Not The Obituary I Wanted To Read Today

Dick Cheney had a stranglehold on "Worst Republican Elected Official In My Lifetime" until Donald Trump came along. The fact that he cared enough about the Constitution to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 is like a form of deathbed conversion.  The blood of thousands is on his hands in a war that was disastrously conceived and fought under his leadership. You could argue that without the Iraq war Donald Trump never really gains a foothold among a certain group of Republicans who saw the Grand Old Party betray them by sending their sons and daughter off to fight an elective war. Russia predicated its invasion of Ukraine on the Iraqi precedent. 

We are a worse country today, because Dick Cheney was Vice President under a weak and feckless president and maneuvered us into one of the three worst foreign policy misadventures in the long history of the Republic. Glad he saw through Trump, but it's not like that even helped.

So Close To Getting It

 Yglesias likes to take one or two ideas and beat them into a fine powder. One of his "ideas" is that Democrats should eschew unpopular ideas and promote popular ones. Really brilliant insight there. 

The problem with this post is that it once again fails to grapple with the fact that Democrats DON'T talk about unpopular issues. Republicans do and mischaracterize Democratic positions. Yes, as he notes, the other side gets to campaign, too, but he points to Andy Beshear who has done a good job sticking up for Democratic values without being labeled as too extreme or "woke".

It's because he's a white dude from Kentucky.

Harris and Hillary were naturally assumed to be further left on cultural issues than the were because they were women. Harris even more so as a Black woman from San Francisco. Voters are pretty freaking dumb when you get to the middle of the electorate. Sorry, but they are - at least about politics.  So they use easy short hands like how the candidate physically looks. Or aspects of their biography. 

If voters were voting their policy preferences, Democrats would be winning all 50 states. Trump's OBBB is toxic and getting worse, but it's basically the GOP wish list going back 60 years.

STFU

 I could make an argument that the most damaging thing to the Democratic Party in the last decade was the demagoguery of one man.

No, not that one.

This one.

The Cruelty Is The Point

 The decision to punish stores for making it easier on people to receive food assistance while Trump withholds SNAP benefits is genuinely monstrous. Yglesias lays out the many ways that SNAP is a genuinely impressive policy. OK, it's not 100% perfect, but the basic difference between the two parties can be distilled to Republicans being outraged that one person on five hundred is abusing SNAP benefits and Democrats working to make sure the other four hundred and ninety nine don't go hungry.

Meanwhile, Trump's approval among 18-29 year olds is 75% disapproval. Turns out dismantling the Great Society and New Deal isn't actually popular among people who have no memory (or historical context) for the world that existed before.

Tone Deaf

 Yesterday, SNAP benefits were shut off despite there being $6B in emergency funds that courts have ruled the administration has to spend to preserve food security. Around the same time, the rate increases to ACA insurance came out, highlighting the massive explosion in premiums. The House has not met in a month and a half. 

Meanwhile, Trump is posting pictures of the renovation desecration of the Lincoln bathroom. He's squeezing other plutocrats to build a ball room desecrate the East Wing of the White House. He's going golfing again. He's holding a Gatsby themed party at Mar a Lardo. 

The most baffling aspect of Trumpism is how working and middle class people convinced themselves that this scion of wealth, this tabloid plutocrat was their champion. As I've mentioned, we have a Republican Party in our town that has dominated the town for decades. They have recently screwed the pooch on a water dispute that is going to cost the town $36,000,000. They adhere to the politics of personal destruction. 

And they look like they might lose on Tuesday. If they do, it will be because some of the Trumpier households in town are displaying Independent Party signs. That screams to me that lots of support for Trump was because he wasn't a "normal politician" and he was going to "shake things up." I heard the same from my friend in Argentina about Milei. Normal politics wasn't helping them so let's vote for the chaos agent. 

I don't know if these stories of Trump's Gilded Age excesses will break through the conservative stranglehold on the media, but if they somehow do, what is the breaking point? At what point do these voters realize that they have been played? And even if they do have this epiphany, what's the best outcome? Do they switch parties? I doubt it. That's why the Independent Party is a great alternative for voters in our particular town. That's why I'd love to see a Great Plains Farm-Labor Party.

Or maybe they just stay home. In our close electoral landscape, not voting is as important as voting. 

