White people are getting squeezed in college admissions

White kids are losing out.  Given that education is thought the golden pathway to great success, these numbers matter.

Highly selective schools now have fewer than 50% of the spaces for white kids.  Ambitious white parents might blame affirmative action. Donald Trump is on the case, looking at college admissions and pointing to Harvard by name.

White resentment over college admissions

The problem is that there are a lot of really talented Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and Mixed Race kids.  They apply, too.

The whole subject may be a winner for Trump.  The more people talk about race and discrimination, the better for Trump.  He picks at scabs and keeps things bleeding. 

I am no expert on college admissions, but I am an eye-witness to a tiny slice of it.   I attended Harvard and Yale and I currently serve as one of the interviewers for local applicants to Harvard.   I get to see a bit of what kind of kid is applying to the selective schools.

The answer:  lots of really bright, able, ambitious kids who are from a variety of races and ethnicities.

Fifty years ago, when I was admitted to Harvard the college was transitioning from a place where the sons of the prosperous New England establishment sent their "well rounded" sons, into a university that intended to serve the national interest to create the next generation of leaders, based on some supposed objective measure of merit.  Sputnik going up in 1957 sent a shock wave through America's educational establishment.  The fact that we invented the atomic bomb before Germany did was understood to mean national survival.  Meanwhile, selective schools were blocking smart Jewish boys from the Bronx from being admitted to save the places for the White, Protestant well bred people who made up the generations of alumni.  The Soviet Union getting the bomb, then sending up Sputnik in 1957, meant that that window of clear American superiority in science had shut, in only eleven years, and maybe the country's select colleges were hoping to commit national suicide.   And Americans were aware that our top scientists were foreigners--Jews out of Europe.  

Perhaps we  were educating the wrong people, they thought.  They decided to change.  I was a tiny beneficiary of that change.

Beginning in the classes accepted in the early 1960s there was a new emphasis on smarts, with acceptance of boys (Harvard was still all-male then) who tested well. There was a lot of emphasis on the SATs, as if they measured something useful.  Harvard wanted geographical diversity and economic diversity, but mostly it wanted measurable smarts.  It also wanted to address the civil rights revolution by accepting black kids, so some 8% of the class was black in my class that entered in 1967.   There were almost no Asians back then.  Harvard had a class of 1,200 boys, about 1,100 of them white, the rest black.

Harvard then was not multi-racial.  It was bi-racial.  Whites and blacks.

Looking at the student body today shows an entirely different makeup, one much closer to the makeup of the high achieving high schoolers of today.   Number one, half of them are women.  Simultaneously, just under half are white.   It means that an entering Harvard class of 1,800 students has about 900 boys, of whom 48% are white: 440 white males.

Are white kids being discriminated against?  Ambitious parents and students may feel that way but in fact the numbers work the other direction.  Very able Asian kids are the ones discriminated against, if one looks at objective standards.  White boys are a smaller percentage of the pool of able high school students than they used to be.  America is changing demographically.  There are a lot of Black and Hispanic kids here, plus a lot of people whose race is complicated (like my son, Dillon, whose mother is ethnically Chinese and I am white.)  

The reality is that those very bright, studious sons of ambitious and successful white parents, often themselves high achieving people with important jobs and enormous social status, want their sons to go to the most selective schools.  They are bound to be disappointed, what with the number of white male admits fell from 1,100 to about 440.   But America has changed.   There are more black kids, more Hispanic kids, and a great many Asian families who put enormous emphasis on education.  Black and Hispanic kids are admitted well below their absolute proportional numbers among the college age population.   Asian kids are admitted well below their merit-based numbers, as defined by standardized tests and other purported objective standards of merit.

And, of course, there is the admission of women.  Girls are Americans, too. They, too, now go to Harvard and all the other highly selective schools, and as a group they are more likely to show evidence of serious academic ability and purpose than do boys their age.  If pure, objective merit, defined by standardized tests and grades and academic ability were to be used as the only criterion, then boys receive affirmative action at the expense of girls, and Whites receive it at the expense of Asians.

The Trump administration has taken up affirmative action as a cause.  It will appeal to the Trump theme of white resentment over the supposed disadvantages endured by the hard working long suffering forgotten white American.  In fact, admission to selective colleges is done with attention to a class that represents America and the world, plus attention to the college's goal of having an orchestra, a football team, reporters for college newspaper, scholars, the children of legacy parents, and much more.  Still, the issue brings up merit, qualifications, and selections.

