By the Promise of These Things

On the one hand, living under the Trump administration is something of a god-send to a political and historical junkie like me. I've always been fascinated by how republics devolve into dictatorships; from Rome to the Weimar Republic, the line between representative democracy and a totalitarian regime has always been thinner than it's made out to be. On the other, there's the fact that the U.S. is becoming the tinpot dictatorship it always wanted to be in its heart-of-hearts and there's only so much that can be done to stave off that sense of disappointment and dread.

Take for example the recent decision of the NFL in regards to players protesting the national anthem. On Wednesday the NFL said that it would fine any club that had players kneeling during the national anthem and if any players felt the need to protest, they could do so by staying in the locker room.  Remember, the whole reason this started is that Colin Kaepernick wanted to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and protest the dismissive way the media and government treated the victims of police shootings and other state violence. So now, two years later, the NFL's official response is that anyone who wants to protest the erasure of black people's humanity when the state kills them must do so off camera, out of sight and out of mind.  Irony is a doozie sometimes.

Of course, this was entirely predictable. There's nothing the NFL hates more than its image of the perfect American past time being punctured by the reality of how it behaves and manages its players, so of course their response would be to shunt any player who wanted to express their conscience into the darkest corner they could get away with. But there's a deeper part to this, which is why I'm focusing on a seemingly irrelevant thing like a sports league telling its athletes to know their place and stay in it.

 In terms of cultural relevance, football as supplanted baseball as America's nationalistic sport. The NFL has done all it can to wrap itself in the symbols of America- namely, the flag and the military- at every opportunity to get fans to associate the feelings of loyalty, fealty, and admiration they have for the flag with the game itself. And it's been widely successful in doing so.

What the NFL is tapping into is something called the American civil religion, which, in a nutshell, treats the symbols of civil government with religious fervor. The Constitution is the bible as given to the holy disciples the Founding Fathers, the military are the priests with the rank of the soldier being equivalent to the rank in the church (i.e. a private is a local pastor, generals are cardinals), and the flag is the Crucifix. 

So when Kaepernick takes a knee during the anthem, he isn't expressing a political point by exercising his 1st-amendment right, no, he's a heretic, a blasphemer, a vandal desecrating all that is sacred, forcing the faithful to take in all the gory details of his defilement. That is why the immediate reaction of all the people who buy into this type of brainwashing is to tell people "If you don't like it, get the hell out of America!" To them, there's no disconnect or hypocrisy in lauding America has the Greatest Country To Ever Exist because they can do things like criticize the government whenever they want to foaming at the mouth when someone actually uses that right to meaningfully criticize the government.

Because to them, and that mode of of thinking, the Bill of Rights aren't political franchises to be enthusiastically exercised, they're symbols of a magnanimous government handing them their freedoms, the best expression of which is for the citizenry to hand them right back, to agree not to exercise them or use those rights too diligently, because the government willing to grant those freedoms is proof enough that it is deserving of an unquestioning fealty.  K

Kaepernick and anyone else who make a point of loudly and insistently proclaiming all the ways America chooses to fail its promises of liberty and justice for all are traitors, violators of the sacrament and has such must be shunned, discredited, or exiled so their heresy will not corrupt the faithful.

If this all seems too outlandish on my part, think about this: When the President said that any player who took a knee should be fired and called them sons of bitches, he got immediate cheering from a group of thousands. Think about how any time you've had a conversation about this there's always that one person who immediately and furiously insists that the protest is disrespectful to the flag and the military and refuses to consider any other opinion. And then think about how you would feel if someone started talking in derogatory terms about whatever faith you belong to and see if the feelings you have towards that imaginary person don't seem really familiar to those conversations about football.

The other thing that has my wheels spinning is the Trump administration's announcement that from here on out they'll be separating children from their parents if the family is found to be crossing the border illegally. The parents would be detained, prosecuted, and serve prison sentences if convicted while the children are whisked off to wherever the government can dump them. 

The whole point of this, obviously, is to send the message to anyone thinking of coming here to stay home because if they get caught, we'll take their children away for years on end while they languish in prison and detention centers before they get booted back to wherever they came from. This is cruelty for cruelty's sake, to make the U.S. so barbaric a place to make anyone thinking they'll find a better life here seriously reconsider that. And, of course, his supporters love this.

Which brings me to a point that's been long-simmering in my mind. I've always been highly skeptical of remaining friendly or affable to Trump supporters and to act like they support him for reasons that don't involve bigotry. Economic anxiety got tossed around a lot in the early days, but when reporters talked to coal miners and other blue-collar workers that were supposedly swayed by Trump's economic message that they were left behind by uncaring elites and he would bring their jobs back, they were all decidedly nonplussed about that and were especially upfront about the fact that they never expected Trump to bring their jobs back and didn't expect anything to change for the better. So, if the people who were allegedly won over by Trump's economic populism are throwing cold water over that idea, what does that leave us with?

Well, as multiple studies have shown, the primary reason people voted for Trump was out of racial resentment and a loss of status. This is an important fact to reckon with because pretty much every strategy I've seen with people trying to win over Trump supporters is to get them to empathize with the targets of his bigotries or point out that his economic policies like the tax cuts and deregulation don't provide any material benefit to them. 

As we've seen though, the economic aspect is irrelevant when push comes to shove, and asking his supporter's if they think he's going too far in his disparagement of black athletes, Hispanics, and all immigrants, well the answer, by default, is going to be "No."

All the things that any decent person would stop and think "Wow, these are terrible things to do/say about people" are exactly what his supporters want him to be doing. Obviously, this has a lot of implications for how we handle things right now, but gets even more troubling when you think about what it means going forward.

The biggest reason I've ever heard for trying to maintain relationships with Trump supporters is the refrain that he won't be President forever and we need to hold on to those people for the time after Trump. Again, I've always been dismissive of this because, in a word, there is no after. From the moment he came down that escalator and declared his intent to run for the Presidency, Trump has been held in awe of the Republican voter base.  Currently, his approval rating among Republicans sits at 85%, and has floated up and down the 80's all through his presidency.  So if his base voted for him out racial resentments, and overwhelmingly approve of what he's doing and how he's doing it, why, exactly, would anyone believe those attitudes would just disappear when he's no longer in office?

This delusion stems from something much deeper though, the lie that is at the heart of Trump's political career. It's not any of the multitudes that have come out of his mouth, no. Rather, it's one that we've told ourselves from the moment it became clear he would win the Republican nomination and one that is still carried over and repeated to this day.  

That lie is that Trump is an aberration, an outlier, a corruption of what we stand for and what our politics is meant to accomplish. Which, as I've gone over more than once on this blog, just isn't true. Obama separated families that crossed the border illegally and kept them in abysmal prison condition with limited access to medical and legal services in an attempt to deter other Central American refugees to make the trek North, so, uh, points for being quiet about it, I guess? Also, it's hard to take seriously Trump's "unprecedented" assault on the press when Obama and Bush both locked up reporters and their sources when it came to damaging national security stories. Breaking the Iran deal is just another in the international laws we helped create that we then abandoned.

