When considering Russia’s brutal oligarchy v. China’s fascist capitalism, it’s hard to decide which one is worse. Trump seems to have a bromance with Putin and has long attacked China, but lately he seems to be waffling on both (although the bromance might get him or his administration in trouble). The split personality of his waffling is baffling too because some in his administration are talking about more sanctions against Russia. Moreover, the original tirade against the one-China policy has become a recognition of it. If, after this waffling, will he still keep his campaign promises: Be a friend of Russia and an enemy of China? The former seems in doubt after firing Flynn.

The waffling is strange because up until now Trump seems to checking off items on a list of campaign promises, even if they’re completely crazy, harmful to the country, and insulting to millions of people. Immigration? California farmers, even those who voted for Trump, are wondering where they’ll find the cheap labor needed to harvest their crops. The Muslim ban seems stymied, and his only response so far is to blast the judicial system like any tin-horn dictator would do. And many ICE cases not related to his unconscionable and unconstitutional Muslim ban are still ripping apart families.

Trump is a family man who doesn’t seem to care about any family except his own. He’ll stoop to blasting Nordstrom for daughter Ivanka when she’s in the White House and supposedly not working in her business anymore. He’ll also support Kellyanne Conway who should be brought up on charges for hawking Ivanka’s products. One son-in-law is in the White House (nepotism), while the other wants to buy the Marlins. Maybe Trump will send his family out to harvest the crops for the California farmers. Might be good for them to see what real work entails!

But back to China v. Russia. Which one is more dangerous? I can’t choose—I find the leadership and power structure of both countries despicable. The Chinese have adopted the most polluting, ruthless, and oppressive form of capitalism imaginable. They’re no longer communists but extreme fascist capitalists, willing to silence or murder anyone who goes against China Inc. The Russians can’t make anything worthwhile, but that doesn’t bother the oligarchy. Putin, the mafia don, makes sure that only the anointed (AKA sycophants to the Russian mob boss) get rich and any opposition is killed, from people running against him in their fake democracy to members of the press.

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One parallel with 1930’s Germany that jumps out for any sane observer of today’s toxic political environment is censorship. This runs the gamut of a mob shouting down a speaker (they should have let the guy in Berkeley speak his mind so everyone could see what a bigot, hater, and idiot he is), to the statement from Stephen Bannon AKA Goebbels’s spawn that the media is the opposition. The latter, and Kellyanne Conway’s statement about “alternative facts” and blast that everyone in the media who criticizes Trump should be fired are only a step away from fascist censorship in this country.

Another example was Fox forcing the lumber company to edit their Super Bowl ad, something that company paid to produce. Why not run it instead of silencing debate? Let people express and discuss the merits of the ad. I suspect that Trump or his cronies pressured Fox to apply censorship. I’ve seen right-wing and insulting ads in the NY Times. They make money off them whether controversial or not, and Fox just made the real ad go viral on YouTube anyway. What did they accomplish?

The Fox example doesn’t even make sense. With respect to Trump’s Putin comment, which basically equated Russia to the U.S. for oppressive actions, Bill O’Reilly called Putin a murderer. Why didn’t Fox censor O’Reilly if Trump is such a friend of the despotic Putin? When censorship isn’t applied evenly, you have to question its application at least. Some censorship is justified, of course—the movie rankings X, R, PG-13, and so forth are a type of censorship, and it’s justified so that parents can make their own determination about whether their kids should see the movie. Excluding erotica and porn from public libraries might be justified too, but I’d hate to be on a panel that determines whether a book falls into one of those categories. I remember the case of some nut in Lexington, MA objecting to his children reading about modern families—maybe he’s moved out of the state by now to Texas.

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In a previous post I outlined some things progressives need to work on. How do we do that? Many Dems are still in denial about the 2017 presidential election—pointing the finger of blame at the wrong persons for the most part—but the losses two years after Mr. Obama became president, the Gingrich Revolution, have become insignificant compared to 2017. Hundreds of Dem legislative positions were lost to the GOP at all levels—national, state, and local. The presidency, two houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court are now controlled by the Republicans. Either true progressives have to take over the Democratic Party, or they’ll have to establish a viable third party. Either one will take time, motivation, and considerable energy. Now that the ABC’s of the new American Reich (“Adolph” Trump, Stephen Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway) have shown their true fascist proclivities in Il Duce’s first weeks in office, this progressive imperative has become all the more important.

