Radio Silence

 Headed to Salt Lake City to grade AP exams. Probably be a little light on the content.

"Now Is Not The Time..."

 The reflexive position of the GOP when their governing choices are thrown into horrifying perspective is to decry "second guessing" the police or "politicizing the tragedy." The failures of the police in Uvalde will be the running focus of many, but the GOP has been caught between the cult they created around the police in response to the Floyd murder and their need to deflect the conversation from guns.

I've seen a lot of Facebook posts talking about how we won't solve guns without campaign finance reform.

I think that is wrong. The NRA is bankrupt and deprived of its Russian cash pipeline. The GOP does not need NRA money, it needs gun fetishist voters. The reason why the GOP will not budge on guns is for the same reason that they won't divorce themselves from Trump: their voters won't let them. 

Saying the problem is money is reassuring to our sense of decency, whereas acknowledging that 35-40% of our fellow countrymen are willing to regularly sacrifice schoolchildren rather than have any regulations on firepower is deeply unsettling.

Brutal

 "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire."

- The Talmud

Unheard

 I've been struggling at work for months. Some of this is unprocessed trauma from trying to teach through Covid. Some is a continuing sense of disempowerment and that my voice is irrelevant. I have over two decades teaching experience at my school and my association with it goes back to 1982. I obviously care deeply about our mission.

I remember in the years of Abu Ghraib and Black Sites thinking that 9/11 broke something in us. We became a fearful nation. As we began to emerge from that, 2008 came and kneecapped us. We became a resentful nation. Then, as it looked like he might put Trump behind us, Covid came and disrupted everything. We became a traumatized nation.

None of this is good for our politics, obviously, but it's also just not good for us as people. I feel like I have an open wound that no one can see, but I can feel. I don't think, from my conversations and monitoring online discourse, that I am alone in this.

No idea what the solution would be. I was hoping Biden could come in and be boring, and we could go back to boring. But the world keeps ripping open our invisible wounds.

It Just Isn't Done

 Reading this piece at TPM and this piece at LGM, I can't help but wonder how much of GOP intransigence on guns is simply a reflex. There was a myth (and I do mean myth) that the 1994 midterms were because of Clinton's assault weapon ban. It was way more complicated than that.

I have to think that a truly rigorous background check, a waiting period and perhaps some limits on rate of fire could pass on the merits. The GOP will oppose them simply because they will oppose them, not out of rationality, but out of reflex.

The Fundamental Stupidity Of Our Gun Debate

 The debate over guns in America is not just uniquely American because we are the only developed country who has so many guns, but because of how absolutely fucking stupid it is.

Does banning guns work? Of course it does. We can look at every other country who has done it and seen that there incidents of shooting goes down. Hell, we can look at our country during the assault weapon ban:

That's pretty clear that these bans work, especially against the horror shows in Uvalde.

Secondly, the counter arguments are also transparently stupid. The "good guy with a gun" myth should be laid to rest once we learn just how messed up the Uvalde police response was. Arming teachers? Same deal. When you have weapons of war on American streets, to the point where the police or security guards in Buffalo or Uvalde are outgunned, then we've gone around the bend. 

The argument that people need weapons of war to protect themselves against a tyrannical government are so stupid it hurts me to think about it. 

One moronic false equivalency was that "after 9/11 we didn't ban planes" or "cars kill more people than guns." Yeah, have you seen how much we regulate both air travel and cars? 

Guns are atavistic items. They are primal. Holding a gun is an act of power. As a result, we have about 45% of Americans who think gun laws are just fine or should be even more lenient. This isn't about the NRA buying politicians, the NRA is bankrupt. This is about a deep sickness and stupidity in our country, where we think holding a murder stick is going to make us safer and more powerful, but having a society awash in guns actually has the opposite result. 

Logic and evidence are all on the side of those who would restrict guns, but nothing will happen, because the other side has emotion and unreason on its side and that tells you everything you need to know about our politics.

