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What Do Trump and Marx Have in Common?

We have a word in German, “Wutbürger,” which means “angry citizen”

Perhaps the most powerful Wutbürger of them all is Donald J. Trump.

How was anger hijacked?

In its pure form, anger is a wonderful force of change.

Karl Marx was a Wutbürger. So were Montesquieu, William Wilberforce, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Jury acquits militia that occupied Oregon wildlife refuge — but the saga is far from over

In a stunning conclusion to a five-week trial, a jury acquitted seven defendants who faced a slew of conspiracy and weapons charges related to their armed takeover of a wildlife refuge earlier this year.

U.S. marshals tackled the attorney for the group’s leader and used a Taser on him.

BO: There’s a wonderful quote that I thought was L.B.J.’s, but I could never verify it: “Every man is either trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes.

I had the benefit of a great relationship with my mom, and she taught me the essential elements of parenting: unconditional love and explaining your values to your kids, having high expectations.

I live above the store. We’ve been able to schedule, pretty religiously, dinner at 6:30 every night for the last eight years. If I had a trip, I might be gone for a few days. But as busy as I was, I was able to go upstairs, have dinner. They don’t want you for more than an hour once they hit teenage.

What was it in white Southern mores, folkways or history that made this such an indelible — though not unique — characteristic of theirs, that allowed so many of them to do such things or simply to stand in complicit silence, without a peep from conscience, as such things were done all around them?

“The Making of a Racist” is at its best in its early chapters as it recounts the author’s childhood indoctrination into the casual racism of the Jim Crow South. Racism was in the books he read. It was in the history he was taught. It was in the social conventions he observed. It was in the jokes he learned. It was like air or water, something that you didn’t question or think about, something that was just . . . there.

both were racists in an explicitly racist region, and both passed that to their son. One comes away from those coming-of-age chapters with renewed appreciation for the subtle yet ruthless efficiency with which systemic bigotry reinforces itself. And Dew’s recounting of his slow break from that system is compelling.

We now live in a post-assimilation America. The 50-year-old rules for racial advancement are obsolete. There is no racial barrier left to break. There is no office in the land to which an African-American can ascend — from mayor to attorney general and the presidency — that will serve as a magical platform for saving black people and our nation’s soul from its racist past.

We cannot engineer a more equitable nation simply by dressing up institutions in more shades of brown. Instead, we must confront structural racism and the values of our institutions.

the exceptionalism of Mr. Obama’s biography couldn’t save us from the Tea Party revolution, Republican obstructionism, police brutality, voter suppression and Islamophobia.

Days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald J. Trump is engaged in a high-profile feud with some of the country’s most prominent African-American leaders, setting off anger in a constituency already wary of him after a contentious presidential campaign.

“I don’t think we have ever had a president so publicly condescending to what black politics means,” said Mark Anthony Neal, an African and African-American studies professor at Duke University.

Mr. Trump has also not made any public announcement of plans to commemorate Martin Luther King’s Birthday, a tradition observed by most Republican and Democratic politicians

Trump seems to have no feel for, no interest in, the American story he is about to enter. He will lead a nation that accommodated a cruel exception to its founding creed; that bled and nearly died to recover its ideals; and that was only fully redeemed by the courage and moral clarity of the very people it had oppressed. People like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. People like John Lewis.

The only organizing principle is the degree of deference to Trump himself. It is the essence of narcissism.

A broader conception of the American story — a respect for the heroes and ghosts of our history — is absent in Trump’s public voice. He seems to be in the thrall of an eternal now. To some, the whole idea of a historical imagination will sound nebulous. Abraham Lincoln called it the “mystic chords of memory.” He hung his hopes for unity on the existence of a shared national experience that transcended regional differences. Today our divisions are more along lines of class and culture, but we also need to hear our story as one people.

The timing was particularly unfortunate: As Americans prepared to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., President-elect Donald Trump tore into one of the civil rights movement's most iconic figures.

The number of Democratic members of Congress saying they will boycott Donald Trump's inauguration on Friday has increased to 26.

Mr Trump lashed out at Mr Lewis on Twitter on Friday after Mr Lewis said he was not a "legitimate president".

Mr Lewis was a prominent member of America's civil rights movement and is a hero to many Americans. He was among those beaten by police during the infamous Selma-Montgomery voting rights march of 1965.

Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying

On his first full day in office Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.

For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.

A sense of proportion, once the conservative virtue, is considered treasonous on the right today

how large a stake conservatives have in convincing themselves and voters that Reagan failed. Think about it: if they conceded ideological victory they would have to confront the more prosaic reasons that entitlements, deficits and regulations continue to grow in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. They would be forced to devise a new, forward-looking agenda to benefit even their own constituencies, like ensuring that American business can draw on an educated, healthy work force; can rely on modern public infrastructure; and can count on stable, transparent financial markets. And they would have to articulate a conservative vision for those welfare state programs that are likely to remain with us, like disability insurance, food stamps and Head Start.

Conservatives have always been great storytellers; it is their fatal weakness. They love casting their eyes back to the past to avoid seeing what lies right under their noses. The story always involves some expulsion from Eden, whether by the hippies of the 1960s, or the suffragists, or the wretched refuse of the shtetls, or the French Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or Luther, or Machiavelli or the sack of Rome.

Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.”

There’s no doubt that Vesey was a violent man, who planned to attack and kill Charleston whites. But those who condemn him as a terrorist merely demonstrate how little we, as a culture, understand about slavery, and what it forced the men and women it ensnared to do.

More than a decade ago, while I was giving a talk on Vesey in Charleston, a member of the audience challenged my view that what Vesey wished to accomplish — the freedom for his friends and family — could be a good thing, on the grounds that he went about it the wrong way. “Why not work within the system for liberation,” the man asked, or even “stage a protest march?”

Although well intentioned, such questions reveal how far American society still has to travel before we reach a sophisticated understanding of the past. There was no “system” for Vesey to work within; his state had flatly banned private manumissions, or the freeing of slaves, in 1820. The only path to freedom was to sharpen a sword. Americans today can admire the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his 1963 nonviolent March on Washington, but his world was not Vesey’s, and we must understand that. Continue reading the main story Write A Comment Continue reading the main story