On Educational Reform II

4.  Public education, as a manifestation of tax-financed formal schooling, is not a right but solely a liberty (i.e. a voluntary collective permission) of citizens in a jurisdiction that commits itself to the principle that an educated population is a positive good for both the quality of democratic discourse and the potentiality of entrepreneurially-driven economic growth and that the existence of such a population requires a tangible collective investment by the polity. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we benefit from a long history of public education, against which the figure of Horace Mann casts a long shadow. Serving as Secretary of the Commonwealth's Board of Education in the 1830s and 40s, Mann considered a free, universal, and secular/non-sectarian education by professional educators, thoroughly trained in pedagogical methods, committed to inculcation of democratic-republican values, and renouncing the use of corporal punishment as a classroom tool, as a fundamental right to the children of citizens in the Commonwealth. We can obviously dwell on the inherent limitations to the exercise of a such a right in Mann's lifetime, but such black marks need not devalue the larger legacy of his ideas and his commitment to work to expand tax financed formal schooling across the Commonwealth and to other states. Evaluated against Horace Mann's legacy, local municipal and state governments owe a substantial fiscal burden to young people within their jurisdictions to ensure that they are conferred an education that will secure their best interests as citizens and as contributors to economic development. To the contrary, I mean to argue here that, in the aftermath of tax revolts that, among other things, created the innovation of proposition two-and-a-half in Massachusetts (a Constitutional restriction on the expansion of property tax levees in Massachusetts municipalities), we cannot fully hold ourselves bound to the responsibility of public education as a right. Having converted our calculus of public school financing from one of inherent public responsibility to every child in the Commonwealth to one prefigured on a cost-benefit analysis, assessing the rates of return to investments in labor and capital on formal schooling against comparable investments in transportation infrastructures, trash removal and/or recycling, or services for the aged, we have, in effect, set the terms of a war of all against all in municipal fiscal policy management. As such, we must, emphatically, recognize that the terms of the debate have changed in the financing of formal public schools. Measured in reference to the economic success of students transitioning from formal k through 12 public schooling through higher education to a remunerative career field, we now assess the mission of formal public schooling in wholly economistic terms. Formal public schooling has become a "worker factory," where the public achieves a return to its investment if and only if the student realizes employment in a remunerative career field upon graduation or, at least, advances to an institutional of higher education from which he or she can realize employment in such terms. In this regard, the language of rights that might have been wholly appropriate to Horace Mann's project becomes horribly misplaced! Instead, we are confronted with a project contingent on the capacity of educators to deliver what tax payers expect to receive for their investment, whether they are directly hiring the educators and administrators of formal schooling or simply contracting with private producers of the formal schooling process.

5.  To the extent that we agree that investments in public education are tangible goods, we must further debate the character of public investments in education, including the problems of management, organization in the interests of labor, curriculum, pedagogical methodology, and standards for assessment of returns to the public investment in relation to the scale of the financial investment and the broader (ideological) goals sought by the public in its investment. Confronting the idea of tax-financed public schooling, k through 12, and the reform of the institution of public, tax-financed schooling demands a full recognition of the various dimensions of the institution as it currently exists, articulating how each dimension might be transformed to better approximate the realization of educational goals. Emphatically, for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, formal public k through 12 schooling has incorporated a hybrid system of traditional and charter schools since the passage of the Educational Reform Act of 1993. Licensed for operation and formal assessment on five-year thresholds, charter schools represent an entirely different approach to management, labor relations, curriculum, pedagogy, and formal evaluation/accountability in relation to traditional, local district schools, on both the primary (k through 8) and secondary (9 through 12) levels. Herein resides their appeal. On the one hand, they introduce critical degrees of pedagogical experimentation and curricular experimentation, and, on the other hand, they pose the potential for more flexible labor relations, enabling ineffective teachers to be readily discharged, contravening the inherent constraints of tenure/seniority for teachers under union contracts in traditional district public schools. At this point, I want to argue that such a mix of potentialities expressly appeals to divergent progressive and conservative perspectives otherwise favorable to educational reform agendas. Conservatives, rightly or wrongly, have consistently grounded their critiques of public education on the idea that tenure protections in collective bargaining agreements insulate poorly performing educators from dismissal. By contrast, from a relatively progressive perspective, I would argue that the primary benefit of diverging from traditional district school models resides in the potential for pedagogical experimentation, a benefit additionally posed in the concept of the "magnet school," otherwise traditional public schools constituted with a different, specialized curricular model and different pedagogical approaches.  
The critical problem here, in my view, concerns the capacity to engage in experimentation in new pedagogical and curricular models, diverging from standard lesson plans, preparation for standardized testing, and standard conceptions of essential curricular goals. If the collective body of citizens in Massachusetts would conclude that a basic-level comprehension of the English language, a basic understanding of mathematics, including elementary algebra, and, perhaps, an introduction to civics/American history/the responsibilities of citizens is absolutely critical for every young person educated in a formal school setting, then we might otherwise disagree about additional curricular thresholds. A charter school in a neighboring town operates on a Chinese-language immersion model, which I consider entirely appropriate not only for young people with parents of Chinese origin but also for students who might aspire to continue onto careers that might take them into East Asia - Mandarin, both in spoken and written forms, is sufficiently complex that any competent speaker needs to start learning the language at a young age. To the extent that we recognize the potential benefits of creating alternatives to "traditional," mainline educational curricula and pedagogy, even as we recognize that there are particular subsets of a larger standard curriculum that we hold as a baseline for all students to learn, local jurisdictions should look into the possibilities for policy experimentation, including charter schools.

