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The Supreme Court just turned us all into vigilantes

John Stoehr

March 07, 2024

The conventional wisdom appears to be the US Supreme Court was right in ruling that neither Colorado nor any other state can remove Donald Trump from the ballot on 14th Amendment grounds. There appears to be a consensus of elite opinion in “letting voters decide.”

As worthies such as Madiba Dennie and Thomas Zimmer have said, however, voters did decide. In 2020, they voted Trump out. He didn’t like that, so he organized an attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government in order to overthrow the democratic will of the American people. The Colorado Supreme Court decision to disqualify him as an insurrectionist was a lonely attempt to hold him legally accountable.

Colorado’s high court was doing what’s expected by a democratic system founded on the principle of checks and balances. When the system’s integrity is under threat, as it was on January, 6, 2021, the rule of law demands democratic institutions administer commensurate justice. The Colorado Supreme Court tried that, as did elected officials in Maine and Illinois, but the US Supreme Court said no. Worse, elite opinion appears to believe that accountability is better left to voters.

I get it. It’s probably not a good idea to allow states to kick presidential candidates off their ballots, whether for good reasons, as was the case in Colorado, or for phony reasons, as would be the case in virtually any state controlled by the Republicans. But that’s not my point here.

My point is about this apparent conventional wisdom. We have not thought through the literal danger of “letting voters decide,” because we haven’t fully reckoned with the reason we’re talking about it, which is the failure of democratic institutions, like courts of law, to hold powerful elites accountable and protect democracy. They can’t or they won’t. So those who are saying voters should decide Trump’s fate are really conceding that democratic institutions have become so corrupt, and accountability has become so impossible, that there’s only one thing to do. Take justice into our own hands. Become vigilantes.

I don’t know about you, but that seems bad. As Australia’s former Prime Minister Malcolm Trumbull reminded us recently, democracy and the rule of law are supposed to work (ideally) in concert so that a majority is empowered but also constrained from acting on its worst impulses against a minority. “Vigilante voting” not only hints at upending those checks and balances. It puts democracy in direct conflict with the rule of law, so it might have very little meaning if Donald Trump wins.

If we’re going to say voters should decide Trump’s fate, we must also say the election’s outcome will be his verdict. If he loses, he’s guilty of all crimes committed against democracy. (Perhaps the justice system would then proceed.) But if he wins, he’s innocent. He will have been granted absolution for everything he’s ever done. Everything. There might never again be such a thing as a crime if the president does it. He could have his opponents murdered, safe in the knowledge that a majority approves. Democracy will have obliterated the rule of law.

“Imagine that Trump is president again and instructs the Justice Department to bring treason charges against Jack Smith,” wroteThe Bulwark’s Mona Charen. “Who will stop him? The carefully vetted MAGA lawyers he has hired precisely for their loyalty?” She went on:

Suppose he orders the Department of Homeland Security to round up and deport 11 million immigrants without due care to ensure that American citizens aren’t swept up? What will Congress do? Impeach him?

What if he instructs the IRS to audit and fine Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, George Conway, and hundreds of other prominent critics? This violates IRS rules. But will IRS employees, again hired for loyalty to Trump, demur? After all, he did run on the promise, 'I am your retribution,' and his voters agreed.

What if he directs the SEC to investigate banks that refuse to loan the Trump Organization money? Would any whistleblower risk his job or worse?

What if, in response to street demonstrations, Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and federalizes the national guard, allowing the military to shut down protests and arrest (or worse) demonstrators without cause?

I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t be in this mess or that America deserves better. (I’m not sure it does.) I do mean to suggest, however, that the conventional wisdom is more problematic than it seems. It attempts to normalize, even minimize, the danger we face by suggesting that everything will be fine as long as voters get to decide.

Don’t bet on it.

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Tucker Carlson’s 'homoerotic' ‘The End of Men’ is no laughing matter

John Stoehr

April 18, 2022

I did not, and I hope you did not, watch Tucker Carlson’s infomercial on Fox called “The End of Men.” We don’t need to see it to know it.

Social media was ablaze last night after a “fitness professional” told the TV show host that when applied to a man’s netherlands, “red light therapy” can boost his levels of testosterone. As of this writing, “testicle tanning” is trending on Twitter. Welcome to Monday.

Another point of focus was the video introduction of the TV special. In it, young, muscular and naked-to-the-waist white men, in this order:

do push-ups,

shoot a semi-automatic rifle,

milk a cow,

grill some meat and

wrestle.

Then comes a panoramic shot of a white man, fully naked, standing in front of what looks to be a bike-share dock. A red light illuminates his groin so brightly it’s like his parts are missing. His arms are reverently outstretched. The scene is set to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.

That’s followed by more unshirted white man lifting a tractor tire (?), chopping a tree (I think) with a double-headed ax (??), bathing (???) and drinking a globulous liquid (let’s hope to God it’s raw eggs). It all ends with a naked white guy standing before a rectangle of red lights.

In conclusion, a male voiceover, slightly British-sounding, says: “Once a society collapses, then you’re in hard times. Well, ‘hard iron sharpens iron,’ as they say. And those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, who are resourceful, who are strong enough to survive. Then they go on to re-establish order, and so the cycle begins again.”

Reactions from the liberal quarters of social media have been mixed. Some call it grift, which seems true. For God’s sake, listen to the guy:

It’s testicle tanning, but it's also full body. Red light therapy has massive amounts of benefits and there's so much data out there that isn't being picked up on or covered. … I was recently exposed to a term called 'bromeopathy' and I think there's a lot of people out there right now that are don't trust the mainstream information.

Others call it homoerotic. I presume some truth in that. But it can be hard to tell where homoerotism ends and where familiar ordinary narcissism begins. I’m partial to the latter explanation. Making a fetish of men’s bodies isn’t necessarily about sex or sexual identity.

(Saying as much is cruelty in disguise. If real men are really closeted gays, then closeted gays can’t really be real men? Let’s avoid that.)

The Nazis made a fetish of men’s bodies. Some were closeted, but all? As Annika Brockschmidt, author of America's Holy Warriors, said:

Fascist aesthetic is highly militarized, focusing on sculpted male bodies that represent the strength of the volk.

This form of hyper-militant masculinity can carry homoerotic implications. This is very on brand, not off brand for fascism.}:

Other aspects are ruralism, anti-urbanism, idealised version of hyper-virility, anti-feminism, pro-natalism.}:

This is a case study in modern American fascist aesthetics, anti-modernist, inspired by idealized ‘Roman’ bodies.}:

Others still called it ridiculous.

After all, “red light therapy” (not UV light) is more fiction than medicine. It won’t boost levels of testosterone any more than herbal cures will. (If you want more testosterone, it’s better to exercise).

In any case, how are young, muscular and bare-chested white men supposed to restore order by consuming products manufactured in a society that’s ordered enough to manufacture products with which young, muscular and bare-chested white men re-establish order?

Sure, ridiculous, but over top that is evil.

The first tell, above all the above, is that a highly profitable cable news network took it seriously enough to broadcast it. Fox knows that much of its viewership fear “testosterone levels have crashed and nobody says anything about it,” as Carlson told his “fitness professional” guest.

“That's crazy,” Carlson said. “So why is it crazy to seek solutions?”

Those solutions might include “testicle tanning” but that’s a stand-in for something else – the subliminal fear that white men are becoming less manly, more womanly, and the result, as the voiceover guy said, is that “society collapses.” It will take restoring white male strength, which is code for their rightful place in society, to “reestablish order.”

That doesn’t involve genitals, though.

It involves pushing women, racial minorities and sexual minorities (perhaps religious minorities) back to where they are “supposed to be,” where they are removed from the machinery of democratic power as well the rights and privileges white men have historically enjoyed.

Carlson’s “The End of Men” is worthy of ridicule.

But let’s remember it’s a reflection of a larger social paranoia about a form of government, democracy, and a set of values, liberalism, that have challenged, though not beaten, an ordinary familiar narcissism that’s now hoping to “restore” white men to the center of everything.

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The Jacksonville shooter was one of 'the chosen people'

Jacksonville gunman who killed 3 Black people is identified: report

John Stoehr

August 30, 2023

Sarah Palin got a lot of attention after Donald Trump’s fourth indictment and arrest. On Newsmax, the former governor of Alaska asked: “Do you want us to be in a civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen. We’re not going to keep putting up with this. I like that you suggested that we need to get angry. We do need to rise up and take our country back.”

Palin is a has-been, but her remarks indicate that “many, many, many attention-starved MAGA straphangers, in or at the periphery of national politics, are going to have a new mantra,” Ed Kilgore wrote recently. “Having burned through more conventional measures to ‘take our country back’ via normal electoral or legislative activity, Trump’s surrogates are embracing their leader’s increasingly incendiary talk about past, present, and future setbacks that must be avenged or prevented by any means.”

All this talk about civil war has many, many, many people worried, and justifiably so. But I think we should consider the fuller context, to wit: we are already in a sort of civil war. It’s slow-motion, one-sided and covert, to be sure, but it’s plainly visible if you’re willing to see it. Before we fear a civil war in the future, let’s properly assess and appreciate the one in the present. Then, perhaps, we can prevent matters from getting truly worse.

Since the beginning of the year, there have been more than 475 shooting massacres in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit tracking group. In most instances, 10 people or fewer died. By July, according to CNN, the US had “eclipsed the number of mass shootings recorded each year from 2013 through 2018. Should the current pace continue, 2023 will see more mass shootings than in 2019 through 2022.”

I don’t see anyone using adequate words to describe death on this scale. Either it’s “the price that we pay for our freedoms” (often the Republican view) or it’s “senseless” or “crazy” (often the Democratic view). But in any other time and place, in any other part of the world, we’d call this out for what it is: intentional, political, seditious, treasonous. It’s guerilla warfare.

Last weekend’s massacre in Jacksonville, Florida, is a case in point. A 21-year-old white supremacist entered a Dollar Store, armed with a semiautomatic rifle (AR-15) and a semiautomatic pistol (Glock), and shot to pieces three Black people before shooting himself to death. He left behind copious writings explaining why political murder was a legitimate recourse against enemies bent on taking away the “natural birthright” of “his people.”

The shooter, whose name I won’t use, was one of “the chosen.” That’s Thomas Jefferson’s phrase. These are people who are historically considered to be the realestof Americans. According to Jason Opal, parties and presidents have since the founding “flattered and favored the [old] rural majorities. American culture identified farm folk and small towns as the most authentic and virtuous parts of the nation — or, as President Andrew Jackson put it in 1837, ‘the bone and sinew of the country.’”

Everything was going fine for The Chosen. They controlled the country – until the revolutions of the 1960s. Specifically, until the federal government stopped balancing the country, by law, on the backs of Black people. That’s when “the heirs of Jefferson’s ‘chosen people’ lost their status as the most American of Americans,” Opal wrote. Since then, “the new, diverse America enrages tens of millions of people who predominantly live in small towns and in the South and mostly identify as white, straight and Christian.”

Another way of understanding The Chosen is by calling them what they call themselves – “Realamericans.” As I wrote in March: “Realamerica is not the real America. Realamerica, according to its adherents, is a ‘nation’ inside the real nation. It is a confederacy of the mind and spirit, made of pure makebelieve. Realamericans live according to God’s law. They share the goal of ruling, in God’s name, the real America. If Realamericans can’t dominate real Americans lawfully, they must take ‘the law’ into their own hands. With the proliferation over two decades of semiautomatic rifles, they have.”

With these weapons of war, white-power guerillas have prosecuted their insurgency. They “hit soft targets – schools, churches, nightclubs, Walmarts – anything that can’t fight back,” I wrote last year. “They foment anarchy. Spread chaos. Create an air of insanity. Voilà! The status quo is upheld by establishing an atmosphere of dread and fear that’s designed to prevent reformers from using democratic politics to reform the existing order.”

I don’t mean to suggest that all of the more than 475 shooting massacres that the country has seen since the beginning of the year have been committed by white supremacists who identify themselves as Realamericans who are fighting to protect the orders of white power against liberal values and democratic politics. That’s clearly not the case.

However, these Realamericans – and the Republicans who serve them — set the tone for everyone else. Since 2013, after the country produced for a second term for its first Black president, they have deregulated firearms at a breathtaking pace, enabling any man of any color to “solve” his problems with a gun. Moreover, that some shooters are nonwhite in effect hides the fact that more than 475 shooting massacres in under a year, more than the total of the previous four years combined, constitute guerilla warfare.

For which, Republicans like Sarah Palin should be grateful.

However much she and other “attention-starved MAGA straphangers” might pine for actual civil war, that’s not what her party wants. That would mean coming out of the shadows to take on the United States government fully and openly. There’s no chance of winning that fight. It’s better to remain hidden beneath the veil of plausible deniability. As long as the civil war is slow-motioned, one-sided and covert, the Republicans are winning.

Which is why we must see what’s really going on. This isn’t only about “the ideology of hate” coming to the surface to kill people, though it’s obviously about that, too. This is about one faction of the country going to war, literally war, with another faction. It’s a civil war, of sorts. We should say so.

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giving makebelieve the force of law is what SCOTUS does best

This is what corruption looks like.

In a case decided late last month, the rightwing supermajority of the United States Supreme Court sided with a Christian web designer, who said that her right to free speech permitted her to deny services to same-sex couples. Turns out it was another case in history of cases in which the court gave the force of law to makebelieve. And when I say “makebelieve,” I mean literally made up.

The New Republic broke the news.

The magazine found that the person who had allegedly requested services from the Christian web designer had never made such request. He didn’t need her services either. He’s a web designer himself. He’s also not gay. He’s been married to the same woman for 15 years.

The Christian web developer, Lorie Smith, wanted to put a notice on her company’s website, saying that it would not create wedding websites for same-sex couples. In a "pre-enforcement challenge," she argued that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law would have infringed on her free speech rights. The Supreme Court didn’t require her to have received “a real request,” according to Post reporter Robert Barnes.

In the case of the Christian web designer, the court’s corruption is more visible than at any time in my lifetime. The man whom Lorie Smith cited in her case didn’t know he was involved, didn’t request her services, didn’t need her services, isn’t gay — but so what?

Citing “Stewart,” who did not want his full name used, Barnes wrote that “the court filing in Stewart’s name has left many baffled, including Stewart himself, who said he was concerned that the case had proceeded without anyone verifying if the request was authentic.”

We should all be concerned, but let’s be honest with ourselves. This is what the court’s majority has been doing for years. This case was only the most recent case of turning makebelieve into law -- of turning rightwing fantasies into hard legal realities that we all must live with.

To be sure, as Harry Litman said, this is a “bonafide scandal.”

“On the legal level,” wrote the Los Angeles Times columnist, “it means the court decided a case that wasn't a real case … On the political level, it means that conservative forces in the country have effected a huge change in the law, an inroad on long-established anti-discrimination principles, based on a contrived story that exploited the judicial system and simply did an end-around the requirement of actual facts.”

Yayup. That’s what the court's majority does. “Conservative forces” in these United States are always, to some degree, working toward undoing major liberal advancements, and whenever they succeed, it’s often due to a “contrived story that exploited the judicial system and simply did an end-around the requirement of actual facts.”

There are, of course, differences between this case and past cases. They are a matter of degree, though, not kind. The court regularly makes law out of thin air. Usually, though, it isn’t obvious about it.

for instance, the court decided recently to overrule the president’s program for student debt-relief. It ruled based in part on something called the “major questions” doctrine.You can read more about it here, but trust me, the “doctrine” is makebelieve. (It’s a condition simply made up by the court over time.) It’s so swaddled in the verbiage of lawyers and courts, however, that it doesn’t look that way.

The court’s supermajority also recently undid affirmative action,ruling that the consideration of race in college admissions is discriminatory. It ruled based in part on the doctrine of colorblindness. It’s a madeup doctrine. Americans have never been colorblind. But Americans want to believe in it so much that the court’s makebelieve doesn’t look madeup.

However, in the case of the Christian web designer, the court’s corruption is more visible than at any time in my lifetime. The man whom Lorie Smith cited in her case didn’t know he was involved, didn’t request her services, didn’t need her services, isn’t gay -- but so what? She wasn't required to have received “a real request" from a gay couple. She apparently made the whole thing up, and the court said that's fine.

You don’t need to be a columnist for the LA Times to see the truth of it – that giving makebelieve the force of law is what this court does best. Any normal person can see that this is what corruption looks like.

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Tyre Nichols getting beaten to death has sparked another round of debate over American policing. Let’s cut to the chase. First, very little will change as long as policing is determined by state laws and local authorities who are exquisitely attuned to the needs and desires of the white-power status quo.

Probably the best we can do is devise some sort of national system in which officers are recruited from around the country to create a body of police as diverse as the body of the republic. It should be thoroughly trained according to universally accepted law enforcement standards and socialized to accept and advance the immense honor of wearing a badge.

As it is, members of the US military show more grace, nobility and restraint than cops do. Army soldiers are trained to kill, but they are also trained to be responsible. Even lying is subject to military justice. Police officers, on the other hand, are under no such constraints, especially if they are white.

READ MORE: 'Performative disgrace': Marjorie Taylor Greene ridiculed for defending Ashli Babbitt while misspelling her name

The police are not an army.

But they act like it.

The petty aristocracy

The hardest truth is about public perception. Cops are the good guys to most people. At best, they are virtuous warriors against evil-doers. At worst, they are a “thin blue line” between civilization and barbarism.

READ MORE: Two layers of context needed to understand Tyre Nichols' murder

Police could devolve into occupying armies that, while operating above the law in the service of local elites, extract tribute from the local population as well as occasionally execute citizens without due process – don’t be naive. Eventhat wouldn’t stop Hollywood from portraying cops as The Good Guys

Despite the ubiquity of smartphones, and despite the ubiquity of smartphone video showing cops tasing, shooting and otherwise brutalizing people for meaningless infractions, white people, especially respectable white people, have continued convincing themselves the culture of cop shops always bends toward equal justice. They cannot, and probably will never, accept that police are agents of the state of political violence – violence made legitimate by the political will of respectable white people.

Respectable white people are the petty aristocrats of US localities. They are the business leaders, property owners, decisionmakers, public figures, political actors and so on. How they see police is linked to how they see themselves, and vice versa. If we get respectable white people to see authoritarian policing jeopardizes their respectability among other white people, we might see some reform. Remaining aristocratic depends on appearing democratic. Change their outward view, change the police.

Maybe.

The institution of the status quo

Fortunately, half the work is done. Petty aristocrats have already conceded that the white-power status quo that makes it possible for them to be petty aristocrats depends on police department maintaining the very same white-power status quo. They just haven’t admitted to having conceded it.

To illustrate, consider a particular moment in Bristol, Connecticut. In October, two city police officers were ambushed and killed by a deranged man. Their murders shocked Bristol, a white working class town whose majority usually endorses Republicans. It shocked much of the state, too.

At first, communities erupted in grief and gratitude. Businesses displayed banners thanking the slain cops for their sacrifice. Neighborhoods put out blue porch lights in honor of their memories. Then things took a turn.

Support for the families of the dead cops morphed into support for the Bristol Police Department. Blue lights blazed in solidarity. Banners exalted the “Brothers in Blue.” The celebration of the memory of the two police officers gave way to the celebration of the institution of the status quo.

With that turn, Bristol’s respectable white people conceded something – that their fates are tied to the fates of the Bristol Police Department. If you’re going to change policing, you have to make respectable white people understand their respectability is at risk. Then (maybe) we’ll see change.

Spectacular displays of violence

Which is why, in the beginning of this piece, I characterized police departments as occupying armies that extract tribute from the local population in the service of local elites, and that periodically hold public executions to force locals into accepting their dominance over them.

That is not what respectable white people say the police do.

But that is what they do.

Occupying armies – in order to keep the peace, uphold the law and preserve the order – periodically send a message to the local population that disorder will not be tolerated. To that end, they will seek out and destroy someone, usually the weak, with a spectacular display of violence.

That’s what happened last week in Huntington, California. The city’s occupying army made an example of a Black man with no legs. (They said was armed with a knife.) They shot to death Anthony Lowe, Jr., as he ran from them in terror on his stumps. Who’s in charge? The occupying army.

(Maybe) we’ll see change

America’s petty aristocrats (respectable white people) are linked directly to America’s occupying armies because occupying armies maintain the white-power status quo from which has arisen a petty aristocracy.

Direct links to an occupying army, however, endanger the respectable image of respectable white people among other respectable white people. This is America, after all. You can’t have armies occupying communities and murdering people at random. Theappearanceof democracy still matters.

Raise awareness of what police departments do in order to pressure respectable white people, whose political will legitimates the occupying army’s spectacular displays of violence. Make respectable white people see no one can be respectable when tied to an occupying army that randomly executes a community’s most helpless. Then (maybe) we’ll see change.

READ MORE: 'Depraved indifference to human life': Legal experts shocked by Tyre Nichols video

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The Iowa Republican party is proposingdraconian new restrictions on what food can be purchased with the state’s food stamps, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

This attack on the poor at the state level is coming at the same time as the national GOP has successfullyblocked the continuation of the Child Tax Credit, a program which substantially, demonstrably reduced child poverty.

The GOP’s priorities are clear. They don’t want to reduce poverty. They want to police, control and torment the poor. The party that constantly touts liberty doesn’t want liberty for all. They want liberty for the powerful to impose their will on the most vulnerable.

READ MORE: 'Everyone in the territory is disenfranchised': Washington DC should replace Iowa as first presidential nominating contest

Republican ire

SNAP is a crucial safety net and the country’s most effective anti-hunger program. In 2021, itensured that 41 million Americans — 12 percent of the population — could afford an adequate diet every month.

SNAP also provides valuable emergency economic stability. SNAP enrollment increases in downturns, putting money into the economy to combat recession and boost recovery.

Despite its importance, or because of it, SNAP has long been a target of Republican ire.

READ MORE: Mike Pence teases a presidential run in Iowa stump speech for Republican midterm candidates

Matthew Gritter’s 2017 monographUndeserving: SNAP Reform and Conceptions of the Deserving Poor chronicles how politicians have moved to regulate food stamps in recent decades. They’ve tried to put limits on what foods could be purchased and to prevent people without disabilities or dependents from getting aid.

They’ve also pushed drug testing — an ideaintroduced by former KKK leader and Louisiana Senator David Duke, and instituted in states like Florida and Utah.

Gritter concludes in an earlier paper that the goal of these interventions appears to be to replace “a safety net of last resort” with “a costly method to impose punitive measures on the poor.”

“Evidence suggests that reforms will reduce enrollment without changing the circumstances that led people to seek assistance,” he says.

Iowa is the latest attempt to target SNAP.

Canned tuna and salmon

The new bill,House File 3, would putharsh limits on what low-income families could purchase in Iowa when receiving federal SNAP food stamp funds for healthy food options.

It wouldrestrict purchases to those covered by the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, which uses federal funds for food assistance to pregnant people and new parents.

According to theIowa Hunger Coalition, “this bill would restrict SNAP participants’ ability to make their own food choices, take food away from Iowans, and increase hunger and food insecurity in our state.”

Families under House File 3 could no longer buy white bread, American cheese, coffee, snack foods, canned fruit and vegetables, bottled water, crackers and more.

They also couldn’t buy any meat except canned tuna and salmon. This despite the fact that meat, poultry and seafood is thetop expenditure category for SNAP recipients, accounting for 19 percent of money spent on food.

The Iowa GOP also wants a limit of $2,750 on household assets for receiving SNAP benefits; the cap is raised to $4,250 in assets if one family member is over 59 or is disabled. Houses and one vehicle would be excluded. Children’s savings accounts would not.

These low caps mean that people could not save for emergencies, because doing so would mean they would lose SNAP benefits. Nor could they own a second vehicle — a necessity for getting to work in many rural areas.

Historic low

The assault on SNAP is ugly because we have just conducted a sweeping experiment demonstrating that no-strings assistance to the poor is wildly successful at lifting children out of poverty with virtually no downsides.

The expanded Child Tax Creditinstituted in 2021 provided monthly cash payments to low-income families with children. It closed a loophole that prevented the poorest families from receiving assistance, and increased payments for everyone.

The result? Child poverty dropped to a historic low of 5.2 percent.

Lawmakers allowed the expanded CTC to expire.

Inevitably, child poverty rateswent back up.

Lawmakers refused to renew the expanded CTC in part because, mirroring attitudes towards SNAP, they believed that the people receiving the money were not deserving.

West Virginia’s conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin saidhe was worried parents would use benefits to buy drugs. He also wanted to institute work requirements for recipients.

But increasing restrictions prevents the neediest people from receiving benefits. It also mayprevent people from working.

A study of those in line to receive CTC funds found that recipientsbelieved the additional money would allow them to pay for childcare and increase their work hours.

Sure enough, in studies of the program conducted after it expired, there wasno evidence that CTC payments reduced workforce participation.

Undeserving

We know that SNAP is effective at reducing hunger. We know that simply giving people money, without conditions, is an incredibly effective means of pulling children out of poverty.

But conservatives don’t care. That’s because they’re not actually concerned with helping the poor.

They are concerned with policing them.

Conservatives want a poverty policy that is focused onpreventing people from accessing benefits. The goal is to punish the undeserving. And all poor people are assumed to be undeserving.

The success of the CTC shows that poverty and hunger are not intractable problems. They are deliberate policy choices.

The wealthy and powerful impose misery on the poor because they believe desperate people are more tractable and less able to organize.

Or perhaps they attack the poor simply because they don’t like the poor and believe they should suffer.

In any case, the expiration of the CTC, and the Iowa GOP’s assault on the SNAP program, shows that neither the pandemic nor the 2022 midterms have changed Republican commitments. GOP politicians like to cosplay as champions of the working class.

But the truth is they hold people of modest means in contempt and relish the chance to take food out of their mouths.

READ MORE: 'This is on you': NRA-backed Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst blasted following mass shooting at Iowa church

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Do you sometimes feel like the punditariat is watching a different Congress from the one you’re watching? It’s like the opiniontalkers can’t let go of their sacred cows long enough to see the reality that’s goring them. We could cheer on their faith in America, I guess. Honestly, though, there’s hope, then there’s abject confabulation.

Yet some in the punditariat can’t help themselves. They have to weigh their observations of what’s happening in Washington against their idea of what should be happening, and what should be happening is rooted deeply in what they believe America is.

They won’t assess America on its own terms. They won’t see the idea of America through the lens of its reality. When Alexander Vindman said during testimony that, “Here, right matters,” that warmed the cockles of pundits’ hearts. He validated their civic-religious dreams. Unsaid, however, is this – right usually has nothing to do with it.