Trump is doing everything that he possibly can to rip the scales from people's eyes. He's doing everything he can to govern poorly. 

Will it matter?

Oh No, Stop. Please. Don't.

 Trump has threatened to end the filibuster to get a continuing resolution, in case you were wondering what the White House polling is showing on the shutdown.

As Josh Marshall points out, please proceed. There's a common thread among Republicans Who Should Know Better, which is that  - despite being an absolute scandal machine and an actual convicted felon - Trump does seem to have some bizarro electoral juice. "He keeps winning when he should lose, so maybe we just need to roll over and pee on our bellies."

I do think Marshall is right that there are enough Senate Republicans who understand that the filibuster is a structural advantage for their party and it won't happen. But I hope it does. The filibuster is about 66% of the reason why Americans say that "government is broken." As Democrats are the only party that wants to govern (as opposed to reign) that hurts their ability to actually pass laws.

Let it die.

On To Something

 Yglesias is very much the "Manhattan Private School/Yale Philosophy Major" type of Smart Guy. However, I keep reading him because he does occasionally have some nice nuggets and I don't want to silo my reading too much.

He has a Six Point Plan for Democrats to run on in 2026:

• Ban congressional stock trading (+34)

• Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing (+31)

• Raise the minimum wage to $12 (+22)

• Crack down on tax evasion (+18)

• Spend on reducing lead pollution (+14)

• Guarantee abortion rights nationally before 12 weeks (+13)

You’ve got some economic populism in there, some progressive social policy, some environmental policy, some good government reform, and a link to Trump’s corruption and abuses of power via tax evasion.

That's a good plan. He goes on to say that other planks are less popular and therefore you shouldn't include them. Climate actually polls poorly - don't touch it. Even background checks, which poll well, don't poll well enough, though a few mass shootings could nudge that into plank seven. 

He notes that a 12 week right to abortion isn't popular with abortion rights groups, but that it needs to be understood as a floor rather than a ceiling. Raising the minimum wage to $15 isn't quite as popular, but again: floor. 

I think you have to throw in some stuff about protecting democracy, just on principle and checking Trump's unbridled power and corruption, because I think that's going to poll well by next autumn.

Still, picking a few things to win a majority sounds like a really solid plan. Once you have the majority, then you can do more.

Speedbump On The Road To Fascism

 Central to the Ghouls surrounding Trump and intent on devouring the brains of American democracy is their plan to militarize police functions. Central to this is utilizing or threatening to utilize the Insurrection Act. That might actually have run into a legal problem that even the Scotus Six might notice. The Insurrection Act was always bullshit, but this might give the Republicans on the bench a chance to save democracy, a prospect I'm not willing to completely cede.

As Richardson notes, and others have noted, the GOP is increasingly in an untenable situation with the shutdown. People are going to lose SNAP tomorrow at exactly the time that they are getting letters about their ACA premium increases. People going hungry when the Agriculture Department is sitting in $6B and we are sending at least $20B to Argentina (a direct competitor in agriculture output) is not a great look! Especially with Trump behaving more and more like the Central Asian despot he so clearly aspires to be. The destruction of the White House to put up a gilded ballroom is just...I dunno man, seems pretty easy to understand, even for the dipshittiest of dipshit voters.

Democratic backsliding and emerging autocracy requires that that the would-be dictator be popular. Trump really isn't, and if anything his policies are less popular than he is. 

Krugman is right when he says that the Republicans were wise to push off many of the worst impacts of their terrible agenda until after the 2026 midterms. What Democrats have done with this shutdown is accelerate the timeline of when the inevitable pain will be felt. All the Very Online Experts who decried the feckless Dem strategy last spring and even this fall ("They will cave, because Schumer sucks.") were wrong. This is really sound strategy that puts the Democrats on their strongest ground.

At some point, too, the House will have to reconvene and Adelita Grijalva will be sworn in, which should prompt the release of House files related to Epstein. Trump's team's preference for "Move Fast, Break Things" is a shitty governance strategy and not much better politics. It works best as a media-dominance ploy, but that dominance isn't always good, when your positions are inherently bad. 

Harbingers

 Richardson's Catalog of Atrocities is longer than usual, but one thing stood out. It's the layoffs.

Amazon laid off 14,000. UPS has laid off 48,000 this year. Target laid off 1,800 corporate jobs. Molson Coors is also laying off corporate workers. General Motors and Rivian are laying of workers in their EV sections. 

