The point is to not make him the point.

In his New York Times opinion column (The Who-Can-Beat Trump Test Leads to Kamala Harris, 8/2/19), Roger Cohen makes a fair case for Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for 2020. And in doing so, he also does a pretty good take-down on Trump and the current (and increasingly inaptly-named) "conservative" movement. But he also unintentionally provides a road map for how Trump could defeat Harris. Harris is a prosecutor. She's a fighter. An attack dog. She will go toe-to-toe with him. She will prosecute him. She will go after him.

And that's the problem: It's still all about him.

It does appear that Harris is the candidate that the Trump campaign fears the most. But I'm not certain how reassuring that is. Trump loves a foil. He needs a foil. Foils are his megaphones. And if he can goad Harris into a debate about his deficits and his failings, then he has once again achieved his goal.

It's still all about him.

The 2020 Democratic candidate needs to be someone who flicks aside such distractions and turns attention back to "Here's what we can do for American families." Someone who won't be baited into wasting their time defensively deflecting Trump's blows. Who treats Trump's tirades as nothing more inconvenient than a jet flying overhead in the middle of an outdoor commencement speech: Yelling at it has no effect, so you just wait for the interruption to die down.

We need a candidate who will not acknowledge Trump for anything other than the noisy, inanimate object that he is.

There are a number of candidates who might do that, including Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or even (ugh!) Gillibrand, De Blasio or Gabbard (assuming she's for real, which is a whole 'nother discussion). But I think the true scrapper in the pack is Elizabeth Warren. And by "scrapper," I don't mean only that she'd hold her own in a brawl with Trump. She would indeed do that, but unlike Harris, she appears to have learned that "brawling" with him is a losing battle, because Trump not only ignores the rules of the road, he does not even acknowledge the road's existence. Roads are confining, inconvenient things meant for sub-human "little people." Trump is an entitled tank, climbing over rocks, ridges and even children in his objective, which is to stay in the limelight. He is not at all concerned that his tweets and tirades have nothing to say to people worried about their health care, their kids' education, their aging parents, the potholes in their street, or the ancient bridge they cross every day to get to that job they'd quit if only they could find a better one. He has nothing to say to them because these problems are no more real to him than the meaning of the word "No." And since he has no grasp of the problems that most people face, let alone any solutions, he'd rather you not hear from someone who does. Distraction is his superpower.

On the other hand, Warren's performance in the debates shows her deftness at deflecting slings and arrows by pivoting back to her ideas. And she does this in a way that is accessible. She's a combination of policy wonk and poet, distilling complex plans into political Haiku, a talent she no doubt honed in her years as a teacher.

I'll vote for whichever of the 2020 Democratic candidates gets the nod. But I'm rooting for Warren. Because nothing gets under a bully's skin faster and deeper than being treated as irrelevant. And that's Warren's superpower.

This is how it happens

Years from now, school children and historians will look back on this ghastly time, and wade through the multiple levels of corruption and treason by the Trump administration, and the compromising of an entire American political party and religious bodies, and ask "Why didn't they SEE it? Why didn't they STOP it? Why weren't people marching? Rushing the camps? Taking over the government buildings?"
And we will say that we did march. We did protest. We did write. We did call. And shake our fists. And scream. 

But we grew tired and hopeless when nothing changed. We grew frustrated when the people we put into positions to stop it dragged their feet. And we despaired to see that so many of our fellow citizens were all too willing to enable the overthrow of our democracy.

So we retreated to our privileged lives. After all, we were not the ones who were locked up. And we had jobs. We had soccer practice. We had bills to pay. Homework to finish. Children to raise.

And so it continued.

This is how it happens: Not a monster appearing suddenly, with yellow fangs and green scales, breathing fire and announcing its plans for destruction. It does not emerge in the midst of dystopia. No, such horror and destruction flower when people are too comfortable to risk their comfort. When people have the privilege of looking away.

That is why we need institutions in place to stop such things before we can even see them coming. The "bureaucracies." The FDIC, the safety nets, the free media.

But those things will only save us if we defend them.

Which is why the monster picks these things as the first to be vilified: They get in the way of tyrants.

x

Slavery, capitalism, socialism and freedom

A video of Vice President Mike Pence declaring that "Freedom, not socialism, ended slavery" appeared in a Facebook friend's post recently. I did not watch the video. I'm trying to preserve as much of my sanity as possible. But it got me thinking about how the words slavery, capitalism, socialism, and freedom, are currently understood in our society. Or should I say "misunderstood." I would challenge Mr. Pence's assertion that "freedom" ended slavery. Freedom was the result of ending slavery, not the means for ending it.
But I would go further to point out that a civil war ended slavery. And the American Civil War was, by its very nature, a socialist endeavor: created (declared), financed, and run by the collective we call "government."
On the other hand, capitalism ("freedom" to the GOP) was the soil from which slavery sprang: profit as a primary motive, and cheap resources as a primary means. Capitalism is, by its nature, amoral (different from immoral). Unchecked capitalism will always lead to things like slavery and authoritarianism. In fact, our current capitalist economy depends on relative slavery, in the proliferation of sub-living wage jobs. And it was only recently that the US recognized slavery happening within its own territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. This was not just recently discovered, however. Do a search for "Tom DeLay Mariana Island sweatshop factory" to learn more. At a party with sweatshop factory owners there, Congressman DeLay declared "You represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America." Republican congressman, I should note, a member of the party of "freedom through capitalism" - which for me always begs the question of "Freedom for whom?"
Both capitalism and socialism are amoral - without any awareness of good or bad. They are systems in the same way that a shark is an "eating machine" (Jaws, 1975). They do what they do. And they each require vigilance, which means regulation and enforcement, to work for the good of society.
So, no, Mr. Pence. Capitalism is not the same as freedom. And neither capitalism nor freedom ended slavery in the US. Because it was a socialist effort that freed the Southern plantation slaves.  And because slavery, in one form or another, is with us still.