Suzanne Farrell: the “Concerto Barocco” spiral

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen the wonderful Balanchine ballet “Concerto Barocco” many times, but never with Suzanne Farrell, one of the greats. Despite the poor quality of the footage of her in the video later in this post, it is extraordinary to watch. Farrell eclipses the other half of the solo pair, but not in an egotistical show-offy way. Her technique is secure and her extensions are high—but never in the service of “Look at me, see what I can do!” And never in the service of mere steps.

What Farrell specialized in was flow. “See, see how this dance goes, a dance in which ‘I’ disappear in deference to it?” is what she is saying. The tempo in “Concerto Barocco” is sometimes very fast, but Farrell seems to have all the time in the world. Never rushed and never too slow, always part of the music, she is doing what seem to be the only steps that can possibly be imagined to match the music, to become the music.

The words that come to mind when watching Farrell dance are “luscious,” “luxuriant,” “unique,” and even “private.” That last is a paradox, because although the performer is on the stage, she doesn’t seem to be aware of an audience. Dance is a private ritual between Farrell, the music, and God.

You think that last bit is an exaggeration? I wrote those words before I read this review of Farrell’s autobiography (although I had read her book when it first came out, about twenty-five years ago), which contains the following Farrell quote:

From early on Farrell appears to have regarded her career as a sort of divine mission, a destiny that was sent to her and that, consequently, we would all simply have to acknowledge and cope with. Never does she seem to have felt that she was dancing for the audience. “I dance for God,” she said, “who gave me the gift of dancing.” She also danced for Balanchine. As for the public, “We’re stuck with each other,” she told the critic Holly Brubach. “You’re stuck looking at me, and I’m stuck being out there in front of you.”

It is doubtful that any dancer has ever worked harder than Farrell””and with a disinterestedness such that, free of the lower forms of vanity (need for compliments, fear of looking foolish), she was never deterred from moving toward her chosen goal.

Farrell was a self-possessed loner who came from a family with a remarkably determined mother who overcame all hardships, as did Farrell. Those hardships included the isolation that came with promotion at a very young age (still in her teens):

But once Balanchine began to concentrate on her more and more closely, and cast her in more and more roles, to the exclusion of other dancers, she found herself utterly friendless. In the book she tells the terrible story of how the dancer Patricia Neary, whom she liked and had roomed with on tour, not only had to give up to her her role in Concerto Barocco but had to teach it to her as well. Neary taught it, through her tears. “I learned the ballet but lost a friend.” Farrell says. Soon she had none left to lose.

It’s well worth reading the whole article. If you do, you’ll understand a lot about Farrell, although she will remain a mystery.

But you’ll understand a lot more if you watch her dance:

As the years have gone by, ballet has become more athletic. You can often feel the dancers’ muscles working and the physical effort, even if it doesn’t look strained. But Farrell managed staggering technical feats with a total absence of visible athleticism. Her dancing seemed like water pouring—fluid, and with no effort at all. Watch this series of arabesque penché promenades (arabesques with the upper body close to the ground and the leg very high, while circling around on the standing leg) that last for about a minute, with particular attention to the final one. No one else can make this look so easy, so beautiful, or so meaningful:

There aren’t many renditions of this ballet on YouTube to compare it to. But here is a good version of the same passage (by the illustrious Russian company, the Maryinsky). But to me it doesn’t even begin to measure up:

The Russian dancer is good, and she’s strong. But you never know why she’s doing any of this, except that it’s in the choreography, so she does it. She doesn’t go into the actual penché in the earlier promenades, either; perhaps she’s conserving her energy.

Farrell doesn’t worry about things like that. Farrell is saying something like, “Here’s what the music tells me to do; my front leg unfolds high, high, to the sky. And then the opposite; my back leg goes up, up, up. And as I turn around, my upper body leans in a slight spiral, so that it looks as though I’m being pulled around and around by some irresistible outside force. That force propels me forward when the leg goes up, and around in the circling arabesque, but something keeps leading me and pushing me, and I must follow it.”

You see the spiral effect? No one else does that.

Nor would I expect anyone else to. Farrell is Farrell, the only Farrell that’s ever been or that ever will be. I first saw her as a teenager in the 60s (both of us were teenagers, that is, although she’s older than I). She retired in 1983, has had two hip replacements (and came back briefly after one of them), and is still going strong as a teacher.

