Putting the House Republicans' Disorder into Historical Context

Over at Substack I wrote about the current fight in the Republican party over the Speakership. We are so used to seeing political events in a decontextualized 24 hour news cycle that many miss how McCarthy's fate mirrored those of Boehner and Ryan because the same dynamics are at play. I basically argue that Gingrich broke the House as a legislative body, and that it's impossible for a Republican Speaker to be both his party's ideological firebrand and an effective legislator. 

I mention the power of conservative media in the piece, and I after I wrote it I read that Sean Hannity is whipping votes for Jim Jordan. I guess I'm pretty smart. 

Tucker Carlson is the Symptom

Liberals, befitting their historical origins, have an intense attachment to the ideology of the Enlightenment. They tend to see the people who vote for their opponents of having been misguided or mislead, and that if they knew the true facts they would have to acknowledge their error.

Of course, it's a ridiculous outlook, but it colors liberal opinion on a lot of things, especially the conservative media apparatus. The liberal Enlightenment take says that if we can somehow shut down Fox News or push it in a less extreme direction, its followers will surely moderate. Once the Fox blinders are lifted the truth shall miraculously set them free. 

Yesterday's news that Fox let go of Tucker Carlson was met with some rejoicing in liberal circles, but the wise heads were not moved. In the first place, this fits a larger pattern. Fox has dumped Beck, O'Reilly, and Dobbs, and their message has not moderated a wit. A new demagogue will surely take Carlson's place. Liberals also fail to understand that the audience has the agency here. 

People like Tucker aren't just radicalizing their audience, they are also responding to their audience's radical demands. He says crazy shit on TV because his audience WANTS him to say crazy shit on TV. Just take the revelations about Carlson's private castigations of Trump. He may loathe the man in his heart, but when Trump comes on his show he bends the knee because that is what his audience expects. 

After January 6, Fox was concerned about losing their core audience to Newsmax and One America News, and had to compete with the crazies. Carlson served them well in that purpose, and I am sure they will find someone else to fulfill the same role.

Of course, if liberals are finally able to understand that their opponents' supporters are reactionaries because they WANT to be, and not because they are tricked, that will be hard pill to swallow. They want to pretend that their conservative neighbors and acquaintances are "good people," and if they have horrible politics, well, they just haven't heard the right message. It's much harder to understand that many people you like and respect quietly support a politics meant to destroy you. It's easy to blame radicalization on Tucker Carlson, it's harder to accept that he is much more the product of his viewership, a viewership that includes people in our own lives. 

Like Trump, DeSantis Understands the Right's Love of Humiliation

Recent news and anecdotal evidence points to a rise in Ron DeSantis' stature on the Right, and a drop in Trump's. It would be superficial and wrong to credit this to a change in the Right's fundamental politics or a return to "normal." 

Rather, DeSantis has adopted the most fundamental aspects of Trump's politics while allowing some on the Right to distance themselves from the latter's toxic brand. DeSantis, like Trump, understands that the conservative base does not care a fig for actual policy outcomes. They aren't really interested in legislating, and the behavior of Republicans in the House has been proof of this. They are far more invested in something far more tangible: punishing and humiliating the people they don't like. 

Just as Trump separated children from their parents at the border, DeSantis has been deporting migrants to other states with not even the minimum of arrangements made for their comfort upon arrival. This policy has nothing to do with border security and everything to do with generating a spectacle of humiliation, both for the migrants and for liberal politicians. 

DeSantis' education policies and anti-LGBT legislation performs a similar function. His base hates gay and trans people and they hate teachers and he is giving them the public attacks against their objects of hate that they so crave. This same base boils over with resentment, angry that the culture is changing and that their worldview is no longer unquestioned. When Disney, a company they assumed was on "their side" starts making movies with Black mermaids or that deal with menstruation, they get mad. When that same company publically opposes their political values when it comes to anti-LGBT hate, they lose their minds. DeSantis understands this, which is why he very publicly humiliated Disney by taking away their special status, something that will also force liberal voters in Orlando to pay higher taxes as well. That was a double win for his politics of humiliation.

Like Trump, DeSantis is what I call an instinctual bully. I've been bullied a lot in my life, both as a child and as an adult, so I know the type. Some people are casual bullies or situational bullies. I call Trump and DeSantis instinctual bullies because it is their central defining characteristic. They look at every situation and think about how they can turn it into a way to bully or humiliate someone they don't like. It is the thing that occupies their minds through most of their waking hours. They don't merely want or like to bully others, they MUST do so.

At this point, I have to point the finger a bit more broadly. They would not have such power if it was not for the masses of people who enjoy living vicariously through the bully's actions. So many ordinary "nice people" get a thrill out of seeing university administrators sacked and replaced with conservative ideologues, or smile about trans youth being denied health care. They are the people who stopped to laugh at me during my own childhood humiliations, cowards content to toady to the big boss bully in order to protect themselves. 

I would also point the finger at this country's useless prestige media, eager to hop on the DeSantis Rising train for clout and getting credit for being on the ground floor of the Next Big Thing. They watch public universities being turned into factories for Right wing ideology and then treat it like just another policy decision, shrugging their shoulders and saying "well, who can say who's right or wrong here?" This is another parallel with Trump: boosting ratings and circulation gets prioritized above actual journalism.

