OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
OUR VIEW
Federal lood insurance
should be sustainable
iscally and affordable
latsop County communities facing a strict deadline to adopt
new federal lood insurance rate maps are like little bubbles
in a raging torrent of problems surrounding the National
Flood Insurance Program.
It’s bound to be worrying anytime a federal entity — in this case
the Federal Emergency Management Agency — imposes dire con-
sequences when local citizens don’t do as we’re told. In this case,
failing to implement new lood hazard ordinances would make local
homeowners ineligible for lood insurance, disaster assistance and
federally backed grants and loans.
In this immediate situation, Clatsop residents can take some
comfort from the experience across the Columbia River in Paciic
County, Washington, which underwent the same process last year.
Although not universally positive, in Long Beach most properties
either moved to a lower-risk category or stayed the same.
Nevertheless, there are examples around the region of proper-
ties being reclassiied to higher-risk lood zones, leading to sharp
increases in insurance premiums on previously affordable homes.
Active involvement is required to make certain you aren’t overpay-
ing, but are sensibly covered for conceivable lood losses.
C
The big picture
The bigger picture is that the National Flood Insurance Program
is in deep trouble — $24 billion in the red, largely due to mass
disasters including Superstorm Sandy on the Eastern Seaboard. If
our broken Congress can gather the wits and gumption to do so, the
program must be revised and reauthorized before a September 2017
deadline. Signiicant changes are required to protect policy holders
— 31,187 in Oregon alone at last count.
Based on climatic and social factors, a top economist with the
Union of Concerned Scientists this month outlined needed reforms.
These include taking nearly inevitable sea-level increases into
account. Although currently counteracted in our area by a ris-
ing land surface, the real estate website Zillow recently said that,
“Nationwide, almost 1.9 million homes (or roughly 2 percent of
all U.S. homes) — worth a combined $882 billion — are at risk of
being underwater by 2100.”
Crucially for communities like Warrenton that are home to mod-
erate-income people, any changes that make the National Flood
Insurance Program more iscally sustainable must also make sure
insurance premiums are affordable, via a system of rebates, tax
credits and vouchers tied to incomes. The Union of Concerned
Scientists and others also note the desirability of getting private
insurers into lood coverage, so long as they have enough assets to
meet claim obligations and don’t undermine the federal effort.
Epic looding happens
A vivid illustration of lood-insurance considerations is playing
out right now on national news, as Louisiana suffers from massive
looding. Earlier this year, an oficer with the National Association
of Homebuilders lamented to Congress that a poorly maintained
federal levee in St. Charles Parish was driving up risks and insur-
ance premiums — to as much as $17,000 a year. This week, much
of the parish is underwater — emphasizing the importance both of
trying to mitigate lood risk and insure against it.
Clatsop County’s citizens and leaders must take an active role in
building resiliency into our communities, making sure we take sen-
sible steps like lood-prooing neighborhoods and maintaining open
lood plains where waters can expand without destroying assets.
While watching to make certain lood mapping is accurate and fair,
this is a perfect time to thoroughly examine old assumptions to
make sure we’re safe now and for decades to come.
Trump is making America meaner
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
New York Times News Service
OREST GROVE — All across
America, in little towns like this
one, Donald Trump is main-
streaming hate.
This community of Forest Grove,
near the farm where I grew up in
western Oregon, has historically been
a charming, friendly and welcoming
community. But
in the middle of a
physics class at the
high school one day
this spring, a group
of white students
suddenly began
jeering at their Latino classmates and
chanting: “Build a wall! Build a wall!”
The same white students had
earlier chanted “Trump! Trump!
Trump!” Soon afterward, a student
hung a homemade banner in the
school reading, “Build a Wall,”
prompting Latinos at area schools to
stage a walkout.
“They openly express their dislike
of my race,” Briana Larios, a 15-year-
old Mexican-American honor roll
student who hopes to go to Harvard,
said of some of her white classmates.
Wounded by accusations that she
doesn’t belong in the country in which
she was born, Briana is thinking of
being home-schooled rather than
returning to the high school when
classes resume.
“People now feel that it is OK to
say things that they might not have
said a year ago,” she said. “Trump
played a big role.”
Among any nation’s most precious
possessions is its social fabric, and
that is what Donald Trump is rending
with incendiary talk about roughing
up protesters and about gun owners
solving the problem of Hillary Clinton
making judicial nominations.
