Supporting A Candidate Quotes

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.

When we support or vote for candidates outside the two major political parties we are immediately lectured about wasting our vote or making it easier for the less desirable of the two major candidates to claim victory. These lies are repeated every election and they must be ignored. You never waste your vote if you vote your conscience.

Each party has a platform--a pre-fixed menu of beliefs making up its worldview. The candidate can choose one of the two platforms, but remember: no substitutions. For example, do you support healthcare? Then you must also want a ban on assault weapons. Pro limited government? Congratulations, you are also anti-abortion. Luckily, all human opinion falls neatly into one of the two clearly defined camps. Thus, the two-party system elegantly represents the bi-chromatic rainbow that is American political thought.

Americans who might have exerted more energy to oppose Trump or support Clinton—especially white women—were goaded into inaction by the assurance that sexism and racism were things of the past, and that to work themselves up about either would look silly, would be unnecessary exertions on behalf of an imperfect candidate.

You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.

Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.

Angry voters are more willing to support candidates who vilify their opponents and find easy scapegoats. Talking heads have become shouting heads. Many Americans have grown cynical about our collective ability to solve our problems. And that cynicism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as nothing gets solved.

National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.

The important thing is that we are participating-whether it's by running, voting, or supporting (financially or otherwise) candidates who make a difference to women. Don't leave shit up to others, 'cause that's how we get fucked over.

Travaillons sans raisonner ; c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable.

There are not enough purple states. No one votes in primaries, except the most ideological. And big money comes in to support or oppose the candidates in those primaries.

Not only is Donald Trump the most despised candidate ever, but many of the people who have made the most scathingly censorious criticisms of him are members of his own party. This is absolutely unprecedented in our history, and it ought to give pause to all Americans, particularly supporters of Donald Trump.

But too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find—there’s no other word for it—deplorable. And while I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses. That doesn’t mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them. And they did it without demanding the basics that Americans used to expect from all presidential candidates, from releasing tax returns to offering substantive policy proposals to upholding common standards of decency.

I got into heated arguments with brothers and sisters who claimed that the oppression of black people was only a question of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white ones. Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn't take too much to figure that black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. It would burn me every time some body talked about Black people climbing the ladder of success. Anytime you're talking about a ladder, you're talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you got a system with a top and bottom, Black people are always going to end up at the bottom because we're easiest to discriminate against. That's why i couldn't see fighting within the system. Both the Democratic and Republican party are controlled by millionaires. They are interested in holding on to their power while i was interested in taking it away. They were interested in supporting fascist dictatorships in South and Central America, while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in seeing racist, fascist regimes in Africa while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in defeating the Viet Cong and i was interested in seeing their liberation.

It is intellectually dishonest to present the Republican Party as the only supporter of Zionism and Israel. The Democrats, while posing as an alternative to the right wing, are just as dedicated to Israel and they are far more dependent on Jewish votes and Jewish money than the Republicans. According to Israeli sources, over 70% of all contributions to Democratic candidates are provided by Jews; Jews provide a relatively meager 35% of all contributions to Republican candidates.

Observing a candidate's supporters is crucial. The candidates themselves are slick and polished. Their supporters aren't, so their words and actions are far easier to unravel. The Berkeley riots at Milo Yiannopoulos' attempted speech told me all I needed to know about Hillary.

Correct thinking provides a sense of certainty. Without it, we fear that faith is on life support at best, dead and buried at worst. And who wants a dead or dying faith? So this fear of losing a handle on certainty leads to a preoccupation with correct thinking, making sure familiar beliefs are defended and supported at all costs. How strongly do we hold on to the old ways of thinking? Just recall those history courses where we read about Christians killing other Christians over all sorts of disagreements about doctrines few can even articulate today. Or perhaps just think of a skirmish you’ve had at church over a sermon, Sunday-school lesson, or which candidate to vote into public office. Preoccupation with correct thinking. That’s the deeper problem. It reduces the life of faith to sentry duty, a 24/7 task of pacing the ramparts and scanning the horizon to fend off incorrect thinking, in ourselves and others, too engrossed to come inside the halls and enjoy the banquet. A faith like that is stressful and tedious to maintain. Moving toward different ways of thinking, even just trying it on for a while to see how it fits, is perceived as a compromise to faith, or as giving up on faith altogether. But nothing could be further from the truth. Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the “sin of certainty.

The key idea here is “negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose. If you’ve ever voted in an election feeling a bit bleh about the candidate you backed, but fearful of the troglodyte or socialist running against her, you’ve been a negative partisan. It turns out a lot of us have been negative partisans. A 2016 Pew poll found that self-described independents who tended to vote for one party or the other were driven more by negative motivations. Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.

This was something new. Or something old. I didn’t think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back to the clinic to bed down next to her child. Bankole had given him something to help him sleep. He did the same for her, so I won’t be able to ask her anything more until she wakes up later this morning. I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don’t think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them. Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, or even a Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a “cultist,” or a well-to-do eccentric. Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protectors or much that’s worth stealing. And “cultist” is a great catchall term for anyone who fits into no other large category, and yet doesn’t quite match Jarret’s version of Christianity. Jarret’s people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness’ sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.

If there is only one issue on which you should base your vote, it is this: whether a candidate supports evidence as the basis for policy decisions.

Travaillons sans raisonner, dit Martin ; c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable.

this is the conversation I’ve been having since the 2016 election ended and liberals and progressives have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. What was missing from the left’s message that left so many people unenthusiastic about supporting a Democratic candidate, especially against Donald Trump? So far, a large group of people (mostly white men paid to pontificate on politics and current events) seem to have landed on this: we, the broad and varied group of Democrats, Socialists, and Independents known as ‘the left,’ focused on ‘identity politics’ too much. We focused on the needs of black people, trans people, women, Latinx people. All this specialized focus divided people and left out working-class white men. That is the argument, anyways.