READ MORE: The powerful GOP Oversight Committee chairman is pushing a baseless narrative that Biden is 'compromised'

If you’re like me, and read a lot of opiniontalkers, you know this cast of mind is everywhere. ThePost’s Jennifer Rubinis hardly alone. But her recent column – “The GOP can’t slam Biden on classified documents without condemning Trump” – illustrates my point.

It’s a heartbreaking work of staggering naivete.

LMAOOO!

The documents in question are the ones found recently in Joe Biden’s office in Washington’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. He used it sometimes when he was the vice president. His attorneys were there recently. They found about 10 documents, some classified, in a secured space. They turned them over to the National Archives and notified officials at the Department of Justice.

READ MORE: New analysis highlights the 'big difference' between Trump and Biden’s classified documents cases

The Republicans quickly compared the news to Donald Trump’s fantasia of corruption at Mar-a-Lago, where the criminal former president hid state secrets after leaving Washington. He withheld dozens of classified documents. None were secure. “When a grand jury issued a subpoena demanding that they be returned,” Rubin wrote. “Trump’s lawyers handed over 38 documents, stating that no other documents were in Trump’s possession.” There were 100 more.

According to Rubin, this isn’t bad news for Biden so much as bad news for the Republicans for two reasons. One, “if they decide to investigate the documents at Biden’s office, it’s entirely possible they will find no wrongdoing. Two, if they insist Biden’s case is super serious, they wind up conceding that Trump’s actions — willful, egregious and aggravated by his own obstruction — are, too.”

Finally, this howler (italics mine):

If they return to the standard they once used for Hillary Clinton — that no one who mishandles classified information should be president — then Republicans would have to demand that Trump not run for president and agree that he should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

LMAOOO!

Standard denial

Again, I don’t know which Congress Rubin is watching but it’s not the Congress I’m watching. “They wind up conceding” – stop right there. Conceding? Remember, we just watched Kevin McCarthy enbrown his nose to become House speaker. He is, at best, a puppet poobah. At what point are we to recognize a level of integrity among the Republicans compelling them to recognize the authority of a fact?

I haven’t seen it yet.

“If they return to the standard they once used for Hillary Clinton” – no, yeah, no. They might make up a new one if it’s convenient. But otherwise, the past never happened. Again, virtuous people with integrity would try to be consistent when applying standards. The Republican anarchists don’t try to be consistent. They don’t try to be fair. They don’t try at all. They deny standards applied equally.

They won’t tolerate any limit on their appetite for power.

“Demand that Trump not run for president”?

Come (TF) on.

Projecting intellectual honesty

As the Post was posting Rubin’s piece, Roll Call reported that the House GOP decided the past never happened and “are escalating their calls for swift federal action” on the Biden documents. They want an “immediate review and damage assessment,” the paper said.

“This discovery of classified information would put President Biden in potential violation of laws protecting national security, including the Espionage Act and Presidential Records Act,” said Ohio Congressman Michael Turner of the House Intelligence Committee.

So much for “they wind up conceding.” They concede nothing. They will use “the standard they once used for Hillary Clinton,” because it was intended for the GOP. Standards apply to the Democrats only. The Republicans are intellectually dishonest. They keep telling us as much. We shouldn’t project intellectual honesty where there’s none.

To the extent that the past did happen, the House Republicans want the Justice Department to give the current president the same treatment it’s giving to the criminal former president – though the facts at hand are so different as to be virtually unrelated cases. The Biden case appears to be one of basic human error. The Trump case appears to be one of greed, contempt, espionage and betrayal.

The goal here is to make the Biden case seem really bad while making the Trump case seem almost good by comparison. Kevin McCarthy, the ensniveler, revealed that goal when he said that the Democrats “overplayed their hands” in their handling of the Mar-a-Lago case.

They can and they will

John Dewey, the philosopher, once said western philosophy would make more sense if philosophers stopped paying so much attention to “the problems of philosophy” and more to the “problems of men.”

His point, as I see it, was about the difference between abstractions and things. Or rather, that you can’t have one without the other. Poet William Carlos Williams probably said it best: “No ideas but in things.”

Pundits can be so in love with the idea of America that they can’t see what America is. Instead of loving the idea in the thing, they love the idea only. For Rubin, it’s as if she can’t envision an America in which fairness is arbitrary. “The GOP can’t slam Biden on classified documents without condemning Trump”? They can. They will.

READ MORE: Why Donald Trump now 'resembles' the Norma Desmond character from 'Sunset Boulevard': journalist

hmmn BBB? edit bd sellout = compromise?

https://www.alternet.org/kyrsten-sinema-doesnt-get-credit/

an 12 22

Among the many problems endemic to the Washington press corps is the dearth of reporters and producers born into ultra-conservative religious traditions but had, by the grace of God, found a way out.

If there were such people involved in deciding what’s news, we would scarcely see stories about the difficulties facing white evangelical Protestants when it comes to voting for people like Donald Trump and his offspring, such as former football star Herschel Walker.

We would not see opinion pieces laboring to explain why white evangelical Protestants are hypocrites for supporting a Republican candidate who has admitted to paying for abortions in addition to fathering a covey of children with multiple women he did not marry.

READ MORE: For white evangelical Protestants, power is religion and Herschel Walker is their vessel

We would not see, in other words, a Washington press corps grown complicit in a decades-long effort by white evangelical Protestant leaders to gaslight America into thinking their zealotry is not at all dangerous to democracy despite all appearances to the contrary.

The bad faith of white evangelical faith

Two days ago, National Public Radio aired a piece with this headline: “Evangelical voters grapple with Herschel Walker's controversial image.” “Grapple” connotes soul-searching, but the interview subject, Timothy Head of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, didn’t seem as vexed by the choice as much as he was vexed by press corps scrutiny of it.

NPR clearly does not have anyone in key positions who was born into ultra-conservative religious traditions but left. If it did, the radio network would not have given Head a chance to explain why white evangelical Protestants are still good people though their vote for Walker signals their deep desire for a return of Jim Crow caste.

READ MORE: 'Democracy has won': Herschel Walker’s ex-girlfriends are celebrating his Senate runoff defeat

That person, in a news meeting, would have said whoa hold up. These people are going to vote for a Republican no matter who it is. Religion has nothing to do with it, unless by “religion” we mean the political power to protect social hierarchies that give white people advantages. In that case, sure, it’s about religion, but let’s say that. Let’s not give an ultra-conservative zealot a chance to gaslight us.

That person, though holding unfamiliar news judgment, would have seen their premonition bear out. Incumbent Raphael Warnock won Georgia’s run-off, but Walker gleaned 48.6 percent of votes, most of it from rural areas dominated by white evangelical Protestants.

NPR isn’t alone.

The Times ran this howler: “‘Saved by Grace’: Evangelicals Find a Way Forward With Herschel Walker.” That’s pure comedy gold to anyone who grew up in an ultra-conservative religious tradition but left.

Why? Because that person would say anything can be rationalized by a religion that’s predicated on the idea that it is right and all others are wrong. Their choices are right before they have made them. Walker was toxic, but voting for him was right, because they are.

When white evangelical Protestants “find a way forward,” it’s not because they are wrestling with hardship, controversy, whatever. The decision has been made. The “finding a way” is justification. Sure, they vote according to the demands of their faith, but it’s bad faith.

Perhaps the worst offenders are liberal intellectuals possessing no conception of the bad faith undergirding white evangelical Protestantism. They then judge politics according to liberal values. The Guardian ran this Tuesday: “Georgia Senate voters have a moral choice. White Christians are choosing hypocrisy.” [Hard groan.]

No, “white Christians” are not choosing hypocrisy. They are overwhelmingly unconcerned with intellectual integrity. If they contradict themselves, so be it. They’re right. Their vote is right.

Instead, they are choosing a Republican who will preserve “their way of life” – or bring back a two-tiered system of law and democracy according to which white people get to step on everyone else and everyone else is forced to put up with it. That’s not hypocrisy.

That’s saying what you want.

Having it both ways

Anyone who was born into but left such ultra-conservative religious traditions knows this. Alas, such special people are virtually absent from the ranks of the Washington press corps. The obvious result is endless reporting about religion as if religion had nothing to do with politics – as if bad faith were not central to white evangelical faith.

If the press corps had more special people like this, perhaps we’d see reporting on how white evangelical Protestants are being held morally accountable for their choices in addition to more stories about real moral “grappling” as a result of being held accountable. In that alternative reality, they’d learn that true freedom isn’t what you can do to other people. It’s what you can do for yourself and others.

As it is, white evangelical Protestants have it both ways.

READ MORE: Laura Ingraham has on-air meltdown in wake of Herschel Walker's defeat in Georgia

12 22

The “rule of three” is one of those informal guidelines that help us journalists decide whether an event is newsworthy. If something occurs three times, it’s probably a trend. Trends are newsworthy.

Trends can be fads, but three rifle attacks on critical infrastructure in less than 10 years – two this week alone – isn’t a fad. That goes double since the attacks appear to correlate with another political trend, which is wider and greater social acceptance of trans people.

Even as GOP-dominated state legislatures move to restrict trans rights, more than 500 municipal governments are moving the other way, opening cities to greater equality and freedom. Two hundred major urban centers and 50 state capitals have enacted or are set to enact laws, policies and services inclusive of the LGBT-plus people.

READ MORE: FBI investigating five power substations attacked in Pacific Northwest strikes similar to North Carolina

That’s democratic politics. It never stops. But neither does the political violence that erupts in reaction to democratic politics. The more Americans perceive trans people as people, rather than subhuman perversions, the more political violence we can expect.

Hence the nature of the ongoing right-wing insurgency.

It’s not a fad

Two electrical substations were damaged Saturday in Moore County, North Carolina, knocking out power in more than 37,000 homes.

READ MORE: What Ye's antisemitism teaches us about right-wing hate speech

In what police said was an “intentional” and “malicious” attack, a person or persons “open fired” on the transformers, leaving behind more than two dozen shell casings from a “high-powered rifle.”

Investigators initially said there was no evidence linking the attack to “a local drag show that had been targeted with threats of violence and calls to cancel the show in recent weeks,” reported USA Today.

There’s still no hard evidence linking the events, but investigators appear now to be broadening their perspective, setting the attack, according to CNN, “in context with the growing tensions and armed confrontations around similar LBGTQ+ events across the country.”

They are looking at “writings by extremists on online forums encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure” as well as “a series of recent disruptions of LGBTQ+ events by domestic extremists.”

CNN reported that paramilitaries have for the last two years used online forums to discuss attacking critical infrastructure, including the power grid, and to encourage individuals to act. These paramilitaries “posted documents and even instructions outlining vulnerabilities and suggesting the use of high-powered rifles.”

A government report from 2013 determined that attacks on 17 transformers in Silicon Valley were the result of sniper fire. More than 100 bullets were expended over 20 minutes, leaving scores of thousands without power and costing the public utility $15 million.

The Seattle Times reported today the investigation of at least five rifle attacks on electrical substations in Washington state. The damage was similar to the damage in North Carolina. Authorities there said it was a “deliberate physical attack,” though the newspaper reported it was unclear whether they caused service disruptions.

That, my friend, is three related events. It’s not a fad.

It’s a trend.

“Normal reality”

It’s also an example of the friction between democratic politics and an established political order (white power) that refuses to yield to democratic politics. That friction can be healthy, but more often than not in this country a consequence of it has been political violence.

It bears repeating at this point that the greatest locus of friction was probably when Americans elected their first Black president. Given that white power was “normal reality” to most white Americans, Barack Obama’s ascendance was a perversion of the natural order.

I don’t find it surprising that a person or persons fired on 17 electrical substations after Obama was reelected in 2012. If democratic politics couldn’t stop “normal reality” from being turned upside down, political violence was justified in returning us to “normal reality.”

But the attack on critical infrastructure was, in 2013, an outlier.

Most of the political violence we have seen since then has been inflicted on people. As I have said before, every shooting massacre is a reaction to white people’s perceived loss of racial status. There have been so many mass shootings, in fact, that if they happened anywhere else in the world, they would be called an insurgency.

If the attackers were Black or brown, yes! Then that’s an insurgency! But we don’t call it that. Most people in this country are white and most white people can’t see a political insurgency in front of them, even when it erupts in schools, even when it mows down children

Property over people

Maybe that will change given this new trend.

This is America, after all. Here, the rights of property have historically superseded the rights of people, as is evidenced by Republican legislators bent on outlawing gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, banning certain trans-related books in public schools and forbidding the discussion of LGBT-plus topics in the classroom.

All of that is jim-dandy, as is the massacre of innocents, but taking out the power supply? That crosses the line. Crosses! The! Line!

There’s no hope for gun control as long as the Republicans don’t want it – and they won’t want it when the status quo is mere mass death.

The Republicans, however, are the party of property, of business, of old white people. Power outages cost time. Time costs money. And money is the entire point of living a once-only existence on Earth.

I’m not the only one who sees a crack in the GOP’s united front. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said Tuesday:

“When we look at all the money that’s being lost by businesses here at Christmastime, when we look at threats to people in nursing homes having lost power, hospitals having to run off generators and not being able to do certain kinds of operations at this point – all of those are deep concerns here, and we can’t let this happen” (italics mine).

I’m not holding my breath, but if this new trend gains some momentum, we might see a few Republicans actually stand up to the paramilitaries among them and put an end to this insurgency.

READ MORE: 25 pro-QAnon extremists arrested in far-right plot to overthrow Germany’s federal government

js edit bd

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/destroying-twitter-elon-musk-democracy/

js edit bd

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/destroying-twitter-elon-musk-democracy/

Helaine Olen’s column last Friday came a week early.

Word got out last night that Twitter could shut down imminently on account of owner Elon Musk telling workers to love it or leave it (ie, to go[engr --- = tech bro ] “extremely hardcore” with no change in pay or go). Turns out some are leaving – “some,” as in thousands. It’s enough to make you wonder about the whole billionaire worship thing, Helaine wrote.

“I’m not denying that some billionaires are brilliant entrepreneurs,” Helaine wrote in the Post. “But they are way less special than they are frequently told. (Some are just heirs, or lucky Powerball winners.)"

READ MORE: Twitter in the edge of collapse as workers revolt against 'notorious union-buster' Elon Musk

She continued:

As ourmen of business become more prominent and wealthier, they enter a feedback loop. Sycophants flatter instead of challenging them. This impacts their ability to hear criticism. And that leaves them more likely to cling to toadies who feed their now inflated self-image. All too often, the end result is ever larger mistakes and more ethically dubious behavior.

Of course, Helaine is right. Billionaires are human. To err is human. To err spectacularly, and destructively, is billionaire-level human.

That’s why there’s more at stake than a “peculiarly American form of worship,” as Helaine calls it. There’s more at stake than even the collapse of America’s premier public forum. We’re witnessing a democratic abomination injure democratic politics, because democratic politics is the only thing that can keep him in check.

Musk deserves ridicule, true, but he deserves more democratic contempt. Why? Because of his contempt for democratic politics.

READ MORE: Former Twitter VP urges companies pull advertising from platform — citing Elon Musk’s 'toxic takeover'

Destroying Twitter proves it.

Musk was born into wealth in his native South Africa. The dead granted him power and privilege that he neither earned nor deserved. The day he accepted his inheritance was, moreover, the day he participated in the deprivation of other people’s political equality, which they are entitled to for the fact of being born.

Musk became a billionaire in these United States. To become a billionaire is to commit political crimes that would be otherwise impossible without a federal government of, by and for the people permitting them to happen or at least looking away while they do.

Musk then harnessed that power and privilege to shape and mold the very same federal government that initially allowed the political crimes that animate his power and privilege. To be the world’s richest man – to exist as such alone – is to profane not only political equality but the republican principle of equal treatment under law.

He is, therefore, a democratic abomination.

But that’s not all.

For all its flaws, which are many, Twitter remains the premiere public forum in America. That’s because its nature is democratic. It puts downward pressure on the orders of (white, patriarchal) power established long before Elon Musk was born but from which he still benefits. Twitter is, in other words, democratic politics in action.

As such, Twitter has played a huge role in democratizing virtually every part of society that previously had been shielded and defended by those with the most to lose from democratic politics. These parts included politics, journalism, sports, religion, business, you name it. Elites who otherwise would not have faced accountability did in part because Twitter is a public forum where the people can be heard.

Sure, Twitter can be chaotic. It can really feel like it’s everything everywhere all at once. But ultimately, Twitter gave voice to people who rarely have a voice – look up “Black Twitter” – and it flattened the (white, patriarchal) orders of power that have shaped, influenced and dominated every human society since humans stood upright.

Twitter can be democratic politics at worst – for instance, an angry mob in search of victims. But it can be democratic politics at its best – freedom of speech for the weak and powerless, accountability for the rich and powerful, and a valuable indicator of the public mood.

Good or bad, Twitter is politics from the ground up.

That’s why Musk hates it.

There are many theories as to why Elon Musk bought Twitter for billions more than it’s worth. The simplest answer is that he really believes Twitter is used as a weapon to silence unpopular points of view – and that someone (a hero!) had to do something about it.

In other words, Musk appears captive to the accusation, popular among elite white men, that these days you can’t say boo without offending someone, and that this fact is a violation of free speech.

While there are many exceptions to the rule, the rule is still pretty clear to an honest reader of the First Amendment. Twitter is not a weapon to silence people. It is, however, a source of counterspeech. It’s a place in which people who never before had a say have a say.

Pre-Twitter, elite white men could say boo while safe in the knowledge that anyone who had a platform high enough to criticize them looked just like them. Post-Twitter, not so much. Then suddenly anyone off the street could read them the riot act.

For Elon Musk and his ilk, it’s not the silencing that’s the problem. The problem is a matter of who’s doing the silencing. Pre-Twitter, elite white men could say virtually anything. They could shut up points of view they didn’t like. Democratic politics was a nuisance but it didn’t threaten their rank, nor did it call on them to answer to it.

Post-Twitter, they’re being held responsible – and they’re being held responsible by people – Black, LGBT-plus and women, for God’s sake – who have no right to hold them responsible. Worse of all, they can’t do anything to shut them up. For the powerful to be made powerless is a grievous injury. It’s enough to make you want to buy Twitter.

Then kill it.

It may be too soon to say Twitter has gone to ground. But whatever form it takes, it will likely be, in Musk’s view, a restoration of the “natural order of things” by which political elites can do and say whatever they want and the rest of us just have to put up with it.

That’s why rethinking the myth of billionaire greatness – that “peculiarly American form of worship” – isn’t enough. Musk is making choices, which are informed by politics, the kind of politics that not only has contempt for democracy but wants the people to shut up.

It’s not enough to say stop worshiping them.

We need to hold them in contempt, too.

READ MORE: Critics trash 'Twitter troll' Ted Cruz after he blames John Kerry for litter along the southern border

an 10 22

In 33 days, voters will decide which party controls the Congress. As the time ticks down, I’m not the only one who’s noticed that the Republicans, for all their Sturm und Drang, don’t appear to be running on anything. What will they do with control of the House? It’s hard to say. Whatever the Democrats do, do the opposite?

Again, I’m not the only one to notice a conspicuous absence of a positive policy program. So has Kevin McCarthy. That’s why the House minority leader staged a big reveal of the Republicans’ new agenda, “Commitment to America,” in Pittsburgh last month.

“Commitment to America” is sure to appeal to the former criminal president’s supporters. It has things like increased border security and repealing recent legislation that boosts funding for the IRS. But McCarthy is aiming higher than Donald Trump’s gutter sludge.

READ MORE: Republicans are gaining ground in key Senate races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: report

He knows that the Republicans must appear to care about public policy in order to win over white suburban women who are already hella mad about the Supreme Court killing Roe. “Americans are going to face a choice,” McCarthy said. “We have a real alternative here.”

Not really.

That bit about the IRS tells you that “Commitment to America” was empty from the start. It’s based on a fiction that was invented by the Republicans’ right-wing media. As the story goes, the Democrats are amassing an army of 87,000 IRS agents who plan to hunt down good (white) Americans and seize their rightful property just because.

The vestige of fact, on which this fiction is based, is a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that restores, over several years, the IRS of funding and staffing after decades of Republicans starving it of both.

Yes, some IRS agents carry sidearms. Some IRS agents have always carried sidearms. Rightwing media has exaggerated that fact in order to stitch it an already existing anti-government pro-militia paranoia. Rather than green-visor bureaucrats, they’re jack-booted thugs.

McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” was intended to counteract the proliferating public perception of a Republican Party that stands for nothing that isn’t conditioned on the Democrats’ success – a national reputation for moral relativism and restricted commitments.

Try as he might, McCarthy can’t transcend the rightwing media’s closed circuit. People like Fox host Tucker Carlson have purified inside thinking so much that the “Commitment to America” agenda promises to deal with issues and events that never happened.

It’s not a “real alternative.”

It’s an alternative to real.

McCarthy isn’t doing anything new. In the run-up to the first shots fired in the Civil War, slavery apologists purified the minds of white southerners in local newspapers so much that politicians could refer to make-believe events widely believed real by southern readers in order to protect planter interests and reproduce slavery nationally.

The make-believe applied to the confederates’ enemies as well as those of their political heirs (today’s GOP). Jeremi Suri, in Civil War By Other Means, said the southern press, like the rightwing media these days, was ruthless. Abraham Lincoln was a monster, a demon, Satan and the Anti-Christ. He corrupted the pure spirit of pure free (white) Americans doing nothing but securing their birthright.

Suri quotes a newspaper, Texas Republican, on Lincoln after the war concluded: “For upwards of four years this man, remarkable for his iron will and malice, had carried on a war against these States, without a parallel in modern history for its atrocity and barbarism, with the declared purpose of subjugation or extermination.”

During Reconstruction, Black Americans were the foundation of an emerging and never-before-seen multiracial democracy. Over and over, whenever they, and hence multiracial democracy, gained any traction, white southern reactionaries declared the end of the world.

“They had only recently broken away from slavery, but African Americans had quickly organized themselves to reach the ballot box,” Jeremi Suri wrote. “That was precisely what offended the white citizens of privilege, who had lost control of Southern politics.

“A wider, multiracial democracy diminished their power.”

Binary thinking was baked into the confederate mind.

Anything good for Black people was bad for white people. The solution, therefore, was cheating and humiliating Black people to help white people. Whether such sadism actually helped white people was beside the point of hurting Black people for the fun of it.

As a result, southern “democracy” was conditional. It rested on Black slavery. Unchained Black people, in the confederate mind, equaled chained up white people. Multiracial democracy, Jeremi Suri wrote, “challenged the status of the polite, well-mannered society of white people whose inherited wealth and power [they] depended upon.”

When your self-worth is based on the subjugation of others, what do you have after the subjugated fight for and achieve their liberty?

You have nothing.

There are no “real alternatives.”

Only alternatives to real.

The present is a product of the past. What the confederates did back then, the Republicans are doing now. For the confederates, white freedom was Black enslavement. Black freedom was white enslavement. For the Republicans, the pattern is the same. Victory for the Democrats, and hence for multiracial democracy, would be “atrocity and barbarism,” “subjugation or extermination.”

Or “white genocide,” as Tucker might say.

The Republicans, like the confederates, do not have principles, policies and goals that are independent of the Democrats’ (or Black people’s) success. The problem, for the Republicans, isn’t the problem. The problem is multiracial democracy taking care of it.

READ MORE: Values don’t matter': Conservative slams evangelicals for sticking by Herschel Walker

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/supreme-court-illegitimacy-is-accelerating/

edit bd

In ‘correcting’ GOP metaphors, liberals reveal their denial

Democrats and liberals just have to keep on keeping on even when, or especially when, keeping on keeping on is exhausting.

Over the summer, there were record numbers of migrants who had attempted to cross the southern border. We know this because border authorities regularly reported the numbers taken into custody. The Republicans often used them to hammer the president. They claimed Joe Biden was ignoring what they call a “border crisis.”

The liberal reaction tended to zero in on what liberals tend to zero in on – external falsifiable reality. Fact is, there was no “border crisis” on account of border authorities doing what they are supposed to do. Seizing migrants who have crossed the southern border did not indicate an emergency. It indicated a system working as it should.

Liberals were right. But being right didn’t matter. Remember this the next time a pundit tells you the Democrats are doing it wrong in the run up to November’s election. Again, with feeling: being right is not the same thing as being victorious. Being right is just one of many tools available to partisans when participating in democratic politics.

Liberals were right. But being right didn’t matter. Remember this the next time a pundit tells you the Democrats are doing it wrong in the run up to November’s election. Again, with feeling: being right is not the same thing as being victorious. Being right is just one of many tools available to partisans when participating in democratic politics.

To the Republicans, the border is not an international political boundary that has been arbitrarily established to divide two nations and their respective laws. It is not a legal event horizon. It is not a zone of ambiguous constitutional rights. It’s nothing concrete.

The border is a metaphor, a fetish, a symbolic representation of meaning deep and profound as well as impervious virtually to facts, fact-checking and the liberal’s fealty to external falsifiable reality.

Just as a rose in western literature is not a rose, but harmony, romance or honor, the border is not the border but the true soul of America that’s been struggling to manifest what historian Federico Finchelstein called, in a separate but related context, “a transnational ideology that opposes the putative barbarism of liberalism.”

Finchelstein was referring to fascism, but I think his concept aptly applies. To the GOP, the southern border expresses “national traditions as emanating from a specific national self rooted in the souls of individuals.” That is, white people. He added: “Only fascism represented the true intuitive nature of nationalism; liberalism, on the other hand, was an artificial form of conceiving the nation.”

Remember what I said about pundits telling you that the Democrats are doing it wrong in the run up to November’s election. One of those pundits is Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks. He said Tuesday that the Democrats are going to lose because reasons.

“It looks like we're going to lose the midterms,” he said, responding, I suspect, to Monday’s freak out. “People will look back at Democrat's inability to pass voting rights legislation as the moment we lost everything. Stunning failure of epic proportions. And everyone in DC yawned because they're used to excusing Democratic failures.”

First, never trust anyone who says with authority that something that hasn’t happened can’t happen because of something that didn’t happen. He’s picking your pocket. Given the ambiguous provenance of Uygur’s financial backers, that’s more likely the case than not.

More importantly, however, is that reasons – or external falsifiable reality – will not and cannot overcome metaphor. No matter how many times liberals say that there’s no crisis at the southern border, or that those hyping this fake crisis are exploiting anti-immigrant bigotry, it’s not going to change much, because Republican voters tend to operate according to the laws of a separate political physics.

They believe that the border is under siege and hence the country is being invaded on account of their view of the border as a metaphor for “a specific national self rooted in the souls of individuals,” which is to say, a white nation under God for white people thanks to God.

Meeting metaphor with reality might even deepen its emotional impact given the view that liberalism creates a nation “artificially” rather than “organically” and according to “national traditions.”

