To: All Democratic candidates

Dear Democrats, Here’s How to Guarantee Trump’s Reelection

You’ve got a historically unpopular opponent in the White House, but there are nearly a dozen ways you could still blow this.

by Charles Sykes, Politico Magazine, June 25, 2019

As you prepare for your first debates later this week, some unsolicited thoughts on what you could do to blow this election. With 20 of you clamoring for attention over two nights, the opportunities are abundant for you to kick off the primary season with an easy win for the president.

This might seem impossible. Donald Trump remains historically unpopular because the past three years have cemented the public’s image of the president as a deeply dishonest, erratic, narcissistic, Twitter-addicted bully. As a result, a stunning 57 percent of voters say they will definitely not vote to reelect him next year and he trails Democratic challengers in key states. Trump himself seems to have given up on swing voters, instead focusing on ginning up turnout among his hard-core base. But, as columnist Henry Olsen points out, this is unlikely to be successful because millions of “reluctant Trump voters” from 2016 have already shown a willingness to bail on him by voting for Democrats in last November’s midterms.

Even so, Trump could still win reelection, because he has one essential dynamic working in his favor: You.

Trump’s numbers are unmovable, but yours are not. He doesn’t need to win this thing; he needs for you to lose it. There are millions of swing voters who regard Trump as an abomination but might vote for him again if they think you are scarier, more extreme, dangerous, or just annoyingly out of touch.

And, you have some experience at this, don’t you?

Despite the favorable poll numbers and the triumphalism in your blue bubble, you’ve already made a solid start at guaranteeing another four years of Trumpism. Last week’s pile-on of Joe Biden was a good example of how you might eat your own over the next 16 months.

On Tuesday, Trump refused to apologize for calling for the death penalty for the Central Park 5, a group of black and Latino men who were later exonerated of charges that they had beaten and raped a woman in the 1980s. But rather than focusing on the latest Trumpian racial outrage, many of you spent the next few days hammering your front-runner for saying that civility required working with people like the late segregationist senators John Eastland and Herman Talmadge.

This week’s debates give you two more chances to form circular firing squads, turn winning issues into losers, and alienate swing voters.

Here are 11 pointers on how to guarantee that the most unpopular president in modern polling history wins reelection next year.

1. Hold firmly to the idea that Twitter is the beating heart of the real Democratic Party. 

Woke Twitter is convinced that anger over Trump means that voters want to move hard left. You should ignore polls showing that most Democrats, not to mention swing voters, are much more likely to be centrist.

2. Embrace the weird.

George Will carries around a small card listing all the things that you have said “that cause the American public to say: ‘These people are weird, they are not talking about things that I care about.’” A short list:

Terrorists in prison should be allowed to vote. End private health insurance. Pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, ‘Green New Deal,’ … reparations for slavery.

“The country hears these individually,” says Will, “and they say I’m not for that.”

He’s going to need a bigger card.

3. Keep promising lots of free stuff and don’t sweat paying for it.

Trump and his fellow Republicans have run up massive deficits, but you can make them look like fiscal hawks by outbidding one another. People like free stuff, but they are less keen on having to pay for free stuff for other people, so talk as much as possible about having taxpayers pick up the tab for free college, day care and health care.

By one estimate, Elizabeth Warren’s various plans would cost about $3.6 trillion a year—or $36.5 trillion over 10 years. She insists she can pay for much of this with a vast new wealth tax that is politically impossible and constitutionally dubious, but, hey, at least she’s not Bernie.

4. Go ahead and abolish private health insurance. 

Health care should be a huge winner for Democrats in 2020, as it was in 2018. But you can turn that around by embracing a Bernie Sanders-like ‘Medicare for All’ plan.

Sure, the idea polls well and is wildly popular in MSNBC green rooms. But, unfortunately, when voters find out that it would double payroll taxes, cost trillions of dollars and lead to the abolition of private health insurance, support plummets—even among Democratic primary voters. In fact, when Democratic primary voters are told that Medicare for All would cost $3.2 trillion a year, support drops to just 38 percent. And that is among Democrats.

The numbers are even worse with the wider electorate. The Kaiser Tracking Poll found that Medicare for All’s net favorability drops to minus 44 percent “when people hear the argument that this would lead to delays in some people getting some medical tests and treatments.” Voters also turn sharply against the idea when they are told that it would threaten the current Medicare program, require big tax increases and eliminate private health insurance. Count on the GOP to spend hundreds of millions of dollars making those arguments.

