Yglesias The Sociopath

 I read Matt Yglesias every morning. There are days when his brand of contrarianism is refreshing, but every once in a while it lapses into a weird almost-sociopath. Today is one of those moments.

Basically his argument is that we should stop pretending that we are living in a pandemic. That we have ceded too much authority to public health officials and need to stop hand-wringing over Covid. He does this without noting that over 2,300 a day are dying of the disease right now. If his argument was "we need clear metrics to determine when we are free and clear," then I could endorse it. But this is just more of the "Who gives a damn about the rubes who won't get vaxxed."

The problem, of course, is that a large un-vaxxed population creates a reservoir of virus that can mutate and give us Delta or Omicron. If we only had to care about the first variant, we would be over this by now. We don't. That's not how viruses work. The callous disregard for those dying right now, choking to death on their own lungs, is frankly sociopathic. 

Yglesias is touting the superior wisdom of being a "generalist" rather than an epidemiologist. He comes of as a sociopath instead. (As do many of his commentators.)

Profiles In Putinism

 This strikes me as a very astute observation of Putin's predicament by John Sipher. Sipher argues that Putin's weakness is driving him to take risks that a more stable autocrat would not take. "Regimes" he writes "that rule by fear live in fear." Putin's fear is the prospect of continual decline. Putin benefitted from soaring gas prices from 2001-2009 to reinvigorate Russia's economy after the smoldering shitshow of the '90s. However, that revival was built on resource money and some infrastructure spending. The weakening gas prices (up until recently) deprived him of the money he needed to spread around Russia and keep people happy. We saw the same dynamic in PRI Mexico and late Communism in Russia itself. You chain yourself to oil revenues and you make yourself dependent on global markets outside your control.

Russia has been fundamentally unable to follow China's path of authoritarian politics wedded to more liberal markets. Because the Russian legal system is designed to coddle the wealthy and powerful, there is no sanctity of contract. While that is occasionally an issue in China, it is standard in Russia. There is no reason to invest in long term, human capital relationship in Russia. In fact, quite the opposite, as Russia has experienced a pervasive "brain drain" under Putin's heavy hand.

Putin's previous invasions of Ukraine have brought more hardships to the Russian economy, and there are signals that the West will place even more sanctions should he invade again. Russia rivals any country in its poor handling of Covid, and faces a long term demographic decline as its birth rate is below the replacement level and no one in their right mind would immigrate there. I've always compared Russia to Mexico, in terms of its economy, and I think that comparison still stands. 

Putin has been obsessed with Russia's "humiliation" at the end of the Cold War. His long term goal, as Sipher notes, is to destroy NATO. This is why he backed Trump, and likely why Trump openly threatened to pull the US out of Europe. That has been and remains Putin's primary goal. Putin's sabre rattling also serves Beijing by stalling the "Asian Pivot" preferred by Obama and Biden. If America has to defend Europe, it will weaken itself in Asia. That does not mean, however, that confrontation with NATO, the EU and the US will benefit Russia.

Putin likely looks at his 2014 invasion of Ukraine and 2008 invasion of Georgia as being successful templates for any action he takes in Ukraine. However, there are other examples of Russian military folly. The invasion of Finland shortly before World War II comes to mind. You could cast your memory back further and look at the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. An overly confident tsarist regime thought it could handle the Japanese easily and were humiliated. This led directly to the first Russian Revolution of 1905. Theda Skocpol has theorized that the leading cause of revolution is international humiliation of some sort. When a regime founders on the world stage, it delegitimizes authoritarian regimes, especially. 

Putin, therefore, cannot back down, but he also can't move forward. For all the ugly flaws we see in democracy, especially recently, the problems with authoritarianism are far deeper. Putin can talk himself into any number of disastrous courses of actions, because his authority is only barely checked by the sycophants he surrounds himself with. 

Putin will likely miscalculate, because miscalculations are really the only viable options he has.

UPDATE: Adam Silverman has a more detailed military plan of what the US and the West should do.

Will This Work?

 Erik Loomis thinks it's just swell that Oregon is decriminalizing ALL drugs for recreational use. Certainly the move from an incarceration model to a treatment model is laudable. This bill could help thousands of people get off drugs. 

However.

While people who are desperate to escape addiction might make good use of this, there will be others for whom no consequence will means no consequence. Will Oregon see people move there specifically to use? 

The human wreckage of the Tenderloin in San Francisco needs to be taken seriously as a warning for well-intentioned efforts to remove penalties from certain crimes and behaviors. I hope it works and leads other states to follow suit. I worry that for two people who escape addiction there will be another for whom Oregon is a place to stay fucked up and panhandle. And then people get sick of it and vote in fascists from Eastern Oregon and they defund the treatment aspect. 

The Riddle Wrapped In A Mystery Inside An Enigma

 Churchill's famous description of Russia largely holds true today. Because decision making in the Kremlin - whether tsar, general secretary or president-for-life - is so centralized, it is effectively opaque. We have no idea what Putin wants, because he's very careful to avoid giving clear clues as to what he wants.

At this point, Putin clearly needs some sort of concession or apparent victory. Could it simply be a variation of North Korea's PAY ATTENTION TO ME foreign policy? Putin has got the West scrambling, ha ha, look at the West scrambling. Made you look! It's not impossible that he will declare that he has won and go home.

Or perhaps he needs something more tangible. He has effectively annexed some of eastern Ukraine with paramilitaries and no so covert support. He could formally annex those territories. Or he could move into the provinces of southeast Ukraine and create a "land bridge" to the Crimea, which he annexed a few years ago.

If Putin attempts to march on Kyiv and install a puppet government, I think that it could go very poorly for him and Russia, and not just because of sanctions. Ukrainians are not interested in being ruled by Moscow. The history of oppression is not limited to the Holodomor. Neither is that bleak moment forgotten in Ukraine. Ukrainians are a real pain in the ass to invaders, and we need to remember a fundamental truth: wars are fought between economies as much as they are fought between armies. The Russian economy is not terribly strong. However powerful it's military is, their ability to sustain an army of occupation - which is what will be necessary - will be hampered by the overall weakness of their economy. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a similar moment of exporting violence to cover economic weakness and it is one of the primary factors in the collapse of the Soviet system. What's more, I think Putin is aware of this.