Faux-liberals have to and will be denounced—their numbers are legion in national, state, and local governments (some current Dem members of Congress should be shaking in their boots). These are people who cozy up to the rich, make false promises to get elected, and become sycophants of the elites. We don’t need more politicians who are beholding to Wall Street and multinationals. We need politicians who truly care about ordinary people and work hard for them. Becoming part of the national oligarchy should never be the goal of the true progressive. All goals can be summarized in one statement: make things better for all citizens, not just the privileged few.

To follow that one mantra, progressives need to elect progressives—true progressives. More grassroots efforts like those that characterized the Sanders campaign are needed. These will be difficult because progressive voters are discouraged, and rightly so. They have had to do battle with conservatives, Trumpers, faux-liberals, and the rich elites. It’s hard to run the marathon corresponding to years and years of political activism, but that staying power is required now to turn things around. I challenge all true progressives to do what they can. Do-nothing attitudes and non-productive actions will only make things worse, especially if the latter are just non-productive whining and wringing hands about losing the 2017 election.

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I imagine many people are yearning for Bernie Sanders right now—yearn for the Bern! If you were a Clinton supporter, admit it: she failed you. If you were a Trump supporter, you might have considered Sanders because his message about trade agreements hurting America’s working classes was similar to Trump’s, although his alternative had its genesis in his genuine concern for people and not Il Duce’s faux-concern just to get votes (HRC’s was false too, but she would have made a better president than Il Duce, but Sanders would have made a great president).

Sanders warned HRC about those battleground states—he knew the anger and frustration their citizens had with the status quo, a political establishment that continually failed them—but HRC didn’t listen. Apparently Il Duce and his goose-stepping minions did. Past history now. The question now is: how do progressives stand up to President Trump and move forward with a progressive agenda?

First, progressives have to realize that they weren’t well represented by establishment liberals in the Dem party. Part of that realization has to be that being liberal can mean not being progressive. HRC and her supporters liked the status quo—that’s not being progressive! HRC was also a one-percenter; so were many of her backers like George Soros, who claims to support progressive causes but should even be considered a faux-liberal. Most of Clinton’s rich backers have nothing in common with people in the struggling middle class and poor—they’re completely out of touch with our reality. Like Soros, they have no idea what it means to be a salaried worker dependent on a job (or jobs) to continue their daily struggle that often leaves them in retrograde motion. The income gap between one-percenters and the rest of us increases day by day, month by month, and year by year. Sanders understands that; the Clintons no longer do; and the Trumps, Bushes, and other GOP VIPs never will.

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There’s a lot of non-productive whining and misdirected finger pointing by defeated Dems still going on, considering that an arrogant HRC campaign simply dropped the ball, as well as non-justified chest thumping by certain knuckle-dragging GOP members, considering Trump had almost 3 million fewer votes than HRC. Both sides were ready to use the Electoral College to their advantage. Now one side abhors it and the other lauds the wisdom of the Founding Fathers for creating it. Those old colonists weren’t stupid, but many fixtures of U.S. representative democracy, like representative democracy everywhere, are flawed or out-of-date or just plain wrong.

That said, I thought I’d have fun reminding readers of this blog about a famous sci-fi master’s take on “democratic institutions.” Unlike John Galt’s overbearing and over-verbose multipage oration in Atlas Shrugged (parodied in The Midas Bomb), the old revolutionary Bernardo de la Paz’s speech in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress mixes a lot of keen observation about human nature and plain common sense to express in a few pages some interesting ideas. Heinlein, like a few sci-fi writers (but not yours truly), has been considered a Libertarian (Hogan, Niven, and Pournelle are others). The ideas expressed in these pages would never be in that third party’s platform, though.

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It’s no secret that I often express admiration for the multiparty system found in many European countries. Many people see this as chaos, and it does seem to make democracy more chaotic as it provides homes for a wide spectrum of opinions but also forces politicos to seek compromise in order to find a majority. But could such a system work in the U.S.? In my last op-ed post I lamented that the progressive movement was dying. Could we at least progress to the point of having a true progressive alternative?