People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing

In 2016, the superdelegates should have steered the party away from a candidate who was so distrusted by most Americans. Instead, they marched in lockstep, supporting a woman who had high unfavorable ratings and who was being investigated by the FBI.

Back in 2007, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan had been asked by the Zürich daily Tages-Anzeiger which candidate he was supporting in the upcoming presidential election. His response was striking. How he voted did not matter, Greenspan declared, because “(we) are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.

During the campaign, I supported and encouraged the Clinton campaign strategy, but in hindsight, I lost track of one of the core lessons of Obama's success--campaigns are about telling the American people a story--a story about where we are, where we are going, and why you are the right person, and your opponent is the wrong person, to take the country there. It's a story that needs to be compelling, but also easily understood, and then driven home by the candidate and the campaign with relentless discipline.

Taft explained that the great issue in this campaign is "creeping socialism." Now that is the patented trademark of the special interest lobbies. Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people. When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan "Down With Socialism" on the banner of his "great crusade," that is really not what he means at all. What he really means is, "Down with Progress--down with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal," and "down with Harry Truman's fair Deal." That is what he means. (Rear Platform and Other Informal Remarks in SYRACUSE, NEW YORK (Near station, 1:25 p.m. October 10, 1952 ) trumanlibrary dot org publicpapers

And I get angry. Because we've tried so hard. Ninety-six percent of Black women tried so hard in voting against him. And not only did this country not elect Clinton, it elected a person who publicly supported sexual assault, a man one accused of rape by his daughter Ivanka's mother. I am angry with the Democratic Party for not knowing that there could have been and should have been a better candidate and angry that a better campaign -- a campaign that honored the journey, that included community in real and transformative ways -- was not launched. I am angry I didn't realize -- or accept on a cellular level -- how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are. I am angry at my own naiveté. Our own naiveté. There was a real and substantive difference between these two candidates and we didn't take that seriously enough.

Love you not deeply?" "Oh yes," answered he; "I deeply love Miss Cunegonde." "No," said one of the gentlemen, "we ask you if you do not deeply love the King of the Bulgarians?" "Not at all," said he; "for I have never seen him." "What! he is the best of kings, and we must drink his health." "Oh! very willingly, gentlemen," and he drank. "That is enough," they tell him. "Now you are the help, the support, the defender, the hero of the Bulgarians. Your fortune is made, and your glory is assured." Instantly they fettered him, and carried him away to the regiment.

Vote for diverse government representatives. Help put people of color into the positions of power where they can self-advocate for the change that their communities need. Support candidates of color and support platforms that make diversity, inclusion, and racial justice a priority.

Elections outside the workplace stand in an ambivalent relation to capitalism’s exclusion of real democracy inside. On the one hand, elections distract people from their conscious and unconscious upsets with working conditions. Elections focus instead on political candidates, parties, and alternative policies around issues other than capitalism versus alternative economic systems and other than their respective working conditions. That is why supporters of capitalism appreciate elections. Well-controlled elections do not question, let alone threaten, capitalism.

Others Exonerated the plebs and threw the blame upon the patricians: it was owing to their artful canvassing that the plebeians found the road to office blocked; if the plebs might have a breathing-spell from the mingled prayers and menaces of the nobles, they would think of their friends when they went to vote, and to the protection they had already won would add authority. It was resolved in order to do away with canvassing, that the tribunes should propose a law forbidding anyone to whiten his toga, for the purpose of announcing himself a candidate. This may now appear a trivial thing and one scarcely to be considered seriously, but at the time it kindled a furious struggle between the patricians and the plebs. Yet the tribunes prevailed and carried their law: and it was clear that the plebeians in their irritated mood would support the men of their own order.

There are people who learn political information for reasons other than becoming better voters. Just as sports fans love to follow their favorite teams even if they cannot influence the outcomes of games, so there are also “political fans” who enjoy following political issues and cheering for their favorite candidates, parties, or ideologies. Unfortunately, much like sports fans, political fans tend to evaluate new information in a highly biased way. They overvalue anything that supports their preexisting views, and to undervalue or ignore new data that cuts against them, even to the extent of misinterpreting simple data that they could easily interpret correctly in other contexts. Moreover, those most interested in politics are also particularly prone to discuss it only with others who agree with their views, and to follow politics only through like-minded media.

So no matter what side of the political aisle you choose, know this: if you are a member of the kingdom, King Jesus makes demands on your life. This includes the political candidates you support, the political groups you give your money to, and the votes you cast. So as for me and my house, we: •​Donate to prolife and pro–religious liberty policy groups •​Cast our votes for those who side with and advance the politics of the King •​Share the good news of the King with the people in our lives in the hope they might become members of the kingdom and might use their voices and votes for King Jesus

The split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced "free collective bargaining" between management and labor. REpublicans boasted of "extending the minimum wage to several million more workers" and "strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits." Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive invenstment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to "open carry" loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.

Some of the leaders of the backlash said their name was an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.” Maybe this was true at first. But the Tea Party was soon infused with paranoia that had nothing to do with taxes. While the ugliness caught Washington observers by surprise, anyone who had spent time in a battleground state recognized it instantly. Back in Ohio, volunteers had been told to check boxes corresponding to a voter’s most important issue: economy, environment, health care. But what box were you supposed to check when a voter’s concern was that Obama was a secret Muslim? Or a terrorist? Or a communist? Or the actual, literal Antichrist? How could you convince a voter whose pastor told them your candidate would bring about the biblical end of days? Other people were just plain racist. Outside an unemployment center in Canton, a skinny white man with stringy hair and a ratty T-shirt told me he would never, ever support my candidate. When I asked why, he took two fingers and tapped them against the veiny underside of his forearm. At first I didn’t understand. “You won’t vote for Obama because you’re a heroin addict?” It took me at least ten seconds to realize he was gesturing to the color of his skin.

