Henry A. Giroux
Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual

In the face of a putrid and poisonous election cycle that ended with Trump’s presidential victory, liberals and conservatives are quick to argue that Americans have fallen prey to a culture of incivility.

It’s true that in the run-up to the presidential election, Donald Trump strategically showcased incivility in his public appearances as a mark of solidarity with many of his white male followers. However, it is a mistake to lump the racism, bigotry, misogyny and ultra-nationalism that Trump has played upon under an obscuring and euphemistic notion of “incivility.” And it is simultaneously a mistake to delegitimize the anger that oppressed people feel about racism, sexism or class exploitation by categorizing protests over these injuries as merely “incivility.”

Understanding the ramifications of current discourses of incivility will be one key to understanding the results of the presidential election and Trump’s ascension. Clearly, Trump’s embrace of incivility (in addition to his embrace of racism and xenophobia) was a winning strategy, one that not only signaled the degree to which the politics of extremism has moved from the fringes to the center of American politics, but also one that turned politics into a spectacle that fed the rating machines of the mainstream media.

The incivility machine Trump resurrected as tool of resistance against establishment politicians played a major role in gaining him the presidency. Moreover, it turned politics into what Guy Debord once called a “perpetual motion machine” built on fear, anxiety, the war on terror and a full-fledged attack on women, the welfare state and people of color.

Too often during this election season, a discourse of “bad manners” has paraded as insight while working to hide the effects of power, politics, racial injustice and other forms of oppression.

The rhetoric of “incivility” often functions as a conservative ideological tool, working to silence critics by describing them as ill-tempered, rude and uncivilized. Politics, in this sense, shifts from a focus on substance to style — reworking the notion of critical thinking and action through a rulebook of alleged collegiality — which becomes code for the elevated character and manners of the privileged classes. Within this rhetoric, the wealthy, noble and rich are usually deemed to possess admirable character and to engage in civil behavior. At the same time, those who are poor, unemployed, homeless or subject to police violence are not seen as victims of larger political, social and economic forces. On the contrary, their problems are reduced to the depoliticizing discourse of bad character, defined as an individual pathology, and whatever resistance they present is dismissed as rude and uncivil.

As a rich white man who has intentionally embraced an “uncivil” persona, Trump has related to this discourse in unpredictable ways. By claiming he loves the uneducated and appealing to the crudest instincts of the mob, Trump elevates incivility to a performance — a pedagogy of righteous indignation — while removing it as a platform for a substantial political critique. The uncivil persona becomes a threat, a signpost for misdirected anger and a symbol of a mass in need of a savior.

There is more at issue here than ideological obfuscation and a flight from social responsibility on the part of the dominant classes; there is also a language of violence that serves to reproduce existing modes of domination and concentrated relations of power. In this instance, argument, evidence and informed judgment — when they hold power accountable or display a strong response to injustice — are subordinated to the category of unchecked emotions, a politics that embraces rude behavior and a propensity for violence. When deployed in a way that obfuscates the injuries of class, racism, sexism, among other issues, the discourse of incivility reduces politics to the realm of the personal and affective while cancelling out broader political issues such as the underlying conditions that produce anger, the effects of misguided resentment, and a passion that connects the body and mind.

As Benjamin DeMott has pointed out, the discourse of incivility does not raise the crucial question of why American society is tipping over into the dark politics of authoritarianism. On the contrary, the question now asked is “Why has civility declined?” Tied to the privatized orbits of neoliberalism, this is a discourse that trades chiefly in good manners, the virtues of moral uplift and praiseworthy character, all the while refusing to raise private troubles to the level of public issues. The call to civility confuses the relationship between anger and resentment, dismissing both as instances of faulty character and bad manners.

What happens to a democracy when incivility becomes a central organizing principle of politics? What happens to rational debate, culture and justice?

The US has become a country motivated less by anger, which can be used to address the underlying social, political and economic causes of social discontent, than by a galloping culture of individualized resentment, which personalizes problems and tends to seek vengeance on those individuals and groups viewed as a threat to American society. One can argue that the call to civility and condemnation of incivility in public life by the ruling elite no longer registers favorably among individuals and groups who are less interested in mimicking the discourse and manners of the financial elite than in expressing their resentment as they struggle for power, however rude such expressions might appear to the mainstream media and rich and powerful. Rather than an expression of a historic if not dangerous politics of unchecked personal resentment (as seen among many Trump supporters), we are witnessing a legitimate and desperately needed politics of outrage and anger — one that privileges the struggle for justice over an empty call for civility and acceptable manners.

Difference Between Anger and Resentment

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nger is connected with injustice, while resentment is more about personalized pettiness.

We see elements of crucial anger among the many supporters of Bernie Sanders, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement and the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Anger can be a disruption that offers the possibility for critical analysis, calling out the social forces of oppression and violence in which so many current injustices are rooted.

Meanwhile, resentment operates out of a friend/enemy distinction that produces convenient scapegoats. It is the stuff of loathing, racism and spontaneous violence that often gives rise to the spectacle of fear-mongering and implied threats of state repression. In this instance, ideas lose their grip on reality and critical thought falls by the wayside. Echoes of such scapegoat-driven animosity can be heard in Trump’s “rhetorical cluster bombs,” in which he stated publicly that he would like to punch protesters in the face, punish women who have abortions, bring back state-sanctioned torture and, of course, much more. Genuine civic attachments are now cancelled out in the bombast of vileness and shame, which has been made into a national pastime and central to a spectacularized politics.

