Samain                                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Darkness has begun to settle on Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain takes out the sun at around 4 pm now and at 5 pm, the current time, evening is ready to shift over to night.

The cultural earthquakes from Tuesday’s election results have only registered as tremors so far, but the big one  is not far off. When will it come? I don’t know. I suspect after the inauguration. A police shooting here. A gay bashing there. A couple of rapes. Perhaps targeted violence against African-Americans. Maybe the National Guard sweeping aside the protesters at Standing Rock.

Those happenings will crystallize out of the solution of public anger and fear a rock hard resistance. And it will be the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Unfortunately, not a new problem. As Saul Alinsky said, the action is in the reaction. How far the call and response of bigotry will spread, how large will be the congregation that ultimately says amen is not yet known. These times are perilous, more perilous than any I have known.

When Reagan came to power, I traveled to Washington, D.C. with the Minnesota AFL-CIO. We went by bus, playing poker and drinking beer (not me, but everyone else), singing labor songs. When we got to D.C., we marched. Reagan, Reagan he’s no good, send him back to Hollywood. Reagan broke PATCO, the union of air traffic controllers and ushered in an anti-union environment that even after Bill Clinton and Barack Obama remains a national disgrace.

It was a combination of union busting, international trade deals and robots that created the rust belt and the dismal future of non-college educated folks in general and whites in particular. We have just felt the first profound shock of those choices. When people lose faith in the structures of power, they do what they can to create new ones, hopefully, they believe, better than the old one. The abandonment of the former working class by liberals and conservatives alike makes our time bereft of powerful allies for them. They’ve hoped, and voted for that hope, that somehow a billionaire who resides on the Upper East Side of New York City will do for them what others haven’t. From within their world it may have seemed like a bet worth making.

(Someone should make a map of the cultural fault lines in the U.S.)

This fault line within American culture has only begun to shift. It has not yet slipped, not yet allowed its full constrained force loose on our common life. Trump’s election is not that earthquake. It will follow in his wake as he takes pussy-grabbing and race-baiting to the home of the country’s first African-American president. Ironically, his predecessor.

That fault will slip. It may not come when the insults to the poor and people of color and the LGBT community mount, but it will surely come when the left behind in the white working class realize that Trump is not their friend, but an archetype of their oppressor. When that awareness dawns, head for the bunkers.

Samain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Time to admit our complicity in this mess. While is there no doubt that crotch grabbing racist xenophobes have had their say, while there is no doubt that know-nothings have seized control of levers they do not understand, while there is no doubt that license has just been given to violent police actions and violent action against whoever is the other, we cannot turn aside from our implication in this disaster.

We? Yes, you, the college educated. Yes, you, the climate change activist. Yes, you, the LGBT champion. Yes, you, the Black Lives Matter protesters. And, yes, even you, the brave folks of Standing Rock.

What? We have allowed identity based politics and the politics of climate change to blind us to the real, often more urgent demands of economic justice. It’s irony so thick it would require an obsidian blade to cut. Oddly enough what we just experienced was class warfare waged from within the very camp of those who have made such a struggle necessary. That is, the party of capitalism, of big business, of Citizen’s United nominated a man for president who claimed the mantle of working class champion. And, due to their own flaws and fears, working class non-college educated white folks followed him.

Trump reminds me of the pied-piper, offering a fun-filled, immigrant-bashing, race-baiting, pussy-grabbing jaunt out of town to a good place, a place with green grass and blue skies, a place filled with winning and winning and lots of guns. Only there is no such place. It’s really more of the same distractions the 1% have used for years, the American political equivalent of 77 virgins. Hear, strap on this Trump pin and help him blow up America. What’s that? A job? Oh, sure. Look, over here! Someone coming to take your guns and the job you might have had if we hadn’t just moved our company overseas.

How are we complicit? First, they came for the unions. And we did nothing. Then, they came for good-paying working class jobs. And we did nothing. Next, they let an antiquated educational system churn out high-school diplomas so worthless they were of no use in hunting for and finding work. And we did nothing. When the banks came for their homes, we stood by and did nothing. When the floods and the hurricanes and the droughts and the wildfires created disproportionate damage to working class folks, we stood by and did nothing. Even the one place where we did do something, Obamacare, it was so flawed that it may well collapse.

We have, as a culture, and as an educated and moneyed elite, ignored fundamental political matters. Each family needs a way to provide for itself, to have a home, food, a decent education, health care. When these key components of life are made difficult or impossible to obtain, a political price will eventually be paid. That note just came due.

