James P. Freeman: Schilling could destroy the Mass. GOP

Tracing the “psychologies” and “pathologies” of this season’s presidential election in her new book, The Year of Voting Dangerously, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes that the “fury” of the 2016 electorate is spawning a number of “wildly improbable candidates [for down ballot races] in both parties.” Here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, one such improbable candidate just announced his intention to seek public office.

Curt Schilling, the former Red Sox pitcher and an avid Trump supporter, has announced he plans to challenge U.S. Sen.  Elizabeth Warren in 2018.

What has Schilling been up to lately? Since his Red Sox days, Schilling has become – wait for it — an entrepreneur and entertainer. His disastrous foray into business, the doomed 38 Studios, is but one piece of fodder for Warren to feast upon. Purportedly a limited government and small business conservative, Schilling was lured to Rhode Island by  a $75 million taxpayer-backed  loan guarantee to launch a video-game company. It went bankrupt in 2012 and four years later is still scandal plagued. His insincere and insipid explanation of the matter in The Providence Journal last week is reminiscent of Trump’s explanations of his sexual shenanigans: Deny it and blame another party.

Like the Republican presidential nominee, Schilling has taken to Facebook and Twitter and blogging as a means of distributing his often rambling and incoherent thoughts. But this gem from an April 19 posting can be taken earnestly: “I’m loud, I talk too much, I think I know more than I do, those and a billion other issues I know I have.”

This past April, Schilling was fired from ESPN as a baseball analyst for a meme he posted on Facebook “that appeared to mock transgender people,” noted The Atlantic. Before this incident, in August of 2015 he was suspended by ESPN for posting an anti-Muslim meme.

Last month Schilling debuted a new radio program. Describing him as an “outspoken conservative,” The Boston Globe underscored that he “solidified the show’s right-leaning reputation” when he interviewed commentator Ann Coulter. And the hits keep on coming… It has been announced that Schilling is joining Breitbart with an online radio show, giving him national exposure. As nymag.com posted: “‘He got kicked off ESPN for his conservative views. He’s a really talented broadcaster,’ Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlow said.”

But Mass. Republicans beware. What Trump has done to national politics — reducing the once respectable national Republican Party to rubble — his Massachusetts Mini-Me just may do to the state GOP.

Just as the state party has regained its respectability with the 2014 election of Gov. Charlie Baker,  a Schilling candidacy would mark its sure death-knell in 2018. State Republican leaders should be mindful that Schilling would appear on the same 2018 ballot as Baker, should the governor run for reelection.

Baker, popular and pragmatic, has proven that a Republican can be successful in campaigning and governing in a state where he is vastly outnumbered by Democrats. Baker, therefore, should be the party’s primary concern and should not have to effectively compete with the incendiary Schilling, a probable Great Distractor, and a likely formidable Democratic challenger. State GOP Chair Kirsten Hughes will hopefully understand this now, seeing as how National GOP Chair Reince Priebus surrendered to Trump; Priebus never understood the Trump effect and allowed Trump to pillage the party.

Senator Warren should almost be allowed to run unopposed as a national and local beacon of the bankrupt ideas and principles of progressivism, and her crowning achievement, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In an imagined superpower summit between Hillary Clinton and Warren in her book, Dowd envisions the senator saying, “I only loaned Bernie [Sanders] my progressive hordes. I’m the real leader of that movement.” But that is art imitating life.

Nevertheless, it will be ugly watching Warren make mincemeat out of Schilling.

James P. Freeman, a friend of New England Diary, is a New England-based essayist and former banker. This first ran in the New Boston Post.

Dull and then dramatic

"Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves are whirling fast."

-- Sara Coleridge

China to an appeasement-minded U.S.: 'You die, I live'

These words by my  friend of 54 years, Arthur Waldron, as published in the Oct. 31 Wall Street Journal, have  rightfully gotten a lot of attention. They come from his remarks at an Oct. 2 conference in New York.

Today the People’s Republic has decided to abandon even talk of liberalization. She wants a Party dictatorship without end. She has no interest now in the United States.

We Americans do not yet entirely recognize that this change of course has been determined in China. . . . We believe other cultures will understand our gestures as we mean them: our hand proffered for a handshake, our attempt to walk a mile in their moccasins, our gestures of restraint, will signal desire for peace and understanding, even friendship. That is the message we are trying to send.

