Joel Mathis

I've got a story to tell, one that's out there on the public record, but one that hasn't been much remarked upon. He lied. Did American democracy die? It takes place during the Obama-Romney campaign of 2012. During the campaign, Mitt Romney was proving reluctant — as Donald Trump was, after him — to release some pertinent personal financial information. So Sen. Harry Reid, then the leader of Democrats in the Senate, decided to make a big deal about it . Saying he had “no problem with somebody being really, really wealthy,” Reid sat up in his chair a bit before stirring the pot further. A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office. “Harry, he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years,” Reid recounted the person as saying. “He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” said Reid. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look? I wrote at the time that "Reid

National Review detects something interesting in the exit polls: The 2016 CNN Exit Poll found, for instance, that Trump won among married voters, winning 52 percent, but lost decisively among the unmarried (see table below). The 26-point marriage gap in the 2016 electorate is large. (The marriage gap is calculated by taking the difference between the two candidates for the married and adding it to the difference between the two candidates for the unmarried.) In fact, it surpasses the 24-point gender gap also found in the CNN Exit Poll of the 2016 electorate. Who is married? It isn't the white working class — at least, not as much as it used to be. WaPo : Over the last few decades, members of the white working class have also become less likely to be married. As this chart from economists Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak shows, marriage rates have fallen for whites without a college degree. About 55 percent of white men and 60 percent of women with no more than a high s

I continue to attend church, even though the old Mark Twain observation that "you can't pray a lie" remains true, at least for me, and I don't have faith to match the hymns or sermons. But community is a nice thing. Here's my favorite part: The sharing of joys and concerns. I don't know if your church does it. Certainly, it's not been practiced in all the churches I've ever attended. But at Peace Mennonite, a young child takes a microphone around the sanctuary, and members of the congregation share important news from the week. My cousin discovered she has cancer. The mother of a little boy in my son's class died suddenly. And joys: I found a place to live. The disease in remission. He's coming home.  It's the difference between church and, I guess, Facebook for me. News gets shared on social media all the time. And that can be very helpful.   But in real time, face-to-face, I get a more palpable sense of community — of th

I'm fairly aware there's not a large constituency for my position, which is roughly: • Donald Trump ran a racist campaign. • People of color and minorities (and women!) are right to be alarmed and angered by his victory. They are justified in wondering why we're supposed to care about the feelings of the "white working class" while their concerns about living under racist regime are so easily disposed of. • That the system that produced this victory placed inordinate value on the feelings of white people — and can reasonably be called "white supremacy."  • That it is nonetheless a bad idea, as a matter of democratic tactics, to write off ALL the Trump voters as irredeemables who cannot be persuaded to join our side. (I.E. It's an approach designed to help lose in 2020, as well.)  • That there are ways of attempting that persuasion without giving up a public and vocal commitment to justice, racial, sexual, and otherwise.  • That i

Folks, forgive me. This is a draft, at best, written after midnight when thoughts kept coming and I couldn't shut up my brain. I used to be pretty decent at community-building. It was back in the early aughts, when I was a newspaper reporter given the privilege of being my publication’s first blogger — and I used the platform to celebrate everything that was wonderful about my community. It was easy — necessary — for me to take that approach. As an “objective” journalist, my professional mission was to avoid at all costs seeming as though I had an opinion on the issues of the day. That’s not really an approach made for blogging, so becoming a cheerleader seemed like the right move. No, that’s not necessarily “objective,” but when you work for a Kansas newspaper, only a few people will object to seeing the stuff of their daily lives lauded by a journalist. Not coincidentally, I built up a nice group of fans and friends who also loved our town. When I left the paper, I went in

In response to my complaints that Hillary won the popular vote even while losing the Electoral College, my friends who are (ahem) perhaps more faithful to the Constitution as written point out — correctly — that the Constitution has a number of “countermajoritarian” features, that the American government was designed as a republic instead of a straight democracy in order to ensure the majority couldn’t tyrannize the minority. In fact, they say, the Electoral College is an important one of these countermajoritarian features because it gives individual states more of a role in selecting the executive, instead of leaving it a straight-up popularity contest. There’s pretty strong evidence, though, the Founders didn’t intend the popular vote losers to regularly win office. One feature of the old — failed — Articles of Confederation  is required a supermajority (nine of the 13 states) to pass legislation. Which meant a single state, or a small minority of states, could muck t

