The P.R. campaign to sell Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to the public is well-underway, with a strong emphasis on portraying him as a moderate/centrist who wouldn’t be so bad for Democrats. It’s a strategy rooted in deception because Gorsuch holds right-wing views on worker rights and has an unsavory history of partisan activity, despite his lofty affirmations about the importance of the independent judiciary.

Gorsuch, who artfully dodged questions about Citizens United and Bush v. Gore, is a fairly slick manipulator of media, which helps to project an image of moderation. As Adam Liptak notes in The New York Times:

The nation’s first extended look at Judge Gorsuch in an unscripted setting revealed a smooth performer who shared some qualities with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who handled his 2005 confirmations hearings with such deep reserves of poise and wit that he was said to have retired the trophy.

Judge Gorsuch’s testimony was folksier, a little more combative and a little more canned. But he shared the chief justice’s ability to describe complex legal doctrines without taking a position on how they applied to actual controversies.

“I care deeply about the independence of the judiciary,” Gorsuch said on Tuesday. “When anyone criticizes the honesty or integrity or motives of a federal judge, I find that disheartening and demoralizing.”

Apparently Gorsuch didn’t “care deeply” enough about his fellow jurist Merrick Garland, a moderate, who is held in high esteem for his personal integrity, being denied a hearing by Republicans, nor even a meeting with any Republicans. This Mike Luckovitch cartoon captures the limits of Gorsuch’s principles regarding “the independence of the judiciary.”

Any Democrat who votes for Gorsuch is, in a sense, giving the Republicans a free ride on the total obstruction of a moderate nominee, Judge Merrick Garland.

Another indication that Gorsuch harbors hyperpartisan convictions underneath his practiced media persona has been noted by Ari Berman at The Nation. As J.P. Green recently noted,

Ari Berman cuts to the chase in his article in The Nation, “In E-mails, Neil Gorsuch Praised a Leading Republican Activist Behind Voter Suppression Efforts. Gorsuch’s ties to Hans von Spakovksy suggest a hostility to voting rights.” As Berman writes: “Few people in the Republican Party have done more to limit voting rights than Hans von Spakovsky. He’s been instrumental in spreading the myth of widespread voter fraud and backing new restrictions to make it harder to vote. But it appears that von Spakovsky had an admirer in Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, according to e-mails released to the Senate Judiciary Committee covering Gorsuch’s time working in the George W. Bush Administration. When President Bush nominated von Spakovksy to the Federal Election Commission in late 2005, Gorsuch wrote, “Good for Hans!””…At very least, the e-mails suggest Gorsuch was friendly with von Spakovksy. But it’s far more disturbing if Gorsuch shares Von Spakovsky’s views on voting rights. Given that we know almost nothing about Gorsuch’s views on the subject, this is something the Senate needs to press him on during confirmation hearings next week.

Gorsuch has already cited Justice Antonin Scalia as a role model, who said the Voting Rights Act had led to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Gorsuch, if confirmed, could be the deciding vote on whether to weaken the remaining sections of the VRA and whether to uphold discriminatory voter-ID laws and redistricting plans from states like North Carolina and Texas. In many ways, the fate of voting rights in the United States hangs on this nomination.

There is also Gorsuch’s very problematic record regarding worker rights and protection. In her Roll Call article, “Senate Democrats Preview Their Case Against Gorsuch: Supreme Court nominee cast as foe of workers.” Bridget Bowman writes, “Judge Gorsuch may act like a neutral, calm judge,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer. “But his record and his career clearly show he harbors a right wing, pro-corporate, special interest agenda.”

Democrats have often opposed recent Republican nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court on the basis of  the nominee’s views on “social issues,” especially reproductive rights. And there is more than enough to be concerned about concerning Gorsuch’s rulings and views on a range of such issues. But it is especially  encouraging that Democrats are now focusing on Gorsuch’s positions on worker rights, which would concern an even larger constituency — all working people.

Whether Gorsuch gets nominated or not, Democrats can use this opportunity to strengthen their image by taking a high profile, front and center, as the real champions of worker rights. If they can stop the Gorsuch appointment or further delay the agenda of Trump and the Republicans, so much the better. The Republicans certainly deserve no better than all-out obstruction, since that has been their policy for over 8 years.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:

It is entirely possible that Donald Trump’s election may indeed mark a significant inflection point in American political history – but not because it spawns a rebirth of white supremacy or the authoritarian right; quite the contrary.

I have been involved in progressive political organizing for 50 years – beginning in the late 1960s. There was an enormous amount of progressive energy, enthusiasm and passion generated during the Civil Rights movement and the mobilizations aimed at stopping the Viet Nam War. But the level of progressive mobilization generated by Donald Trump’s victory surpasses the 1960s and ‘70s or any other time in the last half-century.

Millions of ordinary Americans – many of whom have never been engaged in political activity of any kind – have joined the “resistance.” They have begun to attend town hall meetings, or participated in the amazing Women’s March following the Trump Inauguration, or they were part of the explosive response to Trump’s immigration policies and his refugee ban.
In fact, as far as I know, the Women’s March was the largest one-day series of nation-wide protests in American history.

The emergence of new grassroots-led organizations like Indivisible, the Town Hall Project, and the Women’s March have already transformed the political landscape. And the memberships of grassroots progressive organizations like MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, Organizing for Action (OFA), People For the American Way, and many others have all exploded.

