Two More Views of the Democrats' Dilemma

In today's Washington Post columnist Paul Kane writes that "Senate Democrats lost by doing nothing to separate themselves from Hillary Clinton." In states where she lost to Donald Trump, Democrats running for Senate seats tended to lost by comparable margins. Where she won, they won. It's no wonder. The Senate candidates' campaign strategy had been to hitch themselves to Clinton's coattails.

Kane adds:

“The problem is they [Democratic candidates] talk to people in segments,” Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who is challenging House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), told The Washington Post’s Daily 202 last weekend. “Here’s our LGBT community. Here’s our labor guy. That doesn’t work. You stop becoming a national party. That’s what happened.”

Notably, when Hillary Clinton uttered her unfortunate "basket of deplorables" comment about half of Donald Trump's constituents, she was speaking before an LGBT audience.

So is the answer for Democrats to stop "talking to people in segments" — relying on "identity politics"?

*****

Also in today's Post is a column by economics expert Robert J. Samuelson, "Jobless by choice — or pain?" About 1 in 8 men 25 to 54 years of age — in their prime working years — have no job, says Samuelson, "and, unlike the officially unemployed, aren't looking for one." These men are classed as "dropouts" from the labor force. Back in the mid-1960s, the dropout rate was just 1 in 29. The rate of dropping out began rising as far back as then.

Samuelson lists several possible reasons why there are so many dropouts now. Experts tend to divide about this, with some calling the dropouts "shirkers" and others calling them "victims."

*****

Whatever the reasons for the high rate of dropping out, it seems clear that here we have yet another segment of the populace who — mainly in the person of Donald Trump — are looking for political leverage. Identity politics boosted the GOP more than it helped the Democrats this year. That was unexpected. But is the Democrats' answer, if they want to restore their status as a national party, to cater to the jobless-and-no-longer-looking? If so, given that so many of this segment are white working-class men, how would they go about doing that without alienating other segments of the erstwhile "Obama coalition"?

It's all well and good to say "stop talking to people in segments," but how?

The Democrats' Dilemma

Columnist Charles Lane writes incisively in the Thanksgiving 2016 issue of The Washington Post that we Democrats face a dilemma if we want to make any appeal to white working-class voters. As I've written before, we lost the election to Donald Trump because of "identity politics," defined Mr. Lane writes, as "messaging aimed not at voters broadly, but at Latinos, women, African Americans and the LGBT community as groups."

Voters in the white working-class who voted heavily for Trump did so not so much because of economic woes. Rather, they hanker after the cultural homogeneity they feel slipping away from them:

In rural areas, or small towns, where everyone speaks the same language, or practices the same customs, life can be simpler, more predictable, less frictional. Economists call these “compositional amenities,” and many people value them above the benefits of diversity — even above economic gains. ... Trump just got himself elected president with overwhelming support from non-college-educated whites in smaller cities and rural counties by telling them he would build a wall on the Mexican border, impose “extreme vetting” on would-be immigrants and deport large numbers of the undocumented.

That's a big problem for Democrats:

The Democrats’ dilemma, then, is this: They can make only limited political gains with an economic pitch to the white working class, unless they adjust on immigration and other issues of identity too, probably.

Yet this would require compromising on what the party defined as matters of basic justice and tolerance, and turn off voters from their racially and ethnically diverse “coalition of the ascendant.” 

Some Democrats warn that "conceding on identity politics would be a capitulation to 'white supremacy'," but not making any concessions might doom the party in future elections. What is the right answer here?

Recalibrating Liberalism?

Author Mark Lilla (The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction) writes in an opinion piece for The New York Times, "The End of Identity Liberalism":

... the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

"Diversity": it's a mantra of the political left today. Synonyms: "multiculturalism," "political correctness," "identity liberalism."

Lilla argues that staunchly honoring the mantra of identity diversity put paid to Hillary Clinton's electoral chances this year, letting Donald Trump win. After all, Clinton's tactless "basket of deplorables" utterance came while she was speaking before an audience of LGBT partisans.

