Trump 47 and the battle for the soul of America

I was happy when Biden dropped out of the race. But why’d it take him so long? And I was pleased to see Harris rake in all the $$$ and do well in the polls, not so much because I liked her as a candidate [meh], but because it indicated that Trump might be defeated. That’s something I very much wanted to happen.

By the time I cast my vote for Harris, however, my doubts were inching ahead of my hopes. When I woke up the next morning to discover that Trump had won, clearly – but, please, don’t blather about a landslide; it was a clean win, both the popular vote and the electoral college, but no more, I was not happy. But I was not surprised.

What next?

The writing’s on the wall: Graffiti

Before I get to Trump’s victory, however, I want to talk about graffiti, perhaps the most significant development in American art in the last century. It started on the streets of New York City and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s and two decades later it had made its way across the county and around the world. The people who started it did not go to art schools nor exhibit in galleries. It was born outside the legit art world.

In the summer of 2015 my friend Greg Edgell curated a large graffiti show covering the interior and exterior walls of a Pep Boys building in Jersey City. Forest City had acquired the property and was going to demolish the building to make way for an apartment complex. Greg contacted them and got permission to cover the walls with graffiti; he also talked them into a small budget. Since the building was slated for demolition, we called it The Demolition Exhibition.

Here's a shot of one of the exterior walls:

It’s a battle scene depicting characters from the all-American comic strip Peanuts, fractured, crossed over, and messed-up. There’s Charlie Brown’s head in the center, Linus and his blanket at the right edge, and Snoopy’s in the sky in his aviator togs, pretending to be a WWI flying ace. Who’s that dark little creature to the left of Charlie Brown? Looks like Snoopy’s silhouette wandering the battlefield. Call it the soul of America.

People enjoying the show:

Demolition in progress:

Glenn Loury’s pleased as punch: A working class party

I’ve been watching these guys for years. Glenn Loury’s a distinguised economics professor at Brown and John McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia; he’s also a New York Times columnist. Their political views are complex.

John doesn’t like Trump at all, thinks he’s an idiot (his word), and dismisses him as a standup comedian. I find that a bit harsh, but boy! do I understand it. I don’t think Loury likes Trump either (& I don’t think he voted for him). But he can’t stand Obama, doesn’t like Harris, and is glad Trump won. The two share a disdain for wokeness (as do I).

Why’s Loury glad? Primarily, I believe, because he’s happy to see a working-class party in power. Imagine that, the Republicans are a working-class party! It wasn’t like that when Eisenhower was President. And the Democrats seem to have been captured by (out of touch) coastal elites; JFK’s best and brightest. The times they are changing – perhaps not in the ways Dylan had in mind when first he sang that song – but changing they are. We can’t go back.

Ross Douthat: What about those cabinet picks?

Now we have Trump’s cabinet picks. When that incendiary clown Matt Gaetz got the nod for Attorney General I lost it. Fortunately Trump listed to all the howls, took a deep breath, and decided to ditch him in favor of a woman with substantial legal experience. Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense did not make me happy either. A MAGA apologist for war crimes with no managerial experience, no way! Nor do I want a science-challenged Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human Services. As for Tulsi Gabbard, I’m OK with her anti-war stance (I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War) as Director of National Intelligence.

On these lines, I found Ross Douthat recent NYTimes column, Three Theories of the Trump Cabinet, quite interesting. He takes his first theory from Matthew Zeitlin, who sees Trump’s “picks as making up an American version of a European-style coalition government, where small parties join with a bigger party and receive various ministries in exchange for their support.” After taking that out for a spin he offers a view he takes from Yuval Levin: “they’re designed to stoke conflict within the different agencies rather than within the cabinet. [...] Which suggests that what Trump 2.0 is seeking is less the representation of different factions and more just disruption of all kinds.”

Douthat lands on a third interpretation:

That he’s assembling a “team of podcasters,” to use the conservative writer Ben Domenech’s formulation, a cabinet of “communicators, not administrators,” who are picked for their celebrity and their experience as faces and voices [...] In which case it’s a mistake to look too closely at either their ideological commitments or their administrative experience. Trump mostly just wants them as charismatic faces who will be public salespeople for whatever he decides to do.

But the actual administration of the cabinet agencies still needs to happen, and Trump’s policy decisions are still likely to be strongly influenced by the ideas and proposals that are surfaced from below.

Hmmmm. I like it. Independently of what I’d like to see happen, will it accomplish what Trump wants it to accomplish and will it serve the working-class people who voted for him? I don’t know.

But it is suggestive, very suggestive.

A tectonic shift?

Loury frequently says we’re witnessing a tectonic shift in American politics. He’s right. The realignment that’s given us a working-class Republican party is important. But there’s also the way the whole process has worked, the social media, the showmanship, the celebrity – and don’t forget Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California before he was President, not to mention Arnie “The Governator” Schwarzenegger. I believe Douthat’s got the same thing in mind with the team of podcasters idea. The whole process, the mechanism, is changing, top-to-bottom and inside out. I don’t know how to conceptualize it, but, yes, it’s happening and it’s tectonic.

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Let the graffiti writers have the last word. I took this in FDR skatepark in South Philadelphia in December 2018, beneath the thruway and just north of the naval yard. Built by skateboarders, who have a strong DIY culture, FDR is legendary among skateboarders. Notice the initials “FDR” on the Pabst can.