegregation order.

By then Wallace was in a wheelchair, crippled by the assassination attempt, with his national political career over and my father decamped to adoration of Reagan. After all, the GOP had cribbed all the disabled southern governor’s notes.

But this isn’t to say that my father was racist in any overt sense. He preached equality in matters like sports, although conveniently overlooking the realities of life off the basketball court or baseball diamond.

Dig deeper, and naturally it gets more complicated. My father was, in fact, an ordinary white guy in America. He was a muddled mixture of the admirable and indefensible, usually meaning well, sometimes revealing more than he’d intended, as when he would deny opposing biracial marriage – but shouldn’t they be thinking about the indignities those poor children will have to endure?

These indignities arose from my father’s and his coterie’s misplaced insistence that a biracial child was any of their business in the first place, all of which is to say that yes, my father was racist; he had to be a racist because I am, too, and this, to me, is an inescapable fact, part and parcel of hegemonic structural racism in America, hence the necessity of reading Yancy’s book.

"Racism, in short, is a way of being — exhibited by all white people, progressive and otherwise — that grants more freedom and benefits to whites at the expense of blacks and other people of color."

Am I deferring my own responsibility to listen and learn by somehow blaming my father for my upbringing? I don’t think so. I’m just trying to come to grips with it. Racism is society-wide. It’s endemic, shared and historical. On the surface, my father was better than some, and not as good as others. There’s not a lot to SEE here, such is the annoying and regrettable commonness of the topic.

To reiterate, my father doubtless would have explained his attraction to a populist demagogue like Wallace in non-racial language; obviously, they’re dog whistles precisely because they’re suggestive and implied, not overt.

He’d have said Wallace was a truth-teller who’d make American great again (half-century symmetry, anyone?) and would fight for the underdog. But my father and his buddies, well, they weren’t really underdogs, were they?

How could they be, given the eternal certainty, and those coded-language promises, that Blacks always would remain conveniently beneath them? To be blunt, that white Americans would always have a cushion between themselves and rock bottom: Black America, kept right where it belonged.

I’m angry with my father now, all these years later, not because he was a racist; as I’ve noted, it seems entirely reasonable to me that all whites are racist. Rather, it’s the one point of his that I always previously admired, and find now to be lamentably misplaced, this being his perception of the supposed underdog’s struggle.

Wallace wasn’t an underdog. He wasn’t really shielding the common white folks from mistreatment at the claws of evil central government, or the coming decades-long cancerous neoliberal pillage. Rather, Wallace was reassuring them they’d always stay a step ahead of Blacks, and so what if most of society’s wealth still somehow found its way straight to the 1%?

Maybe the poor would hit the lottery, and move up to the shining city on a hill where the accumulators of capital reside. But they wouldn’t move down THERE, below the (wink wink) invisible and therefore fully visible color line.

If the true underdogs are society’s most vulnerable, did the likes of Wallace really care for them at all? And while my father may have cared, he still supported Wallace and accepted the latter’s shell game. How do we explain this contradiction?

Later, when we both were older, I’d suggest to my father that he should take a closer look at the failure of exploitative robber baron capitalism as the root cause of certain of these maladies. Occasionally, it seemed that I was making headway against those headwinds, although in the end, he may have decided it was easier to humor me by listening, then enlisting with the next populist to appear.

6.

I can’t entirely account for the rise of this crushing angst, and it might well be the case that there’s nothing noteworthy about any of it, at least in the sense of these attitudes being common to a generation now passed.

And yet, as I’ve noted, a quick scroll of your social media feed will reveal the passing of the generational cohort, but not the diseased attitudes. They're very much still with us.

In 2016, dozens of commentators mentioned George Wallace’s racist and white nationalist legacies in the context of Donald Trump’s narcissistic theatrics, and as a well-read and informed individual, I shrugged and looked away. Of course, I recall thinking, but doesn’t everyone know it, and aren’t we past THAT?

Actually, no. Approaching the conclusion of Season Four of Aryan Nation: Trump Remixes the Racist Classics, we remain mired in it.

7.

My father's been dead for a while now. Our relationship was extremely complicated. We were very different people in many ways, and all too much alike in others. Most of the time it's nothing to dwell on, and I think we parted in 2001 with considerable mutual respect. We both gave ground. We both came around.