How does the Chinese government receive it? Not at all as intended, but as the opposite.

The official Chinese reaction will be, “We have successfully intimidated Washington to the point she won’t even mention us. The Americans are weak, irresolute, and when it comes to it, craven. We can deal with them and drive them out of Asia.”

“Compromise” is a scarce concept in Chinese theories of conflict. Rather the phrase they use is ni si wo huo—“you die, I live.” That is not “win-win.” …

Let me conclude with my deepest worry, which is the {U.S.} acceptance and normalization, as it were, of the …hideously oppressive PRC.

The Dalai Lama comes in past the garbage cansto the White House. We are the United Bloody States of America, as Churchill might have put it. …So since when does Beijing get to tell us how to treat our guests? We should tell them—write a protest, hand it to our deputy under assistant secretary and we will file it. And the Dalai Lama should go in from the front door and into the Oval Office.

Acrid autumn

"The acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear"

--- D. H. Lawrence, "Dolor of Autumn"

Politics in a well-mannered micropolitis

Shops in downtown Montpelier.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's Oct. 27 "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Politics in Rhode Island, where I live, can be pretty dispiriting because of excessive identity politics, some local corruption and a low level of intelligence, education and integrity and a  high level of provincialism among too many politicians. (That’s partly due to local journalists and demagogic radio talk show hosts discouraging good people from running for office and very low voter turnout in primary elections.)

So I drove to Vermont last week to see a little bit of Norman Rockwell-style politicking.

The drive to and from Montpelier was a trip up and down memory lane.  I headed west on Route 2 through northern Massachusetts’s by turns pretty and depressing villages and mill towns. The foliage was at its most colorful and the sky was azure. I took a slightly different route than usual, turning off Route 2 well before Greenfield and heading north through unexpectedly high and steep hills and deep countryside near Northfield before getting on Route 91, which runs north up the gorgeous Connecticut River Valley, through which I had driven so many times before.

The farther north I went, the less vivid the foliage; the North Country’s maximum color was about three weeks ago. But much of the landscape still glowed.

In Montpelier, I had dinner with two old friends, Josh Fitzhugh and his wife, Elizabeth. Josh is running as an anti-Trump Republican state Senate candidate for Washington County. We ate in an excellent restaurant called Sarducci’s in downtown Montpelier, which was crowded and cheery. Indeed, the city, although America’s smallest state capital, was surprisingly lively with lots of people on the sidewalks on a mild night.

After dinner we strolled to a small cable-TV studio, where Josh and some rivals had a “debate,’’ though it was really just a discussion, on such big local issues as preventing dirty water from entering Lake Champlain. Everyone was civil. The  candidates had grown to know each other over the years in the intimate and generally friendly and honest atmosphere of the Green Mountain State.

Elizabeth (nicknamed “Wibs’’) and I sat in the waiting room outside the studio but we only heard a little of the “debate’’ on the big screen in front of the room because of technical problems. Sitting with us was a nice man called Jerome Lipani, like many Vermonters from New York City, who promoted  some Bernie Sanders-style reforms to us.

Mr. Lipani, artist, was polite and good-humored and, I inferred, pragmatic, as was now-Senator Sanders, a socialist, when he was mayor of Burlington. Indeed, with a few exceptions, such as outgoing Gov. Peter Shumlin’s overreaching for a single-payer healthcare plan, pragmatism rules. Thus the same state will elect such moderate Republicans as the late Gov.  Richard Snelling,  such Democrats as former Gov. Howard Dean (who ran state government as a middle-of-the road fiscal conservative) and a professed (but realistic) socialist such as Bernie Sanders.  Vermont candidates are judged by their records and characters far more than by their party labels. Given the increasing tendency in the U.S. to vote strictly by party and not by individual this was heartening.

Reliving again the state’s tradition of civility and civic-mindedness was a tonic, and I rather dreaded driving back to the nastiness of megalopolis. By the way, I discovered that Montpelier  along with Barre,  form something called a "micropolitan area'' and that tiny Barre and Montpelier are called the Twin Cities. Vermont cute!

xxx

An old book by Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar for the Country, might help you get through the New England winter, especially in beautiful but, er, rigorous Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. He sees each month as a season.

Indeed, every day is a season, emotionally speaking.

Isaiah J. Poole: In Maine, fighting racism where many white workers also hurt

Since 2011, Maine’s bombastic Republican Gov. Paul LePage has given America a taste of what it might be like to live under a Donald Trump presidency.