Every parent thinks their own kid is special.  It is natural to wonder if someone else got an unfair advantage, then to resent it.

A hard look at Harvard admissions--on the assumption that there is some absolute standard of merit--is more likely to show that white boys are the beneficiary, not the victim, of subjective factors.  Still, it may play out well as a talking point for Trump: him looking out for whites.  Trump may win simply by asking the question with a skeptical tone?  is that black or Hispanic student really, actually qualified?   He made the statement repeatedly about Obama, demanding to see his Occidental grades and questioning why he was president of the Harvard Law Review.  

There is political potential here.  The various sides will rise to the bait.  Blacks will bring up the legitimate question of past privilege and current funding of schools in their neighborhoods.  Asians can bring up the legitimate fact of their children facing soft quotas.  Whites can question whether less qualified Blacks and Hispanics got accepted in advance of them.   Racial talk helps Trump because he appeals to white racial anxiety. 

The country is changing out from under them.  As this blog wrote yesterday, it isn't a question of fair.  It is a question of who wins.   The fair share of slots at highly selective colleges is dropping for Whites, and that means a loss.   Trump wants to fight back and win.

Trump: It is ok to look out for number one.

Donald Trump de-legitimizes the media.  The crowd roars its approval.

The public doesn't like "presidential" as much as experts thought.  The public likes "authentic", warts and all.

Trump has revealed something that had been obscured amid politicians and the reference group of people who operate within or with the government.   There is a big divide between "the people" and that giant class of insiders that include the media, government officials, experts of all kinds, academics, lobbyists, non-profits, interest groups, business people, and other professionals who interacted closely with government.  

Theoretically the political class includes everyone--all citizens, taxpayers, and voters--but in reality the broad citizen class does not feel a part of that "political class."  Trump gave a name to to those politically active insiders of all persuasions:  The Swamp.   The public isn't in the swamp.  They don't like it. They fear it.  They resent its way of thinking and the way it speaks.

Prior to Trump there was a misunderstanding.  The political class thought people liked and respected the rules of political speech and constitutional checks and balances.   Trump showed that people might think they respect it, but in reality they prefer actually to watch something else.  Something authentic--even if that authentic person says things that cause them to cringe.

The old view: self control, careful lip service to the opposition, courtesy, and diplomacy were all appreciated and necessary.  To be "political" meant that one was careful not to burn bridges.  One pretended respect--sometimes ritualized excessive respect ("the esteemed gentleman from the great state of Oklahoma".)  That political courtesy imbedded the understanding that there were other points of view, held legitimately and fervently by others.  It understood that ones own position and interest existed within a context of other positions and interests.  That was true domestically and internationally.  

The Trump reveal:  the public likes authentic, blunt, interesting talk, with villains denounced and winners who celebrate.  They don't like that "sharing" stuff, that diplomatic talk, that notion that we are first, sure, but first among many.    Trump told them it was a way of thinking that let the rich get richer and the rest of the people get cheated.

That sounded about right.

The media is in the middle.  It mediates.  It is the visible translator between the world of public policy professionals--the Swamp-- and the broader world.  They aren't alone in translating.  Academics write books, policy professional join boards then resign from them, but day to day the face of the complex world of competing interests is the media.  But the media is on the front lines and their very world view is different.  They are global and constitutional and political and respectful of diversity and therefore their every sentence is "fake" because it has embedded in it that point of view.

Trump speaks from a different point of view, which makes the media (except Fox and Breitbart and his own tweets) fake.  Trump and the people in the Trump crowds see things from their point of view.  The point of view.  They embrace looking out for number one, period, not first of many.   Not "fair" to others.  No affirmative action, no groping for diversity, no looking out for the interests of foreigners or refugees or anyone but us.  Regular people.  People without color or ethnicity.  

Donald Trump exposed the huge disconnect between the two worlds.  

The disconnect is partially a matter of interest, of who benefits.   The bipartisan establishment failed to address well enough some of the public concerns over access to the middle class, over education and health care costs, over changes in American demography.   That created the impression that leaders of that class were ignoring their own people.

Trump's nationalism is a response to that.  

Trump also understood the media environment better than did the media.  He tweets.  He uses Facebook.  He speaks plainly and bluntly.  He is interesting, even when he is appalling.   The great body of citizens, of all political persuasions, find political speech boring. The ratings showed it.  They like genuine.  They want authentic.  The mis-cues and supposed gaffs--for saying what people actually privately think--made him interesting and a spokesman saying what a great many people believe.