Time will tell if DeSantis or Trump or someone else gets the Republican nomination, but that's beside the point. Either way, this is a party animated by the humiliation ethos of Libs of TikTok more than anything else. That's not going away anytime soon.  

Whatever Happened to "Virtue" and "Character"?

I put out of a Substack newsletter installment last week called "You Can't Shame The Shameless" about how the shamelessness of radical conservatives in the Trump Era is a kind of superpower. They can never be caught in a scandal because they refuse to play along with the media. When they get caught, they just double down and refuse to admit wrongdoing. Their base only cares about gaining power, and anything and anyone is justified in protecting "Real America" from its political opposition. 

I'd like to expand on this theme a little here. I just finished reading a couple books about politics in the 90s, and it was striking to re-familiarize myself with the conservative rhetoric of that era. Today "values" issues for right wingers means abortion prohibition and attacks on trans teenagers. Back in the 90s there was still plenty of fetus fetishization and gay bashing, but there was also a softer side of social conservatism. Social conservatives criticized what they termed a selfish society that had strayed from old virtues.

Movement conservative types like William Bennett kept sounding this trumpet. During the Clinton presidency it wasn't just used to term progressives Godless, it was used to undermine the president himself. He lacked virtue and "character" as well. The impeachment proceedings arising out of the Lewinsky affair injected this stance with a shot of steroids that would've made Mark McGwire jealous. In the worldview of the virtue mongers, the country could not be great if it tolerated such an immoral man at the top. 

At the time I did not think this was just cynical point scoring. I truly thought that social conservatives believed this stuff. In my book these were misguided beliefs, but I still had to take them seriously. I'm also someone who thinks our society is harmed by negative values, especially the worship of money and power. These are not the things social conservatives excoriate, but my own stance inclined me to believe that social conservatives truly wanted a more virtuous polity, even if I found their definition of virtue to be hollow. 

Two decades after the Clinton administration I've witnessed social conservatives bow to the altar of Trump, the personification of greed, pride, and any number of sins. I hear very little talk of values, virtues, and character from them. Their power worship does not have any time for such petty trifles. 

This week marks the sixth anniversary of the Access Hollywood tape. It was a turning point for me because after hearing the vile things Trump said about grabbing women by the genitals the same people who I've known forever who were incensed at Bill Clinton's lack of character back in '98 were open at how they were still going to vote for Trump. In that moment I realized all those years of virtue rhetoric were complete bullshit. Instead of bullshit, we are living with something worse, a full-throated, undisguised movement dedicated to destroying democrac. 

The Crux of Our Low-Grade Civil War

As I have said time and time again, America is engaged in a low-grade civil war, but most outside of the right wing are in denial about it. Some are so used to the way things used to be that they just can't see it, others are more actively sticking their heads in the sand because they are too chickenshit to fight.

This low-grade conflict has been going on for some time now. I would say it definitively popped above the surface when McConnell blocked the ability for Obama to name a Supreme Court justice back in 2016. Since then it has only continued with Trump actively attacking "blue states" as president and denying them COVID relief. We have seen in on the state level with rollbacks of voting rights intended to block Democrats from power, and from gerrymandered state legislatures that have stripped powers from Democratic governors. 

After the 1/6 insurrection and the Republican obstruction of any investigation into it you would think that the reality of the situation was obvious to everyone in this country, but most of the non-insurrectionists just haven't taken it in. People like Joe Manchin are still defending the very filibuster that allows this naked attack on democracy to happen in the first place. Just as bad, national media fails to report the naked power grads on the state level as a coordinated assault on majority rule.

Some of this is the media's idiotic both-sides narrative, some of it is their fear of being called liberal, but I think most of it is something deeper. National reporters simply do not understanding the beliefs and mentalities of the people they are covering. 

In the first place, they think Republican leaders are being pushed by a rabid base, when in fact there is hardly any separation in mentality between Republican politicians and the people they represent. (In fact, I would argue that those representatives are actually MORE extreme.) Second, they do not know the basic, fundamental belief that animates the Right's assault on democracy.

Put simply, most conservatives believe that any liberal political authority over them is illegitimate. It does not matter if a clear majority elected that authority, or if that liberal authority governs in a milquetoast, centrist way or even if that liberal authority does things that directly benefit them. The notion that they must submit and do something a liberal wants, ANYTHING a liberal wants is intolerable no matter how necessary. For example, conservatives were much more supportive of masks until Trump politicized them and made it seem like the "liberal" thing to do. The same goes for the very vaccines that the man they voted for funded. Political orientation is the biggest indicator of vaccine hesitancy.

Things get really crazy, however, when liberals try to enact their agenda. That is something that violates conservatives' fundamental understanding of the universe. The notion that their children might have to learn about the history of racism, or that transgender children be able to compete in high school sports makes them absolutely insane with rage and resentment. 

The fervent belief that any liberal authority is illegitimate means that rigging elections, gerrymandering districts, packing courts, removing governors' powers, attacking the Capitol etc. is not only permissible, it is REQUIRED. They see themselves as the "real Americans" and anything against them as an attack by un-American forces. They don't have a problem limiting the votes of people they don't even think belong in the country in the first place. 

This right here is the crux of the issue. The behavior of Republicans is not comprehensible unless observers actually understand the fundamentals of the conservative mind. Otherwise they are just groping around in the dark. It also means that there is not going to be an easy way out.

