(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) September 6, 2024; UPDATE October 8-9: see my Twitter thread with updated voter registration numbers and analysis; see my related July 5 article, Biden at His Worst Is Better than Insurrectionist Trump at His “Best”: 13 Reasons to Keep Calm & Carry On (Biden’s Already Gaining Ground!) ; because of YOU, Real Context News is approaching two million all-time content views, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Note: when decimal percentages are given, averages are rounded to the tenth; when not given, they to rounded to the nearest full number; *correction appended to fix a date.

SILVER SPRING—Just before the 2022 midterm elections in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s half-century precedent protecting reproductive abortion rigths being overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I had been following the excellent analysis of Democratic political expert Tom Bonier.  He was then busy was pointing out both that women were registering in far high numbers than usual for midterms and, later, that the early vote—which had been favoring Democrats in recent election cycles—was also significantly higher than the previous midterms.  Because of the hard voter data Bonier so skillfully presented, I drew the conclusion in detail before the election that Democrats would outperform their polls and had a real chance to hold both the Senate and the House.  Democrats ended up not holding the House (barely, in large part thanks to 4 Republican flips of Democratic seats in New York, including by the now famous George Santos) but my analysis was correct: with turnout high and many more women voting than usual in a midterm, the pollsters were off in many races and underestimated the vote for Democratic candidates.  Back in 2022*, in the run-up to the midterms and commenting on the new registration surges, Tom was making it clear that he’s “never seen anything like it.”

That midterm, Joe Biden tied for the fifth-best midterm performance for his own party for his first midterm among all modern presidents, with the four doing better than him in the House having significant historical advantages when Biden was at disadvantage, and Biden is tied for tenth out of all presidents in the House and seventh in the Senate (excluding the aberrations that were the Reconstruction midterms and John Tyler, who was partyless).

Wonderful New Data for Democrats

Now, Bonier is at it again with even far more encouraging and unprecedented data for Vice President Kamala Harris, her running mate—Governor Tim Walz—and down-ballot Democrats.  In what he is calling the Harris “Effect,” for the week beginning July 21^st—the Sunday of which saw President Joe Biden formally withdraw as the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency—many constituencies that heavily lean Democratic in 15 states have seen massive surges in voter registration surges compared to the same time-period in the las presidential election in 2020, which Joe Biden won.

• Young black women are up in voter registration by over 175%
• Young Latinas are up almost 160%
• Black women are up over 98%
• Black voters overall are up nearly 85%
• Young women overall are up over 84%
• Latinas overall are up over 78%
• Young voters overall are up nearly 75%
• Hispanic voters overall are up over 68%
• Democrats are up nearly 50%

But male voters—who strongly favor Trump—are just up over 18% and Republicans are just up 8% (not all states released party affiliation, so the Democratic/Republican registration was modeled by Bonier’s firm when that information was not available).  These were the included states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Maryland, Delaware, Vermont, Rhode Island, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Wyoming.  Since then, North Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania (including 262% increase for young black women!) have been added and new data from Georgia analyzed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with all confirming and continuing the trend (and even as I am proofing this, new data is in the process of being added from 19 other states that are confirming these overall trends again and again, but have not yet been presented as added to the overall demographic averages across all states analyzed).

Furthermore, Bonier noted that his political data outfit TargetSmart’s research “found that surges in voter registration are predictive of increases in overall turnout from those groups of voters (not just the new registrants in those groups).”  That’s huge, because this means these surges in registration are indicators of much more than just the individuals registering in record rates, individuals representing groups that are heavily pro-Democratic.

This is a dramatic imbalance that, if it holds, means that polling in these 39 states (38 looked at my TargetSmart and Georgia looked at by The Atlanta Journal Constitution)—including most of the swing states—will undercount support for Democratic candidates, perhaps significantly and perhaps more than in 2022.  This would mean if we look at these close averages, the election might end up being not as close as the polls are indicating they are: Kamala Harris might not just win most swing states, but could even do so convincingly, limiting the ability of bad-faith actors to disrupt the transition to a would-be Harris-Walz Administration or challenge election results and vote certifications.

2022 Midterms: Polling Past as Prologue for 2024?

Getting into the Weeds

I am not sure what changes pollsters have made and may yet make to their methodology from the midterms and previous presidential election for this election cycle.  Are they looking at these numbers and making adjustments?

I am inclined to think perhaps not much just by my gut, but beyond that, let’s look at what happened with the polls in 2022.

In 2022, Senate polls in the last three weeks before the midterms were 0.3% biased in favor of Republicans (also known as the GOP, or Grand Old Party), but 0.2% biased in favor of Democrats in the House.  However, this is actually quite misleading: as Nathaniel Rakich notes writing for FiveThirtyEight (a mecca for many things polling weighted whose averages are higher quality than those of Real Clear Politics), two main types of polls were included in the House calculations: polls for specific House district races and generic ballot polls, the latter being polls asking voters which party was preferred to control Congress, not about a specific House race.  Those generic ballot polls are generally far more accurate than the polls for specific House races (from 1998 and on, 3.9% average error vs. the 6.7% error for the district-specific polls).  In 2022, House polls were off overall by 4.0%, but the specific House race district polls were off by an average of 5.0% compared with 3.1% error margin for the generic polls.  And the polls for the House were overall relatively more accurate in part because a far larger portion of House polls in 2022 were the more accurate generic polls: 46% of all House polls when the average from 1998 and on has been only 21%.

As far as degree of error historically overall, since 1998, polls have been relatively close in the last three weeks before voting, averaging 6% error margins overall (9.2% for presidential primaries, 4.3% for presidential general elections, 5.4% for Senate polls, 6.1% for the House, and 5.4% for governors).  In the 2022 election cycle, the polls were even more accurate than usual and the best of all those examined starting in 1998, only being off 4.8% overall (off 4.8% in the Senate, 4.0% in the House, and 5.1% in governors’ races).  In spite of this relative accuracy, the polls were off in congressional House and Senate races, undercounting Democrats’ support as I suspected they would.

Women were 4% to 5% more of the electorate in 2022 than men, according to exit polls and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, respectively (the two main sources of such information).  I tried looking under the hood of some of those final polls, but when I tried to find the details, some did not indicate their breakdown in gender as far as the sample and/or adjustments to the sample were concerned, though some did and seemed to have gotten it very close or right while others definitely underrepresented women (at least in the raw numbers of people interviewed, but even then, because pollsters don’t always get the exact portions they want for a likely voter model in terms of who responds, they adjust and weight their samples—including demographically including by gender—and it is not clear from the main press releases or crosstabs/methodology sections—if available—how these adjustments were made and if their projection for likely voters was the same or different from their raw sample, how accurate they were in modeling and predicting the portion of the electorate that would be female and how they would vote).

Some, perhaps most pollsters, would reveal their methodology upon request through individual channels but I confess I am pressed for time and resources in trying to track down methodology for two-year-old polls where the information is not as easy to track down online at this point in time, if it even is online, which can be difficult and time-consuming.  Under different circumstances in the future, perhaps I can and will.  Yet even the most wonky websites I have seen, including FiveThirtyEight, have not attempted compiling such a database…

Yet all things considered, given then-historic data on female voter registration in 2022 and because the polls were consistently off there, my hypothesis and one I feel good about given the situation with Roe being overturned is that women were either undercounted and/or the women that were counted were underestimated as far as their favoring Democrats (and I am thinking both, especially as new women registering after Dobbs were very likely motivated overwhelmingly by their loss of reproductive rights and would have been a much more Democratic-leaning group than women overall and who had registered prior to Dobbs).

Before getting into this next section, it should be pointed out, as Rakich does, that even some of the most accurate polls might get the race wrong in terms of predicting the actual winner, that the closer a race is the less “right” a often poll is in picking a winner: if a result is super-close, say, 0.5,% 1%, 2%, 3%, or even 4% or so, these results are often within the margin of error: the range above or below the level of estimated voter support for a particular candidate that the final result should fall under (in most cases) 95% of the time.  So, if a race is 47%-45% between two candidates and the margin of error is 3.2%, since the 2% difference is less than 3.2%, the race would be considered statistically tied.  But if the race was 50%-45% with the same margin of error, that lead would be considered more solid and safe.  And a poll can predict a winner who won by 5% but only have predicted a 1% win, while another poll could have been more accurate and have been off by less than 1% but predicted the wrong candidate.  In other words, polling is… complicated, and is really is about understanding about what the aggregate polling data means, not just screaming about one single poll.

And of course, one poll is just one data point, so it is the averages of polls over time and the polls closest to actual voting happening that matter the most, not one or a few polls.  But anyway, the point is, in very close races, pollsters should not be thought of as “off” if they predicted one candidate in their final polls as down 2 points who won by 0.5%, a 2.5-point-swing, if the margin of error was, say, 4%, meaning a 2.5%-swing either way would fall within margin of error, the way polling methodology is supposed to work.  So many polls could be super-accurate in close races and still get the winner wrong.  But what was interesting about 2022 is how many of the close races had polling biased against Democratic levels of support and were “wrong” even while often being relatively accurate.

Looking at predictions in 2022, FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only model had its average predictive outcome as 229 seats for Republicans to 206 for Democrats in the House, with the middle 80% of results landing from 250 to 208 seats for Republicans, and there were substantially more outcomes with Republicans doing much better than their average than Democrats doing better than their average.  For the Senate, the polls-only model predicted an average predictive outcome as a 50-50 Senate, with 80% of outcomes falling from 54 to 46 seats for Republicans.  For the overall popular House vote, the polls-only model had a 2.4% margin win for Republicans as the most likely outcome.  But keep in mind, these House models in a lot of cases included a lot of generic polls that were not a specific measure of the specific House race in question (this is in part because many House district races have little-to-no polling specific to them) and that, as mentioned before, the generic ballots favored Democrats relative to the specific district polls.

So, what actually happened?

What the Results Tell Us

In the end, the election results gave Democrats 213 and Republicans 222 seats in the House, a loss of 9 seats for Democrats compared with the results from the 2022 midterms, yet which, as I have noted, was a performance for the history books for Democrats, who kept 7 seats more than the polls-only model’s average prediction.  And in the Senate, Democrats won 1 more seat than the average of the polls-only model prediction.

The final popular vote outcome for the House was 50.6% Republicans, 47.8% for Democrats, a 2.8% margin for Republicans, the actual final margin being 0.4% higher than the 2.4% the model predicted. 

Yet, that year, the generic Congressional control preference polling—an important factor in the polls-only model—ended with 1.2% advantage for Republicans (smaller than the 2.8% actual margin, but as Rakich notes in footnote 6 here, Republicans had many more seats in House races where their candidates ran with no Democrat even running to oppose them than the reverse, depressing what the final popular vote would end up for being for Democrats by about 1% and suggesting that some of surge of Democratic women was strategically felt more in competitive races give the number of upsets we will get into in the next few paragraphs).  As of September 5 of this year, Democrats have a 2.6% advantage, a notable swing and another indicator Democrats could have an even better year than 2022 (although to be fair, on September 2, 2022, with the same number of days until Election Day that year—three days later than this year—Democrats were up 0.9%, so the generic ballot would be a serious indicator only if Democrats still end up with an edge towards the end and through early voting, beginning over the coming days and weeks in many states, and there is no reason to think generic ballot polls will naturally mirror patterns from 2022 and necessarily have Republicans favored over Democrats).  If this paragraph was a bit confusing, the big takeaways are that the model and especially the generic ballot average estimates underestimated the national House vote margin for the GOP, but the GOP had a lot more races with no Democrats running in them, meaning this is to be expected, and at least now the generic ballot polls are much better for Democrats than they ended up being in the end for Democrats in 2022, something that if it holds could be another good sign for Democrats.

As far as those upsets, specifically, the polls-only model favored Republicans in 13 House races in which Democrats pulled off upset wins compared with only 7 situations where the model predicted Democrats to win in the House and Republicans won instead (including the 4 surprises from New York state).  In the Senate, the model favored Republicans in two races that Democrats won.

If we break down these races by how close they were in polling, including governor races along with congressional ones, in the toss-ups (leader with a 50%-60% chance of winning in the model), those “tilting” Democratic—7 races in which Democrats were favored on average 55% of the time to win—only 3 of those 7 Democrats won (43%).  But in those “tilting” Republican—11 races in which Republicans were favored on average 53% of the time to win—only 3 of those 11 Republicans won (27%).

In the “lean” races (leader with a 60%-75% chance of winning in the model), those “leaning” Democratic—26 races in which Democrats were favored on average 68% of the time to win—23 out of 26 Democrats won (88%).  But in those “tilting” Republican—13 races in which Republicans were favored on average 67% of the time to win—only 8 of those 13 Republicans won (61%).

In the “likely” races (leader with a 75%-95% chance of winning in the model), those “likely” Democratic races—36 races in which Democrats were favored on average 88% of the time to win—all 36 Democrats won (100%).  But in those “likely” for Republicans—44 races in which Republicans were favored on average 86% of the time to win—40 of those 44 Republicans won (91%).

Thus, in key races, polling relatively favored Republicans much more in key races where Republicans were upset than the reverse, showing a significant undercounting of Democratic support.  In the competitive races (combining “toss-ups”” and “leans,” Democrats won 26 of 33 (79%) while Republicans won only 11 out of 24 (46%) and were upset in 4 races they really should not have lost(“likely”) while Democrats held all those seats.  Again, a historic performance for Democrats against very strong headwinds.

Thus, despite the narrative that the polls were historically accurate in 2022 and they certainly were in a relative sense, they were still consistently off in favor of Republicans in 2022 in many key races by underestimating Democratic support.  To get back to my question about whether pollsters will have adjusted much for this, this accuracy narrative might actually be leading pollsters this cycle to adjust less and question what they did in 2022 less, which might very well be setting up a repeat of pollsters undercounting Democratic support among voters, within the composition of the electorate, and level of Democratic support among women and other key groups, especially since the registration surges for strongly-Democratic demographics are even more dramatic and historic now after Harris’s rise than in 2022.  And as these are new registrants, a very high percent of the new registrants voted in the 2020 presidential election (81.3% in Pennsylvania, for example).

Conclusion: Expect Democrats to Overperform this Election

Given what happened in 2022 and the tendency of that cycles’ polls to miss a surge in Democratic turnout in dozens of close races and even a few that were not close in polling that led to key upsets, as well as the fact that polling now is better and that registration numbers are significantly better across a wide variety of states, feel free to add a few points to the numbers you are getting from polls for Democrats in most key races and attribute that the historic rise in voting registration of young voters, women, black voters, and especially Latinas and even more especially African-American women, then look at the relatively paltry numbers among groups that could favor Republicans.  Additionally, there are a number of other dynamics I felt would favor President Biden as a candidate over time before he dropped out, and most of those still apply to Harris now.  Because of all these factors and the hard voter registration data so wonderfully presented by Tom Bonier, now Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and down-ballot Democrats can be quite confident in victory, especially now because people are responding disproportionately well when it counts most and that will count in the close races that will decide the fate of our republic in the face of insurrectionist Trump’s fascist, violent assault on American democracy.

In data we trust, but also in Latinas and African-American women.

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 1, 2024; Traduce en español/translate to Spanish; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—Many of the problems the problems facing our country today stem in part from a wildly unrepresentative U.S. Senate blocking so much progress and necessary reform (see pages 48-50 in one of my graduate school papers for some examples and context), from the imbalance in the Supreme Court to aid for Ukraine to sensible gun regulation.  Because of the Senate’s innate bias towards far less-populated, far more rural, far whiter state populations, the Republican senators who have engaged in creating this imbalance have represented roughly 39 million to, most recently, 54 million fewer Americans in recent years than Senate Democrats.  This is clearly a tyranny of an unrepresentative minority.

But we can fight back, in numerous ways.

I have three recent policy positions that, combined, can really do a lot to restore some balance to our politics:

My proposal to reduce the threshold of the filibuster from 60 votes to 55 (original proposal on my campaign website here)

My joining the effort expand the U.S. Supreme Court by four more seats to 13 total (original proposal on my campaign website here)

My joining the effort to grant statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia (original proposal on my campaign website here)

A More Reasonable Filibuster

Ideally, the 60-vote filibuster protects a strong minority from being oppressed by a slim majority.  But Republicans have blatantly abused this tradition and this rule for years now allowing a much smaller minority as outlined above to thwart the will of much larger majorities.

At the same time, a narrow factional majority should not be able to impose its will on the nation by just one vote, and the Senate’s tradition of forcing some consensus should not be abandoned: sweeping legislation should be able to be passed with more than just a narrow tiny majority, ideally bipartisan.  The filibuster in concept will also protect us as Democrats, protect others not aligned with Republicans when electoral fortunes shift.  And it also in concept means less back and forth with the country seeing legislation undone and redone with just a one-vote majority or a tie with a vice presidential vote in the Senate, too.

Therefore, instead of needing 60 votes and having a 20-vote majority required on non-budget reconciliation measures in the Senate, I propose to reduce the filibuster to 55 votes, reducing a 20-vote margin to a 10-vote margin for these changes.  This will dramatically reduce the abuse, increase the chances for bipartisanship, and allow America to move forward more often while still doing so with some care and respect for the minority.  Democrats can change the rule now and I would be a strong vote and advocate for this change once I would be a member of the Senate.

Expanding the Supreme Court to Reflect Americans, Not Right-Wing Extremists

Brian Frydenborg respects fairness.  The American people deserve a Supreme Court that represents them and something approximating their views.  Instead, because of Senate Republicans cheating and blatant hypocrisy in blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination for most of a year and then Trump got the benefit of the stubbornness of the late and legendary Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg combined with even more blatant Republican hypocrisy to make the balance in the Supreme Court 6-3 in favor of conservatives instead of 5-4 in favor of liberals.  This is absolutely out of step with American values and has led to the loss of rights for all women in America in the notorious Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade.

But we do not have to take this lying down.  We do not have to accept a right-wing 6-3 Supreme Court for decades.

In line with precedent and the U.S. Constitution, we can and should expand the number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court by four, from nine to fourteen.  Senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tina Smith of Minnesota have already introduced legislation to do this, and as a U.S. Senator, it would be my intention to fully and vigorously support their legislation and to push for its adoption as soon as Democrats would have the numbers in Congress to make this a reality.

The Supreme Court is broken.  This 6-3 imbalance does not represent the views of the vast majority of Americans and we do not deserve to be held back by a reactionary judiciary.  Because of the Senate’s innate bias towards far less-populated, far more rural, far whiter state populations, the Republican senators who have engaged in creating this imbalance have represented roughly 39 million to, most recently, 54 million fewer Americans in recent years than Senate Democrats.  This is clearly a tyranny of a minority.

Accidents of history and blatant political gamesmanship should not define the makeup the Supreme Court, and such a grave, radical imbalance requires a bold solution, one that refuses to accept the status quo imposed by a group of senators representing a minority of the U.S. population.  We definitely have to win more seats in the Senate, but my proposal to reduce the filibuster threshold from 60 to 55 seats will make this much easier and a near-term realistic goal if we turn out and vote just a few more Democrats into the Senate (including me!)!

Statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico

Statehood for both of these places would help adjust the unrepresentative bias against nonwhite, non-rural voters in the Senate, making passing the legislations we need to much more likely.

Puerto Rico was acquired by the U.S. during the Spanish-American War in 1898 and has had an odd history or being autonomous to varying degrees but today is in a no-man’s land of not being an actual state; its 3.2 million people are U.S. citizens but reside in what is now classified as a U.S. Territory: that means it has no representatives with binding, counting votes in either the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate even though the island territory has more people than roughly twenty of the U.S. states that collectively account for roughly 40 out of 100 Senate votes.  And this has had consequences that have harmed Puerto Rico, one glaring example being the inability of its people to hold the U.S. government accountable for the gross disparity in hurricane rescue, relief, and aid efforts from the federal government after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico compared with federal efforts to assist states hurt by hurricanes around the same time, such as Florida after Hurricane Irma and Texas after Hurricane Harvey.  Were this Puerto Rico’s status to change and it to be admitted as a state into the Union, the territory turned state would be given House seats and, like every other state, two U.S. Senate seats.  While Puerto Ricans’ views and votes on statehood have evolved over time, the three latest votes—in 2012, 2017, and 2020—all had a majority of Puerto Rican voters in favor of statehood.  We also have close to six million Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. mainland who can be approached and engaged in this effort, too, and we should be honest: the wonderful, hardworking Puerto Rican people are Americans, adding their wonderful culture to our tapestry of many cultures.

We can approach Puerto Ricans not acting like we are doing them a favor in granting statehood (though statehood could help Puerto Rico in important ways), but be clear we are asking them for their help.  We can make it clear that we want them to join us as fully equal political citizens and that we could really use their help rectifying the gross imbalances in our political system, fighting for justice and policies that benefit all Americans.

A bipartisan bill to move forward with a new binding vote on statehood in Puerto Rice passed the House late in 2022, but was never taken up in the Senate.  As that bipartisan coalition wants to continue its effort, I mean to be a vocal leader in the Senate on this effort: we should put Puerto Rico on the official path to statehood as soon as possible.

The same goes for the city of Washington as the District of Columbia.  There are many reasons why Washington, DC should have statehood, most famous being the simple principle that the Americans whose primary residence is DC suffer from what the Colonial-era American patriots complained of: “taxation without representation,” for many years now part of the phrasing on local DC license plates. 

DC has more people than two states—Vermont and Wyoming—that each have their own representatives in the House and two senators each in the Senate, too. 

Furthermore, many of the Washingtonians whose primary residence is the District are those who serve and work for our federal government and enable it to operate on a day-to-day basis while many others are descendants of freedman, the former slaves who settled in Washington often as refugees before, during, and after the Civil War: it seems terribly wrong to deny so many public servants and their families and so many who are the descendants of those who suffered from America’s Original Sin of slavery the representation in Congress that all Americans living primarily in the fifty states have.

While there may (or may not) be some potential constitutional issues with making a federal district a state, we still must press forward with the campaign to give the U.S. citizens of Washington, District of Columbia equal rights as U.S. citizens in the form of full representation in the Congress, in both the House and with two Senators in the Senate.  I will be a leading voice on this effort and try to tie it to the effort to give the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico full representation, too.

Not only will making Puerto Rico and Washington full states with full delegations in Congress help address the unfair, unjustifiable bias against non-rural and non-white Americans in the Senate, it will also help bring balance to a House that has been gerrymandered for years to disproportionately benefit Republicans.  I will help lead the fight to do to justice not only for Marylanders in Maryland, but for Washingtonians in the District of Colombia, Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, and Americans in the nation as a whole in the U.S. Senate.

Conclusion: Win a Few Seats, Make History with My Trifecta, and I Will Help Lead the Way in the Senate!

If we preserve our 51-seat majority, we can change the filibuster in the way I have outlined without completely getting rid it, and with just a few Republicans or by expanding our current Democratic Senate majority by just four seats, we can then expand the Supreme Court.  Then both those reforms will help make it easier for the Congress at admit DC and Puerto Rico as states while avoiding potential blocks from both the Republicans in the Senate and the extremists on the Supreme Court.  As a new U.S. Senator for Maryland, I will help lead the fight on all three fronts and the combined effect will go a long way to restoring some balance and sanity in our Legislative and Judicial Branches of the Republic we must fight hard to preserve against Donald Trump’s fascist insurrectionist assault on our nation.  These changes taken together will make both Congress and the Supreme Court far more representative of actual and mainstream Americans instead of letting extremists direct two of the three branches of government as often as they do.

Come see Brian debate other candidates, including the two frontrunners, this Saturday in Silver Spring, moderated by Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. I wrote about why this debate is so important for me. Register here now as space is filling up! You can also sign up to watch via Zoom here! And see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here as well as Brian’s official campaign website.

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Fourth Episode: Election Day Edition

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Notes:

In an Election Day-episode, my old professor, Dr. Mark Rush, the Director of International Education and Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Politics and Law at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, discusses polling in American politics, the 2020 election, the Supreme Court, and partisanship and division in the country.

Link to the Five Thirty Eight polling averages mentioned

Here are links to two versions of the article of Dr. Rush’s that was mentioned

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s latest eBook,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  November 3, 2020 NOTE: This map and article accidentally earlier included South Dakota in Biden’s column

SILVER SPRING—This article will be uncharacteristically short, so let’s get to it.

If )we just go by the polls, former-Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris would be winning with an overwhelming Electoral College landslide: according to the essential Five Thirty Eight weighted polling averages, Biden is ahead by small (though not razor-thin) margins in the Southern swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, as well being ahead similarly in Arizona.  Biden is close in the other key swing states of Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, just behind President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence by even closer margins.  Ann Selzer, the “best pollster in politics,” had Trump a few days ago +7 in Iowa, and I think he will just manage to hang on in Ohio.  Because of the GOP propensity to effectively suppress votes in the South (i.e., cheat), I am not giving Biden any of those Southern states (North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, or Texas, but wow, Texas is purple now…).  However, I think there is a decent chance for Biden take Arizona (and there is an especially-strong, and high-performing, Democratic Senate candidate there in the form of Mark Kelly, former astronaut and husband to former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who survived a terrorist shooting her in the head and became a famous advocate for stricter gun laws), so I will favor him slightly there.  Those weird congressional districts with separate Electoral College-awardings in Nebraska and Maine I am giving to Biden since he seemed to have decent leads there.  His decent lead in Pennsylvania and larger leads in Michigan and Wisconsin seem to make those pretty safe for Biden too (though Pennsylvania less so), so my official Map is Biden 291, Trump 247, with Biden retaking the Midwest states Clinton lost in 2016 that Obama had won 2012.

If I am wrong, it would probably be Arizona and I think that we could also most likely see Florida go to Biden with so many displaced Puerto Ricans from Hurricane Maria living there or that Trump might upset in Pennsylvania with Biden’s comments about fracking and energy policy hurting him there (as a sign of this, Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette, which had endorsed Obama twice and has not endorsed a Republican since 1972, surprisingly endorsed Trump on economic grounds even though it called his “unpresidential manners and character” an “embarrassment”).  I also think there is a decent chance Ohio could go to Biden.  And a lot of the states mentioned and a few others could go either way, but I think if I am wrong, that is where I will most likely be wrong.