Here is the entire ballet featuring Farrell:

Dinosaur feathers

The New Neo Posted on by

An astounding discovery:

A dinosaur tail fragment preserved in amber has been found in northern Myanmar, according to National Geographic.

This remarkable, 99-million-year-old specimen was found by a team of researchers led by China University of Geosciences paleontologist Lida Xing, and their paper on this find was published in the journal Current Biology. Xing’s team dates the tail fragment back to the mid-Cretaceous period, and believes that it belonged to a Coelurosaur, a feathered ancestor the T-Rex.

The fossil itself is slightly less than two inches long and (of course) covered in feathers. Those feathers mark it as an important find, because it represents an early point of differentiation between dinosaur and bird feathers capable of sustaining flight. As it turns out, this dinosaur’s feathers were purely ornamental; they have an open, flexible structure that renders them useless. Flight feathers, on the other hand, have “well-defined central shafts, branches, sub-branches, and hooks that latch the structure together.”…

This fossil also lacks the fused tail vertebrae, or pygostyle, that allows tail feathers to move as a single unit, so there’s no way it could have flown.

How blog posts grow

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I thought that this post would be a quickie.

Merkel. Ban the veil. A little fisking of the Bloomberg editorial. Over and out.

About 1500 words and an hour and a half later I was disabused of that notion.

How does it happen? I don’t know whether all bloggers are this way, but I often start a post thinking it will take only a little while and find myself surfacing hours later, surprised at the time. As Frost said, “way leads on to way,” and a chain of thoughts lead to more thoughts and more research.

I’m not really complaining; not exactly, anyway. It’s probably one of the things I find most interesting about blogging—the unexpected discoveries and connections.

[ADDENDUM: Oh, and have you noticed that this blog is a Trump-post-free zone this weekend? If you’re having withdrawal symptoms, feel free to use this thread (or previous ones) to talk about him.]

Merkel and the full-face veil: nations, religions, and culture

The New Neo Posted on by

Merkel is doing penance for her immigration policy by getting behind the banning of the full-face veil—in other words, the burqa and the niqab.

Today there’s an editorial in Bloomberg that states:

Pandering to grievances, real or imagined, rarely works. Sometimes it’s meant to soothe such feelings, as it presumably was in this case. Usually, though, it inflames them and makes matters worse.

Which grievances are being pandered to by the Bloomberg editors?

The editorial goes on to state:

Now, elections are coming up in Germany, and Merkel rightly wants to deny support to the far-right AfD party, whose anti-immigrant thinking is driven not by prudence but by outright racism. In response, Merkel’s newly hardened position is both weak on the merits and plain bad tactics.

It’s weak because the full-face veil is not much seen in Germany — and who’s actually claiming that Shariah law should overrule German law? The effect of her statement is not to encourage assimilation, but merely to convey sympathy with the anti-immigrant worldview. Hence, bad tactics: Flattering such thinking is no way to overcome it. She’s as good as conceding that the AfD has a point.

What’s wrong with this? Let me count the ways.

We can be pretty sure that some members of the “far-right” AfD party’s anti-immigrant thinking is driven by “outright racism” (although “racism” isn’t the right word, since we’re talking about a religion, Islam, rather than a race here). But how much? It’s not at all driven by “prudence”? Not even a teeny weeny little bit? Give me a break. But perhaps the authors of this editorial also were the ones that said all objection to President Obama was racist, too, and that all supporters of Donald Trump are racists.

We don’t know on what evidence the editors based their accusation about the completely racist motives of the AfD, because they are keeping mum about it. We are just supposed to take their august word for it, I guess. Here’s the AfD’s Wiki page, if you want to get up to speed. And here’s a long (confession: I only read about 2/3 of it) article in Spiegel about the party, from which I glean that its supporters very much resemble Trump’s supporters.

Of course, where Germany is concerned, extra caution makes a certain amount of sense. But this party seems, at least as far as I can ascertain, to resemble other populist and nationalist movements that are springing up in a wide variety of places in response to the present governments’ ignoring of what seems like common sense about both unchecked immigration and the preservation of cultural identity.

But let’s get back to the Bloomberg editors. The sentence “It’s weak because the full-face veil is not much seen in Germany — and who’s actually claiming that Shariah law should overrule German law?” contains two errors. If the full-face veil is “not much seen in Germany”—well, so what? Can we only ban things that are common? After all, murder is uncommon, but it is banned. To use a more relevant example, public nudity is uncommon and yet most countries have laws against indecent exposure. They are preventative, as well.

