Been Away

 I've been working to close up my parents' farm in anticipation of selling it. It's been tough, but I'll write about that later.

It's Time For Vaccine Passports

 Building on Josh Marshall's observations immediately below, Jen Rubin says we need more vaccine mandates. She points to France, where Macron has basically put into place a vaccine passport system. If you don't get vaccinated, there are places you can't go. This led to protests (hey, it's France) but it also led to a massive uptick in vaccinations. Indeed, there is some evidence that vaccinations are going up again in this country in the wake of the fourth wave of Delta.

If Marshall is correct that there are supermajorities who are vaccinated and hoping life will return to normal AND if the GQP is largely identified with anti-vax positions (fairly or unfairly) AND Cleek's Law means that the GQP will freak out and protest vaccine passports...THEN you can cement the GQP's status as the choice of about 40% of the electorate, and make the Democratic Party the party of "life needs to return to normal safely."

Is This Why The GQP Is Changing Its Tune?

 Josh Marshall has been speculating on why the GQP has begun to embrace vaccination, and he may have hit on something. He digs into the numbers that most people gloss over. Only about 50% of America is vaccinated, most dumb reporters parrot. But that number is misleading, because very, very few children are vaccinated. Children also, notably, do not vote. Among voting age population, 60% of Americans are vaccinated and 69% have had at least one dose and among the elderly, it's close to 80%.

The GQP thought they could ride Freedumb to 2022 electoral success, based on the 2010 Tea Party movement, I guess. If they get associated with anti-vax positions, and we have to go back to masking...I think they realize that they will pay a price for that politically.

At least, one could hope.

Air Travel Seems Fundamentally Broken

 I have to fly next week - much to my consternation. I booked a flight to and from my destination. Paid extra to check a bag and have enough legroom, because we want to incentivize people bringing steamer trunks as their carry-on and make people over 5'6" miserable.

I flew on American Airlines once this summer, and they didn't have a plane ready. We had to wait an extra hour and a half and get in VERY late after a cross country flight. Then my son flew on American and they overbooked his flight. So we volunteered to switch it since he wasn't on a tight schedule. They sent him to an airport with no jet fuel.

So, fuck American Airlines, right? I booked in United, and they just told me that my return flight NEXT SATURDAY is being cancelled because of weather and runway construction. Given that there is absolutely no way that they can know the weather next Saturday, it's the runway situation. Which they knew about when they sold me my ticket.

We've all heard stories about people being awful on flights. I don't want to be one of those people. I have not been one of those people. But people who snap because of the way airlines treat them? I don't think they are a complete mystery. 

Way back when we over-regulated airlines. Today, we under-regulate them. It's very simple. We need an Air Travelers Bill of Rights. 

- Every airline must have enough customer service reps at their 800 number. When my son was sent to an airport with no fuel it took them 15 hours to return my call and they hung up on me.

- An airline should be penalized for over-booking. (And there should be some sort of penalty for people who book and cancel.)

- An airline who sells a ticket that they cannot honor for reasons related to airport and airline operations (not acts of Dog) must give 150% of the fare as a refund.

- Airlines must reduce seating so that normal sized people have enough room to sit comfortably.

- Airlines should charge for the second piece of carry-on and not charge for the first checked bag. This will improve loading and unloading the airplane.

I don't know. That's just off the top of my head. In return for these regulations, the Federal government should take on some of the financial burdens that are forcing them into these shitty business practices.

Did Covid Break Us?

 Reading this thread from Paul Krugman, I wonder if we aren't underestimating how much Covid broke us psychologically. He basically went driving and if you've been driving in the past 16 months, you probably noticed that people were driving like maniacs. Of course, we all know about the ubiquitous "Karen" videos from your nearest Costco, of someone freaking out over the basic courtesies of wearing a wee paper mask to stop people from dying. Because of a certain overlap with Trumpist Covid denialism, we tended to simply ascribe this to Trump. 

As Krugman notes, maybe this reckless driving is tied to the spike in murder rates. It's only a correlation, but it's pretty clear that both traffic fatalities and murder went up, as did any other number of anti-social behaviors. 

For many of us, the pandemic was about "In This Together." We saw it as an external threat that could only be slowed and defeated by working together. 

However, all you need a fraction of the population - say 10% - to see the pandemic as an opportunity to go full Mad Max to create a measurable increase in reckless behavior.

I don't know if this is true, but we do know that murders and traffic fatalities spiked during Covid. And the reckless driving predates the George Floyd protests.

Complicated events are not caused by One Thing. It does seem clear that Covid was one of the causes of a lot of bad side effects beyond loss of smell.

Acid Test

 Once upon a time, the bullshit axiom used by election horserace talkers was that you had to win "bellwether" states like Ohio and Missouri. Those were states full of Real Muricans and determined who would be presidenting by appealing to those Real (White) Muricans.

Ohio does remain a little bellwethery,  as Obama won it twice, but Trump won it twice without winning a majority of the vote and losing re-election, because he is a loser who loses.

Missouri? The last time a Democrat won Missouri was 1996. Since then Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote without it, Obama won twice and Biden once without it.

In 2012, Obama won 44% of the vote there, basically the same as in South Carolina. Clinton won 40%, roughly the same as South Carolina. Biden won 41% of the vote there and actually did BETTER in South Carolina. So..."Missouri: South Carolina Without the Nice Beaches."

All of this brings me to the Senate race next year. 

Eric Greitens was the governor of Missouri until he was credibly accused of sexual assault. Now, he's working on his comeback by running for the Senate as a the Trumpist candidate in one of the Trumpiest states. But...you know...rapist. Now Trump has also been credibly accused of multiple counts of sexual assault and seemed to sail through those allegations. But at the point those allegations came out, Trump's Bizarro Charisma seemed to inoculate him from repercussions (although, again, never cracked 50% approval).

What happens when you play Trump's lyrics without his calliope music? If Greitens wins the nomination, does he win the seat? If so, does he match Trump's 56% of the vote or does he fall into a neck and neck race?