When you attend town meetings or progressive political events – or just talk to your neighbors – the universal question is: “What can I do – how can I become involved to stop Trump and his policies?”
And already, we’ve seen evidence that the new level of political mobilization washes over very directly into electoral politics. In the Delaware special legislative election where the GOP and Democrats were fighting over a swing seat to determine control of the legislature, the Democrat won going away because turnout far surpassed expectation.

Political observers are watching the Georgia special election to replace former Congressman – now Trump Health and Human Services Secretary – Tom Price. Donald Trump won the election in the district by only 1 percent ― a seat that Price won handily last fall. It is entirely possible that a massive special election turnout generated by the new level of progressive mobilization may carry Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff to victory. That would send shivers down the Republican Party’s collective spine and could presage a Democratic takeover of the House next year.

Some people think that the current level of energy and engagement may fade with time – and they may be right.

But as anyone who has done political organizing knows, it’s much easier to get people fired up about things someone is trying to take away from them than about things to which they aspire. Once people have something, they don’t want to give it up.

At the same time, if you give newly energized people a taste of success, they are much more prone to deepen their engagement.
Ironically then, on the one hand the more successful Trump and his forces are at taking away our health care insurance, public television, school lunches or the rights of the immigrant community, the more angry and fired up people will be. On the other hand, the more progressives are successful at stopping Trump from achieving his declared goals of taking these and other things away, the more that success itself will inspire people to fight on.

This is not at all to say that the new level of progressive mobilization will inevitably continue. If progressives were to allow Trump to truly consolidate power, limit the rights of free speech and assembly, further suppress the right to vote, eviscerate the judiciary, pack the Supreme Court with Trump rubber stamps like his nominee Neil Gorsuch – or blunder into a truly devastating war ― that could change the picture.
But unless Trump is truly able to make himself into an American Putin, the Trump victory and the new level of political mobilization it has inspired present progressives with an historic political opportunity to catapult the country into a truly progressive direction that allows us to break through the gridlock ― and political and economic constraints of the last 30 years.

Increased progressive voter turnout massively changes the equation at every level of government. In addition, many voters who supported Obama, and then supported Trump in 2016 have already begun – gradually – to realize they were conned. Many of those most negatively impacted by repeal of the Affordable Care Act, for example, would be the older, rural, white working class voters upon which Trump most heavily depended for his surprise win last November.

And just last week, an iconic article appeared in The Huffington Post quoting a Trump voter saying that she didn’t know he would cut her Meals on Wheels program. “I was under the influence that he was going to help us,” she said.

If in 2018 Democrats take back the House and begin to retake the Governors’ mansions and legislatures upon which redistricting depends in 2020; if in 2020 itself we oust Trump and replace him with an inspiring populist progressive bent on building an economy that works for everyone – not just CEO’s and the wealthiest; and if the new level of progressive engagement allows us to simultaneously take back the Senate and make further inroads at the state and local level: if all of those things happen, America could make more social and economic progress over the next decade than we have made in the last half-century – all compliments of the progressive mobilization precipitated by the election of Donald Trump.

But to realize that possibility, progressives must do everything we can to nurture and encourage that mobilization. Here are some of the rules of engagement:

Do everything we can to provide people with useful, strategically valuable things to do. People will not be “burned out.” They want more to do, not less. We must provide them with the times, dates and places of town hall meetings and demonstrations; engage them in voter registration operations, creating press events, and – next year – the critical task of turning out the vote.

Continue to avoid the kind of sectarian, circular firing squads and hand wringing that often accompany major defeats like the Trump victory. The most inspiring thing about the tone of the new progressive movement is its clear understanding that Benjamin Franklin was right: we must all hang together or we will all hang separately.

Relentlessly take on Trump and the Republicans. Most Americans support progressive values – on economic issues, social issues, and international issues. We need to self-confidently stand up for those progressive values and never give in to those who say we should “compromise” or cut our losses.

In spite of their November election victory, the right wing in America is on the defensive. They’re in the same place as the dog that caught the bus. For eight years they have been free to criticize Democrats at every turn because they did not have responsibility for actually governing. Now they own it all. And they have to show they can govern. But instead they are in disarray.

When you have them on the run, that’s the time to chase them, not the time to settle down and act like we have to negotiate with Trump because he is the “new normal.”Those newly mobilized progressive activists expect us to go to war to defend our values. Progressives will win if we listen to our mothers, who tell us to stand up straight.

Celebrate our victories, but never try to claim that a defeat – or some minor modification in a horrible right wing policy ― is a victory. Victory is stopping them from achieving their agenda. Victory would be stopping them from eliminating the ACA – or making them take months to achieve their goal. Victory is stopping the Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination cold. Victory in the short run is driving Trump and the GOP approval rating through the floor. Victory is living to fight another day and preparing for real game-changing wins in 2018 and 2020.

Don’t be afraid to make it completely clear at all times that any victory that we achieve while the GOP controls the House, Senate, and White House is only a holding action until we can take back the reins of government in 2018 and 2020. One thing many “non-political” Americans learned in no uncertain terms last fall is that elections have consequences. Another is that we can’t count on the conventional wisdom to be right, we can’t count on other people to do it for us – everyone has to take personal responsibility for creating the society we want. No one can ever again sit out an election. We must all get involved in electoral politics.

