Rogue Columnist

'The white working class'

After the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton, progressive mandarins are calling for a complete rebuilding of the Democratic Party. Here, for example, is Robert Reich's eight-step program. Unlike the Republicans after defeat, who double down on their ideological convictions and nihilistic congressional maneuvers, it may well happen. And it may be for the good. I don't know.

One thing I doubt is that the Democrats can win back the vaunted white working class. Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who is challenging Nancy Pelosi for House Minority Leader, said, “We need to speak to their economic interests, that we get it, that we understand, that we talk about those things and we try to fight hard for those things.”

Well, how? President Obama saved General Motors, including the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly. Yet that county supported Trump over Clinton by six points. Obamacare provided more health insurance for whites than for blacks and Hispanics combined. Yet exit polls show whites voted 58 percent for Trump vs. 37 percent for Clinton, who had detailed policy proposals to help working Americans. As you can see from the map above, the Rust Belt states that went for Trump have plenty of counties that were doing well. The same thing with the hard-red South. (Although, as I wrote in the Seattle Times, blue states are the economic superstars for reasons that most red states shun).

Perspective is important. Hillary Clinton has won a larger majority of the popular vote than any candidate in modern history who did not also win the Electoral College. We vote by states, but even here it was a near-run thing. Trump won Michigan's 16 electoral votes by two-tenths of a percentage point (how'd that protest vote work out for you?). In the end, she couldn't get the low-single-digit additional points in key states that Obama had previously won.

Air conditioning and Phoenix

The first air-conditioned building in Phoenix was the Hotel Westward Ho, in 1929.

The common narrative is that Phoenix's spectacular growth was made possible by air conditioning. But that's only partly true.

Some of the hottest places in America held big cities in 1930, when air-conditioning units were large and expensive, confined to the largest buildings with money to spend. Among them were New Orleans (458,762), Dallas (269,475) Houston (292,352), and Atlanta (270,366). These cities suffered not only very hot, but also humid, summers. Phoenix, by contrast, had a population of only a little more than 48,000 that year. Even El Paso, the city that Phoenix leaders aspired to surpass as the business capital of the Southwest, held 102,421 people.

Before the beginning of the great post-war migration to the yet-to-be-named Sunbelt, the Intermountain West was lightly populated and a magical place unknown to most Americans outside of movies. The entire state of Arizona had a population of fewer than 436,000. The Intermountain West population was about 3.7 million out of a total U.S. population of 123 million. In other words, those seven states had fewer people than today's metropolitan Phoenix.

The great impediment to Phoenix's growth was not as much heat — note the cities above — as isolation. Cut off from the east and north by nearly impenetrable mountains, and from the west by forbidding desert, Phoenix was far from natural routes of commerce or travel. This began to change as branch lines of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads reached the emerging agricultural empire of the Salt River Valley in the late 19th century (the railroads' main lines had been built through northern and southern Arizona). This changed dramatically with the completion of SP northern main line through the city in 1926. Along with new highways, this forever broke through Phoenix's seclusion.

Live through this

If you want to argue about who or what is to blame for this catastrophe, I direct you to The Best of the Front Page, where the articles are as definitive as we can be at this point. I suspect mauch, much more will emerge in the coming months and years about Russian intelligence, Wikileaks, media malpractice, and the shenanigans of the FBI.

To the white working class voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan who went for Trump: Fuck you. I refrain from profanity on this site, which has been overused to the point of being trivial, but how else to put it? Your situation is going to be so much worse as a result of what you did. I just wish you weren't taking the rest of us — those who made the majority of the popular vote that went to Hillary Clinton — and the planet down, too. My hope in this election was to avoid national suicide, not make any grand progressive gains which are impossible in this Cold Civil War. Even that modest aim proved impossible. I didn't sign up for this murder-suicide, but here I am.