But the real reasons why scientists promote accommodationism are more self-serving. To a large extent, American scientists depend for their support on the American public, which is largely religious, and on the U.S. Congress, which is equally religious. (It’s a given that it’s nearly impossible for an open atheist to be elected to Congress, and at election time candidates vie with one another to parade their religious belief.) Most researchers are supported by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, whose budgets are set annually by Congress. To a working scientist, such grants are a lifeline, for research is expensive, and if you don’t do it you could lose tenure, promotions, or raises. Any claim that science is somehow in conflict with religion might lead to cuts in the science budget, or so scientists believe, thus endangering their professional welfare.

When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.

Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens; young men subject to the draft are not more opposed to military escalation than men too old to be drafted; and people who lack health insurance are not more likely to support government-issued health insurance than people covered by insurance.35 Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: “In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’ ”36 Political opinions function as “badges of social membership.”37

People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were.

So you have to  ask, “Is it better to help the worse candidate to be elected?” You can make a case for doing that. In fact, there was an old Communist Party principle back in the  early 1930s: “the worse, the better.” If you get the worse candidate in, it’s going to be better, because then there will be more support for a revolution.

Paul He paces the hallway getting more and more impatient with every stride. Having decided to go into work late today, he didn’t expect his flatmate, Lee, to make him even later. Paul has known Lee for five years. They first met whilst attending an interview for an IT support role. On the day of the interview the company decided to do a group interview with all the candidates for the positions that were available. Paul was paired with Lee and instantly disliked him as, only a few seconds after being introduced, Lee stole his pen. During the interview process, several technical questions were asked which Paul had answered correctly, but Lee’s answers were always incorrect with Paul having a feeling that Lee was making things up as he went along. The interview stages went well for Paul and, after being told that he had got the job, on his first day at the company, he was surprised to see Lee start work as well. Puzzled, Paul put it down to fact that Lee’s flirting with the HR lady that day had helped him get the job.

The daughter of a black man murdered on camera by police runs an ad for a presidential candidate and white people who support the candidate are so moved by her retelling of life without her father. And I do imagine that it must be something, to be able to decide at what volume, tone , and tenor you will allow black people to enter your life, for praise of for scolding.

Despite Alex Jones’ enormous appeal, not one candidate was pushing for his support as the primaries drew closer—not Marco Rubio, not Ted Cruz, not Ben Carson, not Jeb Bush. No one! It was just mind-boggling how candidates chose to turn their backs on such a pool of potential voters as those millions of Americans who listen to or watch Alex Jones every day. Alex didn’t need any convincing

Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were.

Once Reagan was elected, the Republican strategy had two components. The first was to build from the bottom up, getting the party rooted so it could win state and local elections, then congressional elections, then the presidency. When it comes to the presidency, liberal Democrats have daddy issues, even when their candidate is a woman. Rather than concentrate on the daily task of winning over people at the local level, they have concentrated on the national media and invested their energies in trying to win the presidency every four years. And once they do, they expect Daddy to solve all the country's problems, oblivious to the fact that without support in Congress and the states a president under our system can accomplish very little. And so they are perpetually dissatisfied with their presidents and snipe at them from the left, which is the last thing a Democratic president in the current environment needs.

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!

While many have scratched their heads wondering how white Christians could support a candidate who has made white supremacy a foundation of his campaign and presidency, knowing how deeply racist attitudes persist among white Christians today makes this unorthodox political marriage less mysterious. Trump’s own racism allowed him to do what other candidates couldn’t: solidify the support of a majority of white Christians, not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy.

We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters-and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their "believability." "Hope" is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: "Hope for the best, in a process over which you have no control." For, if one had control, if one could endorse a candidate with actual, rational programs, such a candidate demonstrably possessed of character and ability sufficient to offer reasonable chance of carrying these programs out, we might require patience or understanding, but why would we need hope? We have seen the triumph of advertising's bluntest and most ancient tool, the unquantifiable assertion: "New" in what way? "Improved" how? "Better" than what? "Change" what in particular? "Hope" for what? These words, seemingly of broad but actually of no particular meaning, are comforting in a way similar to the self-crafted wedding ceremony. Whether or not a spouse is "respecting the other's space," is a matter of debate; whether or not he is being unfaithful is a matter of discernible fact. The author of his own marriage vows is like the supporter of the subjective assertion. He is voting for codependence. He neither makes nor requires an actual commitment. He'd simply like to "hope.

1934 it became apparent that the Germans were swiftly rearming, the leader of the British Labour Party vowed “to close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force,” and he got his candidate elected by saying so.7 The Peace Ballot, a national survey of public opinion, was distributed throughout Great Britain in 1935 and a majority of those polled stated that while they supported collective national security, they did so only “by all means short of war.” At a time when Hitler was

The principal justification offered by the Democrats for their campaign against the Iraq War was that “Bush lied” in order to persuade them to support an invasion that was unnecessary, illegal and immoral. This claim was the only way Democrats could explain the otherwise inexplicable and unconscionable fact that they had turned against a war they had supported for domestic political reasons, when an anti-war primary candidate, Howard Dean appeared to be on his way to winning their presidential primary.

Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly

The official obeys whom he serves. Nominated independently of the people, elected because there is no choice between candidates so nominated, the official feels responsibility to his master alone, and his master is the political machine of his party. The people whom he serves in theory, he may safely disobey; having the support of his political organization, he is sure of his renomination and knows he will be carried through the election, because his opponent will offer nothing better to the long suffering voter

identity politics endorse the concept that people are essentially tribal, and our differences are irreconcilable, which of course makes diversity and inclusion impossible. This is the toxic dead-end of identity politics; it’s a trap. But even so I didn’t reject people because they believed in this, or wanted to align themselves with a particular candidate. They were free to do as they wanted, and as a friend I supported them. I might not have agreed with them but I wasn’t about to unfriend anyone because of what his politics happened to be.

The underlying point of the letter was to notify Grant that, if Sherman’s brother John should be a candidate for president, “it would be unnatural for me to oppose or qualify his purpose.”9 When he received this letter in Tokyo, Grant was deeply moved by Sherman’s sensitivity in explaining why he might be forced to support his brother. With tears in his eyes, he told Young, “‘People may wonder . . . why I love Sherman. How could I help loving Sherman. And he has always been the same during the thirty five years I have known him. He was so at West Point.