Thinest Of Blue Lines

 I remain on the record as saying "Defund the Police" was a terrible political messaging effort. But it's tough to square the need for effective, professional law enforcement with what happened in Uvalde. My Trumpist town is preparing to gut the education budget with smaller budget cuts for the town government, but I doubt they will entertain cuts to the police budget. "We need the police to keep us safe" is true, but there is a very open question as to how effectively they do so, especially when it comes to Black and Brown people.

Texas

 Amanda Marcotte's reflection on Uvalde is particularly good and important. We focus - rightly - on the policy outcomes surrounding guns, but the GOP has launched a full scale assault on other forms of communal expectations that might prevent shit like this from happening over and over and over again.

The Tree Of Liberty

 I mean, what more is there to say? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants schoolchildren and teachers. As Josh Marshall notes, the gun cult in this country is about having the power to kill a lot of people in a great hurry. Sure, the guy down the street with a gun locker full of AR-15s is not thinking about killing a lot of schoolchildren (I hope), but he's thinking he can save...something, Murican Fredumbs, I guess with his arsenal. He's powerful with a gun in his hand, and that feeling is real. If you've fired a gun, that feeling is one of power.

As we saw in Uvalde, there were cops who engaged the shooter BEFORE he went into the school. Three police officers shot at this guy before he went in and started slaughtering elementary kids, but since he was wearing body armor and carrying a weapon of war, he could blast right past them. Naturally, the gun fetishists are suggesting we arm teachers, but the lesson of Uvalde (which will blow right past them) is that there is no "good guy with a gun" solution to this fucking insanity. 

The other source of rage - and certainly that's the tidal wave in my Twitter feed right now - is that we have no illusions that anything, and I mean anything, will be done. I live a few minutes drive from Sandy Hook, so I know full well that there is nothing that will happen. 

The gun debate is therefore about power, brute, violent power. Gun fetishists feel that power when they hold a weapon capable of slaughtering people in a school, a supermarket, a church, a concert or an office park. Non-gun fetishists feel the powerlessness of knowing that even though we know for a certainty that gun restrictions will make us safer, nothing will be done.

Carpe The Freaking Diem

 I've had my disagreements with Yglesias more often than not, but one area we tend to agree on is energy policy. His argument that inflation is fundamentally tied to exploding energy prices is one I agree with. I also agree that the stagflation of the '70s was fundamentally about energy costs. You don't get the same inflation today with other issues like the supply chain problems, but without energy, none of this registers the same way.

What Yglesias focuses on is how to create more energy to bring prices down and how that's tricky because of past spikes and crashes. Fracking, as he notes, enjoyed a boom during a previous period of high energy prices, but then crashed when the Saudis pumped more oil. It's worth noting that Saudi Arabia's intransigence on this issue should herald a refocusing of our Middle Eastern and energy policies. Let's get the Iran nuclear deal up and running and get Iran pumping oil into the economy.

The Saudi issue is a good example of the problem both in the moment and long term that this poses for policy makers. The Biden Administration obviously wants energy prices to go way down before the midterms and GOP attacks on the Biden Administration are transparently cynical. However, we have a clear policy opportunity in front of us.

- We have ample evidence that energy supplies are fragile and usually dependent on some of the worst regimes in the world.

- This impacts our economy and our national security. In fact, our responsible national security position - support Ukraine - comes into direct conflict with our economic needs - cheap Russian energy. As long as global markets are dependent on regimes like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Iran, we are fundamentally not in control of some basic elements of our macroeconomic destiny.

The opportunity exists to create a long term policy to move off imported fossil fuels, but it won't make a terrible amount of difference in the short term. The long term benefits are huge, but we tend not to address long term benefits, given the exigent nature of our politics. 

First, we need exponentially more electrical generation. This means more solar, more natural gas, but it means more nuclear. If we want to dramatically alter our energy production, energy independence and economic autonomy, then we have to stop dicking around about nuclear power. Every kilowatt hour that is produced by nuclear power is one not produced by natural gas - which can then be rerouted to other uses.

