By Michael Cornwall

If it Takes a Village to raise a child as Hillary once insisted, then it assumes that all children are born innocent beings who are shaped by the social forces around them. At what point does the village fail a child?

Does the would be leader of the village declare a child or teen or adult an outcast based on the level of toxic and destructive beliefs the person may have been exposed to and may have tragically internalized? – racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist beliefs – or is the individual outcast judged solely as a deplorable “other,” an irredeemable citizen that angrily is cast into a “basket of deplorables” by the shunning of them by the would be leader?

Isn’t the person labeled a deplorable member of the village now a pariah?

Being called “a deplorable” by the would be village leader constitutes a form of degradation ceremony.

Such labeling, such name calling that transforms the word deplorable into a noun, that assigns the outcast identity to millions of American citizens, is a huge social wound that Hillary has just inflicted on countless members of the village who support her opponent.

Trump and the Alt/right and the Republican Party have made it clear they have contempt for Obama and Hillary.

Hillary has now revealed her contempt for millions of people that the village has failed.

We won’t be seeing a national leader who values every American equally, and who is fully worthy of the name of village leader of us all anytime soon.

In Lincoln’s second inaugural address even as the civil war raged on, he concluded – “With malice towards none, with charity for all… Let us strive on to bind up the nations wounds.”

I have supported Hilary’s candidacy and I still do, and I hope she reconnects with her Methodist heritage of charity towards all, that doesn’t grant Christians like herself the power to judge anyone as being irredeemable.

I hope some Hillary backers learn from her comments about Trump supporters. It doesn’t seem her inner circle has. The talking points they circulated to their surrogates said she made a mistake by saying “half” rather than “some.” That stance saddens me.

Her description of the “deplorables” was bad enough, but how she described the second “basket” was even worse because the condescension is less obvious. About those people she said:

That other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from.

To say that those frustrated Trump supporters are suffering so much from extreme anxiety they are irrational is also an insult. In his Facebook Live commentary, Van Jones  presented a much different perspective. Unfortunately, it seems Hillary did not hear it.

Her remarks yesterday were not out of the blue. At other events in August which were closed to the press, she used the “baskets” metaphor. Why didn’t any of her people alert her to the risk involved?

In “I Love Donald Trump,” “Arlie Hochschild and Crossover Issues,”and other recent posts I’ve addressed those issues, sensing their importance.

But little did I anticipate that Hillary would place them front and center. I fear it will cost her the election.

Following are some of my recent interactions with passengers in my Yellow Cab:

A medical malpractice lawyer tells me that she alternates between representing patients and representing insurance companies because representing patients becomes too disturbing. I tell her about another passenger who works as a consultant to hospitals who told me that medical treatment is the third most common cause of death in the United States. She said she agrees. I asked her if she was familiar with Ivan Illich and his argument in Medical Nemesis that doctors cause more illness than they cure. She said she did not know the book but she believes the thesis is correct.

A Swiss man rants about the sorry state of affairs with American politics. I sum up his argument: “It’s almost as if anyone who wants to be an elected official is automatically disqualified by wanting that position.” He replies, “Precisely. That’s what I’m saying.” I comment on how in ancient Greece political officials were selected randomly and suggest maybe we should do the same. He likes that idea. I then told him about James Fiskin’s successful experiments with deliberative democracy, which involve presenting balanced briefing materials that include the pros and cons of different choices to a representative sample of people, followed by small-group discussions and  extensive confidential questionnaires. The results have produced wise policy decisions. I suggest modern elected officials could support a similar process on pressing issues, with a promise to generally follow the recommendations that emerge. My passenger likes that idea and tells me that the Swiss government operates with a collaborative structure.  The seven-member Federal Council, which consists of the heads the seven federal executive departments, is the collective executive head of the Swiss government and is responsible for leading the federal administration. The position of President rotates among the seven Councillors on a yearly basis. My passenger tells me that the Council’s collective decision-making is conducted openly. I recall that when I was locked up while freaking out on a long, bad LSD-trip, I was inspired to write that the President and his cabinet should make decisions collectively on live television. Maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all!