Ordinary voters are beginning to sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them. The world is changing all around, and they don’t understand how or why. Power is shifting away from them, but they are unsure where it has gone. In Britain voters imagine that power might have shifted to the EU, so they vote for Brexit. In the USA voters imagine that ‘the establishment’ monopolizes all the power, so they support anti-establishment candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The sad truth is that nobody knows where all the power has gone.

The current leading candidates for dark matter are particles predicted to exist from supersymmetric theories, extensions of current particle physics that include a new symmetry of Nature. The reader may recognize the “super” in supersymmetry from superstring theory, a candidate theory for unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics. As of the winter of 2014, no evidence for supersymmetry had been found, despite decades of intense search and the enthusiastic support of many physicists. At this point, it is unclear and somewhat doubtful that supersymmetry is realized in Nature.

I have no illusions that I, by myself, pose any threat to the current status quo. They, who have effectively neutered and marginalized the population so greatly, that a coffee-table book of Madonna’s twat constitutes a greater threat in Americans’ minds than does a 150-billion-dollar defense budget during peacetime (more on Madonna’s twat later.)... ...For all the lip service being paid by our candidates for the need to change, it looks like Business As Usual here in America. So, who am I supporting? Which candidate best represents my interests? As for me, I’m voting for Madonna’s twat.

I have no criticism of the basic concept of irrefutable authority. Properly employed, it is the easiest, the surest, and the proper way to resolve conflicts. There is an omnipresent temptation, however, to rely on such authority regardless of its applicability; and I know of no better examples than the scriptures and the Constitution. We find it easy to lapse into the expansive notion that the Constitution, like the gospel, embraces all truth and that it protects and guarantees all that is right, equitable, and just. From that grand premise it is only a short and comfortable leap to the proposition that the Constitution embraces my particular notion of what is right, equitable, and just. The Constitution lends itself to this kind of use because of its breadth. Issues such as foreign aid, fluoridation of water, public versus private education, progressive income tax, to which political party I should belong and which candidate I should support; questions about economic development and environmental quality control; questions about the power of labor unions and the influence of big business in government--all these are issues of great importance. But these questions cannot and ought not to be resolved by simply resorting to irrefutable authority. Neither the Constitution nor the scriptures contain answers to these questions, and under the grand plan of eternal progress it is our responsibility to develop our own skills by working out our own answers through our own thought processes. For example, the Constitution authorizes an income tax, but it neither commands nor forbids an income tax. That is a policy issue on which the Constitution--and the scriptures--are silent. Attempting to resolve our differences of opinion by asserting that if our opponents only understood the scriptures or the Constitution they would see that the whole answer is contained therein only results in foreclosing the careful, rational attention that these issues deserve and require. Resorting to several broad provisions of the Constitution in answer to that kind of question is just plain intellectual laziness. We, of all people, have an obligation to respect the Constitution--to respect it not only for what it is and what it does, but also for what it is not and what it does not do. For in this as in other contexts, improper use of that which is grand can only result in the diminution of its grandeur.

That was brought home even more deeply less than a year into the movement, when former Polish president and communist fighter Lech Walesa came to Illinois to support a Tea Party candidate. Why? “The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations,” he said. “There was the hope that whenever there was something going wrong in the world, you could count on the United States. Today we’ve lost that hope.” Walesa and others like him—people who have felt the oppression and the totalitarianism of the state at a fundamental level—understand that America is the beacon of freedom and liberty.

Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: ‘When [Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli’ to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, ‘a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.’ According to Wright, Obama then told him, ‘You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.’ But privately, Obama and his family prayed with Wright just before the presidential announcement.

Ordinary voters are beginning to sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them. The world is changing all around, and they don’t understand how or why. Power is shifting away from them, but they are unsure where it has gone. In Britain voters imagine that power might have shifted to the EU, so they vote for Brexit. In the USA voters imagine that ‘the establishment’ monopolizes all the power, so they support anti-establishment candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The sad truth is that nobody knows where all the power has gone. Power will definitely not shift back to ordinary voters if Britain leaves the EU nor if Trump takes over the White House.

Hundreds of political assassinations related to minority races, labor leaders and spokesmen against fascism have taken place in the U.S. since World War II. In 1963, the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas allowed our own hidden, clandestine government to maintain control. The candidate for President in 1968, Robert Kennedy, was murdered by the same people on the night of his victory in the primaries. The judiciary, including the Supreme Court, have supported secret government by lending its authority to the concealment of conspiracies to murder our leaders. They refuse to examine documents that exist, allow truth to remain locked in the National Archives to perpetuate the “national security” lie.

While one should always be wary about painting large groups of people with a broad brush, it is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamophobia, and many more hateful traits. There is certainly a significant difference between “because of” and “despite” in this context, and sensitivity to the difference should attune us to the importance of mass organizing, which can divert potential fascist-sympathizers away from the Far Right. It is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.

Even the most talented executives are a blend of strengths and weaknesses, light and dark. One of the most difficult jobs in running a company is to keep people’s energies focused by giving them new challenges. As we looked for the next generation of leaders at Disney, only those who could handle highly varied responsibilities were going to be candidates. The company had become too interdependent to rely on highly specialized managers with narrow sets of skills. I was less drawn to people with perfect credentials for a given job than to those who had strong underlying qualities such as common sense, character, creativity, and passion. With those traits—and the right training and support—people tend to succeed at whatever jobs they’re given.

He knew how to work a crowd and how to package himself as a celebrity. It didn’t matter what the press said about him, he told an associate. “The main thing is that they mention us.” Now let us contemplate one simple but remarkable fact: the Nazis charged entrance fees to Hitler’s speeches! Is there any other politician of the twentieth century who would be considered worth spending money to hear? Churchill at his best, perhaps, though not on so regular a basis as Hitler or with his frequency. Churchill wasn’t the polished performer that Hitler was—just think of the difference in their body language. And before Donald Trump, perhaps, it’s impossible to imagine any modern American candidate for office asking people to pay for the privilege of listening to him try to win their political support.

Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.

We've given them more than we've taken away, said the Commander. Think of the trouble they had before. Don't you remember the singles' bars, the indignity of high school blind dates? The meat market. Don't you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a man easily and the ones who couldn't? Some of them were desperate, they starved themselves thin or pumped their breasts full of silicone, had their noses cut off. Think of the human misery. He waved a hand at his stacks of old magazines. They were always complaining. Problems this, problems that. Remember the ads in the Personal columns, Bright attractive woman, thirty-five… This way they all get a man, nobody's left out. And then if they did marry, they could be left with a kid, two kids, the husband might just get fed up and take off, disappear, they'd have to go on welfare. Or else he'd stay around and beat them up. Or if they had A job, the children in daycare or left with some brutal ignorant woman, and they'd have to pay for that themselves, out of their wretched little paychecks. Money was the only measure of worth, lor everyone, they got no respect as mothers. No wonder they were giving up on the whole business. This way they're protected, they can fulfill their biological destinies in peace. With full support and encouragement. Now, tell me. You're an intelligent person, I like to hear what you think. What did we overlook? Love, I said. Love? said the Commander. What kind of love? Falling in love, I said. The Commander looked at me with his candid boy's eyes. Oh yes, he said. I've read the magazines, that's what they were pushing, wasn't it? But look at the stats, my dear. Was it really worth it, falling in love? Arranged marriages have always worked out just as well, if not better.

What the turbulent months of the campaign and the election revealed most of all, I think, was that the American people were voicing a profound demand for change. On the one hand, the Humphrey people were demanding a Marshall Plan for our diseased cities and an economic solution to our social problems. The Nixon and Wallace supporters, on the other hand, were making their own limited demands for change. They wanted more "law and order," to be achieved not through federal spending but through police, Mace, and the National Guard. We must recognize and accept the demand for change, but now we must struggle to give it a progressive direction. For the immediate agenda, I would make four proposals. First, the Electoral College should be eliminated. It is archaic, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. Had Nixon not achieved a majority of the electoral votes, Wallace might have been in the position to choose and influence our next President. A shift of only 46,000 votes in the states of Alaska, Delaware, New Jersey, and Missouri would have brought us to that impasse. We should do away with this system, which can give a minority and reactionary candidate so much power and replace it with one that provides for the popular election of the President. It is to be hoped that a reform bill to this effect will emerge from the hearings that will soon be conducted by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. Second, a simplified national registration law should be passed that provides for universal permanent registration and an end to residence requirements. Our present system discriminates against the poor who are always underregistered, often because they must frequently relocate their residence, either in search of better employment and living conditions or as a result of such poorly planned programs as urban renewal (which has been called Negro removal). Third, the cost of the presidential campaigns should come from the public treasury and not from private individuals. Nixon, who had the backing of wealthy corporate executives, spent $21 million on his campaign. Humphrey's expenditures totaled only $9.7 million. A system so heavily biased in favor of the rich cannot rightly be called democratic. And finally, we must maintain order in our public meetings. It was disgraceful that each candidate, for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, had to be surrounded by cordons of police in order to address an audience. And even then, hecklers were able to drown him out. There is no possibility for rational discourse, a prerequisite for democracy, under such conditions. If we are to have civility in our civil life, we must not permit a minority to disrupt our public gatherings.

For all the noise and heat generated by the 1840 campaign, its most lasting legacy may have been one of the shortest words in the English language. In the spring of 1839, the phrase “OK” began to circulate in Boston as shorthand for “oll korrect,” a slangy way of saying “all right.” Early in 1840, Van Buren’s supporters began to use the trendy expression as a way to identify their candidate, whom they labored to present as “Old Kinderhook,” perhaps in imitation of Jackson’s Old Hickory. Van Buren even wrote “OK” next to his signature. It spread like wildfire, and to this day it is a universal symbol of something elemental in the American character—informality, optimism, efficiency, call it what you will. It is spoken seven times a day by the average citizen, two billion utterances overall. And, of course it goes well beyond our borders; if there is a single sound America has contributed to the esperanto of global communication, this is it.

By 1980 the bipartisan consensus on women—that the laws should not discriminate on grounds of sex and that qualified women should be allowed to compete for jobs at every level—had seriously unraveled. There was no more room for good-government Republicans to agree to disagree on matters such as the Equal Rights Amendment while well-heeled women such as Anne Armstrong and Pat Lindh “nagged” long-suffering men in the White House for a token appointment here and there. At its 1980 convention, the Republican Party, firmly in the hands of the conservative wing, and about to nominate Ronald Reagan, repudiated its support for the Equal Rights Amendment and allied itself publicly with the opponents of women’s abortion rights. Polling revealed that women were starting to peel off from the Grand Old Party. Four years later, the gender gap, wherein women disproportionately support the Democratic candidate and men the Republican, would emerge as a constant in American politics.