Reflection no longer challenges a poisonous appeal to commonsense or the signposts of racism, hatred and bigotry. Manufactured ignorance opens the door to an unapologetic culture of bullying and violence aimed at Muslims, immigrants, Blacks and others who do not fit into Trump’s notion of “America.” This is not about the breakdown of civility in US politics or the bemoaned growth of incivility. Throughout its history, US society has been inundated by a toxic, racist ideology that oppresses and marginalizes Black people, Indigenous people and immigrants of color, and particularly since 9/11, has singled out Muslims as targets. It is a market-driven ideology that enshrines greed and self-interest, and a sustained attack on public values and the common good, fueled by the policies of a financial elite — much of it coded by both the Republican and Democratic political establishment.

Trump did not invent these forces; he simply brought them to the surface and made them the centerpiece of his campaign. As anti-democratic pressures mount, the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics and responsibility. The goal of making the world a better place has been replaced by dystopian narratives about how to survive alone in a world whose destruction is just a matter of time. The lure of a better and more just future has given way under the influence of neoliberalism to questions of mere survival. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued in his books Wasted Lives and Consuming Life, entire populations once protected by the social contract are now considered disposable, dispatched to the garbage dump of a society that equates one’s humanity exclusively with their ability to consume.

The not-so-subtle signs of the culture of resentment and cruelty are everywhere, and not just in the proliferation of extremist talking heads, belligerent nihilists and right-wing conspiracy types blathering over the airways, on talk radio, and across various registers of screen culture. Young children, especially those whose parents are being targeted by Trump’s rhetoric, report being bullied more. Hate crimes are on the rise. And state-sanctioned violence is accelerating against Native Americans, Black youth, and others now deemed unworthy and disposable in Trump’s America.

In the mainstream media, the endless and unapologetic proliferation of lies become fodder for higher ratings, informed by a suffocating pastiche of talking heads, all of whom surrender to “the incontestable demands of quiet acceptance,” as Brad Evans and Julien Reid have argued in Truthout. Politics has been reduced to the cult of the spectacle and a performative register of shock, but not merely, as Neal Gabler observes, “in the name of entertainment.” The framing mechanism that drives the mainstream media is a sink-or-swim individualism and a shark-like notion of competition that accentuates and accelerates hostility, insults and the politics of humiliation.

Capitalism’s New Age of Bullying

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]harles Derber and Yale Magrass are right in arguing in Bully Nation that “Capitalism breeds competition and teaches that losers deserve their fate.” But capitalism also does more. It creates an unbridled individualism that embodies a pathological disdain for community, produces a cruel indifference to the social contract, disdains the larger social good, and creates a predatory culture that replaces compassion, sharing and a concern for the other. As the discourse of the common good and compassion withers, the only vocabulary left is that of the bully — one that takes pride in the civic-enervating binary of winners and losers. What has been on full display in the presidential election of 2016 is the merging of the culture of cruelty, the logic of egregious self-interest, a deadly anti-intellectualism, a ravaging unbridled anger, a politics of disposability, and a toxic fear of others. Jessica Lustig captures this organized culture of violence, grudges and resentment in The New York Times Magazine with the following comments:

Grievance is the animating theme of this election and the natural state of at least one of the candidates; Trump is a public figure whose ideology, such as it is, essentially amounts to a politics of the personal grudge. It has drawn to him throngs of disaffected citizens all too glad to reclaim the epithet “deplorable.” But beyond these aggrieved hordes, it can seem at times as if nearly everyone in the country is nursing wounds, cringing over slights and embarrassments, inveighing against enemies and wishing for retribution. Everyone has someone, or something, to resent.

It gets worse. In the age of a bullying internet culture, the trolling community has elected one of its own as president of the United States. Criticizing the pernicious trolling produced by political extremists should not suggest a generalized indictment of the internet and social media, since the latter have also been key tools in pushing back against Trump’s egregiousness. As the apostle of publicity for publicity’s sake, Trump has adopted the practices of reality TV, building his reputation on insults, humiliations, and a discourse of provocation and hate.

According to The New York Times, since announcing his candidacy, Trump used Twitter to insult at least 282 people, places and things. Not only has he honed the technique of trolling, he has also made it a crucial resource in upping the ratings for the mainstream media who, it seems, are insatiable when it comes to covering Trump’s insults. Trump has done more than bring a vicious online harassment culture into the mainstream, he has also legitimated the worst dimensions of politics and brought out of the shadows white nationalists, racist militia types, social media trolls, overt misogynists and a variety of reactionaries who have turned their hate-filled discourse into a weaponized element of political culture. This was all the more obvious when Trump hired Stephen K. Bannon to run his campaign. The former executive chairman of Breitbart News is well known for his extremist views and for his unwavering support for the political alt-right. One of his more controversial headlines on Breitbart read, “Would you rather have feminism or cancer?” He is also considered one of the more prominent advocates of the right-wing trolling mill that is fiercely loyal to Trump. Jared Keller in The Village Voice captures perfectly the essence of Trump’s politics of trolling. He writes:

From the start, the Trump campaign has offered a tsunami of trolling, waves of provocative tweets and soundbites — from “build the wall” to “lock her up” — designed to provoke maximum outrage, followed, when the resulting heat felt a bit too hot, by the classic schoolyard bully’s excuse: that it was merely “sarcasm” or a “joke.” In a way, it is. It’s just a joke with victims and consequences…. Trump’s behavior has normalized trolling as an accepted staple of daily political discourse.