The problem with authoritarian decision making is that Putin might not be aware of this. He could easily have talked himself into his own bullshit about Ukrainians not really wanting to fight for their national survival. This is the Russian equivalent of the Bush Administration creating an "information silo" that suggested invading Iraq would be a cakewalk and we would be "greeted as liberators."

The question is simply whether Putin has an exit strategy for war. There is also the matter of the "Olympic Truce," which is supposed to dissuade countries from attacking each other during the Olympics. Putin used the last Beijing Olympics to attack Georgia for many of the same reasons he's threatening to attack Ukraine.

In the end, I fear Putin has created a situation where he has to do something. Whether that's a wise decision or not is secondary to the logic of trying to be a regional bully.

Thank You, Justice Breyer

 Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's decision to step down after this session is a very welcoming sign that Democrats in Washington are finally "getting it" when it comes to the ridiculous cycles of our nation's politics. While I don't necessarily think we can say what the midterms will bring - the pandemic and the lunacy of our partisanship render past models flawed - it's fair to plan for a wipe out. I don't think it's a lead pipe cinch, but it's certainly probable. 

Breyer seemed determined to hang out the way Ginsburg did, which obviously has had disastrous effects on the state of jurisprudence in this country. By this June, we will likely see Roe v Wade overturned and any efforts to curb voting rights abuses nullified. I'm already seeing worm-brained pundits talk about restoring impartiality to the Court. What a fucking joke. The Supreme Court is now a nakedly partisan institution. It has always been a cypto-partisan institution, but now it's out in the open. 

Act that way.

Two Americas

 The GOP/Fox News death cult that has stirred up partisan division over public health measures is one of the most depressing events in recent memory, and that includes 1/6.

There's some evidence that regardless of mandates, people are indeed changing their behavior in a rational way. The impact of the virus among the vaccinated and unvaccinated is so starkly different that we've effectively "privatized" our pandemic response.

One America is vaccinated, thinking about or has already gotten a booster and puts a mask back on during a surge in cases. The other is bathed in the blood of Jesus and holds rallies on the Mall saying that getting a vaccine is the same as the Holocaust.

Totally normal stuff.

I moved to KN95 masks when I saw what was happening with Omicron and as more data came out about how much effective they were than regular surgical masks. I've also been holding wrestling practices where the kids "wear masks" in the most perfunctory way. We just tested our team and we only had one, asymptomatic positive. Remarkable, but also not because the team is vaccinated and many are boosted.

I'm hopeful that by March break things will feel a little more normal, though we will be travelling down South where Omicron will likely still be circulating. My hope is that we can see a real return to normality by April across the country.

The Man Who Broke America

 Kids today won't believe it, but it didn't all start with Trump. No, Newt Gingrich bears a sizable portion of the blame for the descent of the GOP from a pro-business, hate-the-poor party into a raving pack of culture war lunatics, neo-Birchers and hysterics. Gingrich was the pioneer of marrying vitriolic assaults on his enemies as threats to America in order to win tax cuts for millionaires. He was one of the first of the old Republican elite to endorse Trump in 2016, because he recognized how Trump was a natural extension of the bilious politics that he had initiated in the 1990s.

Mitch McConnell gets a lot of blame, because he's on the stage currently. However, McConnell is not a naked authoritarian. He's a guy who realizes that he can stymie progress with a minority of the Senate elected by a minority of the public. He's cynical and a hypocrite. Gingrich was the one who created the benchmarks of Trumpist politics.

The fires of hell can't burn hot enough for that guy.

America Poverty

 Yglesias takes on his favorite topic: housing affordability. What's interesting to me - rather than his 15th take on this topic - is the data about the American poor. 

The median American is richer than the median European, and I would assume that would be true for the average American, too. Some of this, he points out, is because Americans own more and bigger homes. This is part of his larger, ongoing argument that America should build more cheaper housing. "Housing projects" have a bad reputation, but he argues that they are superior to people squatting in public parks. A quick trip to the Tenderloin in San Francisco would argue in his favor.

Europe's poor are "richer" than America's poor, because Europeans are taxed at a higher rate to provide more benefits for the poor. America's rich are richer because they are taxed at a lower rate to provide more income for investment and business growth. That's a clear difference in political culture. (Obviously, America's poor are generally better off than the global poor.)

How does America change it's attitudes towards the poor in order to even slightly improve the outcomes? Housing projects or large scale shelters are clearly only a partial solution, and Yglesias seems to treat it as a magic bullet. "Getting rid" of the homeless improves livability in urban centers, and European cities follow this approach, too. And a lot of that is subtly racist, too, especially the treatment of refugees and Roma (gypsies). 

Striking some sort of middle ground between a "zero tolerance" policy towards panhandling and tent cities and the overly tolerant policies found in San Francisco could create a political merger between the middle and upper middle classes who want more livable cities and advocates for the homeless themselves.

The other part of this equation that never shows up in his article is the role of mental illness and substance abuse in homelessness and poverty. If you create "homeless people warehouses", you also need to create programs to help stop addiction. The genuinely mentally ill will need long term care. History is not kind to "asylums" but then again, living on the streets is hardly ideal either.

Back in the Progressive Era, the states were called the laboratories of democracy, because they were the ones experimenting with new ideas to arrest America's descent into oligarchy. It strikes me that there is a real opportunity for a mayor or governor to embrace a policy towards homelessness that could late be expanded to a nationwide policy. 

The status quo seems untenable.

A Fool And His Nonexistent Money...

 So cryptocurrency took a dive, apparently because there is ample room for a market correction and gambling your savings on patent bullshit turns out to only be fun when the rubes insure that the price continues to rise. 

I've tried to figure out what the actual fuck is up with cryptocurrencies. As near as I can tell, there are people who have created money without the backing of a government. The technological mumbo-jumbo is beside the point. I don't care how "secure" my make believe money is. I suppose the idea is a the sort reductio ad absurdum of fiat currency. A lot of those lunatic Ron Paul gold standard nutjobs gave way to people who said, "Oh, money doesn't have to be based on anything? Hold my beer!"

Of course, money IS based on something. The full faith and credit of a nation's government, modified by the strength of that country's economy establishes the worth of its currency. 

This all feels like a toxic combo of techbro and libertarian narcissism. I wouldn't care, but I have a sinking suspicion that crypto will cause another 2008 style financial crisis. I'm not sure we can weather another storm quite so soon.

My Very Best Goodest Idea

 Biden should pass a one-time "GI Bill" type of benefits package for health care workers,. For doctors and nurses it should be a package of student loan forgiveness. For support workers, some sort of benefits package.

