The Death Of Civic Life

 Josh Marshall extrapolates from health care workers being reluctant to take the vaccine with the general decline in public trust in institutions. There are many root causes for this, including four years of Trump's assault on the basic notion of objective truth, but this war on truth predates Trump.

Marshall ends by discussing how when Britons came over to the US after WWII, they realized - painfully - how far their standard of living had fallen behind their cousins. As America roared into the mid-'50s, Britain was still rationing. He notes that the way Asia and other places have managed this pandemic so much better than us is similar to the shock that those British visitors felt.

Good governance - even in authoritarian regimes - is dependent on shared truths and assumptions about civic life. America no longer has that. The fact that supermajorities of Republicans can't accept that Trump got smoked in the election implies that the civic assumptions that underlie American democracy are toast/

I'm skeptical of peaceful secession and the ability of the country to divide neatly along ideological lines. But if there is to remain an "American superpower" it would almost have to secede from the red states that have basically given up on entering the 21st century.

The Psychology of Trumpism

 Worth a read.

Rotten To The Core

 Josh Hawley will contest the election results. That - combined with several whackaloons in the House - means that there will be a delay in accepting the entirely legitimate and validated election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I don't know how long the delay will be - a day, a few hours - McConnell wants no part of this, and it will fail in the House. 

However, Hawley - slick, cynical and slightly brighter version of Trump - is clearly hitching his political fortunes to Trumpism. As a Republican, it's hard to say that he's wrong. Every passing day cements the GOP as the party of authoritarianism, ethnonationalist populism and wild-eyed conspiracy theories. There is no longer a discernible ideology tp the GOP beyond hatred of liberals. The old Republican Party of deregulation and tax cuts still twitches on the Senate floor like a dying body that doesn't know it's dead. Hawley has also come out for the $2000 checks, showing that he understands that what the Trumpenproletariat hears is that Trumpists will give them shit, just not give to the colored people.

Hawley is more disciplined than Trump. He gets that there is a road to power via these conspiracy theories and giving stuff to WWC voters. I wonder if he has the cruelty to pull it off.

I Call Bullshit

 I read this interview with Stephen Wertheim and was left incredibly unconvinced by his argument. It very much feels to me like he's conflating the very bad decision by Bush to invade Iraq with American military hegemony. Since the rise of a global world around 1750, either Britain or the United States has served as a sort of global hegemon. The presence of both US and NATO ships off the coast of Somalia or in the South China Sea is important and not a role that anyone can play. Yes, there is a burden that American tax payers have to bear because the US is patrolling the Indian Ocean or insuring that Saudi Arabia doesn't get invaded, but that is repaid by the US dollar being the unquestioned global currency. 

Wertheim acknowledges that this grew out of World War II, but he seems to miss the almost immediate efforts to demobilize after the war, followed by the shock of the Korean War and NSC-68. Americans wanted to retreat into the Western Hemisphere after the war, but Britain announced - in response to the crises in Turkey and Greece - that it could no longer afford to play a stabilizing role in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Truman administration acted to replace Britain and the Truman Doctrine was born. The Marshall Plan only passed because of aggressive Soviet actions in Czechoslovakia; NATO only happened because of the Berlin Blockade. America assumed the role of global superpower because of the lesson of trying to appease aggressive expansionist dictators that World War II taught us.

Was that lesson overlearned? How many great power wars have occurred since 1945? The only one that remotely comes close was the Sino-Soviet border wars in the 1960s and if anything they prove the utility of American global security arrangements, sitting as they do outside of them. The first Gulf War was important. If anything, American reluctance to get involved in Rwanda and Bosnia made the world worse.

Now, if Wertheim suggests that the relationship between Europe and the US should be more equal in terms of responsibility, there is some merit there. NATO sort of needs a new mission, but Russian expansionism suggests it's hardly obsolete. 

Despite the handwringing, the world really is safer from interstate military conflict than at any time in it's history. If we look at post-World War II interstate wars with high deaths and exclude civil wars and wars of independence, in declining number of deaths there is the Second Congo War (1998-2003) which began as a civil war in Congo, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Iraq War, the Iran-Iraq War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Everything else has occurred as civil wars, wars of independence and collapsing states. 

In other words, the post-war order put in place largely by the United States and predicated on American military ability, has done what it was designed to do: prevent immensely damaging interstate wars. If the argument is that America and the rest of the global North should work harder to prevent internal conflicts...ok. But that is not Wertheim's argument. 

It has been 75 years since World War II ended. It seems clear that we have forgotten what great power wars can do. Wertheim certainly forgot.

Assessing Trumpistan, An Ongoing Series

 Paul Campos links to the invaluable Finan O'Toole of the Irish Times. O'Toole makes the case that Trump is both a logical extension of Reaganism and yet something new. Trump took Reagan's rhetorical contempt for governance and made it the overreaching condition of his administration. Reagan's contempt for government was really nothing more than a way to deprive the Poors, especially the Darkly Hued Poors, from accessing resources. Reagan was about destroying Pell Grants and food assistance. He loved the state when it came to military spending. 

Gingrich and McConnell took what essentially a bumpersticker and made it a philosophy. Trump made it something else. His contempt for government and its functioning was aptly summed up, as O'Toole notes, by Trump throwing out Chris Christie's transition plan. It could also be summed up by disbanding the Pandemic Task Force. Or a million other things.

Trump is manifestly incompetent. We saw that this weekend in his helpless floundering on the Covid Relief plan. He (rightly) noted that direct cash payments of $600 (different from UI benefits, though no one seems to get this) were insufficient. So he was going to veto the bill. In the tumult that followed, he allowed the Democrats to stake out their position in favor of the $2000 while Republicans in the Senate said, no, a week before the special election in Georgia.  

Brilliant.

As Josh Marshall notes, this is a demonstration of incredibly weakness on Trump's part. He looks the fool. Of course, when has Trump been legitimately strong? When has he shown an ability to do the job? What is so paralyzingly painful is that 74,000,000 Americans thought he was doing a good job and deserved another term. Trump has achieved nothing of real substance that can't be erased by Biden's administration. The tax cuts won't survive a Democratic Congress. The Wall is a fragment of what he said he was going to build. Infrastructure Week is a punchline. 

All Trump has accomplished is negative. He has - along with memories of Dubya - deeply damaged America's standing with its allies. He has rolled back environmental regulations and accelerated global warming. He opened the door to a nuclear Iran that Obama had nailed shut. Most of all, he did serious damage to the institutions of American electoral democracy and the rule of law. 

Because of the latter, O'Toole argues, rightly, that it is not enough to let Trump slink off to Mar A Lago. He and his vile creed need to be eradicated. 

Is This A Story?

 The Post catalogues what we already know: Putin's Russia becomes less free every day. This has been true since at least 2008, when Putin stepped down as President and became Prime Minister, centralizing power in his person as opposed to any office.

As Putin centralizes power, he has come into sharper focus for the general unhappiness of the Russian people. For decades, Putin has allowed a little dissent in Moscow and Petersburg. He lets some marchers march while arresting others. He allows for a few small free media outlets. He keeps a solid hold on rural and interior Russia.

The problem is that Putin was able to finance his Russia regeneration with high gas prices that no longer exist. Russia population is sick and declining. Russian GDP per capita is lower than China's and their economy is growing a considerably slower rate. At Purchasing Power Parity, the GDP per capita is lower than Malaysia, and most of the former Stalinist states of Eastern Europe. It is a vastly unequal country as well.