I'd use the word "love" if I could, but it isn't something he'd have said, so the notion seems superfluous. We were far tighter at the end than the beginning, and for this much I'm genuinely grateful.

Perhaps what I have learned the past few days while struggling to finish this demented jigsaw puzzle, all the while wearing a self-imposed blindfold, is that evidently I tried to bury quite a lot about those Wallace years as they pertained to my father – and to me. I buried it as deep as I could for as long as the memories would stay put, safely subterranean.

Maybe my boxing up of these memories and feelings, to be hidden in a dusty corner of the noggin, was a form of self-protection, with George Wallace merely a peripheral indicator. That’s because at the tender age of eight, I was an eager co-conspirator of my father's Wallace fetish, if for no other reason than the hope, so often forlorn, of this enthusiasm somehow making him happy.

My father was capable of a strange, unpredictable bad temper. He kept it inside the house, to our trepidation, and his contemporaries probably wouldn’t have known. When I was a kid, I'd try to figure out what was eating him, and couldn’t, so it became my habit to conclude that it was directed at me. My father erupted, then just as quickly erased the memory of his distemper.

It would seem that I didn’t.

Once enrolled in university, and intent on becoming the sort of intellectual calculated to irritate my father, it finally occurred to me that his anger likely stemmed from undiagnosed PTSD, a by-product of World War II; seeing as three years during your late teens on a leaky boat lobbing shells at people you couldn't see, until they came your way in kamikaze planes, is the sort of trauma calculated to stay with you.

Then, deciding the war was to blame, it compelled me to try to protect my father from his ghosts. It seemed terrible to me that one would go to war at 17, and be afflicted by the experience for decades afterward. Maybe he’d been shaped by these factors to be receptive to Wallace and his ilk.

52 years later, with the idiocy of racism and white privilege flaring all around us amid a deadly pandemic, tanking economy and global climate crisis, there remains sufficient depth of feeling – some level of feeling – about my father that out of nowhere exposed previously suppressed anger about the bill of goods my father peddled with regard to Wallace, as opposed to what Wallace really was about, and whatever part of all this involved me – or didn’t.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

8.

It is well documented that during Wallace’s twilight years, in a dogged pursuit as vigorous as any of his campaigns for public office, he made an apparently sincere effort to atone for his mistakes. If his purported religious awakening was genuine, then the word “sins” might be more fitting.

According to Wallace’s friends, he finally understood that what he had done in order to possess political power caused great suffering to others, with his own accumulating illnesses and pain abetting this revelation. Wallace asked for forgiveness, and remarkably, Alabama’s Black voters supported his final runs for the governor’s office in the early 1980s.

A Black attorney who had figured in Wallace’s early period as judge during the 1950s responded to these entreaties by saying yes, he could forgive Wallace, but no, he could not FORGET what he'd done.

In another striking convergence, the late John Lewis – beaten by Wallace’s state troopers on Bloody Sunday in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a 19th-century Confederate general, politician and Klansman – also forgave the governor.

Forgiveness from Wallace’s victims in the play’s final act alone attests to the seemingly distant role of William Shakespeare in all this, although I think the Bard of Avon is twice applicable.

I’m not the first to see familiarly dramatic Shakespearean aspects of tragedy as pertaining to Wallace’s story: a lust for power, deals with the devil, the ironic cruelty of an assassination attempt leaving him crippled and in agony (but not killing him), and of course these later efforts to achieve forgiveness and redemption as intended to snatch his tattered soul back from Satan.

Also, like Oedipus in ancient Greece, Wallace’s ambition and arrogance carried both the seeds of success, and his own destruction.

My personal nod to Shakespeare comes with an early 1970s recollection that somehow has stayed fresh in my memory, perhaps as the perfect summary of how tense the relationship with my father was at the time.

I’d taken to checking out LPs of Shakespearean plays from the library, and trying to follow along, reading them while listening. My father came into my room one day, projected his finest facially contorted dismay, and ordered me to get ready for baseball practice by turning off “that shit.”

It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t.

At times, it can be downright debilitating.