I think you could get Senate Republicans on board with that.

Cognitive Dissonance On Covid

 We've reached a weird point in the pandemic. On the one hand, cases are incredibly high, but they appear to be following the pattern we saw in South Africa: incredibly fast spike in cases, but a similarly fast decline once it's peak. That's the case in Connecticut. Groups like my school and the NFL have basically started moving to an endemic model of simply testing the symptomatic and possibly tracing close contacts.

Deaths here in Connecticut have been about as bad as any time except March of 2020, when we got hit especially hard by the first wave. But cases have far outstripped anything we've seen. And of course, everything we see suggests that the vaccinated will be OK unless they have significant comorbidities. 

So, the pandemic is definitely not "under control" or flickering around the edges of communities. It's a full blown public health crisis straining the ability of hospitals to treat the sick - Covid or not-Covid. We've simply decided to move on. So you will see some people still masking, but fewer and fewer every day. Some people are finally getting vaccinated, but that has to be a marginal number.

I am hopeful this burns out for good by April, because if it doesn't...

Martin Longman Is Bummed

 He points out that he (and others, including yours truly) predicted that governing with the "trifecta" was still going to be difficult, because of the filibuster and Joe Manchin. Right. In fact, I think the problem is that Biden actually DID accomplish quite a bit, but his recent efforts on BBB and voting rights have failed. That erases whatever memories we have of his remarkably successful first few months.

I've argued that specific legislative victories are not the key to winning elections, and I stand by that. Biden's approval ratings are low because the pandemic won't go away, and people are generally bummed. The economy is actually pretty good right now and likely to stay strong. There is the possibility of Ukraine blowing up, I guess, but I feel like this is more Putin's brinksmanship than a prelude to full scale war.

In short, I remain bullish on the midterms for two reasons.

First, it's a long way to November. I anticipate that - barring new variants - Covid will become largely endemic by spring. We are already treating it as an endemic disease here on campus, because we are entirely vaccinated. Kids get sick, they go home. Just like with the flu. If the pandemic truly wanes away into background noise, people will feel better about things and they will have six months to change their minds.

Second, the GOP's gerrymandering and turnout advantages might be tapped out. The electoral maps do not appear to wipe out Democratic hopes to hold the House. It still is the most likely outcome, but see point #1. I think we will see major indictments up and down the ranks of former Trump Administration figures. Trump will explode and that - combined with the perverse incentives created by GOP vote suppression - could be enough to drive Democratic voters to the polls. To do this, Biden and Democrats will need to secure those suburban votes that they won in 2018 and 2020. The Senate map looks decently favorable, again if the pandemic can recede. 

Will a GOP wave happen? Possibly. But to capitulate now is bad.

Laws And Unintended Consequences

 We have a problem here in Connecticut. We passed what seemed like a good law, reducing felony penalties in offenders under the age of 18. The idea was to reduce the school-to-prison pipeline. Diversion programs are really good.

Last night, my friend's car was broken into in their driveway. On the other side of town, a 17 year old was arrested for the third time in a week for some form of felony theft - usually cars.

So my frustration with the idiocy of "Defund the Police" comes from this phenomena, which is a blind spot for progressive reformers. Ideology or simple ideals prompt you to make a change, but in acting with haste, you put into place a law or program that hasn't been properly tested against reality and human nature. Then you have to pick up the pieces.

I'm hopeful that legislators in Hartford will amend the law in someway to create more consequences while not returning to a "throw the book at them" attitude that would prevail if Republicans win control of the legislature. While that is unlikely to happen, that depends on not letting crime waves crest.

Fix What You Can Fix

 As I wrote about the other day, Yglesias thinks there is a decent chance you could pass a bipartisan bill to fix the Electoral Count Act. 

In it, he focuses on a few things that are important to discuss.

I think he downplays the pernicious impact that the Roberts' Court has had on democratic rights. Here is his quick take:

Virtually everything in Democrats’ voting rights package reflects a fairly longstanding grievance with some Roberts Court decision: in Citizens United, the court took a view of campaign finance law that Democrats disagree with; in Shelby County, it greatly weakened the Voting Rights Act; and in Rucho v. Common Cause, the court declined to strike down partisan gerrymandering as unconstitutional.

From there, he quickly moves on. But the Roberts' Court's decisions have had major impacts on the sanctity of voting rights. Hopefully, the courts will untangle some of the worst efforts at partisan and racial gerrymandering, but after that basket of decisions, does anyone have any confidence of that?

Where I agree with Yglesias is that we are likely overstating the actual impact of many of these impediments to voting that Republicans are coughing up. He cites studies that show that Voter ID laws have very narrow impacts, although a great many elections have very narrow outcomes. This is why Democrats oppose them and Republicans support them. If you moved a few hundred thousand votes around in 2020, Trump would still be president. 

The stronger argument is that Trump voters are typically the low-information, irregular voters that may or may not show up without Trump on the ballot. The assumption of making it harder for people to vote is that this will fall disproportionately on "working class" voters who can't afford to stand in line for hours. (It would be interesting to see if Republicans would fold making Election Day a national holiday into a ECA reform.) There's gathering evidence that making it harder to vote could very well backfire on Republicans, as their electoral coalition shifts from suburbs to the exurbs.

We should absolutely be making is easier to vote, as the John Lewis Act does. However, the most important issues that have to be solved are the ones that will prevent chaos in 2024: fixing the Electoral Count Act so that a mob cannot disrupt the certification of the election and possibly short-circuiting efforts to allow partisan legislatures to override the will of the voters. 

Who knows, maybe you can get enough Republicans on board with that.

The Invisible Battle

 Betty Cracker links to an article about how Democrats and democrats need to pay more attention to state house races. Democrats focus entirely too much on winning the Presidency and not nearly enough on winning state house races. This is true. But partisan and natural gerrymanders make it exceedingly hard for Democrats to break the grip of GOP control of states like Ohio, Florida or Wisconsin. As conditions get worse in those states, it breeds the natural suspicion of "gubmint" that works to reinforce the GOP message that government never works.

Outside of my long hoped for schism in the Right between Trump and the institutional GOP, I don't see a way clear of this. I think House gerrymanders won't be TOO bad, but state house gerrymanders will be.

Evangelical Authoritarianism

 Nancy Le Tourneau has a run down on how a "Christian" afterschool program teaches kids to accept patrimonial authoritarianism. This was in response to Fucker Carlson running a fear special on a Satanic After School Club.