Also, if we have an abundance of electricity from nuclear power, then we can convert water to hydrogen, which opens all sorts of opportunities for alternative fuels. 

We have seen the folly of abandoning nuclear power in Germany's current dilemma. They are so dependent on Russian gas that they cannot act with regards to Ukraine, and they are dependent on Russian gas because they shuttered their nuclear power plants.

There is an understandable tension between wanting to address CO2 emissions and global warming and wanting to address inflationary energy prices. Building out nuclear power will not help solve the immediate energy crunch. Easing our sanctions on Iran and Venezuela might be the best bets there. But using this "crisis" to create a long term solution to BOTH climate and energy precariousness would be the responsible long term action.

There's the old saw about what you would do if you could go back in time and tell your younger self one thing. Presumably that one thing would allow for amazing changes over the intervening decades. If I started to learn the guitar in my 20s I could play by now. The same is true for something like long term policy. Adding nuclear capacity will take years to pay off, but it will pay off by having the electricity necessary to drive EVs and use electricity to heat and cool our homes and create hydrogen and even desalinate sea water.

Use this energy crisis to change meaningful things for decades to come.

Odd

 Three prominent Democratic politicians have suffered strokes this spring. I have to wonder if this is a Covid effect.

Maddening

 The Federal Reserve issued its "Economic Well Being" report. They have been doing these reports since 2013, so the data set is limited, but it covers the lingering effects of 2008 and the Trump years.

Here's the nut graph:

The report indicates that self-reported financial well-being reached its highest level since the SHED began in 2013. In the fourth quarter of 2021, 78 percent of adults reported either doing okay or living comfortably financially. Financial well-being also increased among all the racial and ethnic groups measured in the survey, with a particularly large increase among Hispanic adults. Parents were one group who reported large gains in financial well-being with three-fourths saying they were doing at least okay financially, up 8 percentage points from 2020.

But Biden's approval numbers are in the tank and the "economy" is one reason why.

Make it make sense,

Christianism Is Authoritarianism

 I've said that America has a Christianist problem, and I stick by that. I want to be clear that there is nothing specific about most elements of Christian dogma that's problematic. Most of Jesus' teachings are profound and beneficent. 

Christianism, however, is not about the Beatitudes. It's a political ideology that centers some very odd interpretations of Christianity (largely drawn from Leviticus and Deuteronomy) in a framework of patriarchal authoritarianism. I've defined Trumpism and patrimonial authoritarianism, and that's pretty close to Christianism's desire for a strong, male figure to exert political control over women and children.

When we look at the abortion issue, we can see the clear preference from conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals for a strong consequence for women having sex and being required to have a child. There is no call from these quarters for men who impregnate women to be held financially responsible for raising the child; the focus is entirely on the women and doctors who are helping the women. 

As we are seeing in Ukraine, authoritarian systems often produce shitty outcomes, precisely because they are authoritarian. For all its myriad flaws, democracy allows for stress-testing policies and rigorous debate. While most of Joe Manchin's objections are preening grandstanding, he does have some arguments on the merits that could be addressed (whether addressing his concerns would change his vote is another matter). As a result, democracies less frequently blunder into things like Russia's disastrous invasion of Ukraine. The US invasion of Iraq was largely caused by shutting down debate and ignoring the will of the majority and led to the party that made that choice losing power.

All of this leads me back to Christianists - again conservative Catholic and Protestant sects - and their massive blind spot. One of the more disgusting developments in Republican politics is calling Democrats pedophiles, but if you want to find pedophiles, you're better off looking at patriarchal theocrats, because there is a direct link between believing in the dominion of White men over...everyone, and the exploitation of children or women.  

My Only Hope

 Joe Biden's approval numbers are not great. This is what usually predicates a wipe-out in the midterms. My only hope is that a substantial amount of that those who are unhappy with Biden are people who remain Democrats but - being Democrats - expected Biden to completely erase the Trump legacy and hang the moon while he's at it. When they are forced to choose between Mehmet Oz or Herschel Walker and John Fetterman or Raphael Warnock, they will show up and do the right thing. But then again, elections are usually decided by people whose knowledge of politics is pretty sketchy, so...who knows.