If the rest of us don't roll up our sleeves and fight we will be returning back to America's tradition of minority, Herrenvolk rule. If we do actually want to prevent that, there's a lot of uncertainty about what that could lead to. A definitive electoral win could remedy the situation, but the Senate, gerrymandering, electoral college, and voter suppression have made that impossible. In any case conservative authorities have basically signaled that they will be trying to invalidate elections going forward. The only thing any self-respecting progressive can do is to be prepared to fight back with all that is in us, consequences be damned.

Can a Wedge Be Driven Into the Republican Base?

Randy Newman figured what really makes conservatives tick fifty years ago

Today I saw some interesting polling numbers that showed that lower-income Republicans were in favor of Biden's 1.9 trillion economic recovery bill, while middle and upper-income Republicans were opposed. (Democrats are highly in favor across income levels.) These numbers piqued my interest because I have long thought of the Republican base as being far more solid than that of the Democratic Party. The Democrats have tended to be a fractious coalition whereas the Republicans have coalesced around a common ideology.

One very important ideological element has been trickle-down economics. By sponsoring massive relief and spending last year, Trump and the Republicans were flouting their party's "fiscal responsibility" narrative even more so than usual. Many of their voters who got tangible help from that relief seem willing to break from the party line on trickle down. As we have seen, Republicans will let the money taps run when they are in office, so it's hard to drive a wedge on this issue in those times. However, with Republican politicians shifting gears back to austerity an opportunity may present itself.

At the same time, I wonder if the Republican Party's defense against this attack is still impregnable. What lashes their party together is not the ideas of Hayek and Friedman but resentment. Everyone in their group from the Bible thumpers to libertine libertarians is united in their hatred of liberals. This is why the Dr Seuss bullshit is so effective. Conservatives go around every day thinking that liberals are out to corrupt society and dominate them. They'd literally rather die than do something a liberal wants, just look at the anti-mask stuff. 

It's hard to draw people from a political faction that seems more like a cult. Even harder when challenging a white nationalist framing that so many on the Right embrace, and which can override other concerns among working class white people.

Seen from this perspective, a difference of opinion about the role of government in helping its people is actually pretty ancillary to the conservative cause. The more respectable members of the movement have been allowed for decades to put on their bow ties and go on television and act like they are some association of principled thinkers. In reality the Birchers completed the Long March and contrary William F Buckley's narrative, ended up victorious in the end. 

This is another way for me to say while I am surprised to see a potential wedge in the Republican Party, I doubt much can be done with it.

Death of a Clown

Rush Limbaugh was one of the most influential media figures of my lifetime, if not the most influential of all. This failed sports broadcaster became the central figure of both the Republican Party and conservative movement, the one person that the libertarians, Bible thumpers, militia nuts, and rank and file right wingers could agree on. He united this broad coalition through their common hatred of "the liberals."

Limbaugh always pronounced that phrase with such dripping contempt. I remember when he had a late night TV show in my youth, and the ad consisted of stereotypical liberals acting offended at what Rush said. Well before social media was a glint in Mark Zuckerberg's dead eyes"triggering the libs" was the conservative staff of life. 

Sometimes out of morbid curiosity I would watch that TV show, and was struck by just how scared and resentful his audience seemed to be when it came to the most milquetoast liberals. Early in the Clinton presidency he would come in and out of commercials with a "America held hostage" graphic. Well before January 6th, 2021, he had propagated the notion that any Democratic presidency was de facto illegitimate. 

What unnerved me was how people in my life who were devout Catholics and extremely kind in their personal lives and careful not to say negative things of others embraced Limbaugh so much. One aunt of mine who I never heard say a disparaging word to others would listen to him and parrot his arguments. She was a clerk and her husband a small farmer and yet followed the corporatist Limbaugh line. Family friends who sponsored my church youth group had his books displayed prominently. I would flip through them sometimes, taken aback by the rank misogyny and cruelty masquerading as humor.

Nowadays, I understand the connection. The same kind of people also voted for Trump, another showman with a big mouth full of hateful words completely unburdened by shame. I have come to realize that conservatives who are kind upstanding people in their personal lives long for a champion who can express all the contents of their id. Limbaugh and Trump both gave them that. 

Limbaugh was Trump's John the Baptist. (The awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom was a real game recognize game moment.) Limbaugh made it clear that Republicans were far more animated by the culture war than they were about actual tangible political goals. As long as the people they didn't like got hurt worse than them they didn't really care all that much about a whole lot else. For decades the respectable conservative movement thought of itself as being animated by higher principles and ideas, but in reality that was only for the occasional Frum and Kristol type. Trump knew that in 2016 and came in like wrecking ball, forcing the likes of Ted Cruz to drop their high-minded schtick and get down into the muck. 

Limbaugh also knew that Republicans would get far more support from obstructing Democrats than doing anything themselves. His infamous speech at CPAC in 2009 rallied conservatives chastened by their huge defeat in the 200 election. His call for them to derail the Obama administration was heard, and by 2010 the Tea Party would sweep Republicans back into power. 

At the end of the day, however, Limbaugh was primarily in it for himself. There was no animating ideology behind him apart from making a buck. His CPAC speech reasserted his relevance at a time when he faced more competition from other conservative talkers trying to win his crown. He made his bucks appealing to the cultural resentments of his ditto heads, and that only occasionally steered him wrong. (I remember his disastrous stint as a NFL studio commentator when he said Donovan McNabb was getting praised as a quarterback because he was Black. That basically killed ESPN's dumbass experiment.) 