Putin's long standing tolerance of a nominal opposition was designed to bleed away just enough discontent so that there would be no widespread unrest. As he cracks down more and more, the pressure from within will build. We have seen a similar dynamic in Ukraine and now Belarus. 

Russia is presuming, rightly, that the Biden administration will be much harder on Russia than Trump - Putin's lapdog - was. Biden will be able to do real damage to the Russia economy, which is already fragile. And while we have seen a general trend towards right wing populist authoritarianism in Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines and the US, those regimes ultimately have to resort to authoritarianism to maintain control. As they trend into authoritarianism, they are unable to respond to a changing world. 

Biden will also need to find a way to empower opposition groups in ways that don't trace back to the US. Russia has been able to exert itself outwards because we didn't push back for four years. Now we need to fuck with them.

The Nashville Bombing

 Early reporting on these events are always wrong. Still, some things seem understood.

This was not an attempt at a mass casualty event, which means it does not fit neatly into the terrorism box. The biggest impact was on AT&T's communication network. You don't want to put too much emphasis on post hoc ergo propter hoc, but there are three reasons to attack the AT&T hub.

First is a suicide/grievance. If there is a disgruntled AT&T employee, blowing up the hub without killing anyone works as a motive.

Second is an attack on any information held there. This is the "Tyler Durden" attack designed to erase...something. 

Third feels the most likely, which is a probing attack on the infrastructure of the country. How did police respond? How many information networks were taken down? How long does it take to restore service?

The fact that it happened Christmas morning feels like it should mean something, but while it was a symbolic date, it was not a symbolic target, unless it's Option One. 

There are certainly more questions than answers.

In A Sane World...

 Republican obstruction of Covid relief would be enough to easily win the Georgia run-off elections.

We do not live in a sane world.

Launching The Cheese Submarine

 Creating a workable Brexit agreement has been compared to building a cheese submarine. While there is a model for what England might want (the so called Norway model) but it was unappealing to Hard Brexiteers. What Boris Johnson has negotiated is a greater remove than Norway has to the European Economic Area, but I could see Britain move closer to the EEA over time. 

The potential trouble created by a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was at the center of the difficulty in creating a workable solution. It looks like the new Brexit deal basically is EEA-lite and there will be almost no tariffs between the UK and the EU. That means no taxation issues with goods moving from the UK and EU, so the border will not need to have customs posts. There are still some regulatory issues that will need to be worked out. The UK wanted to escape EU regulations, but British goods headed to Northern Ireland will "technically" be entering the EU, which could cause some problems.

The basic idea of free trade is that competitive advantage allows for differing areas to provide different goods and services at more reasonable costs. Productivity increases as prices fall. The problem is that in some sectors, wages fall as jobs leave. This dynamic of economic displacement among manufacturing and agricultural workers is not only at the heart of Brexit, but Trumpism, Victor Orban, Poland's rightward lurch, Bolsanaro and the other Rightist populist demagogues. 

There is some evidence that Brexit will cost Britain more in terms of GDP loss than the pandemic. Whether it reaches the 4% decline in GDP - and this EEA-lite approach should mitigate that - it seems likely that Britain will suffer more economically from living the Union than from staying in. Meanwhile, the Scots are restive, and I could see them demand some sort of relationship similar to what Northern Ireland has. This is the logic of secession: where does it end? 

Toddler In Chief Thrashing About

 Trump vetoed the NDAA. His veto message is the usual inchoate and incoherent farrago of bullshit. The Defense budget specifically includes measures that are tough on China and limit the ability of Trump to pull troops out of Europe and South Korea, so the Liar in Chief says it's a gift to Russia and China.

He will likely also veto the Covid Stimulus Bill. It seems a foregone conclusion that the NDAA veto will be overridden. Will Congress suddenly develop a spine and override his veto on the Covid Stimulus? The hilarious wrinkle in that one is that Trump has complained about how SMALL the direct payments are. Pelosi will likely pass a stand-alone bill changing just the amount of the direct payments and the Republicans in the Senate will squirm. Apparently McConnell only budged on the Covid Relief bill because Loeffler and Perdue are getting hammered over it. Now he will have to defend not giving more money that Democrats AND Trump wants. Hilarious.

Given the increasing evidence that Trump is in full meltdown, it would be really swell if Trump's Cabinet invoked the 25th Amendment. Apparently, the House can wait 21 days before holding a hearing as to whether the President is non compos mentis. If they are not in session, it's 21 days after they return to session. In other words, we are about a week away from making Pence Acting President until Biden is sworn in.

If Republicans were patriots and not partisans, that would be the way to go. We of course, know what they will do instead.

War Criminals

 I confess that I've spent too much time on Twitter since the pandemic started. Mostly just boredom. The quality of the dialogue on the Hellscape is widely divergent. There are some really interesting discussions to be had. There is also a lot of aggressive twaddle.

One of the worst forms to Twitter Twaddle is the "Person X is a war criminal."  Person X is usually Obama, but it can be Hillary Clinton or any other of "neoliberals" (another misused and overused term). The argument is that Obama didn't end drone strikes and sometimes drone strikes do wrong and kill noncombatants. So he's a war criminal. Obama puts out his Best Books of 2020 list and the relies are full of "Oh, great, the war criminal likes to read." It's exhausting.

I say all this as preface to the fact that Trump has first of all greatly increased drone strikes and secondly and more germane: he is pardoning actual war criminals.

There is an argument that presidential pardons are too stingy. There are certainly people in jail for minor drug offenses that should be freed. Reality Winner needs to be pardoned as soon as Biden can get around to it. Of course, with Trump, his motivations and actions belie any sense that he is doing this out of mercy.

Trump's pardons seem to fall into three categories. First, and most troubling, he is pardoning his associates who have committed crimes. This should be unconstitutional, but the Framers assumed that either the President would not be an open crook or that Congress would check him if he was. Nice call. I've seen the argument that Trump's pardons of his cronies has a silver lining in that they can no longer take the Fifth if called before Congressional panels. If your goal is a Truth and Reconciliation panel, this would be good.

Secondly, he's ladling out pardons and commutations to the various corrupt Republicans and Republican media figures. This is also bad, because Dinesh D'Souza and Duncan Hunter deserve jail time. I doubt that the sheer tonnage of corrupt Republicans will negate the hold that party has on a sizable portion of the population, but consequences matter.

It's the third basket that is perhaps most disgusting. We know Trump is a transactional person. Everything is a "deal." So pardoning his con-conspirators in return for their silence or rewarding political allies seems like a natural extension of his ingrained corruption.

To a degree, the pardon of the Blackwater contractors falls into the "personal allies" basket, as it indirectly helps Erik Prince, a Trump crony and Betsy DeVos' brother. But it's more a part of his native sadism, his wanton contempt for lives that do not benefit him directly. 

Trump has pardoned actual war criminals. Sometimes in war, civilians are killed because wars are brutal and dangerous. These people, along with a Navy SEAL named Gallagher, are people who targeted civilians. They are murderers. Convicted and sentenced. He also pardoned Border Control agents who were convicted of the wrongful shooting death of an alleged drug smuggler. 