6.  There is no necessary reason to accept a single pedagogical approach to formal schooling and abundant evidence to suggest that individuals respond to diverse pedagogical approaches with varying degrees of receptivity at different points in the process of formal schooling. Generally, a maximization of access to divergent pedagogical methodologies and fluid admissions/transferability between institutions might best promote educational goals.  

Absurd Criticisms of Clinton's Comedic Racial Insensitivities and Ignored Criticisms of Clinton's Inexplicable Appeal to African-American Voters

On inspecting news headlines this morning, I was surprised by the presence of a headline that Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio were being criticized for making a thoroughly botched attempt at racially insensitive humor at a political roast on Saturday night, proving once again that a humorless technocrat like Hillary shouldn't venture out on stage like she's Amy Schumer - when we finally elect Clinton President in November, it definitively won't be because she could have a majority of the American electorate rolling in the aisles with laughter better than Donald Trump (the mere notion of a Trump Presidency simultaneously make me chuckle uncontrollably even as it scares the shit out of me!!).  That said, I find it a little absurd that Clinton would be criticized for a failed attempt at humor over "colored people time," as if she was being utterly insensitive toward African-Americans.  Such criticisms are expressly silly and the Sanders campaign, especially on the eve of the New York Democratic primaries, shouldn't be indulging in them!!
                Having said this, an encounter last week in Philadelphia between former President (and future first Gentleman) Bill Clinton and some Black Lives Matter protesters, regarding the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act interests me much more, especially in regard to the margin of support that Hillary Clinton has enjoyed within the African-American community and, even more pointedly, among media commentators of the support that Hillary Clinton enjoys within the African-American community.  Expressly, I remain befuddled as to why Hillary Clinton was able to thoroughly run away with the Southern state primaries by massive margins against Sanders on the strength of her support within the Black community.  Dare I ask, are South Carolina and Mississippi two states in the union that the Black Lives Matter movement and recent media coverage on the killings of unarmed African-American suspects at the hands of White law enforcement officers have inexplicably missed?!  To be clear, there is no monolithic Black voting bloc within the Democratic Party, and I am not arguing that some imaginary Black Democratic voting bloc has a slate of issues that it is seeking to advance among Democratic Presidential candidates.  However, to the extent that a range of issues appear especially pertinent to African-American voters, among them law enforcement and criminal justice reform, educational reform and housing policy in urban communities, and environmental justice(EJ), I am oblivious to the appeal of either Secretary Clinton or Senator Sanders on this range of "African-American" issues.
           Both candidates have, over the larger primary campaign, mentioned reform of the federal criminal justice system, notwithstanding the marginal character of the federal government as a participant in the mass incarceration of African-Americans.  Neither candidate has, to my knowledge, advanced any aggressive measures to appeal to the EJ movement - in certain respects, the local character of EJ issues seems to suggest that, short of greater oversight over a broad range of polluting industries, a greater federal role in EJ may not be forthcoming anyway.  The preponderant support for public teachers' unions on the left wing of the Democratic Party, to which Sanders has been pushing Clinton over the course of their campaign, may preclude any significant focus by either candidate on aggressive educational reform measures outside of increased expenditures in support of local public education targeting disadvantaged communities, building on existing frameworks in educational reform (e.g. No Child Left Behind, etc.).  Finally, beyond aggressive enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI, governing housing discrimination, it seems improbable to me that either Clinton or Sanders would promote significant changes in federal housing policies directly impacting African-Americans in urban communities - a likely scenario involves vigorous (or vigorously publicized) reactions to well-publicized abominations affecting urban communities, like the widespread lead contamination of water supplies in Flint, Michigan.  If, in these respects, the policy slate of African-American voters has been largely ignored by the two leading Democratic candidates in the primaries and we can hardly expect that this will change during the general election campaign for the Democratic Party nominee, then we can hardly say that either Clinton or Sanders should maintain a robust appeal among African-American voters.
             Rather, the only explanation that I can advance for the success of Clinton among Southern African-American voters and among older African-American voters outside of the South remains the default option - such voters tend to lean toward a more moderate to conservative political position in relation to the national Democratic electorate as a whole.  The latent conservatism of such voters is especially connected to its religiosity, grounded in denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, and the National Baptist Convention.  In this manner, it makes sense that such African-American voters would be more inclined to throw their support toward a candidate that at least professes the Christian faith and maintains a relatively moderate slate of policy prescriptions rather than support a secular Jewish socialist with (on their face) radical policy prescriptions.  As such, it might not make as much sense to attribute as much of Clinton's success to her appeal toward African-American voters or racial/ethnic minorities, in general (or, for that matter, attribute Sanders' failure to appeal these demographics in racial/ethnic terms), than toward a particular, relatively conservative demographic, mistakenly classified in reference to race and/or ethnicity, under the big tent of the Democratic Party.  Sanders' record in appealing to African-American millennials in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin seems to suggest as much.
                 