What's striking is that this carnival barker dishing out racial resentment, misogyny, and homophobia to his eager audience ended up being so important. It's another sign of our failed media, failed politics, and failed society. Limbaugh was a smart enough showman to give the people exactly what they wanted. In the process he turned the right wing's dark id into the Republican Party's mainstream. I guess the clown gets the last laugh. 

The Republican Party Doubles Down on the Trump Movement

We now take you live to Mar-a-Lago...

As I said in a recent post, the Republican Party has ceased to be a broad-based political party in the American tradition, and has become The Trump Movement. The party narrative now resembles that of France's National Front, which could be termed The LePen Movement (hence Marine taking the reins.) 

There's another historical comparison I could make but I don't want to distract ourselves too much.

After 1/6 the GOP was faced with a decision. It could either continue to be The Trump Movement, or it could take the golden opportunity to jettison the demagogue and rebuild. For a moment there it looked like even Mitch McConnell was onboard, but then reversed course when he suddenly realized that the rest of his party was not. This week Kevin McCarthy, their House minority leader, made the trek to the Mar-a-Lago government in exile to collaborate.

So we are left with a situation where a president can try to overthrow the government and invalidate an election and once out of office will face no consequences. Congress members who supported this action, including AFTER the Capitol was assaulted, still hold their seats. I used to wonder why Hitler only spent a couple of years in jail after the Beer Hall Putsch, then later realized it was a reflection of the weakness of Weimar democracy. In that context and present-day America most reactionaries will not accept democracy if it means having to let other people into power. Those who defend democracy are so weak that they are not able to call those trying to to kill it into account.

I should also take a minute to clarify what I mean by The Trump Movement. I mean a politics that promises that the strong man will revive the humiliated nation, smite the internal enemies, expel immigrants, punish Black people, and restore white cishetero Christian supremacy. At its core this is fascism. A lot of his supporters on the far Right seem to understand that. Plenty of other Republicans might be motivated by low taxes and abortion, but they still share the same white nationalist assumptions, even if just subconsciously.

This doubling-down represents the culmination of decades of history. This summer I read Julian Zelizer's most recent book about Newt Gingrich's rise to power in the late 1980s before his ultimate victory in the 1994 election. He learned that shameless, scorched earth tactics worked, and that the most efficient way to get support in the Republican Party was by demonizing Democrats. Back in the 90s plenty of Republican voters bought into things like the New World Order conspiracy, but national Republican politicians would never give them credence. (Although Pat Robertson would.) Today they have caught up with their base. 

Whack-job true believers like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Green just openly spew the conspiratorial litany, but Ivy League sociopaths like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have jumped in, understanding that the way to get power in the GOP is to indulge the fever swamps. 1/6 was not the end, it was the beginning. A democracy where one major party wants to destroy democracy to get its way won't survive very long. Instead of thinking they can go home and rest, those who resisted the Trump administration need to stay active and focused. The Trump presidency is over, but the Trump Movement still lives on.

The Sacking of the Capitol

I have an interest in the history of the late antiquity and early middle ages ever since my childhood, especially the breaking apart of the Roman empire. While references to Rome's fall and America's situation can be tenuous and trite, I want to make a comparison that is less a one to one deal and more a way to get some perspective on the events of this week. 

The sacking of the Capitol got me thinking about the sacking of Rome in 410 by the Goths. Obviously, the two events are unlike in terms of participants and motivations, but they share a SYMBOLIC meaning. Rome being sacked showed the world that a once mighty empire was vulnerable. That empire still lasted in name for a few more decades (the exact date depends on how you want to argue what the "fall of Rome" is) but its allure was shattered.

The US Capitol being stormed by a MAGA mob containing white supremacists and literal Nazis who were then treated with kid gloves by law enforcement had a similar symbolic power. The notion that this country is some kind of democratic beacon to the world has been a useful myth for quite some time, and while it is indeed a myth it still had some staying power. Plenty of people here and in other countries wanted to believe in it. It's a myth that both Obama and Biden deployed. Seeing a bunch of red-hatted thugs literally smear their shit in the halls of Congress has broken that forever.

It is impossible to deny what everybody saw. China's government is mocking the us. A Kenyan newspaper had the headline "Who's the Banana Republic Now?" The American Empire is merely a hollow shell. This is not hyperbole or speculation, it was laid out for all the world to see on television. 

The only way to prevent the fate of Rome is stop claiming "this is not who we are." It obviously IS who we are, but we are presented with an opportunity to make things better. We cannot miss this opportunity. The perpetrators, both the ground level thugs and their politician enablers, must face consequences. They must no longer be accepted into polite society. It should be impossible for Trump administrators to ever find a job again in public life. Trump himself must be impeached and removed.

As awful as the sacking was, I know that these people do this stuff to make us feel hopeless. Without hope, you can't fight. Well I refuse to give away my hope and I will keep my shoulder at the wheel. All you fascists bound to lose. 

