Required Reading for Democrats and Republicans

David Brooks

Our democratic republic's politics are foundering as never before. Why? Here are two analyses. The first comes from New York Times columnist David Brooks and asks why today's conservative Republicans are light years apart from the conservatives whom Brooks revered a few decades ago. In "The G.O.P. Is Rotting," Brooks says:

A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed. 

Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist ...

Read the rest of the column to learn more about why Brooks, a center-right pundit, is in a state of despair.

Thomas B. Edsall

In "Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears," New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall offers his own despairing analysis of why liberal Democrats such as the ones I personally support aren't much better off:

For the moment, the left is both stunned and infuriated by the vehement animosity it faces from red America ... Many Democrats continue to have little understanding of their own role — often inadvertent, an unintended consequence of well-meaning behavior — in creating the conditions that make conservatives willing to support Trump and the party he is leading.

Edsall quotes Karen Stenner, author of "The Authoritarian Dynamic," who Edsall says is "no fan of the president," to the effect that:

... liberal democracy’s allowance of these things [such as unfettered freedom, diversity, multiculturalism, etc.] inevitably creates conditions of “normative threat,” arousing the classic authoritarian fears about threats to oneness and sameness, which activate those predispositions ... and cause the increased manifestation of racial, moral and political intolerance.

I admit I find some of the discourse that Edsall cites in this column a bit too nuanced for my full comprehension. Yet since Trump's electoral upset in 2016, I've found myself thinking a lot about what Stenner calls "normative threat." It's a good explanation for what's happened in our politics of late. However, it's anything but clear to me what we liberal Democrats can do about it without backpedaling away from our current commitments and constituencies.

*****

Roy Moore

Meanwhile, check out this Real Clear Politics polling aggregate page concerning tomorrow's special election in Alabama. There seems to be a lot of variability in the individual poll results between the two candidates vying to replace Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate. The Republican, Roy Moore, leads the poll aggregate by a whisker, +2.5 percent as I write this.

Doug Jones

His Democratic opponent is Doug Jones. Given that Alabama is a solid-red state, the fact that Jones is even close in the polls surely has something to do with the allegations several women have made that Moore, then in his early 30s, had inappropriate sexual involvements with them when they were teenagers a few decades ago. If Moore does manage to eke out a victory tomorrow, it will mean that many of his supporters simply looked past his misdeeds ...

"Movement" or "Moment"?

Gail Collins

Gail Collins writes in The New York Times of "The Great Al Franken Moment," in which there seems to be a tectonic shift going on. Women are claiming their power not to be sexually harassed by men without severe consequences for the men. A progressive Senate Democrat, Al Franken, is having to step down in view of his past transgressions. That's real change.

(Collins mentions the installation of a ladies' restroom in the 1860s in the A.T. Stewart Dry Goods Store in New York City. Alexander Turney Stewart — who knew he was a progressive on women's rights — was an ancestor of mine.)

Christine Emba

But Christine Emba writes in The Washington Post today ("Real change is taking root on sexual harassment. Unless it’s not.") of how she worries this Al Franken "moment" is just that: a moment, and not a movement.

A litmus test will be the outcome of Tuesday's special senatorial election in Alabama. Will the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, be able to edge the Democrat, Doug Jones? Moore has been credibly accused of pursuing teenage girls romantically and sexually several decades ago, when he was in his 30s. But he has great credibility with religious and political conservatives today. Emba says, and I agree, that Alabama voters should deny Moore a Senate seat because of his sexual past. All eyes will be on this race this week.

Confession Is Good for the Soul, Pt. 1

As a 70-year-old male virgin (and how many of us can there be?) I want to make a public confession. When I was 20 and a junior in college in 1967 or '68, I committed what today might be called sexual harassment.

I had met a young woman at a university mixer. To my shame, I can't even remember her name now — so for ease of reference, I'll call her Karen. I asked Karen for her phone number and later called her for a date.

This was while I was a student at Georgetown University, and she was a student at a business college. The "scene" in the Georgetown part of Washington, DC, involved numerous bars and discotheques with live music and dancing. I took Karen to one of the nicer ones. We sat at a secluded table on a balcony overlooking the stage and dance floor, and we both had several drinks. When the urge struck me — again, to my shame — I commenced to grope her breast, sliding my hand underneath her bra.

Karen and I had one more date after that. It was a double date with my friend John S. and his girlfriend. We two couples ended up making out on the double twin beds in my dorm room.

My memory is hazy on what transpired between Karen and me after that ... until the Saturday afternoon when she called me at my family's home in Bethesda. She told me on the phone that she had recently attempted suicide.

Alarmed, I drove to her residence hall and picked her up. We sat in my car in front of the residence hall and talked about why she had tried to take her own life.

I regret to say that I remember little about our conversation. The reason for that was, I today think, that I was scared at potentially becoming responsible for, and to,  a suicidal girlfriend. I imagine I may have spoken words to that effect to her. After that, I never saw Karen again.

I imagine I also tried to console her, to a degree, during that last conversation. In addition to being one pathetic and immature guy, I was, after all, also empathetic. But never mind. I cut her loose.

Had her suicide attempt been a response to my having stopped calling her for dates? Regrettably, I don't remember. It may have been. If I maintain that it was, then I'm possibly guilty of inflating my own self-importance, no? But if I say it wasn't, I'm still guilty of having severed ties with a young woman who had phoned me for psychological support.

Karen, if you're out there and you recognize yourself in this story, I need to apologize. I hope you managed to find a long and happy life. I'm sorry I didn't treat you as well as you needed to be treated.

A "Rapport Revolution"?

Christine Emba

I'm grateful for Christine Emba's op-ed, "Let’s rethink sex," in today's Washington Post. Ms. Emba wants us men to prioritize building "rapport" with our potential sexual partners instead of merely obtaining "consent." It would pave the way for "a clearer, more boundaried sexual ethic" than we have now.