The ghosts wobble, but they don’t fall down.

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Recent columns:

August 13: ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

July 23: ON THE AVENUES: These overdue mask mandates should help us separate the bad actors from the good.

WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER: This three-hour documentary film about George Corley Wallace is a must-watch.

I didn't expect to embark this week upon a long-delayed detour through the life of George C. Wallace (1919-1998) in order to process what obviously are a handful of unresolved issues from my upbringing.





Well, you never know when it's going to happen, do you? Ever since the advent of Donald Trump, the parallels between the coddled New Yorker and the rural Alabamian have been obvious and frequently discussed.

I sat them out, because I really didn't want to think about how my father and so many of his friends were huge Wallace supporters in the late 1960s.

Time to get my act together. Here's an article about the making of the documentary (which was released in 2000). I strongly recommend that you set aside three hours, with strong drink if that's what it takes, and watch the complete film.

My weekly ON THE AVENUES column this Thursday likely will explain the rest ... well, insofar as it can be explained.

Reich: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

"I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system – I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause."
-- Robert Reich

I'm confused. Reich's analysis appears to be broadly correct, but nonetheless, I still feel the pressing need to take a shower. I asked Jeff Gillenwater for his thoughts.

Yes. A few quibbles - marking the erroneous white working class bit again - but generally correct. An overwhelming majority of “professionals” are complicit, hoarding opportunities and not standing up while outwardly claiming to be very liberal just as long as the financial and social order favors them. As a country, we’re not in overall possession of the self-awareness, intelligence, and fortitude to own up to that. While actual discrimination remains a serious problem, much of the virtue signaling lately serves the same role as “but I have a black friend” did previously. It’s more cover than impetus for genuine self-reflection within realistic social and economic frameworks.

Reich says: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

And, as I write, these same Democrats are frantically undermining radical democratic reform in a desperate attempt to install a fully complicit nitwit like Joe Biden as the party's candidate.

The Democratic Party's engorged elites never learn; on second thought, that's a redundancy.

Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump, by Robert Reich (The Guardian)

... In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’ magnetism or Trump’s likeability
Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism”.

These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement ...

Amazon, NYC, subsidies and YOUR town: "Tightening the parameters whereby cities can give out subsidies is a way to nudge us closer to that reality."

My social media feed was interesting last week. So many of you were angry: why would anyone NOT feed public money to a colossal monopolistic entity and fail to WELCOME its arrival to further squelch competition, fluff the oligarchs and concentrate amassed capital even further?

Me, for one. Sayeth a writer at The Nation:

The absurdities of the Amazon deal, which enraged New Yorkers and motivated them to fight back, are globalized absurdities present in every factory, every office, every farm, and every export-processing zone across the planet in which people are treated like cattle, offered by their governments to Amazon and other world-striding corporations as a cheap resource to be exploited. This outward-looking, supranational view is already implicit in New York’s anti-Amazon movement, which, much to the company’s displeasure, broadened its perspective to encompass Amazon’s general attitude toward unionization, corporate welfare, and immigration policy. In other words, the movement’s was a holistic critique: rejecting Amazon’s values for a wholly different idea of the kind of world we want.

Meanwhile Strong Towns shrinks the analysis to the micro, i.e. communities like ours and what we're willing to give away in the name of "economic development." There are other ways, though they're not always effective in building the personality cults of big fish in small ponds.

What Local Government Should Do in the Wake of Amazon's HQ2, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... How Baseball Resembles Economic Development
Last week Amazon announced that they were pulling out of the deal they had made with a handful of power-brokers in New York to build a new headquarters there. The traditional practice of negotiating these bad deals in private and then forcing them through the various approval processes based on sheer momentum is undermined by today’s populist mood. For those aspiring to political power, there is less to be gained by going along and being a good soldier. We live in interesting times.

I also don’t think it is lost on Amazon executives—or those of other major tech companies—that prior populist movements in the United States coincided with massive levels of wealth inequality and eventually led to the breakup of anti-competitive monopolies. Our grandchildren may study Amazon’s HQ2 shakedown as a turning point in the Gilded Tech Age.

