The Zeitgeist

 

The late Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong (left) and the late Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek (right) The fight goes on?

A “One Taiwan” Policy? Let’s Take Out the Chinese?

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on December 5, 2016

Much brouhaha has been made over the weekend phone call between President-Elect Donald Trump and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. On the surface you’d think that calling out for Chinese would be no big deal, but this conversation wasn’t about Moo Goo Gai Pan and by merely having any conversation at all, a lot of mainland Chinese bile has hit the wok.

Taiwanese Presidents have been untouchable by top US leaders for nearly four decades owing to the “One China Policy” created back in the 70s by former President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. This policy in a nutshell says that the US and most of the West recognize that China is one integral, indivisible country and that the Communists in Beijing by dint of controlling over 90 percent of it are the legitimate government of this one country.

Conventional thinking is that partition is ok for Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, for Palestinians and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis but not for China. This is a big burr under the posteriors of the Beijing Politburo because any deviation from this position implies the Communist regime perhaps isn’t as legitimate as they’d like the world and their own people to believe and that the Chinese civil war hasn’t been resolved. It infuriates the Communists that any remnant of non-Communist China exists because that existence means there must be another political point of view and in monolithic mainland China, that’s an anathema because the people of China aren’t meant to have any say as to who their leaders are and how their country is run.

For nearly four decades, the US and the West have been cravenly kowtowing to the Communists by dint of their strategic (and now economic) importance in the world. Nuclear missiles, millions of soldiers and really cheap consumer goods speak louder than the principles of freedom, democracy and human rights.

The Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan are the heirs to the popular revolution more than a century ago to overthrow the millennia-old Chinese monarchy and create a republic. Seeing an opportunity to further international Communism owing to the instability within China as a result of that revolution, the Soviets poured money and materiél into the fledgling Communist guerilla insurgency led by Mao Zedong. Mao made life miserable for Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists who were concurrently battling breakaway warlords, the Communists and then by the late 1930s, the Japanese who were trying to conquer the country.

During World War II the Soviets instructed Mao to take a break from beating on the Nationalists to fight the Japanese, but after 1945 the civil war resumed in full earnest. From the late 1920s until the Communists conquered the entire mainland in 1949, Mao slaughtered and starved hundreds of thousands of opponents and after 1949 the Communists killed millions more of their own citizens through their Stalin-esque Gulag system, endless purges and forced collectivization.

Chiang’s troops, driven from the mainland, fled to the island of Taiwan along with a couple of million mainlanders and declared that the Republic of China was now situated there and they hoped to use that island to eventually invade the mainland, resume the civil war and overthrow the Communists. For about 30 years the US backed the Nationalists on Taiwan as the legitimate government of all China. In the 70s former President Nixon “opened up” Communist China as a way to create a strategic wedge between and the Soviet Union and China thereby weakening global Communist forces. In this Nixon succeeded. While switching recognition from the Nationalists to the Communists, the US also ambiguously pledged to ensure that Taiwan wasn’t forcibly integrated into the mainland and could defend itself and maintain its de-facto independence.

Over the last few decades the government in Taiwan has evolved from an essentially pro-West fascist dictatorship led by the Kuomintang (KMT, or Chinese Nationalist Party, founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1912) to a multi-party pluralistic free democracy where there have been peaceful transfers of power between the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Taiwan’s current President is from the DPP. Taiwan today is a free-enterprise economic powerhouse with the rule of law, freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion, travel, livelihood, etc.

Meanwhile, on the mainland, the Communists still have an iron grip on any political expression. Basic freedoms are still repressed. The people are made quiescent by a potent mixture of intimidation through force and the injection of state-sponsored capitalism which allows folks to make money and buy creature comforts. Ironically, the Communist Party has transmogrified into a fascist dictatorship themselves which enables them to stay in power. But the people are given no other options. It’s kind of like both Saudi Arabia where silence is also bought with money and ancient Rome where the masses were quelled with bread and circuses.