First, let’s end a myth: In the U.S., neither major parties’ voters are speaking with one voice! Each party contains a wide spectrum of voters. Historically one can say that the center of those spectra is slightly left of center for the Dems and slightly right for the GOP (the fringes of both are outliers). Also both parties tend to move toward the extreme ends of those spectra for primary season and back toward the center to govern. But the Dems have their conservatives and the GOP has its progressives, although these might be issue-dependent (Catholic Dems who are pro-life and anti-LGBT, and born-again Republicans who are environmentally conscious, for example). Let’s call this our unique American brand of political chaos, and the first nail in the coffin for the two-party system.

Our system is chaotic precisely because the two parties can’t possibly make all those registered Dems and Republicans happy. Keeping them all bottled up in a group in which they’re often uncomfortable can only lead to stress and not participating in political discourse, so they participate only on election days, if at all. Many Dems didn’t bother to vote for HRC for a variety of reasons, even in those “battleground states” (a recent NY Times analysis of voting in Milwaukee was telling—are you listening, Dems, or still just blaming others for dropping the ball?), or voted for her opponent, because they felt their party’s establishment had betrayed and abandoned them. The GOP fielded a non-establishment candidate, so many more “traditional Republicans” (also feeling betrayed and abandoned!) voted for HRC (Bush senior and junior the two most notable examples). In the end, the chaos all settled and out of the ashes rose Mr. Trump, the victor and unlikely phoenix.

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First, let’s end a misconception: not all progressives are liberal, and not all liberals are progressive. The last election offers evidence for the latter: HRC’s “liberal message” was “more of the same” and was directed more to certain sectors of our society instead of to all. Too many voters didn’t like this “liberal message,” most of them coming from the sectors HRC neglected. More women voted for Trump than HRC too, so that “first woman president” pseudo-progressive message didn’t resonate that much either. (That first woman president will come when a woman lacking Clinton’s obvious flaws and baggage is nominated.) But fundamentally Clinton’s message wasn’t progressive.

A progressive message has to be one that’s inclusive and works to improve the lives of the majority of Americans, not just the few sectors HRC appealed to. Despite Harry Reid’s shenanigans in the Nevada primary, HRC appealed to a lot fewer union members than her husband, Al Gore, and Barack Obama did.  Those so-called liberals, fanatic HRC supporters, ignored the warning signs on the roads through the primaries and the months preceding the general election. HRC found many of her convention delegates in the South where they didn’t matter in the general election (even unpredictable Florida went for Trump, and the starry-eyed attempt to win Arizona, Georgia, and Texas, perhaps spurred on by liberal media giants like the New York Times, was a complete failure), while Bernie Sanders, with a long history of supporting unions (again making Nevada in the primaries an anomaly created by the nefarious Reid) showed that HRC’s assumptions about the rust belt were foolish.

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Now that Trump has won, the GOP-controlled Congress will probably receive a new nominee for the court to replace Obama’s. When it looked like HRC would win in a landslide in the Electoral College (what a difference a day makes!), there were major threats from Congress to the effect that they wouldn’t approve any nominee during her presidency. That would have been yet another blow to an important but sick democratic institution and would have continued its crippled state we saw in many important decisions during the last months with the constant threat that lower courts’ rulings are left standing when there’s a tie 4-4 vote. Now, with the tables turned, it’s possible that the Dems will do the same thing to Trump unless he nominates someone the Dems can live with (the rejection of Bork offers a precedent of what the Dems can do).

With hindsight, Trump would want to guarantee his nominee would ensure a conservative agenda, probably a Scalia-clone (isn’t Thomas enough?). Ensuring any agenda from your nominee is hard to do, though. Earl Warren was the conservatives’ worst traitor and the progressives’ delight—that justice nominated by Eisenhower shed his wolf clothing and became a liberal lamb, presiding over many important decisions that upset conservative apple carts. The situation was exacerbated for Ike and the GOP because Warren was even Chief Justice! CJ Roberts has shown a wee bit of that irascibility and independence too, earning the wrath of conservatives in many cases. Kennedy and Souter also have offered many surprises. No one knows whether the conservative side of the court will be emboldened by Trump’s win and Sessions nomination to the AG post (that will probably be filibustered by the Dems in the Senate unless it eliminates the filibustering tradition—I can see some sleepless days and nights in old Dems’ futures).

