Friday, June 24, 2016

UPDATED: Does Brexit Shock and Awe Forecast POTUS Election - and UFT Internals too

Will we be shocked to wake up in November to a President Trump?

Trump is in Scotland on the very day of the major shock over Britain's exit. I can see the same kind of surprise in November since many of the same issues in Britain and all over Europe are operating here. One of the themes is that the wealthy/elite/liberals/neoliberals were opposed to Brexit while the working class was for it.

In the primaries, Bernie and Trump seemed to capture some of those same political winds albeit from different directions. Hillary and the Bushes in many ways were more aligned than may seem obvious.

I think this will be going on all over Europe as the right rises. And it will go on here too to some extent -- but the left may be rising too -- so maybe we will end up in another civil war.

Now let me leap to some internal debates that have been taking place and will be taking place in MORE -- a sense of people at elite schools don't feel the same kind of pressure that most of the rest of the UFT members face. I feel a similar yin-yang going on but then again I may be looking too deep.

Anyway - Michael Fiorillo sent this along which touches on some of these issues with this comment:
Worth reading, if only because it takes a far more honest view of class conflict than mainstream, Clintonian "liberalism" does

Why Clinton Lost So Many Democrats

Almost half of her party—and more than two-thirds of its youth—want a different kind of liberalism.