Basically, if you want to kill Iraqis or a migrant, you have carte blanche. Meanwhile, he's executing more people than ever at the federal level. Most of them are Black or Brown. 

I think the Left has gotten a bit broad in its use of "racism" as a rhetorical cudgel. I don't actually think it's wrong to use the term in most cases, it's just that the word is getting blunted by overuse. We almost need more versions of the word to keep it sharp.

What Trump is doing with these executions and pardons and commutations is pretty much racism and cruelty. It's deplorable.

Unhinged

 About 150 rightist lunatics besieged the Oregon state house.  I recommend this reportage.

Who The Hell Knows?

 Survey USA took a look at the Georgia runoffs. There is some good news for Democrats, in that it looks like 41,000 people - mostly young people and African Americans - have voted in the runoff who didn't vote in November. The Survey USA poll suggests that a non-negligible number of conservatives might stay home because "the vote is rigged."

But you know what? Who the hell knows? One thing I think we can say with some certainty: Trump voters don't talk to pollsters. They were missed in both 2016 and 2020. In 2018, Democrats ran ahead of the polling with Trump only on the ballot by proxy. 

For my entire life, the dynamic has been that Republicans always show up to vote and Democrats only show up for presidential elections. With Democrats making strong inroads with college educated whites, that dynamic could flip with profound implications for the country. Perhaps Trump's unique boorish appeal to WWC voters masked the demographic decline of conservatism and with him gone (at least until 2024) Democrats might have an advantage.  Or maybe not!  It's a mystery.

We Are Terrible At Understanding Risk

 Do your remember the Ebola panic of 2014? It dominated all news, but especially Fox as a way to cudgel the Obama Administration, because of the scary African virus (get it?). We freaked out over a disease that is very hard to get in a modern, medically advanced society. When Ebola crossed into Nigeria, Nigeria - a country not known for it's well functioning government - stopped it dead in its tracks.

What Ebola has going for it, is it's terrifying. It's a horror show of blood and pain. 

Covid kills a largely invisible population: the poor and the elderly. The Post has a nice rundown of the various ways we simply ignore Covid deaths and why. We are having more deaths every day than on 9/11. Yet I guarantee you the very people who have "Never Forget" bumper stickers on their pick-up trucks are the ones who are ignoring public health measures. Planes flying into towers captures the imagination. (The Onion ran a post-9/11 piece about how this all felt like a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie.) The lonely people dying in hospitals and nursing homes are invisible to us.

We have never been good at assessing risks. This is a human, not an American, condition. Covid seems engineered to exploit all of the flaws in our perception.

What Next

 Carlos Lozada runs through some of the literature from Very Serious People about what comes after the pandemic. He looks at three books, and - while I confess I haven't read any of them aside from his summaries - they seem to follow similar themes. Basically, the pandemic has exposed whatever we believed prior to the pandemic to be absolute truth. If you believed that massive restructuring of American health care delivery systems before Covid, then Covid simply proves you were right. 

The assumption is that whatever your prior beliefs, the pandemic will prove you right and accelerate whatever trends you prioritized before. 

Some of these beliefs are certainly "accurate" in the broad sense. American governance has been degraded since Reagan, though not uniformly. Republicans have systemically undermined the efficacy and efficiency of government for ideological reasons. Trump and Dubya added rank incompetence to the mix. Trump was more obvious, but I think the people of New Orleans can attest to the incompetence of Bush's bureaucracy. 

There is another lesson that might be true of Trumpistan: Institutions hold. There is almost uniform skepticism among the online left that the institutions have held. They point to the current immunity Trump has enjoyed from accountability for his actions. While this is true, this is a huge problem among (young) online commentary, in their desire for instant gratification. We don't know the final accountability of Trump. We know that the electoral system worked. Trump has been thwarted in the courts both as president and as a sore loser. Trump's footprint on our institutions is likely to be shallow.

So people predicting that the pandemic will dramatically reshape institutions are likely wrong. We will shift things at the margins here and there. The piece is right that it will likely reshape things for the well off more than the poor. Zoom and other changes will modify how work is done among certain service industries. Online medicine will take a step forward...for the wealthy. Work will change in interesting ways...for the wealthy.

One trend we have seen is the fundamental disaffection from large segments of the population with the status quo. Trump was the champion of those petty bourgeois white Americans who feel increasingly left behind. There is a massive opportunity here for Biden and the Democrats, but it's pretty clear the GOP will obstruct every effort to make things better. 

Things are unlikely to change the way they should because our institutions simply don't change fast enough. If Biden had the sort of majorities Obama enjoyed for a few months at the beginning of his presidency, we could see major legislation that could make a tangible, positive difference in people's lives. What we have seen, however, is that we will continue to limp along with systems inadequate to our governing needs. Biden will improve many things, but absent a Senate supermajority, it's unclear what real changes will be made.

A Failure On Two Axes

 The waning days of Trumpistan are seeing two profound failures of governance from the Republican Party. 

The first is rather typical of the Republican Party going back a quarter century. They simply cannot keep government functioning normally. Their anti-governmental ideology is so profound that they can't compromise on anything as simple as a budget. Yesterday, they passed a two day continuing resolution to keep the government open DURING A PANDEMIC. The sticking point is whether they should pass a Covid stimulus plan, which is like asking should they eat foie gras or ground glass. 

Any normal sense of public duty would insist on helping struggling Americans in the face of an economic crisis rooted in a pandemic that the government has also chosen to ignore (a third axis of failure). The economic slowdown is not the fault of lazy people, it is the product of forces beyond individual control. Yet, the GOP - who gleefully ran up massive debt during Trump's presidency to the tune of $8,000,000,000,000 - is now concerned about inflation and the debt. This is absolute bullshit, especially the action of Pat Toomey who wants to restrict the ability of the Federal Reserve (on of the few properly functioning entities) from assisting the recovery.

This is a continuation of McConnell's strategy from 2009-2011 of immiserating Americans for political advantage. 

So the GOP Congress has taken upon itself a role antagonistic to the welfare of the American people in order to create an economic malaise that will help them in the 2022 midterms. That's it. That's the sick, cynical game.

The second axis of failure is unique to Trump. 

We now have overwhelming evidence that Russia has hacked important government and private entities. Even Trump sycophant Mike Pompeo has admitted that Russia is behind the hack. Only one prominent member of the Executive continues to deny the evidence in front of everyone: Donald Trump. This denial is...baffling on the merits. Trump made a predictable nod that Russia may have hacked the voting machines, but that would require a breach with Putin, so he abandoned it. 

The links between Russia and Trump have been a source of inquiry and concern since the fall of 2016. Impeachment was the one incontrovertible instance of the smoking gun being held in Trump's hand, but there are smoking guns all over the fucking place. This is the latest. Putin's hold on Trump has to be more than a simply confluence of interests or outlook. Putin has Trump in his pocket in ways that are simply uncontestable. It is imperative for the Biden team to find out why.

Meanwhile, the information security of the United States is compromised by the President, who refuses to do this part of his job (as he refuses to do so many other parts of his job). 

We have another month of this shit.

This Is Not Good

 There is a mutation of Covid-19 that has been discovered around London. Mutations happen between generations, and the very short life spans of viruses means that they mutate all the time. This is why you get inoculated against different strains of flu every year. While there is no evidence that this new strain is more deadly, there is some evidence that it spread more easily or more rapidly. Since a virus requires a live host, mutations that make viruses more deadly tend not to enjoy any evolutionary advantage, but that's not to say that a more deadly variant could arise.