And far as the question of who is arguing for sharia law, take a look at this sort of thing. I don’t have time right now to check the study itself, but I’ve read plenty of similar findings in the past.

Now let’s look at this from the Bloomberg editors:

The effect of her statement is not to encourage assimilation, but merely to convey sympathy with the anti-immigrant worldview. Hence, bad tactics: Flattering such thinking is no way to overcome it. She’s as good as conceding that the AfD has a point.

But do they really think the AfD doesn’t have at least a point, considering what has happened with immigration in Germany? Not to mention what has happened in this country, which has been one of the main factors leading to the election of Trump. No point at all? And what has the left ever done in Germany to “encourage assimilation”? Does allowing full-body (including face) coverage in Germany “encourage assimiliation”? Hardly.

In addition, the Bloomberg editors ignore two very important things. The first is that wearing a facial veil is not dictated by Islam, it is cultural in certain countries. The second is that covering the face entirely has security consequences, and they are not good. There are anti-mask laws in various countries that have to do with people covering their faces in any manner when in places of public assembly:

In many US states and the District of Columbia, there are anti-mask laws.

Anti-mask laws date back to the mid-20th century when states and municipalities passed them as to inhibit the Ku Klux Klan, whose members typically wore hoods of white linen to conceal their identities.

I wonder whether the editors would champion the KKK’s right to cover their faces. Somehow I doubt it.

France has what is probably the most restrictive law of all in that respect:

The French ban on face covering is an act of parliament passed by the Senate of France on 14 September 2010, resulting in the ban on the wearing of face-covering headgear, including masks, helmets, balaclava, niqābs and other veils covering the face in public places, except under specified circumstances.

Here’s an article on the extent of bans on face-veiling, which includes this map:

bans

Western countries—not just Germany—are struggling with issues of nationalism versus immigration. To what extent will a nation declare its own culture to be something with which immigrants must conform? What is the proper proportion of immigrants to natives in order to preserve a country’s own culture, and how many people even want to preserve that culture? What is racism and what is common sense? How far can the left go in accusing people of blanket racism before the word becomes meaningless and causes a backlash (and has that point already arrived)? What form will that backlash take (considering that Germany, for example, has a very troubling history)?

And it’s not just western countries, either. Many Muslim countries have struggled with related cultural issues. When the Shah was in power in Iran, for example, women didn’t wear the chador, but it came back with a vengeance (literally) after 1979, along with the theocracy.

And let’s not forget Turkey’s Ataturk:

The Ottoman Empire had a social system based on religious affiliation. The religious insignia extended to every social function. It was common to wear clothing that identified the person with their own particular religious grouping and accompanied headgear which distinguished rank and profession throughout the Ottoman Empire. The turbans, fezes, bonnets and head-dresses surmounting Ottoman styles showed the sex, rank, and profession (both civil and military) of the wearer…

Ataté¼rk’s Reforms defined a non-civilized (non-scientific, non-positivist) person as one who functioned within the boundaries of superstition. The ulema was not a scientific group, and it was acting according to superstitions developed throughout centuries. Their name was “Gerici”, literally means “backward”, but it was used to mean bigot. On February 25, 1925 parliament passed a law stating that religion was not to be used as a tool in politics. The question became how this law could be brought to life in a country whose scholars are dominated by the ulema. Kemalist ideology waged a war against superstition by banning the practices of the ulema and promoting the civilized way (“westernization”), with establishing lawyers, teachers, doctors. The ban on the ulema’s social existence came in the form of dress code. The strategic goal was to change the large influence of the ulema over politics by removing them from the social arena. However, there was the danger of being perceived as anti-religious…

Beginning in 1923, a series of laws progressively limited the wearing of selected items of traditional clothing. Mustafa Kemal first made the hat compulsory to the civil servants. The guidelines for the proper dressing of students and state employees (public space controlled by state) was passed during his lifetime. After most of the relatively better educated civil servants adopted the hat with their own he gradually moved further. The Hat Law of 1925 introduced the use of Western style hats instead of the fez. Legislation did not explicitly prohibit veils or headscarves and focused instead on banning fezzes and turbans for men. Another control on the dress was passed in 1934 with the law relating to the wearing of ‘Prohibited Garments’. It banned religion-based clothing, such as the veil and turban, while actively promoting western-style attire.