The decisive factor in Hillary Clinton’s victory over Bernie Sanders was her rock-solid support from upscale liberals voting primarily on culture-war issues. White Democrats, in other words, largely voted along class lines.
This was most starkly illustrated when the New York Times published a map of how every precinct in the five boroughs voted in April, with Hillary completely sweeping Brownstone Brooklyn and all of Manhattan save a few lonely precincts on the Lower East Side. It was first seen as early as March 1 in Massachusetts, when Cambridge and its bedroom satellite Lexington put Clinton over the top by a fraction of a percent. And it ensured her consolidating victories throughout the Northeast and finally in California.
The urgent wake-up call that these facts should present to the Democratic leadership is this: While Hillary won the upscale white liberals and minorities who “look like the Democratic Party”—indeed, she lost among registered Democrats only in Vermont and New Hampshire—she still won only 54 percent of the primary vote, and she lost young voters by nearly three-to-one.
The turbulence of this election is best understood as the end of the era that began with the election of 1968, defined by the numerous domestic consequences of the Vietnam War. Published the following year, The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin Phillips remains the indispensable chronicle of the historical forces that led up to that election, as well as the most breathtakingly accurate forecast of its long-term aftermath. Phillips bluntly described the diminished Democratic Party that would face the Nixon/Reagan supermajority as “the party of the Establishmentarian Northeast and Negro South.” The generation of progressives shaped by this tumult reached its apotheosis in Hillary Clinton’s present campaign.
The presidential contender who set the tone of American liberalism for the epoch that began in 1968 was not a high-minded representative of Cold War liberalism’s better half such as Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern, but Bobby Kennedy, whose campaign represented an odd alliance of the Democratic establishment with such New Left ideologues as Tom Hayden. The politics of Vietnam have obscured the early history of the New Left, which was deeply invested in the idealism of the Great Society—an idealism that Kennedy most effectively channeled.
In his widely praised book The Agony of the American Left, Christopher Lasch diagnosed the fatally limited imagination of this species of leftism. In discussing the lionization of such early-20th-century anarchists as “Big Bill” Haywood and the IWW, Lasch explained that “Haywood’s militancy, his advocacy of violence and sabotage … and his view of radicalism as a movement based on marginal people, all correspond to the anti-intellectual proclivities of the contemporary student left.” Oddly enough, this proved a comfortable fit for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which was directed at such marginal populations as Appalachian coal miners and the black urban poor, as opposed to the more nationally unifying, and thus naturally more popular, programs of the New Deal.
Whatever one’s opinion of Bernie Sanders’s proposals for single-payer health care, tuition-free public college, and a massive reinvestment in infrastructure, they have reemphasized why the New Deal was popular and the Great Society was not. This is a fundamental break from the pattern of missionary progressivism by what in the 1970s was called “the new class” of affluent professionals, typified by the Great Society and over the following decades increasingly conflated with culture-war priorities.
This is the source of the biggest misunderstanding of the Sanders phenomenon by the generation of liberals formed by 1968 and its aftermath. Even older Sanders supporters, hailing from that milieu themselves, have typically assumed that the campaign is merely the latest in a predictable cycle of generational struggle between youthful “egalitarians” and wizened “politicians” (to borrow from the title of the suspiciously timed new book by Sean Wilentz, who is perfectly representative of this conceit as both an ardent Clintonite and nostalgic son of postwar Greenwich Village).
But Phillips provides a clearer insight into what presently roils American liberalism. Perhaps nothing is more striking to the retrospective reader of The Emerging Republican Majority than how completely marginal, if not irrelevant, was the drama of the New Left to the causes of the realignment that led to the Nixon/Reagan supermajority. Phillips recognized what was lost on the political and media elite of the 1960s and ’70s—that the emergence of this supermajority, not the campaigns of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, was the real story of 1968.
Much of the political story of the past few years should be understood as the unfolding consequences of a highly analogous situation among the millennial generation. The privileged student radicals of 1968 became the vanguard of the new class, which, despite its electoral marginality, defined American liberalism for the next five decades. Their children, inheriting their values, advanced their cause both in the prestige media and as the loudest, most aggressive voices on elite campuses. Today, that prosperous elite is ever-more isolated from the social and economic devastation that has gripped most of the country.
The overwhelming preference of millennials for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton—and the not-insignificant showing of millennial support for Donald Trump—has thus been a revolt by that generation’s masses against their appointed representatives in prestige media, who were largely responsible for creating the illusions about the mood of the country that have set the tone and underlying assumptions for the Clinton campaign.
This self-satisfied culture-war extremism might have been tolerated by most millennials had it not become the hallmark of open class contempt. But it is no accident that leading corporate liberal publications, from The Atlantic to Slate to New York, traffic in the most unrestrained identity politics, belligerence, and transgender extremism while their mostly young writers have also been the most supportive of Clinton and critical of Sanders.
It may be extremely sobering that Hillary Clinton’s only challenger for the Democratic nomination was both a lifelong independent and a representative of the aging Jewish cohort that is perhaps the last surviving segment of voters with a serious attachment to the class-solidarity appeal of the New Deal Democrats. But it is at least as revealing that only such a man as Bernie Sanders could have rallied the economically hard-pressed youth of America behind a future they could believe in, just as it is now clear that only a human wrecking ball such as Donald Trump could have finally dislodged and buried the rotting corpse of the historic conservative movement.
Many longstanding assumptions about the future of American politics are likely to be exploded over the next several months. Polls have been showing Clinton and Trump running about evenly among millennials, and Nate Cohn of the New York Times has laid out data undermining the assumption of a declining white electorate. Meanwhile, a millennial supermajority that rejects its politically correct mouthpieces, not unlike the boomer supermajority that rejected the New Left, is coming into view.
To be sure, that majority is firmly committed to social and economic policies that are far closer to those of Bernie Sanders than to those of Ronald Reagan. But it is precisely because the liberal culture-war catechism is so totally losing resonance with them—not to mention the slaying of the Reagan policy paradigm by Trump—that the liberal pundit class is invoking that catechism with increasing hysteria. This election will do much to determine how the millennial majority ultimately takes shape.
If Trump wins, the combination of his likely one-term disaster and the shock of a Clinton loss will likely open the way for a lasting generational transformation of the Democratic Party. Unless Trump loses in a landslide, which looks increasingly unlikely, there is no going back to the old order for the Republicans, in which case they could still thwart the emerging Democratic majority of the past decade. Yet the success of the Sanders campaign has made clear that if, as some have suggested, the coming realignment is between the Bloomberg party and the Trump party, the former cannot long survive.
The legacy of the Bernie Sanders campaign will have been to reveal that for the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, the twin legacies of the 1960s—in both the party establishment and its ideological base—are at long last at death’s door.
Jack Ross is the author of The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History and the forthcoming The Strange Death of American Exceptionalism, on the history of the present political moment inspired by the scholarship of Kevin Phillips.
Here is another point of view from Daily Kos. I don't quite agree since there is a lot more devastation in this ecomony than it admits too and the effects of globalization are a reason in part.