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[If you haven’t already voted, what are you waiting for? Don’t like any presidential candidate? Then vote for Buddha. But vote–local down-ballot races and ballot questions might be more important to you than whatever “psychopathic personality” resides in the White House (there might be two–the quote is from Kurt Vonnegut.]

Even in junior high (middle school for those in the Midwest and East), I recognized the truth of the adjectives in the title. In California, at least back then, we had to pass a “Constitution Test” at the end of the eighth grade—probably nowadays only immigrants seeking citizenship have to show they have this general knowledge. (The Constitutuion is like the Bible–people claim to know it, few do, and many misunderstand it and misquote it.) Every election I confirm that original, youthful analysis. Diehards who hold up the Constitution as a holy relic to be worshipped and never changed are blind to the flaws in that grand old document that seems to show its age and irrelevance with every election cycle. The Electoral College represents the worst lack of vision the Founding Fathers had.

There are many—they often wrote an erudite, flowery, but anachronistic English that was ingenuous in many cases and aristocratic in others (the Electoral College falls into both classes).  They did throw the “all men are created equal” in the Declaration under the bus—Jefferson’s flowery idiocy is just plain wrong, and the Constitution basically corrected it by considering that all citizens should have equal opportunity and rights if we add in the amendments (it took a while to correct that women weren’t allowed to vote and slaves were fractional men).

They also left too many things open to interpretation. The Second Amendment means, for example, that our National Guards, the successors to those old militias, can exist and carry arms, nothing more, but the NRA and many other extreme gun aficionados think that it means you have the right to carry an automatic and own a military-style weapon like an AR-15. The Electoral College, however, prevents a true democracy, clearly not what the Founding Fathers intended. Here are some negatives to prove that point:

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Britain has the Conservative and Labour parties. We have the GOP and Dems. France’s two main parties are the Socialist Party and Republican Party, while Germany’s are the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties. Western democracies tend to have two major parties, whether their system of government is parliamentary or like ours.  In parliamentary systems, more sharing of power is done, because a multitude of minor parties often guarantees that two or more parties have to join forces to govern—no party has a simple majority. In any case, these are all representative democracies.

Conservative voters should be happy, though. For the most part, representative democracy is more conservative than progressive, because majority opinion often puts brakes on any radical ideas. In this sense, conservative parties are superfluous. It often takes the domination of one party, often despotic, like in Venezuela, or in faux democracies (the German Democratic Republic AKA East Germany was a prime example), for the majority to wake upa an spur on radical, progressive change. For the most part, people just try to get on with their own lives and hope THEIR representatives don’t screw things up too much.

When I first arrived in Colombia, Conservatives and Liberals took turns. That was an agreement reached after toppling the dictator Rojas Pinilla, who had forcibly ended La Violencia, that terrible civil war between—you guessed it—Conservatives and Liberals. For years, government in Colombia was a shadow representative democracy, although elections for lower legislative positions were “representative.” Democracy is messy, so people often turn to strong men (or women) who will clean things up. There are still people in Spain who yearn for Franco, for example. “You could walk safely in the streets of Madrid late at night,” one guest at a dinner party there once told me. Fascism appeals to people who see chaos all around them.

Franco’s appeal is Trump’s appeal in the U.S. now. People want to walk safely in the streets late at night. They don’t want to be terrorized by criminals of any stripe. They want to feel safe, have good jobs, educate their children, and forget about government. Now they feel that the old way of doing things isn’t working. Sanders’s appeal is often said to serve that same purpose. But it was the other pole of the magnet. Yes, people wanted change, but they didn’t want to turn to fascism either. Sanders’s revolution also was attractive to many not satisfied with the old way of doing things, but his supporters looked toward a brighter future, not a return to the dark past of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese Empire, or the faux democracies Russia has often suffered from and promoted, or Donald Trump.

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