My son had some fun with Satanism a few years back. He's militantly unreligious, and he seized on "LeVayan Satanism" as a way to mock religion in general. While there are real devotees of Satanism who seize on it's ethical practices of self-realization, there's another strain designed to poke fun at religion, especially Christianity. Frankly, I prefer the Church of Pastafarianism, but to each her own.

I've been in and out of the Episcopal Church most of my life. At the moment I'm more interested in Neo-Stoic philosophy and ethical Buddhism, but at one point, the church was important for my mental and emotional health, because of the compassionate ministers I was lucky to find.

The texts Le Tourneau has found focus on Old Testament bullshit that is designed to scare children into obedience and cow before authority. Their God is an angry, vengeful fucker who wants blood sacrifices. The Jesus of the Beatitudes is nowhere to be seen.

If Satanists want to take a run at them, be my guest.

Possible Work To Save Democracy On MLK Day

 The John Lewis Voting Rights Act will not pass in this Congress. That's a simple mathematical fact. Efforts at some form of bipartisan compromise legislation have predictably gone nowhere beyond Manchin and Murkowski's fantasy world.

However, there is one thing that absolutely needs fixing and might actually be fixable with the filibuster still in place: The Electoral Count Act. This is an antique law passed as a compromise between states' rights Democrats and Republicans a decade after the fustercluck of the 1876 election. That election saw two sets of electors submitted from three Southern states still under Military Reconstruction, South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida (of course it was Florida). The competing sets of ballots were ruled on by a Committee with nine Republicans and eight Democrats, handing the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes, the quintessential Anonymous Bearded Ohioan. In return, the last vestiges of Reconstruction were ended and White "Redeemer" governments re-imposed Master Race Democracy.

It took a decade to write a proper law to accommodate any future instances of contested slates of Electoral College ballots and there are apparent loopholes that John Eastman tried to drive the Trump Coup through a year ago. Eastman's idea was to contest the critical states with a few diehard Trumpists like Paul Gosar, throw the count into chaos, threaten the count with a mob and have Mike Pence certify that the contested electoral votes don't count, throwing the election to the House, where Trump would win.

Even Mitch McConnell has signaled an openness to make it harder for another 1/6 to occur. 

Frankly, Democrats should bring a bipartisan, stand-alone reform of the Electoral Count Act to the floor, vote on it and see where Republicans really stand. This doesn't preclude further work on other voting rights legislation, but it at least patches a critical flaw in how we elect our presidency.

I said the other day that many of our political institutions are inadequate to moment. Federalism was a great idea at the time to get independent republics - which is effectively how the original thirteen states saw themselves - to subsume some sovereignty to a national government. There are important positives to federalism, in terms of how different states accommodate different budgetary and cultural needs. 

Elections for federal office, however, should be governed by federal law. That is at the heart of the current impasse. Democrats are pressing for a uniform standard that increases access to the ballot. Republicans want to leave it to the states, where they have advantages due to natural and partisan gerrymanders. Tackling the low hanging fruit of standardizing the Electoral College Count to prevent another attempted coup isn't going to solve Republican efforts to stop people from voting, but that doesn't mean it's not important.

Bold Prediction

 Glenn Youngkin and Republicans are going to do a bunch of unpopular stuff. Virginians will come to regret their decision to vote out of pique that they have to monitor their kids Zoom classes and return Democrats to power in the next election.

This bizarre pattern seems to be electing Republicans, have them shit the bed, electing Democrats who spend time trying to clean the shit from the sheets, the sheets are still in the laundry when the next election comes around, so voting Republicans back into power.

This is why I feel strongly that "policy" does not - in and of itself - win elections. People vote their tribe or they vote "fundamentals." Tribal votes are locked in. I don't care how honest a particular Republican might be, I'm not handing the reins of government to that party.

The so-called undecided or persuadable voters vote their feelings every 2-4 years. They basically don't really pay attention to politics until elections come around, stick their finger into the wind and then say shit like, "That Glenn Youngkin wears a fleece vest, so he must be a nice guy" and then watch agog as creates a bunch of shitty laws.

GOP Death Cult

 We were recently given Saturday and Monday off from school (we have Saturday classes) because we have a rampant Covid outbreak on campus. In conversations with peers and kids, there is a lot of Covid fatigue. We all just want it to be over with. 

That doesn't mean we don't want to die.

Reading about how Ron DeSantis (Grim Reaper-FL) is positioning himself to Trump's "right" on Covid is...something. Basically, DeSantis is hoping that the people who go around coughing in people's face when asked to put a mask on constitute enough votes to win the GOP primary in 2024. DeSantis is betting that Trump's militant ignorance is insufficiently militant or ignorant enough for GOP voters.

I really can't even.

Busted

 Yglesias dances around the central conclusion of his piece. While rightly mocking Thomas Friedman's latest symptom of late stage prion disease, he sort of makes the case that we need to scrap the Constitution of 1788.

The fact is that presidentialism as a system of government is...bad. Countries - primarily in Latin America - that adopted our system of a Presidential-Congress system often slipped into despotism. Even as some have emerged, democracy is pretty dysfunctional. 

Some form of parliamentary government is ultimately just better. Of course, we aren't getting that, but that's the reality. 

The problem with American governance right now is not Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema, it's the underlying institutions.

The Great Promotion

 Yglesias looks at the "Great Resignation." He argues plausibly that this is not peopling opting out of working altogether, but people moving up the hiring food chain. Burger King will pay $14/HR, but the local pub will pay $12 plus pretty good tips. So you "quit" Burger King, but you are hired by the pub. 

The last time we had a labor market like this was the '90s, and it was pretty good. It's empowering to people to be able to walk away from a shit job and get a better one.

However, life is all about trade offs, and right now there are sectors of the economy hurting for workers. 

As Yglesias rightly notes, a sane immigration policy could react to this dynamic by letting in more workers. Even a guest worker program - like Bush proposed - would work. 

Since a sane immigration policy requires both functional knowledge of making policy and would constitute a "win" for Biden and the Democrats, I think we can rule out Republicans doing anything but obstructing it.  Because patriotism.

Jesus Take The Steal

 Nancy LeTourneau breaks down the religious roots of January 6th and Trumpism.