Like Trump, LePage has made outrageous comments against immigrants and communities of color. They include telling the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” publicly complaining about “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” selling drugs and impregnating “young, white” girls, and blaming “illegals” for spreading diseases like HIV — all while cutting funding to cities that offered health care and other assistance to undocumented immigrants.

After five years of LePage practicing an extreme form of wedge politics, people like Ben Chin are working to heal the resulting divisions in Maine.

Chin, the 31-year-old grandson of an undocumented Chinese immigrant, has been working with the Maine People’s Alliance to rally support from white working class neighborhoods for a series of progressive ballot measures this November.

Countering the racist and nativist appeals of candidates like LePage and Trump, their goal is to get people to reject the politics of scapegoating immigrants and people of color and to instead focus on the real causes of — and solutions to — their economic distress.

“We’re starting out a conversation in which we’re making it clear we’re on their side,” Chin said in a recent phone interview. “That’s the foundation that gets laid for whatever comes next.”

These conversations are based on the research and experience of a broad range of grassroots organizations that have been struggling to get working-class white voters across the nation to see beyond the color line.

Chin got a personal taste of division politics when he was racially caricatured during his 2015 run for mayor of Lewiston, Maine. During his campaign, a local businessman paid for billboards that said, “Don’t vote for Ho Chi Chin. Vote for more jobs not more welfare.”

Since then, Chin’s turned his political focus to ballot initiatives that include increasing the state’s minimum wage and levying a 3 percent tax on household incomes over $200,000 a year.

Chin and his fellow Maine People’s Alliance members don’t have a “silver bullet” set of talking points that disarms the people they encounter with racist or anti-immigrant attitudes. Instead, they focus on questions that get people to think about their economic anxieties in a deeper way.

One question they ask is, “Why do you think some people are poor and other people are rich?”

That opens up a discussion about the ways a small group of the wealthy and powerful are stacking the economic deck against ordinary people of all colors, with their black and brown neighbors feeling it the most because of America’s history of systemic racism.

Chin said he was particularly struck by a recent conversation with a voter in Auburn, Maine. The voter was undecided about whether to support a referendum that would increase the state’s wage to $12 an hour by 2020.

“One of his ideas was that ‘certain people’ were going to get a wage increase,” Chin said. “We tried to unpack that.”

They talked about his life experiences and whether he really believed that increasing the minimum wage was about helping some “certain” group of undeserving freeloaders.

Chin said that though this voter wasn’t a “raging justice activist” by the end of their conversation, he was more thoughtfully considering the minimum wage.

Conversations like these are happening in many states around the country this election season, as progressives grapple with the mainstreaming of racist and nativist appeals by Trump and other far-right politicians.

These types of empathetic conversations are the nemesis of the conservative-corporate elite who have engineered extreme wealth inequality and, for too many, the disappearance of the American dream.

The last thing  that politicians who benefit from wedge politics want to see is working people across the nation transcending racial and cultural lines, and realizing those same politicians are the common source of their pain.

Isaiah J. Poole is the communications director at People’s Action (peoplesaction.org). Distributed by OtherWords.org. 

Angel B. Perez: Race, class and 'uncomfortable learning'

Colleges and universities have a significant role to play in shaping the future of race and class relations in America. As exhibited in this year’s presidential election, race and class continue to divide us. Black Lives Matter movements, campus protests and police shootings are just a few examples of the proliferation of intolerance. It seems like we understand each other less each day. Higher education has a moral imperative to become the training ground for issues that students will face throughout their lives. Given the increasing diversity of higher education, there has never been a greater opportunity to address race and class.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 20.5 million students are expected to attend college this year. These students will be entering a postsecondary landscape unlike any other; 14.5% of students in college are Black and 16.5% Hispanic. While low-income students still enroll at lower rates, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that 46% of America’s traditional college-age people who are low-income are now enrolled in college. Colleges are beginning to reflect America’s diversity and this presents an opportunity for cultivating understanding.

Universities are microcosms of the world we inhabit. However, campus interactions can be more intense than those outside academia. For many, stepping through the doors of higher education could be the first time they are confronted with engaging difference. Low-income students will now be eating, working, living and playing with wealthy students. Students who grew up in predominantly white communities will now live in residence halls with students from all over the globe. While it’s an incredible opportunity for exchange, it’s also easy for misunderstandings to lead to conflict.

