By ERIC LIPTON and MATT FLEGENHEIMERJAN. 3, 2017

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WASHINGTON — House Republicans, facing a storm of bipartisan criticism, including from President-elect Donald J. Trump, moved early Tuesday afternoon to reverse their plan to kill the Office of Congressional Ethics. It was an embarrassing turnabout on the first day of business for the new Congress, a day when party leaders were hoping for a show of force to reverse policies of the Obama administration.

The reversal came less than 24 hours after House Republicans, meeting in a secret session, voted, over the objections of Speaker Paul D. Ryan, to eliminate the independent ethics office. It was created in 2008 in the aftermath of a series of scandals involving House lawmakers, including three who were sent to jail.

Mr. Trump criticized House Republicans on Tuesday for their move to gut the office, saying they should focus instead on domestic policy priorities such as health care and a tax overhaul.

In a pair of postings on Twitter, Mr. Trump called the Office of Congressional Ethics “unfair,” but he said focusing on it now was a case of misplaced priorities. He appended the hashtag “DTS,” an apparent allusion to his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington.

The comments constituted a public break by Mr. Trump with rank-and-file Republicans, who overrode their top leaders on Monday in a vote to significantly curtail the power of the ethics office, which was set up in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

Democrats and ethics watchdog groups were also sharply critical of House Republicans, adding to the pressure that led them to reverse course.

Christmas traditions like giving Santa all the props for what’s under the tree? Ain’t gonna happen.

Good Christmas traditions leave you with a warm feeling in your heart, not a cold keister.

“Everyone look at the damn camera!”

“Once more with feeling. And don’t be so pitchy.”

By MARK LILLANOV. 18, 2016

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It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary success story.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life.

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.” Fox News and other conservative media outlets make great sport of mocking the “campus craziness” that surrounds such issues, and more often than not they are right to. Which only plays into the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus. How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them? How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in “His Majesty”?

This campus-diversity consciousness has over the years filtered into the liberal media, and not subtly. Affirmative action for women and minorities at America’s newspapers and broadcasters has been an extraordinary social achievement — and has even changed, quite literally, the face of right-wing media, as journalists like Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham have gained prominence. But it also appears to have encouraged the assumption, especially among younger journalists and editors, that simply by focusing on identity they have done their jobs.

Recently I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France: For a full year I read only European publications, not American ones. My thought was to try seeing the world as European readers did. But it was far more instructive to return home and realize how the lens of identity has transformed American reporting in recent years. How often, for example, the laziest story in American journalism — about the “first X to do Y” — is told and retold. Fascination with the identity drama has even affected foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply. However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own. No major news outlet in Europe would think of adopting such a focus.

But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan’s playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from its identity-conscious wing, concentrated his energies on domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance) and defined America’s role in the post-1989 world. By remaining in office for two terms, he was then able to accomplish much for different groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.

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The media’s newfound, almost anthropological, interest in the angry white male reveals as much about the state of our liberalism as it does about this much maligned, and previously ignored, figure. A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.

Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)

Teachers committed to such a liberalism would refocus attention on their main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our history. A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote. A post-identity liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and about what matters there, especially religion. And it would take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.

Some years ago I was invited to a union convention in Florida to speak on a panel about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941. The hall was full of representatives from local chapters — men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem, and then sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt’s speech. As I looked out into the crowd, and saw the array of different faces, I was struck by how focused they were on what they shared. And listening to Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear — freedoms that Roosevelt demanded for “everyone in the world” — I was reminded of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are.

Throughout the election, CNN commentator Van Jones has been a leading voice for progressivism, a smart critic of failings within the Democratic Party, and an unflinching tribune against the bigotry exhibited by the Donald Trump campaign. On election night, Jones—co-founder of Color for Change and president of the social justice incubator Dream Corps—spoke for many when he said that parents who'd told their kids not to be bullies or bigots were dreading how to explain the outcome to them in the morning.

