Month: November 2020

David Brooks has come close to figuring out what is going on, which is an accomplishment. Yet, he still has some mileage to go before he reaches true understanding.

He’s identified many of the sources of alienation among rural and non-college educated Americans, particularly white people: their jobs are less secure, their already low status is under threat, their religious beliefs are no longer ascendent, their communities are hollowed up, they’re suffering through a health and drug crisis, and the rules of the game seemed stacked against them.

But nowhere does he mention fascism. He simply wants to know why right-wingers seem to be suddenly much more predisposed to believing utter bullshit than left-wingers, since this can’t be explained by technological change alone.

Brooks recognizes that right-wing propaganda feeds a need.

For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

With that, Brooks has arrived at the explanation but simply walks right past it.

The right is filling this need and the left is not. Perhaps the collapse of international communism in the 1990’s has something to do with it, or maybe the waning power and de-radicalization of the labor movement is by itself an adequate cause. The key is that communities that used to be so organized around opposition to remote, capitalists’ control of their lives that they stuck with Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis when no one else would, are now organized around radical Facebook groups. While they used to explain their powerlessness through a hard-left prism, they now explain it through a hard-right one.

When right-wing populism is the only populism on the menu, what you get is fascism. The reason is simple. The populism is pretty much inevitable, especially whenever things take a turn for the worse. The question is whether this populism will be tamed or weaponized. When you’re talking about minority populations, often in urban areas, the populism can be weaponized in the service of social activism and the power of the state will tame the excesses. But when you’re dealing with an ethnic and religious majority group, if it’s not organized around economic issues then it will be organized around nativism and nationalism, and the state power will often take their side.

It’s not that the left can be blamed for the growth of white nationalism and the rotted brain of the Republican Party. It’s more that the left isn’t a passive spectator with no agency over the problem. Many of the left’s virtues contribute to the problem. If you’re unwilling to provide your own baseless conspiracy theories and cherry-picked explanations for people’s woes, then you’ve left the marketplace of ideas to people less scrupulous. When you value reasoned discourse above all else, you easily overestimate its persuasive powers and feed the alienation between yourselves and the downtrodden communities that increasingly despise and distrust you.

The right is filling this vacuum out of pure need. They can’t find their votes any other way. And, since their demographic problems only grow more challenging, they actually have to feed the paranoia and resentment to get the same results. In simplistic form, they want white people to vote with racial self-consciousness so they can win a greater share of their votes, but this is done by creating distrust in every honest messenger who might challenge their phony facts.

The left finds it curious that this is so effective, but also as proof that these voters are unreachable and, often, unworthy of their outreach or help.  That doesn’t solve the problem, but rather serves as an accelerant. It makes it easier to convince folks that the left is not on their side, and it solidifies right-wing nationalism as the only populism on offer.

My formula is that when the left abandons or gives up on a struggling ethnic majority population, the inevitable result is fascism. The clearest sign of the disease is a sudden lack of faith in the legitimacy of elections and the underpinning principles of representative democracy. Longstanding norms fall away with shocking ease. Lawbreaking can be pardoned with impunity. Civil and human rights protections are instruments of weakness and oppression. The organs of that the state that protect the embattled majority are given carte blanche to beat down ascendent minority populations.

The left watches this stupefied, wondering how things can slip away so quickly and with so little resistance.  A good part of the right –the educated part– has the same reaction.

It’s not actually a giant mystery. People are not rational. They’re highly suggestible. When their passions run high, those passions need to be addressed and channelled. Good policy can keep passions from running high in the first place, but they’re near powerless to put out a populist fire once it has begun to spread.

The modern, technocratic Democratic Party has no clue how to put out this fire, and is mostly opposed (for some fairly virtuous reasons) from even making the attempt. But the left is bigger than the Democratic Party, and they have grown too weak in rural and non-college educated white America.

To solve this problem, the left has to understand that these communities will only get more threatening if no one is willing to fight back. They will get more racist and more violent. They will become more impervious to facts and more hostile to experts. And they’ll be less supportive of democratic institutions and restraints on state power. Leaving them to the right is not an option.  Fighting back with the rules of the academy and the newsroom hasn’t worked, and it won’t work in the future.