"Political incorrectness" of any variety serves today as a sure rallying point for liberal anger. During the 1960s the ur-source for political anger was the Black Power movement. That movement's tendencies toward incendiary protest primed the then-ongoing anti-Vietnam war protests to incite police violence in Chicago in 1968. Women's liberationists who supposedly (but not actually) began burning their bras in 1969 were expressing anger akin to that of blacks about their oppression. The gay rights movement, for its part, had its origins in the Stonewall riots of that same year.

The unified response to all these developments was that "identity anger" in general became embedded in liberal politics. Fast forward to today, and we have liberals dutifully echoing identity anger at the oppression that keeps transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice.

All those versions of identity liberalism further alienated two other groups of Americans who have long felt ignored and oppressed, says Lilla: "the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals."

What are liberals to do in response to white-working-class anger? Jettison their own embedded identity anger? Mr. Lilla recommends:

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)

But what exactly does "work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale" mean? And, importantly, how would it affect the liberal ur-commitment to racial equality?

Thomas B. Edsall writes in "The Not-So-Silent White Majority" in The New York Times that it has long been the case that

“Blacks constitute the explanation [for white working-class voters] of [their] vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives.”

Tapping in to this white-working-class version of identity politics goes back at least as far as Richard Nixon's successful appeal to the "Silent Majority" in the 1968 presidential election. The idea of white victimhood has since had its electoral ups and downs, but it is what propelled Donald Trump to victory this year.

Slavery, it is said, was our country's "original sin." Its spawn have included the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and racial discrimination in general. If we liberals follow Mark Lilla's advice, do we have to soft-pedal our anti-racism commitment? And if we do that, what of the other matters of identity justice that so many of us liberals are committed to fostering? Do they have to go by the boards, too?

These are tough questions for tough times.

Anti-elitism in today's world

I'm basically an anti-elitist, which I guess makes me a populist.

Although I voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election, I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary. I recognized early on that Hillary was plugged firmly into a network of elite Democratic leaders and donors, and that was one of the reasons I supported Bernie. I nonetheless think Hillary's honest intentions as a candidate were to use the power of her intended office, the presidency, to help those who lack power. But I feel there's something adverse to that intention in the very notion of powerful elites.

This attitude of mine is upheld in a book I'm reading, Nick Spencer's The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values. Mr. Spencer's book has it that Christian core values have underpinned all of Western thought and belief following the decline of the Roman Empire. Though I'm a Catholic Christian, it surprises me to learn that such values as ...

• women’s rights
• care for the poor
• opposition to slavery
• legal equality of all individuals,
• an appeal to personal conscience rather than "trial by ordeal"
• and even how liberating it was to women to insist the sexual renunciation of libertine practices rife in the Roman Empire

... all come directly from core Christian principles. (Never mind that the church hierarchy in medieval times typically observed those values in the breach.)

But the core value in interested in here is that of Christian opposition to the very notion of hierarchy:

[Saint] Paul’s message [was that] ‘the Christ reveals a God who is potentially present in every believer.’ Through an act of faith in the Christ, human agency, which is no longer simply a plaything of stars, gods or fate, can become a medium for God’s love. Such an understanding of reality deprived rationality of its aristocratic connotations. Thinking was no longer the privilege of the social elite and became associated not with status but with humility, itself a virtue entirely alien in the ancient world.

I take this to mean that our modern "aristocracy" — the power network that Hillary Clinton was plugged into — violates Christian core principles.

For many of Hillary's supporters who aren't necessarily in the country's power loop, this idea will nonetheless seem problematic. Here we had a choice between Trump, who despite his wealth came across as a populist, and Clinton, whose heart was in the right place despite her associations with Wall Street. Trump's rhetoric was racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and so on. His personal behavior was execrable. If Hillary had won, she would have used her power base to help those with little power. The choice was clear. Right?

Well, yes ... and no.

As I say, I voted for Hillary, but my heart wasn't hugely in it. I'm an anti-elitist to the core.

But I am great friends with Catholics who are stronger that I was for Hillary. My best friend is one of them. He voted for Hillary in the primary partly because (in my opinion, based on our long friendship) he is drawn to elite personages and their power networks. As a political pragmatist, he felt that Hillary could leverage her powerful connections into policies that would advantage the powerless. In fact, it must seem to a lot of people that such a pragmatic approach embodies our requisite Christian support for the poor.