Once we take back the reins of government, our first priority must be raising the wages of ordinary working people. That means we must end the era of growing income inequality and reduce the share of national income that goes to the top 1%. America’s gross domestic product per capita increased 48% over the last 30 years, but the wages of ordinary people flat-lined. That’s because those increases all went to the top 1%. Our failure to adequately address that fact created the fertile ground in which Trumpism flourished. We must never fail to address this fundamental question again.

Finally, while people are much easier to mobilize to prevent someone from taking something away rather than achieving something to which they aspire – they also most be inspired. They must have hope for the future. Hopelessness and fear are the enemies of empowerment and mobilization. Inspiration and hope are the catalysts that light the fire. Inspiration requires that someone believe that they are part of something larger than themselves – but that they themselves can play a personal, instrumental role in achieving the larger goal. We must remember that in fighting against the forces of darkness, we must always offer the sure belief that a bright, exciting future is possible – that it is sometimes darkest right before the dawn.

Dr. King was right, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. But it is our hands that will make it so.

Katrina vanden Heuval explains how “How Democrats can win back the working class” in her Washington Post column.

…A tireless commitment to fighting Trump’s disastrous policies and support for the activists marching in the streets are important. But there is also a natural danger of falling into the default mode of opposing Trump, and merely defending existing policies, without offering the serious solutions that people so desperately need. Rebuilding the party requires Democrats to speak boldly about what they are for and not just what they are against. Otherwise, they risk replicating the failed campaign strategy of 2016, when the Clinton campaign hammered away at Trump without appealing to working Americans with a clear and bold alternative vision of its own. To that end, it has been encouraging to see progressive leaders recently taking their message straight to working-class voters across the country, including in red and purple states where Trump maintains solid support.

In addition to Sen. Bernie Sanders, writes vanden Heuval, Democrats have another exemplar who is focused on meeting this challenge, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who has unveiled “a progressive populist economic blueprint that he’s been developing since late 2015. At the heart of Brown’s plan is the fundamental principle that “it’s not businesses who drive the economy — it’s workers.” Vanden Heuval credits Brown with offering “a passel of bold measures designed to empower workers, from a $15 minimum wage and paid family and medical leave to protections against wage theft and expanded collective bargaining rights.”

In addition, vanden Heuval cites impressive progress towards a proactive working-class message and agenda at the state level:

Meanwhile, progressives have been aggressively pushing a pro-worker agenda at the state level as well. State Innovation Exchange (SiX) Action, which advocates for progressive policies in state legislatures, responded to Trump’s congressional address by spearheading a “week of action” that brought together progressive lawmakers and grass-roots organizations in more than 30 states to advocate for some 130 pieces of pro-worker legislation. As part of the effort, state legislators introduced, advanced or highlighted paid sick leave in Michigan and Maryland, equal pay in Oklahoma and Colorado, and minimum wage hikes in New Mexico and North Carolina, among other bills.

None of this is to back away from strong criticism of Trump and the Republicans, whose increasingly “barbaric policies” must be called out and challenged. However, concludes vanden Heuval, “regaining the trust of working-class voters who supported Trump will take more than opposition. As Sanders recently argued, it will take a forward-looking message and a real commitment to addressing the challenges that working people face. “You cannot just be defensive,” Sanders said. “You need a proactive agenda that brings people together to fight for a new America.”

Leaders like Sanders and Brown are lighting the way forward for Democrats who want to win the support of workers of all races. Progressive candidates and campaigns who want to shed the Republican branding of the Democratic party as elitist ought to pay close attention to the messaging and policy agenda of these  two energetic champions of the working-class.

The Congressional Budget Office’s report on the Republican Obamacare replacement bill, the American Health Care Act, is the closest thing we have to an objective analysis of the legislation. With that in mind,  the credibility of this version of the replacement bill is ireparably damaged.

Vox.com has some of the best coverage of of the CBO analysis, nicely distilled in this excerpt of Ezra Klein’s blistering critique:

The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the GOP’s American Health Care Act is one of the most singularly devastating documents I’ve seen in American politics. For a thorough explanation of the findings, read Sarah Kliff’s explainer. But here is the one-sentence summary: Under the GOP’s bill, the more help you need, the less you get.

The AHCA would increase the uninsured population by about 24 million people — which is more people than live in New York state. But the raw numbers obscure the cruelty of the choices. The policy is particularly bad for the old, the sick, and the poor. It is particularly good for the rich, the young, and the healthy.

Here, in short, is what the AHCA does. The bill guts Medicaid, halves the value of Obamacare’s insurance subsidies, and allows insurers to charge older Americans 500 percent more than they charge young Americans.

Then it takes the subsidies that are left and reworks them to be worth less to the poor and the old, takes the insurers that are left and lets them change their plans to cover fewer medical expenses for the sick, and rewrites the tax code to offer hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the rich. As Dylan Matthews writes, it is an act of class warfare by the rich against the poor…This is not fine. It is not decent, it is not compassionate, and it is not what Republicans promised. It is a betrayal of Donald Trump’s vow to protect Medicaid from cuts and to pass a health care bill that covers everyone with insurance that has lower deductibles and better coverage.