By Laurence Lewis   
You’re going to be reading a lot of stories about the Brexit vote being a warning that Donald Trump can win. Those stories will be wrong.
Brexit apparently has won, and the primary reason is the economic turmoil wrought by the greed and at times open cruelty of British austerity, as imposed by David Cameron and George Osborne. Labour didn’t run against austerity in the last British election, and was punished for it. The British people were punished with more austerity. A brutal economy always feeds extremism, and that is how Britain got Brexit. The irony was that Cameron and Osborne had to fight desperately against the consequences of their own policies. And if you think I’m ignoring Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, that’s because he was almost invisible during the Remain campaign, and his support was tepid if not feigned. Britain has austerity and no credible national leaders. Hence Brexit.
While much of Europe was electing right wing governments that imposed austerity, the United States was electing Barack Obama. The Obama stimulus was a starkly different approach from European austerity. A larger stimulus would have done more to fuel a robust recovery, but the stimulus that was enacted stopped the economic free fall, and got the United States back on the right track. More needs to be done, and will be done, but the difference with Europe and particularly Britain is obvious. The extremism fueling the Trump campaign is neither as broad or deep as the extremism fueling Brexit. Because President Obama and Congressional Democrats ensured that the United States did not end up with the sort of brutal economic program the Republicans would have imposed, and that Cameron and Osborne in Britain did impose.
Simply put, the extremism fueling Brexit does not have the same resonance in the United States. Because our economy is not suffering the way Britain’s economy is suffering. And the economic agenda of Hillary Clinton is very deliberately designed to build on the success of the Obama economic agenda. The United States has alternatives that Britain did not have. And the United States will not follow Britain’s path into extremism because it hasn’t been on a parallel economic path.

31 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not to veer away from our education comment section but related with regards to the supreme court decision to block shady Obamas amnesty for illegal immigrants there is one really, really interesting point to note. The supreme court ruled 4-4 deadlock similar to the deadlock when the court ruled 4-4 in the case of paying union dues. The interesting thing in the illegal immigrants ruling is that amazing enough, 4 justices voted for illegal immigrants to be able to break the law and stay backing the executive order from obama. How is it that the supreme court was tied 4-4?? It clearly should have been 8-0!!!! THe law in this case put forth to the supreme court is as clear as a bell!!! Yet, 4 justices voted to "break" the law and keep these illegals here. Just another example of how corrupt of a society we actually are living in where even the supreme court is making decisions based on politics. So sad and really scary for us educators as the validity of law basically means nothing these days.

Anonymous said...

Just look at the above comment. Trump will be president and many teachers will vote for him, thanks to Obama.

ed notes online said...

Listen. I don't like Obama over the ed stuff. And other things too. But the anti-Obama stuff is so much about race and racism. Same with de Blasio. People hate him because they think he caters to the non-whites. And his wife is black. Race matters so much. Are there racist teachers? Hell yes. I met them all the time in my own school. When I was considered too radical in supporting the local community I was pulled aside by people who told me I was too far out in support of "them." I heard stuff said in teacher rooms that would make your hair curl. Let them vote for Trump and see how things turn out. What alternative do you want? If it was a left movement people go crazy. I'm proud to be a left leaning social democrat who wants better for all. Maybe a Trump apocalypse will wake people up.

Anonymous said...

I agree with you and feel the same. I voted for Obama and he f--ked us. I don't think people are as racist as you may think. Lots of young white voters got Obama in, but any is too much. The alternative is to vote for Hillary. There's no way a thinking person can vote for Trump.

ed notes online said...

Let me offer a longer term big picture. If Hillary wins I believe she may very well lose in 2020 and we end up with a slicker Trump. Any movement from the left - ala Bernie will be met by the same recalcitrance by the Dems. Obama ed policy will continue and the unions with the current leadership will be decimated. 2020 is important also on the state level as the state legislatures do the gerrymandering. So we may have a Pyrrhic victory. In 2020 we will be told we have to support Hillary to keep Republicans from winning. Lesser of 2 evils time and again. Now if Trump won the potential of disaster is great but it also opens up 2020 for a big move from the Bernie types as the Dem Party is roiled over the next few years. Just some thoughts. A big short term risk but with a possibly better long view. I'm voting 3rd party in this state to make a point.

Anonymous said...

As a member of The Establishment Govt., Brexit definitely hurts HRC, since she was a strong proponent of Remain. If it hurts HRC, it helps Trumps chances, to be simple about it. Hillary may be a casualty of History...the waves of populism sweeping The West, trumpeted by Trump.

Mr. X said...

Forget about that fact that he is a racist, egotistical, con artist How can we have a President who uses the word "bigly", cannot pronounce the "L" sound properly [ask a speech teacher to listen if you cannot pick that up}, has hair that resembles a bird's nest and continually uses the words "loser and disgusting", when ever he makes a speech!! What a ball SNL will have if Trump becomes President

ed notes online said...

Since I've barely laughed at SNL since John Belushi it might be worth having Trump win for that reason alone.

Anonymous said...

