2015 Election Results So Far: Right on the Rise; Left Holding Steady in Pockets of Progressivism

The morning after election day in the United States the early results seem to be a status quo election. The U.S. status quo is drifting to the right, with pockets of progressive sentiment in those places where the economy is waxing. For instance, here in Seattle, much to my surprise, a vague, nearly $1 billion transportation levy is headed for victory. My sense, based on a steady diet of negative local press and word-of-mouth hostility, was that the proposition would lose by a super-majority. Also encouraging, though not unexpected, a progressive county-wide initiative on early-childhood education is headed for approval. Plus, there is socialist Sawant's solid showing. She leads her corporate challenger 53% to 47%. The way ballots are tallied in King County, which votes entirely by mail, it takes a week to finalize the count. By that time, Sawant's total, if her last election is any guide, should be closer to 60%. Quite a statement.

One disappointment is West Seattle's District 1. Progressive Lisa Herbold is running six points behind the corporate stooge. It is not impossible, as the late ballots are counted, for Herbold to mount a comeback, but it a real long shot. Maybe if the margin were three points she could pull it off. But six is daunting.

Nationwide, the Gray Lady is trumpeting two elections, both conservative victories. In the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the Republican Tea Party candidate, Matt Bevins, easily bested his Establishment Democrat opponent, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, 52.5% to 43.8%.

Two passages in the frontpage story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Alan Blinder, "Matt Bevin, Republican, Wins Governor’s Race in Kentucky," both persuasively argue for a rightward electoral drift.

In the first, the reporters mention that there is only one statehouse in the South that is now under Democrat control -- one! -- and that is looking shaky:

For Democrats, more than the governorship was at stake. Kentucky is the last state in the South where Democrats hold a legislative chamber — the Kentucky House — and without the governor’s mansion, their hold on that chamber is in danger. 

“This changes the dynamics,” State Senator Robert Stivers, a Republican and the Senate president, said. “Instead of having one leg of the stool, we now have two legs of the stool — and the third leg is very weak.” Later, Mr. Stivers and Mr. Bevin appeared together onstage after Mr. Bevin’s victory speech, leading supporters in a chant of “Flip the House! Flip the House!”

Second, Democrat Conway ran to no avail on all the issues that Democrats consider their "Aces High":

The son of a prominent lawyer in Louisville, Mr. Conway hews mostly to traditional Democratic positions. He favors increasing the minimum wage (Mr. Bevin is opposed); is a strong backer of unions (Mr. Bevin favored “right-to-work” laws that would limit union organizing); and made early childhood education a centerpiece of his election campaign. (Mr. Bevin emphasized school vouchers.)

Not a good sign. Also not a good sign is the other election that The New York Times national edition highlights this morning, the defeat of Houston's anti-discrimination ordinance. One positive trend over the last few election cycles has been the increasing social tolerance of the American voter. Willing to countenance non-traditional sexual preferences, gender roles and substance consumption, citizens in some spots of the Western world have shown a progressive, open-mindedness that points in the direction of a more egalitarian society. If one were willing to engage in some "pie-in-the-sky" hopefulness, one might say all we need to do is crack the plutocratic, oligarchic stranglehold on the our politics and we'll be ready to solve some of big, unresolved issues.

But the old, negative divide-and-conquer logic is hard to overcome. In Houston, the opponents of the anti-discrimination ordinance were able to conjure up a lurid, pulpy image of men stalking women into public restrooms, ravishing our fertile daughters, and the law helpless to do anything but stand by and watch.

Baltimore's Freddie Gray Riots: U.S. Thuggishness Comes Home to Roost

There is something that seems not quite right in the explanation of why Baltimore police mustered in force the day of Freddie Gray's funeral. In her front-page story, "Baltimore Enlists National Guard and a Curfew to Fight Riots and Looting," Sheryl Gay Stolberg says the decision was based on rumor and a flyer posted on social media:

The police said early in the day that they had received a “credible threat” that members of various gangs, including the Black Guerrilla Family, Bloods and Crips, had “entered into a partnership to ‘take out’ law enforcement officers.” But officers kept a low profile in the neighborhood during Mr. Gray’s funeral. The police also said that a flier circulated on social media called for a period of violence on Monday afternoon to begin at the Mondawmin Mall and move toward City Hall downtown.