If I were 30 and in better condition, I'd move to Scandinavia in a heartbeat. If I had been more careful in picking my parents, I'd drop out, go off the grid, keep subscribing to newspapers but not read them, read the great books and history, listen to classical music, opera, and jazz, be thankful for every day. I'd go back to school, learn a foreign language, become an amateur botanist, build a model railroad, re-read everything Shakespeare wrote, vote for what it's worth. I'd write my memoir, even if nobody would publish it.

Unfortunately, I have to work as long as I can, and do so in a calling that requires me to deeply immersed in the news. First as tragedy and then as farce? No, Karl. We're going to get both at the same time, good and hard.

Night falls on the republic

President-elect Trump. Roll that around in your mouth for awhile, see how it tastes.

This is what we get after the most portentous election in American history. The office of what was once quaintly called chief magistrate will be occupied by a temperamental narcissist hustler with no knowledge of statecraft, history, the world, or the Constitution. The republic is over, baby. You just need to decide how you'll live with it.

The pundits and pollsters were surprised. I was not.

For months, I've had a nagging worry. The cultural left grabbed the public square. Gay marriage, now accepted by most Americans, was not enough. We had Black Lives Matter shouting down opposing views and even taking the microphone from Bernie Sanders, whether a police shooting was uncalled for or righteous. The LGBTQI activists pushed into mainstream media to the point of a New York Times story on gender identity change in the first grade. The left weaponized language, such as "white privilege." As if all white people are the same and similarly "privileged." It celebrated the coming minority status of white people, demonized "white American history" through the lens of presentism as a cavalcade of nothing but genocide and oppression. Wrong-thinking academicians were badgered into silence or out of a job. The thought police aggressively patrolled social media.

And through all this, I thought: an increasingly angry number of whites were keeping eerily silent. Until they didn't on election day.

Yes, "fear of losing white privilege," "white nationalism," and no small amount of Obama Derangement Syndrome led to Trump's victory. It wasn't about the economy. But overreaching by the left was perhaps most consequential. And that kills the idea that Bernie Sanders would have been the better candidate. First, he would have been savaged by the right as SOCIALIST! (He was their preferred opponent). But like Hillary Clinton, he would have necessarily been the tribune of a changing country where the opponents of that change get a vote, too.

A version of the Bradley effect was surely at work here, too, where white likely voters told pollsters they were voting for Hillary — but when it came time to vote, the marked Trump. I warned about that, too. At the same time, years of Republican vote suppression efforts came together in this election, with results that were no doubt substantial and perhaps even decisive. As to this latter, most of the media will be so busy "normalizing" Trump that it will go unexamined.

A dozen historic elections

With Donald Trump, the most extreme and unqualified candidate of a major party, in striking distance of winning the presidency, we stand on the edge of the abyss. This election shouldn't be this close. You can use the comments section as an open thread as the next few days unspool. For my contribution, here are a dozen of the most consequential elections, nationally and in Arizona. At the least, they show that elections do indeed matter.

1828: John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson. Adams, the sitting Whig president, was defeated by war hero Jackson. The Whigs stood for the "American System" of internal improvements (infrastructure), a national bank and limiting the spread of slavery. Jackson was just the opposite. Jackson's victory led to the breaking of solemn treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes and their brutal relocation west (denounced by Adams) to open land for slaveholders, among many other ills.

1844: James K. Polk vs. Henry Clay. The defeat of "Harry of the West" not only doomed the American System but eliminated the last chance that the Civil War might have been postponed or avoided. One reason was the familiar partisan circular firing squad. Clay lost votes in New York and Pennsylvania to the abolitionist Liberty Party. It was the death of the Whigs.

With Polk, the nation again had a Southerner determined to extend slavery, including by prosecuting the highly unpopular Mexican War. At one point, Polk considered demanding all the territory to Tampico, but didn't want so many Mexicans brought into the union (they automatically became U.S. citizens with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war). On the other hand, in settling the Oregon Country dispute with Great Britain, he would have settled for the Columbia River as the northern border (in other words, Seattle would be in British Columbia). With Polk, the Civil War became inevitable.