5. Spend time talking about reparations. 

There may be no magic bullet to guarantee Trump’s reelection, but support for reparations for slavery may be awfully close. Even before Charlottesville, Trump’s record on race was horrific, and his winking appeasement of the white nationalist alt-right has been a running theme of Trumpism. But Democrats can neutralize Trump’s most glaring weaknesses by redoubling their support for reparations.

You have already made the hyperdivisive issue a big theme of the campaign and the Democratic House seems poised to pass legislationcalling for a study of the issue. Support for considering reparations has also quickly gained support in the 2020 Democratic primary, with contenders like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris expressing their interest in Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee’s plan. It’s a stark shift from previous presidential campaigns in which Barack Obama opposed reparations.

The problems here are obvious. No one really knows how reparations would work. The historic wrongs committed against African Americans are undoubtedly unique, but as the debate heats up, the questions will be: Who pays? Who is owed? How do we pick the winners and losers? And then there are other inevitable questions: Who else? The Irish? Jews? Native Americans? Asian Americans? Gays and lesbians?

What is clear, however, is that reparations are opposed by somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of white voters, so your support is a huge gift to Trump’s reelection campaign, which would like nothing more than to drive a deeper wedge between black and white Americans.

6. Trump thinks that immigration and the crisis at the border are winning issues for him. They aren’t. But you can turn that around.

Trump is actually underwater on the immigration issue. In a recent Fox News poll, 50 percent of Americans said Trump has gone too far, more than double the number of voters who think he hasn’t been aggressive enough. Family separations continue to shock the conscience of the nation and his threats to round up millions of illegals could backfire badly on him. Moreover, huge majorities favor giving legal status to the so-called Dreamers.

But you can flip the script: instead of talking about Dreamers, talk as much as possible about your support for sanctuary cities, double down on proposals to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and be as vague as possible about whether or not you really do support open borders.

7. Lots more focus on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

By no means allow voters to hear more about centrists who actually swung the House like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey or Dean Phillips in Minnesota. Trump wants nothing more than to make AOC the face of the Democratic Party. You can make it happen.

8. Socialism. 

Trump will accuse Democrats of being socialists who want to turn the United States into Venezuela. This is a tired, implausible trope. But you can make it work for him by actually calling yourself socialists and loudly booingyour fellow Democrats who suggest that “socialism is not the answer.”

9. Turn the abortion issue from a winner into a loser.

Polls suggest that there is wide opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade and Republicans have drastically overreached in states like Alabama where they have outlawed abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

But here again, Democrats can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by moving to a hard-line maximalist position. While the public leans pro-choice, its views are quite nuanced. So, instead of talking about abortion as “safe, legal, and rare,” you should demand the legalization of late-term abortions, focus on taxpayer funding and express as much contempt as possible for people with different views.

A model for this is Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who compares being anti-abortion to being racist. When she was asked whether her pro-choice litmus test for judges threatened their independence, she said:

“I think there’s some issues that have such moral clarity that we have as a society decided that the other side is not acceptable. Imagine saying that it’s OK to appoint a judge who’s racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic. Telling or asking someone to appoint someone who takes away basic human rights of any group of people in America, I don’t think that those are political issues anymore.”

You might recall how Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment played in 2016; this time around, Democrats can convey their contempt for much larger groups of people, which will be immensely helpful to Trump’s efforts to convince his base and swing voters that Democrats look down on them.

10. You can also turn a winner into a loser on the issue of guns.

There is a growing bipartisan constituency for reasonable restrictions on guns, including overwhelming support for expanded background checks. Trump’s GOP is especially vulnerable here because it remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Rifle Association, which is stumbling under the weight of its own extremism and grift these days.

But you can easily turn this into a firewall for Trump by joining Senator Cory Booker’s call for vast expansions of the licensing of guns and banning certain kinds of weapons. Under Booker’s plan, “a person seeking to buy a gun would need to apply for a license in much the same way one applies for a passport.”

Let’s see how that plays in Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan.

11. As you try to get Americans more alarmed about Trump’s attacks on democratic norms, make sure you talk as much as possible about your support for court-packing.