Trump only mildly distanced
himself when an adviser suggested
that Clinton should be executed by
iring squad for treason, and his rallies
have become toxic brews of hatred
with shouts like “Hang the bitch!”
The New York Times made a video
of Trump fans at his rallies directing
crude slurs not just at Hillary Clinton,
but also at blacks, Latinos, Muslims
and gay people.
We need not be apocalyptic about
it. This is not Kristallnacht. But
Trump’s harsh rhetoric tears away
the veneer of civility and betrays our
national motto of “e pluribus unum.”
He has unleashed a beast and fed its
hunger, and long after this campaign
is over, we will be struggling to corral
it again.
“We’ve spent the last 15 years
ighting bullying in schools, and the
example set by the Trump campaign
has broken down the doors, and a tidal
F
wave of bullying has come through,”
said Maureen Costello of the Southern
Poverty Law Center.
The center issued a report
documenting how Trump’s venom has
poisoned schools across the country.
It quoted a North Carolina teacher as
saying she has “Latino students who
carry their birth certiicates and Social
Security cards to school because they
are afraid they will be deported.”
Another teacher reported that a ifth-
grader told a Muslim student “that
he was supporting Donald Trump
because he was going to kill all of the
Muslims if he became president!”
Here in the Forest Grove area,
west of Portland, students of Mexican
heritage at four high schools — most
of them born in the United States
— described to me how some local
whites take cues from Trump.
“They say, ‘We’re going to deport
your ass,’” said Melina McGlothen,
17, whose mother is Mexican. “I don’t
want to say I hate them, but I hate
their stupidity.”
Ana Sally Gonzalez, 17, said
a school club had put up posters
criticizing racism, and they were then
marred by grafiti such as “Go back
where you came from” and “Trump
2016.”
The tension relects deep
resentment among some white
working-class families. They are
angry at immigrants who have
taken over some jobs, at the way
communities they cherish are
changing demographically and
linguistically, and at what they
perceive as a stiling political
correctness that leaves whites accused
of racism when they speak up.
Many of my old Oregon farm-
town friends are strong Trump
supporters, and they will completely
disagree with this column. Their
headline would be, “Big Media
Suffocates Real Americans With
Political Correctness.”
The upshot is that this election
year, we’re divided not only by
political party and ideology, but also
by identity. So the weave of our
national fabric unravels. And while
our eyes have mostly been on Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton, the
nation’s history is being written not
just in the capital and grand cities, but
also in small towns and etched in the
lives of ordinary people.
I wrote a column recently
exploring whether Trump is a racist,
and a result was anti-Semitic vitriol
from Trump followers, one of whom
suggested I should be sent to the
ovens for writing “a typical Jewish
hit piece.” In fact, I’m Armenian
and Christian, not Jewish, but the
responses underscored that the Trump
campaign is enveloped by a cloud of
racial, ethnic and religious animosity
— much of it poorly informed.
The Trump-inspired malice seems
ubiquitous. A Georgetown University
study found a surge of anti-Muslim
violence, from murders to attacks on
mosques, coinciding with Trump’s
hostility toward Muslims. In March,
a man attacked Muslim and Latino
students in Kansas, shouting “brown
trash” and “Trump will take our
country from you guys.”
I hope Trump and his aides will
soon come to recognize that words
have consequences that go far beyond
politics, consequences that cannot be
undone. It’s perhaps inevitable that
some overzealous supporters will
periodically go too far, but Trump
need not incite them, and he certainly
shouldn’t joke about harming
protesters or tolerate advisers who
propose a iring squad for his rival.
So far, Trump has arguably
beneited from his fondness for over-
the-top rhetoric. He gets attention and
television time and is always at the
center of his own hurricane. But in
November, after the ballots have been
counted and the crowds have gone
home, we will still have a country to
share, and I fear it may be a harsher
and more fragile society because of
Trump’s campaigning today.
Inlammatory talk isn’t
entertaining, but dangerous. It’s past
time for Trump to grow up.
Yet if bigotry has been ampliied
by his candidacy, let’s remember that
there are still deep reservoirs of social
capital — including in conservative
neighborhoods — that have proved
impervious to Trump’s insinuations.
In Georgia, an India-born Muslim
named Malik Waliyani bought a gas
station and convenience store a few
months ago and was horriied when it
was recently burglarized and damaged.
He struggled to keep it going. But then
the nearby Smoke Rise Baptist Church
heard what had happened.