Beginning with the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, our society has veered toward today's "hookup culture." It is now, says Emba, "America’s prevailing and problematic sexual ethic." Prior to the inception of the hookup ethic, "sexual encounters outside of marriage [were] disallowed or even discouraged." So we have swung from a maximally restrictive ethic to a minimally restrictive one. One result has been the ungodly frequency with which sexual assaults and incidents of harassment have been taking place over the past few decades.

Emba is saying we now need to move back toward the middle of the sexual-ethic continuum. We need what I might as well call a "rapport revolution." I heartily agree!

The Male Libido ... Is It Brutal?

Stephen Marche

In "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido" in the New York Times, Stephen Marche has it that: "For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. ... How are we supposed to create an equal world when male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal?"

I think Marche is wrong. Male "mechanisms of desire" are not "inherently brutal."

Yes, the recent upwelling of powerful men being credibly accused of sexual abuse against unwilling women shows that some men are sometimes brutal in their sexual expressions. Men "from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and ... Charlie Rose and John Lasseter" have indeed acted brutally at times. But I'd be willing to bet those same men have most often acted gently in expressing their libidos. So have virtually all of us men.

Yet the questions Marche implicitly raises are valid ones. Why do some men's sexual and romantic lives sometimes turn brutal? Is that happening more often today than it used to? (Keep in mind that most of the allegations against Weinstein et al. go back many years, even decades.) How can we men, starting right now, arrange for it to happen less often, en route to some virtual vanishing point? If, as Marche says, sexual and social norms have been changing, what further changes would be needed to tamp down sexual predation? And is not the current discussion a fitting prelude to their much-needed arrival?

"Do Gun Rights Make Us Freer?"

Elizabeth Bruenig

The title of this blog post echoes the headline of a piece by Elizabeth Bruenig in today's Sunday Washington Post. The title of the piece as rendered online is "Do we really understand the Second Amendment anymore?" In it, Bruenig ties today's debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment to various notions of "the good" which Western philosophers have debated.

Do gun rights make us freer? The answer to that question, writes Bruenig, depends on whether the freedom to own guns advances that which, as a separate category of thought from liberty itself, can be deemed "the good."

Until the 17th century, Christian philosophers such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas held that "service to the good" trumped liberty as the prime desideratum of humankind. Beginning in the 17th century, though, "the good" as a rationale for liberty gave way to freedom itself as the single desideratum of any pluralistic, democratic society such as our own.

Hence Bruenig's worry that "freedom unchained from the good" is actually making us less free today, as we hunker down and try to protect our families from mass murder at the hands of crazed gun wielders.

While I think Bruenig's view is well taken, I think she misses something. Her vantage point is indeed quite a valid Western one; still, if we shift focus to the spiritual philosophies of the East, we are likely to discover that "the good" is not some external reality above and beyond the nature of our human souls. It is instead something that comes from within our own minds and hearts. In a Buddhist or even a quasi-Buddhist understanding, that which makes us "good" is:

• Being compassionate to others
• Being self-compassionate
• Being spiritually "on center"

Most of us would agree with the importance of being compassionate to others. Being self-compassionate, though: what does that mean? I am learning about the theory of self-compassion from Kristen Neff's excellent book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. Neff writes:

From the Buddhist point of view, you have to care about yourself before you can really care about other people. If you are continually judging and criticizing yourself while trying to be kind to others, you are drawing artificial boundaries and distinctions that only lead to feelings of separation and isolation. This is the opposite of oneness, interconnection, and universal love — the ultimate goal of most spiritual paths, no matter which tradition.

"You have to care about yourself before you can really care about other people": that seems to invite each of us to be maximally self-indulgent, and not necessarily compassionate toward others, right? Actually, says Neff, wrong. She tells us that she herself once worried about just such a result:

"If I’m too self-compassionate, won’t I just be lazy and selfish?" It took me a while to get my head around [the idea of self-compassion]. But I slowly came to realize that self-criticism — despite being socially sanctioned — was not at all helpful, and in fact only made things worse. I wasn’t making myself a better person by beating myself up all the time. Instead, I was causing myself to feel inadequate and insecure, then taking out my frustration on the people closest to me.

In the recent mass shooting at Sutherland Springs, Texas, the shooter (Devin Patrick Kelley) was taking out his frustration over a marital breakup on a church congregation of which his estranged wife and her extended family were members.

First Baptist Church at
Sutherland Springs, Texas

Did Kelley tend to "beat himself up" over his own inadequacies? We can never really be sure about that, but we can reasonably guess that Kelley's personal self-esteem had been wounded by the breakup of his marriage, that he was feeling separated and isolated from the rest of humanity, and that he was driven to his heinous deed by his overwhelming self-righteous anger. His ego and wounded self-esteem were in control of his actions. And Neff writes that "the relentless pursuit of self-esteem" is what drives our souls off-center:

Although thousands of [scholarly] articles [have] been written on the importance of self-esteem, researchers [are] now starting to point out all the traps that people can fall into when they try to get and keep a sense of high self-esteem: narcissism, self-absorption, self-righteous anger, prejudice, discrimination, and so on. ... self-compassion [is] the perfect alternative to the relentless pursuit of self-esteem.

Neff accordingly writes of the crucial importance of "staying centered." Her book is a guide to doing just that. Although it is not a religious book, it is in fact a spiritual one.

Hence my "yes, but" reaction to Bruenig's piece. I feel that our society and culture tend to push us away from our proper spiritual center. I am just realizing that I am quite off center, myself. Fortunately, my own off-centeredness doesn't incline me to gun violence. Yet I also realize that there are inevitably going to be those of us who cannot say the same, and who will pack heat as a way of coping with their antisocial feelings. One of these sick people was Devin Patrick Kelley.

Put in terms of "the good," what I am saying is that it is not really sane to consider the liberty to own guns as an absolute right, the philosophical search for "the good" notwithstanding, unless we also consider the desperate need for all of us — not to mention our culture as a whole — to find ways of being much more spiritually "on center" than we currently seem to be today.