The left needs to get organized from within these communities, not from without. The reason I’ve talked about antitrust enforcement so much in this context is because it’s both what these people need and because labor unions have grown too weak and placid to do the job themselves.

Most of all, people need to understand that this is how you fight fascism without guns. Eventually, we’ll have to fight them either way.

To put it mildly, I am uncomfortable with any policy that involves assassinating scientists. I can understand that it might be necessary in some extreme cases, like preventing a hostile adversary from developing weapons that can put your entire populace at risk, but it really ought to be a last resort. For one thing, it does nothing to resolve conflicts between nations, and will tend to invite revenge attacks. Most likely, it will do no more than delay the development of weapons and make your enemy more determined to use them. Stalling tactics can be better than no tactics at all, but they’re only a solution if you use the borrowed time to reduce the overall risk.

The Israelis’ policy of killing Iranian nuclear scientists might make sense for them but it doesn’t follow that it fits America’s national security needs. We had a policy, which Israel vociferously opposed, of easing tensions with Iran and heavily monitoring their nuclear program. It had massive international buy-in. And it made it unnecessary to target scientists in Iran. Trump withdrew from that agreement, and Biden wants to stand it back up. That’s why the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is so troubling. It seems designed to cut off Biden’s plans.

Sending kill teams into a foreign country to murder their scientists is not a sustainable policy. It’s an act of war and the only reason it doesn’t immediately result in open conflict is because, in this case, Iran is too weak to fight back. This is largely because they don’t have nuclear weapons, so it’s kind of obvious that these actions will incentivize them to obtain nuclear weapons. The idea, I guess, is to make the nuclear physicists too scared to work on the project, but I’m not sure they really have any choice in the matter, and they’ll be expected to take risks out of pure patriotism.

It just seems like a much better idea, and certainly a less morally dubious path, to pursue a monitoring program and seek ways to reduce tensions. I’m not naive about the nature of Iran’s revolutionary government, but I can’t support these murderous violations of the sovereignty when clear alternatives are available.

I also think it’s unacceptable to take rash actions designed to limit an incoming president’s options, especially when it’s clear that a new policy is coming.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using (My own from a visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Limited progress for this week’s cycle. I have started the details of the green plants above the cliffs. To the far rear, I have revised the distant buttes. Next week it will be done.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Political blogging was born in the Bush years, peaked under Obama, and mostly died in the Trump Era. The decline is partly explained by the mainstream media adopting some of blogging’s strongest features and hiring some of its talent—think Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent. But the most important factor is that straight journalists finally internalized that it’s part of their job to tell the reader when they’re being lied to.

The mainstream media didn’t see it that way when the topic was invading Iraq to deal with Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.  The political press corps was tentative in combating Birtherism and the Tea Party response to the election of a black man. At times, they were still somewhat credulous and deferential with the Obama administration. Yet, it was Trump’s flurry of incontrovertible falsehoods that led the Washington Post to put the famed “Democracy Dies in Darkness” banner up shortly after his inauguration. Today, after four years of covering his presidency, straight news reports are blog-like in the way they chop down lies and contradict official statements. This has made blogging less vital, and less unique.

A good example of this admirable adoption of blogging sensibilities can be found in Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey’s coverage of Trump’s Thanksgiving appearance from a diminutive desk in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, where he took questions for the first time since he lost the November 3 election.

Trump said he planned to continue to make claims of fraud about the results and said, without evidence, that Biden could not have won close to 80 million votes. His legal team has been widely mocked — and has lost almost every claim in every state, as officials certify results for Biden.

 I try to imagine what it would have been like in 2002-03 if the Washington Post had written, “Bush said he planned to invade Iraq and said, without evidence, that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. His foreign policy team has been widely mocked­­ – and the United Nations inspectors have contradicted almost every claim as they’ve scoured the country in vain looking for weapons of mass destruction.”

Dawsey also wrote that “Trump continued to falsely claim that there had been widespread voter fraud in his election, without offering proof. And he again falsely said Republican poll watchers were not allowed to observe in Pennsylvania…” In a similar vein, Michael Crowley, writing for the New York Times noted that Trump’s Thanksgiving remarks “reiterated baseless claims of fraud that he said would make it ‘very hard’ to concede” his defeat.