Tinkering with the makeup and independence of the Supreme Court hasn’t been a winning issue since 1937, but, waving the bloody shirt of Merrick Garland as often as possible still feels satisfying, doesn’t it?

Given Trump’s deep unpopularity, losing to him won’t be easy. But don’t despair; remember, you managed to pull it off in 2016.

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That interests me of course, what happens. Actually what is happening, for I’m already  84. I have called my blog, Dans Mes Quatrevingtans, that is, in my eighties.  In just six years will I call it, if alive, in my nineties? How about In my hundreds. I just read that the “oldest person”  in the world, Emma Morano, an Italian in her 110s, has just died at age 117.

I do want to write about these years at the end of life, perhaps more so than I wanted to write about any earlier period. If you asked me why is that I couldn’t say. For there’s nothing exciting about my life now, although in our favor my wife and I don’t live in a retirement community where things can be dull, but rather in an active, busy residential area, in South Tampa, where there’s  always a lot going on, new home construction, lots of it, and neighbors who could be us 40 or 50 years ago, mostly all young with young children (and a lot of dogs, and that’s where we see them mostly, walking their dogs).

And then right across the street from our front door is a city park, Friendship Center, our “Luco” (as we call it, from the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris), where there are always park visitors, mostly parents and their small children, talking, playing, on the swings and slides, and often celebrating using the park facilities for their get togethers with friends and their birthday parties with family members. The result is that we see a lot of the young people living in booming South Tampa but little or nothing of people our own age whom we might ask about what they’re doing in their eighties. But to hear from them to listen to their voices we would have to go South to Naples or Fort Myers.

So given our separation now in our old age from our peers, not to mention from the few friends remaining, also in their old age, but somewhere else usually far from Florida if they are still alive, our own eighties are to a large extent, unplanned and unwished for solitary experiences. Although no surprise that the young couples we meet don’t want to hear about how well we’re sleeping or whether we’re back to walking again and even riding our bikes, following a bad fall and a broken femur, the latter while walking too fast and not looking, that which we shouldn’t have been doing at all at our age.

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Then just earlier today while looking over my notes and collections of my thousands of readings from earlier years, which I’ve never wanted to let go, I stumbled on this article by Lewis H. Lapham from the New York Times Magazine of October 23, 2014, “After 80, some people don’t retire. They reign.”

Lapham was himself 79 when he wrote these brief portraits of men and women in their 80s and 90s, old masters he calls them, all rich in the rewards of substantial and celebrated careers. “Why do they persist,” Lapham asked, ” the old masters, with an unceasing effort to discover or create something new? Why not rest on the laurels and the oars?”

People like Sophocles who in his early 90s wrote “Oedipus at Colonus”  filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, 84,  I. F. Stone who began the study of ancient Greek in his 70s, T. Boone Pickens, 86, chairman of BP Capital Management, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 81, Edward O. Wilson, naturalist and author, 85, Ginette Bedard, long-distance runner at 81, Tony Bennett, singer, 88, Christopher Plummer, actor, 84, Carl Reiner, actor, 92, Senator Dianne Feinstein, 81, and a number of others.

And then there’s Lapham himself who writes at 79 about his own writing career:

When I was 6, I delighted in the act of writing, at 12, in the expecting that by the time I turned 21, I would know how to make of it an art. The birthday came and went, and no dog showed up with the bird in its mouth. Before I was 30, I’d written seven drafts of a first novel mercifully unpublished; I consoled myself with the thought that by the time I was 40, I would know what I was doing. Another dream that didn’t come true, and so when I was 45, I began to explore the uses of the essay, the term from the French essayer (to try, to embark upon, to attempt), the form experimental and provisional, amenable to multiple shifts of perspective and tone, and therefore the best of instruments on which to practice the playing with words. The essay proceeds from the question “What do I know?” and doesn’t stay for an answer until the author finds out what he means to say by setting it up in a sentence, maybe catching it in the net of a metaphor.

On the way through my 50s I could see signs of progress, producing manuscripts that required only extensive rewriting, not the abandonment of the whole sorry mess of a dumb idea. Revisions pursued through six or seven drafts allowed for the chance to find the right word, to control the balance of a subordinate clause, to replace the adjective with a noun. I didn’t enlist the help of a computer because words so quickly dressed up in the costume of print can pretend to a meaning and weight they neither enjoy nor deserve. Writing with a pen on paper, I can feel the shape and sound of the words, and I’m better able to judge how and why one goes with another, and on approaching the age of 70 I toyed with the hope that success was maybe somewhere not far away in a manger or on the near side of a rainbow.

