alias Bruce.

The real reason why so many Americans don’t vote.

It’s not ignorance or apathy. It’s bitter awareness.

On November 5, the day before the midterm elections central to the continued power and influence of dictator-in-progress President Donald Trump, a Washington Post story went against the dominant narrative about American nonvoters. Instead of offering yet another bewildered eulogy to the lost civic conscience of the more than half of Americans who don’t vote, the Post story let nonvoters from across the country explain, in their own words and in detail, why they chose to refuse their ostensible civic duty in one of the most momentous elections in the nation’s history. For instance:

Charlotte Greenleaf won’t be voting on Tuesday. Neither will anyone else in her family. Never have, never will, she says. It’s not that she’s too busy. Greenleaf, 60, is unemployed and trying to make it on disability benefits, plus the pigs and chickens she raises on a small farm near this scruffy town in central West Virginia. And it’s not that she’s satisfied with how things are. Unhappy with President Trump, she quoted her mother: “If you don’t got nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” No, this is why she’s not voting: She figures the country’s leaders are chosen by rich and powerful people far from any place she’s ever been. “My favorite subject in school was history, and I learned that’s how it’s always been,” Greenleaf said. “Politicians just think about themselves.” So she tunes them out: Doesn’t read the news, doesn’t watch it on TV. And most certainly does not vote.

Read the entire Post story. Its importance is not that it blows the cover off some national secret about why people don’t vote, but that it says out loud what is literally a matter of common knowledge to most of we Americans. A good number of the more than half of Americans who elect to not vote — many for their entire lifetimes — do so because they choose to not insult themselves with the sorry pretense of having participatory power over the country’s policy decisions. They may possess or lack formal education; they may have enough money to get by or they may not; they may live in a hamlet in eastern Idaho or on the west side of Manhattan. But what these boycotters all have in common is a deep and often bitter clarity about the fact that the United States, with its flood of corporate campaign money propelling public policy from top to bottom, is not a democracy. So why would they vote when the one shred of civic power many would-be voters feel they possess is to tell big money, in effect, “You can’t fire me. I quit.” This is not a position to mock or to dismiss. It reflects a serious and fierce understanding by which millions of competent adult American nonvoters reach a cogent decision to abstain from the charade.

I am not one of those people. I vote — despite my rage at the corrupt moneyed machinery that runs the nation and controls its major decisions — because the outcomes of voting can mean life or death in people’s real lives and because voting is not incompatible with my determination as a progressive to lay waste to the structural monarchy of money on which modern capitalism rests. The two coexist, and electoral casualties are real and present. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory — courtesy of the Electoral College but theoretically preventable had more nonvoters turned out and made it harder for digital interference to ensure a Trump win — has already killed people and will kill and devastate more. In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial win, if it holds, will embolden racial murders and deadly statewide policies on health care, guns, and policing, while Andrew Gillum’s victory there, if it happens, will mollify some of these and lend strength to those who resist them. Ted Cruz’s victory in Texas will buoy racist and fascist attacks, economic savagery, and suffering and death for women denied reproductive rights in that state. Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez’s New York victory has put the fear of progressive outrage into the hearts of cowardly Democrats locally and nationally.

But we betray a huge number of outraged and aware people who refuse to vote — and we weaken our shared clout as a force for overturning this corrupt corporate-funded system of governance — if we trivialize or demonize nonvoters instead of recognizing that many of them are simply expressing, in a different way, the very same things that we want in a society.

This is not about whether or how someone voted in this filtered popularity contest that we call a democracy. This is about voters’ core sense of what serves their interest. Never, ever forget that most Americans, no matter how they act out, ultimately want the same things we progressives want: an end to corporate money in government, a citizen-driven system of single-payer universal health care, and policy that serves the public will rather than private wealth.

That is our greatest strength, and it is our way to ultimately win.

The midterms proved that most voters don’t want Trump. The GOP is betting it won’t matter.

The Democrats have taken the House. Good. It will save lives. Some of us who would suffer and die under GOP-ruled policies on health care, policing, poverty, and poisoning of our air and water will instead live longer lives because of particular bills that Trump and his supine party will be unable to ratify. You and I awoke this morning to a better reality than we feared.

