And in Brussels

Sprouts of yellow vests:

The sign on the left says, "Michel Resign"; Michel is the Belgian Prime Minister

It's worth remembering -- yellow hi-vis vests are universal wear in the working class. Every time I stop for coffee in the morning on my way to work, I see people who are landscapers, or electricians, or construction workers, wearing hi-vis. It's worn so that workers who do potentially dangerous work are easily visible. It's the perfect thing for these protesters to wear, especially in Brussels, where such people are supposed to remain invisible while the EU technocrats devise ways to direct their lives. Pay attention.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam

It's a thing, kids:

These aren't college-age dork anarchists

Paris ain't Rotterdam. We're talking about well-behaved Netherlanders. Pay attention.

Divide

When Donald Trump began his campaign in 2015, I was disgusted with him. During 2016, I publicly identified myself as a NeverTrumper. For however long Trump is president, I'll never be very comfortable with him. But he is the president. And many of the people who oppose him are far worse than Trump is. 

John Kass, writing for the Chicago Tribune, makes the salient point:

So, what is bothersome isn’t that reporters and many pundits don’t understand Trump. I really don’t know who does understand him. He wasn’t my choice for president.

But what concerns me are his voters, our countrymen and women. That’s half of our nation. And what bothers me is that I really don’t think many in journalism want to understand them.

Shame them? Yes. Understand them? No.

Pharisees come in many packages. Back to Kass:

But Trump’s voters know what put him in the White House. It wasn’t merely that Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. It was that Trump voters detested the crowd that backed her, loathed them; and those voters in turn were viewed as something to be stepped on, to be ridiculed for heresy.

By not wanting to understand them, I worry that journalism blinds itself to something very real, critical and, in the long term, dangerous in our nation: A simmering resentment against the establishment in much of red state America.

And it’s not going away even if Trump goes away.

I've spent the better part of the past 18 months trying to grapple with these issues, especially in this feature. Kass is correct -- from what I see, the concerns of many Trump voters are somehow illegitimate, at least to those who make their living telling us how the world is. And that leads to a bad place. Victor Davis Hanson senses it, too:

Ideologies and apologies accumulated to justify the new divide. In a reversal of cause and effect, losers, crazies, clingers, American “East Germans,” and deplorables themselves were blamed for driving industries out of their neighborhoods (as if the characters out of Duck Dynasty or Ax Men turned off potential employers). Or, more charitably to the elites, the muscular classes were too racist, xenophobic, or dense to get with the globalist agenda, and deserved the ostracism and isolation they suffered from the new “world is flat” community. London and New York shared far more cultural affinities than did New York and Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, the naturally progressive, more enlightened, and certainly cooler and hipper transcended their parents’ parochialism and therefore plugged in properly to the global project. And they felt that they were rightly compensated for both their talent and their ideological commitment to building a better post-American, globalized world.

One cultural artifact was that as our techies and financiers became rich, as did those who engaged in electric paper across time and space (lawyers, academics, insurers, investors, bankers, bureaucratic managers), the value of muscularity and the trades was deprecated. That was a strange development. After all, prestige cars, kitchen upgrades, gentrified home remodels, and niche food were never more in demand by the new elite. But who exactly laid the tile, put the engine inside the cars, grew the arugula, or put slate on the new hip roof?

In many cases, people who voted for Trump provided the services Hanson describes. My job requires me to market products and services that people who lay tile require. I can't ignore their concerns and stay in business. And those who earn their living in media shouldn't, either. But too often they do. Back to Kass:

Think back on that laughter, on that giggling when she talked of “deplorables.” What followed were the snickers of the clique who get the joke at the expense of those who don’t.

That laughter stuck. And Trump voters took the memory of it to the polls on Election Day. Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump voters overwhelmingly gave him the Electoral College victory.

Now, Democrats are lathered up with the trial of this B-movie villain, this Manafort, whose alleged crimes took place long before he worked a few months for Trump.

Let’s say their Manafort fantasies come true, and he cuts a deal, and he serves Trump to special prosecutor Robert Mueller and the orange presidential head is placed upon a platter.

Then what?

What do you do with the millions who voted for Trump? Mock them into submission? Have them grovel and beg forgiveness before they’re re-educated?