In fact, that seems logical, no? But Christian teaching often turns ordinary logic on its head: the last will be first and the first shall be last.

And admittedly, my anti-elitism is more an aspect of my personal psychology than it is a grudging acquiescence in Christian teaching. My friend's personal psychology is the opposite of mine on this point, but we are both responding to the interior organization of our respective psyches.

As are, I assume, the voting habits of most people in our electorate. It is difficult for any of us, Christian or not, to go against our own deeply held attitudes and beliefs.

Anger in the body politic

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning — an euphemism for feeling quick to anger.

My own anger on this day is more of the free-floating, non-political kind, but it occurs to me that there is a huge amount of political anger in the air as well.

In the political arena, we Democrats on the progressive left are currently expressing great anger at President-elect Donald Trump's appointment of Stephen K. Bannon as his chief White House strategist. Mr. Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News. He once declared the site "the platform for the alt-right." The alt-right has been said to be associated with white supremacism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism.

Let's pretend for the moment that I am in that group of Donald Trump supporters that gravitate to the alt-right. I expect I would be motivated by anger at all the things that have made me feel marginalized and powerless. There are many such things, and many have nothing to do with people who do not look and act like me. Washington, New York, and the other big cities have lost sight of my needs, as the bigwigs who live there fly over my little towns and rural abodes on their way to yet another distant power luncheon. I don't feel I have economic security any more. Our universities are teaching our youngsters — the ones who are lucky enough to attend them — to, again, be insensitive to the beliefs and needs of folks like me. It all makes me angrier than I can remember being at any point in my life.

So, what about all those folks who don't act and look like me? The power elites coddle them, so I believe, while I get ignored. Accordingly, my anger spills over onto them.

OK, now I'll stop pretending I'm an alt-right enthusiast and go back to being me ...

Many of the commentators I read on the left are livid because Trump, whose rhetoric during the campaign was often hateful, appointed Bannon. Again, anger rears its ugly head in the political arena. And I have to wonder if many of those angry pundits on the left also have a storehouse of non-political anger built up in their system. My guess is they do.

Anger seems endemic to our society and culture today. At some point I think we have to admit that we've become addicted to anger. And a lot of that anger is free-floating and non-political.

My thought here is that political/free-floating anger in the society and culture are bound to spill over into racial hatred, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. So if we on the left want to end such bigotries, we need to figure out a strategy that can damp down America's anger.

An underlying reason why Trump won

Charles M. Blow of the New York Times has expressed beautifully what I think is the underlying reason why Donald Trump won:

"Shifting demographics contribute to the sharp political divisions seen in this year’s election"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/trumps-rural-white-america.html

What's the Future of the Democratic Party?

Hillary Clinton and the Democrats surprised the pollsters and pundits by losing Election '16 to Donald Trump and the Republicans. What do we Democrats do now?

Does the Democratic Party Have a Future? in The Atlantic pithily says:

There’s no obvious answer to how the [Democratic] party can reconcile its need for some working-class whites with the focus on social and racial justice that has become a Democratic priority, driven by the near unification of minorities under the party’s banner.

Parsing that: Hillary lost bigtime among working-class Americans, particularly white middle-aged voters who lack a college degree.

According to "2016 Election exit polls: How the vote has shifted" from The Washington Post:

• 72 percent of white men with no college degree voted for Trump
• 62 percent of white women with no college degree voted for Trump

The white working class is telling us by how they voted that they feel marginalized. But the Democrats' post-1960s focus on justice not only for African Americans but also for many other groups who have traditionally been marginalized — other people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, etc. — alienates this one particular group of once-powerful but now-marginalized voters. How does the Democratic Party reinvent itself so as to attract those white working-class voters while not seeming to cast aside all of their longtime constituency groups?