Pastor Max Lucado of San Antonio, Texas, said in an editorial for the Washington Post in February 2016 that he was “chagrined” by Trump’s antics. He ridiculed a war hero. He made a mockery of a reporter’s menstrual cycle. He made fun of a disabled reporter. He referred to a former first lady, Barbara Bush, as “mommy” and belittled Jeb Bush for bringing her on the campaign trail. He routinely calls people “stupid” and “dummy.” One writer catalogued 64 occasions that he called someone “loser.” These were not off-line, backstage, overheard, not-to-be-repeated comments. They were publicly and intentionally tweeted, recorded and presented.18 Lucado went on to question how Christians could support a man doing these things as a candidate for president, much less as someone who repeatedly attempted to capture evangelical audiences by portraying himself as similarly committed to Christian values. He continued, “If a public personality calls on Christ one day and calls someone a ‘bimbo’ the next, is something not awry? And to do so, not once, but repeatedly, unrepentantly and unapologetically? We stand against bullying in schools. Shouldn’t we do the same in presidential politics?” Rolling Stone reported on several evangelical leaders pushing against a Trump nomination, including North Carolina radio host and evangelical Dr. Michael Brown, who wrote an open letter to Jerry Falwell Jr., blasting his endorsement of Donald Trump. Brown wrote, “As an evangelical follower of Jesus, the contrast is between putting nationalism first or the kingdom of God first. From my vantage point, you and other evangelicals seem to have put nationalism first, and that is what deeply concerns me.”19 John Stemberger, president and general counsel for Florida Family Action, lamented to CNN, “The really puzzling thing is that Donald Trump defies every stereotype of a candidate you would typically expect Christians to vote for.” He wondered, “Should evangelical Christians choose to elect a man I believe would be the most immoral and ungodly person ever to be president of the United States?”20 A

On the eve of Super Tuesday, the establishment struck. Despite having raised tens of millions of dollars, and having run campaigns that were still seen in many circles as credible, two of the leading moderate Democrats in the race, Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, abruptly canceled their candidacies and endorsed Biden. Both flew to Texas, the most hotly contested of the primary states, to appear with the former vice president. They were joined by another former candidate, Texan Beto O’Rourke, in a highly choreographed show of support. The establishment had succeeded in uniting, in support of Biden, the candidates who had been dividing up the moderate vote. Meanwhile, the liberal and progressive vote continued to be divided between Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and myself. Despite poor showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, Warren chose to stay in the race. I was closer to her on the issues than any other candidate. But, at a point where her endorsement could have been significant in a number of Super Tuesday states, she chose not to give it. Even

During the same hours of 1993 when the chopper crews in Somalia were slowly being overpowered and gunned down, there were twenty-four young boys back in the United States who would grow up to be future players in that African struggle. They had no way to know anything yet about the unique fighting group every one of them would eventually strive with all his determination to join. They also couldn’t know, though they would one day find out in person, that this particular battle corps is so elite, the candidate must first be a Navy SEAL just to attempt to get through the training - and even then, three out of four of those superb warrior-athletes fail to qualify. The group has had numerous military names during its long rise from the murky history of the early “frogmen” swimmers, to the black operations of the Underwater Demolition Teams whose only calling card was to render their targets dead, to the latest appellation as the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group - or DEVGRU, for those who prefer names ugly and short. But the group is better known to the general public as the near-mythical warriors of “SEAL Team Six.” Their complex training supports a brilliantly simple task: to be the very last thing their opponents see, if they are ever seen at all.

Why Trump, many wondered, including many evangelicals themselves. For decades, the Religious Right had been kindling fear in the hearts of American Christians. It was a tried-and-true recipe for their own success. Communism, secular humanism, feminism, multilateralism, Islamic terrorism, and the erosion of religious freedom—evangelical leaders had rallied support by mobilizing followers to fight battles on which the fate of the nation, and their own families, seemed to hinge. Leaders of the Religious Right had been amping up their rhetoric over the course of the Obama administration. The first African American president, the sea change in LGBTQ rights, the apparent erosion of religious freedom—coupled with looming demographic changes and the declining religious loyalty of their own children—heightened the sense of dread among white evangelicals. But in truth, evangelical leaders had been perfecting this pitch for nearly fifty years. Evangelicals were looking for a protector, an aggressive, heroic, manly man, someone who wasn’t restrained by political correctness or feminine virtues, someone who would break the rules for the right cause. Try as they might—and they did try—no other candidate could measure up to Donald Trump when it came to flaunting an aggressive, militant masculinity. He became, in the words of his religious biographers, “the ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.” 6

This mostly restrictionist trend reached an important pivot in 2012. Three major developments prompted this change in direction and momentum. First, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Arizona v. United States opinion, delivering its most consequential decision on the limits of state authority in immigration in three decades. Rejecting several provisions of Arizona's controversial omnibus immigration enforcement bill, SB 1070, the opinion nevertheless still left open possibilities for state and local involvement. Second, President Barack Obama, against the backdrop of a stalemate in comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) in Congress and contentious debates over the role of the federal executive in immigration enforcement, instituted the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program, providing administrative relief and a form of lawful presence to hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth. Finally, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate whose platform supported laws like Arizona's and called them a model for the rest of the country, lost his bid for the White House with especially steep losses among Latinos and immigrant voters. After these events in 2012, restrictive legislation at the state level waned in frequency, and a growing number of states began to pass laws aimed at the integration of unauthorized immigrants. As this book goes to press, this integrationist trend is still continuing.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

Author Shelby Steele, one of America’s most insightful commentators on race relations, notes that whites have been looking for some time for a black leader who has credibility within the black community and yet can offer whites racial absolution. This should not be taken too cynically. Many whites genuinely espouse an idealism that seeks to move beyond race, and they recognize that it’s going to take a black spokesman to make this case on a national level and help to get us there. Steele notes bluntly that this idealism cannot be divorced from a powerful sense of white racial guilt. We have to get beyond race because America’s past racial history has become such an embarrassment. Now the black leader that whites are looking for does not actually have to issue indulgences in the manner of the medieval papacy; rather, by his words and deeds, he can signal to white America that whites are no longer on the hook for past racism. In Steele’s view, whites have been eagerly, hungrily awaiting the black leader who would give them a chance, through their support of his leadership, not merely to say to others but to feel, in their innermost being, “Whew, I am not a racist.” Steele speculated that whites may be willing to pay heavily both in money and in political support if such a candidate appeared on the horizon. He would truly be the anointed one.11 Obama’s ingenuity was to recognize that this unique opportunity required a black man of a kind not seen in American politics before. Such a man would have to look black but act white.