You don’t have to understand Trump. But it’s dangerous not to understand the 63 million who voted for him. They’re not going into exile. They’re here.

And the lesson I've learned? They are me.

The Local Scene -- Big Yellow Taxi, or Whatever Lotter Wants, Lotter Gets

Following the election results of yesterday, I can safely say two things about municipal government in New Brighton:

• The city council will get along splendidly and will be spending a lot of time congratulating itself for its wisdom and courage in investing in a brave new future for our fair city; and
• The city council will be a rubber stamp for the person who actually runs things, City Manager Dean Lotter.

After 12 years fighting the powers that be, Gina Bauman will not be part of the council next year. Gina was the one person on the council who would regularly challenge the logrolling and "what am I signing, Radar?" ways of the rest of the council, especially in the last two years. Because she was regularly outvoted 4-1 on fiscal matters, Bauman hasn't been able to effect needed changes for a while now, but her efforts have meant that some of the more dubious ideas get at least a touch of scrutiny. That's gone now. You can expect a lot of 5-0 votes on the council going forward -- the incoming council members, Graeme Allen and Emily Dunsworth, are both DFL operatives and while their positions are nominally nonpartisan, there's little question they will defer to Lotter's wishes and pose for a lot of photo opportunities. I'm sure they'll have a great time.

There's more to say about this election, especially the role of the successful school board levy vote in driving the results, but the lesson is obvious -- if you go along, you get along. And as the citizens of New Brighton look at their property tax bills in the coming years, they'll understand the refrain of Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi":

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

We'll be keeping a tally here.

Mostly open thread

Don't have much to say, so we will call this an open thread. I would call your attention to this article from the Atlantic. Pull quote:

The most popular public forum at Reed is Facebook, where social tribes coalesce and where the most emotive and partisan views get the most attention. “Facebook conversations at Reed bring out the extreme aspects of political discourse on campus,” said Yuta, a sophomore who recently co-founded a student group, The Thinkery, “dedicated to critical and open discussion.”(The Atlantic used first names for students out of concern for online harassment.) Raphael, the founder of the Political Dissidents Club, warned incoming students over Facebook that “Reed’s culture can be stifling/suffocating and narrow minded.”

It can also be bullying. When the parent of a freshman rebuked RAR for derailing a lecture, a RAR supporter tagged the parent’s employer in a post. In mid-April, when students were studying for finals, a RAR leader grew frustrated that more supporters weren’t showing up to protest Hum 110. In a post viewable only to Reed students, the leader let loose:

To all the white & able(mentally/physically) who don’t come to sit-ins(ever, anymore, rarely): all i got is shade for you. [... If] you ain’t with me, then I will accept that you are against me. There’s 6 hums left, I best be seein all u phony ass white allies show-up. […] How you gonna be makin all ur white supremacy messes & not help clean-up your own community by coming and sitting for a frickin hour & still claim that you ain’t a laughin at a lynchin kinda white.

The RAR leader proceeded to call out at least 15 students by name. One named Patrick defended himself, saying in part, “I didn’t realize this was [your] opinion of me as a friend. … I will not give you my support simply because you are leading a noble cause.” The leader referred to that defense as “white supremacy.” Another leader used a vulgar insult, followed by “White tears white tears.”

That's a long pull quote, but it's a long article. Stay with it, though. Perhaps the fog is lifting, just a little.

I have only come here seeking knowledge

Things they would not teach me of in college:

Colleges have been perceived as liberal bastions for decades, but the latest round of campus culture warring—beginning around 2014 and continuing through the present day—has had a sudden and dramatic impact on conservatives’ perceptions of the Ivory Tower. According to a new Pew survey, Republicans saw colleges and universities as having a “positive effect on the way things are going in the country” by about a 20 point margin until 2015. In the last two years, however, GOP esteem of America’s higher education institutions started to collapse. Today, Republican [sic] 58 percent of Republican voters say colleges have a negative effect on American society, compared to just 36 percent who say they have a positive effect.

Writing for the American Interest, Jason Willick explains the current dynamic well:

Most campus lefties will probably look at these numbers as evidence that Republicans are even more anti-intellectual than they thought, and that the #resistance against them needs to be taken up a few notches. This would be a big mistake. The homogenization of leftwing views on college campuses, and the obvious hostility to conservative ones was bound to produce a backlash from conservative voters. That backlash has been wrapped up in class conflict between a highly-credentialed professional class and a working class that finds higher education and the well-paying jobs it provides to the elite increasingly out of reach.