One example of such vitriol was noted by Andrew Marantz’s profile for The New Yorker on Mike Cernovich, a prominent internet troll. He writes:

His political analysis was nearly as crass as his dating advice (“Misogyny Gets You Laid”). In March, he tweeted, “Hillary’s face looks like a melting candle wax. Imagine what her brain looks like.” Next he tweeted a picture of Clinton winking, which he interpreted as “a mild stroke.” By August, he was declaring that she had both a seizure disorder and Parkinson’s disease.

In the age of trolls and the heartless regime of neoliberalism [which the Democrats also unwaveringly supported and the Clintons have been prominent in selling], politics has dissolved into a pit of performative narcissism, testifying to the distinctive power of a corporate-driven culture of consumerism and celebrity marketing, which reconfigures not just political discourse but the nature of power itself. In spite of the large-scale protests against economic injustice that ranged from Madison to Occupy Wall Street, the teacher strikes that have emerged since the 2008 Wall Street collapse, the ensuing political corruption and the consolidation of wealth and power, millions of Americans turned to the politics of resentment.

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 Amid this turmoil, we cannot let our anger simply become an expression of misdirected resentment. It is time to wake up and repudiate the notion that capitalism and democracy are the same thing. We must use our anger to fight collectively for a politics that refuses to forget the crimes of the past, so it can imagine a different future. Such a struggle is not an act of incivility, but a call to educated hope, civic courage and the need to start organizing.

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This totalitarian logic has been reinforced by the strange intersection of celebrity culture, manufactured ignorance and the cult of unbridled emotion, to inhabit a new register of resentment, which as Mark Danner points out in The New York Review of Books, takes “the shape of reality television politics.” Within such an environment, a personalized notion of resentment drives politics while misdirecting rage towards issues that reinforce totalitarian logic. Under such circumstances, the long-standing forces of nativism and demagoguery drive American politics and the truth of events is no longer open to public discussion or informed judgment. All that is left is the empty but dangerous performance of misguided hopes wrapped up in the fog of ignorance, the haze of political and moral indifference, and the looming specter of violence.

The rise of Donald Trump as a corporate-fueled celebrity troll represents the broader contempt for a politics of empathy and compassion. This contempt is the bedrock of a neoliberal formative culture that, as my colleague David Clark once remarked to me, “breeds horrors: the failures of conscience, the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions.”

The issue is no longer whether politicians, such as Donald Trump, are about to lead us into a new age of authoritarianism and bigotry. Rather, we should be seeking to locate and challenge the forces that have produced these politicians. When individualized resentment and scapegoat-centered violence are normalized, we move closer to a police state and toward an age that forgets the totalitarian impulses that gave us Iraq, state-authorized torture, a carceral state, war crimes, a plundering of the planet, and much more. Trump is only a symptom, not the cause of our troubles. Global capitalism is the monster and Trump is its most dangerous, confused and hateful messenger.

Anger is a double-edged sword and can be transformed into various forms of productive resistance or it can be appropriated and manipulated as a breeding ground for resentment, hate, bigotry and racism. What is clear is that Trump knew how to turn such an odious appeal into both a performance and a spectacle — one that mimicked the darkest anti-democratic impulses.

The Struggle Continues

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]et’s hope the planet is around long enough to begin to rethink politics in light of this election of Donald Trump to the presidency, which ranks as one of the most sickening events in American political history. Democracy, however flawed, has now collapsed into Trump’s world, one led by a serial sexual groper, liar, nativist, racist and authoritarian. As my friend Bob Herbert mentioned to me recently, “Trump threatens everything we’re supposed to stand for. He’s the biggest crisis we’ve faced in this society in my lifetime. The Supreme Court is lost for decades to come. His insane tax cuts will only expand (and lock in) the extreme inequality we’re already facing. I don’t need to provide a laundry list for you. The irony of ironies, of course, is that the very idiots, racists, misogynists and outright fools who put him in the presidency will be among those hammered worst by his madness in office.”

The strategy of the left will be set back for years as a result of this election, given Trump’s propensity for vengeance, crushing dissent and sheer animosity toward anyone who disagrees with him. When he withdraws the US from the Paris Accords, goes after Black youth with his call for racial profiling, lowers taxes for the rich, deregulates business, sets back the Supreme Court for decades and expands the police state as he begins mass deportations, maybe we should rethink where the levers of power lie.

Amid this turmoil, we cannot let our anger simply become an expression of misdirected resentment. It is time to wake up and repudiate the notion that capitalism and democracy are the same thing. We must use our anger to fight collectively for a politics that refuses to forget the crimes of the past, so it can imagine a different future. Such a struggle is not an act of incivility, but a call to educated hope, civic courage and the need to start organizing.

=By= Allie Yee

There are two parts to this report and both are in this post. The links below are The Greanville Post navigational links.

Part I: Refugees become a flash point in elections across the South
Part II: Refugees stand up to anti-immigrant sentiment in the South

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Part I: Refugees become a flash point in elections across the South

Refugees have drawn big cheers at the 2016 Rio Olympics this summer, competing as part of the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team. Comprised of athletes who’ve fled war-ravaged homelands in Africa and the Middle East, the 10-member team was created as a symbol of hope for refugees worldwide and to bring attention to the ongoing global refugee crisis.

But in the U.S. South, the presence of refugees — and their potential future arrival — have been far more controversial, and the hot-button issue has found its way into this year’s state and local elections.

The tone of the national debate over refugees was set late last year when, after the November terrorist attacks in Paris, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. But while Trump’s rhetoric was particularly extreme, his were far from the only anti-Muslim and anti-refugee statements made by politicians.

Even as local agencies and officials urged openness, over 30 governors called on federal authorities to stop resettling refugees in their state. Among them were the governors of 10 of the 13 Southern states.

