OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2017
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
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week — 2006
Federal authorities are conducting a criminal investigation into the
Port of Astoria’s 2005 dredging violations.
Of all the problems that beset the Port of Astoria, the dredging viola-
tions have the greatest effect on the agency’s pocketbook and the credibil-
ity of its executive director and commission.
Port Executive Director Peter Gearin said he has been instructed by
the Port Commission not to discuss the investigation.
But a lawyer familiar with the investigation, who requested anonymity
because of legal matters, said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Portland are involved in a criminal
investigation of the Port, Gearin and commissioners.
Port Commissioner Larry Pfund has been doing some investigating,
too, and he says he no longer trusts Gearin to tell the truth about the vio-
lations that took place two years ago. Phund said he has tried to convince
other commissioners to fire Gearin, and they have not given him their
support. Now, he is going public with what he knows.
It’s been a long and bumpy road for the “Safeway intersec-
tion” traffic light since it was first proposed in 2003, nearly a
year before the new supermarket opened for business.
There were financing issues, then construction problems
and delays, followed by more financing issues, then disagree-
ments about exactly where the light should be located and even
doubts about whether it should be installed after all.
Along the way the traffic light’s original $200,000 price tag
ballooned to $311,000.
But somehow the project survived all the setbacks.
Now city officials expect it to be operational within the next
week or two.
50 years ago — 1966
U.S. Rep. Wendell Wyatt, R–Ore., introduced legislation today to
include U.S. Highway 30 between Portland and Astoria in the national
highway system so it can be eligible for federal funds.
Wyatt said the federal funds would be used for widening and improv-
ing the highway — “a virtual immediate necessity” because of area
growth.
As the final Job Corpsmen leave Tongue Point, just a bare
two years from the date of establishment of this institution,
many people are still wondering why the Office of Economic
Opportunity wiped it out.
Many people also continue to be appalled at this example
of the casual attitude of a federal agency toward the taxpay-
er’s money.
A bill to forbid commercial fishing for steelhead appeared in the
House of Representatives at Salem Monday, introduced by Rep. Edward
W. Elder, Eugene Republican and fish and game committee chairman.
75 years ago — 1941
The Daily Astorian/File Photo
Shown above is a replica of the pledge which every American
was asked to sign during a house-to-house campaign in every
part of Oregon in 1941.
The U.S. Army has closed the north Clatsop beaches to
pedestrian and vehicular traffic, from the south jetty to the
Necanicum River but leaving Seaside’s beach open, it was
learned today. There are certain restricted areas within the
Seaside beach but they are minor and patrolled.
The beach in the described areas are considered outposts
of the subsector command and as such are banned to civilian
use. A defense saving pledge card program will start tomor-
row in Clatsop County in which every income earner in the
county will be asked to sign a card pledging purchase of a defi-
nite weekly or monthly amount in defense savings bonds and
stamps, according to William F. McGregor, county defense sav-
ings chairman.
The program is part of a nationwide effort to have every
income earner in the nation pledge purchase of defense savings
bonds and stamps in an effort to help finance the huge cost of
the war, promote private savings and defeat inflation.
Brigadier-General Thomas Rilea of Fort Lewis told the Astorian-
Budget by telephone last night that the Army has issued no orders
closing Oregon beaches to the public, as it was announced in a report
Monday.
An authorized spokesman from Lewis said last night: “The Army has
issued no orders closing Oregon beaches to the public as has been reported
in the press. Unauthorized persons are not permitted in the immediate
vicinity of military installations wherever located. Otherwise the move-
ments of civilians are not restricted.”
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
A man watches as marchers begin to walk during the Women’s March Saturday in Astoria.
After the Women’s March
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
T
he women’s marches were a
phenomenal success and an
important cultural moment.
Most everybody came back uplifted
and empowered.
Many said they felt
hopeful for the first
time since Election
Day. But these
marches can never
be an effective
opposition to Donald Trump.
In the first place, this movement
focuses on the wrong issues. Of
course, many marchers came with
broad anti-Trump agendas, but
they were marching under the
conventional structure in which the
central issues were clear. As The
Washington Post reported, they
were “reproductive rights, equal
pay, affordable health care, action
on climate change.”