And, more importantly, the conservatives hold the purse strings:

Meanwhile, Republicans control an overwhelming share of America’s statehouses, and so have unprecedented power to defund and restructure public higher education. And Congressional Republicans could restrict the flow of student loans that academia depends on or subject massive university endowments to ordinary tax rates (most are currently exempt). In other words, America’s higher education system, as currently structured, depends on consensus support from both parties. If universities continue to torch their reputation with the right, they may find that some of the privileges and resources and social prestige they have become accustomed to will go up in flames as well.

This is why Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is feuding with the UW system; he'd prefer more money go into undergraduate instruction and less into the scholarly research that fills the obscure journals of academe. He's not wrong in wanting that, and he doesn't particularly care whether the denizens of the UW system excoriate him about his preferences, since they would find another thing to complain about if he weren't digging in their sandbox.

I'm not sure if the Pew survey is correct, but there's little question academe is full of leftists. And as a parent with one child a year away from graduating from a liberal arts college, and also about to send a second child off to college, it's a bit of a conundrum. There are only a couple of explicitly conservative colleges in the country, but my kids never seriously looked at those schools. We haven't been trying to steer the decisions our kids make; as it happens, one school which has had significant issues with protests and outright fakery in the reasons for the protests, was on my daughter's list, but she has already eliminated that school on other grounds. All of the schools on her list are to the left, but at least two are ranked highly for ensuring free speech and avoiding the shouting down of opposing views. My son's school is liberal, but the college president, on my son's orientation day, explicitly said "we must listen to conservative voices" and asserted that conservative views had a place on campus. And her promise has held true. It's a start.

Nothing to do but feed all the kangaroos

I didn't support Donald Trump in 2016, but he is president in 2017. The perpetual outrage machine from the Left is risible. Trump has only been in office two weeks. I do counsel a few deep, cleansing breaths, but it's still imperative to call out when he does something dumb. Getting in a fight with the prime minister of Australia is dumb. Walter Russell Mead is on the case:

The readouts of Trump’s less-than-diplomatic phone call have provoked understandable concern about his capacity to work productively with America’s strongest allies. And the critics have good reason to question Trump’s combative approach; if Trump is angry at Obama for taking a deal he doesn’t like, he shouldn’t take it out on the Australian PM.

And Trump didn't like it one bit:

Study before you make the phone call, Mr. President

Sorting through the deals his predecessor made will be an ongoing challenge, but bluster isn't the way to approach the leader of an ally. Back to Mead:

The deal between [Malcolm] Trumbull and Obama was a swap: Australia would take some of the Central American refugees that were embarrassing the United States in an election year and threatening Obama’s political interests, in exchange for a small number of Middle Eastern refugees from Australia. Central Americans aren’t a big issue in Australia, so Turnbull looked good at home; Obama (and presumably Clinton) felt that the deal would largely escape notice in the United States.

The deal did escape notice, or at least reportage, until Trump decided to bring the matter up. I don't blame Australia for making the deal with Obama; as Mead notes, the Aussies have all manner of refugee problems themselves:

The debate over Australian immigration detention centers is not a new one; the first such facility was established on Australian territory in 1966. Even as the number of such centers has grown, they have always been controversial, with periodic riots and escapes and persistent human rights criticisms chipping away at support. The so-called Pacific Solution, first implemented in the early 2000s, established Pacific detention centers off Australia’s shores in Papua New Guinea and the island of Nauru, but support for that, too, has waxed and waned; offshore processing was abandoned in 2007 before resuming again in 2012 after an uptick in asylum seekers. Australia’s current asylum policy has established a “zero tolerance” stance toward illegal boat arrivals, combined with mandatory detention. This has helped keep asylum seekers out of Australia, but it has also left Turnbull with an intractable humanitarian problem.

It's a problem that isn't going away, either. Trump, Turnbull and other leaders have work to do to sort out all these problems. But there won't be any progress if we find ourselves fighting our allies. Those of us on the starboard side criticized Obama consistently for his disdain of Great Britain. Trump can't do the same sort of thing with other allies and expect to conduct a successful foreign policy.