Month: November 2021

Living through the Covid-19 pandemic, one thing that has stood out to me is the selfishness of right wingers. From day one back in 2020, they failed to grasp that a pandemic is a community event that requires us to not only take care of ourselves, but to be concerned about each other. For example, wearing masks has limited effect in protecting us from catching Covid, but is mainly recommended as a way to avoid passing it on to others. In response, right wingers oppose wearing a mask because it supposedly limits their own “freedom.” That is the definition of selfishness.

All of this is especially troubling in that it often comes from those who claim to follow Jesus. When asked which was the greatest commandment, he said it was to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” He went on to say that the second greatest commandment was to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

But the truth is that the kind of selfishness we’re seeing has been baked into conservative ideology for a long time now under the guise of worshiping individualism. At it’s root, it is a rejection of democracy. For example, Marshall Ganz once summarized what Alexis De Tocqueville found when he visited our fledging democracy back in the 1830’s.

[H]e saw that we had learned that choices a few people make about how to use their money could be balanced by choices many people make about how to use their time.

But only by joining with others could we come to appreciate the extent to which our fates are linked, gain an understanding of our common interests, and make claims on the political power we needed to act on those interests.

To avoid the kind of aristocracy that had flourished in Europe prior to our founding, self-government meant that collective action by citizens could balance the choices a few people make with their money. That is the heart of democracy, which inherently poses a threat to the power of aristocrats.

More than any other president, it was Ronald Reagan who undermined this concept of self-government with his focus on the idea that “Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.” With that messaging, our government was no longer “us,” but a “them” that represented a problem to be conquered. That has consistently remained the underlying message of Republicans.

By now you might have forgotten that all of that became a focus during the 2012 presidential race between a community organizer and a hedge fund manager. It all started when Barack Obama said this during a campaign event in Roanoke, Virginia:

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Mitt Romney and Republicans immediately jumped on the line, “you didn’t build that,” claiming that Obama was hostile to free enterprise. They made it the cornerstone of their convention that year.

While not naming the Republican messaging directly, Obama responded with a speech at the Democratic Convention dedicated to the idea of citizenship.

We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk- takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system, the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world’s ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations…

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe.

Obama was terribly prescient about the Republican obsession with “freedom,” reminding us that a focus only on “what’s in it for me” is unworthy of our founding ideals.

That line – “America is not what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us” – pretty much encapsulates the ideal of self government  as the enactment of democracy. It goes to the heart of what might be the foundational difference these days between Democrats and Republicans.

What we have, once again, are two stories of America. One is dedicated to the uniquely American idea of “rugged individualism” that, in isolation from citizenship, leads to the kind of selfishness we’ve witnessed from right wingers during this pandemic. It’s all about “me” and “my freedom.” The other says that we also have obligations to one another and can act on those interests “together through the hard and frustrating work of self-government.” As Obama said on another occasion, “the single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.'”

I think Bill Scher did a really excellent job of skewering Bill Maher in his latest piece for the Washington Monthly, but he didn’t convince me that I should ignore Maher’s argument. And that really makes me wonder whether the effort was worthwhile.

For decades now, Maher was been making politically incorrect jokes because that’s his schtick. From 1993 to 2002, he actually hosted a show called Politically Incorrect, first on the Comedy Channel and then on the ABC network. Along the way, he’s mixed in social and political commentary, especially on his pet projects (e.g., pot legalization, the ethical treatment of animals, climate change) and pet peeves (e.g., religion, boycotts of Israel, 9/11 conspiracy theories). He has whatever influence comes with having a good-sized audience, but as a vote-mover he is inconsequential.

At the moment, Maher is on the warpath against “wokeism” and “cancel culture,” which is to be expected from someone who is the poster boy for opposing political correctness. But his main concern is that the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot by policing thought and speech, and this is handing power to the Republicans. At no point does Scher demonstrate why Maher is wrong about this.