But that is not the only truth today. Here are some others:

- The Electoral College is the Trump Party’s last weapon. Money, male rule, and racism are the traditional toxins that have prevented the United States from being a democracy. Structurally, the Electoral College is the hangman’s bridge for all travelers in American government. Virtually no seekers of the presidency cross it intact without proving allegiance to those who stand to lose money or power if their policy needs are not met. Trump, as Charles Blow has said, represents a war: money’s last hope of directing the rage of non-rich white males at someone other than the white rich super-minority whose explosively greedy choices have decimated what remains of non-educated white privilege. Aside from white rage and male crotch-clutching, today’s Republican Party platform of enabling rich cheaters offers nothing — nada, zero — that non-college-educated white Americans can embrace or believe. From omnivorous political rodents like Mitch McConnell to self-promoting brayers like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, the sole remaining salable alternative to a progressive money-shouldn’t-rule pitch is a white-or-male-must-rule pitch. That’s all that the CEOs have left to offer before the incessantly climate-heated, increasingly brown, increasingly young and non-rich population of the United States inevitably surges progressive. The Electoral College, whereby states secure representation without regard to population, is the last anachronism protecting the artificial dominance of old white racist senators and presidents in America. It elected Trump in 2016 — where he lost the popular vote — and it will, unjustly, thanks to Republican white and rural gerrymandering, re-elect him in 2020, absent some sea change of popular revolt.

- Today’s institutional Democratic Party will not lead. It will follow. You already know more about this than any pundit needs to tell you. From Bill Clinton’s smarmy supply-side myths to Hillary Clinton’s empty corporate “Stronger Together” jingle to Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s we-can’t-go-there calculus of mannered self-censoring to the DNC’s sabotage of Bernie Sanders’ actual progressive momentum, the institutional Democrats have excruciatingly shown us that they and their donors forbid authenticity about how corporate-funded policy actually works. Key Democratic candidates who won this season — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — led on their own, defiant of party norms. Key progressives who lost succumbed to plain old institutional corruption (as with Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, whose opponent used his official position to implement policies undermining her voters) or, to my mind, to bad “moderate” advice (as with Beto O’Rourke, who inexplicably met a bloodthirsty Ted Cruz with soft anecdotes about voters’ family stories instead of a savaging of Cruz’s empty and corrupt claims. Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party, terrified of the gall it takes to piss off today’s corporate DNC donors with passionate truths about the corporate-funded modern American pretense of democracy, will, in future history, appear as the fading rear guard of small-d democratic values. True leadership will come, and is already emerging, from those who dare to run and win (or lose) on honest arguments about corporate power. At some point in the future, this truthful baseline will become a new normal, which the fearful inheritors of today’s DNC will then timidly claim as their own.

What will make the difference is what you and I now do, in public as we face politicians and police, and in private at our gatherings of family and coworkers and friends. It has happened at decisive moments in all repressive regimes.

Our move.

What do you do when your nation is in the hands of a traitorous criminal and his collaborators?

This is not partisan fiction. It isn’t the routine fake outrage of Fox News or yet another algorithmically-designed online whopper. It is the demonstrated factual truth: President Donald Trump, known racist, misogynist encourager of murderous white supremacists, banner of Muslims, and jailer of children ripped from their refugee families, has now capped his criminality by committing actual legally-defined treason: aiding and abetting an attack by a foreign government on the very nation he purports to lead.

On July 16 in Helsinki, standing a few feet away from the threat of President Vladimir Putin, Trump proved to even the most cowardly of his backers —the fleeing Paul Ryan, the concave Mitch McConnell, the whole worthless lot of the Republican leadership — that he as president will serve or betray anyone, any time, in any way that suits his own immediate interest. Especially as he withered under the plutonium stare of an 18-year autocrat — the man who helped to make him president — who very possibly has the means to handily kill Trump if the need arises.

You, like many of us, may see that we are fast running out of mainstream options for dealing with the Trump problem.

Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the money-trained Democratic leadership know no language for responding to being beaten with a steel bar and left for dead behind a garage. Mainstream reporters, now emboldened to openly use terms like “disgraceful” to describe Trump’s conduct, are straining for words to spur peaceable corrective action in the electorate. Republican leaders, who didn’t figure that their downward slope of moral cave-ins to racism and plutocracy would corner them into siding with a man who is willing to sell out America’s republic of good white people, are responding to Traitor Trump with murmurs of protest, clinging to hope that he will in the coming hours and days rephrase the past 24 hours’ impeachable thoughts.

He might. By the time you read this, Trump, at a safe distance from enforcer Putin, may very well have back-pedaled on his words for the sake of sustaining the state of chaotic demolition that is his best grip on power. What the nation — and the world — lose in coherent thought and understanding of his regime, Trump gains in his ability to maneuver and manipulate. There’s no telling what will happen. That’s the deliberate idea.

Meanwhile, the two fundamentals of Trump Nation continue to be a policy mandate of globally suicidal economic pillage and environmental destruction, and the goaded immorality of a white base too drunk on the lie of regained racial glory to notice the hastening of their own extinction.

So what do we do when our head of state is a real-life monstrous factually-verified criminal willing to sacrifice civilization for power, and a sizable chunk of the state’s enforcers (read: ICE, National Guard troops, police, prison staff, Congress), along with a nasty bloc of voters, have consented to be his collaborators?

One thing is certain: our current American mainstream, safely indoors with its indignant but toothless dissent, offers no answers.

The roots of the Trump electorate’s immorality.

The lynching of Reuben Stacy, Fort Lauderdale, FL, 1935

After an average of 54 lynchings a year between 1877 and 1950, with a peak average of 111 annually from 1889 to 1918 in the wake of Reconstruction, lynchings in contemporary America happen far less often. That’s progress. But America’s 400-year enterprise of demonizing black and brown people for fear and profit is explosively thriving in the racist fusillades of President Donald Trump and their reception by his voters.

It is time to call out those in the Trump base not only for their calamitous ignorance and their horrific gullibility in falling for Trump’s false economic promises, but also for their immorality, plain and simple, in once again trading away human decency for racial privilege.

In the past 50 years, the fall of white working people from having strong unions and solid blue-collar careers to being corralled in the post-Reagan work camp of unregulated industry has created real and justified rage and disillusionment. But in no sane world is this an excuse for suffering whites, with their eroded privilege, to fall back on the expedient evil of white supremacy. This centuries-old core moral failure will be, in the future telling of history, the monumental disgrace of America’s ever-shrinking white majority.

White racism is the trick gear enabling America’s impossibly top-heavy capitalist machinery to somehow keep lurching forward, through monopoly to plutocracy, in defiance of claimed meritocracy or democracy. White supremacy is to non-rich white people what money is to the fabulously rich: an exclusive currency of dominance by which both enjoy a monopoly on something they covet. For the one percent, the payoff is their economic and political dominance over the rest of us. For whites without great wealth, the reward is the simple privilege of their presumed centrality in the nation’s culture, with comfortably white national standards of normality by which whites never have to explain their presence or their worth, and through which they can rely on their whiteness as a guarantee of authority and respect. Like any group that inherits privilege, both of these favored parties — the rich and the white — can, if they choose, expediently learn to live with the nagging moral wrongness of their roles in the hierarchy.

And so we now see that 58 percent of Republicans (versus 5 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents) support the Trump administration’s separating — in some cases literally tearing loose — traumatized children from their parents as part of its anti-refugee policy at the U.S.-Mexican border, which has separated 2,000 children from their parents in six weeks. (A whistleblower’s recording of such children screaming in their prison — let’s call these facilities what they are — reveals the level of abominable cruelty here.) Meanwhile, alleged Christian leaders sell out what Jesus is known to have stood for in their attempt at a quid pro quo for Trump’s support of policies that allow their religious groups to feed at the government trough while dodging discrimination laws and the constitutional separation of church and state. And in recent incidents, Greyhound Bus Lines and Concord Bus Lines both folded to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers’ illegally telling passengers they must be U.S. citizens in order to ride.

