The Record

 The Washington Post has a brilliant and thorough summary of the lead-up to January 6th. It goes into great detail about how law enforcement had a general sense that something awful was about to happen, but various institutional inefficiencies and biases worked against proper preparation for what transpired. You really should read the whole thing. 

A few things stood out to me. 

First, the descriptions of the Trump supporters usually included "though so-and-so had never really been active in politics before" or one who voted for Bush, then Nader, then Obama. These are not typical voters, and they represent a substantial section of Trump most fervid supporters. These atypically political people were the ones who were most likely to see Trump as some sort of messianic figure. Trump's non-traditional background and rhetoric were what appealed to them.

They are the ones who are both the most dangerous and the most likely to remove themselves from politics without Trump there to activate them.

Second, it has been apparent for years that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are simply not willing to look hard at domestic terrorism. Reading the Post's account was like reading the 9/11 postmortems. In both cases, all the information was there, but no one had the authority or motivation to act on it.

Finally, there is no way January 6th happens without social media. The delusions and paranoia found an echo chamber that was not available to them two decades ago. Sure, there was the Brooks Brothers' riot from 2000, but that was a handful of GOP staffers bussed in to intimidate one ballot counting facility. What transpired throughout the fall and early winter of 2020-21 was both organic and carefully scripted. Online connections turned the lunatic ravings of Alex Jones and Rudy Giuliani into gospel truths. We see the fallout of this today with the bizarre anti-vax movement. 

It is imperative that future elections are free and fair. At the moment, it seems likely that they will be, but Trumpists are trying to remove state-level officials. This could create dynamics that weren't in play last time. Last time, local Republican officials in Georgia and Arizona held firm. There is little hope that will play out the same way. As we approach future elections, the FBI and others cannot be hamstrung in preventing violence ahead of time. 

Trump 2024

 Paul Campos makes some nice points about Trump's signature hold on the GOP and how it's impossible to discern if he is the symptom or the disease. It is becoming clearer - and will become even more clear - that January 6th was planned from the White House and the Willard Hotel.

Watch as Republicans justify this. They will. We know they will. And they will know they have the absolute support of 40% of Americans no matter what. All they will need is the right 7% of Americans to fall for some absolute bullshit false equivalencies and smears to potentially win in '24.

I am not one of the "Do Something" caucus caterwauling online about the lack of indictments for Trump and his crew. I'm fine with them taking their time. But they should be working on a timeline that indicts Trump in December of 2022, so that he runs for the presidency under that cloud.

Eat The Rich

 ProPublica has a nice rundown on how the "Billionaires Tax" would work. There are plenty of parts of BBB that Manchinema killed, but killing this one was almost political malpractice. It's needed, it's popular and it could have funded something like paid family leave.

BBB is going to do a lot of good. Hopefully, Democrats will get another bite at the apple in 2023 with a few more Senate seats.

Got Nothing

 Every new story is simply the old story on a new day.

Also, I got my booster and feel like hot buttered ass.

A Big Fucking Deal

 When Obamacare passed, Biden was caught telling Obama that this was a "big fucking deal." Now, it looks as if Democrats might finally be closing in on the passage of BBB.

Combined with the earlier infrastructure bill, this is a huge step forward in social spending and efforts to repair various broken parts of our country. 

Yes, it is not perfect, but every Twitter Slacktivist and every IRL activist who decries BBB because it doesn't go far enough? They can work to add Democrats to both Houses next fall so maybe we can build on it.

This is how legislation happens. If you think it sucks, it does. If you become despondent over that, you're a toddler.

Sausage Making, Sausage Eating

 It looks like we are getting closer to having an actual BBB plan. It will be - in the manner of all major legislation - a bundle of compromises. Today, ACA is considered a policy triumph, an effort to provide health insurance to millions of Americans. In 2010, it was considered a failure by progressive advocates who want a single payer system. Since 2010, ACA has been protected, expanded and improved upon.

A similar dynamic is at play here. BBB will be a major accomplishment, but the idea and plan for BBB was so expansive that any bill that survives Manchinema will seem like a letdown. 

It will not be.

The question is: How can Democrats - in an age of Internet Hot Takes and Purity Politics - sell a truly impressive expansion of benefits to a skeptical public?

Pie In The Sky With Matty Y

 I link to Matt Yglesias a lot here, because his whole schtick is to pen hot takes that really aren't hot takes, so much as repudiation of assaults on conventional wisdom. However, I'm going to link to his recent piece for a different reason. Yglesias is part of a cadre of commentators who have taken issue with the New New Left's take on politics. In large part, I agree with him, Jon Chait and others who find a lot of the New New Left to be pursuing politically toxic policies and messaging because they have their heads firmly up each other's asses. Years ago, epistemological closure warped the Republican party into what it is today: a fever swamp of conspiracy theories and counterfactuals. The New New Left would create a similar condition of epistemological closure among Democrats, and that would be bad.

In response to this, Yglesias suggests creating a new "Center Party." The idea is in response to a truism about American politics: it is currently broken. The reason it's broken is that excessive partisanship - mostly fomented by Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell - has made it impossible for Congress to pass legislation through regular order. The anti-democratic - and therefore anti-Democratic - nature of the Senate makes this especially pronounced. Yglesias proposes that a Center Party made up of Joe Manchin, Susan Collins, Jon Tester and Lisa Murkowski could somehow break this logjam.

What he doesn't address is the filibuster. Even if Collins, Murkowski, Portman and Toomey signed on to the Center Party nothing would change. Even a modest voting rights bill would not get enough votes. Maybe...MAYBE you get some sort of "Protect Democracy" Act that prevents another 1/6 from happening, but I doubt that.

