A New Story: Politics for the 21st Century

January, 2017 I have been, like many, reading the post mortems on this campaign, and it has been very frustrating. I see intellectual arrogance and naive realism (tendency to think that everyone views the world in the same way) aplenty. And I know of what I speak as I have been intellectually arrogant and suffer from naive realism myself. As I tend to always look internally when I am wrong, I have been doing much soul searching. I worked on the Clinton campaign in 1992, at the DNC and several other gubernatorial campaigns before becoming a History, Anthropology, and Economics teacher. I thought I had a good grasp on politics. Apparently, I don’t. But some clarity has arisen for me. In the back of my mind, I always had these nagging questions. How could blue collar democrats vote for Reaganonomics, which was so obviously skewed to help the wealthy, in 1980? How did Dukakis have a 17 point lead in the summer of 1988 when statistically the country was doing well and th...

Just a shameless promotion post for my novel, available on Amazon and other ebook sellers The Campaign By Trip Powers

The following is an excerpt from my novel, The Campaign. It is the first of four speeches delivered by the candidate, Jackson Turner, about the "Bulwarks against change". It's been a while since I have used this blog, and reading through my first attempts shows that I am still concerned about similar issues. The Campaign, Chapter 28 “Thank you for your warm reception. I hope that by the end of this speech I will have earned it.” More applause. “When I announced my intention to run for Senator, I made a pledge that this campaign would be about uncovering the realities that we all face, and the forces which keep us largely in the dark. The forces which support the status quo of injustice and inequality. One of my favorite quotes from anthropologist Marvin Harris led me to see things that we are not supposed to see. He made the claim that “Art and politics fashion the collective dreamwork that prevents us from understanding the realities of our social lives.” ...