Evangelism and authoritarianism go together like peas and carrots. Submission to divine and patriarchal authority is central to evangelical Christianity. The move to Christian nationalism is a short walk. Denying Covid or basic reality is pretty easy when you think God is out there giving your stepsister piles or that every thing that happens is part of some divine plan.

I don't have a solution, I just think it bears repeating. Trumpism is fundamentally powered by fundamentalism. 

Kill The Filibuster

 Jon Chait must be working on a book or something, because he's been writing sporadically.

Anyway, he explains why arguments to preserve the filibuster are bullshit.

Cannon Fodder

 Josh Marshall has been writing about the current war over in-person schooling. It's very good - and unusually fair.

He started by assessing the state of NY schools. Got reader feedback here. Expanded his points.

Then he got feedback from parents and teachers.

Here

Here

Here

Here

Here

Here

Here

Was It Always Thus?

 "A lie can travel around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes" is an old adage. Conspiracy theories and flat earth nonsense is not unique to the Internet age.

But it sure seems like stupidity and lies have been accelerated by social media.

Save Me From This Idiocy

 I defy you to click through and watch the video linked in Martin Longman's analysis on current Republican efforts to fuck about in classrooms. There's an embedded link of a very compelling presentation by a history teacher about what history is, why it is resonant and why it must be taught unvarnished. He ends with James Baldwin's quote, not everything we face can be solved, but nothing can be solved if we don't face it.

Then some mook says that it is not the job of a history teacher to bring value judgments to things like Jim Crow or Marxism or FUCKING NAZIISM. 

That's right, the Indiana GOP doesn't think we should be teaching kids that Nazis are bad.

Their "rationale" is that this will prevent teachers from teaching that Jim Crow and white supremacy is bad. By removing the ability of a history teacher to teach actual history, they hope to sanitize the next generation from "wokeness", which is to say, thinking that America is not perfect. What they are saying is that we should not teach history in American schools. We should teach mindless propaganda to American greatness.

What's Going On?

 Yglesias writes about the shocking rise in "bad behavior." It ranges from murder to reckless driving to unruly passengers on airplanes to excess drinking. He places almost all the blame on the pandemic, which makes sense from a correlative point of view. However, I can't help but think that the broad anger in America is not just in America. We see violent protests around the world over pandemic safety measures. 

I wonder what the role of social media is on all this. Even briefly dipping my toe into Twitter exposes a vast, self-reinforcing tide of anger and vitriol. If someone posts a list of favorite Beatles' songs, someone else will naturally come along and tell them how stupid their list, how stupid they are for liking the Beatles and how come they didn't have "Blackbird" on their list. 

Trump obviously dominates this era, and I can imagine how a future historian might call this the Trump Era, even if he disappears from public life. He typifies the meanness and bile of online life. He's the Troll-In-Chief. In this sense, he very much is the symptom, not the cause.

The pandemic has rubbed our very last nerve raw, but social media then squeezes lemon juice on it.

You Are All Replaceable

 I am opposed to term limits, because I think there are benefits to wisdom and experience, but I agree with Paul Campos that we need a mandatory retirement age for our elected and appointed public officials. People's bodies are living longer than ever, but there is inevitable decline with age. Look, I've seen Joe Biden a few times over the decades on the streets of Nantucket. He's physically frailer than I would like to admit. 

I would support a constitutional amendment mandating retirement for Supreme Court justices at 75. I would go further and say that you may not run for office over the age of 75 either. 

People will get elected until they are literally rolled out in a hearse. That's not necessary. No one is irreplaceable. 

Covid Take The Wheel

 Looking at these charts, it's fair to say that Omicran seems to be moving the virus in the direction of endemicity. That is to say that we are moving towards the "it's just the flu" stage of the virus, as it becomes less lethal both because of evolution of the virus and our better ability to fight it with vaccines, acquired immunity and therapeutics.

Our school has decided we are already in the endemic stage of the disease. We are not going to test the entire student body and faculty and staff anymore. We are "acknowledging the reality that omicron is here" and abandoning any efforts to do anything except isolate and treat the sick. During exam week in December, we sent home dozens of students with the flu. It was incredibly disruptive, we wound up not counting student exams if they "hurt" a student's GPA, regardless of whether they were sick. That seems to be our new "strategy" for dealing with Covid. 

High school students are not - as you might imagine - great about mask wearing. My team will be competing with other schools without masks, because you can't really wrestle with a mask anyway. Omicron is definitely on our campus, as we sent home roughly 30 students after our first round of testing. Since we testing is so overwhelmed, we can't get timely results, so we have decided that we are better off not knowing how many asymptomatic cases we have on campus. We aren't even going to update our testing dashboard.

At some point, we were going to have to get to this point. But the decision to simply not know how many of our students and faculty have the virus seems to be placing the desire to be "in session" over student and faculty health. Our priority is keeping the school "in person." If that creates super-spreader events, well, we're all vaccinated, so people are unlikely to get very sick.

The problem, I would think, is two fold. First is the current state of Covid in Connecticut. Hospitalizations of people with Covid (as distinct, it seems from people who are hospitalized because of Covid) are higher now than they have ever been. This does include ICU beds being as full of Covid patients as they were during last January's surge. If you remember "flattening the curve" we have abandoned that as a guiding principle. Fuck health care workers and strains on the system. For our purposes, I certainly hope no one gets really sick with Covid, not only because it sucks, but because they will not be able to get the same attention as they could have a month ago or a month from now.

Second is simply that while Omicron seems mild, that doesn't mean that Delta isn't still circulating or that the virus won't mutate again into something more deadly. By abandoning Covid mitigation efforts we - and frankly almost all of America - are inviting another mutation, at which point it will be really hard to re-introduce measures that work.

Rumor has it our Head of School was told by the school doctor that we should wait a few weeks to re-open. Other schools in our situation have done this. He apparently replied we would delay reopening "over my dead body."

I hope that remains a metaphor.

A Post-Governing Party

 Martin Longman makes a case for any Republican with a shred of public virtue to resign rather than further debase themselves by toeing the Trumpist line with regards to January 6th. It's a good point, that the purpose of our legislative and electoral system is to create independent legislators - sadly, like Joe Manchin, but there are more felicitous examples. If you are subsuming your independence and critical reasoning functions to appease the QAnon/Stop the Steal crowd, you're no longer valuable as a legislator. You could literally be replaced by a bot.