The problem with Yglesias' argument is that it badly mistakes cause and effect. He presumes that Murkowski and Manchin - who have been at odds with the general bent of their national parties - would somehow want to separate from those parties. But it is precisely the rigid partisanship that creates the loyalty to parties. Break with the GOP and who is really going to support you?  As we have seen, especially on the Right, loyalty to party is usually very, very important. In fact, being a Republican is today about 90% being loyal to the person of Donald Trump.

There are likely quite a few Republicans who would love to break with Trump, but his cultists are their primary voters. They know they can't get elected without them. In a few states, you could see an argument for Collins being an independent. Angus King, the other Senator from Maine, is an "independent" but he's a Democrat in name only. (This doesn't even get into committee assignments. The whole of Congress is structured around parties.)

The other part of Yglesias' argument I find bothersome is the idea that the Democratic Party is basically just "the party for people who live in big cities and care a lot about intersectionality." This is the sort of bullshit analysis one gets if one spends a lot of time on Twitter arguing with 20-something Leftists who think Joe Biden wants to lower taxes on billionaires when literally the opposite is true.

I agree that fear-mongering about Democrats being Socialists and wanting to abolish the police helped keep the 2020 election close. But the Democrats ARE a big tent party in ways the Republicans really aren't anymore. It was culturally conservative African American voters who rescued Joe Biden in South Carolina and helped win the election. Relying on young voters or new voters almost always fails; you need to convince the people who vote to vote for you. Yglesias made this very point yesterday. Trump managed to mobilize a certain group of voters who had not voted before, but it is very far from clear if those voters will vote without him on the ballot.

(I could see Terry McAuliffe in Virginia losing narrowly, winning narrowly or blowing Glenn Youngkin out of the water. Pollsters are always trying to make up for their mistakes and having undersampled Trump voters in 2020, they could oversample them in 2021. The California recall was a nail biter until they actually started counting votes.)

In a perfect world, it would be nice to have a three party system, where the center had the ability to mold legislation to appeal to the broadest possible constituency. However, Murkowski and Collins voted for Trump's tax cuts. Manchin votes with Democrats most of the time, and he will vote for the BBB when they are done negotiating it. In fact, the current standing of Manchinema is precisely the centrist structure Yglesias claims to want. It's unclear what the advantage would be for Susan Collins or Jon Tester to drop their party identifier.

Yglesias says that Duverger's Law isn't really applicable here, because Canada and Great Britain (and Mexico) have the same sort of electoral systems, but more than two parties. The problem is that our two parties are so deeply institutionalized that even when they change their positions completely, they still exist. The parties don't exist because of ideological commitments, but because we have a presidential system and you really only have a binary choice. 

I have been hoping for years that the GOP splinters into a Chamber of Commerce/Libertarian party and a Trumpist/Revanchist/White Supremacist party. The outcome will be large majorities for Democrats in the Congress, as the minority Rightists in this country split their votes. Yglesias' idea isn't that hopeful. All he wants to do is take the existing system and rearrange the letters on the name plates of Senator's doors.

A Barrel Of Bad Apples

 Reading this story about a police chief in LaGrange, Georgia (of all places) who has instituted a "shot to stop" policy, I was struck by the response. Basically, shooting someone in the legs or pelvis is more likely to stop them than shooting them in the chest - the current preferred placement for a shot when an officer feels threatened. It is also less likely to kill them.

The response from police organizations? Look at this passage:

A neighboring police department posted a link there to its own recruiting video and told officers it was hiring: “Come to an agency where you are appreciated, valued, respected, and are able to do your job.”

How can you read that and not take away from that that "doing your job" basically means being able to use lethal force when it might not be necessary? 

If you hire people who think that the best part of their job is unloading a clip into someone's chest, then you are going to have the sort of policing we have in too many parts of this country.

The Education Wars

 Among the many horrific social cleavages that have rent our country, the current war over what is being taught in schools is becoming especially fraught. The basic argument - that I see in my local Facebook nightmare - is that parents have a right to dictate their children's education. That is not true. The secondary arguments surround mythical ideas about what is being taught in school. Most notably the insane idea that a law school theory - Critical Race Theory - is being taught to second graders after their juice and cookie break.

What has parents upset, apparently, is the idea that an accurate picture of America's past might be taught to their children. For instance, Christopher Columbus has a trash-fire of a human being. That's not revisionist history, that's the opinion of Columbus's contemporaries. However, for certain segments of the population, especially Italian Americans, giving a true portrait of Columbus undermines a mythic idea that those parents grew up with. It's an assault on their preferred vision of America. The fact that it's true is irrelevant. 

Parental anger over an accurate teaching of America's racial, social and economic past is being stoked by Rightist media. This is precisely where Fox News and OANN create the greatest fissures on America. Their ability to create controversy where none previously existed is on display in this CRT bullshit. 

Back when America tried to reckon with its racist legacy in the '50s and '60s, conservatives responded by founding "private" schools surreptitiously funded by tax dollars. We will likely see a similar effort now, either with the hostile takeover of school boards or the creation of MAGA Academies. In our town, students voted to remove the "Indian" mascot. Mind you, this was the students, not the teachers. There are currently people running for the school board to force the Indian mascot back into the school, which will cost the district ALL their state funding. (You can keep a racist mascot, but you can't reinstate one.)

The irony is that teachers need a college education, and college educated people hold very different understandings of the world than non-college educated people. The pandemic has led many teachers - along with so many other underpaid professions - to consider quitting. If you read that linked story, you will see a lot of the same complaints: sure, we've never been paid enough, but our community mostly respected us; that's no longer true. Going to a private school won't really solve that.