New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes in "The View From Trump Tower" that:

• Donald Trump is probably going to make the G.O.P. the party of individual/closed [ideology]
• The Democrats are probably going to be the party of social/closed [ideology]

He favors an ideology that is "social/open." These terms mean:

• Individual — "the traditional Republican agenda of getting government out of the way" so that individuals, acting on their own without government help or interference, can succeed (or fail) in life; i.e., no more social "safety net"
• Social — "proposals that help communities with early education programs and the like" are insisted upon in a "social" agenda; i.e., the "safety net" will remain in place and in some cases be expanded
• Closed — "walls, protectionism and xenophobia"; i.e., leaving "people isolated in the face of the challenges of the information age economy, and [closing off] ... dynamism and diversity"; dialogue among opposing political ideologies would be next to impossible
• Open —  a "compassionate globalist party would support the free trade and skilled immigration that fuel growth. But it would also flood the zone for those challenged in the high-skill global economy — offering programs to rebuild community, foster economic security and boost mobility. It would integrate the white working class and minority groups by emphasizing that we are all part of a single American idea"; i.e., an agenda that would make all of us feel less walled off from one another

Mr. Brooks favors a third-party movement that would oppose the two existing parties' present slide in the direction of a "closed" society. He wants an "open" agenda.

Mr. Brooks thinks the "coming Sanders-Warren [Democratic] party will close off trade, withdraw from the world, close off integration with hyper-race-conscious categories and close off debate with political correctness." I'm doubtful about his "coming Sanders-Warren party" assumption. But I agree with Mr. Brooks that the Democrats, like the Republicans, have begun opposing international free-trade agreements and have chosen to engage with the outside world less vigorously than was once the case.

And I agree that the Democrats have already become "hyper-race-conscious" and also hyper-conscious of other minority cohorts whom they have long cultivated. They have tilted — on, say, our college campuses — in the direction of substituting political correctness for open debate. True, they have adopted these stances for reasons both practical (it has helped them win elections) and moral (because it is simply wrong to marginalize African Americans and other disparaged groups). But now it looks like the practical aspects of their choice have evaporated to the extent that Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton among a segment of the electorate the Democrats themselves have contributed to the marginalization of.

So, what's next? Can the Democrats square the circle and reinvent themselves in a way that holds on to their existing constituencies while attracting Trump's white working-class voters? Can either party find its way to policy positions that are, in Mr. Brooks's terms, "social/open"? Do we need a third party? Is there the slightest possibility that a third-party movement can succeed?

Stay tuned to see how it all works out over time ...

One Reason Hillary Lost, Pt. 2

I want to pick up where I left off in my previous post, One Reason Hillary Lost. This is a subject that's important to me.

I said in that earlier post that Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump for many reasons. The one I highlighted was that she did not "grok" the white working class ... and Donald Trump, even though he's a billionaire, did.

To "grok" somebody, in terms of their attitudes and general mindset, is "'to understand [them] intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with [them]' and 'to empathize or communicate sympathetically [with them]." Hillary could not do that with America's white working class — particularly the men in that group. So that group went overwhelmingly for Trump.

The members of the white working class that most concern me are the "hillbillies" that J.D. Vance has written about in his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. They come mainly from people of Scots-Irish descent who live in southern Appalachia (though many of their families moved to northern cities to find work during WWII).

I come from a family background about three-eighths Scots-Irish. Though none of my forebears lived in the South, many lived in the Ozark region and elsewhere in Missouri. My grandparents were occasionally poor but most of the time occupied the middle part of the economic spectrum. One of my great-great-grandfathers was a wealthy slaveholder in central Missouri prior to the Civil War.

Even with that sort of thing in my family background, I'm not entirely sure I can tell you why I grok the "hillbillies" J.D. Vance writes about. In fact, my own father used to laugh at and about the "hillbillies" he encountered in the Ozarks during his formative years, saying for instance that they all had one leg shorter than the other so that they could easily run along mountain ridges. My Uncle Preston — the husband of one of my mother's sisters, who became a millionaire in St. Louis — used to joke that he was born a "hillbilly," but I have no idea how true that was.

Anyway, I grok the white Americans who have been derogated as "hillbillies" far better than I do the other members of the white working class who lack a college education and whose jobs have disappeared or are at risk. But I do know that both groups feel like they're outsiders in their own land, and both cohorts voted overwhelmingly for Trump. So I feel justified in saying that Hillary does not grok either cohort, having once said that half of Trump supporters constitute a "basket of deplorables."