So, yeah, you can pretty easily argue that Trump is escalating some of the worst trends about how our government functions, but doing so means you have to admit that those problems existed before Trump and our main objections to the Trump era are driven more by our disgust at Trump's boorish personality than any deep-seated ethical concerns.

This is actually what I think is the most insidious aspect of Trump's legacy, that the country as a whole allows itself to be pulled into his narcissism and pretend that everything about his campaign and election win just materialized out of nowhere, has nothing to do with anything that's ever happened before, and is solely the result of Trump and Trump alone. And since there's nothing America loves doing more than letting itself off the hook for its bullshit, I think that's exactly what we're going to do and then be dumbfounded when it happens all over again. If we were more honest with ourselves, I'd consider that a tragedy, but, since we insist on being as dumb as humanly possible, well, I guess we'll just get what we deserve.

There's Not Much Left to Lose

It's been a while since I've picked on someone writing something stupid in The New York Times so I feel like I have to thank  Greg Weiner's and his terrible op-ed "When Liberals Become Progressives, Much Is Lost" for giving me such a great opportunity.

The basic theme of the article is that the trend of Leftists in recent years to identify as "progressive" rather than as "liberal" is a bad and unfortunate trend, since it leads to a more dogmatic political stance that makes people less interested in Compromise.  He argues that since progressives view progress as an unmitigated and unlimited good, it means they'll stop at nothing to achieve said progress and will pay whatever price they need to get it, regardless of who is hurt in paying the cost.  

He tries, limply, to cite historical examples like Woodrow Wilson as the "bad" example of what progressivism looks like and compares him to the "good" liberal that is FDR.  This is weird because if you wanted to cite a historical figure of what devil-may-care, turn the system upside down kind of attitude, FDR's cousin Theodore is a much better pick than Wilson.  Seriously, there's hardly any other President who went to work dismantling the monopolies of big business than Theodore Roosevelt, so for Weiner to pick the rather staid in comparison Wilson is just, odd.  There's also the small problem that FDR's contemporaries didn't view the New Deal as some sort of safe, middle-of-the-road political exercise; rather, they viewed it as yet another Roosevelt taking dangerous government action to upend the natural order of things (he wasn't called a traitor to his class for nothing). But what I think is the more relevant issue here is that Weiner is able to come to these conclusions- like everyone else who writes "the left shouldn't be too leftist, because Compromise" pieces- because he insists on making his analysis in a vacuum of context.

For example, he writes that "[n]othing structurally impedes compromise between conservatives, who hold that the accumulated wisdom of tradition is a better guide than the hypercharged rationality of the present, and liberals, because both philosophies exist on a spectrum."  Once you get past Weiner's exquisite ability to state the obvious, you may began to realize that he apparently hasn't gotten out much in the last say, thirty years or so.  Because you know what does seem like a structural impediment to conservatives and liberals compromising with each other?  Mitch McConnell refusing to even hold a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee in the last year of Obama's presidency.  Or a then-minority leader McConnell saying that his most important goal was to make Obama  a one-term president and then proceeded to obstruct every initiative the president put forth.  

On top of all that, you know what really helps in the whole building compromise industry? A shared understanding of reality and facts.  So when you have an entire media landscape that study after study has found left its consumers less informed of the world around them, or as a significant determinator in whether or not a person will believe climate change and evolution are real or fake.  It's sort of difficult to build consensus on the best way to deal with a problem when the other half of the political spectrum believes that the problem you're trying to solve is either a Chinese hoax or a secret plot of the New World Order to take away their freedom. Apparently for Weiner  these rather obvious structural impediments aren't important because as long as you insist on looking at Left and Right as points on a spectrum and not how they actually exist in the real world, it's much easier to make the point that identifying as progressive is the most pertinent threat to the country's political order.

Just as a quick diversion, I want to touch on 4Weiner's romantic definition of conservatism.  Saying that they believe the accumulated wisdom of tradition is better than any current philosophy makes them seem like they're kicking their legs up in a hay barn singing the word "Tradition!" over and over again; but that's heavily misleading.  The thing that conservatives are conserving is traditional economic, social, and political hierarchies.  So that's why in the late-18th century and up to the revolutions of 1848 when citizens began demanding things like constitutions and guaranteed rights from the monarchies they lived under, conservatives responded by crushing them with all the force they could muster to protect the royal crowns.  The whole idea of conservatism is that the people who already have power should keep that power and that any enfranchisement of marginalized peoples should come in piecemeal, insignificant ways if it ever comes at all.  To pretend like conservatism is some benign, "we just want to use traditional methods to solve new problems" ideology is grossly misleading and just flat out lazy.

Anyway, the other big problem that Weiner has in this column is that he never really engages in what the progressive movement he's taking so much time to demonize actually wants to do.  He drones on and on about how the unimpeded search for progress is dangerous because it makes people who oppose it enemies of the common good who need to be destroyed rather than listened to or reasoned with.  There's also the obligatory reference to progressives driving conservatives away by calling them prejudiced and forcing PC culture onto them via self-righteous condescension.  And sure, people can go too far with that sometimes, but the only thing I'll say in response to that is that if conservatives didn't want to be seen as bigots, they shouldn't be so happy to embrace people who say white people where the only race to ever contribute to civilization or stay silent about a president who defends  the "good people" that make up the KKK and Neo-Nazi's

Weiner says that the best thing about liberalism is that at its core it is just the belief in the "capacity of government to do good, especially in ameliorating economic ills" rather than progressivism which he says suffers from the tunnel vision of "[identifying] a destination, grip the wheel and depress the accelerator."  Notably, Weiner declines to actually use any examples of what current progressive policy options are, so let's just do that work for him.  The main policy goals you could point to for the current progressive movement is a single payer healthcare system (Medicare-for-all) the elimination of student debt and creation of tuition-free colleges, higher minimum wages, and a general restructuring of the tax code that doesn't funnel 90% of income and wealth to the top .01% of the country.  I think enacting policies that eliminate the number one cause of bankruptcy, paying workers a wage they can actually live off of, and getting rid of the debt that is holding the economy back are all pretty solid examples of the government doing good to ameliorate the economic ills that plague its citizenry.

Weiner also makes the point that progressives drive for progress also makes them favor a strong executive that destroys the balance of powers in the Constitution. That all the goals listed above can only happen via Congress passing the laws to make them happen and that progressives explicitly call for them to do so is just another thing he has to conveniently pretend doesn't exist for his analysis to have any weight.  There's also the small wrinkle that the primary reason progressives reflexively dismiss conservative positions about well, pretty much everything is that Republicans have implemented their agenda pretty successfully at the federal and state level and left a long legacy of failure in its wake.  It seems like a relevant thing to bring up when you want to portray progressives as dangerously averse to compromise, but, relevant examples just don't quite seem to be Weiner's strong suit.