If unfounded claims from the White House had been treated that way in the lead-up to the Iraq war, I don’t think the progressive blogosphere would have taken off in the way that it did. The way Crowley concluded his piece gives the kind of satisfaction that only bloggers used to provide:

At times, Mr. Trump shifted his explanation of his defeat from claims of fraud to complaints that the political battlefield had been slanted against him, casting the news media and technology companies as his enemies.

“If the media were honest and big tech was fair, it wouldn’t even be a contest,” he said. “And I would have won by a tremendous amount.”

After seeming to concede reality, Mr. Trump quickly caught himself and revised his conditional statement.

“And I did win by a tremendous amount,” he added.

This has an appropriate mocking tone, making clear that that president is lying, making lame excuses, contradicting himself, and acting in a delusional manner. It’s a shame that it’s necessary to characterize the president’s remarks this way, but it’s essential. Trump sensed this himself. When Reuters White House Correspondent Jeff Mason asked if he’ll concede after the Electoral College votes, Trump barked: “You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me that — don’t talk — I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”

Political blogging was born of media deference to the president. It died in large part because the media woke up during Trump Era and put an end to that error.

It’s been 59 years since Congress failed to send an annual Defense Appropriations Bill to the president for signature, but that streak is now in danger in a dispute over the renaming of bases and ships that honor Confederate officers. Ironically, lawmakers in the House and Senate actually agree that the time has come to make the change, but they are facing a veto threat over the issue from President Trump. The question is how to respond.

The House adopted an amendment sponsored by Democratic Rep. Anthony Brown of Maryland and Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, that compels the Pentagon to do away with Confederate names by the end of 2021, while the Senate Armed Services Committee’s language, which was sponsored by Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, would allow the changes to be phased in over three years. Neither version is acceptable to the president, who wants to preserve our country’s heritage of white supremacy.

Nonetheless, a lot of the negotiation between the House and Senate has involved the distinction between the phase-in times, and the House Democrats eventually agreed to go along with the slower Senate version only to discover that the Mitch McConnell-run Senate won’t introduce a bill that Trump has promised to veto, “This is a simple provision that was in the Senate language,” [House Armed Services chairman Adam] Smith said Friday, “What we are insisting — this is the irony — the House is insisting that the conference report accept the Senate language.”

Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma is seeking to strip the renaming language from the bill entirely, and this is causing some internal division among House Democrats. If they stand firm, they’ll have to explain why our national security is threatened for lack of funds and weather a fight over who is to blame. This may not be advisable for a party that, after all the counting is done, may have a House majority of just five seats. On the other hand, the Republicans would have their own problems rationalizing their defense of a 19^th-Century armed insurrection in the defense of slavery.

For now, the Democrats who want to cave on the issue prefer to remain anonymous, especially because the Congressional Black Caucus remains adamant that the provision stay in the bill. Yet, they argue that President-Elect Joe Biden can quickly rectify the situation by executive order, and it’s therefore unnecessary to take political risks or put our defense funding in jeopardy. It’s a point echoed at the White House, where an unnamed source told NBC News, “Why put a large, important bill at risk for something that will come to pass anyway?”

On Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t back down, “It is imperative that the conference report include provisions that secure this essential priority. Our bases should reflect our highest ideals as Americans.” Yet, even though the House and Senate both passed their bills with veto-proof majorities, she can’t compel the Senate to bring a reconciled bill including the name changes up for a vote. The Military Times suggests that the two January 5th Senate runoff elections in Georgia are a factor, “Either way, the issue seems to be a loser for Georgia’s Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Breaking with Trump to override the veto could mean a loss in support among core GOP voters, while standing in favor of keeping the base names could drain support from independents.” For McConnell, the best option is to avoid a vote altogether and blame the Democrats for putting the country at risk.

The vote on the Defense Appropriations Authorization Act must occur in early December before the holiday recess if it’s going to be enacted by this Congress, but there is no clear way out of the impasse. The only hint at a compromise came from White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who reportedly floated the idea that Trump would relent on the Confederate issue if the Democrats agree to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. This is the provision that allows websites to post content from users without facing legal liability, and thankfully it’s not something the Democrats will trade away.

So far, the Biden transition hasn’t offered specific guidance, but Biden has been supportive of the renaming issue. There are many other important provisions in the bill, including a pay raise for our military, but it could be that Biden is happy to see the bill fail so that he can be at the center of crafting a replacement next year.