A Legitimacy Crisis For All The Wrong Reasons

The crowds calling the system illegitimate are not who you'd suspect

It should not be a surprise that the American system of government is having a legitimacy crisis. After all, Democrats have won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, but only three members of the Supreme Court were nominated by Democrats. Two of the most disastrous presidents in this country's history were elected with a minority of the vote. The Senate, filibuster, and gerrymandering have allowed the minority party to either gain power or prevent the majority from wielding it. In states like North Carolina and Wisconsin Republicans have won legislatures via gerrymandering then stripped incoming Democratic governors of their powers. 

It's very strange then that we are seeing accusations of illegitimacy not by the disenfranchised majority, but instead by the aggrieved minority. The fact that 126 House Representatives and 17 state attorneys general signed onto Texas' ridiculous challenge to the election result is truly staggering. They are the people who benefit from the undemocratic nature of the system, yet they are the ones fighting to tear it apart.

On the surface this doesn't make sense, but it does if you look at legitimacy through their eyes and take stock of the past thirty years of American political history. Jimmy Carter is the last Democratic that Republicans treated as legitimate. They impeached Bill Clinton over a minor offense after years of saying his win in 1992 was not legit because he won a plurality, not majority of votes. When Barack Obama took office they said he wasn't really born in America. They used the filibuster to block his legislation and would not even give Merrick Garland a hearing. Now they are openly calling Biden illegitimate before he even has a chance to take office. 

What explains all of this is the conservative worldview where they are the "real Americans." In this framing liberals and those who vote for them are the other, something compounded by the fact that people of color and city-dwellers mostly vote for Democrats. Anyone who opposes conservatives is de facto illegitimate because they are not Real Americans. On top of that, Republicans refuse to submit to the authority of any elected Democrat because liberals represent an un-American, malevolent force impinging on them. 

As I have said, many conservatives would literally rather die than do something a liberal asked them to do. The pandemic has offered proof. Conservatives have opposed mask mandates and refuse to cooperate with contact tracing, even as we are seeing a 9/11 worth of deaths every single day. Reason, science, and even self-interest are not adequate antidotes for this mentality. Any admission of being wrong means the entire basis of the their identity as the infallible Real Americans crumbles and so challenging their worldview only causes them to double down. 

The current legitimacy crisis is going to be perpetual as long as the Republican Party and its allied media continue the narrative that they are the only people with legitimate claims to power. It will continue until the party and its adherents change, or their behavior finally breaks the system. Our political system certainly can't sustain one of two major parties actively trying to destroy it for very long. 

My Letter to the Nebraska Attorney General

 This evening I discovered that my home state of Nebraska has joined 17 others in the lawsuit filed by Texas to overturn the election. I know that the people responsible for this will never stop being horrible, but at the very least I don't want them to think that they can play games with our democracy without getting their ears burned with words of rebuke. My letter is below, I urge others to do likewise.

*****

Attorney General Peterson:

It was with great alarm and disgust that I read that you have included Nebraska in the group of states that have joined Texas in trying to overturn a free and fair presidential election. Millions more Americans voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, and those votes have now been certified. Apparently you are such a craven partisan that you would rather destroy democracy than accept losing an election. 

I grew up in Nebraska and while it was always conservative politically, I never had to doubt that the state's leaders supported the maintenance of democratic institutions. I am saddened and angered that this is no longer the case. I do not know if you are doing this out of misguided conviction or a slavish devotion to the Republican Party, but either way you should be ashamed of yourself and resign your position. You are clearly unfit to hold it, at least in a free and democratic nation. What puzzles me is that you would sell your soul for Donald Trump, a lying con artist who cares about no one but himself. To betray the public trust in such a flagrant manner for such a man is truly, truly pathetic. If the consequences were not so damaging I would laugh. If there is any justice in this nation your name will forever be wreathed in shame. 

Sincerely,

Jason Tebbe

They Are What We Thought They Were

On this election eve I have been thinking back to 2016 and contemplating what I anticipated and what I failed to see. I missed a few things, but I was right about one important thing: the Republicans are who we thought they were. 

I get the phrase from the famous Dennis Green meltdown after his Arizona Cardinals lost in a humiliating fashion to the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football. Back in 2016 there was this talk that placed "Trump voters" in a separate category from "Republicans" as if they weren't one and the same. There was this bullshit notion that Trump and elected Republicans would act independently from one another, and might even butt heads. 

The opposite has happened because Trump stands for the same things that Republicans stand for, he just says the quiet parts out loud, and Republicans love him for it. This is why a sniveling weasel like Ben Sasse will let it leak that he privately objects to Trump's behavior while he still votes for all of his bills and judicial appointees. Other Senators may get disturbed at how big daddy Trump has the ability to turn their Fox News addled voters against them, but since they all want the same stuff it doesn't really matter. 

Republicans have figured out that their brand lacks mass appeal. Their ideology is anathema to most Americans, which is why they have won the popular vote in the presidential election only once since 1988. If you want minority rule you have to have a flashy strongman, not a no-necked simp in a suit telling people to eat cat food to increase Wall Street's bottom line. No, you need a preacher proclaiming the old time religion of racial and religious resentment with a showman's flair. 

Despite the botched pandemic response, kids in cages, failure of North Korean diplomacy, and constant governmental chaos, Republicans have not abandoned Trump. Nixon and Dubya's approval ratings dipped far lower. He has successfully made himself the avatar of white American identity, and reaped the reward of a fanatical following that cannot be lost no matter how badly he fucks up. When he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, he knew what he was talking about. 