At heart, the real issue I have with Weiner's argument and all the others of its kind is that it boils down to advocating that when we look out at the problems that plague our society, we should prioritize the solutions that don't upset too many people rather the ones that would actually solve our problems.  This, in a word, is bullshit.  To borrow the New Deal example again, if FDR had followed Weiner's advice that he shouldn't do something which the conservatives did because it would make them and their precious traditions feel attacked, he would've done absolutely nothing and the Great Depression would've been even worse.  When the society you live in has the kind of deep, structural problems that ours does, you need a solution just has big to fix it.  At this point, looking at all the failure that being the centrist, modest party has gotten them, why would anyone seriously want to argue that the Democrats should fight to keep that strategy?  More importantly, why would anyone be dumb enough to listen and think it's a good idea?

But If I Know You, I'll Know What You Do

Something I've been thinking about lately is that we don't really live in a society has much as we do in the intersections of vicious cycles.

There's been another shooting, this time 17 dead teenagers in Florida, and that's playing out as all the rest before it have.  By summer I think we'll have worn out our current mass shooting response down to a couple hours and then we'll have to come up with a brand new script or else the whole performance will just get stale.  The more likely way I see this going is the whole national crying game will finally come to an end, having served its purpose to drill into the national psyche that nothing will be done about this and to just move along and maybe donate to a Kickstarter or GoFundMe when the parents are looking for help to pay the medical bills if they're lucky or pitch in for some nice flowers or a casket for the ones who aren't.  

At this point I'm just waiting for the consulting company staffed by ex-military, feds, and cops to spring up and start a YouTube channel offering sample lectures on how to react in a mass shooting and how your business, school, movie theater, softball game, or music festival can have a comprehensive security package prepared just for them.  Hell, with a premium service, they'll even screen your employees for the ones most optimal to be covert security- secret guards given full weapons and crisis management training that spring into action when the need arises.  Soon they'll have sister architectural companies who design public and private spaces with an emphasis on easy evacuation and accommodating a tactical response. Taking away such a lucrative entrepreneurial opportunities from those bold enough to claim is just down right un-American.

Luckily, we have a president who does his damnedest to at least bring some razzle-dazzle to the death spirals around him, even if all he can usually do is cough up some spittle. For an irrelevant yet illustrative example, we have the whole Stormy Daniels brouhaha.  Trump's scandals, or more specifically, their cover-ups, typically follow the pattern of "Complete Denial-Partial Denial-Partial but unincriminating Admission-Full Disclosure Proving Original Claim"  Right now, his "I payed porn star hush money" saga is currently in the Partial, yet unincriminating Admission.  Trump's lawyer Micheal Cohen issued a statement saying while, yes, there was a payment to Ms. Daniels to keep her quiet regarding her affair with Trump, the money used to make that payment came out of his personal account and not from the Trump campaign.

If that seems like an incredibly specific denial to throw in it's because Cohen presumably doesn't want his client to be indicted like John Edwards was when his whole love child mishap came to light.  The core legal issue is that if Cohen is telling the truth- that he paid Daniels to keep quiet and avoid further scandal for then-candidate Trump, then that would qualify as an undisclosed campaign donation, which is sort of illegal.  The full legal breakdown and exploration of possible outcomes can be found at The Harvard Law Review and it's a fascinating read; one of the things the author mentions is that things are actually a little easier for Trump if the money came directly from him.

It'd still be a campaign contribution, sure, but if the money was Trump's it'd be easier to say that he was trying to spare himself the personal hassle of this controversy first rather with the political implications has a secondary consequence.  The governments case against Edwards fell apart under similar lines, so what makes this doubly hilarious to me is that Cohen taking the fall for this is unnecessary and also not all that helpful since it doesn't really make any sense for a lawyer to cough up $130k to stop an old mistress from talking to the press two weeks before said client is up for election for nothing but pure, personal reasons.  It just amazes me how willingly people will throw themselves under the bus for a guy who will crack a joke at the skid marks they leave behind or turn tail and run if they ever needed him to repay them in kind.  Some people can't lose weight, others dedicate their lives to garbage people born richer than they were.  We all have crosses to bear.

Which should come as no comfort to Mike Pence, stuck as he is in South Korea for the Winter Olympics.  Since he can't dramatically walk out because the athletes want nothing to do with him, he just has to sit there and be miserable.  Then, to top it all off, he gets upstaged by Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korean dictator King Jong-Un.  To the bewilderment of many, Yo-jong got pretty favorable headlines over her "humility" and she was "stealing the show."  This isn't too far out of character for the American media, though, since our press corps loves to normalize autocratic or dictatorial behaviors of pretty much everyone so they don't have to reckon with their actions.  They did with W. Bush and his terrible paintings, they did it with Obama and his ability to engage in pop culture, and they've tried so, so hard to do it for Trump.

Remember how after the election and in early 2017 there was all that commentary about how the demands and rigors of the job would smooth out Trump's edges and make him more Presidential?  Or how after that disastrous raid in Yemen and Van Jones said "[h]e became President of the United States in that moment, period" when he said some nice words about the soldier who died because of his orders?  That's what a dedicated effort not to be confrontational or upsetting looks like. The whole thing came crashing down in the wake of Charlottesville because there's just nothing you can do to spin away a president defending Neo-Nazis not once but twice.  So when a photogenic propaganda official from a brutal authoritarian regime showed up, it's not all that surprising that the press was positively giddy to exercise those muscles again.  The rebuttals for why no one should be doing any of this are already coming in, but, seriously, that they even have to be written is embarrassing all on its own.

Personally, I think if Trump wasn't such a baby and didn't insist on acting like he was pus seeping out of an infection, the press would trip over themselves saying that his "controversial and confrontational" style was just a different direction for the country to go in.  They'd even do it now if someone just took Trump's phone away and kept a muzzle on him at all times so he could only speak during scripted events.  The headlines would go something like "Radical Approach as Trump Works to Limit Distractions, Stay On Message."  Ah the Fourth Estate, what pitiful things you've become. Again, it makes sense when you think about it- media companies need eyeballs now more than ever, and the daily meltdown of the Trump administration is the best thing to happen to televised news media in years.  So a vain and insecure president constantly lashes out at the world which deservedly mocks and belittles him, and allowing the  media to sit back, shake the can a little harder, and then huff the fumes of higher ratings and advertising dollars until the next time Trump opens his mouth or tweets something stupid.