This is not a small topic, nor is it a simple one, although the editors of Bloomberg would like to pretend that it is. The way we dress is not the least bit arbitrary, as any wearer of the burqa could tell you. The issues are not simply religious, either—they are cultural too, and they also have security implications in a world in which Islamic terrorism is an important and dangerous phenomenon even in western nations. To say otherwise and to declare that all of this is simply a racist brouhaha is delusional.

Fixed!

The New Neo Posted on by

The problem on the blog with spam and other comments yesterday has been fixed. Turns out it was actually a problem with the host, and not local to this blog.

When glitches like that happen, a blogger never can be sure where the source is. It didn’t initially occur to me this time that the source was the host, because in the past that has meant the whole blog has gone down (perish the hateful thought). This time everything was working okay except the spam blocker, which was now putting all comments—spam and real—into moderation. I get a lot of comments here, but I get a lot more spam—ordinarily between 5 and 10 thousand spam comments a day. To sort through that without an effective spam blocker would be a full-time job and more.

Anyway, everything seems to have been fixed, and comments are posting as usual.

How about a nice…

The New Neo Posted on by

…spam invasion?

Every now and then my spamblocker goes on the fritz. Actually, what I think is happening is that the people (there still are people involved somewhere, right?) who design spamming programs keep trying and trying to find a way past the firewall, and suddenly they do something that works. Then the people (there still are people involved somewhere, right?) who design spam-blocking programs have to catch up.

Or something like that.

Usually I get about 100 spambot comments a minute. Yes, you heard right—100 a minute, which the spam blocker puts into the spam folder. So when something in the blocker breaks down, a vast number come to the blog itself. You don’t ordinarily see them, because they are cleverly deposited on old threads, the better to escape detection. But I can see them coming in, and I can hand-block them.

It’s a laborious process. Usually something gets fixed after a couple of hours, and then the problem is no more. But in the meantime, the blocker may “unapprove” the occasional real comment from a regular person, which I then have to unblock by hand.

Fun.

Apologies for any inconvenience to you. The problem should end fairly soon.

Changing places, left and right

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “mollyNH” writes about the 2016 election:

It was all so tantalizingly close for the Left…

“Tantalizingly close” is one big reason this election has been so very difficult for the left, and why the right isn’t just happy but is stunned at the fact that, when it least expected it, it now has control of every branch of government (because it is poised to control SCOTUS, too). The shock and reversal has been immense for both parties, although one is sad and one is happy.

This was the strangest election of my lifetime. And not just because Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both very unusual candidates.

It was strange and curious—and extremely stressful—because nearly everyone was predicting the death of the GOP. Some thought the death was coming (or even was already here) because Trump would lose, Hillary would win, the Senate would be in Democratic hands, and the Supreme Court soon would be. There would be horrible recriminations and blame on the right. Some thought the death was coming (or even was already here) even if Trump won, because he would drive a stake in the GOP’s heart—or already had done so, just by his candidacy.

But it turns out that, as with Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the GOP had been greatly exaggerated. In fact, I don’t think the party has ever been so healthy (well, maybe not actually healthy, but giving the appearance of health) in my entire lifetime. Reagan as president had to contend with either mixed or Democratic Congresses for his entire presidency (see this). The Contract with America in the 1990s, which returned Congress to Republican hands for the first time in ages, happened with a Democratic president on board.

So not only did the party not die this year, it seems unusually robust, at least at the moment. It holds the presidency, both houses of Congress, probably SCOTUS in a while, and most of the statehouses and governorships.

And it’s the Democrats who are looking sickly. No wonder they don’t know what hit them. Nor, it seems, does anyone else, the reversal in perception is so enormous. Oh, we don’t lack for theories. They explain Trump’s victory, perhaps. But they don’t explain the scope and breadth of the reversal.

It’s as though everyone was keeping a vigil by the deathbed of someone who had been shot and was dying. That someone was the GOP. They were hearing the death rattle in the throat and were waiting for the final moment, heads bowed. Some had tears streaming down their cheeks. Some were secretly (or maybe not so secretly) happy, because they felt that the person on the bed had wronged them terribly.

But all knew it was very near the end.

And then suddenly the person jumped up.

Not just jumped up, but started tap dancing and chuckling.