On Educational Reform I

This post was initially premised as a contribution to current debates over education reform in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  As I began to rethink the current debate over educational standards and evaluations grounded on student performance between the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)/Common Core standards and earlier or newly developed versions of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam, I realized that the concerns that I had with educational reform in Massachusetts run much deeper than the grounds of the present debate.  For that matter, as an intellectual otherwise amenable to the idea of utilizing charter schools as a means for building greater heterogeneity into the public education process, I shoulder certain misgivings regarding the larger, market-oriented framework of consumer choice in public education currently being advanced as the primary argument for expanding the number of charter schools in the Commonwealth as an alternative to "standard" public education.  In the end, debates over educational assessment/accountability and over choice in public education fundamentally take certain rationales in the educational reform process for granted without undertaking a broader debate about where the education process fits within the economy, civic/political life, and cultural development of the Commonwealth.  Emphatically, we are taking for granted that public education constitutes, for all intents and purposes, the production of workers for the Massachusetts economy.  Insofar as the educational process certainly does have an economic rationale grounded in the development of a workforce capable of undertaking tasks that will sustain the vitality of a dynamic, Twenty-first century economy, including programming of electronic devices for automated manufacturing techniques, it further stands to reason that, if we allow the public educational process to degenerate into a "cradle to career" workers' training program, then we will condone the hijacking of public education by a strictly economistic logic that subordinates broader human developmental concerns, including citizenship, nurturing of artistic creativity, and the interpersonal socialization of young people, to the problem of employability upon graduation.  With my basic concern that the administration and reform of public education, from kindergarten through grade twelve, is becoming a subject of public debate along lines ensuring that economistic rationales always take precedent over other priorities in defining the mission(s) of the public education process, this post seeks to advance a larger vision of what public education is, what purposes it serves, and how it should be evaluated in the interest of ensuring that it serves the needs of the community that undertakes its establishment.  At this level of abstraction, the arguments advanced here will necessarily obtain cursory treatment.  The material broached in this post could occupy several book-length monographs.  My intention is not to be conclusive but to lay down a set of principles on which I think any discussion or debate over the direction of public education should be premised.