Let us try self-compassion, then, and see whether it really leads us to true compassion for others and to being more "on center" spiritually.

Societal Dysfunction, the Alt-Right, Spirituality, and Following Your Bliss

A headline at today's online New York Times: "‘Hero’ Bystander Shot at Texas Killer; 26 Dead at Church." The reference is to the shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., which claimed the lives of 26 innocent people and ended with the death of the shooter himself. The hero in question was an unidentified bystander, a man who pursued the shooter and exchanged fire with him with his, the armed bystander's, own rifle.

Candlelight vigil following the
First Baptist Church shooting

The shooting was yet another sign of the burgeoning dysfunctionality within our society. Such awful things are happening more and more these days.

Looking for a solution to the gun violence problem, we've talked about passing tighter firearms laws. I support such measures, but I know they are politically impossible at this point. Besides, all this gun violence is but a symptom of things that are wrong with our society at a deeper level — at a spiritual level, I'd say.

By "spiritual" I mean something that taps into the universal human capacity that goes beyond the teachings of any particular organized religion. I mean what Rabbi Michael Lerner talked about in such books as his 2000 "Spirit Matters." A quote from Lerner:

Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they've received and what problems they are facing.

We're encountering a potpourri of different world views in America today, which is one of the principal factors that blocks us off from attaining greater unity and harmony. One of the world views that is coming to the fore right now is that of the so-called "alt-right." In the Sunday Washington Post yesterday, I found a Carlos Lozada review of three new books about this phenomenon. "Where the alt-right wants to take America — with or without Trump" has it that the participants in the alt-right movement occupy "an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia."

The alt-rightists are deemed, at least by their opponents (of whom I am one), to be white supremacists/nationalists. I'd accordingly say each of them must feel as if he (I use the pronoun because most are white males) is someone from whom something has been taken. They each feel as if their once-dominant culture has come under attack from the cultural left, with its insistence on the so-called "identity politics" that empowers nonwhites, immigrants, women, gays, and so on.

In other words, they feel as if society has herded them into some sort of cultural jailhouse. And it's true: the cultural left has pretty well established a new set of strictures on thought and behavior. The strictures are what's called "political correctness." The alt-rightists hate political correctness.

But that means there is a tendency for alt-rightists to be haters in general. Their vituperative online behavior — so-called "trolling" — bears witness to that. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary online offers this definition of "troll":

to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content

Hate is not a spiritual value. Rather, just as is the burgeoning gun violence in America today, it is symptomatic of a spiritual deficiency.

In 1949, Joseph Campbell wrote in his premiere book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir.

To Campbell, the "hero adventure" that is at the heart of much of the world's trove of mythological wisdom is a spiritual journey towards personal compassion, not hate. Vituperation and hate offer the hero no life-giving elixir, no vitalizing boon that the journeying hero can bring back to his troubled society to heal its wounds. Rather, said the late scholar of myth, the true path to spiritual elevation is for each potential hero among us to "follow your bliss."

"Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be," Campbell said. The things that initially may seem to be soul-strangling strictures imposed upon the individual by society are ultimately illusory. The hero's adventure takes him or her beyond the current politics or current sociology of his society to reveal a life-giving elixir that is compounded of courage and compassion. The pathway of vituperation and hate does not lead to such an elixir; that's one of the lessons taught by Jesus.

So, please, let's all look elsewhere than the alt-right for paths to America's spiritual healing. Let's all learn to go on a hero's journey and (what amounts to the same thing) to follow our bliss.

More Profundity from David Brooks

Jonathan Sacks

New York Times columnist David Brooks says in "The Week Trump Won" that America was founded on a (however oxymoronic) "secular religion" that held that "the heart of society was in the covenantal realm: 'marriages, families, congregations, communities, charities and voluntary associations'," exactly as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has recently pointed out. These are, Sacks says, values that derive from the Hebrew Bible, a.k.a. the Old Testament.

"America’s Judeo-Christian ethic," Brooks points out, "celebrated neighborliness over pagan combativeness; humility as the basis of good character, not narcissism. It believed in taking in the stranger because we were all strangers once. It dreamed of universal democracy as the global fulfillment of the providential plan."

The presidency of Donald Trump represents a complete upending of this foundational idea. Sacks has noted, "Today, one half of America is losing all [their erstwhile] covenantal institutions. It’s losing strong marriages and families and communities. It is losing a strong sense of the American narrative. It’s even losing e pluribus unum because today everyone prefers pluribus to unum ... ."

Don't miss reading Brook's full column about this ugly turn of events!

Has Change Come Too Fast?

Michael Gerson

Center-right Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson writes, in "The issue that is — unfortunately — uniting Americans on the left and the right," that Americans are mostly of one accord today ...

... in their belief that the United States is dominated by corrupt, self-serving elites. They are united in their call for radical rather than incremental change. While disagreeing deeply about the cause, they see America as careening off course. Little wonder that Americans consistently say their country in on the wrong track by a margin of more than 2-to-1. Disgruntlement is our nation’s common ground.

I think the disgruntlement stems from progressive changes happening too fast over the course of the last few years or decades.

I say this as a progressive Democrat who likes the progress we've made during the 70 years I've been around. To paraphrase Barack Obama: "[Each] successive generation [has indeed looked] upon our imperfections and decide[d] that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals." Among the good things that have happened:

• We've seen African Americans and other people of color get a fairer deal, in large part because of federal laws banning discrimination and ensuring voting rights.
• We've witnessed women's gains in self-determination in our once-patriarchal society, due primarily to the liberation movement that began with the rise of second wave feminism in the 1960s.
• Our world is now one in which the once generally mandated restrictions on individual sexual behavior have been lifted, thanks largely to the Sexual Revolution of that same decade.
• We've progressed from a society of LGBT intolerance to one in which gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people don't have to hide their sexual and gender identities.
• We now have a society in which everyone is truly free to practice the religion he or she prefers, or no religion at all.