Democrats — of whom I am one — have in my lifetime taken up the causes of numerous other groups who have felt like outsiders in their own land. Notable among these groups have been African Americans. When Democrats hitched their wagon to the civil rights movement in the 1960s and '70s, white people in the South who were once Democrats switched to Republican. Many of the newly Republican southerners who resented the Democrats' civil rights agenda were working-class, and some of those working-class southern whites were "hillbillies."

President Richard Nixon, through his first term, "pursued a Southern Strategy with policies, such as ... desegregation plans, that would be broadly acceptable among Southern whites, encouraging them to realign with the Republicans in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era." That was in the late 1960s and early '70s. After the realignment, Democrats and white working-class southerners were like oil and water: they didn't mix.

White working-class southerners get derogated as not only "hillbillies" but also "rednecks," "rubes," "yokels," "hayseeds," "bumpkins," and the like. Other social groups that get derogated by the use of equally ignorant, equally stereotypical terms have drawn much sympathy and support from us Democrats, but white working-class southerners have not. The reason: White working-class southerners are often the ones whose utterances have been known to slander African Americans and other cohorts that Democrats strive to help.

There's a conundrum here. Democrats believe they are the first to support any and all victims of slandering and stereotyping, but they look the other way when the slanderers and stereotypers themselves get slandered and stereotyped.

This is quite understandable. It's human nature to find it hard to hate the sin (racism, say) yet love the sinner (white working-class folks whose culture has long promoted racism). But it's wrong to give in to that difficulty.

One reason it's wrong was illustrated by Election 2016. Our Democratic champion Hillary Clinton couldn't pick up enough electoral votes to win the presidency because (I'd say) she has tin ear when it comes to the white working class, many of whom vote in the South, and many others of whom, though once southerners, today vote in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These are states that went to Trump this year. Quite a few of states like these once voted reliably Democratic. Hillary desperately needed them to vote her way if she were going to win. They didn't. She lost.

Another reason having a tin ear for "hillbillies" and other members of the white working class who have often been racist in their outlook is wrong is that it perpetuates the wide gulf that currently separates many Americans from many other Americans. Democrats and Republicans bemoan the gulf, but neither party seems willing to do what is necessary to bridge it. Democrats are not the only ones at fault, true ... but they are at fault. Specifically, Democratic elites are at fault. These elites, because they are elite "somebodies," cannot really hear the voices of the "nobodies" who cry out that they have become strangers in their own land.

Democrats — elites and ordinary folks — need to open their minds, hearts, and ears to the likes of the "hillbillies" whom J.D. Vance celebrates, despite all their flaws, in his book.

One Reason Why Hillary Lost

I voted for Hillary Clinton, and I was admittedly stunned when she lost to Donald Trump in Election 2016. The pundits on TV gave at least a hundred reasons why she lost. I'd like to focus on just one.

That particular reason for her losing has to do with the Trump voters themselves, half of whom she insensitively called a "basket of deplorables." Such disdain tells me that, deep, deep down, she simply cannot grasp the mindset of that group of Trumpists.

That's not uncommon among us (upper) middle-class whites with a college education, whether we are male or female.

White working-class voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Exit polls showed that white voters without a college degree are nowadays down to just 1/3 of the electorate. Yet they turned conventional wisdom on its head by voting Trump into the Oval Office.

"In the end, the bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength among white working-class voters fell to Mr. Trump," wrote Nate Cohn of the New York Times. "White working-class voters may not have commanded enough of Clinton’s attention," wrote Matthew Cooper of Newsweek, "but Trump put a spotlight on them. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir and study of these voters, became a best-seller and a must-read for political types."

I think those post-election analyses miss a point that may or may not be relevant. (I think it is relevant.) I'd say the "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength among white working-class voters" are not "hillbillies" by J.D. Vance's characterization in Hillbilly Elegy. "Hillbillies" are mostly white people of Scots-Irish descent who live in southern Appalachia or whose families have moved north to find work. The term "hillbilly" applies also to other (often poor) white people from other mountainous areas of the country, such as northern Appalachia or the Ozarks.

We need to keep in mind that the term "hillbilly" is frequently used by non-hillbillies in a derogatory way — suggesting that a fair number of America's non-hillbillies consider hillbillies to constitute a "basket of deplorables."

I'm saying that the erstwhile "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength" and the "hillbillies" are two different sets of working-class whites, even if both sets voted heavily for Trump.