These are all important matters,
and they tend to be voting issues for
many upper-middle-class voters in
university towns and coastal cities.
But this is 2017. Ethnic populism
is rising around the world. The
crucial problems today concern the
way technology and globalization
are decimating jobs and tearing the
social fabric; the way migration is
redefining nation-states; the way the
post-World War II order is increas-
ingly being rejected as a means to
keep the peace.
All the big things that were once
taken for granted are now under
assault: globalization, capitalism,
adherence to the Constitution, the
U.S.-led global order. If you’re not
engaging these issues first, you’re
not going to be in the main arena of
national life.
Second, there was too big a gap
between Saturday’s marches and the
Democratic and Republican parties.
Sometimes social change hap-
pens through grass-roots movements
— the civil rights movement. But
most of the time change happens
through political parties: The New
Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan
Revolution. Change happens when
people run for office, amass coali-
tions of interest groups, engage in
the messy practice of politics.
Without the discipline of party
politics, social movements devolve
into mere feeling, especially in our
age of expressive individualism.
People march and feel good and
think they have accomplished
something. They have a social
experience with a lot of people
and fool themselves into thinking
they are members of a coherent
and demanding community. Such
movements descend to the language
of mass therapy.
It’s significant that as marching
and movements have risen, the
actual power of the parties has
collapsed. Marching is a seductive
substitute for action in an anti-politi-
cal era, and leaves the field open for
Change
happens when
people run for
office, amass
coalitions
of interest
groups, engage
in the messy
practice of
politics.
a rogue like Trump.
Finally, identity politics is
too small for this moment. On
Friday, Trump offered a version of
unabashed populist nationalism.
On Saturday, the anti-Trump forces
could have offered a red, white
and blue alternative patriotism, a
modern, forward-looking patriotism
based on pluralism, dynamism,
growth, racial and gender equality
and global engagement.
Instead, the marches offered the
pink hats, an anti-Trump move-
ment built, oddly, around Planned
Parenthood, and lots of signs with
the word “pussy” in them. The defi-
nition of America is up for grabs.
Our fundamental institutions have
been exposed as shockingly hollow.
But the marches couldn’t escape
the language and tropes of identity
politics.
Soon after the Trump victory,
professor Mark Lilla of Columbia
wrote a piece on how identity
politics was dooming progressive
chances. Times readers loved that
piece and it vaulted to the top of the
most-read charts.
But now progressives seem
intent on doubling down on exactly
what has doomed them so often.
Lilla pointed out that identity
politics isolates progressives from
the wider country: “The fixation on
diversity in our schools and in the
press has produced a generation of
liberals and progressives narcissisti-
cally unaware of conditions outside
their self-defined groups, and indif-
ferent to the task of reaching out to
Americans in every walk of life.”
Sure enough, if you live in blue
America, the marches carpeted
your Facebook feed. But The
Times’ Julie Bosman was in Niles,
Michigan, where many women had
never heard of the marches, and if
they had, I suspect, they would not
have felt at home at one.
Identity-based political move-
ments always seem to descend
into internal rivalries about who
is most oppressed and who should
get pride of place. Sure enough, the
controversy before and after the
march was over the various roles
of white feminists, women of color,
anti-abortion feminists and various
other out-groups.
The biggest problem with
identity politics is that its categories
don’t explain what is going on now.
Trump carried a majority of white
women. He won the votes of a
shocking number of Hispanics.
The central challenge today is
not how to celebrate difference. The
central threat is not the patriarchy.
The central challenge is to rebind a
functioning polity and to modernize
a binding American idea.
I loathed Trump’s inaugural:
It offered a zero-sum, ethnically
pure, backward-looking brutalistic
nationalism. But it was a coherent
vision, and he is rallying a true and
fervent love of our home.
If the anti-Trump forces are to
have a chance, they have to offer a
better nationalism, with diversity
cohering around a central mission,
building a nation that balances the
dynamism of capitalism with bibli-
cal morality.
The march didn’t come close.
Hint: The musical “Hamilton” is a
lot closer.