And yet, if the Republican-controlled courts, with the newly installed Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, get to decide by stopping vote counts or tossing out ballots, the election could be stolen.  But even with a polling error within the margin of error like in 2016, Biden should win with my map, minus Arizona.  I would love to believe Republican cheating will not be effective, but I feel that would be going against history. And it is hard to account for postal sabotage on the part of the Trump Administration.  

Of course, none of this accounts for possible election interference, hacking, or cyberwarfare…

But that’s it.  That’s my prediction.  Biden wins.  The world is saved.

NOTE: This map and article accidentally earlier included South Dakota in Biden’s column

See Brian’s two pieces where he out-predicted all of the mainstream press in picking Biden to win the nomination before early March’s Super Tuesday: Democrats Look Disastrous, But Biden May Yet Save Them from Themselves Starting in South Carolina; & Why Putin Boost Bernie Sanders and The Best Guide to Super Tuesday (no, seriously): Biden’s Got This (and the Nomination)

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 27, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter: @bfry1981) January 27th, 2017; original interview conducted December 24th-26th, 2017; here is the English version of the interview published by ISNA on January 24th, and here is the Farsi (Persian) version

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Iranian Student News Agency (interviewer: Atefeh Moradi): The US election has passed, but we can truly see the polarized atmosphere in American society; how do you anticipate the political and social situation after 20 Jan.?

Brian Frydenborg: To be honest, it will be pretty awful. 53.9% of voters chose a candidate other than Trump, including 48.2% for Secretary Clinton, to Trump’s 46.1% (f this seems strange, just look up Electoral College on the Internet, and you will see that American elections are based on voting majorities divided into specific regions, not an absolute national majority). Yet Trump and his party will control the White House and both houses of Congress (with a large majority in the House and a small majority in the Senate), as well as the federal judiciary once Trump starts making judicial appointments and getting them confirmed, including filling that all-important vacant Supreme Court seat. For at least the next two years and likely even a longer period, this means almost 54% of Americans who voted will have no real power to check President Trump and his Republican Party from enacting an agenda they very forcefully do not support.

The one real exception to this is the filibuster, a Senate rule that, on most issues, allows the minority to prevent passage of something that cannot get at least 60 of 100 senators to support it; however, each new Congress can make its own rules, and Republicans will have the power to get rid of the filibuster if they choose to do so, which would become increasingly likely if Democrats use it block Trump’s and the Republicans’ agenda. If this happens, the Democrats lose their one way to check Trump independent of any help from Republicans, and, thus, will be powerless if Republicans stay united. Yes, in some ways, the Republican Party has not been this divided since the 1960s, but if one looks closer, this is not the case: while conservative public intellectuals and publications, many former Republicans officials (including both living former Republican presidents), and numbers of important major Republican political donors and fundraisers either privately or publicly oppose Trump, this is a tiny elite within the scope of the party as a whole; only a handful of senators and a small portion of Republican representatives in Congress consistently and publicly opposed Trump; nearly the entire Republican membership of Congress either supported Trump or dared not opposed him, and with the megaphone of the presidency on top of his Twitter-following of nearly 18 million people, Trump will be seeking to loudly intimidate any opposition, whether within his own party or not, and those within his own party will be highly vulnerable to this pressure as Trump can easily use it to rouse his followers. The political stalemate of the last six years will end as one party, led by Trump more than anyone else, will control the highest levels of the entire federal government.

What this means is that the nearly-54% will certainly see many of their hopes dashed and their fears realized, in particular women and minorities like African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans who have been subject to abuse of power by the private sector and the government at the local, state, and federal level. A Trump Administration seems poised to either stop actively protecting these groups from abuses with any vigor at the least, or to actively undermine some of the protections and gains they have enjoyed in civil rights that have been enacted in recent years. Either way, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions that have been simmering and occasionally exploding into riots and violent attacks over the past few years in America are likely to get dramatically worse under Trump and serious civil unrest is a real possibility; this will especially be the case if Trump keeps acting the way he has been, which is to say, in ways that do nothing to assure groups fearful of a Trump presidency that they will be respected and have their needs and concerns addressed seriously.

ISNA:Some analysts believe Trump campaign’s rhetoric is not the cornerstone of his policies, what would be your stance toward this?

BF: I would call this out as wishful thinking. While Trump’s stated positions have shifted so many times it’s been easy to lose count, his rhetoric and his style have stayed fairly consistent, and the overall content of his rhetoric makes it clear that many of his harsher policies are going to be pursued with vigor; any doubt about this should have been erased by his cabinet picks announced thus far. Even if he ends up enacting a milder form of some of what he has discussed, such policies will still be game-changers and move the country sharply to the right policy-wise. But as a practical matter, his supporters—and, within the Republican Party’s group of elected officials, a strong core of the Republican House members—will insist that he carries out his promises, and Trump, ever so needful of admiration and validation, won’t want to disappoint his biggest fans. So his constituents and counterparts in Congress will make it hard for him to backtrack, even if he wants to, which on most issues he probably does not. 

ISNA: In regard with Trump’s cabinet nominees, can you anticipate the upcoming Washington policies?

BF: The best sign that Trump might move into a “governing mode” and power down his “campaign mode” would have been putting moderate people who could unite the country into key positions of power, most notably selecting either Mitt Romney or David Petraeus as Secretary of State. By picking big-oil CEO Rex Tillerson (a Putin ally) as Secretary of State, but also along with virtually all of his other choices, Trump made it clear he has no intention of generally pursuing a more moderate course. Instead, he has assembled the most extreme and most right-wing cabinet and White House in American presidential history. A simple look at his choices and their records make this beyond dispute, so there should be no confusion as to what to expect from them. In several agencies—the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, and the Environmental Protection Agency—Trump even appointed people who don’t believe in the agencies core missions or are downright hostile to them. Others, like Dr. Ben Carson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Nikki Haley for Ambassador to the United Nations, are supremely unqualified; still others like Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Ambassador to Israel David Friedman are outright extremists. And those who will be running the economy hail from the billionaire class. So those who are saying “Let’s wait and see…” are deluding themselves if they mean in any way to imply that a moderate course is a possibility and that moderates and liberals should not jump to conclusions: Trump’s behavior, actions, and selections are sending a clear message that would be foolish not to acknowledge.

ISNA: The US nuclear suitcase is in Trump’s hands now, do you think there should be any doubt about it?

BF: Let’s put it this way: should we think Trump would use nuclear weapons for fun or just on a whim? No. But the man’s character and temperament are so vastly different from every single president before him, and unsuited to the responsibility of the decision to use or not use nuclear weapons, that if a crisis with a major power like China erupted, I would be worried to have Trump as a Commander in Chief. If one recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis, WWIII and nuclear war were avoided because the cooler heads of both Kennedy and Khrushchev prevailed; the only way the phrase “cooler head” and the word “Trump” can fit into the same sentence is with satire. So if a truly grave situation did emerge, yes, we should be worried that Trump would be more likely to both threaten and use nuclear weapons than any previous American president in a similar situation. As it is, Trump is already calling for America to expand its nuclear arsenal, and the last thing that is good for the world now is a new nuclear arms race.  

This, in particular, concerns Iran, and Iran is in a tough position. Should Iran resume uranium enrichment because Trump follows through on his pledge to end the nuclear agreement from the U.S. side between the great powers and Iran, this would likely cause two things to occur: 1.) an attempt by Saudi Arabia to develop a nuclear program of its own, and perhaps Turkey, maybe even others, and 2.) an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities that would likely be supported or joined by a Trump Administration, sparking a wider war in the Middle East, likely between the U.S. and Sunni-led powers on one side and Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in one form or another on the other. Yemen and Bahrain could easily become battlegrounds, and there is reason to consider as a serious possibility Russia joining or at least supporting the Shiite side, as Russia now already has something of an alliance with Iran, Hezbollah, and the Syrian Government through Syria’s Civil War.

ISNA: Trump repeatedly said that he is not for JCPOA [the Iran nuclear deal], although EU senior officials say it is beyond Trump’s authority to make any changes to this agreement; what would be your explanation on this issue?

BF: Trump can definitely end U.S. participation in the agreement, and can get Congress reapply the sanctions that were removed as part of it (these are separate from the current sanctions regarding military and terrorism issues). Would it be fair if Trump broke the agreement with Iran? No. Would it be understandable, even justified, for Iran to resume uranium enrichment under those circumstances? Of course. Yet sometimes, what you have the right and ability to do isn’t always the right choice, and the question Iran’s leaders will have to really ask themselves is this: is it really in Iranian interests to do so? Because if it does, the possibility of an Israeli strike—however unjustified or justified, leaving that question out it—supported or even joined by the U.S. becomes highly likely, and that is a situation that will be no good for Iran and Shiites all around the Middle East, especially those who are living under oppressive Sunni governments, or for the Middle East in general, not good at all. It will result in large losses of life and perhaps catastrophic economic and physical destruction.

Sometimes, leadership is about swallowing pride and being able to absorb verbal and diplomatic abuse (in this case, coming from a Trump Administration) than it is about confrontation and conflict, even if one feels one’s cause is just. Peace is its own reward and there are a number of outcomes that can be good for Iran that do not involve uranium enrichment. For one thing, after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and watching the Arab Spring churn largely into chaos, destruction, and death, there is virtually no appetite in the U.S. for a war that would involve overthrowing Iran’s government and occupying Iran with American troops; thus, should Iran seek nuclear weapons capability as a way to prevent a U.S. invasion and the overthrow of Iran’s own government, it is trying to prevent something that in all likelihood will not be happening, yet the pursuit of such a goal would be ruinous for Iran, as plenty of military options for the Israel and the U.S. exist, with their superior air forces, that do not involve an invasion or overthrowing the Iranian government.

For another thing, if Trump cancels the agreement and Iran does not resume enrichment, the moral high ground on this issue (apart from other considerations) will be incredibly strong for Iran, and the pressure on Trump and the U.S. from the rest of the world powers will be considerable, so great that the pressure the U.S. faces could be severe and beyond verbal, and if Trump initiates major trade wars with countries like China and Mexico, sanctions against the U.S. for violating the agreement would be even greater possibility that they would otherwise, though not necessarily likely. If Iran can resist the temptation and behave more responsibly than American leadership, the support from Europe, Russia, and China would be that much greater. And, ultimately, those nations are doing far more business with Iran than the U.S. In the end, the temptation to resume enrichment would be great, and nobody likes to undergo that level of pressure, but the longer-term interests of Iran, and the lives of the Iranian people, will be much better served by not pursuing such a course. If Trump behaves poorly and Iran conducts itself with restraint, the stature of Iran in worldwide diplomatic circles will only increase, with a deeper level of respect than it currently enjoys. It Iran tried to match Trump taunt for taunt, insult for insult, threat for threat—as some of his former Republican rivals tried to do—Iran will only be seen as more like Trump than as conducting itself in a more dignified manner, and Trump’s Republican rivals show there is no out-Trumping Trump: if there is one thing the Republican primaries taught us, it is that Trump always wins when his opponents sink to his level. Finally, Iran can know that many American people will appreciate this restraint, and should politics shift and Democrats make a comeback, new people who noted Iran’s praise-worthy restraint would be empowered by such restraint to improve U.S.-Iranian relations and support Iran should it pursue policies that defuse tensions and further peace.

ISNA: And finally, do you believe amid tensions which still are in the two countries’ relationship, especially regarding US sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program, and that so far have not vanished as was predicted after JCPOA, that it would be possible that Iran and US could be better friends rather than enemies?

BF: Well, the relevant nuclear-related sanctions have been removed by the Obama Administration; other sanctions related to other matters are separate issues. But to whether Iran and the U.S. make better friends than enemies, of course we make better friends. It just becomes much harder with Trump and the Republican Party running America’s foreign policy, and especially if the sanctions that have been removed by Obama are reimposed by Trump. Clinton would have been tough, but fair, with Iran: she would have honored the JCPOA, and have used that a basis to work for breakthroughs with Iran on Syria, Iraq, Israel, and other regional issues; such work might have led to the lifting of other non-nuclear sanctions. I have always believed that Iran and the U.S. have plenty of issues with which they can find enthusiastic agreement. And I think it’s overdue for a grand ayatollah to come to Washington and for a president to go to Tehran.

And yet, the biggest obstacle to having the JCPOA become a springboard for further cooperation thus far has been Syria. I’ve personally been disappointed in Iran’s actions when it comes to Syria. As old as the concept and word “terrorism” has been around, it has been used by oppressive leaders as an excuse to crush opposition and impose iron-fisted rule. This can be the case if there is no actual terrorism or, in the case of Syria, if there is very real terrorism, even the worst in the world. Iran has good reason to fear Sunni extremist terrorism from the likes of ISIS and al-Qaeda, but one can stand against terrorism while also condemning the slaughter of Syria’s people on a massive scale by the Assad government. I understand and respect that Assad is an Alawite and that Alawites are religious cousins of Iran’s Shiites, but history will judge Iran for its support of Assad and Russia’s assault on large segments of Syria’s civilian population, not just terrorists. Even with ISIS in charge of Mosul, with the Iraqi Army having the U.S. as an ally and behaving in a relatively restrained way towards civilians, look at how much worse the civilian killings and refugee situation is for Aleppo with the Syrian forces’ assault backed by Russia (it is interesting that Iran has advisors, forces, and/or militias involved in both operations, and can easily tell the differences in the conduct and brutality of the operations for themselves even if it does not acknowledge these differences publicly). In particular, I was saddened that Iran did not forcefully condemn Assad’s relatively larger-scale use of chemical weapons against his own people back in the fall of 2013, because I know how horribly Iranians and suffered when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in an even more massive way against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, with the support and cover-up of the Reagan Administration, one of America’s most shameful acts.

Thus, I was hoping that Iran could be the conscience of the Assad regime since it is clear that Assad and Putin have almost none when it comes to Syria’s people. Imagine if Iran was seen not only to be a protector of Shiites, but also of Sunnis in Syria? I still believe that Iran can act within Syria as a force to reduce the brutality and killing of the civil war, something very clearly in line with more mainstream Islamic teachings since the time of the Prophet Muhammed himself, who during war generally urged humane treatment over brutality (after all, the very first verse of the Quran refers to Allah by the title of “the Merciful,”) and to act to push against Assad’s government’s and Russia’s military’s acts of indiscriminate killing.  

If Iran were to ensure that Assad, if(?)/when(?) victorious, shows mercy and takes great care to protect civilians, Iran can play the most constructive role of any power in Syria given the present realities, eclipsing Russia, Turkey, the Gulf, and the West (including the U.S.) in helping to make a humanitarian difference and saves lives. It is beneath the dignity of Iran to be an accomplice in the abuses of Assad against his own people, and Iran can be more than just a no-questions-asked ally like Russia, which is even taking part in the mass killings with its air force and heavy weapons. While Iran’s own government has its issues with human rights, it has never done anything to its own people that rises to Assad’s level of brutality, even in the suppressions that followed the end of the 1979 Iranian Revolution; during the run-up the Revolution, the Shah, too, did not even come close to Assad’s current levels of mass murder. 

Part of the spirit of the Iranian Revolution was originally one of standing up to oppression; for Iran to be true to itself and its ideals, it must work to help alleviate the suffering of Syria’s people, not just Alawite, but Sunnis, too, Kurds, and all of Syria’s people, especially to protect civilians at the mercy of Assad’s government and Russia’s air force who have been shown no mercy or next to none. With its troops on the ground and its close ally Hezbollah heavily involved in fighting in Syria on Assad’s behalf, and with Assad’s own official forces so heavily depleted, Iran is in the best position to do something about human rights and saving lives in Syria. If it does so clearly, visibly, and verifiably under international observers, it will win hearts and minds all over the West and the Sunni world, in addition to the Shiite world. 

If it helps Assad kill genocidal or near-genocidal-numbers of Syrians and turns a blind eye to this reality, it will be behaving just like Russia is now and like Saddam Hussein behaved in Iraq, and far crueler than the Shah. I believe Iran can be better than this, and if that happens, maybe not under Trump, but eventually the American government will show substantive appreciation for such actions of protection and mercy, along with the rest of the world community. But right now, with the world horrified not just by ISIS (and rightfully so) but also by the Assad government’s actions in Syria and especially Aleppo (and rightfully so), Iran is associated with this killing in Syria and it makes it harder for the West to proceed on negotiating with Iran when it comes to other issues, negotiations that may lead to the removal of non-nuclear sanctions. In fact, Iran turning a blind eye to mass killing in Syria makes it that much harder for other regional partners to trust it in working to find common ground on and resolutions to other important Middle Eastern issues.

Any who doubt that Iran and the U.S. can find common ground should look only to the crisis with former-Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki from 2014, when the Obama Administration, Iran, Iraq’s Shiite political establishment, and Shiite religious leaders in both Iran and Iraq came together to insist the divisive Maliki step aside to give new, less divisive leadership a chance, giving eventual rise to the far more accommodating team of Dr. Haider al-Abadi (more on that in my article here). Iraqi, Iranian, and American interests are all better-off as a result, and especially the Iraqi people, thus proving American-Iranian cooperation can bring about positive change to the region. 

Ironically, the Trump Administration will be far less concerned about human rights than other recent American administrations and is seeking to come together with Russia, which makes Iran’s respect for human rights all the more important when it comes to Syria. I can say one thing: to be seen coming together with Putin and Trump in working against human rights and ganging up against Sunnis will not raise Iran’s standing globally, nor will it make things better for the people of the Middle East, whether they are Shiite, Sunni, or of other faiths; the last thing that is in Iran’s and the region’s interests is a worsening of the Sunni-Shiite conflict already playing out across the region. With the rise of Trump, Iran has a unique chance to be a champion of human rights, peace, and mercy in a region where now even fewer powers are acting towards those ends. I hope Iran’s leaders and people together see that this is a great opportunity for them, even in spite of the many challenges, some unfair, Iran may face in choosing such a course. But the right course is often not the easiest, as the lives of the Prophet Muhammad and the major Shiite Imams Ali and Hussain, so revered by Iranians, amply demonstrate.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 16, 2016

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 16th, 2016 Updated December 3rd w/ additional exit poll data

Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images

AMMAN — Many people are perplexed as to how white people who apparently voted for Obama in recent elections voted for Trump in this one (Update 12/3: Clinton apparently mostly turned off these white voters to stay home or vote third-party, much less than to switch their vote to Trump; the below analysis still makes sense in that even the movement away from her supports its conclusions about race). Others say this proves those people can’t be racist, since they voted for a black president. The first issue is actually easy to explain, and the second assertion is easy to refute; both points lie in the same understanding of what happened in 2008, 2012, and 2016.

Why Obama Was Acceptable to Some Whites, but Not Clinton

When Obama ran in 2008, he didn’t frame himself heavily as the first African-American president, and he didn’t frame his campaign as one what would give any special attention or cater to African-Americans, Hispanics, or other minorities. In fact, he engaged in what was mainly a post-racial, race-neutral campaign that many white voters found to be a welcome and inspirational message; many of them thought how nice it would be to move beyond the past and the issue of racism, in general, leaving conversations on the issue to history. In 2012, Obama stuck to not campaigning explicitly as a black president and to not paying any significant particular attention to the issues and needs of minority communities; his was a broad message, except in one sense: he certainly campaigned in a way that catered to the needs of women. But women aren’t a minority. And, again, a black man with liberal inclinations easily won minorities in roughly sharing their skin complexion and more or less sharing their general politics, and won well more than enough votes among whites with an uplifting message that, once again, avoided any focus on specific racial or ethnic minorities. And in his two terms as president, he did little to focus on minority issues apart apart from some action on immigration (blocked in the Supreme Court) and some fine speeches—as opposed to action—on race relations; the nation’s first black president did not even nominate a black person for the Supreme Court, instead nominating a Latina, a white woman, and a white man (the last almost certain not to be appointed).

We know that in 2016, Hillary Clinton, a white woman, ran a campaign that definitely catered to specific needs and issues of minority voters—even explicitly pushing white Americans to open their minds, eyes, and ears to the plight of people of color—and also basically ran to continue many of Obama’s policies that voters had validated in 2012; she practically launched her campaign with an amazing speech on race, boldly challenging America to do better by its communities of color, and made this one of her major issues throughout the campaign. She performed very well with African-Americans, although not quite as high as Barack Obama (which was never going to happen since she was not the first African-American major-party nominee, and this may have in part been due to a massive long-term GOP effort towards voter suppression in the first presidential campaign since key parts of the Voting Rights Act protecting minorities were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013), and did better with Latinos than any candidate ever better analysis is examined than exit polls, which are relatively poor at measuring Latinos.

The New York Times

Her white support fell and Trump’s went up, falling for her and rising for him sharply in key geographic areas in the Rust Belt: whites who had supported Obama stayed home and/or different whites that were motivated positively by Trump and negatively by Clinton came out and voted (obviously, a combination of these). Trump beat Clinton by 21 points (58%-37%) among whites, while Romney had beaten Obama with whites by 20 points (59%-39%), a 1 point decline for Trump but a 2 point decline for Clinton, not insignificant considering whites are 70% of the electorate. Trump’s victory included beating her by 32 points with white men (63%-21%), even beating her by 10 points with white women (53%-43%), and even beating her with college-educated whites by 4 points (49%-45%), including 45% of college-educated white women to Clinton’s 51%. Even though Clinton is on pace to receive at least the second-most votes in history of any candidate after Obama and has already now come in at least 1 million votes ahead of Trump, with millions more to be counted, the difference among white voters in key counties in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa gave Trump the electoral math he needed to triumph in the Electoral College and win the presidency.

Either way, the lesson is clear: in 2008 and 2012, racism in America had evolved so that enough whites out there were willing to vote for a black candidate. But in 2016, there were not enough whites willing to support a white woman who promised to give some special attention and resourcing to people of color. So, a black candidate is fine as long as that candidate isn’t asking white America to accept any responsibility, special attention, or resourcing for disadvantaged persons of color, to sacrifice anything for them or even to admit through any substantive action that people of color have it worse and deserve special attention; a white candidate that speaks “hard truth” about race and the need for special attention to groups of color who have been especially discriminated against by white people is a bridge too far for millions of white people in 2016.

As a white woman, Clinton could not take minority support for granted; she absolutely needed to court, and cater, to minorities’ needs and concerns in order to earn their support. As a black man, Obama did not need to to this, and could, more or less, take their support for granted; it was white America that he needed to aggressively court, on which his candidacy would rise or fall. In the end, Clinton’s gamble was that enough white voters would accept a white candidate who gave such special focus and attention to minorities; in the end, they did not, and she lost.

In other words, there are enough whites comfortable enough voting for a black president as long as that president doesn’t emphasize his blackness to them, doesn’t ask them to come down from their perch from which they can look down on minorities, or doesn’t suggest he will apply any particular energy to helping people of color.

*****

The New Racism

This is the new, modern form of racism; there’s plenty of the old, more obvious and outward racism, but the new racism is accepting of people of color so long as they don’t ask for justice and accept their place without seeking any government redress or leadership to help them with their problems. The new racism is pretending that those problems aren’t any worse than those, on average, faced by white people. The new racism is being willfully ignorant of how history, policy, and politics are front and center in the disproportionate suffering of people of color. The new racism is a total denial of white responsibility or agency in the suffering of people of color. 

Those espousing the new racism, some of them could support the black guy who sounded white and didn’t talk about black people much, but they deserted a white woman who wanted to continue the black guy’s policies because, in their view, she talked too much about people of color and wanted the nation as a whole to address their plight directly. 

The old racists—those who would burn crosses if that was still a thing and who hurl epithets in private and sometimes public—exist, and there are plenty of them. And the new racists and the old racists united, especially in key places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and Michigan, and Florida; that is a major reason why Trump won, is probably the main reason why Clinton’s support among whites fell.

In case this is not obvious, they fled her to vote for a candidate who, if not openly espousing racism (and that itself would be a controversial assertion), openly played with racism, racial resentment, and undercurrents of racism and hired an outward racist to be one of the two most powerful people in his campaign in the closing months of the campaign, and has now named this person—Steve Bannon of the racist, despicable Breitbart News—as one of his two most powerful White House advisors.

In case it’s still not obvious, after Trump was elected, there was and still is open wave of hateful racism and bigotry hurled by white Trump supporters at various minorities, often graffiti and words, but also including some violent incidents, as if Trump’s election somehow validated such behavior: over 400 incidents in less than 6 days from Wednesday, the day after the election, through Monday morning alone.

Still not convinced? People of color overwhelmingly rejected Bernie Sanders and his unrealistic ideology and delusional proposals, though the younger people were, the more support he had with them. Sanders’ message was clear, consistent and extremely narrow: the political revolution, focusing on income inequality and punishing the wealthy and corporations, would bring about success for all, and Sanders repeatedly refused to articulate a message that allowed for specific programs for people of color, or that they were a special group that had suffered more than the white majority; rather, all were equal victims of the rigged system and the wealthy elites who ran it (on a side note, this system for him included the media, and Sanders and his apostles absurdly claimed that if only he and they could educate the masses and bypass media propaganda, they would unite and rise up, regardless of race or religion, and unite in supporting Sanders and his political democratic socialist revolution; this utter nonsense has been dispelled in so many ways, but perhaps most notably by the fact that the United States just elected a man who epitomizes everything Sanders campaigned against).

As was the case with Obama, white liberals loved this race-neutral message, language, and policy program, and flocked to Sanders by huge margins, preferring his one-size-fits-all approach that gave no special consideration to people of color and their special circumstances, and people of color were, conversely, repelled by this. In fact, when Sanders was peaking after New Hampshire, he was pressed by some of his supporters of color and black and Latino activists to make room for special consideration for minorities in his economic message; he adamantly refused, and thus he himself destroyed his own chance of winning the nomination by not adjusting this message before heading into the diverse states of Nevada and South Carolina and other diverse states of the first Super Tuesday, exposing Sanders’ narrow appeal and narrow constituencies for what they were: something that could win about 40% of participants in the Democratic nomination contests but that was incapable of winning that nomination or a general election.