And the mourners looked back at the bed, and lying there was (and is) another very ill person…and they recognize that person as the shooter.

Very odd.

Now, it’s one thing to say Trump will win, and to be correct. Quite a few people did that, although the great majority did not. And even someone like me, who did not predict a win for Trump, gave him about a 1 in 3 chance of winning during the last month or so of his candidacy. But I never really thought that we’d get Trump, plus a completely Republican-dominated Congress, so many statehouses, and retention of most of the majority in the House with just six seats lost there.

And not just that, but Trump is currently making nicey-nicey with the “establishment” he so reviled, and they are in a minor lovefest with him.

Don’t for a moment consider that all of this means that the Democrats (or in particular the left) are goners and that the Republicans have won. The GOP is riding high right now. But if it doesn’t get results, the public will turn on it just as it has turned on the Democrats, who once thought they were riding so high it would never end.

The Gramscian march is still the province of the left, for example, although propaganda can be overridden by the very real changes (for good or ill) that actually affect people in their actual lives. But those good changes have to happen during the next four years, or people will turn on those who promised them what they could not (or would not) deliver.

The site of the Oakland fire had not been inspected…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for three decades, despite plenty of complaints.

Completely disgraceful:

Right. Budget cuts are to explain why a building hadn’t been inspected in thirty years. Here is more nonsense:

There weren’t any inspections because “we had no applications for permits in the last 30 years, and there were no violations that were submitted for interior work within the main building attributed to that street address,” said Darin Ranelletti, the city’s interim director of planning and building.

Right. Meanwhile, people were apparently complaining about the building continuously:

On Friday night, the warehouse became the scene of one of Oakland’s deadliest building fires as an electronic dance party was underway. The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.

Nevertheless, the city received repeated complaints over the years about the warehouse-turned-art space, a dilapidated two-story structure at 1315 31st Ave., and its adjacent lot.

The site had become cluttered with old cars, oil containers, pests and trash, according to those complaints.

Many of the complaints were directed at the lot, pointing to a “ton of garbage piling up on the property” as well as the “illegal interior building structure” at the warehouse, according to city records released this week.

The most recent complaints were filed three weeks before Friday’s fire.

The notion that the city couldn’t send somebody over there to check property because of budget cuts is complete garbage.

I would imagine there are many other structures like this in the city. I hope the city starts paying attention, and doing something about potential disasters waiting to happen.

American hero John Glenn dies at 95

The New Neo Posted on by

The headlines practically write themselves: “American hero.” Quintessential American hero.

When I read that Glenn had died at 95 my first reaction was surprise that he was still alive. After all, he was named an astronaut in my youth, and he wasn’t even all that young back then. I well remember that Life magazine cover, back when Life was what everyone read:

Cover of LIFE magazine dated 09-14-1959, w. logo & group portrait of Project Mercury astronauts (R-L): Top: Walter Schirra; Alan Shepard; Middle: John Glenn; Scott Carpenter; Donald Slayton; Bottom: Leroy Cooper; Virgil Grissom.

September 1959. John Glenn is the one with the bowtie.

Glenn’s list of accomplishments reads as though it was written by Hollywood:

He was the first American to orbit the Earth, a war hero fighter pilot, a record-setting test pilot, a longtime senator, a presidential candidate and a man who defied age and gravity to go back into space at 77.

But those were just his accomplishments. What made John Glenn was more his persona: He was a combat veteran with boy next door looks, a strong marriage and nerves of steel. Schools were named after him. Children were named after him. His life story of striving hard, succeeding, suffering setbacks and high-flying redemption was as American as it gets. Add to that unflagging devotion to a wife he has known since childhood and unerring service to his country.

“Known since childhood”? Try “known since toddlerhood.”

One of the most interesting things about Glenn was that in his private life he was so conventional, and even in some ways insular. He married a woman he had met, as he himself said, “in the playpen” and known his entire life. And he stayed with her; they were married a remarkable 73 years, and she survives him, so they both shared not only their lives but longevity too. And yet those lives were anything but conventional in terms of what they did. Couples often make promises before marriage, and only sometimes are those promises kept. But Glenn certainly fulfilled this one, didn’t he?:

“I promised her on our wedding day I’d do everything I can to make sure our life is never dull,” Mr. Glenn said.