The more the virus spreads, the more likely it is to mutate.  Wear your damned mask.

It Is Not Just Trump

 We look to be leaving Trumpistan in a month. As we do, it's important to realize that Trump was more a symptom than a cause. The Republican electorate is broken. As they break, they break further and further into the land of conspiracy theories and crank science. Glenn Beck and Alex Jones have long been hawking quack cures and pseudo-science and now that cynical, unreasoned outlook is the official position of the GOP.

Trump's inherent ignorance and meanness are linked. His stupidity is at the root of his cruelty. As millions of Americans withdraw from the Enlightenment, they are dragging their party with them. As the Ignatius article above reveals, Republican politicians are running scared from their feverish base. I'm not sure how we recover from 40% of Americans believing that the election was stolen. Maybe it's true that this is always the case, in which case it's more worrying about the depth of devotion to a demonstrably horrible human being like Donald Trump.

Most illuminating will be whether Republican voters remain devoted to El Caudillo Del Mar A Lago when he's no longer swaddled in the trappings of power. Will they abandon him when he becomes pathetic? Or will they double down?

Good Plan

 I like Josh Marshall's idea here, that we should not engage with bad faith arguments from Republicans. Obama wasted much of the first two years of his presidency waiting in vain for McConnell's band of neo-nullifiers to come around and compromise. The essential lesson of 2009-2011 was that Republicans settled on a strategy of delay and obstruction; at the time it was referred to as "Lucy and the football" - which Marshall references. The constant moving of goalposts meant that precious time was wasted waiting for Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe to somehow come across with their vote. It never happened, and Biden was a witness to that.

As with so many things, it hinges on the Georgia Senate races. If Biden can get to 50 voters with Harris as the tiebreaker, then there is a possibility he can cram through a massive budget bill that accomplishes as much as possible. Tax increases on the wealthy; massive green infrastructure; pandemic relief. He could also force tough votes on DACA and some other issues with McConnell unable to shield his members by refusing to schedule votes. 

If Democrats don't win in Georgia, it becomes easier and harder. Easier, because it will all be within the executive branch, harder to achieve real change for the same reason. 

One thing that is increasingly clear, though Marshall doesn't center this in his argument: there should be no space for concern-trolling the Biden Justice Department for investigating Trump's crimes. Congressional Republicans - with a handful of exceptions - excused Trump's lawbreaking and, most importantly, his politicization of the Justice Department at every turn. They refused to even hear witnesses in the impeachment trial. They have zero credibility on issues of the use of executive levers of power to punish political opponents. This is absolutely not to say that Biden should force his Attorney General to prosecute Trump and his cronies. Career investigators should decide on the merits whether to indict Trump, his children and his cronies. The merit of these offenses of manifestly clear.

Fuck Republican handwringing over prosecuting a former president for crimes he committed.

Took A Day Off

 For some minor knee surgery. 

I see the Congress is trying its hand at actual governance, with predictably messy results. Ideally, we would have a trillion dollar bill that provides aid to states and local governments, puts money in people's hands and assists the distribution of the vaccine. Republicans don't want to bail out state and local government, but they want to shield corporations from legal actions surrounding  forcing people back to work during Covid. So states get hung out to dry unless Democrats win the two Senate races in Georgia.

The current inadequate bill is the BEST that can be hoped for as long as the GOP controls the Senate. Even winning the two Georgia races limits the type of legislation we can expect to see from Congress.

Still, we won't have a president looting the country for his own benefit, putting children in cages and letting corporations pollute as they want. So that's something.

This Country Has An Epstein Problem

 Here's another example.

When, Not If

 Paul Campos explores the next stage in GOP fuckery surrounding the election. Tomorrow, the Electors will meet and vote and Joe Biden will pass 270 electoral votes with quite a few to spare. While there are potential faithless electors, I doubt it happens this time.

More concerning is what will happen in the Congress in early January. Given the behavior of the Sedition Caucus that supported Texas' lunatic bid to overturn the election, we can be sure that quite a few House members will object to Biden's victory. The odds of all GOP Senators acknowledging Biden's win is not zero, but you can see zero from there. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson or some other cynical moron will object, and then accepting the entirely lawful and legitimate election will be thrown to both houses of Congress. Because the House will not go along with the objections, Biden will be made the victor. In fact, I think Romney, Sasse, Collins and quite a few other GOP Senators will vote to certify Biden's victory. It will be something like 80-20 in the Senate.

But what happens under different circumstances? What happens if the result is more a 2000 election, but where the Democrat wins the popular vote by several million, but it comes down to one state. The Republican candidate is awful, but not Trump-awful. He or she has ties to the GOP establishment. Let's say it all comes down to Pennsylvania, and the GOP refuses to accept their electors from that state because of "voter fraud" (which is really just Black and Brown people voting in Philly). Because they control the House and Senate, they decide to take the plunge and end electoral democracy in America.

Is there anything that suggests that the current GOP would defend American democracy, if it meant getting four years of President Mike Pompeo or President Tom Cotton?

The Courts aren't especially interested - it turns out - in destroying American democracy. Congressional Republicans on the other hand....

And NOW The Danger Starts

 Unlike Paul Campos, I'm not terribly shocked that the Courts struck down Trump's bullshit conspiracy theories left, right and center. There's a popular take that the only reason the Courts have been so uniformly against Trump is that the election "wasn't close enough to steal this time." Maybe if it had come down to a Florida 2000 scenario it could have been stolen in the Courts. Of course, the margins in GA, PA, WI, AZ and NV are largely a product of nationwide trends that led to Biden winning by 4.5%. So, I never had much worry that the Courts might somehow throw this to Trump. They have lifetimes appointments. The few Republicans to stand up to Trump are usually those who have nothing to fear from a primary or are not running for re-election. The judges are similarly immune from the Trumpenproletariat.

However, the unhinged ranting from Cult 45 is bad and getting worse. As the magnitude of their loss becomes clear, they are reaching for bigger and bigger conspiracies and bigger and bigger delusions. They believe the agitprop from the Republicans/Fox/OANN/Newsmax. They believe that Joe Biden is a communist and his election will end America as we know it. When you believe that and that - somehow, someway - Democrats stole the elections in Republican controlled states...that's when you feel perfectly justified in engaging in political violence.

We were basically staring at two scenarios before the election. First, Trump loses badly - and yes, his current loss is a bigly loss - and Cult 45 are outraged. Second, Trump loses by a small amount and manages to either pull off his inside straight again or somehow they throw the election to Trump in the Courts or legislatures and the majority of Americans are outraged. In either scenario, our politics is so fundamentally broken that one side would likely start calling for secession. 

Since the first scenario came to pass, it will be Cult 45 that begins wailing for secession. I'll cede the floor to Daniel Webster the last time this idea came up:

Peaceable secession! Peaceable secession! The concurrent agreement of all the members of this great republic to seperate! A voluntary separation, with alimony on one side and on the other. Why, what would be the result? Where is the line to be drawn? What States are to seceded? What is to remain American? What am I toe? An American no longer? Am I to become a sectional man, a local man, a separatist, with no country in common with the gentlemen who sit around me here, or who fill the other house of Congress? Heaven forbid! Where is the flag of the republic to remain? Where is the eagle still to tower? or ishe to cower, and shrink, and fall to the ground?