Trump revealed there are two very different frames for honesty.  Trump says things that are obviously and objectively inaccurate, but he says them extemporaneously and vividly and without apparent filter.   That unfiltered directness makes it "honest and forthright."   This frames the divide.  This means that words spoken from a written speech, or words that place policy into the context of a complex world of competing interests (i.e NY Times, et al.), are "dishonest" per se.  Fake.  The media point of view denies the validity of first person self-interest.  

The media, the academics, the experts have the incapacity of being broad minded.  Trump showed that a great many people define broadmindedness with losing.  Trump validates having a point of view.  Win. 

Afghanistan and Vietnam

We are back to escalating in Afghanistan.

There are limits to what one can do with bombs and drone strikes.  They don't win friends.

The New York Times this morning has a news story on victory in Afghanistan.   It begins with the following story:

In the aftermath of 9-11 America treated the event at the opening strike in a worldwide war on terror.   There were policy choices available.  We could have treated it as an criminal conspiracy to do mass murder, and then sought out and arrested or killed the people involved in the conspiracy.  This would include telling the Afghan government that we were going to send people into Afghanistan to root them out so they should expect American troops.   It would have been an attack on the crime, not an attack on the government and people.

That is how we treated Timothy McVey and the Oklahoma City bombing--as a criminal act.

We have gone to war in far away places hoping to create, with weapons of war, a pro-American government, against the tide of the culture, politics, religion, and national history of a far-away, technologically less complex people.  We know how this can work out.   The Vietnam War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) displays the horrors of American bombing, the Agent Orange, the napalm.  They describe them as birth pains they endured in establishing their nation, a unified Vietnam.  American war efforts hardened their resolve at the time, and now are remembered as points of pride.  See the hits we could take.

Our efforts did not frighten them off.  It steeled their resolve.

The Bush-Obama policy was unpopular here in America because it was protracted and seemed to have little good effect.  We were not creating a viable pro-American government and population, and apparently still are not.   Trump successfully campaigned against this war, rather like the way that Obama eight years before won election by campaigning against "stupid wars."   Anti-war classmates from college told me in October, 2012, that they expected to vote for Trump--notwithstanding huge reservations otherwise--because they considered him the anti-war candidate.    Americans anti-war candidates if their talk can be described as peace with honor.   We want to be able to declare victory.

Lyndon Johnson was sucked into Vietnam.  Obama was stuck in place in Afghanistan.  Trump promised change, but the change is that he is being sucked in deeper again.  Surely more of what did not work will change the dynamic on the ground.

Heroin poppies are the financially viable crop grown by rural Afghanis.  We destroy the crop.  We have tools we are reluctant to use: people on the ground in harm's way.  America has tools of war we are willing to use: bombs, missiles, drones--so that is what we use.

For some reason, the war for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people is not working. 

Trump sells.

Trump sells with conviction.  He tells people what to think.  He is taking same-old, calling it "New and Improved!".   

He is better at this than Obama was.

In the past three minutes on Fox News I saw two examples of the Trump administration doing forcefully what a persuasive narrator does.  He is telling people what they are seeing, thus shaping what they think they see.   Believing is seeing.  

Afghanistan policy.

Trump:  Bush-Obama policy a failure.

Donald Trump just announced a continuation of our policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The policy has been one of the great failures of both George W. Bush and Barrack Obama.  All three presidents claim we are not "nation building" but are in fact attempting to shape a government in Afghanistan that will end the power of the Taliban and others to maintain a sanctuary for Islamic terror.   We are attempting to do it through proxies, with limited war, using drones on specific targeted people and groups.

For ten years authorities in Afghanistan have told us our policies and tactics create more damage than good.  It is a recruitment tool for our enemies.  Candidate Donald Trump described the situation vividly.  Get out of Afghanistan, he said.

Yesterday, he announced a major policy direction for Afghanistan and Pakistan--open ended continuation of the same policy.  He is presenting it as new, as sure to work, as an expression of American values and interests.

Fox is helping him sell the idea of "new."  The "Improved" element of the policy is that it will continue indefinitely.  Trump announced the policy in a speech read from a TelePrompTer without ad libs and asides.  It fit into the style of formal, serious addresses to the nation that presidents give at times of major policy changes.  From a policy point of view, it is more of the same, but it has huge political implications for Trump.  By announcing this as new, improved, Trump-made policy, forced on him by the demands of his office and the advice of his generals, he is now shouldering political responsibility for what happens next.