“[Anti-refugee sentiment] was really fueled by the election rhetoric at the federal level,” said Stephanie Teatro, co-executive director of the Tennessee Immigrants and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC). “And we absolutely saw the trickle-down.”

Some critics charged that these statements against refugees, particularly those from Syria, were an attempt to play on people’s fears in order to score points in an election year. For example, when North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) called for a stop to resettling Syrian refugees in his state, a representative of a refugee assistance agency noted the political nature of the governor’s move.

“What we’re fighting is an election cycle,” Andrew Timbie, then with World Relief’s High Point, North Carolina, office, said at the time. He noted that raising concerns about refugees and resisting President Obama’s refugee resettlement efforts would resonate with certain voters in the state.

This fall McCrory is facing off against state Attorney General Roy Cooper (D) in one of the nation’s tightest gubernatorial races. Back in November, the McCrory campaign used his statement about banning Syrian refugees as a fundraising hook on Facebook, with a post that read “NO SYRIAN REFUGEES” and linked to his campaign’s contribution page. Cooper also put out a statement asking to “pause” Syrian refugee resettlement.

It’s not just governors and would-be governors who are using the refugee crisis for political advantage. State legislators in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and elsewhere have introduced legislation to ban new refugee arrivals to their states or to make resettlement more difficult. Texas and Alabama went so far as to sue the federal government to block refugees, although both of those lawsuits have been dismissed.

And Tennessee lawmakers passed a resolution earlier this year directing the state to sue the federal government over refugee resettlement under the 10th Amendment, which limits federal powers. The resolution passed despite reservations from Gov. Bill Haslam (R), who did not sign it, and the refusal of state Attorney General Herbert Slatery (R) to represent the state in any such lawsuit.

“There were a handful of legislators who saw this as a winning political issue,” Teatro from TIRRC said. “[They thought] that they could really run on and build a reputation on being tough on refugees.”

No lawsuit has been filed yet. Tennessee legislators are considering hiring an outside law firm to represent the state.

Fertile ground for backlash

The political backlash against refugees comes at a time when the South — a region with historically low rates of immigration — has been experiencing dramatic growth in foreign-born newcomers, including refugees.

Southern states like Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama have had some of the fastest rates of growth nationally among their foreign-born populations. And while immigrants make up only a small share of most Southern states’ population — and refugees an even smaller share —  the arrival of new languages, complexions, cultures and religions has elicited reactions from local communities ranging from wariness to outright hostility and even violence.

The anti-refugee reaction is intertwined with the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment in the region. A report published last year by TIRRC addressed this in Tennessee:

In this context of generalized anxiety and backlash against newcomers, Islamophobia was never far from the surface. An estimated 48% of refugees resettled in Tennessee in 2013 were from majority Muslim countries, while only 1% of US-born Tennesseans identify as Muslim.

Syrian refugees, who have been the focal point of the anti-refugee backlash in the past year, have been increasing in numbers in Southern states recently. But even so, they make up only a small share of all the refugees coming to the region, many of whom are coming from other conflict-torn countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Bhutan.

A sign of hope in Tennessee

A debate over refugees is also taking place on the local level across the South, with responses ranging widely from place to place.

Some local communities in the region have been extremely hostile to refugees. The TIRRC report chronicles how backlash in Tennessee cities including Nashville, Columbia, Shelbyville and Murfreesboro stoked anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment across the state. Incidents like the 2010 arson at a mosque in Murfreesboro garnered widespread media attention and established the state’s reputation as unwelcoming of newcomers.

Since the Paris terror attacks, at least two counties in North Carolina — Craven County in the east and Henderson County in the west — have passed resolutions banning the resettlement of refugees there. These moves are largely symbolic since localities don’t have the authority to enforce a ban, and the commissioners passing them have acknowledged as much. But one Henderson County commissioner said the resolution “sends a message to state and federal representatives where Henderson County stands.”

Many of the Southern communities most hostile to refugees have had few resettled there. But in communities that have become resettlement hubs, the sentiment is often very different.

“Some of the anti-refugee voices are coming from places with few refugees,” Teatro noted. “In cities and communities where refugees are actually resettled, they are welcomed and the program is defended.”

“Some of the anti-refugee voices are coming from places with few refugees,” Teatro noted. “In cities and communities where refugees are actually resettled, they are welcomed and the program is defended.”

Nashville, Tennessee, where TIRRC is based, is home to 75 percent of the refugees who have resettled in the state. The fast-growing city has been proactive in welcoming both immigrants and refugees.

Teatro was encouraged by Nashville voters’ rejection just last week of a candidate who sent a campaign mailer that attempted to stoke anti-refugee fears.

In the GOP primary for the state Senate’s District 20 seat, challenger Ron McDow attacked incumbent Steve Dickerson for being the only state Senate Republican not to vote for the resolution directing the state to sue over refugee resettlement.

McDow distributed a campaign mailer in July showing an image of an ISIS flag flying in a neighborhood, with the words, “Does Steve Dickerson want ISIS living next door to your family?” On the other side, the mailer said, “Steve Dickerson says come on in — and puts out the welcome mat for potential dangerous Syrian refugees.”

 

In response to the ads, Dickerson stood by his vote, saying, “The people who we are trying to welcome into the country are people who are literally in fear of their lives … This [ad] also misrepresents the refugee community at-large by painting them with this brush.”

In Tennessee’s Aug. 4 primary election, Dickerson won handily with 60 percent of the vote in his district. For Teatro, it was a hopeful sign.