And those who would make the argument that Trump’s win was more about class or economics are making an argument that simply doesn’t hold up, and obviously doesn’t hold up, because, while “working class” whites overwhelmingly favored Trump, people of color—”working class” or otherwise—overwhelmingly rejected Trump. Furthermore, Clinton beat Trump by 11 points (52%-41%) among all voters who made less than $50,000 a year and even beat trump by 4 points (49%-45%) among all voters who made less than $100,000 annually (UPDATE 12/3: Further fuel to the argument that this was less about economics and more about race: among voters who said the economy was the most important issue, Clinton beat Trump by 11 points nationally and in every swing state that Trump won: she beat him among those voters by 4 points in Pennsylvania, by 3 points in Ohio, by 8 points in Michigan, by 11 points in Wisconsin, by 3 points in Florida, and by 7 points in North Carolina, and even by 2 points in Iowa and 2 points in Arizona).

A Win for White Nationalism &, Therefore, Racism

In elevating Trump to the Republican Party presidential nomination and then to the presidency, Americans basically validated white denial and the concept that white victimhood is the most glaring, most deserving of attention of all ethnic and racial victimhoods; in other words, Trump’s wins were victories for white exclusivist nationalism, in hindsight hardly surprising as a wave of ethno-centric nationalisms takes over democracies all over the world, from India and Israel to Turkey and Hungary to Poland and Bulgaria. In Trump’s America, white Americans—as they see themselves—are a racial group like any other racial group in that they are oppressed and need to unite and fight for their rights or suffer the consequences; such delusion and denial of white privilege, such zero-sum exclusivist thinking, is not only now mainstream, it is a unifying thread for the vast majority of Trump’s voters, whether conscious or unconscious.

Some may say that what was here termed the new racism isn’t really racism at all. And those people are wrong. To willfully deny that there is racism today and that certain groups of people suffer from it today still, to deny that historical racism is still affecting certain groups today because of persistent generational effects that a racist system and racist institutions inflicted upon them have a long half-life and don’t simply vanish at the passing of a law, to deny that it is harder to be black or brown in America than it is to be white, to deny that white people have huge advantages over people of color even if they are poor themselves (admittedly a hard sell but still absolutely, demonstrably, indisputably true regardless the poor socio-economic condition a good many whites), or to accept any of these but to simply say that nothing should be done to deal with these past and present realities—in essence saying a big “who cares, not my problem,” which is de facto saying those people should just accept their inferior status and that we as a nation owe them nothing despite such a long, brutal history of and continuing mistreatment—is clearly racism. Stubborn and willful ignorance is also racism because that perpetuates inaction, which perpetuates a system that discriminates people of color and keeps whites at an elevated status. Such beliefs outlined here clearly favor whites over people of color, and stubborn and willfully advocating inaction on injustice for entire groups of people of color is basically pushing for continued white favor, privilege, and superiority no matter how you frame such beliefs. If you refuse to accept reality that people of color do suffer absolutely and proportionately from racism in ways that whites do not, or if you refuse to accept that basic ethics and morality means that justice is owed and continues to be owed to such people until the effects of racism are obliterated, then this is actually active support for racism and a racist system. And when a person votes in such a way as to perpetuate either of these dual refusals, if means that vote goes towards actively perpetuating the social and economic superiority of white people over people of color, to at least maintain or perhaps even expand the benefits, advantages, and privileges that whites currently enjoy over their fellow citizens of color.

The New Racism Is the New Normal (Democratic Fascism?)

As I wrote earlier, this is utterly banal and such ethnic and racial and religious politics are common all over the world today; conservatives in America are particularly fond of claiming America and Americans are exceptional, but in this, they are depressingly normal. What is clear is that many white Americans were ok with a black candidate who avoided making race a centerpiece of his candidacy and presidency but were not OK with a white candidate who wanted to push white America to be more racially conscious and put racial justice and racial inequality at the center of hers; even worse, over her they chose Trump, who ran the most racist campaign since archsegregationist George Wallace and whose raises the disturbing question of “Is he really that racist, or just using racism to win?” Either way, Americans of color are terrified, and they have every right to be.

Welcome to racism in American in 2016: a terrifying mix of the old and new that could lead to what I call democratic fascism. But more on that another time…

A comment I posted in the comment section shortly after publication:
More analysis, this from FiveThirtyEight, backing up the idea that Clinton lost in part because voters stayed home, not so much switched parties.

See related article: Republic of Georgia Shows Trump & His Fans Depressingly Normal: Just Another Ethno-centric Nationalist Movement

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Nevada Key: State-by-State Predictions for Election 2016: Barely or BIGLY, Trump Likely to Lose

It could be close, but it may not be: Democrat Hillary Clinton should still win at least 274 Electoral College votes even if she loses big states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, thereby defeating Republican Donald Trump on Election Day, and Nevada is the likely key; below, a state-by-state analysis of every competitive state.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 7/8, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 7th/8th, 2016

270towin

AMMAN — I wrote after the third debate that the election was over and that Clinton would win unless there was some kind of major Surprise. Then, FBI Director Comey spoketh… And it’s closer than many thought possible.

As we pass through the homestretch and near Election Day, the discussion inevitably turns to maps and geography more so than any other time in the general election, and Americans get to reacquaint themselves with states other than their own, the existence of which they tend to forget when there is not a presidential election at hand. “Who are these mysterious denizens in distant lands who look at the same sky we do, can agree we both seem the same color, and then agree on nothing else whatsoever?” many ask.

Well, here is your guide to the map, states, and math of the Electoral College that will determine who will be the next president of the United States of America.

In order for Trump to defeat the favored Hillary Clinton, he would have to win almost all the battleground states. Now, this is why Clinton is favored in every major statistical model, and the gold-standard in polling analysis, Five Thirty Eight, has two models—one taking into account only polls and another taking into account polls and a few other factors like demographics and economics; the thing is, it’s not as daunting a task to win for Trump as one might think, hence Five Thirty Eight’s models wisely have Trump at about a 1-in-3 shot to become president.

And keep in mind folks: our magic number here is 270.

The Locks:

First, we have the states that are locks, barring a polling disaster or a political miracle (for all states, the number in parentheses is that state’s—and DC’s—number of Electoral College votes):

Hillary’s got these locked down: Vermont (3), Massachusetts (11), Rhode Island (4), Connecticut (7), New York (29), New Jersey (14), Delaware (3), Maryland (10), Washington, DC (3), Illinois (20), Washington (state) (12), Oregon (7), California (55), and Hawaii (4), for a total of 182 certain electoral votes for Clinton.

Donald’s got these states locked down: West Virginia (5), South Carolina (9), Kentucky (8), Tennessee (11), Alabama (9), Indiana (11), Mississippi (6), Missouri (10), Arkansas (6), Louisiana (8), North Dakota (3), South Dakota (3), Nebraska (5, but only 4 are certain because the state splits its votes), Kansas (6), Oklahoma (7), Montana (3), Wyoming (3), and Idaho (4), for a total of 116 certain electoral votes for Trump.

Locked electoral votes: 182 Clinton, 116 Trump

The Near-Locks:

For Clinton:

Then, we have states which look like they could be competitive in theory, but will not be unless something crazy happens: Virginia, Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, New Mexico, Alaska, plus Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District; let’s go through each by which candidate is an overwhelming favorite and why.

Virginia (13): Before Obama won Virginia in 2008, the last time Virginia voted for a Democrat was in 1964, but since 2008 it’s been solidly blue, only sending Democratic U.S. Senators to DC since and reelecting Obama in 2012. Its main population growth has been in the DC suburbs, an area with a young, diverse increase in population mainly working for or contracting with the much-reviled status-quo “Establishment” government; they are the system and won’t vote for someone who advocates tearing it down. So while Clinton’s pretty steady lead is modest, don’t expect it to succumb to a Trump assault. Virginia will almost certainly stay in Clinton’s camp.

New Mexico (5): While Trump appears within striking distance in New Mexico, don’t let that fool you: only once since 1992, in 2004, has New Mexico voted for a Republican for president, and both of its senators and 2 out of 3 House seats are Democratic. Also, Clinton’s polling lead there has generally fluctuated between modest and good, but her lead has been steady. And, of course, Trump’s ridiculous comments about Mexican immigrants has riled up the normally relatively apathetic Latino bloc: Latinos—and Mexican-Americans especially—are coming out to vote for Clinton in record numbers, and New Mexico is fertile ground for this trend to keep it solidly in her column on Election Day. It should very much end up in with Clinton’s in the end.

Minnesota (10): Minnesota is the most liberal state not on a coast in the country: it hasn’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate since Nixon in 1972 and did so only two other times—each time for Eisenhower in the 1950s—since 1932. In addition, 6 of its 8 House (and both Senate) seats are in Democratic hands—the only state in between the coasts with such an imbalance in favor of Democrats other than New Mexico—and Minnesota polls have shown a consistent and generally sizable lead for Clinton there. Keep dreaming, Trump.

This gives us an addition 28 electoral votes that are almost certainly going to Clinton

28 near-lock + 182 lock = 210 in Clinton’s column total

For Trump:

Georgia (16): The polling has been mighty close in Georgia, but, for the most part, it’s been a consistent lead for Trump, if only a small one; but Democrats shouldn’t kid themselves: while Georgia is changing demographically and is becoming a more diverse state, the state-level political machine is very much dominated by Republicans, who have ensured that only about 28.5% of its House delegation is Democratic and both of its senators are Republicans even though nearly 45.5% of its voters voted for Obama in the 2012 election; the state system is clearly stacked against Democrats. There is a reason the Voting Rights Act (VRA) preclearance provisions were so focused on the South: white conservative southerners had used the state and local governments for generations there to disenfranchise southern blacks; with the conservative Roberts Supreme Court striking down the preclearance provision of the VRA, in 2013, overall in the South it is quite clear that Republican state authorities are engaging in systematic attempts to make it harder for people to vote in heavily Democratic and heavily African-American areas, with at least 655 polling locations closed since the Supreme Court decision in the six southern states where data is available. Georgia is not included in the available data-set, but Georgia can almost certainly be sure to be part of this trend and, especially with African-American turnout seemingly down compared to when Obama was running, it would take a miracle for Clinton to win Georgia.

Texas (38): Yes, a large number of polls show that Clinton is within striking distance in Texas (and, personally as a Democrat, I can’t wait for that state to go purple and then blue), but it’s not going to happen in 2016, barring some crazy miracle. And yes, while unlike African-Americans, Latinos will be turning out in historic numbers for Clinton, with Republicans firmly in control of the state (the state hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1976, only about 30.5% of its House delegation are Democrats and both its senators are Republicans both even though almost 41.4% voted for Obama in 2012) and trying to suppress voter turnout (at least 403 polling places have been closed in the state since the 2013 VRA decision), it would take something pretty crazy for her to top Trump in Texas.

Alaska (3): Though polls have shown a highly unusually close race in Alaska, and Five Thirty Eight’s models show Clinton with roughly the same chance of winning Alaska as Donald Trump has of winning either Wisconsin or Michigan, calm down, people, Trump is still up and it’s Alaska: this state only voted for a Democrat once, in 1964. Alaska is a diverse state, with Alaskan Natives/Native Americans a large portion of Alaska’s population—nearly 15%—and though they vote heavily Democratic, they have some of the lowest voter turnout rates of any group in the United States and hopes of Clinton taking the state would ride largely on the difficult task of turning them out. Don’t stay up late expecting Alaska to surprise anyone; it’s almost certainly going to be Trump territory.

Then there’s Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (1), which famously voted for Obama in 2008, but not in 2012; whispers of Clinton having a shot have been heard, but in the scant polling we do have, nothing showed Clinton to be competitive, and there is no other evidence that this will be the case. Yes, there’s so little data that anything is possible, but take it to the bank that this is going stay Trump territory.

This adds another 58 electoral votes that are pretty definite for Trump

So 116 lock + 58 near-lock = 174 total for Trump total

So, certain/virtually certain Electoral Votes: 210 Clinton, 174 Trump

Now, below is where it gets more interesting…

The Upsets-Are-Very-Possible-States

Departing from the above states, we have a number of states where one candidate is moderately favored but where an upset is quite possible: Maine, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Utah, and Arizona. Let’s break them down by which candidates are favored.

Advantage Clinton:

Maine (4 at stake in total, 3 at stake for the 1st Congressional District and overall winner): Overall, Maine is surprisingly close, and while a few polls have it very close, most have given Clinton a healthy lead; still, Maine is a very white state, and the whitest states have been her weakest during the primaries against Sanders and are also her weakest during this general election at the same time, but unlike most very white states, Maine’s population is relatively well-educated, a trait that hurts Trump’s chances. It is not very populous state, so any swing can make a big difference; Clinton is still an overwhelming favorite, and the state hasn’t voted GOP in a presidential race since 1988, but don’t count Trump out. Trump is far more likely to get 1 of Maine’s 4 electoral votes, from the state’s 2nd Congressional District (see further below), than he is to win the state outright.

Pennsylvania (20): While Pennsylvania has tightened in recent days, Clinton’s lead here has been averaging a very consistent moderate one, though one that has shrunken a bit in recent days. It’s not big enough to close the window on Trump but isn’t so small that it doesn’t make her a clear and substantial favorite. Yet possibly lower African-American turnout could mean Clinton doesn’t get quite the boost she is hoping for from Philadelphia.

Ballotpedia

And another point, and this is where we get into the whole early-voting situation and FBI Director Comey’s letters: Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states where there is no early voting and where only a specific set of reasons allow a person to absentee vote. Before Comey’s latest public statement, released yesterday, which exonerates (for a second time) Clinton of any prosecutable wrongdoing in her e-mails/server situation, I would have said that his previous incredible statement of October 28th—that new e-mails were found in the process of a possible sex-crime investigation on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, which he apparently shared with top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, which may be relevant to the Clinton investigation but which neither Comey nor the FBI has begun examining, meaning there was no evidence to report yet (a statement that altered the race, hurt Clinton, and helped Trump)—could have led to a dip in Clinton’s support in general and especially in states that do not allow early voting, since very few people there would have been allowed to vote before that damaging statement from Comey came out, and since people voting on Election Day would have had this e-mail thing as likely the last revelation of the 2016 campaign and the piece of information most fresh in their minds in the voting booth. 

In other words, in a close race, that October 28th Comey revelation could have made it closer or even changed the outcome. With the new revelation exonerating Clinton from wrongdoing coming only 48 hours before Election Day, on one level, this probably reduces some of the damage from the earlier statement; but the fact is that that previous statement gave America a week of non-stop negative coverage of Clinton and this new one came so late it might not make much of a difference at all: people might even miss the information depending on how busy and engaged they were/are with just two days left (a further question that will be very difficult to answer is: how many people would have voted differently during early voting if they had known now that they know from Comey’s latest revelation and/or if they had never heard the previous Comey statement; that is a mighty difficult question to answer, yet it is still very troubling that we even need to be asking this question, much to the discredit of Comey and the FBI). Another thing to consider is that even though this is “good” news for Clinton, it is still news that keeps the spotlight on this e-mail/server issue, one of Clinton’s worst, and not the issues, not her positives, not Trump’s negatives. Especially in a close race that does not allow early voting, the whole FBI e-mail stuff is still what has colored the last stretch of the campaign, so even with the latest exoneration this stuff probably hurts, more than helps, Clinton.

Still, Pennsylvania looks good for Clinton, and the state hasn’t picked a Republican for president since 1988, but it doesn’t look that good for her, and Trump has a decent chance of winning, or failing that, quite a good chance of making Pennsylvania a very tight race and much closer than expected. Bet on Clinton, but don’t bet the house.

Michigan (16): Michigan is quite an interesting state; on paper, it’s generally shown a steady and moderate Clinton lead in the polls, but with a few exceptions. However, Michigan became one of the greatest polling disasters in polling history—and the greatest in primary history—during the Michigan Democratic Primary, when Bernie Sanders ever so narrowly upset Hillary Clinton; it was the surprise Brexit (so far) of the 2016 election season. There are plenty of reasons—lower black enthusiasm, higher white enthusiasm, anger at trade deals, etc., that Trump won big in the primary and Clinton lost to Sanders—to look at a Trump upset as a serious possibility in this state. Plus, the state-level government is totally controlled by Republicans. And oh, Michigan is another state without early voting and which is strict with absentee voting, raising the possibility of Clinton’s e-mails weighing disproportionately heavily on voters’ minds here. She is definitely favored, and Michigan hasn’t gone Republican for president since 1988, but the people at the Clinton campaign sure aren’t taking Michigan for granted; nor should they. 

Wisconsin (10): With a generally steady and moderate lead for Clinton, Wisconsin isn’t quirky like Michigan, and it isn’t as close in polling as Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t mean it is out of Trump’s reach: the state government is totally controlled by Republicans, with controversial Gov. (and former 2016 presidential candidate) Scott Walker at the helm. Conversely, if Michigan is possibly weaker for Clinton because she narrowly lost to Sanders there, it must be mentioned that former 2016 Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz trounced Trump in the Wisconsin Republican Primary; additionally, Wisconsin hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1984. Both Michigan and Pennsylvania are better bets for Trump, though he still has a decent, if smaller, shot at Wisconsin.

This adds 49 more electoral votes to Clinton’s column, probable but far from certain or even close to certain

49 likely + 210 lock/near lock = 259 looking good for Clinton overall

Advantage Trump:

Iowa (6): For a while it seemed like Iowa would be pretty competitive, but as the campaign draws to a close, the polling trends have moved decidedly in Trump’s favor; Clinton still has a shot, but that shot has become smaller just when she would have hoped the opposite would be true. Expect Trump to prevail in Iowa.

Utah (6): Utah undoubtedly has to win the novelty prize of “most interesting race:” For a while, the state was host a tight three-way race between Trump, Clinton, and independent conservative and one of the last true standard-bearers of the conservative #NeverTrump movement, Mormon Utahn Evan McMullin. Unlike the vast majority of conservative Christians—who have proven themselves little more than rank hypocrites in supporting Trump after harping so long on “family values” as an issue, Mormons have admirable actually demonstrated a fidelity to their principles and have never warmed up to Trump; in fact, they really don’t like him. But polls in the last few weeks have shown Trump with a moderate and steady lead, and Utah seems to be his to lose. Still, with many Mormons being so principled and passionate in their feelings against Trump, it’s quite possible that anti-Trump Mormons may turn out in higher numbers than expected and vote for their fellow Mormon. McMullin has been surprisingly impressive, and still has the ability to shock and be the surprise of the election, but it is still an uphill battle for him, and even more so for Clinton in a conservative state, no matter how close they are; expect Trump to win but allow room for a surprise.

IF McMullin does pull off an upset—hardly inconceivable—his victory could throw a monkey wrench into the whole Electoral College math in some interesting scenarios where neither Trump nor Clinton hit 270 Electoral College votes, sending the election… to Congress? See more at the end of my article (coming soon)…

Arizona (11): Arizona has only gone once for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1952: Bill Clinton, in 1996. This time around, there has been a mostly steady and moderate lead for Trump, though a few more relatively recent polls have it very close and a few even have Clinton up a sliver. It should still go Trump, except… as mentioned, there is a dramatic increase in Hispanic voter turnout this election, and this could put Arizona in play. But there is also an increase in white turnout, as well, which may even outpace the big bump in Latino participation. And Republicans control the entire state government, having at least 212 polling places been closed in the state since the 2013 Supreme Court VRA decision. Even with a Latino surge, with the polls the way they are, a competing white surge, the state dominated by the GOP, and a longer-term national Republican strategy of voter suppression already in place, Arizona is likely to remain with Trump.

This gives another 23 likely, but hardly certain, electoral votes to Trump

23 likely + 174 lock/near lock votes = 197 for Trump

So far, that’s 259 for Clinton and 179 for Trump

The Battlegrounds

Finally, true battleground states where things are most in doubt are Florida, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada, as well as Maine’s 2nd Congressional District; we’ll divide these into leans and true tossups.

Leans Clinton

Colorado (9): Clinton had a good-sized lead in Colorado for most of October, but after the Comey announcement of October 28th, polling showed the race here tightening considerably. Still, even though the race is closer, she is shown to have a clear if slight lead, and the fact of the matter is that the demographics of Colorado are very much against Donald Trump, not just because the state is diverse, but because much of the white population is young and Millennial-heavy, profusely college-educated, and liberal. It may be a very close race, but this ground is not favorable to Trump, not enough to give him a victory without a lot of luck and a big surprise. Colorado is a state that has changed a lot and now seems firmly on a path that will keep it a blue state in terms of presidential politics for the foreseeable future.

Nevada (6) TIPPING POINT: The polling in Nevada—perhaps the most difficult state of all to poll for a mix of reasons—has been balanced out to being pretty much tied (not so much with actual ties but with a number of polls canceling each other out), and it would be easy to include it in the tossup category… Except that a lot of early voting data suggests that the race is basically over, that Latino and Democratic turnout has so exceeded expectations in favor of Clinton and without an increase in whites large enough to offset this, that the race can already be called for Clinton in the eyes of the most reputable authority on Nevada politics, Jon Ralston, especially considering that the vast majority (70%) of Nevada voters voted early in 2012.

So Clinton might have already won Nevada before Election Day, with the Nevada State Democratic Party and Harry Reid’s political machine delivering her a victory through an exceptional early-voting-drive effort; it would be fitting particularly for Reid, since it was arguably his machine that delivered Nevada to Clinton in the contest with Sanders, and, as I have pointed out, that was the point where Clinton effectively defeated Sanders for the nomination, even if many others did not realize this at the time. Yes, this would be quite a curtain call for Reid, set to retire after suffering a terrible head injury while exercising back on New Years’ Day in 2015.

Given what we know from early voting, it’s very hard to see Trump winning Nevada.

This means that looking at how uncertain other parts of the race are, considering how in-doubt Nevada was until early voting data came in and how Colorado was thought to be much less competitive than Nevada, if we look at the map and do the math, if we consider Colorado a state more secure for Clinton than Nevada, then we can basically say that Nevada is the tipping point, because it is with Nevada secure—the least secure of all the contests for her in which she is favored—that she has enough Electoral College votes to win the election regardless of who wins New Hampshire, North Carolina, or Florida, the outcomes of which are far more in doubt; Nevada in this case is the kingmaker, then, or, rather, we should say queenmaker.

So 15 electoral votes (with Nevada being the final 6) + the 259 we already gave to Clinton = 274.

Game over.

*****

But, let us finish our analysis:

Leans Trump

Maine’s 2nd Congressional District (1): Polls previously had this very rural, extremely white part of Maine solidly in Trump’s camp, but over the last month is has tightened and now the polls indicate it will be a toss-up. But aside from very being white, it is also not as well-educated as the rest of Maine, making it fertile ground for Trump; thus, even with the numbers indicating a tie, in the end, the demographics suggest that Trump is more likely to prevail than Clinton.

Ohio (18): Ohio always seems to be a crucial state in elections: since 1804—its first election—the state has only failed to vote for the winning presidential candidate 9 times, and only twice in the 20th century, in 1944 (weirdly enough) and 1960.  But there’s a pretty good chance that Ohio will pick the loser in 2016, for the first time in 56 years. Clinton has a decent shot, but not a great one: for most of the last month, Trump has had a steady and moderate lead, but very recently a number of very close polls came out; if not for these polls, I would have had Ohio in the previous category. On one level, Ohio is mad about Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade deal, plus African-Americans, as mentioned, have been coming out to vote in lower numbers than in 2008 and 2012, Ohio included; on another level, Clinton still managed to beat Sanders soundly here in the primary, while Trump was embarrassed by then-rival and sitting governor of the state John Kasich, who refused to vote for Trump and wrote in John McCain’s name in early voting. Still, the Republicans control the entire state government and Trump is definitely favored here: Clinton has about as good a chance of winning Ohio as Trump does of winning the whole election: according to Five Thirty Eight models, about one-in-three. It could be really close, but Trump should win here.

This means we have 19 electoral votes that lean trump

19 leans + 197 likelies, locks/near locks = 216 electoral votes for Trump

That’s 274 electoral votes for Clinton, 216 for Trump even before the most in-doubt races are factored into the mix, but let’s go into them anyway, since the above numbers are likely, but hardly guaranteed.

True tossups:

New Hampshire (4): Clinton had a relatively steady lead here, but polls tightened over the last week or so, and even though she still seems to have an overall edge in polling, there are many contradictory polls; given New Hampshire’s famous propensity for bucking trends and defying prediction, being independent-minded, and having a strong libertarian streak, it’s just too hard to predict this one. Clinton got crushed here by Bernie Sanders, and Trump dominated his opponents here on the other side of that primary, but the state also voted for Obama twice and voted for Kerry in 2004. The state is also overwhelmingly white, but also very educated. On top of it all, New Hampshire is one of those few states that does not have early voting and has strict absentee voting, begging the question of how the whole FBI/Comey stuff will play out. New Hampshire, you’re tough, and I honestly don’t have a prediction to make.

North Carolina (15): Going into the final few weeks, a number of conflicting polls emerged, with a majority showing Clinton with a slight-to-moderate lead, but a strong minority giving Trump a lead, and most of those a slight one; the final poll showed a tie. If this wasn’t confusing enough, North Carolina is a relatively educated state, with a strong number of college-degree holding whites and a large African-American population; conversely, white turnout is up in North Carolina and African-American turnout is down in the state after the GOP closed a number of polling sites, and the state government is totally controlled by Republicans, who have been exposed there as systematically trying to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” with voter suppression in a federal appeals court rulingfrom late July that struck down some of the North Carolina Republicans’ attempts to restrict voting, a ruling which a 4-4 deadlocked Supreme Court was unable to overturn at the end of August (had Scalia survived, he certainly would have made that a 5-4 decision overturning the federal appeals court ruling). The state voted for Obama in 2008 (the first time a Democrat won the presidential race there since Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976), but then went for Romney in 2012, and with plenty of reasons for both campaigns to be optimistic and both campaigns to worry, it is unclear how the state will go once all the votes are counted in 2016.