It’s true that Maher is hardly a credible voice on how to avoid alienating middle American voters. His notorious hostility to religion makes that clear, and Scher finds other examples of Maher’s coastal snobbery to bolster the point. But a comedian and social commentator doesn’t have to be win elections. They don’t have to be consistent or follow the advice they offer to others. All that matters is that they entertain and have a point.

Scher does an admirable job of tearing apart some of Maher’s specific examples of “wokeism” by noting that they’re exaggerated or highly misleading. But Maher isn’t handing in a term paper or testifying under oath. It’s true that his point would be stronger if he was careful to have his footnotes properly documented, but I don’t see why this matters much at all.

Scher thinks it’s highly significant that Maher mischaracterized Illinois Democrats’ treatment of Abraham Lincoln:

During his turn on Cuomo Prime Time, Maher said, “When you’re doing something that sounds like a headline in The Onion, that’s when you’ve gone too far, you know? Land of Lincoln cancels Lincoln. That really happened. They tore down Lincoln’s—Lincoln isn’t good enough for them. Seattle, the city council voted to decriminalize crime. This is an Onion headline. I saw one, very recently, maybe babies should vote. It’s what I mean about the ‘Party of No Common Sense.’”

Every one of these examples is misinformation.

Nothing of Lincoln has been torn down in Illinois, though a statue of Lincoln’s bête noir Stephen Douglas has been removed from the statehouse grounds. Maher is probably referring to last year’s creation by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot of an advisory committee to review 41 monuments and murals, including five Lincoln statues. But the committee has not yet made any recommendations, and inclusion on the list, according to the committee, is “not a condemnation of these monuments, but … an opportunity to learn from them.” Lightfoot has said, in response to criticism of Lincoln’s presence on the review list, “Let’s be clear, we’re in the Land of Lincoln, and that’s not going to change.”

As Scher further details, Seattle did not decriminalize crime and it was an employee of a right-wing think tank that suggested there should be no age requirement for voting. But you know what did just happen? The New York City Council removed a statue of Thomas Jefferson from their City Hall chamber. The author of the Declaration of Independence, first Secretary of State, second vice-president, and third president of the United States is now unworthy of reverence.

To be clear, the argument here is not over whether Jefferson’s abhorrent personal behavior warrants his cancelation. There are many ongoing cancellations that have merit, and if someone wants to make the case Jefferson belongs on the list, they can make it. The argument, made by Maher, is that these kinds of decisions are hurting the Democrats politically by creating a cultural chasm with the largest bloc of American voters. The accuracy of this analysis does not depend on choosing the right examples to make the point.

Now, there is one thing that Scher wrote that I think is worth sharing.

In his diatribe on November 19, to prove his point that Democrats don’t seem to care about noncollege whites, Maher said, “You can find ways to stand up for these folks without being David Duke. This month, when the Democrats finally passed their big trillion-dollar bill to rebuild our roads and bridges, six Democrats voted no because it didn’t go far enough to address climate change … This was free money from the federal government that would actually improve their constituents’ lives.”

But Maher’s example makes the opposite point. Only six Democrats voted no, while 215 House Democrats and 50 Senate Democrats voted yes. Let’s ask the question again: Why is the party that supports so many issues that benefit the middle class still considered out of touch by 62 percent of Americans? Maybe because people with big media platforms act like the votes of six congressional Democrats define the party more than the other 265.

Even though Maher is very concerned about climate change, he thought it was stupid to vote against the infrastructure bill because it didn’t do more to address the issue. But he made it sound like the party as a whole was responsible for the votes of a tiny fraction of their caucus. That’s the kind of take we expect from a political opponent. Take the outliers on the other side and hang them around the necks of the rest.

If you want to advise the Democrats on how to do a better job winning elections, you don’t want to be launching Republican talking points at your audience. It’s makes the Democrats less likely to listen, and it also makes their job just a little bit harder.