“We know legislators will continue to play on the worst sentiments of Tennesseans,” Teatro said. “But we’re also optimistic that [Tennesseans] voted against that rhetoric.”

[Top of Post]

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Part II: Refugees stand up to anti-immigrant sentiment in the South

[Top of post]

For Ahmed Osman, coming to the U.S. was like coming to a new world.

Originally from Somalia where civil war has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, Osman arrived in snow-covered Minneapolis in March 2009.

“It [was] a totally different country in every aspect of life,” Osman said.

Osman moved to Nashville, Tennessee, later that year, coming to a Southern city with a growing Somali refugee community where he knew a few people. While he could speak English, finding a job and fitting in to the community in Nashville was still a challenge. It took him six months to find a job, he said.

Beyond the struggles of daily life, Osman, who is a Muslim immigrant, had come to a region where leaders and communities have become increasingly hostile to people like him. Since Osman arrived in Tennessee, lawmakers there and in other states across the South have introduced legislation targeting Islamic Sharia law, establishing English-only mandates and creating other barriers for immigrants.

After the Paris terror attacks last November, antagonism towards refugees, particularly those from majority Muslim countries, flared. While Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s anti-refugee rhetoric made headlines, Southern politicians have also stoked fears about refugees in the region.

That backlash has in turn motivated refugees like Osman to speak out and — for those like him who are naturalized citizens — to vote in the upcoming election.

“I hear a lot of comments from people [in my community] saying if Donald Trump is elected, he’ll send us back,” Osman said. “There is a fear created by his campaign.

“That’s why I’m focusing and everyone in my community is focusing this year,” he said.

Coming to the South

Each year since 2012, roughly 20,000 refugees have been resettled in the 13 Southern states, according a Facing South analysis of Office of Refugee Resettlement data. They make up about 30 percent of the new refugee arrivals to the country each year.

While concerns about those fleeing war-torn Syria have been the focus recently, refugees from that country have made up only about 1 percent of recent arrivals in the South between 2012 and 2015. Almost half have come from Burma and Iraq, with significant numbers from Bhutan, Cuba, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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Before coming to the U.S., refugees go through a thorough vetting process that can take years and involves several international and U.S. federal agencies. The federal government partners with local agencies, including faith-based organizations like Catholic Charities of Tennessee and Church World Services in North Carolina, to resettle refugees in local communities.

Each year since 2012, roughly 20,000 refugees have been resettled in the 13 Southern states.

When Aline Ruhashya arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1998, she felt a mix of emotions. Originally from Rwanda, she fled the 1994 genocide in her home country, traveling to Congo, Kenya and Senegal before coming to the U.S. Initially, there was a “honeymoon phase,” she said, when she was so excited to arrive and for all the promise of opportunity.

But reality quickly set in. The apartment she lived in with her relatives lacked some basic needs, like pots to cook in. A teenager when she arrived, she struggled to understand her teachers and fit in at school. And with only three months of support from the resettlement agency, she worried about how her family would support itself when that time was up.

“Those things kind of make you start wondering, am I going to be OK?” Ruhashya said.

But there were also those who extended a helping hand to Ruhashya and her family, and this was another highlight of her experience coming to the U.S. It wasn’t only the people with the refugee agency but also neighbors and teachers who helped her adjust to life in her new country.

In 2005, Ruhashya became a U.S. citizen, as refugees are eligible to do after living in the country for five years, fulfilling her dream of becoming an American. The naturalization ceremony was an emotional experience for her.

“Seeing all these people from different walks of life, different skin colors, different nationalities, becoming American citizens together,” Ruhashya explained, “It’s just like the foundation of this country.”

Overcoming the myriad of challenges involved in coming to a new country and building a new life, refugees and other immigrants contribute in important ways to their communities. A recent study by the Partnership for a New American Economy found that in North Carolina alone immigrants earned more than $19 billion in income and paid more than $5 billion in taxes. In 2014, they generated $972 million in business income and employed 120,800 people.

But recent rhetoric has increasingly cast immigrants and refugees as drains on local economies and threats to safety. These portrayals have been heartbreaking to Ruhashya, who said people don’t understand how hard it is to be a refugee and not have a country that you belong to.

“It’s not just about things like money,” she said. “This person doesn’t need anything. They just need a place to feel safe.”

Lifting up refugee voices

While debate about them rages in politics and the media, refugees themselves have seldom had a voice in the conversation, noted Adamou Mohamed with Church World Services (CWS) in Greensboro.

“Those that are being impacted by all of these negative sentiments that we’ve been seeing in the last year have not been involved much at the table speaking on their own behalf,” said Mohamed, an immigrant from Niger.

Mohamed is a grassroots organizer with CWS who promotes civic engagement among refugees, empowering them to have a greater say in decisions that affect their lives. With Mohamed’s support, refugees have brought their concerns around issues like housing and jobs to their city council members, mayors, state legislators and even federal officials.

Mohamed also encourages civic engagement through citizenship and voting. Becoming a citizen opens up new opportunities in terms of jobs and community involvement. Mohamed also emphasizes to refugees how important their right to vote is.

“It’s not something that was easily granted,” Mohamed said, noting the sacrifices that people have made to ensure people of color and new Americans have the right to vote. Partnering with the local League of Women Voters chapters, CWS helped register over 300 new American voters at naturalization ceremonies in Greensboro last year, Mohamed said.

Meanwhile in Nashville, Ahmed Osman is preparing to vote in his first presidential election. And he’s determined to bring as many people from his community with him as he can.

Seven years after moving to Nashville, Osman has built a life for himself. He knows many more people now, he understands how the system works, and he knows where to turn if he needs help, he said. In 2015, he became a citizen and voted in Nashville’s local elections, which he said was a great experience.