Keep an eye on the Show Me state.

Bureaucracies Are Necessary, But Not Always Great

 In order to run a large and complex country, you need established bureaucracies to maintain the even distribution of goods and services. We are all equal at the DMV. Most of us never come into contact with the federal bureaucracy (the DMV is local government) and we have no idea how or why they make the decisions they do.

The decision to not give full approval to the mRNA vaccines is a bad one. There is a lot of logic is slow-rolling drug approvals, especially for new drugs. The recent fustercluck surrounding a new Alzheimer's drug is a good example of how the regulatory process should NOT work. But the Covid vaccines have been widely, widely used. There are no weird chemicals in them that might show up later, just a few strands of RNA to teach the immune system how to fight a novel virus.

So much of the vaccine resistance that is killing thousands of Americans every few days is because they have latched on to the "emergency use" tag that the mRNA vaccines have. If the purpose of the EUA was to get as many shots into people's arms as possible, then moving from EUA to full authorization would have the same effect. 

Of course, as soon as the FDA gives full approval, those same idiots will claim it was done under pressure from evil Demoncrats who want to put Bill Gates' computer chips into our arms.

Someone said the Confederacy "died of a theory." The New-Confederacy will "die of a stupid."

I Hate Tankies

 In case you're wondering, "Tankies" is the name for neo-Leninists who actually seem to favor some form of communism. Jon Chait runs through the basic arguments that Tankies are making against liberal democracy, including its historical roots in the Cold War. Chait has been waging a long war against the illiberal Left, and much of his critique ends up covering that well-trodden ground.

I'd like to look at the broader condemnation of liberalism by the Tankie Left. Democratic Liberalism can basically be defined as a respect for rights and liberties, codified by the rule of law and organized through free, fair and competitive elections. It is a product of the British and American revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is, as Churchill quipped, the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.

Liberalism (as opposed to "being liberal" which is your attitude towards political change) is at the foundation both of democracy and capitalism. Because capitalism has been allowed to run rampant - in Keynes' phrase "red in tooth and claw" - the stains of capitalism have been visited upon liberal democracy. That is understandable, but unfair. As frustrating as liberal democracy can be, it is infinitely preferable to authoritarianism as a basis for governance. There may be a nice authoritarian regime (Singapore) and a horrific liberal democracy (....) but as a general rule, the more the rule of law exists, the better.

That we have allowed capitalism to create a class of rich people who seem beyond the rule of law is a critical problem, yet one that liberal democracy is uniquely able to tackle. The heavily redistributive regimes of Scandinavia are liberal democracies with social democratic economic systems. There is no reason whatsoever that America cannot embrace a fairer economic system. 

However, the fantasy on the Tankie Left is that America is a uniquely horrible place. Not just on race (which, America is not uniquely horrible) but on class. America is profoundly unequal, but if you think that the poor in America are similar to the poor in Lesotho or Guatemala or, yes, Cuba, you are simply blinkered and provincial in your thinking. 

More likely, you are beginning from ideological principles and forcing the world through that lens. This, as much as anything, is the problem with the Far Left. They are almost definitionally ideologues, and extreme ideologues at that. Therefore, actual evidence is irrelevant. 

I'm currently reading a book on Communist China from 1947-1957. Everyone agrees that Hitler was bad. Almost everyone agrees Stalin was bad, although, hello, Tankies. In terms of absolute number of people killed, neither holds a candle to Mao, who likely killed over 100,000,000 of his own people. This inconvenient fact is invisible to those who insist on lauding an ideology that is fundamentally wrong and has been shown to be fundamentally wrong time and time again.

Much of this is driven by young people who seem intent on ignoring the lessons of history. Or maybe they weren't taught them. Marx makes a few good points, but quickly goes off the rails. Lenin was a mess and Stalin a nightmare. Marx's "beautiful theory" keeps being trashed by the historical record.

The internet echo chamber, however, continues to give this failed ideology an Amen Chorus. As Chait notes, the Tankie Left is a hiccup compared to the cancer of Trumpism, and therefore it's perhaps better to mock them than fight them. They don't deserve real battle.

What Gives?

 Suddenly, the GQP and it's media overlords have gotten religion on vaccination. I'm with Josh Marshall that it's difficult to tease out what is happening here. The GQP is only afraid of one thing" electoral backlash in 2022. As far as they are concerned, 2024 is a lifetime away. Everything is about winning control of one house of Congress so that they can make Biden's life a living hell.

Something must have convinced them that this vaccine-reluctance is bad for the brand. Perhaps is the fact that it is literally killing their voters is enough.

The Climate Crisis Is Here (An Ongoing Series)

 David Von Drehle at the Post has a thumbnail rundown of the water crisis in the West. My sister is a big deal in the Colorado Basin and so I've been hearing about this coming crisis for years.

Basically, as Von Drehle points out, the Colorado Compact was written for a mythical Colorado. There simply isn't enough water even in good years to make it work. In drought years, the problem is amplified. We were just out west in early June and the scarcity of water was profound. Then, of course, you have the flash floods that ripped through Zion Canyon. 

It's all gone wonky.

One of the enduring questions in the climate debate is the degree to which technology might save us, through things like carbon capture and sequestration technologies. When it comes to water, we already have some options. You CAN desalinate sea water but it's expensive. California is simply going to have to find a way to meet that cost, both for its cities and its agriculture. We have irrigation techniques that could help tremendously, but Western farmers are stubborn to the point of being assholes about it. We drove through southern Utah and saw farmers using spray irrigation in the middle of a 100 degree day, rather than drip irrigation at night.  Madness.

Since we live in a world where we literally can't pay those farmers to get a vaccine that could save their lives, I'm trying to think of a way where we can get them to change their farming practices to save water for their grandchildren. Drawing blanks here.