So on this election eve, I can't help but think about how rank and file Republicans will react. If he loses decisively I expect another Tea Party, filibusters, obstruction, and state nullification. Like their white supremacist forbears at the dusk of Jim Crow, they will opt for "massive resistance." If it's close I suspect we will see a thousand "Brooks Brothers riots" across the country. No matter what, we will be stuck with figuring out to have a functioning democracy in a country where one of the two major parties doesn't want to accept democracy at all. The Republicans will continue to be who we think they are. 

The Thirty Percent Problem

As an educator this summer means many hours spent tying my brain into knots with anxiety. Over the next few days I expect to hear from my school, my wife's school district, and my children's school district about plans for fall. I pray that they are in some way compatible, since we are having to make shit up as we go all along. 

There's a deeper reason for that, of course. The United States has simply opted not to have any kind of national response to the pandemic. This is by design, since the president just wants people to go back to doing what they did before, thinking this will boost the economy and help him win the election. It also fits with his complete inability to build up, the man is only capable of destruction. 

When I have my daily anxiety attacks one thing I keep thinking about is how little will change even if Donald Trump loses the election and leaves office. A great number of Americans, I would estimate thirty percent, simply refuse to take the virus seriously. I've seen pictures and heard accounts from friends in some parts of the country where people do all kinds of activities in crowded, indoor areas without masks. Even here in New Jersey, which has suffered horribly from the virus, I will see people go into stores wearing a mask on their goddamned chins. 

This is not merely lax behavior, it is rooted in how deep our political divide has come. As plenty of others have pointed out, the thirty percent I mentioned before has reached "epistemtic closure." The people in that group simply do not trust ANYTHING that comes from outside their conservative world. This is not a matter of stupidity or ignorance, but a willful construction of an alternate reality. That's why presenting facts or educating will not matter. In fact, as with climate skeptics and anti-evolutionists, it only confirms their viewpoint if they are challenged and forced to defend it!

Social media and the segmentation of news into sources like talk radio, Breitbart, Fox, and OAN mean that the thirty percent has a constant stream of misinformation to confirm their membership in their community and distrust all those outside. Younger people might change their minds when exposed to other viewpoints, but as for the old, forget about it.

This means that even with a Biden presidency putting a national response in place, it would get nowhere. The militant minority could easily stop it. In fact, our political system is set up to let that happen. The unrepresentative nature of the Senate, the Senate filibuster, gerrymandering, and federalism all allow this thirty percent outsize power. A mask mandate and closures will simply never be undertaken by most Republican governors. What then? 

If Biden wins or he loses I predict that this disease will be endemic, killing and killing and killing and never stopping. There will be ebbs and flows, highs and lows, but it will always be here. And even if there is a vaccine developed (which I am skeptical of) enough of the thirty percent will refuse to take it and thus make it far less effective.

We've reached the point we have been traveling towards for years. The United States of America in its current state is ungovernable. There won't be a civil war, just decades of being an ever-burning dumpster fire of a country, like many of our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. It turns out we aren't all that exceptional after all. 

How the Conservative Idea of Freedom Explains the "Re-Open America" Protests

Over the last two days there has been a lot of news about right wing protestors trying to pressure state governments to lift quarantine measures. As with the Tea Party, this appears to be stoked by conservative media and various organizations. The numbers of people in the street aren't really that impressive, but that hasn't stopped the media from giving them wall to wall coverage.

It certainly seems surreal for people to be demanding they risk disease and death so they can go to Applebee's again. However, it makes total sense if you understand the conservative idea of freedom in America.

The name of the concept is a reference on my part to The German Idea of Freedom, a venerable intellectual history by Leonard Krieger. The book posits that in the years before Germany became a nation-state in 1871 that "freedom" was defined in ways inconsistent with liberal values of individual rights and democracy. The book suffers from the same problems of a lot of other histories of its time in terms of treating Germany as "other" in European history to explain the rise of Nazism. That said, it does offer a valuable service in showing that there is more than one definition of "freedom" in the modern world and that conceptions of freedom can be quite consistent with authoritarianism.

The culture of American conservatism illustrates this as well. The people descending on state capitols with signs like "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death"  and "Socialism Distancing" seem to think that the current quarantine measures are a huge violation of their freedoms. It is an important illustration of what these people think freedom is and what it isn't.

This is not freedom in any democratic sense. The same people protesting have no problem with Republicans limiting voting rights They support mass incarceration and limiting reproductive rights. They are fine with immigrant families being separated and children being jailed.

Instead, freedom for them means the freedom to do as they please and not being told what to do, especially by some egghead liberal. It is the freedom to pay your workers peanuts, to pollute as much as you want, to say whatever you want no matter how offensive, and most importantly to buy whatever you want.

This is the low-brow and more widespread version of conservativism stripped of the fripperies and trappings of Austrian School economics. The Tea Party foot soldiers see economic freedom is far less high-flown terms. America's lowest common denominator consumer culture to them represents the end all be all, and having their access denied by rules laid down by public health experts infuriates them. It is a kind of dime store Ayn Randianism, Being forced to make a sacrifice for the good of the collective is completely anathema to them. Sure, you can make a sacrifice if you want, but NEVER against your will. Being free means going to Home Depot whenever the hell you feel like it, pandemic or not.