And of course we can't talk about cyclical black holes without including Russia, which has moved back to it's indictment phase. The 37-page indictment  lays out how Russian operatives working under a company called Internet Research Agency stole the identities of U.S. citizens, maintained several social media accounts to disparage Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump, and how they evaded federal officials by lying about their intentions to work as unregistered agents of a foreign government.  Basically, reading over the indictment is just seeing social engineering done by government actors, every government does it, but there's a reason it's illegal and every government should protect themselves against it.  Couple things I want to make clear before we go forward: The only mention of the Trump campaign in the indictment is how the defendants contacted unwitting individuals connected with the campaign.  So, no bombshells there, for now.  This doesn't mean that this indictment vindicates or clears Trump or anyone associated with his campaign, so, make sure you don't fall for that, either.  Oh, also, the indictment makes it clear that the company and its agents where up and running in early 2014, a full year before Trump even declared his intention to run.  So while these people ended up operating with a pro-Trump agenda, they weren't created to do that specifically.

All that out of the way, the main thing I want to talk about here is how much of the work these people allegedly did was straight up plagiarism.  The indictment includes excerpts from some of the ads the company bought, the most illustrative to me were "Donald wants to defeat terrorism . . . Hillary wants to sponsor it" from May 10th, 2016,  "Vote Republican, vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment" from May 19th, "Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote" from May 24th, "Among all the candidates Donald Trump is the one and only who can defend the police from terrorists" from October 14th and finally, "Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is" from October 19th.  If you've spent any time around right wing media like Fox News, Alex Jones, or anything published by the NRA, you've heard these arguments before.  The foundation of the Blue Lives Matter movement is that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is made up of criminals and thugs who would stop getting killed if they stopped being criminals and anyone who stands by BLM is complicit or an active accessory to their crimes.  The trope that Hillary and the Democrats are enslaving black America through welfare and affirmative action is decades old, and the whole "Hillary is a Satan" thing is Alex Jones almost verbatim.

I don't bring this up to say that all of these people have been infiltrated by Russian agents or have been co-opted by the Kremlin to further their villainous plans of villainy; rather, I point them out because for all the scare-mongering and flag-thumping liberals and others do when we talk about the Russia investigation is that at most, Russian agents are just reaping from the culture of ignorance we sowed ourselves.  It's not an accident that most of the groups activity targeted the conservative side of the country;  Trump supporters consume and share fake news more than any other segment of the population. Should that be surprising to us?  Well, no.  Remember, these are the same people who primarily get their news from Fox News, a demographic who consistently proves it knows less about the world than people who get their news from anywhere else.  I'm just going to steal from a guy named William Poundstone who broke down Fox's oeuvre this way:

"There's a lot that goes on in the world that doesn't easily fit the Fox template. There are important stories that don't make anyone angry, prove liberals are evil or otherwise carry an emotional punch. Fox viewers get less of them. Fox News is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, serving up red meat."

Here's the thing though, an organization that only tells or manipulates stories to fit a narrow political or ideological narrative isn't a news network, it's propaganda.  Instead of saying that and dealing with the implications of millions of people weaning themselves into the information age on deliberate ignorance and lies, we just said "Well, people are going to agree to disagree."  When we're talking about things like "Islam is a fundamentally violent religion whose true adherents are all terrorists," or, "Climate Change is an Al Gore hoax meant to increase government taxation," or, "The Iraq War was a successful endeavor (which later morphed into it was an honest mistake based on bad intelligence)" we should be a little firmer in holding people accountable for being wrong. But no, pointing out that nothing someone said is true in any way shape or form is rude and we shouldn't judge people based on their willingness to wholeheartedly believe things that are demonstrably untrue.

Except, it appears, when they get similar talking points from Russian agents.  When that happens it's a subversion of our national integrity, on our democracy, on our grip of reality itself.  So yeah, sure, get rid of them.  Lock them away so they can't manage their dozens of social media accounts.  Pretend that our failings are solely the result of foreign meddling and that they aren't doing anything other than jumping on bandwagons we constructed.  I'm sure everything will turn out well in the end.  Until the next turn comes, at least.

How To Suck At Criticism

I feel like, every now and then, there has to be a movie where the bulk of its criticisms show that the people criticizing it somehow managed to miss the entire point of the work they experienced.  Right now, Three Billboards outside Ebbings, Missouri seems to be that movie.  I've avoided most of the critical pieces about the film because they've been maddeningly off the mark, but, since I came across this piece in the Grey Lady, I figured it was about time to say something since there's undoubtedly going to be more like this as award season rolls on.  (There will be spoilers.)

The article from New York Times' critic-at-large Wesley Morris is a classic example of feeling the need to say "something" about a movie he feels is undeserving yet award winning.  And, fine, everybody gets to like or dislike what they want, I'm not here to say his taste is wrong; what I will say though, is that his qualms and hot-take criticisms seem like he missed the entire point of what the movie was trying to do.  Morris frames his take like this:

"What’s got people arguing is whether the movie is convincingly about America (Ebbing is as real a place as Narnia) and whether this movie about America ought to be, say, redeeming one of the racist cops serving and protecting Ebbing. Of course, anybody who loves “Crash” already knows the answer to that one — “Why not!”"

 Right here is why I think everything else about Morris' piece just falls flat- he's asking the wrong questions.  Three Billboards isn't a movie about America, nor is it trying to be.  To say that it is would be say the The Chronicles of Narnia are really about how England should restore itself to theocratic monarchical rule.  Three Billboards is set in a small, rural town as a dramatic convenience for everyone to know intimate details about each other, it has no interest in "saying" anything about those towns one way or the other.  The other part of this though, falls on what you think "redeemed" means, and whether or not that's actually happening.

Sam Rockwell's Officer Dixon is, quite easily, one of the worst cops in recent films.  Hes a violent, racist thug who refuses any personal responsibility or culpability in anything he does, and who follows Woody Harrelson's Chief Willoughby like an approval and attention starved middle child.  After he's been (inadvertently) burned by Francis McDormand's Mildred Hayes, he resolves himself to find her daughter Angela's rapist/murderer as a way to live up to the by this point dead Willoughby's expectations of him.  He tries to be patient, thorough, and creative in his investigation, and then when it doesn't quite pan out, he ends up driving to Idaho with Mildred to possibly murder his suspect.  If that isn't a textbook redemption arc, I don't know what is.

Dixon never confronts the issues that made him terrible, he just briefly tries something different until it doesn't work before he falls back into his old habits.  Obviously, that isn't redemption.  That he becomes more pitiable over the course of the movie does not mean that he is somehow become "better" or that the story has now moved him into the "good" column.  Making a character   sympathetic while still being an ignorant bigot is meant to highlight that no matter how badly we may want to, we rarely have the opportunity to feel just one, unconflicted emotion for another person.  The idea that if someone isn't constantly being called out for their bigotry that means that prejudice is acceptable is a cultural hang-up borne of our long denial that prejudice even existed and if it did, that it was entirely deserved.  That's our problem to solve, not McDonagh's; it's ridiculous to expect his story to resolve our problems and then bitch about the fact that he doesn't even try to.