But no one said Bill Maher was a political genius. He doesn’t have to be a genius to be right that the Republicans are making huge gains off of cancel culture. We can discredit the messenger, but that won’t make it more popular to attack our Founding Fathers or call Jefferson “a slaveholding pedophile who should not be honored with a statue.”

When it convenes this week, Congress will until Friday to avert a government shutdown. It has until mid-month to avoid a catastrophic national default that would destroy our credit rating and probably cause a worldwide recession. It also has to pass our national defense spending bill and would like to push President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda through the Senate by the end of the year. Naturally, the members would also like plenty of days off so they can prepare for and celebrate the holidays.

That sounds like too much work in too little time, especially when you consider that the Republicans will use every stalling tactic they can devise to make the job more difficult. And even if there are enough hours available to get everything done, the Republicans won’t readily supply any votes (except, perhaps, on defense spending), so the Democrats will have to be unified and perhaps prepared to get creative on how to deal with the debt ceiling.

If there’s any compensation for the political observer, it’s that we’ll at least get to see our representatives working long hours. It’s not like they ordinarily give themselves a grueling schedule comparable to the average American worker. Let them earn their money for a change.

Hanging over all of this is the possibility of failure. Each failure would bring with it a different set of political consequences, but all of them are quite serious threats. Defaulting on our debts would be the worst of them, and a government shutdown might be the least problematic, provided it was brief. The Defense spending will get done, but any delay could cause some strong ripples. For the Biden Administration, all of this is paperwork compared to the Build Back Better bill. It represents the heart and core of the president’s agenda, and it’s also the one item that could actually suffer a permanent death. The government may shut down, but not forever, and we could default but we’ll go back to paying our bills before long. But if the Senate doesn’t pass Build Back Better now, it may never get passed, and you can kiss his presidency goodbye.

So, we’re in for a very consequential few weeks in Congress. I hope you’re mentally prepared.

On November 8, 2016, many of us were shocked that Donald Trump prevailed in the Electoral College and became the 45th president of the United States. For the next four years, we absorbed one shock after another. They came so fast that sometimes it was impossible to react to all of them, but we watched a POTUS do things like lie over 20,000 times, claim there were good people on both sides of a white supremacist rally, suggest that the previous administration had tapped his phones, refer to black and brown immigrants as coming from “shithole” countries, separate families who were seeking asylum, ignore a pandemic, and suggest that perhaps we should inject bleach into our veins. It all ended with an orchestrated coup to overturn an election.

An overused meme these days is to say something controversial and then suggest that we “let that sink in.” For most of us, Trump’s presidency was so shocking that we still can’t let it all sink in.

Nevertheless, we elected Joe Biden as president and gave Democrats bare majorities in both the House and Senate. But armed with a right wing media network, Republicans continue to send shock waves into the body politic. For example, the premier propaganda channel, Fox News, has fully embraced the white supremacist great replacement theory, Republicans are combating every effort to get Covid under control, local elected officials (particularly school board members) have been physically threatened, and a young man who killed two protesters is being hailed as a hero.

Frankly, for those of us who live in the reality-based world, our shock absorbers have been been tested on almost a daily basis and it is exhausting. As a result, on one side of the political divide are the collective narcissists who, after decades of fear-mongering, live in a constant state of hyper vigilance. On the other side is an exhausted majority. Dan Rather recently wrote about the latter.

We get to a point where the exhaustion is itself exhausting. And I firmly believe that the forces who seek to undermine our society, who seek to pit us against each other for their cynical gain, see exhaustion as a potent weapon at their disposal. The more exhausted people who care about solving difficult challenges become, the more uncertain success in these endeavors becomes. And I suspect many of you sense this as well. And find it exhausting.

The message to those of us who are feeling exhausted is that, while vigilance is necessary, it is critical that we occasionally take a break because “resilience is a perspective that requires rest as well as determination.”

It is also helpful to understand what’s going on because our addiction to bothsiderism would suggest that people on either side of the political divide are the same. But that’s not the case. Those of us who rely on science, reason, and logic are not reacting out of fear, which is the “juice” that drives collective narcissists.