One thing is for sure, we are going to have to price water differently out west in ways that impact usage without immiserating the poor, especially Native Americans. I don't think our politics is up to the challenge.

Bring Charges

 Martin Longman is absolutely right. Trump is hiding behind a stupid norm in American politics: you don't prosecute outgoing presidents. Admittedly, the only one who this really applies to is Nixon. A good norm is not prosecuting presidents because of official actions that turned out badly. That's vindictive partisanship. But charging Trump with his very real crimes is imperative, because the main reason Trump will run again in 2024 is to avoid prison. Put him there before he has a chance!  As Longman notes, numerous other well-established democracies do not have a problem with this. 

We have this norm because most presidents are not venal, self-serving assholes, and the few that were weren't out-and-out criminals. Trump is.  

Bring the charges.

The Depths of Cynicism

 One of the pervasive puzzles of the Republican electorate is why they persist in voting for a party that really only wants to cut taxes for the top 1% of Americans. That should not be a winning electoral formula. OK, you can add on the fact that - as WEB DuBois explained so long ago - white supremacy brings psychological and social benefits, even if it does not bring economic benefits.

However, the GOP makes rhetorical and actual nods towards various social issues like abortion to motivate certain parts of the electorate. They ride their perverse version of "pro-life" (which means anti-abortion but pro-death penalty) to victory. The fact that they are embracing various forms of deregulation that will necessarily impact working class Americans in ways that will actively kill them is just removed enough from direct causality to let the GOP off the hook. If the GOP deregulates a chemical plant, and the people downwind get cancer...whose to say why that happened?

As Greg Sargent notes, the recent Trumpist tilt of the GOP has removed even that thin line of plausible deniability. The Trumpist Party is throwing massive doubt about vaccine safety, even while the same elites who are peddling this shit have themselves been vaccinated. So, Trump gets the virus, it nearly kills him, he gets state of the art treatments unavailable to his cultists, he's probably still been vaccinated just in case, and he is going around telling his cultists not to get vaccinated.

As I mentioned the other day, I think the primary focus for the Biden Administration is working with rural churches. Black or White or Hispanic? Doesn't matter. The White evangelicals will reject the outreach. But if you can get vaccination rates in the Black and Brown communities above 80%, and the members of Cult 45 continue to avoid getting vaccinated...let them. Fuck'em. 

If Trump and Tucker Carlson and the rest want to kill their supporters, I don't see how that is something that should keep me up at night. They have a choice. Both the elite opinion makers and the cultists are making a choice that flies in the face of evidence and common sense. Fuck'em.

These People

 Is it tragedy?

Is it farce?

"A Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated"

 The head of the CDC used that phrase - accurately enough - the other day. It's a terribly depressing turn of events. America is basically giving away vaccines to anyone who wants them. There are now programs to come to your door if you want. 

While I'm not a huge fan of the Covid ActNow map, because I think it's rather alarmist in how it determines risk (any risk factor that is "orange" colors the whole area "orange"), but it's a pretty good source for determining trends. A few weeks ago, the country was overwhelmingly "orange" and "yellow" with a few "green" states thrown in.

Now the green states are gone - even Vermont - and we have "red" states emerging. And of course, they are red in more ways than one.

Let's compare two states. 

Vermont is "orange" because their infection rate is 1.16. That means every person with Covid is passing it one to 1.16 persons. In other words, it's the R0. Frankly, 1.16 is pretty low. Below 1.00 and the disease is disappearing. Also, the positive test rate is a very low 0.8%. In other words, most people who have Covid are likely being caught in the testing. They are recording slightly less than 2 new cases per 100,000 people, which isn't very many (roughly 12 a day). The other things about Vermont is that almost 75% of Vermonsters have been partially or fully vaccinated. So while there are "breakthrough" cases among the vaccinated, the pool of potential Vermonsters who can even get it is shrinking. The pandemic in Vermont will likely burn itself out, if it hasn't already.

No let's look at Missouri. Missouri is currently "red." Their infection rate/R0 is 1.25. Not horrific, but not great. Their positive test rate is over 11%. That means over 1 in 10 people going in for testing are coming up positive. Given that many people can be asymptomatic and some people are simply less likely to go to the doctor, that suggests there are a lot of people wandering around shedding the virus. What makes Missouri "red" is that they are recording almost 30 new cases per 100,000 people a day. Given the population of Missouri, that's roughly 1,800 cases a day. 

So to compare, Missouri is seeing 1800 new cases a day, Vermont is seeing 12. Missouri is much larger than Vermont, but that is still a striking number. The vaccination rate for Missouri? It's 46.2%.

What's more, St. Louis county has been vaccinated/partially vaccinated at roughly 50%. (For some reason there's no vaccination data on the counties that contain Kansas City.) That means rural Missouri is often vaccinated at levels lower than 1 in 5.

Let's look at race in Missouri. African Americans have gotten 9% of the vaccinations, and they are 11% of the population.  Whites make up 82% of vaccinations and 82% of the population. In other words, at least in Missouri, this is not a vaccine hesitancy based on race. A quick scan of the table shows that African Americans are getting the vaccine at roughly the rate of their prevalence in the overall population.

However, given the widespread effort by conservative media to undermine confidence in the vaccine, it strikes me that targeting African Americans - especially rural Blacks through their churches - would be a very efficacious way to improve overall vaccination rates in the swath of "red" Red state - Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Florida. (Florida especially has a disproportionately law rate of vaccination among Blacks.)

Use the importance of Black churches the rural South to get those vaccinations up! 

Biden As FDR

 Jon Chait makes the argument that Joe Biden is trying to create an FDR-sized presidency that redefines the role government plays into our lives and heads off threats from radical outliers - like FDR did. Roosevelt was the bold reformer who staved off challenges from the Socialist Left and the Fascist Right and created a broad based prosperity that lasted for almost 40 years (and created an powerful Democratic majority).