There are many on Taiwan who would like to put a formal end to the Chinese civil war, give up any claims to the mainland and rejoin the family of nations – essentially get on with their lives and have their own freedom and self-determination on Taiwan for Taiwan and leave the mainland to its own devices. The problem is that the Communists won’t hear of it. It’s an all or nothing, my way or the highway deal with them – no Chinese (except maybe in New York’s Chinatown) can be under their own umbrella – it has the be the Beijing parasol or you’re flat out of luck.

So, back to Mr. Trump and Ms. Tsai. By even implicitly or by slight inference recognizing that Taiwan has a President and that this President might possibly be legitimate, it opens the specter of a brave new world vis-à-vis China that could have geo-strategic and economic implications of a potentially frightening nature.

Should the 23.5 million people of Taiwan have the right to self-determination free from threats of coercion and annihilation? Should the US stand firm for human rights and for what’s right around the world irrespective of existing political orthodoxies? A lot of folks didn’t think the Iron Curtain in Europe could ever be shattered, but it was. What about Asia’s “bamboo curtain?” (China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Korea). Donald Trump could certainly make it an interesting ride to say the least if resetting China policy is on his mind.

The Zeitgeist

Donald and Melania Trump voting in New York on November 8, 2016

Trump Win Proves the Election and System isn’t “Rigged”

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on November 9, 2016

The election wasn’t rigged.

Confounding the pollsters, the pundits, the media and conventional wisdom, Donald J. Trump, entertainer, entrepreneur and real estate developer was elected as the next President of the United States.

Improbably, a billionaire became the voice of the common man having run a populist campaign pledging to give voice to the ignored, the dispossessed and disenfranchised – those left behind in the high tech revolution, those passed over in the massive cultural changes of the past dozen years, those who felt palpable insecurity with the evaporation of much manufacturing, the explosion in health care costs and those who tired of accommodation and appeasement of violent Islamic extremists.

Trump put together a victory without the benefit of carrying the Northeast or the West Coast – the Trump win was a win for the “Flyover States,” as the middle of the country is sometimes derisively dismissed by the coastal elites. It was also a win for Texas and Dixie – the South rose up to repudiate an increasingly liberal and progressive vision of America as embodied by eight years of President Obama. Even Florida narrowly slipped out of the Democrats’ grasp. This is the first presidential election in perhaps a century that was accomplished without winning New York, Illinois or California.

The Trump win can be compared in to Richard Nixon’s in 1969 when Spiro Agnew’s “Silent Majority,” the everyday folks ignored by the media ushered in GOP rule as a reset to America’s “cultural revolution” of the 1960s. Trump’s victory also has echoes of Andrew Jackson – a sometimes vulgar and coarse blunt-speaking, hard-charging guy who eventually also overcame the disgust of the entrenched elites of his day and the dynastic entitlements of the Adams (John and John Quincey) family.

A majority of American voters were just not that into Hillary. Never an especially likeable figure and never an especially good retail politician, Hillary oozed aristocratic entitlement and fixed, smoke-filled room inevitability, which is why Obama was able to beat her in 2008 and why Bernie Sanders came awfully close in this primary season. That it was “her time” and “her turn” didn’t resonate with most folks.

In a sense it really was FBI Director James Comey who put Trump over the top. With his campaign swooning in the polls just two weeks ago, Comey’s letter to Congress about Huma Abedin’s laptop and more Clinton emails was the tipping point for many Americans. No matter that just before balloting Mr. Comey cleared Hillary yet again, the sense of many people was that Hillary was slippery, untrustworthy and dishonest. That Trump was able to maintain two weeks of self-discipline, stay on message and not go off the cliff on irrational Twitterized tangents made a big difference for many undecided voters.

Finally, the Trump victory also shows that the path for Republican majorities is in part paved with stifling discourse about people’s bodies and people’s bedrooms. Trump was heavily reticent on abortion and highly tolerant of the LBGT community, two areas of often strident posturing by GOP candidates in the past. People just want more tolerance and want candidates focused on big picture issues, not what goes on in their boudoirs.