Even more importantly, we’re not the ones garnering headlines in a media environment that is driven by instant reaction and outrage. That creates the impression that our voices don’t matter and the shock troops are winning. But I don’t believe that’s the case. As an example, I could point to the fact that right wingers got all of the attention in the run-up to the 2017 elections, primarily with their threats to school boards. But according to Ballotpedia, they lost 72% of the school board races they contested nationally. Similarly, anti-vaxers are the ones making headlines, but 70% of adults have had at least one shot and 60% have been fully vaccinated.

Among the exhausted majority are those who simply expected Biden to fix everything immediately because the impression they get from news stories is that he has the power to do so. For example, here is Dan Balz at the Washington Post writing about Biden’s “failure” when it comes to the pandemic.

Biden’s hope to vaccinate the overwhelming majority of the population has fallen short, leaving a patchwork of vaccinated and unvaccinated states and regions within states. Political divisions over the president’s policies, particularly his vaccine requirement for many companies, are worse than ever…After a premature claim by the president in July that the pandemic was mostly behind us and that people would soon have their freedom back, the delta variant struck hard. Now reality has taken hold.

Here’s what the president actually said in July:

Two hundred and forty-five years ago, we declared our independence from a distant king. Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus…

Don’t get me wrong, COVID-19 has not been vanquished. We all know powerful variants have emerged, like the Delta variant, but the best defense against these variants is to get vaccinated.

My fellow Americans, it’s the most patriotic thing you can do. So, please, if you haven’t gotten vaccinated, do it — do it now for yourself, for your loved ones, for your community, and for your country.

The irony is that if Biden was the tyrant right wingers claim him to be, he wouldn’t have to be pleading with Americans to get vaccinated. Honest journalists would affirm that, in a democracy, a president isn’t all powerful, which would lead them to report on the forces that are aligned against him (ie, Republicans).

The benefit of that kind of reporting would be that Americans would be better informed about the positions of both parties. But even more importantly, they would be more inclined to understand that real power comes from voting for those who align with their values.

So if you are feeling exhausted, please take a break from news and politics. But while Republicans do everything they can to make voting more difficult, remember that it is the one thing we can’t take a rest from.

I’m glad to see ex-Republicans like Charlie Sykes calling out the Republican Party for embracing white nationalism and political violence, and it’s a little jarring to see his dire warnings about where this is all headed.

Unfortunately, calls for violence are no longer confined merely to the far edges of the right’s fever swamps.

Just last month, at an event held by right-wing group Turning Point USA, an attendee asked, “When do we get to use the guns?” The audience applauded, The Atlantic reported. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”

Prominent figures on the right have also penned fictionalized fantasies of racial violence. Kurt Schlichter is a columnist at the conservative website Townhall.com and fills in as a guest host on Hugh Hewitt’s nationally syndicated radio show. He has also written a series of books featuring what one critic called “white genocide paranoia and race war fantasy.”

Prominent figures on the right have also penned fictionalized fantasies of racial violence.

Schlichter’s self-published Kelly Turnbull series, Christian Vanderbrouk wrote, “imagines a red state/blue state split, the latter now a progressive dystopia called the People’s Republic of North America, where whites have been impoverished and left homeless by reparations taxes.” In the books, Schlichter describes a brutal and hyperviolent “all-out war.”

In Schlichter’s books — which are widely praised on the right — the body count of progressives, minorities and even police officers is extraordinarily high. This can be dismissed as hyperbole and lib-triggering lulz … at least until the shooting starts.

But there are a few rather important things lacking from Sykes’s analysis. At no point does he mention the near certainty that the Republicans will win control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections. He doesn’t mention that it’s a good bet they’ll win control of the U.S. Senate, too. He doesn’t address what it means that the American people are looking at all of this horrifying behavior and preparing to reward it with political power.