Through it all, purportedly responsible white adult American citizens have continually excused Trump’s lies, boasted and accused sexual assault, numerous fiscal concealments, apparent obstruction of justice, vulgar and racist statements, and unprecedented debasements of the presidency. Contrast this with the throngs of white voters who were so desperate to crucify dignified non-felonious President Barack Obama that they had to make up sufficiently inflammatory fairy tales. The most successful of these false claims, the “birther” myth that Obama was not born in the United States, was championed for five years by Trump himself.

The long and convenient tradition of bigotry-based immorality is alive and well in a substantial chunk of today’s white American electorate, and has in fact been here since the beginning: through the rise and predominance of the slavery industry, the Civil War that was fought over that industry, and the nation’s unofficial but perennial race wars ever since. These include the war on black civil rights, the real estate war to create and sustain white suburbs and to contain poor communities of color, the War on Drugs, the economic war to further privilege the rich and to pit neglected uneducated whites and abandoned people of color against one another, the war of militarized and brazenly corrupt policing in poor communities of color, and the post-9-11 War on Terror and its successive military and civilian assaults on majority-Muslim nations and on Muslims here and abroad.

Fearing and subjugating people of color in general and black people in particular has been elemental to American whiteness since that category’s very creation as a way to place the enslavers above the enslaved, and to, later, exclude Jewish, Italian, Irish, and other immigrants from official inclusion in white American ethnicity. Whiteness, a concept invented when European invaders needed to legitimize their homicidal occupation of the New World and their violent appropriation of free labor from Africa and the Caribbean, has served as an excuse for genocide and other atrocities on this side of the Atlantic since the 15th century. It continues to do so.

So let’s properly attribute responsibility. Trump did not create this monster. He just fed it raw meat.

Germany to Trump-era America: you are no longer our friend.

Der Spiegel, a globally-respected mainstream German publication, has now gone public with what others of America’s European partners have so far not wanted to declare out loud to the United States: You Americans elected this monster, and we in our country will no longer abide what your nation does at his bidding.

A May 11, 2018 Der Spiegel editorial, Time for Europe to Join the Resistance, sending shock waves through Western media and politics, said in part:

The West as we once knew it no longer exists. Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership. President Trump has adopted a tone that ignores 70 years of trust. He wants punitive tariffs and demands obedience. It is no longer a question as to whether Germany and Europe will take part in foreign military interventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is now about whether trans-Atlantic cooperation on economic, foreign and security policy even exists anymore. The answer: No.

Let that sink in: A leading ally of the United States – and a nation that already knows a good bit about where Trump’s America would like to go and is struggling with its own relapse in that direction – has just told us, as a country, to fuck off. Because of what we have allowed our nation to become.

We 21^st-century Americans need to get used to this pariah treatment. Our nation has earned it.

A large and growing segment of the world – not only the poorer and less powerful nations we have traditionally ravaged but also now our wealthy erstwhile global partners and peers – are horrified at what our American state has become under the loathsome, corrupt, racist, and bottomlessly amoral authoritarianism of President Donald Trump.

No American can any longer excuse Trump as an aberration, an electoral error of misplaced passion. Trump is a bona-fide and accurate reflection of our actual nation: savage in its hypocritical 400-year white supremacist expectation of conquest without consequence, lazy in its ignorance of the actual world, wickedly expedient in its acceptance of whatever lie might prolong its fantasy of mastery and unconditional prosperity.

Increasingly, the world sees this about the American state.

Our job as Americans is not only to know it, but to change it.

Here is the good news about Trump.

Since the 24-7 information feed from Western civilization’s fast-disintegrating way of life is disheartening beyond description, here, for you and me, are two facts about Trump of which we can remind ourselves in our daily struggles to both guard our inner lives against his toxicity and shut down his regime for good.

1.) The first, and maybe obvious, piece of good news is that, with few exceptions, people who have associated themselves with Donald Trump in his real estate/media/political career ultimately end up hating him and, often, wanting to hurt him. Like a mob boss with a memory disorder, Trump constantly creates new lethal enemies by simply being himself: a temptingly powerful but utterly crooked operator who will tell anyone anything and deny it the next day. Every month these days, the landscape is crawling with more characters who sold themselves out for Trump only to awaken gasping in swamp graves. Perennial enemies are worse than zombies: you can’t kill all of them.