Biden is doing all this without the benefit of large majorities in the House and Senate. However, FDR often had to negotiate within his fractious caucus, too. Southern Democrats would not countenance any expansion of social benefits to Blacks, for instance. 

What strikes me about this comparison is the similarities between Roosevelt and Biden as men. Both were instinctive politicians - warm and optimistic - and neither were considered especially deep thinkers. If Biden lacks the cool brilliance of Obama, FDR lacked the scholarly insights of a Woodrow Wilson, yet both build off the intellectual underpinnings and failures of their predecessors. 

Because Biden and FDR are not deep philosophical thinkers, they are freer to acknowledge the horse-trading politics of it all. They were comfortable with the "sausage making."

I don't know if Biden will be the next FDR, but today's news is encouraging.

We Are In The Climate Crisis

 Rarely a fortnight goes by without another story of extreme weather costing people lives. A few weeks ago it was the Pacific Northwest. Today it is Germany and Belgium.

Some of this is simply a reporting issue, as cameras increase in ubiquity and news travels faster, images from droughts and floods are more easily deposited in our living rooms. But the reality is records are falling that are not simply a reporting issue. The world is hotter and these weather events are more common.

Being in the crisis does not mean that this is as bad as it will get. It will get worse. But the climate crisis is not simply a collapse into Mad Max style environmental anarchy. It is people and animals dying from the weather and billions in wealth being destroyed.

Naked

 Ron DeSantis is the Trump we all fear; a Trump unshackled by the manifestly unfit personality traits that Trump manifests every second of the day. (The fact that those manifestly unfit character traits are exactly what appeals to many of his voters is not lost on me.)

In a transparent bid to pander to white resentment DeSantis passed an odious law that basically makes certain forms of protest illegal. It was specifically designed to target Black Lives Matter.  How do we know? Because when Cuban Americans in Miami engaged in exactly the sort of behavior that the law prohibits - blocking a freeway - they were not arrested.

Importantly, some Cuban American protestors in Tampa were arrested. That means the courts will get to weigh in sooner rather than later on the constitutionality of this law. Frankly, I would be surprised if it survived judicial scrutiny, but that doesn't matter to a fucker like Ron DeSantis. If the courts strike it down, it becomes just another cause in the culture war.

Speaking of which, there's a good quote buried in the piece. Anna Eskamani, a Democratic rep who opposed the law, says that it shows "how bad policy comes out of culture wars." If there was a way to encapsulate the entire GOP agenda for this century, it can be wrapped up in that sentence. Because GOP governance is based on culture war grievances, often with little to no basis in reality (see Critical Race Theory being taught in elementary schools), it does not lend itself to thought out policies, but rather these ridiculous bills that are blatantly targeted at Black people.

Anyway, it would behoove Democratic strategists to start tearing DeSantis down now, the way the GOP did with Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi hearings. He's genuinely evil without being as self-destructive as Trump.

Huge If True, Also Not

 The Guardian is running a story - not as of this moment picked up by major American outlets - that purports to have internal Kremlin documents from 2016 that show Putin directing Russian intelligence agencies to help Trump win. The leaked documents appear to be genuine, but it's always best to be skeptical of anything coming out of Moscow. 

The documents describe Trump as an "impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex." Check...check...check. It also claims that they have kompromat material on him. The Pee Tape is real people! This meeting took place a few weeks before the DNC hack. The article reads:

A Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system” and see hidden discontent burst into the open, it predicts.

In some ways this feels like a post hoc manufactured document. It's just SOOOOO spot-on in its depiction of what happened from 2016 onwards that it feels a little too neat. On the other hand, people were saying Trump was manifestly unfit for office in 2016 in America, so...

Whether or not Russia tilted the election to Trump is unknowable. The 2016 election was so close that it's certainly very probable that any influence Russian intelligence exerted on the electorate through media and social media manipulation could have thrown just enough votes to Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (a total of about 75,000 votes across those three states). The leaked document also shows that Russia understood how fractured our politics were and how Trump's election would make it even worse. Again, that's part of how "too pat" this leaked document is.

The problem, of course, is that even if the Kremlin were to come out an admit they did it, it wouldn't effect the members of Cult 45. If anything, Trump's election and the allegations of Russian aid have moved numerous factions in the Republican Party into a soft collusion with fucking Russia. 

The Republican Party's war on democracy does not stop at the voting booth.

The Party Of Stupidity

 Look, I know we Coastal Elites(tm) aren't supposed to look down our noses at the salt of the earth Real Muricans of the Heartland. 

But come the fuck on.

A basic level of intelligence is the ability to form new opinions in the face of new evidence. Like...that's the fundamental goal of education. Can you change your mind? As Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Let's take two examples that are only tangentially related to the Former Guy.

First, Tennessee - a state that once elected people like Al Gore to the Senate - has decided that the proper response to a global pandemic is to...stop ALL required vaccinations. I'm currently reading a book on the American Revolution, and the biggest killer of all during the war was smallpox. You know why no one gets smallpox anymore? Because of vaccines. Same with the measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus...vaccines are arguably the greatest invention in the history of medicine. Bigger, perhaps, than antibiotics. 

The GOP wants to reduce the efficacy of the most important public health tool we have for reasons that can only be described as stick-your-tongue-in-a-socket-to-see-what-electricitry-tastes-like stupid.

On a more typical note, we have Stephen Moore. The vast number of positions Republicans take - including the example above - are examples of Cleek's Law (Republicans believe the opposite of what Democrats believe, updates every 15 minutes) and are therefore inherently negative. The GOP defines it's positions simply by opposing other positions. However, there is one "positive" belief that Republicans have. One policy that they believe for its own sake, rather than simply because it is in opposition to things Democrats want - like vaccinations or climate change legislation or helping people get health care or building infrastructure - is cutting taxes for the very rich.

Stephen Moore has spent his entire adult life as an apostle in the cult of tax cuts for the rich. And he has been spectacularly wrong. His record of wrongness is so extensive and well-documented that it's frankly a little embarrassing to read aloud.