Predictably enough, Speaker Paul Ryan tried to put lipstick on the pig in his statement reacting to the CBO analysis. Ryan’s strategy, however, was less predictable in that he claimed the CBO report affirmed the AHCA’s merits, instead of bashing away at the CBO like other Republicans. “This report confirms that the American Health Care Act will lower premiums and improve access to quality, affordable care,” said Ryan. “It is about giving people more choices and better access to a plan they want and can afford.”

Having affirmed the credibility of the CBO on the AHCA makes it difficult for Ryan to blast it later on. In is New York Magazine aticle, “Paul Ryan Tries to Bluff and Fib His Way Through CBO Fiasco,” Ed Kilgore comments on Ryan’s response:

This is, to put it mildly, a disingenuous take. According to CBO, the AHCA will actually boost premiums in the short term, and will boost them even more for poorer and older Americans. It does not, in fact, improve “access to quality, affordable care” — the insufficiency of its tax credits are a big reason for the coverage losses CBO anticipates. Ryan’s argument that this is just part of a “three-pronged approach” is specious for the reason I mentioned above: The idea that any iteration of this deeply broken Republican health-care plan will conceivably command 60 votes in the Senate is pure fantasy.

The Republican vision of national security never seems to include the health of millions of Americans, who would be seriously endangered by this Obamacare replacement bill. It would certainly kill and sicken many more Americans than terrorists likely will murder in the years ahead. Apparently, Speaker Ryan and the bill’s supporters think that is an acceptable sacrifice to make on the altar of the GOP’s most sacred cause, ever-increasing tax cuts for the wealthy.

The early reviews of ‘Obamacare lite,’ the just-released House of Represenatives Republican majority plan to replace the Affordable Care Act are rolling in, and those who were expecting the GOP proposal (aka ‘The American Health Care Act’)  would screw working people to benefit high-end health care consumers will not be surprised at the changes.

The AHCA is a predictable mess of irrational concessions to Obamacare-bashers, designed more to mollify knee-jerk extremists than thoughtful conservatives. Those who entertained the fantasy that the Republican alternative would have a clear explanation of how the plan would be funded will be disappointed, as will those who believed the Republicans would find a way to make sure no one lost the health security the ACA provided or be forced to pay more for health care.

As  Mike DeBonis, Amy Goldstein and Kelsey Snell report in the Washington Post,”Starting in 2020, however, the GOP plan would restrict the government’s generous Medicaid payment — 90 percent of the cost of covering people in the expansion group — only to people who were in the program as of then…“Trumpcare doesn’t replace the Affordable Care Act, it forces millions of Americans to pay more for less care,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).”

In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jay Bookman elaborates,

In fact, if enacted into law, the GOP plan would strip millions and millions of our fellow Americans of their health insurance, and all the progress that we’ve made in reducing the percentage of uninsured to record low levels will be quickly reversed.

Some would be forced to drop their policies because the subsidies that have allowed them to purchase individual coverage will be slashed and slashed dramatically in many instances. Others would lose coverage as the expansion of Medicaid is rolled back by the GOP bill, and as federal funding for traditional Medicaid is cut as well.  We have no good estimate on how many millions will be affected — House Speaker Paul Ryan is trying to force the plan through the committee process before the Congressional Budget Office can produce such numbers — but there is no plausible way to make cuts of the proposed magnitude without significant reductions in coverage.

On the other hand, if you’re wealthy, the House plan gives you a lot to smile about. The taxes on Americans making more than $200,000 a year that have helped to pay for Obamacare and that make it deficit-neutral at worst would be rolled back under the House plan, producing an average tax benefit of $165,000 a year for those in the top 0.1 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.

In their New York Times article, “Millions Risk Losing Health Insurance in Republican Plan, Analysts Say,” Abby Goodnough and Reed Abelson explain:

Starting in 2020, the plan would do away with the current system of providing premium subsidies based on people’s income and the cost of insurance where they live. Instead, it would provide tax credits of $2,000 to $4,000 per year based on their age.

But the credits would not cover nearly as much of the cost of premiums as the current subsidies do, at least for the type of comprehensive coverage that the Affordable Care Act requires, analysts said. For many people, that could mean the difference between keeping coverage under the new system and having to give it up.

“The central issue is the tax credits are not going to be sufficient,” said Dr. J. Mario Molina, the chief executive of Molina Healthcare, an insurer that offers coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces in California, Florida and several other states.

Other people likely to be hurt under the new plan are those in areas where the cost of coverage is high. Subsidies are now pegged to the cost of a plan within a specific market, but the tax credits in the Republican plan are the same whether you live in Alaska or Minnesota. Coverage tends to be most expensive in parts of the country where there are few hospitals or few insurers. “When it comes to health insurance, high-cost areas tend to be rural areas,” said Cynthia Cox, a researcher at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which recently did an analysis of how the tax credits compared with the subsidies now available.

In their New York Times op-ed, “How Republicans Plan to Ration Health Care,” Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Aaron Glickman and Emily Gudbranson warn:

The Republicans say they want to give states more flexibility. But that flexibility most likely means they could use the money for non-health-care programs, or to close state budget gaps. When given budgetary flexibility with large sums of money, this is a common state tactic.