Now I am 79. I’ve written many hundreds of essays, 10 times that number of misbegotten drafts both early and late, and I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

The men and women Lapham writes about are all my age. But they’ve all been creators, have done something special, extraordinary with their lives. I haven’t. They make me aware of all I haven’t done in the same number of years. Also as Lapham points out, now in their 80s and 90s they haven’t stopped, painting, acting, singing, writing, running….

Now in my 80s this is where in my own small manner I join up with them. And while I have few successes to my name, if any, comparable artistic, intellectual, athletic or other life achievements, I do share very much with them a life when I’m writing during most of time left to me, and trying to write better, to better express my thoughts, and yes, as the philosopher says, trying to better know myself, and as everyone says, trying to go on  with my own lifelong education.

Lately I’ve been reading Ayn Rand, probably because of the followers she has even today among the Republican majorities, first in the Tea Party and now in the House of Representatives, led by a life-long Rand follower, Paul Ryan. I’m not a fervent follower of Ayn Rand myself. For me her views were not complete. Or rather the coin of human nature has two sides and she wrote only about the one of them, individualism but not about collectivism on the other side. They need each other, are both essential for our happiness, and she never seemed to understand that.

But now, in my 80s, I very much agree with many of her ideas, in particular with what she has Kira Argounova say to Comrade Taganov (really Ayn Rand herself) in what I think is Rand’s best book, We The Living.  (In the following text I have considerably edited/altered Rand’s text but I have not altered, I trust, its meaning. To read the original text go to Part1, Chapter Five of We The Living.) or see below Continue Reading.

Kira:  “Haven’t you ever wanted, Comrade, a thing for no reason save one: that you wanted it?…And then when you’ve found it, and when you think you’re right, you do that thing at any cost?

“You have your ideals, Comrade Taganov, and your Party, no matter how much it promises to accomplish, no matter what paradise it plans to bring to mankind… there’s always one false claim that you and your Party make, one that will turn your paradise into the most unspeakable hell. This is your claim that man must live for the state.

“And you ask, than this, what better purpose can man live for?  Don’t you know?”  Here Kira’s voice trembled suddenly in a passionate plea she could not hide. “Don’t you know that there are things in the very best of us, that must not be touched by any collective, by any number of millions? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say of them: ‘These are mine alone.’ Comrade Taganov,” she whispered, “how much you still have to learn!”

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The individuals that Lewis Lapham is writing about in their 80s and 90s show us clearly there are things within each one of them that only they can know and touch. They have been living their long lives to pursue what’s deep within them, for that which is theirs by nature, theirs alone. What they have done has not been done for something that is outside of them. And to some degree aren’t their lives telling us that the very best of us live only for ourselves?

In regard to my own life I would say that to the extent that I have lived for others, for family, my students, for organizations where I have worked, I have necessarily neglected myself. This is probably how most of us live, and probably most of us see it as the way to live, no longer for the State perhaps, but for others. Balancing the individual and the collectivity, —the two sides of the coin. Not like the men and woman Lapham writes about, where there was probably little or no balance. To speak in the language of Ayn Rand we are probably not selfish enough. They were.

Continue reading What happens after we turn 80? →

Now in my 85th. year I ask myself what do I know?

In this sense, do I know anything at all that I could in one-to-one, apprentice type situations pass on to someone else? How to play the violin, for example, how to describe the night sky, how to repair an automobile engine, and, particularly relevant to my own life as being a few of my own personal failures, the Russian language, differential equations, and any number of other like fascinating subject matters, including my reading of just this morning, “Is there a gene for Racism?” (No)

Haven’t the greatest among us acquired the requisite skills and knowledge of which I speak? And haven’t they through their works passed on to us at least to some extent their skills and understandings? Reading them and getting to know and to the extent possible understand their work has been the real story of my life.

Just in modern times I think of Shakespeare, Galileo and Newton in the 17th. century, of James Watt, Leonhard Euler, and Adam Smith of the 18th., of Edison, Pasteur, and Darwin in the 19th, and in our own time of of Einstein, Mandela, and Richard Feynman (whose Physics Lectures I’ve been struggling with all my life).