The loss of white collar jobs might be a harbinger of the coming AI assault on corporate jobs. It may also be a combination of AI displacement AND a weakening overall economy. The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates in the face of still high inflation, which can only mean their estimation of the job market is pretty bad. 

Now, we are about to get apocalyptic news for SNAP and ACA recipients in the face of these strong "headwinds" in the economy. 

Usually, we should see a market crash about now in the calendar year. For whatever reason, the fall is when the markets collapse. So far it hasn't happened, but the overall signs are pretty dire.

Given Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves out of electoral consequences, a massive economic collapse might be the Republic's only hope.

Time Waiteth for No man

 The operating assumption of Trump during the shutdown has been that the longer it goes on, the more people suffer, the more likely Democrats are to cave.

However, SNAP benefits expiring doesn't "hurt" Democrats, in the sense that everyone "knows" that Democrats support SNAP and Republicans don't. 

Now, we have the ACA subsidies expiring and the letters going out informing people of what they are going to have to pay next year. This is happening while Democrats are refusing to vote for a CR until those subsidies are restored. In other words, these two news stories are going to flow into each other. 

Again everyone "knows" that Democrats want you to have health insurance and Republicans want you to earn health insurance. The GOP doesn't understand that both ACA and SNAP help working families. They are so wedded to the idea that all "welfare" is a scam that they are about to face the coming train head first.

I don't think that an up-or-down vote on extending the ACA subsidies would fail in a vacuum. Trump has decided that Democrats can't "win" this showdown, so people are going to suffer rather than have both parties work to solve the issue. All for the whims of the Mad King.

About Those Tests

 Trump has been bragging about how he's acing his "IQ Test" at Walter Reed.

It's a dementia test.

It's not "hard".

Let's Check In On Karl Marx

 Marx argued for heightening the contradictions. What he meant was that efforts like labor unions actually hurt the proletariat by improving their living and working conditions. What was needed, he argued, was the full cruelty of bourgeoise capitalism to be felt by the working masses. This was "heightening the contradictions." Things had to be terrible for "the revolution" to happen.

Well, we are about to heighten the hell out of those contradictions. 

The coming devastation of SNAP is the first thing that will be felt all over the country. Then, the exploding health care premiums will devastate the middle class. 

Which brings me to the Democrats endgame on the shut down. Lot of Republicans seem almost gleefully eager to immiserate their own voters. If they ram through a CR by eliminating the filibuster for it, and the health care increases kick in - does that matter? If all these rural voters lose SNAP benefits - does that matter?

I've always been skeptical of this argument, because it seems to me that people have picked their parties based on things besides tangible policy positions. I wager we will see a lot of "I'm really disappointed Trump has increased the price of groceries, killed my SNAP benefits and made my insurance unaffordable, but at least he's not a Democrat."

What's more, do you even want to win? Like on tariffs - which are all clearly illegal - do you want the Court to rule that they are illegal? Or does it serve to benefit you electorally when the economy finally sputters and dies?

Painful

 In a few days, SNAP benefits will expire. The level of pain this will cause Americans - rural and urban, young and old - is going to be profound. People are going to go hungry. People are going to miss debt payments to pay for food, which will accelerate the usual debt crises among the working poor. 

A "normal" government - even a Republican one - would not want to see Americans suffer. There were competing visions on how to help the poor and the near-poor, with the GOP offering up bullshit "bootstraps" ideas, but at least they cared in the abstract.

Trump is a sadist or at least a narcissist for whom other people's pain is not "understandable." The cuts to USAID have led directly to the deaths of children. We're murdering people in the Caribbean. Those are foreigners. These are Americans, and he's showing the same callous disregard for their well being as he would for people on the other side of the world. Both are bad, but the latter is literally his fucking job. 

The Very Online Doomerism has a point when they look at things like the destruction/desecration of the East Wing of the White House and say that Trump has no intention of leaving office. Democracy is doomed, because he's behaving as if democratic checks on presidential power no longer exist. 

I don't think that's right, because it buys into the same idea that Trump is pushing: that he can create a reality with the stroke of his pen. However, the needless and immediate pain that he is foisting upon the people that he is supposed to be serving (not that he has the slightest idea what "service" means) is pretty strong evidence that he is not planning to have elections ever again.