The other important aspect of this shift in the GOP is their move to a post-governing party. The GOP is fundamentally about winning elections and having power, rather than doing anything with that power. Sure, cutting taxes is fun, but stacking the courts is really only for...having power. It will be interesting to see how the Trumpist state governments fair as they ban abortions and cut spending to the bone on things like education and healthcare. If Sam Brownback's Kansas is a model, it won't go well.

The GOP doesn't want to do the hard work of governing. They just want power. So if that means siding with seditionists and criminals...cool.

Blood From A Stone

 As I predicted, the GOP is not going to get a great deal more advantage from gerrymandering than they had in 2020. The simple truth is that they had already heavily gerrymandered most maps that they could and there simply isn't enough blood to squeeze from that particular stone. There is also the fact that Democrats have gerrymandered their own states when possible. While this is not "good" it is necessary.

Yglesias points out the problem with embracing our own gerrymanders, and...sure, I guess. But his solution is a pile of crap. He suggests states become proportional in their representation (PR). He does admit we would need more House seats, because you can't have proportional representation in a state like Vermont. Some states have proposed this for the Electoral College, and it demonstrates why this is a bad idea. Unless you dramatically expand the House to like 1,000 members, you're going to give a ton more seats to parties that don't really deserve them. He uses extreme examples like how Massachusetts doesn't have a single Republican member (in fact there is no Republican from all of New England), even though more than a third of Massholes voted for Trump.

The only real way to do PR is to do it in massive "districts." Basically make New England a district, the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, etc, districts. Then you would spread the proportionality more smoothly. 

This, however, defeats the purpose of the House of Representatives. You're supposed to have a single person in DC who represents your reasonably compact district. PR denies you that. It would increase the power of parties because your placement on the party list (if you win 3 seats in the PR district, the top three names on your list are elected to the Congress) would be determined by the party, not the voters via primaries. Given how insane the GOP is becoming, is that really a path forward? 

If you want a Democrat from Arkansas or a Republican from Connecticut, the simple answer is to expand the size of the House.  If there were 800 House members, you would get a few crossover seats in solidly "Red" and "Blue" states. 

One thing I WOULD support is PR for the Senate. If you increase the size of the House to 800, then you have a much closer ties to your Rep. Removing the Senate as a state level representation would get rid of the absurdity of Wyoming have the same number of Senators as California. It would also reflect the increasingly national nature of our politics.

There is nothing sacred about the size of the House. Increasing it would not require a constitutional amendment, the way moving to some sort of PR system. It would make it harder to gerrymander seats, because the margins would be smaller and less predictable. 

Do that.

Must Read

 A fascinating and disturbing look at young "conservatives." Basically, the old definition of conservatism, as I've said before, is increasingly an obsolete way of looking at the American Right. They are radical reactionaries, intent on creating some imagined past via "any means necessary."

It's a chilling read in many ways, but it reinforces my idea that young people are really fundamentally unwise, and that unwisdom makes them "dumb" even if they are measurably "smart." It's also unclear whether this "intellectual vanguard" of anti-democratic reactionaries represent anything of real import in American politics.

Still, a penetrating look at people who are either a time capsule to Trumpist insanity of a frightening harbinger of what's to come.

The Boa Constrictor Problem

 I was struck by Eric Levitz's take on why Don't Look Up largely fails as a metaphor for climate change, it's intended satirical target. While intermittently amusing, it doesn't really land because it fundamentally misdiagnosis the problem. A large comet headed to earth is a cataclysmic and immediate problem. Solving that problem would presumably involve efforts to blow the comet off course with nuclear weapons. That's a technology we already have and would just require money, which we have enough of for a one time launch.

In other words, it's a finite crisis with a finite solution. Don't Look Up has a sort of amusing McGuffin to prevent that solution, which also feels stupid and forced.

Climate change, Covid and the January 6th problem are all slow moving boa constrictor problems, as opposed to a comet, which is a rattlesnake problem. A rattlesnake strikes fast and then leaves. A boa constrictor grabs you can gets tighter and tighter. It slowly crushes the life out of you.

As we sit on the anniversary of Trump's autogolpe, I'm struck by how poorly we deal with boa constrictor problems. In the immediate aftermath of Trump's obvious culpability in an attempt to destroy electoral democracy in the US, there was a glimmer of hope that people - including and especially Republicans - would act to neutralize this threat. There was some bipartisan hope for impeachment to prevent Trump from ever running for or holding office again. Maybe a 9/11 style non-partisan commission to find the truth of everything that happened.

Republicans, for the most part, failed their test (again) to put country over party. 

Now we live in an unbelievable moment where every day brings new revelations about the coordination of elite Republicans to try and overthrow the 2020 election, and we have yet to really act.

I would argue that fighting climate change looks increasingly easy from a technological point of view: more renewables and a massive increase in nuclear power around the globe.  Boom. Done. 

I would argue that Covid looks increasingly easy from a medical point of view: mandate mass vaccinations around the globe. Boom. Done.

I would argue that the Trumpist threat to democracy is increasingly easy to combat: put the motherfuckers in jail. Boom. Done.

The fact that none of these solutions are even close to being adopted says something about our ability to mobilize ourselves for slow moving, boa constrictor problems. We can jump back and run away from a single, quick rattlesnake bite, but we simply can't bestir ourselves to do the hard work of solving the problems that are really important.

In the end, it seems we have to hate the problem in order to confront it. It's so much easier to hate someone than to work on an abstract problem. Since we hate each other - and it's not just the US - we fall back into hating the "other side" rather than focusing on the boa constrictor latched onto our leg and squeezing its way up our body.

He's Not Wrong

 Slava Malamud has a thread where he makes the analogy that being a Republican is like being a sports fan. It moved from " my team, right or wrong" to "my team, and your team must be ground into paste and dispersed to the four winds."

This bit makes sense:

Sports fans don't care who plays for their team. The guy can be a major asshole or a criminal, but if he can whack the thingy into the doodad and help beat the guys in differently colored clothes, he is good and opposing him is bad. Sports fans are cultish, irrational and shrill.

We see this perpetually with players like Antonio Brown who literally had to disrobe on the field to get bounced from the Tampa Bay roster.

I do think he places too much blame at the feet of Rush Limbaugh and other RW media types. Mainstream media has turned politics into sports journalism for years. In fact, it's called "horse race journalism" for a reason. It's so much easier to do sports reporting on whether a team is winning or losing than assess what the impact of whether a team is worth the $2B stadium taxpayers will have to pay to keep the team from moving to Charlotte. Reporters will absolutely write the stadium story, but people will skip over that for the box score. 

