Al Doblin is speaking from "The Bubble"

/

Alfred P. Doblin is the Editorial Editor of the Record of Bergen and the surrounding counties.  His writing is strong, with few of the over-the-top emotions that are often on display over at the Star-Ledger.  He appears to try for balance, for persuasion instead of name-calling.      

But we fear he is trapped, as so many others are trapped, in a perception that is based more on geography and on class than on ideology or party identity. 

In his recent column -- "GOP at the crossroads" -- Mr. Doblin falls back on the tired values of an old religion.  Using terms like "mainstream right... extreme right... hard-line conservatives... social issues," we feel that he misses the lessons of the 2016 presidential election.

And who are the people Mr. Doblin turns to in his column to illuminate his argument?  All members of the ruling class:  former Governor Christie Whitman, global lobbyist Mike DuHaime, and Senator Kevin O'Toole Esq.

From them we get the same, tired prescriptions we get after every presidential election -- win or lose:  “(Republicans) can no longer be defined both statewide and nationally as the older white man’s party and expect to succeed (even though they just did)... (Republicans) have to do a lot more to attract females, to attract African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics. We have to be far more diverse than we have in the past.” 

The perspective of these people is one of class.  They are far, far more richer and more prosperous than the average American or the average Republican. When they speak of diversity it is the false diversity of gender, color, ethnicity, or sexual identity.  What is studiously ignored is class. 

In his book, White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making, Duke University's Nick Carnes points out that while upwards of 65 percent of citizens are "working class" and 54 percent are employed in a blue-collar occupation, just 2 percent of the members of Congress and 3 percent of state legislators held blue-collar jobs at the time of their election.  How about some diversity?

Donald Trump's campaign saw through the false political divide of Democrat and Republican to the vast economic and social divide that is the truer measure of America today.  Authors as diverse as George Packer of the New Yorker (The  Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America) to Charles Murray (Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010) to Chris Hedges (Days of Destruction Days of Revolt) to David Brooks (BoBos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There) have written about this, with Brooks actually employing Donald Trump as an example of what the "new upper class" finds unfashionable.  In a prescient piece of writing, Ralph Nader gave an outline of what was coming when his book (Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State) was released in the summer of 2014.

On election night, MSNBC's Chris Matthews came closest to the mark, with this surprising exchange:

Of course, the ruling class will try to fit what happened back into the perception that they are most comfortable with -- and so we get the familiar postscripts about "old white men" and "diversity" of the surface variety.  It is an exercise in virtue signaling, whereby one member of the ruling class assures his "goodness" to another.

White collar America spends its time concerned about issues like the availability of condoms to Ivy Leaguers.  Such concerns are the marks of privilege. Blue collar America, working class America, worries about foreclosure, about housing, about having a job, about getting out of debt, about having enough to give their children the life that they've enjoyed.  With the greatest respect to Christie Whitman and Mike DuHaime and Kevin O'Toole, they don't have those problems.  So relieved of such pressing concerns, they can float above the mass and think sweet thoughts, reaffirming their "goodness" to one another.

The lack of shared experience places much of our ruling class, and those who aspire to it, into a kind of "bubble" -- secure and apart from the mass. Senator O'Toole's statement to Editor Doblin that what he regretted most was not voting for same-sex marriage is a symptom of that "bubble."  The Senator is a wise and judicious man and surely, if he thought about it a bit, he would have said that his greatest regret was not being able to cut property taxes down to a sane level.  For it is property taxes, a major driver of foreclosure and of homelessness, that is the greatest concern to the greatest many.

The idea that some Americans exist in "bubble" communities that vastly outstrip neighboring zip codes in status, wealth, cultural influence, and corporate/political power is not new.  Although now it seems to be going mainstream, filtering into "pop" culture.  Consider this recent skit from Saturday Night Live:

Wealthy professionals, like Al Doblin, should be aware of their class bias.  As a journalist, great care should be taken to seek out and include the opinions of genuine members of the working class for balance -- and not just members of the ruling class who happen to be labeled "diverse" for whatever reason

Trump is taking Sanders' voters

/

Today is the Ides of March, memorable for its connection to Gaius Julius Caesar, a Roman politician with parallels to Mr. Donald Trump.  Like Trump, Caesar entered politics during a period when the working class (the Roman Plebeians) were being squeezed out of the labor force by imported foreign labor.  In Caesar's day, the imports were slaves from newly conquered territory (Gauls, Germans, Greeks, and Spaniards).  Today the imports come from human trafficking (a modern euphemism for a form of illegal slavery) and porous borders.  Both undercut the price of labor by glutting the market.  Caesar's murder at the hands of a group of rich Patrician Senators was due, in part, to his efforts to limit the importation of slaves and secure work for the citizens of Rome.

Like Caesar, Trump is a rich oligarch who has betrayed his class to gain the affection of the common people.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported that 46,000 Democrats had switched to Republican.  That's half of all the new voters the Democrats have gained since the 2014 congressional elections.  This mirrors huge party-switches in other states, with exit-polling indicating that the candidacy of Donald Trump is the reason for much of the switching. 