1.  The educational process, as the inculcation of accumulated curricula of ideas to students on a range of diverse fields of knowledge, fundamentally expresses the outcomes of political processes, determining the overall mission of education and the necessary standards for transmission of knowledge to students.  That is to say, in order for a process involving the transmission of ideas between individuals to be qualified as education, it must involve a broader, explicit or implicit, determination that the ideas being transmitted achieve some mission that the broader community or politically dominant groups consider definitive of the educational process.  Education is necessarily an outcome of political processes and the educational process necessarily works, at least in part, to reinforce existing power relations within a community, however large or small, diverse or homogeneous, democratic or authoritarian, the community is.  This is not to say that the truths expressed in the educational process are purely rhetorical objects of partisan control over docile, infinitely mutable minds or that educational processes can ever take place to the exclusion of other information transfers between individuals that do not qualify as educational matter.  Simply stated, the body of information that qualifies as educational matter derives from processes through which individuals or groups with the political capacity to evaluate ranges of ideas determine which ideas are important to convey to students.  This determination is fundamentally predicated on the principle that the transmission of these ideas will advance the welfare of the community, as determined by those with the power to make the determination of what is in the community's best interests.  This principle is sufficiently broad to encompass all scales at which decisions on curricula take place, whether we are talking about the determination, in the American context, of national educational standards in federal statutes or through collaborative processes between various state-level educational decision-makers (e.g. the Common Core initiative), or we are talking about decisions on curricula effected by home-schooling parents.  To the extent that we accept this general principle, the idea of educational reform is subsumed within a larger structure of decisions through which politically influential decision-makers in a given community (of any size) have already determined the mission and goals of education from diverse potential missions.

2.  The notion that education and formal schooling are not equivalent amounts to something more than a cliche, to be posted on a bumper sticker. Education is a lifetime endeavor, transcending the temporal boundaries of formal schooling. This conclusion should, likewise, be basic to my further argument. When an individual in their forties, like myself, is introduced to a new set of ideas, either through formal lecturing/training or by incidental or purposeful exposure to divergent information media, education is taking place. Examining this conclusion in reference to conclusion 1, we, emphatically, must recognize the political nature of the process taking place, even when the individual has freely chosen to be exposed to a certain set of ideas that reflects the efforts of their creator or disseminator to exercise authority in reframing the reality of the particular subjects involved in order to change the way the subject is perceived by the student. The education process, as a conjointly political and cultural process, in this sense, is absolutely coterminous with every dissemination of information, by every conceivable media, however mundane. If we accept this principle, then we must simultaneously truncate the larger subject of this document in order to prevent its degeneration into a larger discourse on epistemology writ large. In this document, I am not concerned with educational processes as they affect me, in my forties and, at least presently, out of any formal educational setting - my interest resides entirely in formal schooling, as a distinct educational process, and, more pointedly, on formal schooling from kindergarten through grade twelve (henceforth: "k through 12").  

3.  The financing of formal schooling is a secondary question except to the extent that public financing of formal, k through 12, schooling with tax revenues invokes concerns regarding the sufficiency of returns to public investments in the education of young people.  As a final, critical entry point to the broader argument that I intend to make in this document, it is fundamental that the educational process, in all of its divergent forms, involves expenditures of labor and capital that usually, though not always, demand a rate of return, frequently involving market processes.  With regard to formal k through 12 schooling, professional educators, possessing years of specialized schooling (with costs incurred at their expense), an evaluated formal practicum, and, perhaps, years of prior experience in the formal schooling process, demand a rate of return sufficient both to maintain a desired, if modest, standard of living and to reimburse the (increasingly less than modest) costs of their formal schooling (e.g. to compensate for the servicing of higher education debt!).  Such concerns, channeled through the collective bargaining power of public teachers' unions, in turn, elevate the concerns of tax payers that their investments, to compensate teachers and administrative staff and to finance infrastructure development, are yielding an adequate return in regard to educational goals.  Educational reform, as a legislative initiative at the state and federal levels, remains ultimately grounded in these latter concerns of local tax payers, filtered through policy debates in higher echelons of government on the best ways to support local educational processes at the least possible cost to higher level governmental authorities.  The public financing question, thus, becomes wholly intertwined with educational reform, as an agenda, to the extent that the latter seeks to tweak the educational process in ways that will render it more efficient relative to the investment of tax revenues for its purposes.  

Is Bernie Sanders the Racially Blind "White" Democratic Candidate?