Interesting : Nate Cohn of the New York Times estimates that when every vote is tallied, some 63.4 million Americans will have voted for Clinton and 61.2 million for Trump. That means Clinton will have turned out more supporters than any presidential candidate in history except for Obama in 2008 and 2012. And as David Wasserman of Cook Political Report notes , the total vote count—including third party votes—has already crossed 127 million, and will “easily beat” the 129 million total from 2012. The idea that voters stayed home in 2016 because they hated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is a myth. We already know the Electoral College can produce undemocratic results, but what we don't know is why — aside from how it serves entrenched interests — it benefits the American people to have their preference for national executive overturned because of archaic rules designed, in part, to protect the institution of slavery.  A form of choosing the national leader that — as has happe

Here and there on Facebook, I've seen a few of my friends declare they no longer wish the friendship of Trump supporters — and vowing to cut them out of their social media lives entirely. I'm not going to do that. To cut ourselves off from people who have made what we think was a grievous error in their vote is to give up on persuading them, to give up on understanding why they voted, to give up on understanding them in any but the most cartoonish stereotypes. As a matter of idealism, cutting off your pro-Trump friends is to give up on democracy. As a matter of tactics, cutting off your pro-Trump friends is to give up on ever again winning in a democratic process. And as a long-term issues, confining ourselves to echo chambers is part of our national problem. Don't get me wrong: I expect a Trumpian presidency is a disaster, particularly for people of color. And in total honesty: My own relationships have been tested by this campaign season. There's probably so

Note: This was more or less written prior to the election — a time when I thought the campaign would end with Democrats having some power to create change. That ain't gonna happen for a couple of years. Still, for the sake of conversation.... Something’s gotta change. That much is clear after an election that was one of the most divisive ever — one that left many of us feeling, as Alec Baldwin said on SNL, “gross.” Our governance and our politics have failed us. It is within our power to fix it. These fixes aren’t marginal. So let’s admit up front that radical changes could have radical, unexpected consequences. But let’s also admit that a system that put Donald Trump in charge of nukes is a system that deserves radical reconsidering, at the very least. Seven ideas to fix it all: • Scrap the presidential system, replace it with a parliament. I suspect a lot of frustration in the land right now is that nobody really has the power to get things done. Dems get f

If you've spent the last eight years using the word "tyranny" to describe the presidency of Barack Obama, but then turned and supported Donald Trump — a man of clear authoritarian instincts — to be president, well: I don't believe you anymore. I have to assume everything you said about "liberty" and "freedom" was just a fog of words meant to help your side retain power.

I'm up. In a few minutes, I take my son to school. He's alarmed by the news I just gave him. I told him he doesn't have to worry. I hope I'm right. I don't really believe I am. I try to practice my politics somewhere in the neighborhood of "a pox on both your houses," trying to remember that the speck I see in the eye of my political rivals is probably matched by the log in my own. Politics is ever an elbow-throwing business, the Republic usually survives, and so I don't want to let myself get too high or low about specific outcomes. But what haunts me is this: Many of the people I know who ended up in the Trump camp pretty much expect him to be a disaster , too, or they did until they convinced themselves otherwise. And they did convince themselves — in some cases because tribal affiliations demanded it, in other cases out of spite , and in many cases because they ardently believed that Hillary Clinton was just as monstrous as their candidate.