When a political movement is effectively bereft of ideas, it ceases to be vital. It becomes, instead, the entity we have now: an empty shell for the machinations of a career con-artist and narcissist.

The Sunrise Movement Of The People's Front of Judea's Popular Front

 Yglesias rightly points out the folly of so-called climate activists for attacking their allies in the climate fight. Biden's climate package is simultaneously the most aggressive attack on underlying climate issues that any president has attempted and insufficient to reach climate goals. There are many reasons why it's insufficient, but it can be reduced to "Republicans" when you get right down to it.

Rather than attack Republicans for obstructing more climate related reforms, the activists are naturally attacking Biden. If this has the effect of depressing turnout in 2022, then Republicans could win one or both houses of Congress, at which point there will be NO climate legislation passed.

This is just unbelievably stupid.

It reminds me a passage from a book I just read.

Burke believes that the attempt to apply what he calls metaphysical methods in politics confuses politicians and citizens about the purpose of politics - leading them to think that governing is about proving a point rather than advancing the interests and happiness of a nation.

I know I quoted this before, but it's just so spot-on. The problem with any extremist political stance or movement in a democracy is proved most dramatically by the Republican Party's descent into a form of maximalist culture war that has embraced authoritarianism as the culture leaves them behind. Because they see the "Democrat" Party as Satanic Communist Pedophiles, there's no reason to win elections by persuading voters, just prevent the "wrong" people from voting.

On the Left, we have factional purity politics that punishes allies for being insufficiently "right." We dissolve into intramural squabbles over how many letters come after LGBT or what is the proper way to refer to people from Latin America, while the Right pushes "conversion therapy" and family separation. Trump had the great ability to clarify the venal cruelty at the heart of the modern GOP. Now the "Resistance" is fracturing as it inevitably would.

Cultism

 This is a fascinating bit of reporting - respectful but closely observed - about the new form of apocalyptic Christianity that is creating the foot soldiers in Donald Trump's version of America.

I have drifted into and out of the Episcopal church in my life. During a very hard time, I found the ministrations of two priests in particular very helpful. There is a solidity, a tangible realness, in some churches. I get that. That's real. My problem was the theology. I simply don't believe the Nicene Creed. I've said it a hundred times, but...nope. I just can't believe a God that is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful can exist in a world such as ours. 

This new form of Dominionist Christianity offers community to people who are broken. That's great. But here's the thing: that's exactly what cults do. Cults don't acquire new members from those who are mostly well-adjusted and happy. The description of the sermons is a description of an America that simply doesn't exist. But that description resonates with people who have been broken by this modern world. It's a simple Manichean worldview that allows them to cast themselves as willing martyrs (one young man in the story fantasizes about being martyred in horrific fashion) in a titanic holy war between themselves and literal demons. It takes a messy world and establishes a clean order upon it. Bad things are caused by demons and we must fight using God's power which will be breathed into us.

I know as a "Coastal Elite" I'm not supposed to look down my nose and these "Real Americans." But, yeah, I pity them. I do understand why this simple, simplistic, simple-minded version of "faith" appeals to them. Personally, I've drifted more and more into a soft Buddhism as a way to understand the world. (Something those two priests I mentioned earlier put me on to.) Buddhism is hard. Dominionism is actually easy, because it absolves you of so much. It wraps you in a warm sense of purpose.

Religion - at its best - is a balm for the broken, but that should mean it is a personal relationship of faith. Dominionism is not, ultimately, about that. It's about forcing their views on the rest of us. It's about investing executive power in a corrupt conman who worked for four years to break our country (and may have succeeded). So in the end, while I want to be sympathetic to these people seeking certainty and faith in an uncertain world...nah. Fuck'em.  

Murder, We Wrote

 The past 18 months has seen a stark reversal in the falling homicide rate in America. The reasons why are very hard to pin down. The analysis in the article notes that it is likely an overlapping of many different trends, but ones that include stressors to communities brought on by the pandemic, protests against the police that led to reduced police presence in many neighborhoods, an even wider proliferation of guns and the reluctance of courts to place pre-trial offenders in jail during a pandemic. 

In many ways, we have a problem when it comes to assessing crime, because we don't have very good date on crime. We won't know whether this reversal was a unique product of a unique year or a trend until next year at some point.

The other issue is that we have a real and measurable increase in crime and overall lawless behavior - people seem to be driving like fucking maniacs more than usual. While police reform is absolutely necessary, the fundamental bedrock of American governance is not "democracy" but "rule of law." Without rule of law, democracy is simply mob rule. Binding the powerful as well as the poor by the same laws is critical for democratic governance to have any legitimacy. 

Trump and Trumpism eroded the sanctity of law in this country. His crimes - past and present - were so manifest, why would anyone think that laws still had legitimacy? That coupled with anger at police abuses created and then added on to opposition - largely emanating from Trump - to public health measures created a broad sense of the loosening of the social contract.

There is also going to be another factor in all this. The breakdown of civic order in the late 1960s and '70s was also created by a loss of legitimacy in the rule of law. Vietnam, civil rights protests, Watergate, a youth culture that curdled into anger...all of these created a sense within the broad middle of America that things were spiraling out of control.  

This leaves opening for cynical asshats like JD Vance to build on Trump's American Carnage themes. Nixon - up until Trump the avatar of presidential lawlessness - used the idea of "law and order" to break the New Deal Coalition that had dominated American politics since 1932. He used coded (and not so coded) appeals to racism to peel off the White working class voters that now form the bedrock of the Republican Party.

There is no doubt that Republicans will desperately want to run on a breakdown of law and order. My guess - and it's barely an educated guess - is that the economy will be thriving in 2022 for the midterms. Biden has pretty good approval ratings and I am hopeful that the new Democratic tilt in White College graduates will translate into good midterm turnout. (I also think that the talk of voter suppression is overblown, but could be helpful in getting some voters to the polls.) 