On Friday, I spoke with Van Jones about where we go from here.

Clara Jeffery: On election night, you said it was pretty clear that this was a "whitelash" against not only Barack Obama, but also due to the unease that whites have of losing their demographic choke hold.

Van Jones: That part got the most attention because I was the only person on national TV willing to call out the elephant in the room. The vast majority of white people voted for Trump, and the vast majority of people of color didn't. That's been true in presidential elections for a while, but in a race where even Paul Ryan said there were textbook examples of racism coming out of the mouth of the Republican nominee, we have to accept that some very toxic stuff was marbled into the Trump phenomenon.

Now, the Trump phenomenon has a lot of really good stuff in it, the anti-elitism, the concern for America's economy in the Rust Belt, the desire to see better days for the country. That's all great stuff. Some of that stuff is Bernie Sanders stuff. The problem is that it's marbled through with xenophobia and misogyny and bigotry. The problem that we have in the country now is, some people only see the positive stuff and wave off the toxic stuff, and some people only see the toxic stuff and wave off the positive stuff. You can't have an honest conversation.

For the past 30 years, elites in both political parties signed off on trade, deregulating the banks, building all these prisons, getting into these dumb wars, et cetera. Both parties. When somebody comes along and says, "I think Washington, DC, sucks," that's not wrong. The problem is that in Trump's case, he also demagogued around racial issues. Now I think liberals have gone from underreacting to Trump and saying that Trump is just a clown and a buffoon, and that Hillary Clinton's going to kick his ass, to now overreacting, and saying, "Oh my God, 60 million people consciously endorsed a white supremacist for president."

Neither of those are true, okay? I put out a video on MoveOn.org explaining how Trump was going to beat us. I had insufferably arrogant people from across the Democratic establishment and innumerable regular NPR liberals tell me I was crazy. It has been the most frustrating year and a half, trying to explain to people who think that they're so smart and think the red-state people are so stupid that they are the ones sitting on train tracks. That the rumbling sound they're hearing is not a Beyoncé song. Okay? It was ridiculous.

Now, these same people are completely panicked and they think that Trump has power he doesn't have. Trump is holding together the shakiest coalition that you could conceivable govern on. It is a conservative, populist alliance that agrees with itself on very little. Now, he's a great deal-maker with a lot of momentum and it will do a lot of damage to us. We are in grave peril and it's going to be terrible.

But, Paul Ryan wants to privatize Social Security. Trump says he wants to keep it, save the program. How does that get worked out?  Trump wants to tear up TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership]. Paul Ryan is 1,000 percent for TPP. How do the conservatives and the populists govern together? Now they will agree on a whole bunch of terrible stuff, trust me, they're going to put pipelines everywhere if they can. They're going to town militarizing stuff. Civil liberties, immigration, there's a whole bunch of terrible stuff to come. But this idea that 60 million people all want to join the Klan and now have absolute control of all three branches of government and that America's over is just ridiculous.

CJ: Sure, we can't think all Trump supporters want to join the Klan—it's much more complicated. Some might be really drawn to the messages of bigotry, but for most it's probably just that…

VJ: Those kinds of comments were not disqualifying for a lot of voters who were basing their vote on other reasons.

CJ: But we have seen attacks on people all over the country, people who are Muslim or Latino or whatever. What should our level of panic be about Trump supporters who think they have permission to act like that.

VJ: One, we should take it very, very seriously. We are on track now for a tragedy. There will be a Muslim Trayvon Martin within the next six months on our present trajectory. Some completely innocent Muslim, possibly a female, who gets gravely injured, if not killed, by somebody who feels empowered by white nationalist extremes of the Trump phenomenon. So we should take it very seriously.

Number two, we need to try to get as specific and concrete as we can and gather the evidence, because one or two stories circulate on Facebook, bounce a thousand times, and it can sometimes feel like there's more going on than there is. We want to make sure we're accurate in what we're describing.