“Let’s shower our neighbor with
love,” Chris George, the pastor, told
his congregation at the end of his
sermon, and more than 200 members
drove over to assist, mostly by
making purchases. One man drove
his car around until the gas tank was
empty, so he could buy more gas.
“Our faith inspires us to build
bridges, not to label people as us and
them, but to recognize that we’re all
part of the same family,” the pastor
told me. “Our world is a stronger
place when we choose to look past
labels and embrace others with love.”
This is a wrenching, divisive,
polarizing time in America, and we
have a major party nominee who is
sowing hatred and perhaps violence.
Let’s not succumb. Good people, like
the members of Smoke Rise Baptist,
are reweaving our nation’s social
fabric even as it is being torn.
The beckoning of racial patronage is on display in campaign
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
T
hink of a Donald Trump voter,
the kind that various studies
have identiied as his arche-
typal backer: a white man without a
college education living in a region
experiencing economic distress.
What do you see? A new
“forgotten man,” ignored by elites
in both parties, suffering through
socioeconomic
dislocations, and
turning to Trump
because he seems
willing to put the
working class
irst? Or a resentful
white bigot, lashing back against the
transformation of America by rallying
around a candidate who promises to
make America safe for racism once
again?
You’re allowed to answer “both,
depending.” But where to lay the
emphasis has divided liberals and
conservatives against one another.
Conservatives who are generally
happy with the Republican Party’s
status quo, the mix of policies that
Trump has ranged himself against,
have stressed his voters’ baser
proclivities and passions.
Conservatives who favor a populist
shift in how the GOP approaches
issues like taxes or transfer programs
have stressed the ways in which
Reaganite Republicanism has failed
the working class, while urging a
conservative politics of solidarity that
borrows at least something from the
wreck of Trumpism.
Likewise on the left: The more
content you are with a liberalism in
which social issues provide most of
the Democratic Party’s energy, the
more likely you’ll be to crack wise on
Twitter — “a lot of economic anxiety
here!” — every time Trump or one of
his hangers-on or supporters makes a
xenophobic foray.
Alternatively, the more you favor
a left-wing politics that stresses
economic forces above all else,
the more you’ll cast Trump’s blue
collar support as the bitter fruit
of the Democratic Party’s turn to
neoliberalism, and argue that social
democracy rather than shaming and
shunning is the cure for right-wing
populism.
My sympathies are with the
second group in both debates —
as a partisan of a more solidaristic
conservatism, and as an outsider who
prefers the old left’s class politics to
the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of elite
liberalism today.
But it’s also important for partisans
of socioeconomic solidarity, whether
right wing or left wing, to recognize
that racial and economic grievances
can’t always be separated, and that
a politics of ethnic competition is
an unfortunately common state of
political affairs.
Consider the trajectory of
liberalism. In the 1930s, Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal deliberately
excluded blacks from certain
beneits and job programs. This
was discrimination, but it was also
patronage: It was a time when
“afirmative action was white,” to
borrow from historian Ira Katznelson,
lifting white workers at the expense of
African-Americans.
Then decades later, liberalism
moved to create afirmative action
programs to help those same African-
Americans. This was redress and
expiation, but it was also another form
of patronage: a promise of a hand
up, a race-based advantage that only
liberalism would provide.
With time, that promise was
extended to groups with weaker
claims to redress than the descendants
of American slaves, even as mass
immigration expanded the potential
pool of beneiciaries. Eventually, we
ended up with a liberalism that favors
permanent preferences for minority
groups, permanently large immigration
lows — plus welfare programs that
recent immigrants are more likely than
native-born Americans to use.
This combination is (mostly)
rooted in idealism. But it still amounts
to a system of ethnic patronage, which
white Americans who are neither
well-off nor poor enough to be on
Medicaid see as particularly biased
against them.
This constituency, the gainfully
employed but insecure lower middle
class, is the Trumpian core.
The activist energy on the left is
pushing for a more ethnically focused
politics, devoted to righting structural
race-based wrongs. That energy will
be blunted temporarily by the light
of well-educated whites from Trump,
but the absence of economic common
ground between Hillary Clinton-
voting white moderates and the
party’s poorer, minority base means
that her temporary coalition is likely
to fracture irst along racial lines.
That fracturing will help the GOP
recover, but it won’t help Republicans
build a pan-racial conservatism. The
pull of white identity politics can be
overcome, but only with great effort.