I admit that I was confused about New York offering so much subsidy to Amazon. By my sense of how economic development works, if there was any city in North America that did not have to bribe a business to love them, it would be New York City, a highly-skilled workforce replete with tech workers with all the cosmopolitan amenities to attract the best workers in the world. New York has done all the up-front work; why not just sit back and let the deals come to them? It’s what they did with Google, which just announced a $1 billion expansion and 7,000 new jobs (without any subsidy).

Nowadays incremental local ecosystem improvements don't seem to be the strategy calculated to get you re-elected.

My hope is that cities would ultimately evolve to be like MLB teams: they would start to see that their resources would be better committed to growing their own talent within, to incrementally improving their own economic ecosystem instead of paying for free agents to pretend you’re their favorite team. It’s not happening, and I’m doubtful that it will, for reasons that MLB teams sometimes struggle with.

I love this idea of a citizen advisory group purposefully purged of usual suspects.

Establishing Ground Rules for Business Incentives
For state governments looking to strengthen their cities, I’m on record already as saying I would dramatically expand the municipal toolbox, but I’d limit the city’s annual debt service to 10% of locally-generated revenue. It’s a mechanism to prevent short-term thinking from blowing them up. I’d add to that some provisions on tax subsidies that allowed cities to be competitive, but limited how deep they could go. Something like:

• Set the maximum length of any deal to something less than seven years to keep current leadership from imperiling future leadership,
• Set the maximum annual dollar amount of any deal to something less than 2% of the city’s locally-generated revenue to keep any mistakes from damaging the system, and
• Set the maximum amount of a rebate to 50% of the amount of revenue generated from the deal, so that the new business has skin in the game.

If every city had to live by these rules—which would function, essentially, like a salary cap—it would limit the capacity of businesses to play local governments off against each other, at least within a state. I’m aware it would also limit how much smaller cities could give away to compete with larger cities—something many would call unfair. But I’ve worked and lived in small cities all my life; what they need most of all is enterprises scaled to them, not something vastly disproportionate that is only preying on their weakness.

Ultimately, what we all want is for the right business to be matched with the right city for the right reasons. Tightening the parameters whereby cities can give out subsidies is a way to nudge us closer to that reality.

And for populist advocates on the left and right who dislike these kind of deals, here’s how to be more effective. First, I recommend you educate yourselves on how these tax subsidies actually work. I’ve heard many advocates out there undermine their own credibility by suggesting things like, “We can use this money saved on schools and solar panels.” In fact, you didn’t save anything, you just didn’t collect any of the money you would have given away in subsidy. These kinds of corporate incentives come out of future taxes the company would otherwise owe, not from money that’s available up front.)

Then, I think you should advocate for two things in your community:

First, your city should have a set of values for when giving out tax subsidy is a good fit and what kinds of things would disqualify an applicant. Having such a document in advance, something that can be discussed community-wide, will counter the blindness that passion can create during decision-making.

Second, I’d recommend a broadly representative advisory group to study tax subsidy deals and make an independent recommendation before the deal gets to the city council. Some prominent business people that aren’t in the get-rich-quick game—more like an established banker than a real estate agent—along with someone from the school system, neighborhood groups, maybe a member of the clergy…. Just not the regulars. This group should be trained on how tax subsidy deals work. When a package is put together, they should be empowered to review it and report, not to the city council, but to the community at large, prior to any vote. The staff supporting them should not be the same staff that put together the deal.

Subsidies aren’t going away, but the failure of this Amazon deal—on multiple levels—should prompt us all to re-examine ways to improve our own local approach.

Thomas Frank and The Baffler on the betrayal of populism by liberals.

It's No. 42 of The Baffler, on the topic of populism.

What’s to blame for our disgraceful turn toward fascism? “The scourge of populism,” your Ivy-educated tutor answers confidently. But the liberal framing of populism as an uprising of unruly rednecks in MAGA gear, writes founding editor Thomas Frank in his introduction to Issue no. 42, is a betrayal of “the faith in ‘the people’ that built unions and fought World War II.”

Yes, I know: What is ...

The Baffler is America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems and art. We publish six print issues annually, as well as online content every day of the cursed workweek.

Founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank as “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” the magazine is currently edited by Chris Lehmann and headquartered in New York. We publish both new and established voices, and our regular contributors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein and Astra Taylor. You can subscribe here for as little as $24 a year.

Our regular subjects include Silicon Valley snake-oil, the deadening weight of consumer capitalism, our faithless media, and the redemptive promise of people claiming control of their own lives. Submit your own dyspeptic work for our consideration over here.

The Baffler is owned by the non-profit Baffler Foundation and the majority of our budget comes from tax-deductible donations. We are as charitable as a church, and certainly more fun. Please give us your money. We will beg and/or threaten dogs as necessary.

Frank's introduction is choice. A subscription to The Baffler is likely to be a Saturnalia present to myself. 

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The People, No, by Thomas Frank (The Baffler)

An introduction from our founding editor

THE BACKLASH AGAINST LIBERALISM was thirty years old when this magazine dedicated a special issue to it in 1999; today it has been running for a full half-century and it is ready for its testimonial dinners and commemorative postage stamps. In its early days, the backlash was startling and strange: it was ordinary people siding with the Chicago police when they brutalized protesters; it was the hardhat as a symbol of reaction; it was a Republican presidential candidate claiming to speak for the “silent majority.”

The common man appeared to be in open rebellion against liberalism, and it was no passing tantrum. Dozens of tax revolts and busing riots and flag battles later, The Baffler tried to gauge the volcanic perversity of the spectacle. Populism, we thought in 1999, had once been a phenomenon of the left; it was a mobilization of the people united in outrage against bankers, industrialists, or just “the establishment.” How had it come to pass that middle-class Americans now poured into the streets to demand that the taxes of the rich be cut or that the coal mines be deregulated? And how could the backlash keep going as it dismantled the middle-class arrangements on which its fantasies were based?

Well, continue it did. Today a spiteful disciple of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order agenda sits in the White House. The shade of segregationist George Wallace stalks the land, and the crypto-racist spirit of the white backlash is playing on TV all day, every day.

In one sense, I guess, we can finally say that Americans understand this. Among the bien pensant theorists of the liberal “Resistance,” everyone talks about “populism” today, and everyone is against it. For the high-born and the well-graduated, the word is perfect—in one drive-by slur, it brings together all that is not-them: the racist and the rural; the uneducated and the left-behind; the clueless billionaire president and his adoring proletarian throngs. Today it is the dread of populism that causes the foundation dollars to flow and the murmurs of agreement to sweep the well-heeled audience at Aspen or Davos or SXSW.

The incandescent perversity of the thing, however, is completely lost to populism’s growing chorus of detractors. In 1999, we thought right-wing populism was a historical mystery that needed to be unraveled and understood; in the minds of its legions of analysts today it’s no mystery at all. For them, the common people’s incomprehension of liberal values is as unremarkable and self-evident as is the superiority of Yale over Southeast Missouri State. Populism, much of our ruling punditburo now believes, is a creature of the ill-informed right by its very nature. Bring aggrieved plebes together in movements and mass rallies and of course they will start chanting the name of Trump. That’s just who ordinary Americans are. In this democracy, it’s the people themselves who are the problem.

This is the reason that so many of the prized manifestos of the left these days resemble nothing so much as ritualized scolding—or, rather, concerned letters from mom gently reminding the lowly of their precarious place in the New Economy hierarchy. Before long, chide the solons of liberalism, they’ll have to retrain and repatriate to one of the coastal warrens of tech monopoly and lifestyle liberalism—places where they don’t look too fondly on MAGA hats.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, meanwhile, the Tea Party movement of 2009 is now in the midst of a full-on populist makeover. Never has there been a phonier, more transparent bid to mislead an angry public. Supposedly a protest against bank bailouts, it was actually launched from among the futures traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—and then backed to the hilt by Beltway libertarians looking for a way to distance themselves from the badly damaged Republican brand. The movement’s Number One heroine, Ayn Rand, spent decades dreaming up ways to express her contempt for democracy and its beloved average citizen. The Tea Party movement’s great demand for solving the problem of out-of-control bankers—more bank deregulation—seems to have been developed as a kind of thought experiment to gauge the outer limits of human gullibility.