Florida (29): Oh, Florida, it’s always crazy in Florida on Election Day. Polls in Florida have been a bit all over the place, about half showing Clinton with a small lead and half showing Trump with a small lead (plus one) tie. And there are reasons for both sides to be optimistic: Clinton is happy that Florida is a diverse state and that in its vibrant Latino community turnout is dramatically up in early voting, but the white vote is also way up, the Democrats’ lead in early voting is less than it was in 2008, and Republicans control the entire state government, a position from which they may be engaging in voter suppression, as Republicans have been apt to do this election cycle: after Hurricane Matthew hit, Republican Governor and enthusiastic Trump supporter Rick Scott did not even want to extend voter registration, but he was sued by the Florida Democratic Party and a federal judge forced him to extend the deadline. Thus, Florida, as usual, is also too close to call, give the polling and what I laid out.

I really think these last three states are just too close to call, so that’s 48 electoral votes that are anybody’s guess. But this still gives us a range:

Likely closest result: 274 Clinton, 264 Trump

Likely biggest gap: 322 Clinton, 216 Trump 

The Crazy Scenarios if Nobody Gets to 270

Then, there are the crazy scenarios with a realistic chance of actually happening, where neither Clinton nor Trump hit 270.

For starters, let’s say that the states go as I have predicted and say that New Hampshire goes for Clinton with North Carolina and Florida going to Trump, with the exceptions that Trump pulls off upsets in Nevada and Colorado: ladies and gentleman, we would be tied 269-269, and the election would go to the incoming Congress (more on that in a bit, and wow, Maine’s 2nd Congressional District would look mighty important in such scenario).

But then we have other crazy scenario: if Evan McMullin wins Utah (hardly an extremely remote possibility given what I laid out) there are a number of very close scenarios where candidates could be just a few electoral votes shy of getting 270, sometimes just a single vote (Maine’s 2nd Congressional District could be a kingmaker here if it went Clinton) . And, again, we go to Congress.

There are other scenarios where neither Clinton nor Trump reaches 270, but these are easily the most likely, the other being dramatically more remote but hardly impossible (scenarios involving less competitive states above the battleground tier, as outlined above).

I’ll avoid going into those since they are far more remote, but feel free to play with your own maps.

But, under the Constitution, when the election goes to Congress, the president is chosen by the state congressional delegations from the incoming House of Representatives class (extremely likely to be majority-Republican), with each delegation getting one vote: all of Texas’ congressmen are equal to Montana’s one congressman. They would be allowed to choose from the top three electoral vote receivers, and if McMullin’s Utah delegation could pull in other Republican states’ representatives who are hostile to Trump into a bloc, they could prevent enough delegations from picking Trump, who would need 26 out of the 50 delegations to win. Meanwhile, the Senate would select the VP from the top-two electoral-vote receivers for the vice presidency, with senators voting as individuals; if the House could not pick a winner with at least 26 delegations by the inauguration, the VP chosen from the Senate would become president; if Senate was deadlocked, the president would be the incoming Speaker of the House (likely Paul Ryan but not certainly so).

On top of all of this? A Bernie Sanders support who is 1 out of 12 electors in the Electoral College for Washington State, which a lock for Clinton, has explicitly said he will not vote for Clinton in the Electoral College regardless of how his state votes; if he stays true to his statement, then Clinton will lose 1 electoral vote. If some of the aforementioned wackier scenarios play out, this one obnoxious man may decide the fate of the nation, and perhaps Western democracy and the world…

About That Popular Vote…

With lots of close races, it’s going to come down to turnout. Can Obama’s personally hitting the campaign trail help to make up some of the gap between black turnout in 2012 and 2008 compared to reports of lower turnout thus far in 2016? Can Trump turnout whites in record-enough numbers to upset Clinton? Will Latinos, like the Ents in The Lord of the Rings, wake up to their potential power and be kingmakers in key states like Florida, Arizona, and Nevada?

As for the numbers of popular vote, the best pollster in politics, Ann Selzer, just released a national poll which had Clinton at 44%, Trump at 41%, 4% for Gary Johnson, and 2% for Jill Stein; 1% did not know, 3% voted/intended to vote but not for president (think of this as the disgusted vote), and a whopping 4% did not want to tell their choice; as I wrote in my early October prediction of how voters might shift before Election Day (I seemed to have underestimated the collapse of Johnson and Stein, but my best guess from then was about Clinton 45%, Trump 43%, Johnson 6% and 2-3% for Stein, with about 4.5% undecided that I wouldn’t dare guess), I noted how I thought the vast majority of those who said they did not want to share their intentions were probably Trump voters; if I am right here, the popular vote margin could be very close; Clinton could even lose the popular vote while winning the electoral college, something that, given what I just mentioned, seems a more likely scenario that any would have thought previously (I didn’t say likely, just more possible). If I am wrong about those people who didn’t want to share their choice with pollsters, Clinton should win the popular vote by a small but clear margin, but perhaps the Latino surge will outperform these surveys and give Clinton more than a small margin in the popular vote; probably the main reason she will win by a larger margin if so, and, possibly the main reason she will win in general.

It’s also quite reasonably possible that the polls are off by “a normal polling error” across the board, kind of like with Brexit; if this is the case, we could see a decent-sized Trump win, but that could mean a Clinton blowout.

We’ll know very soon. Nothing to worry about here, only the fate of American and Western democracy…

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The worst thing about Trump? Globally, people like him and his supporters are everywhere and their politics maddeningly banal, as the ethno-centric politics of hate in the Caucasian Republic of Georgia demonstrate frightening similarities to the same politics in the Unites States of America.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 10, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 10th, 2016

Patrick Robert/Corbis/Getty; EPA

AMMAN — Amid all the talk of the issue of the “normalization” of Trump, perhaps the most disheartening realization that comes to those who ponder such a concept is in how many ways how utterly banal are figures like Trump and the movement he is cultivating/exploiting, both in the wider world and throughout history. Georgia—the Republic of, in the Caucasus, not the one of peaches, the Atlanta Braves, and America’s Deep South—is as illustrative of this sad reality of the human condition as any other place, and is thus deeply relevant to understanding our own predicament with Mr. Trump and his fans.

To illustrate this point, I will steal from my own graduate school work in 2009 on conflict in Georgia involving Georgians, Abkhaz, Ossetians, and Russians, inserted in italicized blocs (apologies for all the parenthetical citations as we had a very strict and I would argue frustrating series of guidelines; here is the full paper). 

As will be demonstrated, much of Georgian history involves internal and external forces managing the relationships between ethnic Georgians on one hand and ethnic Abkhaz and ethnic Ossetians and others on the other in what can loosely be understood to be Georgian territory and in what comprises the internationally recognized borders of Georgia today. Since 1800, Russia dominated the country and has been nearly the sole major outside actor involved in these ethnic conflicts, and in recent years has acted to allow both Abkhazia and South Ossetia to become de facto independent from Georgia and to become de facto parts of the Russian Federation. After the period of the rule of the Czars over the Russian Empire ended, the ethnic minorities in Georgia competed for favor and power to be bestowed from the Soviet Union’s governing elites, elites whose behavior ranged from accommodating ethnic Georgian nationalism to addressing concerns of minorities in Georgia as a way to check Georgian nationalism when it became too anti-Russian/anti-Soviet (something which continued after the fall of the USSR up through today).

Much of American history, likewise, is the story of race relations between white masters and black slaves in the South and the relationship between the rest of the country and the South when it came to limiting the institution of slavery. Since 1865, slavery ended in America but attempts at legal and political equality for freed slaves in the South failed in the face of a terrorist insurgency that finally succeeded in overthrowing the post-Civil War order everywhere in the South by 1877. It was not until a long period of first oppression and later unrest that legal and political equality for African-Americans was imposed on the South by an activist U.S. federal government by 1965.

Creating Identities

“The creation legend of Abkhazia and Georgia is identical, a sad fact that has not led to unity and fraternity between these two peoples,” writes Goltz (2009), “but rather to a disputation of basic history and the denial of the very humanity of the other group” (Goltz 2009, 21). For most of its history, Georgia had a stronger eastern kingdom which dominated a weaker western Georgian kingdom, and Abkhazia (then called Abkhazeti) was often ruled by a local prince who might submit to another prince or one of the Georgian kings, or might not, and managed to stay free, and eventually grew in power into its own kingdom, supplanting the west Georgian state and rivaling the east Georgian kingdom for several centuries until the latter unified both into a single Georgian kingdom in 1008 C.E. (Suny 1994, 11-33; Braund 1994, 152-313; Rapp 2000, 576; Gvosdev 2000,1). This kingdom would be a “decidedly decentralized state,” where local rulers often flouted the authority of the “kings” and reached out to foreign powers independently for leverage against them, some trying to take the throne (Suny 1994, 33- 38). Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Georgia “remained…primarily rural” and its “towns…were largely inhabited by Muslims, Armenians, and other foreigners” until the nineteenth century (Ibid., 38-39). Mongols and plague fragmented Georgia, and Abkhazeti was one of three western regions “ruled as semi-independent” principalities; Georgia would not see reunification “until the annexation by Russia in the nineteenth century” (Suny 1994, 38-59; Gvosdev 2000, 2-5).”

Note how divided and difficult to control the region was.

“Because, arguably, interests are tied to identities,” writes Suny (1999), “self-understandings… must be investigated as prerequisite to analyzing the security requirements of states” (Suny 1999, 139- 140). Georgia is among certain former Soviet states where “uncertainty about current politics and future possibilities are deeply embedded in more general confusion about who ‘we‘ are and where ‘our‘ interests lie” and he writes that “[n]ational identity is a particular form of political identification” in a world where “nation is not natural or given but must be worked for, taught, and instilled, largely through the efforts of intellectuals, politicians, and activists who make the identification with the ‘imagined political community‘ of the nation a palpable and potent source of emotional and intellectual commitment” (Ibid., 140, 144-145). For Suny, “[m]odern nations are those political communities made up of people who believe they share characteristics…that give them the right to self-determination… they can be thought of as arenas in which people dispute who they are, argue about boundaries, who is in or who is out of the group, where the ‘homeland‘ begins and ends, what the ‘true‘ history of the nation is” (Suny 1999, 145; 4 Suny 2001, 866). He argues that many wars in the modern era are fought over such issues, and that “longlived ‘nations,‘ [like]…Georgians… who have written traditions that go back millennia, have in modern times reconstructed and made consistent the varied and changing identities and ways of conceiving themselves that existed in the past;” “earlier identities” have been molded into “frame[s] of later templates, particularly that of the nation” (Suny 1999, 146). He describes Georgia as one of several former Soviet Republics where “the problems of ethnicity, identity, and the appropriate political forms to sustain the new state in the future were at the base of the devastating and violent crises that fractured” them (Suny 1999, 154). For Suny (1994), Georgia is “reinventing its past;” and “[t]the key to the future lies in what a people selects from its past, how it imagines itself as a community and continues to remake itself as a nation” (Suny 1994, 334-335).

Several authors besides Suny articulate a similar position, that the intensely-felt ancient identities of the Georgians and the Abkhaz are important components to understanding their modern struggles conflicts with each other. Grant (2009) comments that these ancient Abkhaz and Georgian identities were so strongly felt that Russia “never entirely convinced…[these people] that they were full partners alongside the rest” of the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Georgia‘s current President, Mikheil Saakashvili, “took a holy oath” as part of his presidential inauguration ceremony at Gelati, where the “greatest Georgian king of the eleventh century…is buried. By receiving the blessing at Gelati, Saakashvili, who wants a strong Georgian state, was symbolically alluding to a period of history when Georgia had such a state” (Grant 2009, ix-x; Nodia 2005, 78).

On the use of history in this debate, Zverev (1996) notes that it is a “salient factor” in understanding “why conflicts break out,” that “in Abkhaz literature, one finds references to the Abkhazian kingdom which existed in the 9th and 10th centuries. This is instrumental to the Abkhazian claim for sovereignty over the region even though the same kingdom could equally be described as a common Georgian-Abkhazian state, with a predominance of Georgian language and culture;” he points out that on the other side, Georgians “stress the allegedly non-Abkhaz character” of the historical Abkhazia, and that some even think of Georgians as “hosts” and that everyone else, including Abkhaz, are “guests” in Georgian territory (Zverev 1996, part I par.7). This debate, for Zverev as it was for Suny, is about presenting a case for who has the right to govern where and over whom, and this representation of the debate is also corroborated by the recent EU report on the August 2008 war (2009), by Khazanov (1996), by the International Crisis Group (ICG) (2006), and by Nodia (1998) (EURII, 66-69; Khazanov 1996, 6; ICG 2006, 3-4; Nodia 1998, 14). Nodia sums up Georgian views: “Abkhazia is Georgia, because it has always been part of Georgia when it was united. Georgians cannot see Abkhazia as a ‘foreign‘ land which was once conquered by them, and the accusation of imperialism usually makes them furious” (Nodia 1998, 19). Jans (1998) sums up the intersection of Georgian and Abkhazian thought, in that after the Cold War they were engaged in a quest for identity since “[d]emocracy, understood as the rule of the people by the people, begs the question of what is to be understood as ‘We, the people.‘“ (Jans 1998, 109) He further argues that “Ethnonational identities base their credibility and legitimacy on an interpretation of the historical past;” so for Georgians and Abkhazians, the past is of very present relevance to them (Ibid., 110). Lynch (2002) says that Abkhaz claims to the right of self-determination are, among other things, “based” on the idea that modern Abkhazia can claim to be the latest incarnation of “a long historical tradition;” he then quotes Abkhazia‘s foreign minister as saying “Abkhazia has a thousand-year history of statehood since the formation in the 8th century of the Kingdom of Abkhazia. Even within the framework of empires, Abkhazia kept this history of stateness. No matter the form, Abkhaz statehood remained intact” (Lynch 2002, 837). Departing from the more neutral posture of others, Chirikba (1998), writing as an Abkhaz government official, argues that Abkhaz history shows more independence from Georgians than not, and thus provides its people with “legitimate grounds for their claims to statehood and sovereignty” (Chirikba 1998, 48).”

Now, if some of this sounds familiar, it should: for much of American history, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants constructed an American identity that was based on their supposed superiority over other whites—Irish, Eastern and Southern Europeans—in addition to Africans and others, and defined being true “Americans” as their exclusive domain, working actively to frame these other groups as non-Americans and undeserving of the same rights, if any. Over time the different whites generally unified when it came to ethnic politics and redefined “American” as being white, which over much of the last century meant seeking to exclude blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-whites from sharing in the spoils of being an “American.”

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Perceptions of Meddling

“Areshidze posits the theory that the Soviet “system of ethnic autonomies was…in reality…a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the ‘protected‘ minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize” Georgia; Zürcher (2005) echoes this analysis (Areshidze 2007, 22; Zürcher 2005, 99). Castells (1996) claims that “the strong development of nationalism in the post-communist period can be related…to the cultural emptiness created by 70 years of imposition of an exclusionary ideological entity, coupled with the return to primary, historical identity (Russian, Georgian), as the only source of meaning after the crumbling of the historically fragile sovietskii narod” (Soviet people) (Castells 1996, 24). Eventually all these trends culminated on the Georgian side with the idea that “their further evolution was hindered by the restraints placed on them by the Russians. An attitude arose that, left to themselves, the Georgians could more quickly realize their historical potential;” “the erosion of Marxist ideology within the Soviet Union cleared the way for its replacement” by the forces already pent up even before Stalin and released after him. Released, they “produced an increasingly potent nationalist mood in all parts of Georgian society—and counternationalism among the ethnic minorities within the republic;” this in turn “stimulated a rapid escalation of ethnic politics in Georgia;” “[t]he specific goals of Soviet nationality policy, the rapprochement and eventual merging of nationalities, were further from realization in the 1980s than they had been at any time in Soviet history” (Suny 1994, 313-316, 320-321; Remington 1989, 145).

Such Georgian views are remarkably similar to those of many conservative white Americans: if the federal government would just get out of the way, they would be free to realize their full potential, and they deeply resent and oppose federal efforts to protect minority rights or to divert any common resources specifically in the direction of minorities; for these white Americans, this is taking what is “theirs” as “true Americans” as they define that concept and they seek to exclude or place limits on other groups that they view as less “American” and worthy than themselves. For them, their concept of their own freedom involves their ability to restrict the freedoms of others as they please. 

It was no coincidence that the election of a black President—America’s first non-white president—who campaigned heavily on giving poor uninsured people (the way conservative whites incorrectly read it: non-white) healthcare gave rise to the Tea Party which was in many ways white nationalism run amok (one only has to look at the many polls and multiple studies that showed that huge numbers of Tea Partiers thought Obama was a Muslim, doubted he was a Christian, believed he was not born in America, and had more prejudicial, insensitive, and extreme views on racial issues than most Americans, even when compared to non-Tea Party conservatives); those Tea party forces have morphed into the Trump movement, which has taken over the Republican Party, one of two major political parties in America, and clearly those people now carry the same noxious and extreme views on race that they did when they were members of the Tea Party; in fact, racial concerns seem to be the largest motivators behind people choosing to support Trump: in other words, Trump is the candidate of white ethno-centrist nationalism in America.

Weaponizing History

Suny (2001) claims that Soviet policy created a tendency for ethnic groups like Georgians and Abkhaz to invent imaginary histories that can bolster “the legitimacy of the nation and particular claims to territory and statehood” while at the same time becoming become “exclusivist” and encouraging “desperate policies of deportation and ethnic cleansing” (Suny 2001, 895-896). The EU report concludes that in the atmosphere discussed, there was “no political framework that would have been strong enough to integrate the conflicting national demands” (EURII 2009, 63). Violence, war, and revolution would soon erupt as Soviet rule ended in Georgia.

One only need to look at how conservatives in America, particularly in the South, have created a fantasy about the Civil War that they maintain to this day: Lincoln was a tyrant while the South was bravely fighting for freedom and small government, despite a clear and overwhelming preponderance of evidence that, without question, slavery and white supremacy were at the heart of the Civil War—were actually its primary drivers—and at the heart of the ideology of the self-styled “Confederate States of America.” White ethno-centrists even try to force textbooks into public schools that downplay the issue of slavery, minimize discussion of racial oppression, and falsely frame America’s founding in a Christian context. Georgians and Abkhaz and others fight among themselves over their founding myths and over their histories, trying to distort and weaponize history as a way to delegitimize certain groups and assert exclusivity over this or that, but Americans are clearly no different.

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Zero-Sum Mentalities on Minorities: Identity and the Meaning of Independence

“Many Georgian nationalists are apprehensive of minorities like Ossetians and Abkhaz having too much autonomy and see this as a threat to Georgia; it was ethnic Georgian protests against the Abkhaz request for separation from Georgia in 1989 which sparked the rapid acceleration of Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s nationalist, anti-ethnic minority agenda and “radicalized” Georgian nationalism; it became more belligerent towards perceived threats from minorities, especially Ossetians and Abkhaz” (Suny 1994, 317-323; Zürcher 2005, 90). For Devdariani (2005) Gamsakhurdia and his movement “perceived Abkhazia and South Ossetia as simply tools for Russian pressure directed against Georgian independence… “[C]oncerns of [their] local elites…[were ignored and]…tensions spiraled into violent clashes…[They failed] to see how…[their] own quest for independence challenged the identities of the Abkhazians and Ossetians” (Devdariani 2005, 161)…

Jones (2006), seeking to downplay ethnic tensions in favor of economic ones, disagrees that the protests were about Abkhazia and argues they were more about “Georgian independence,” but Jones still describes Gamsakhurdia as “using nationalist slogans to gain authority” and “manipulat[ing] a formerly moderate Georgian populace into a chauvinistic mob;” Zürcher maintains with others that the Abkhazian call for secession “led” to the protest (Jones 2006, 257; Zürcher 2005, 89). The EU report and Zürcher take care to mention Georgians, especially those in Abkhazia, saw concessions to minorities as too generous, and that this explains the rise of leaders like Zviad Gamsakhurdia (EURII 2009, 69; Zürcher 2005, 89)

When ethnic minorities tried/try to assert themselves in America, there was/is almost always a hostile backlash from the white majority, and these backlashes are often violence and can take on a form of terrorism. This was the plight the Irish faced as famously depicted in the Scorcese’s Gangs of New York, and of freed slaves who suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of the Civil War and for a century after, and violence spiked again when they asserted themselves in the later 1950s and 1960s. Today, with racial, gender, and sexual orientation movements, there has never been a more diverse array of loud assertions of minority groups for their deserved place in public and private life, and the discourse is richer and more diverse than it has ever been as a result. But with the rise of the Tea Party and Trump after the election of a black president and the codification of homosexual marriage as a right protected by the Constitution (both good things), with the yet further proliferation of oversensitivity, an extreme form of politically correct discourse, and complaints of microaggressions (no so much good things), we are seeing a major backlash and Donald Trump’s rise to a height of just a few percentage-points of votes away from the presidency is the face and spirit of that backlash. Many of Trump’s supporters look at groups like blacks, Hispanics, and the LGBT community as tools for an unholy alliance between such groups and a liberal activist federal government—led by a black president they generally believe is a foreign-born Muslim—that these whites perceive has come to oppress them in order to favor brown people and gays and non-Christians (more or less non-Americans to them). Hence, we have whites chanting All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, with many whites condemning Black Lives Matter and some even trying to frame it as a terrorist group; too many and too often, whites feel they must have a virtual monopoly on group victimhood and cannot stomach the idea of recognizing and legitimizing the grievances of other groups.

Trump is therefore in many ways just America’s Zviad Gamsakhurdia. And it should be noted that Gamsakurdia propelled his country onto a path of ethnic hatred and violence that led to civil war. I don’t think Trump would push America into a civil war, but, as I’ve noted before, I do see America at an already dangerously high level of racial tension and violence not seen since the Civil Rights Era half a century earlier, with the one major exception being the 1992 L.A. riots, and I do see American society becoming far more divided than it is even now should Trump be at the helm, and view Trump as a danger to Western democracy. 

Still, it is clear that the nativism and ethno-centrism that are driving today’s Republican Party and have handed it to Trump are parts of a longstanding American tradition, best exemplified by the “Know-Nothings” for which Abraham Lincoln harbored such disdain, Southern Civil-War slaver secessionists and Redeemers, and George Wallace’s movement from the Civil Rights Era. And, as in Georgia, these often regional movements are both about hostility towards other ethnicities and about independence, and independence from a federal government perceived almost as a foreign power and from a foreign power for the U.S. and Georgia, respectively. Such a concept of independence is tied to spheres both public and private that are seen to be contested with these other ethnicities in a landscape that has long been ethnically and/or racially polarized.

In America, people, locations, and states that are very anti-federal government hardly look at what they deem interference from Washington—in particular from Democrats, and in particular from the African-American-led Obama Administration—differently from how Georgian chauvinists look(ed) at Russian/Soviet efforts to accommodate Abkhaz and other minorities in Georgia; likewise, minorities in America have long looked to the federal government to establish and protect their rights against a white majority that, to varying degrees depending on location, has often sought and still seeks to infringe or even outright destroy those rights, much like Abkhaz and Ossetians have appealed to Soviet/Russian authority to protect them from abuses at the hands of Georgians.

A most salient case-in-point in America involves recent controversies in North Carolina; as one of the states that had used state laws to institutionalize the oppression of African-Americans until 1965, the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) had included North Carolina along with a number of states and localities in a list of places—mostly in the South—that had to receive “preclearance” from federal authorities before changing any of its voting laws, with this preclearance provision on component of an effort to prevent the re-disenfranchisement of black voters. This system worked quite well until 2013, when the narrowly conservative U.S. Supreme Court issue a partisan 5-4 ruling that basically said the VRA was no longer needed and that it constituted federal oppression of state sovereignty. Almost immediately after the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina was one of several states that enacted controversial restrictive voting laws under Republican leadership. These laws were criticized to varying degrees as thinly veiled attempt to suppress the votes of African-Americans, and at the end of August of this year, that is just what the federal court system decided: a federal appeals court had ruled that the North Carolina law sought to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and struck it down as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court in a 4-4 partisan tie issued on August 31st (with a vacant seat since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most conservative justice on the Court) was unable to alter this decision (but almost certainly would have had Scalia been alive; a close call indeed).

Thus, as American Republican right-wing white ethno-centrist nationalists seeks to curb and flout federal authority and prodding on many issues related to minorities, from accepting refugees and affirmative action to voting rights and Medicaid expansion to LBGT rights and imposing sectarian religious agendas, so Georgian ethno-nationalists long sought to fight Soviet/Russian attempts to protect and ensure minority rights for Abkhaz and Ossetians. Georgia has been a part of the Russian Empire for over 200 year until the end of the Cold War, so though this involves two separate sovereign nations today, many of the dynamics still resemble those of Russian/Soviet intranational politics; conversely, the South of the United States experimented with secession as a unit from 1861-1865 and tried to form its own nation, an experiment which failed miserably but which still helps to explain why the South above all other regions of the United States exhibits a staunch resistance to the rest of the national will and to attempts by the U.S. federal government to bring it along with other national projects, from segregation to the ACA (Obamacare) and any of a whole host of other items.

As in the case with Georgia, at the heart of all this tension are ethnic tensions between those in a majority that see any concession to minorities as a loss of their “rightful” power and societal position on one hand and ethnic minorities that depend on outside forces for protection from outright oppression and domination at the hands those in that majority on the other. And, much as Trump is galvanizing a backlash in minority consciousness and activism in America, so, too, did Gamsakhurdia galvanize Abkhazians and others to resist him.

Conclusion: All Politics Is Local (Exclusion of “The Other?”)