As parents - gripped by the Fox-fueled fever dreams about the state of education - increasingly become agent provocateurs in their own school systems, it will be a race to see if we can break the fever before we break the hearts and souls of educators.

Can Democrats Win Back Old People?

 Here's a chart:

It is too small to read, so here's a link.

What's interesting about this is what Republicans and Democrats think are important in the BBB plan. Republicans really like adding dental and vision to Medicare, long term care coverage, prescription drug pricing and pandemic preparedness. Democrats also like those things, but Democrats are more fired up for taxing the wealthy and pursuing clean energy.

Or to put it another way: Republicans are old people.

Some of those old people once voted Democratic, but they switched because "crime" or "Socialism" or what have you. The culture wars that animate both sides have driven some Olds into the Republican party, because they simply can't grok the idea of being transgender or the fact that Christopher Columbus was, in fact, a huge gaping asshole of a human being or maybe some of the police are racist bullies. 

As W.E.B. DuBois explained, White Southerners will vote against their economic interests, if it means perpetuating a system of White supremacy that benefits them socially. I think that's a little less compelling, but it's also clear that a program (unlike the one that Sinema says she supports) could benefit Democrats among older Lean Republican voters. The fact that Manchinema have been resistant to providing various programs and breaks for the Olds is just political malpractice, given the aging demographics of their states. 

I do not think that simply passing BBB will suddenly transform a bunch of Boomer Republicans into Democrats. But again, elections are so tight right now, that simply peeling off 5% of Republican support could be the difference between a Democratic House and Senate in 2022 and a collapse of democracy with a Trump election in 2024.

Give the social activists a wink and a nod. Carry out their agenda quietly where you can. Be very public with taxing the rich (if you can get that past Manchinema) and providing better care for the Olds (and the Youngs). 

If the future of democracy in this country really does depend on lancing the festering boil of Trumpism in 2022-24, then you have to move on this.

Immoral Panic

 This is an excellent and necessary read.

Is It The Kids?

 Much has been made about how far America has fallen behind other similar economies in our vaccination rates. The reality is 77.4% of eligible Americans are vaccinated. Unlike a lot of European countries, America has a larger percentage of young people in its population. Birth rates are higher here. If we quickly move to vaccinate the youngsters, we could get to 3/4s of the population being vaccinated by Christmas. Pair that with those with acquired immunity and we should be in a pretty good place.

All the noisy anti-vaxxers represent a pretty small percentage of the population, but a large absolute number. That's a dynamic that falls under American Innumeracy. 

Misunderstanding Data

 Among the many lessons that we are sadly learning during the pandemic, America's innumeracy is certainly one of them. 

Right now, there are people quitting their jobs over vaccine mandates. We see them on the media. Dozens of police and firefighters publicly quitting over the requirement to get a vaccine against a disease that is the leading cause of death among the police. The reality is that most places that require a vaccine see 90% compliance. 

Jon Oliver did a bit on climate change deniers with Bill Nye, where they challenged the usual talk show format of one climate scientist and one climate skeptic. This implies a balance between the two. As Nye pointed out, you would need 3 climate deniers and 97 climate scientists to accurately depict the scientific consensus.

We see similar things with groups like "American Frontline Nurses" referenced here. Apparently there are only three of these lunatics. Now, there are a surprising number of nurses who are anti-vax, but the number is nowhere near 50%. Anti-vaxxers in the medical establishment exist, but they are rare. 

We see a similar situation where people think a 95% effective vaccine means it's impossible to get Covid. No, it means you have a 1 in 20 chance of getting it. If some of the data on Delta is true, that number might be closer to 1 in 10. It does mean that if you're vaccinated, you're much, much less likely to die.

Yglesias takes this on when he asks why we continue to do "Covid theater" like surface disinfecting, when we know Covid doesn't really transmit via surface transmission. You could expand this to asking we still have to take off our damned shoes at the airport. 

So much of our inability to do accurate risk assessment depends on a simple misunderstanding of how numbers work and what they actually say. 

Dave Chappelle

 There is apparently a heap of controversy over Dave Chappelle's latest stand-up special on Netflix. I've never seen anything but a few clips of Chappelle's work over the years, but I at least know that he specializes in taking his comedy right up to the edge. Much of his targeting is towards White people, but in this special he targets Trans people.

There are two different takes on this. 

The first is that Chappelle represents a broader problem at Netflix, where they produce so much content that some of it is especially hurtful. The article at the link runs through some of it. However, it's difficult to conclude that Netflix itself is discriminatory towards Trans people, since so many Trans people who work for them are upset.

The second is roughly that Chappelle specialize in controversial and largely juvenile takes on gender and sexuality issues, and if you don't want to watch it than you shouldn't. One argument that Yglesias has been making for months now is that activists - especially culturally left activists - have a tin ear for what is actually popular.

I suppose there is a third take - that Chappelle is right - but that's not worth engaging in. He's not.

This is one of those messy issues where basically a lot of people are right. Chappelle targeting Trans people is more or less punching down. Comedians who punch down are verbal bullies. Chappelle seems to get that when he concludes by saying he doesn't have a problem with Trans people, he has a problem with White people.

Yglesias teases this out in a way that's interesting. Basically, Black elites are like White elites in that they largely support LGBTQ issues, but the general support for these issues among Black voters is much, much weaker, BUT it's not non-existent. As Yglesias puts it, Black voters may not actively support LGBTQ issues, but they vote for people who do. Chappelle's quip about White people feels like a targeted barb at the sort of White people who put a "Hate has no home here" sign in their front yard, but vote against building affordable housing that might bring poor or minority groups into their school district.