It would be a fitting end to the Trump presidency, with defense spending lapsing because Trump doesn’t want to insult fans of the Confederacy, and McConnell’s Republicans are unwilling to use a veto-proof majority to override him.

Hi everyone!

It is now not only Hump Day, but we get to follow that up with Turkey Day (and then endless days of leftovers).

With the news that the transition between administrations is now official, it’s time to break out an old classic that I’d hoped to post a bit earlier. We’ll add preliminary good news about covid-19 vaccines to the list of reasons to celebrate and be thankful.

Like many of you, this will be a much different Turkey Day than in the past. It will be just immediate family, instead of a bunch of extended family congregating. I’ll miss my mom’s home cooking, but the hope is that we all avoid the coronavirus and get to celebrate again together when it is safe. Besides, if things start looking safe enough in the summer, who’s to say that Turkey Day in, say, July or August is not acceptable.

I’m thankful to Martin for giving me this space, and for each of you all who drops by and visits for a moment. Take care of yourselves. I’ll do my best to do the same.

The bar’s open, and the jukebox is working.

Cheers!

Apparently, President Trump made a rare post-election appearance today in a laughable effort to take credit for the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting 30,000 for the first time in history. Of course, progress on COVID-19 vaccines has something to do with the market’s optimism, but the far larger factor is that the election finally seems settled, and not in Trump’s favor.  And, even if want to be generous and give Trump some props for the Operation Warp Speed program that has promoted research on vaccines, his allowing the pandemic to grow out of control is actually a gigantic drag on the economy. His appearance reportedly lasted less than a minute and then he left without taking any questions.

Meanwhile, Biden administration-in-waiting is starting to take form. The General Service Administration finally “ascertained” that Biden and Harris were the winners and released the transition money. The national defense team (sans the Defense Secretary and CIA director) were formally introduced in Wilmington, Delaware. Separately, the next Treasury Secretary will be former Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellin.

Life goes on, while Trump bleats like a lost sheep.

There’s plenty more to say, but I just want to savor this moment.

 

 

Dan Pfeiffer, the former White House Communications Director and senior advisor to Barack Obama, doesn’t believe that cowardice explains why Republican officeholders are not doing more to stop Donald Trump’s post-election madness. In an echo of an analysis I’ve provided, Pfeiffer declares that the Party of Lincoln is working to maximize the white vote:

Republicans represent a dwindling base of mostly white, working class voters. With every passing election, this base gets smaller. Therefore, in order to win they need to get higher and higher turnout from that base. Trump has proven that the best way to jack up turnout with these voters is through an apocalyptic, conspiracy theory laden narrative of victimization at the hands of others. The “others” in this narrative are almost always people of color. This is the core of Trump’s white nationalist immigration appeal — immigrants/gang members/Muslims are coming to your community to take your job and threaten your life. It’s bullshit, but it’s clearly powerful with a relatively sizable portion of the population.

The problem with this craven strategy is that as more educated white voters abandon the GOP, the challenge of winning an ever-larger share of a shrinking white vote gets more challenging and the victimization/race-baiting card has to do more work. That’s where all the crazy-talk comes in. Even if Republican officeholders don’t subscribe to these theories themselves, they don’t believe they can do without them and they’re probably right, at least for the moment.

But racism and cockeyed conspiracy theories were never the only play for the Republicans. Just as important as maximizing the white share of the electorate is suppressing the votes of people color and other reliable Democratic voting blocs, like highly mobile college students. That’s why we’ve seen voter ID laws proliferate and GOP officeholders in the South taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling that rendered moot the Voting Rights Act’s provision that any election-related changes in most of the region be approved by the Justice Department or the D.C. Court of Appeals. It’s why Republicans purge voter lists, target early voting, resist vote-by-mail, insist on unscientific signature matching requirements, and consolidate polling stations in Democratic areas to create long lines.

For Pfeiffer, it’s a mistake to think there’s a big distinction between erecting barriers to voting and refusing to count votes. “I don’t know why anyone is surprised by this,” Pfeiffer argues, “Voter suppression has been the primary political strategy of the Republican Party for more than a decade. Throwing out legally cast ballots is barely a hop, skip and a jump from stopping legally eligible voters from casting ballots in the first place.”