If you are an evangelical reading this book, then I would ask you to look around and see what your witness has wrought. The nation is polarized. The candidates you back want to take us back to a mythical time—apparently the 1950s—that honestly did not exist. The bile and hatred of some of the leaders you emulate make it impossible for people to believe whatever witness you have left. While you are clinging to God and guns, mothers are clinging to pictures of children who have been shot dead in classrooms, in streets, in malls, in cars. More people go hungry today than ever before. Inequality is mounting. Calls for law and order mean more Black and Brown bodies dead at the hands of the police. The nation’s infrastructure is failing. Disdain for science has left America behind during a pandemic, while the rest of the world moves forward. The president you followed slavishly declared “American carnage” in his inaugural speech. Look around. You helped make this carnage we now experience. All of these things have occurred because evangelicals, through religious lobbying and interference, supported the political structures that curtailed, limited, or struck down truly important issues. The polarization we are experiencing in government has stymied progress. That polarization has taken on a resemblance to ideological and theological battles. Your nationalistic evangelicalism is hurting others. Your racism is actively engaged in killing bodies and souls. My analysis and prognostications may be dire, but it is never too late to make amends.

Explaining the rise of MSNBC, the Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said: “I think there are a lot of people out there who are dramatically troubled by the direction of the country, and they would like to be reminded that: (A) they’re not alone, and (B) there’s an alternative”. But loneliness isn’t the problem; the direction of the country is. And being alone together is not an alternative direction, just as a cancer support group does not shrink a tumour. It’s probably true that viewers of MSNBC are sometimes inspired to give money to progressive candidates, and perhaps there’s someone out there whose politics were changed, rather that their loneliness assuaged, by Rachel Maddow. It’s certainly true that a hybrid car gets better mileage than a traditional gas car. But primarily, these things make us feel better. And it can be dangerous to feel better when things are not getting better. […] Too often, the feeling of making a difference doesn’t correspond to the difference being made – worse, an inflated sense of accomplishment can relieve the burden of doing what actually needs to be done. Do the children getting vaccines paid for by Bill Gates really care if he feels annoyed when he gives 46 percent of his vast wealth to charity? Do the children dying of preventable diseases really care if Jeff Bezos feels altruistic when he donates only 1.2 percent of his even vaster wealth? If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job put performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?

And then I saw him speak. Years later, after writing dozens upon dozens of presidential speeches, it would become impossible to listen to rhetoric without editing it in my head. On that historic Iowa evening, Obama began with a proclamation: “They said this day would never come.” Rereading those words today, I have questions. Who were “they,” exactly? Did they really say “never”? Because if they thought an antiwar candidate with a robust fund-raising operation could never win a divided three-way Democratic caucus, particularly with John Edwards eating into Hillary Clinton’s natural base of support among working-class whites, then they didn’t know what they were talking about. All this analysis would come later, though, along with stress-induced insomnia and an account at the Navy Mess. At the time, I was spellbound. The senator continued: “At this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said you couldn’t do.” He spoke like presidents in movies. He looked younger than my dad. I didn’t have time for a second thought, or even a first one. I simply believed. Barack Obama spoke for the next twelve minutes, and except for a brief moment when the landing gear popped out and I thought we were going to die, I was riveted. He told us we were one people. I nodded knowingly at the gentleman in the middle seat. He told us he would expand health care by bringing Democrats and Republicans together. I was certain it would happen as he described. He looked out at a sea of organizers and volunteers. “You did this,” he told them, “because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.

The depressed person shared that she could remember, all too clearly, how at her third boarding school, she had once watched her roommate talk to some boy on their room's telephone as she (i.e., the roommate) made faces and gestures of entrapped repulsion and boredom with the call, this popular, attractive, and self-assured roommate finally directing at the depressed person an exaggerated pantomime of someone knocking on a door until the depressed person understood that she was to open their room's door and step outside and knock loudly on it so as to give the roommate an excuse to end the call. The depressed person had shared this traumatic memory with members of her Support System and had tried to articulate how bottomlessly horrible she had felt it would have been to have been that nameless pathetic boy on the phone and how now, as a legacy of that experience, she dreaded, more than almost anything, the thought of ever being someone you had to appeal silently to someone nearby to help you contrive an excuse to get off the phone with. The depressed person would implore each supportive friend to tell her the very moment she (i.e., the friend) was getting bored or frustrated or repelled or felt she (i.e., the friend) had other more urgent or interesting things to attend to, to please for God's sake be utterly candid and frank and not spend one moment longer on the phone than she was absolutely glad to spend. The depressed person knew perfectly well, of course, she assured the therapist;' how such a request could all too possibly be heard not as an invitation to get off the telephone at will but actually as a needy, manipulative plea not to get off-never to get off-the telephone.

After that preacher told me to quit thinking, I began thinking harder. I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.

If the pursuit of learning is not defended by the educated citizen, it will not be defended at all. For there will always be those who scoff at intellectuals, who cry out against research, who seek to limit our educational system. Modern cynics and skeptics see no more reason for landing a man on the moon, which we shall do, than the cynics and skeptics of half a millennium ago saw for the discovery of this country. They see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. But the educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that "knowledge is power," more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, "enlighten the people generally ... tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day." And, therefore, the educated citizen has a special obligation to encourage the pursuit of learning, to promote exploration of the unknown, to preserve the freedom of inquiry, to support the advancement of research, and to assist at every level of government the improvement of education for all Americans, from grade school to graduate school. Secondly, the educated citizen has an obligation to serve the public. He may be a precinct worker or President. He may give his talents at the courthouse, the State house, the White House. He may be a civil servant or a Senator, a candidate or a campaign worker, a winner or a loser. But he must be a participant and not a spectator. - President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (from a commencement address given at Vanderbilt University on May 18, 1963)

ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides. But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold. Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