Given the framing he's working from, you can expect Morris to get smaller moments in the film dead wrong, and he doesn't disappoint.  When Dixon has Mildred in an interrogation cell, he reacts to her "How's the nigger torturing business?" taught with an explosive "It's Person-of-Color Torturing business, you can't say nigger anymore."  Morris reads this as McDonagh having cheep thrills at having someone say the word nigger and to highlight the absurdity of PC culture.  But... it's not.  That exchange is there to highlight that Dixon cannot distinguish the important things staring him right in the face.  The thing he's most upset about when he's called a professional bigoted sadist is to complain about someone else using a racial slur while doing so; which, again, speaks to his skewed sense of priorities or what constitutes a violation of proper decorum.

Morris also thinks that someone watching Don't Look Now is an attempt to make the people in the film "poetically interesting" instead of just McDonagh engaging in the self-referential nods that he built Seven Psychopaths out of.  (For context, In Bruges is a film with some spiritual and textual ties to Don't Look Now.) The weirdest hangup Morris has is that he thinks the movie is going for some kind of sense of pretension by making "Oscar Wilde" Willoughby's last words before he kills himself.  Never mind how mentioning one of the most iconic and widely known authors in the English language qualifies as "pretentious," let's deal with the fact the reason Willoughby is saying them is because that was the punchline to joke his wife just told him not five minutes before.  You know, the last time he'll ever talk to her, because he's about to kill himself.  That Morris can spin a man trying focus on the last thing his wife told him so his last thought will be a happy one into some hamfisted attempt at hoity-toity "auteur" pretension is a testament to how even professional critics can fail so completely when they really want to.

All that aside, the real attempt at a haymaker is this:

"For a movie that asks you to behold so much violence — defenestration and talk of rape, a bludgeoning, a suicide, charred skin, a dental drill that treats a thumb like drywall — “Three Billboards” feels weirdly benign. Its black comedy doesn’t leave a bruise. The violence curdles into the cartoonish. The movie could be about grace and vengeance, but they’re presented as hoary lessons and hokey contrivances — happening upon a deer, sharing your orange juice with the madman who tried to murder you, juxtaposing the reading of an inspirational letter with an inferno. There’s no reckoning with anything, no introspection, just escalating mayhem."

I want to focus on the last sentence first, that "there's no reckoning, no introspection, just escalating mayhem."  The only thing I can really say to this "Well, duh."  The "no reckoning, no introspection" thing is sort of the whole point.  Does Morris really think that Mildred would be pulling such a stunt and escalating things at every opportunity if she was willing to be introspective and try to reconcile the grief and anger she has over burying a child against the hatred she has for herself after a moment of anger she can't take back, having her last words to her daughter be "I hope you get raped, too."  Mildred's refusal to do so, to only vent her anger by unleashing it on anyone and everyone in her path, is what drives the movie.  Surely Morris has seen movies where the plot is driven by the flaw of its main character before, so it's odd that he wouldn't recognize that the flaws are an intentional part of the story and not because McDonagh just forgot those things existed.

What I think is the most telling give away that Morris not only doesn't understand the movie but has no intention of trying to, is his dismissal of the orange juice scene as hoary or hokey.  The scene takes place between Dixon and Caleb Landry Jones character Red Welby.  Red owns the titular billboards and was thrown out of a window by Dixon after Willoughby shot himself.  Dixon is in the hospital after being burned in Mildred's firebombing of the police station and has most of his face wrapped in bandages.  Red makes the offer of orange juice to make him feel better before he realizes who he's talking to, but figures it out once he stands over Dixon's bed.  At this point, Red naturally starts having a bit of a breakdown being so close to the man who threw him out of a window, but he still decides to pour Dixon a glass of his orange juice, with a straw to boot.  It's a small thing, yes, it's one that had Red not done it, no one would've blamed him for doing so.  Instead, when given the chance to repay him for the evil that's been done to him, Red chooses not to.  He's been viciously attacked, but he chooses to be something other than the anger and pain that resulted in it.  To treat a moment like that like it's some hackneyed Very Special Episode climax without a voice over just seems antagonistic.

I could see why someone would find the imagery of Dixon reading Willoughby's posthumous letter to him while the flames creep up to him unnoticed, as a representation of both Dixon's and Mildred's uncompromising passions, it's hardly subtle.  But conflating personal distaste with objective flaws is presumptuous as fuck and should only be the realm of IMDB users with a love of all caps and exclamation points.  And the deer scene?  The movie explicitly subverts the idea that the deer showing up at the billboards is some kind of cosmic sign to be forgiving instead of wrathful; the only way to mistake that scene for the opposite is do so on purpose which, again, is just disingenuous.

Of course, none of this is to say that Three Billboards is a perfect movie and all criticism is invalid, it's just that the primary things people are saying about it are just wrong.  It makes no sense to criticize this movie over its ideas about race and police brutality in America because it simply doesn't have or even attempt to have any.   The issue of police brutality is only used as a characterization of Dixon early in the movie and as a justification for another character bringing Mildred the backup posters after the originals are burned later on, but that's it.  There's no examination or even an interest in using the issue as anything other than plot point, so to criticize the film's message regarding the issue, you have to first invent one.  So if someone was to say they were disappointed that McDonagh used these things as a quick and dirty way to establish the town's "Southerness" but nothing else, they'd be right to say so.  Morris actually does do this, saying that Ebbing doesn't have any real sense of place or specificity and... yeah, he's right about that.  And I think that blandness is intentional, so McDonagh doesn't have to deal with any actual place and it's history of bigotry or brutality.  That, too, could be a solid grounds for criticism, that McDonagh treats things as inconvenient distractions to his character drama to be avoided. But that perspective is less favorable to polemics, so it obviously just won't do.

It's always disappointing when bad criticism surrounds any movie but it's even more so when someone's who's supposed to be a professional and actually good at this jump on the bandwagon of inventing messages the movie doesn't actually have to make their own taste seem more impressive than it actually is.

So, Justice League

This is one of those movies where, immediately after it's over, my main thought is "It's pretty forgettable and there's really nothing to talk about here" but then, like fifteen minutes later there's this switch that goes off in my head and it usually starts with "Okay," and I am off to the races and ranting, like so.

Okay, so, these movies don't have to suck.  What is easily the most infuriating thing about almost all the DC movies is that every single one of them has an interesting story buried in the one it's actually telling and if the people weren't so insistent on making the worst choice every time they had the chance to, we could actually have some bad-ass movies to work with. But no. 