These and others like them were epochal changes that happened stunningly fast.

Too fast, I think. There has been backlash. When epochal changes follow one another too rapidly, the culture gets indigestion. There are now just too many dyspeptic citizens who feel cruelly trampled over. They are the ones who voted a candidate like Donald Trump into the White House. Some of them even show their disgruntlement by painting swastikas and rallying for white supremacy.

So I think progressive change now needs to take a long nap. That's the only way we can bring people back together over something positive, rather than just over shared disgruntlement. It's the only way the center of our culture can begin to hold once more.

Faith and Trust ... and Gun Violence

An article by historian Randolph Ross in today's Washington Post has it that there is a long historical connection between rises in people's tendency toward committing deadly acts of violence and people's having lost faith and trust in government. "How the erosion of trust leads to murders and mass shootings" details the way in which, as trust dissipates, killings rise.

Americans' trust in governmental leaders is at a low ebb. We've just seen, in Las Vegas, the worst mass shooting in our history. There's a connection, Roth maintains.

A makeshift memorial to those killed by Stephen Paddock
at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas.

This doesn't come as a big surprise. Whenever Americans have faith in those who lead them, each feels as if he or she comprises a distinct thread in a common flag.

Whether one is a red thread or a blue thread, each of us is best off when he or she knows it takes both colors to make an American flag.

We've lost that sense of unity today. What can we do to restore it? I think all of us need to work harder at restoring our one-time mutual dedication to civility.

According to the thesaurus, words closely related to civility include ...

... honors; ceremony, observance, rite, ritual; decorum, etiquette, form, manners, mores, proprieties; ... regards, respects; favor, grace, kindliness, kindness; protocol, rules

Let's all think about words like those and try to implement them in our lives once again! It may help put an end to all these unconscionable acts of deadly gun violence ...

Remembering Hugh Hefner and the Advent of Playboy

Hugh Hefner in 1966

Hugh Hefner has died. As the founder of Playboy magazine in 1953, Hef changed the world. By the time of his death last week at age 91, he was no longer much of a factor in the culture. The culture had moved well past what he'd once meant to it, back in the day.

I expect my father was one of the original subscribers to Playboy. I don't really remember for sure, though, whether he had the first issue, that of December 1953, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover:

The December 1953 premiere
issue of Playboy

I was only six years old at the time, but by the time I was nine or ten, Dad was letting me peruse the Playboy issues stacked up on a shelf in our house.

I didn't understand then how radical Playboy was. I realized, of course, that photos of buxom young women in the nude were its main attraction, but I didn't know that just a few years prior, no mass-circulation magazine would ever have tried that.

After Hef died, Washington Post columnist Alyssa Rosenberg wrote:

On some major social issues, Hefner was early to take what are today mainstream progressive stances. ... Hefner was an early and avid defender of the gay rights movement, arguing that sexual liberation had to include gay people, too, in order for it to be meaningful. The same instincts led Hefner to publish extensive coverage of the emerging AIDS epidemic, recognizing that a sexually transmitted disease had no sexual orientation.

Hefner threw racially integrated parties in decades when it was not always popular to do so. Playboy picked its first black Playmate in 1965. And his magazine helped jump-start the writer Alex Haley’s career by asking him to interview Miles Davis, and Playboy then gave Haley an entire series, which eventually would include important interviews with Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

But her praise was not unalloyed:

Hefner may have advocated for women’s equality and independence in the political sphere. But that ideal state of affairs never arrived in Hefner’s lifetime, despite his advocacy for it. And Hefner’s own relationships were not necessarily defined by an equal balance of power.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was downright scathing:

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

That's unseemly and unfair. It misreads the Hefner legacy by judging it by the feminist and post-feminist standards of today — an ethos that could not have emerged at all in the 1960s absent what Hef did in the 1950s.

In 1948, researcher Alfred C. Kinsey and two other authors published the first of two "Kinsey Reports." Called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it would be followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.

These reports documented statistical studies that Kinsey undertook to find out what sorts of sexual behavior people were actually engaging in. The reports showed that in addition to the licit types of sexual behavior, there was a surprising amount of nominally illicit sex of various types going on.

My parents kept a copy of at least the Human Male report on a bookshelf, and at some point in my late childhood or early adolescence I pulled it off the shelf and looked it over. I doubt I understood much of it, but I did at least realize that it was telling the world about the ubiquity of sexual expression in our culture.

By 1960, when the first birth control pill was introduced, we were embarking on a sexual revolution, thanks in part to Alfred Kinsey and High Hefner.

Betty Friedan

In 1963, Betty Friedan published her groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique. Challenging the widely shared belief in the 1950s that "fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949 — the housewife-mother," it sparked the rise of "second-wave" feminism in the U.S (see the Wikipedia article here).

By the late 1960s, Friedan's second-wave feminism was rocketing skyward among my female age peers. There was a supposed "bra burning" in 1969 that protested the Miss America contest in Atlantic City, Apparently, no bras were actually burned, but the event nonetheless ushered in an era in which feminists would conscientiously refuse to wear bras.

In 1973, Playgirl magazine appeared:

First Playgirl issue, June 1973

It, too, had a centerfold. The first one was Lyle Waggoner, of the "Carol Burnett Show" on TV:

Lyle Waggoner as the first
Playgirl centerfold

So it was a time when sexual liberation and feminism were intertwined. That's not so true now ... but I think the late Hugh Hefner is owed a vote of thanks, anyway!

Our "Cultural President"

Abbie Hoffman

David Brooks of the New York Times calls Donald Trump our "cultural president" in a recent column, "The Abbie Hoffman of the Right: Donald Trump."

Abbie Hoffman was (alongside Jerry Rubin) Provocateur-in-Chief of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s. As a student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, I participated as an antiwar protester and also as a reporter for our college radio station, WGTB-FM, in the October 21, 1967, "March on the Pentagon."