If I had lied to the CIA, perhaps I might have passed a test. Instead of writing a book about the White House, I’d be poisoning a drug kingpin with a dart gun concealed inside a slightly larger dart gun, or making love to a breathy supermodel in the interest of national security. I’ll never know. I confessed to smoking pot two months before. The sunniness vanished from my interviewer’s voice. “Normally we like people who break the rules,” Skipper told me, “but we can’t consider anyone who’s used illegal substances in the past twelve months.” Just like that, my career as a terrorist hunter was over. I thought my yearning for higher purpose would vanish with my CIA dreams, the way a Styrofoam container follows last night’s Chinese food into the trash. To my surprise, it stuck around. In the weeks that followed, I pictured myself in all sorts of identities: hipster, world traveler, banker, white guy who plays blues guitar. But these personas were like jeans a half size too small. Trying them on gave me an uncomfortable gut feeling and put my flaws on full display. My search for replacement selves began in November. By New Year’s Eve I was mired in the kind of existential funk that leads people to find Jesus, or the Paleo diet, or Ayn Rand. Instead, on January 3, I found a candidate. I was on an airplane when I discovered him, preparing for our initial descent into JFK. This was during the early days of live in-flight television, and I was halfway between the Home Shopping Network and one of the lesser ESPNs when I stumbled across coverage of a campaign rally in Iowa. Apparently, a caucus had just finished. Speeches were about to begin. With nothing better to occupy my time, I confirmed that my seat belt was fully fastened. I made sure my tray table was locked. Then, with the arena shrunk to fit my tiny seatback screen, I watched a two-inch-tall guy declare victory. It’s not like I hadn’t heard about Barack Obama. I had heard his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His presidential campaign had energized my more earnest friends. But I was far too mature to take them seriously. They supported someone with the middle name Hussein to be president of the United States. While they were at it, why not cast a ballot for the Tooth Fairy? Why not nominate Whoopi Goldberg for pope?

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin.

By the time Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somalia on October 25, 2011, the twenty-four boys back in America who had been so young during the 1993 attack on the downed American aid support choppers in Mogadishu had since grown to manhood. Now they were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and each one had become determined to qualify for the elite U.S. Navy unit called DEVGRU. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy and undergoing their essential basic training, every one of them endured the challenges of BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, where the happy goal is to become “drownproofed” via what amounts to repeated semidrowning, while also learning dozens of ways to deliver explosive death and demolition. This was only the starting point. Once qualification was over and the candidates were sworn in, three-fourths of the qualified Navy SEALS who tried to also qualify for DEVGRU dropped out. Those super-warriors were overcome by the challenges, regardless of their peak physical condition and being in the prime of their lives. This happened because of the intensity of the training. Long study and practice went into developing a program specifically designed to seek out and expose any individual’s weakest points. If the same ordeals were imposed on captured terrorists who were known to be guilty of killing innocent civilians, the officers in charge would get thrown in the brig. Still, no matter how many Herculean physical challenges are presented to a DEVGRU candidate, the brutal training is primarily mental. It reveals each soldier’s principal foe to be himself. His mortal fears and deepest survival instinct emerge time after time as the essential demons he must overcome. Each DEVGRU member must reach beyond mere proficiency at dealing death. He must become two fighters combined: one who is trained to a state of robotic muscle memory in specific dark skills, and a second who is fluidly adaptive, using an array of standard SEAL tactics. Only when he can live and work from within this state of mind will he be trusted to pursue black operations in every form of hostile environment. Therefore the minority candidate who passes into DEVGRU becomes a member of the “Tier One” Special Mission Unit. He will be assigned to reconnaissance or assault, but his greatest specialty will always be to remain lethal in spite of rapidly changing conditions. From the day he is accepted into that elite tribe, he embodies what is delicately called “preemptive and proactive counterterrorist operations.” Or as it might be more bluntly described: Hunt them down and kill them wherever they are - and is possible, blow up something. Each one of that small percentage who makes it through six months of well-intended but malicious torture emerges as a true human predator. If removing you from this world becomes his mission, your only hope of escaping a DEVGRU SEAL is to find a hiding place that isn’t on land, on the sea, or in the air.

I walk everywhere wearing orange pants, an orange vest, and a yellow bicycle helmet with a bumper supporting a political candidate I don’t support. I want people to associate that politician with a retard in the hopes they don’t vote for him. Or they could just associate him with a retard because his vice president is one.

told his supporters that the campaign had “pushed this country in the direction of peace,” adding, “If we pushed the day of peace just one day closer, then every minute and every hour and every bone-crushing effort in this campaign was worth the entire effort.” When there is no overriding issue on which a campaign was based, the losing candidates have often offered a laundry list of causes for which they promise to keep fighting. This particular rhetorical device has been

There may be some legitimate surprise at the president’s extremism and the harm he is causing. After all, candidate Obama and his supporters, beginning in 2007, sedulously hid his history of radicalism.10

Sheldon Adelson, for example, gave more than $53 million to Super PACs, but all eight of the candidates he supported lost.59 Karl Rove, a strategic mastermind who won fame advising George W. Bush, oversaw groups that spent $175 million and still lost twenty-one out of thirty elections.

In collaborative professionalism, we want deeper collaboration in stronger relationships of trust, support, and solidarity. We also want more professionalism involving good data and good judgment, more candid and respectful professional dialogue, more thoughtful feedback, more collective responsibility for each other’s results, and more courageous engagement with bolder visions of education that will help young people become change makers in their own and other people’s lives.

The political class, in a very real sense, is merely the tip of an iceberg that threatens to sink the ship of state. It is buttressed by a media establishment (the mainstream media) that supports its candidates uncritically, while hammering any outsider with charges that are simply inaccurate and yet maddeningly difficult to refute

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place - by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common sense cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

Smallwood the Coalition candidate was returned; and the Imperialist of 27 October offered a £500 reward ‘to any person furnishing evidence to support a successful petition under “The Corrupt Practices Act

During the campaign, I supported and encouraged the Clinton campaign strategy, but in hindsight, I lost track of one of the core lessons of Obama's success--campaigns are about telling the American people a story--a story about where we are, where we are going, and why you are the right person, and your opponent is the wrong person, to take the country there. It's a story that needs to be compelling, but also easily understood, and then driven home by the candidate and the campaign with relentless discipline.