Not Great, Cotton

 The unilateral disarmament by certain "liberal" figures is going to destroy this country.

Getting Worse

 Josh Marshall looks at how both Trump said the quiet parts out loud when it came to racism and how the GOP has not abandoned those politics since he lost. The hope was that the GOP would moderate after Trump waddled off the national stage. To a certain degree, Trump really has waddled off. His ban from Twitter has actually worked to deny him oxygen. He's still out there saying repulsive things, but it's not thrust in our faces every hour. Instead, the GOP is going full GQP and White Nationalist. They've abandoned the messenger as flawed but kept his repellent message.

In much the same way that the Republic denied Democrats power for decades after the Civil War (because of their association with treason), we need to make sure the GOP never gets back in power until they've abandoned overt race-based authoritarianism.

I'm not optimistic that will happen. I don't think Americans are eager to embrace the central fact that the GOP has gone insane.

Democratic Problems In A Nutshell

 This piece outlining the ambivalence that the Biden Administration feels over tariff reduction is a great example of some of the issues that plague the Democratic Party.

Inflation is the main issue currently created headwinds for Democrats in November. Inflation is global, however, and largely - in my opinion - a product of energy price spikes and supply chain issues (in that order). The early inflation was supply restriction, but I'm a firm believer that energy price spikes are a huge driver of inflation.

Lowering tariffs will not help either of those issues. The piece quotes several people from places like the Peterson Institute, which...yeah, not really a fan. And it notes that labor unions don't want to lose the tariffs without something in return from China. The reality is that we also have tariffs on Canadian lumber that drive up construction costs. Would lowering the tariffs solve the price spike in housing? Doubtful.

Would it help? Yes.

I was listening to my wife's podcast with Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson. He makes the accurate point that stories win elections, not policies and white papers. Democratic strategists and activists don't grok that. They think there is a magic portfolio of legislation that will re-create the New Deal Coalition that controlled America for 35 years. The reason the New Deal Coalition won election after election was that the party of FDR was the party that knew that your boss was an SOB and wanted to give you Social Security to make sure you could retire.

Activists don't think in terms of narratives, really. They are hyperfocused a set of policy prescriptions. Maybe there's a narrative, too, but they lose track of that. "George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by unaccountable police who don't respect Black lives" is a story that even most White people can understand. They saw the video of Derek Chauvin choking the life out of Floyd. But "Defund the Police" is a different narrative that tells a different story. It's a story activists want to hear, but not persuadable voters.

Biden is trying to create a perfect counter-inflation policy. That's irrelevant. He needs to tell a story about greedy corporations price gouging consumers. He needs to point to his efforts to reduce prices by reducing tariffs. He's "taking on interests." He's "fighting for you." Republicans are literally voting against baby formula. They are passing heinous abortion laws. 

Saying that the GOP is party of god-botherers and plutocrats is a story Americans already know in their hearts. You don't have to solve inflation (because you can't), but you have to show that you are "fighting for the little guy."

Got Shot Number Four

 I got boosted again yesterday, as we have graduation coming up and I'm travelling to the AP reading. I have that freshly hit by a truck feeling, but I would really recommend getting your shot boosted. It is pretty clear that we are hitting another mini-surge, though I imagine deaths will be low. Still, I've known several people who have been poleaxed by their recent infection. We also know that we won't be doing any real mitigation efforts, so get that fourth jab.

One Acre, One Vote

 Josh Marshall flags a candidate for Colorado governor that makes explicit the sort of anti-majoritarian position of the contemporary GOP. His proposal is that Colorado adopt an electoral college to elect its governor. 