If you think of elections as a two-part process, Pfeiffer makes even more sense. The first part is Election Day, along with all the early and absentee ballots. Win the most votes, and you win the election. But there are battles waged before the votes are cast over who can and cannot vote, where they can vote, how difficult it will be for them to vote, whether their ballots will be easy or difficult to challenge, and so on. By gerrymandering districts, politicians famously choose their voters rather than being chosen by them. Winning control of judicial panels makes it more likely that legal challenges will hold up in court. It helps if the governor, legislature, attorney general and secretary of state are in the control of your party. The idea is to win the election before it occurs by changing the shape of the electorate.

We can measure progress by how these two impulses compare in relative strength. Until 1920, women were not allowed to vote. The black vote wasn’t secured nationwide until 1965. Voters under 21 earned the right to vote in 1972. In recent years, early and mail voting have become more widely available, reaching an all-time high in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. What we’re seeing now is different in the detail, as it’s still a fundamental disregard for the consent of the governed.

Curtailing the electorate undermines the legitimacy of its choices. Just as we would no longer accept an election in which women were forbidden from casting ballots, we shouldn’t accept one where voters are intentionally forced to wait in eight-hour lines or their ballots are thrown out by poll workers acting as handwriting “experts.” We certainly cannot abide Trump’s lawyers who would throw out mail-in votes or the returns from of entire counties.

Republican officeholders would be perfectly happy to go along with these extreme theories, Pfeiffer suggests, if they saw a prospect of success. They’re not tolerating Trump’s actions from simple lack of bravery:

The implication is that if things ever got really serious, the Republicans would step in to stop the election theft. I do not believe that. Math — not morals — is why Biden’s election victory is secure. He simply won by too large a margin in too many states for the results to be overturned. I believe without a shadow of doubt that if the election came down to a small margin in one state, the Republican Party — from top to bottom — would be engaged in a full fledged effort to overturn the will of the voters.

This is a conservative and reactionary impulse not a partisan one. When race baiters found their home in the Democratic Party, we had Jim Crow. Today, we have a Trump-led GOP. For both groups, the will of the people is only valid if it brings victory.

The Republicans want to support the myth of our representative system, which is why they won’t go along with simply ignoring the results of the 2020 election based on nothing more than crazed theories that don’t stand up in court. But, Pfeiffer is correct that if they could get away with stealing the election while retaining the fiction that we live in a Republic rather than a dictatorship, they would.

By some measures, it doesn’t seem like Donald Trump was really ever the president. He just didn’t do a lot of work. Most of our interactions with him were virtual. He was seemingly on vacation half the time, or at least wasting time at one of his hotels or resorts. The daily press conferences disappeared. He stopped talking to anyone except right-wing media outlets, for the most part, and eventually the cable news simply stopped covering him when he spoke because he was just spreading lies. He had so few legislative accomplishments that signing ceremonies were rare. He didn’t know how to console the nation during tragedies, so he mostly didn’t try. His foreign adventures were universally bizarre and humiliating, but also fewer in number than is ordinary.

That’s why this doesn’t really seem like much of a change:

It is as if the vast machinery of diplomacy, business and lobbying has suddenly been recalibrated for the Biden era. Mr. Trump, by far the dominant world figure for the past four years, is increasingly treated as irrelevant.

Trump may not be recognizing his own defeat, but the rest of the world is meeting with Joe Biden and preparing to deal with him as a dominant global leader.

Mr. Biden is seizing the moment, not to aggressively confront the president he defeated, but to act presidential in his stead. Even as he demands that an orderly transfer of power be allowed to begin, the president-elect is proceeding as if the political drama created by Mr. Trump amounts to little more than noise — or what his new chief of staff called the “hysterics” of a lame-duck president.

There is going to be a nasty hangover from the Trump Era, of that I have no doubt. At the same time, I’m hoping that with the passage of a little time, the last four years will almost seem like a bad dream, like something we’re not even sure really happened.

That’s the best-case scenario. We’ll look back and think, could that really have happened? Did we really live through that?

If we ever get to that place, I think I’ll be happy again for the first time in a very long time.

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using (My own from a visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now completed the central cliffs. The right side cliffs now reside below a darkened area mirrored on the left side. To the far rear I have repainted the distant buttes.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.