The 1967 "March on the Pentagon"

This march was a huge gathering of about 70,000 at the Lincoln Memorial to hear protest songs by Phil Ochs ("I Declare the War Is Over") and antiwar speeches by David Dellinger and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Then Hoffman led 50,000 of us on a hike to the Pentagon, where a second rally took place, hippies tried to "levitate" the Pentagon building, and about 650 protestors were arrested for civil disobedience.

It was, yes, a time of cultural upheaval. Now we are experiencing another such upheaval. Brooks writes that "in 2016, members of the outraged working class elected their own Abbie Hoffman as president" — in the person of Donald Trump. Today, the President of the United States is our new Provocateur-in-Chief.

What happened? Brooks says:

After World War II the Protestant establishment dominated the high ground of American culture and politics. That establishment eventually failed. It tolerated segregation and sexism, led the nation into war in Vietnam and became stultifying.

Then came the ascendancy of Hoffman, Rubin, et al. among much of the youth of America. But we Baby Boomers quickly shed our trappings of hippiedom and became the new leaders of our culture:

The late 1960s were a time of intense cultural conflict, which left a lot of wreckage in its wake. But eventually a new establishment came into being, which we will call the meritocratic establishment.

That was us as we entered our late 20s and early 30s: college-educated meritocrats who were setting out to run things our way. We were the ones who:

... cut [our] moral teeth on the civil rights and feminist movements. [We] embraced economic, social and moral individualism. [We] came to dominate the institutions of American society on both left and right.

And, Brooks notes, Hillary Rodham Clinton was one of us.

Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1969

Hillary Clinton's whole life has been oriented toward success. Her family came from the middle echelons of American society. She moved up and away from that starting point, until she came within an eyelash of being elected our first woman president.

As a good meritocrat, she set aside whatever inclinations she'd had as a younger woman to be a cultural provocateur. She learned how to turn her intelligence and drive into national leadership — until, that is, a large segment of the electorate decided to rebel against her sort of leadership.

For me personally, this new cultural transition is hard to accept. Brooks says,"Trump is shredding the culture and ending the dominance of the meritocratic establishment." Well, I was never much of a meritocratic climber myself, but a great many of my friends and associates were. I'm not at all ready to tear down what my generation — however flawed — has built.

Yet there is nothing so constant as change. We all have to adapt. The kids who are just entering adulthood today are especially on the spot. Brooks:

Because of [Trump], a new culture will have to be built, new values promulgated and a new social fabric will have to be woven, one that brings the different planets back into relation with one another. 

That’s the work of the next 20 years.

Good luck to you, all ye children (and, soon, grandchildren) of the meritocrats!

Taking Knees and Linking Arms

I write this as a fan of the Washington Redskins. Before last weekend's Sunday Night Football contest between the Redskins and the Oakland Raiders, Redskins' owner Dan Snyder linked arms with some of his African American players on the sideline during the singing of the National Anthem:

Dan Snyder links arms with players.

It was a protest against the way President Trump had, a couple of days before, called for NFL owners to fire players who take a knee during the pregame anthem ... the way San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and a few other players had begun doing in 2016 as a protest against police shootings of unarmed black men.

Colin Kaepernick takes a knee.

At other NFL games last weekend, there were similar arm-linkings, knee-takings, and even refusals to leave locker rooms for the anthem. This activity was meant primarily to upbraid Trump. But it was also meant to show solidarity against racial injustice.

In the wake of last weekend's protests, the Washington Post published two op-ed columns, one supportive of the protests and the other against.

The supportive one was by columnist Eugene Robinson, who is black, and was called "If Trump’s not a white supremacist, he does a good impression." The anti-protest column was by columnist Marc A. Thiessen, who is white, and was called "Disrespecting the flag is a disgraceful way to protest Trump."

Robinson's remarks centered on the notion that "We ... have a president who, if he’s not a white supremacist, does a convincing impression of one." He added, "Trump claimed in a Monday tweet that 'the issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race,' but that is a lie. Kaepernick’s method of protest had everything to do with race, as its intent was to focus attention on racial injustice."

Thiessen felt that showing due respect for the American flag is the dominant issue here: "What these players don’t seem to understand is that Americans gave their lives so that they could have the freedom to play a kids’ game for a living. When players disrespect the flag, they disrespect that sacrifice."

I agree with Robinson and disagree with Thiessen. Given that the underlying issue in the protests against Trump's rhetoric is one of racial justice, I'd say it outranks questions of the proper protocol for respecting the U.S. flag. We can't separate the racial justice issues of today from America's "original sin" of slavery. A lot of Old Glory-defending soldiers died in our Civil War, a struggle that was fought to restore the Union and emancipate Southern slaves. Here is one of the flags which the Union forces fought under:

Civil War flag

The Grand Old Flag represents a Constitution that insists on the equal treatment of all citizens, and on the right of all to exercise freedom of speech. And the anthem celebrates "the land of the free and the home of the brave." I'd say that considerations like these settle the question of whether recent pregame protests on NFL sidelines were indeed proper and just.

The Roots of Trump-Style Politics

David Brooks

My favorite op-ed columnist David Brooks writes in "The Coming War on Business" that everything Donald Trump stands for was presaged some decades back by an essayist/cultural critic named Sam Francis. Brooks knew Francis when the two of them worked at the Washington Times in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Francis opined that:

• Globalization was screwing Middle America.
• The Republican and conservative establishment did not understand what was happening.
• Politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts — religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite — were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.

Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan shared these views when he ran unsuccessfully for president in the 1996 Republican primaries. But this version of populism and nationalism wasn't yet ready for prime time. By 2016, it was ready. Donald Trump now sits in the White House as our president.

Brooks quotes Francis:

Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts — economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing; culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.

Globalization, in this view, is what was killing American farms and blue-collar manufacturing jobs. That's why the remedy needed to be nationalism. Francis: "A nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes the better."