What is interesting about this (aside from being terrifying as a prospect) is how it reflects some warped aspects of "originalism." Obviously, the Electoral College is an "original" method for selecting the President. It represented the Framers fear of democracy. They worried about a demagogue and looked to the election of popes and Holy Roman Emperors for their model. There would be a buffer between the people and the presidency. However, before all of the Framers had actually died, the country had shifted to embracing the idea of democracy. (Jefferson, famously, was not at the Constitutional Convention.) As a result of this embrace, large "catch-all" parties formed to consolidate the new democratic masses in ways that made sense given America's electoral system. There was some mucking about with third parties in the 1840s and '50s, but eventually we settled in to a two party system.

All of this made the Electoral College obsolete. Parties now nominated candidates, then the masses effectively voted for those candidates, because the Electors were mere proxies for the will of the plurality in each state.

The structure of the Electoral College meant that rural states were dramatically overweighted. This process was somewhat true in 1900, but 2000 it had become so extreme that we have now elected someone twice in 16 years who failed to win a plurality of the popular vote. Arguments from Republicans to keep the Electoral College used to be bound to traditional legitimacy: "This is the way we have always done it, and we shouldn't change just because one party doesn't like it." 

What is striking since 2016 is how explicitly the GOP is basically saying that urban voters - younger, more racially and ethnically diverse and usually better educated - are now no longer "equal" in terms of electing governments. In Reynolds v Sims, the Supreme Court ruled that districts must be roughly equal in population in order to fully satisfy the principal of "one person, one vote." As Earl Warren wrote, "legislatures represent people, not trees or acres."

The GOP is basically settled into the idea that acres are more important than voters.

Some of this can be traced back to a book called The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. The basic argument of this book was that demographics were going to favor the creation of a persistent Democratic majority, in much the same way demographics favored Republicans from 1968-1992. 

Most Democratic strategists no longer believe in this trend, but what's fascinating is that Republicans clearly do. This is what underlies Tucker Carlson's appeal to Replacement Theory and the broad efforts by Republicans to make it harder for certain groups to vote. 

They have basically accepted that they are a demographic minority. Their only hope is to create more anti-majoritarian rules. This is not "we should preserve the Electoral College because it's tradition," this is "we need to inject more anti-democratic structures into our politics to prevent 'those people' from winning."  For Alexander Hamilton, "those people" were the poor who would vote to take stuff from the rich. For Mitch McConnell, "those people" are, simply put, Democrats.

Aside from the stunning assault of the basic principle of elective government, what's really interesting to me is that maybe Judis and Teixeira were right about this emerging majority. Maybe we are a few electoral cycles away from a younger, more diverse electorate tilting the field towards Democrats for a couple of decades. 

Of course, we have to survive the last ditch efforts of Republicans from destroying the basic principle of democracy first.  Nothing to worry about there...

The Summer Of Our Discontent

 I've been fairly bullish on the Democrat's midterm prospects, primarily because it was too early to start wailing, gnashing my teeth and rending my sackcloth. However, I'm starting to despair a bit. The best hope for Democrats is that the rightward lurch of the GOP into full QAnon will cost them winnable seats. I'm certainly hopeful that the relative merits of the candidates in Pennsylvania is a good sign. 

I also felt that the primary issue for voters was going to be Covid and Covid would be "over" by the fall. I do think that remains true, absent some horror show of a variant coming along. 

The problem has become inflation, and this is an especially tricky problem because a lot of Americans have no real memory of inflation from the late 1970s. The other reason is that there are myriad reasons for inflation and few of them have policy solutions. Yes, Biden should reduce tariff barriers immediately to reduce costs. But gas prices and the post Covid surge in demand are beyond any policy problem. 

Yglesias has gone full inflation hawk, but the reality is that countries that didn't do the same level of stimulative spending are still seeing 8-9% inflation. It wasn't so much that Democrats overstimulated the economy as that the economy was going to be overstimulated anyway coming out of a pandemic and supply chain issues have a long knock-on effect. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has sent oil and gas prices skyrocketing and that has been a major factor in inflationary spirals. 