…State flexibility is a ruse. Per-person allotments are an elaborate cost-shifting mechanism — a fancy way to reduce federal funding and transfer financial responsibility for the health care of low-income Americans to states. A 2014 assessment by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of Representative Paul Ryan’s plan, which contained elements similar to those in the current proposal, estimated that this accounting trick would increase Medicaid costs for state budgets by $169 billion by 2026. So, under the banner of flexibility, the current Republican plan would force states to make a series of Hobson’s choices.

This would be even worse than going back to the days before the Affordable Care Act. It would force states to ration care and deny some Americans lifesaving treatments or nursing home care. Cruel only begins to describe the Republican plan.

And the Times editorial, “No Wonder the Republicans Hid the Health Bill,” notes,

While working people lose health care, the rich would come out winners. The bill would eliminate the taxes on businesses and individuals (people making more than $200,000 a year) who fund Obamacare. The tax cuts would total about $600 billion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

As Timothy Stoltzfus Jost puts it in his WaPo op-ed “the real focus of the legislation is not on health-care reform, not even on repealing the ACA as such. What the AHCA would in fact do is massively redistribute wealth from the poorest Americans to the wealthiest.”

After 8 years of blasting Obamacare and offering no alternative, the Republicans have kludged together a  predictable disaster. “Republicans have found themselves frantically scrawling out a hopelessly inadequate solution in order to meet a self-imposed deadline driven by their overarching desire to cut taxes for the rich,” writes Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine, who preers the term “Trumpcare.” He quotes Republican health care guru Avik Roy: “Expanding subsidies for high earners, and cutting health coverage off from the working poor: it sounds like a left-wing caricature of mustache-twirling, top-hatted Republican fat cats.” And “the caricature,” writes Chait, “is true.”

But Republicans don’t have a lot of wiggle room. They can afford no more than 21 GOP House members voting against the proposals, a pretty narrow path to enactment, given the criticism of the proposals that has emerged, just on the Republican side. Indeed, many of the GOP dissenters want something even worse.

It’s the same old game of cutting federal spending to later provide tax cuts for the rich, which is the emblematic goal of the GOP. This nightmare of a health care “plan” reveals in stark relief  the moral and intellectual bankruptcy that defines the modern Republican Party like no other.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of “The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think,” is cross-posted from The Washington Post.

Is Donald Trump the end for the left? Is it really possible, as a baby boomer averred in an interview last month with The Washington Post, that “all the things we cared about for the past 40 years could be wiped out in the first 100 days”?

American leftists are not known for their optimism, and yet, even for them, the prevailing sentiment is that these are especially dark days. Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say they are “worried or pessimistic” about the future of the country in a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll.

Historian Jeremi Suri, writing in the Atlantic, assessed that “with his barrage of executive orders, Trump is taking America back to the historical nightmares of the world before December 1941: closed borders, limited trade, intolerance to diversity, arms races, and a go-it-alone national race to the bottom.” Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) spoke out against Trump’s attorney general pick, saying, “If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man.” Climate scientists offer a similarly bleak view, fearing that Trump will quickly unravel President Barack Obama’s legacy and that “the world, then, may have no way to avoid the most devastating consequences of global warming, including rising sea levels, extreme droughts and food shortages, and more powerful floods and storms,” as the New York Times put it.

But fears that Trump will set back the left’s agenda dangerously and irreparably are not well founded. Core advances can’t be undone. Although Trump could do some real temporary damage, he and his movement will fade, and the values and priorities of the left will eventually triumph.

Consider social equality and tolerance, where some of today’s greatest fears are concentrated. It is true that Trump has said many egregious things, like associating Mexican immigrants with criminal behavior, and has tried (though so far failed) to implement a ban on immigration from some Muslim countries. But people should not lose sight of the massive progress in the past half-century, led by the left. This includes the destruction of formal and many normative barriers to racial equality, the rise of the black middle class, the advancement of women in higher education and the professions, the dominance of anti-sexist views in public opinion, and the acceptance of gays, including the institution of same-sex marriage. We still have far to go in the attainment of full social equality, but it is also true that we have gone far.

Public-opinion data is quite clear that the United States has become more, not less, liberal in all these areas over time and that these trends are continuing. Take the standard question about whether immigration levels should increase, decrease or stay the same. The 38 percent of people who say “decrease” is about as low as it ever has been since Gallup started tracking the question in the 1960s. The current number represents a massive drop, of about 30 points, since the early 1990s, when Pat Buchanan first raised his pitchfork high at the Republican National Convention. There has also been a considerable change in views about whether immigration is a good or bad thing for America — and it’s positive, not negative, change, even if one confines the data to white Americans. According to Gallup, the “good thing” response by whites was as low as 51 percent in the early 2000s but has been around 70 percent in the past two years.

Nor has there been any kind of spike in negative racial attitudes in recent years — in fact, according to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey , such attitudes were far more prevalent in the early 1990s than they are today, including among white Democrats and Republicans. This is true even as perceptions of the quality of race relations have been dimming, thanks primarily to conflict around police shootings and to a tiny minority of genuine haters whose rhetoric and actions have been widely covered. But the underlying trend toward racial liberalism continues.