At a minimum, liberal fealty to external falsifiable reality can keep the partisans of political metaphor in check. At best, they can erode the metaphor’s power through time-consuming, back-breaking, mind-numbing attrition. But something somewhere at some point has to give. Just hope it breaks in the direction of liberal democracy.

My intuition tells me liberals remain in denial. They don’t want to believe so many Americans, perhaps more than half the country, tend to operate according to the laws of a separate political physics.

More precisely, they fear the work necessary for winning what is essentially a war of attrition. The AP reported that 45 percent of Republicans say they have little or no confidence in the midterms.

It doesn’t matter whether they believe the Big Lie or know the Big Lie is a lie. What matters is that Big Lie is a metaphor for a transcending truth, which is that a “specific national self rooted in the souls of individuals” is under attacked by the “barbarism of liberalism”

Again, it’s not that liberals should abandon their fealty to external falsifiable reality in order to defeat metaphor. I think those who suggest wielding our own are wrong. We don’t need more metaphors. We need more democratic politics. We have to keep on keeping on even when, or especially when, keeping on keeping on is exhausting.

an 7 22

there was another shooting massacre over the weekend, this one in Highland Park, a picturesque, affluent and majority-white suburb of Chicago, where mass violence of the kind experienced during a Fourth of July parade isn’t supposed to happen on account of Highland Park being picturesque, affluent and majority white.

Mass violence of this kind is supposed to happen in places like Philadelphia, which did experience a shooting during a fireworks display, sending hundreds of spectators fleeing, but that has gotten none of the attention that the Highland Park shooting has gotten on account of Philadelphia, which is majority Black, being where violence is supposed to happen on account of being majority Black.

Evidently, Robert E. Crimo III doesn’t get it.

READ MORE: How SCOTUS wiped away progress in a single term

The 22-year-old, who appears to be white, perched himself atop a building along the holiday parade route with a “high-powered rifle” to shoot into the crowd, killing six and wounding 40. Per the *Post*: “At least two long bursts of rapid gunfire left five people dead at the scene and sent hundreds of people fleeing in panic, leaving a wake of overturned lawn chairs, coolers and strollers. … One spectator, a father, put his young son in a dumpster for safety as he scrambled to find and shield other family members while bullets rained down.”

I’ll talk more about the shooter after the story has been reported out, although we learned on Tuesday that Crimo had planned the attack for weeks, USA Today reported. The details of his case don’t matter, however, as much as the larger contours they fit in. As I’ve said, all shooting massacres, in one way or another, are a violent reaction to the politics of liberal democracy making it possible to elect the first Black president, who then ceased being subject to the law and became instead the enforcer of it.

That’s impossible for people who see “the law” as the same as white.

So impossible, they feel crazy.

READ MORE: The Supreme Court’s illegitimacy is accelerating

Shooting massacres are the result of “the natural order of things” being turned upside down in a country where “the law” is not the law so much as the law is a white man with a gun. In such an upside-down world, it’s only “natural” for some Americans (ie, usually white men who cannot and will not tolerate “their country” turned upside down) to seek “justice” by “taking the law into their own hands.”

This pattern has held steady since at least 2012, after the Sandy Hook massacre, when the Republicans made a permanent choice. They could do the truly conservative thing – enacting laws that would regulate the distribution of firearms for the purpose of promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty for all. Or they could recognize the obvious – that liberal democracy and the rule of law in the hands of a Black man had become the enemy.

The writer David Frum once famously said that "if conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

That’s close, but more precisely: if the champions of white power become convinced that they cannot win democratically, theywill notabandon white power, nor will theyonly reject democracy.

READ MORE: [Talk of secession in Texas means political violence is already here. Thanks to SCOTUS, there will be more

They will go to war with it, replacing law and orderwith anarchy and chaos so that respectable white people doubt democracy, too.

Since 2012, the GOP has built on the structures of white power already in place in police departments around the country. (These structures are why cops can arrest Robert Crimo without incident, but shoot Jayland Walker 60 times, killing him, for no crime at all.)

They radically expanded the number of people with the authority to enforce the law by deputizing every white man willing to wield a gun. They got around the old constraints on law enforcement that were acceptable to respectable white people by resorting to vigilantism.

With easy access to guns, and permission to carry them virtually anywhere, Republicans created conditions for wave after wave of mass death that has for years been tearing apart civil society.

READ MORE: Our freedoms have already been revoked

I don’t think the respectable white people who populate places like Highland Park are champions of white power. If choosing between a liberal Democrat and a fascist Republican, I’m confident they’d make the right choice. But respectable white people, who determine so much of the direction and scope of our national politics, are nonetheless the principal beneficiaries of white power. They are the property owners, the bourgeoisie, the social class elected officials turn to when charting a respectable position on any given issue.

As the principal beneficiaries of white power, respectable white people are more often than not insulated from or immune to the consequences of a political party’s decision to go to war with democracy. (It’s a one-sided war that involves “soft targets” like parades.) They are, that is, all the way up to when they are not.

I think that’s the case with the Highland Park massacre. White-power violence first came for immigrants, then Black Lives Matter, then LGBT-plus people. And now, those who had least expected it. “If this can happen here, I promise it can happen anywhere. This is the last place I would ever imagine something like this happening.”

Will respectable white people understand that the Republicans are responsible for the chaos and anarchy, for the upheaval of the established order? Or will they turn to the Republicans to protect them from the chaos and anarchy that the Republicans created?

READ MORE:**Blaming 'the gun lobby' and the NRA for violence is a 'convenient fiction' to avoid offending white people**

an 6 22

NO LNX

Talk of secession in Texas means political violence is already here. Thanks to SCOTUS, there will be more

Blackboard with "Texit"written on it (Shutterstock).

John Stoehr June 23, 2022

The Texas Republican Party issued its platform Monday. Among other terrible things, it called for the Lone Star State to secede from the US.[and UN]

This was met with mixed reactions from liberals. On the other hand, some said great – good riddance!On the other, some said secession would mean the abandonment of people who are already on the margins of society. As my friend, the historian Thomas Lecaque said: “Every time you say ‘let them secede,’ slap yourself in your stupid overprivileged face.”

I think there’s a third perspective.

Right-wingers know they’re winning

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}:

Liberals do not, perhaps cannot, see that political violence is normal in this country. Political violence, in fact, is so ubiquitous that one could say it constitutes the political reality of the American experience. We all live inside white power. Serious challenges to it are met violently. There are always serious challenges to it. Political violence is always already normal.

Violent reactions to democracy, however, usually backfire, politically speaking, unless political conditions prevent them from backfiring.

I don’t know exactly what those conditions would be, but they surely involve polarization over the fundamentals of America – over whether it’s a white man’s country. When these conditions allow, political violence stops backfiring. First, it will be tolerated. Then, it will be encouraged.

That tells us something.

That the right-wingers are winning.

And they know it.

We have been tolerating subversive political violence since at least 2012. As I’ve argued, every shooting massacre is in one way or another part of the white-power reaction to Barack Obama’s historic twin victories.The GOP has since then gotten the public tied up in knots over the ins and outs of the Second Amendment. That’s deadlocked public opinion long enough to push political violence as a means of state-level social control.

Forward to 2022, after the J6 coup, to see the evolution from tolerating subversive political violence to encouraging overt political violence.

Indeed, as of this writing, the Supreme Court has issued a ruling that will encourage more overt political violence. In a 6-3 opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court struck down a 108-year-old New York state open carry law, saying it was too restrictive of Second Amendment rights.

Eric Greitens, a Missouri Republican running for the Senate, made an ad in which he’s holding a shotgun and inviting voters to go RINO hunting. A GOP challenger to Nevada’s Democratic attorney general reportedly told a friend: "This guy should be hanging from a fucking crane.” Couy Griffin, a rightwing organizer with influence on Donald Trump, has often said that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” The former president reportedly said hanging Vice President Mike Pence wasn’t a bad idea.

All of this is to say talk of secession does not come from nothing.

There is a context. That context features the evolution from subversive political violence to overt political violence. We should remember that.

Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican, said that political violence is coming. So is a sustained period of democratic instability. But we’re already in that period. We have already seen the evolution from subversive political violence to overt political violence.

That’s why the Texas GOP now formally supports secession.

Talk of secession is a consequence of political violence – especially political violence that is now working in the Republicans’ favor.

Indeed, they appear to believe political violence not only doesn’t backfire anymore – it’s now a political asset. Whatever political violence the future holds will be an expansion of overt political violence that’s already here.

Secession-talk is a sign that they know they’re winning.

Refresh liberalism

As usual, liberals missed it.

They tend to think political violence is unusual, an interruption of normal life. There’s more to this thinking than the basic human longing for peace.

Unlike rightwingers – unlike anarchists, Marxists, communists, even some progressives – liberals do not seek out conflict, because liberals do not see politics as war by other means. Politics is about problem-solving.

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}:

To liberals, politics is about process, strategy and established rules and norms. And anyway, labeling peace as normal, and violence as abnormal, pits those encouraging violence against those favoring the status quo.

Which is to say, pits rightwingers against conservatives.

But in order to insist that political violence is abnormal, (white) liberals must pretend that white power is not the political reality we inhabit. By pretending white power has nothing to do with it, (white) liberals end up legitimating the status quo – which is, as I said, already politically violent.

Our precious norms won’t stop political violence.

They’re already politically violent.

Indeed, by insisting on preserving established rules and norms, liberals paper over the root problem, which is that white power constitutes our political reality. In this way, liberals, I think without meaning to, hasten rather than circumvent the destabilization of American democracy.

As I said, Kinzinger thinks that’s coming.

No, it’s here.

Liberals think they are addressing political violence. They think that by appealing to peace, law and order, they are seizing the advantage.

They aren’t.

The more they stick to “the rules,” the worse things get. Politics isn’t war by other means. It’s about problem-solving. But when liberalism’s solutions aggravate things, perhaps it’s time to refresh liberalism.

Secession, seschmession

As I said, on the one hand are those welcoming the Texas Republican Party’s support for secession. Good riddance, wrote the Post’s Dana Milbank. On the other hand are those saying no liberal should welcome such a thing, as the human tool of secession would be horrific.

Both sides are missing the political violence that has made talk of secession seem real, credible and plausible (though entirely illegal).

It’s that political violence we need to focus on.

We need to admit it’s here – that it’s been here.

And liberals need new ways of thinking about it.

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an 6 22

Democracy, wow. I just don’t know sometimes. This time last year, I thought we were heading in the right direction. The political energies of anti-racism and anti-Trumpism conjoined to create the biggest winning coalition in the history of presidential elections.I was so optimistic, I wrote a piece arguing the “culture wars” had finally reached an end.

Ha!

Then came Glenn Youngkin’s election. Despite Virginia going to Joe Biden the year before, voters in 2021 apparently decided the fascist threat was over. It was safe to elect for governor a rightwinger yammering about kids being brainwashed by their pedo-communist “CRT”-loving teacher. Now he’s going after trans people the way comrades in other red states are. Now he’s undermining public education like his fellow Repubolsheviks.

Youngkin’s election was the first sign of the Biden coalition coming unglued. Turns out a lot of respectable white Virginians evidently felt they were so immune to the effects of white power that they didn’t mind white-power policies as long as the former president wasn’t involved.

Who would you vote for in 2024, Biden or DeSantis? Vote now.]

Last week’s primaries are another sign and another blow.

A harder blow.

Who needs an insurgency?

More than 100 GOP primary winners are Big Lie senseis. A third of the way through this year’s primaries show voters picking candidates who believe the 2020 election was rigged, according to analysis by the Post.

District by district, state by state, voters in places that cast ballots through the end of May have chosen at least 108 candidates for statewide office or Congress who have repeated Trump’s lies. The number jumps to at least 149 winning candidates — out of more than 170 races — when it includes those who have campaigned on a platform of tightening voting rules or more stringently enforcing those already on the books, despite the lack of evidence of widespread fraud.

To be sure, these are party elections, not general elections.

But given the historical patterns of midterm elections, there’s a good chance of general voters signing off on these arch-seditionists. Some of them, like Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, actually contributed to Trump’s failed attempt to overthrow the government. That was a coup attempt, you’ll recall, approved by all but 10 Republicans in the Congress. They apparently thought treason didn’t deserve punishment.

Yet here we are, in the run-up to the first congressional election in Joe Biden’s term in office, in which the conventional wisdom anticipates voters handing control of one or both chambers of the Congress over to the very people who supported overturning a full, free and fair election. (Remember, most Republicans objected to the vote count after the attack.)

Who needs a coup d'état when the people can be trusted, given the patterns of history, to give power to those who, the last time the people gave them power, lent support for the overthrow of the government?

Democracy, wow.

It’s dangerous.

It’s up to us – the liberals – to remind the people that democracy is more important than gas prices. It’s up to American liberals to push the people – educate them, morally scold them, harangue them if necessary – in the direction of democracy before they hand democracy over to its enemies.

Democracy is priceless, right?

There was a moment in February, after Russia invaded Ukraine, when I thought perhaps a majority of Americans might connect the dots between the resurgence of white-power politics in the US and across the world.

It seemed possible at long last for Americans to see that the Kremlin’s authoritarian propaganda, which justifies genocide in a fledgling democratic republic, is akin to the GOP’s authoritarian propaganda, which justifies anything to “take back” “their country” for “real Americans.”

Even an attempted coup.

Even murder.

I hoped then that a majority of Americans would intuit, at least, that the GOP is better understood as a separatist movement complete with a paramilitary faction possessing a penchant for committing acts of public political violence for the purpose of controlling liberal-curious Americans tempted by democracy to see such social control as totalitarianism-lite.

In February, polls showed a fulsome majority in favor of defending Ukraine and punishing Russia with economic sanctions, even though protecting democracy would almost certainly come at a price, such as high gas prices and supply-chain issues driving up prices generally.

Damn right, I thought.

Democracy is priceless.

But cheap gas

Turns out democracy is too expensive.

Gallup released a survey this week with the headline: “Usual Midterm Indicators Very Unfavorable for Democrats.” Joe Biden’s job approval is 41 percent. Only 16 percent of respondents are happy with the ways things are going in the US. Gallup’s numbers are in keeping with other polls.

These polls are a picture of systemic displeasure with a president who isn’t doing enough to bring down the price of gas, food, housing and more. Evidently, Joe Biden should have considered inflation before going off half-cocked in allied defense of Ukraine’s national sovereignty.

Democracy is great and all, but seriously.

Is it more important than cheap gas?

No, said Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan: “Real America [white people] doesn’t care about the January 6 committee. Gas is over $5 per gallon!”

To which we liberals say: no. Real Americans are all Americans, because all Americans have a stake in the continuation of this democratic republic.

Dangerous democracy

We forget that democracy is the radical redistribution of political power.

In theory, democracy is supposed to confiscate power from the class of people who rule by right of blood (or in today’s terms, who rule by right of money). Democracy pushes power downward, so the people may determine their nation’s direction and fate in the name of the people.

But such a system requires the people to be informed, to have an idea of what’s going on, and if you have learned nothing else by reading the Editorial Board, you’ll have learned this: most people most of the time have or will find something better to do than pay attention to politics.

One of the consequences of this dearth of civic faith, knowledge and participation is that the people – the ultimate sovereigns in a democracy – might surrender government of, by and for the people to those who abetted a figure who nearly overthrew the sovereignty of the people.

Again, who needs a coup?

Democracy is dangerous.

Especially when liberals have forgotten themselves.

Another coup-in-progress

Liberals have a habit of confusing majority opinion with democracy as well as the liberal values undergirding it. They are not the same, though.

For instance, I’ve been told the US Supreme Court is jeopardizing its legitimacy in the face of a majority that wants Roe to stay intact. If it strikes down Roe, as expected, it will invalid abortion rights and political parity for women, making clear that it’s at odds with majority opinion.

Liberals often tell me the court is sewing the seeds of its own reform.

That would be great.

I hope so, too.

But we cannot allow reform to be seen as fait accompli.

Liberals suggest that majority opinion won’t tolerate a court that strips women of their rights. Just as likely, however, is that majority opinion will follow the court’s lead. With enough time and effort, particularly from the rightwing media apparatus, which is global in scale, it’s conceivable that majority opinion will accept the court’s decision, even support it.

After all, the majority of Americans is set to return power to an insurgent party that, the last time it had power, tried to overthrow the government.

If you believe there’s a difference between Trump and his party, as if it will not attempt another coup when given a chance, I invite you to read news out of New Mexico, where a commission in a rural county refused to certify primary election results that the three-member panel didn’t like.

It gets worse. One of the members isCouy Griffin, founder of Cowboys for Trump. This isn’t the first time he’s obstructed a full, free and fair election. According to CBS News, he “was convicted of illegally entering restricted US Capitol grounds — though not the building — amid the riots on Jan. 6, 2021, and is scheduled for sentencing later this month.”

So, again, with feeling.

Democracy is dangerous.

Toward liberal democracy

We cannot afford to believe that Americans will choose democracy by dint of being American. We cannot afford to believe that Americans will demand equal treatment under law. We liberals cannot allow our values to blind us to the danger of taking democracy for granted.

The usual solution to democracy’s problems is more democracy.

That’s good but not good enough.

We liberals have a unique responsibility. We know the people are fickle, near-sighted, self-interested and easily moved by right-wing propaganda. We liberals have a duty to move them the other way.

Toward democracy.

Toward liberal democracy.

I’ve come to believe no one knows exactly why candidates win or lose elections for public office. We say we do. We don’t, though.

We would know why Candidate X defeated Candidate Y if we had direct knowledge of every single cause and effect accreting toward one irrefutable end. We can’t know, though. Our brains are limited.

Explanations for what happened are always after the fact. So they are never exact or complete or conclusive. And it can’t be otherwise – this is how it will be until we can see the world from God’s point of view.

As a storytelling species, we end up making everything that happened before the end fit the end. Why do we tell these stories? Well, again, the end is all we know for sure. Maybe we just like stories. Anyway, do you like thinking about how much of life is determined arbitrarily?

This is not to paper over obvious errors in campaigning. However, it is to say that even a campaign run “perfectly” can end in defeat. Terry McAuliffe got more Democratic voters to show up for this year’s race for Virginia governor than any Democratic candidate ever. He still lost.

For all the above reasons, I have sympathy for the Democrats running for reelection. I’m particularly sympathetic to Democrats holding seats in swing districts. They can’t know how the race will end. Every choice is like swimming to the surface after being underwater while upside down and blindfolded. They can’t afford to retrofit chaos and chance.

That doesn’t stop the Democrats’ liberal critics. For them, the way to beat the Republicans is obviously obvious. Democracy is facing an existential crisis! The Republicans are stoking political violence by calling opponents pedophiles! That goes for their own, too! They lie and lie and lie! All you gotta do is tell swing voters the whole truth!

Case in point is Kevin Kruse, a superlative historian and very loud and very confident critic of Democratic orthodoxy: “You'd think this would be an easy call for Democrats -- the GOP attacks aren't just baseless; there are many examples of pedophiles and sex traffickers in the GOP! -- but Democrats never miss a chance to miss a chance.”

To me, Kruse represents a genre of writing, found mostly on Twitter, in which the Democrats never do what they should be doing if they cared about beating back the tide of right-wing authoritarianism.

When the Republicans say the quiet part out loud (eg, that state legislators plan to steal the next presidential election), these critics call on the Democrats to pounce. When the Democrats dodge though, and instead stick with kitchen-table stuff, like the cost of health care, their critics say they don't have the guts. Welp, they say, we’re doomed.

I think liberal critics of the Democrats fail to think about something the Democrats think about. The voters they need to keep the Congress don’t know democracy is in crisis, don’t believe democracy is in crisis or kinda-sorta perhaps maybe don’t mind if democracy is in crisis.

It depends.

It depends on what the Democrats offer.

For these voters, it’s difficult to accept the fact that the Republicans have gone full fascist. It’s so hard it’s easier not to. And that’s easy, because, well, these people are not far from where the Republicans are. That’s what happens in a society organized by white supremacy.

That’s what the Democrats understand.

White supremacy is on the Republicans’ side.

So: What do you say to people who don’t believe the Republicans are dangerous? What do you say to people who believe democracy is fine now that the former president is out of power? What do you say to people who are already leaning toward the Republicans, because, you know, whiteness, but open to giving the Democrats a fair hearing?

You avoid “hot buttons” issues.

If you don’t, you lose.

You talk about the cost of health care.

If you do, you might win.

By urging the Democrats to do what they think the Democrats should be doing without respecting them enough to appreciate the stakes involved, these liberals critics reveal their faith in the American people.

A totally misguided faith.

They seem to think these swing voters will do the right thing once presented with the facts. I don’t know why they would when it’s easier, and more pleasurable, to believe the dulcet lies of white supremacy.

Look, the critics might be right. They might be wrong.

But let’s be honest.

The Democrats are asking respectable white people who are indifferent to suffering, who are immune to the painful outcomes of white supremacy and who are perhaps open to the Republicans suggesting that democracy has gone too far to vote for them.

That’s a huge challenge.

Let’s respect it.

4/22

I don’t follow what every Democrat says. No one can. There’s no way for me to know whether the tenor and tone of their collective rhetoric changed last week. But it felt like it got stronger, sharper and angrier.

Consider Brian Schatz.

The Hawaii Senator took to the Senate floor to scorch his colleague Josh Hawley of Missouri, who’s been holding up appointments to the Department of Defense that are necessary to America’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before he signs off, he said, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin must resign for his “failures” in Afghanistan.

Schatz said that’s rich coming from a guy who raised his fist in solidarity with the J6 insurrectionists and who voted to acquit the former president for the high crime of extorting Ukraine’s president.

“This comes from a guy who before the Russian invasion suggested that maybe it would be wise for [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy to make a few concessions about Ukraine and their willingness to join NATO.”

He added:

“They withheld lethal aid until, unless Zelenskyy released false smears against Joe Biden's son. Then [Hawley] voted to exonerate President Trump for this. So spare me the new solidarity with the Ukrainians and with the free world, because this man's record is exactly the opposite.”

His tirade amazed those of us longing for the Democrats to take a strong stand against the Republican Party’s lies and bad faith. Perhaps we’ll see more now that Greg Sargent put a brighter light on it.

The Post columnist interviewed Brian Schatz on Friday. “Democrats need to make more noise,” the Senator conceded. “We have to scream from the rooftops because this is a battle for the free world now.”

Let’s not forget what Schatz said, however.

He said Hawley is “doing a very specific thing.”

“He is damaging the Department of Defense.”

So far, Schatz is the only Democrat seeing what needs seeing.

Though he says he’s outraged by the US pullout from Afghanistan, Josh Hawley is also attacking, directly, the military leadership itself. (He won’t move on appointments until the secretary of defense resigns.)

Demanding Austin’s resignation is not a “reasonable request,” Schatz said. It can’t be. The point is sabotaging civilian control of the military.

You read that right.

The point is cleaving the ranks. The point is to create conditions in which military personnel feel inspired to take action that’s favorable to the Republicans’ (perhaps the former president’s) return to power.

They are picking up where the J6 insurrection left off. But next time, it won’t be a mob of schlubs. It will be an army of highly-trained insurgents bent on restoring whiteness to the center of the republic.

At gunpoint.

Everyone should see what Schatz sees.

So I interviewed Fred Wellman, founder of Beer Hall Projectand a 20-year Army veteran who served when Secretary Austin was General Austin. I called Fred after US Rep. Matt Gaetz failed to humiliate the secretary in testimony before the House Arms Services Committee.

Fred said: “A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.”

Matt Gaetz and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Thoughts?

My main frustration has always been with the “performance wing” of the Republican Party. They don’t want to govern. They want to act.

In this case, Matt Gaetz tried convincing people that “wokeism,” or trying to get a more diverse American military force, is hurting our ability to fight wars. It shows how monumentally stupid he is.

He's dragging culture wars into national defense. That he does so while sitting on the House Armed Service Committee is outrageous.

It’s a committee responsible for oversight of the men and women in uniform, but it’s oversight partially provided by someone as monumentally asinine as Matt Gaetz – that’s just disgusting to me.

Good point. When a country sends people overseas, the presumption should be that leaders will take that responsibility deadly seriously. Deadly serious responsibility is the opposite of Matt Gaetz.

I'm a 20-year Army veteran. I rose through the ranks to be a lieutenant colonel. I retired after Desert Storm and three Iraq tours. I’m the son of a World War II Marine veteran. My son is an Army veteran. My son-in-law continues to serve in the National Guard.

But not everybody can serve.

Less than 7 percent of our nation is veterans. Less than 1 percent serve at all. Less than one-third of the eligible population is capable of serving. I'm talking about fitness, criminal record, mental health, etc. This is the reality of maintaining and growing an all-volunteer force.

That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the officer corps. That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the pilot corps. That's the point of welcoming all races and creeds. As Secretary Austin said, anybody who's eligible, who has the capability to serve, should be welcomed even if they're non-binary, gay, straight, whatever.

If they're capable of serving, of meeting the physical and mental requirements we need in our military, we've got to open our arms.

There are just not enough white dudes left.

When you have someone like the Florida congressman directly attacking that, that turns away possible recruits. Gaetz is literally undermining those who serve and who may serve in the future.

Sounds like you’re angry?

I amangry.

The Matt Gaetzs and Marsha Blackburns of the world are openly undermining good order and military discipline with a culture war for political effect. A representative sitting on the Armed Services Committee should understand the challenges of an all-volunteer force.

Civilian oversight of the military matters even though those civilians may never have served, may not have been qualified to serve. People like me, people like Secretary Austin – we understand that. Someone who rose to the rank of four-star understands he’s going to answer to some 25-year-old kid on the Armed Services Committee.

That's the nature of it.

But what frustrates me is the lack of respect for the office and a lack of respect for the military as an apolitical and non-political entity.

One of the biggest fears of our founding fathers was a standing army. They didn't want one and that undermined efforts early on in the republic because of rebellions. We had no army to address them.

Even Washington was like, man, we need an army.

A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.

The troops love Trump, they believe, but the troops are being failed by “woke” leaders. Where the fuck do you think the leaders are? You don't just magically make a general. Secretary Austin started as a fucking second lieutenant. He rose through the ranks. This is dangerous.

I do not say this lightly.

This is incredibly dangerous.

They attack the military leadership as “woke” because they're trying to cause a break in the ranks. They're literally undermining good order and military discipline deliberately to break the chain of command.

I've never seen that in my lifetime.

You’re describing national security risk. Is that overstating it?

No, I don't think so.

The very nature of our republic relies on an apolitical military every American knows serves them, no matter their race, creed, religion, color, region, political party, whatever. Our republic depends on everyone knowing a standing army is not a threat to the country.

Many in the Republican Party are super-fans of Putin, let's be honest.They're having CPAC in Hungary, for God's sake, a country led by a rightwing dictator, a Putin fan. Imagine a scenario in which they’re in power and we can't fight because they’ve undermined the military.