Republicans are losing the culture wars. "Law and order" might be their last chance at leveraging an area where they still enjoy some legitimacy. Casting Biden as a Socialist is only working on their base, not the wide swath of the polity. Casting the Democrats as the party of Antifa and Rioters might work, but only if Democrats let it happen.

Make A Big Deal Of This

 The firing of Andrew Saul is going to become another synthetic outrage on the Right. It's going to be "like Hitler only worse." 

Democrats need to be proactive in ways that they often struggle to be. Some of this is a product of an undeserved faith in Americans to understand the truth, some of the presence of the Rightwing Wurlitzer, some of it is that traditional journalistic practices default to a "he said/she said" dynamic that obscures Republican lies.

Anyway, the article notes that interest groups for the elderly and disabled are hailing this move, because Saul was delaying checks and making it harder to qualify for benefits. This is basically the Louis DeJoy method of running a federal agency. Make it run like shit to undermine public faith in the government's ability to do basic tasks.

As I've mentioned before, restoring the ability of the bureaucracy to function - from the postal service to the IRS to Social Security to NOAA - has to be a primary focus of the Biden Administration, and to their immense credit it appears to be so.

Six Months

 It has been six months since the insurrectionists tried to overthrow the American electoral system by storming the Capitol. I was at home, scrolling through Twitter where I saw reports that an unruly mob had gathered outside the Capitol and was trying to force its way in. I did something I rarely do: turned on cable news. The word "surreal" gets bandied about too much, but there is really no other word to describe what we saw that day.

I never felt that this band of misfits would seriously overturn electoral democracy. Even as I watched it, I wasn't worried that somehow this would be the end of America. If anything, I was worried - and remain worried - that 1/6 was not the end of something but the beginning of a new phase in the fundamental brokenness of Rightist politics in America. The demented ramblings of Marjorie Traitor Greene and Paul Gosar have become the rallying cry of the perpetually aggrieved twice-impeached Florida Man and have now become the litmus test for any Republican aspiring to hold office. 

On election day, I still felt that Trump was going to lose. It was playing out exactly the way prognosticators had said: Trump would hold early leads and then early vote totals would swing it towards Biden. However, the tragedy of election day was that it wasn't a crushing landslide. A defeat so humiliating and total that Trumpism would be vanquished as surely as the man himself was. Instead, we are headed for at least a few more years of fighting against an anti-democratic movement within one of our two major political parties.

And yet, Cult 45 continues to worship this Golden-plated Calf....

Reclaiming MLK

 Matthew Yglesias looks at how Martin Luther King's economic radicalism is largely ignored by both the Left and Right today. The Right, naturally, lifts a single line from the "I Have A Dream" speech - the "content of their character" bit - in order to argue that we don't need to address racism anymore. As others have done, Yglesias brushes these bullshit arguments out of the way pretty comprehensively. Jim Crow was often not crafted in explicitly racial terms, especially voting restrictions. In fact, not much has changed there, as Conservatives continue their project to make it harder for People of Color to vote without writing "Don't let Black people vote" into the actual laws.

The case against the "Left" is little trickier. It's the case, oddly enough, that Bernie Sanders was trying to make, but he made poorly: the best way to help Black and Brown Americans is to help ALL poorer Americans, since poverty disproportionately effects those communities. Not just "jobs" and "education" but just actual money can help those communities immensely. Ending childhood poverty should be a universal goal of American politics, whether you believe in racial justice or equality over equity. If you want improved outcomes for Black Americans, improve the inputs. If you want to stop "talking about race all the time" then make a society where poverty is not concentrated in certain racial groups.

As I've noted repeatedly, the main problem with Left of Center politics is the Judean People's Front problem: endless factionalism. The bridge from King's racial justice focus to King's economic justice focus is the bridge to a potentially enduring political coalition. 

It will take, however, an unusual political figure to walk it. I don't think White America would trust a Black politician to navigate it, because we saw what happened when Obama created a race-neutral redistribution of wealth. They derided Obamacare (and also Obamaphones given to the homeless so they could get callbacks for job interviews) by placing his name - Black and foreign sounding - in the title. Perhaps Biden - Scranton Joe - a political relic from the last century, among the whitest of White men could be the avatar of a class-based coalition that marries cross-racial efforts to alleviate poverty with an implicit (rather than explicit) liberalism on diversity. If you can marry enough working class whites to racial minorities to suburban college educated whites...that leaves the Republican Party screaming at the 27%.

They Share One (Damaged) Brain

 You do not - under any circumstances - have to hand it to Adolf Hitler.

The latest documentation of Trump's moral and intellectual vacuity will be hitting the shelves soon. Trump's profound ignorance of the most basic information regarding US and world history should surprise exactly no one who isn't a Kool Aid swilling minion of Cult 45. 

The West Wing has been derided by the Internet Kewl Kids as being facile, NPR propaganda, and there is some truth to that criticism. But there are a few killer lines, including one where Nobel Laureate Economist Jed Bartlett was running against an idiot Florida governor. One of the characters said something along the lines of, I don't need the president to be PhD, but I want to know he has a full toolbox. 

Trump's toolbox was empty. I would've loved for a debate moderator to ask him to name the capitol of South Dakota. Odds are he couldn't do it. Expecting him to understand Hitler beyond the "he made the trains run on time" or "he built the autobahns" so he wasn't ALL bad is expecting him to move beyond the sort of understanding of history that plagues so many of the rightists in this country.

Having observed young boys, you can notice that a lot of them love Darth Vader or the Hulk. Frankly, those are not great role models. The reason boys love Vader - the villain of one franchise - and the Hulk - the brute force of another - is because both a "strong." That strength is divorced from accountability or empathy, but it doesn't matter. The world is scary to a 6 year old and being strong like Vader or the Hulk means not being scared.