Maybe Sykes doesn’t address these things because he has no answer for how it’s possible, nor for how to prevent it. But if there’s a point to writing these types of pieces, it must be more than to just preview the atrocities. We need to know what the hell to do.

We lack solutions because we still can’t diagnose what’s going wrong. A jury can award a $25 million verdict against the organizer of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, but the electorate is going to put those people, or folks just like them, in charge of the Capitol Building they stormed on January 6.

It’s like an asteroid, headed straight for the Earth, and we’re complaining about the asteroid rather than the destruction it will cause.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle in the UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×10 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.

Since last time I have continued to work on the reflections, particularly the right side of the moat. The painting is now finished.

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

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Kazakhstan was the last Soviet Socialist Republic to declare independence from Moscow, but in March 1992 it was recognized by the United Nations as a full member. On December 16, Kazakhstan will celebrate the 30th anniversary of its Independence Day. Keep that in mind when you see right-wing shills argue that Saule Omarova is “Biden’s first openly Communist nominee.”

Cornell Law Professor Omarova wasn’t there to see the birth of her home country because she was in America as an exchange student. She received a Ph.D in political science from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Northwestern University. She is now an American citizen.

She served as an adviser on regulatory affairs to the Treasury Department’s Under Secretary for Domestic Finance during the George W. Bush administration. If she’s a communist, apparently the Republicans only discovered this when President Biden nominated her to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a posting that oversees small banks.

That’s when banking flak Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) declared “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more radical choice for any regulatory spot in our federal government.” He then provided the following explanation:

“You could ask yourself, ‘Where would a person even come up with these ideas?'” he said. “Well, maybe a contributing factor could be in if a person grew up in the former Soviet Union, and went to Moscow State University, and attended there on a Vladimir Lenin Academic Scholarship.”

Omarova is definitely guilty of growing up in the former Soviet Union, and she did attend Moscow State University on a government scholarship after being the first student at her high school to receive a prestigious gold medal award for academic distinction. It was through Moscow State that she became an exchange student, and she chose to remain in America. Her loyalty to the Soviet Union is doubtful, for one, because Joseph Stalin killed several members of her family. She explained this in her confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee.

I grew up in an all-women household, under a totalitarian regime presiding over a failing economy. My mother, a doctor at a local hospital, worked long hours, just to make ends meet. I was raised by my grandmother, a soft-spoken woman who was orphaned and barely escaped death when, in the 1920s, Stalin sent her entire family to Siberia. The crime for which my grandmother’s family was killed was that they were educated Kazakhs who did not join the Party.

That is why, to me, pursuing education and academic excellence was an act of defying political oppression and injustice. I studied hard, got into the best university I could, and was ultimately able to fulfill my dream of coming to America – the land of opportunity and freedom.

In truth, the USSR references are just a nasty effort to discredit her. Her research into regulatory matters is well-respected.

“Saule is widely regarded as one of the top financial regulatory scholars in the world,” says Jeremy Kress, an assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan. “Whether you agree with her, or disagree with her, you can’t have a complete debate about current topics in U.S. banking law and U.S. financial regulation without taking into account what Saule has written on the topic.”

Yet, within the mighty right-wing media Wurlitzer, we see her characterized this way:

The Democrats are now divided between “radical Communists” like Bernie Sanders and Omarova who admire the Soviet Union and “moderate Communists” like Barack Obama and Thomas Friedman who admire Communist China.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board says she hasn’t “repudiated her Soviet-era views.”

This kind of attack is nothing new. In fact, it’s kind of outdated. People who were born after the Cold War might see it as a novel approach by the right, but it’s more of a resuscitation of John Birch Society nonsense from the 1950’s and 1960’s.

The right doesn’t like Omarova because they serve the banks that she will oversee if confirmed, and the banks think she’ll be too tough.

The OCC has previously come under criticism over perceptions it’s too close to the banks it regulates. The comptroller during the Trump administration, Joseph Otting, reportedly referred to banks as his “customers.”

…Financial experts say Omarova is likely to adopt a tougher approach to banks, but many agree that her previous research has been misrepresented.

