Someone -- maybe Mark Twain but probably not -- once said that history doesn't repeat itself . . .
But often rhymes.
We're in the summer of rhymes.
George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1947 and 1948 and published it in 1949. In the wake of World War II, the cold war had begun and Orwell imagined a world less than forty years hence with a superstate called Oceania -- basically North and South America, Australia, southern Africa and Great Britain --locked in perpetual cold combat with its two enemies, Eurasia and East Asia, superstates as well.
In fictional Oceania, a so-called Ministry of Truth regularly revises history so that the past conforms to its dictator's (Big Brother's) present; dissent is "vaporized" as opponents are not just killed but -- in a kind of anti-birtherism -- removed from history as well; and relationships are transactional (sex to reproduce and spawn additional Party servants is the working pre-nup). To support the project, science does not exist and a new language -- an ungrammatical amalgam with few words that limits both thought and self-expression -- is invented.
The glue holding this superstate together is propaganda.
And the foundation for that propaganda is Big Brother's and his apparatchiks' doublethink.
Or as Orwell defined it:
"To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, . . . to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself."
Though Orwell himself was always a struggling writer, often starved for publishers given an integrity he refused to relinquish for any amount, and though 1984 was critically acclaimed when it was published, it has only recently become a best seller.
Thanks to Donald Trump.
In 1928, New York Governor Al Smith became the first Catholic ever nominated for President by an American political party. In November of that year, he lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover. Republican Hoover won forty-one states (to Smith's mere seven, which did not even include his home state of New York). The electoral vote count was 444 for Hoover, 87 for Smith.
During the campaign, the anti-Catholic vitriol was palpable. Opposition to Smith from Methodist and Baptist ministers on account of his religion was nearly universal; of 8,500 Southern Methodist ministers polled prior to the election, only four supported Smith. This, moreover, in the south (where six of Smith's winning states were located in an age when the south still despised the party of Lincoln). The charge was that Smith as a Catholic owed allegiance to a foreign power, the Vatican; the joke upon his defeat was that he sent a one word telegram to the Pope -- "Unpack".
In the thirty-two years that followed, the notion that a Catholic could ever be President or should ever be nominated was considered ludicrous. So ludicrous that, in 1960, John F. Kennedy literally had to run the table by winning every primary contest he entered, including the primary in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virgina, to get the Democratic Party nomination. And even then, JFK had to go to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association during the general election campaign in an effort to finally put the so-called religious issue to rest. He barely succeeded, winning by one of the smallest margins in American political history.
Today, the GOP has a 1984 problem and the Democrats have a version of what was -- until Kennedy -- their 1928 problem.
Trump is an Orwellian nightmare.
His penchant for claiming 2 + 2 = 5 is now legion. (The proposition itself, which Orwell lampoons to great effect in 1984, was invented by Stalin as he tried to convince the Soviet Union that he could accomplish the government's second five year plan in four.) Whether he's libeling Mexicans as "rapists" or Central American refugees as "terrorists"; illegally imprisoning asylum seekers and their children in inhumane (and separate) lock-ups; lying to claim that loss of the popular vote was on account of millions of illegals having voted; falsely claiming to having had the largest crowds at any Inauguration; finding "good people" in a scrum of racists and neo-Nazis; mocking Russian interference in the 2016 election; praising dictators and their wanna-be's the world over (Russian's Putin, North Korea's Kim Jung Un, Hungary's Orban, the Philippine's Duterte); claiming vindication Robert Mueller specifically and expressly withheld; touting an economy he inherited as one he created; or turning July 4th's celebration of "We the People" into a militaristic promotion of "me, the President", truth is more than beside the point with Trump.
It's his first casualty.
And has been his entire life.
And has been his entire life.
The sound of 1984 is also echoed in the administration's treatment of the media. Abroad, he turns a blind eye to state sponsored killers of journalists in Russia (Putin) and Saudi Arabia (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman). At home, he routinely charges "fake news" on anything remotely opposed to his lies and supplements that with fascist claims that the free press is the "enemy of the people" or that "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening". His sycophants then pile on, with Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" or Rudy Giuliani's "truth isn't truth" explaining or excusing His Hairnesses latest fantasy.
Marching in lock step with Trump is the larger GOP.