If Trump wins, it will be the anti politics-as-usual wave that carries him to the White House. I rode the wave with Bernie and will now ride the wave with Trump. I truly see it as the only way to wake up the Democratic Party. I understand that people may disagree with those who think like I do but what I can't understand is how you can't understand why people like me are voting for Trump. Claims that we aren't "thinking people" or mocking his hair and his speech impediment don't matter to Trump supporters. Some buy his rhetoric. Others, like myself, are willing to accept whatever comes our way with him because we are tired of being told by dems that they are on the side of working and middle class people while their actions contradict their words. Obama was bad for teachers. Clinton will be bad for teachers. Cuomo is bad for teachers. Dems have not been good for unionized workers at all. So there really is no difference between them and the republicans other than the republicans tell us up front that they hate us. As I said....I get it if you disagree. If you think Clinton will be a better president than Trump, you have your reasons and that's your right. But to claim you don't understand why Trump has more than neandertals and racists supporting him means you just don't want to understand. Plenty of teachers and other unionized workers I know are voting for Trump--and they are not racist idiots. They, like me, are tired of the democrats and their bullshit. And as a result, we are willing to back the other guy because we genuinely believe that a vote for Clinton is telling the democrats it's okay to screw us anytime you want because we will give you our vote regardless of what you do. I'm not willing to do that anymore. And I'm also no longer willing to give my vote to a third party that has zero chance of winning. The mere fact that Clinton was endorsed by Randi, who sells us out time and time again, is reason enough for me to vote for Trump. If every teacher committed to voting for the guy/gal Randi doesn't want us to vote for, her political clout would be gone. Agree or disagree but please stop saying you don't understand why. Roseanne McCosh

ed notes online said...

Here's where I disagree Roseanne - on the 3rd party issue. The Democratic Party will not change - they will keep putting up phony fronts. Only a growing 3rd party can really stop them - it happened very fast in Italy over the past few years. I don't know if Green is the answer but if the Bernie people get active there is a chance. Jill Stein is polling 7% right now - the difference between Hillary and Trump. So a vote for Green builds the cache and influence of a 3rd party - only that threat will force change om the Dems. And really, if Trump turns into the North Korean guy you may not want your vote for him on your conscience.

Anonymous said...

What 6:02 described above has already happened with a twist. Trump is a "slicker" Ross Perot. Remember how right Perot was ? "That giant sucking sound" you hear are all of the jobs that will leave the U.S. with acts like NAFTA. Well, he was completely correct ! Now that giant sucking sound is the entire country now, across the board. The U.S. is so broke and in debt, that automatic welfare packages for illegals is unaffordable. Many will vote for Trump, and he will win, because people know that he can't possibly fuck things up worse than the establishment politicians. Clinton is history, and should sit with Jeb Bush....over and out. Clinton is on the wrong side of history...Trump is your next President. Obama was a charlatan, and quite a racist himself. Racism goes both ways, with black racists as well. Obama is a very dangerous racist himself.

ed notes online said...

Really? Obama a racist? Why not give examples. If anything he bent over backwards to downplay race. You seem to think the white people have been screwed. That is a form of racism lacking any understanding of the black experience in this country where when I began teaching in 1967 black people down south had just had the right to ride in the front of the bus. Before accusing Obama of racism study some history.

Anonymous said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/3/ben-stein-obama-most-racist-president-in-american-/

Lets start with some or all of these points. From this writer...this could be the most racist President in history.

Anonymous said...

So Roseanne is voting Trump. Good to know. Isn't she a strong MORE supporter who got most of her school to join MORE? MORE includes Trump supporters. I can't stop laughing. How do you explain this to your NYCORE buddies?

Anonymous said...

Start with Steins comments...let me count the ways.

ed notes online said...

Really? Ben stein is a source? I'm sure Obama is more racist than Andrew Jackson and slave owners thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Make America great again. Let's reinstall the 3/5 rule to count black people. After all it was in the constitution.

ed notes online said...

Clearly you are a Unity slug. Did you read Roseanne's reasons? Or Arthur's reasons for voting 3rd party? Fact is many people in MORE won't vote for Hillary - and if she loses I can only imagine Unity blaming MORE for her defeat. People are sick of the Democratic party and your maximum leader's having her head up their donkey ass. My aim is to destroy the sellout Democratic Party and I bet many people in MORE agree. It is you who have lost so many of us by groveling at the feet of ed deformers.

ed notes online said...

I just went to read the Ben Stein piece - are u fuckn nuts:
“What the White House is trying to do is racialize all politics and they’re especially trying to tell the African-American voter that the GOP is against letting them have a chance at a good life in this economy, and that’s just a complete lie,” the conservative author said on Fox News’ “America’s News HQ,” Mediaite reported.
Mr. Stein rejected the notion that Republican budget cuts negatively impact minorities.