The first thing higher education must do is help students understand that life in college is challenging. What’s often lost in conversations about safe spaces and trigger points is the acknowledgement that college is where students go to leave their comfort zones. Being uncomfortable actually helps them grow. In fact, former Williams College Prof.  Robert Gaudino, a political scientist and experiential educationalist, dedicated most of his career to helping students engage “uncomfortable learning.” He believed that putting students in uncomfortable situations and forced to confront their own beliefs, values and “habits of mind” was the key to their growth and success.

Confronting race and class in college is hard, but the results can be transformative. Recently, I hired a young African-American student as a research assistant. She told me about a powerful experience she had in college when called the “N” word by a white peer. Her outrage was evident, but given the small size of our institution, she ironically ended up in a class about race with this student. Through intentional class discussions and heated debates, the two have now reconciled and are friends. The young man acknowledged his own ignorance and has been transformed by the experience. While their journey was unpleasant, both students were forced to deal with the implications. The structure that college provided them created a space for them to turn anger, and bias into learning and mutual understanding.

Administration plays a significant role in setting the stage for dialogue. In fact, much of their work impacts issues of race and class each day. They can use the admissions and financial aid process to socially engineer a campus that represents the diversity of the nation. They can create orientation programs that cultivate cross-cultural interactions and engage students in conversations that challenge beliefs. The way colleges construct everything from their residential life policies to extracurricular activities, can have an impact on how students engage difference.

I recall my own experience as a first-generation low-income student who was placed in a dorm room with a wealthy, white male (the first I had ever met). We spent a year engaged in interactions about our differences. We both made so many assumptions about each other, (often wrongly so), but we learned so much because of the way the college provided a platform and support for us to do so.

Faculty also play a pivotal role in campus conversations. Addressing issues of race and class are often delegated to sociologists, anthropologists and historians, but campuswide change happens when all faculty see race and class as an opportunity for pedagogical engagement. Race and class are omnipresent and its realities don’t go away when a student walks through a classroom door. The willingness of faculty to incorporate these issues into curriculum and navigate conversations when they arise could also change how students engage difference.

Last semester, I taught a course with a mix of students of color and majority students, as well as low-income and wealthy students. One day, they were visibly upset about the fact that some students had written “Trump 2016” in chalk around campus. This created a lot of emotion for students of color and confusion for majority students. I immediately went “off script,” and moderated a difficult conversation. I passed over the day’s planned course content, but the issue was important. There was no solution, but the greatest gift of the conversation was when students on both sides of the argument admitted they had never thought of the issue from the other’s perspective.

As the demographics of the U.S. change, that of those who walk through the doors of higher education also shifts, and we have a moral imperative to socially construct the platform for students to learn how to engage difference. The 20.5 million students in higher education will impact our future. In his book The Uses of the University, Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, reminds us that “as society goes, so goes the university.” He believed the university has a responsibility to meet the urgent demands of society. The deliberate creation of platforms that support students through cultivation of spaces and interactions about difference can shape our nation’s future. This is no small task, but society has spoken. It’s now higher education’s turn to respond.

Angel B. Perez is vice president of enrollment and student success at Trinity College.

Working at a protein factory

Franklyn E. Goucher, an Essex, Mass., clammer, digging on a  sand flat in 1978, in the coming show "Kodachrome Memory: Nathan Benn's North Shore, 1978'' at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Mass., Dec. 27-Feb. 19. This show will display 30 photos taken by Mr. Benn while on assignment by the National Geographic Magazine on the North Shore in 1978. The National Geographic article was entitled ''Harboring Old  Ways''.

'Tones of time'

"How innocent were these Trees, that in
Mist-green May, blown by a prospering breeze, 
Stood garlanded and gay; 
Who now in sundown glow
Of serious color clad confront me with their show
As though resigned and sad,
Trees, who unwhispering stand umber, bronze, gold; 
Pavilioning the land for one grown tired and old;
Elm, chestnut, aspen and pine, I am merged in you, 
Who tell once more in tones of time, 
Your foliaged farewell."

--   Siegfried Sassoon, "October Trees''

Time and space at Wheaton

Featured  multimedia work by Judy Pfaff, in her show "Judy Pfaff: Drawings Thick and Thin at the Beard and Weil Galleries,''  at Wheaton College, Norton, Mass., through Nov. 11. The curator says that her work "creates new perspectives on time and space.''