So the idea that Trump will somehow successfully relitigate the role of immigrants, minorities, gays and women in American society is scary but absurd. He may continue the Republican campaign to restrict voting rights. He may seek to overturn Roe v. Wade (supported by 70 percent of the American public). He may promote prejudice against Muslim Americans. Such actions may in fact be cheered on by his hard-core supporters. But he will ultimately fail, because what he wishes to do is both massively unpopular and runs against the grain of legal precedent and institutional norms.

And he can’t hold back the one true inevitability in demographic change: the replacement of older generations by newer ones. Underappreciated in November’s election was the continuing leftward lean of young voters, once again supporting the Democratic candidate by around 20 points — and with younger millennials, including both college-educated and noncollege whites, even more pro-Democratic than older ones. That is huge. And don’t expect these voters to shift right as they age. Political science research shows that early voting patterns tend to stick.

Another locus of disquiet, if not hysteria, on the left is the environment. But consider this: In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire; in 1979, when Obama was attending college in Los Angeles and remembers constant smog, there were 234 days when the city exceeded federal ozone standards. Our water and air are now orders of magnitude cleaner than they were back then.

Trump will not be able to suddenly wipe out all these gains. Sure, he says he will severely cut environmental regulations, especially ones put in place by Obama; hollow out the EPA; somehow bring back the coal industry; and much more. But saying and doing are two different things. Getting rid of Obama-era rules such as the Clean Power Plan would take years and be challenged by litigation. Reversing the decline of the coal industry is economically impossible. Abolishing the EPA and gutting the clean air and water acts is politically impossible. When the George W. Bush administration tried to eliminate one Clinton-era rule on levels of arsenic in drinking water, it ran into a political buzzsaw and had to retreat.

The left’s priority of a clean environment with clean air and water is immensely popular, with deeply entrenched programs and practices that sustain it. Trump will be able to slow down environmental advances, by chipping away at relatively obscure regulations and reducing enforcement, but he cannot reverse them.

Nor will Trump be able to derail the remarkable progress on another cherished goal of the left: a green economy that can stave off global warming. The key here is abundant, cheap, clean energy, and work toward that goal has been going forward at a breakneck pace. World investments in clean energy, chiefly wind and solar, have reached levels that are doublethose for fossil fuel. Renewables now provide half of all new electric capacity around the world. The cost of solar has fallen to 1/150th of its 1970s level, and the amount of installed solar capacity has increased a staggering 115,000 times. Indeed, it is increasingly common for clean energy in some areas to be fully cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Trump will not and cannot stop this trend.

Or take living standards and the middle class, where progress has admittedly been slow (though not absent) in the recent past. Capitalism is certainly capable of performing much better — but Trump is not the man to make that happen. All he’s going to succeed in doing is blowing up one of the main roadblocks to better economic performance: the conservative Republican anti-government, quasi-libertarian consensus around economic policy. A protectionist president who proposes to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, criticizes corporate decisions on job location, and swears to oppose any and all Social Security and Medicare cuts is miles away from that consensus, even if he does support slashing taxes for the rich and undermining unions. He is on a collision course with his own Congress that will result in incoherent economic policy with little or no benefit to the working-class voters who elected him.

Finally, consider the tremendous progressive achievements of the Obama era, from a stimulus bill that saved the economy and poured money into clean-energy investments to the Dodd-Frank act regulating the financial sector to the Affordable Care Act and much more. These were remarkable gains for the left, attained despite severe headwinds in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Of course, Trump and the Republican Congress have declared their intention to roll back these advances and then some. The president has already signed executive orders that seek to weaken Dodd-Frank and undermine the ACA. But can Trump and his GOP allies really get rid of these programs, as opposed to nibbling at their edges? It will not be as easy as they expect and as many on the left fear.

The chaos surrounding Republican efforts to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act illustrates just how difficult this rollback would be. The idea of repealing the ACA first and coming up with a replacement later died quickly, forcing Republicans to confront the fact that they cannot agree on what the new plan should be. Some want to keep the Medicaid expansion, some balk at requiring higher deductibles, some worry about reducing subsidies, and many fear political damage from throwing millions of people off health insurance. The disunity of the repeal forces is so palpable that former House Speaker John Boehner, who once led the charge to repeal the ACA, now admits that repeal is “not going to happen” and that “most of the framework of the Affordable Care Act” will remain in place.

Trump and the Republican Congress fail to understand, and the left would do well to remember, one of the most enduring features of American public opinion. The dominant ideology in the United States is one that combines “symbolic conservatism” (honoring tradition, distrusting novelty, embracing the conservative label) with “operational liberalism” (wanting government to take more action in a wide variety of areas). As political scientists Christopher Ellis and James Stimson, the leading academic analysts of American ideology, note: “Most Americans like most government programs. Most of the time, on average, we want government to do more and spend more. It is no accident that we have created the programs of the welfare state. They were created — and are sustained — by massive public support.”

That’s why, now that the ACA has delivered concrete benefits for many people, it is so very hard to get rid of. As a constituent of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put it: “I’m on Obamacare. If it wasn’t for Obamacare, we wouldn’t be able to afford insurance. With all due respect, Sir, you’re the man that talked about the death panel. We’re going to create one great big death panel in this country if people can’t afford to get insurance.” In the long run, it is far more likely that the ACA will be built upon and improved, so that it extends coverage and tamps down rising medical costs even further (that will be the “something terrific” Trump has talked about), than truly be eliminated.