That's basically the worldview of people like Trump. They never get out of worshipping the "strong" man. Trump's idolatry of people like Putin or Xi and his inability to see the moral rot of someone like Hitler is because he shares the fascination with "strength" that so many of his cultists have. They loved Trump because he was "strong." Not real strength - intellectual, moral, cultural - but this preening faux strength that typifies people like Trump and - yes - Hitler. 

The number of suburban dads who read incessantly about Hitler or the Civil War without really understanding them is frighteningly large. Placing slavery as the root cause of the Civil War is not "revisionist" history or a mythical version of "Critical Race Theory" that is used to scare people and get them primed to accept a "strong" man. The defense of slavery and white supremacy was the absolute cause of that conflict. We have the receipts! Hitler's rise was partly "economic anxiety" but the hyper inflation of the early Weimar Republic had disappeared by the time Hitler seized power. Hitler's rise was about the "humiliation" of the German people at Versailles and his ability to case responsibility for that "humiliation" on ethnic minorities and socialists. Sound familiar?

This is the reason for all the GOP efforts to create warped "memory laws" to prevent the accurate teaching of history in schools. If you understand America's and the world's past, you will understand that the world was always flawed and that those flaws must be addressed or they will erupt in really terrible ways. Reforms succeed and revolts fail. However, the reforms this country currently needs are ones that might imperil GOP control of various parts of the country. So it is best to prevent people from understanding that. If that leads to an American dictator...well, you can't make a Hitler Omelet without breaking some eggs/heads/norms.

I remain hopeful that America will reject the GOP's increasingly obvious turn towards authoritarianism. However, it's important that we all understand that this is what is going on.

They Want To Own It, So Make Them Own It

 In a move that should surprise exactly no one, Trump is beginning to valorize the 1/6 Insurrectionists. As Josh Marshall notes in the piece, that Trump would try to elevate the violent fringe who attacked the Capitol in his name was inevitable. That a movement that turned Randy Weaver and David Koresh into martyrs would do the same for Ashli Babbitt is also unsurprising. 

I know that Biden and Democrats want to run on a strong economy and the end of the pandemic in 2022. Fine, you can run on that as your positive message. One reason Republicans didn't want any part of a 1/6 Commission is that they were worried Democrats were going to turn it into an endless "Benghazi" style witch hunt that would release findings leading up to the 2022 midterms. 

Since they have refused - for the most part - to participate in the hearings and because they are actively embracing the insurrection in order to kiss Trump's immense, puckered ass...OK, make it work for you.

Kevin McCarthy is on tape bragging that the Benghazi hearings help destroy Hillary Clinton's approval ratings (which were actually quite high when she was Secretary of State). Maybe it did work or maybe it was just the dynamic where women are popular doing the work by unpopular when they ask for a promotion. We prize women's competence and condemn their ambition. Or maybe it really was the relentlessness of the Benghazi hearings. 

If so, repeatedly and consistently tying the insurrection around Trump, McCarthy and the (disturbingly large) lunatic fringe in Congress could be exactly the sort of anchor around the GOP in 2022 that could win enough Senate seats to neuter Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. In February - when she was just beginning to really ramp up the crazy - Marjorie Traitor Greene had a national approval rating of 15% favorable and 37% unfavorable. If anything, those numbers should have expanded as she and the other mini-Trumps in the House expose themselves for the adulation of the OANN/Newsmax crowd. 

Pay no attention to their rising popularity among Republicans. The goal of the next four years must be to make fewer Republicans. If they've already drunk the Kool Aid, there's no saving them. All we can do is peel away Republican-leaning independents into true independents and make true independents into Democratic-leaners.

That should be the goal and the Insurrection should be the lever to move the populace.

The History Wars, Part II

 A colleague passed along a very good essay from the NY Times Magazine. It begins by talking about how the Soviets and now the Russians have tried to erase the brutal dekulakization in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Basically, Ukraine was the "breadbasket" of the Soviet Union and collectivization of agriculture there killed millions. The Soviets and now Putin's Russia has made understanding this act of genocide a crime. 

I want to excerpt this part when the author starts to talk about how "normal" people become complicit in ethnic atrocities.

Atrocities begin in everyday life, so we need tools and concepts to peel away the familiar and the exculpatory. I started writing this essay after doing what I do most days, dropping off my children at school. After I arrived in Vienna last summer, I had to hustle to find a school for my kids. There was a pandemic; I was a foreigner; and there were some moments of uncertainty. It was a huge relief to me when my kids were admitted to a good school. What would I have done if I had then learned that the slots opened up because some other kids had been expelled from the school? Most likely I wouldn’t have looked too closely; a human reaction would be to presume that those other kids must have deserved expulsion, just as my kids deserve admission.

Now let us imagine that I am in Vienna, looking for a school, but it is 1938. Hitler has arrived, and the Austrian state has collapsed. Jewish children are leaving schools as their families flee the country. My children, who have been on a waiting list for a very desirable school, suddenly have places. What would I do? The school authorities spare my feelings by not mentioning just how the spots opened up. Perhaps I am not an anti-Semite, and perhaps the school director is not, either. But nevertheless, something anti-Semitic is happening, and regardless of how I assess my own motives, I am drawn in. For me and for the other parents in my situation, whom I would no doubt come to recognize and know, it would come to seem normal that there were no longer any Jewish children in school.

When we claim that discrimination is only a result of personal prejudice, we liberate ourselves from responsibility. Only our story matters, and what matters in our story is our innocence. The only way to preserve the neutral description of a situation like that one is to expel from the story the other people involved. The parents who want to think that what they did was normal could be drawn to think of the Jews as beyond the national community. The Jews become less than human so that we can tell ourselves that we are human. The anti-Semitism that grows from this conjuncture lies not just in the mind and not just in the institutions: It resides somewhere in between, in a system that is now functioning in a new way. We know where it led. Jews were excluded from the vote and from the professions. They were separated from their property, and from their homes, and from their lives.