I have somehow lived a life, my life, and as I say above, have learned little or nothing myself, of substance, of real significance, let alone anything at all that I could, with the confidence that I would be heard and understood, pass on to someone else.

And the great irony of this is that, if I have accomplished anything in my 84 years, it’s that I’ve helped to found a school, school being, of course, where skills and knowledge are passed on to others. I have to admit that on my part the skills and knowledge were not there. Not there to start with, although I must have pretended that they were, and  certainly not there now in my 85th year when I’m literally grasping at the straws of knowledge that are still out there, and to me still unknown, and that I still might make, with yet more struggle and hard work, my own.

Furthermore what then might I say now about my own role in an independent middle and high school that I founded and where my wife and I both worked many years? My role couldn’t have been my own ability and readiness to pass on to the young my own skills and knowledge which were minimal or non existent. What then could it have been?

To that question I think I may now know the answer. I seem to have, for most of my adult life, that which began in France the summer of 1951, while accomplishing little or nothing myself, I seem at least to have recognized what many others have accomplished, if only just a few of all those skills and knowledge that man has acquired during the tens of thousands of  years of the common history of us, of humanity, of homo sapiens.

The acquisition of course, is still going on, and it may very well be accelerating. So what was my role in the school I founded with my wife? It does seem to me to be that I have almost always understood what at best school, any school ought to be most about, this being to help the young to come to something like “my own view”  and recognition of what is the true achievement, the true greatness of man. That which is not there to begin with. Is it there, we would ask and hope, at the end of schooling?

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What are the real issues facing our country?

They’re not, I believe, the subject matter of the President’s tweets. They’re not the porous Mexican border to the South. For bad people and drugs are never stopped by border walls. Nor are they the whereabouts of the Islamic terrorists. For how many Americans have ever encountered a member of ISIS, let alone been blown up by one?

These and other non issues that the President would address, first at the loud and raucous rallies during the campaign and now daily in his tweets are red herrings that function to keep his followers if not the whole country away from any real path to any real solution to any real problem.

Does the President even realize just how far from the real needs of the country are his own pieces of fake news, the wall, ISIS, the millions of illegal immigrants? Probably not. In any case his concerns probably stem from no research of his own, which he apparently never does, but come from the same small clique of advisors who got him elected in the first place, from the two Stevens, Bannon and Miller, from the  two former United States Senators, Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions, along with their choral director, Kellyanne Conway, and  principal soloist Sean Spicer..

This is not a President who reads. I take the following excerpts from Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article, Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz , Tells All, of July 25 of last year.  “The Art of the Deal,” says Meyer, made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that myth and [now] regrets it.
Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance…. That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites….I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”   During the eighteen months that Schwartz observed Trump,  he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

During 18 months he never saw Trump with a book! Is it safe to assume that this guy does little if any independent reading of his own and in his ignorance may even believe that the porous wall on our Southern border and ISIS together are the biggest threats we face. And he may even believe what he’s always repeating that his first job to assure the nation’s security (by the extreme vetting of refugees??!!).

What terrible things haven’t been done, even in our land of the free and the brave, in the name of national security? Right now, daily, we read how our agents, not my agents, Trump’s and Miller’s and Bannon’s agents? are separating long term illegal residents, who are not criminals, from their own children because they are a threat to our national security?

Trump may be a bit closer to a real problem when he talks about job losses, but he’s completely wrong about their causes and solutions. In fact jobs never stay in one place for long, other than those, say, of being a mother or father. Maybe it was at one time that one could spend a lifetime at the same job, but not any more.

Jobs are always changing and the changes, what some call job losses, result because  we are always finding more profitable ways to do things. Would Trump really want us to go back to burning coal, thereby giving some permanency to miners working under ground in the West Virginia and Kentucky hill country, that life itself being for the miners a kind of living death? Also, would Trump really want to return living people to the factory assembly lines in order to replace the non living robots that had earlier replaced them?

When Trump talks about bringing things back to the way they were, or, as he sees it, making things great again, does he even know what he means by that? When were things ever great, and what would they look like if they were ever great? Does anyone know?

Hasn’t happened. Nor could we know if it did happen. The bottom line is that things are probably greater now than they ever were. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Estate and castle must know this. If nothing else there’s more food on the table, his table for sure and the tables of most of us, enough to feed more people than there ever were.