So, liberals, this is the country we’re stuck in. Unless you’re moving out — and you’re probably not — you now have a couple of alternatives: • Surrender. • Fight for your values. Let’s choose the latter. How do we do that? A couple of lessons learned and strategies going forward: • Let’s vote our hearts. Except for the opportunity to nominate (potentially) the first woman president, Bernie Sanders (despite not being an actual Democrat) probably stood closer to the heart of the Democratic base than Hillary Clinton, who had supported the Iraq War and who was enmeshed in Wall Street. I supported Clinton during the primaries, despite my concerns about her on policy, as well as the Clintons’ predilection for making it easy on GOP scandalmongers trying to ruin their reputation. (The same scandalmongers never really laid a glove on President Obama, but it requires the target of that scandalmongering to be disciplined, a trait the Clintons have never managed consistentl

I saw this on a friend's Facebook page today, telling his Trump-supporting buddies to get lost, and it admittedly resonated: I strive to be a man of peace and I will always be cool if we find ourselves in the same place. But if this circus clown gets elected, I will never forget what you have done. I want change as much as anyone, but you’re standing by a monster who boasts of committing sexual assaults, won't reject his endorsement from the fucking KKK, taunts his audiences to physically harm his critics and rejects religious freedom and other rights that generations of Americans have fought and died to earn and preserve. This election season has been deeply trying to all of us. As it culminates, it's natural and easy to wonder how the hell we can live with the other half of Americans whose values so repulse us. Maybe it's time to divvy up the country? Liberals get the coasts and Great Lakes states, while conservatives get the rest? Might that be safer than trying

Rod Dreher's not voting for Trump, but he'd still kinda sorta like to see those nasty liberals suffer the pain of having Trump win. If Trump wins, on Wednesday morning I will wake up looking for something good, anything. The idea that the election results will have ruined the day of these horrible people , as well as this sad-sack sycophant , is … well, it’s better than nothing. That Rod Dreher. He sure is a super-Christian, isn't he? Only thing: Can any liberal deny feeling the same way about the prospect of a Trump loss? I hope we wouldn't feel that way if we thought Hillary Clinton was a disaster, like Dreher says about Trump. But we probably would. I can't escape the feeling that schadenfreude and associated emotions are driving too much of our politics. We admire politicians and give them our support because they make the "right enemies" instead of what we want them to do in office. Delighting In The Tears of Our Enemies — becoming an "

I’ve been trying to come up with a closing argument on this election that edifies rather than irritates — a way of communicating that embraces wisdom and thoughtfulness instead of the shrill anger that has characterized so much of the campaign. After days of introspection, what it comes down to this: I got nothing. Either you agree with me or you don’t. There’s not much I can say that will change your mind now. I have tried to resist the idea for years now that people having different political ideas makes them bad people. But Donald Trump appears, from everything I can observe, to be a bad person. At best he’s a boor, the proverbial rich boy who was born on third base and assumed he’d hit a triple. Mostly, though, he’s a breeder of resentments — against Mexicans, against Muslims, and against Jews. (Oh, and women. Perhaps especially women.) He doesn’t ask us to be our best selves. Instead, he glories in being his worst self, calls it a crusade against political correctness,

Let's be clear, there's a straight line between this : In a vintage return to his confrontational style, Sen. Ted Cruz indicated that Republicans could seek to block a Democratic president from filling the vacant Supreme Court seat indefinitely. And this : Jared Halbrook, 25, of Green Bay, Wis., said that if Mr. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton , which he worried would happen through a stolen election, it could lead to “another Revolutionary War.”  “People are going to march on the capitols,” said Mr. Halbrook, who works at a call center. “They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there.”  “If push comes to shove,” he added, and Mrs. Clinton “has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.” The connecting line: Conservatives have spent a generation arguing that Democratic governance isn't just wrong, but illegitimate. (Thus the Clinton impeachment, thus birtherism, etc.) If Democratic governance is illegitima

Conservative thinker Hadley Arkes doesn’t understand why #NeverTrump Republicans can’t just get on the bandwagon already. Don’t they know what’s at stake? I can hardly blame the Bushes for recoiling from the indignities and insults, the lies and calumnies, thrown off with such abandon by Donald Trump. But accomplished public men are even more obliged than the rest of us to respect the difference, searing at times, between personal wounds and public duties. To take those duties seriously is to raise the question of why the Bushes and people like them do not care as much for the things that other Republicans, ordinary folk, see at stake in 2016: the prospect that medical care will be politically managed at the national level, with an independent commission rationing care, bringing everyone under their control; the specter of federal courts filled at all levels with the professoriate of the Left, ready to install as law those fevered theories that have now become the fas