“You come to know that it’s a really nice place,” Osman said about his new hometown. “It’s different today than the first time I was here. More welcoming today than that time.”

Osman has also become a leader and advocate for refugees and immigrants in Nashville, heading the Somali American Association of Nashville and sitting on the mayor’s New American Advisory Council, which addresses immigrants’ and refugees’ concerns with local government.

During the local elections last year, Osman helped organize voter turnout in his community. In Tennessee, nearly 38 percent of the immigrant population — over 114,000 people — were naturalized citizens and eligible to vote in that election, Stephanie Teatro of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told local media.

This year, Osman is once again working to get them to the polls.

“This one is personal to every one of us,” Osman said. “Every vote counts, so I’ll try my best.”

[Beginning Part II]   [Top of Post]

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=By= Michael Roberts

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hat the mainstream media helped to create the political monster (and disaster) that today is Donald J. Trump is not in dispute. And, aided and abetted by its willing lackeys in the neo-conservative television and radio movements, they helped to over-inflate his insatiable mega-sized ego that told him he could win the ultimate prize — the presidency of the United States.

Indeed, Republican hatred of President Barack Obama and his policies, and their spineless prevaricating cowardice to privately embrace what Trump is saying and vocalizing in public, allowed a loud mouth and blowhard mediocre businessman to hijack the Republican Party from its conservative moorings.

They both conspired and fornicated with each other to produce this bastard political horn-child now genuflecting to his every whim and outrageous pouting all in the interest of the continued cancerous metastasizing hating Barack Obama. Embraced by the most rabid sections of the Republican Party, the Tea Party zealots, traditional GOP establishment leaders were powerless to stop the rise of this ultra-Right Wing faction within the party that see Trump as “speaking their language” and identified with his particular odious brand of extremism and xenophobia.

They are ALL complicit in the rise of the GOP’s Political Pretender. Establishment Republicans should have seen the writing on the wall when Eric Cantor, then the party’s majority leader in the House, was defeated in his bid for re-election in June 2014 by Dave Brat, an unknown Tea Party member. They should have known that the extreme wing of the party was now calling the shots when a freshman senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, one year before Cantor’s defeat, was able to orchestrate a temporary shut down of the Federal Government in October 2013. And they should have been put on the alert when the 40 or so Tea Party members in the House successfully hounded Speaker John Boehner out of office on October 31, 2015.

 

But even with all that these signs and developments Republican leaders still so hung up on hatred from Barack Obama did absolutely nothing. They continued to be an obstructionist force and rejected any and all compromise. Talk about unintended consequences! Now they have laughingly launched a “Stop Trump” movement to deny the party’s present front runner the presidential nomination. The party’s conservative wing, joined by a whorish mainstream media, and sundry political pundits and talk show hosts, are desperately seeking ways and means to stop Trump up to and including a controversial “brokered convention” — not that they are calling it that.

If no GOP candidate — Trump, Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich — reaches the magical number of 1,237 delegates the party’s national convention in July would be the last place where Trump can be stopped. But it will be very, very messy and unpopular with the Republican Party’s base, especially its Tea Party section. It that happens, the political civil war will be waged between the white collar sections of the party and its ruling class elements pushing proxy candidates like Florida’s former governor Jeb Bush, and, perhaps Senator Marco Rubio. What this will boil down to is a party willing to deny and reject the will of the vast majority of Republican voters, no matter how misplaced, in favor of a hand-picked, anointed, party establishment candidate.

The split, already evident, will be between white collar Republicans and their angry blue-collar brethren from where the Trump and the Tea Party draw its members and support. The ultra-Right Ted Cruz is now attempting to position himself as the Trump alternative and the “stop Trump” candidate. However, it appears increasingly that the GOP leadership and its establishment wing is in favor of a so-called “contested convention.”

So what exactly is a contested convention?

Well, for starters, during the early days of American politics there was no need for the present system of primaries across the states. There was no 24-hour news cycle that hung on the every word of posturing, bombastic candidates and their surrogates. So for decades both parties — the Democratic and Republican Parties — chose candidates in large convention halls and negotiated, horse-traded, in smoke-filled hotel rooms near and around the main convention center.

Ultimately, these systems became corrupt and were simply mechanisms for protecting party favorites. They were ultimately replaced by primaries where delegates were selected and apportioned based on who won (or lost). This process was accelerated in the 1970s that literally did away with brokered party conventions. The last Democratic political convention to go more than one ballot round was in 1952. On the Republican side their last brokered convention was in 1976 when Ronald Reagan forced Gerald Ford into a primary contest. Reagan was unsuccessful and had to wait until 1980 before becoming the GOP’s candidate and win the presidency for two terms.

Contested or brokered conventions are very messy things. There are still many arcane and obscure rules and procedures that govern delegate behavior depending on the state they come from. For example, there are rules instituted by party organizations in, say, Ohio, that may compel its delegates to behave in a particular way in the first round of balloting in a contested convention and if there are no clear results may or may not apply to them in future rounds.

Delegates may be “bound” to a frontrunner candidate in the first round of balloting and “freed” in the second round if no winner emerges. If they are “freed or unencumbered” then they can pretty much vote for who they choose. Here is where “politricks” and corruption sets in: candidates can woo delegates with promises that will materialize after they win the nomination. That’s called bribery but its quite legal in BOTH parties since its called “negotiating and advocacy.” It’s “horse-trading” at its best.