What is persuasive about this is how Tim Snyder begins with a thing we all "know" is bad: the Holocaust. I bolded the critical insight that this passage carries. In America, we can freely teach that the Holocaust was awful, but increasingly, Republican led states are trying to erase the understanding that racism was central to America's development as a country. The latest hobgoblin of the conservative "imagination" is Critical Race Theory, which basically begins by asking why racism persists even after changing the laws in 1964-65. How do non-legal racist structures persist even after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts should have made them illegal.

Places like Florida and Texas are basically denying the ability of schools to suggest that racism is a pervasive social structure that has an impact on America today. Instead, it was a personal choice by some flawed people in the past and we don't need to talk about that either.

I am generally reluctant to participate in what I call "Dunking on the Dead" over the issue of race. I also believe it's really important to teach that men like Jefferson and Washington were white supremacists. How could they not be? Their entire worldview since they were children was based on the idea that it was right and proper that they should expel Natives and enslave Africans. It wasn't up for question. When slave owning Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death," he wasn't even aware of the contradiction he had introduced, because "liberty" was for white men and inconceivable for Blacks. The point isn't that Patrick Henry chose to be a hypocrite; the point is that the foundations of Henry's life made his position consistent to him and almost everyone else at the time who listened to him.

Ironically, these "Memory Laws" - based in spirit and form on Russian laws - seem to tilt in the Dunking on the Dead direction. I read that Conservative venerate the "Founders" of America and Liberal venerate the Foundational Ideals of America. As Obama often said, we are in a process of making a more perfect union; we do not live in a perfect union. The American project in this telling is an effort to constantly bring our actual country into closer alignment with the ideals articulated by men like Jefferson and Henry - even if our understanding of those ideals is different than what they believed. 

If we teach that racism was a just a choice dead people made, that seems to consign Jefferson and Washington to a moral purgatory. If we teach that racism is systemic and pervasive, we contextualize their failings and understand better the dynamic contradiction that has driven American history from the Trail of Tears to Seneca Falls to Antietam to Greenwood to Montgomery to Selma to Minneapolis. 

That contradiction is discomforting, as Snyder notes in his essay. Wrestling with that discomfort is precisely the point of studying history. 

The political goals of the GOP in denying the central role of race in American history and understanding how that legacy informs the country we currently live in is obvious. If we understand racism properly, we might act on that understanding. And that would upset the snowflakes - white, frigid and fragile - that constitute the Republican electorate. 

The Republican Party is currently the greatest threat to American democracy since Jim Crow.

Was It A Revolution?

 Josh Marshall lays out Gordon Wood's argument that the American Revolution was a proper revolution.

I've struggled with the idea of revolutions and whether America's qualifies. In the end, most revolutionary studies find a beginning date - usually easy enough - and then some sort of conclusion - which is much more fraught. If we assess a revolutionary era's beginning - what is the status quo that is being overturned - and then we look at the outcome - did it succeed in overturning that status quo, then the date you pick is critical to determining the success of the revolutionary movement.

Marshall makes the case that America unleashed powerful language of "liberationist" rhetoric. He leans into Wood at the end, but Wood's mentor was Bernard Bailyn, and Bailyn points to how the American colonies existed within the political discourse and traditions of Britain, but also outside of them. Basically, the Radical Whigs of mid-18th century Britain were, well, radicals. Few listened to them outside the coffeehouses of London. America lacked the constraining presence of elaborate social hierarchies - with the obvious exception of race. Those Radical Whig writers had few censors among the educated elites of America. 

American egalitarianism predated Lexington and Concord, and it was based heavily on the shared racial superiority of White, Anglo Americans over Africans, Native Americans and Catholics. America was equal among a reasonably large group of white men. However, few had the vote. (Briefly women were given the vote in New Jersey by accident, but it was the Jeffersonian Republicans who stripped that right away; the ballot was for white men.)

True political democracy was largely kept at bay, even prior to the so-called counterrevolution of 1787, and the writing of the Constitution. While the Revolution may have unleashed revolutionary rhetoric, it rarely worked to truly upend society, the way the French and 20th century revolutions did. Yes, there were a few societies established - mostly in the Upper South - to end slavery...but they achieved nothing. Yes, as mentioned, women were extended the vote...and it was snatched away. Yes, there was talk of levelling economic differences...but if you were wealthy and supported independence, you largely stayed wealthy. Loyalists might be stripped of their estates, but it was not wealth that made them targets, but their support for independence. 

After the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the relative conservatism of the Federalist years until 1801, you could make a case that America returned to its British roots: a bicameral legislature with a separate head of state, common law courts, even a financial entity modelled on the Bank of England. 

America was, perhaps, inherently radical in its embrace of white, Protestant male equality, though even there, areas like the Hudson Valley or South Carolina were very much unequal. But as Edmund Burke noted in his defense of the American "revolutionaries" they were simply defending the institutions and norms that had evolved there for 150 years. That Burke could agree with Thomas Paine about the American "Revolution" and disagree so vehemently over the French Revolution tells us something important about those respective moments of change.

After Jefferson became president, a broad expansion of suffrage for white men occurred over the next three decades. It was political evolution, rather than true revolution. It proceeded from the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson's advocacy for those principles in his presidency, through the rise of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren and the Democracy. James Madison thought political parties a terrible evil; Martin Van Buren created them as forces to organize the new mass politics. 

If you want to pick the end date of the American revolution, is it 1783 and the Treaty of Paris? Was it the suppression of Shays's Rebellion? The drafting of the Constitution? The election of Jefferson? Jackson? The Civil War and Reconstruction?

You can't find an end date to the American Revolution because it wasn't a true revolution. It was a war of independence that sparked some social upheaval. That social upheaval was at first suppressed in Massachusetts in 1786 and with Washington crushing the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. It was then channeled into political movements that coalesced into the first intentional political parties under Jackson and Van Buren.

Calling that a "revolution" seems a stretch. Certainly Paine felt that way, as he turned his back on America after the war, because he felt it insufficiently revolutionary.