Voters are, sorry, dumb creatures. I will die on the hill that elections are decided by dumb things like inchoate feelings about "stuff." The right track/wrong track question pollsters rely on are basically trying to measure this. Maybe, the "wrong track" numbers are bloated by Democratic leaning voter who are appalled by the authoritarian tilt of the modern GOP and will turnout to vote Blue anyway. 

I just worry that American democracy is about to get body-slammed by voters unhappy over things that are beyond policy solutions.

The "Party of Ideas."

 Paul Campos points to John Ganz who has been cataloguing the atrocities over at the Claremont Institute.

It's a striking the roster that Ganz analyzes here. (He goes on in the linked piece to dive into the OG Claremont Guy, but that's less important.)

The basic criticism from the Claremontsters (as they call themselves) is that Western Civilization is in a critical state of decline and decay. Fascist poet Ezra Pound called European civilization after World War II:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

The explicit criticism from certain corners of the "intellectual Right" has been focused on this perceived state of decline for centuries, which should probably tell you about the actual state of decline. If we've been in critical decline and decay since 1945, you'd think we'd be gone by now. 

This represents the more high falutin state of Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour and the replacement theory that motivated the Buffalo shooter. The basic idea is that America is White and Christian and "conservative" and that a bunch of Brown people who can't possibly be real Americans have warped this country into something that can no longer be accurately called America.  

If this is the intellectual underpinnings of your political movement, then violence like Buffalo is inevitable. It's preordained. What's more, it's tacitly welcomed by people like Tucker Carlson or Elise Stefanik who once represented the moderate GOP establishment. They have now wholly sold their souls to dark ideas that were the foundations of Trump's erratic impulses. Trump's cognitive inability to focus or plan made him ultimately a failure, but people like Ron DeSantis are capable of planning and following through on basic fascism in the name of...American liberty?

Difficult to see how we survive as an existing country if these fuckers win in the next election.

Casual Misogyny

 Paul Campos does a good job breaking down the disparate strands of various white supremacist ideology that can safely be said to constitute the bedrock beliefs of the modern GOP. It starts with White Christian Nationalism, then proceeds to see how America is becoming a more diverse nation under the racist "Great Replacement" Theory. This exists not as a demographic fact but as a vast conspiracy. 

At the root of this conspiracy is women's autonomy. By allowing women (fundamentally White women) to decide when to have children or whether to have a career outside the home, women's autonomy threatens the White birthrate, and therefore is part of the vast conspiracy.

I should note that white women are an active part of this denial of women's agency, sometimes unwittingly. But there is a strain of Christian women who argue that they should be subservient to their husband. There is also a strain of thought that is riddled with racism about which women should be banned from certain choices.

America is undergoing some of its ongoing reckoning over race. That discussion and process has been somewhat successfully attacked by the GOP over nebulous terms like CRT. 

What we haven't adequately done - though I think the Dobbs decision will blow this open - is discuss the underlying misogyny that informs so much of rightist thought today. All these odd paeans to embattled masculinity are part of a broad panic by some men because many of the old male prerogatives are under siege.  This works hand-in-glove with the panic over the loss of privileged status for whites. 

Grievance is all they have, and this grievance is easily turned towards authoritarian political models. We've seen it most clearly in Hungary. It is being tried in Florida, Texas and elsewhere as we speak.

It's bad.

Matches and Gasoline

 Yesterday, an 18 year old white supremacist went into a predominately Black supermarket and started slaughtering people. He was parroting the points that Tucker Carlson spews forth on his White Power Hour every night on Fox. 

Of course, America has a gun problem. We know this, even if we are rendered mostly powerless to do anything about it. Even the most common sense of gun laws are held beyond our capacity to act. 

Our increasing tolerance of outright racism by people like Carlson is the match to the gasoline. This deluded kid was poisoned by Carlson's desire to get ratings by pandering to the worst impulses of American history, and then have Sean Hannity whine about CRT.