Yet in the fast-growing field of populism studies, the Tea Party movement is widely understood to be the realest deal there is. This is what populism looks like, the new Trump-addled cohort of populist diagnosticians confidently tells us; indeed, it is an almost perfect example of the species. That anti-bank catechism the founders of American populism preached in Kansas a century ago is the outlier, the mystery. That faith in “the people” that built unions and fought World War II is something completely forgotten. Don’t call those things “populism”; don’t even think of them at all.

The story of how racist right-wing demagoguery came to be the meaning of “populism” rather than a perversion of the populist impulse is a fascinating one, but what’s even more critical now is the implication of the change.

What does it tell us when liberals, faced with epic political corruption, spectacular bank misbehavior, and towering inequality, take that opportunity to declare war on populism? It tells us that they’ve lost any sense of their own movement as an expression of the vast majority. It tells us they have no idea why they believe they should be entrusted with power in the first place. And it reminds us that their particular brand of class-based self-delusion is a luxury that the rest of us can ill afford.

"Ultimately, right-wing populism is a tool that is used by cynical elites for their own political advantage. However, right-wing rage is not something that can be controlled."

History: An inconvenient record suggesting it regularly repeats itself.

The on-line radicalization of Pittsburgh synagogue shooter George Bowers is discussed, and as I embark on a new book ...

Ian Kershaw’s ‘To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949’

 ... Why did Europe go mad? The four horsemen of the apocalypse Kershaw identifies in his nightmare history are a dramatic rise of ethnic-racist nationalism; angry, conflicting demands for territorial revisionism; acute class conflict that took on sharper focus by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and a prolonged crisis of capitalism that many thought terminal.

 ... I can't help but observe that those prattling on about how a "good" economy alone is sufficient reason to ignore sheer lunacy is pretty far over the lunatic boundary line themselves.

The problem comes when the economy turns bad. Who'll be blamed? My advice is tear yourselves away from comic book movies and read a bit of history.

The Fascist Creep: How Conspiracy Theories and an Unhinged President Created an Anti-Semitic Terrorist, by Joseph Flatley (CounterPunch)

 ... “Much of Bowers’ online profile resembles those of countless other extremist users,” according to a Southern Poverty Law Center analysis of the shooter’s social media. “As with other alt-right killers, it’s likely that Bowers was radicalized entirely online.” His social media activity revolved around several common obsessions of the racist right. He feared “white genocide,” an antisemitic conspiracy theory which holds that everything from immigration and multiculturalism to low birth rates and abortion are being promoted by the “globalists” (that’s an antisemitic code word for “Jews”) to drive the white race to extinction. In Bowers’ virtual reality, the white men have no power—undoubtedly resonant to a white man who seemed to have little in his own life worth living for—while George Soros is personally overseeing the extinction of the white race.

“Lone wolf terror” (sometimes called “leaderless resistance”) describes terrorist attacks conducted by a single person, or perhaps a very small, unaffiliated group. As terrorism expert George Michael writes in his book Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance, it is commonly understood among right-wing populists that “they are part of a relatively small and marginalized movement,” and that to take up arms “would almost certainly lead to organizational suicide,” not to mention actual suicide. This has led to the strategy, favored by the more conservative members of the right-wing populist movement, to concentrate on winning the masses over through propaganda.

The more extreme elements of right-wing populism, not willing to abandon armed struggle, have encouraged “lone wolves” to pick up arms. The idea is that individuals like Bowers and MAGA mail bomber Cesar Sayoc are the vanguard of a new movement that’s paving the way for a right-wing takeover of the United States. Now, this might be the case—but probably not in the way that the extremists like to imagine.

“Under specific conditions,” writes journalist and activist Chip Berlet, “virulent demonization and scapegoating can—and does—create milieus in which the potential for violence is increased.” While you can’t predict which individual will turn to violence, it can pretty much guarantee that someone will, “upon hearing the rhetoric of clear or coded incitement,” strike out at the perceived enemy.