It's terrifying to think where this could go.

I've seen reports of white nationalism gaining traction in the ranks of the military. There's an effort from above to deal with that.

I learned in military science 101 at West Point that an all-volunteer force is a direct reflection of our society. You raised your children for 18 years before they get into the military. I give them 12 weeks of basic training. That won’t overcome 18 years of raising them as racists.

All I can do is ensure they don't act on those beliefs and undermine good order and military discipline. If they do behave inappropriately, we use the separate military system to discipline them appropriately and remove them from the military as they're no longer a threat.

But we do know white nationalist and patriot front-type groups have been actively sending “their troops,” if you will, into the military for military training. Right-wing nationalist groups are infiltrating the ranks and recruiting veterans after they get out of the military.

At one point,10 percent of Jan6 cases were United States military and veterans. One of them is an active-duty Marine Corps major!

How horrifying that is.

Talk about the fundamental tension between universal values, like honor, and individual interest, like investment in whiteness.

Some really extreme right-wing politicians say universal values are an attack on conservative thought. It's not against conservative thought.

Conservative thought should mean taxes and “pulling up my bootstraps and raising myself up by going into the military” – that's fine.

Saying Black people are inferior soldiers, assaulting the ranks, inciting homophobia and transphobia and attacking fellow service members – That’s not conservative. That’s extremism, white nationalism.

That needs to be stomped out.

There have been several surveys of service members saying the biggest threat they face isn’t Muslim terrorists. It’s extremism in the ranks....

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Americans used to worry about communists. We thought they were under and behind every bush and tree. Our anxiety came in two waves. Red Scare 1 (the early 1920s) and Red Scare 2 (the 1950s). Eventually, the Soviet Union became everything the United States was not.

The average American, however, could not tell a communist from their elbow. How, then, did Americans get so worked up their collective anxiety justified the government violating civil rights or ruining lives?

That’s easy. The news media and the US government talked about communism very frequently in the context of existential threat.

That much talk equals that much worry.

You’ll have noticed something.

The news media does not talk about Russia, which still has warheads, the way it once talked about the Soviet Union. It does not talk about the growing alliance between American rightwingers and Russia the way it once talked about American communists and the Evil Empire.

Why? Again, easy.

The people who own the most lucrative media properties (Comcast, Facebook, Time-Warner) are America’s very obscenely rich. The same class of people existed during the Red Scares. They had obvious reasons for fearing communism. It was appealing to anyone cheated, abused or murdered by the representatives of the very obscenely rich.

They do not fear and have never feared violent rightwingers, white supremacists, neo-confederates and homegrown fascists. They don’t and never did because their discord and chaos, which divides the majority of people, almost always benefits the very obscenely rich.

Yet the alliance, mature or nascent, between the American right and the Kremlin is threatening to undermine or overturn democracy at home. It’s threatening the global order as we know it, too. If the Russians invade Ukraine, any country can invade any country. A lot rides on trusting the United States to be the world’s good guy.

We need to talk about these enemies, foreign and domestic. So I got in touch with Professor Emily Channell-Justice. She’s the director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at Harvard and a specialist on Ukraine. Ultimately, Dr. Channell-Justice told me, we have to ask, “do we want to live in a world where Vladimir Putin calls the shots?”

Hell no.

Americans over a certain age remember the Cold War. They remember the Soviet Union. What can they draw from their memories to help them understand current tensions over Ukraine?

I wouldn't want to make too precise of a comparison, because things have changed so much since that time period, and because the 1990s (the early post-Soviet period) is extremely important for understanding what's happening in Russia and Ukraine right now.

But in general, I think the most important things are the intangible: the idea of Russia as a great power, as influencing how the rest of the world works, as a country that garners the respect of the world.

I think one of Putin's goals is not rebuilding the Soviet Union per se, but rebuilding a “Great Russia” the time of [the Tsars] that had an extensive geographical and ideological footprint. That's something I think would resonate with anyone who remembers the USSR.

Tell us about Ukraine's view of "Great Russia." Chris Murphy, my senator, said the Ukrainians would fight to the last man (my words) due to their opposition. Murphy said such opposition made Putin panic in 2013 after the Maiden uprising and panic now.

The Russian Empire spanned from present-day Poland to the Far East and through Central Asia and the Caucasus. I'm not sure the modern vision of “Great Russia” can be that geographically expansive (though I'm sure Putin would pursue that if he thought he could succeed!).

Ukraine was so essential to the Russian Empire, and to the Soviet Union, that it was considered the "Second Soviet Republic" (historian Yaroslav Bilinsky wrote a book about Ukraine with this as its title).

So in Putin's mind, any truly “Great Russia” has to include Ukraine.

Ukraine was turning away before 2013, but the Maidan protests solidified it. Ukrainians showed they didn't want to be part of Russia.

I don't know if I'd call it "panicking," but Putin certainly started changing his tactics in response to that clearly democratic decision-making in Ukraine--not only would it take Ukraine away from Russia, but it would show Russians that democracy is a viable option for them.

That's something he's been fighting since the color revolutions.

Murphy said Putin "gambled" by amassing troops and materiel on the eastern border in hopes of pressing the Zelensky government into collapse. He said Putin expected the west to agree to his demands. Murphy is great, but he's still a politician. Is he right?

I'm not sure what it is Putin wants, but he's either going to get exactly what he wants or he's going to get something that he can spin within Russia as a win against NATO, the "West" and the United States.

Personally, I think Zelensky and his administration are stronger than Putin thinks they are. My guess?  Zelensky isn't a politician. Therefore, Putin thinks Zelensky will be easy to manipulate. So far, however, he has shown a good amount of strength in the face of a big threat.

I think Putin knows that Zelensky's approval ratings are at the moment lower than they had been throughout his term. It's possible that Putin thinks that by backing a coup and installing a new government, Ukrainians will support it. After all, they are not very supportive of Zelensky. I think that's a miscalculation if he thinks that'll work.

That's, I dunno, kinda stupid, right?

Yes!

But that's not the world Putin lives in.

He thinks he's done such a good job consolidating power in Russia that he can't imagine that Ukrainians would rather live in a democracy.

Can we dwell on this a little? This seems like a vital distinction between a values-based system of government (ie, democracy) and a purely transactional system of government (ie corrupt oligarchy).

This is why the election of Zelensky matters so much.

The previous president, Petro Poroshenko, was an oligarch. Maybe "better" oligarchs than others (Rinat Akhmetov, Victor Pinchuk, Ihor Kolomoyskyi), but the guy privatized Soviet industries. He built a localized power structure from there and took it to the presidency.

Zelensky was elected. People wanted to vote for him. They wanted to vote against Poroshenko. That’s far more reflective of Ukraine being an actual democracy than arguably any previous presidential election.

On the other hand, Putin has built up this increasingly small echo chamber in which everyone who helps him benefits and everyone who challenges him ends up dead, jailed, deathly ill or exiled.

It does seem to me that the differences in governing in Ukraine and Russia are more different now than they have been before.

Can we loop Donald Trump into this? Aided by Russian interference in the 2016 election, he then blackmailed Zelensky into finding "dirt" on Joe Biden in exchange for funds to continue repelling Russian forces in the east. All of that was stupid, too. Thoughts?

Yes, that was definitely stupid.

Though the worst fallout had more to do with giving Ukraine a bad name in the eyes of the American public. I think Biden may have been hesitant to seem too enthusiastic about aiding Ukraine because of the fallout of the [phony] Burisma scandal and Trump’s first impeachment.

While it's unlikely that Putin had this goal in mind – it probably turned out to be a fringe benefit – I wouldn't discount the possibility that it was intentional on Putin's part to make sure he could threaten Ukraine without too much of a response from the president.

Have the US and its allies contained Putin? The Biden administration seems to be betting that public exposure of Putin's intentions -- ie, attacking imminently, installing a puppet -- will work. Is that right?

This is an interesting tactic I haven't seen before.

The idea is to get all the information out there so that Putin can't effectively use a "false flag" tactic to justify invasion. In this way, Biden and his allies are getting the American public to engage in a new way, because it's harder to be convinced of the Russian version of the story.

This has definitely been effective.

Will it stop Putin? That I can't say. There hasn't been an attack or a coup yet, which is a good thing. But it could still be coming.

It really has gotten Americans' attention, perhaps enough to overcome whatever worry Biden might have had about Ukraine’s bad name. Fox's Maria Bartiromo said this morning the crisis is being hyped up to distract Americans from blah blah blah. Novel tactic but good, too?

This is a massive international crisis. It doesn't matter what's going on domestically. The president has to deal with both things at the same time. That's his job. I'm extremely concerned about how well the Russian state perspective has infiltrated the far right in the US.

They are parroting the Russian narrative. That's what is so scary. It's all this whataboutism, “NATO is the aggressor,” etc. That's what Russian media is saying, because that justifies Putin's aggressive response.

During the Red Scares 1 and 2, Americans worried about communists hiding behind every bush. Worries were overblown, but they had grounding. Lots of Americans sympathized with the Soviet cause.

Things have flipped around.

Instead of communists, we have white supremacists and rightwingers openly aping the Kremlin's line. Yet we are not nearly as worried as we were during the Red Scares. Am I onto something?

Very interesting.

I am certainly worried about it, and I think a lot of people are worried not just about the existence of this far right, neo-Nazi element, but about how far it has infiltrated America’s actual power structure.

I think this has everything to do with how the media landscape has transformed since the Red Scares. The narrative of "hidden communists" worked because we didn't have all this media.

Now, there's no hiding. People are overtly saying racist, fascist things and parroting the Russian line. That's alarming some, but not enough.

I don't know if that's because we're more divided or if it's because people just don't care, or, worst case, because more people are sympathetic to the Russia-Fox views than I want to admit.

Hate to say it, but the very obscenely rich, who own the lucrative media properties (Comcast, Facebook, etc), do not fear an alliance between US rightwingers and Russia as their counterparts feared an alliance between US communists and the USSR. The former advances their interests. The latter threatens them.

Sorry to be a bummer.

That's very true.

These media are built to benefit from exactly what's happening now.

This goes back to your first question – why we can't make a direct comparison between the communist period and now.

These overlapping interests are a perfect illustration of what didn't exist during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example.

Russia figured out how to best take advantage of social media and disinformation. They got out so far ahead it's hard to catch up. We're just trying to do damage control, while they come up with new tactics.

In a country without the rule of law, you decide the landscape of malicious uses of media, and everyone else is reacting defensively.

see ME vs we

11 21

...Another one of her cartoons, called "Avatar: The Last Airbender," speaks to our current social and political crisis, which I think of as a crisis of humility.

Meaning, there's not enough of it on account of there being not enough demand. That might be a consequence of history. When I was my daughter's age, in 1984, American culture was very worried about children and their feelings of shame. (To a degree, it still is.) The culture asked parents to encourage in their kids a pride of self. Healthy self-directing egos were thought to mean healthy self-directing children, which meant a society of healthy self-directing individuals.

But Uncle Iroh, one of the characters in "Avatar," knows better. For reasons I won't go into, Iroh is something of a pariah by the time we meet him. He has fallen from a great height. As such, he's come to understand the real link between pride and shame. As he tells his young nephew, who insists on being proud: "Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame."

READ:**Former Trump aide who was 'Anonymous': Why he stayed, why he left and how the GOP became more dangerous than ISIS**]

Our culture still seems to think the answer to feelings of shame and insecurity is feelings of pride and self-confidence. You often see this after some kind of disaster, like a shooting massacre. We are frequently told suspects felt shame so they lashed out violently. If they had a more robust inner life, a more secure sense of self, perhaps the violence could have been averted. But as Uncle Iroh understood, high self-esteem is not the answer to low self-esteem. The ego is the source of rage, hate and violence. Humility is where one finds peace.

This has some empirical basis. In the 1990s, social psychologist Roy Baumeister led a team of researchers in finding that threats to the ego can disrupt a person's ability to self-regulate emotions. This can and does result in hate, which, in turn, can and does lead to violence. Baumeister does not address humility specifically, but he does imply it as he points to the problem of being proud instead of being humble.

"The new cultural demands on selfhood make it into a burdensome concern that can produce frequent stress," he wrote in The Self and Society in 1997. "People feel they must maintain a highly positive image of self that requires constant vigilance against dangers and threats. Even if they do not experience major experiences of humiliation or disgrace, the ongoing threat and resulting demand for vigilance may become tiresome and draining. Awareness of self may often be tinged with worry or stress and hence may take on an aversive aspect."

You can imagine how this plays out politically. Since 2008, the political right has stood against democracy on account of democracy electing a Black president. To these bigots and ghouls, America is a white man's country given to them by God to rule with impunity. Every time the outgroup wins a little freedom, the ingroup feels less free. Democracy, moreover, leads to equality. The political right hates that. Equality means bigots and ghouls aren't as super-duper as they believe they are. Equality means they just might have to go out and kill somebody.

You could say the election of Donald Trump, the anti-democratic turn we have seen from the GOP and all the shooting massacres we've seen since the reelection of a Black president altogether constitute one giant wounded ego. The result has been one giant lashing out against democracy the way mass shooters lash out against schools. As Baumeister said, in a different but relevant context: "Cultural prescriptions can exert considerable influence by telling people at what point it is appropriate to turn violent, ranging from 'only when someone is attacking you in a life-threatening fashion' to 'when the person implies disrespect toward you by making eye contact.'"

Ego, pride, shame, hate, rage, violence, fascism. These all have a common source in the human mind. The irony is our culture believes the antidote is more of the same. USA Today's Marco della Cava wrote today that the path toward national political healing this Thanksgiving holiday might be "practicing gratitude." As one of his sources told him: "We learn to appreciate things when we lose them, unfortunately."

How about we appreciate losing them? To be sure, you should have what you need. If that's not enough, rethink your needs. Desire, said Epicurus centuries ago, is what causes so much pain. To minimize pain, and maximize pleasure, you should minimize desire. "Practicing gratitude" can easily slip back to the original problem -- to an ego that can't be satisfied no matter how much self-confidence it has, an ego that can't tolerate the "disrespect of eye contact," and an ego that manifests itself politically as a Republican Party turned fascist.

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So much depends on respectable white people. Those are white people who care about appearing respectable to other white people, who themselves care about appearing respectable to other white people. They are the great globular middle of American politics that determines electoral outcomes in this country.

For the longest time, they sided with the Republican Party on account of tax cuts and other goodies. My hope is that, for the foreseeable future, they will side with the Democrats on account of tax cuts and other goodies being a banner for hiding the fact that sadism is the GOP's point.

Sadism isn't only about sex, though it can be, obviously. When I say "sadism," I mean the pleasure derived from seeing other people suffer. The Republicans have no policy goals. Their only goal is creating legal and political conditions in which the in-group is protected while the out-group is punished. But it doesn't end with punishment. It can't.

When the out-group gains power, the in-group feels powerless. When the in-group feels powerless, the in-group feels oppressed. When the in-group feels oppressed, it cries out for freedom. But in order to feel free, the in-group must do more than merely punish the out-group. It must derive pleasure from seeing pain and suffering. This is what I want respectable white people to understand. When they vote for tax cuts and other goodies, they are doing far more. They are helping the GOP's authoritarian base feel a freedom that depends on suffering.

When white police officers pulled a Black paraplegic man out of his vehicle by his hair last month in Dayton, Ohio, on illegal drug suspicion, that might appear to be another case of police brutality. (Body cam footage of the incident was released Friday. An investigation by the police department is underway.) But to the authoritarian base of the Republican Party, what the Dayton cops did was the goal itself. Seeing the man's pain produced pleasure. It made them feel free.

It is sadism. It is not cruelty. Cruelty is not the point. Sadism is. You can be cruel without meaning to. You can be cruel without taking pleasure in pain. You can be cruel because you can't help it (on account of repeating past traumas, for instance). But sadism takes intention. It takes the desire to set aside priorities, like tax cuts and other goodies. It is its own cause. It is its own effect. This is another thing I want respectable white people to understand. Sadism isn't an unintended consequence. It's the point. When you vote for the Republican Party, when you give money to Republican candidates, you are joining a concerted effort to bring more suffering to more people, and you are complicit in the derivation of pleasure from suffering. You have become a sadist.

This sounds extreme. That's because sadism cancels equality. If the Republicans had some degree of commitment to equality, they might seek conditions in which the in-group feels free regardless of whether the out-group feels pain. But there is no equality. Therefore, there is no equal protection under law. Therefore, there is a one-to-one relationship between in-group freedom and out-group pain. Put another way, it's quite impossible for the in-group to feel free when the out-group does not feel pain. Sadism is the GOP's vital link.

Given the reality of this one-to-one relationship, you can see they don't mean freedom when they say freedom. They don't mean the presence of choice. They don't mean the absence of coercion. They don't mean freedom in any conventional sense. What they mean is the pleasure of seeing other people's pain, because their freedom can't exist without their suffering. Respectable white people need to understand this. Cries for freedom are in fact cries for sadism.

Just as they don't mean freedom when they say freedom, they don't mean borders when they say borders. Ten Republican governors went to the southern border to pressure the president to do more about immigrants coming in. Most of them were from non-border states. And that's the tell.The border they are defending isn't the border. It is the border between us and them, between the GOP's authoritarian base that can't feel free unless someone suffers, like immigrants, and everyone else who can feel free as they share power with others.

This is the last thing I want respectable white people to understand. There is no middle way. There is no neutral position. "Every state is now a border state," said Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany last week while visiting the border. Every state is a border state. Every issue is a border issue. Every person is a border person who must choose a side. Are you with us or against us. Sadism is the point.

1021 an

Yesterday, I described a situation in which local boards of education are being squeezed between two separate but related forces. On the one hand are shadowy nonprofit organizations funded by the very obscenely rich that are staging "protests" against masks, vaccines, the teaching of anti-racism and other things they don't. I call them the death-threat squads. They harass, intimidate and threaten board members in such numbers as totrigger waves of resignations. Their goal isn't changing minds. It's silencing enemies. The tactic works.

But it only works due to the help of a tandem force in question. On the other hand are local law enforcement officers, even whole police and sheriffs' departments, who do not or will not enforce the law in order prevent such crimes from being committed. Why? Because they are sympathetic to the interests of those who are committing the crimes. For this reason, a national school board group called on the president to help. The US attorney general is now taking steps to investigate.

I'm summarizing yesterday's column, because I want to stress this pattern — the squeeze play — that's between active agents of the very obscenely rich and passive agents of the state. I want you to be aware of how these lawless forces work in tandem, though not necessarily in explicit coordination, to shape not only our views of politics but our understanding of freedom, too. I want you to see more fully that what they are doing now is how they want America to be, a nation in which the in-group can harass, intimidate and threaten the out-group, and the out-group is legally and constitutionally bound to put up with it.

Consider an upcoming case to be heard before the United States Supreme Court. It's the biggest case on Second Amendment rights since Heller in 2008. Heller established the right to self-defense. The state is forbidden to outlaw guns for personal use and safety. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, plaintiffs hope to take Heller a step further to establish the right to conceal one's weapon.

It's important to understand the context of Bruen. Heller was decided before America elected its first Black president. After the election, the"gun-rights" movementsprang into action. I said this yesterday, but didn't say why. It's because democracy "unexpectedly" empowered non-white people. For many white people, empowered non-white people, especially Black people, means disempowered white people.

Something had to be done. Since American democracy could no longer be trusted, they turned to their guns. They turned to tactics to fight the feeling of being "enslaved." Thanks to Heller, they could legally carry their guns in public, in places where they'd never need a gun, like the library. They said they were exercising their rights. They were lying. They were doing exactly what the school board death-threat squads are doing now. (Local law enforcement officers said then as now that nothing can be done.) They were harassing, intimidating and threatening people they don't like. They were doing that because harassing, intimidating and threatening people makes them feel free.

The need among some white people to feel "free" in the face of a treacherous democracy that empowered non-white people — thus robbing white people of their freedoms — was so fierce that a day that might otherwise have triggered a national reckoning on gun violence was barely noticed. While most Americans saw the slaughter of 20 innocents at Sandy Hook as an overwhelming reason to increase gun regulation, the "gun-rights" movement was focused on something else: the 2012 reelection of Black president and chief avatar of tyranny.

I used to say the Republican reaction to the Sandy Hook massacre was the rapid expansion of laws deregulating access to firearms and their use. I was wrong. Those laws, including concealed carry laws, were a reaction to Barack Obama's reelection. They were a reaction to American democracy betraying white people for a second time. (The good guy with a gun is not just a good guy who shoots back. He's a white guy who's "free" to shoot whomever he pleases. That's what makes him good.) It is the expansion of these laws, and all they symbolize, that's set to be heard by the Supreme Court. I don't have reason to doubt this court will establish a concealed carry right. Once that happens, the right to military weapons might not be far behind.

Thus the high court will do its part in squeezing freedom out of Americans. On the one hand, the in-group gets to harass, intimidate and threaten the out-group with guns, concealed and/or open. One the other, local law enforcement gets to shrug, pointing helplessly to the Supreme Court and its interpretation of the Constitution. The out-group does indeed have the right to equal protection. What we're seeing, in stages, is a slow-motion conspiracy to pretend otherwise.

Which is the point. Freedom for the out-group is equal to tyranny for the in-group. More accurately, freedom for the in-group is dependent on the out-group living in fear of the in-group. Without that fear, the in-group just doesn't feel free enough. That's why freedom isn't and can't only be doing whatever you want. Freedom must mean harassing, intimidating and threatening the out-group while enacting laws and interpreting the Constitution so the out-group can't fight back.

The first bit of news today is that the United States Chamber of Commerce has been sitting in on strategy calls by the GOP leadership of the United States House of Representatives. That's news, because the chamber speaks for every major corporation you can think of. It claims to be nonpartisan and strictly business-focused. That was a lie.

The second bit of news is the decision by the chamber to flip-flop on its support of a Democratic plan for nation-building at home.After months of lobbying for a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, at a cost of millions, it decided this morning to oppose it. That's news, because its decision was announced after reporters revealed the House GOP leadership was kicking the chamber off its strategy calls.

What can we take away from this news? First, as I said, the chamber has been lying to us. It has been an active participant in advancing the House Republican agenda, even when that agenda is a hit-and-run over democracy itself. (Many of its members have resumed making donations to Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election.)

Second, the interests of business are becoming subordinate to the interests of the party. That's a third bit of news, actually. For decades, wherever corporations went, so did the Republican Party. Now it's corporations, represented by the chamber, are struggling to hang on. Indeed, it was Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, who said earlier this year that corporations should "stay out of politics."

In reality, everyone benefits from federal investment in public works, but especially multinational firms that use the roads, bridges, airports and harbors to get their goods and services to consumers. Yet here's business saying its interests are secondary to staying on those calls.

I don't want to make too much of this. The GOP has long served the very obscenely rich. But rare is the moment in which one partner turns to the other and says, it's time for you to choose: us or them?

This seems to be one such moment. The biggest business lobby in the United States decided today that it's better to support the Republicans than oppose them, though its members lose. How much gain is there in staying on good terms? How much loss is there in being on the outside of the party looking in? This is something new. This is the Republicans assimilating corporations into an authoritarian collective.

Well, not that new. In 1964, Eugen Weber wrote Varieties of Fascism. In it, the late historian wrote that assimilation into the authoritarian collective, or "mass conformity," as he put it, was necessary to achieving the goals of fascism. A nation's "ideal cannot be one of individual freedom, free enterprise, and enlightened self-regard," he wrote, "because such concepts are disintegrating and divisive."

Fascists sought a "group ideal which will encourage the individual to transcend his private interests and give, abandon, and devote himself to the greater good of the greater whole."

That ideal was called "corporatism." It was organizing the economy such that "the state is no longer an instrument for the conservation of individuals and the achievement of their ends," Weber wrote. Instead, "individuals become means, instruments of the life of the State."

Benito Mussolini was clear about his vision. "The individual exists only insofar as he is in the State and subordinate to the necessities of the State," the Italian dictator said in 1929. "The more complex the forms of civilization become, the more freedom of the individual is restricted."

Where is capital in this scheme? Not good. "The Fascist tendency is towards collectivism," Professor Weber wrote, which welcomes "the gradual squeezing out of capital and the diminution of its influence."

So again, with feeling: What we saw today is something new. It's the GOP's assimilation of corporations into its authoritarian collective. The spokesmen of capital should bear in mind the possibility of "the gradual squeezing out of capital and the diminution of its influence."

This isn't new but it's unfamiliar. The greatest achievement among conservatives over the last half-century was getting a majority of (white) Americans to believe they stood for the rights of individuals, private enterprise and private property. Conservatives have always stood for ordered power, rights be damned, but pretending otherwise was useful during the postwar years during which Americans still had memories of right-wing collectivism (the Nazis) and, later with the Cold War, left-wing collectivism (the Soviets). It's been so long since its authoritarian wing dominated the party, no one remembers. But by forcing the chamber to choose sides, the GOP is returning to form.

Liberals have long accused the Republicans of being hypocrites. Why is it bad to give poor people "handouts" but good to give rich people "stimulus"? Why are one "welfare queens" and the other "job creators"?

My hope is that liberals will see today's decision by the chamber as an opportunity. Not only are the Republicans assimilating corporations into their authoritarian collective. The representatives of capital are willing to be assimilated, risking themselves and democracy along the way. So forget hypocrisy. A fully fascist target is coming into view.

Liberals should hit it. Hit it hard.

an 1021

A reader asked the other day why the Republicans are voting against the full faith and credit of the United States when the GOP comprises so many millionaires and billionaires invested in financial markets. In other words, why would the very obscenely rich support a party that's clearly threatening the very obscene power of the very obscenely rich?

One theory, which I think is the right theory, is they don't want the Republicans to prevail. They think the Democrats will do the right thing for the sake of their country, not their party. The gamble is almost certainly the right one. Bringing the economy to the brink of panic is dangerous, but the actual risk is minimal given the Democrats are the party of governance. They would not call the Republicans' bluff.

Proof of this theory can be seen in the near-total silence of the very obscenely rich in the wake of news that the Senate Republicans had voted against the full faith and credit of the United States. Sure, there's been a few gentle reminders that defaulting on the national debt would be, um, subpar. But that's nothing compared to the hysterical outcry against the Democrats and their big plan to raise taxes on the very obscenely rich to pay for reshaping the government. While they have little to say about the real danger of default, they have a lot to say about higher taxes! That would hurt business! The economy! Jobs!

One takeaway is the very obscenely rich are lousy with bad faith.The government taxed them at much higher rates decades ago (at more than 90 percent during the Eisenhower administration). Yet they still managed to continue being very obscenely rich. During the same period, the economy was gangbusters. Jobs, too. The Democrats haven't yet passed their 10-year infrastructure bills, but so far, they seem unaffected by the lousy bad faith of the very obscenely rich (though the rates they are aiming for are not nearly high enough).