Polling on Trans rights in particular is all over the place. Generally speaking, progress like this is largely supported, but often if it's done without drawing attention to it. Yglesias shows the polls that show an astonishing 66% of Americans agreeing that Trans people should be allowed to serve in the military, but a similar number 62% believing that Trans people - mostly women - should be required to play on teams with their sex at birth. At the same time, 54% say that gender is determined by birth sex and also 63%  saying that Trans rights are either about right or could be improved.

It's just a mess, and so picking battles over what is exactly important and what isn't is largely impossible. However, coalitional politics suggest that doing work quietly on controversial issues is better than picking loud public battles that alienate median voters.

People like to point to Republicans nakedly brutal power politics, but the reality is that Republicans campaign on roughly popular messaging before pivoting to plutocratic service. They don't tout their unpopular positions, so much as place themselves in opposition to less than popular Democratic positions. No one wins an election on cutting Jeff Bezos' taxes.

Democrats should campaign on popular things but do righteous things.

On Colin Powell

 Powell's death has led to the usual paeans to a prominent life lived largely in the public eye. He was a groundbreaking figure in many ways. However, those hosannas and tributes have been balanced by harsh criticisms for his behavior as a "good soldier." Powell was at least tangentially involved with the My Lai Massacre cover-up. The lessons he said he learned in Vietnam colored his strategy in the First Gulf War, when he strenuously argued against a campaign to Baghdad.

Yet, a little over a decade later, Powell was shilling for the Second Gulf War and giving his tacit approval to the same assault on Baghdad that he had resisted in 1991. Powell's service to the thin gruel of "intelligence" linking Saddam Hussein to WMD is rightly fronted in news stories about his legacy. For all the terrible damage that Donald Trump has done to the civic fabric of this country, George W. Bush's - and by extension Colin Powell's - decision to wage war in Iraq remains so much more damaging in terms of human, financial and moral costs. In fact, the Iraq War was such an unmitigated disaster that even Donald Trump could look at it and describe it thusly. 

Colin Powell represents the same sort of institutional thinking that kept us in Afghanistan long after the mission there had obviously failed. He managed his spectacular rise to Chairman of the JCS to Secretary of State precisely because he was not the sort of guy who rocked the boat.

I don't think Colin Powell was a monster, the way some of the left have characterized him. He was, however, a man who lost his way serving a morally neutral vision of American leadership that in fact abetted a profoundly immoral war. 

Powell said he learned important lessons from Vietnam, but Iraq apparently unlearned those lessons. Hopefully the next generation of military leaders will learn those important lessons and have them stick.

The Lyrics Without The Music

 Josh Marshall ponders whether nominating batshit insane Trumpists - without Trump on the ballot - will lead to unexpected pickups for Democrats. I suspect it will. Trump holds his Deplorables because he's Trump, not because people instinctively love the "Big Lie."  They just love Trump. But many more people hate Trump, so...

Additionally, we are living with the Conventional Wisdom that the President's party gets creamed in the midterms. Obviously, this was true in 2018 and 2010. It was less true in 2002. Ultimately, a quick and sustained recovery from Covid will have more to do with Democratic hopes than anything. However, running insane Trumpists could further cement Democratic gains with moderate suburban voters who typically vote in disproportionate numbers in midterms. That's the hope anyway.

The Case For Being Modest

 Yglesias sort of takes on "popularism" but really just restates earlier positions he's had. I would agree that taking positions that hurt you at the margins (defund the police) are important when elections are nailbitingly close. I do think some of Biden's weakness among Black and Hispanic men is from the Defund rhetoric. 

Mostly, I agree with the framing of people who claim we are headed to fascism, yet embrace political rhetoric and policies that make it more likely that you might lose. If you really think Trump is a full on fascist, you would make the calculation Black voters made in 2020 and select the boring old white grandpa. But so many on the Left were pushing "transformational" figures like Sanders or Warren. 

This goes to Yglesias and Chait's broader criticism of the Professional Class of Urban, College Educated Democrats. They are sequestered from a lot of the realities of the American polity and it shows.

Blue Lives Matter...

 One of the reasons we have imbued police with a rather frightening discretion over the use of force is that they do come into contact with people with deadly intent. While it's a great deal rarer than TV cop shows would suggest, it's undeniably true that police must have the ability to defend itself. Efforts to secure the necessary civil rights and safety of the population are in conflict with this.

However...

We have the fact that Covid has killed 476 police officers since the pandemic started, compared to 93 from gunfire, despite the alleged lawlessness of the summer of 2020. Worse, police unions are arguing strenuously against vaccine mandates, while arguing for untrammeled use of force by police officers. 

If your argument for not having oversight and checks on police use of violence is that we have to protect police lives, while simultaneously arguing against something that will absolutely protect police lives, one has to wonder if the main priority if actually protecting police lives.

The Baser Instinct

 Philip Bump looks at the hypothesis that I've advanced here: that Trump voters vote for Trump and not Republicans. He notes that polls were wrong in 2016 and 2020, but largely accurate in 2018. There clearly are Trump voters who don't answer pollsters phone calls. It also looks clear that Trump voters do not show up if their Tangerine Caligula is not on the ballot.

Virginia will be an interesting test case for this, especially the accuracy of polling. If McAuliffe wins easily (like Newsom) then we may be seeing the two trends that I'm banking on to save American Democracy:

- Trump voters won't vote when Trump isn't on the ballot.

- The New Suburban Democrats tend to vote regularly and will turn out in 2022. 

Trump clearly has some weird hold on a segment of Americans who are not usually engaged in politics. That hold cannot be transferred to a Ron DeSantis. 