This has been conservatism's promise to its adherents for four decades now. When Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 he emphasized that Americans did not need to sacrifice anything to defeat the energy crisis. This was a crucial moment, since conservatives had long called for sacrifice in times of crisis. (Just think to the Great Depression and Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover.) After 9/11 Dubya told everyone to go shopping, and he never raised taxes to pay for his wars. Buying McDonald's hamburgers in those old styrofoam containers and tossing them out of your car window is FREEDOM baby! The quarantines have taken that freedom away, and that is unacceptable to conservatives.

As poor a thing as this freedom sounds, it cannot be countered without an alternative version. The left needs to make freedom part of its discourse. The freedom of never having to worry about health insurance. The freedom of having low cost child care. The freedom of your boss not having life or death power over your life. The need for this kind of freedom is something most people in this country understand. Now is the time for our society to have, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "a new birth of freedom." Let's make it happen.

The "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy Was A Harbinger Of Our Times

Hey folks, I've got a new piece over at Tropics of Meta, "The Ground Zero Mosque Was A Harbinger Of Our Times." It was inspired by an off-hand comment by Tropics editor Alex Sayf Cummings about that particular event. I happened to be present at the protest against the Cordoba House (which was not within site of the WTC, by the way) by accident. The hate-filled mob I witnessed on a  summer day in 2010 scared me. Back then they were called the Tea Party, now we call them "Trump supporters."

Read the piece, and tell me what you think.

Listen To The Bubble Jumpers

Tropics of Meta was kind enough to publish another essay of mine, one that I am proud of and was the result of a lot of thinking on this blog. In the essay I talk about the concept of "bubble jumpers," those people like me who have moved from conservative to liberal "bubbles." Within it is a critique of all those bad articles where a coastal journalist parachutes into the Rust Belt or a farm town and let's us know that conservatives in those places still like Trump.

So please, read the piece and share it if you can. Also read and support what Tropics of Meta does, they put out great stuff on a regular basis.

Right Wing Leninism Strikes Again

The vote for the tax overhaul bill in the wee hours of this morning was part of something I have been trying to say for years on this site. The Republican Party is not a party in the traditional sense, but merely a vehicle for a radical ideology. The Republicans are not conservatives, they are revolutionaries who intend to roll back the 20th century.

In this regard they have a lot in common with the Bolshevik party, which in 1917 did everything with one goal in mind: to gain power. Other revolutionary parties had moral limits on their behavior, they Bolsheviks didn't, and they won. They would do any deed and tell any lie if if helped them reach their goal. The ends justified the means if it meant getting their revolution.

The Republican Party has signed a blood pact with a lunatic, supporting his presidency as long as he he supports its revolutionary agenda. He may have collaborated with an enemy power, he may be bilking the government for personal gain, and he may even be an unhinged wacko, but the Republicans don't care as long as they get tax cuts. In the same spirit, they passed a bill that consisted largely of scribbles in the margins without any kind of public hearings, or even the ability for legislators to read it. They know the majority of the country is opposed to it, and they just don't care.

They have no qualms about using undemocratic means to hold power. They suppress the vote, they pack the courts with unqualified 36 year olds, they gerrymander, and they willingly accept assistance from a foreign dictator. They have their own television network, web sites, and radio stations to feed their lies and bullshit to their followers. The truth, the Constitution, and the law are useful only in so much as it serves their agenda.

There are no "good ones." The sentimental attachment to the likes of McCain, Murkowski, Flake, and Collins among liberals needs to stop. These supposed paragons of virtue showed their true colors at 2AM this morning. The one and only response is to drive them out, and to fight fire with fire.

Nancy MacLean's Democracy In Chains Is Required Reading

After hearing people whose opinions I trust talk breathlessly about it, I picked up Nancy MacLean's Democracy In Chains last week and quickly devoured it. It is the kind of book that shows how history can used to fight political battles in the present, and the importance of historical research as a way of uncovering hidden realities.

The book is about James Buchanan, an obscure name despite winning the Nobel Prize for economics in 1986. MacLean essentially argues that while most of us tend to see Milton Friedman as the godfather of modern day right wing (there is good reason not to use the word "conservative") political economy, it is Buchanan who has by far had the bigger impact. A good part of the reason is that Buchanan's ideas were completely embraced by the Koch brothers, who have used their wealth to spread their influence.

MacLean derives her title from one of Buchanan's central tenets, namely that democracy is inimical to freedom. Of course, it is the libertarian notion of "economic freedom," which essentially boils down to the supremacy of property rights. Because those pesky voters want to finance the social safety net with the money of the wealthy, democracy must be limited in the name of "liberty." This is why Buchanan was glad to go to Chile and assist the oppressive Pinochet regime in their neoliberal economic agenda.

Buchanan also vigorously fought against democracy in the United States. MacLean finds that it was the Brown court case that first gave Buchanan, who was Tennessee born and a professor at the University of Virginia in the 1950s, his impetus to apply his ideas to politics. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court ordering schools in the South to be integrated, Buchanan argued for a voucher system, and essentially against the entire notion of public education. He approved of poll taxes and literacy tests, which were onerous in Virginia at the time, as a way to prevent the "ignorant" from voting. While he never discussed race itself as a reason to suppress the vote, if it quacks like a duck etc.