Afghanistan is now Trump's war, for better or worse.

Jobs and the Economy.

Michael Pence, in a Fox News interview this morning, summarized the extraordinary economic gains under Trump, one million new jobs created, he said, as contrasted with the "moribund economy" during the prior eight years.  And, in fact, there were some 1,074,000 new jobs in the economy over these past six months of the Trump presidency.  The country has come out of the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath of low asset values in stocks and housing, bank failures, foreclosures, and economic distress.

The economy is growing under Trump as the same pace it grew under Obama.  No change there.  But Trump is doing what Obama did not do.  Claim success.  

Not a turnaround.  A continuation of job growth under Obama.

Had Obama sounded upbeat it may have been interpreted as self-satisfied.  The economy was improving but it was not yet strong. For whatever reason, Obama did not counter the unified description as weak by GOP candidates for president.  Trump's inauguration in January started a new era, and Trump is defining it sharply as an new period of tremendous growth in jobs and the economy.  Things were terrible before, no job growth, and things are great now.  It all changed when he was elected.

A more accurate description is that Trump is now continuing the Obama rebound from the financial crisis.  Trump is taking charge of the message.  What you are seeing is a gigantic turnaround! What you are seeing is new and improved!

Again, for better or worse, this is Trump's opportunity and Trump's risk.  Trump has momentum on his side (unlike in Afghanistan) but by claiming the victory Trump is now shouldering the responsibility.  It is Trump's economy.

Trump is bolder than Obama and far more effective at shaping the narrative than was Obama.  Trump is telling us what we are seeing.  It is all great. 

This has bought Trump time.  But now the policies are his.

Life Re-enacts High School

Some people think we never really get over high school.

High school give us some insight into what people like about Trump and why they are sticking with him.

By high school we have settled into certain roles.  The popular jocks.  The preppies.  The smart kids.  The pretty girl cheerleaders.  The wallflowers.  The orchestra crowd.  The poor kids. The gang kids.  The cigarette smokers.  The pot smokers.  

Archetype: Valedictorian

Every reader who has graduated from high school has a sense of this and a sense of where he or she belonged in that tribal setting.   High school cliques create archetypes.  Hillary was a high school archetype and so was Trump.

This blog has likened the Republican primary election to Junior High School boys struggling in a pushing match.  Trump, Rubio, and Cruz were rivals over top-dog status.  Who could be the toughest?  Who was most like Putin.  This blog called it the Putin Primary.  Poor Jeb Bush had already been dispatched, Carly Fiorina was disqualified for having estrogen, Ben Carson was sleepy.  It was a testosterone show off battle.   Rubio threatening a war of civilizations, Cruz saying the sand would glow, Trump wanting to "bomb them to shit."

Archetype:  Confident Boy

Then the election settled into a high school drama.  This blog likened Hillary Clinton to the school good girl valedictorian.  The problem is that she checked off all the boxes with the teachers, got straight A'a, and in a run for Student Body President she had the great disadvantage of not being all that relatable.  Competent, yes.  Likable, not so much.   Donald Trump was the tall, rich, fearless guy people looked up to.  The guy with a great car.  The guy who dated the very prettiest girls, then dropped them for other, younger, prettiest girls.  He had a swagger.  He didn't genuflect to the teachers and the principle.   

The Valedictorian often loses the election to the Confident boy.   

The Valedictorian is too goody-goody--to close to the authorized power people--to be popular.  The Confident boy gets status from dating the pretty cheerleaders, then moving on to other ones.  He seems cooler.  He is more in line with the students than with the teachers.   The Valedictorian represents the elites and status quo; the Confident boy represents the students.   Hillary loses to Trump.

Now that Trump is Student Body President, why do people like him and stay loyal to him even as he does surprising, transgressive things.   The New York Times this morning quoted a retired man, a Trump supporter,  who likened Trump to a high school student.

"Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from a Minneapolis suburb, compares Mr. Trump to a high school senior who could “walk up to the table with the jocks and the cheerleaders and put them in their place.” That is something that the “nerds and the losers, whose dads are unemployed and moms are working in the cafeteria,” could never do. Mr. Trump may be rich, he said, but actually belonged at the nerd table."

Laughlin sees Trump as being loyal to the "forgotten" people in high school.   The ones who were not rich, not particularly outstanding, not particularly popular.  He could have been a member of the rich-boy-snotty elite club, so he has the status to reject them without it looking like sour grapes.  Trump is loyal to them.