The other takeaway is the very obscenely rich are fully supportive of the Republican Party's efforts to sabotage the country just enough to maintain parasitic control of it. The GOP and the very obscenely rich don't want to kill off democracy. That would be bad for business. They only want to weaken it. As I said earlier this week, the party voting against America's credit is the same party "undermining the national recovery from the covid pandemic, which is the same party tolerating insurgents who nearly brought down the republic, which is the same party eroding the rule of law, which is the same party welcoming interference by Russia, which is … so on and so forth." The very obscenely rich, meanwhile, have resumed campaign donations to Republicans who voted to toss the 2020 election results. Firms like Home Depot and Walmart want the people to buy their stuff. They also want to prevent the people from flexing the sovereignty that would prevent them fromcontinuing to extract wealth from the people.

Those of us worried about the future of democracy have pinned hope on the Democrats passing election reform. I've pointed out one reason that's not enough. We need to crack down on lawlessness, too. But all of the above is another reason reforming elections is insufficient. If we're going to fight authoritarianism creeping through the body politic, we need to do more about the very obscenely rich who are paving the way for that authoritarian creep with their money. The democratic way of doing that is with higher, much higher, taxation.

The problem is worse than it looks. The very obscenely rich are not only financing Republicans prepared to deny the sovereignty of the people. Directly and indirectly, they are enabling the bullies, thugs and terrorists trying to bring the republic down. In April, The Guardian reported a Christian fundraising site connected the Proud Boys and other violent groups to "anonymous high-dollar donors." Robert Mercer, Donald Trump's sugar daddy, backs far-right candidates and a social media network insurgents used to organize the assault on the US Capitol. Charles Koch, the industrialist, is tied to a vast propaganda network that includes VDare, a fascist organization. Virtually all organized anti-government "protests" during the covid pandemic can be traced back to the very obscenely rich. Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, has been called "one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement."

Right now, the Democrats are focused on getting two infrastructure packages through the Congress to reshape government and the US economy. Their focus is on raising taxes on the very obscenely rich just enough to pay for it. Democracy demands taking that another step. To fight fascism, we must fight the people paying for it. That means raising taxes higher, much higher, on the very obscenely rich.

to understand the American authoritarian mind, look to evangelical Christianity

no lnx

John Stoehr July 21, 2021

Michelle Goldberg is a superlative Times columnist. To my way of thinking, she's a quintessential liberal. I mean that in ways positive and negative. Positive in that she's a warrior for liberty, morality and self-government. Negative in that Goldberg does not, and probably cannot, understand the authoritarian mind, nor its perennial threat to us. Liberals are right to have sympathy for the devil. But there's such a thing as too much.

In her newest column, Goldberg talked about her experience reading Michael Bender's book about the 2020 presidential election, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost. Bender, who's a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, recounts not only "White House disarray and Trump's terrifying impulses," Goldberg writes, but "the people who followed Trump from rally to rally like authoritarian Deadheads."

Bender's description of these Trump superfans, who called themselves the "front-row Joes," is sympathetic but not sentimental. Above all, he captures their pre-Trump loneliness. … There are many causes for the overlapping dysfunctions that make contemporary American life feel so dystopian, but loneliness is a big one.

Goldberg suggests strongly that loneliness might be the cause of the current drift in the United States toward authoritarianism. She quotes The Week's Damon Linker, who cites Hannah Arendt: "Lonely people are drawn to totalitarian ideologies." "'The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,' Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describing those who gave themselves over to all-encompassing mass movements."

I love Arendt, but she's wrong here. She has things in reverse. I don't know if the chief characteristic of the mass man is brutality and backwardness, but I do know that loneliness is the result of brutality and backwardness. In other words, authoritarianism causes alienation, not the other way around. Democracy does not, and cannot, constitute "normal social relationships" to the authoritarian way of thinking, because democracy, to the authoritarian way of thinking, is a moral perversion of the natural order of things, which is to say, "normal social relationships": God over Man, men over women, black over white, etc. Democracy always runs against the grain of "God's law." The authoritarian is always already alienated—from her nation but mostly from herself.

Goldberg cites the American Enterprise Institute's Daniel Cox, who found a link between loneliness and support for the disgraced former president. The "share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise," Cox said. "And these voters disproportionately support Trump." His survey found that "17 percent of Americans said they had not a single person in their 'core social network.'" He added that these "socially disconnected voters were far more likely to view Trump positively and support his re-election than those with more robust personal networks."

Like I said, Michelle Goldberg is a quintessential liberal. She's reading Cox's findings as loneliness causing authoritarianism. It's the reverse, though. How can I be so sure? If loneliness causes authoritarianism, what are potential solutions? Among them would be more social networks, more community, more human bonding, and so on, right?

Guess what? White evangelical Protestants are very social, very communal and very bonded by religion and conviction. God over Man, men over women, black over white, etc.—God's law is the basis for their "normal social relationships." White evangelical Protestants are, moreover, united by their collective authoritarian belief that they have been chosen by God to rule America in God's name for the purpose of hastening the End Times, so that anything is justified as long as it serves Him. Put more plainly, nothing matters but authority and power. There are plenty of lonely people in this world, but making them less lonely isn't going to make many of them less fascist.

How can the authoritarian be alienated from her nation but especially herself while at the same time appear to find connection in communities like white evangelical Protestants? That's a very good question! It gets to the heart of the real problem. The authoritarian mind is taught to never ever ever come to its own conclusions about the world. Truth is whatever Dear Leader says, not what your eyes and ears tell you. This "education" begins before birth and lasts a lifetime. As a consequence, there's no such thing as independent thinking. There's no such thing as freedom of choice. In the collective, there's no such thing as you. As a result, you will always be lonely. Big rallies might seem communal, but they're illusory. You're filling a hole that can't be filled.

Goldberg again cited Hannah Arendt who "described people shaken loose from any definite place in the world as being at once deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being: 'Self-centeredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation.'" Goldberg said the pandemic did that. It shook people loose from "any definite place in the world." No, it didn't. The covid, the lockdowns, the isolation—these did affect authoritarian minds like they did all other minds. The difference, however, is that the authoritarian mind was already shaken loose from its definite place. And their always already-present anxiety rose to ever more feverish pitches the more democracy prepared to overthrow their fuhrer. We should not ease this mind with sympathy. We should break it with more democracy.

Again, it's the reverse. Being "shaken loose from any definite place in the world" does not necessarily make you "deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being." Not if you're already there. If so, already being "deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being" is what shakes you loose "from any definite place in the world." Indeed, you aren't selfish so much as selfless in the most literal sense, as in there's no daylight between you and the collective. You have no sense of self-preservation because you never developed a self to preserve. This makes it very easy for authoritarian people to throw their lives away for the leader. And that's what Michael Bender's reporting shows.

"Toward the end of Bender's book, Saundra reappears," writes Goldberg, referring to a Trump supporter mentioned earlier. "She'd just been at the Capitol for the Jan. 6 insurrection and seemed ready for more. 'Tell us where we need to be, and we just drop everything and we go,' she says. 'Nobody cares about if they have to work. Nobody cares about anything.'1 If you give people's life meaning, they'll give you everything." I don't know why we should read this in any way that's not literal. Saundra says she doesn't care about anything, because she doesn't. Sympathy won't change that.

The thing about quintessential liberals like Michelle Goldberg is they don't imagine, probably because they can't imagine, human relationships completely devoid of the principle of political equality between and among individuals. They can't imagine being uncertain of who they are in the absence of authority. When you don't or can't imagine such a life, the authoritarian mind can seem so confounding that you search for some concrete reason for its suicidal behavior. To the liberal, loneliness seems to be rational cause for authoritarianism. The truth, however, is far uglier, scarier and more dangerous to democracy than most people, not just liberals, seem to know. Nothing causes authoritarianism. It has always been here. It always will be here.==

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/wannabe-aristocrats/

Yesterday, I left you thinking about centibillionaire Warren Buffett's contempt for democratic morality. The sixth-richest person in the world paid 0.10 percent in federal income taxes over the course of four years, according to an analysis by ProPublica. The nonprofit news group obtained 15 years' world of tax returns for thousands of the country's richest people, including the top 25, which includes the Sage of Omaha. He said it's OK for him to pay virtually nothing, because he's giving his fortune away.

That's contempt. In saying philanthropy is better than paying a fair share for a national government of, by and for the American people, Warren Buffett is saying, though of course without saying it out loud, that he's separate from and unequal to American citizenry—on account of normal people paying more than their fair share for a government serving him more than it does them. But there's another layer of contempt I want to draw your attention to today. That's the contempt for work.

The Republicans Party has for decades been successful at portraying the poor (read: nonwhite people) as those who do not work. Because they do not work, the poor look to the government for things they won't provide for themselves. Republican-controlled states still use work as a requisite for the accessing of relief. This requisite amounts to proving one is a worthy enough American citizen. If you can work, you can get help. If you don't work, you don't get help, because only worthy Americans are deserving of help. Anyone who is not worthy of citizenship is someone who is worthy of contempt.

The thing about being poor, however, is that it's work. Hard work. This is so plainly true, I'm not going to bother proving it. The poor are rarely idle, because to be idle is to flirt with death. (That's how close to the bone a chronically impoverished existence is.) Obviously, the poor do not earn incomes with the nonstop labor that comes with being poor, but let's not confuse earning an income with work. If we accept the Republican view that working is a requisite for being a worthy citizen, the poor are the worthiest of all. The poor are deserving of state relief by simple dint of being poor.

But we shouldn't accept the Republican view, because it does not apply equitably or universally. The very obscenely rich are exempted. Always. Yet they are idle. Yet they are unproductive. Yet they sure as hell take more than they give. As the ProPublica expose revealed, the income of the 25 wealthiest people is not derived from labor but from "the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property." The Republicans Party idolizes them as models for us to emulate. Tyler Cowen said that taxing capital gains (the stuff making the very obscenely rich so very obscenely rich) would be un-American. He said that instead we "should prioritize" the "valorization of wealth."

No, the US should prioritize the valorization of work. (In this I mean any kind of work, whether it's compensated or not.) And taxing capital gains is totally American. To be clear, being wealthy isn't the problem. The problem is political. The very obscenely rich of the 21st century are the wannabe aristocrats that Americans feared in the early 19th century. As aristocracy threatened everyone's liberty back then, the wannabes threaten everyone's liberty now. But before we get to the point of using government policy to break their choke-hold, we must demonstrate a depth of contempt for the very obscenely rich that's at least as robust and enduring as their contempt for us.

Again, it's not because the very obscenely rich are so very obscenely rich.

Judith N. Shklar, author of American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion explained Andrew Jackson's view of an aristocracy as

...any group that by its use of its wealth "exercises more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs." It was not wealth as such that was reprehensibly aristocratic, but wealth either gained through governmental favor or used to buy political power and influence. All monopolists and holders of license and charters were aristocrats because they owed their wealth to government grant, and had not earned it by their own efforts. They enjoyed unearned advantages. [my italics]

The aristocrat is not only a political monopolist, he is a moral and cultural threat to the republic as well. The aristocrat is idle and shows contempt for work. The merely rich were unobjectionable, but the "idle rich" were intolerable. The great division among men in society was not between poor and rich, but between "do-somethings" and "do-nothings." Failure to work was not merely immoral in and of itself, it also expressed a social ideology, the contempt for labor. Jacksonian democrats were acutely aware of the traditions that treated work as defiling. That is why so many insisted that by "we the people, we mean emphatically the class which labors.":{:(style="transition-property:color, background, opacity"):}:

ProPublica revealed that the very obscenely rich are so very obscenely rich because most of their money is not taxed. It is not taxed because the government does not see "the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property" as income. They use this wealth to maintain their advantages politically. In other words, they "owed their wealth to government grant, and had not earned it by their own efforts. They enjoyed unearned advantages." They should be, therefore, seen as "reprehensibly aristocratic."

The Jacksonian democrats did not view the poor the way I do. Even so, they are useful in that they give us a history and heritage to draw from. The Republicans and their ideological comrades (think libertarian economist Tyler Cowen) want us to believe that taxing the very obscenely rich is un-American. That's a lie. It's the most American thing of all. The point of using the government to break their power isn't about envy or revenge. It's about the duty of the government to protect the citizenry from tyranny.

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ProPublica is doing the Lord's work. Specifically, investigative reporters Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel are doing it. Two weeks ago, the nonprofit news group published the first in a planned series of pieces revealing, in exquisite detail, the moral character of the very obscenely rich. The series will be based on "a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years." It's a goddamn truth-bomb:

It demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

Their first report, published on June 8, exposed the very obscenely rich as the greatest tax dodgers of them all. But before I get into it, let me say two things. One, Eisinger et al. do more than reveal the truth. They reveal the extent to which the very obscenely rich go to hide it. Two, the very obscenely rich keep lying as the truth is being revealed. I don't see how one can avoid coming to the conclusion that the tax system not only privileges the very obscenely rich. It gives them incentive to lie about their privilege. There's so much lying, in fact, you wonder if being a billionaire means being a liar.

To normal people (that's you), the money that comes in is income. Importantly, income is what you earn with your labor. Sure, you might have some investments here and there yielding a few dividends. Your net worth probably includes the (hopefully increasing) value of your house. But otherwise, by and large, the vast bulk of the money coming into your household is earned, and the word you use to describe that is income. Nearly all the money coming into your household is subject to tax by the US government.

The very obscenely rich are not normal people. To be sure, they have "income" but the vast bulk of the money coming into their households "derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property," Eisinger et al. wrote. Importantly, "those gains are not defined by US laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell." So they rarely sell. They hold onto their assets and they do "labor" for them. Unlike normal people, whose income is what they earn with their labor, the very obscenely rich's "income" is what their assets earn with their asset's "labor." The moral difference between income and "income," and the moral difference between earning and "earning," is the moral difference between normal people and the very obscenely rich.

None of this would be a BFD if the very obscenely rich paid their fair share. They do not. Yes, they pay income tax on income. But, again, the vast bulk of the money coming into their households is not taxable. So the vast bulk of their money is not taxed. In fact, it's impossible to know their real share. Eisinger et al. had to get creative. "To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period," they reported. "We're going to call this their true tax rate." While the median household ($70,000 a year) paid 14 percent, and while couples earning more than $628,300 are going to pay this year the highest rate of 37 percent, the 25 richest paid a total of $13.6 billion in income taxes or "a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent."

To put this in perspective, you have to keep in mind what "earning" means. By the end of 2018, Eisinger et al. wrote, the richest 25 Americans "were worth $1.1 trillion." It would take "14.3 million ordinary American wage earners put together" to earn that much money. In other words, it would take nearly 14 and a half million normal people to work normal hours to earn with their labor what 25 people "earn" not with their labor but with the money they already have. And instead of paying $1.9 billion in income taxes (at the rate the very obscenely rich enjoy) normal people would have to pay $143 billion. Unsaid in the ProPublica report, but worth saying clearly, repeatedly and loudly, is that the US tax system encourages idleness while discouraging actual work. I'm sure Jeff Bezos works very hard but it's not humanly possible to earn with one's labor what Bezos is reportedly worth. To the very obscenely rich, "earning" is meaningless.

It encourages lying, too. Warren Buffett is the sixth-richest person in the world. He's usually seen as an enlightened centibillionaire. Yet the ProPublica report, specifically his reaction to it, shows the Sage of Omaha isn't wise so much as fraudulent. Even as he publicly supported tax reform so that people like his secretary don't pay more in income tax than he does, Buffett was privately hiding his "true tax rate," as determined by ProPublica. It is 0.10 percent. This is possible, because Buffett owns so much of the stock of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, and his company doesn't pay dividends.

Buffett tried justifying that he pays almost nothing in federal income tax by saying he has paid what he legally owed and saying he's going to give away his fortune. "I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing US debt," he wrote to ProPublica.

This is adding insult to injury. First, because Buffett knows full well that raising the income tax on the very obscenely rich, a move he has advocated, would mean squat when the very obscenely rich don't earn incomes with labor, but instead with their assets, which are untaxed as long as they are not sold. If he wanted to reform the tax code, he'd advocate taxing capital gains (the very obscenely rich's assets). But then he'd lose a lot of money. Being a reformer is one thing. Pretending to be is more lucrative.

Buffett's response to the ProPublica report adds insult to injury in a second way—by expressing contempt for democratic accountability. I have no doubt he thinks philanthropy serves society better than government redistribution does, but it's really not up to him. It's up to the will of the American people and their representatives in the government. Like other very obscenely rich people, Buffett is saying without saying that he's separate from and unequal to the rest of us, an attitude coming from the world's sixth-richest person that a free republic should hold in equal contempt.

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===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/crt/

I think it's good that people who know what they are talking about when they talk about critical race theory (CRT) are coming forward to talk about it publicly. If MSNBC's Joy Reid wants to put a CRT expert on every night, more power to her. It's good for the health of the public square for knowledgeable people to speak about ideas and topics they are authorities in for the benefit of democracy and the common good.

But a republic that depends, for its future viability and therefore its freedom, on the quality of information available in the public square, there are limits to this behavior. The American public square does not privilege knowledge. It does not give the benefit of the doubt to truth-tellers. It takes pleasure in heat more than light, conflict more than understanding, and gross characterizations more than explicit fact. So when it comes to critical race theory, we need to do more than explain what it is and is not.

We need to go on the offensive.

Before I go on, let me remind you what all this anti-CRT stuff is about. First, it's not about CRT. Its critics, who include Republicans but also white anti-left liberals like *Jonathan Chait(and, I suppose, Andrew Sullivan), don't care what critical race theory is. They don't care what anti-racism or wokeness or whatever is. All they "know" is that they already "know" everything they need to know, which is that CRT is either anti-white, from the perspective of GOP fascists, or that it's anti-liberal, from the perspective of white anti-left liberals who insist the politics of the 2020s is the same as the politics of the 1990s and who are otherwise drifting toward political irrelevance.*

This anti-CRT stuff is a reaction to a breathtaking confluence of forces no one had witnessed before. I mean the merging of anti-fascists (anti-Trumpists) with reformers like advocates for Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by white cop. Not only did those energies become the greatest voting coalition ever seen—one that defeated an incumbent president, something that has rarely happened in our history—but the merging of these political energies sparked a much-needed and healthy reckoning over the country's history of anti-Black racism. What happened last year (and during and after the election) was an amazing leap forward for this country. Whenever that happens in American history, there's usually a white backlash, though.

And that's what all this anti-CRT stuff is.

But it's more than that. The tell is what's happening in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia and others. In those states, Republican lawmakers are exploiting the former president's supporters, who say they believe he is still the rightful and legitimate president, to enact an agenda they wanted to enact but did not have the opportunity to enact it until the former president lost in what appeared to be, to the former president's supporters, a democracy escaping their ability to control it.

That antifascists (anti-Trumpists) merged with reformers like advocates for Black Lives Matter last spring and last fall to defeat an incumbent president, something that rarely happens in our history, is proof, to the former president's supporters, that election itself was illegitimate. Why? Because, to them, the Black Americans who constitute the foundation of the current president's base of power are illegitimate.

So when state Republican lawmakers (and the useful idiots among white anti-left liberals) allege that critical race theory is running amok in our public schools, colleges and universities—when they accuse institutions of learning of "indoctrinating" children, or even "brainwashing" them into hating white people—what they are really doing is fighting the great leap forward that we all witnessed last spring and last fall when white voters allied with Black voters to save the republic, an event that sparked a last-ditch attempt to cancel the will of the American people by way of insurrection.

This isn't how we go on the offensive though. We go on the offensive by accusing the Republicans of what is plain to see but many won't see because the former president is no longer on the scene, which is fascism. For some reason, Donald Trump's absence has meant all talk of GOP fascism is now déclassé, leaving white anti-left liberals like Chait, Sullivan and others enough room to continue their years' long crusade against anti-racism on college campuses, giving ideological cover to the full-on fascists in state governments who are now policing free speech, free thought and free inquiry.

That's the conclusion we must draw from Republican state laws written to "ban" critical race theory from classrooms and schools but written so vaguely as to cover virtually anything related to race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, the history of slavery or even unkind interpretations of American history. In a very real sense, we are just a few small steps from "banning" ideas to burning books. It's not enough to just explain what critical race theory is, because while we're doing all this explaining, the republic's enemies are in the early stages of forming state and local thought police.

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an 621

"The culture war" is so familiar I don't need to explain what it is. It has been part of the Republican Party's rhetorical repertoire since at least Robert Taft's time. What most people do not understand, however, is nearly every moment in which "the culture war" flares up—over abortion, guns, sexuality, etc.—is rooted in a lie. If more people understood the centrality of lying to "the culture war," more might understand the goal of the GOP's "cultural war" repertoire is making some Americans seem illegitimate.

Consider the case of Mara Gay, a member of the Times' editorial board.1 She was on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Tuesday. The subject of table discussion was Max Boot's new op-ed in the Post on how too many people in this country are still underestimating the dire threat posed by the Republican Party to democracy and the American union.

Joe Scarborough, the co-host, said there's a need to stop being surprised by the GOP's anti-democratic posturing. Gay agreed. "We need to start taking it seriously," she said. When it comes to creating an independent bipartisan body to investigate the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol on January 6, she said the Democrats in the United States Congress should stop asking for the GOP's permission and act alone.

"The reality is that we have a large percentage of Americans … who continue to believe their rights as citizens are under threat by the simple virtue of having to share democracy with others," Mara Gay said. "I think that as long as they see Americanness as the same, as one, with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table … [and] separate Americanness—America—from whiteness. Until we can confront that, this is really going to continue."

Gay illustrated her point with an anecdote: "I was on Long Island this weekend," she said, "and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing … Essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this."

It was this anecdote that made news, not the context the anecdote was attempting to illustrate. More accurately, it was the lie about the anecdote that made news. And it's such lies, I contend, that constitute the foundation for virtually all "culture war" discourse, whether about "political correctness," "cancel culture," "wokeness" or anti-racism. With rare exception, all national debate over topics of interest to the liberal cause rest on countless small sedimentary layers of falsehood. Making it much worse, in my view, is a Washington press corps knowing the truth, but not speaking it.

Here's what made the news Tuesday, all day. Headline: "NYT, MSNBC's Mara Gay: 'Disturbing' to see 'dozens of American flags' on trucks in Long Island. Subheadline: "New York Times board member: There needs to be conversation about 'Whiteness'." The media source was Fox. Fox's headline was repeated by expected outlets, such as the New York Post and National Review, but also surprising outlets, like Yahoo News and RealClearPolitics. And, of course, Breitbart: "Times columnist Mara Gay said Tuesday that she noticed trucks with American flags and was 'disturbed' by what she saw."

The key here isn't just repeating the lie. It's getting a response to the lie, as a result of the repetition, and then getting a third-party to respond to the response. (Again, Fox: "NYT panned for Mara Gay defense following her 'disturbing' American flag remarks: 'Every word here is a lie'." Who accused the Times of lying? A senior editor at The Federalist who was, you know, lying.) Once this pattern has been established, there exists a legitimate controversy worthy of the press corps' attention as well as of public debate between opposing views from across the spectrum. All that might appear to be natural, normal and healthy except for this fact: The entire discourse is based on a lie.

This pattern is everywhere once you see it. It's present even in matters of more complexity than what a Times editorial board member did or did not say. Since Joe Biden took office, we have seen numberless attempts to examine "cancel culture," "wokeness" or anti-racism. Most have been from the point of view of their critics, not their practitioners, or worse—they are predicated on the small sedimentary layers of misrepresentation, distortion and lies about them. The takeaway: So much of what counts as "debate" begins and ends with what liberalism's enemies say liberals say.

Lying is a bug, though. Ideology is the feature. Liberals like Mara Gay can't be right about America, but critics can't turn to history to prove it, because history points in the direction of Mara Gay being absolutely right. So they lie about what she said, thus detaching the issue from shared reality, thus making her seem to confirm what they already believe to be true without bothering to prove it, which is she hates America.

Yet Gay's comments, more than anything else, were grounded in love of country. The anti-democratic forces threatening us are the same ones that sacked and looted the United States Capitol, and as long as being white is seen as the same thing as being a legitimate American—as long as being non-white is seen as the same thing as being an illegitimate American—our democratic union will always face threats from the inside.

Gay never said she was disturbed by flags. She said she was disturbed by the historical fact, symbolized to her by the side-by-side flying of Trump flags and American flags, that "a large percentage" of white Americans continue to look at her Black and wise and beautiful face and refuse to see her as a legitimate American. That Fox and others lied about what she said is a continuation of the history that disturbs Mara Gay, and while that's bad enough, she said, there's something else even more concerning.

"I think there is a large percentage of my colleagues in journalism who are invested in some way in pretending that this isn't the threat that it is," Gay went on to say. "That is a real concern. The Trump voters are not going to get on board with democracy, but they're a minority. You can marginalize them long term. But if [her colleagues in journalism] don't take this threat seriously, we're all going to be in bad shape."

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says less about his popularity/power than power of of soc med monolopies?!

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-blog/?rs=182

edit bd

The former president deleted his blog Wednesday. The reason, according to the Times, was humiliation. After being banned from Twitter and Facebook, a spokesman said Donald Trump would return with "his own platform" that would be the "the hottest ticket in social media" and that would "completely redefine the game."

Turns out it was a blog. It got less attention, according to a Postanalysis, "than the pet-adoption service Petfinder and the recipe site Delish. The blog's prospects hadn't improved since, even though Trump had taken to writing on it more." The Times said the former president became "frustrated after hearing from friends that the site was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant." After less than a month online (29 days), "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump" has vanished from the internet.

What can we glean from this? For one thing, Trump seems to need the public square more than the public square needs Trump. Matter of fact, as the philosopher Karl Popper once predicted, the public square is in better health now that it has become intolerant of the highest-profile representative of intolerance. Some warned "de-platforming" a former president would make him stronger. It would seem to prove accusations of being a victim of mainstream censorship. But that's being disproved in real-time. His puny blog isn't why he "looks small and irrelevant." Politics is why.

More specifically, legitimacy is why. Trump doesn't have any, not anymore, and he didn't have much to begin with. He lost the popular vote in 2016. During his entire tenure, his job approval rating never crested 50 percent. (I'm talking about the polling aggregate.) On Jan. 5, 2021, he stood at 42.6 percent approval. By the time he left office, which was after the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol, an insurrection in his name, he stood at 38.6 percent. (Both per FiveThirtyEight.) NBC News ran a poll in late April. It found he had an approval rating of 32 percent. This man may have a grip on the base of the GOP, but he no longer has a grip on the popular imagination.