The announcement of Glenn’s death engenders reflection on how people decide to live their lives. Glenn’s life was very very large: one of action and movement in his outer life, rock-solid stability in his inner life and personal relationships. It made me think of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” and how Glenn resembled the hero in that poem in some ways and was the opposite in others.

The poem begins with restlessness: “matched with an aged wife,” Ulysses desires to set sail again. Glenn adored his “aged wife,” but he “set sail” again when he went back into space at 77. He continued to be active into his 90s, and to “drink life to the lees.” :

…Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices…

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

RIP, John Glenn.

When United says “no frills”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…they really mean it:

The airline, one of the world’s largest carriers, plans to introduce a new ‘basic economy’ fare in the New Year.

But these tickets come with a catch. Passengers who buy the ‘basic economy’ ticket instead of a standard economy fare can travel with a single small item of carry-on luggage, but only if it fits underneath the seat in front of them…

Prices, however, for this new low-frills ticket will actually be comparable to the low fares United now charges for the economy cabin, according to Reuters – which effectively means that using the overhead bins will hit fliers in the pocket.

The Telegraph reported that United ‘expects the changes to raise around $1bn by 2020’.

Nice.

I suppose they’ve done their market research. But it seems to me that this appeals only to passengers who are going on day trips or at the most overnight jaunts. I suppose that’s a sizeable number, but it wouldn’t be me. I travel heavy, even for short trips. And so do a lot of women (this video features the f-word quite a bit, but it’s very funny and it describes me almost exactly):

[NOTE: I hesitate to put up this companion piece video that shows how guys pack, because it’s really gross. But it’s really funny, and spot on about the more cavalier attitude to packing of most guys I know.]

The personal in politics

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m always interested in political change. I’m not at all sure that this type of change is fundamental enough to last, but it’s certainly of interest, and it could end up being permanent rather than situational, depending on what happens during the next four years:

Robert James stood outside the Carrier plant just before the president-elect addressed workers at the refrigeration and heating assembly factory.

“I feel a great swing of emotions that go from disbelief to satisfaction that this is happening in our community. An area like this can go from a stable middle-class area to foreclosures and urban blight in the blink of an eye,” he said.

James would never dream of voting Republican: “For all of my life the Democrats have been the party of the working guy, had my back. But if I am being really honest, and this is tough to admit, but I can’t remember the last time they did anything to improve the dignity and value of my job” ”” a point that didn’t really crystallize for him until it became personal: until his job was saved. By a Republican.

James, wearing a United Steelworkers jacket on a brisk afternoon, was in no way saying he’s found political religion in the Republicans. But the 57-year-old, African-American longtime Carrier employee did share the sentiment of many of his co-workers, Democrats who didn’t vote for Trump but felt their party was disconnected from their lives.

Most of the Democratic leaders quoted post-election don’t seem to acknowledge that, although some do. I seem to recall that during her 2008 campaign against Obama, Clinton tried to cast herself as a working class hero. But it didn’t quite stick, and perhaps that’s why in 2016 she never really tried, particularly when up against a guy who, despite his vast wealth, connected with that group and championed it very explicitly and repeatedly.

And why would the Democrats have seen that they needed to, anyway? They had cobbled together what they believed was a winning formula based on changing demographics that they felt favored them, in which minorities of various kinds, the elite rich, and the lower classes would combine to elect them time and again. So they could ignore the vast middle, which wasn’t so vast anymore.

Here’s one Democrat who sees that, at least now:

“The Democratic Party has become a coastal elitist club and if there is any decision or discussion made to broaden that within the ranks, it is squashed,” said Dane Strother, a legendary Washington, DC-based Democratic strategist.

“We have completely lost touch with Middle America,” he admits. “How did we go from the party of the little man to the party of the elite?”…

“We kept waiting for the white working class to just show up, but we didn’t give them any reason to,” he said, adding that Democrats can’t just be the party that simply waits for minorities to become the majority.

Well, to defend the Democrats, they didn’t just wait for minorities to become the majority. Part of the reason for their liberal policy on illegal immigration was with the goal of hastening that day.

Meanwhile, they didn’t account for Trump’s flair for the dramatic deal, although they should have:

Tuesday, a Politico/Morning Consult poll confirmed what Strother knows in his gut: Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s deal last week with Carrier is wildly popular with the voters. The poll showed Democrats, Republicans and independents heavily viewed Trump’s negotiations with Carrier as an appropriate use of presidential prerogative.