Mr. Trump gets a solid GOP majority in the House and a secure one in the Senate along with winning The White House. A big mandate to roll-back much of the past eight years. Now all the kids have to play well together to get things done for the American people and we all have to hope and pray that Trump is capable of rising to the august office of the presidency so his late parents, his family, the GOP and the American people will be proud to have elected him.

The Zeitgeist

Inside the Basket of Undecidables: Millions of Americans Choosing “None of the Above.”

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on October 26, 2016

About a dozen Uber drivers in Florida and New York have told me they’re not planning on voting for a presidential candidate and neither are most of their friends and family. Ditto with the ladies at the dry cleaners. Most of the personal trainers at my gym either aren’t planning to vote at all or not vote for President. Many of the checkout people at the supermarket? Not interested. Then there are my business and professional colleagues who have been wringing their hands so hard that it’s amazing they can still use their fingers. Anecdotal to be sure, but everywhere I go, people from all walks of life, of all genders and ages tell me they hate the choices for President and aren’t planning on voting for either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton.

Most people who tell me they are planning to vote for a presidential candidate are so markedly unenthusiastic you’d think they were being forced to swallow some horrible tasting cough medicine. Never in my lifetime (and I’m 57) have I ever seen so much ambivalence less than two weeks before a presidential election.

There is a huge “basket of undecidables” – people who either can’t choose or are determined not to choose a presidential candidate. A significant percentage of the everyday folks I talk to are planning to vote for Senatorial, Congressional and other races, just not for President. And I make it my business to ask folks about the election to see what people are thinking.

What so many Americans are thinking is that they’re being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils and the problem is that the lesser of two evils is still evil. A lot of folks actually feel that President Obama looks good by comparison to who’s running now, thereby conclusively proving Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

The first Billboard number one single of the 21^st Century was Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” (2000) wherein the Jamaican pop-reggae singer relates how when caught by his girlfriend in flagrante delicto with another woman decides to outrageously, vociferously and repeatedly deny everything by saying “it wasn’t me,” despite clear visual evidence to the contrary. (https://youtu.be/Qv5fqunQ_4I). That’s how a lot of the Undecidables feel about Hillary Clinton. A lot of prevarication. A lot of shenanigans with missing emails, personal servers and bald-faced denials in the face of Wikileaks visual proof. Many of these people are former Bernie Sanders supporters who also are uncomfortable with the millions she and her husband made to essentially peddle influence and access along with her close ties to the Top 1 Percent.

Then there is Donald Trump. For fans of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ seminal take on plutocratic excess, one can’t help but recall that when the character Charles Foster Kane (while running for Governor) was caught having an affair he opted not to do the honorable thing and withdraw from the race but tough it out even with the specter of horrible defeat looming before his eyes. A newspaper magnate, he has front pages prepared with the huge headline “Fraud at the Polls” if he didn’t win. Trump’s railing about the election being “rigged” while having no shame whatsoever about his verbal and physical treatment of women is life imitating art incarnate.

Trump also has that “Il Duce” thing going on. Ron Chernow in his bestselling biography “Alexander Hamilton” asserts that “Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth popular shibboleths to conceal their despotism.” At the Constitutional Convention held during the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia Hamilton said that “demagogues are not always inconsiderable persons. Patricians are frequently demagogues.”

The clergyman at the house of worship I attend gave a sermon a few months back asserting that often “societies get the leaders they deserve.” The choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump says something about America in 2016. In many quarters the qualities of both honor and shame have disappeared in equal measure. The very fabric of our civil society seems to be unraveling before our very eyes and this is why so many people who yearn for a time when things were better, when America was better and who want America to be better (not necessarily “great”) again have found a comfortable spot in the Basket of Undecidables and are proudly supporting “Nobody in 2016.”

My prediction is for low voter turnout at the top of the ballot as a protest “none of the above” non-vote on November 8^th to send a signal to our country’s political leaders that today’s choices are unacceptable.