The bottom line is that the sad identity politics of hate and division and resentment are hardly anything exceptional in America and can be found all over the world throughout history and up through today, from Burma to Turkey, from Israel to Burundi, from France to Syria. Americans can only hope that Trump is not nearly as successful as Gamsakhurdia and that America will not follow Georgia in fracturing itself over ethnic hatred. Even if it manages to stave off such a scenario, that will only be a starting point for much needed healing and mending of racial and ethnic fences.

On a final note: Russia at one point gave military support to Gamsakhurdia, after he had been overthrown, as a way to weaken Georgia’s overall position before turning on him after Russia had wrested concessions from the new Georgian leadership. Trump might be interested in such history, with Putin’s Russia today interfering in America’s election and trying to help Donald Trump get into the White House.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 23, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 23rd, 2016 (UPDATED September 24th with further details on server security; see separate post-October-Surprise-Comeygate article here)

Richard Drew/AP

AMMAN — Well, a lot has happened since my last update on this story in January.

Or has it?

More Much Ado About Nothing: Summer of Sadness

The conventional wisdom is that yes, it has. But as is so often with this story, what often seems to be a big deal or raises questions actually is more of the same or has answers that are more boring and mundane than anything else (Occam’s razor, anyone?). 

After an FBI investigation, the Republican and well-regarded FBI Director, James Comey—known for his “independence” and “aggressive” upholding of the law—recommended to the Justice Department in early July that Hillary Clinton not face any prosecution for both her use of a private e-mail server and the fact that some classified material passed through this server, and publicly explained his decision to not recommend prosecution. The recommendation was followed on by the Justice Department and no prosecution of Clinton has been pursued.

Republicans, outraged that they did not get the result that they wanted, had Comey testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform soon after his announcement. Repeatedly throughout the hearing, Republican lawmakers seemed far more concerned about their feeling that Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted than with any proper understanding of the evidence or how that evidence would or would not merit prosecution under a proper understanding of the relevant statutes and their broader history of application.

Espionage Act: 18 USC 793(f) and Its History

AP

A brief explanation should make Director Comey’s decision and why it was the right one clear for our readers…

The law under which Clinton could have been prosecuted was a statute dating back to WWI, the (problematic) Espionage Act of 1917, an anti-espionage law enacted during the height of war with Imperial Germany, and in nearly 100 years of its existence, no one has ever been convicted in civilian court of violating the statute without demonstrating clear intent to do material harm to the United States. Intent has been one of the major required components in determining in civilian court culpability within a formal understanding of the law that has existed ever since a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in a case dating back to 1941. This can be confusing based on the wording of the 18 USC’s relevant section 793(f) alone, but a key element of the overall law of which that section is a part is that the whole law was supposed to be based on prosecuting those intending harm to the United States in the form of espionage, sedition, or worse. In fact, only once has anyone ever been charged by the Justice Department purely on gross negligence without intent—an FBI agent who was arrested in 2003 for having an affair with a Chinese mistress and who unknowingly gave her access to classified information by not locking or paying attention to his briefcase when spending time with her—and, in the end, this charge was dropped in 2004 when he settled and was thus not convicted of that charge but another, lesser crime. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that officials, aware of the law and its application history, may have regarded conviction of that charge as unlikely or even impossible, but may have included it in an array of charges thrown at the defendant in order to help intimidate him into accepting a plea bargain, which he did. 

Military courts-martial did twice charge and obtain two convictions without using the intent standard under section (f) of the statute—one stemming from an incident in 1979 and one from another incident in 1989, the only two court convictions unearthed thus far under this statute without the intent factor over a nearly 100-year history of this law’s existence (neither person found guilty served more even a full year of time)—but it is important to note a few things: 1.) military personnel are generally held to, and military courts generally use, a stricter interpretation of the law and enforce stricter penalties than their civilian counterparts, 2.) the cases were dramatically different than Clinton’s and each included clear, indisputable obstruction, which tends to make prosecutors go for harsher penalties, 3.) at least one of the cases including overruling earlier precedent, an overruling on which the conviction likely depended, and 4.) the cases were not subject to civilian court appeal rulings, and, given the Supreme Court’s ruling and precedent established in 1941 and other civilian court rulings, it is quite possible these convictions under 18 USC 793 (f) could have been overturned should civilian courts have dealt with them.

The point is that as a civilian official operating in the civilian legal system, Director Comey was completely right when he stated that “No reasonable prosecutor would bring the second case in 100 years based on gross negligence” because the case history is clear and the only cases where charges were brought under such pretenses, including military cases, bear no resemblance to the circumstances of Clinton’s case; when myopically accused of by Republican congressmen of a double standard in not prosecuting Clinton, he noted that the “double standard” would be “If she were prosecuted for gross negligence,” and that such an act would amount to “celebrity hunting.”

Of course, none of this matters to the bulk of Republicans, who have been predetermined to find criminal wrongdoing with the Clintons for decades (again, only perjury relating to Monica Lewinsky has ever been proved). With Hillary, when the GOP was unable to prove any specific wrongdoing after nine Benghazi investigation, they were only too happy to discover this e-mail server and the classified contents that passed through it in the course of their ninth Benghazi investigation, which was such a sham that by the end it tended to focus more on Clinton’s e-mails than anything else, since everything else they threw at her on Benghazi either stood on incredibly flimsy ground or was demonstrably false, as I noted before. Basically, the whole e-mail situation looked bad and raised some questions, but now those questions have been vigorously pursued by professional investigators, and what may have looked bad turned out, upon closer inspection, to not contain anything criminally prosecutable, and no matter how much Republicans want it, the aura of something bad or questionable is not enough to warrant prosecution, certainly not in our American justice system.

About Those Classified E-mails…

How Many?

The FBI’s “July” report (released in early September by a clearly-exasperated-with-the-brouhaha-and-political-criticism-Comey) and information provided by the State Department on July 6th detail how many e-mails had contained classified information at the time they were sent to or received by Clinton’s server: we know that there was information that was classified at the time of sending or receiving in just about 200 e-mails in 82 e-mail chains* that passed through Clinton’s server. All but 13 of these chains were turned over by Clinton as part of the some 30,000 emails Clinton’s team had determined were work-related (most can be read here), and none of those other 13 e-mail chains—which were found among some additional 17,000 unique work and personal e-mails recovered by the FBI—were the highest level of the three levels of classification, TOP SECRET. Overall, of the 82 e-mail chains: 69 are still classified (16 of which has been downgraded in their classification level), and 13 have been declassified (suggesting that at least those 16 and 13 are not involving anything particularly serious or particularly sensitive, even at the time); 8 chains were classified as TOP SECRET (7 of those, consisting of 22 e-mails total, were regarding Special Access Programs [SAP, more on this below]), 37 were classified as SECRET (the middle level of classification), and 37 were classified as CONFIDENTIAL (the lowest classification level). The report only mentions others sending Clinton material that was classified to begin these exchanges, not the other way around, suggesting that she may not have started any of the e-mail chains with classified material, essentially meaning that people were sending this information to her, and none of the e-mails contained classified material warnings in the headers, as is standard practice (more on that in a bit), so it would have been reasonable for Clinton to assume that the people sending her this material knew what they were doing; in fact, it would be a terrible use of a Secretary of State’s time to parse through every e-mail and ask if material that was not labeled as classified was actually classified: that would be a recipe for endless inquiries and not getting anything else done. Out of the 82 chains, Clinton herself weighed in and responded in 4 chains that were CONFIDENTIAL, 3 that were SECRET, and 4 that were TOP SECRET (all 4 of these were SAP related, see below), and 67 times she passed on information from chains classified CONFIDENTIAL or SECRET (frustrating that the report inexplicably did not detail how many of each!).

So, out of over 47,000 e-mails under consideration, let’s remember that about 200, or about 0.425%, were deemed to have contained classified information at the time of sending and receiving and at least half or more were either the lowest level of classification or concerned publicly available information, and some of them were not considered not to be classified by Clinton’s own State Department. 

*(Side note on above numbers: for the above numbers, I presumed the “July” report—almost inexplicably no specific date is given as to the completion of the report, just the month of July—was more recent/complete than Comey’s press conference on July 5th and testimony on July 7th, in which that information given at those times, combined with the information from State, provided a lower figure of 113 or 114 emails in about 53 or 54 e-mail chains that had classified information in them at the time they were sent/received; the FBI report also states that the number of e-mails and chains is subject to change as the FBI was still waiting on responses regarding some of the content in question from several relevant agencies; the lack of clarity,lack of a clear specific presentation, the inability of the whole of the government to just be able to produce a single, clear figure on this is somewhat remarkable; since the report had larger figures than the one Comey gave in the first week of July, it is reasonable assume to the number was higher because other agencies had provided subsequent updates, thus the assumption that the “July” report came some time after the 7th, when Comey gave lower numbers during his testimony to the House committee; if, somehow, the updates would have involved the less likely scenario of reductions in the number of e-mails and chains identified as classified, Comey’s lower numbers would be more current)

How Serious?

To delve into the topic of classification itself, contrary to almost all the reporting I’ve seen, there are the only three actual levels of classification; I myself erroneously reported that SAP (Special Access Program) was a separate level of classification, and many other major mainstream sources have reported that and that SAP is a level of classification above TOP SECRET, when actually it is just a special type of TOP SECRET or SECRET information, designed to give people who “need to know” that information access to it but not indicating a higher level of sensitivity than the classification level; these days SAP often has to do with the U.S. drone program, and the available reporting on the subject suggests that nearly all of the most sensitive TOP SECRET information (7 of 8 TOP SECRET chains) in the classified content that passed through Clinton’s server had to do with SAP-related, publicly available information on the drone program or other publicly available information about North Korea; in both cases, anything from an eyewitness account published by an NGO to a newspaper report about drones would be considered classified, pushing us to the issue of rampant & unnecessary overclassification in the government, often more about interagency turf wars than national security, to the extent that prolific national security officials of both major political parties have publicly testified that “between 50% and 90% of all classified material could even be disclosed without any detrimental effect on national security,” as I have discussed before; objectively, then, much and perhaps all of the information with the highest classification labels in Clinton’s e-mails were objectively not really sensitive or secret in nature. And it should also be noted that CONFIDENTIAL generally describes information that is so mundane and harmless that America’s intelligence chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, is considering a move to do away with the CONFIDENTIAL classification level entirely, noting that this is something the UK did recently in 2014 “without [adverse] impact.”

How Would Clinton Know They Were Classified? (It’s All About the Labels!)

Another important thing to note is that something would still be considered classified even if the State Department did not feel it needed to be but another agency did, as happened with information in some of Clinton’s e-mails; to expect the head of one agency to be aware of other agencies’ classifications of information that that head’s agency did not feel the need to classify is, indeed, quite unreasonable.

But this next point is a crucial one: zero of these e-mails were properly marked as classified. See, all e-mails that are supposed to be classified are supposed to have clear, obvious headings and subject lines indicating that they contain classified information, but not one of the roughly 200 e-mails had anything indicating it contained classified information in any header or subject line. In fact, only one classified e-mail chain contained any classified markings whatsoever; this involved one or a few simple “portion mark” “(C)”s that preceded material that was specifically classified and appeared in the body of the emails within the chain (two other e-mail chains had the same markings but the information in question in those chains was improperly classified and should not have been marked in the body with “(C)”s at all). Some important things to note here:

1.) As Director Comey said as much during his testimony, the absence of the classification markings in all e-mail headers meant that it would be “a reasonable inference” to “immediately [conclude] that those three documents were not classified” even for an “expert at what’s classified and what’s not classified.” In fact, it seems it would be reasonable to assume, as Clinton did, that, in the absence of any other markings, such “(C)”s could at a glance seem to be a selection from an alphabetical list.

2.) Nobody ever reads every part of every work e-mail. Many people probably don’t fully read even a majority of their work e-mails, as so much content is sent and received and often people have to ignore much of the content and many e-mails entirely for the sake of time; still others will be ignored out of simple prioritizing or would even been seen as a nuisance. The idea that Clinton was careless and irresponsible because she 1.) did not know that about 200 e-mails out of tens of thousands were classified but had no classified markings, 2.) that she did not know that classified material was in 1 e-mail chain (2 including the mislabeled ones) that had 1 or more little “(C)”s buried in e-mail bodies that any person skimming could easily miss is preposterous; in fact, it is possible she did not even read some of these e-mails or only read them in part, so considering this, holding her responsible for being aware of every detail of every e-mail sent to her has an added layer of ridiculousness.

3.) Taking into account that neither Clinton nor her people sent anything properly marked as classified on this e-mail system, this would actually mean that they were quite careful not to send anything that was and that they knew was classified, contrary to the popular narrative and the conclusion of Director Comey. After all, he told Congress that there was no evidence to suggest that Clinton or her people were aware that any of the material passed through that server was classified.

About That Server…

Clinton Did Not Make the Decision to Have Private Server

The FBI report also helps shed light on some other details: while Clinton directed her people to set up a specialized personal e-mail account, the decision to set up a private server in her Chappaqua, NY, basement was not something she directed her staff to do, though she later did become aware that there was such a server after it was established; rather, it was a decision staff made agreed to with technical experts. One thing that is clear is that Clinton and her staff were scarred by such a tumultuous political past of being subjected to so many politically-motivated witch hunts, acting in a very secretive way that actually helped to foster some of the issues about which we have now heard altogether too much. One of the most crucial examples of this is that Brian Pagliano, the IT expert from the Clinton 2008 campaign tasked with setting up the personal server, at first was not apparently not aware that then-soon-to-be-Secretary of State Clinton would even be using this server to host her e-mails, though the FBI was unable to specifically verify exactly what he knew at this time; still, this is an indication he very well may have had no idea Clinton would be conducting any official business using this server, let along using it, at the time. It is ironic that Team Clinton’s penchant for privacy in this case may have possibly prevented Pagliano from having knowledge that may have made him set up the e-mail server differently for a sitting Secretary of State than for a retired president’s staff in ways might have shielded Clinton from some of the criticism levied against her since the e-mail server’s discovery and may have even led to some coordination with the State Department.

The Server Was Not Insecure When Clinton Used It (9/24 UPDATE)

One thing the report makes clear is that the email server was not up and running, or even physically installed, until March 2009, when Pagliano also set up the SSL security encryption. This invalidates a major line of criticism thrown at Clinton, that from when she took office in January and until March, when the SSL encryption was installed on the server, her e-mails were somehow totally unprotected, but we know that the server was not installed or in use before then, and that Clinton’s e-mail domain was being used on the previous Apple Server, installed by Apple; though very little is known know about that server, it is inconceivable that Apple would not have included security protocols, such as SSL, in the process of installing a server for such high-profile clients (Occam’s razor, again, for all you conspiracy theorists that believe Apple would install a server without no security features to prevent hacking; and, frankly, Pagliano would not have gotten as far in his field of IT administration if he is someone who would have had set up a server with no safeguards). This means, contrary to previous suspicions, her server was not insecure for months as headline after headline has trumpeted and countless other articles assumed.

The FBI report notes that the Server was “operational” starting March 19th, and that SSL security was installed by Pagliano on either the 29th or 30th, and Pagliano stated that he was not the one who set up an e-mail account on the new server for Clinton; it seems that another IT specialist working for the Clintons, Justin Cooper, did that, though Cooper could not recall the details but assumed he was the one who performed that task. An e-mail from Cooper to Clinton indicated that in April he was readying to move her Blackberry (and thus, her e-mail communication) over to the new system, meaning Clinton was not conducting work through the new server before April and before the SSL was set up and that the server was not insecure at all when she used it as Secretary of State.

Conversely, the State Department’s state.gov system has been hacked on a regular basis. Perhaps her private system was relatively more secure since nefarious actors would have been extremely unlikely to have known of its existence and, therefore, would have been unlikely to deliberately hack it knowing what and who they were hacking.

No Evidence She Deliberately Hid Anything Work-Related

Another point which has been shamefully and myopically not had appropriate emphasis given on the part of the media is that nearly all of the e-mails would have been backed up by State Department servers: only thirteen people were regularly in touch with Clinton through her private e-mail, and most of those were people using state.gov e-mails, thus, anything sent to her e-mail from a state.gov e-mail or from Clinton to a state.gov e-mail would have been automatically captured and preserved by State’s record-keeping system. So the idea that Clinton was trying to hide her work-related e-mails is ludicrous because it would be incredibly easy to expose her for doing that using State Department records, and, in any case, there is no evidence-based reason to think that she did, considering that the work-related e-mails that have been recovered after being deleted from her server contained absolutely nothing worth hiding or incriminating and many were already captured and publicly released by State.

Which brings us to this Judicial Watch nonsense, what would mercifully seem to be the near-final chapter, at least for some time, in this faux saga. Judicial Watch has long been a right-wing advocacy “investigative” group looking to smear Democrats with a long, partisan history of targetinganything and everything Clinton. The group’s efforts have led to court-ordered releases of more Clinton e-mails, and, so far, they have shown pretty normal operations in terms of deals and influence and arranging meetings despite attempts to scandalize their content. More e-mails will be coming out between now and the election, but, like the other tens of thousands which had no incriminating content, these will almost certainly be more of the same.

There was 1 new e-mail about Benghazi, though: a congratulations from the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil on Clinton’s solid congressional testimony on Benghazi, while 29 other Benghazi e-mails that were part of the recent release were already part of State’s records. The right’s desperation to open any Clinton closet it can find in the desperate hope that something will reflect badly on the Clintons or that the very process of opening the closets will cast doubt on Bill or Hillary and damage their reputations, regardless of reality, is all too apparent (as usual).

Why, oh WHY?

It is also important to remember why there is so much scrutiny about these e-mails to begin with: when eight previous investigations had failed to unearth any wrongdoing on the part of Hillary Clinton or her close personal aides in regards to the Benghazi tragedy, the crusading, witch-hunting Republicans who drove the formation and/or ran the ninth Benghazi investigation and came across the existence of this server were ostensibly convinced that the e-mails contained on the server would confirm their wild conspiracy theories that they had had all along, that Clinton deliberately lied and covered up information about Benghazi and that she ordered rescuers who were ready to save the four fatal victims of the Benghazi attacks to stand down (the e-mails held no such information, in part because none of this ever happened, as I and many others have demonstrated in detail before). I have no doubt that many fanatics within the GOP were convinced at the time they would find such non-existent evidence, but the then-#2 Republican in the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, foolishly publicly confirmed what everyone already knew: that this ninth Benghazi investigation’s main raison d’être was to damage Clinton politically to lower her chances of becoming president (this screw-up was largely thought to have cost McCarthy his chance at succeeding Boehner for the #1 GOP House spot as Speaker of the House); in this, it was undoubtedly a success, even as it failed to unearth any new dirt on her conduct regarding Benghazi. The Committee’s quest to find quest to find wrongdoing by Clinton vis–à–vis Benghazi had about the same odds of success as Frodo and Sam running around alone in Mordor without Aragorn marching on the Black Gate, and it is telling that the Republicans who ran the hearings were at least subconsciously (and at least some must have been consciously) aware that the the “Benghazi” hearings ended up spending just as much—maybe even more—time on Clinton’s e-mails, her use of a private e-mail and private server, that classified information had passed through the server, and that the server was a possible security risk as they did on anything related to their committee namesake of Benghazi. So much for justice for the victims of Benghazi…

Conclusion: This Is Ridiculous: 15 Takeaways

So, below, we can outline my findings/conclusions which, at the risk of sounding egotistical, are far fairer and sounder that what we’re getting from large swaths of the media and certainly many politicians.

1.)   As Comey made clear, neither Clinton nor her staff or associates gave any indication they knew any material was classified when they were passing it around through the private server or ever had any intention of using this much maligned private e-mail system to disseminate classified information, and the FBI has no evidence to point towards a coverup or Clinton or her people lying to FBI investigators. 

2.)   Only 3 e-mail chains had any indications whatsoever that they contained classified material (only one actually did), and the markings were themselves not clear, were not accompanied by required classified markings in headers and subject-lines, and only referred to the lowest level of classification.

3.)   None of the people involved were expert specialists on classification, and they and Secretary Clinton relied, as most non-classification-specialists would rely, on proper and clear headings to warn that classified information was at hand and that people sending them knew they were following proper procedure.

4.)   The only indications we have in terms of the content of the most sensitive material of higher classification levels is that it was publicly available information.

5.)   Over 99.5% of all e-mails in question had no issues as far as classification was concerned; no official in the history of the modern United States has ever has so much of her communications material examined (or released so much to the public) so thoroughly and so soon after her time in office, and she used e-mail more than any of her predecessors because of the increasingly technological times we live in; if most other senior government officials had an audit like Clinton’s it is safe to say that she would hardly stand alone in having less than 0.5% of her content containing some sort of classified information; some would very likely have more, given the problems with overclassification.

6.)   No evidence exists that any sensitive information was given to the wrong people or enemies of America or that America’s national security was compromised in any way by Clinton’s use of a private server or the fact that some classified material passed through it (remember, the server was not insecure early in her tenure at State while she was using it as had been previously speculated/assumed in many a report).

7.)   Even if Clinton had used state.gov servers for her e-mail and never set up a private server, the information would still have been sent improperly through non-classified channels (her successor, John Kerry, was the first Secretary of State to ever use a state.gov account; why so little interest in Rice or Powell? Oh, yeah, they’re both Republicans and they aren’t running for president).

8.)   Yes, there were issues with having a private server (not initially her decision, which was just to have a private e-mail address) and it was not the best judgment call, but was hardly among the worst decisions made by a cabinet-level-or-higher official in modern history or even recent memory (the Benghazi investigation lasted longer than the Watergate investigation), yet Clinton has been investigated more thoroughly than any other official in the modern era for something that is at best a moderate mistake, not one that caused grave damage to anything other than her reputation and her poll numbers and not one that seemed to put any serious state secrets at risk, because, for all the talk of her “lack of judgement” in this case, we have no information yet that any of the information in question was of major consequence, the release of which could have had serious ramifications for the U.S. In other words, her staff and she were careful not to use the system for anything clearly sensitive, overclassification notwithstanding, at least based on what we know up to this point.

9.)   Basically, Clinton dove into a gray area with the personal e-mail/server that walked a line when it came following the exact letter and spirit of preferred policy, but from my earlier research, it was clear there was no outright prohibition on what she did. In an era of extreme partisanship, she should have known, just like Bill Clinton when he engaged in sexual relations with an intern, that such behavior would open her to serious attacks from her political enemies. It was an error in judgement, but hardly one that would be a tipping point in evaluating her performance as Secretary of State or her record as a public servant overall. 

10.) We can easily see that Clinton’s understandable main motivations were in seeking a convenient way to communicate both professionally and personally using the same device and to shield her private affairs from the public and her political enemies after years of witch hunts conducted by her rivals and the media. Nothing in the Constitution or the law states that senior government officials have no right to private communication for personal business.

11.) So Clinton is not perfect, but if this is the worst thing or one of the worst things we can come up with about her and her judgement and career, well, that’s a historically strong candidate, folks, no matter how you slice or dice it, at least if you slice or dice it in a reasonable way. Which Republicans and the media are not. But more on the media another time…

12.) In fact, I expected the investigation by the FBI would explain in considerable detail whose job it was to have labeled the material as classified and at what stage and when this should have occurred, because by the time any of that info reaches senior official that process should already have been completed; this to me seems a bigger issue than Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server, because if people had properly labeled this information it would not have passed through Clinton’s server to begin with. There is no attempt to blame any specific officials for not labeling classified information as classified, and the illogical burden of blame has been put on Clinton and her people for receiving information they accepted in good faith mostly from within their own State Department (certainly the blame cannot be on them for that!). Strange that the focus for blame has been on the use of a server and not that the e-mails were improperly marked, which, again, is the only reason they ended up on said server. Also frustrating, if understandable, that major parts of the FBI report dealing with these issues were redacted. Still, contrary to what many have said, including Comey, it does not appear that Clinton herself or her senior staff were careless in the handling of classified information, as, again, they were careful not to use the private server for anything properly labeled as classified. Such conduct does not seem to fit Comey’s words of “extreme carelessness.” 

13.) The information we do have from the investigation shows that much of the material that was classified and passed on through unclassified e-mail channels was information that senior leaders needed to have to address pressing, time sensitive issues, where using standard secure terminals was impractical, impossible, or both, and that this was common practice.

14.) The last point in particular makes it clear that official procedures for the dissemination of classified information to senior officials when that information is needed in a timely manner are grossly inadequate and impractical to the extent that they are not followed so that important business may be done when it needs to be done. Comey would have to basically call the entire State Department extremely careless, for the classified content being improperly sent and improperly labeled was the product of unofficial but standard practice, and though he did note that the State Department was “generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government;” that seems to be decidedly less harsh language than Comey used to describe Clinton’s similar (the same?) behavior, even though State overall was just as big a factor in creating the situation as Clinton, if not more so.

15.) The above may be the most important controversy of all, but the fact that this all arose from investigations borne out of efforts to politically damage Hillary Clinton always meant that she, not these other important issues, would be the focus. It would have been useful to task the FBI investigators with recommendations for reform, but this was not done. If anything, Clinton herself has been a distraction from the real problem at hand: reform of a system that few seem to have confidence in or respect for under certain important conditions, a system that is outdated and not taking into account more rapid forms of information dissemination that are common in the twenty-first century. But that has been lost in the conversation. And that itself is a true scandal.

