Trump’s victory only confirms that the Democratic Party as it stands is a corporate fundraising machine that doesn’t speak to the needs of working people. We need to build a party that actually represents the working class.
This piece first appeared at RobertReich.org

As a first step, I believe it necessary for the members and leadership of the Democratic National Committee to step down and be replaced by people who are determined to create a party that represents America – including all those who feel powerless and disenfranchised, and who have been left out of our politics and left behind in our economy.

The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it. We need a people’s party – a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican party, which is about to take over all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a New Democratic Party that will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.

What happened in America Tuesday should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

At the core of that structure are the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers; the major media, centered in New York and Washington DC; the country’s biggest corporations, their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington; and the wealthy individuals who invest directly in politics.

At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.

Paul Krugman: Our Unknown Country

We still don’t know who will win the electoral college, although as I write this it looks — incredibly, horribly — as if the odds now favor Donald J. Trump. What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.

We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.

We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.

It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.

I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible. I guess we have to pick ourselves up and try to find a way forward, but this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair.

People filled the overflow section of the Javits Center where Hillary Clinton is holding her election night event in New York City. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

NYT/By Paul Krugman

The idea that the working class is a lost cause becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Democratic Party.
Last year, two Princeton University scholars reported a startling development: a sharp rise in the mortality rate among middle-aged white people. The increase meant about 500,000 more deaths between 1999 and 2013 than if the mortality rate had continued to fall at the same rate as in years prior. The primary causes, the scholars noted, were drug use and suicide, along with alcoholism and related diseases. The spike in deaths was especially sharp among people with a high school degree or less.

Those findings were widely reported. They coincided with Donald Trump’s emergence as the star of the GOP primary race, and they helped to establish the narrative for this race. It was easy to connect the dots between the grim statistics and the rising popularity of Trump, a reality TV star who claims to speak for people who’ve been marginalized and dispossessed in America—in other words, the working class.

The problem? That simple storyline doesn’t withstand much scrutiny.

It’s true that Trump voters are overwhelmingly white and tend to have less formal education than Democratic voters. But they aren't primarily “working class” if that’s defined by income. A senior economist with Gallup, Jonathan Rothwell, studied the data and found that, “if anything, more affluent Americans favor Trump, even among white non-Hispanics.” That analysis squares with median household income estimates of voters done by FiveThirtyEight, based on exit polling in the primary season. For Trump voters, it was $72,000. Among Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders voters, it was $61,000. The median household income for the states studied was $56,000.

What is unnerving in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s march to authoritarianism is how dismally familiar it is: the coup that becomes a pretext for a massive roundup of real and imagined enemies; the claims to be the one man who can withstand the onslaught of foreign foes; the invocation of purported historical slights; the silencing of the news media. The world has seen this before in other countries. The pattern is tried and true; the tough question is how to break it.

Over the weekend, Turkish authorities shut down 15 pro-Kurdish news outlets, including the only national Kurdish-language daily. An additional 10,000 civil servants joined the ranks of those who have been fired since a coup attempt in July. And on Monday, the editor in chief of Cumhuriyet, one of the few remaining opposition newspapers in Turkey, was detained along with at least a dozen other executives and journalists. And so it goes.

People whose livelihoods can turn with an election can't afford to wait for a third party to rescue them.
IN THE 40 YEARS THAT IN THESE TIMES HAS SPOKEN TRUTH TO POWER, few topics have generated more spirited discussion among its readers and writers than how the Left should relate to the Democratic Party: whether to challenge the neoliberal establishment from within or to build a competing political structure from without. This is an old debate, but carries more relevance and urgency today than ever, given the rise of a neofascist Republican presidential nominee.

A core mission of left movements is to promote the interests of working-class and marginalized communities. Yet for many such communities, this debate is far removed from everyday realities. People whose livelihoods can turn with an election don’t have the luxury to wait for a messianic third party—or a political revolution, for that matter—to rescue them. As just one example, for those making minimum wage, this election could make the difference between their pay plummeting (if Trump carries through on abolishing the federal floor of $7.25 per hour) or doubling (if Hillary Clinton makes good on the Democratic Party platform promise, pushed through by the Sanders campaign, to raise the minimum to $15). On purely humanitarian terms, progressives must help ensure relief for vulnerable communities by voting without apology for the candidate—yes, Hillary Clinton—who will embrace a minimum wage hike.

