[Occupymendocino] We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners

[nlnelson at mcn.org]

sounds like an idea whose time is here


 May I suggest flying the inverted ensign for the July 4th parade?
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>> On Jun 25, 2018, at 8:33 PM, Mark Safron <marksafron at att.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/trump-sarah-huckabee-sanders-restaurant-civility.html?action=click&module=Ribbon&pgtype=Article
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/trump-sarah-huckabee-sanders-restaurant-civility.html?action=click&module=Ribbon&pgtype=Article>
>>
>> We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners
>> June 25, 2018
>> Last year, the white nationalist Richard Spencer was kicked out of his
>> Virginia gym
>> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/georgetown-professor-confronts-white-nationalist-richard-spencer-at-the-gym%E2%80%94which-terminates-his-membership/2017/05/21/d3ff6512-3e51-11e7-8c25-44d09ff5a4a8_story.html?utm_term=.10f7d95207bd>
>> after another member confronted him and called him a Nazi. This incident
>> did not generate a national round of hand-wringing about the death of
>> tolerance, perhaps because most people tacitly agree that it’s O.K. to
>> shun professional racists.
>>
>> It’s a little more complicated when the professional racist is the
>> president of the United States. The norms of our political life require
>> a degree of bipartisan forbearance. But treating members of Donald
>> Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than
>> pariahs does more to normalize bigotry than exercising alongside a white
>> separatist.
>>
>> Over the last week, several Trump administration officials and
>> supporters have been publicly shamed. On Friday night, the Trump press
>> secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a farm-to-table
>> restaurant in Lexington, Va. That morning, protesters blasted a
>> recording of sobbing migrant kids outside the home of Kirstjen Nielsen,
>> Trump’s secretary of homeland security.
>>
>> A few days before that, Nielsen left an upscale Mexican restaurant near
>> the White House after protesters confronted her, chanting, “If kids
>> don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace!” The Trump adviser
>> Stephen Miller was also yelled at in a Mexican restaurant
>> <https://nypost.com/2018/06/20/protester-yells-fascist-at-stephen-miller-dining-in-mexican-restaurant/?utm_source=twitter_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons>
>> — someone called him a fascist, though he may not regard that as an
>> insult. The same night that Sanders was denied service, Pam Bondi,
>> Florida’s Trump-supporting attorney general, was heckled outside a
>> movie theater where she’d gone to see a documentary about Mister
>> Rogers. Adding to the furor, Representative Maxine Waters, a California
>> Democrat, urged people to keep jeering at members of Trump’s cabinet
>> when they’re out and about, saying, “You tell them they’re not
>> welcome anymore, anywhere.”
>>
>> Naturally, all this has led to lots of pained disapproval from
>> self-appointed guardians of civility. A Washington Post editorial urged
>> the protesters to think about the precedent they are setting
>> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/let-the-trump-team-eat-in-peace/2018/06/24/46882e16-779a-11e8-80be-6d32e182a3bc_story.html?utm_term=.d09bec8bb385>.
>> “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe
>> that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who
>> protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their
>> families?” it asked.
>>
>> Of course, this is not hard to imagine at all, since abortion opponents
>> have assassinated abortion providers in their homes and churches,
>> firebombed their clinics and protested at their children’s schools.
>> The Roman Catholic Church has shamed politicians who support abortion
>> rights by denying them communion. The failure to acknowledge this
>> history is a sign of the reflexive false balance that makes it hard for
>> the mainstream media to grapple with the asymmetric extremism of the
>> Republican Party.
>>
>> I’m somewhat agnostic on the question of whether publicly rebuking
>> Trump collaborators is tactically smart. It stokes their own sense of
>> victimization, which they feed on. It may alienate some persuadable
>> voters, though this is just a guess. (As we saw in the indignant media
>> reaction to Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents’ Association
>> Dinner routine, some pundits project their own concern with Beltway
>> decorum onto swing voters, who generally pay less attention to the news
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/upshot/so-just-who-are-these-undecided-voters.html>
>> than partisans.)
>>
>> On the other hand, there’s a moral and psychic cost to participating
>> in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public
>> servants. I don’t blame staff members at the Virginia restaurant, the
>> Red Hen, for not wanting to help Sanders unwind after a hard week of
>> lying to the public about mass child abuse. Particularly when
>> Sanders’s own administration is fighting to let private businesses
>> discriminate against gay people, who, unlike mendacious press
>> secretaries, are a protected class under many civil rights laws.
>>
>> Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s
>> important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a
>> breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s
>> tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with
>> help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his
>> vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and
>> humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil
>> Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack
>> Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter
>> roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering
>> <https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/supreme-court-north-carolina-gerrymandering/index.html>
>> that will further entrench minority rule.
>>
>> All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently
>> refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens
>> they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working
>> tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms —
>> which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes,
>> given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s
>> anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.
>>
>> But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans
>> watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes
>> immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses
>> his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged
>> phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police
>> might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but
>> that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The
>> right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther
>> conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a
>> racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.
>>
>> Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump
>> presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with
>> assault weapons and threatening civil war. I know of no left-wing
>> publication that has followed the example of the right-wing Federalist
>> and run quasi-pornographic fantasies
>> <https://thefederalist.com/2018/06/21/america-wont-see-go-without-epic-fight/>
>> about murdering political enemies. (“Close your eyes and imagine
>> holding someone’s scalp in your hands,” began a recent Federalist
>> article.) Unlike Trump, no Democratic politician I’m aware of has
>> urged his or her followers to beat up opposing demonstrators
>> <https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-incitement-violence/>.
>>
>> Instead, some progressive celebrities have said some bad words, and some
>> people have treated administration officials with the sort of public
>> opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization.
>> Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because it’s
>> the only power they have left, and people have a desperate need to say,
>> and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is
>> intolerable.
>>
>> Sometimes, their strategies may be poorly conceived. But there’s an
>> abusive sort of victim-blaming
>> <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-language-of-the-trump-administration-is-the-language-of-domestic-violence>
>> in demanding that progressives single-handedly uphold civility, lest the
>> right become even more uncivil in response. As long as our rulers wage
>> war on cosmopolitan culture, they shouldn’t feel entitled to its
>> fruits. If they don’t want to hear from the angry citizens they’re
>> supposed to serve, let them eat at Trump Grill
>> <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/trump-grill-review>.
>>
>>
>>
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