Change

 Radley Balko notes how - even as the George Floyd Act dies of the filibuster - Breonna Taylor's death has begun a long overdue reckoning on "no-knock" raids. Sometimes real change happens just out of eyesight.

What Is This All About?

 Apparently the Senate will take up some truncated form of voting rights. There are some Republican Senators who are putting forth proposals. As Rafael Warnock says, they are inadequate, but they deserve to be heard.

It will be interesting if they can find 10 Republican Senators to sign on to some sort of bill to fix the problems exposed by January 6th and Trumpist attempts to overthrow the election. No serious effort to stop gerrymandering or voter suppression, but some attempt to stop another blatant attempt to subvert elections via force or fraud.

It might be all we get out of this Congress, which might have to be enough.

Morons, All The Way Down

 So, let me see if I've got this right. Texas gubnor, Greg Abbott, opposes the state mandating vaccines, so he's issued a mandate banning vaccine mandates? What's interesting is that a majority of Americans support vaccine mandates. Once again, we see how the Republican Party has become captivated by it's dumbest members. I would doubt very, very few prominent Republicans are unvaccinated, but they are so pants-pissing afraid of their own voters that they won't embrace basic public health measures.

We may very well have passed the worst of it, but I'm sure we've all felt that way before. We are closing in on 66% of the population being vaccinated, and hopefully the vaccination of children will get us over the 75% mark, so we can have a normal life again.

It's just shocking that we have a major political party embracing climate change denialism regressive tax policy barely coded racism pro-mass shootings forced birth laws attacks on universal health care plans that would prolong a global pandemic.

Has It Always Been This Bad?

 Lots of people have been asking if America has ever been this crazy before.

Let's take the war over vaccination. About 56% of the American population is fully vaccinated.  As we start vaccinating more kids, that number will rise quickly into the 60s. According to the linked article, the steadfastly anti-vax are only at best 15% of the population. I want to pause on that, considering how fucking noisy they have been. It's worth recalling Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote that poem in 1920, interestingly, that is within the era of the 1918 Flu pandemic and shortly after World War I, which was pretty awful.

Also in the 1920s, the Klan became a major factor in American politics. They marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and Harding met their leaders in the Oval Office. They largely controlled several state governments, including Indiana. The "new" Klan was not only anti-Black, but anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-woman suffrage. Recently, the Greenwood massacre (if not the Rosewood massacre) has become common knowledge. In Tennessee, a teacher was convicted of teaching evolution. The Harding Administration was so corrupt, only the Trump Administration exceeds it in venality. 

So, looked JUST at the 1920s,  that's an era that's as crazy and mean as ours in many ways. The anti-fluoride, anti-communist 1950s were pretty crazy. Most Americans would be freaking shocked at the conduct of people in the entire 19th century.

The problem, I think, is two-fold. 

First, the period from 1960-2000 was indeed crazy. Hijackings, assassinations, Watergate, AIDs, Oklahoma City...I could go on. As humans, we tend to erase that stuff from our memory. We don't dwell on the horrible things that happen to other people.

Second, and more importantly, we are in the era of immediate gratification and immediate information overload. We want something, we go to Amazon and three days later it's at our door. We want to watch a TV show, we stream it. We are no longer patient about anything. As a result, the natural slow pace of change is simply too slow. We see this with the debate over BBB and arresting Trump and his minions. Why hasn't it happened NOW is simply not the way the world really works.

The immediate information is even more problematic.

We live in a world of trolls and hot-takes. Social media actively encourages trolls, most notably Trump himself, who is best understood as a WWE heel or a Twitter troll. Trolling seeks emotional over intellectual engagement and coaxes us into a constant state of white-hot rage. Meanwhile, the Hot Take Industrial Complex churns out pieces that lack context or historical perspective. Maybe relax and wait a bit?

Jefferson famously said he would rather live with newspapers and no government than government with no newspapers, which just goes to show that Jefferson could be a blithering idiot. Replace "newspapers" with Facebook and Twitter and you have Jefferson's dystopia of angry screeching over ephemera, while important work is being done.

We struggle with two real problems. The first is that no one knows history and the second is a tidal wave of social media bullshit. We have developed the attention span of fruit flies in a world that needs more wisdom.

Popularism

 A lot of debate over David Shor's idea of popularism.

I'll offer two caveats.

First, there is almost no evidence that people make decisions at the margins based on policy. The people who DO make electoral decisions based on policy have made up their mind which party they support and will vote for that party. Tweaking policy is largely irrelevant.

Second. there is a case that bad rhetoric hurts you. I've been critical of "defund the police" for a while now. I think "open borders" is suicidal. However, I'm fully on board with major changes in how we train, fund and hold police accountable. I'm fully on board with a more humane and open immigration policy. I think that one page we could steal from Republicans is that they never advertise their unpopular positions. They scream about rapists coming from Mexico to excite their base, but then all they really do is cut taxes for the rich, which is unpopular. 

Running on a message of opposing plutocracy and supporting the middle class is good. Run on that. You don't run on transgender rights. You win, and then you write transgender rights into law, because you won.

The Chicken Little Caucus

 Josh Marshall summarizes a lot of what is being said among Democratic power brokers and something I've been writing about a lot: the Doom Caucus within the Democratic Party.

They are working off a bit of an data problem, in that it's difficult to predict Democratic turnout next fall, when your data points are fairly small. Incumbent presidents can get killed (2010, 2018) or they may not get killed (2002). But the changing nature of the Democratic electorate could mean disproportionate turnout for an incumbent in the midterms. 