The Washington press corps brayed and mewled over four years about Trump going to war with it, but make no mistake. There was no better way to sell its wares than for a sitting president to make everyone aware of them. Normal people don't work that way, though. Normal people don't pay attention to things they don't want to pay attention to. (Reporters and producers, however, do.) Once Trump made it clear he stood against democracy itself, a popular view that galvanized at some point between Election Day and Insurrection Day and Inauguration Day, normal people no longer wanted to pay attention. When you stand against democracy, what more do you need to know?

That's my take. To pay attention to Donald Trump again, to the degree we were all paying attention to him, is to recognize his political legitimacy, which most normal people most of the time, if current polling is any indication, are just not willing to do—not after burning up every habit and norm, not after being impeached twice, not after betraying the country. Some of the Republicans are now saying Trump would be the next presidential nominee, easy-peasy. That's plausible. Winning, however, is something else. They appear to seriously underestimate what it would take for most normal people. They appear to seriously underestimate, moreover, the potential for backlash that comes after asking normal people to pay attention to Trump again.

my friend and mentor Walter Shapiro is a confessed optimist. In his latest for Roll Call, the dean of American politics said despite everything, he has faith in the people to choose democracy over tyranny. "I cling to the stubborn belief that American democracy will be saved by an outpouring of voters, in 2022 and beyond, who understand that the nation's freedoms are on the ballot," Mr. Shapiro wrote.

It was this part of his column, however, that really struck me: "In an ideal world, Never Trump Republicans will vote Democratic in the short run because preserving democracy is infinitely more important than honest differences over taxes, government regulation and foreign policy. In an ideal world, GOP efforts to restrict the franchise will inspire record turnout from Black and other minority voters."

In this, I confess to have faith, too, in the American people. Most of them most of the time are now intolerant of the highest-profile representative of intolerance. Most of them most of the time are not going to change their minds about him. This, to me, is the anchor of a paradigm shift, the thing around which future politics will revolve. To pay attention is to recognize as good something unthinkable to most normal people. The more the Republicans lean into Trump, the more they lean into the whirlwind.

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===

==

One hundred political scientists who study an array of topics, including the back-sliding of democracies into autocracies, co-signed a letter Tuesday urging the United States Congress to pass legislation protecting and expanding access to the franchise. The joint letter came as the president called for the same thing during a speech commemorating the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. It came as conservative Democrats in the Senate are wrestling with ways to pass such legislation, and even if they should.

The letter was in reaction to myriad efforts by lawmakers in GOP-controlled states to continue efforts begun in 2013 to shrink their electorates to sizes prejudicial to the Republicans. Those efforts were supercharged in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The former president keeps lying about losing due to voter fraud. State-level Republicans are using the lie to suppress voting in the name of "election integrity."

"The most effective remedy for these anti-democratic laws at the state level is federal action to protect equal access of all citizens to the ballot and to guarantee free and fair elections," said the letter, posted by New America, a think-tank. "Just as it ultimately took federal voting rights law to put an end to state-led voter suppression laws throughout the South, so federal law must once again ensure that American citizens' voting rights do not depend on which party or faction happens to be dominant in their state legislature, and that votes are cast and counted equally, regardless of the state or jurisdiction in which a citizen happens to live. This is widely recognized as a fundamental principle of electoral integrity in democracies around the world."

This letter is good in and of itself, and I trust the Democratic leadership is taking notes. What I find most interesting, though, is its effort to define democracy morally. The Republicans "are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, the most basic principle underlying the right of all adult American citizens to participate in our democracy."1 If you're not looking for it, you might miss it. What this does is place equality at the heart of democracy. Vitally, without equality, a democracy can't be free, fair or full. This is what's at stake. This is what pro-democracy activists are fighting to preserve.

Of course, democracy is at the heart of our national myth. But anyone with any sense of our history knows democracy really was not at the heart of the founding. Many of the framers likened democracy to anarchy and violence. A republic was the preserve of those who had the capacity to participate in it, which was to say, enough invested in the established order to fight efforts to blow it up. The "men" in "all men are created equal" was meant to convey equality among equals, which, to the founders, obviously didn't include property-less men, non-white men and sure-as-hell not women.

So what we're really talking about when we talk about democracy is the slow, crawling expansion of the democratic franchise since the founding. First, political participation was restricted to property-owning white men. Then it was expanded to all white men. Then all men, white and non-white (after the Civil War and the ratification of the 14th Amendment). Then all women. With each expansion, the franchise became more equal but not fully equal. That didn't happen until the civil-rights era of the last century.

The 100-year reign of Jim Crow in the American South (but by no means restricted to the American South) was back-sliding of the kind we are now being warned about. After all, the Reconstruction amendments (the 13th, 14th and 15th) granted equal rights and protection to former slaves. But just as Republican-controlled states are now shrinking electorates down to prejudicial sizes, Democrat-controlled states back then did, too. District-by-district, state-by-state, they whittled at equal rights and protection until white people were, in effect, feudal lords. It took federal law and federal power (the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act) to smash these autocracies. It took federal law and power to make American democracy liberal.2

So when 100 political scientists call on Congress to protect democracy, what they are really calling for is the protection of all the gains made in our history, and that reversing them not only offends democracy but morality, too. This is important to keep in mind. The Republicans in Georgia, Florida, Texas and other states, most of them in the American South, deny allegations of voter suppression. They say they are defending democracy. That can be true only if democracy is defined by the mere possibility of voting. It cannot be true when democracy is defined morally. Without a commitment to a moral principle — equality — a democracy can't be free, fair or full.

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===

United States is at the mercy of those who think they're God's elect

John Stoehr

I'm going to try connecting things that don't at first seem related. They are the fight over a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection; the disproportional number of covid...

===

Donie O'Sullivan is a reporter for CNN. His beat appears to be American conspiracy theories. He was on Anderson Cooper's show last night with reporting on a QAnon conference last weekend during which former Donald Trump adviser and pardoned traitor Michael Flynn said a Myanmar-style military coup "should happen" in America.

That some people in this country long for purifying violence to "reinstate" Donald Trump to his "rightful place" is not what got my attention, though. What did was Donie O'Sullivan's editorial remark at the end of his report. This is what he said:

I spend a lot of time reading these pro-Trump forums, reading these QAnon forums online, and speaking to Trump supporters, and I will say of all the conspiracy theories we hear, this talk from Americans about a coup, cheering a coup, and hoping for a coup, in the United States is one of the most chilling things I hear.

Before I go on, I should say O'Sullivan appears to be an immigrant. (I think he's Irish, given his accent.) As such, I don't expect him to be as attuned to American political culture as I'd expect a native-born American to be. Indeed, as a non-native, I'd expect him to be more attuned to the American civic religion than native-born Americans generally are, because fealty to the civic religion is so often demanded of immigrants.

This civic religion believes military coups and their consequent dictatorships cannot happen in the United States. Ordinary Americans do not want them, moreover, because it would be against their civic religion. You can't quite tell from the written version of his remark, but when you watch the clip, you can hear O'Sullivan put a little more stress on "American" when he says he's chilled to hear Americans, of all people on this earth, talking "about a coup, cheering a coup, and hoping for a coup, in the United States." Implicit point: this is what Trump has done to the globe's oldest democracy.

I suspect some of O'Sullivan's remark was showmanship. (He does work for CNN, after all.) But I think some of it, maybe most of it, reflects the conventional wisdom in Washington—that it's shocking to hear Americans talk this way. It's not shocking, though. It's familiar and quite normal when you know where to look. Fact is, lots of Americans believe they are God's chosen people. They believe the end of the world is coming, according to God's divine plan. They believe the US Constitution is a covenant with them only, and that a genocidal purge will preface Christ's return.

This is the End Times I'm talking about, a story about global events culminating ic that "reinstates" the King of Kings to his rightful place. It's a story millions of Americans tell themselves and their children. It's a story in which the messy and hard-to-understand world around us is no such thing. Instead, it is polarized as conflict between God's friends and God's enemies. The only difficulty is decoding the signs and symbols God lays out. Reality isn't real. Reality is a sinful illusion. What's real is the trail of secrets leading the chosen safely to The End. Argument, language, reasoning—they don't matter. Only they can know The Truth.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that religion is off-limits. Therefore, the conventional wisdom in Washington does not see, because it will not see, that tens of millions of Americans already believe democracy is getting in the way of God's plan, that democracy is—and I mean this seriously—desecrating the sacredness of the US Constitution. As one critic put it, the Venn diagram showing the overlap of QAnon believers and white evangelical Protestants (and related groups) is actually a circle. When you stand with God against His enemies, you have God's permission to hate.

That's their religion. No, it's not a cult. It's more than that. It's deeper than that. The hate felt by the former president's supporters during four years' worth of political rallies is the same hate for America as it stands, not as they desire it to stand, that right-wing religious radicals have felt since post-Civil War America. That's when Charles Darwin's theories and what they determined about humanity's place in God's divine scheme first gained traction in the United States. Every single intellectual development—from evolution then to Critical Race Theory now—has been met with such hate. I don't understand why the conventional wisdom looks away from history.

Because it's easier, I guess. It's easier to maintain the myth of the civic religion; to be shocked by Americans talking about a military coup; to blame the former president for imperiling the world's oldest democracy. It's easier to respect religion without scrutinizing it too much, and risk discovering it's steeped in hate, which might force the conventional wisdom in Washington to take responsibility. On this one-year anniversary since Trump gassed Americans out of the way for a photo-op of him holding a Bible in front of a church, we need the truth. And that's never been easy.

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===

521

Journalist John Harwood had a piece in CNN Sunday reflecting on an essay published in 2012 that accurately predicted the coming of today's GOP. "Let's just say it: the Republicans are the problem" was written by Thomas Mann, who was at the time with the Brookings Institution, along with Norm Ornstein, who is still with the American Enterprise Institute. The Republicans, they said, had become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." Sound familiar?

I have been teaching a class for a few years, on and off, at Yale and Wesleyan on how to understand American politics. I assign Mann and Ornstein's essay every time. But I didn't know some important context Harwood provides, meaning that the essay landed with a thud nine years ago, even among what are now called anti-GOP conservatives.

Hardwood calls on Charlie Dent to comment. He's a former Republican moderate from Pennsylvania, who is now a talking head for CNN. He told Harwood that, "I thought they overstated things." He added: "I don't like where we're heading, but don't think it's inevitable that we get to that terrible place." William Kristol pooh-poohed Mann and Ornstein's essay, too. He told Harwood of his feelings at the time. "People like me were thinking, 'Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c'mon.'" That was before Donald Trump's ascent and the consequent demise of his magazine, The Weekly Standard. (Kristol later joined other anti-GOP conservatives to found The Bulwark.)

Harwood's piece is good. I encourage you to read it. But I want to make the case for a more prescient essay. It was published in 2004 in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq by The Chronicle Review, an obscure monthly supplement to The Chronicle of Higher Education, itself obscure. I assign it alongside Mann and Ornstein's essay. But if theirs had little impact, Alan Wolfe's had none at all. (No one in the United States Congress or the Washington press corps is being asked how they feel about it now.) With all due respect to Mann and Ornstein, I think Wolfe's is more important, because it gives a name to "where we're heading," a name that even John Harwood seems to avoid.

Alan Wolfe is a political scientist and sociologist at Boston College. He is or was the director of its Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. In 2004, he was searching for ways to explain Republican behavior after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the launch of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was, in other words, doing what Harwood did, but instead of looking to pundits like Mann and Ornstein, Wolfe looked way, *way back to scholars like himself, this time to Carl Schmitt, who was briefly the leading exponent of fascist political thought. Fascism is "where we're heading" now, but Wolfe saw the first stirrings of it over 17 years ago.*

Using Schmitt's The Concept of the Political as a lens through which to see the politics of the early 2000s, Wolfe wrote that "the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the policies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself." Wolfe goes on to explain that:

*Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes.

Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency … the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.1*

I think Alan Wolfe used the word "conservative" for a couple of reasons. One, because he didn't feeling like being charitable that day. Two, more likely, because "fascist" was not available to him in 2004. I like to think if he were to rewrite this essay, he'd make room for conservatives like Norm Ornstein, or Liz Cheney for that matter, in order to establish the boundaries of acceptable behavior in a liberal democracy in which some things really are above politics, such as the political legitimacy of a rival faction.

"Fascist," however, continues to get side-eye from mainstream commentators like John Harwood, I think because it so easily evokes images of gas chambers. But as Wolfe makes clear, it doesn't take genocide to make a fascist. What it takes a particular and particularly coherent worldview in which everyone outside one's group is the enemy. As Harwood said, Mann and Ornstein were right. Their diagnosis of the GOP is undeniable. But Alan Wolfe was more right. What's more, he gave us a vocabulary.

We should use it.

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==

521

Editorial Board, as I hope you have noticed, is not in the business of making arguments for the sake of argumentation. It does not invest time in fights over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (The Editorial Board, for this reason, will never see The Big Money. It's too shrewd.) It works hard to read politics critically and come to concrete conclusions for the sake of normal people and the common good.

There's a reason I say this. Sometimes the Editorial Board is ahead of the conventional wisdom in Washington such that when the conventional wisdom in Washington eventually catches up, there's a feeling of whiplash. Before this past week, I'd been arguing for a year or so that the nightmare will not be over after Donald Trump's presidency comes to an end. (There are reasons aplenty, but primarily no matter the crime, obscenity or moral outrage, about 40 percent of the electorate approved of Trump during his term.) Then this week, the conventional wisdom in Washington appeared to awaken to oh my God the nightmare isn't over how could this happen! I scrambled for a day to find out what I missed. Turns out I didn't miss anything.

Something triggered the prevailing discourse, though. I'm not sure what. Perhaps it was the Republicans in the United States House of Representatives knocking Wyoming Congressman Liz Cheney from the leadership. Perhaps it was the Republicans at the state level passing laws to suppress voting. Perhaps it was the Republicans in both chambers of the Congress opposing a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 sacking and looting of the United States Capitol. Perhaps it was the GOP doing the most unbecoming thing of all in Washington: sticking with the loser. Whatever the reason, this week's punditry seems to finally recognize the nightmare for what it is.

Here's Paul Waldman, a columnist at the Post: "Because his party has so aggressively worked to twist and corrupt the US electoral system, [Donald Trump] could clearly lose both the popular and electoral votes and still become president again." Here's Perry Bacon Jr., also a columnist at the Post: "Presented with a clear chance to move on from Trumpism after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the GOP has instead continued its drift toward anti-democratic action and white grievance. The future looks scary."

This part, from Bacon, is the scariest to me: "If Republicans win the governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin next year, taking total control in those key swing states, they could impose all kinds of electoral barriers for the next presidential election. The Republicans are laying the groundwork to refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic presidential victory should the GOP hold a House majority."

There are many examples of the conventional wisdom in Washington getting triggered now for some reason instead of, I dunno, after an attempted coup d'etat. All of them, however, focus on the United States Senate, especially Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, who is key to passing a major democracy reform bill, the one thing that will do the most to prevent the country from sliding into autocracy. I wrote about Manchin Tuesday. I suggested there's hope for passage. But even as I was writing the piece, something was happening to give us even more hope. The fact that nearly everyone missed it seems to illustrate the conventional wisdom's myopia.

And when I say nearly everyone missed it, I mean nearly everyone missed it. The only two people to report on what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday were Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota from The Intercept, and since I don't trust anything from The Intercept, I tracked down what Schumer said myself, and whaddayaknow? Schumer said what he's been saying for months, which is the filibuster is not going to get in the way of democracy, because democracy is too important. Here's the quote1:

The letter that Senators Murkowski and Manchin talked about, which was the Voting Rights Act, is actually authorized through 2032. So, their letter to us saying authorize it, well, it's pretty much done for—we'll all be in the Senate here in 2032, and I think we look forward to voting on it. Look, the bottom line, as I said, S.1 is very, very important to our democracy. You cannot let millions of people's rights be taken away. Senator [Gary] Peters [of Michigan] gave a little presentation also on how it would affect elections in key states and how it would have changed things dramatically. One of the things that stuck out in my mind was that … in Wisconsin, the vote in the House of Representatives, 53 percent of the vote was Democratic, but the Republicans had some huge percentage of the seats. I think it was two-thirds. These kinds of things just are abhorrent to our democracy and we must change them, and we will. And as I've said before, failure is not an option and everything will be on the table. We're continuing [to] have the discussions within the whole caucus.2

It baffles me why this was not more widely reported. I mean, here's a Democrat saying another Democrat is wrong. Isn't there a law requiring journalists to report "Dems in disarray"? It didn't get play in the Post, the Times, the AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, USA Today, none of them. Only *The Intercept, which deserves credit for reporting that Manchin's and Murkowski's proposal to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act made no sense whatever given that it's already been reauthorized. I did not know that, but I'm also not a member of the Washington press corps, people you'd expect to know that.*

Importantly, Schumer said failure is not an option and everything will be on the table. That suggests that nixing the filibuster is 1) optional and 2) increasingly optional in the face of things that are abhorrent to our democracy. Schumer added that we must change them, and we will, which suggests when not if. The question, therefore, is timing. And timing is going to be determined primarily by how the Republicans are willing to behave.

I think it comes down to this. Are the Republicans going to act less fascist than they have been since January 6? If the answer is yes, then the Democrats are in a pickle. They won't feel the pressure necessary for enacting sweeping democracy reforms. If the answer is no, then the Democrats are going to be in a position in which they are forced to act in ways that would ordinarily seem nakedly partisan. To build the pressure necessary to nix the filibuster, though, they are going to need the conventional wisdom in Washington to be on their side, which is to say, conventional wisdom saying that it's OK to act nakedly partisan. I think this past week saw the beginning of that process.

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===

521

The Republicans in the United States House of Representatives voted this morning to install New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik as chairwoman of the House GOP conference, replacing Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. As you know, Cheney kept telling the truth about the former president, meaning he's a treasonous loser, while Stefanik kept winking at the lie that Donald Trump is the legitimate president.

I've talked this week about what all this means. The Republicans are now officially an anti-democracy party. They are also an anti-policy party. They can get almost nothing done, because their leaders are 100 percent focused on stopping nearly everything from getting done. All of this is obvious. It's exhausting having to point out the truth to those unwilling to see it. (Not you!) But since it's the end of the week, and I'm tired anyway, I may as well go the distance. The Republicans are now a pro-terrorism party.

The seeds were planted on January 6. They have been watered every day since by nearly all the Republicans in the United States Congress who failed to indict the former president, who have failed to convict the former president, and who have otherwise minimized, overlooked, or defended the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol, an attempt to overthrow our republic worse than the September 11 terrorist attacks. Insurgencies are attempts to use violence for political ends when normal channels stop producing desirable results. In other words, the January 6 insurrection was terrorism. Anyone siding with it, even in the least, is complicit.

Getting rid of a truth-teller like Liz Cheney, and replacing her with a bootlicker like Elise Stefanik, is not something ideologues do out of fear or cowardice. It is a rational process by which they follow what appear to be rational but amoral incentives. This morning, after the House GOP voted, Stefanik said, "Voters determine the leader of the Republican Party, and President Trump is the leader that they look to. He is an important voice in the Republican Party and we look forward to working with him."

This might sound insane, but only if one persists in believing that Republicans are dedicated to the union of the United States. Once you drop that idea, everything makes sense. When a party clings to a loser, it has decided the entire principle of winning and losing, fair and square, is no longer a principle worthy of respect. It has decided the Democrats are no longer opponents—they are enemies. It has decided losing to the enemy is a crime deserving revenge. It has decided loyalty to the union of the United States has become an obstacle to obeying the will of God. When the US Constitution is a "covenant" between God and His chosen, nothing matters and anything's possible.

Marjorie Taylor Greene follows the same rational but amoral incentives. The Georgia Congresswoman made news yesterday. She accosted New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, accusing her of being in league with terrorists.1 Greene is perhaps the most vocal defender of the former president. She is perhaps the most vocal apologist for the January 6 insurrection. At the very least, she tolerates using violence or threats of violence as means of achieving political ends, which is to say, tolerates terrorism.2 But there's more here than Marjorie Taylor Greene's obscene hypocrisy.

Greene is making a bet. She's betting there are more (white) Americans than not who have lost faith in American democracy and the union of the United States. Because they have given up on America as a good and noble covenant between and among individuals and communities, for the betterment of all, they will, according to Greene's logic, find security and future hope only after making a choice: Which terrorism is better? The one serving God's (white) chosen people or the one serving His enemies.

God isn't on their side, but racism is. And when racism is on your side, you have the advantage. I don't mean there are more people who openly demonstrate hostility toward non-white people. I mean there are more people in this country who will not believe Marjorie Taylor Greene would murder a member of the Congress if the rational but amoral incentives pointed in that direction. They won't believe it, because white people tend to give other white people endless sums of benefit of the doubt. Racism is blinding lots of (white) Americans to the dangers of a party that's now pro-terrorism.

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===

// antifa concept?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/republicans-fact-free/

The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, has lately been making a fetish of something called "critical race theory" (CRT). This has prompted academics to defend it. It's not a radical political ideology, they say. It's merely a form of critical inquiry. It is not the boogeyman it's being made out to be. There's nothing to fear.

I understand the need to defend critical race theory. Colleges and universities are beset on one hand by Republican fascists accusing scholars of indoctrinating students, on the other by anti-left liberals accusing the same of hostility toward freedom of speech. Meanwhile, administrations act more like corporations that privilege efficiency over research and teaching. It's enough to think CRT is an appropriate hill to die on.

This, however, overlooks the larger dynamic at work. The more you defend CRT as an ideologically neutral mode of seeing and thinking about the world, the more the propagandists are going to do what they do best, which is terrifying the ignorant. More importantly, CRT defenders are not seeing the true nature of their opponents. From the authoritarian perspective, modes of seeing and thinking about the world are never ideologically neutral because once you learn to see and think about the world on your own, you don't need authoritarian leaders to tell you what to see and think.

I risk making them seem like cartoons. I risk making people who treasure "traditional" and "conservative" and "Judeo-Christian" values look like they yippy-skippied over the Enlightenment on their way from the Spanish Inquisition to the 21st-century America. But it's worth the risk given that most respectable white people, in my opinion, tend to overestimate the societal effects of liberal arts education. Critical thinking is so uncontroversial among respectable white people as to be barely worth mentioning. The authoritarians, however, see it quite clearly for what it is—an existential threat.

This is why the particulars of critical race theory don't matter.1 (You don't care about the particulars when you're fighting for survival!) This is also why explaining those particulars to people who seem to fear them won't change their minds if you don't also take into account that explaining the particulars of critical race theory can itself be seen as intolerable aggression. What most of them fear is loss of social control. What most fear is loss of authority. Where you see an individual merely muddling through life the best she can, coming to the best conclusions she can, most of them see an individual whose ideological aggression is so monstrous as to justify any response.

Respectable white people look at the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, and marvel at the fact that Americans consuming its propaganda inhabit a fact-free world. I think what they misunderstand is lying isn't a bug. It's a feature. Facts are available to individuals to see and think about on their own, free and independent of authorities licensed to say what individuals see and think. Facts, therefore, are aligned politically with perceived enemies. A rational response to facts is nonstop lying. So "alternate facts" are not a result of authoritarian politics. They are a first principle.

Critical race theory is not a political ideology, but it may as well be to the world of the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale. It might as well be because anything that teaches individuals to see and think about facts independent and free of groupthink compromises the integrity of the authoritarian's grip on the group. Case in point is Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. The Republican believes the former president tried bringing down the republic. She is factually correct. For the "crime" of seeing and thinking about the world on her own, she's now being punished. The House Republicans are poised to purge her from the House conference leadership. The Republicans are not individualists. They are collectivists enforcing groupthink.

Respectable white people marvel at the fact that Americans consuming right-wing propaganda inhabit a fact-free world. As a consequence, they do not take it seriously. People who insist on inhabiting a fact-free world are not just ignorant—not when democracy depends on the ability of individuals to associate and organize themselves for the purpose of self-rule. When huge numbers of people inhabit a fact-free world, and collectivist leaders police the integrity of that groupthink, they threaten not only democracy's ability to function minimally, but its survival. Liz Cheney is now being reassimilated into the collective. Democracy itself faces the very same fate. Do not marvel at these people and their fact-free world. Regard them as the danger they are.

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===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/american-dynasties/?rs=182

i  follow the thinking of a handful of conservative-but-honest writers. Nearly all think infrastructure investments are wise. That would be good for business. Whatever's good for business is ipso facto good. What they quibble with is cost. How on earth is the president going to pay for the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan? We're talking about upwards of $5 trillion! You can't just soak the rich to pay for it!

You don't need to. At a public event Tuesday, United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said something that had a lot of us nodding our heads. Yep, there's always been plenty of money. What has been missing is the political will to collect it. "It's really shocking and distressing to see estimates suggesting that the gap between what we're collecting in taxes on current tax and what we should be collecting—if everybody were paying for taxes that are due—that amounts to over $7 trillion over a decade," she said.

Joe Biden has proposed raising the effective rates on large corporations, many of which pay zip in federal levies, as well as very obscenely rich individuals. That, he said during last week's State of the Union address, is how the government would pay for public investments for the purpose of competing with autocracies around the globe.

If Yellen is correct, however, Biden's proposals could be funded merely by enforcing existing law. What we're talking about isn't just a lot of money. What we're talking about is transformative societal change. We're talking about, therefore, the power of the very obscenely rich to overrule transformative societal change as a result of being so very obscenely rich they can dodge paying their fair share. We're talking about the government's ugly complicity in serving these monied interests by not enforcing existing law and its dereliction of duty to serve the people and the common good.

Correction. We should be talking about these things. So far, we're only talking about what we want to spend and where the money's coming from. The stakes, however, is so much higher than jobs and childcare (and even defeating global autocracy). Supposed we achieved these things, what then? We'd still be here, which is to say still beholden to unelected (white) men with more money and power than the world has ever known.

Consider this. There are now in existence eight centibillionaires. Seven of them are American. These (white) men combined are worth more than the annual budgets of most sovereign nations. Our discourse focuses on America being a free country where the plucky and smart can get rich. We envy those who succeed. Our discourse does not, however, focus on this: no unelected person should have that much power.

Before you say there's a difference between being rich and being powerful, let me say I wasn't born yesterday. Money equals political power. More money equals more power. Centibillions equal centibillionaire power. You, me and everyone we know can call the White House to leave a message. I'm pretty sure Joe Biden takes Warren Buffett's call, though. Lived everyday experience speaks truthfully. This is why accusations of socialism every time liberals suggest raising taxes are ridiculous. This isn't about confiscating private property in the name of magical utopia. It's about restraining democratically the unlimited power of men politically unaccountable to the people.

in my opinion, inherited power—which is to say, inherited wealth—is problematic, but tolerable under certain levels. Everything above a said amount, however, should be taxed maximally. What should a threshold and tax rate be? That's for democracy to decide. (I'd say 100 percent on estates worth over $10 million.) What I do know is that inherited power should be as offensive to civic morality and the democratic faith as the hereditary right of monarchs (and white supremacists) to rule. Judging by our discourse, though, it isn't offensive. Being born so rich as to be aristocratic is enviable. If we're going to change things, start there — by evoking the old contempt for nobility.