After Sen. Toomey graduated from Harvard, he took a job at Chemical Bank and pursued a career as a Wall Street trader. It’s no surprise that he’s running interference for the banking industry, but his McCarthyite approach is certainly disappointing.

It appears that Omarova will still get a confirmation vote provided that she can convince Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana that she’s not a radical. Tester is a key vote on the Banking Committee and is well-known for “going to bat” for small banks. He says he has concerns.

Asked if her comments [at the Nov. 18 confirmation hearing] pushed him for or against her candidacy, Tester told reporters that he is “going to synthesize what we heard.”

“I’ll probably have a statement later,” he added. “I don’t know about today, but it’ll be soon.”

It’s possible that other “moderate” Democratic senators like Mark Warner of Virginia, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona could also present a roadblock, but they’ve kept mum so far.

I’d like to think the right’s smear campaign makes them more, rather than less, inclined to confirm Omarova. They wouldn’t like to reward this kind of behavior, would they?

Maybe I should just use Session instead of Vol. I’ve been back enjoying a favorite anime and processing some thoughts about the first (and hopefully not last) season of the live action remake of Cowboy Bebop. Tht dropped over the weekend on Netflix. I know it has been a polarizing experience among the fandom. All I can say is that if I accept it on its own terms, it’s actually pretty okay. It is not the disaster that the Deathnote live action film was a few years ago. The new Cowboy Bebop is more of a remix. The main characters and those peripheral characters who show up are generally familiar, but it is its own story. It had to be. Otherwise, we’d be bored out of our skulls. It’s set up nicely for a second season if Netflix picks it up. I get the feeling the cast is willing. And I appreciate that some of the more cringy elements of the original anime (especially with regard to gender and sexual orientation) are handled in a manner more appropriate to 2021. I’m not a huge anime fan, but if I am given a premise that interests me, I will check it out. Cowboy Bebop had everything I enjoyed – sci-fi, Spaghetti western, and procedural detective drama, with a slapping jazz soundtrack. The characters became very likeable for me in the original. They became very likeable for me in the remake. I tend to like back stories. The remake weaves that in quite nicely. I wish we’d had more time with the Corgi, Ein, and with Radical Ed. If there is a season 2, I am guessing we’ll see that, as well as how the three primary characters figure out how to reconcile.

And then there is the music. Here’s Yoko Kanno (the composer behind the soundtrack and background music for both the original anime and the new series) doing her thing:

I know that this post will drop around the extended Turkey Day weekend. Hang in there. If you want to drop a comment or two, feel free. Otherwise, see you, space cowboy.

It became obvious a while ago that Donald Trump has some serious mental health issues, focused mostly on Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  But one of the problems with our current mental health system is that it tends to focus on individuals, failing to take context into account. When it comes to understanding the election of Trump, a study by Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of London, started to fill in the gap.

“Political campaigns, especially those that use conspiracy beliefs as a tool to mobilize their electorate, are likely to mobilize collective narcissists. We found that American collective narcissism was linked to the conspiratorial mind-set and this relationship strengthened during the 2016 presidential campaign in the U.S,” Golec de Zavala told PsyPost.

“In another study, we found that collective narcissism was the strongest, after partisanship, predictor of voting for President Trump.”

So what is “collective narcism?” Here is how it was defined by Golec de Zavala:

Collective narcissism occurs when an exaggerated, inflated, and unrealistic view of the in-group compensates for creeping feelings of loss of dominance and declining importance, while also displaying a hypersensitivity to any out-group threats to the in-group’s image. Perhaps most relevant is the research showing a propensity for the in-group to aggressively retaliate and revel in the out-group’s misfortune when the in-group is criticized or feels insufficiently recognized or respected.

As Trump was preparing to run for president, white supremacists Richard Spencer tapped into how he was exploiting those “creeping feelings of loss of dominance.”

“Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.” He said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have – that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon.”