2.) The second, and more broadly uplifting, good news is that American corporate rule, represented most ruthlessly by the Republicans (although the Democrats follow not too far behind as a timid second), has become so self-destructively greedy that it now has only two remaining plausible pitches it can make to try to dissuade the non-rich from storming the estates of the one percent. One of these last-ditch offerings is Trumped-up fake populism that admits that the system is rigged while offering ravaged post-industrial want-to-be-working people the same old disproven trickle-down lies of lower taxes for the rich and permissiveness toward dirty and rapacious industry. The other is white patriarchal fear and hatred toward women, blacks, browns, LGBTQ people, Muslims, and other targets for the displaced rage of a Caucasian American constituency that has subsisted on a manufactured sense of superiority for centuries. What is nefariously effective about the second option is that it not only distracts angry white people from attacking the rich but also alienates them from the very allies they need in order to have any hope of making America the fair and prosperous place they want it to be.

To be sure, this is one hell of a trap for non-rich Americans of all genders, colors, orientations, and backgrounds.

But it also shows that voracious corporate monarchy is just about out of options for successfully explaining itself to you and me as we pay the price for its suicidal destructiveness.

We can work with that opportunity.

Trump for the Nobel Prize? Another Joe McCarthy moment.

You may have heard: 18 Republican politicians have nominated President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his interplay with North Korea.

To quote a Twitter reply to journalist Andrea Mitchell’s call for Michelle Wolf to apologize for having publicly insulted Trump’s surrogate liar Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

In 1950, the venerable Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith – no liberal, she – had some choice words for cowards in her party who folded to the reign of another demagogic GOP fear-mongerer, Senator Joe McCarthy:

Certain elements of the Republican Party have materially added to this confusion in the hopes of riding the Republican party to victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.

Chase’s stand helped to eventually undo McCarthy’s reign of political terror. It’s another reminder that political cowardice in the face of a national bully is nothing new in America – and that blood-eyed resistance isn’t, either.

I’ve written about this on Truthout regarding Wolf’s April 28 scandalizing of the more timid among American corporate journalists with her ruthless skewering of Trump’s enablers, some of whom were in the room during her monologue.

We are now in a McCarthy moment, but what's worse is that the dominant demagogue is the president, not a senator. Cowards – like Paul Ryan, who kowtowed to the vile Trump for the sake of a policy win for the rich and who now scampers out of the game to duck the longer-term consequences – suck up to the momentary boss man and then dive for the sidelines when they see an opening.

Nobel Prize for Donald Trump? It will of course never happen. Scandinavia faced its own awful reckoning of cowardice versus courage 80 years ago under the rise of Nazism, and has not forgotten it. But for cowards the point isn’t in fulfilling a full agenda, it’s in cashing in on political expediency in order to buy themselves five more minutes or months of personal survival under the rule of a momentary despot.

That’s today’s Republican Party leadership: mice dragging fresh corpses to the cat.

Why Trump is the death of white men as we know them.

Smart people keep saying this but that’s because reality keeps shouting it: Trump is part of nature’s answer to the temporary global authority of white males who have massive treasuries and armies but tiny appendages of social perception.

There Trump is, braggingly brushing what he calls “dandruff” off the shoulder of French president Emmanuel Macron, a younger white male who thinks he can save the burning clubhouse, or at least inherit membership points. There Trump is, making his pear-shaped golf swing at his Florida swamp playground while he brays the planet into incompatibility with human life. There Trump is, lavishing sick job-starved white men with shamelessly wicked promises about coal mines and winning wars and grabbing women by their privates.

I fear it will get worse before it gets better. America, with its 18th-century patrician presumption of noblesse oblige, hasn’t yet had time to create a working model for addressing bad monarchs.

But make no mistake: Trump is the last titanic white man, the final Caucasian male officiate ranting oaths from the lifeboat, the end of the line for a brand of capitalist maleness that is rotting on the shelf in a rapidly-browning and broader-gendered market of humanity.