*****

I’m almost 35, and this is easily the most overblown, blown-out-of-proportion thing I’ve ever seen in politics, and may also be the most poorly-reported-on “scandal” I’ve ever encountered, as well, but more on that another time…

© 2016 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Related articles: Comey Damages Clinton With Horribly Timed Weiner Speculation in Historic FBI Injection Into Election

THE DEFINITIVE Clinton E-mail Scandal Analysis: The Real Scandals are the Benghazi Committee GOP Witch Hunt & Media Hype

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Sudden, shocking, disturbing, and largely self-propelled trends in America and Europe are doing more damage to Western democracy today than Soviet armies or nuclear missiles ever did during the Cold War

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 17, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 17th, 2016

Clockwise: Photo/Agencies, Cheryl Evans/The Republic, AP

AMMAN — Roughly a quarter-century ago, the world seemed poised for a triumph of democracy and human rights unprecedented in human history. As Francis Fukuyama famously noted in “The End of History,” the end of the Cold War marked the end of thousands of years of ideological struggle, and the spread of Western democratic capitalist ideals all around the world was inevitable with the demise of the Soviet Union. It was the end of history as we knew it: nothing could stand anymore in the way of the West and its triumphant march forward through history.

Except, apparently, the West itself.

*****

Not a New Problem

The West and democracy being their own worst enemy is hardly a new thing.

As one historian wrote:

“The pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen…It was the result of peace and an abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this, because, before the destruction of…[our chief rival power], mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the…[governing elites] characterized the government…Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity…every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and [our political system], which had been our common ground, was mutilated…And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.”

The above quotation is not from a Western historian of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries; rather, it is the ancient Roman historian Sallust writing in the first century B.C.E. in his The Jurgurthine War (41.1-10). He was writing of the slow self-destruction of the democratic Roman Republic, which lasted nearly 500 years, after its final triumph over Carthage. He lived to see his Republic crumble politically, dying a few years before Octavian would become first of the Roman emperors.

HBO

American Founding Father and (second) President John Adams wrote in the early nineteenth-century of democracy being its own worst enemy:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

*****

“Flet victus, victor interiit” (The conquered mourns, the conqueror is undone)—Latin proverb

Much like ancient Rome, the West today exercised relative restraint in domestic affairs when faced with a mighty foe as the Soviet Union functioned as its Carthage. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the United States seemed poised to dominate the world for the foreseeable future and the European Union was on its way to producing a unified Europe that would also be a dominant global power, working in tandem with the United States to spread and maintain peace, democracy, and capitalism.

Lionel Cironneau/AP

Just a few decades later, in 2016, that vision appear to be fading.

In the United States, the presidency of George W. Bush squandered a massive budgetary surplus, the result of a prosperity not seen since the years after WWII, when Eisenhower gave America a globally-unprecedented highway system and a military that ensured it would be the dominant player in the Cold War; Bush opted to use America’s prosperity to pay for lopsided tax cuts for the wealthy and then prosecuted two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose costs he added to the deficit and debt, and the latter of which destabilized the Middle East more than any event since the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after WWI.

At home, his administration (and other officials) failed miserably in addressing Hurricane Katrina as it humbled and partly destroyed New Orleans, a great American city, and did nothing to prevent the onset of the greatest global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression (barely managing to address it in time to prevent a possible total meltdown of the global financial and economic systems).

Now, America’s first non-white president, Barack Obama, has encountered a level of obstructionism and partisanship from Congress unseen since the Civil War; the elation and hope of the election results of 2008 has given way to a level of dysfunction and gridlock that calls into question America’s ability to govern itself regardless of who sits in the White House.  As of now, the U.S. may have a vacant seat on its Supreme Court for close to, or more than, a year, the longest vacancy since the 1840s and the result of partisan obstruction on the part of the Republican Party.

Over the last few months, that Republican Party, one of America’s two main political parties since the elections of 1856, appeared on the verge of melting down in the face of the candidacy of businessman and TV personality Donald Trump; just a few days ago, it seems it reluctantly accepted that he is near-certain to be its nominee. In a few months, the United States might be able to be said to have gone in a mere-quarter century from victor of the Cold War to electing a President Trump.

Jan Kruger/Getty Images

In Europe, even in the 1990s it was demonstrated twice in the Balkans that Europe was incapable of dealing with major conflicts in its own backyard without help and, more importantly, leadership from the United States. Since then, it has failed to effectively deal with conflict in Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, all within or near its periphery. The situation in Syria has led to refugee and migrant crises unseen in the world or Europe since WWII; Europe’s response has been grossly inadequate and the influx of refugees has been one of the main catalysts for the dramatic rise all over Europe of far-right political parties that border on being fascist; they are often against the European Union and are forcefully hostile to immigrants and refugees.

Leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany, trying to show kindness and compassion to refugees, may be ousted sooner by politics rather than later for her troubles, and other governments balk at attempts to coordinate regional refugee and economic policies. In France, a rising far-right party funded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government may possibly come to control France in the coming years. Poland seems to be in the process of destroying its democracy.

A series of complacent governments in places like Greece, Italy, and Spain set off dramatic economic, finance, and debt crises that have severely weakened confidence in the European Union as well. There was, and still is, talk of a Greek exit (“Grexit”) from the EU. Now, there is talk of a “Brexit,” as, even after unprecedented concessions by the EU to Britain (concessions that severely undermined the EU), Britain’s public may still vote to leave the EU in a matter of months. The United Kingdom itself only recently narrowly avoided disintegration by secession from it by Scotland, a possibility which, it was just announced, will be pursued again.

AP

Even in Israel, considered a bastion of Western democracy in the Middle East, the public and government are becoming increasingly okay with the erosion of democratic values and a deeply undemocratic military occupation of the West Bank as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stifles Israel’s left and drives its people further to the right. The assault on democratic norms in Turkey by its government is far worse. Still worse in that region, the Arab Spring has, in general, become a massive tragedy.

Archive

Additionally, democracy by no means appears stable or secure overall in either Sub-Saharan Africa or in Latin America.

Failing the Test?

Fighting in Ukraine in 2015—Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons

As The Economist pointed out, Europe has its “little Trumps;” America might install its Trump as president. A deeply divided American public is desperate for functionality from its government, but seems incapable of electing a Congress that can produce this; after only a few years of near-total gridlock, it may turn to Trump. If there is an ensuing period of longer dysfunction, it is terrifying to imagine what Americans might opt for then.

Likewise, in Europe, as leftist leaders are challenged, weakened, and/or ousted one-by-one and are replaced by governments whose missions are resisting pressures of EU policy, as racial, ethnic, and religious tension, fears of Islamic terrorism, nativism, and demagogues become ever more commonplace, it is terrifying to envision its future, too. An autocratic Russia sits on Europe’s edge, poking and prodding from the outside, funding right-wing extremist parties in Europe that look to Putin’s Russia as a model, even while that democratic model has become a farce.

Make no mistake, Western Democracy is on trial; if Hillary Clinton does not enter the White House this next January, who or what, then, will encourage Europe to rethink its own rightward march, and what will keep America’s Trump-led “house divided against itself” from following, even encouraging, Europe’s lead? What will that ultimately mean for democracy and its viability worldwide as this century progresses? 

That is not to say that it is certain Mrs. Clinton can solve all of these problems.  But at least with her, there will be a sincere effort from the most powerful nation on earth to push back against the downward spiral on both sides of the Atlantic; with Mr. Trump, that downward spiral will only be encouraged and accelerated.

AP

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Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 18, 2016

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) February 18th, 2016

Mark Kauzlarich / Reuters

I earlier posted this at the end of a recent article titled “This Map Proves Sanders’ Political Revolution a Delusional Fantasy, or, My 1 Question for Bernie,” but I felt this needed its own post, so… Also, I am my own man, have never been paid by or formally associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. I just exercise critical thinking, thank you very much… and here are my April 29th terms for peace with camp Sanders!

AMMAN — Jay Michaelson, writing a column for The Daily Beast titled “Dear Bernie Fans, a Vote for Him is a Vote for Donald Trump,” basically wrote a sugar-coated, kinder version of what I have written, and more or less says the same thing New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says at the the end of one of his pieces, noting that the white, college-educated, privileged liberal core of Bernie supporters should consider the far less privileged people who would truly be hurt the most by the dramatically-far-increased-risk of a Republican (Trump?!) victory a Bernie Sanders nomination creates, to think about how all the policies and programs these people depend upon would be negatively impacted by such an outcome.

AP/John Locher for photo without text

It’s a truly excellent piece, but I think aim is strategically and tactically wrong. Strategically, Michaelson seems to be trying to win over Bernie Sanders supporters, and tactically, his approach is to engage them in reasoned dialogue backed by data. Unfortunately for his approach, he seems to have discovered that Sanders supporters aren’t interested in reasoned dialogue backed by data, as this post-article Tweet by Michaelson demonstrates:

This matches my own experience with Bernie supporters for some time now: there is no point in discussion, and research and data unfavorable to their fantasy are simply not acknowledged at best or are outright dismissed at worse. I often hear the line “We’ll see!” as if data-driven approaches are just some outdated method for winning as if data and research were not major components in the Obama campaign’s impressive victory over Romney in 2012, not even four years ago. 

The truth is, Bernie supporters are not worth engaging because they don’t want a discussion, at least not one the basis of data and details about moving forward: they’ve found their prophet and savior and are supporting him no matter what in true cult-like fashion, thinking through and consequences be damned. Some of them will support Hillary if she wins the nomination, others will not. As Michaelson notes in his Tweet, and as I noted earlier, neither of these groups can point to data that supports Bernie’s viability as a candidate (the type they do point to, early-election-season general election polls, are as a rule demonstrably wildly inaccurate and are therefore irrelevant and will continue to be so for months until much closer to November). As is obvious, and as I pointed out at length in my last piece, the main reason for this is that such data does not exist. But, even worse with my own experience with Bernie supporters and pro-Bernie “alternative” media is that there is not even an attempt to seek out such or even to ask the tough questions needed to translate any candidate or social movement into anything other than a fad.

Bernie and his supporters asking me and others to support him based on the far-fetched hypothetical possibility of the virtually impossible is not responsible politics and is not a recipe for a successful social/political movement. This is basically asking me, other Democrats, and many other Americans to take a huge gamble on someone who has not proven himself capable of doing what he says he wants to do or done the legwork to maximize his chances of victory. Sorry, I can’t respect a “movement” that hasn’t put in the time and effort to organize and build up a following over time, as other successful social/political movements have. To say that this Sanders democratic socialist “movement”—now only months old—is rushed is a dramatic understatement.

The hubristic mentality Berners exhibit is that they are somehow a silent majority or will be able to convince Middle America to hop aboard the democratic socialist love-train, which is most definitely an express train with very few stops along the way. That train passed the realm of rational discussion long ago.

So, no, my main goal is not to engage Sanders supporters. I see them as the harbinger of something new and dangerous for the left: a possible delayed (equal?) opposite reaction to the movement of and forces behind the Tea Party. Just as the Tea Party is doing incredible damage to their long-term goals and the Republican Party without realizing it, this new group of Berners may very well be situating themselves to do the same for progressive liberalism. 

The question is, will the Democratic Party become beholden to Berners the way the Republican Party has become beholden to Tea Partiers? That is what the Clinton vs. S anders contest is all about.

So my goal? Point out how, like the Tea Party, all but those who are flirting with Bernie have become a destructive force within the left, a force that, like the Tea Party, will drive voters away in big national elections. As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death should remind us all, elections have very real world-consequences. So my goal is to drive away any voters who are not in the Bernie camp away from that camp’s self-destructive, self-indulgent, delusional nonsense by exposing it for what it is, bluntly and harshly and rightly so. I’m basically declaring war on Camp Bernie because it declared war on the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton months ago, not wanting to participate in the Democratic party but to hijack it Tea Party-style. I’d like to win over the light Bernie supporters, those flirting with his candidacy, and undecideds to our side in this nomination contest before it’s too late, making anyone not under this Pied Piper’s spell realize how inane and ridiculous his message and followers are. It’s not enough to say “Well, enough Bernie supporters will come around to Hillary in the end.” Because the more normal Democrats calmly act like that will happen and the more we stand by and don’t fight back, the more people will think it’s not extreme to support Bernie, the more people will be attracted to his candidacy, and the greater the chances that Bernie could actually win the nomination. 

If however, moderates unite and loudly denounce Camp Bernie for the unhelpful, destructive camp it is, then undecideds will see our passion andour reason and come to us. But if we are quiet with our passion, Camp Bernie has too great a chance for my comfort to win out with their passion over our quiet reason.

The time to act is now. One of George W. Bush’s greatest faults was his long support of his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who refused to admit to himself, his boss, and the American people that U.S. forces in Iraq were facing a metastasizing insurgency drawing increasing support among the disaffected and malcontents of Iraq. The consequences were disastrous, and we are still living with them today. Eventually, they drove Iraq to a period of-near civil war, in which many normal Iraqis found themselves tangled and transformed, even to the point of becoming violent malcontents themselves. Well, the Democratic Party needs to recognize the insurgency in Bernie Sanders it has on its hands now, call it for what it is, and stop treating it with kid gloves. Rick Perry called Trump “a cancer on conservatism.” That cancer appears to be terminal. Sanders is on liberalism’s chances to affect real change. Time for some chemo.

Don’t get me wrong; I like Bernie Sanders, agree with him on many issues, and know his intentions are good; I can say the same for many of his supporters. But history shows us far too often alone are not enough to succeed, and are no substitute for a practical plan that both incorporates an understanding of the pressures that place limits on the currently possible and addresses reality it exists, not as we wish it to be; “Politics is,” after all, “the art of the possible,” to quote the great nineteenth-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck. And at a time when the Republican Party has, for years, been acting irrationally, has lurched far to the right, and increasingly disdains both compromise and governance, now is not the time for the Democratic party to lurch to the left; now is the time to broaden the Democratic Party’s practical, rational, centrist appeal, to draw centrists and liberal Republicans who are horrified by the far-fight turn of the Republican Party and the rise of Trump. For decades, no Democrat has run as a liberal and won the White House: Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and Obama in 2008 and 2012 all ran as center-left candidates. Under President Obama, Democrats have worked hard to cultivate a brand that is centrist, rational, non-extremist, and non-ideological; it would be more than foolish to abandon this very clear contrast with Republicans that Democrats can provide to voters in favor of Sanders’ extreme, narrow, and polarizing approach to politics.

The battle lines are drawn. Time is running out. And it’s time to fight. Now is not the time to show that, like the Iraqi Army then and even now with ISIS, that moderates don’t want to fight, that only the extremists have the passion to really fight. That is how we lose support to the Sanders Insurgency.

U.S. Department of State

Hillary Clinton is a fighter. I’m with her.

If you want to win and help people in real life, you should be, too. Join us, join us now, and get ready to fight, or get ready for President Donald Trump.

Don’t be a Berner.

UPDATE April 29th: See my terms for peace with camp Sanders

Hillary for America

If you appreciate what I have to say, please like and share my analysis and do so throughout all the primaries and caucuses, especially with Sanders supporters. Too much is at stake and Bernie must be stopped!

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 18, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 18th, 2016

Evan Vucci – Pool/Getty Images

AMMAN — President Barack  Obama began his final State of the Union speech by speaking undeniable facts about the strength of the economy, later followed by undeniable facts about the security threats from terrorism: how bad they were, and how bad they were not, with a caution against fear and bigotry, in addition to discussing other issues.  These are facts that most Republican candidates want to ignore or deny.  In fact, Obama sounded like a reasonable man asking for reasonable things.  Not, generally, pie in the sky idealism, not calls for the improbable but just the doable.  He busted myth after myth, from the economy to climate change to immigration to foreign policy.  He mentioned smart, sensible, non-extremist goals and strategies on domestic and foreign policy. The rational man calling for rational things was a sad picture, though, too: he was addressing a Congressional body that has been anything but rational since the advent of the Tea Party.  Thus, there is a tragic quality to the scene of such a rational man addressing a multitude consisting of mainly the irrational.

There were many bittersweet things about watching Obama’s final State of the Union speech.  Actually, that’s an understatement because there were many bittersweet feelings as I was watching this man, my president, for whom I had voted twice, give his final address to Congress as outlined in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution.  This meant that my reactions went from being proud and pleased to being disappointed and frustrated.  But even for his faults, very humanely put on display last night, I could not help but like, admire, and respect this great man as I saw and heard him speak.

No matter how frustrated I am with President Obama, his greatest traits always shine through.  Let’s go through them in detail, as displayed in this final State of the Union speech:

THE GOOD

Charles Dharapak/AP

1.) The sheer force of his vast intellect and his willingness to use it

Acclaim Images

Even if you absolutely hate Obama and are a rabid Trump supporter, it is impossible to deny that this man has a brilliant mind.  You might disagree with how he uses it, you might think his understanding of the world is naïve and childish and flat-out-wrong, but the man is unabashedly a thinker and is clearly a man who thinks through things deeply, who is very articulate and well read, and who clearly was not out of place intellectually at Harvard Law School, where he stood out among one of the highest concentrations of brilliant and ambitious minds in the world. 

This is a man who got to see much of the world at an early age and became wiser for his experiences abroad, who clearly displays both a boundless intellectual curiosity and strong tendency to spend time deliberating over problems rather than carelessly rolling dice and jumping into situations impulsively with the feeling of some sort of grand divine wind at his back, markedly unlike his predecessor.  After overdosing on a wanna-be “cowboy” (whatever that means) who thinks that John Wayne is an acceptable source for political philosophy, I was perhaps always and foremost grateful for this aspect of President Obama after eight years of George W. Bush.  I knew that Obama was a man who would spend time thinking over issues and was smart and worldly enough to make his own decisions based on his own understanding, not just rely on personal relationships and trust to make decisions based mainly on who were better advocates of their own agendas because of a Bush-esque lack of a command of the issues.  Like Lincoln, Obama had many smart people around him, his own team of rivals, and more often than not he played them and their disagreements against each other to get the best advice and then make his own decision with their input.  Bush, on the other hand, was a victim of his own team’s rivalries, and lacked the knowledge and judgment to realize when his closest, most trusted people were flat out wrong until it was far too late. 

If anything, Obama moved the pendulum too far into the deliberative mode at the expense of action some of the time, but, frankly, this is exactly what the American voters as a whole decided they wanted after George W. Bush: they would rather have their leader overthink than underthink, rather not act after the “decisive” impulsive blunders of Bush lead to national disasters unprecedented in modern history than act too rashly.  We’d had enough of “the decider” and his “decision points;” in many ways, the image of our president being Rodin’s The Thinker was a comforting one, and an image we badly needed to send to the world at the time.  His general policy—“Don’t do stupid shit”—may not be perfect but it was just what we wanted (and in many ways needed) after what many consider to be a “lost” decade of recklessness and missed opportunities.  To be fair to Obama, while I would argue that there are some big moments when he should have acted more and thought less, I am willing to admit that I respect the fact that he respected the fact that out power is not limitless and that our capacity for error and for the possibility of unintended consequences were rational reasons not to do more. 

His thoughtful, deliberative State of the Union certainly reminded us that we had a thoughtful, deliberative president.

2.) A superb understanding of the problems of America and the world

AP Photo/Jacky Naegelen, pool

I’ve studied politics, international relations, foreign affairs, conflict, and policy for over fifteen years now.  Most Americans have not.  That places a gulf between most of them and me, the same way an electrical engineer, surgeon, or mandarin speaker who each studied their crafts for over fifteen years would put a vast gulf between themselves and me on those subjects.  It therefore gives me great comfort to see, in Obama, someone who thinks like me: he looks at a problem, studies it, and then uses that info to figure out what needs to be done.  There is not a tremendous amount of ideology in this approach, save aversions to cynicism, selling people out, and acting on emotion.  He knows how to look at the world and he understands it in the general sense of the way I do.  He understands that complex problems do not usually have simple solutions and that reducing things to “good” and “evil” is not usually a productive way to problem solve.  He is also culturally sensitive and has a knack for speaking to people on their terms, not his or ours (that, my friends, is how you reach people).  With Obama, I never had to worry about some sort of irrational, emotional, born-again, religious-driven approach to public policy and political problems.  Regardless of how effective he was as a leader, knowing that Obama could see problems, America, and the world clearly and appreciate that strategy and tactics, speech and deeds, are different things, gave me great comfort.

That in his speech he put a proper perspective on things like terrorism and immigration, where so much misinformation, emotion, and irrationality are omnipresent, was fitting and characteristic of Obama indeed.

3.) Cool, calm, and collected

Buzzfeed video

Another thing I love about Obama is that that man has self-control and knows that getting worked up, and working people up, is often part of the problem in Washington.  He can be relaxed and actually crack some good jokes while being cool and professional.  I appreciated that he made decisions based on a cold analysis, not raw emotions.  The man generally keeps his composure in a way far too many politicians now, especially Tea Partiers, routinely fail to do.  Sure, sometimes people wanted him to be more emotional, but are we that childish that we need our leader to explicitly and loudly express whatever emotions we are feeling at the moment?  Sometimes, I think Republicans think being president is like being a high school football coach (no wonder the areas where high school football is so popular tend to vote Republican).  Obama knows that a cool delivery is all the more effective: Republicans freaked out when Obama didn’t start screaming and bombing in response to Putin’s moves in Ukraine, but Obama fairly quietly implemented sanctions that have helped to cripple Russia’s economy; that’s some Darth Vader stuff, with Obama practically Force-choking Putin economically.  That’s pretty badass in a leader. 

Obama always carried himself with grace and dignity, not with goofiness and shooting-from-the-hip eye-roll-inducing gaffes.  After Bush, Obama felt a bit like James Bond, and that was refreshing.  Yes, sometimes he would tear up when talking about murdered children, sometime he would channel the great African-American rhetorical tradition to communicate in a different style than his normal approach, but Obama was usually one cool customer in an era where the rhetoric has increasingly become hyperbolic and extreme.  Often, those making the most noise and spewing the most venom were quick to blame Obama for the partisanship, but just listening to Obama and taking in his delivery, it was clear they had no one to blame but themselves for the tone and partisanship of the era. 

Throughout most of the last seven years, at the very least the President of the United States did his best to personally set an example of a tone that was respectful and measured, grounded and cordial relative to what was devolving around him.  That he kept his cool so well in these trying times was a credit to him and his presidency, showing that it was possible to operate a measured, mature approach.  And often (see the Benghazi hearing with Clinton) but not always, he laid down an example that his party followed much more often that the Republicans did.

4.) Obama’s likability

Admit it: Obama is just likable.  He’s obviously super smart but also has a common touch, able to talk sports or music and crack a good joke while he is out and about. He smiles a lot (and what a killer smile) and can speak and appeal to people of all kinds of diverse backgrounds.  The man can also sing, whether it’s Al Green or “Amazing Grace.”  He is relaxed, and easy to talk to, and thrives in town-hall style meetings. In fact, the second town-hall-style debate against Romney was the moment for many when Obama successfully fended off Romney’s candidacy.  It’s not bad to have a cool president that people at home and around the world actually like and can identify with when he travels around the world.  Heck, even some Republicans admit that Obama is a likable guy.  This quality of his was very much on display as he delivered his final State of the Union speech, which he even opened with a joke about the 2016 presidential race.

5.) Obama’s idealism

Shepard Fairey

Soon, I will be brutally honest about Obama’s idealism’s limitations and its downside, but, to be fair, I must also acknowledge its positives.  Many Americans find themselves cynical and jaded (myself among them); some are so desperate to find change that they flock to dangerously naïve, inexperienced, and unprepared candidates, or to those who have virtually no shot at winning a general election.  To have our head of state not give into this cynicism and to be constantly promoting a lofty idealism, and at least show the American public and the world that even if we have given up on each other and ourselves that our leader has not, is not insignificant.  Even if they seem distant, the visions of America, its people, and its politics that Obama keeps dangling in front of us that at least remind us what is, theoretically at least, possible, even if not this year or even soon.  And it is important for us to hear these things.  Obama keeps confidently projecting that our best days are ahead of us, and, in spite of all the problems we face, he may be right.  One thing Obama that deserves credit for understanding is that if Americans don’t believe we have better days ahead, that makes it that much more difficult bring about a more positive reality.  Even if Obama has failed to convince many of this, you sure can’t blame him for trying. 

Obama also knows how essential it is that the Democrats and Republicans work together to pass legislation to solve America’s problems, even if Republicans in Congress are not very interested in working with him or Democrats at all.  That Obama tried, and tried hard, to reach out to Republicans—for example: helping to incorporate many conservative, Republican-originated ideas into the Affordable Car Act (ACA)—is something else which for which he is to be commended to a degree, at least in principle.  Even in his final State of the Union, Obama pleaded not only with politicians but with the American people to work together for the common good with passion and eloquence, laying a vision of the future that should be a common aspiration for all Americans.

Having just gone over what I will miss most about Obama, using his speech to illustrate these points, now, I will go over what I find most frustrating about him, using the same speech.

THE BAD

AP

1.) Obama’s idealism

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Yes, we have some overlaps here: one of Obama’s greatest strengths is perhaps also his greatest weakness.  Obama came into office ready to hold hands with Republicans, take their ideas into account and include them in his programs, ready to sit down at the table with them and discuss, discuss, and discuss… He expected reasoned and prevailed argument to prevail.  His expectations were lofty indeed, and reality never came close to them.  As I noted, to a degree this is admirable.  But pretty early on—in fact, even before he assumed office—it was clear that a dark undercurrent of America’s polity, harnessing racism, ignorance, fear, demagoguery, regionalism, and obstructionism at some of its worst manifestations since the Civil Rights Era—was coming to take corporeal form; it was clear when only three Republican senators and zero Republican representatives voted for the stimulus package, but the form of this dark undercurrent was most visibly demonstrated in the gestation of the Tea Party in the season of the great “debate” over health care reform.  In many places in the country, mobs shouted down congressman attempting to defend or discuss the Administration’s attempts at healthcare reform during town hall meetings with their constituents.  The Democrats’ plan advocated by Obama incorporated several significant conservative and Republican-originated ideas, and gave up on some long-held liberal dreams like a public-option or a single-payer system, but this made no difference to congressional Republicans in the end and got him not one single Republican vote for the Affordable Care Act.  Basically, Obama began negotiations with major compromises, intended as an olive branch to win over Republican goodwill, but seeking that goodwill proved to be a fool’s errand as, in the end, the Republicans were only interested in obstruction or sabotage.  This meant that Obama began from a weakened bargaining position, having already offered compromises publicly to a hardened and intransigent Republican Party that had no interest cooperating with Obama whatsoever. 