And a majority of Americans say the Carrier deal gives them a more favorable view of Trump. “It was magnificent, brilliant theater, and who gives a damn if he can’t replicate that everywhere?” Strother said.

“The fact that my fellow Democrats don’t get that has more to do with denial problems or the fact that they weren’t up there doing it themselves.”

This reminds me of the discussions in 2012 on the GOP side after the Obama re-election, the ones that advocated for the GOP to start adopting a kinder gentler illegal immigration policy in order to retain any power at all. Didn’t quite work out that way, did it?

Saying a tearful good-bye to Reid and the filibuster

The New Neo Posted on by

Harry Reid is leaving the Senate, and in this interview with Politico he evaluates his tenure and makes predictions. He thinks he did just fine, and that the future for the Democrats looks just fine, too:

“They have Trump, I understand that. But I don’t think the Democratic Party is in that big of trouble,” Reid said in a half-hour interview with Politico on Wednesday, one day before he’ll deliver his farewell address. “I mean, if Comey kept his mouth shut, we would have picked up a couple more Senate seats and we probably would have elected Hillary.”

Well, what did you expect from Reid? And who knows, he may even be correct that the Democrats will rise again. Stranger reversals have happened, such as the unexpected triumph of the GOP that we’re experiencing right now.

Does anyone mourn Reid’s leaving, even the Democrats? He has really been a nasty piece of work, even for a politician.

This statement of his in the interview caught my attention [emphasis mine]:

Reid’s most controversial move as leader ”” invoking the “nuclear option” on Senate confirmations ”” will leave his party essentially powerless to halt Trump’s Cabinet selections.

Reid insisted that it was the right thing to do.

“I don’t know if it’s my biggest achievement, but I’m satisfied we did it. We had to. Look at why it was done,” said Reid, who turned 77 this month. “We got almost 100 judges approved ”¦ we saved the integrity of different agencies of government. No, think of what our country would’ve been without that.”

Reid predicted that the 60-vote filibuster threshold for legislation and for Supreme Court nominees will ultimately disappear altogether ”” calling it a natural evolution of the chamber.

The rules are “going to erode, it’s just a question of when,” Reid said. “You can’t have a democracy decided by 60 out of 100, and that’s why changing the rules is one of the best things that has happened to America in a long time. It’s good for us, it’s good for them.”

Small point—I think he actually might have meant: “you can’t have a democracy blocked by 41 out of 60.”

The larger picture is that Reid is trying to cast himself re the filibuster not as the autonomous agent of change, but as a mere cog being carried along by the wheel of history. The filibuster (actually, the earlier filibuster plus the adoption in 1917 of the rule about how many votes are necessary for cloture) had been in operation since 1837, with plenty of motivation to change it along the way. But despite this both sides had decided—till Reid came along—that it was in their best interests to keep it as a sort of insurance policy against the day when they might be on the outs in the Senate. The idea of the entire thing was to prevent simple majority rule in that legislative body, and to generally keep government moving at a slower pace and with more compromises necessary for it to move at all.

That’s not Harry Reid’s preference. His preference is to say, “we’ve got the majority and so we’ll do whatever we want, even in the Senate, and you shouldn’t be able to stop us.” That’s why he speaks of “democracy,” even in the Senate which has not functioned as a simple democracy for a long time, and which has traditionally been dedicated to preserving the rights of the minority party, and which was established as a specifically republican (small “r”) body to counteract the more democratic (small “d”) House.

I think Reid is well aware of this history. He just pretends he’s not, because it suits his purposes right now. And when the filibuster suited his purposes, he didn’t hesitate to use it.

I was never exactly sure what Reid thought he was doing when he ended the filibuster in 2013 in order to get those nominations approved. But he seems to feel it was worth it. My guess is that he thought the appointees would fundamentally change the country (and in particular its judicial system) in a way that would have enormous long-term effects that would keep Democrats and the left winning indefinitely in the institutional sense and the electoral sense, and that it was unlikely to come back to bite them. Judges’ decisions are enormously influential. Or maybe he thought the GOP would be too wimpy to use the power he gave them. I also have a hunch that Reid didn’t think it at all likely that the GOP would take control of both the Senate and the presidency in just a few short years.

But that’s what has happened, and now the Democrats are reduced to being the party of No!. Thanks to Reid, their ability to yell “no” as loudly and effectively as before has been attenuated.