Many of these voters would otherwise have been voting for Bernie Sanders, but when the Vermont Senator screwed up and told them that they don't exist, apparently they started jumping to Trump. 

"When you're white, you don't know what it's like to live in a ghetto".

Hey, doesn't Sanders know that twice as many white people are living on food stamps as are black people?  That there are more white people on welfare than black people.  Doesn't he know this?  Why would Senator Sanders diss the very working class voters he needs, in an attempt to pander to black voters?  Doesn't he know that racial and ethnic divides have historically been used to split the working class?  To pit group against group within the working class, to undermine it.  Is remedial Marxism in order?

Consider this:  Black Lives Matter's advocate Al Sharpton is managed by the same public relations firm that manages Governor Chris Christie.  Sharpton is a rich man, not a man of the Left.

Of course, Bernie Sanders' ideology was always closer to the 1960's New Left than to the class-based Old Left.  The New Left was dominated by academics and the children of the well to do.  Frustrated with the cultural traditionalism of the working class, it focused on the grievances of racial and ethnic groups, gender, and sexual identity.  Dominated by younger voices, the New Left was in a hurry to tear down the existing order in any way possible and deemed group-identity the quickest means to that end.  But of course, these younger voices grew up and, being who they were, inherited the establishment -- proving to be more greedy and rapacious than anything practiced by their parents.

Split along racial and ethnic lines, by gender and all the rest, working class jobs have disappeared overseas, the labor market at home has been glutted, and working class incomes have declined while the inequity between rich and poor is an ever-widening gulf.  Perversely, the rich have never been more "progressive."  Johnson & Johnson puts out a "progressive" LGBT video to take your mind off them selling products to children and women that cause cancer -- and covering it up for 30 years.  HSBC bank signs on to a pro-same-sex marriage brief to keep "progressive" support when it comes out that they laundered a billion dollars in drug cartel money.  "Vulture capitalist" billionaire Paul Singer pushes "gay rights" but off-shores his operations in the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes and oversight.

Today's Democratic Party is controlled by these "progressive" rapists of the working class -- making the Democrats anything but an old-order party of the Left.  As for the Republican Party, it too has long embraced the same neo-liberal economic policies practiced by the corporate "progressives" who dominate the Democrats, while the unleashing of campaign and lobbying money has given rise to an all-encompassing regime of crony capitalism that makes corruption in both parties ordinary, usual, and customary.

The parties "clash" in a series of what Daniel Boorstin called "pseudo-events," everyone bemoans "gridlock," but behind the scenes everything functions quite well if you have the money to buy it.  A crisis is manufactured, the working class get taxed, the government spends money, rich lobbyists/ vendors/ consultants/ investors get richer, the solution fails miserably, the crisis is forgotten, the national debt has grown.  A recent Princeton University study reported that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

While equal to the Democratic Party in corruption, the Republican Party actually is more democratic than the Democrats, in that its leadership does not exercise the full control over the institution the way the leadership of the Democratic Party does.  Being "Republicans" and therefore "bad" in the minds of those who set such fashions, they can't get away with the same level of wrongdoing that the Democratic Party's leadership can.  Remember, the Democrats are fashionable and therefore "good."  You will never skunk a cocktail party by announcing that you're a Democrat.

So the Democrats get to crush their Bernie, even though the polls show he is the far stronger candidate in any match-up with Republicans. 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html

But the Republicans can't crush their Trump... or even their Cruz.  The Republican electorate has slipped their leash and gone off the plantation.  Can you blame rank and file Democrats for enviously eyeing this outbreak of freedom and wanting to join in?  After being lied to for so long, being told what to think, what to do, and what to feel, it is exhilarating for some to just raise their fist and let fly that middle finger. 

The real worry to the establishment class does not come from those who are temporarily free, who will soon tire and then be rounded up by their assigned keepers.  What keeps the establishment up nights is what Ralph Nader wrote about two summers ago in his book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.  It's what groups like Represent.Us are putting into practice:

Represent.Us: End corruption. Defend the Republic.

Unlike the pseudo-left movements funded by corporate "progressives," these groups do not divide Americans by race, ethnicity, or gender.  They don't pit this lifestyle against that religion.  This is about taking on corporate cronyism and the political class and cleaning up the Republic.  This is about the one BIG thing we need to do if any of the little things have a chance of becoming something good.  This is about the PROCESS and it's not unlike the coming together of Left and Right in the United Kingdom in that country's battle over who controls their PROCESS -- Parliament or the European Union.  This IS THE FIGHT and it has and will produce some interesting alliances, as you can see below.

London Mayoral Candidate George Galloway gets a standing ovation for his speech on leaving the EU, at a Grassroots Out event. @alondonforall @georgegalloway

Sanders channels Reagan in new ad

/

Remember Ronald Reagan's "It's morning again in America" ad from his 1984 re-election campaign?

Well, Democrat Bernie Sanders has captured the same hopeful feel in his new ad running in Iowa and new Hampshire.

We will leave you with President Reagan's salutary warning in his last address to the American people from the White House, in January 1989.

President Ronald Reagan's Farewell Address to the Nation on 1/11/89. For more information on the ongoing works of President Reagan's Foundation, visit us at http://www.reaganfoundation.org