Webster went on to note that you couldn't divide the country in anyway that made sense, especially with the Mississippi flowing in the wrong direction. Let's limit the states seceding to the ones where Trump won 60% or more of the vote. That gives us a "country" of the Dakotas, Wyoming and Idaho and a "country" of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and Alabama. Yet, look at Wyoming. No state supported Trump more, giving him almost 70% of the vote(!), but its most prosperous county (Teton), where Jackson Hole is went for Biden with 67%. Alabama has its "Black Belt." Tennessee has Nashville and Memphis that both went over 60% to Biden.

So, division seems implausible, to put it mildly. 

What I fear instead is something similar to what we saw in the early Clinton years: low levels of right wing terrorism punctuated by something truly horrific. There were batshit lunatics in the Clinton years, and Janet Reno took them on with unpleasant results. Obama largely left the Bundy-types alone, not wanting another Ruby Ridge or Waco, so that there would not be another Murrah building bombing. I fear that there is nothing Biden can do to prevent something like the Oklahoma City bombing. You don't need a prompt like Waco; this generation's Timothy McVeigh is already out there. We also know that the Trump administration hampered efforts by the FBI to keep track of these extremist groups, but it could be that PATRIOT Act legacies have made it easier to surveil the violent.

Regardless, I think we can count on some serious attempts at large scale violence. I don't really think we will see true secession. So much to Trump's cultists are "Keyboard Kommandos," willing to fulminate and rant, but not really interested in doing the actual work of launching civil war. The Texas GOP under certified lunatic Allen West has issued a statement calling to think about Secession, but I have a hunch that crap won't fly very far. 

We are headed for a dangerous time, but not perhaps a perilous time. Most people are fine with Joe Biden, but I fear people will lose their lives, because Trump simply can't countenance letting go. He's going to get even more Americans killed.

Murderous Thugs

 Adam Serwer's quote "The cruelty is the point" remains the ur-text of Trumpistan. It's in the vein that last night's state-sanctioned murder of Brandon Bernard took place. Arguments for the rampant use of the death penalty tend to disintegrate under scrutiny. There is very little credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime. European countries without the death penalty have lower crime rates than we do. 

There are, I suppose, some crimes so heinous that the death penalty might be warranted. I could be convinced that bin Laden shouldn't have lived out his days in Gitmo. A guy like Ed Gein might have qualified, but he was insane, as so many serial killers are. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, confessed to killing over 70 women, but he also didn't get the death penalty.

So, what's the point of it? 

I don't like backwards reasoning, but Trump's gleeful killing spree as he leaves office - nine so far in his last year in office, with more to come - suggests that maybe it's just an extension of Serwer's point. The death penalty is about cruelty. It's about vengeance. There's no justice for people who are killed. Their deaths are permanent and irrevocable. Killing the perpetrators is not a restorative act. While I can sympathize with the families of the victims, sincerely I do, there is less reason for society at large to require the deaths of people. And this is before we even get into the misapplication of the death penalty (certainly true in Bernard's case) and the false guilty verdicts.

We also know that race plays into the death penalty. First, if you're Black and accused of killing someone, you're more likely to get the death penalty. Second, if the victim is White, the killer is more likely to get the death penalty. This is another, underdiscussed, facet of Black Lives Matter. First, the disproportionate number of Black men and women who are sentenced to death and the lack of legal accountability when Black people are killed by criminals (not just the police).

Americans have always had a cruel streak, because they are human beings. Cruelty isn't cultural, it's universal. Our unique history of race layers onto that innate bloodlust. I doubt that Biden will ever have the votes to ban the death penalty at the federal level; I doubt even more that a Court dominated by "pro-life" death penalty advocates will rule it unconstitutional under the 8th Amendment.

Still, it seems a fight worth having.

The Easiest Lift On Police Reform

 I'm in the camp that believes "Defund the Police" did hurt down ballot candidates at the margins. Maybe Cunningham pulls out the NC Senate race and they save a few House seats. We will never know.

Most police reform is a local issue anyway. We are already seeing what we might call the Baltimore Effect. After the Freddie Gray murder, Baltimore police basically stopped doing some of their job, a sort of "Blue Flu" to prove that their services were needed. For all the utopian aspirations of some "Defunders" there is crime and police are important in preventing that.

However, there is one way to dramatically decrease police harassment of people of color: legalize pot. Whether or not you go further with changing how you prosecute harder drug crimes, especially possession, is another matter. Charging dealers and traffickers but sending users and holders to rehab is perhaps a possibility. But marijuana legalization is coming and coming soon. 

"Routine" if racially targeted stops of people of color are not more likely to find drugs that stops of whites, perhaps because Blacks are disproportionately stopped. If there was no longer a criminal penalty for having a dime bag of pot or even a gram of cocaine, then you will simply see fewer people of color incarcerated. 

It's a backdoor measure that doesn't require picking battles with police unions and is beginning to enjoy more and more support. Ending the "War on Drugs" needs to happen, because drugs won decades ago. Like Afghanistan, we've lost a war we could never win, but insist on still fighting it. It's time for a new way.

Grand Old Police Blotter

 Scott Lemieux notes that the Texas lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court is a laughable piece of crap. Most likely the SCOTUS will hear from the "plaintiffs," challenge them on both standing and the law, including the safe harbor date having passed and then tell them to piss off.

As the Post editors note, we have passed the moment when there is even a shred of legitimacy to these complaints, and the GOP have become co-conspirators against American democracy. While I remain skeptical of an actual insurgency or civil war, I do think we are getting closer and closer to someone getting killed. When that happens, McConnell and others will cluck their tongues and say something about antifa or some other bullshit and they will not pay a price. Not politically. 

There were those who discreetly hoped that Trump might pass away during his presidency. I wanted him to experience the loss of his re-election. And clearly it has wounded him deeply, as almost every day goes by with him somehow losing the election all over again. Maybe we can place him in a medically induced coma until January 21st, because right now he's waging a full scale war against America. With Cult 45 sticking by him, the Coward Caucus, which is the GOP, are aiding and abetting this assault.

It won't work, but it will do lasting damage.

The Problem And The Opportunity

 This is a remarkable piece by Paul Campos. A few things strike me.

First, he's right that we moved into a fundamentally different reality about 300 years ago, when technology allowed humans to increase productivity by leaps and bounds. There is enough "stuff" to feed, shelter and clothe everyone in the world. Poverty - especially in the United States - is a political problem, not an economic problem. And as automation increases, that will become more and more true.

So why is this a political problem? Campos uses a mind blowing thought experiment.

If you were standing in front of an ATM that spit out one dollar bill every second, how long would it take your to become a millionaire?

What's your guess?

Was it eleven and a half days?

How long would it take to become a billionaire?

What's your guess?

Did you come up with 32 years? Probably not. That gap between a million dollars is simply unfathomable. We think it's ten times a millionaire, but it's a thousand times more. And if you want to be Jeff Bezos, you need to stand in front of that ATM for 5,833 years. 

Our inability to conceive of numbers that big is why we lump millionaires in with billionaires and why we aren't rioting in the streets. Campos' final point is that this creates what he calls the Neal Katyal problem. (Katyal basically ended his future in progressive politics by taking on a case for Nestle basically arguing in favor of child slavery.) There is no material reason for someone like Katyal to degrade himself that way, but because he's aware of and consorts with people who have hundreds of millions of dollars - as opposed to his mere tens of millions - he doesn't feel "rich" and therefore needs to keep grinding.