Yes, it made sense for him to try to work with Republicans, but not long after it was clear they would not work with him, he should have gone into combat mode.  Instead, he kept trying to earn their support long after it was clear it was not coming.  What was most unforgivable is that Obama continued this style of “leadership” well after the lessons of the stimulus and ACA, for years, even into his second term, and this resulted in Obama being repeatedly outplayed on budget deals, to the frustration of his own party; through this approach, Obama also unwittingly helped to legitimize threatening both government shutdowns and not voting to raise the debt ceiling as legitimate hostage-taking-style tactics for Republican extremists because he rewarded such threats, while his own efforts at bipartisanship have gone largely unrewarded.  It was hard for me not to laugh out loud when Obama suggested in his speech that even now Republicans and Democrats could work together to pass meaningful legislation…

In his speech he also seemed to think that somehow the American people will improve the tone and tenor of our politics, which seem terribly naïve, given that we ourselves are becoming increasingly more partisan and that we are the ones who have been electing increasingly partisan people to office who are reflecting the pressures that we are placing upon them.

Sadly, the same idealism that made him such an attractive candidate and helped propel him into the White House was one of his largest constraints while he was in office.  Even as he appealed to our idealism in his final State of the Union, for many, including his supporters, the limits of his idealism and the problems it caused were only too painfully obvious.

2.) Obama’s disdain of politics, or, Obama the professor vs. Obama the president

Obama campaign

There are times when I wonder if Obama knows the difference between lectures and leadership, being a professor and being a president.  This State of the Union speech, sadly, was one of those times.

I will admit, I kind of felt stupid when I was watching the speech.  When Obama started talking about how much our system needed to change, when he mentioned redistricting (which I have identified as one of the major problems facing our democratic republic), I thought for the briefest of seconds that he was going to say advocate constitutional amendments to address redistricting and money in politics (Hillary Clinton has been advocating a constitutional amendment to help address campaign finance for some time).  Barring some sort of major disaster/attack, this is the last time Obama will command the attention of this large a number of Americans, so I thought he might, I don’t know, be bold.  That he would call for a constitutional amendment, that he would announce a plan to mobilize activists to lobby state legislatures and congressmen and that he would tour the country to drum up support and force the issue just in time for the election.  But that’s kind of a lie; I knew deep down that this is what I wanted, that this is what I wished, but that this was not on Obama’s nature or character.  This was classic Obama, giving a lecture to university students: “Ok class, today I’m going to lay out what the problems are, and discuss what needs to be done to solve those problems.”  And, much like a professor, Obama does both these things excellently.  But then the lecture is up, like all situations with all professors and all classes, nothing happens after class.  Like a professor, he steps away from the podium as if it is not his role to take a commanding lead and tell us step-by-step what his plan is and how he will take us all forward, how he will overcome obstacles, how he will get things done.  Like a professor, he look at the presidency in a pure, academic form, where the Constitution does not call for the president to campaign for his party and its agenda.  Thus ends theory, but in practice the party of the president very much relies the president to be its campaigner in chief.  But Obama, with his clear disdain of politics, shunned this role, tried to remain aloof and apart from the party politics.  In fact, he did this to such a degree that members of his own party angrily complainedthat he was not helping them enough in their reelection campaigns, a traditional if informal part of the modern presidency.  In general, Obama stayed out of the trenches and preferred to delegate lobbying Congress to his vice president, Joe Biden.

Even on his greatest domestic policy accomplishment—The Affordable Care Act—this is more than amply demonstrated.  Obama the professor campaigned on the broad outcomes we needed in healthcare reform.  Obama the professor then let Congress and the American people debate for months about what a plan would and would not look like, let congressional democrats take the lead in crafting a plan.  Obama the professor even held an academic-conference-like summit with Congressional Republicans and Democrats (it accomplished nothing: note the lack of similar summits after this one).  At no point did he simply say “Here is the plan my team and I have come up with” and pressured his own party like hell to pass it when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.  Obama the professor preferred to stay aloof and above the politics as much as possible, Obama the professor viewed a clear line between Congress and the Presidency when it came to legislation, preferring to let Congress, not his team, write the bill.  Obama never made any public attempt to advocate for single-payer or a public option, and the Affordable Care Act was significantly weaker and less impressive than it could have been, starting from a position already offering compromise and hanging in the air for months while the President stayed on the sidelines and during which public opinion, exposed to unified Republican distortions and misinformation without President Obama leading Democrats with a vigorous counternarrative, soured on the bill.  The end result reflects all these tactical and strategic mistakes by the Obama Administration, and even for all its accomplishments, the ACA fell far short of what it could have been. Thus, in the end, ACA/Obamacare was far less than the outcomes Obama had campaigned for, but having delegated the task of crafting the solution to lesser men, the result is hardly surprising. 

This was how Obama acted when it came to his signature piece of domestic legislation, so I must have been crazy if I thought Obama was going to help lead and guide an attempt at a constitutional amendment overturning the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

Even now, I want to scream at Obama, “You have time!  Pick one big thing and just throw yourself into it, be relentless, tour the country, lobby individual Congressman, president like your time presidenting is almost over, because it is almost over!”  But it would be useless.  And this is probably the most vexing thing for me when it comes to Obama, something I will never understand.  What happened to the “fierce urgency of now???”  It sure could have been fiercer.  And with a gifted politician like Obama in the vanguard… well, the tantalizing thoughts of lost possibilities, especially in the crucial first few years, especially when there was a chance to dent the impact of the Tea Party, are heartbreaking to consider…

This last Obama State of the Union speech was Obama at his best, but also his worst.  It was Obama being Obama.

*****

THE LEGACY

How, then, in the end, will Obama be remembered?  Perhaps, not altogether fairly, he will be remembered primarily as America’s first non-white and first black president (even though he is half white!).  This is an extremely symbolic thing and yet the making it happen was quite a thing of substance.  Yet this has nothing to do with the man’s accomplishments once in office: digging America out of the colossal economic ditch it was thrown into by the Bush Administration, first with the continuation and implementation of TARP and then Obama’s implementation of the stimulus, putting America on a slow but steady path to recovery; making America the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world and greatly reducing America’s dependence on foreign energy while also dramatically increasing America’s use of renewable energy; singing into law the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the greatest piece of domestic legislation and step forward for the American healthcare system since the Civil and Voting Rights Acts and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Jonson in the 1960s; appointing two competent, fine women judges to the Supreme Court; bringing Osama bin Laden to justice; ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq responsibly; and achieving major diplomatic breakthroughs with both Iran and Cuba, achieving a nuclear agreement with the latter that should prevent a war between Iran and the West for many years to come and perhaps far beyond that.

The White House

Yes, Obama could have achieved so much more, could have fought harder and led more boldly, and it is a tragedy that he was unable to use the office of president more effectively.  But it was the better angel of his nature—his desire to bring Republicans and Democrats together, to work in a bipartisan manner, to transcend party politics—that often led to his greatest frustrations, that led to his domestic power and accomplishments being very little for the last five years of his presidency after his initial two had accomplished so much.  But his failures came from a place a good intentions in a way that is somewhat admirable, and, in the end, the balance sheet of history will show that his failures will not drown out his accomplishments and that he will be viewed positively by historians, at the very least a pretty good president presiding over extraordinarily difficult times, even if he will never be regarded as great.  Especially coming after the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, Americans of all stripes should be grateful for his presidency; of course, the reality is that many of them will never realize this, let alone admit it, but history will vindicate him, if not the quality of American politics that took hold during his tenure, though that deterioration occurred in spite of his best efforts, not because of them.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

I’ll miss him, even as I hope the next president is better.

Getty Images

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One author’s attempt to combine all his writing on gun policy/politics in America in way that he hopes will help others understand this pressing issue and arm them with knowledge to debate and discuss it along with a clear understanding of what needs to be done. 

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 5, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) December 5th, 2015

The following is a preview of the brand new short-but-powerful eBook Needless Deaths, Inexcusable Responses: Missives on Guns, Policy, and Politics in America,  available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and in ePub format!

Summary:

From Columbine to Sandy Hook to San Bernardino, mass shootings are an epidemic unique to America among developed/Western nations in their frequency. But the level of “normal” gun violence in America is also far higher than virtually any other developed/Western nation as well. In this short yet useful and data-driven exploration of the intersection between guns, policy, and politics in America, historian and policy/political expert Brian Frydenborg presents a series of discussions from a range of his work (including one article never before published) arranged by different themes to bring his readers up to speed on the crucial public policy and political issue of guns in America. 

Going over the history, American exceptionalism, numbers, mentalities, and, building on all of these, possible solutions regarding the problems with guns in America, Frydenborg takes his readers on a journey beginning with a historical, contextual understanding of the Second Amendment as America’s Founding generation would have understood and lived it, going back over a millennium into a sacred, constant tradition of English history dating back to the withdrawal of the Roman Empire, but lasting up to and through the American Revolution. Next, a brief yet sound data-driven analysis is presented explaining why America is so exceptional when it comes to gun violence. Then, an exploration of data on how gun violence is carried out in America, by whom and to whom and where, helps establish that the problems surrounding gun violence are hardly insurmountable. Next up, he discusses the absurdity of the mentality of Americans when it comes to gun violence, comparing the policy responses to gun violence and terrorism and noting that terrorism kills far fewer Americans each year, even taking into account 9/11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also embarks upon a surprising but eye-opening comparison between African-Americans and Palestinians. Finally, taking all of this into account, Frydenborg makes a clear and compelling case about the policy directions America needs to take as far as reducing gun violence.

Anyone seeking to understand the tragedy of gun violence in America would do well to consider Brian Frydenborg’s thoughtful, data driven, and conveniently thematically organized pieces on this urgent policy and political topic, especially as people consider who they will support in the presidential and other political races of 2016. The lives—or deaths—of thousands depend on the policy choices these leaders will make.

Table of Contents

Preface. 3

PART I: HISTORY.. 4

Chapter 1: The Irrelevant Second Amendment 5 

PART II: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM.. 11

Chapter 2: Why is the US so Good at Gun Violence?. 12

PART III: NUMBERS. 17

Chapter 3: Gun Violence in the U.S.: The Numbers Behind the Madness. 18

Chapter 4: American Guns: Not Just Killing Americans (See Mexico) 26

PART IV: MENTALITIES. 30

Chapter 5: How Not to Stop Terrorism & Gun Violence: Lessons from the Republicans  31

Chapter 6: Arms and the Man (Underwater): The Myth of Mass Gun Confiscation in Post-Katrina New Orleans. 44

Chapter 7: A Ferguson Intifada: Why African-Americans are America’s Palestinians  49

PART V: SOLUTIONS. 59

Chapter 8: These Maps Debunk Everything the NRA Has Told Us About Guns. 61

Chapter 9: Development: The Fix for Terrorism & Violent Crime. 68 

Afterword. 75 

About the Author 78

Dedicated to all who have been touched by domestic gun violence in America, may their suffering not be in vain, and to my friends and family, without whom I would not be alive.  And to my readers, without whom this and all my articles are just fancy diary entries.

“I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.”

—Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir, 2010

“We say keep your change, we’ll keep our God, our guns, our Constitution.”

—Sarah Palin, speech at CPAC, February 11th, 2012

“Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and the corrupt.”

—Christopher Hitchens, “What I Don’t See at the Revolution,” Vanity Fair, March 31st, 2011

Preface 

As Cicero wrote in his Orator over 2,000 years ago, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever” (120).  Therefore, we shall begin with history.  From history, we will progress to data, then to mindsets, and, finally, we will see where all that points us in terms of solutions.  Seemingly simple enough, and yet, on such a contentious issue, we shall go into some detail just so that the reader can more easily refute those who are part of the problem and not the solution, those who cling to fantasies and falsehoods in the face of much better, far more productive alternatives.  After all, this debate, among many in modern American politics, has become clouded in manufactured ideology and irrationality.  Yet such things are the mortal enemy of policy, with which the collection of essays/articles here is primarily concerned.  Tame the politics and mythology, and policy may yet win the day.

PART I: HISTORY

This was the first piece I had ever formally written about the issue of guns in America.  As a lover of and student of history, naturally, I felt a good place to begin was going back in history, to the origins and context of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.  Unless one properly understand what the Second Amendment is (and what it is not), any discussion becomes something of a farce.  Perhaps, then, is not surprising that most discussions on guns in America are just that: farces, as illustrated by how few Americans actually know and understand what is illustrated in this section.  Most conservative Republicans—including, unfortunately, too many Supreme Court Justices, believe that the Second Amendment enshrines a right to bear arms for every individual and that this right is not subject to any government regulation.  Such an interpretation flies in the face of the substantial weight of history and the Amendment’s context, as will be demonstrated in the following chapter.

Chapter 1: The Irrelevant Second Amendment

The individual right to keep and bear arms as part of the state militia is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. What does that have to do with today’s citizenry? Nothing.

Vikings vs. English Saxon fyrd- The History Channel/Vikings

Originally published by American Gun Laws, republished by LinkedIn Pulseand by Stupidparty Math v. Myth

Updated November 30th, 2015, to include a discussion of Lord Blackstone’s Commentaries 

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the gun-control debate in the United States, apart from the continuous stream of deaths that still have yet to merit not even a modestly serious policy response, is that for as many times as the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—part of what is termed the Bill of Rights—is invoked, nearly as many times there is a total lack of historical context of that very amendment presented alongside. Into this vacuum all sorts of creative reasoning has flooded, to such a degree that the highest law courts and judges of the land, too, have fallen to such erroneous thinking that ignores the history and tradition from which the Second Amendment emerged.

J. G. A. Pocock correctly notes that “[i]t is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it,” and the Second Amendment is a textbook example of this phenomenon. The roots of this amendment go back to Saxon culture in the era of the Roman Empire. When Rome decided to withdraw from its provinces in the British Isles early in the fifth-century to consolidate its withering power in the rest of the West, the Saxons, Angles, (from which England got its name) and other Germanic tribes eventually filled the power vacuum the Romans left. The most visible presence of Roman governmental authority had been the army, the professional, standing Roman legions that had been stationed in Britain. Security after their withdrawal became nonexistent, but the Saxons, after a bloody conquest, imported a tradition of theirs from mainland Europe with them: that of the fyrd, as the U.S. Army’s official history explains. In this system, all adult males had to engage in military training, and, in times of war, would be expected to fight. This tradition continued throughout English history. The English freemen, like the Saxons before him, were given the right to bear arms as part of a contract in which their responsibility was to train in their local militia and defend the realm when necessary. This part is important: there is no tradition in English history of the local peasants having an institutionalized right to keep and bear arms without the responsibility of being part of an organized militia which would act to defend the land when needed; the right to bear arms does not exist without the militia, and the militia does not exist without the peasants being trained for and participating in a militia… (CHAPTER CONTINUED IN FULL VERSION)

END OF PREVIEW… WANT MORE??

If you are interested in reading the full eBook you can find it on Amazon Kindle,Barnes & Noble Nook, and in ePub format.  And, in general, do not hesitate to reach out to me or share your thoughts about the book on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter(you can follow me there at @bfry1981)!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 13, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 13th, 2015

GETTY IMAGES/CNN

AMMAN — The Debate last night was not the farcical circus it could have been.  Aside from Megan Kelly’s activism (how was it the job of her as a moderator to put in a big plug for candidate Carly Fiorina and her standout performance from the earlier second-tier kids-table-debate as the main debate for the top ten began?), she, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace did a good job of keeping the debate lively and interesting with pointed, challenging questions and also kept the more rowdy candidates in line.  They were overall very fair, giving each candidate chances to shine but also putting them on the spot.  Trump was leading in all the polls so it is fair that he got more airtime, and most of the other candidates got the time they deserved relative to their standings in the polls and how close they are in these polls to each other.

The New York Times

The exceptions to the overall fairness were Scott Walker and Rand Paul: Walker was third in many pre-debate polls and second in others, while Paul had tended to also be at the top just behind Walker, Bush, and Trump, so the moderators should not have allowed them to be the next-to-last and last candidates in terms of speaking time.  But still, the debate was good television and surprisingly had a good amount of substance.  Below is an attempt to rank the ten candidates from the main debate (plus Carly Fiorina whose performance was pretty much the only major takeaway from the kids-table-debate of the bottom seven) in terms of substance, then style.

Substance rankings:

#1 Governor John Kasich (OH)

I’ve got to be honest; I had no idea who the hell John Kasich was before this debate.  But I do now, and I was very impressed.  He seems to be 2016’s Jon Huntsman: a substantive, serious, accomplished, sensible, rational Republican who is not afraid to compromise to get results and who does not run on hatred or discrimination in any way.  Of course, all this means that he has zero chance of being chosen by the Republican base as their champion since they seem to abhor most, it not all, of his qualities, even if it would improve their chances of winning in the general election.  Kasich is the popular governor of Ohio.  He was one of a small number of Republican governors who supported Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and gave a very rational and eloquent defense of this decision, talking about the relationship of the mentally ill, prisons, and emergency-room-care costs to Medicaid.  He did a great job referring to many specific achievements with specific numbers, discussing his record of success in Ohio on multiple fronts with ease.  He also touted his record as a congressman in Washington as Chairman of the House Budget Committee, where he was instrumental in helping to achieve a balanced federal budget with the Clinton Administration and Congress. He showed moderation on both gay rights—saying it was time to accept the Supreme Court ruling and move on—and on immigration, a moderation that will be key in the general election as the election takes place within the United States of America, not just the states of the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America.” This man should be leading in the polls, but the fact that he is not says much about today’s Republican Party. He seems to be the most well-rounded candidate, with national and state experience and a record of balancing budgets and expanding healthcare.

#2 Governor Christ Christie (NJ)

Christie had a lot of details on his record of service—from being a U.S. Attorney that was appointed on September 10th, 2001, who helped to lock up and prosecute terrorists under the Patriot Act to being a governor dealing with tough budgetary and economic issues and having to govern in a blue state—that he weaved in comfortably and impressively into his answers.  He had a lot of specifics to discuss but was able to tie each of them into broad themes as well.   Christie was very eloquent and passionate when discussing everything from terrorism to balancing budgets and dealing with social security, and made an impassioned case for surveillance in a feisty exchange with Rand Paul.  Paul made good points, but Christie won stylistically and many would also say substantively.

#3 Senator Marco Rubio (FL)

Senator Rubio gave a good talk about immigration, talking about the need for comprehensive reform, and demonstrated his knowledge and experience on the issue and getting quite specific.  He talked about his own personal, family, and political background—weaving each one into a compelling narrative—and he talked about how the economy has changed dramatically just in the last few years in a way no other candidate did.  He was clear and sharp, addressed what he was asked directly, and had clever and effective attacks on Hillary Clinton.  He definitely had one of the most substantive performances in this debate.

#4 Senator Rand Paul (KY)

Paul’s points on ISIS were misleading, but he made a solid case for civil liberties and his defense of them as well as for trimming spending.  Yet his line about wanting to “collect more records form terrorists, but less records from innocent Americans” was, to use Christie’s words, ridiculous, because, as Christie also pointed out, “how are you supposed to know” people are criminals or terrorists before they commit their acts,  and that’s why some degree of surveillance is necessary.  That’s not to say that his point was invalid, or that Christie’s points don’t deserve some scrutiny, and Paul made valid points on surveillance and defended them well, even if Christie arguably got the better of him. Paul’s opposition to the Iran deal made absolutely no sense.  Still, even with his even performance, Paul still brought more substance to the table than most.

#5-#6 Tie: (former) Governor Jeb Bush (FL) and Governor Scott Walker (WI)

Governor Bush did a great job defending the humanity of illegal immigrants while still making a competent case for how to deal with illegal immigration.  He did a good job selling what he claims are his achievements in education during his governorship, but that record is actually spotty and questionable at best.  He answered the question on him being his own man well, gave complete answers that addressed what he was asked even if he stumbled verbally.  He sort of flubbed a question about his approving of a Bloomberg charity budget that included funding for Planned Parenthood (the current overblown Satan in Republican politics) but then ended that question with a strong defense of his overall “pro-life” record. Hard to say he did “great” or even “good,” he did ok.

Scott Walker was weak on immigration, against the only practical solution—comprehensive immigration reform—and instead doubling down on his closing of any path to citizenship for illegal immigrants currently in the country.  His came off as extremely anti-labor/union.  He is just as impractical on abortion, calling for a total ban with no exceptions.  With all his solutions, he was for extreme positions that are generally untenable in the general election.  He had little substantive to say, and was unable to answer even a basic question about foreign policy (likely because he knows almost nothing about foreign policy) and like the other candidates, and made no sense on Iran.

#7 (up from the kids-table-debate) Carly Fiorina

Though surrounded by generally weak competition that helped her to look stronger than she actually is, Fiorina was still able to highlight her international business experience to her advantage, highlighting her personal relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and King Abdullah of Jordan and surprisingly giving herself multiple strong moments on everything from ISIS to the economy.  As the only woman candidate for a party nervous about Hillary, many Republicans are desperate to see her rise enough to at least be vice-presidential-running-mate material.  If she does end up winning either the nomination or a VP slot, this debate will be the moment where people will say it all began.  Still, it remains to be see if she can share the stage and perform well enough with the big boys.  But look for her to be in the top ten for debate #2 and, perhaps to become one of the more substantive candidates in the overall Republican race.

#8 (former) Governor Mike Huckabee (AR)       

Love it or hate it, Huckabee’s invoking of the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution represent a creative, bold, and somewhat rational approach for conservatives to abortion and will certainly win approval from them.  He looked weak compared to Christie on the issue on social security reform, playing for sound bites instead of substance.  He did not speak much in depth on issues, instead appealing to a more general sense of the way America should be governed.  Definitely not one of the more substantive candidates.

#9 Donald Trump

Christie accused Paul of blowing a lot of hot air, but without question the most hot air was blown by Donald Trump.  His perhaps his most substantive point was making it clear that he opposed the Iraq War back in 2004 because he said it would destabilize the region.  He also made intelligent comments about single-payer healthcare working in Canada and Scotland and with getting rid of restricting the healthcare choices available that exist because of a person’s location.  At the same time, theatrically is what characterized the rest of his extensive airtime, no substance.  Lots of tough talk and generalities, but little specific for policy analysts to consider.

#10 Senator Ted Cruz (TX)

Senator Cruz resembled not so much a living, breathing human being but a doll where you pull the string and the doll spews out a number of canned, recorded, unoriginal lines.  All Cruz managed to do was rile up the base and impress no one else.  With position after position, he advocates for extremist position only supported by the right-wing base of the Republican Party that have no chance of passing Congress of being supported by the American people as a whole.  With such a lack of substance, it is not surprising that he goes all out with demagoguery.  His focus and solution for ISIS is a semantic one about focusing on Islam and emphasizing the Islamic nature of ISIS, which would likely be counterproductive by giving ISIS more legitimacy by constantly emphasizing their Islamic aspects as opposed to other aspects, regardless of that fact that ISIS clearly draws inspiration from extremist interpretations of Islam, as many religious extremists from many religionstoday draw and in the past have drawn inspiration from extremist interpretations.

#11 Dr. Ben Carson

While not tripping over his words like Jeb Bush, Carson had almost nothing (and perhaps nothing) substantive to say.  He got his mention of the “Saul Alinsky” model which will mean nothing to anyone outside the Republican base during a general election.  He either just did not answer the questions he was asked or spoke in such vague generalities that no one could have a clue what he would specifically do as president.  Using Christianity and the Bible as the basis for his tax plan showed why this man is not one that anyone should take seriously (unless they are discussing neuroscience).  Just being smart—the man is a neurosurgeon—does not qualify someone for being president.  Being a neurosurgeon in this race (the man said Obamacare was the worst thing to happen to America since slavery) seems to be Dr. Carson’s version of staying at a Holiday Inn Express…

Style Rankings:

#1-#2-#3-#4 Tie: Trump, Rubio, Christie, Kasich

Trump was able to throw everything the moderators threw at him and threw it right back at them.  He remained unbowed and unapologetic and arguably didn’t come off the worse for any of his kerfuffles with candidates or moderators and rhetorically got the better of anyone who crossed him.  The hostile questioning played right into his narrative of being a victim of the media and the Establishment, and he dominated the debate overall, getting the most time and the most coverage/buzz.  It may have been a lot of political hot air, but it was hot air at its best, wildly entertaining and engrossing.

Rubio badly needed his good performance from tonight.  From his nervous, infamous State Of the Union response speech’s water bottle antics to his numerous appearances in Senate committee hearings in which he came off as a vapid lightweight who was out of his depth, there was considerable and very legitimate concern about whether this man could hold himself together under the spotlight, retain composure, and be a man of substance.  Well, for the first time on the national stage, he did just that.  He must have spent a lot of time working on his flaws, prepping, and practicing because the Marco Rubio I saw that night was a different man: poised, confident, funny, and ready for primetime, with some of the most memorable moments from the debate, particularly with his jabs at Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.  It was his finest public performance since becoming a U.S. senator and he since seems to have climbed to the top tier of candidates as a result, with strong boosts in multiple national and state polls.

Christie had a great night, though it may not help him much as he is disliked by the Republican base.  Still, he was very passionate and could weave effective and emotional storytelling into statistics and policy details with ease.  He came back from a very cheap shot about hugging Obama from Paul and got the better of him in that exchange on both (arguably) substance and style.  He was able to handle very tough questions and turn them into positive laundry lists of his accomplishments.  He came off as strong, intelligent, articulate, passionate, and able to handle anything anyone throws at him.