Right-wing populism is a continuum. The extreme right (which Berlet also refers to as “the ultra-right”) is the revolutionary arm of right-wing populism in America. This includes the Klan, neo-Nazis, Aryan Nations, and anyone willing to pick up a gun or a baseball bat or make a pipe bomb for the struggle. Among the more conservative elements of right-wing populism are “reformist political movements.” These include the Republican Party, FOX News, and conservative think tanks. In between these two poles—the revolutionaries and the reformers—are the dissidents. This includes patriot and militia groups, right-wing talk radio, tea partiers, and anti-semitic conspiracy theorists. There is a lot of movement along this continuum: people might be drawn into right-wing talk radio, for instance, which becomes a conduit to a more extreme right-wing ideology.

Quite possibly, this is what happened to Robert Bowers ...

Local Democrats gear up for the talent show, except "you can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism."

Earlier this week, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi asked that Steve Bannon be fired, and a day later Bannon was gone. I was struck by this single passage in Taibbi's article.

... Prospect writer Robert Kuttner noted with surprise in his piece that Bannon seemed upbeat. He essentially told Kuttner he believed the Charlottesville mess and stories like it were a long-term political windfall for people like himself.

"The longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em," he said. "I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

Speaking for myself, perhaps this lifelong atheist's revulsion at public displays of piety, when otherwise unaccompanied by private acts aimed at gaining the stated objective, explains why the past week's gestures have left me not so much cold as completely disinterested.

It isn't that I disagree with many of them, having been proudly "anti-fascist" since around 1978, so much as lament the left's ongoing inability to place the focus on the genuine economic evil perpetuating our divisions: capital accumulation, big money, robber barons, the One Percent-- call it what you wish.

Inequality results from more than one contributing factor, but really, don't we need to follow the wealth?

To me, Bannon's phrase "economic nationalism" reads as code for those who'll perpetuate divisions to keep the money where it rightfully belongs, and in this usage, Bannon might be detestable but at least he's honest. He knows his bosses' names, and makes sure their birthday cards always arrive on time.

Democrats imagining themselves as leftists or progressives in a Clintonesque mold are in thrall to an illusion. You can serve the interests of capital accumulation, or not. There isn't much of a middle ground, if any, and yet local "Democrats" avoid this introspection as though you were asking them to ban same sex marriage or reinstitute Jim Crow.

I cannot recall a local Democratic Party candidate speaking about anything of a genuine balls-out economic nature apart from Dan Canon, who hasn't yet even contested an election. But we're treated to a never-ending series of resolutions and gestures -- and faux Democrat Jeff Gahan's dog-whistling putsch against public housing, which by now should have been publicly condemned by every Democrat in the city.

But instead, everyone merrily plans events, concerts, talent shows and diversions, and while they're engaged in these wild goose chases, functionaries like 1Si's Wendy Dant Chesser ensure the worsening of the fundamental economic imbalance by serving our regional oligarchs first -- and maybe some of it will trickle down, eventually.

Presumed left-wingers, note that your omelette remains uncooked because almost no one among you is willing to break a few eggs. A member of Jacobin's editorial board explains why, and if you fancy yourself a progressive ...

Steve Bannon’s Autobahn, by Connor Kilpatrick (Jacobin)

You can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism.

 ... So “far-right racist” doesn’t make Bannon particularly unique or worrying. It’s how devastatingly well he understands liberalism’s failures and how willing he is to craft a fraudulent and reactionary program for those who’ve only experienced decline during the Clinton and Obama years.

Like a mutant weed growing out of a shit-covered pile of compost, Bannon has cultivated his particular brand of reaction entirely within the decomposing corpse of American liberalism. In no other soil could it ever have blossomed.

And:

Bannon’s ambitions make gruesomely clear that liberalism and the Democratic Party in no way represents the left-wing obverse of conservatism and the GOP. And liberals, deep down in their hearts, understand this. They have no true ideological counterpoint — no real program and certainly no vision for changing society for the better. Michael Wolff correctly diagnosed Bannon as “embodying more than anyone the liberals’ awful existential pain and fury.” This doesn’t just refer to his disgusting comments — it includes his fiery ambition, something the Democratic Party has altogether lost. And even at its absolute best, liberalism’s aspirations were only a watered-down, cheap knockoff of the utopian dreams of communist and socialist activists.