The single biggest issue for 2022 is very, very simple: Covid. If we have truly moved into a post-Covid world by next summer, Democrats should be fine. The bills that will eventually come out of Capitol Hill are much less important. If anything, bills like the Texas Abortion Vigilante Law will drive Democratic engagement much more than whether the BBB Bill is $2.2T or $2.9T. 

Hyperpartisanship will matter, but MAGA partisanship is linked specifically to Trump's personality cult, and he is not on the ballot. If the college-educated suburbs stick with the Dems, they can still retain their GA Senate seat and pick off seats in PA, WI and NC. Depending on how Florida voters feel about Republican Covid policy, I wouldn't put Florida out of reach.

I can certainly see a situation where Democrats lose the House, but gain a seat or two in the Senate. Not ideal, but you can confirm people with a Senate majority.

Maybe terrifying Democrats will work to get them to the polls next November. That tactic has worked for the GOP for decades. 

But maybe there also needs to be a positive message. 

Learned Helplessness

 Yesterday, we had a lot of blazing hot takes about whether or not the House Select Committee on January 6th would enforce its subpoenas. Twitter was full of goalpost moving, as Rick Wilson said they wouldn't enforce them, then the Committee said they would, then everyone said, "Well, why aren't they in jail right now!" These sort of takes bled off Twitter into the blogosphere.

For two years, Trump's control of the Justice Department meant that any effort by House Democrats to gain oversight ran into a stonewall. This created a sense that Trump would never be held accountable. While he was impeached twice, he never came close to being removed from office. He has committed - by any reasonable account - a host of financial crimes, both as president and before.

Now, we have ample evidence that the crimes of the rich are poorly prosecuted or enforced, so a certain cynicism is warranted. However, financial crimes prosecution does proceed very slowly because they are usually so complicated. Plus, if your target is the former president, you had better be damned sure your case is airtight. A certain caution is warranted.

The assumption that there will never be any prosecution of Trump seems based on a learned helplessness during his presidency. He has escaped so many scandals and crimes that he seems impervious to consequences. A good example was how "everyone" was outraged that the January 6th insurrectionists were going to skate because they were rural white Trump supporters. The FBI did the methodical work of rounding people up, charges have been filed and people are starting to go to jail. This takes time, even for an open and shut case. Financial crimes, in particular, take time.

However, if I wanted to damage Trump the most, I would wait until after the midterms to file charges. You want to depress Trumpist turnout next fall. Without their orange God-King on the ticket, why would they vote for Chuck Grassley? Democratic hopes for maintaining American democracy rest on the suburban college educated voters turning out and the Trumpist rural evangelicals staying home. If the Biden DOJ is prosecuting Trump, that would motivate his cultists. 

Waiting until November 2022 to drop the charges on him would force him to be playing defense in court throughout his presumed presidential run. It would force Republicans to defend his various crimes for two years - after they will likely suck up to him more in the run-up to 2022. 

Strategically, there is no reason to rush into the prosecution now. Doing so is prioritizing feelings over efficacy.  Drop the January 6th Commission finding this spring. Prosecute shitbirds like Bannon, Meadows and Miller.  No one really cares about them anyway. Wait until November '22 to go after Trump and you maximize the political impact of your legal case.

In this one instance, learn something from Michael Corleone: revenge is a dish best served cold.

This Would Be Good

 Democrats are planning on scraping the Iowa caucus' place as first in the nominating process. First, there should be no caucuses period. They should make that a blanket rule. As someone in the piece says, caucuses are more restrictive than the most restrictive Republican voter suppression effort. Second, Iowa and New Hampshire are whiter than a weatherman's teeth.

One solution offered in the piece is to have Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina all go on the same day. One of the "arguments" Iowa and New Hampshire make for their primacy is that it allows for people who excel at retail politics to make their case before an engaged and intimate electorate.

The problem is that in no way, shape or form does that reflect the way we campaign for the presidency anymore. In fact, the sort of politicians who excel at that are often quite deficient in other, 21st century campaigning skills. Forcing the nominee to demonstrate the ability to reach Latino, Black AND rural white voters is a better predictor of how they will campaign in the general election.

However, Iowa has been on the chopping block before. Let's see if the axe actually falls.

Dumb Brute

 Trump has - naturally - come out blasting McConnell for caving on the debt ceiling.

Now, the debt ceiling is stupid to begin with. Threatening to force the US into default and triggering a worldwide economic crisis is mindbogglingly stupid. McConnell was stuck because he picked a fight that ultimately he couldn't win. So he caved.

Trumpistan's position is so depressingly revealing. There was no plan for McConnell to "win" this fight, merely anger that he caved to Democrats. 

The entire point of MAGA is to hate on and oppose Democrats. There is NO positive position that defines Trump's political movement beyond Cleek's Law. That's why he didn't need to run on a platform; his platform was Cleek's Law.

I really hate that guy and everyone who fluffs him.

Energize!

 I like the way Yglesias frames the climate debate here. We could basically solve the climate crisis with abundant-to-the-point-of-being-free electricity. If electricity was basically free, we could desalinate water, capture carbon from the air and produce hydrogen - all outputs that Yglesias mentions. 

If we are going to stop and reduce global warming, it really seems like carbon capture is going to figure prominently in that solution. Some climate activists are wedded to conservation as a form of personal virtue, and allowing people to simply capture the carbon in the atmosphere reduces the need to conserve. The real impediment to carbon capture is the energy cost. The same goes for cheap, abundant hydrogen. Yglesias' broader point - which is really important - is that if we produced massive amounts of electricity we could have better outcomes and not disrupt everyone's lives too much.

What Yglesias references briefly but doesn't commit to is nuclear power. Germany, who has done great work on renewables, is shuttering its nuclear power plants. That's a "scarcity model" that is precisely backwards. Renewables might replace nuclear power in terms of gigawatts, but why wouldn't you want to have massive additional gigawatts? 