Really? You mean the Republican agenda is GOOD for people? Cutting budgets to the bone is good for people? Making the govt dyfunctional is good for people? Do Republicans pull the race card since Nixon? Did their paragon Barry Goldwater oppose the vioting rights act? Did you ever take a history course? I should ban you from even reading ed notes.

Anonymous said...

Why shouldn't MORE include Trump supporters if they feel comfortable enough to join a clearly leftist organization. I guess you want a loyalty oath like you have in Unity.

Anonymous said...

Sorry it drives Unity people nuts that non lefty liberals like me will support a lefty group like MORE and that they don't require a loyalty oath to join. Calm yourself the Unity way by just declaring this another VICTORY. "VICTORY, VICTORY, VICTORY!" See, don't you feel better already? Roseanne

ed notes online said...

Unity has used red baiting against the opposition for almost 50 years. Yes most people in more are left. Having people like Roseanne support more scared unity because it takes away one of their lines of attack. We had right leaning conservatives run with us. If more shifts too far left and ignores the fundamentals that attract Roseanne more will end up being what unity wants it to be.

Anonymous said...

MORE is exactly the opposition Unity wants and needs. A bunch of far left fundamentalists with a few union people thrown in because MORE is against Unity. Keep fighting for the end of racism while some of your people back Trump. Do you even get the irony Norm?

ed notes online said...

You must be right. Only 11000 votes and winning the high schools while the other opposition which focused on a narrow teacher rights agenda couldn't get enough people to fill a slate. Yes unity is loving that more can attract people like Roseanne despite its leftists. In the long run we keep fighting racism because it must be fought. I see more as a big enough tent where people who want to focus on social justice can do so and those who want to focus on things like contract can do that. Or do both. Our summer series is hard core but led by strong Sj people. Our book clubs are Sj. That kind of caucus is a threat to unity in the long run unless it goes off the rails. At the pep I met young teachers who knew all about more and support us. We were in the house fighting farina and unity wasn't.

Anonymous said...

Let's take a look at what MORE is against. MORE is against teacher evaluations being tied to test scores. Against high class size. Against the persecution of teachers in the opt out movement. Against the 2nd tier status of ATR union members. Against a bullshit contract and delay in retro. Against abusive administrators who torment members. And---OMG! Against racism...how dare they? Roseanne McCosh

ed notes online said...

Riseanne's rationale for voting trump is not agreement with him but to keep you slugs out of getting more power. Just whatever need is Randi with more power for 4or 8 years under Hillary. Roseannes thinking is to bite the bullet with trump for 4 years as a radical act. I disagree with her because a dictator with an army behind him can ignore all rules. Giving republicans control over every branch of govt is not a radical act. Paul Ryan is death to teachers. If Obama was bad u ain't seen nothing yet. They will evuscerate state budgets. Kansas here we come. No pensions for us. Even we retirees. So while in a safe state I can vote to build a 3rd party my feeling is to live with hillary for 4 years but start a movement to make sure 4 years are it from the left.

Anonymous said...

Roseanne you said you are voting for a racist. The fact that you support MORE is comical.

ed notes online said...

That non leftists like Roseanne supports more should keep you laughing for a long time.

Anonymous said...

So then you want the Trump supporters in MORE. How do your NYCORE buddies feel about that? I don't think the fundamentalist leftists are going to be happy with your position or Roseanne's. Maybe that will be a topic for the summer. MORE and Trump.

ed notes online said...

You may be right about fundamentalist leftists. A whole bunch of people are not fundamentalist leftists. I didn't notice more sending back the membership dues. And there is a difference between someone who supports trump because they agree with him and people who hate the democrats so badly for betraying teachers. I see it as spite votes and when push comes to shove I believe they will vote 3rd party. And if Hillary lose you guys won't distinguish between trump actual voters and Jill stein as you try to naderize everyone.

Anonymous said...

8:30PM must be naive about fundamental leftists who see Clinton as being as bad as Trump. Many of them weren't even happy about Bernie. And you vastly overestimate the NYCORE connection. Few NYCORE people are active in MORE since NYCORE work takes most of their time. More ICE people who are not fundamental leftists seem to be involved in MORE.

Anonymous said...

If knowing I support MORE gives you a chuckle then I guess you'll split your sides knowing I also send them a monthly donation. People like me support MORE because MORE supports working teachers---a foreign concept to you Unity shills. Roseanne