We shouldn't, for instance, just grin and bear a plan to close a tax loophole affecting the scions of centibillionaires. We should cheer it on with patriotic fervor. I won't get into the numbers, but this from Bloomberg gets to the gist. "Ending that practice and raising the rate would amount to the biggest curb on dynastic wealth in decades, altering an American economic landscape dominated by a few wealthy families" (my italics).

These same wealthy families, the sons and daughters of rich (white) men long dead, have dominated the "American economic landscape" for going on half a century. And they have continued to dominate not because they made more and better widgets, like their patres familias did, but because they are so very obscenely rich they can pay armies of tax attorneys to find more and better ways to dodge paying their fair share. Or they can fund the campaigns of Republicans who will do everyone in their name. The result has been $7 trillion left uncollected. Does that sound worthy of contempt?

It should.

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===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-insane/

Forgive me for repeating myself. The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, is so powerful it can bend political reality. The latest evidence comes from James Carville, whom I'd normally recommend ignoring with prejudice. The former adviser to Bill Clinton and cable-news talking head said recently the Democrats should put the kibosh on talking about "wokeness." Normal people just don't talk like that.1

Carville hasn't been right about much in quite some time. (He thought United States Senator Michael Bennett should have been the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nominee.) Moreover, political rhetoric of any kind being used now by the left or the right is almost certainly going to mean zip by 2022, by which time about 22 billion news cycles will have churned.2 Swing voters who make the difference will be thinking about pretty anything other than the boutique anxieties of out-of-touch consultants.

James Carville is right about one thing, though. The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, is making a fetish of "wokeness." That fetish gets the attention of out-of-touch but still-influential consultants like Carville, who in turn urge the Democrats to act more like Republicans, even though the party has unified control of Washington. Importantly, "moderate" Democrats seem to agree.3 Behold the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale! This is the power to bend political reality!

In fairness, I agree that normal people don't talk about "wokeness." In fairness, most normal people don't care. If "wokeness" is the word Democratic Party insiders and social-justice activists prefer in talking about the struggle for freedom and equality, more power to them. But if we're going to talk about what most normal people want from the Democrats, let's not forget their bias for reason, peace and prosperity. Above all, the truth. James Carville, in urging the Democrats to make like Republicans, is defeating his purpose. To make like a Republican is to make everyone feel crazy.

I mean "crazy" in the sense Harry Frankfurt intended. In 2006's *On Truth, the moral philosopher described the ethical effect of lies. They are not just deceptions. They are not just duplicity. They are injuries. "Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality," he wrote. "So they are intended, in a very real sense, to make us crazy." But more than that, they are authoritarian injuries. "The most irreducibly bad thing about lies is that they contrive to interfere with, and to impair, our natural effort to apprehend the real state of affairs," Frankfurt wrote. "They are designed to prevent us from being in touch with what is really going on. In telling his lie, the liar tries to mislead us into believing that the facts are other than they actually are. He tries to impose his will on us."4*

The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, told normal people over the weekend the Biden administration planned to limit meat-eating as part of its policies to combat climate change policies. The news ping-ponged across the apparatus until esteemed members of the Republican Party at the state and national levels denounced the plan as tyrannical. Thing is, it was "completely imaginary,"wrote CNN's peerless Daniel Dale. "1) The Daily Mail ran an article that dishonestly connected Biden's climate plan with a not-at-all-about-Biden study. 2) Others on the right just ran with this." In typically methodical and painstaking fashion, he laid out what happened, how and why. Dale's job is chasing down serious public lies. Dale's job is keeping him busy.

But fact-checking serious public lies won't stop them. There are two reasons. One, the Republicans inhabit an almost purely fictional view of American politics. Two, neutral observers, like the Washington press corps and, to an extent, political consultants like James Carville, keep honoring that almost purely fictional view of American politics by taking it seriously. By honoring it by taking it seriously, the rest of us end up giving this almost purely fictional view of American politics enough leverage to bend reality and make everyone free crazy. It's plausible to say the Democrats should emulate the Republicans in order to win the congressional elections. As plausible, however, is to say that emulating them will chase swing voters by making them all feel crazy.

How do we stop it? I think by seeing through the lie to what's genuinely intended, which is to say, through the lie toward a conscious authoritarian intent to injure our democratic republic. Lying about the Biden administration's "war on meat" is by itself silly, but in context, a grotesque attempt to dominate not only a gullible television audience but hard-nosed empiricists like Daniel Dale whose life is almost totally consumed by fact-checking, which in turn consumes the energies of many more of us, which consumes the attention spans of people who want to talk about something else.

This kind of dominance is ideal for a party that has not only run out of ideas, but is hostile toward the idea of ideas. Ideas and a commitment to seeing them through require recognizing the legitimacy of those of a political opposition, which is impossible. Ideas and a commitment to seeing them through demand grounding in facts that the other side can debate with equal veracity. The Republican don't want that, because the Republicans can't win that way. So they have constructed a right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, in order to skip factual debate. With it, they can foment enough instability, chaos and, yes, insanity to create a desire among normal people for a strongman to come and fix things.5 They are, as Harry Frankfurt intimated, setting the groundwork for a fuhrer-king "to impose his will on us." The last thing the Democrats should be is complicit in the Republicans' descent to hell.

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===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/supreme-court-conservative/

js edit bd

In Friday's column, I said the Republicans seem to have frightened David Brooks, which suggests the party has frightened respectable white people, too. I consider the Times columnist to be representative of the conventional wisdom of that great globular middle of American politics. The more these people fear the Republicans, the better.

Today, I want to take this a step further. If I'm right in thinking that respectable white people are less willing to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt, on account of most of them being okie-dokie with Donald Trump's attempt to overturn a free and fair presidential election, this is an ideal time to push them, by way of persuasion, to an important conclusion, to wit: conservatism has become a byword for barbarism.

Consider a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court. In Jones v. Mississippi, the court ruled a person convicted of murder while a minor does not have to be shown to be "permanently incorrigible" to be imprisoned for life without parole. In a 6-3 decision, the court's six conservative justices reversed years of progress in the courts to show mercy toward juveniles who had committed heinous crimes. The AP: "Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said previous decisions only require a judge to consider 'an offender's youth and attendant characteristics' before imposing a sentence of life without parole. Kavanaugh rejected a more demanding standard."

In fact, Miller and Montgomery held that life without parole for juveniles was justifiable only in the worst of the worst cases—if the convicted person cannot be rehabilitated or, in other words, is "permanently incorrigible." Kavanaugh said his opinion was in keeping with those previous rulings, but it was a departure from them. He said Miller and Montgomery didn't require a more demanding standard, but, um, they did. Only Justice Clarence Thomas was honest. He said the old decisions were wrong anyway.

All this is made worse by the facts of the case. According to Slate's Mark Joseph Stern, quoting Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissenting opinion, Brett "Jones was 'the victim of violence and neglect that he was too young to escape.' His biological father was an alcoholic who physically abused his mother, who had severe mental health problems. His stepfather abused him, too, using 'belts, switches, and a paddle.' He openly expressed his hatred for Jones. When Jones moved to Mississippi to live with his grandparents, he abruptly lost access to medication he took for mental health issues, including hallucinations and self-harm. Jones' grandfather beat him, as well." Twenty-three days after his 15th birthday, young Brett Jones stabbed his grandpa to death.

Jones was convicted after confessing to the murder. He became a model prisoner. His grandmother, the victim's widow, asked for his release. Jones met the criteria required by Miller and Montgomery. He had demonstrated corrigibility. So the court didn't only make a return to free and open society impossible for Jones. It handed judgment down on the idea of reform, to wit: that reform, however much a free and open society depends on it, is a delusion. No amount of rehabilitation will change bad people. Brett Jones' fate was sealed the moment he was born. That he was born into violence and suffering merely means he deserved it. As for jailing him for life, the court is just furthering a process begun by God, the only true source of goodness and mercy. If all that doesn't sound conservative so much as barbarous, that's because you're right.

That Kavanaugh, and presumably the rest of the conservative justices, were dishonest about whether or not Jones was in keeping with Miller and Montgomery suggests they know a ruling allowing juveniles to be put away for life without any chance of getting out is indefensible. They know Jones is going to get flak from legal activists on the right and the left, people who won Miller and Montgomery thanks to former Justice Anthony Kennedy. They know Jones moves in the opposite direction of democracy, but they are going to move that way nonetheless. Why? They can. They have the power. Because they have the power, they must be good. Otherwise, they wouldn't have it.

The Republicans benefit greatly from the word "conservatism." It sounds like just another school of political thought in free and fair competition with others. It sounds like a way of thinking about the world seeking to conserve the collective knowledge and traditional values of humanity for the sake of our progeny. But that's not the case. The Republicans abandoned democracy after the twin shocks of 2008, Barack Obama's election and the financial panic. Inside a democratic context, conservatism can be healthy. On the outside, it's not. Outside the rule of the majority, it becomes barbarism.

The Republicans used to worry about their national reputation for cruelty. That's why the campaign of George W. Bush invented out of thin air the popular concept of "compassionate conservatism." His politics would be more palatable to respectable white people who did not want to be seen supporting a candidate who'd punch down as president. Punching down, and enjoying it, has become the point of conservatism. This is what we need to press respectable white people into understanding clearly.

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===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-corporations/

why did the Republicans enact laws suppressing the vote in Georgia? Because the former president made a big stink about "voter fraud" being the reason he lost. Why did the former president make a big stink? Well, for one thing, because Donald Trump is a sadist and fool. For another, because the *Republicans in Georgia and other (mostly southern) states had been making a big stink about "voter fraud" since 2013.They had worked very hard to convince state residents that the problem was real. Given such a context had already been established, Trump's false allegations seemed almost true.*

Why did this start in 2013? That's when the United States Supreme Court gutted part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It had required "pre-clearance" with federal authorities any time state and local legislators, especially in the South, changed their election laws. With that out of the way, Republicans in the South, worried that democracy was getting out of their control, decided to limit maximally but legally who can participate. Ergo, they invented a problem—voter fraud—the solution to which was voter ID laws.

So what's happening in Georgia is like a scene in a bit of absurdist theater in which cause-and-effect are not really cause-and-effect. It's more like effect-and-effect. Less than a decade ago, Peach State Republicans decided what laws they wanted to enact, but at the same time knew the real reason for enacting those laws, voter suppression, would not be tolerable to a majority of people in their state, even other Republicans.

So they fabricated an end to justify the means of getting there. (Just to be clear, voter fraud does not exist anywhere in any widespread and, therefore, worrisome way.) But imagine their surprise when a fascist president used the same fake reasons to bring hell and fury down on them for the fact that he lost Georgia. Now, post-election, in order to appease his supporters, who stand ready to oust them from power for their "betrayal," they have to double down on the big lies they've been telling all along.

This time is different. Before 2020, the big lie seemed like a legitimate cause requiring a legitimate effect. (Voter fraud caused restrictive voting laws.) After 2020, the big lie just looks like a big lie. There is no real and legitimate cause to justify enacting even more suppressive voter-suppression laws. There is only effect. Thanks to a fascist president who used those fake reasons to bring hell and fury down on Georgia, it's clear the problem for these Republicans was never voter fraud. It was democracy.

If it were only the Democrats raising awareness of the big lies, the Republicans in Georgia and in the United States Congress could let it roll off their backs. But it's no longer just the Democrats. Now, Republicans everywhere must contend with large corporations that can no longer afford to participate, even tacitly, in the bits of absurdist theater that have brought us all to this point. Even as they benefit from Republican policies—i.e., tax cuts and deregulation—they suffer from even the appearance of alignment with a political party at war with democracy. The CEO of Atlanta-based Delta Airlines is representative: "The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true. Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights."

The Republicans, especially Mitch McConnell, understand what it means when huge non-political entities like Delta, Coke, American Airlines, Major League Baseball and others take a stand in favor of full and fair democracy. It suggests to a vast array of people who buy their products and use their services that the Republicans might not be on the same side. Once such a perspective takes root in the public imagination, it will be difficult for the Republicans to uproot. Perhaps they don't have the will or the capacity to. Once a majority suspects that you might stand against them, your side has incentive to treat that side like The Enemy. And that, I think, is what's happening.

Again and again, whenever non-political entities have (even mildly) criticized the Republicans—sports teams, the military, the press, universities, churches and now mass-market firms—the Republicans, following Donald Trump's lead, have reacted by accusing them of being in league with the Democrats. Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador, said recently that "Big corporations are the new liberal mob. First, they came after Georgia; now, they're coming after Texas.2 We can fight back with the power of our voices—and our wallets—to show them we mean business."Many big corporations pay virtually nothing in federal income taxes thanks to years of GOP effort. The Republicans bailed out the airlines repeatedly during the covid pandemic. Accusing Delta of participating in the "new liberal mob" isn't just ridiculous. It demonstrates the fear among Republicans that they are on the outside looking in.

Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that corporations should stay out of politics. He didn't mean it, though. In the next breath, he said he wasn't talking about political donations. What he wants is for Delta, Coke, the MLB and others to stop talking about democracy in ways that make it appear to a majority of Americans that the Republican Party stands on the other side of it. What he wants is for these non-political entities to stop making it harder for the Republican Party to pursue its anti-democracy agenda. The corporations have, however, endorsed the whole truth, and there's no going back. They have become a political rock against which the Republicans will break themselves.

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==

more cancel ~ fascist

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/political-discourse/

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/cancel-culture/

In discussing the truth about "cancel culture," I'm going to ask you to act for a moment like a journalist. Journalists are concerned, or should be concerned, with gathering relevant facts, crafting stories using relevant facts, clarifying ambiguities and identifying as much as possible who is doing what to whom, when, where, why and how. As applied to "cancel culture," this means who is using the term, in what context are they using it, why are they using it, and whom are they applying it to.

When you look at "cancel culture" from the point of view of a journalist, you can see that the people most likely to use "cancel culture" are most likely critical of the maddeningly muddled liberalization of American society in which people historically on the margins of respectability and power are slowly taking their equally entitled place at their center. Most critics are conservative. Some are liberal in that they worry about freedoms lost as freedoms are won. Others are merely and transparently fascist.

The context in which critics use "cancel culture" is naturally related to language. I say "naturally," because the words we use to engage the political reality we all inhabit is naturally as important as the reality itself. Indeed, the words we use can create their own fictional reality, one that ends up competing with, or even replacing, political reality. Because of the link between language and power, forces of liberalization are naturally interested in reshaping the language we all use in the interest of expanding the rights, liberties and blessings of the franchise. Forces against liberalization are naturally resistant to tampering with the language et al. And as these polar forces collide, there might arise legitimate constitutional questions of freedoms and rights.

But this binary I have established—advocates for and critics against the reshaping of the language that we use in order to engage the reality we inhabit—is mostly false. It's distorting, because it suggests an equal moral footing. Fact is, critics of "cancel culture" are not being honest with you. Advocates are not trying to cancel anyone. They are trying to change the political culture for the purpose of improving as many lives as possible. Critics understand that. That's why they invented a term of art in order to malign advocates—"cancel culture" is an inchoate threat we must face before it's too late. Critics of "cancel culture" are doing the same thing critics of liberalism have done since forever. While liberals complain about problems, critics complain about liberals. And they go to great lengths to get the liberals to shut the hell up.

While "cancel culture" is a fiction invented by critics of liberalization for the purpose of attacking liberals, there is such a thing as cancel culture. We just don't call it that, because real cancel culture has plagued human relations since the dawn of human history—it's when the politically powerful stomp the politically weak. Maltreatment on such a vast and historical scale is so normal, pervasive and ubiquitous that it's almost entirely invisible to those of us lucky enough to have been born on the giving end of it. Those of us unlucky enough to have been born on the receiving end of it, however, can see real cancel culture quite clearly. Again, the difference should be a familiar one. Those with the power to name, name. Those without the power to name, don't name. Those with the power call it "cancel culture." Those without the power sit in silence.

Power is, in fact, how you tell the difference between cancel culture and "cancel culture." It's the best way, to my way of thinking, to make sense of stuff that just doesn't make sense. For instance, the Times reported the story of a Black student at Smith College who claimed being targeted for discrimination by the school's white staffers. The claim wasn't true, turns out, but Smith College's president continued to take the student's side for reasons related to systemic racism. Critics of "cancel culture" howled. This was proof of wokeness run amok! Stop it before it's too late!

This wasn't "cancel culture," though. It was real cancel culture. A privileged Black student at one of the elite institutions of higher education in the United States chose for her own bad reasons to stomp some white working-class stiffs with the full faith and approval of her elite institution, an injustice as old as the history of the country. The problem for critics of "cancel culture" was not, however, the abuse of power. It was not that Smith College took the side of a student in abusing her power. It was the abuse of power by a Black person who isn't supposed to have any power to abuse.

Critics of "cancel culture" would rather not talk about the old hierarchies of power, however, because talking about the old hierarchies of power makes things that don't make sense make sense. The question is almost never about language and freedom of speech. The question is almost always about who is doing what to whom, when, where, why and how. Critics prefer we debate unclear and unresolvable abstractions. But you can free yourself from propaganda by acting, for a moment, as a journalist should.

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===

===

don jr at cpac Tpac fail, PO'd at mccarthy

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-evangelicals/

===

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/journalism-lies/

On Sunday, NBC's "Meet the Press" interviewed United States Senator Ron Johnson. ABC's "This Week" interviewed House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. CBS's "Face the Nation" interviewed United States Senator Lindsey Graham. "Fox News Sunday" interviewed United States Senator Rand Paul. They're Republicans and they had a message for a combined television audience of millions: Donald Trump won.

Not in those exact words, but that was the clear implication. This thing or that thing—it didn't really matter what thing—meant in their "view" that the former president was robbed and the legitimacy of the current president, Joe Biden, is somehow suspect.

I bring this up not because yesterday was a disaster for journalism and the integrity of the public square (though it was that). I bring this up because it seems to me an answer to the question that haunts democratic discourse: How does a republic deal with parties that lie so intensely, so voluminously and so shamelessly? Some say we should afford them the same respect we ourselves would expect. If we call them liars, that might encourage them to lie more given the outrage of being called liars. Better to check their facts, state the truth and move on in hopes that they behave in kind.

This was certainly the thinking behind Frank Bruni's latest, titled "Must We Dance on Rush Limbaugh Grave?" The Times columnist said Sunday that while the radio broadcaster, who died last week, was a white-power racist, sexist, fear-mongering, homophobic crank (not his words), it's crude and rough and, worse of all, "screechy" to say as much about a man recently killed off by the cancer. It's one thing to speak ill of the dead, Bruni wrote, "but the pitch of that ill-speak needn't be screechy. The manner of it needn't be savage. It has more credibility—and I think, more impact—when it's neither of these things. And we preserve some crucial measure of civility and grace."

For four decades, Rush Limbaugh had the biggest media megaphone through which he spit poison every day straight into the ears of 20 million Americans. He lied and lied, and he lied and lied. If there were no Limbaugh, there would be no President Trump, who himself told more than 30,500 lies, falsehoods and misleading claims during four years. Their canon of lies included lies about the covid pandemic, culminating in a death toll now exceeding half a million. Their repertoire of lies included lies about the election, culminating in the worst attack on our government since September 11, 2001. Their stockpile of lies included The Big One repeated Sunday by three GOP senators and one GOP House leader to the detriment of millions of television viewers. How does a republic deal with parties that lie nonstop? There's never been an easy answer. Whatever it is, it's not "civility and grace" alone, because they alone do not work.

It's not that I think Bruni is wrong to remind people to follow the Golden Rule. He's correct, in a purely abstract sense, to say that, "If you're going to fling your opinions at the world, you must be braced for the world to fling its reaction back at you. Those are the terms of the contract." But we are not talking about public morality in the abstract. We are talking about public morality in this place and in this time and in the spirit of defending our republic from ghouls conspiring, and still conspiring, to bring it down. Moreover, a Golden Rule that's wholly decontextualized and dehistoricized can be a gag preventing us from speaking the truth and silencing all but the most powerful.

You know who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is. During last week's deep freeze in Texas, she started a fundraiser that has raised, as of this writing, more than $4 million to alleviate hunger and suffering in the Lone Star State. She was doing for Texans what you'd think Texans would do for her (and other New Yorkers). But instead of gratitude, the Texas Republican Party answered generosity with slander:"The gesture is appreciated, but it doesn't remove the fact that her Green New Deal philosophy failed Texans," wrote Chairman Allen West. Fact No. 1: The Green New Deal is Ocasio-Cortez's policy idea. It's not anything more yet. Fact No. 2: Texas has nothing to do with her policy idea. Fact No. 3: Wind power accounts for 10 percent of energy use in Texas. Conclusion: West is smearing Ocasio-Cortez even as she's trying to help.

This is clear later when he writes that Ocasio-Cortez's charity is not charity. What appears to be the Golden Rule is actually something sinister. West wrote: "What Texans found out this week is that wind energy, and solar, are not reliable, dependable, and available energy resources. Therefore, ma'am [Ocasio-Cortez], you're not going to buy off Texans for your green new deal energy pipe dream for $2 million" (my italics). Ocasio-Cortez did not blame Texas politicians for the straits they're in. Her pitch has not been "screechy," as Frank Bruni wrote. Her manner has not been "savage." She has been living up to the Golden Rule according to Bruni's advice. But what does she get in return? Lies, slander, contempt, and rancid accusations of trying to "buy off Texans."

Ocasio-Cortez (as well as Beto O'Rourke, who's also raised impressive sums) is modeling what Texans could expect from a government of, by and for the people. That's a threat to corrupt parties like the Texas GOP. It's therefore in the interest of people like West to run Ocasio-Cortez down, even if he comes off as gauche in the process.Fact is, coming off as gauche might be a good thing, as a lack of manners and etiquette and decorum tends to look like authentic strength, and when that's set side-by-side with kindness, authentic strength usually wins though it's a lie. The real problem, West might as well said, isn't that Texas is corrupt. The real problem isn't that the state's government failed its people. The real problem is carpetbaggers and their "New York values" coming down here, making us look bad. That's not nice.

As I said, Bruni isn't wrong in terms of substance. He's wrong in terms of engagement. He's so aloof as to be extraterrestrial. This is the world we live in. This is the world we struggle to change. It's not going to change if truth stops at the border of politeness.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/fascists-democracy/

There's a plausible argument in wide circulation that says that daily newspaper editorials no longer matter. I say "plausible," because most daily newspaper of size and significance endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. You know how that went. But while the newspaper business continues to founder, I think its unsigned editorials remain important, because they reflect the views of respectable white people, the views of white people invested in their reputations as respectable among other white people.

The opinions of respectable white people are important to keep tabs on, as we move out of the age of Trumpism, which is to say (as Michael Gerson did), out of the age of American fascism. Respectable white people did not suffer under Donald Trump. They probably did fine or better than fine. The temptation among respectable white people, in the face of a politics that punches down, not up, is to be indifferent, which is bad, or complicit, which is worse, or cooperative, which is the end of freedom. Fox, Newsmax and others are pushing Republican voters deeper into fascism, but respectable white people, as represented by editorials and the Republican publishers who write or sign off on them, continue to be receptive to arguments that are moral, decent and patriotic.

If respectable white people are mostly immune to a politics in never-ending search of enemies to punish, how do they recognize the danger? When the fascists betray democracy.

Remember that newspaper editorials do not feature bylines, because they speak for the newspaper as a public institution yoked inexorably to the collective fate of the paper's community. Newspaper publishers are almost always Republicans, people with deep knowledge and preferential concern for their business communities. The incentive to reflect the interests of Republicans, instead of the interests of everyone else, is very strong. So when a newspaper like the Kansas City Star accuses its readership's GOP senators of emboldening sedition against the American republic, that's a BFD.

All four senators from our region—Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley of Missouri, Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall of Kansas—voted Saturday to acquit Donald Trump of the impeachment charge against him. Their votes were fundamentally wrong.

Hawley and Marshall were never going to judge allegations against Trump with an open mind, the editorial said. Blunt and Moran, however, should have known better. Their votes to acquit Trump "seem somehow more disturbing. Their long service gave us reason to hope both would put their country over their party. They failed the test."

Both [Missouri's Roy Blunt and Kansas's Jerry Moran] must face voters in two years, and are favorites to win. Perhaps they voted to acquit because they fear primary challenges from the Trumpistas in their party. If so, their votes are not only wrong, but also display a troubling political cowardice we should never forget.

The editorial did not buy their phony excuses. It saw arguments in favor of Trump's conviction and disqualification as compelling and true. It cast their votes, moreover, in terms of patriotism. The republic faced "an unrelenting assault" seeking "to overthrow a free and fair election." There will be a next time, it said. "The votes of Hawley, Moran, Blunt, Marshall and their cowardly colleagues ensure it. … When the next riot comes, who will stand for democracy? Not the senators from Missouri and Kansas."

Remember that the incentive for newspaper publishers to favor GOP politicians is very strong. The Star endorsed Blunt and Moran in 2016. It endorsed Hawley in 2018. (It endorsed Marshall's Democratic opponent in 2018.) For allegiances to break utterly like this, something has to give, and that something seems to have been their vote to betray democracy. Partisans can tolerate a lot. They demand a lot. But partisanship that evolves into treachery is "political cowardice we should never forget." "The stain of their votes must remain affixed to their names as long as the republic survives."

The thing about the idea that fascism can't happen in the United States—an idea often called American exceptionalism—is that it presumes Americans believe in democracy by dint of Americans being American. What's forgotten is democracy itself gives Americans the freedom to be fascist if that's what they want to be. Moreover, being a fascist can seem legitimate when one's fascism is derived from the democratic process. That's the case for Hawley and Marshall. That appears to be increasingly the case for Blunt and Moran. And because that's the case, being a fascist might not seem all that bad, especially to respectable white people who are mostly immune to fascist politics.

If respectable white people are mostly immune to a politics in never-ending search of enemies to punish, how do respectable white people recognize the danger? When the fascists betray democracy. When the fascists make themselves the republic's enemy. When newspaper editorials say their cowardly votes are stain on their names. But especially when the fascists make it abundantly clear that being white is not the same thing as being safe, as being democratic, as being legitimate, as being patriotic.