So, what does our future look like now? Brooks posits two alternatives, the first bad and the second good:

1. That "Trump may not be the culmination, but merely a way station toward an even purer populism." That is, Trump's nominal pro-business stance will fall away, and "the next populism will ... take his ethnic nationalism and add an anti-corporate, anti-tech layer. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple stand for everything Francis hated — economically, culturally, demographically and nationalistically."
2. Or, that a "cancer [will] destroy Trumpism" — the particular cancer called racism. Francis was a racist who wrote, "The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."

I vote for option #2. If this country is to be saved from the Trumpian politics of nationalism and an outlook based on the principle of us-versus-them aggression, it seems to me it can only be because our willingness to set aside the original sin of America — slavery, with its aftermath of ongoing racial disharmony — ironically provides the ultimate salvific impetus.

This is why the removal of Confederate memorials and statues is such a marvelous sign ...

The Triumph of Tribalism?

Michael Gerson

Op-ed contributor Michael Gerson's column in today's Washington Post is a must-read. The headline says "Tribalism triumphs in America." The thrust is that in our country today, politically and culturally, we are ever at daggers drawn. We divide into two tribes (or "phyles"), "reds" and "blues," and each phyle makes perpetual war on the other.

Andrew Sullivan

Gerson's comments extend those of essayist Andrew Sullivan in a recent New York magazine. In "America Wasn’t Built for Humans," Sullivan asks how our democracy can survive the tribalism that has infected us during the last couple of decades. (Actually, I think tribalism of the sort Sullivan describes has been our bête noire since at least the late 1960s, when the country was nearly torn apart by race riots and by civil unrest incited by anti-Vietnam War protesters.)

Never have I read such insightful commentary. I agree with just about everything Gerson and Sullivan say.

My own focus on such matters is not quite as broad, presently, as that of these two gentlemen — who, frankly, are capable of greater intellectual breadth and depth than am I these days. I'm more about race than I am about all the other matters that the "reds" and the "blues" are at daggers drawn about. I don't think we can patch up our differences about all these other matters if we can't get back to patching up our differences about race in America.

The Tides of Racial Reconciliation

Charles M. Blow

New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow recently wrote: "Sometimes you simply have to call a thing a thing, and the thing here is that Trump’s inner racist is being revealed, and America’s not-so-silent racists are rising in applause."

Heather Heyer

He was referring, first and foremost, to "Trump’s growing intolerance and his growing adoption and internalizing of white nationalist ideology," as revealed by his reactions to the recent tragedy at Charlottesville in which a counter-protester named Heather Heyer was killed by a vehicle driven by one of the white supremacists protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.

I've been trying to figure out how best to respond, myself, to Charlottesville.

On the one hand, Blow is right to rue the president's constantly appealing to Americans' worst hatreds, whether racial or ethnic or otherwise. He is right to worry that all the hatred, whether it is of African Americans or Latinos or Muslims or any other group defined by skin color or religion or sexuality or gender, is pulling us in the wrong direction entirely.

Yet it seems clear to me that the tides of history are moving in the direction of reconciliation, not hatred. The most important of these tides is the one that is moving us toward a healing of the scars of African slavery in America.

We have, after all, just lived during the time of the first African American presidency, that of Barack Obama. Fifty years ago, no one would have thought that possible.

Catherine Pugh

I live in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, a city whose mayor, Catherine Pugh, is African American. Citing questions of her city's safety and security, she wisely orchestrated the removal of the city's Confederate monuments in the wake of Charlottesville. For Baltimore to have an African American mayor — the third black mayor in a row since 2007, and the fifth since 1987 — is something that would have seemed possible in 1967.

But the other side of that same coin is a negative one. Baltimore can have had a succession of black mayors in large part because of the white flight to the suburbs that took place during the 1950s and 1960s.

So the overall direction of the tide during the 70 years of my life has indeed been a positive one, in the direction of racial reconciliation. Yet I have to acknowledge that backlash has never ceased to rear its ugly head. The best metaphor I can come up with for that recurrent backlash is that of undertow. And as Charles M. Blow indicates in his column, undertow can be very, very dangerous.

Whither White Identity Politics? (Part 2)

David Brooks

In Part 1 of this series of posts I talked about how New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks recently took "white identity politics" to task for coming between today's Republicans and their party's erstwhile "universalist" principles which were conservative yet colorblind. Brooks himself comes out of that sort of conservative universalism, so he is understandably afraid for the future of his party.

I'm a liberal Democrat, so my fear is more for the future of our country. It boggles my mind how an America which had made such great strides in the fight for racial justice, during my 70-year-and-counting lifetime, has now had such a profound racial relapse — witness the recent martyrdom of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in a counter-protest against white supremacists who were themselves protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Jean Jaurès

In my own mind I frame this all in a context that will take me a while to explain. The context has to do with a project I am working on with my friend Bob. Bob plans to teach, with some help from me, an Osher Lifelong Learning Institute course on the life of a great Frenchman who was assassinated just over 100 years ago. Jean Jaurès (1859-1914) was a member of the National Assembly in France's Third Republic. He was a great orator, historian, philosopher, newspaper founder-editor, and anti-militarist. On the eve of World War I — specifically, on July 31, 1914 — a nationalist who feared Jaurés might be able to restrain France from entering a looming war with Germany shot him dead in a Paris café.

Jaurès was a leader among France's (and Europe's) socialists of his day. Though born into a bourgeois family in decline, and thus not of the proletariat or working class, Jaurés became the champion of the workers who toiled for too little pay in coal mines and factories. He insistently supported their right to unionize and strike for better wages and working conditions. His anti-militarism was born in part of his realization that many, many of France's proletarian class would die in a nationalist war with Germany.

Now, fast forward to the America of today. The No. 1 nonfiction/general bestseller is currently Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance. The people Vance describes, and himself comes from, are families who earlier moved from Appalachia's coal country to places like Middletown, Ohio, to get jobs. In both places they were/are working-class, i.e., of the proletariat. Today, many of these people are out of work, but they once had decent-paying jobs in places like automobile factories.