It is difficult to see Fox News as anything but an ongoing conspiracy against our desire for a "kinder gentler America" that even Republicans once professed a desire to see.

There will be no consequences for Carlson and Fox of course. And guns will remain freely available to any angry asshole who wants one.

Change You Can Believe In

 This is an interesting Twitter thread about the generational divide between Russian and Ukrainian leadership. The average age of Russian leadership is 64, Ukrainian leadership is 44. That's the literal definition of a generational divide. 

There has been a ton of pixels spilt over why Russia has so badly underperformed militarily in Ukraine, while Ukraine has defied early expectations. A lot, obviously, has to do with relative morale and the nature of offensive vs defensive warfare. However, there is a deeper problem in Russian military and political culture: ossified doctrine and leadership. A lot has been made about the inferiority of Russia's non-commissioned officers. The sergeants that make up the backbone of an effective fighting force must be on the younger side, say in their 30s. Russia's military does not create good NCOs and allow them autonomy, because the regime is quintessentially authoritarian and autonomy is not granted "underlings." In a combat environment, adaptability and flexibility are essential. Russia doesn't have that, which is why generals have to be near the frontline and keep getting killed.

The broader implication of the tweet, though, is that this is a problem we saw in the late Soviet period of a decaying gerontocracy. Putin is old and apparently dying of cancer or Parkinsons. He has surrounded himself with a bunch of other older men with ties to the late Soviet period, like himself - the siloviki. His critics, like Navalny, are mostly younger. Since the war broke out, we've seen young, urban, cosmopolitan Russians flee the country in a "brain drain" that has negative implications for regime change in Russia, but also is a real problem in a country with an ongoing demographic crisis of declining birth rates, a declining population and high mortality rates among its male population. (This is one reason why Russia is literally kidnapping Ukrainian children.)

Authoritarianism has a certain appeal for people who feel unmoored during times of great change and turmoil. This was central to Trump's appeal. The entire point of Fox News is to keep GOP voters agitated about the changing world so that they will cede democracy to a Trump/Orban/Bolsanaro type strongman. In the end, though, authoritarianism usually fails as a form of government because it becomes unadaptive. It can't roll with the punches. 

One worry I have at this moment is America's current state of gerontocracy. Biden turns 80 this year; Pelosi is 82, Trump is 75, McConnell is 80, Schumer is 71, Hoyer is 82, Clyburn is 81, Leahy is 81, Durbin is 77, Patty Murray is 71, Stabenow is 72.

The GOP actually has a relatively younger leadership group in McCarthy, Thune, Scalise and Stefanik. I mean, they're awful, but they aren't ancient.

As we've seen with Madison Cawthorn and to a lesser degree Ilhan Omar, there's a certain impetuousness and lack of perspective in younger people. You see it on Twitter all the time. People without appropriate historical perspective and memory can get lost in the moment, because the moment is all they know. There is a place for "wise old heads."

However, Democrats need to begin now to start adding youth to their political leadership. Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, Brian Schatz even Amy Klobuchar at 61 need to be elevated to positions of real leadership.

If not, the Democrats will rely on ancient leaders at the mercy of their 27 year old staffers, and that's the worst of both worlds.

America's Christianist Problem, One In A Series

 Martin Longman explores why fundamentalist parents censoring school materials is bad. If your worldview cannot survive contact with information freedom, that is not a problem with information freedom. It's a problem that your worldview can only exist in a hothouse environment, sheltered from contrary viewpoints and even basic facts.

Fundamentalism is deeply corrosive to a democratic state, in my opinion, precisely because it it rarely interested in open discourse or critical thinking. In fact, one definition of fundamentalism is the belief in the literal truth of ancient religious texts. There is not even an allowable debate on this issue. In a "liberal" political environment, we have to be free to question everything within the limits of reason. Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart...which it currently is doing.

The other definition of fundamentalism is the use of religion as a political ideology. This is seen most clearly in Islamism, which argues that Islam should be the political ideology establishing the political norms of a country. There has historically not been any separation between mosque and state in Islam, so this is easy. Religious pluralism has its deepest roots in the United States, which is one reason why America remains an unusually religiously observant country for a developed economy. Religious pluralism has been a net positive for American religion.