This post is conceived as a response to Joan Walsh in The Nation ("What's Wrong With Bernie Sanders's Strategy," The Nation (3/21/16), at: http://www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-with-bernie-sanderss-strategy/).  Walsh, who apparently is an expert on the latent problem of trying to build a successful electoral strategy around the idea of winning White, working-class Reagan Democrats back to the Democratic Party, makes the argument that this is precisely the source of Sanders' failure to generate greater momentum among African-American voters in Southern Democratic primaries.  To take Walsh's argument a step further than she seems to be willing to take it, the sort of electoral mass that Sanders seeks to assemble to win Democratic primaries in economically marginalized constituencies in the South and in other less favored regions appears to be decisively split on racial lines, with African-Americans voting for Clinton and White working-class voters overwhelmingly sticking to the GOP and running into the arms of Donald Trump.  Who can help the confusion of working-class Whites?  Both Trump and Sanders appear as decisive and uncompromising enemies of free trade and globalization, generally!  Oddly enough, for the sake of at least maintaining some appeal along these lines, Clinton now opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that, in principle, I would support but, in its details, few people can because its details have in no way been clarified!  Proceeding thus, Trump appears to manifest himself as the implicit and never mentioned background to Walsh's piece, in the same sense that the initial White, working-class turn toward the GOP demanded Reagan.
               Being a post-structuralist Marxist thinker, this piece just screams out the larger conclusion that, notwithstanding all of the old-time united front strategies of the 1930s, there is no such thing as a monolithic working-class voter, either in the United States or anywhere else!  Conversely, it seems somehow to be my mission here to argue, as decisively as I can, that there are no monolithic White voters and no monolithic African-American voters in the Democratic primaries, their results notwithstanding (to say nothing about monolithic women voters!!).  That is to say, if we want to be truly serious about the demographics of the Democratic primaries, then we have to acknowledge the multifarious cross-cutting racial, ethnic, and gender specificities of the Democratic electorate, the relative appeal of particular policy positions by particular candidates toward particular constituencies, and the relative effects of mass media and social media on the electorate.  In these respects, it might be true that Sanders has not made a career in Washington by catering to traditionally African-American issues.  For that matter, neither has Hillary Clinton.  Walsh acknowledges substantially that Clinton's 2008 campaign for the nomination against Obama was oriented toward a Democratic "Southern strategy" to rebuild the "(Bill) Clinton coalition."  I may have missed something but it does not seem abundantly clear, at a time where the idea that "Black lives matter" has entered into debate in the mainstream American consciousness, that Hillary Clinton has ever embarked on a strategy that might, in some way, be characterized as an appeal to African-American voters.  In this respect, no, I don't buy Walsh's argument on Clinton's electoral strategy in 2016 - Clinton has done absolutely nothing in my view to command a decisive advantage against Sanders with African-American voters.  As such, I cannot help but say that when I saw the results of voting in South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, notwithstanding the pronouncements of political analysts, I could not help but question why so many African-American voters would have instinctively thrown their support to Hillary Clinton with nothing at least palpably suggested as a possible return to their support.
               In the end, two propositions seem clear to explain why Clinton has, to date, run away with African-American support in the Democratic primaries.  First, working-class African-American voters seem even less inclined than working-class White voters, especially in Southern states, to cast votes for a self-described "democratic socialist."  Second, working-class White voters, especially in Southern states, seem much more inclined to cross party lines to vote for Trump, Cruz, or other Republican primary candidates than to stick around to decide whether they want to choose between a corrupt Washington veteran from a Democratic political dynasty and an out-in-left-field radical socialist.  Either way, there is something to Walsh's notion that a working-class White strategy, at least in the Democratic primaries, is a dead end, but not as much as she seems to want to make of it.  Emphatically, African-American voters, especially in Southern Democratic primaries, are voting for Clinton because they perceive that they have no where else to go - what good is it ever going to do to listen to the promises of socialist?!  On the other hand, no one on the other side of the two-party divide is, in any way, singing their tune, even if Hillary Clinton isn't exactly Aretha Franklin!  In the end, I am not prepared to make a big deal about the racial dynamics of the 2016 Democratic primaries - Bernie Sanders might be the Democratic Socialist candidate in the race, but he is by no means the definitively White candidate, at least with respect to the positions embodied either on the Clinton or Sanders side of the contest.  There are other sources readily evident for the racial divide between the Democratic candidates, especially in the Southern primaries.    