The reason clickbait journalism is imperiling representative democracy is not - at its core - about the journalists; it's about how we consume that journalism. We like horse races more than detailed policy arguments, because we're vapid and/or exhausted. 

Militant Ignorance

 I read these two pieces back-to-back. The first was about "militant ignorance." Regular ignorance is what it sounds like. I'm pretty ignorant about chemistry. I never took high school chemistry and I just don't know that much about it. I admit it, because...whatever. Militant ignorance takes a fierce, vocal, combative pride in that ignorance. Not knowing chemistry becomes a source of pride. Only nerds know chemistry, and they are probably gay or something.

I think it's pretty clear how this relates to our current political moment.

The second piece was a profile of J.D. Vance. Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy about his escape from a genuinely rough upbringing to reach Yale Law and the prestige that goes with it. He has since pivoted to what he and other call National Conservatism. This is basically an attempt to take what was genuinely interesting about Trump's 2016 presidential run - his disdain for existing GOP orthodoxy on Iraq and economic redistribution - and turn it into an electoral and political movement.

The problem, as the piece alludes to but never lands on, is that Trumpism was never about opposing the Iraq war, but about mocking Jeb Bush for being a geek whose brother sent other people's sons overseas to die. Trump didn't oppose Iraq from a principled position but one entirely borne of expediency. What Trump gave his supporters was someone who would be an asshole on their behalf. The policy heresies ultimately meant nothing. He did slap some tariffs on things, but that has only exacerbated the inflation we have right now. Meanwhile, he cut taxes on the rich and tried to kill Obamacare.

Vance is trying to articulate a culturally conservative movement that embraces left wing economics, but he's doing so in the midst of a political movement that is entirely about militant ignorance and really doesn't care about policy. Vance can mouth the slogans of Trumpism - the entire piece is about the question "What happened to J.D. Vance?" - but the ignorant fury of Trumpism, lashing out at any target, is hard to replicate.

Vance was criticized in his hometown for his depiction of Appalachian life. He has clearly learned not to anger those he targeted in his book. Rather than be an interesting voice for a conservative intellectual movement, he has become another online troll, placating the grievances that cannot be divorced from social changes beyond the ability of a White plurality to control with stale expressions of contempt for other Americans.

As a "Coastal Elite" do I hate the "Heartland"? No. I've lost my patience with anti-vax bullshit, but I don't want my countrymen to suffer from joblessness and opioid addiction. But I also know that neither of these plagues originated in Washington or liberal college campuses. They originated from corporate boardrooms of US Steel and Purdue Pharma. I support efforts to bring back meaningful jobs to areas of the country that have lost them. 

In the face of militant ignorance, though, it's hard to get very far. 

More Good News

 Biden is reshaping the lower courts. Yes, the outright theft of two Supreme Court seats is tragic, but as Lemieux notes, Democrats have not paid nearly enough attention to the Courts. All of the Courts.

It's Not Fascism, It's Just Sparkling White Supremacy

 Jon Chait returns from hiatus to dissect some Yale philosopher who wrote a column full of logical fallacies. Chait's point is that saying Republicans are all fascists (when you really mean authoritarian) only accelerates the process of the entire GOP becoming outright authoritarian.

Let's leave aside that argument and address what I've been trying to say for a few years now: Not all authoritarianism is fascism. Fascism is a unique set of institutions coming from the differing forms of humiliation Italy and Germany felt after World War I. There are about as many different forms of authoritarianism as there are authoritarian regimes, so labels only get you so far. I can say that Britain is a parliamentary democracy with a monarchical head of state, but Putin's Russia is really just...Putin's Russia.

Anyhoo, I was finally finishing Sean Wilentz's Rise of American Democracy (as I mentioned the other day), and I keep coming back to Wilentz's term "Master Race democracy." It's not that the Antebellum South was completely resistant to democracy. Noted democrats like Andrew Jackson and James Polk were from the South. The understanding of who got to enjoy democratic privileges, however, was very much restricted to White men. In places like South Carolina, it meant rich White planters. 

Calling the GOP a fascist party is not to understand fascism, and what's more it shows a blindness to our own history. America was a very flawed democracy for much of its existence, even after it adopted the Jacksonian democratic creed. Even after the Civil War, the White South stamped out true democracy in the South by the 1880s, and it only fitfully returned in the 1960s and '70s. 

Of course, the composition of America is much, much different than it was in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed. America is not a lily-white nation anymore. The GOP's embrace of Master Race Democracy, where the only votes that matter are White votes, is just as troubling for our democratic institutions as wild, ahistorical claims of fascism. It is much more grounded in our history and cultural DNA.

Understanding the GOP as a Master Race Democratic party rather than a Fascist party is central to fighting them. You can't defeat what you don't understand.

Student Debt Reform

 Yglesias does one of his Yglesias things where he pretends to take a bold stand against the online Left, when really he's just throwing out conventional wisdom. 

I do think the "End Student Debt" crowd are overplaying their hand, and I agree with Yglesias that there is not a need for the macroeconomic stimulus that debt forgiveness would bring. 

Where I differ is that we have a rolling problem in the country stemming from a lack of qualified governmental employees. This extends down to school teachers and cops, both professions that have come under a lot of strain in the past years. 

Student debt forgiveness should be conditional on taking public sector jobs, including federal government jobs. It should be a permanent reform, along the lines of Pell Grants, but instead of the individual student's level of need, it should be society's level of need. We need more health care professionals, especially general practitioners. No one wants to be a GP, because it doesn't pay as well as being a plastic surgeon, but it's critical for a well-functioning health care system. Fine, forgive their loans.

We need scientists to work at NOAA and DOD and Interior. Forgive their loans.

Of course, we won't get Yglesias's fabled bipartisanship, because the GOP hates the idea of people doing good work in government for the benefit of everyone.

But it's worth a shot.

Instant Darwin's Gonna Getcha

 It's pretty remarkable as we enter into Covid's "junior year" that we still have sizable numbers of people who refuse to take it seriously. Still, we have millions of Americans who refuse to get vaccinated and see health mandates of any kind as tyranny. That latter bit just pisses me off. You think a vaccine is tyranny? This is why we need more history education in schools. Screw STEM, we have people who have literally no idea what life is like outside the US or what it was like 50 years ago in the US.

Anyway, vaccines. 