Fascists like Hawley and Marshall, and latent fascists like Blunt and Moran, are forcing respectable white people of the kind whose interests are represented in the Kansas City Star's editorial pages to consider other white people without the benefit of the doubt normally afforded immediately to other white people. The fascists are forcing respectable white people to thinkmore like non-white Americans who have always recognized that being American does not necessarily mean believing in democracy. The long-term outcome, I hope, is respectable white people finding common cause with non-white Americans against the enemies of the republic.

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an 221

js ed bd

This afternoon will see the first leg of Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the United States Senate. The whole journey will last about a week or so. (Roll Call has an excellent item explaining the ins and outs of the proceedings.) The House Democrats will try to prove the former president's guilt in leading an attempt to overthrow the republic. The Senate Republicans will pretend they can't sit in judgment, because sitting in judgement of a former president, they have said, is unconstitutional.

Let me put this as plainly as I can. The very fact that Donald Trump's impeachment trial is happening at all, and that it will be happening over the next seven to 10 days, means it's constitutional. Full stop. The United States Congress is the first branch of the United States government. (Its constitution, after all, is Article I of the United States Constitution.) There is no higher authority. No, the United States Supreme Court is not a higher authority, not when it comes to impeachments and trials.

The very fact that Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate is happening, and that it will be happening over the next seven to 10 days, means it's constitutional. Full stop.

Quite literally, the Senate Republicans are saying it's unconstitutional to prosecute a former (Republican) president, because they want it to be unconstitutional to prosecute a former (Republican) president. But the fact that a former (Republican) president is being prosecuted—starting today—invalidates the premise of their constitutional argument. Indeed, it wasn't an argument. The truth is in plain sight. When it came to a Democratic president who lied to a grand jury, the authority of the Congress would not be denied! When it comes to a (former) Republican president involved in the attempted murder of his enemies, that authority is a bit much, don't you think?

Gerald Ford, when he was the House minority leader during the Watergate era, famously said "high crimes and misdemeanors" are "whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers them to be at a moment in history." Same thing for the question of whether it's constitutional to prosecute a former president. If a majority of the United States Senate (or rather a two-thirds supermajority of the Senate in the case of conviction) says it's constitutional, it's constitutional ipso facto. So, again, with feeling: Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate begins today. That it's happening at all, and that it could lead to conviction, means it's constitutional.

With there being zero chance of the United States Supreme Court getting involved in a dispute between the branches of the United States Congress, the question is settled. It's over. Indeed, there never was a question. (The truth has been in plain sight.) Because there never was a question, we should ask ourselves: why are the Republicans pretending there's a question when there's no question? Once you start asking yourself that question, the trial's outcome, which is not in doubt, starts to be less important than the reason the Senate Republicans are asking the question in the first place.

The reason the Senate Republicans are questioning a certainty (i.e., Jesus *God*, yes, it's constitutional to prosecute a former president, will you please knock it off already?) is the**same reason all Republicans are so often certain about things that might actually be in question. The truth is always a threat. Deference to truth is always tyranny. What's important is authority. Their authority. Their authority over you *and everyone you love*. And once you start seeing the deep authoritarianism of most of the Republicans in the Congress, once you start seeing the deep authoritarianism of millions of your fellow Americans**, you also start seeing lying isn't something they do merely to get what they want. Lying is something they do, because lying is the point.

Remember that Rand Paul and other Senate Republicans have something you don't. **They have a global right-wing media apparatus to not only amplify their lies, but *bend perception* away from political reality and toward a favorable fictional one. To lie at this grand a scale is to create a world in which morality is perverted, politics is barbarous, and whole populations can be pushed around and told what to believe, and not only that: they *want to believe*, because the lies have become so totalizing that everything being upside down, backwards and prolapsed seems normal, rational and worthy of defended in the name of *muh freedom***. When everyone says the sky is green when the truth is in plain sight, everyone is not merely trying to deceive you. Everyone is maintaining a perversion in which speaking truthfully could inspire your murder.

The House Democratic impeachment managers are going to push through the Republicans' lies in order to reveal the whole truth to the American people about their former president, which is this: Donald Trump committed a heinous presidential crime worthy, at the very least, of being disqualified for life from holding public office. This is as it should be, but let's not forget what the lies themselves reveal.

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edit bd

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/leaving-qanon/

I don't believe Ashley Vanderbilt escaped QAnon. Yes, I know that's what she told CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, and that's what Donie O'Sullivan told the rest of us on Wednesday. But trust me when I say there's no way someone indoctrinated into believing up is down, left is right, and wrong is right snaps out of it in a matter of weeks. People like Vanderbilt are primed to believe anything, and will keep being primed to believe anything. O'Sullivan's reporting suggests the danger is fading. The danger is not, and O'Sullivan's reporting goes a way toward obscuring that reality.

Who is Ashley Vanderbilt? She's a married white 27-year-old mother of a young child living in South Carolina. She lost her job last April as a result of the covid pandemic. Though neither she nor O'Sullivan say what kind of Christian she is, the fact she does not say suggests she's with a nondenominational evangelical congregation, I'd guess a megachurch, which would put her squarely among Donald Trump's loyalest of loyal supporters, the people most likely to believe the former president was sent by God. As such, she's probably gotten very adept at envisioning her life not as one she has control over, but one she must suffer through as the price for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

When she said, "I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it," I knew she and I come from similar religious backgrounds in which morality is obedience.

O'Sullivan said that after Joe Biden won the election, Vanderbilt "spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube becoming indoctrinated into the world of QAnon." (That's the conspiracy theory holding that the Democrats are in league with a global—read: Jewish—cabal of satanists who fornicate with children before eating them.) "By inauguration day," O'Sullivan said, Vanderbilt "was convinced that if then President-elect Joe Biden took office the United States would literally turn into a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to go into hiding with her daughter."

Vanderbilt said she was spending a lot of time by herself after losing her job. She was depressed. She was cranky. She too often snapped at her daughter. As a result, she said, she probably lost touch with reality. "I wasn't one hundred percent there like I should have been," she said. Folks, I'm here to tell you someone who believed that the "deep state" was having sex with children before eating them, that the former president would declare martial law, and that the military would round up his enemies before publicly executing them in cold blood is not someone who needs to lose her job, go into a depression or snap at her child to be not quite "one hundred percent there."

She was already there. How do I know? From experience. I've mentioned before I grew up on the margins of a closed protestant sect called the Christians Gathered Unto the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. (They are better known as the Plymouth Brethren.) Strict obedience to authority, which is to say, strict obedience to the father of the family, which is to say strict obedience to God, was morality.When Vanderbilt said, "I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it," I knew she and I come from similar backgrounds. We were taught Hell is really real, and God really will send you there if you do not do what He tells you to. We were taught a God who threatens eternal pain and suffering is a lovingGod. We were taught to believe up is down, left is right, wrong is right, but especially don't think just do as you're told.

So I know she was already there. She didn't need TikTok to fall down "the QAnon rabbit hole." If it wasn't TikTok, Facebook or whatever, it would have been something else, most likely ordinary word of mouth. QAnon does not demand of believers any more than Vanderbilt's white evangelical church does. She seems to have sensed the connection between them. O'Sullivan said, "while she was deep in the conspiracy theory, she said Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her who could do no wrong. She recalls once asking herself, 'Am I putting even Trump above God?'" She doesn't read, she said, and she doesn't pay attention to the legitimate press. All she needs to do is what she's told to do, which is follow the leader don't ask questions.

Which is why her explanation of how she "escaped" doesn't hold up. "Some QAnon adherents concocted a new conspiracy theory in the hours after inauguration," O'Sullivan said. "Biden's inauguration itself was a key part of the plan, the new theory held, and Trump would return as President in the coming few weeks. Then, certainly, all the deep-state arrests would happen. That was a step too far for Vanderbilt."Wut!

She was convinced Joe Biden's inauguration would transform the country into a Communist state. She believed she'd have to go into hiding with her daughter. She believed the Democrats and the Jews and "the Globalists" are cannibals. And she was disappointedwhen the military did not publicly execute Der Führer's enemies in cold blood. But wait whoa—a conspiracy theory adapting to reality? That's a step too far!?

Look, I don't understand why Vanderbilt thinks she escaped QAnon. I do know, using my intuition, that she does not understand why either. In not understanding why, she's vulnerable to the influence of a CNN journalist reporting a national story about a QAnon believer who escaped. Vanderbilt, in being someone who always did what was asked of her, continued being someone who did what was asked of her, in this case, giving O'Sullivan a story he was asking for, however tacitly. And in the process of telling that story, he obscured a terrible conclusion about Vanderbilt. That she felt fooled into believing there would be blood does not change the fact she wanted blood.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-2650333948/

Last night, nearly a dozen Republicans joined all the Democrats in the House to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Donald Trump protégé from Georgia, of her committee appointments — in particular, her place on the powerful House Budget Committee. This was in response to her incendiary speech and fear-mongering before taking office. In effect, they neutralized her, as it were. If you don't have a seat at the table, especially the big government money table, you don't have much in the way of leverage or bargaining.

You could say, however, this was her second neutralizing. The first one she did herself. As Jonathan Bernstein noted this morning, it's not like Greene went to Washington to govern. Her role is demagogic. Leverage and bargaining, bills and laws—these are beside the point. The main point is creating conditions in which she can appear to be in a near-total state of persecution to speak for Americans who feel the same way.

Marjorie Taylor Greene did not go to Washington to represent the will of the people, because, to God's chosen people, representing the will of "the people" is an abomination.

Constituents from Georgia's most conservative corner didn't send her to the United States Congress to represent them, to fight for their interests or their share of the big government money, to "bring home the bacon." They sent her to Capitol Hill to die on that hill, like Jesus Christ on the Cross at Calvary, in order to reenact the suffering of God's chosen at the hands of His enemies. Her job is to manufacture crisis in the absence of one. "The whole point of evangelicalism is that you get to constantly be persecuted,"said Chrissy Stroop, "and you enjoy moral superiority from that."

A worldview in which you're always persecuted is a worldview in which you're never responsible, because being responsible would mean you're possibly to blame, which is impossible, because the persecuted are always blameless.Acting out some measure of contrition, when absolutely forced to, is an opportunity to show why you're always persecuted. Before the vote last night, Greene said she was being wrongfully accused, and because of that, the Democrats should be apologizing to her, not the other way around, which totally makes sense given they're the enemies of God's chosen people. [TURMP ALSO AGENT OF CHAOS, B/C GOV'T IS ALWAYS ALREADY BROKEN CORRUPT, PARALYSIS IS GOOD DEFENSE; ALSO // HE HAS 2 MODES, I AM A WINNER OR I AM THE VICTIM B/C THEY KEPT ME FROM WINNING FOR YOU [WHICH DOES NOT NEC MEAN ENACT BILL THAT WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER B/C SEE ABOVE, BUT BEAT UP OUR ENEMIES DEMS POC]

"I was allowed to believe things that weren't true,[HUH? PASSIVE, BY WHOM?] and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret," Greene said. "Because if it weren't for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn't be standing here today, and you couldn't point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong." [SO SHE WAS THE BRAVE SEEKER OF TRUTH, BUT HER ERROR WAS WRITING IT DOWN SO SHE CAN'T DENY IT NOW? //~ CHENEY NOTE STRATEGY]

A worldview in which you're accountable to God only, rather than to people of equal worth and dignity with whom you share responsibility in human affairs, is a worldview inherently hostile to a free republic. It will not tolerate diverse interests, nor will it tolerate a republic's tendency to flatten hierarchies of power and privilege. But "demographic change," as the thinking goes, is not the only reason for this hostility.

Marjorie Taylor Greene did not go to Washington to represent the will of the people, because, to God's chosen, representing the will of "the people" is an abomination. Authority does not arise from below, from the consent of the governed. It comes from above, from God. It doesn't matter to Greene that she was removed from committees—that the tools of lawful democratic engagement with other human beings worthy of dignity and respect were taken away—because democracy is the problem. To engage democratically in a republic of equals is to make common cause with the enemy.

Jim Jordan, the House Republican, made a lot of noise the day before Thursday's vote. On Fox, he portrayed accountability for Greene as a "slippery slope." "Who's next?" he said. If the Democrats "keep attacking people, their First Amendment free speech rights, where does it end? … It won't stop with Republicans. It'll go to all of us. If we don't stop it now, every single American is at risk. And that's what concerns me."

Jordan, Greene and most of the rest of the Republicans do fear a slippery slope, but it's not a slippery slope into tyranny. It's a slippery slope into freedom—for all. What they aim to preserve is a social hierarchy that protects but does not bind the privileged few while it binds but does not protect the unprivileged many. What they want is a state in which the small in-group and the huge out-group are separate and unequal. What they fear is a slippery slope threatening to bring liberty and justice to everyone else.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/leaving-qanon/

stoehr

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/economy-republicans/

stoehr edit bd

I trust the New York Times' David Leonhardt knows what he's talking about when it comes to economics and economic policy. But I feel I have something to contribute to the question he posed Tuesday. Why are Republican presidents so bad for the economy? In addition to considering the Gross Domestic Product and other empirical factors, we ought to consider a moral one, to wit:the reason the United States fails to thrive under GOP presidents is because they so often seek out more and better ways to lie to us.

These lies are intentional. They are ubiquitous. They are huge. And the bigger they are, the more pain they cause, over years and over decades. If the lies are not directly related to the economy, they are certainly related indirectly, as most of them are conceived and motivated by the desire for riches, with the net effect being the crowding out of the many from the center of American democracy for the benefit of the few.

Fortunately, truth now has more in its favor than good people doing what they think is right. It has partisanship on its side.

A very, very short list: Tax decreases pay for themselves. Tax increases hurt job-creators. Regulations hurt business. The minimum wage hurts workers. Redistribution is theft. Welfare is addiction. Abortion is murder. Feminism is reverse sexism. Equality is reverse racism. Iraq had WMDs. Obama wasn't an American. Voter fraud is rampant. All/Blue Lives Matter. Political correctness. Cancel culture. Trump won.

There are more, but let's not forget the most obvious and deadly lie in recent years, to our bodies and our republic—that the covid pandemic is nothing much to worry about, indeed worrying about it means you're on the other side of a president trying to root out a conspiracy against "the people" by Democrats in league with a global (Jewish) cabal of satanists who fornicate with children before eating them, a conspiracy so evil the Democrats in the Congress deserve nothing less than capture and assassination.

Donald Trump was the most conspicuous of all the liars, it goes without saying, but Republican presidents going back to my childhood lied with such frequency, felicity and nuance the inevitable result was four years of hourly nonstop fire-hose lying. The outcome of that has been half a million deaths by the covid by the end of this month, and a national economy that hasn't been this bad since 1946. Leonhardt and others are correct, of course, in looking at interest rates, the unemployment rate, GDP and other empirical factors in order to answer the question of why Republicans fail so badly. But let's not forget that lying causes pain and that suffering often comes in economic form.

The bigger the lie, the bigger the pain inflicted on everyone until the lie and the pain are so nearly total that the distinction between believing and not believing the lie is a distinction without a moral difference. The Post reported Tuesday that Ginni Thomas, wife of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, apologized to her husband's former clerks for her role in supporting the January 6 protest-turned-insurrection. What's astounding isn't that Ginni Thomas admitted obliquely to having some responsibility for the republic's near-death. What's astounding is she seems to continue to believe the lie—Trump won—even after that near-death experience.

Clarence Thomas' former clerks constitute a "blue-ribbon membership," according to the Post, with major influence inside and outside the courts. Yet some of its members appear to believe what Ginni Thomas believes. "Many of my friends and I had been praying our knees off that January 6 would see light and truth being shed on what we believe in our hearts was likely a stolen election," wrote Wendy Stone Long, and that eventually "President Trump would be determined to be the legitimate winner."

What does it mean when a society's cream of the crop continues to believe lies so big they nearly bring down a republic? It means the rest of us, who have nothing like the influence these people have, must spend valuable time and energy sorting through the lies, organizing ourselves and convincing as many people as possible, but especially those at the very top, that lies they espouse or spread or both are causing pain not just to the common people, but to the nation as a whole, including them. In the process, this drains the economy of resources that could be used for something more productive.....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mcconnell-treason/

Despite being polarized, Americans really do agree on the fundamentals. Is the president above the law? No. Does every citizen have a right to vote? Yes. Should powers be separated? Yes. Are checks and balances good? Yes. Should people be free to worship as they wish? Yes. Are the people the ultimate sovereign? Yes. And so on.

Theory isn't the same as practice, obviously, but even so, there's only one correct answer to fundamental political questions. If there were other correct answers—if these questions hinged on differences of opinion—we would not be members of a political community whose outlines were established long ago. We would be part of another kind of political community, one none of us would recognize as familiar, legitimate or good. Our nation would be something else. It would not be America.

These fundamentals and the outlines of our political community that were derived from them constitute a contract among and between citizens and noncitizens. We agree to them, consciously or subliminally, because if we did not, we wouldn't participate in the union we all actually participate in. We'd be in something else that does not exist.

In the run-up to Election Day, CNN's Jake Tapper urged counting of every vote. He was not violating the norms of journalism. He was not taking a position. With respect to voting, there's no position to take. Counting every vote is what we do. If we do not count every vote, we are not America. Very few things in this country are either-or, right or wrong, but fundamental questions are. They are, because they must be. They must be, because we want them to be. We want them to be, because we are America.

The president and the Republican leaders are failing the test of fundamentals. Should they recognize as legitimate the outcome of a lawful democratic process? The only answer is yes. That's the only correct answer, because either the American people are sovereign or they are not. If they are not, we do not live in a representative democracy. Anything less than yes indicates unwillingness to participate in the union as it stands. Anything less than an immediate yes indicates a certain softness of dedication to the US Constitution and the republic. Yet Donald Trump, and now Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party, are refusing to recognize Joe Biden's victory.

I'm told this is theater. I'm told this is about fundraising. Campaign debts must be paid, after all. I trust some of this is true. I also trust history, though. No president has ever denied the reality of his defeat. (Biden has now eclipsed Ronald Reagan's share of the popular vote, 50.8 percent to 50.7. It is the highest for a challenger since Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover in 1932. And the counting continues.) No president has ever refused to concede in the face of a mathematical certainty. To my knowledge, no political party has ever gotten behind an incumbent's effort to steal an election.

That effort will fail. (I say "will" but honestly I'm as full of dread as you are.) The president's legal scheme has so far floundered. Every one of his suits has been thrown out, because there's no evidence of voter fraud on the scale he's alleging. On the off-chance of one of these lawsuits getting to the US Supreme Court, I'm guessing the conservative justices there will buy themselves legitimacy by dismissing the case outright. Accusations can work in politics, less in court. As GOP Sen. John Cornyn said: "In the end, they're going to have to come up with some facts and evidence."

But even in failure, the president and the Republicans will have accomplished something. (It will benefit the GOP, of course, not the president; Trump will face legal scrutiny the minute he's out of office.) They will have succeeded in three things. One, establishing doubt in Biden's legitimacy. Two, establishing the groundwork for obstructing his agenda. More important, though, is three. They will have deepened an assumption already at work in the background of Republican discourse. Democrats don't count. Anything they do, whether criticizing Republicans or beating them by a landslide in national elections, deserves any reaction up to and including murder.

In a very real sense, the Republicans are constituting a nation inside this nation, a confederacy of the mind and spirit to be made real so "real Americans" chosen by God can dominate the whole in God's name. They are constituting a separate and unequal system inside the one everyone else recognizes as legitimate, in which a small minority is privileged over a majority bound by law but not protected by it. They are, ultimately, on the path toward suicide. When parasites kill their hosts, they kill themselves, too.

The most extreme view among pundits is that the Republicans won't recognize Joe Biden's legitimacy. That's not extreme enough. They are creating a beachhead inside the United States from which to continue covert civil warfare against the United States. The Republicans are committing treason literally, yet they're being afforded respect, as if accepting the outcome of a lawful democratic process were a matter of opinion. Wrong. There's only one correct answer to that fundamental question. Anything less than fully accepting the people's will is desiring an America that will never exist.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-white-evangelical-christians-are-bonded-by-sadism/

john s eb

there’s still too much confusion over the president’s bond with white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). I suppose there will always be as long as outsiders presume that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters believe in loving thy neighbor as thyself. Once you see that WEPs do not apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally, things become clearer. Once this Christian concept is removed from the discussion, “paradoxes” melt into the air. What’s left is a natural alignment of political interests.

How do I know WEPs don’t truly believe in the Golden Rule? From life experience. I know what I’m talking about. All you have to do is listen carefully, however, and know what to listen for. Elizabeth Dias wrote a big piece in the Times last week trying to clear up the “contradiction” of WEPs standing by Trump “when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.” A source explains helpfully that there’s no contradiction at all.

“The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her,” Dias wrote of her source. “She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.” The source: “I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all. Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”

This makes no sense to outsiders. Freedom for “gay people and members of minority groups” is not taking anything away from anybody. This makes no sense, because outsiders do not generally accept a worldview in which power is ordered. First God, then man, then woman, then child. White over nonwhite. Heterosexual over LGBTQ. Christian over non-Christian. When you believe with your whole being that power is ordered according to God’s will, “giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups” is not political equality, as outsiders would often see it. It’s knocking you out of the order of power. It’s taking something away. Equality is literally theft

when political equality is theft, you cannot apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally. If you did, you’d be complicit in a crime. The Golden Rule demands white people share power with nonwhite people. It demands husbands share power with their wives. Neither can ever be done.A wife, according to the same source in Dias’ reporting, must “submit” to her husband in accordance with God’s law. If she does not, she’s trying “to rule over him.” Same for whites and nonwhites. If white people are not at the top of the order, they are being ruled over. This is why Dias’ source says that, “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.” The more for “them,” the less for “us.” They believe Trump prevents that from happening.

They believe Trump is “restoring their freedom.” Utter nonsense. What they are really saying is that the president will prevent people lower down the order of power from achieving more freedom and equality, “violating” their “freedom.” He must do that by any means, even if he confiscates kids from their mothers, bans a world religion, orcommits treason. None of that matters as much as maintaining the supremacy of a religious identity built on sand.And make no mistake: this is a religious identity. These are very real anti-democratic Christians hostile to critical thinking, modernity, pluralism, and all forms of equality. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance,” a WEP source told Dias. “If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”[ // reverse disvrimination]

If WEPs believed in the Golden Rule, they’d never tolerate other people’s pain. They do tolerate it, however. Indeed, they like it. It feels good to see the president “restoring their freedom.” When WEPs say they want to “live out our faith,” what they mean is sadism is and should be a natural consequence of the natural order of things in which God’s people are chosen to rule in God’s name. “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is,” Dias wrote. “They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” That’s correct, but take that to its logical conclusion. His enemies are their enemies. His pleasures, their pleasures. Their bond is far from a contradiction. It’s an alignment of political interests in which sadism is the point.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/must-we-continue-to-respect-stupidity/

Wall Street Journal ran an item this morning touching on something I have been thinking about lately: the role of stupidity in our national discourse, and the apparent requirement that the citizenry respect stupidity no matter how dangerous it is.

As Bonhoeffer said in an age similar to ours: “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”

The subject of the piece was face masks, and why some Americans refuse to wear one. It is beyond dispute that wearing a mask in public is the simplest, cheapest, and easiest means of preventing the coronavirus from spreading. The virus is airborne, meaning it survives in droplets of water so small they float in the air. Sneezing, laughing or just talking loudly, especially indoors with inadequate ventilation—that’s how the novel virus goes from one person to another. If we’d all been wearing one since March, we might not see over 150,000 deaths and over 4 million infections. Wearing a mask should be a no-brainer. As Jennifer Calfas’s reporting shows us, however, it is not.

It’s a joke,” said Joseph Lee, a 62-year-old in White Bear Lake, Minn. who wore a mask once to comply with rules to get a haircut. “All [mask wearing] does, I think, is give people a false sense of hope.”

Aside from being wrong, if we’re all gonna die, let’s all die with our eyes open?

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When asked if the president’s recommendation last week to wear a mask had any impact, Cody Adams, “a 34-year-old pipe welder based in Arkansas,” said no can do.

“It hasn’t swayed my opinion.”

The dumbest reason comes from Peggy Hall. The Orange County, California, resident “who has decried face mask requirements there and elsewhere” actually said out loud:

“The beautiful thing about our country is freedom does come first, and public health comes a distant, distant second, third, fourth, maybe 20th.”

To be sure, as Calfas reports, this is a minority. A recent poll by the Journal and NBC News found that most Americans most of the time wear a mask in public no matter their political affiliation, suggesting that good sense can still trump nonsense. Only about 11 percent “rarely or never wear” one, which might be comforting in any social context other than public health. If I’m not mistaken, even a small minority refusing to wear a mask could mean the pandemic won’t end for years until there’s a vaccine. Meanwhile, more people die, more get sick, and mass disruption continues apace.

It’s for this reason we need to talk about the role of stupidity in our national discourse. We should not aim to insult, demean or marginalize anyone. Stupid people are human beings deserving of equal rights and equal justice. We should, however, redefine and reestablish the boundaries of acceptable public opinion. Stupid people deserve equal treatment, but it’s deadly—literally—to give stupid ideas equal respect. (Stupidity, moreover, is not in the eye of the beholder when the medical, scientific and good-government consensus is that wearing masks is good, not wearing masks is bad.)

Of course, redefining and reestablishing the boundaries of acceptable public discourse is at the heart of the controversy over so-called cancel culture. In truth, no one is getting canceled (anyway, not in the way “cancel culture” critics claim). And in truth, the people most likely to complain about getting “canceled” often have access to public platforms so gigantic as to undermine the very premise of their arguments.

Take John Kass, for instance. A columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he wrote recently a piece about George Soros and “lawlessness” in cities run by Democrats. Soros is a frequent subject of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. Outraged by its antisemitism, some said the column is a firing offense. This week, Kass defended himself against “the angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution [using] fear to sweep through our civic, corporate and personal life.” A column about being a victim of censorship becomes incoherent the moment it’s published. Yet we accept this stupidity, give it respect, and encourage it though it can and does poison discourse and enable evil.

As I noted recently, “cancel culture” critics aren’t defending speech. They are instead blurring lines. They make it appear as if demands for redefining and reestablishing the boundaries of acceptable public opinion seem as authoritarian as the authoritarian president who really is dispatching his paramilitaries to harass and intimidate social reformers in cities nationwide under the guise of “protecting” federal property. Voters who don’t want to vote for a fascist president might vote for him anyway to “protect” against “the angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution.” Stupidity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”

Bonhoeffer really did get canceled. A Lutheran minister in Germany, he opposed Hitler’s rise and the eventual attempt to exterminate Jews from Europe. The Nazi regime accused him of conspiring to assassinate Hitler, and hanged him just before the war’s end. This is what he said from his prison cell about stupidity. (Here I want to thank Editorial Board subscriber Jim Prevatt for bringing this to my attention):

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.

“Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

“For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

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