Kasich stayed direct, positive and hopeful throughout.  He declined to attack Trump when the moderator pitched him a big fastball down-the-middle for him to be able to do so.  His overall message was inclusive and not divisive, even included reaching out to minorities that are less successful, and even though he is against gay marriage, he showed that he would show and has shown respect and tolerance for homosexual Americans in a way few if any of the other candidates have.  In fact, his whole style advocates a conservatism that leaves a big place for love and caring for people and a big heart.  In a party that often seem heartless towards the poor, minorities, and illegal immigrants, this is a message that will resound on the national stage.  Unfortunately for him, it is unlikely to resound among the Republican base.  He played his home crowd (the debate was held in Ohio) to his advantage, and presented a good balance between wonkish statistical policy accomplishments and a tender, caring heart.  His overall strong performance seems to have helped him in New Hampshire and Michigan, but not anywhere else so far or nationally.  This is not to the credit of the Republican Party and their voters.

#5 (guest-from-the-kids-table) Fiorina

There is no question that Carly Fiorina was the standout performance of the kids-table-debate of the bottom seven (out of seventeen!) candidates.  On one level, this is a big deal: barring some awful implosion, she unquestionably will be part of the adult-dinner-party next debate.  She was very articulate and good at delivering her talking points and stood far above almost everyone else on that stage, save for Santorum (see the note at the end).  And she was able to weave her experience into her answers in a way that was (rhetorically) impressive, and even managed a few decent jokes.  But at the same time, we have to remember 1.) that she was standing out when surrounded by six bottom-feeders and 2.) that no one at either debate saw her as a threat or felt the need to attack her; it was a pretty smooth ride for her without adversity.  It very much remains to be seen if she can come off as poised and polished when she is under attack from rivals and surrounded by far more accomplished and theatrically-savvy candidates.  The evidence suggests she cannot; she was crushed in her U.S. Senate campaign against California Senator Barbara Boxer in 2010 and on numerous appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher during extended discussions, she has been unable to go past surface-level talking points or discuss anything with a degree of depth and detail that shows an accurate understanding of what she is talking about, even if she sounds better than most Republican candidates.  She is also quite vulnerable on her business record, having been fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.  Still, Fiorina may have gained as much as anybody from the debates, maybe even more than any other candidates.  Especially being the sole woman and, thus, a weapons against Democratic charges that Republicans are anti-women, do not expect the party or voters to cast her off the island anytime soon.

#6 Carson

Like Mr. Cruz below, Carson utterly lacked substance.  Yet he was a crowd favorite, delivering heartfelt religious sentiment and amusing applause lines.  He came off as sincere and was able to stay above the sniping occurring between other candidates.  He seemed very much the non-politician (a strong asset to the Republican base) and seemed very natural and at ease on stage as well as very genuine and authentic.  He gave a particularly eloquent message about a person’s brain—not his skin color-defining him or her (though this type of answer does risk downplaying the very real racial problems that exist in America).  Though he seemed unable or unwilling to answer multiple questions, he still let his charm, ease, and message come out clearly.  If we were grading only with style points that the Republican base cares about, Carson would be ranked even higher, and this is beyond doubt as he has surged in most post-debate polls, even as high as second-place in Iowa!  To non-Republicans, he is not someone to be taken seriously; yet it is likely that the Republican base’s love of him means he could have staying-power long into this race.  Frankly, I was ready to write him off as a candidate after his debate performance, but (full disclosure) I am a liberal Democrat and I clearly underestimated his popularity with the base and how his answers would play with that base.  And as an African-American, his simply being in the race is ammunition against Democrats’ charges of the Republican Party being racist and only a party for whites.

#7 Huckabee

Huckabee was humorous and charming in his usual way, smiling throughout and getting plenty of folksy and faith-related comments out there in ways that are sure to continue to endear him to the base.  He certainly did not hurt himself even if he did not stand out.  The crowd consistently warmed to him and he did end the debate with one of the best lines of the night, seeming to hit Trump powerfully and harshly but, actually, in the end, revealing his attack was on Clinton, not Trump.  Yet that was also his only real standout moment besides the abortion answer (see above), as his other answers were predictable and unmemorable if decent.  He didn’t do badly at all, but will have to do much better if he is to rise above the pack.  Still, as a popular Fox News TV personality and as the man who came in second in the Republican primaries of 2008 to John McCain, it will be interesting to see where he is in a few months if other candidates drop out.

#8 Cruz

If Cruz’s lines didn’t come off as so rehearsed, forced, and canned, I might have tied him with Carson or Huckabee.  Both he and Carson utterly lacked substance, but Cruz really came off as a demagogic manipulator.  His lines went over well with the audience, but will only serve to alienate him more with the general public.  Still, he, like Carson, has seen something of a bounce post-debate, though not as big or consistent as Carson’s.  Love him or hate him, he the Republican base loves him and Cruz knows how to retain at least some significant support among it.

#9 Paul

Paul had a very uneven night.  Yes, he got his applause and moments defending civil liberties and smaller government, as was expected, but he didn’t necessarily come off better with his attacks on Trump and Christie.  He had less speaking time than anyone else, but also had moments where he could have given longer answers used more time and declined to do so.  Direct and simple—like his approach to government—but also leaving him a bit on the sidelines.  He showed he could pick a fight, but chose the two brawler candidates best able to respond harshly back—Trump and Christie—to get into fights with and thus, in the end, it’s hard to say he had a good night.

#10-11 Tie: Bush-Walker

Though their performances differed, they ended about equalizing each other; where Walker may have been more articulate, his performance often fell flat and to muted applause with a few exceptions, which were mostly him making jokes about Hillary; where Bush maybe got a better response from the crowd, he stumbled over his words consistently (perhaps the bar is low because of his association with his brother?)  Neither did any serious damage to themselves or anyone else with their performances, but neither really gained anything either, and others’ gains (e.g., Carson, Fiorina, Rubio) already seem to be coming at their expense (their support has dropped in multiple post-debate polls) more than any other candidates. Both ran like they were the frontrunner, trying to not do badly/lose as opposed to trying to win.  Yet, since neither are the frontrunner, this didn’t make sense and it did not help.  Even if they didn’t do badly per se, not standing out has meant they have already begun losing support to other candidates.

Honorable Mention: (former) Senator Rick Santorum (PA)

Don’t completely give up on Rick Santorum.  He is very intelligent, articulate, passionate, genuine, competent, and has a level of charisma.  He came in second behind Romney in 2012 in the Republican primaries.  He has a fairly uniquely moderate economic message among Republicans even if he is socially extremely conservative.  If anyone makes it out of the kids-table-debate-level besides Fiorina, my money would be on him.

****

Thus, we see a war here with substance versus style in the two very different rankings one would have to give the winners of substance vs. style in these debates even if one disagrees with my specific rankings.  Kasich, Christie, and Rubio would be the best combination of both, though it would seem that only Rubio has a shot among those three candidates.  Part of me would love to be proven wrong.  Two things are for certain: 1.) already, this race is full of surprises and we are still about half a year away from the first contest in Iowa, and 2.) as we watch all this unfold, there will be more surprises yet to come.  Part of me is rooting for substance to win for the sake of the quality of America’s politics, and part of me for entertaining, substance-less style, since my personal preference is for a Democrat to win in 2016.  We’ll have to stay tuned to see what Trumps what and who Trumps who for the Republican nomination and for the presidency.

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

The rebel “Confederate” flag is much less of a problem than the values and system it represents. The romanticization of the South’s traitorous slaveowner-led rebellion is an insult to America and American values and 150 years after the defeat of the that rebellion, the blatant, offensive distortions of history cannot be tolerated by this nation anymore…

…or, almost everything you need to know about the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America” in one series of in-depth articles, this being Part II and looking at the actual system and values of the so-called “Confederate States of America” and the untold story of huge numbers of Southerners who opposed its values and actions, fought against it, and/or remained loyal to the United States.

Other articles in this series:

Black & White I: Confederate Flag Nothing to Celebrate: SC Debate

Black & White III: Why Southerners Voted to Secede, in Their Own Words

Part IV (coming soon)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 23, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 23rd, 2015

Continued from Part I

III.) The Untold History of the Civil War: the “South’s Inner Civil War,” and the Real Values of the Rebellion

The above characterizations by defenders of the rebel cause is an appallingly false understanding of pretty much everything involved, pure nonsense at its best.

The rebel states that formed an illegal (and never formally recognized by any sovereign national government) confederation had some very clear principles for which they and their confederation stood, the most overarching and dominant principle being the preservation and expansion of slavery and the principle of the states being able to determine their positions and practices, yes, in general, but with this ability very specifically, explicitly, and clearly tied primarily to the issue of slavery and to expand slavery freely and without any limitation into what were then the new Territories in the West, thus allowing slave states to continue their dominance of the Federal Government. This dominance is indisputable, for as James McPherson notes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, part six of the Oxford History of the United States:

During the first seventy-two years of the republic down to 1861 a slaveholding resident of one of the states that joined the Confederacy had been President of the United States for forty-nine of those years—more than two-thirds of the time. In Congress, twenty-three of the thirty-six speakers of the House and twenty-four of the presidents pro tern of the Senate had been southerners. The Supreme Court always had a southern majority; twenty of the thirty-five justices to 1861 had been appointed from slave states.

The New York Times

For the Americans who voted Lincoln into office, the 1860 election was about the corrosive dominance of America by the slaveowning elite of the Southern states and the problems of the institution of slavery. Slavery was very much an issue on the mind of the public. Even if American abolitionism was a relatively small movement in the years before the Civil War, it was still comprised of hundreds of thousands of people who were able to find a lot of support outside of their movement, garnering some two million signatures for antislavery petitions (and roughly three million up through 1863). In fact, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 famous antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—banned in most of the South—was the century’s bestselling novel not only in America (where 300,000 copies were sold in its first year alone), but also the world; the only book which sold more copies in the nineteenth-century was the Bible.  For most Northerners who weren’t abolitionists, there were still significant reasons to oppose slavery and is expansion. Because of the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths clause, allowing for three of every five slaves to count towards apportioning the number of Congressman seated in the U.S. House of Representatives for slave states, white Southern voters had far more power and representation per capita than white Northern voters. Lincoln made sure to emphasize this point, pointing out that while both Maine and South Carolina had equal numbers of presidential electors and Congressmen, Maine had well over twice the white people, and therefore citizen voters, as South Carolina had. As Lincoln said in a famous speech from 1854:

The South Carolinian has…the…advantage over the white man in every other free State, as well as in Maine. He is more than the double of any one of us in this crowd. The same advantage, but not to the same extent, is held by all the citizens of the slave States, over those of the free; and it is an absolute truth, without an exception, that there is no voter in any slave State, but who has more legal power in the government, than any voter in any free State.

This, in effect, diluted the vote of a free white Northerner relative to a free white Southerner. When the South was no longer guaranteed that dominance, the South was willing to destroy the Union, and the very concept of democratic republicanism, at the time when the rest of the world was hostile to this very experiment of American democracy. As The Economist notes, the Union victory in the Civil War was a victory for democracy and for all of humanity.

Thus, the people speaking as if “that flag” does not first and foremost embody slavery totally miss the mark and misunderstand and/or mischaracterize the issue people have with the rebel flag of the illegal slave-power confederation: the issue is not with the flag, and the issue is not so much with people who have “co-opted” or used the flag as members or racist or hate groups (though these issues are important factors). Rather—and what is amazing to me is that even in 2015 so many of the people speaking in support of the flag or of having an alternate banner of the rebellion and its forces displayed seem to either deliberately or unwittingly miss this—the issue that many people have with the flag is not the flag itself, per se, but mainly and primarily that is was associated with and was a major symbol of the rebellion both during and after the Civil War. That the particular flag that flew by the South Carolina House until last week was used by many hate groups and terrorists in the 150 years since the formal end of the Civil War is hardly insignificant, but the original sins of the rebellion and slavery, which are to be understood as the most patently grievous offenses, are the real issues at hand. Even if freed black slaves had perfect freedom and equality after 1865, and there had never been any Ku Klux Klan, “that flag,” representing the rebellion, the rebel army, the traitorous rebel leaders, and the values they professed and strove to promote and enforce is what all Americans should have a problem with, particularly when all this is promoted and sanctioned by the government flying any flag associated explicitly with and created for the slaveowner’s rebellion.

It is also incredibly ironic today that the people who—and the region of America that—are the most stridently anti-taxation and anti-government assistance for both the poor and especially African-Americans are whites living in the South, often the very same people whose descendants practiced or supported slavery, built up a would-be aristocracy of slave-owning planters who owned large amounts of land, benefited from very low property taxes and low taxation in general, to the degree the South generally did not even have much support for public education. This translated to an illiteracy rate among white adults that was forty times higher (20%) than that of New England (less than 0.5%) in 1850. Virginia, for example, even had a massive tax loophole for the tax on slaves, so that slaveowners paid far less in taxes than a fair assessment of their slaves would have required. The slaveowning planters’ overbearing power also meant that a small percentage of people owned an increasingly huge portion of the land, and they dominated the state governments of the South even though they were just a disproportionately tiny minority. In fact, slaveowners fell as a percentage of the proportion of the South’s population throughout the 1850s, yet slaveowners rose in terms of the percentage of them who were state legislators. In many ways, the South was an inherently undemocratic society. As one North Carolina newspaper editor wrote,

This great national strife originated with men and measures that were…opposed to a democratic form of government. The fact is, these bombastic, hi-falutin aristocratic fools have been in the habit of driving negroes and poor helpless white people until they think…that they themselves are superior; [and] hate, deride, and suspicion the poor.”

The confederation rebel government, both in its legislative body’s and in its “President” Jefferson Davis’ approaches, would only increase the undemocratic tendencies of the prewar South, grossly and repeatedly violating during the war in reality nearly every principle of liberty, legality, and constitutionality it was claiming in both practice and principle (all in contrast to the restraint and moderation of the Lincoln Administration). An extensive study from the Virginia Law Review catalogs many of these violations by Davis and the rebel confederation government, as well as the rebel politicians who spoke out against them. An exception to these violations, of course, was the fidelity of Davis and the rebel confederation government to slavery and slaveowners. 

This tiny minority of slaveowners propagandized and mobilized many of the vastly larger numbers of ignorant and uneducated poor white Southerners to fight a war whose chief aim was the perpetuation of the chattel-slavery system of bondage for Africans and their descendants even though these masses of poor whites were themselves not slave-owners. David Williams’ Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, details how thoroughly divided the South and its people were over secession and the war and how these divisions became major fault lines in Southern society all throughout the earthquake of the war; many of the details in this section come from his fine and important work that effectively dispels the myth that Southerners almost all united behind secession, slavery, the war, the rebellion, and governments of both the rebel states and their illegal confederation. In addition, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Foner’s  article/chapter titled “The South’s Inner Civil War” also provides much of the information on Southern disunity presented in this section. He notes that “scholars today consider the erosion of the will to fight as important a cause in Confederate defeat as the South’s inferiority in manpower and industrial resources[emphasis added].”

A look at some maps and voting data can help to paint a vivid portrait of the scale and scope of diverging views in the South. One very telling thing to do is to take two steps: 1.) look at the map (more detailed info here) below, produced by the U.S. Government in 1861 using census data from 1860, of the distribution of slaves as a percent of the population in each state in slave states (darker means more slaves):

And then 2.) look at the maps of 1860-1861 below, and note how in most of the areas where slavery did not have a strong presence as indicated in the previous map, voters in the election of 1860 (South Carolina did not even have a popular vote) did not vote for the very proslavery Southern Democratic candidate (red) in large numbers but instead either voted for the staunchly pro-Union Constitutional Union Party candidate (green) or were very divided in their voting, and many of the delegates to the secession conventions from those counties subsequently voted against secession. These areas would form much of the core resistance within the South against the rebellion and its pseudo-government, both in terms of political dissent and through armed resistance. Where Union military forces came into these regions, they often found themselves greeted as liberators by people waving United States, not rebel, flags, and found many people willing and eager to assist them. Thus, throughout the South, different regions had varying degrees of slavery, enthusiasm for secession, and loyalty to the Union, with some regions remaining deeply loyal to the Union and the United States; sentiment was far from uniform.

Without endorsing Marxism, a Marxist could have a field day analyzing Southern society in this period, and the original Marxist, Karl Marx himself, did just that as a newspaper correspondent based in the United States and covering the war for several newspapers. Marx not only saw the oppression of the black man in slavery, but saw that Southern society oppressed all who were not slave-owners in favor of this slave-owning elite. Many of the non-slaveowners at the time felt the same way, even before the Civil War. The Civil War only intensified these feelings and saw them spread. Conversely, those poor white non-slaveowners in the South who supported slavery, secession and rebellion were heavily influenced by their religious, political, and community leaders who usually propagated a culture and an ideology of intense pro-slavery white superiority in unison with the dominant slaveowning elites. In the words of just one prominent and popular pastor in New Orleans in 1861:

The particular trust assigned to a people becomes the pledge of the divine protection; and their fidelity to it determines the fate by which it is finally overtaken…If then the South is such a people, what, at this juncture, is their providential trust? I answer, that it is to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing…This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible…Not till the last man has fallen behind the last rampart, shall it drop from our hands.

This culture formed a reassuring bedrock of Southern society to which vulnerable poor whites could mentally cling (so long as slavery was preserved). Today in the South, most white people idealize a system and a rebellion that oppressed everyone who was not a slave-owner and forced non-slaveoweners—both white and black alike—to do the bidding of and/or serve the interests of slaveowenrs. When one dispels the myth of a unified South by understanding all of this, it is easy to see why many whites and blacks alike came to resist the slave system that propelled them into war in 1861, and continued to resist their being forced to be subservient parts of the society that advocated it.

Roughly one-third of the south was composed of black slaves, and of the white population, three-quarters owned no slaves, and most of these three-quarters “made it clear” they were against secession when secession was debated in 1860-1861. The delegates to the state conventions that voted for secession firmly represented the slaveowners, not the common masses of Southern whites.

The Southern rebel illegal confederation government and its rebel member states had a litany of major problems with their own white population. When the slave-owning class could not get enough volunteers to fight their extremely bloody and likely-to-lose war against the Federal Government of the United States and a strong plurality of the people of America who disliked the slavery system and had voted for Lincoln specifically to limit the spread of slavery into the Western Territories, they had their rebel confederation government resort to conscription, passing America’s first major military draft in 1862, one that exempted any slaveowner who owned at least twenty slaves (later reduced to just fifteen in 1864) and for some time allowed those with a lot of money to legally hire a substitute (to be fair, the U.S. Federal Government also allowed a fee to be paid or a substitute to be hired for its later draft when that was instituted in 1863, but that fee was relatively low and far more substitutes were hired than draftees inducted, with less than six percent of the Union military forces being drafted while far more people proportionately were drafted into the rebel military forces). The rebel states had much greater problems finding volunteers and had about double the percent of draftees in their army as the Federal Government’s Union Army.

Needless to say, the slave-owning exemption was one bitterly detested by the fighting men and the Southern people. Among the common people and enlisted soldiers of the rebel states and their confederation, the cry “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” became a common slogan for a widely-held sentiment throughout the war (an 1864 editorial from a North Carolina paper vividly illustrates such feelings). Obscenely, the same landed slave-owning planters who orchestrated secession and pushed their states to war spent most of their energy planting cotton and tobacco for export and neglected planting food even while soldiers and the common people went hungry, with rebel armies and homes underfed due to the selfishness of the slave-owning planter class. Many of these planters actually did better during the war as prices rose sharply. Furthermore, speculators horded much of the food that was available and shortages became “severe.” All over the South from 1862 onward, riots over the lack of food became  frequent. Additionally, tax policy in the rebel confederation exempted or was light on many in the slaveowning planter class and the tax burden fell disproportionately on poor white non-slaveowning farmers; in fact, in slave states, the burden of taxation had been heavily skewed regressively towards the poor and away from slaveowners throughout the decades before the war as well, especially compared to Northern states. The rebel confederation’s government also took an active approach to confiscating property from citizens for the war effort, but a libertarian (to borrow the modern term) approach to helping those most affected by the confiscations and the poor in general, who suffered greatly throughout the war as families’ breadwinners were conscripted or died in combat and the wives/mothers who stayed behind were subject to having their horses and food and farm equipment taken either by corrupt government officials tasked with confiscation or any number of roving bands of marauders/deserters. It is telling how little the slave-owning elite and “Confederate” government cared for the rights of their own masses by resorting to conscription (and so quickly) in pursuit of their reckless war and by doing little to look out for the welfare of their own people; their selfishness in a society that was already heavily stratified was rampant and spoke volumes about the society that they led.

As for Southern Unionists who remained loyal to the United States, about 300,000 Southern whites and 200,000 Southern slaves joined the U.S. Government’s Union military forces, about one-quarter of the U.S. forces’ overall military strength, and rebel forces were understrength due to many Southerners not wanting to serve or choosing to fight for the Union instead. Huge portions of the rebel confederation outright rebelled against the rebel confederation government and against their own state governments and/or remained loyal to the Union, with whole counties more or less attempting to secede from their own state (including, for example, Winston County, Alabama, which formally voted to secede from the rebel confederation in July 1861). Whole sections of rebel states, in particular most of the upcountry and mountain regions (and in particular Appalachia), would remain outside any effective control of the rebel confederation government or the rebel state governments, while other areas would remain violent for long periods on-and-off (or) throughout the war. Inside these eras, loyal Unionists and supporters of the rebellion often engaged violently with each other as civilians all during the war, as did rebel forces and Unionists; roaming partisan bands, murder, and atrocities were common as these areas devolved into anarchy and a war of neighbor against neighbor; very little is known of the total death toll in this Southern civil war within the Civil War because these places were often remote, with scant media or official reports, or with those doing the killing not leaving a record of their acts for posterity. 

The Unionists of the South suffered greatly during the war, subject to violence and reprisals from both their neighbors and what constituted their “government.” Whole communities were shattered, suffering both privation, devastation, and constant harassment. They were often driven from their homes and into the mountains, hunted down like wild animals, imprisoned and sometimes even executed/murdered, and enjoyed little protection from any authorities, unless they were fortunate enough to come under occupation by Northern military forces. Other simply left their homes to cross into Union-held territory, Unionist strongholds, or left their states altogether. If rebel authorities managed to successfully conscript those Unionists who stayed behind into the rebel army, Unionists were even forced to fight for a cause that went against everything in which they believed. In the subsequent “histories,” especially written after the postwar Reconstruction governments had been overthrown, their stories often remained untold and, if they were told at all, quite ironically, they were characterized as traitors by Southern historians for not supporting the rebellion.

Part of Virginia left that state, choosing to remain loyal to the Union, and became the State of West Virginia in 1863. The same thing came close to happening in East Tennessee, as well, which remained a stronghold for Unionists throughout the war. There is also the special case of North Carolina. During 1863, a massive peace movement in the state (a state that was home to many Unionists and had large levels of dissent against the illegal rebellion and its illegal government throughout the war) arose, with even a majority of the state’s representatives to the rebel confederation’s self-styled “House of Representatives” who won election that year running on some sort of peace platform and an end to the war. The rebel confederation’s leader, Jefferson Davis, permissive of liberty and freedom of speech when it was not against the rebel cause, saw to it that confederation and state authorities enacted repressive measures, including the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (This was hardly the only state to suffer from the rebel confederation government’s, and Davis’s, hypocritically imperious approach to “state’ rights;” as examples, Georgia’s state governor during the rebellion and even the rebel confederation’s “Vice President” denounced Davis and confederation policy throughout the war as a violation of liberty and both state and individual rights). Still, the movement gained enough momentum that it seemed for a while in 1864 that the state might elect a candidate for governor, William Holden, who was calling for ending the war and making a peace with the Union before the movement was defeated, and without a large degree of voter suppression, intimidation, and propaganda on the part of Holden’s incumbent opponent, Zebulon Vance, who readily abused his power to hold onto his position. When soldiers who had supported Holden deserted en masse and began waging an insurgency in North Carolina, the governor illegally arrested and held the families of the soldiers as hostages in prison camps to get them to stop their resistance.

Desertion and lack of enthusiasm for the Southern enlisted soldier became yet another problem after the war’s first major battle at Manassas and remained a problem throughout the war. Desertion became only dramatically worse for the rebellion in 1863 and 1864, at which point roughly two-thirds of rebel soldiers were absent from duty. The problem of desertion was a much larger issue for the rebels than for the Union forces because of the South’s much lower levels of manpower. But the problems with rebel deserters did not end with manpower; all over the south, many of these deserters would become bandits, armed gangs, and even anti-rebel-confederation guerillas and partisans, weakening the rebel home front and contributing further to the “inner civil war” in the South that put the rebels in a two-front war against Federal Union forces and many of the South’s own people who remained Unionists. Into this mix, deserters often sided with Unionists or at least organized resistance against rebel forces and authorities that were sent after them.

There were even important practices and ideological similarities with the state-sanctioned racism of the South and with those of Nazi Germany nearly a century later, even though there were also major differences, the main one being that the Nazis attempted to exterminate Jews by committing genocide, while Southern slave owners did not try to exterminate blacks, merely to treat them as property, pets, animals, and beasts of burden. Still, many of the same institutional discriminatory practices and ideological affirmations of pseudo-superiority and pseudo-inferiority, of imaged superiority for whites/Aryans and imagined inferiority or Africans/Jews, can be found in both societies. This state-sanctioned racism led to some horrible atrocities committed against black Union troops, usually former and/or (recently) emancipated/runaway slaves. Jefferson Davis made it official rebel government policy to execute or re-enslave black Union soldiers captured by rebel forces (even if they had never been slaves, though this one aspect was later slightly modified) and to execute their white officers. Though this policy was inconsistently carried out, atrocities were common and this led to some infamous incidents like the massacre at Fort Pillow, where many black (and some—in proportionately lower numbers—white Southern Unionist and rebel deserter) Union soldiers were executed when they tried to surrender, and the massacre during the part of the Siege of Petersburg known as the Battle of the Crater, where likely over 200 black Union soldiers were executed after hostilities had ceased And there were certainly many otherless famous incidents of massacres, atrocities, and executions against black Union troops.

If there is any doubt about the absolute primacy of slavery for the rebel confederation government and its leaders, in Part III we will look at the words of the secessionists themselves, in each state that had a convention that voted to secede and at the time of secession.

Continued in Part III

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