Will Clinton or Trump Help Families of Murder Victims?

A mother or wife who has lost a child or a spouse to a shooting steps up to the podium, briefly identifies herself and describes the promising life that has been cut short. She tells the audience that the candidate she supports will stop more senseless killings like this one and the crowd, sympathetically cheers their courage. Clinton or Trump? Both. 

Clinton has brought to the stage families of African Americans who have died at the hands of police and Trump the mothers and spouses of those killed by undocumented immigrants.

Are the candidates using these families for crass political gain or are they giving voice to their grief in order to highlight a grievous wrong that they intend to fix as president? And is there moral equivalence in the solutions they espouse?

Because I support Clinton and abhor Trump, my knee jerk reaction was that there is no equivalence, and that there is something untoward in one white woman after another coming to the stage to name the Latino criminal responsible for a death. But, I asked myself, why was that different than the black women who came to the stage to talk about their children or spouses? 

The answer may have come slowly, but it came. There is equivalence in the pain these family feel, but there is no equivalence in the solution the candidates offer to solve the problem their family members’ deaths represent.

“There's no evidence that immigrants are either more or less likely to commit crimes than anyone else in the population," says Janice Kephart, a researcher for the Center for Immigration Studies. This fact flies in the face of Trump’s insinuations that immigrants from Mexico are primarily criminals. Roughly 2-3% of Americans may commit a violent crime. Yet in order to prevent violent crime of those who might commit it within the population of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States Donald Trump proposes on most days to deport all eleven million, and on some days to deport immediately any that have been arrested for anything and decide later what to do about the rest.

In order to reduce the shooting of blacks by police, Hillary Clinton proposes to increase training for police departments on the use of force and to help them buy body cameras so that after an incident police can be either prosecuted or exonerated based on hard evidence rather than witness testimony only.

So, on one hand, disrupt the lives of millions of people including millions of innocent women and children, some of whom are American citizens, and on the other hand spend some money to help communities improve their police forces. Where is the moral equivalence?

And for the record, while Clinton doesn’t specifically address violent crime by undocumented immigrants, she does plan to focus resources on detaining and deporting those individuals who pose a violent threat to public safety and reduce gun violence by getting more illegal guns off our streets and keeping guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them by closing the gun show loophole and expanding background checks. Hillary has plans that will keep our country safe while preserving our freedom and our unique status in the world as a nation of immigrants. Trump would neither keep us safe nor keep us great. Trump’s America is like no America we have every seen.

Trump and Sanders are Populists. So What?

The rise of Donald Trump and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders have brought up a label of which I was ignorant, Populism. I had to look it up and read some history to come to an understanding. I had thought of Populists as adhering to popular ideas, wanting to change the establishment or status quo, or not being ideological, which is about right, but misses the history and connotations.

The first "Populist" movement spawned a political party in the 1890's that Bernie Sanders could have led: “ ‘The fruits of the toil of millions,’ the Party declared in 1892, ‘are boldly stolen to build up the fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind.’ The Populists also called for a secret ballot; women's suffrage; an eight-hour workday, direct election of U.S. Senators and the President and Vice President; and initiative and recall to make the political system more responsive to the people....The Populists embraced government regulation to get out from the domination of unregulated big business. The platform demanded government ownership of railroads, natural resources, and telephone and telegraph systems.” (Copyright 2016 Digital History)

But Populism came to be viewed  “as merely empathizing with the public, (usually through rhetoric or "unrealistic" proposals) in order to increase appeal across the political spectrum…. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell define populism as an ideology that ‘pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice’.” (Wikipedia: Populism). That certainly describes Trump.

The common thread that seems to unite Sanders’ and Trump’s Populism is what many see as unfulfillable promises. Campaign promises always contain an aspect of aspiration. If the economy is bad, the candidate promises it will improve. If there is trouble in the world, the candidate promises security. If we are engaged in an unpopular war, the candidate promises to end it. What a savvy voter does and what a healthy campaign process and debates are supposed to do, is to expose and evaluate the plans the candidates have to solve the problems or improve the economy.

Chump tells the voters to trust him, his skills as a successful businessman who negotiates great deals will make America Great Again, as in, respected and feared by the rest of the world, which will then make favorable trade deals with us.  The grand gesture (or crime) of rounding up 11 million illegal immigrants and sending them out of the country and constructing a wall on the southern border to keep them out, along with barring Muslims from entering the country will solve our immigration problem and open up jobs for American citizens he promises. Bellicose pronouncements that he would be willing to torture foreign prisoners and kill the families of terrorists without regard to international law and norms gives some people a sense that he would be a strong leader who would keep Americans safe. In short, he “otherizes” people who are not like his most fervent supporters, less educated white males and their families, and he makes what many believe are unfulfillable promises.

Sanders, on the other hand, does not demonize groups of people, he demonizes the elites: Wall Street investment firms and bankers, greedy corporations, and politicians who he accuses of being corrupted by the money these people and groups spend on their campaigns or pay them in speaking fees. He makes promises to provide free healthcare for all, free college education, and other reforms that will require new taxes or elimination of tax breaks adding up to several trillions of dollars in coming years. Most economists regard his projections of costs and revenues to be unrealistic, and even Bernie acknowledges he couldn’t pass any of this legislation without a “political revolution” — support so YUGE, that a new Congress would be elected, not only of Democrats, but of leftist Democrats willing to basically remake the American economy to be more like the European one. 

On the corrupting influence of money, Trump and Sanders are remarkably close. Trump doesn’t talk about solving the problem, he just notes that he’s rich enough that he can’t be corrupted. It’s not clear how he would persuade those he accuses of being corrupted to pass the laws he wants except through his superior abilities as a negotiator and a leader.  Sanders promises to change the campaign finance laws, which at this point would either take a Constitutional amendment, or a Supreme Court willing to overturn their ruling on Citizen’s United. 