Number three, we need to put pressure on Trump, to speak out very forcefully that he's the president of all Americans including Muslims, and that his administration, including his law enforcement, is going to take very, very seriously any crimes against any Americas based on their race or their faith, including Muslims. He needs to send that signal very, very soon and very, very clearly. Otherwise, he's going to be seen as culpable. And his silence may be interpreted as encouragement, rightly or wrongly.

I think we have every reason to hope for the best but expect and prepare for the worst. It is conceivable that maybe he won't feel the need to throw so much raw meat at his base and might govern reasonably, but it seems more likely that he'll follow the usual pattern of demagogues. The usual pattern of demagogues is to promise the moon, fail to deliver, and then blame vulnerable others for those failures. He's promised the moon. Now he has power. He's going to fail to deliver. He's not going to be able to bring a bunch of coal jobs back and a bunch of factory jobs back in this global economy. Period. Because you can't. It's not going to happen.

When he fails to deliver and the economic pain is the same as it is right now, he'll have two choices. He's going to have to spend a bunch of money on infrastructure jobs, which, frankly, I'm not mad at. Especially if they're not only in the red states. That will have, against the overall economy, some multiplier effects, but relatively limited impact. He's not going to want to pay for it, so he's going to have to do that depth of finance, which will have some economic consequences, maybe mild. Then he's going to start blaming people. He's going to start a war, he's going to start attacking immigrants or Muslims or Black Lives Matter or whatever. Because he's going to have to distract them from the no jobs. I think we have every reason to hope for the best but to expect and prepare for the worst.

CJ: There's obviously a lot of infighting—everything from bitter animosity to heartfelt soul-searching—about what went wrong within the Democratic Party. What should the next Democratic National Committee chair do?

VJ: Well, you know, try to rebuild, but the problem wasn't the DNC. The problem was the arrogance of the Clinton camp, which showed up in a thousand different ways. The whole email server thing was just a debacle. She shouldn't have done it. Then the way they stopped the Sanders' rebellion, which was 80 percent fine and 20 percent bad.

Listen, Sanders lost because he didn't get enough black support. Period! End of story, we're done. Black women in the South stuck with Hillary Clinton and stopped his rebellion. You don't have to do anything else. You don't have to do all kinds of hijinks and stuff like that. In fact, do the opposite, and tell your people to do the opposite.

CJ: Do you feel that that came from Clinton herself, from her circle? Or from Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC?

VJ: Hard to know, but the Sanders insurgency felt it was treated like garbage. The candidate said nice things, but…Let me just tell you how it should have been. First of all, look, you fight. You try to win. You try to win based on your own advantages and your own stuff. Hillary Clinton, in two debates, pulled out unfair attacks that made it seem like Bernie Sanders was supporting the Minutemen. Distorting attacks when people already don't trust you is not smart.

Then when the thing went down at the Nevada caucus, where allegedly chairs were thrown, but no chairs were thrown…Sanders had an opportunity that he blew and Hillary had an opportunity that she blew. Sanders should have come out and said, you know, in one statement just, "Any violence or threats in my movement, I don't want." Period, full stop. Then come back four or five hours later and talk about being concerned about the denial of the [convention] rules. He didn't do that.

She had an opportunity to come out and say, "Any shenanigans that are going on, I don't want." She and Bernie and Debbie should have held a press conference and said, "We want every vote to count. We are concerned about this and we're looking into it. Bernie and I don't agree on very much, but we both agree on democracy, and we both agree that every Democrat matters. I'm appointing a special team and so is he and we're going to oversee this thing and we're going to make sure none of this happens again."

Because listen, this played huge for the Sanders people. That's where, "This thing is completely rigged" came from. It came out of how Nevada was handled. That's really where it got accelerated.

CJ: Well right, and the primary and caucus system is so crazy. Especially to people who are new to politics.