We are living in a broken society that produces a Trump because our economy is broken and we aren't fully aware why. 

Back On Their Shit

 Annie Laurie is cataloging the atrocities. Perhaps the least surprising thing as we exit Trumpistan is the media rushing ahead of us to get back to the crap they've been doing for decades that, in fact, massively greased the skids into Trumpistan in the first place.

Trump is entirely a media creation - though not entirely a news media creation. Last night at dinner, Thing Two offered up the Trump was a real estate tycoon, but the evidence is pretty clear that he wasn't. He inherited a real estate empire, drove it into bankruptcy, bankrupted a casino and a football league...and so on. Trump had squandered every one of the massive advantages being born rich had afforded him, until Mark Burnett resurrected him as a "tycoon." For Cult 45, Trump's Celebrity Apprentice run is the touchstone of his presidency and personality cult. From the cruelty of "you're fired," to the staged opulence, it was all a lie, all a fake and yet it was on TV, so people believed it.

When Trump launched his presidential bid in 2015, it was largely treated as a joke, because Trump was a joke, a punchline. The elite media and elite Republican gatekeepers knew what he was - a con man with no relevant experience and the brains of bowl of room temperature chowder. 

Once he started winning contests (albeit never with a majority of the votes until mid-April), Trump was suddenly treated as a credible major party candidate. And then the bothsides began. We know all about "her emails" until it's become a punchline. We know about the "Clinton Rules." Trump is on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women? Well, Clinton got dizzy when she was sick. Same difference.

Biden largely escaped this treatment for two reasons. One was that he was not a Clinton, and his personal foibles, including his stutter, didn't resonate. The other was that he benefitted from four years of a dumpster fire that made boring old Joe look good by comparison.

I'm in the camp that, yes, our institutions saved us, because institutions are very hard to change. The Courts turned out to not be interested in overthrowing democracy. That's really not shocking. However, two of our institutions ARE broken, the Republican Party and the news media.

As we return to "normal" politics, we will have the sort of tedious bothsides nitpicking that frames every point of view as being valid. After four years of norm shattering, Biden's decision to tap a former general for Defense has resulted in pearl clutching. When he stumbled over Xavier Becerra's name, reporters rushed to cover the gaffe. Seriously? After everything that's happened?

The media are desperate both to turn the page on Trumpistan, yet also craving the ratings boost that the malign narcissist in the Oval Office gave them. They need the conflict that Mitch McConnell is more than happy to give them. They want to be able to frame every issue as being just two sides of the same coin, at a time when the GOP wants to strip away Obamacare, environmental regulations and civil and voting rights. 

In some ways the media is behaving better. They are consistently saying that Trump lost the election and he's lying about it. Great. But once Trump is gone, they will be back on their shit and paving the way for Trump 2.0.

Whither The Storm

 I just had a quick exchange on Twitter that I regretted and then muted because it was just a touch unhinged. (I should know better.) Basically the OP suggested that Trump was executing a coup (actually sparkling autogolpe) and Biden and Pelosi weren't doing anything about it. This was the latest iteration of the "Do Something" caucus on Twitter, that freaks out over every burp and fart emanating from Cheeto Benito.

Trump's salient characteristic is failure. He was a terrible business man, a terrible husband and father, a terrible human being. All he has been good at is "selling his brand" with a BIG assist from Mark Burnett and Celebrity Apprentice. Trump is a celebrity, not a businessman. Everything else reeks of failure.

The idea that he could overthrow the electoral result is an article of faith amongst Manic Progressives. There's a weird sort of symbiotic relationship between Trump and a segment of the Left that sees America as being in a perpetual state of near failure. They almost crave his assaults on institutions, because they don't really care for those institutions either.

Trump's attempts to overturn the election are laughable and have all failed. Today is the "safe harbor" day for the Electoral College results. It's over except for more whining from Trump and his Enablers. Next week the Electoral College selects Biden and in early January, the House (and likely the Senate) confirms it. 

This is not to say there are not things to be worried about. The Arizona GOP tweeted out explicitly violent imagery linked to fighting the legitimacy of the election. I am genuinely worried about right wing political terrorism. There will be people who die over this. Temperatures are very high and Trumpists who have been fed a steady diet of bullshit are prepared to believe that Biden (of all people) is a Communist and America needs them to take up arms. 

So while Rightist terrorism is a real threat, I don't believe a true Rightist insurgency is looking at all likely. The piece in Prospect magazine I linked to the other day places Trump not in an ideological political movement but an online celebrity cult. Trump is the "most online" president ever, and it extends beyond Twitter. Like 98% of all online discourse, it is about shouting and grievance and noise without every really being about anything substantive. The vast majority of Trumpists are couch-bound and lazy, willing to scream and wave a flag at a rally but taking actual risks with their life and limb...that seems beyond them. 

Like Trump himself, Trumpists are all talk and little action. The long nutjob is absolutely going to respond to Trump and the GOP's rhetoric and kill someone. We have not seen the last Kyle Rittenhaus. This is bad. Very bad. It is not, however, an immediate threat to American democracy. Aside from McConnell's plan to pack the courts, Trump has achieved remarkably little as president. He has certainly not done much that could properly be understood as "creative," though he has been "destructive" in his repeal of regulations. Much of that will be undone in short order. Among the most baffling assertions in support of Trump by Cult 45 was that "he kept his promise and got things done."

Trump failed to build his wall and get Mexico to pay for it. He failed to "drain the swamp." He failed to bring China to heel. He failed to reorganize the global order. He failed to bring back coal or reinvigorate the Rust Belt. He blustered and he spun and he tweeted, but he accomplished very little, because he's a failure and has always been a failure. 

His cultists are more or less the same. Angry, raging and impotent.

We are not done with the dark days, but the darkness we are in needs to be plumbed and understood. Trumpists will kill people. That seems inevitable. They will not overthrow our country.

The Law Is Coming

 There is widespread belief that Trump will pardon himself, because why wouldn't he at this point.

It strikes me, however, that Trump's continual actions to overturn the election could very well be violations of state laws. 

If he wound up being convicted of conspiracy to commit electoral fraud in Pennsylvania and Michigan...that would be hilarious.

Rural Voters

 I'm not sure how Democrats make inroads among rural voters and I think Erik Loomis is largely right that there might not be a way.

The problem is never that Mainstream Democrats are holding unpopular policy positions. There are some extreme examples like "Defund the Police" that are legitimately unpopular, but many things that people like Biden propose are very popular in rural areas. As Loomis notes, Trump did absolutely nothing to help rural communities. He launched a trade war that decimated farmers...and they voted for him anyway.

I think high-speed rural internet, Green infrastructure and anti-trust action against Big Box retailers could be very helpful for rural communities...but that won't make them vote for Democrats.

Where Does The Energy Go?

 Much has been written in this vein about the perpetual grievance machine that is the modern "conservative" movement. The author of this piece accurately places Trumpism within a political continuity with the Tea Party movement. Sure, it has its roots in the Gingrich, Reagan and Goldwater movements, but those eventually made at least some nod towards the idea of actual governance. 