Llewellyn King: Taking a wrecking ball to the U.S. and U.K.

On both sides of the Atlantic, political and business retaining walls are being torn down in the belief that they are of no structural importance. Messing with the political and business architecture is likely to have grave, and possibly terrible, effects on democracy and prosperity.

In the United States solid, political orthodoxy, which has served well for so long, is under attack in the Congress and on the hustings.

A more advanced attack is underway in Europe than the United States, but it is a harbinger nonetheless of bad things that can happen here. The commonalities outweigh the differences.

In Europe, Britain has embarked on one of the great, avoidable debacles of history: the decision to leave the European Union. It will destabilize Europe, almost certainly lead to a breakup of the United Kingdom, and leave the British Isles vulnerable and impoverished, clinging to the tatters of its “sovereignty.”

To bring about this state of affairs, the British had to take aim at the very architecture of the English Constitution: the collection of rules and precedents that has flowed since Magna Carta and is enshrined in the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

Now the Conservative Party is bowing to the result of a referendum, a decisive result nonetheless, which will involve the withdrawal from Europe without a debate or vote in the House of Commons. A referendum in Britain — there have only ever been three, and all have been on Europe — denies representative government, created over the centuries, as the only system of government: the fundamental political architecture.

In the United States, the political architecture is under threat because we fail to revere it. A book by Richard Arenberg and Robert Dove, titled Defending the Filibuster: The Soul of the Senate, outlines one way that the structure is facing the wrecking ball. For 34 years, Arenberg worked in the Senate for such Democratic political giants as George Mitchell, Carl Levin and Paul Tsongas. Robert Dove served twice as Senate parliamentarian and was on Republican Leader Robert Dole’s staff. They argue that the political architecture in the Senate is under attack from the ceaseless, ugly partisanship and that the filibuster, a minority guarantee to a say, may be swept away.

Arenberg told me that the filibuster, always used sparingly and seldom invoked, has been abused in recent years to such an extent that a change in the Senate rules could sweep away this unique tool of whichever party is in the minority to be heard. If that happens, he said, a situation like the one in the House would prevail, where the majority holds sway without regard to the minority, more like a parliamentary system.

Other threats to the structure of American democracy abound. Many of them have been enunciated by Hedrick Smith, a distinguished documentary filmmaker and former New York Times correspondent, in his book Who Stole the American Dream? He points to gerrymandering and special interests and their money as threatening the retaining walls of the American democracy.

Worse, maybe, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the growing conservative rejection of trade as the basis not only of prosperity, but also of foreign-policy stability.

Brexit is the willing destruction of Britain’s largest trade arrangement and an equivalent reduction in its influence in Europe and, by extrapolation, in the world.

In the United States, Hillary Clinton has pusillanimously turned her back on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact that she helped write. And Donald Trump has declared his intention to trash almost all our trade treaties, which, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, he claims have been written by idiots to favor our competitors.

Most worrying is the way the U.K.’s Conservative Party and Republicans, silenced by Trump’s candidacy, here have accepted this rejection of traditional conservative bedrock: prosperity through trade. Institutionally, they have been quiet, so quiet.

The threat to good governance in Europe and America, combined with the prevailing economic heresy, poses a serious threat to the West and must have its enemies in Moscow and Beijing doing a happy dance. They know that if you knock down enough retaining walls, the structure will be weakened to the point of collapse. The wrecking balls are already at work.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking2@gmail.com) is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a veteran publisher, columnist and international business consultant.

Remember Pearl Harbor

Sign up for a Nov. 13 viewing of the World War II Foundation's new movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Hit this link for details.

Nice scenery at Yale

''Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail'' (1873), by Albert Bierstadt, in the show "Exploring the Incomparable Valley,'' at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, through Dec. 31.

The show commemorates the 150 anniversary of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale and the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.

Will hospital merger mania continue?

Excerpted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.

The collapse of affiliation talks between Care New England,  the Rhode Island hospital chain, and Southcoast Health, in southeastern Massachusetts, as did the collapse of Lifespan and Care New England talks a few years back, raises the question of when we’ll see another hospital chain merger around here, given the inevitable turf battles.