Keep in mind that collective narcissism doesn’t depend on an actual loss of dominance, but a fear that it will happen, as Peter Hall, a professor of government at Harvard, explained.

The people most often drawn to the appeals of right-wing populist politicians, such as Trump, tend to be those who sit several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder in terms of their income or occupation. My conjecture is that it is people in this kind of social position who are most susceptible to what Barbara Ehrenreich called a “fear of falling” — namely, anxiety, in the face of an economic or cultural shock, that they might fall further down the social ladder,” a phenomenon often described as “last place aversion.”

In other words, fear – not reality – is the culprit. That is precisely what right wing outlets like Fox News are promulgating with their embrace of replacement theory. As psychologist Nick Carmody explains, it is important to know about “the effect that fear……especially disinformation-induced fear……has on the collective human psyche.”

From a neurobiological standpoint, the more evolved, cerebral cortex is located the furthest from the primitive brain stem….and contributes to the functions that make us distinctly human such as reason, judgment, and perhaps even our conscience because of its role in awareness/consciousness.

But fear is a primal response that originates in the amygdala, which is located closer to the primitive brain stem. Fear is an evolutionary response that helps guarantee survival. An animal relies on fear to instinctively engage a “binary” fight or flight response to survive. If there is any delay in cognitive processing, the animal risks being defeated in battle if it hesitates to “fight”….or risks being caught in “flight” if it hesitates to flee. Fight or flight requires animals to react first, and then think later, if at all. This is what has been occurring in American politics.

Decades of fear mongering/demagoguery have conditioned people’s primitive fear responses to be in a constant state of “hyper-vigilance” (not unlike PTSD)….which causes them to see enemies everywhere…..and to view everything as a “threat” to their survival. Demagogues have incited people to fear minor “threats” to status…, wealth, and lifestyle…

As a result, “threats” to a white, Christian, unregulated gun-owning society is equated to a literal existential threat to survival.

That is precisely the response Republican politicians are triggering with statements like this:

“The left’s ambition is to create a world beyond belonging,” said Hawley. “Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America.”

“The left’s attack is on America. The left hates America,” said Cruz. “It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America.”

“We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.

Obviously, “the left” is the out-group that poses an existential threat to the in-group of collective narcissists.

All of this forms the basis of grievance politics, which focuses on how right wingers are victims, whose way of life is under attack from the left. Here’s the goal:

The reality is that it’s not about actual victimhood. It’s about perceived victimhood, and the need to keep 45% of this country in a “hyper- vigilant” state of perpetual victimhood…

The byproduct of this perpetual state of victimhood is that a number of otherwise decent people are incited into such an irrational emotional state that they not only tolerate intolerance….but, in some cases, they’re willing to embrace inhumanity.

That is where things get dangerous.

In our society, there is a belief that victims have a right to take extreme measures to defend themselves, up to and including, deadly force. In the law, there is a common law principle called the “Castle Doctrine” that allows people to use reasonable force (including deadly force) to protect themselves against an intruder in their home. This doctrine was codified by state legislatures with “stand your ground” statutes that expanded it to include public places.

As Lance Mannion once explained, Christian nationalists need to feel persecuted.

[I]t feeds their self-pity and sense of entitlement, and it gives them their excuse…If they are under attack, then they’re free to fight back.

According to these folks, victims not only have the right to defend themselves, they have the right to strike preemptively to protect themselves. That is precisely what the defense attorneys in both the Kyle Rittenhouse and McMichael/Bryan trials claimed. In the same way, the January 6 insurrectionists believed that they were the victims of a stolen election, which justified their attack on the Capital. So we see this mindset creeping in to our culture as a justification for the escalation of violence on the right.

All of this is frightening and I have no idea how the story ends. But one thing I do know: if Democrats simply focus on policies (an appeal to reason and judgement), it isn’t going to break through this fear-induced collective narcissism. To be honest, I don’t have a lot of answers about what will break through. It’s just clear to me that the place to start is to better understand what we’re dealing with.