The Trump administration could still do some real damage. There will be lax enforcement of financial and environmental regulations. There will probably be tax cuts for the rich and underfunding of important social programs. There will be more harassment of immigrants and no progress on comprehensive immigration reform. But its ability to remake America in the libertarian image (privatize Social Security! voucherize Medicare!) envisioned by Paul Ryan is distinctly limited — even assuming that Trump backs such moves wholeheartedly, which he very well might not, given his public pronouncements on these programs.

In the end, the Trumpian populism of the 2010s will probably have no more staying power than the agrarian populism of the 1880s and 1890s, which was also driven by demographic groups on the decline and was similarly undercut by structural change and the transition to a new economic era. That earlier populist era was followed by an era of strong social advancement in the early 20th century — the Progressive Era.

What will have staying power in the 21st century is the values and priorities of the left. They will not win every battle, but they will win the war.

The Trump campaign — it’s more that than an actual functioning government — is all puffed up about some favorable feedback he got for his State of the Union speech. But it remains weak at the core, which for any Administration, rests on the twin pillars of integrity and competence.

In that regard, Yale political scientist John Stoehr, a U.S. News & World Report contributing editor who has written for a broad range of progressive newspapers and magazines, has some strategic insights for highlighting Trump’s weaknesses. As Stoehr addresses his readers at The Washington Monthly,

I really want you to understand the connection between Trump’s appearance and the trust his supporters place in him. What the Democratic opposition needs to do is undermine that trust. Part of doing that is pointing out every time Trump lies. (The Washington press corps is doing that.) But the opposition must also attack the president where it really hurts him—by appealing to logic and reason, but not only logic and reason. The opposition must wound the president by focusing on his weakness

….When confronted with the fact that he did not win a bigger electoral victory than anyone since Reagan, he immediately backed down, spluttering something about how he had been given that information so it’s not his fault. Some have implied he will never accept the truth, so don’t bother. But that’s an argument of logic and reason. What happened in that brief exchange needs to happen a million times over in order to reveal that the president is weak and that in that weakness his supporters have misplaced their trust.

So, say it with me: The president is weak. Say it again. Over and over. Then when the president really does demonstrate weakness, as he did when confronted by the reporter about his fake electoral landslide, the president will have substantiated the opposition’s charge of weakness.

That will hurt.

Trump ran on strength. Only he was strong enough to solve our problems. And people believed him. They still believe him. But if the opposition can establish an image of weakness, it will come close to breaking trust in him.

Stoehr is revealing something unique here. He advises watching Trump on television with the sound turned off to get a sense of how much he relies on projecting the visual image of strength, even while confidently spouting transparent lies and nonsense that contradicts what he said a few days before. More importantly, many of his supporters are mesmerized by his blustering boldness, longing as they do for a simplistic authoritarianism, somewhat like the ‘strict father‘ paradigm referenced by George Lakoff.

In his U.S. News & World Report column, “Trump Can’t Govern: The Democrats’ best play may be to highlight the Trump administration’s incompetence,” written just before Trump’s SOTU address, Stoehr explains further,

The following post is by Keith Gaby from the EDF Action.

The Trump administration is in the midst of one of the most chaotic presidential launches in American history. Intelligence agencies are reportedly withholding information from the White House for fear of it being passed to Moscow, a senior general has publicly fretted about the stability of the government, and the president creates daily distractions with tweets and false information.

By historical standards, the president is deeply unpopular. A recent CNN poll showed that just 44% of the American people believe he is doing a good job – in what should be his “honeymoon” period. By contrast, a majority of Americans approved of the job performance of the last nine newly elected presidents in their first months in office, averaging a positive rating of 61%.

There were almost as many people (43%) who had “strongly” negative feelings as approved of him at all. How does that compare to former presidents? At this point in their first terms, strong disapproval was Reagan 9%, Clinton 16%, Bush 9%, and Obama 18%. In other words, intense feelings against Trump are more than triple the average of four of his immediate predecessors.  Since intensity drives activism and voting in mid-term elections, this is a dangerous sign for the president and his allies in Congress.

The administration’s early moves on environmental policy will not likely be met with favor. During the campaign, Trump said he would dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and eliminate 70% of governemnt rules and safeguards. The leader of his EPA transition suggested cutting the agency’s staff by two-thirds and the president nominated a famous opponent of clean air and water rules, Scott Pruitt, to lead EPA. But polling suggests moves like these will not sit well, even with those who voted for Trump. A Morning Consult poll revealed that 78% of Trump voters want the same or stronger federal limits on air pollution.

Trump has also said he is not a “big believer” in climate change and wants to end the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon pollution. But the same poll showed that 61% of his voters want to “require US companies to reduce carbon emissions that cause climate change.”

The public at large, of course, is even less disposed to giving industry whatever it wants. A Quinnipiac Poll found that just 39% of voters want the administration to “remove regulations on businesses and corporations” and only 29% want to end rules “designed to limit climate change”.

Until the next presidential election, the most important impact of the president’s unpopularity will be the effect it has on members of Congress. With his party in control of both houses, and 10 Democratic senators from Trump states up for re-election in 2018, a popular president should be able to push through his agenda. But Congress is watching the spectacle at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue warily. Aligning themselves with a failing president is a dangerous thing.