Every white male who cuts you off on the highway, or who floors his burp-tuned exhaust all the way to the next red light, or who votes to economically screw himself in order to savor a momentary blow at brownness or femaleness, is screaming, “This world is killing who I thought I was, and I don’t want to die.”

That goes with the territory when any animal stakes out unsustainable turf.

Being unaware of the world will kill you every time.

How Do We Get Rid of Trump?

Short of some single-minded soul’s borrowing one of Trump’s insinuations and giving him the Second Amendment treatment – which would place the United States at the mercy of the smarter and more efficiently hateful monster Mike Pence – what will it really take to rid ourselves of the lethal Trump regime?

Like a primordial predator that can kill with its eyes closed, Donald Trump is idiotically expert at destruction. His arsenal of continual chaos is, so far, keeping an entire society’s alleged defenses of due process at bay. Any one of them – the Mueller investigation is a good possibility – could bring him down. But, like any great con man, Trump is a deadly master of distraction and deflection.

So what will it take to rid ourselves of Trump and his terrible reign of supremacist rage?

• Trump voters, even the most demure, will need to own responsibility for having empowered wickedness that they claim to not embrace. It makes no difference that you’re “not a racist” or that you “don’t like the sonofabitch but liked some of his policies” or that you “just wanted somebody to shake things up.” As Charles Blow has said, in effect, if you voted for Trump after hearing the things he said he would do, you are now responsible for his having done them. This is on you, bamboozled white avengers. Own it.

• Liberal-leaning voters need to ditch, once and for all, the corporate incrementalist lie that we can’t risk a flat-out audacious, in-your-face progressive economic and political campaign in the next presidential election. If Trump’s success with a thoroughly phony but blisteringly audacious “the system is rigged” pitch – laced with virulent racism, no less – could win an election but lose the popular vote, a truthfully in-your-face progressive call to jettison what is broken and to champion what is fair in America can only do better. Progressives need to own that. We need to swat away the alleged leadership of the money-wedded Democratic Party. Through our own voicing of what most Americans continually say they need and want – universal health care, an end to big money in politics, higher wages for the non-rich and higher taxes for the rich – we need to rise, in the streets and online and in candidacies, and exert national leadership that the Democratic Party, if it is smart, might then follow.

• I’ll keep saying it: Americans need to redefine normal. “Normal” is not the silence that reporters and money-backed politicians subject us to about the constant atrocities of corporate control over public policy on health and education and policing and war. Normal should be, instead, a very public reckoning on those devastating realities. Trump cashed in on that trauma. Progressives can do far better than that for this country.

Fascism happens one agonized personal concession at a time.

This is the mistake we make: We think that the troops and the tanks and the ovens appear all at once, a firestorm of evil that we can track from a distance and wall out of our towns and our jobs and our decisions.

But these are the ways it actually happens:

• Your boss tells you to do what is ordered or lose the paycheck that keeps your kid out of jail or keeps your sick loved one out of the morgue.

• As an employee, you simply know, you are certain beyond all doubt, that a national leader this horrific cannot possibly last in a society like ours. So you keep your head down and you do what you are told. And you wait for it to end. And you wait. And wait.

• The incredible days of incredulous journalists reporting impossible things begin to blur together until it feels less and less unusual for the president to talk not just like a cynic or a crook, but like a madman.

• Police officers and soldiers, who swear to an oath that assumes that obedience to official authority in our society is a just cause, follow their oaths. For some uniformed recruits, the jackboots and shields of a bullying posse are irresistible perks.

• Politicians, who assume that the public deserves what it submits to, hold their noses and stow their valuables and follow their fortunes. Or they quit politics.

• Teachers teach what they are told to teach or, in growing numbers, they quit teaching.

• Health practitioners, including mental health specialists, make choices: they condemn and fight against the mad leadership and the physical and mental torture embraced by their freshly unleashed nation, or they calculate to aid and abet it, or they shut up about it.

• Reporters make choices, too: they defiantly report reality in the face of blacklisting by a regime of “alternative facts,” or they quit and denounce the amoral enterprise of filtered storytelling, or they smile and cooperate with the authorities.

We are all making these choices. Right now. So I am talking to myself as well as to you: Please. Do not confuse what is expedient with what is true.