Democrats and other people who cannot bear Trump need to understand and integrate this point:   Yes, Trump is a bully. Yes, he offends some powerful people.  It's OK, because Trump is a good bully, a bully for our side.  Not diplomatic, not careful and respectful, but courageous.

Here are the implications which Trump opponents need to understand and integrate.  Trump being disruptive to the sensible "adults in the room" does not hurt him with those people who wanted a champion.  They expected him to be disruptive.  Trump being rich and getting emoluments and deals from office don't hurt him either.  This behavior does not signal disloyalty to the tribe of the non-cool kids.   The personal stuff with "pussy grab" and three wives don't hurt him.  His ability to get then discard women are signs of his coolness and status, making his loyalty to the forgotten classmates all that more valued.  The fact that he is criticized by presumed authority figures does not hurt him.  The fact that he is embattled and yet he puts those "jocks and cheerleaders" in their place in favor of the forgotten classmates only makes him the more valued.

Trump is showing something more important than good sense, maturity, and reliability.   He is showing loyalty to the cultural values of the un-cool "nerds and losers."   The more he is criticized for it, the more remarkable and valued is that loyalty.

Trump doesn't need to be good to stay powerful.  He needs to be loyal to his tribe.

Lumpers and splitters

Some people see similarities and unities.  Other people see distinctions.   Lumpers and splitters. Democrats need to be lumpers again.

We encounter lumpers and splitters in academic life.   

Lumpers see large unifying themes and splitters see particulars.  In American history a lumper might see the New Deal era as starting in 1933 and continuing into the Truman presidency, perceiving him as a continuation of FDR's policies.  A splitter would see the New Deal in multiple phases and decisively ending with the beginning of World War Two in midterm FDR, and seeing little similarity between Truman and FDR.

2004:  Unifier

Democrats have become splitters on issues of identity and grievance.  They need to become lumpers again. 

Barrack Obama voiced it oratorically with his breakout speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states--red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats.  But I've got news for them, too.  We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red sates.  We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states."    

It was actually in a later speech that he refined the idea and used that uplifting phrase we we remember as the high point of his talk: "Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.  We are, and always will be, the United States of America."

Note that Obama addressed directly markers of the culture war, not political differences: Democrats worship God, Republicans want free speech, Democrats do family activities like Little League, Republicans know gays.   He was observing similarity despite supposed typecasting.

Obama was lumping, not dividing.

This blog got vigorous negative feedback via Facebook when it advised Democrats to refocus on the unifying message of economic justice and access to the middle class and to turn away from identity politics.   Steve Bannon was chortling that Democrats could easily be goaded into keeping the race issue front and center, and that it was a big loser for Democrats.

I agree that it is a loser for Democrats. It backfires.  It doesn't please the beneficiaries and it actively displeases those accused of privilege and prejudice.  

And yet, simultaneously, racial injustice and discrimination are real and pervasive and Democrats have an obligation to address it.  What to do?  

Democrats need to accept that the only politically viable path toward the goal of equal justice is through relentless lumping, not particularizing grievances.  It is not to deny particular grievances, but it is to recognize that a political focus on grievance creates enemies and does more damage and gain.   It is not complicated: people do not like being accused of being deplorable racists.  Whether there is any truth in the accusation is irrelevant.  Minds of the accused are hardened.

Daniel Sage

Democrats can learn, if they allow themselves.  

I cite a lesson from my uncle, the late Daniel Sage.  He had a long distinguished career as an educator of children with special needs, both in the trenches of direct service early in his career, and then for decades as a university professor of education, specializing on special education.  He said that the first half of his career was spent attempting to diagnose, describe, isolate, and treat the various forms of disability that required special education.  Then, he said, he spent the second half of his career trying to undo the damage he and others like him caused by focusing on diagnosis, description and particularizing of disability.  Instead, mainstream kids he said.  Treat them as much as possible like everyone else. Don't look at what makes them different; just focus on what makes them the same. The best strategy in an imperfect world is to lump them in with everyone else in the same classroom.

This is--or should be--a period of reflection for Democrats.  Republicans control the government because they won elections.   It is OK for Democrats to decide some of their policies were wrong.  There is no shame in changing.  

Democrats, particularly in the 2016 campaign under Hillary, particularized racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual orientation grievance.  Democrats can accept that the grievance is real--acknowledge and affirm it-- and then assert a new way to mitigate and end it, by refocusing not on the grievance but on the unity of both the offended and offender.  The offenders aren't deplorable.  They are fellow Americans.  