However, they are not ready to abandon him yet. Because a primary challenge is often the greatest threat to their political careers, most members of the House and Senate focus on views within their own party. At the moment, nearly 90% of Republican voters are sticking with Trump. But even in a highly partisan atmosphere, the missteps of the administration will eventually begin to drag on voters who are now giving Trump the benefit of the doubt as a fellow-Republican. (The polling cited above was taken before the resignation of Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor and the accompanying revelations about Russia. In a Gallup survey taken after the Flynn events, Trump’s job approval had sunk, at least for the moment, to 38%.) And only one-third of Independent voters approve of Mr. Trump.

Despite all that’s happened and historically low approval ratings, the Trump administration still threatens our most important environmental protections. With just executive powers, he could sharply curtail enforcement and strip away important safeguards. But the president’s initial unpopularity, and the incompetence of his White House staff provide progressives with a unique opportunity to limit the damage.

The following post by Keith Gaby is cross-posted from the Environmental Defense Fund:

The Trump administration’s stumbling start – daily controversies, “alternative facts,” historically low approval ratings and much more – doesn’t mean the president and his allies can’t carry out plans to undermine decades of environmental progress.

But the fact that their views are unpopular with the American people, and that there’s been a massive mobilization to fight back, does mean we have a good chance to protect much of what we’ve gained.

The attacks from the White House and Congress have been coming fast since Trump took office.

• The House has voted to end a rule that limits methane pollution from oil and gas leaks and saves taxpayers millions of dollars every year – a hat trick by lawmakers that’s fiscally irresponsible, damages our health and accelerates climate warming.

• The House also passed bills to hobble agencies from developing health and safety rules on clean air, worker protections and food safety.

• As many as 118 House members co-sponsored a bill to amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit federal agencies from limiting carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – all dangerous climate pollutants. The bill would declare them not to be pollutants under the law, despite decades of scientific evidence showing they contribute to climate change.

• Several new House bills would weaken the Clean Water Act and eliminate the latest updates to the Good Neighbor Rule, which limits air pollution that floats from one state into another. How the state on the receiving end is supposed to deal with pollution coming from outside its borders is unclear.

This week brought a new rash of assaults, some shockingly radical. One bill consists of a single sentence, “The Environmental Protection Agency shall terminate on Dec. 31, 2018.”

The agency of 15,000 employees who have saved the lives of countless Americans and transformed our nation into a dramatically cleaner and healthier place would simply go away.

Odds are that Congress won’t go that far, but the fact that three members of the U.S. House of Representatives have sponsored it shows just how extreme some elected officials have become.

It is true that President Trump said during the campaign he wanted to dismantle the EPA as we know it, explaining he didn’t like limits on big business. In other words, we were warned and given an explanation. But, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said, we are nevertheless persisting in fighting back.

This week, Environmental Defense Fund filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act asking for documents on the Trump transition team’s advice for overhauling the EPA, including a reported “Action Plan” that called from drastic changes to the agency. It’s critical that these plans be made transparent and available for public scrutiny.

Our advocacy partner, EDF Action, has also spent more than $1 million fighting against the confirmation of Scott Pruitt, the anti-EPA crusader nominated to run the agency – and on ads running across the country against overturning the methane waste rule and other health and safety protections.

We must hold members of Congress who voted for these bills accountable.

The battle, in other words, is fully engaged on both sides.

With all its flaws, our democracy still responds to public opinion. And we continue to focus on making Congress aware that Americans will not be happy if our air, water and future become less healthy.

President Trump settled on a widely-respected national security expert to replace Michael Flynn as  National Security Advisor, retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward. Unfortunately, Harward turned Trump’s offer down. Kevin Drum’s Mother Jones post “K.T. McFarland Is Too Much to Swallow, So Robert Harward Turns Down NSA Position” cuts through the fog and explains why Trump bungled it:

After Michael Flynn resigned/was fired as National Security Advisor, everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the top prospect to replace him turned out to be Retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward. He’s well respected by both Democrats and Republicans and would have brought some needed experience and sobriety to the White House.

Unfortunately, Harward turned down the job. It all hinged on whether he would be allowed to choose his own team. Here is CBS News:

“Two sources close to the situation confirm Harward demanded his own team, and the White House resisted. Specifically, Mr. Trump told Deputy National Security Adviser K. T. McFarland that she could retain her post, even after the ouster of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Harward refused to keep McFarland as his deputy, and after a day of negotiations over this and other staffing matters, Harward declined to serve as Flynn’s replacement.”

McFarland hasn’t held a government position for over 30 years, but she has appeared regularly on Fox News as a standard-issue hardline pundit for the past decade. In Trump’s eyes, this qualifies her to be the #2 person on the National Security Council. Apparently Harward didn’t agree…

It sounds a lot like Harward didn’t want to put up with lightweight ideologues meddling about the all-important business of the National Security Council. As Drum puts it,

Basically, Harward is a serious guy who wanted the National Security Council to be staffed with national security experts, not Fox News hacks and political operators. That was a bridge too far for the Trump team, so Harward pulled out…That’s all bad enough, but it raises another question: now that this is all public knowledge, will anyone serious be willing to take this position? How could they?

That’s a very tough question, and it’s a shame that America has been denied the leadership of a top expert with Harward’s impressive credentials — yet another indication that the President is getting some very bad advice, and worse, taking it.