There are strategic reasons for doing so, as well. In this election, polls show that African Americans and Latinos overwhelmingly favor Clinton. To engage these communities in movement-building, progressives must listen to them. We cannot say, “To hell with your fears. We know best what’s best for you.” The total rejection of the candidate who is supported by a significant segment of the progressive base undercuts the mutual trust necessary for such a conversation.

Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign indicates that the Democratic Party can be pushed left. Thanks to the Sanders campaign, the Democrats embraced the most progressive platform in their history.

In the summer of 1964, Bob Dylan released his fourth album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” which includes the track “It Ain’t Me Babe.” “Go ’way from my window/Leave at your own chosen speed,” it begins. “I’m not the one you want, babe/I’m not the one you need.”

That fall, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre played a variation on the same tune in a public statement explaining why, despite having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he would not accept it. “The writer,” he insisted, must “refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances.” Mr. Dylan was talking to an imaginary lover, Sartre to an actual Swedish Academy, but the message was similar: If you love me for what I am, don’t make me be what I am not.

We don’t know whether Mr. Dylan was paying attention to l’affaire Sartre that fall 52 years ago. But now that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he seems to be following in Sartre’s footsteps. Indeed, Mr. Dylan has done the philosopher one better: Instead of declining the prize, he has simply declined to acknowledge its existence. He hasn’t issued a statement or even returned the Swedish Academy’s phone calls. A reference to the award briefly popped up on the official Bob Dylan website and then was deleted — at his instruction or not, nobody knows. And the Swedes, who are used to a lot more gratitude from their laureates, appear to be losing their patience: One member of the Academy has called Mr. Dylan’s behavior “impolite and arrogant.”
There is a good deal of poetic justice in this turn of events. For almost a quarter of a century, ever since Toni Morrison won the Nobel in 1993, the Nobel committee acted as if American literature did not exist — and now an American is acting as if the Nobel committee doesn’t exist. Giving the award to Mr. Dylan was an insult to all the great American novelists and poets who are frequently proposed as candidates for the prize. The all-but-explicit message was that American literature, as traditionally defined, was simply not good enough. This is an absurd notion, but one that the Swedes have embraced: In 2008, the Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, declared that American writers “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” and are limited by that “ignorance.”

Still, it’s doubtful that Mr. Dylan intends his silence to be a defense of the honor of American literature. (He did, after all, accept the Pulitzer Prize for “lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”) No one knows what he intends — Mr. Dylan has always been hard to interpret, both as a person and as a lyricist, which is one reason people love him. But perhaps the best way to understand his silence, and to praise it, is to go back to Sartre, and in particular to Sartre’s concept of “bad faith.”

Defeating Trump is No. 1. But holding a Clinton administration accountable to the left is a close second.
BY Kate Aronoff
“I'm in a room full of women,” Yong Jung Cho, an organizer with #AllOfUs2016, said during Wednesday night’s presidential debate, “and we all audibly gasped and cringed at (Donald) Trump's response on abortion. Women will make our own decisions about our own bodies, lives and we'll happily defeat Trump in November.”

“Each time he is confronted about how disgusting or dangerous he is, he deflects and talks about something he thinks white voters think is more dangerous than he is: ISIS, Mexicans, undocumented people, Black people and immigrants,” she said. “It's clear. Trump never apologizes and he will never take responsibility for his actions and words.”

Cho was one of hundreds of women around the country this week to protest “Cheeto Voldemort,” as one activist’s sign called the Republican nominee. She helped pull together a demonstration in Washington, D.C., at the Trump International Hotel, just down the road from the White House. At least 15 “GOP Hands Off Me” and “Pussy Grabs Back” actions are scheduled to happen around the country by week’s end, led by women and—in some cases—survivors of sexual assault. Several more protests are being planned through election day.

The names of the protests are a reference to Trump’s 2005 brag to “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush that he grabs women “by the pussy” without consent, because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Signs at demonstrations in different cities riffed on the concept, quipping “This Pussy Votes.” Another sign, in a nod to a hit song by Beyoncé, announced “Pussies in Formation.”

Upon hearing the Trump tapes, Brigid Flaherty, an organizer in New York’s labor movement, went into rapid response mode. She got on the phone with two other women she knew from doing racial and immigrant justice work and started planning a “multi-racial feminist response to this moment.”

“He’s shown his cards his entire run,” Flaherty says about Trump. But the tapes, leaked this month, made it a “much more deeply personal moment.”

Flaherty told In These Times that “the way that rape culture was exposed hit me in the gut. I needed to be in a space with women to express that anger and to show that we’re fighting back.”