The point of any energy policy should not be to replace carbon fuels with clean energy but to exceed that quantity.

I don't think we can wait on the fusion power miracle. We need more nuclear power plants. Today.

The World Is (Not) Always Ending

 I am not surprised at all that the US avoided default on it's debt. Of course someone (McConnell) blinked and we will get it extended to December, when we will have to do this shit all over again.

Here's the thing though. For the past two weeks we've been treated to endless hyperventilation in both the media and the Very Online about how this was going to be a financial Armageddon. In the end, the same thing happens that always happens: the side that is grandstanding backs down.

It seems to me that we have collapsed into a permanent psychology of crisis. This started in many ways with the Rise of Trump and his constant attacks on the norms that we thought governed our country. Remember how in the spring of 2017, we were constantly checking our phones, as John Mulaney put it, to check on the horse in the hospital? Trump thrived on chaos, but his grasp on us was possible because of the ubiquity of information via our phones and computers.

Then the damned plague comes around, and we all amp the crisis level shit up to 11 and never turn it down.

The Debt Ceiling Kabuki is basically a Thing that happens in DC every year or two. McConnell seemed to up the stakes, perhaps trying to tap into that state of permanent crisis. It didn't work, and he backed down, because he's McConnell, not Trump.

Another example is the Texas anti-abortion law. Everyone (rightly) freaked out over the law. Yesterday and judge issued an injunction stopping it. This is by no means the end, but neither was the "shadow docket" ruling by the Supreme Court. 

Nevertheless, we are still hooked into this sense of cascading crises. 

The whole Facebook scandal is linked to this, too. Facebook's entire model is to drive "engagement." It uses a form of AI to analyze everything you like and click to send you more of "that." We also know that negative stories or emotions drive that engagement more.

This has two outcomes.

The first is a never ending doom loop that has us constantly upset and angry. (Welcome to Mental Health Awareness Week, by the way.)

The second is to distort our sense of what really is a crisis and what is just trolling and clickbait. 

We have become a nation whose civic discourse is warped by shitposting trolls who hijack all conversations and strip it of subtlety and nuance in favor or anger and outrage. It's breaking us as a country. It's actively harm our brains, and it's as true of NPR as it is of Twitter.

There Are No Good Republicans

 Jon Chait lays out the fundamental problem with the GOP's two-step surrounding Donald Trump. Mainstream Republicans want you to believe that Trump does not represent a threat to American democracy because he failed in his attempted coup. This, of course, ignores the fact that he attempted a coup. 

Ever since he shambled onto the scene in his golden escalator, the GOP have tended to ignore Trumpist politics until they can no longer do so. When a Charlottesville happens or a Zelenskyy phone call or injecting bleach into your veins or an actual attack on the Capitol, they momentarily decry what he is doing...then retreat into supporting him.

The current hijacking of the debt ceiling - supported by people like Mitt Romney - is a good example of the Republican nihilism. Sure, posture on it, like everyone does. But refuse to allow it to be raised? Risk default? Why the fuck does that? 

Maybe a party whose 2020 platform was simply to venerate the corpulent god-king, the Caudillo El Mar A-Lago. 

I don't think we are headed to authoritarianism. But I don't think democracy is safe in this country. 

It would be nice if Merrick Garland got off his ass and prosecuted Trump for the crimes we already know he has committed - tax fraud, certainly, campaign finance violations, too - so that Trump has to run from a jail cell, a sort of Bizarro World Eugene V. Debs.

Debt Ceiling Carve Out

 Josh Marshall has landed roughly where I've landed on the debt ceiling standoff. Adam Silverman explains McConnell's nihilism.

I've felt that there was a possibility from the start of simply amending the Senate rules to allow debt ceiling legislation to pass with 50+1 votes. Debt was created with 50 votes, why shouldn't the debt ceiling. As Marshall notes at the end, the debt ceiling is probably unconstitutional, under the XIVth Amendment.

Obviously, we're back to Manchinema. And that sucks. However, if we presume that Manchinema's primary position is pro-business, we know that the business community wants no part of a default. While I feel the debt ceiling is unconstitutional, I don't want to have to rely on the Executive Branch minting a coin or the Judiciary having to rule on it. It has to happen in the Senate.

Most likely case is to amend the rules allowing to raise the ceiling with 50+1 votes. Hell, maybe the Parliamentarian goes along with it! The best case scenario is to simply get rid of the debt ceiling. If the rule is changed to allow 50+1 votes on ANY debt ceiling legislation, maybe we can remove this ticking bomb from American politics once and for all.

How Do Statistics Work

The Pfizer shot is 90% effective at preventing hospitalization and death.

I was hospitalized.

I'm 1 in 10.

That's really not a huge outlier. 

I'm also alive.

Get your damned shot.

All Legislating In America Is Transactional

 I was reading A Different Democracy (OK, I'm still reading it; it's a slog), and the authors made the point that legislating in a presidential system is, by definition, transactional. Here's what that means.

In most parliamentary systems, the prime minister has his or her job, because they control a majority of the votes in parliament. If they didn't, they wouldn't be prime minister. Even if it requires a coalition, they can command a majority, otherwise they aren't prime minister. If the PM brings a major piece of legislation to the floor of the parliament and it fails, there will be snap elections, which could damage the party or parties in a coalition.

In other words, the PM can command her party members in the parliament via the threat of having elections that could cost people their seats. What's more, the party usually determines who gets to run for seats. If you're Krysten Sinema in a parliamentary system, you are bounced from the ballot by the party leadership, and your seat will be contested by someone less intractable.