This thread is where I'm hoping we are. For the vaccinated, Omicron will land like a shitty cold. But because it's so contagious, it will hit the unvaccinated hard, even though Omicron is milder than Delta. You will simply have a larger number of people getting infected, and even if a smaller percentage die, it will still be a large absolute number.

What I also like about the thread is it points out how we are close to a new wave of therapeutics that should dramatically improve outcomes.

If we have a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" I do worry a great deal about the strain on our health care system. I was struck by Connecticut's numbers, where 75% of the population is fully vaccinated, but hospitalizations are approaching levels we saw last January, and ICUs are fuller that they ever were. Deaths, however, remain low - though that could be a two week lag.

I have lost most sympathy with those who eschew a simple vaccine, stress our hospitals to the breaking point and then act like they are standing up for "freedumb." My son and the rest of his wrestling team stand on the brink of losing another season to this illness, because a bunch of dumb SOBs would rather listen to Joe Rogan, Aaron Rodgers and Marjorie Traitor Greene than Anthony Fauci.

Doomscrolling Antidote

 The last five years have featured New Year's reminiscences that basically revolved around the theme of "Well, that sucked, I hope next year is better."

It is the nature of being Extremely Online (or cable news) that only shitty stories land and "engage." So we focus on terrible things and fail to recognize that many good things happened.

First, the year began with Warnock and Ossoff winning and giving Biden the opportunity to pass legislation and confirm judges. The next day, Trump's coup failed and created yet another black mark on the Republican Party. He became the first president to be impeached twice. Just about every court has ruled against America's new Nazis.

Second, Biden and Democrats managed to pass an incredible amount of social spending that created one of the most robust economic recoveries in history, so that what we are worried about now is inflation!

Third, Biden ended the Afghanistan War, a pointless sucking hole of money and lives that had exhausted its purpose a decade ago. Drone strikes are down.

Wages rose (INFLATION!) and labor has become more empowered than they have been in decades. Unemployment is basically not an issue any more.

Vaccination rates are simultaneously low and high. Yes, we've hit a wall of ignorance and denial, but if you want one, you have had one.  That's amazing. The new mRNA vaccines will change the world, in ways we can't imagine.

Derek Chauvin, Ghislaine Maxwell and the McMichaels went to prison.

A year ago, we wondered if America's justice system would convict murderous cops and rich, connected pedophiles. Now we know it can. The problem with our economy is that it's possibly TOO healthy. The latest wave of Covid might very well be the wave where it turns from a deadly illness to a rough cold.

Things aren't uniquely terrible. Josh Marshall compares this era to World War II, a finite tough time. Looking back, World War II's results and the eventual blossoming that came from it seem foreordained. That was hardly the case of those living through them.

For all his depredations, Trump's imprint on American law was minimal. True, his justices could warp the law for decades, but the people tend to win over the courts in the end. He battered our institutions, but he did not break them. 

I do think things can get better and will. 

Is Secession Possible?

 Stephen Marche launches an incomplete analysis of the viability of secession. He talks about the constitutionality of secession, which is...stupid? The legal questions can be resolved. He uses Texas as an example. Texas had a brief run as an independent country, a fact that some Texans will happily remind you of. Marche focuses on things like the presence of US Military bases and so on, some of the questions that the country faced in 1860-61. Would an independent Texas acquire a proportional share of the national debt? What about NASA?

The problem is that Texas would not secede. Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Idaho, Wyoming, Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana would secede. Hell, maybe Ohio. 

The Red/Blue dichotomy is not as clear as the secession crisis that led to the Civil War. Daniel Webster's Seventh of March speech and Lincoln's First Inaugural both made the case that secession was a geographic impossibility. That logic is even more clear today. The divide in this country is not "sectional" in the sense of North vs South. It's Rural vs Urban. 

I've been reading Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy, and his analysis of the coming of the Civil War is really interesting and perhaps illuminative. The democratic forces unleashed in the Age of Jackson posited the inherent equality of all White Americans. However, it wasn't a huge stretch for people like Lincoln or Henry Seward to extend that legal equality to the enslaved. The idea of human equality, as opposed to White equality, is right there in the Declaration, staring people in the face.

The White South instead embraced a theory of Master Race "democracy" that effectively became a form of oligarchy, especially in John C. Calhoun's South Carolina. Poor and middling, non-slave owning Whites elected planter elites to run the South (and really the country) to preserve their system of racial prerogatives. White elites in the South and parts of the North were horrified at the political philosophy that permeated the rest of the country. 

That's effectively where we are now: two very different forms of "democracy." Two different political cultures that really start from such a fundamentally different conception of what it means to be American, that it's hard to see a way clear. Just as the South saw Lincolns election as illegitimate, so Trumpistan sees Biden's election as some form of "fraud."

It is also clear that secession in 1850-60 was a minority movement pushed by a coherent political cadre known as the Fire-eaters. These pro-slavery secessionists had been consistently pushing for separation for a decade before Ft. Sumter.

I think we are basically in the early 1850s, in this regard. There are Fire-eaters in our midst, but it's unclear whether they have anywhere close to majority support, even in Trumpistan. Of course, both sides see themselves as the True Americans, so neither side feels a need to accommodate the other.

Of course, this is somewhat the exact problem that Federalism should solve. If you REALLY hate the liberals, then move to Mississippi! If Alabama disgusts you, then move to Maryland. Of course the problem is if you live in Henry country Georgia, you would simply move to Atlanta. But what happens if Georgia secedes?

I totally get where the Soft Secessionists are coming from. Think about the politicization of vaccines. We are all sick of the fucking pandemic. Masks are a hassle. One side says, get your damned shot so we can stop wear masks; the other side says, take of the masks and let natural immunity take care of things. I think the second position is insane, many think the former position is too. How the hell do those two basically oppositional world views persist in the same polity?

In 1860, the fracturing of the United States held portentous omens for the future of "government of the people, by the people and for the people." If secession had succeeded, democracy would have been discredited as a form of government. Slavery would have persisted. Secession today would not carry that same freight, and though a new Confederacy would be horrible for women, minorities and the LGBTQ community it would not be the same as slavery.

If Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma alone wanted to secede and a we had a free exchange of citizens, then...sure. But that isn't what will happen. We will see the US break into at least three different countries, a situation that would delight China and Russia. 

It's all a mess. But it's our mess, and maybe we should just get to work cleaning up our existing house rather than thinking of burning it down.