Their current situation, though, is dire. Vance describes their situation as mainly one of cultural disintegration. It's a lot worse than just not having jobs any more. There are numerous symptoms of social dysfunction: family dissolution, alcoholism, drug dependency, etc. Wikipedia says Vance "feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role" in their misfortunes than the social rot does.

Maybe so. But a lot might improve for these erstwhile Appalachian members of America's "proletariat" if they had a champion from the political left, à la Jean Jaurès, who could fight for better economic conditions on their behalf.

In America today, many of our working-class citizens who saw Donald Trump as their champion became the decisive factor in giving him enough Rust Belt electoral votes to put him in the White House in the 2016 election. This shouldn't have happened. But there was no Jaurès to act as a working-class champion from the political left.

Hillary Clinton did not do and say the things that might have made her their champion. Bernie Sanders came closer than Clinton in his rhetoric and policy proposals, but Bernie did not capture the imaginations of the white working class. Other Democrats, such as Elizabeth Warren, are offering policies that would benefit this group of left-behind people, but her image does not resonate with them the way that Jaurès' image resonated with the workers of France. So it was left to Trump, a supreme charlatan, to do all the resonating.

Why don't the subjects of "Hillbilly Elegy" find a true champion on the left? I think a fundamental reason is that in the minds of many Rust Belt voters, white identity politics outweigh the economic policies offered by Clinton, Sanders, Warren, et al. — policy proposals that might boost these Americans' chances of gaining better jobs and richer lives.

In short, in America today race "trumps" class as a decider of elections. Even the great Jean Jaurès might not have been able to overcome that ugly truth, were he to be living in America today.

Whither White Identity Politics? (Part 1)

David Brooks

"A greater percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats," writes New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks in a recent piece. Surprised? I am. I was in my late teens in 1964, and I should have known that.

Brooks opines that the G.O.P. of today would never have supported the 1964 act that, per Wikipedia, "outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations."

What's changed? The G.O.P., writes Brooks, has "become more of a white party in recent years ... the Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics."

Brooks says:

Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative universalists and maybe 40 percent are what you might call conservative white identitarians. White universalists believe in conservative principles and think they apply to all people and their white identity is not particularly salient to them. White identitarians are conservative, but their white identity is quite important to them, sometimes even more important than their conservatism.

It's a huge step in the wrong direction, not just for Republicans but for the country as a whole. Brooks:

... white identity politics as it plays out in the political arena is completely noxious. Donald Trump is the maestro here. He established his political identity through birtherism, he won the Republican nomination on the Muslim ban, he campaigned on the Mexican wall, he governed by being neutral on Charlottesville and pardoning the racialist Joe Arpaio.

"Things," moreover, "will get uglier." And it all may lead to the dissolution of the party of Lincoln. "When you have an intraparty fight about foreign or domestic issues, you think your rivals are wrong. When you have an intraparty fight on race, you think your rivals are disgusting. That’s what’s happening. ... It may someday be possible to reduce the influence of white identity politics, but probably not while Trump is in office. As long as he is in power the G.O.P. is a house viciously divided against itself, and cannot stand."

Next: "Whither White Identity Politics? (Part 2)" ...

David Brooks on what being a "moderate" entails

David Brooks

As I've said before, New York Times columnist is my favorite opinion writer. His recent column "What Moderates Believe" tells why.

By the standards Mr. Brooks lays out in his column, I am most definitely a "moderate." I, like Mr. Brooks, "do not see politics as warfare." I agree that "there is no one and correct answer to the big political questions." I also agree that, "at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish."

Quite syncretistically, or so I think, I often can "hold two or more opposing ideas together in [my] mind at the same time." I prefer "steady incremental reform to sudden revolutionary change." I don't believe in suppressing speakers of the hard truth in the name of maintaining ideological purity. I never "prioritize one identity, one narrative and one comforting distortion." I recognize the limits of (hyper-)partisan debate. And I hope I'm humble enough to admit that "the more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding."

So I think this column, like so many written by Mr. Brooks, ought to be taken to heart by the American body politic.

And yet ... I'd like to ask Mr. Brooks to add something like the following:

There are, however, certain absolutes that ought to constrain political discourse. We cannot, for instance, relativize the truth of the equality of all of humankind's races in seeking political amity, and the same is true today of gender equality and sexual equality. Such principles have become enshrined in the American value system over the course of time. Some of these absolutes, such as gay rights and transgender rights, have entered the pantheon of American certainties only quite recently, but this does not mean that any of them ought to be be negotiated away in a search for "steady incremental reform." Remember: President Obama echoed Martin Luther King in saying,“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Once it has achieved the fruits of so bending, I believe we must never bend it back simply to be able to say we are seeking a spirit of political "moderation."

What say you to that, Mr. Brooks?

On Moral Puberty

New York Times
columnist David Brooks

David Brooks of the New York Times is my favorite columnist, in part because he so frequently analyzes current affairs in terms of what is or is not moral. I don't know of any other pundits who are less afraid to use the words "moral" and "morality" in their writing.

In Brooks' recent "Can People Change After Middle Age?" column, he invokes the term "moral puberty." For several days now, I have found myself thinking about what he meant by that.

The column is about two southern men, now in their 60s, both of whom found themselves undergoing a sort of midlife moral conversion. They had been brought up in an atmosphere of racial bigotry, and they'd inherited their white culture's disparagement of African Americans. That changed dramatically after both men felt called to something higher than self-advancement and ethnic hatred, as they duly "transformed their lives for the final lap."

Brooks was struck by how both men have "gone through a sort of moral puberty, as if a switch turned. They’ve lost most of their interest in egoistic calculation and some sort of primal desire for generativity has kicked in."

I feel that I myself — now nearing my 70th birthday — went through a period of "moral puberty" during the troubled time of my "midlife crisis." Prior to age 38 — the time when my mother died, that is — I almost never thought in terms of what's moral and what's not. I was not at all religious in those days, either, but within a few years I found myself "getting churched" for the first time.