On Terror in Brussels

Very briefly, it is extremely difficult to reiterate the point that the only short term ameliorative to Sunni Salafist terrorism by groups like the Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda is good police work to maintain surveillance on suspected violent extremists and, as much as possible, break up plots before their realization.  Such amelioratives are imperfect - some plots will not be stopped.  The prosecution of armed violence by sufficiently well-organized, financed, and secretive networks of individuals and groups, militantly committed to a particular vision of the world and willing to pursue its realization by all means necessary may, on occasion, yield extreme instances of carnage, despite the best efforts of law enforcement and civil defense authorities to prevent them.  There are, of course, more proactive alternatives, like aggressive military action in Southwest Asia, especially in Syria and Iraq but also in the Sinai peninsula and Libya, to breakup the emergent safe havens of IS and other groups.  And there are the extreme alternatives of closed borders and aggressive restrictions on the civil and religious freedoms of Muslims in Western societies, as if Islam, as a theological generality, is to blame for current patterns of violent extremism.  Evidently, the populations of every Western state, the U.S. included, are eager to specify an appropriate scapegoat for transnational violent extremism in order to prosecute its successful excision from the world, by isolation or prophylactic annihilation.  In this manner, it is difficult but necessary to argue that violence begets further violence, and selective exclusion in closed borders breeds internal xenophobia and external jealousy and enmity.  In Western society, we've spent two hundred years building a culture grounded in liberal internationalism, anticipating a borderless world of indiscriminate, free human civilization.  Western Europe is enduring a dark chapter in its history of standing as one under the principle that open borders and open democratic societies best realize economic development and nurture cultural heterogeneity and exuberance.  As a defender of such principles, I hope that we are not watching the Salafists win in destroying the light of open, liberal, pluralist democracy in a unified Europe, or even replacing such high values with unity on the perverted principle of a war against Islam.  Grieve the dead, pursue and prosecute the perpetrators, but leave the freedoms of peaceful believers intact and the borders open to refugees seeking a brighter future in a sphere of cultural and economic liberty and pluralist democracy.      

Mitch McConnell Doubling Down on the Republican Base: Why the GOP is racing for an utter train wreck

Apparently Mitch McConnell told CNN this morning that this Senate will not even consider approving Merrick Garland for a seat on the Supreme Court in its lame duck session after the general election.  Moreover, he stated unequivocally that he would support the GOP Presidential nominee whoever that nominee turned out to be, implying that he would be OK weathering the fortunes of a Trump nomination against Hillary Clinton.  To the extent that he and Paul Ryan stand as the GOP's two most obvious federal stand bearers in an election year when the Republican Party base has seemed determined in state level primary and caucus fights to buck national leadership, it is worth considering why someone of Mitch McConnell's stature would be so dogmatically determined to set the national GOP on a course for certain self-demolition!  Either McConnell senses that he and his party may discover an opportunity to veer off from a catastrophe and save face before the general election or, in view of his ostentatiously bellicose and aristocratic ethos and doctrinaire faith in the conservative mindset of a rapidly dissolving White, Anglo national electoral majority, he somehow cannot comprehend that his party stands preciously little chance of winning in November.  The third possibility, obviously commanding significant attention among incumbent Republicans in Washington, is that the persistent nurturing of a radically participatory rightist base, most recently with the development of the Tea Parties, has institutionally driven federal Republican leadership to a position where they recognize that it will be impossible to secure the reelection of incumbent Congressional office holders if they do not curry favor to the most intransigent views of the radical right, opposing any measure of compromise and bipartisanship with Congressional Democrats and Obama administration.  Succinctly, to the extent that this certainly seems to be the gist of McConnell's strategizing, it seems certain to be a losing strategy for the GOP - their base cannot deliver the Presidency in the general election and they may not even be able to secure contested Senate seats in Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Hampshire.  As many other political analysts have astutely noted, the GOP is becoming its own self-contained, myopic political universe, where American ethnicity/race, politics, and culture remain suspended in the 1950s and where the effects of unrestrained government retraction on economic policy, manifest as an unremitting deepening of inequality in opportunity and income, are occluded by an absolutely faith that governmental intervention is the single greatest source hindering American economic growth.  In the latter respect, Trump's opposition to free trade, however simplistically articulated, may constitute the first step of a Republican Party Presidential candidate to challenge neoliberal economic orthodoxy on the politics of the global economy.  Indisputably, McConnell is signing himself onto a partisan slate that cannot win, even among its most adamant Wall Street supporters.  A Republican Party that succeeds in assuming its destiny of becoming the party of an older, rural, White, isolationist America is ultimately consigning itself the fate of becoming virtually irrelevant in determining the course of the country as we continue to venture against the challenges of the early Twenty-first century.  In the absence of any true alternative to Clinton's version of the Democratic Party, we need to ask what direction politics will take across the American political mainstream as we become more global, more ethnically diverse, more economically liberal/neoliberal, less religious, and, generally, less demographically and politically homogeneous.  I feel certain that there is no future for the GOP in its current form in this burgeoning America, but I await a better alternative than Clinton and her party!    