On the one hand, Michael Grynbaum’s article on Joe Biden’s media strategy in the New York Times reads like a typical complaint about access: “He has not sat for interviews with The Associated Press, The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal or USA Today.”

On the other hand, Grynbaum raises legitimate questions about whether Biden’s approach is failing.

As president, Donald J. Trump was a media maximalist whose unavoidable-for-comment style helped generate saturation news coverage, for better or worse.

President Biden has taken a stingier approach to his dealings with the press — and not all his allies believe it’s working out.

After nine months in office, Mr. Biden has conducted roughly a dozen one-on-one interviews with major print and television news outlets. That compares with more than 50 for Mr. Trump, and more than 100 for Barack Obama, in the same period, according to West Wing record keepers.

If the pulpit is one of a president’s most powerful tools of communication, Mr. Biden has opted to rely more heavily on fleeting, impromptu exchanges with White House reporters, often taking a few shouted questions as he boards a helicopter or exits a photo-op.

One thing to keep in mind is that whether you’re training a prizefighter, a chess champion, or advising the president of the United States, there are no one-size-fits-all answers. Everyone has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses, and this is true of the adversaries, too.  Media consumption patterns change, as does the makeup of the American electorate and the opposition party.

It seems self-evident that White House strategists don’t think having Biden speak extemporaneously or off-the-cuff plays to his strengths. He’s well known for making verbal gaffes, and he is beginning to slow down a bit at his approaches eighty years of age. The risk is that rather than managing and directing the news, he’ll make himself the story, and for the wrong reasons.

Joe Frazier didn’t beat Mohammed Ali in their first fight by dancing around in the middle of the ring. He applied relentless pressure and wore Ali down over 15 rounds. A similar strategy got Frazier knocked out when he tried to defend his title against George Foreman.

In the last chess championship, between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, Carlsen opted to pursue a draw in the last classical game even though he was in a slightly stronger position. This was because he knew the match would then go into a phase of rapid games with short time controls, and he was a much stronger rapid player. He calculated that he was more likely to blow a winning position in a classical game than to lose a tiebreak consisting of quick games. It worked. It’s unlikely Carlsen will use the same approach when he defends his title against GM Ian Nepomniachtchi, beginning of Friday, because Nepo is one of the strongest rapid players in the world.

Similarly, we can’t advise Biden to emulate Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama simply because they had success doing it their way. I think it’s quite obvious that Biden wouldn’t be good at using Twitter as his primary way of communicating with the public, so it’s not a matter of him failing to use the methods that worked for Trump.

The question then is less what Biden isn’t doing that was effective in the past than trying to identify strengths that are going unexploited. He needs to do something different, but he has to play to his unique strengths. One clear strength of Biden’s is his ability to connect with ordinary people, to talk on their level, to console them, to empathize with their problems, to let his basic decency shine through. That’s why the town hall format works pretty well for him, but it’s time consuming. A president can work in a few of these a year, but not much more than that. It’s also a hard format to control. It’s much easier to control an interview with a reporter from a major newspaper.

I think one area where Biden’s strengths could be better utilized is in developing a sharper partisanship, but one that casts indecency as the real opponent rather than the Republican Party per se. He can go into any community in the country and truthfully argue that he’s delivering for the people. He can say he’s bringing down the cost of prescription drugs and expanding broadband and repairing dangerous roads and bridges, and maybe their representatives are focused on producing viral tweets and nasty putdowns. Insults won’t help you pay for day care or a hearing aid.

He needs to be more visible, for sure, but not necessarily by sitting down with reporters or having more of a social media presence.

It’s best if a politician can be authentic, and Biden is very real and very convincing when he tries to call on our better angels. There’s a thirst for that, which helped him win the election, but he’s not doing a good job of reinforcing that message every day. If he ties it into every message he sends out, I think it will begin to get people back on his side.

He should go with what people like about him, which also happens to be his strongest asset and the Republicans’ biggest weakness.