VJ: Right, the Clintons just felt like "we can ignore people's complaints about the process, because the process is always bumpy and we're going to win this thing and move on. Just like in 2008, when we got on board with Obama, these Sanders people will have to get on board with us." Then we see nasty, inflamed comments all over the internet against the Sanders people…

CJ: Although in fairness there was also some really vicious stuff coming from some Sanders' supporters.

VJ: Listen, but guess what? A lot of all that stuff was Russia. This is the first election we ever went through where an enemy deliberately disrupts our democracy, and everybody keeps acting like it didn't happen. The Russians have had and continue to have an active program to undermine American society, and a part of that was accelerating all this online stuff. It hacked the DNC but not the RNC. We've never seen Donald Trump's email. All of this stuff was part of the disruption, so yeah, there were some Bernie bros who were saying bad stuff, some horrible behavior. I'm not trying to excuse it, but what I am saying is that…

CJ: You think some of the online nastiness from each camp was in part stoked by or was actually the work of Russian disinformation?

VJ: This is what top American intelligence officials have been saying the entire time, with the mainstream media ignoring it. And Donald Trump saying that he doesn't believe it, even though he was briefed on it over and over again. We're in the middle of a cyberwar with Russia. Yes, there was terrible behavior from some Sanders people. But Hillary Clinton was almost certainly going to be the nominee. I think they really misread the Sanders voters.

The most enthusiastic, the hardest-working, the best of the Sanders campaign had a very hard time making that turn. Here's the thing: Hillary Clinton did try to reach out to the Sanders voters with policy concessions, but Sanders voters, especially his most activist core, are process people. They're not policy wonks. They're people who want big money out of politics. They're people who want fairness from the DNC chair. They're people who want every vote to count. They're the people who don't like Wall Street money. Right? They're primarily about the process of politics and whether or not it's fair and whether or not big-money elites are rigging things in your favor. They don't care how many zeroes you add onto your promised education college policy if they don't trust you in the first place.

You saw this tragic thing, where Hillary Clinton thinks she's handing roses to the Sanders people by making policy concessions. That's how it appeared to her. These people are actually probably allergic to roses and wanted chocolate in the first place.

So you wind up with this train crash inside the Democratic Party. I tell people all the time, "Well, they had no place to go but Trump." I said, "Have you ever heard of Pokemon Go? Have you ever heard of Netflix and chill? They can go Netflix and chill and play Pokemon Go, they don't have to do what you say. They don't have to come vote." Guess what? Six million Democrats didn't come vote.

CJ: Are you in the "Keith Ellison for DNC chair" camp? How are you feeling about the candidates that have come forward so far? [Editor's note: At the time of this conversation, both Rep Keith Ellison (D-MN) and former DNC chair Howard Dean's had both been floated for DNC chair. Labor Secretary Tom Perez had not yet signaled interest.]

VJ: I'm for Keith Ellison to head the United Nations, but if he decided to turn that job down, he could deign to be the DNC chair. Keith Ellison is the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the progressive movement.

CJ: Howard Dean said the DNC chair has got to be a full-time job. What do you think about that?

VJ: I don't know. There's how hard you work, and there's what you would do when you got the job. You have both problems right now because the party's been decimated. Since 1992, the fundamental center of gravity was the Clintons and the Obamas. Now the Clintons have been obliterated and Obama's going to have to go and be quiet for at least two years—because you can only have one president at a time and he doesn't want to be a jackass like Dick Cheney. That means there's just a big gaping hole. Who's going to inspire us and point us in the right direction and encourage us? And some of it is practical: How are we going to organization ourselves and raise all the money and find all the candidates? It's really hard to say which one is the bigger problem.

I love Howard Dean, it's just that Keith Ellison's the future of the progressive movement. The future of the progressive movement is Elizabeth Warren and Keith Ellison.

CJ: What would you encourage ordinary people to get involved in right now?