With the drive for economies of scale and for sharing access to the best care and research, will the latest collapse lead to a big Boston-based chain coming in and taking over? Partners HealthCare, whose hospitals include Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s, might eye expansion in these parts because Massachusetts regulators think that it has gotten too big and powerful in Greater Boston. The Brown Medical School would presumably not like a Partners invasion because Partners is joined at the hip with the Harvard Medical School behemoth. Maybe given the size and executive salaries of hospitals these days, affiliating with the Harvard Business School would be appropriate.

Many hospital chains want to merge to strengthen their bargaining power with huge insurance companies. Maybe in 10 years, we’ll have “Medicare for all,’’ which will make much of this moot.

In the meantime, we have something to learn from those independent hospitals, such as South County Hospital,  in southern Rhode Island, that have maintained their independence and high-quality care in the face of the massive disruption that that healthcare sector is now undergoing.

The 'Cauldron of Regeneration'

Bobbing for apples.

"Perhaps the most famous icon of the holiday is the jack-o-lantern.  Various authorities attribute it to either Scottish or Irish origin.  However, it seems clear that it was used as a lantern by people who traveled the road this night, the scary face to frighten away spirits or faeries who might otherwise lead one astray.  Set on porches and in windows, they cast the same spell of protection over the household.  (The American pumpkin seems to have forever superseded the European gourd as the jack-o-lantern of choice.)  Bobbing for apples may well represent the remnants of a Pagan 'baptism' rite called a 'seining', according to some writers.  The water-filled tub is a latter-day Cauldron of Regeneration, into which the novice's head is immersed.  The fact that the participant in this folk game was usually blindfolded with hands tied behind the back also puts one in mind of a traditional Craft initiation ceremony."

--   Mike Nichols, “All Hallow's Eve’’

Family reunion

"School of love,'' by Steve Locke, a sculptor, in his show "school of love & Family Pictures,'' at the Gallery Kayafas, Boston, through Nov. 26.

Don Pesci: Apres le deluge, c'est Hillary?

The national elections at this point may remind poor battered voters of Oscar Wilde’s description of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable!”

Republicans, Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review, will have much repair work to do after the election – whatever happens. National Review has not been hospitable to Donald Trump’s candidacy, but the election should awaken second thoughts among conservatives. In “Conservatives Should Vote For The Republican Nominee,” Hanson takes a birch switch to what Trump supporters might call disdainfully the Republican Party Establishment.

Here is the central premise in Hanson’s piece:

 “Something has gone terribly wrong with the Republican Party, and it has nothing to do with the flaws of Donald Trump. Something like his tone and message would have to be invented if he did not exist. None of the other 16 primary candidates — the great majority of whom had far greater political expertise, more even temperaments, and more knowledge of issues than did Trump — shared Trump’s sense of outrage — or his ability to convey it — over what was wrong: The lives and concerns of the Republican establishment in the media and government no longer resembled those of half their supporters.

 “The Beltway establishment grew more concerned about their sinecures in government and the media than about showing urgency in stopping Obamaism. When the Voz de Aztlan and the Wall Street Journal often share the same position on illegal immigration, or when Republicans of the Gang of Eight are as likely as their left-wing associates to disparage those who want federal immigration law enforced, the proverbial conservative masses feel they have lost their representation. How, under a supposedly obstructive, conservative-controlled House and Senate, did we reach $20 trillion in debt, institutionalize sanctuary cities, and put ourselves on track to a Navy of World War I size?”

In the reliably conservative Wall Street Journal opinion pages, Peggy Noonan, a longtime columnist and once a special assistant and speechwriter in the reliably conservative President Ronald Reagan administration, permits herself to wonder what a Trump campaign might have looked like if Trump had been sane.

On the Democratic side, an email tsunami threatens to capsize Clinton’s plush ground-game schooner. And she is –- perhaps more than Trump –- unspeakable and uneatable. After nearly a half century in politics, ambition scrambles the brain. White privilege may or may not be a political myth, but political privilege is the original sin of politics. Just ask Machiavelli, or Hanson, a classical historian and author of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Here in Connecticut, the sort of people whose business it is to gauge the correlation of political forces are dusting off their crystal balls. All the editorials nominating so-and-so- for such-and-such have already been written. It remains only to pull the pins on the editorial endorsements.