The following is admittedly a guess on my part: Hillary Clinton has more trouble grasping the mindset of the "hillbillies" than she does the mindset of working-class descendants of the erstwhile "bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength" — people whose family background can be that of those who once were thought of as "ethnic" whites: Italians, Irish, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Hungarians, Slovaks, French-Canadians, Portuguese, Croats, etc. Many of these are people who typically became blue-collar workers after their families arrived in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As people who furnished labor to grow America's economy, they were generally ill-treated until they unionized during the early 20th century. Such white union members once voted reliably Democratic.

*****

But "hillbillies" were not part of the original union movement of the early 20th century. They were nonetheless typically Democratic. But as southerners, they voted Democratic (if they voted at all) for different reasons — often deeply entrenched racial ones — than did the "ethnic" whites of the North.

The "hillbillies" of J.D. Vance's narrative are often the people of whom President Obama has said:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

This was a somewhat ham-fisted attempt by the president to show he understood their plight. Yet his "cling to guns or religion" remark was called out as false stereotyping, just as has Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment deservedly was. Both comments gave off more than a whiff of disdain. Disdain for any group of Americans implies a lack of understanding, a lack of listening, a lack of honoring.

*****

Over the past fifty years many Americans have ceased stereotyping and showing disdain for groups that are not just like themselves. These groups have included (for men) women; (for whites) African Americans; (for straight people) gays and lesbians; etc. etc. etc.

But just as importantly, "hillbillies" have not been included in that list.
One reason has been that the general stereotype of America's "hillbillies" includes the adjective "racist" — and there is a fair amount of accuracy to that attribution. Many whites from the South are not disposed to see black people as their equals. And many of those whites are "hillbillies."

Since at least the 1960s, the Democratic Party has invested itself heavily in furthering the civil rights of black Americans. That is a marvelous and much-needed thing. But at the same time, it has made it harder than ever for the upwardly mobile white folks who form the "elites" of the Democratic Party — Hillary Clinton is included in that group — to "grok" the mindset of white "hillbillies." To "grok" means "'to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with' and 'to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment.'"

Hillary did not understand (or enjoy) the "hillbillies" of the white working class "intuitively or by empathy." I have to compare her unfavorably with Bobby Kennedy. During the 1960s, Kennedy became a hero of ordinary African Americans and black civil rights leaders. But at first, he (as his brother John F. Kennedy's attorney general) tended to talk at, rather than listen to, leaders of the civil rights movement. In a crucial meeting with them in New York, according to Larry Tye's biography Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, they pretty much handed him his head.

The fundamental problem was that Kennedy didn't yet understand black Americans "intuitively or by empathy." He didn't grok their mindset. This was a problem that Bobby would soon rectify, during a period of deepening of his personal understanding as he mourned the assassination of his brother. In that period, he took the trouble to look first-hand into the poverty many African Americans were forced to live in.

Then, when Kennedy was running for president in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated on an evening when Kennedy happened to be campaigning in a black community in Indianapolis. His sensitive extemporaneous remarks to African Americans on that night, which became one of his most famous speeches after he himself was struck down by an assassin's bullet, were proof that he had learned to grasp their mindset intuitively and precisely. That speech kept Indianapolis from erupting in riot and flame the way many other cities did in the wake of the Reverend King's slaying.

*****

Back to "hillbillies." They (and other working-class whites) were not truly understood by Hillary Clinton the way Donald Trump seemed to be able to grok those supporters' wants and needs. She tried to talk at them, offering policy proposals that might help them economically, but she did not really listen to them.

We aspire upward in the social-class hierarchy. We want to climb the ladder, so we identify with those above us on the ladder. That means we tend to disdain downward.

It takes a special person to grok downward instead. Bobby Kennedy was just such a special person. In his early life, that third son of a wealthy Boston Irish businessman named Joseph P. Kennedy took his designated part in Joe's aspiration that a Kennedy son would become president. The first son, Joe Jr., died in WWII, making Jack the presidential aspirant. The Kennedy children were groomed by their father and mother to possess the characteristics typical of the powerful Protestant leaders in this country, such as attending Harvard University. They had little reason not to somewhat disdain those below them on the social ladder, including African Americans.