A Portuguese couple tells me about their country’s remarkable social insurance programs and workers’ extensive paid vacations, not bad for one of the poorest European countries. They share that amazement at the Trump phenomenon and tell me there’s no chance Portugal will ever leave the European Union as did Great Britain.

A young female artist about to move to Florence to study painting in a special program there tells me she paints because she’s compelled to do so. She sees her work as an ongoing process, with each piece merely a report on one investigation. She finds it hard to generalize about what kind of impact she wants to help, but one example was a mural she did in the Clarion Alley Mural Project affirming trans women activists while they are alive rather than waiting to celebrate them after they are dead.

I share my proposal for transforming the Democratic Party by forming precinct-based clubs that work year-round to implement the Party’s platform with Kate Maeder, who’s campaign manager for Supervisor Jane Kim in her neck-and-neck campaign for State Assembly. She replies, “This is great.”

Shortly after Obama’s speech in Dallas about the tension between Blacks and the police, a female passenger tells me about how her husband, when he was a Yale professor, was unjustly arrested, beat up, and charged with felony assault on a police officer by the Washington Police Department. Held incommunicado for two days, he got charges dropped only because the Metro subway system had video surveillance tape. But it still cost thousands of dollars in legal fees. Though she has relatives who are police officers, she agrees that somehow we need to dissolve the “Code of Silence.”

I’m working on a list of proposed policies with majority support that a national organization could promote.

The current list reads as follows. Please suggest additions, with references to documentation.

• Limit the amount of money individuals can contribute to political campaigns.
• Reduce “corporate welfare” such as government aid to help other countries buy U.S.-made weapons.
• Break up the big banks.
• Provide free education at public colleges.
• Make corporations and wealthy people pay what’s fair in federal taxes.
• A Medicare-for-all insurance option.
• Reduce military spending by at least $12 billion — especially money for weapons the military doesn’t want.
• Reduce jail and prison populations and invest more in crime prevention and drug treatment.
• A federal jobs program that would spend government money to create more than one million new jobs.

Might you want to join a team to explore how to engage in mutually beneficial conversations “beyond the choir,” especially with people who have no college degree. Those conversations could be online and/or in person. Team members could brainstorm strategies and compare notes on their efforts.

In response to my Arlie Hochschild and Crossover Issues, which discusses her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, on Facebook Steven Shults commented:

It’s good stuff, but it doesn’t address how to overcome the ‘alt right’ echo chamber. … It’s a real dilemma, how do you reach people who are in that echo chamber?

And Melyssa Jo Kelly commented:

SURJ (showingupforracialjustice) has a good strategy — try to go for the low-hanging fruit. For me that means: Focus on reaching white people who you think have potential to become true allies to POC/active anti-racists, and (my words not SURJ’s) fuck wasting breath on hardcore racists.

One possibility would be to post comments on the Fox News website. Another would be to convene face-to-face conversations with specific communities, such as Delancey Street.

A piece for Rolling Stone by Joshua Holland, “Everyone Gets It Wrong About Donald Trump and White Voters,” presents a fairly detailed analysis concerning non-college-educated white voters.

Holland reports:

• The Democrats’ share of those voters in presidential elections has fluctuated pretty consistently with their share of all white votes (and the vote overall).
• Democrats have a serious problem with those voters in the Deep South and the Mountain states.
• Republicans are unpopular with this demographic in the North-central states and on the West Coast.
• And the two parties are competitive in the rest of the country.

Holland uses that data to make disparaging comments about the widespread concern about the issue. He says:

• No group of voters is more fetishized than white people who didn’t attend college.
• Liberals have long engaged in hand-wringing about non-college-educated whites.
• It’s no longer necessary to bend over backwards for these voters.
• A near-obsession with these voters persists.

He concludes, “Clinton may well outperform Obama with this demographic.”

But his dismissive attitude overlooks the fact that polls indicate that Trump is doing better than Romney with non-college-educated whites and Clinton is doing worse than Obama.

Regardless, the bottom line is that the Democrats need to win big, including in Congressional elections, which calls for a better performance with those voters.

Holland’s stance runs counter to that proposition.