Even so, I resisted the call to moral stricture that my particular church imposed. I wanted what was not really on offer, a sort of "Catholic lite" — à la what Robin Williams said once said about the Episcopal Church vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic: "all the sacraments but half the guilt."

Somehow, though, it was not long until my religious path took me from high-church Episcopalianism to becoming an actual member of the Roman Catholic faith. I was by that time living a pretty decent approximation of a "moral life." Yet I still found myself resisting many of problematic tenets of Catholic moral teaching.

I still do, as a matter of fact. But never mind. My point here is that I know it's indeed possible to undergo some sort of life-changing "moral puberty" in midlife.

* * * * *

That this is indeed possible is a reflection of how we as a society live today. In the distant past, humans could be expected to become "moral adults" at the time of actual puberty. Adolescence, if it existed at all, was brief. Before you were out of your teens, you probably would be married and with children of your own. You would be, by that point, fully embarked upon your grown-up life. If you were not a "moral adult" by that time, you never would be.

Over some number of decades, or even centuries, that pattern has evaporated. The number of years between the onset of sexual maturity and the arrival of a truly grown-up life has grown and grown.

When I was in my teens, in the 1960s, it was becoming true that larger swaths of young people were going to college. That was not as true of the pre-Baby Boomer generations. But since the time we first Boomers began to come of age, the percentage of youths going to college has grown steadily larger:

Plus, many of those college attendees go on to graduate school. Then will come several years of getting established in a career, perhaps having to sleep all the while in mom and dad's basement.

We see in the behavior and lifestyle of many of those "post-adolescents" — or "adultescents" — a stance that lies somewhere between being childishly ignorant of moral questions and having become a full-fledged moral adult. If and when "moral puberty" does strike, it's going to make a tremendous difference.

Meanwhile, today's "kids" — some of whom will be going gray by the time their adultescence ends — are unlike kids from an earlier age. All this was just starting to be so when I myself was a kid. My generation, after all, was the first rock 'n' roll generation.

So I think David Brooks has, as is usual with him, put his finger squarely on the pulse of our present-day sociology and has delineated the historically unprecedented way we go about living our lives today. We now spend a huge chunk of our life spans in adolescence or post-adolescence, morally speaking. And we increasingly find little room in our young lives for organized religion, judging by the percentage of youth who define themselves as "nones" on sociological surveys:

When and if "moral puberty" arrives in midlife, we may find ourselves — as did I — in need of a church. But even if that specific change doesn't happen, we will nonetheless tend to find that our interior life has changed dramatically. Our very conception of who we are and how we are best to live our lives is going to be altered. Only then will we finally be "all grown up."

Democrats Want "A Better Deal"

Washington Post writer Paul Kane (@pkcapitol) recently discussed how Democratic leaders are tweaking their electoral strategy with their “A Better Deal” agenda. "A Better Deal" is, I hope, an important development that can be a route back to liberal Democratic power at both the national and state levels.

Yet it seems not to have gained much traction in its first couple of weeks after being introduced. For example, there is, as of August 4, 2017, no Wikipedia entry on it.

The Atlantic's Michelle Cottle calls "A Better Deal" a "kinder, gentler populism" but says Democrats are struggling to sell it.

"A Better Deal" is a platform-in-progress. It has a number of planks, with new planks being added as time goes on. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced the plan in the New York Times on July 24. Among the planks he cited:

1. Policies that will increase people's paychecks. Examples: "creating jobs with a $1 trillion infrastructure plan; increasing workers’ incomes by lifting the minimum wage to $15."
2. Policies to reduce people's everyday expenses. Example: "rules to stop prescription drug price gouging."
3. Providing workers the tools they need to compete in today's economy. Example: "giving employers, particularly small businesses, a large tax credit to train workers for unfilled jobs."

More recently, says Kane, Schumer proposed another plank: "taxes and penalties on corporations that ship jobs overseas." Such policies are obviously designed to, writes Kane, "build an economic identity so that [Democratic] candidates can run next year on something more than just opposition to President Trump."

However, Kane adds, "The pressure point ... is crafting an agenda that balances the needs of energizing anti-Trump liberal activists without driving away centrist voters and Republicans disillusioned with the president and the lack of results coming from the GOP-led Congress."

So true. If the Democrats can't pull independents and centrist Republicans into their column, they can't "take back the night" in 2018 and 2020. Yet the populist planks of "A Better Deal" could alienate a whole slew of supporters on the Democratic left who might see their agendas as falling by the wayside.

A huge question will be how what Cottle calls "the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing" of the party receives the "A Better Deal" plan. She writes, "As for the guts of the plan, many of its proposals carry the imprint of [that] wing: get tough on monopolies, boost the minimum wage to $15; invest $1 trillion in infrastructure; cut the cost of medications, college, and child care."

But I think it's inaccurate to conflate Senator Warren (D-Mass.) with Senator Sanders, and Kane shows why. He says some liberals wanted the drafters of "A Better Deal" to "advocate more generous policies such as the free college proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)." Yet, he says, "That proposal, along with Sanders’s push for a national health-care system for all, were left out of the early agenda items."

Sen. Warren walks through the crowd after unveiling the Democratic party's "A Better Deal" for working Americans with members of the party leadership in Berryville, Virginia, July 24, 2017

As I wrote here, "In order to get faster economic growth, we need to do what Senator ... Warren is calling for: breaking up the market 'behemoths' that are prospering greatly at the expense of ordinary Americans of all races, ethnicities, genders, etc." "A Better Deal" seems poised to undertake just that kind of populist agenda.

Sen. Bernie Sanders

Senator Sanders, on the other hand, was conspicuously absent when the Democrats unveiled "A Better Deal," according to this New York Times story, even though "the imprint of his presidential campaign was unmistakably present."

I voted for Sen. Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary in Maryland, and I like much of what he stands for. Yet today I feel that Sen. Warren may have an even better feel than Sanders for what needs to happen to get America moving again.