Economic justice, an egalitarian distribution of the fruits of our common life, is central to a just and fair politics. It cuts across race, gender, sexual preference, ethnic origin. By allowing the perversions of capitalism to gut whole demographics, we, the moneyed and educated elite, have let our own comfort trump effective policy for the working class.

The good news here is that the way out of this political swamp, Drain the Trumpian Swamp!, is known. All it requires is political will. We need solid unemployment benefits, training in crafts and skills, support for retraining as soon as jobs are lost (see coal mining, for example), real healthcare access, support for unions, affordable housing and higher taxes on the 1% to fund all this. This is the program that can unite people of color with working class whites.

Let’s get to work.

Samain                                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Samain                                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

We have experienced something dark, disturbing and powerful, an election in which the id drove our common choice. Kate said, “Hate has won.” Yes. But not only hate. Fear. And, even worse, hate dominated by fear.

The most prescient article I read, and I read hundreds, cautioned American liberals and leftists not to take the polls too seriously. I tried to find the article, but couldn’t. It was written by a Brit, an opponent of the Brexit decision and a man who awoke to a decision by his countryfolk that defied polls and pundits. He reminded us of the European turn toward nativism, French, Austrian and German movements in particular. And, he said, it could easily happen in the U.S. It has.

As I wrote earlier, I’m not a man given to despair and I don’t feel it this morning, this terrible wakin’ up mornin’ when the American dream has ghosts and rapists and Confederate flag waving, gun toting white men ranging uninhibited in it. This election is, I believe, a result of that dream dissipating like puffy cumulus clouds pounded by hurricane force winds. A dream denied, hopes crushed. What happens to the heart when the future dims?

Of course, you can ask any woman, any African-American or Latino, any member of the LGBT community. Ask any of the native Americans on the ground in North Dakota today. Ask any group that has existed on the fringe of the American experiment. They know what happens to the heart when the future dims.

Today that same disillusion among white working class men and women has pounded on the door of our destiny. Yes, the irony is thick, but the political dilemma of persons shunted to the side of history contains the seeds of revolution.

In part I do not despair because I have read history. The United States is not the first great power to be brought low by economic dislocation of a former privileged class. Paul Kennedy’s, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, proposed a mechanism for great power collapse. Military overreach strains domestic budgets and can create misallocation of economic resources. The resulting economic woes, Kennedy suggested, create the conditions for dissent at home, dissent that can wreck political unity.

It remains to be seen whether the toxic stew cooked up by the Donald’s political base will poison our common life and prove fatal to this long experiment in democracy. I doubt that it will. I believe we are, still, stronger than the darker angels of our nature.

Lincoln, that stalwart of the old GOP, said it best:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Samain                                                                  Thanksgiving Moon

I imagine, all round the U.S., on all political sides, a fervent Thanksgiving prayer will be, “Thank God, it’s over.” Of course, the finish of this demeaning, dispiriting and dismal campaign will not heal the divisions it has unveiled. Welcome to the new America where less-educated white men and women are newly visible as an underprivileged and problematic slice of the citizenry.

Wow. From my 1950’s childhood in eastern central Indiana that sentence would have seemed like a fever dream, a nightmare, a unicorn in the possible futures branching off from the Atomic Age. Yet here we are: much more demographically diverse, decimated unions, manufacturing both fled on the one hand and roboticized on the other, birthrates among the white population long in decline, even the familiar protestant and catholic profile of white, high school educated America, slumping toward secularism. Family farms have become vestigial to the onrush of corporate agriculture. The home states of blue collar workers are either now the rust belt or the Confederate flag waving south or the unhappy west of Sage Brush rebellion militants.

None of these trends, decades now in the making, will be easily turned around, especially since the common good will to solve them seems absent. This means the next decade, perhaps, literally, the rest of my life, will be spent attempting  to negotiate the political terms of a new U.S. This is necessary and it is the chief reason politics exists in the first place, to barter out differences among groups. But it will not be easy and it may be violent. The politics of frustration often bends in that direction.

On the other hand we have no choice. These are divisions, like Jim Crow (and its contemporary manifestations), the plight of the undocumented, the integration of refugees from the Middle East that have no simple answers. In fact, even addressing them creates political resistance. Again, it doesn’t matter. Our public square has potholes and fissures deep enough to swallow our future unless we figure out how to live together.

Gotta say, the notion of this struggle energizes me. Let’s get ready. Let’s do this.