And furthermore how about the fact that the present unemployment rate of 4.7% is the lowest since the last years of the presidency of George W Bush, and this in spite of the fact that there was nothing done during the eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama to either close our Southern border with Mexico or to prevent our manufacturing plants and jobs from being transferred overseas? Here again Trump seems to completely ignore the facts.

So what’s left to our President in the way of real issues and problems? Is there anything there of substance? Perhaps in regard to health care (or education) But about both of these he has little  of substance to say, other than that Obama Care has been a disaster (as has public school education, as has NAFTA, as has the Iran Nuclear Deal, as has….) He has few ideas of his own about what to do to correct the disasters, be it Obama Care, NAFTA or the Iran Nuclear Deal, or even, as in one of his tweets, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term at Celebrity Apprentice.

China, Russia, Iran, do they represent big trouble needing big attention? In regard to all three no one knows what’s on Trump’s mind, if anything much, other than perhaps lately and little by little coming around to the thinking of his predecessor in the Oval Office, Barack Obama.

There have been other things, problems, trivia? that have got his attention. There was the project to send Hillary to prison but Trump abandoned that effort soon after being elected. (And for this he may have lost a good many of the thousands, if not millions of followers who at his rallies would shout following his lead, “lock her up.”)

Then there are nearly daily in his tweets, what he describes as the “fake news stories,” mostly those made up by the Trump haters, to put him down, and eventually perhaps to bring him down, the Times and the Post being most often the creators of these fake stories, attacking him and his family, as the other day when the Times and the Post handled the fake story of Nordstrom’s dropping Ivanka’s “stuff” from their shelves and displays.

Trump’s multiple daily tweets make it clear what’s important to him. If you read them you will quickly see that the most important thing for Trump is winning, is being always right, is being recognized as being always right. And for him to always be right others have to be wrong. His now hundreds, thousands of tweets are either putting someone (John Lewis, Judge Robart) or something (the NYTimes) down, or putting himself and his family, his followers, the Trump name and the Trump businesses up. There’s nothing in between.

I will need to post something just on Trump’s tweets. For tweets are his most favored manner to communicate with us, with the people. If we would know what he thinks we have to read his tweets. Here’s the link. Otherwise he doesn’t write himself. And as we’ve seen he doesn’t read. And when he speaks it’s most unoriginal, in clichés.

Let me conclude this post with a real issue that confronts us, that confronts our country. I take the chart below from an op ed writer at the Times, Thomas Edsall, who is in just about every respect the opposite of Donald Trump. He reads a lot. He thinks about what he reads, and he learns from his reading as he should, and what he learns he shares with us. His columns usually appear a few times, if not once a week, a month and most often he writes about American politics, inequality, campaign strategy and demographics.

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His latest column, Integration Works. Can It Survive the Trump Era?, contains the chart that I post below:

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This chart. by itself shows all too clearly why the country is struggling, and its not the Wall nor ISIS that should disturb us. It’s the fact that in this chart the math SAT scores are segregating our highschool seniors by race as much or more than did Jim Crow in the first half of the 20th. century.

In many respects we overcame the unequal world of Jim Crow. We haven’t yet begun to face up to the, in some respects, even more unequal world of the math SATS. (Edsall didn’t give us the results of the literature SATS, but they too were probably segregated by race.) Knowledgeable people have been aware of this situation, in my own experience, forever. Knowledgeable people have never ceased, almost from the first day some 200 years ago, to reform our schools, to make them places where everyone could be successful, but the reformers have never succeeded.

In the language of Trump our country has never been great in respect to utilizing the talents of all our citizens. Somewhere around half of our people have always been left out, have not had the fulfilling lives that a more thoughtful, more sensible, and more sensitive organization of both school (rather than school, places of learning) and society could have provided.

Edsall’s chart shows just how greatly not so much that we have failed, but that we have allowed what are at the moment anyway “natural” differences to get all the attention. And we have neglected, have done little or nothing to foster and develop the more natural ways that young people are all alike if not the same.

We need a world where SATS are not as now the determining factor in a young person’s future. And this, of course, would require much more than a reorganization, one more reform of our schools. We really need to walk away from it all and begin again. (Something that maybe a Trump like person could have done if he himself hadn’t had so many character defects.)

Imagine a learning place or situation when kids, all kids could be a part of whatever was going on, instead of as now when so many, through no fault of their own, are being left out of much of what is going on.

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