Obama's Mistake

It is not unusual for politicians to talk about healing divisiveness and working across the aisle during their campaigns.  The difference in Obama's case was that he actually tried to make that work after he took office.  It was a great waste of time and effort.  When he reached out, the Republicans were right there ready to chop off his hand and shut the door on his candidate for the Supreme Court.

I was reminded of Obama's unfortunate strategic error yesterday when I went to a Democratic ward meeting in Albuquerque.  The up side of the get-together was the presence of some bright, engaged young people.  One of the brightest and most articulate spent his allotted time talking about the negative consequences of confronting aggressive rants by Trump supporters, pointing out that their attitudes were likely due to some personal misfortune.  For all I know that could be true, but is it relevant to effectively changing the way the country is governed?

I think it indisputable that people stressed by economic, social and emotional conditions will often turn for reassurance to authoritarian leaders.  We are certainly seeing that now with the rise of Trump and other right-wing leaders world-wide.  It is also important, however, to not lose sight of that fact that people over-all are becoming more liberal generally across the ideological divides.

Just look at attitude shifts in recent decades toward inter-racial relationships, gay marriage and marijuana usage.  Some concrete statistical support for those trends was offered recently in an article at FiveThirtyEight.  The article was specifically addressing the liberalization over the past thirty years of the Democratic Party, but the statistics also support the idea that liberalization has not been confined to the left side of the political spectrum.  While the populace as a whole has moved leftward, governance has moved in the opposite direction.

So, the problem is not the natural age-old human tendency to look to support from right-wing authoritarians.  Rather it is that the machinery of governance has been captured by corporate dark money which supports the politicians willing to sell out the real interests of their constituents -- and not all are Republicans.  An obvious response is to just not support any candidate -- regardless of party or ideological pretense -- who accepts corporate campaign funding.