In this one, the emotional weight of the movie is put on Bruce and Diana working past their reluctance to get back into the world after cutting themselves off from it. So far, so good. Diana feels weird about standing up and inspiring people in the world around her and leading them into dangerous situations because the last time she did that, the person she cared about killed himself to save her.  She'd rather not have to do that again, so, no more world saving for her. Still, so far, so good.  

Here comes the fuck up.

The thing Bruce is tripping himself over is that he was manipulated into following Luthor's plan to take out Superman and, when that didn't work, Luthor just used Doomsday and then Superman died. If you're trying to figure out why any of that is really his fault or why he should be caring so much guilt for things he didn't do or have any control over, that's good, because you should be; the movie should be, too, but it mostly doesn't and just wants you to skate by on just accepting that Bruce feels bad about something and his Character Development will be not feeling bad about it by the end.  See, nice and tidy.

So where's the interesting bit they could have used? Well, in both this movie and BvS, we're told that Bruce has been doing his Batman gig for twenty years, and that he hasn't always been alone in doing it. The Robin outfit covered in "Ha ha ha's" in BvS is a pretty big hint that something horrible befell at least one of his sidekicks and that's what made him hang up the cape in the first place. 

So maybe instead of vague guilt trip, maybe Bruce's thing is that he, too, has inspired people to stand up and fight for a better world alongside him, and that, like Diana, people he cared about suffered because of that. Maybe the movie can have these two people who are working so hard to assemble and lead another team into near-certain death actually talk about how uncomfortable they are with that prospect and that, maybe this time, by watching each other's backs, they can avoid the outcome that's caused so much harm to their lives. I mean, the idea that when we share our burdens with the people we trust they become much easier to carry is sort of the whole fucking theme of the movie and if you have the relationship at the heart of the movie advance that theme in the most meaningful way possible it'll probably work out great for everyone, but, I've been wrong before.  

In all seriousness, that this plot and character thread didn't occur to literally anyone involved in this movie just hammers the point home for me that no one involved in the creative direction these movie's take has any idea why these characters work or how to use them to make these movies compelling in any way. 

Oh, also, would it kill these people to shoot on location? There's a scene in the beginning of the movie where Steppenwolf attacks Themyscrya and amid all the CGI antics there's a shot of Connie Neilsen where it looks like someone prettied up a landscape desktop background and just pasted it around her body outline. Later on, Clark takes Lois to his Kansas farmhouse after he's been resurrected and they're having what's supposed to be a deep conversation about him being alive again and all that jazz except the emotional weight is somewhat undercut by the fake-as-shit sunset which gets super distracting the more time they spend on it.  

Instead of looking immersive, it just looks like Warner Brothers is cutting corners because god forbid they have to physically shoot things in a field of some random ass island instead of just having everybody do choreography in front of a green screen.  That cheapness infects everything the movie is trying to do because it gets really difficult people are having real emotional beats or reactions when everything around them is so blatantly artificial. 

And please, for the love of Jebus, use practical effects at least once in a while.  If all we have is just wall-to-wall digital effects where the actors aren't actually moving that way and the things they're hitting don't really exist than people just tune out because, what's there to invest in? Sure, it looks nifty, but if there isn't anything physical for our eyes to attach to, then all we end up doing is waiting for the 1's and 0's to stop going at it and for the real stuff to show up again. As an example, look up anything from the Star Wars prequels and compare it to any of the sets from the Force Awakens and see which one you're actually more connected to when you look at it.

Okay, so, Steppenwolf. Why, for the love of fuck, is he the villain in this movie? I doubt there was anyone who wasn't an obsessive DC or Jack Kirby fan who even knew he existed and I doubt anyone walking away from the movie remembers much about him, either. Side Track: I feel bad for Cirian Hinds getting stuck playing the villain in yet another shitty comic book movie (he really should've just let the first one  be the only one he did).  That he apparently never met or acted in the same scene with the rest of the cast shows, and is yet another reason why you shouldn't make a movie like it's a cut-and-paste digital scrap book where nothing interacts until it all gets glued together in the end.  

Back on topic:  The reason genre stories like this one need strong antagonists is that they force the heroes to their natural extremes, the drama comes from how well the hero handles that extreme and how long they can maintain it. A bad villain just means the hero does what they already do, just quickly. And Steppenwolf is a horrible villain, he's never anything more than an immediate problem which forces the team up so when the more interesting and pressing threats come up, everyone already knows each other.

I know this is so much bitching and moaning, but, we deserve better. It's always bothered me that things like movies have always been treated as so disposable that "Eh, it's fine" is somehow all we expect from them. That these are some of my favorite characters just makes it worse seeing them handled so badly. Pretty much everyone is cast perfectly- except Lex Luthor. Jesse Eisenberg is still the worse thing about the movie even if he only shows up for twenty seconds in a stinger- but until they get material they can work with instead of work to overcome, Justice League is as good as these movies will get.  Which, in the end, is just sad.

(Mostly, I think Wonder Woman is the exception to pretty much everything I just said. I still have issues with that movie, and if you want to know what they are, you can read them here)

A Suggestion

Lately, I've been thinking about how if I could just create my own universe (or just tweak this one) I'd focus on making sure that as far as the afterlife was concerned, there won't be a heaven, but there certainly will be a hell.

A no heaven situation sounds cruel to those looking forward to it, but, honestly, I'm not that big on the concept.  The idea of spending eternity as a perfect, stagnant being sounds like a duller version of torment than anything to look forward to.  Also the idea of a god gathering his faithful so they can do nothing but say how incredible he is for the rest of time seems less like a reward for the faithful and more like a petty, jealous god suckering people into giving him the validation he's apparently so desperate for and pretend like he's doing them a favor.

Blasphemy aside, I also feel like the idea of heaven partly plays a role in making us take the people in our lives for granted, and that opens us up to regrets and grief we just don't need.  We let people slip in and out of our lives because we tell ourselves that there'll be a later time, that we'll see them in a place where time doesn't matter anymore and whatever we missed while they were here, we can make up and more.  But then the people we care about die and the mantra of "We'll see them again, we'll see them again" against that sudden doubt that no, they're gone and we're never going to see them again.  At that point, I think paradise becomes less of an assurance and more of a way for us to drown out that sudden fear that everything we get told to mitigate death just isn't true.  The fear that this is all we have is so deeply ingrained in us and is something we fight so vehemently against that I have a hard time believing it isn't true.  We wouldn't work so hard to bury that fear if we didn't think it was real, so, for me, that's the biggest proof I can point to.

The difference is, I don't see that as a bad outcome.  If this is all we have, then it becomes even more important for us to make our lives mean something.  And I don't mean that in the "if our lives aren't changing the whole world they're meaningless" way, I just mean that in we have to make our lives mean something to ourselves, that when we go through them it doesn't feel like our waking moments are a burden.  We exist for such a short time in a world that couldn't give a shit about us but instead of letting that define us, we fight and scrape our way to building friends, families, lives, and work that will make people remember us when we're gone.  We may be nothing more than drops in the ocean, but all of us make a ripple.  To live in a world where everyone is screaming to be heard yet we still find people willing to listen to us?  How is that not enough?