Their left-of-center sensitive data receptors tell them that Clinton has the edge, both nationally and here in the Land of Steady Habits, which has steadily voted Democratic progressives into office. Connecticut progressives, in turn, have steadily voted in favor of cosmetic and temporary spending cuts. Once returned to office, they will vote in favor of higher taxes for two reasons: 1) They wish to use politicians to advance a particular rather than a general good, usually involving public worker unions; and 2) Despite the inescapably obvious consequences following tax increases and burdensome regulations – i.e. job losses, anemic economic growth and the flight from Connecticut of wealth-producing entrepreneurial activity -- they are perversely convinced, mostly for ideological reasons, that Connecticut is suffering a revenue problem, not a spending problem.

Hanson’s recommendation to national Republicans that they should adjust their polity to changed circumstances is not likely to be adopted by Connecticut Democrats, our new Aristocrats. Demography, rather than a filial regard for democracy, is destiny, say the demographers, and Democrats outnumber Republicans in Connecticut by a two to one margin; unaffiliateds outnumber both Republicans and Democrats. And so – what has been must ever be. That is the operative principle of most politics, until the roof comes crashing down, at which point there will follow a peaceful, small “d”, democratic revolution.

The one thing we know for certain about democracy, G. K. Chesterton reminds us, is this: “Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.” To this many journalists reply, yearning for an aristocracy of thought and manners, “Bunk.” They can be safely ignored. Chesterton was a superb journalist, and that is why he said “Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.

Brakes needed in bike-path push

Excerpted from Robert Whitcomb's"Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.

Alex Marshall, writing recently in Governing.com, raised some cautionary notes about the bike-path mania in some cities.

The biggest one is whether it’s worth it to eat up a lane of car traffic to assign the space to bicyclists.  Have cities adequately forecast the number of people who are likely to use bikes and maybe even give up their cars? We see a lot of dedicated bike lanes with very few bicyclists.  Perhaps in a city with a lot of college students, such as Providence, adense and carefully planned network of bike lanes can make sense. But what would be the tradeoff against what might be heavier motor-vehicle traffic congestion created by removing lanes?

And safety would call for many bike lanes to have physical barriers separating them from car and truck traffic rather than just lines. Many of these lanes now are too dangerous, especially compared to Europe’s.

I learned in Europe, where I used to work, and rode a bike a few times in the Netherlands, that compared with the U.S., car and truck drivers there bear much more legal responsibility in crashes with bikes than do bicyclists. That’s simply because the former are driving fast, multi-ton machines. “It’s a standard sometimes known as ‘default liability,’’’ Mr. Marshall says. We need that in America. (I wonder how the coming of self-driving cars might affect all this.)

U.S. jurisdictions should look at their traffic laws and make adjustments.

Perhaps after a few years of adding bike paths, communities might very rationally decide to turn some of them back to cars, trucks, buses and install light rail. My own preference is for cities and states to focus on mass transit, not bike lanes. But, of course, they’re both admirable.

-- Robert Whitcomb

David Warsh: Let's stop the jingoism about Russia.

A propaganda war bubbled up in London last week as an antiquated Russian aircraft carrier steamed down the English Channel, on its way to the coast of Syria.

NatWest, a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, which is mostly owned by the British government, announced that it planned to close the accounts of Russia Today, the Russian government’s news service and television network – presumably because RT publishes material critical of Britain and the U.S.

I read one or two RT items almost every day, via Johnson’s Russia List.  In fact RT publishes a good deal of interesting material.

Meanwhile, The Economist prepared a scary Putinism cover, a special section, and a tough editorial: “How to contain Vladimir Putin’s deadly, dysfunctional empire”.

The Spectator countered with ''Stop the Stupid Sabre-Rattling against Russia.''

“It’s not their side that worries me; it’s ours,” wrote Rod Liddle, a Spectator columnist.

Moscow bureau chief Neil MacFarquhar, of The New York Times, heaped ridicule on that Russian aircraft carrier. Neoconservative stalwart Robert Kagan, in The Wall Street Journal, asked, "What can the next president do about Russia? ''

Send U.S. troops back to Europe?  Retaliate for cyber-offenses?

This is jingoism.  Let’s get the election over with.  Then we can get back to business.

David Warsh, proprietor of economicprincipals.com, is a longtime economic historian and financial columnist.

Very New England raw material

From the show "Birches, Bark, and Beyond: Marja Lianko at Maud Morgan Arts,'' Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 31-Nov. 25. Her show features paintings and sculptures depicting, and in some cases made of, trees,or at least of their bark and branches.