Tactically, Buchanan thought it was best not to reveal to the public the true nature of his preferred agenda. Thus attempts to cut back on Social Security would couched as attempts to "save" it. The safety net was to be gradually weakened to the point of ineffectiveness, at which time it would be easy to eliminate. At that point, according to his strict ideology, freedom and liberty would reign supreme. Notice there was no supply-side argument about boosting the economy in his thinking. Allowing the wealthy to have their money was to him a moral imperative, pure and simple.

I am sure that a lot of this is sounding familiar to you. MacLean also shows how, in the past decade, Buchanan's way of thinking has more fully taken over the Republican Party via the Koch brothers and their largesse. This book has helped me understand so much. For example, on the surface it is confusing how eager the Republicans are to slam through a hugely unpopular health care act. However, it is obvious that ideology trumps everything for these people, and that they are relying on self-consciously anti-democratic means (gerrymandering, voter suppression, propaganda) to shield themselves from the effects. Buchanan's proteges openly talked of a "shock doctrine" that would be used when opportunities presented themselves to destroy "collectivism," and the current Trump administration appears to be just one of those moments.

It is obvious from this book, if it has not been obvious already, that an extremist attempt to roll back the 20th century is at the heart of the political party that now controls all levels of government. This book makes me despair, but it does a valuable service by showing us what we are all up against, and that it is democracy itself that hangs in the balance. This is a battle that we cannot afford to lose.

Footnote: I was glad to see that this book confirmed an argument of mine, that the current conservative movement is best defined as right-wing Bolshevism. Many of Buchanan's proteges explicitly called themselves Leninists in their internal documents, and deliberately copied his methods.

Why Comey's Firing Is The Third "Constitutional Crisis" In A Year

After Donald Trump fired James Comey, and then had the temerity to admit in an interview that it was, as everyone suspected, to end the Russia inquiry, there's been a lot of talk of a "constitutional crisis. I laugh a bit at this, not because I deny the seriousness of of Trump's action, but because we have been in crisis mode for quite some time.

The first such crisis came last spring when the Republican Senate refused to even consider president Obama's pick for Supreme Court justice, effectively treating him as illegitimate. The second crisis came after the election, when the candidate who lost by millions of votes was allowed to become president. The Supreme Court battle was a case of the Constitution being ignored, the election was a case where the Constitution appeared to be at odds with its intended purposes. And now, of course, we have a crisis where the chief executive is behaving like an autocrat, but his Republican allies are unwilling to provide a check on his power.

At base in all of these cases the issue is that one of our political parties is merely the vehicle for an extremist ideology that will stop at nothing to grab political power by any means necessary. This ideology is also not supported by a majority of Americans, which is why this party suppresses the vote, gerrymanders, harnesses gushers of dark money, and puts its support behind a nationalist demagogue who promises "jobs" while passing all the cuts to taxes and health care that they want.

Anyone who fails to understand the true nature of the Republican party fails to understand the current political reality. Those "objective" journalists who portray it as just another center-right political party are wrong, as are the radicals on the Left who treat them as one side of the neoliberal coin, with the Democrats on the other. It is not fear mongering to say that the Republican party as currently constituted poses a threat to the existence of constitutional democracy in this country, it's the truth. Democrats, radicals, and journalists all need to be acting under this assumption. Our three constitutional crises in the past year ought to be proof enough.

How Long Will Our Legitimacy Crisis Last?

This has been a dark week in American politics. John McCain basically said that Republicans, who have blocked president Obama's Supreme Court nominee, would also block any nominee put forward by Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump and many of his surrogates have proclaimed that this is a "rigged" election, and are calling on their minions to take action.

I believe what we are seeing is the latest chapter in a legitimacy crisis that stretches back to the 1990s. Republicans since the Clinton administration have decided that any Democrat in the White House is de facto illegitimate. They impeached Bill Clinton over a hummer after years of obstruction. The levels of obstruction got even worse under Obama, with the debt ceiling used as a hostage taking device on more than one occasion. Worse than that, Congress has refused to act on Merrick Garland's nomination, something that in a normal year would be considered a constitutional crisis.

Why do Republicans assume that every Democratic president is illegitimate? It's a matter of ethno-nationalism, really. Republicans see themselves as the "real Americans," and thus if they lose, it must be the fault of anti-Americans, or a nefarious plot to subvert the will of the true majority. Keep in mind, no Democrat for president has carried a majority of the white vote since LBJ. Deep down a lot of Republicans feel in their guts (they probably don't even consciously think this) that a president not approved by a majority of white men or white people generally is not legitimate.

How much more of this can our nation endure? The weakness of the Republican Party in presidential elections means that they are likely locked out of the White House for the foreseeable future. If Clinton wins, they will have lost the popular vote in six out of the last seven elections. This era may soon resemble the period between 1860 and 1908, when Democrats won only two presidential elections over a 48 year period, with the parties reversed.  The "real Americans" will not stand for such an outcome.

If Democrats keep the White House, the paramilitary organizations (which is what militias are) will only get stronger. The white nationalists, who have used this election to grab a place in the political mainstream, will only have more and more disaffected white voters available to sway to their side. Above all, the Republicans, as long as they can keep winning off-year elections, will just obstruct obstruct obstruct, and get their way by refusing to cooperate. They will also deny the legitimacy of the other party's presidents, and keep ratcheting up the "rigged election" rhetoric and the fear of people of color, all while the folks on the fringe are oiling up their guns.

This state of affairs cannot last forever. A house divided against itself cannot stand. It must become either all one thing, or all the other.