Yes, that we're gone forever never to be seen again is sad.  Crushing, really.  But we couldn't have poignancy without grief, so, that seems like a fair trade, in the end.

All of that- fade away into nothing at the end- still leaves a bad taste in my mouth because that seems like too good an ending for more people than you can count on this planet.  That so many will just die and then... nothing feels like a cheap ploy, like they're getting the easy way out.  Which is why I would really insist on having a hell but not a heaven.  Basically, it would make life into a threat: Be good, or live forever.

The nice thing about it is it wouldn't be limited.  All the people voting for Roy Moore because it's more important that he has an "R" after his name than he hunted teenage girls?  Cosmic kindling.  Everyone who turned a blind eye and made sure people like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and all the rest go about their business for decades on end?  Up in smoke for eternity. The operating principle would be that yeah, the people committing the harm and the suffering deserve to endure all that and more once they're gone, but the ones who abet them along the way is what allows that harm to grow, to evolve, to survive well past the time the act was committed.  In this hell, we'd acknowledge that the ones who nursed the more active residents along have hands just as dirty and deserve to burn as much if not more so.

Alas, that's built on as much fantasy as heaven.  We fuck up so much and so incredibly that hell is just us wishing there's something, anything out there waiting to clean up our mess.  "Oh, you let rapists get away with for decades on end?  No worries, we got you."  It's a bigger shame that we don't have a hell, especially now that we live in a time replete with so many who would deserve it.  It's that same nothing that gnaws at us, that makes us wish there was a place of tearing and slashing that would render unto them that earned it all that they were due.  This time, we're trying to avoid the thought that no matter what a person did, in the end, they always get better than they deserve.

In the end, we belong to ourselves, and it's high time we faced up to that.  Let's stop fantasizing and wishing that there's a place where we find the peace we never looked for here or that all the terrible people we let slide by will get what's theirs somewhere that isn't here.  Since this is all we'll have and all we're ever going to be, let's at least make it count.

This Is Why We Don't Have Nice Things

Every now and then I come across a piece of punditry that's just so amazingly bad and mendacious that it really bears breaking down on a line-by-line level. So that's what we're going to do with Dougles Schoen's "Why Democrats Need Wall Street" column in Tuesday's New York Times. Now, before we get started, it's important to note that Dougy was a pollster for Bill Clinton from 1994-2000, so he has something of vested interest in making sure the strategy his boss implemented doesn't look so horrible. He starts off with 

"Many of the most prominent voices in the Democratic Party, led by Bernie Sanders, are advocating wealth redistribution through higher taxes and Medicare for all, and demonizing banks and Wall Street.
Memories in politics are short, but those policies are vastly different from the program of the party’s traditional center-left coalition. Under Bill Clinton, that coalition balanced the budget, acknowledged the limits of government and protected the essential programs that make up the social safety net."

It's nice that right from the start we're already pretending that the whole Democratic Party structure is moving in the direction of Bernie Sanders' populism. And sure, he has Elizabeth Warren and maybe a few others on his side, namely a bunch of people looking to be President in three years and are covering their asses now by co-sponsoring his Medicare For All bill, but to act like the DNC or the  party leadership in Congress like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have any interest in moving away from the holy "center-left" coalition is laughable.

The other bit of comedy comes in acting like the this is somehow violating Democratic "tradition;" a tradition which is barely over thirty-years-old.  The Clintons and their ghouls all sprang from something called the Democratic Leadership Council which formed in the wake of the 1984 Presidential election and the party's second loss to Ronald Reagan. Their strategy was to move the Party away from the working class and make it more appealing to Wall Street and other donors with lots of cash on hand. And hey, it worked, didn't it?

Anyway, back to Schoen:

"As the party has left behind that version of liberalism, it has also found its way to its weakest electoral position — nationally and at the state level — since the 1920s. Hillary Clinton’s lurch to the left probably cost her key Midwestern states that Barack Obama had won twice and led to the election of Donald Trump."

This is really where the column makes the jump from your average bullshit punditry to some truly artistic levels of outright fuckery. First off, Schoen just glides over the fact that the Democratic party lost Congress and the majority of governorships and state legislatures - that weak electoral position -  during the Obama Presidency. You know, the same Obama who Wall Street gave more money to in both of his Presidential Elections than his supposedly more business friendly Republican opponents. Also the same Obama whose Attorney General confirmed that they were intentionally not arresting or prosecuting Wall Street for their litany of criminal acts in the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2007-08 and who threw trillions upon trillions of dollars at the banks through whatever bailout method he could find. Yeah, that's totally the actions of a party moving away from acting in the interests of Wall Street, sure.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that Clinton's loss of key Midwestern states had more to do with not even bothering to campaign in them once she secured the nomination but, I don't get paid for this so what would I know.

Speaking of, here's Schoen's primary reason why Democrats should snuggle up closely to the Vampire Squids:

"Democrats should keep ties with Wall Street for several reasons. The first is an ugly fact of politics: money. Maintaining ties to Wall Street makes economic sense for Democrats and keeps their coffers full.
In the 2016 election, the Center for Responsive Politics reports, employees and companies in the securities and investment industry donated more than $63 million to the Democratic Party."

And that, right there, is the core of the entire piece: politics is a job and we all need to get paid. The idea that we should change our system to one that eliminates or at the very least mitigates the influence of money in politics is never considered in the column mainly because, if it was, Schoen would have to address the overwhelming majority of people who want nothing money to have as little to do with our politics as possible.  

 

One poll has 78% of the country saying that we need new laws limiting the influence of money.  Think about that, in a country as polarized as this one, you still get eight out of ten people across the political spectrum all agree on that one key fact. That same pole shows 81% of Democrats saying they support their elected officials working across the aisle to come up with legislation to that effect, with 79% of Republican voters saying the same thing.  

You would think that someone whose literal job is to collect and analyze the data on the political and ideological trends of the voting public would see that massive, bi-partisan suspicion about money and its corrupting influence on our political system as something of a hint that advocating for its continued prominence is something of a liability. You might also think that, in the wake of the DNC having its worst fundraising year since 2003 because there are so many voters refusing to give the party money for refusing to turn away from the direction Schoen is advocating for, would be a hint that they shouldn't fucking do that anymore.  

Oh well; back to the party:

"If voters really hated ties to Wall Street and financial elites, Republicans would not enjoy such a commanding electoral position — or have elected a New York plutocrat president. Most voters’ major problems with President Trump stem from his performance, not from his wealth or connections to Wall Street."