Donald Trump turned, in the third and final presidential debate, from insulting the intelligence of the American voter to insulting American democracy itself. He falsely insisted there were “millions of people” registered to participate in the election who did not have the right to vote and declared he would not commit to honoring the outcome.

Hillary Clinton was clearly shocked that he was attacking the very foundation of the republic, the American tradition of peacefully transferring power. “That’s horrifying,” she said, rightly. At one point, Mr. Trump even said, outrageously, “She shouldn’t be allowed to run.”

The presidential debate was another exercise in narcissism, bombast and mendacity by Mr. Trump. One could only hope that this might be the last grand display of his gross unfitness to be president.

Mr. Trump arrived at the debate in Las Vegas after days of making venomous attacks on the democratic process, and by implication, the voters’ ability to make sound choices. Asked about whether he would accept the election result, he tersely answered, “I will look at it at the time.” In rejecting his answer, Mrs. Clinton noted that Mr. Trump is a chronic complainer when he loses, even in an Emmy award competition. But applying his loser’s lament to an American presidential election is a far different proposition than whining about a TV show. “He is talking down our democracy,” Mrs. Clinton warned.

Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton clashed over Mr. Trump’s favorable view of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. She pointed out that Russian hackers have been traced by numerous government intelligence agencies as the source of leaks undermining the Democratic Party and the American election. Mr. Trump defended the Russian leader, insisting he had no close relationship with him, but that Mr. Putin had “outsmarted” Mrs. Clinton “every step of the way.”

Hungary’s anti-immigrant referendum last week was declared invalid because less than half of the electorate turned out. But it is distressing that 3.3 million voters, or more than 98 percent of those who cast ballots, favored the proposal by Prime Minister Viktor Orban to reject European Union requirements that the country accept its share of refugees.

Mr. Orban, the autocratic leader of one of the right-wing parties stoking fears in Europe, spent $36 million in government funds and risked considerable political capital on the referendum. He was seeking a mandate to pursue his exclusionary policies and push the bloc to restructure itself to return more power to individual nations. He now says he will try to achieve those goals with a constitutional amendment. Voters should reject that approach.

There is no doubt that Europe and the European Union are facing a crisis, with terrorist attacks and a staggering influx of refugees at a time of high unemployment. The result is that many Europeans have lost faith in their government institutions and turned to populist movements or nationalist leaders like Mr. Orban who promise to protect their jobs, way of life and security by closing national borders and rejecting pan-European solutions.

European leaders clearly must do better at problem-solving and restoring that faith if the bloc is to survive. In March, they reduced the refugee tide by making a deal with Turkey, and on Wednesday they announced a deal with Afghanistan that would send tens of thousands of Afghans back home. But these are partial, temporary answers. Commitments to more equitably share the responsibility for millions of people fleeing conflicts are urgently needed.

Mr. Orban’s approach would put a unified solution further out of reach. The trigger for his referendum was a modest European Union plan to relocate 160,000 people throughout the bloc to relieve pressure on Greece and Italy, the main entry points for migrants. Hungary, which was a major transit point during last year’s migrant crisis, was asked to take 1,294 asylum seekers, a manageable number for a nation of nearly 10 million.

Officials in Hungary have stoked fears by describing the largely Muslim refugee population as a security risk. Mr. Orban framed his referendum as an attempt to defend Europe’s “Christian values.” There seems to be no recollection of how, in 1956, other countries welcomed roughly 200,000 Hungarians fleeing the failed uprising against Communism.

And so we have now heard the Republican nominee for president of the United States bragging about repeated sexual assault.

Donald Trump — a man who aspires to represent the highest ideals of the nation to his fellow citizens and the world — is heard on a videotape obtained by The Washington Post talking about how he would force himself on women. He could even grab them between their legs, he boasted.

“And when you’re a star they let you do it,” he said.

In a statement released after the video became public on Friday, Mr. Trump tried to minimize the conversation as “locker room banter.” As if the problem were just his words rather than his actions.

“I apologize,” he added, “if anyone was offended.”

If? Well, maybe it’s reasonable for him to wonder. This is a man who has said many outrageous things, after all, proudly violating all conventions of civic discourse with gutter attacks on women and the disabled, immigrants and minorities. He said that Senator John McCain was not a war hero and that fat women were disgusting.

Yet, those kinds of remarks have not deterred the millions of Americans who fervently support him. And the Republican establishment has remained staunchly in his corner. So it is perhaps quite understandable that Mr. Trump might wonder whether anyone might be so sensitive as to actually be offended.