You can count on one hand, and only when it doesn't matter, the number of GOP House members or GOP Senators who confront Trump or call him out, and now, even the supposedly independent Supreme Court has issued at least one recent decision that should scare us all, shielding as an absolute matter extreme partisan gerrymandering from any form of judicial review or oversight.
The gerrymandering case is instructive. The practice of drawing district lines to favor one's party is not new. What is new, however, are the computer-based data analytics that can predict votes down to the household and that result in a type of extreme gerrymandering never previously possible.
In the North Carolina case decided this past week, data analytics allowed the party that won less than 50% of the votes to nevertheless get 76% of the seats. That's not democracy. It's also not equal protection of the law or one person one vote and renders the free speech exercised in political campaigns more or less superfluous.
Finally, relying on those who got the seats to solve the problem -- which is the remedy Chief Justice Roberts and the four other GOP appointed justices suggest -- is the equivalent of asking Jesse James to guard the bank.
Ain't gonna happen.
(Mitch McConnell, of course, praised the decision as precisely the sort of hands off role the Court should play, but he's also the guy who stiffed Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 and therefore put the current GOP court majority in place. Meanwhile, in a moment that brought Orwell's doublethink to life in the Senate, McConnell also said his party would confirm any Supreme Court nominee proposed by Trump in 2020 even though it had refused to do so for Obama in 2016.)
For their part the Democrats have now started the process of selecting the candidate who will oppose Trump in 2020 and toward that end, the crowded field was split into two debates within the last week, showcasing twenty of their twenty-four hopefuls. In post debate polls, viewers agreed that Sen. Warren and Sen. Harris fared best in their respective debates. Former Vice President Biden was a bit shaky but certainly held his own and will only improve as his lines and responses become more crisp; in any case, oratorical discipline has never been his hallmark and won't necessarily be expected in this go round. Others who had a good day were Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former HUD secretary Julian Castro
Almost immediately, however, polls also showed substantial numbers of Democrats concerned that a woman, were she to be nominated, could not beat Trump in 2020. Typically, the result came in the form of concerns about whether other voters were ready for that first (an Ipsos poll had three-quarters comfortable with a woman president but only a third believing their neighbors would be) and so-called "magic wand" questions where a quarter of those who picked a male candidate said they'd pick a female if they had a "magic wand" and could ordain the result they really wanted.
Thus, on the "can a woman be President" question , many Democrats are stuck in 1928. In this time warp, Hillary lost because she was a woman or because the country is not yet ready for a woman. So no other woman can win or should try.
Too bad.
For many reasons.
One of which is that it's not true.
There are two things one needs to say about Hillary and the 2016 election.
The first is that the election was very close and that more than a dozen things -- most of which were unexpected -- had to go wrong to keep her from winning. Imagine what the result would have been without James Comey's 11th hour histrionics, or Russia's interference, or the political malpractice by the twenty-somethings at Team Hillary in Brooklyn who should have been polling in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in the last month rather than thinking Arizona and Texas were in play.
The second is that, prior to January 20, 2017, Trump's bluster could persuade rust belters who hadn't received a raise in more than thirty years that, perhaps, a loud mouth businessman could improve their lives. That hope, however, is now lost. The bluster is still overt and over the top but there are no results to match it. Inequality is still a problem, coal mines are still closing, and opioid addiction continues apace. Given the negatives that attach to him as a matter of course, and the fact that he has not really grown his base by any amount, the notion that Trump can run the same inside straight he drew in 2016 is at best dubious and at worst delusional.
What Democrats need is a candidate with the fortitude to confront and remove Trump without any of the adhesion that might allow his negative campaign (and that is all it will be) to stick. If Biden is the nominee, he can't be "sleepy" or "creepy". If it's Warren, she can't be Hillary 2.0.
None of this means the nominee cannot be a woman or a gay guy or Obama's former Vice President. Sen. Harris at this point appears more than capable of taking Trump on and disarming whatever ad hominems come her way. So does Buttigieg. And Biden is ahead in the polls not just because of name recognition and the Obama connection; he's also a moderate in this field and that may be what the voters want.
The Democrats need to stop acting like it's 1928 . . .
So the country can stop acting like its 1984.
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