This would be a real solid stumper and excellent point if it wasn't so busy ignoring literally everything about how Republicans work to win elections. I've gone over the Southern Strategy so many times even I'm kind of sick of doing it, but, really, it's easy to think of the Republican strategy as having three main pillars: stoke as much racial/cultural resentment as humanly possible (the "Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays" or whatever other Judeo-Christian values nonsense is in this season), voter suppression like the voter I.D. laws that by sheer coincidence keeps poor minorities from voting Democrat and turn out favorably low, and finally, the grand American tradition of gerrymandering. As far as Trump goes, his connections to Wall Street mattered far less to his base than his appeal to their good ol'-fashioned racism.


And now, one of my absolute favorite passages:

"A second reason Democrats should keep ties with Wall Street: Despite what the Democratic left says, America is a center-right, pro-capitalist nation. A January Gallup poll found that moderates and conservatives make up almost 70 percent of the country, while only 25 percent of voters identify as liberal. Even in May 2016, when Senator Sanders made redistribution a central part of his platform, Gallup found that only about 35 percent of Americans had a positive image of socialism, compared with 60 percent with a positive view of capitalism."

The whole "Americans identify has conservative" trope is one of my favorites in political hackery precisely because it such a naked ploy to ignore actual policies the public supports.  

 

Let's take regulation, as an example. In a poll released this year, Americans for Financial Reform found that 70% of Independents and 53% of Republicans felt Wall Street should be more tightly regulated. The same poll also found that 90% of Independents and 87% of Republicans think it's important to regulate Wall Street activities.  Oh, and Medicare For All? That's at 60%.  Tuition-free college is at 62%.  Higher taxes for the rich and corporations? Those poll at 76% and 52% support, respectively.  So yeah, Americans may not like the label of Socialism, but they're pretty fond of the expanded social policies, higher taxes on the richest people, and tighter regulations of businesses.  Point is, there's no way you can look at those policy preferences and say that the American public is of an overwhelmingly conservative mindset when it comes to economic and social policies.  In the 90's and early 2000's, I can see Schoen and his ilk easily getting away with this kind of tactic because no one could easily disprove what they were saying.  But now, in the Google era?  That he's still trotting out this shit when it takes all of five minutes to get a full, comprehensive rebuttal is just insulting.

Moving on:

"Third, it is hypocritical for Democrats to maintain ties to Silicon Valley and then turn their backs on the very people who help finance its work. The financial industry brings to market the world’s most innovate products and platforms that expand the economy and create jobs."

Schoen actually stumbles onto a solid point here, so, good for him.  I think it merits a participation award, even.  To the core of his point, though, I will say that given the rampant racism, sexism, and massive invasions of privacy perpetrated by the tech industry, the easiest way out of this conundrum is to cut ties with both of those toxic industries and hold them to account.  Pretty simple, when you think about it.

Next:

"Fourth, demonizing Wall Street does nothing to bridge the widening gaps in our country. Wall Street has its flaws and abuses, which were addressed in part by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. And yes, the American people are certainly hostile to and suspicious of Wall Street. But using this suspicion and hostility as the organizing principle for a major political party will consign Democrats to permanent minority status. 

Here’s what the Democrats need to do instead: develop a set of pro-growth, inclusive economic policies. Democratic leaders must prioritize entrepreneurship, small-business growth and the expansion of job-training and retraining programs."

You can really see Schoen running out of rhetorical thread here, since his main argument in the top paragraph boils down to "Yes, Wall Street has done bad things, which we kinda-sorta already punished them for.  And yes, most people still hate them.  But playing to that majority opinion will only make you unpopular, so there."  Also, the Democrats already have a plan that follows his whole thing about prioritizing entrepreneurship etc etc, it's called "A Better Deal."  That Schoen has apparently forgotten or never even knew that the Party already did the thing he wanted them to speaks for itself in how successful they would be in pursuing that path.

And now, the beginning of the home stretch:

"American leadership in finance will make it possible for our country to invest as much as $1 trillion in infrastructure, extend health care access to every American at an affordable rate and lift the 76 million Americans who are barely surviving financially, as reported in May 2016 by the Federal Reserve, into the middle class. 

The Democrats need to partner with the financial community on these issues. Most important, the Democrats have simply had an ineffective, negative and coercive economic message. Advocacy of a $15 minimum wage and further banking regulation does not constitute a positive, proactive agenda."

Okay, so, first of all,you really have to admire the casual contempt Schoen has for the idea of paying people more money so they can maybe have a living wage.  It's such a tell that he views "pay workers more money" as such an obvious waste of time that he can't hide his frustration with the, from his perspective, utter stupidity of pursuing such a thing in the first place.   More importantly, if the government really wanted to expand social services or spend money repairing and rebuilding our infrastructure, they could do it all on their own.  The government creates the money used to do all of those things in the first place, they don't need the financial industry for shit.  The only reason to include the public-private partnerships in those kind of public services is to give the private sector a chance to fleece the public to profitability.

Finally, the closer:

"The Democrats cannot be the party that supports only new, stifling regulations. Reducing regulation allows banks to employ capital and finance investment in our country’s future, making electric cars, renewable energy and internet connectivity across the globe a reality 

This was evident to Democrats in the 1990s. From 1996 to 2000, for example, Democrats led the way on two key economic legislative victories. First, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the communications and cable industries, increased growth and enhanced market competition. Second, the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 removed regulations placed on financial institutions by bureaucrats and expanded opportunities for Wall Street to engage in mergers and acquisitions, adding wealth to the retirement accounts and other investment portfolios of millions of middle-class Americans. 

If the party is going to have any chance of returning to its position of influence and appeal, Democrats need to work with Wall Street to push policies that create jobs, heal divisions and stimulate the American economy."

I already covered the regulations bit, so I won't go over it again.  But, I will say that it's hilarious that Schoen uses deregulating the cable/internet industry, an industry that has spent the last several decades consolidating into regional monopolies and provides the absolute worst internet and broadband services in any industrialized country on the planet, as a "win" for deregulation.  The real balls-of-steel moment though, comes right after, where he uses the deregulation of Wall Street as the apex move of the moderate Democrats.  Schoen really expects everyone to forget, or just ignore, that the end result of that bill was a financial industry so untethered from consequence or oversight that they made fraudulent mortgages to any warm body they could pull off the street, and then packaged those up with other toxic loans and falsely sold them off as quality products that would never default only to turn around and bet heavily that those products would implode, and finally, when all that and more finally came crashing down and nearly caused a second Great Depression, wrote off the entire thing with taxpayer bailouts and walked away into the sunset, free and clear of absolutely everything.

It takes a real piece of shit to wax nostalgic about the time where everyone turned a blind eye to the thing that turned our financial system into little more than a government-backed criminal enterprise but, hey, Schoen has to be good at something, I guess.