When you add the anger that now permeates BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and the growing distrust of the American electorate then the recipe for political chaos looms very large are is a very real possibility. For the Republican Party this convention is about the battle for the heart and soul of the par

On the Democratic side of things are different, but there is an important fight. The party is fighting to redefine its very identity having been caught in a socio-political crisis for more than a decade. In 2016 the party that once identified with poor and working class Americans is no more. That is why Democratic party establishment figures and leaders cannot understand or come to grips with the anger and dissatisfaction that has been the meteoric rise of Senator Bernie Sanders on the Left pitted against the establishment candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on the Right.

Today, the Democratic Party is the party of the hyper-educated elite and the so-called “professional class,” a veritable meritocracy that is status driven and not welcoming of dissenting voices, especially from its blue-collar wing. It is a party that has and is now identified more with Wall Street than with Main Street. In many ways the political dialectics that drove the rise of Donald Trump are partly due to the unbelievable shortsightedness of policy decisions made by Democrats in government and on Wall Street.

For example, many Southern conservative Democrats in Congress did nothing when their Republican colleagues were excoriating and attacking President Barack Obama left, right and center. They stood by and twiddled their thumbs or abandoned the party’s position and sided with Republicans. Their dislike of their own president (I’m loath to use the word “hatred”) helped to legitimize people like Trump. They never condemned a member of Congress, Joe Wilson for South Carolina, who called the president a liar during a September 2009 speech. And they have done very little to help push the president’s domestic and foreign policy agendas.

Such party abandonment has drawn the ire of blue collar Democrats and young voters who saw this as a betrayal of their contract with President Obama starting in 2008. This anger and disenchantment would morph into the “Occupy and Black Lives Matter Movements” that Hillary Clinton cannot impress or attract to her campaign. In fact, were it not for the African American community and voters in the Democratic Party Ms. Clinton could not win the party’s nomination or the presidency.

Here I have a word of caution for her: Just because young Democrats and white blue collar workers are flocking to Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign does not translate to her winning these voters over if he loses the nomination as expected. She’ll have to do a hell of a lot more to win over these angry and frustrated voters then she’s presently doing. Her political dilemma is that she has to be the standard bearer of a new Democratic Party — a class party. And it’s not a blue-collar working class party or even a middle class party but a party of the professional elite classes.

So what’s the difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the context of this new socio-economic and political dispensation?

Well, there are now just only two hierarchal structures in the United States t that at the core definition and character of bot the Republican and Democratic parties. The first is that of the dominance of corporate big business interests and the obscene amounts of money of the one percent as evidenced by the concentration of wealth in the hands of 540 American billionaires with a combined net worth f $2.4 trillion.

The second is the rise and now control of the professional class that are also at the very zenith of this moneyed and wealth hierarchy. They are in a now symbiotic relationship and share the same assumptions and attitudes to the world. However, they differ in significant ways even as they share some similarities.

On the Republican side these professionals are ultra and neo-conservative when it comes to finance, business policies, cultural issues, and class challenges. By contrast, professionals on the Democratic side tend to be very liberal on most issues except the economy where they are just as conservative as their Republican counterparts. They also share on essential and fundamental similarity: both are hostile to labor and contemptuous of the American working class.

Do I have contempt for higher education and college degrees?

Certainly not. But I do have a problem with a kind of arrogant orthodoxy that comes with that class. When meritocracy becomes the dominant ideology of the professional class it creates a certain world outlook that says that you’re at the top of your profession because you deserve to be there and you’re the smartest and the best in whatever you do. You see this in the Democratic Party when Hillary Clinton seeks to dismiss income inequality as a “one issue” and universal healthcare as impractical and unattainable. You see this in the orthodoxy of President Barack Obama whose cabinet picks all come from Harvard. What happens here is that you get a group of people who do not listen to other voices and ideas from those outside of their narrow social groupings and treats those differences with total contempt.

 

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MICHAEL D. ROBERTS is a top Political Strategist and Business, Management and Communications Specialist in New York City’s Black community. He is an experienced writer whose specialty is socio-political and economic analysis and local community relations. He has covered the United Nations, the Caribbean and Africa in a career that spans over 32 years in journalism. As Editor of New York CARIB NEWS, a position that he’s held since 1990, he is in a unique position to have his hands on the pulse of the over 800,000 Caribbean-American community in Brooklyn, and the over 2.5 million members resident in the wider New York State community.

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Way Right

=By= RETIII

TThis is something that should not slip by lightly. The video above is of a roomful of Republican voters interrupting the speech of a Republican Senator and presidential candidate with a standing ovation at the news that the Republican House Speaker has been forced to resign.  It is hard to watch this outburst of joyful anger (or angry joy?) without wondering: what in the world is going on with the Republican party?  Why would news of the humiliating resignation of John Boehner spark an immediate Republican celebration?

Mr. Boehner certainly was unpopular with his own Republican voters. The day of his resignation a WSJ/NBC poll found that “some 72% of Republican primary voters said they were dissatisfied with the ability of Mr. Boehner and GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell to achieve Republican goals.”  But that phrase – failure “to achieve Republican goals” – is remarkable.  As a very good “Abbreviated Pundit Round-up” details today, John Boehner and the Republicans overall never had the votes to impose Republican policies.  As Phillip Bump notes, the only “compromises” Boehner made “have been between reality and fantasy.”

Indeed, it is notable that when conservative writer Erick Erickson writes a column titled “Why John Boehner Had To Go,” he can’t actually name or describe anything Boehner did wrong – only arguing vaguely and nonsensically that Boehner (somehow) held his own Republican party “in contempt.”