People resist being scolded but the culture can change via unifying institutions and reminders of shared interests and values.  Cultural change will be slow, but will go faster under calls to unity, Democrats coaching Little League, Republicans with gay friends.

Equality is a national value, celebrated sometimes more than observed, but still a value memorized by schoolchildren.  The Democratic goal has the weight of law and tradition, and Lincoln's addition of equality as a central, unifying principle, that we are a people dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

Lincoln did not particularize the grievance or assert that only one side was right.  He called for a shared and unifying goal.  Democrats today need to do the same.  Lump.  

Tina Fey is Right.

Democrats should be the modern version of "Clean for Gene"

Clean-for-Gene, I will inform younger readers, is the phrase meaning that young volunteers cut their hair before traveling to New Hampshire to help Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential campaign, where he contested incumbent president Lyndon Johnson.    The haircut was a recognition that long haired hippy-student style grooming turned off adult voters.   If young people wanted to be effective we had to make sure our personal style didn't estrange people we were trying to motivate.  

People cared enough to cut their hair.  We wanted to persuade, not estrange.

Food therapy is better than being counter productive

Throughout college I had short hair and a clean shaven face.   I also displayed an American flag.  There weren't many persuadable voters who came by my dorm room but still I was trying to make a statement: anti-war people like me were perfectly respectable people and we were proud patriots, too.  It was patriotic to protest the War in Vietnam.

Tina Fey just got some criticism.  On Saturday Night Live she said that when viewers witnessed outrageous things like white frat boys in polo shirts shouting about taking their country back, that instead of shrieking at them the person should eat cake, the tried and true therapy of calorie loaded food.    

She went on to say, "I really want to encourage all good, sane Americans to treat these rallies this weekend like the opening of a thoughtful movies with two female leads:  Don't show up.   Let these morons scream into the empty air."

It is an hilarious sketch. Click Here. Six minutes. Lots of laughs.       

It is also great political messaging advice.  A great many Democrats want to do something, something to resist Trump's agenda, something to make the statement that they find Trump vulgar and dangerous, something to make a show of force against racism.

Most of what they want to do will backfire.

The least effective thing a Democrat can do is show up at a rally of neo-Nazis, prepared to counter-protest and shout them down.  The optics are terrible.  The second worst thing a Democrat can do is march in some rally and disrupt traffic while doing so.  People don't want to be inconvenienced on behalf of someone else's politics.   The third worst thing a Democrat can do is show up at some public meeting and think that being unruly and disruptive (as contrasted with angry but polite) because the big message that is projected is that the protesters are disruptive, not that they are correct.

Violence and disorder are good for Trump.   Trump got elected in part by offering people safety from the fear over crime by immigrants and terror by Muslims.  He was the law and order candidate.   

Trump, Fox News, and a great many Americans of both parties look at a shouting or shoving confrontation during an event organized by white supremacists, and they consider both sides to be essentially equal in fault.   It does not work  for Democrats to say that "they started it!", with they meaning neo-Nazis.   On TV everyone looks the same.  Everyone was itching for a fight.  

This is how Trump describes counter protesters.

Donald Trump called it that way--violence on all sides. Donald Trump knows how to de-legitimize.  He ascribed a motive to the counter protesters.  It wasn't justice.  It wasn't that they were the good-guy anti-Nazis.   Donald Trump characterized counter protesters as "anti-police agitators."

Who would believe that characterization?  Lots of people, especially if they see on TV police interacting with protesters.

This is how the conservative media covers counter protests.  

Democrats need to understand that the political theater of resistance to Trump is counter-productive when resistance creates civil disruption.  Trump wants Democrats to rise to the bait.  If there is disorder in the streets then Trump gets legitimacy when he takes strong executive action.  It validates the image he sold the public: the strong leader who will keep us safe.

How to be "Clean for Gene"--i.e. smart--as a modern-day manner of resisting Trump?  

Be politically active with phone calls, petitions, involvement in public events, and most important, avoid falling into the trap of making persuadable voters think you are actually more dangerous than Trump.  Don't dispirit political allies by demanding all-or-nothing agreement with candidates. Most important, actually vote,  Democrats lose elections because politically active ones do not vote as a matter of principle, staying home or going third party, while politically inactive Democrats don't don't bother voting.   Democrats are not defeated by Republicans.  They are defeated by bad turnout.

Tina Fey's advice is sound   Deal with outrage by eating sooting cake.  Then don't show up at their events.  It makes them look pathetic, a strong message to send.