VJ: Local politics matters a lot. Local, state, an effort to rebuild the farm team from the ground up, because we lost so much during the Obama years when it comes to Congress, when it comes to state legislatures. Anybody who's mad should run for something. Let's get that going. I also think that also sometimes we overemphasize the political system. There are other ways to make a difference. There's technology, there's media, there's business. We need a more diversified portfolio of change-making tools so that we don't just get so freaked out by whatever's happening in the political corner.

This is a horrific setback—there's going to be horrible consequences for a generation or more. The country may never fully recover from this, but it's not all bad and it's not over yet, and the American people may recover their senses.

First of all, almost half the people didn't vote at all. Of the half that did vote, Hillary got more votes, and of the people who voted for Trump, only probably 10 percent of them endorsed all this crazy stuff; the other 40 percent were just giving a middle finger to either Hillary Clinton, DC, or PC stuff run amok, whatever that means to them. That doesn't mean that they all want to privatize Social Security or even build a wall, in fact. If you take the people who didn't vote, cut them in half, and assume that some would have voted for Trump and some would have voted for Hillary, and then if you take her voters, that's like 150 million people. That's a lot of people who cannot be rationally included in the Trump camp at all. Then if you take the half of his voters—or more, probably—the vast majority of his voters who aren't into a lot of his crazy stuff, you got a lot to work with.

CJ: Where do you feel the media screwed up the most?

VJ: The catnip of the ratings, it's just hard to shake off. He's a hell of a performer, he's a hell of an entertainer. If you put him on and let him say his crazy stuff, you're going to get a lot of viewers. If you take him off and have some sober discussion about what's going on in Syria, you're going to lose 80 percent of your audience. When you get $1 billion of free advertising, it's hard not to have anybody buy the product.

You have a new media system and he emerged as a new master of it. FDR was underrated, but he understood radio and he dominated. JFK was underrated, but he understood television and he dominated. Obama was underrated, but he understood the internet and its capability to bring out small-dollar donors and to push viral videos. Trump was underrated, but he understood social media and he understood reality television. We thought he was leaving that world of entertainment and climbing over the wall into politics. In fact, what he did was he pulled the world of politics into the world of reality television. Basically, we all just had to live in the Trump reality television show, and now we're kind of stuck there for at least four years. Maybe eight.

He understood the dynamics of the new media system better than the people who ran the old media system. You don't get fewer followers saying outrageous stuff on Twitter. You don't get lower ratings playing the villain on reality TV. Playing the villain gets you higher ratings on reality TV and saying outrageous stuff on Twitter gets you more followers. All the old rules—if you say some crazy stuff you get your show canceled or you get your campaign ended—don't apply in the world of social media. They don't apply in the world of reality TV. He just played everybody.

CJ: At 3:30 a.m. on election night, you said a lot of Americans were struggling with what they were going to tell their kids. It's been really hard for especially young kids to process the fear that grown-ups are feeling and a lot of cases that their classmates are experiencing. If you have any wisdom for America on that front, I'm sure people would like to hear it.

VJ: I think that this should give us a lot of empathy for the kids in Syria and other wartorn countries who want to get away from crazy and to come here. Like, just the fact that someone who said mean things was able to become president traumatized a whole generation of children. No building got blown up next to them. They didn't see their dad get torn apart in a car bomb. Just one mean person saying mean things, being put in a position of power, traumatized half of a generation of kids. So it should give us a little bit more empathy for people scrambling to leave these war zones. Rich countries do civil wars with tweets and votes. In countries where there are real civil wars, people go through a lot, and we should be willing to go through a lot to help them. Hopefully this will open up our eyes to how fragile democracy is and how key civility is to civilization. Civility isn't just some optional value in a multicultural, multistate democratic republic. Civility is the key to civilization. Everybody got through it with their kids as best they could. If you're a Muslim parent, if you're a Latino parent, you're still going through it. For the rest of us who have a little bit of privilege, maybe we should be a little bit more tender-hearted.