If he keeps this up, even gerrymandering won't protect him or his acolytes in the House.

Have Renewables Escaped Containtment?

 Krugman looks at the economic reasons why renewables have exploded in the last 15 years. It's obviously clear that the Trump Administration is waging a mostly pointless, pique-filled war against solar and wind, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Sure, there are the arguments that this is just naked corruption by making coal mines more profitable for the next few years. That's normally a strong argument with these mooks. The other argument is that this is just Cleek's Law at work. Democrats support renewables, so Republicans must oppose them. There's also the argument that Trump has a stick up his diapered ass because he doesn't like the way windmills look from his Scottish golf course.

It still doesn't add up.

Renewables are an absolute economic positive in multiple ways. There's the obvious climate change mitigation, but renewables are cheaper in the long run than hydrocarbons. Once you build a renewable facility, that cost is largely "it."  You don't have to pay fuel costs.

Trump and Republicans have stripped out tax credits for solar, even on residential buildings. We are currently building our retirement home, and we want to get solar on the roof, but we won't be able to before January 1st, when the tax credits expire because of the OBBB.

At the same time, the cost of electricity is spiking, almost entirely from AI data centers. Yes, it will be more expensive to put PV panels on our roof in 2026 than it would have been in 2025, but we can budget around that, especially since otherwise our long term electrical bills would be a real burden.  I'm even looking into residential wind - it's not supposed to be great, but it's really cheap, about $3000 for a 5000 watt turbine. We will need a battery, and those credit, too, are expiring. 

This is among the thousands of outrages committed by the Trump administration against American citizens and their economic interest. 

I do wonder, though, how much renewables will continue to grow simply because they are so economically efficient now. It made sense and was necessary to subsidize renewables a decade ago or even five years ago. While it still makes sense to do so today, I wonder if it's economically necessary.

In the long run, the real issue is climate change, and it's heartening that other countries are picking up some of the slack. If Americans aren't going to be buying solar and wind and batteries, other countries will. It will make us poorer, it's stupid and it's shortsighted, but I don't think it's reversible. 

Resist

 Josh Marshall looks at the failure of civic elites to stand up to Trump. He references the concept of "civic virtue" that was central to the earliest vision of republican rule immediately after the Revolution. The assumption was that - in a Republic - citizens, especially elite citizens, would subsume their personal ambitions into the national project. This largely failed under the Confederation and was why the Constitution was written: to replace voluntary virtue with a government strong enough to enforce laws. Ironically, the Framers still thought some civic virtue would remain, which is why they didn't think political parties and the attendant partisanship would exist. How can their be an "opposition" party in a Republic?

Back to Marshall, I heard Obama speak at the CT Forum, where he said that elites need to risk a little comfort to preserve democracy. The results since then have been mixed. Universities are finally fighting back against efforts to destroy academic freedom, but corporate media seems more and more supine in their coverage of Trump. The Times currently has a piece about the changing architectural plans for the East Wing, rather than screaming about the fact that every bit of what he's doing is a violation of the red letter of the law. He's breaking the law in plain sight and they want to discuss his aesthetic vision?

Krugman has one of his weekend talks with Erica Chenoweth, where they discuss the relative success of both protests and civil resistance (which Chenoweth argues are not synonymous). Chenoweth famously noted that if 3.5% of the population joins protest movements, the regime usually falls. 

While that is actually optimistic - No Kings mobilized about 2.3% of the population already - my concern is about one aspect that we are truly deficient in, if we are going to use mass movements to defeat fascism in America: civil society. When Chenoweth looked at the most successful mass movement, she was especially taken with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Those happened despite crackdowns on civil society, but those crackdowns actually made civil society important. When you repress something, you get a counterreaction. 

Our problem is not that civil society has been repressed, but that we have largely let it atrophy and perish. 

The Big Event that has yet to happen is Trumpist shock troops shooting protestors. What made No Kings so impressive was how peaceful it was. Chenoweth and Krugman talk about how important that is. Still, Trump has hired a bunch of unqualified goombahs to staff his Deportation Force. It's only a matter of time before one of them fires at and kills a protestors. I know I kept a wary eye towards every pickup truck that drove by our protest. 

If - or more likely when - Trumpists draw first blood, the response of the American people will be critical. I have no idea what that response will be.