Then:

But you can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism. A paltry means-tested welfare state just flips white-supremacist programs and policies “for the deserving us not the undeserving them.” Both fit comfortably in the ruling-class politics of divide and conquer as opposed to the broad solidarity they fear. How can we expect the public to rally around something like Medicaid when huge portions of the working and lower-middle classes don’t qualify for it? Universal social democracy — a more transformative program than the one Sanders campaigned on — is called for. We’re in the midst of a reckoning with the neoliberal consensus. The Right has made their play, and now we have to make ours.

In closing, a suggestion to my councilman: if Team Gahan won't show you the results of its rental housing registration program, perhaps a new council resolution would do the trick. Just make sure to craft it in a manner emphasizing human rights rather than economic imperatives, or Adam will overrule you.

7 Days of Piketty: Monday, or "The Geography of Populist Discontent."

I'm publishing seven days of links to web material about Thomas Piketty and his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Prior to reading the book, my friend Brandon warned me that it wouldn't improve my mood.

He was right.

Pitchforks, anyone?

We continue with a consideration of inequality's contribution to populist discontent.

The Geography of Populist Discontent, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

“There are times when rational, well-educated societies lose a sense of perspective,” says urban scholar Josef Konvitz. The global populist backlash represents one of those times.

 ... The current discussion focuses primarily on stagnant or declining real incomes, and hence on widening disparities between most people and the top 1 percent or 5 percent by income. Productivity is increasing at a lower rate. And, as Robert Gordon argues, we seem to be living off innovations that are decades old. Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century and Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape, both published in 2013, emphasized a long historical perspective, the importance of cultural values, and the impact of meta-events, usually overwhelming catastrophes, that separate one phase, often lasting decades, from another. These studies, however, look at large social categories and the unit of the nation-state, ignoring spatial variations within countries or in the distribution of social and cultural groups.

The decline of the middle class and the broken escalator of social mobility are no fiction. Before the 2016 U.S. election, Le Monde published maps about the geography of disparities in the U.S. Did you know that the size of the middle class shrank by more than 7 percent between 2000 and 2013 in New England, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona? Some of these were red states, others blue. But the trend shaped the political narrative.

Another map showed that the chances of a child born into a family at the lowest level of poverty ever reaching the upper level of income were under 6 percent in virtually all parts of the South, as well as much of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.

The spatial perspective comes into sharper focus when we look at indirect measurements such as the higher cost of rental housing, declining real incomes, the burden of debt for home ownership, the cost of commuting by car, pressure on infrastructure capacity—things that matter in daily life and for which people have no elasticity, meaning that they cannot find better or less expensive ways of doing things. Pressures build up. These indirect indicators highlight how the organization of housing and work in particular places can generate problems that accumulate. As Jane Jacobs famously said, when this happens, problem solving has broken down.

Trump, Obama and the enduring lure of "populist nationalism."

It's worth it for the Voltaire quote, which I haven't seen for many a moon.

Trump and Obama: A Night to Remember, by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker)

Once, and only once, in 2011, have I attended the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C., on the grounds, as I explained then, that Voltaire is said to have cited when he declined a second invitation to an orgy: once a philosopher, twice a pervert. Luckily for the philosopher in me, it turned out to be an auspicious night. Not only, as we did not know then, was President Obama in the midst of the operation that would lead shortly to Osama bin Laden’s killing; it was also the night when, despite that preoccupation, the President took apart Donald Trump, plastic piece by orange part, and then refused to put him back together again.

There's a far deeper side to this. It's the enduring lure of what the author calls "populist nationalism."

Nor is it at all surprising to find a billionaire businessman representing this ideology, because it is not really members of the economic élite who are its villains—it is the educated élite, and the uneducated outsiders, who are. It is, on the historical record, much more a response to the ceaseless anxieties of modern life than to any financial angst of the moment. Probably the best student of this modern ideology is the conservative historian John Lukacs, whose 2005 book “Democracy And Populism: Fear and Hatred” makes clear how different the nationalist formula is from patriotism properly so called: it rests not on a sense of pride in place or background but in an intense sense of victimization. The cry of the genuine patriot is, Leave us alone to be the people we have always been. The populist nationalist cries, We have been cheated of our birthright, and the Leader will give it back.

The ideology is always available; it just changes its agents from time to time.