Warned by the police of possible violence, the University of Maryland campus in downtown Baltimore closed early, as did the Mondawmin Mall. The Orioles postponed their home game against the Chicago White Sox. The Baltimore police vowed the authorities would take “appropriate measures” to keep officers and the neighborhood safe. 

“You’re going to see tear gas. You’re going to see pepper balls. We’re going to use appropriate methods to make sure we can preserve the safety of that community,” a spokesman, Capt. J. Eric Kowalczyk, said at a news conference. Fifteen police officers were injured, some with broken bones, and one was unresponsive, according to the department.

Well, the "appropriate methods" -- tear gas, pepper balls -- didn't keep the community safe. Parts of Baltimore burned last night, despite a curfew being declared by the mayor. The National Guard, called out by Maryland's governor, now patrols the streets with rifles drawn (Richard Oppel and Stephen Babcok, "Morning Brings Wail of Fire Engines in Wake of Baltimore Riots").

A display of force in a community by ninja-clad, armor-wearing police firing off tear gas and pepper spray never works to keep the peace. It didn't work in Hong Kong to tamp down the pro-Democracy protests, nor in Kiev on the Maidan. People in charge know it doesn't work to keep the peace. What they know is that it sends a message, and that message is that I am stronger than you are. I am the biggest thug on the block.

Keep that in mind when you hear "thug" thrown around in the wake of the Freddie Gray Baltimore riots. Freddie Gray was murdered in police custody; his neck was broken and his larynx crushed. Yet it is people like Freddie Gray, young men living in the Gilmor Homes of Baltimore, who are labeled "thugs" by the mayor of Baltimore and the governor of Maryland.

As Sheryl Gay Stolberg notes,

Also among the mourners [at the Gray funeral service] were Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman and chief of the N.A.A.C.P.; three aides to President Obama; and several family members of others killed by the police in various parts of the country, including Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, a man who died after a police officer put him in a chokehold last year on Staten Island. She said she had come “to stand with the family of Freddie Gray. It’s unfortunate, but I feel we have a connection.” In his eulogy, Mr. Bryant [Pastor Jamal Bryant of the Empowerment Temple] spoke of the plight of poor, young black men like Mr. Gray, living “confined to a box” made up of poor education, lack of job opportunities and racial stereotypes — “the box of thinking all black men are thugs and athletes and rappers.”

Sure enough, at the beginning of Stolberg's article, you have the white Republican governor of Maryland and the black mayor of Baltimore both invoking the talisman-like term "thug" to dismiss the riots yesterday:

In Washington, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, on her first day on the job, briefed President Obama, who in turn called Governor Hogan. Mr. Hogan said the president urged him to have law enforcement officers exercise restraint, and he assured the president they would. “But,” the governor added, “I assured him we weren’t going to stand by and allow our city of Baltimore to be taken over by thugs.”

City officials said schools would be closed on Tuesday for the safety of children. At City Hall, Ms. Rawlings-Blake, sounding exhausted and exasperated after days of appealing for calm, announced that a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew would be imposed for a week beginning on Tuesday. The city already has a curfew for juveniles under age 17.

“Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs,” she said. “I’m at a loss for words. It is idiotic to think that by destroying your city that you’re going to make life better for anybody.” The police said that at least 27 people had been arrested.

But the important takeaway from Stolberg's piece is this: the #Black Lives Matter uprising will not die down anytime soon.

It was the second time in six months that a state called out the National Guard to enforce order in a city shaken by violence after a black man died in an encounter with police. Missouri deployed the guard in Ferguson in August after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, and then again in November when violence greeted the news that a grand jury had not indicted the officer who shot Mr. Brown.

At a late night news conference, the Baltimore police commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, noted that Ferguson is a much smaller city than Baltimore, which covers 80 square miles. “We were pulled so thin,” he said, adding, “We had opposite ends of the city pulling us at the same time.”

Policing is a bigoted and thuggish profession with an institutional memory that knows nothing but racism and violence.

And that is the United States in a nutshell. From the genocide of the American Indians and the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade to the crimes against humanity in Yemen and the re-militarization of Japan, the United States raison d'etre is first and last to be the biggest thug on the block.