Grandpa Bernie will fix everything!! Reflections from Super Tuesday 2016 in Massachusetts

Very briefly, I want to convey a set of hopeful, if mildly cynical and irreverent reflections on the Super Tuesday primaries and the state of both parties.

1.  At least from the looks of things in Hampshire County and the reflections of younger co-workers in Greater Springfield, Bernie Sanders will take the Massachusetts Democratic primary, if by a razor thin margin, against Secretary Clinton.  The Massachusetts Democratic primaries should be thoroughly irrelevant to the larger conclusion of the Democratic primary season - Hillary Clinton is going to win her nomination off the backs of African-American voters in the South and elderly voters in the coming weeks in Florida, even if she has to struggle for working class Whites in razor thin margins for Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin against Bernie in the coming weeks!  I don't know how Minnesota is going to vote today, but the caucus structure does not seem to be in Bernie's favor (I could be wrong).  Colorado could slide Bernie's way if Boulder has its way (don't count on it!).  Either way, Clinton will cruise out of today's primaries and caucuses with a heavy lead.  She'll run away with Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas, a brutal enough beating for Bernie to crawl into the Midwest primaries wounded, clear victories in Massachusetts and Vermont, notwithstanding.  (OK, from the morning after, no such luck for Grandpa Bernie in the Bay State!  Wrong again; just too many Democratic insiders in metropolitan Boston pulling for Hillary.)  

2.  Trump will run away with the Deep South, Cruz will squeeze out Texas, Rubio will look very respectable in Georgia and Virginia, Kasich will eek out second place in Vermont and Massachusetts, and every Republican insider will spend the next week, like they spent the last week, wondering how the hell to defeat Trump in order to save the party!  Once again from the morning after, who knew Rubio would win the Minnesota caucuses, and what does it tell us about Trump's appeal within the GOP?  Why are things different in Michelle Bachmann's backyard?  Just the nature of the caucus process?  Trump ignore the Minnesota electorate in the run up to Super Tuesday?  Or do Republican voters in Minnesota possess a strange foresight, comprehending that there is no way that a Trump nomination can win the Presidency for the GOP?  Ben Carson is now, apparently, officially gone.  Kasich might as well be - he may be able to hold out for the Michigan primary, but he stands no chance of winning it.  Rubio had better hope to win his home state.  Cruz needs to make a dent in the Plain states and the Rockies.  Outside of these states, Cruz stands no chance against Trump.  

3.  No candidate that has to take time to figure out whether he wants to play footsy with acknowledged racist, White supremacists in order to curry favor with the radical right wing is ever going to be elected President of the United States in this period of our history!  Trump is winning by summoning a particular angry, anti-establishment dynamic within the Republican Party.  Effectively, he is pulling in the Tea Party crowd, denying these supporters to Cruz and Rubio, who might otherwise split the super-conservative vote.  Oddly, however, Trump is appealing to groups within the White population that Sanders is appealing to on the Democratic side, notwithstanding the radical degree of difference between the messages conveyed by the two campaigns.  Sanders appeals to the hopes of poor, working class White Democrats who look wistfully at the promise of a return to the New Deal and the Great Society.  Trump appeals to the fear and hatred of Republicans in the same economic dynamic, looking for someone to blame for their economic woes and anxieties, to which they resist the notion that governmental action might improve their lives.  The problem is that, when you pull this crowd in on this sort of a message, with nuanced racial imageries in tow, you end up also attracting the out-of-the-closet racists from the Deep South and Midwest.  If someone like Trump has to take a few minutes to realize that an endorsement from David Duke, telling all red blooded Anglo-Saxons to go out and cast your fortunes with the Republican front runner, is an endorsement that he needs to renounce, then he cannot expect to win a general election with an electorate that is looking exceedingly less White by the day.

4.  Acknowledging when I'm wrong! Bloomberg is going to stay out of the Presidential race if Hillary Clinton comes out in complete control of the Democratic nomination process from Super Tuesday - a Bloomberg run will only help a tragically absurd and immoderately insane Trump nomination on the Republican side, and Michael Bloomberg is too smart and too patriotic to risk a national catastrophe!!