Jack became president, with Bobby his attorney general and closest advisor, at a time in our history when African Americans were demanding their rights. Reluctantly, Jack and Bobby had to deal with their push for equality. It was in that context that Bobby met with civil rights leaders in New York in 1963  and failed to impress them. He did not yet listen to them. So he could not yet grok them.

After Jack Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby's "better self" began to emerge out of his intense mourning. He started to study the great philosophers of ancient Greece and to read Shakespeare. He took ever more seriously the Catholic adjurations to help the poor. He traveled to places where poor "Negroes" lived and painfully witnessed the conditions of their impoverishment. He became involved in their struggle to better their lives. The revised and matured version of Bobby began at last to grok them.

To grok someone is to lose the tendency to disdain them. To lead, you first must grok. Bobby Kennedy, in grokking the "Negroes" of this land, had become able to be one the few white civil rights leaders in America.

Hillary Clinton does not seem to be a special person to the perhaps unique extent Bobby Kennedy was. Coming from a family lower in social and economic class than the Kennedys, Hillary has so successfully aspired upward as to become a first lady, a U.S. senator, a U.S. secretary of state, and the first female U.S. presidential candidate to win the national popular vote. In climbing the ladder, she has formed a vast network of movers and shakers who support her assiduously. What she has not done is the kind of homework Bobby Kennedy did that allowed him to set aside his earlier disdain and to grok the lives and minds of needy people lower down in the social hierarchy. Bobby, once he was open to honoring their plight and their unfulfilled needs, earned their trust, loyalty, and political support.

The Hillary Clinton of the "basket of deplorables" utterance is clearly not yrt open to honoring the plight and socioeconomic needs of lesser-educated working-class whites. she wants to help them via programmatic but she hasn't really listened to them — especially not the "hillbillies." She hasn't learned to grok them. Hence, they don't see her as an eligible leader in Washington.

It's a big reason why she got too few electoral votes and lost the election.

Vote!

My purpose in this post is to convince you to go ahead and vote in the 2016 presidential election. Don't not vote because you don't like either major candidate particularly well.

I'm assuming you prefer one of the two major-party candidates, either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, even if the candidate you prefer doesn't thrill you.

Since I'm an "old-style liberal," I prefer Hillary Clinton. I don't love her, but I prefer her. Yet what I'm saying here applies just as well if you happen to prefer Donald Trump.

The reason is that this election is going to be close. As of today — the Thursday before Election Day, which is Tuesday, November 8 — the polls are showing a virtual tie. The Real Clear Politics average of several national polls is (as of this date; it could change over the next few days) showing Clinton with a 1.7 percentage point lead. Most polls have a margin of error of at least 3 percentage points, so +1.7 points is basically a dead heat.

Electoral votes

The election will be won by whichever candidate gets at least 270 votes in the Electoral College — whether or not he or she wins the nationwide popular vote. Votes in the Electoral College are awarded state by state. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes. That number depends on the population of the state. The more populous states get more electoral votes than the less populous states.

We had close elections in 2000 and 2004. In 2000, George W. Bush won the electoral vote over Al Gore when the populous state of Florida went very narrowly for him — in a contested statewide result that went all the way to the Supreme Court — even though Gore won the national popular vote.

In 2004, the Republican Bush won again, this time over the Democrat John Kerry, in an election that came down to the winner of the extremely populous state of Ohio: Bush.

Who will determine the next president?

When elections are that close, it's the people who don't show up and vote that can determine the outcome. Or, voters who don't vote for one of the two major-party candidates; in 2000, third-party candidate Ralph Nader took enough votes from Gore in Florida to tip the election to Bush.

If you live in a very populous state that is also quite close in statewide pre-election polls, your state can swing the way you don't want it to if you and just a few other people with the same candidate preference don't express your preference in the voting booth. That can tip the entire election!

If you live in a state with a smaller population, but one that is close in the polls, your absence might likewise tip the entire election. It's not as likely that this year's election (or any year's) will pivot on a smaller state, but it's not impossible.

So vote!


P.S. If your state has "early voting," you can avoid Election Day lines by taking advantage of it. If you are eligible to vote but haven't registered, your state may permit "same day registration" that will still allow you to vote.