The defining characteristic and paradox of the Tea Party/Trumpist movement is that it represents some form of legitimate grievance: economic and cultural dislocation caused by economic changes over the past 30 years. That's real, though some of it is more a perception of relative deprivation than actual decline. As cities and suburbs thrive, rural areas fall further behind while still seeing some advances. It is the relative decline in status of whites without a college degree, especially men, that has driven the rise of the populist right. I think we get that at this point.

The question that is left hanging by this piece is that the Tea Party/Trumpist movement is incapable of addressing the actual cause of these grievances, because it is incapable of governing...so what happens?

McConnell realizes that if Democrats fail to win the Georgia Senate races, he can effectively make every single legislative agenda item that Biden proposes be a dead letter. No budgets, no programs...nothing. And the failure of Biden to actively improve the lives of Americans will feed into the Trumpist mythos. 

But what happens if Democrats win the Georgia runoffs? What happens if they are able to invest in rural America? In some ways, it won't make a difference to Cult 45. The Deplorables won't move an inch and Trumpism is singularly immune to evidence that disproves their a priori beliefs. 

How long, though, can they hold on to perpetual anger? It's exhausting. Joe Biden is hardly a guy to get worked up over, but a potential Kamala Harris run in either 2024 or 2028 would certainly fit the bill. The misogyny in Trumpism is arguably stronger than the racism. 

It's just difficult to believe that anger and grievance can fuel a long term movement, but then again it's been going for a decade. It's a minority movement, but one that enjoys veto points at critical junctures of our institutions. At some point, some of them will start dying. The only age demographic that Trump won a majority of is over 65. Biden won white college graduates by a slim majority, so Trumpism's base is shrinking in most directions. He was able to leverage incumbency and Red Scare tactics to won over some Hispanic votes, but he was still only able to win a third of Hispanic votes. He definitely motivated new or infrequent voters, but it was precisely their inconsistent voting patterns that make them unreliable for consistent victories.

Anger is exhausting, especially anger rooted in fear. Hopefully it will burn itself out.

Cowards

 This Post piece demonstrates the abject cowardice of Republicans in Congress. The Post reached out to every Republican member of Congress and asked them if the sky was blue Biden won the election. Of the 249 member of the House and Senate, only 25 will admit on record that Trump has lost the election and Biden will be sworn in on January 20th. What is arguably more significant is that only 2 members, the irredeemably awful Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks who ran against no one, said that Trump has won despite all evidence to the contrary. Instead, 221 members of Congress ducked the question.

As Trump and his "legal" team continue their assault on American democracy, the vast majority of Republican "lawmakers" sit in petrified silence of a man who is just itching to cut them off at the knees. This slavish devotion to one of the worst people in American history is nothing less than cowardice.

It is, of course, cynically prudent. Trump's hold on the imaginations of his followers is profound. I certainly hope his assaults on the legitimacy of elections will depress turnout among Cult 45 in the Georgia runoff election, but I have my doubts. For someone like Gosar or Brooks, the only real challenge to their hold on their seats is a primary from someone even more irreconcilably wretched. 

At this point, it's tough to say where the GOP is heading. It is certain that they have abandoned their fealty to American democracy in favor of either crazy conspiracy theories or simply the conviction that the majority of Americans who live in urban and suburban communities are not "real Americans." Their options are to reject democracy or embrace a herrenvolk democracy limited to White Christians. The other option is that they are simply a zombie political movement, dead on its feet but still shambling forward under inertia. Able to destroy but unable to create, they are the dead hand of the past on the tiller of the ship of state.

Screw all of them.

This Is Brilliant

Josh Marshall found this essay in the British magazine, Prospect, and it's required reading for students of this age. I've been arguing for a while that Trump is not - strictly speaking - a fascist. Several on Twitter accused me (with some merit) of being pedantic. I was focusing on nomenclature when the country was on fire.

Except, the country wasn't really on fire, and certainly the Reichstag never burned. It never was Weimar for reasons big and small.

What this essay does so well is show how this is a NEW movement and should be understood as such or else the failure to understand it will lead it to more successes. Yes, it's authoritarian and should be understood as such. I've argued that Trump fits into the oligarchic authoritarianism that encompasses everything from Mobute's old regime in Zaire to Putin's Russia to Erdogan's Turkey to the House of Saud to potentially even the Chinese Communist Party. 

Yet there is clearly something different about Trump (and Farage and Le Pen and Duterte). This essay notes that Trumpism is steeped in capitalism and the language of rights. While Trumpists decry the abuses they feel they have suffered under globalism, they are still endless consumers. There lives are defined by it. The Truck and Boat Parades are great examples of this, as they represent conspicuous consumption offered up to the Leader. They are consumers of celebrity culture the way oceans consume rivers. They drink in The Celebrity Apprentice and while some cluck their tongues and Trump's Twitter vulgarities, others cheer him along. The difference between a Trump Loyalist and a Generic Republican is whether they read Us magazine or the Wall Street Journal.

The language of "rights" has been largely hijacked at the moment by anti-maskers who claim they are being oppressed by having to follow public health measures. Their "right" to tell racist or sexist jokes is being infringed. They bleat about their First Amendment rights in ways that demonstrate first and foremost that they don't understand what the First Amendment is, but secondarily places them outside any normal definition of fascism.

The piece talks about social media in a way that has been largely done before, but adds that Twitter flamers and Facebook thread authors about the horrors of "transgender bathrooms" are not people who take the barricades. They are "creating content, " the laziest form of activism or protest. For the all the real damage that they do to a shared set of objective facts, they are simply angry ranters, not Brown Shirts.

Consumers are ultimately passive. Trump's audience consumed his rallies and ranted online. They talked about "taking back the country." And maybe the authors and I are wrong and they will launch a massive insurgency to try and topple Biden's government. But it sure seems like they will stay inside where it's warm and bleat about socialism and buy more weird-assed flags online. 

Like Trump, his followers are not men of action. They are men of Twitter and Facebook and couch-bound outrage, at least until someone changes the channel.

The Vaccine

 The NY Times has an interactive page where you can figure out roughly when you'll get the vaccine. Apparently, I'm behind 135.7 million out of 328 million Americans. I figure that gets me vaccinated sometime in the early spring. But there are some interesting wrinkles, and I wonder if the Times has accommodated them.

First, there are currently 14,500,000 confirmed cases of Covid in America. Will people who have survived Covid get the vaccine? If so, why? Would it work on them? We are adding around 50,000 cases a day so the number of Covid survivors will grow, too. 

Second, (on a personal note) does being a private school teacher mean that I won't be given preference? I can see one world where teacher's unions will prioritize their members (and rightfully so) whereas non-union teachers would not benefit. I can also see a world where wealthy parents or alums sneak us to the front of the line so that freaking hockey season can happen.

And of course, thirdly, we know that there are a bunch of freaking maroons who are going to refuse the vaccine. How many millions of non-masking nutjobs are going make a political stink over mandatory vaccinations? 

When it comes to the non-maskers, I'm not convinced that their screaming matches their numbers. I live in a red town in a blue state. There is a cigar bar on Main Street that has a bunch of middle aged white guys with goatees sitting around smoking obviously without masks. I'm sure they have a "Fuck Your Feelings" t-shirt in their closet. But outside of that, I see almost everyone else wearing a mask. There are those who insist on eating in restaurants, sure, but most places people are wearing masks. As late as October, WebMD found 90% of people wore masks, but polling remains untrustworthy when measuring the Trumpenproletariat. 