Are they right that U.S. politicians are corrupted by the influences of huge campaign contributions and unlimited spending of PACS and issue groups? I’ve been reading Jane Mayer’s new book, Dark Money, and it’s easy to conclude from that that the money the Koch’s and other billionaires are spending on elections is changing how America is governed, putting tax, regulation, and environmental protection averse Republicans in charge of Congress and state governments. It’s harder to prove that these politicians wouldn't hold these views regardless of dark money, though she does show instances in which some have changed their positions in order to gain the favor of wealthy individuals or groups, evidence of quid pro quo. Bernie Sanders asserts that Hillary Clinton is similarly tainted by having accepted speaking fees and donations from Wall Street firms and those who work there. 

The bottom line is that Populism is too general a description to give a voter information about a candidate. You could almost substitute “Panderism” for Populism. A Populist candidate panders to the aspirations and/or to the fears and prejudices of the voters without necessarily offering realistic plans for achieving those goals. The young and the less educated are perhaps more attracted and vulnerable to such appeals—the young to the aspirational candidate, the less educated to the promoter of fear and what some have described as an attraction to authoritarianism. I shouldn’t have to say that I am not equating Sanders and Trump in any other way. I would only vote for Trump if I had a gun pointed to my head (and, at my age, might not then….I don’t fancy living in a world with him in charge). I will willingly support Sanders for president, but at the same time fear he will lose badly, or winning, face even greater opposition than Obama as president. My hope is that the great American middle will step up and elect Hillary and usher in an era of pragmatism and effective government. Yes, that is likely a pipe dream, as she is likely to face as much opposition, if elected, as any Democrat from Republican politicians. 

Hillary could certainly learn from the Populists and start making sweeping generalizations about the amazing progress a Hillary Clinton presidency would bring! One thing is clear about what American voters want at election time: an inspirational leader who will promise a better future. 

Electorate Lacks Critical Thinking Skills

In recent elections, why have so many voted for candidates who support policies they say they oppose or that are harmful to their economic interests?

Why vote for politicians who seek to dismantle public education, are against raising the minimum wage, pass tax cuts to further increase the wealth gap, and who want to continue to allow corporations and billionaires to flood the political system with money when generally you disagree with those policies? Polling shows that even many who disagree with their policies chose the Republican party in this election.

Benefits from Social Security Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Unemployment Insurance, Workman’s Compensation, SNAP (food stamps) are designed to keep working people and those unable to work out of poverty.  What does it mean when even people who are receiving these benefits vote for a party that seeks to dismantle or undermine these programs?

I believe it’s because many simply reject facts regardless of scientific and historical evidence in favor of voting based on their mood, feelings, or beliefs. They do this at least partly because many lack a skill that educators call “critical thinking,” an essential backbone of a competent education, and an area of emphasis in the Common Core State Standards. Republicans have now turned against this challenging set of educational principles, which was developed by the states in a non-partisan process. I wonder if they are concerned they might work.

When George W. Bush, with help from liberal lion Ted Kennedy, passed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001, many saw it as an attack on public education. NCLB required annual testing that would not only label schools in which the majority of students were not reaching annual benchmarks in reading and math as failing, but would give parents the option of sending their children to another school, often a charter school run by a private company. Kennedy had apparently signed on because he hoped that after identifying struggling schools, which he knew would mostly be in poor neighborhoods, the law made provisions to provide large influxes of money to the school to implement change. Naturally, the law was never fully funded by the Republicans. Regardless, even a large amount of money rarely turns around a school serving a population of students who are growing up in poverty in only a year or two.

The most laughable (or more accurately, tear-inducing) part of the law was the goal it established that declared that ALL students must reach mastery in Reading and Math by 2014. The only reason that most all schools have not been labeled failures is that the Obama administration has allowed states to apply for waivers from the most onerous provisions of the law.

Critical thinking is the highest goal of education. It can’t be taught in one lesson or in one year. You can find short definitions and full-length books on the topic. In a word, it is rationality: the ability to weigh evidence objectively, to identify and distance the emotional triggers and beliefs that may cloud one’s thinking, so that one can analyze the validity of “facts” and assemble a theory or argument.

Americans often wonder how masses of people in other parts of the world can be convinced to support dictatorial governments or follow religious leaders who exhort them to hatred of others and rejection of freedom and Democracy. The answer is simple: a powerful combination of control of the media, religious belief, and weak or religiously based education systems and systems of law which do not operate on the basis of critical thinking, but on pre-determined belief systems, whether they are economic, secular, or religious.

In recent years America’s radio and TV airways have increasingly been filled with intelligent right wing personalities who craft seemingly rational arguments based on faulty premises and suspect “facts”. They almost always wrap their propaganda in expressions of religious belief, patriotic fervor, and fear that the opposition is trying to destroy the American way of life, nostalgically bringing to mind an America of small towns, picket fences, and….for many, segregated schools.

The Republican strategy seems to include weakening education, instilling fear of an increasingly diverse society in their low and middle income white male base, and allowing the rich to spend limitless money on elections in order to maintain power and win elections.

If I were President Obama, I would challenge the nation to embark on a simple mission. Congress should come together to pass an education law to repeal and replace No Child Left Behind and its patchwork waiver system. The Common Core has become a punching bag, so start over. Call the new law, or some major part of it “FACTS: For All, Critical Thinking Skills.” From pre-school to free adult classes in libraries and community centers, make rational discussions and analysis a national pastime. We could start by studying the campaign ads from this season.

Paul Epstein is a retired teacher, a musician, and writer who lives in Charleston, WV. He blogs at http://paulepstein-muse.blogspot.com/