When forced to explain this supposed “contempt,” numerous Republicans (even presidential candidates) list not only Boehner’s (non-existent) failure to stop Obamacare, but also his supposed enabling of Obamacare.  As Mike Huckabee explained, “When people sent [Republicans] here, they didn’t send them to give the president more power on Obamacare[.]” Think about that: after total legislative obstruction, a government shut-down, more than 50 votes to repeal Obamacare, an ensuing presidential election, two Supreme Court lawsuits, and other pending litigation – – Republicans are livid with the belief that John Boehner has worked with the President to strengthen Obamacare.

No sane political observer could think that.  So, what gives?  As Jonathan Chait explains, we are witnessing a sort of collective Republican denial where they cannot accept that they are not the ruling party, not the “deciders” (to use a former president’s phrase):

To understand the pressures that brought about Boehner’s demise as an ideological split badly misconstrues the situation. The small band of right-wing noisemakers in the House who made Boehner’s existence a living hell could not identify any important substantive disagreements with the object of their wrath. . . . The source of the disagreement was tactical, not philosophical. Boehner’s tormentors refused to accept the limits of his political power. . . .This discontent runs much deeper and wider than Boehner. . . . Boehner had the misfortune of leading, or attempting to lead, his party in an era when it had run up to the limits of crazy, where the only unexplored frontiers of extremism lay beyond the reach of its Constitutional powers.

What is important here is not that Republicans object to the limits of their power, but that Republicans apparently cannot accept that such limits even exist.  Greg Sargent recently caught this in a very revealing FOX News poll:

[Republicans] failed to block Obama’s transformation of the country; that must be because they didn’t even try, so they must be complicit. But this failure, too, is structural. Republicans don’t have the votes to surmount Dem filibusters or Obama vetoes. The idea that this can be overcome through sheer force of will (the argument conservatives are making in favor of another shutdown fight) is just another version of [the “Big Lie”].Indeed, the Fox News poll unwittingly captures what is particularly problematic about this last one. It finds that 60 percent of Republicans feel betrayed by their party, and that 66 percent of Republicans don’t think their party did all it could to block Obama’s agenda. The poll asks why respondents think their party leaders failed at this: they didn’t really want to stop Obama; they weren’t smart enough; they would rather fight each other. The Fox poll doesn’t even offer respondents the option of choosing the real reason — that Republicans structurally lack the votes!

You see?  Lack of majority political power is not even a possibility.  When, in the video above, Republican supporters jumped from their chairs at news of Boehner’s resignation, it is because someone or something defective had to be blocking the Republicans’ exercise of their undisputed authority.  With Boehner gone, Republicans have something legitimate to celebrate in their minds – the restoration of their thwarted authority.

It sounds crazy, I know, but this represents the true “dark side” of Boehner’s resignation: it is another significant step in the Republican party’s shocking withdrawal from our system of democratic governance.  Specifically, it presages a doubling-down of the Republicans’ intentions to assert “negative control,” where government shutdowns, hostage-taking, and (the immensely dangerous) debt-ceiling fights threaten to become more determinative than electoral outcomes and a functioning government. As one Republican writer put it, the emerging Republican belief is that threats of government destruction combined with the inherent rightness of Republican beliefs “could be so strong (as Ted Cruz was of his proposal to defund Obamacare) that Senate Democrats, the Obama White House and the mainstream media would, for once, finally, this time, cave in and let the House Republicans have their way.”  (And the use of the words “for once, finally” means “rightly,” “appropriately,” consistent with the “true” distribution of power.)

If anyone doubts that this is where we are increasingly headed, Steve Benen has a useful summary of the growing history of Republicans’ “hostage governing”:

* April 2011: House Republicans threaten a government shutdown unless Democrats accept GOP demands on spending cuts.* July 2011: Republicans create the first-ever debt-ceiling crisis, threatening to default on the nation’s debts unless Democrats accept GOP demands on spending cuts.

* September 2011: Republicans threaten another shutdown.

* April 2012: Republicans threaten another shutdown.

* December 2012: Republicans spend months refusing to negotiate in the lead up to the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

* January 2013: Republicans raise the specter of another debt-ceiling crisis.

* September 2013: Republicans threaten another shutdown.

* October 2013: Republicans actually shut down the government.

* February 2014: Republicans raise the specter of another debt-ceiling crisis.

* December 2014: Republicans threaten another shutdown.

* February 2015: Republicans threaten a Department of Homeland Security shutdown.

* September 2015: Republicans threaten another shutdown [over Planned Parenthood].

As Jonathan Chait, Greg Sargent and others note, the forced resignation of John Boehner is another step in the above line of this undemocratic behavior, and not some gossipy, intra-mural Republican politics.

What we have here is one of two major political parties increasingly disengaging from the democratic process.  Did you know that President Obama is an illegitimate President because he is not a “natural born citizen”?  Or that he won election by promising “free stuff” to minorities? That minorities and illegal aliens are engaged in massive voter fraud? Or, that popular elections of U.S. Senators should be taken away?  That some “Boehner Rule” or “Hastert Rule” exists which neuters any Democratic House votes?  Or that is OK for Republicans to filibuster every proposed law while in the minority, but the filibuster should be repealed now that Republicans have a Senate majority? Or that the Electoral College should be reformed to provide proportional votes only in “Blue States”?  . . . or, that policy outcomes should not be determined by elections but instead by holding hostage the federal government or the “full faith and credit” of the U.S.?

Most importantly, did you realize that all of the above are necessary to enact the majority will of the people?  Because – believe it or not – that is what the Republicans believe.

The conclusion of Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein has been widely quoted, but not sufficiently absorbed:

One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

 

 

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