We just had a department meeting where we bemoaned the compromises in our teaching that this environment forces upon us. The demands of Covid have made teaching incredibly hard. But hopefully we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully. Because I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.

UPDATE: Paul Campos writes about how we really don't know how bad it is, even with our numbers being horrifically bad.

The Republican Party Is Un-American

 This is a piercing essay by Finan O'Toole about how the GOP is the party of Trumpism and Trumpism represents the retreat from democracy. As the GOP becomes less and less capable of winning majorities, it will abandon any pretense of honoring democracy. It has the Irish lyricism that O'Toole has unleashed before, but it also angles to explain why Trumpism might be the future of America. This passage is painful to read because it's largely true:

One half of a two-party system has passed over into a post-democratic state. This reality has to be recognized, and a crucial aspect of that recognition is to accept that the claim Ford could make in 1974—“Our Constitution works”—no longer applies. After the long national nightmare of Watergate, America could rub its eyes and awaken to a renewed confidence in its system of checks and balances.

But the Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There may be much we do not yet know, but what is known (and in most cases openly flaunted) is more than enough: the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal, the flagrant self-dealing, the tax evasion, the children stolen from their parents, the encouragement of neo-Nazis, Trump’s admission that he deliberately played down the seriousness of the coronavirus. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this. They saw it all and let it happen. In electoral terms, moreover, it turns out that they were broadly right. There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.

O'Toole concludes:

The historic question that must be addressed is: Who is the aberration? Biden and perhaps most of his voters believe that the answer could not be more obvious. It is Trump. But this has been shown to be the wrong answer. The dominant power in the land, the undead Republican Party, has made majority rule aberrant, a notion that transgresses the new norms it has created. From the perspective of this system, it is Biden, and his criminal voters, who are the deviant ones. This is the irony: Trump, the purest of political opportunists, driven only by his own instincts and interests, has entrenched an anti-democratic culture that, unless it is uprooted, will thrive in the long term. It is there in his court appointments, in his creation of a solid minority of at least 45 percent animated by resentment and revenge, but above all in his unabashed demonstration of the relatively unbounded possibilities of an American autocracy. As a devout Catholic, Joe Biden believes in the afterlife. But he needs to confront an afterlife that is not in the next world but in this one—the long posterity of Donald Trump.

I wonder, though, if O'Toole isn't misreading things. Incumbency is a powerful tool, and quite a few voters voted for Trump because he was the president. A strongman isn't a strongman from the golf course at Mar A Lago. Absent the trappings of the presidency, Trump's swagger and illusion of might will fade. As Digby Parton famously wrote about George W. Bush "Conservatism never fails, it can only BE failed." 

As the size of Trump's defeat and the impotence of his response grows, he will lose those outside the cult. He is already losing any hold he has had over the Executive, as Josh Marshall notes here. The trappings of Trumpism are closer to Ceausescu in Romania - once the façade slips, the clown show will be laid bare.

My hope is that the exit of Trump from the White House will disenchant Cult 45 and they will sit out elections in fits of pique. O'Toole notes that the GOP has abandoned democracy and the basic tenets of democracy - mainly that the majority should select our leaders. Our 18th century vestiges of inequality in the Senate and Electoral College mean that there is a path - albeit a very narrow one - for Republicans to gain the presidency even by losing the popular vote by huge margins. 

But there is another future. As the hardcore Right turns its back on the democracy, it turns its back on elections. This could be a future tinged in violence, as Rightists abandon and deny democratic legitimacy, they will reach for their arsenal of guns. Or they could simply slink away into their rural corners of America, into sovereign citizen lunacy and away from the growing and vibrant urban America.

The idea that America is doomed is an easy reflex for those who see doom, or as O'Toole calls them, those who read Yeats over Seamus Heaney. 

Trump's level of support is shocking, but it could be contingent on his actually being president. Dictators require the illusion of potency. All of this makes a full and vigorous accounting of Trump's crimes a requirement of the Biden Administration and especially state courts.

Trump needs to be humiliated and chastised not out of vindictiveness or "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but because the health of our democracy depends upon it.

Meanwhile...

 Remember Afghanistan? Yeah, it's time to leave.

You can make a case that we owe Iraq more than Afghanistan, as we invaded and broke their country for very little reason. But Afghanistan was broken before we got there, and it WAS the place that harbored Al Qaeda. I think we've paid enough to try and bring order to a place that seems immune to it.

Why I Can't Believe In A Sentient God

 These people would be dropping dead like flies if there was any sort of plan to this hellish universe.

These fucking morons have no idea what government actually is or freedom, for that matter. Or history. These mouthbreathers are invoking freedom lovers Jefferson and Madison - two men who OWNED OTHER HUMAN BEINGS - to invoke resistance to proven public health measures. Because freedom's just another word for being a fucking idiot. Luckily they didn't invoke Washington, who issued a mandatory vaccination of the Continental Army. Washington may not have been as "smart" as Jefferson or Madison, but then again...

Meanwhile in the real world, 98,000 people are sick enough to be hospitalized and nearly set a record for daily Covid deaths - 6 fatalities below the mark of 2,603 back in April.  We are losing a 9/11's worth of people every day and these poisonously stupid people want to offer bin Laden the controls of all the aircraft in America.

Unpardonable

 Michael Flynn has received a pardon from Trump for his first round of crimes. Now he seems to be actively committing sedition. Now, sedition has a troubled history being used against people who merely dissented from government policy (see Debs, Eugene), but this is pretty clearly beyond criticizing the incoming Biden Administration on political grounds. Flynn is calling for the violent overthrow of our constitutional system of government.

On the other hand, Neera Tanden was mean on Twitter so...basically the same.

Can The Old Ways Work?

 Years ago, talk of a "bipartisan group of legislators" coming up with a solution that was stuck in Congress was a hopeful sign. Today, it just seems like an exhausted nod towards a system that no longer works. From a basic macroeconomic standpoint, any additional stimulus is better than no additional stimulus, but from a political standpoint, there are a variety of changing incentives. 

Some Republicans see the need to pump some more money into the system, but they are attaching that money to limiting liabilities to companies that force people back to work during the pandemic. Some Democrats see an urgent need to get money into the hands of citizens and local governments and are willing to embrace a less than ideal package in order to get it. Biden's incentives are trickier. The 2009 stimulus was too small to erase the smoking crater in the heart of our economy and Obama and Democrats suffered in 2010 as a result. However, no stimulus is terrible and ideally a vaccine will unshackle the economy by the summer. Trump is golfing and has no incentive to do anything to help the American people who very unfairly and meanly voted him out of office.

Ideally, a compromise measure worked out in the Sausage Factory would help ease the burdens on millions of families and hundreds of governments. If Democrats don't win the runoffs in Georgia, this might be the only chance to stimulate the economy via Congressional spending. However, judging from the unmitigated shitstorm that Biden's nominees for key positions has unleashed online among the Very Serious Socialists, any compromise will be seen as a sellout as opposed to a natural byproduct of a nearly equally divided country.

Republicans introduced "no compromise" legislating under Gingrich and brought it to the Senate under McConnell, and I fear that some on the Left will suggest that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. The problem is that incentives work differently for Republicans - who don't want the government to do anything for the common people - and Democrats - who do.