In a presidential system, Congress is elected independently (if occasionally concurrently) of the president. This is why Joe Biden can win less than 30% of the vote in West Virginia, but Joe Manchin can win a Senate seat there. 

Every bill a president wants passed into law must be negotiated with everyone who holds a veto point in the process: committee chairs, majority leaders, and now Manchinema. Republicans don't have to worry about this because they have no ideas or plans about how to run the country beyond cut taxes and roll back regulations.

So, when Democrats want to pass a major bill like BBB or ACA, they have negotiate their way through those veto points. Those are transactional. In 2009, people pitched a fit about the "Cornhusker Kickback" for Nebraska negotiated by Ben Nelson, an actual Democrat from Nebraska. In return for voting for ACA, he got some special carve outs for his home state and people freaked out.

Why? 

Congress has broken down precisely because it is no longer nakedly transactional. Ideally, Joe Manchin would demand a huge jobs program to rehabilitate old coal mines to be carbon sequestration vaults. Since we can't sequester carbon in large quantities yet, this would be an obvious boondoggle.  

Who cares?

(I have no idea what Sinema would want.) 

Everyone seems to think that some bizarre fealty to an abstract standard is more important to getting things done. Giving West Virginia or Arizona some special perks should absolutely be part of Manchinema's strategy.

As it is, they have no strategy. That's just dumb.

Demilitarizing Law Enforcement

 After the summer of 2020, there were calls to demilitarize the police that were, in my opinion, better rhetoric and policy than defund the police. 

It extends further than your local PD having an MRAP and a SWAT team. It extends to the Border Patrol. Focusing on the racist roots of CBP misses the point. By making CBP a militarized agency within DHS, you created incentives to hire Rambo wannabes and racists. Turning the agency into one that does humanitarian work while still enforcing immigration laws would be a huge improvement.

It's Important, But Not Enough

 A few years ago, the Panama Papers shocked/did not shock the world with an entirely predictable story about wealthy people around the world hiding wealth in offshore accounts and trusts. Now, we appear to have chapter two of that saga with the Pandora Papers. 

This is a multi-story report created by a combination of reporters and news services around the world and represents the finest in investigative reporting. Additional reports will come out all week.

The reality is that these reports will only add details and color to a reality we already know: there are different rules for the global rich. After the Panama Papers, some reforms were implemented, but trying to regulate global finance in an age when wealth can move around the world at the speed of light is effectively impossible.

Most of the prominent political figures in the story are not from the United States. For all the caterwauling about "corruption" in Washington, the American political system is fairly "clean" from a global perspective. Trump does represent an outlier in this regard, but his corruption and tax evasion predate his emergence as a political figure. 

The Post story notes that the richest Americans do not appear in the story, primarily because American tax codes are already so favorable to great wealth. Also, a billionaire might want to skirt the law and a multibillionaire has no need to. One promise the story makes is to examine increasing instances of states like South Dakota acting as tax havens for the rich.

The solution is evident for both stories. The idea that South Dakota, Delaware or Nevada can act as onshore tax havens needs to be addressed with national legislation. Trying to do the same for internatioal actors is harder. As the Panama Papers incident exposed, it's possible to fix one problem, but new problems will inevitably arise. Some of the solutions will only apply to G20 countries, because the very people interested in stopping this corruption are the ones who benefit from the current system.

As America considers higher tax rates on the wealthy, enforcement mechanisms are absolutely necessary to make sure that those taxes get collected.

This, frankly, is bullshit and needs to be squashed.

You Can't Roll It Back

 Brexit is largely an attempt to roll back global integration and the future of multiethnic communities. Trumpism was like that, too. The results from Brexit suggest strongly that you simply can't roll it back without significant pain. 

Economies and communities do not emerge overnight. They evolve. The slower the evolve, the more durable they become. The shock of Brexit and the flight of Continental Europeans is leaving Britain reeling. Frankly, "they" deserve it, and by they, I mean the bare majority the supported this fustercluck because they were horrified that their gardener spoke Romanian. 

Not Sure What Yglesias' Point Is Here

 Yglesias says something I think we can agree on: Krysten Sinema must be stopped. Unlike a lot of Very Online Commentators, Yglesias understands that Manchin is a pain in the ass, but having a 50th Senate vote from West By God Virginia represents a massive electoral overperformance by Manchin over his state demographics. Sinema, Yglesias notes, is literally replacement level for Arizona. I also think he rightly points to Ruben Gallego as a natural primary challenger.

However, Yglesias also suggests that Sinema might represent a potentially fatal turn for Democratic politics. He's been beating the drum for what he calls "popularism" as opposed to populism. Doing thing that are popular is good politics. He also notes, correctly, that too many positions Democrats take are only really popular with elements of their activist base. 

He would be right if insisting on defunding the police or mandating the use of Latinx were the central point of Democratic politics. His worry is that Sinema represents some sort of Woke Neoliberalism, that uses the appropriate pronouns, but votes for corporate tax cuts. As evidence for this move, he points to...Krysten Sinema. Sinema is remarkably unpopular among Arizona Democrats. Her overall favorability is buoyed by Republicans giving her a boost, but that will evaporate in the face of a Republican challenger. Sinema in no ways shows any sort of way forward, precisely because she has moved away from the most popular elements of Biden's agenda: competitive drug pricing and raising taxes on the wealthy. 

Republicans have run for years on leveraging social issues to win elections and then only really cutting taxes on the rich (which is not popular). Democrats have largely coalesced around raising taxes on those same groups. Manchin has left himself open to repealing Trump's tax cuts - he voted against them the first time. One outlier who could very well lose her primary does not represent a potential direction for the broader party.