But Christianism, as a fundamentalist ideology to define the workings of the state, rejects religious pluralism. It seeks to create a hothouse environment in which its tenets are immune to challenge. If Leviticus is the revealed word of God and a proper way to organize society, you'd think it would be more robust. Instead, we get the closing of the American Mind in exactly the opposite way that Allan Bloom suggested. (Allan Bloom was a crank.)

I have drifted in and out of faith and religion in my life. There is real wisdom in many religions, but none hold a monopoly on wisdom. Fundamentalism, in both meanings of the word, argues that in fact there is only one valid practice of faith and that should rule our society. And because this is an article of faith, there is no argument than can be advanced to challenge it.

All of this should help inform the ongoing GOP war against public education. It's not about CRT or SEL or specific works in the library. It's about the very project of public education and critical thinking.

This Is Significant

 Monmouth polled people as to what the most important issue in the midterms was. The results were that 26% said the economy. That's not good for Democrats, unless we can defeat Putin in the next month or two and gas prices collapse. But the second more important issue was abortion at 25%, and that's before we start getting tangible horror stories from women who have been persecuted or even died from non-clinical abortions.

I agree with Yglesias that Schumer's "message bill" on codifying Roe was bad. You have to write a bill that does the very least acceptable so that it gets more support. First 15 weeks, health and welfare of the mother, rape and incest. Trying to legislate abortion without restrictions is just stupid.

However, there are credible reasons to think abortion could upend a very bad electoral environment for Democrats.

Crypto

 Looks to be exactly what I - and many others - thought it was: a huge scam and pyramid scheme. 

My only hope is that it only takes down the rubes and not the whole economy. In fact, a crypto crash could plausibly slow inflation, I guess.

Fight The Culture Wars From The Middle

 The rhetorical excesses of "Defund the Police" or "Open Borders" embraced by a few primary candidates in 2020 has led the idea that the Democratic Party has raced to the left of the Berkley faculty. The actual positions of the Democrats on many of these issues is far more moderate than the GOP or the "popularist" critics make it out to be.

There is no question that Republicans think culture war issues surrounding CRT and MS-13 are winners for them. They think Trump and Glenn Youngkin won on those issues. I have serious doubts about that. I would argue that Youngkin won on school closures more than CRT. There is no question that these culture war issues motivate the GOP base, but that's not big enough to win elections.

We won't really know how the Dobbs decision overturning Roe will fare politically. It's unlikely to be popular. However, there are a bunch of other culture war issues that Democrats need to start running on. 

One of them is academic freedom. Mini-Trumps like Ron DeSantis are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in American politics. He's attacking Disney, which is another culture war issue that Democrats should pounce on, but his attack on academic freedom is one that Democrats need to talk about. Of course, "academic freedom" is a bit niche, in terms of framing. No one gives a shit about a University of Florida professor's work on non-binary genders in classical Greek literature. 

Instead, framing DeSantis' actions as "thought police" attacks on your student's teachers could work. Or the idea that Big Government wants to punish your daughter's teacher for what she says or thinks can switch the narrative. Plus, it ties in to the idea that these self-same "conservatives" want to monitor a woman's uterus.

Culture War Police State can be an all encompassing angle to attack the GOP, but you can't wait until Labor Day to start telling your story.

What He Said

 Jon Chait asks a question that I have been trying to figure out for a while now. Why hasn't Biden repealed Trump's tariffs to combat inflation? Chait correctly identifies inflation as the biggest problem facing Biden and the single greatest threat to his presidency and therefore arguably the future of American democratic governance.

There are two main sources of inflation: energy and the broad issue of "supply chains." Energy is largely beyond his control, unless he can assassinate Vladimir Putin and end the war in Ukraine. Some of the supply chain issues of the lingering pandemic are also beyond his control. He can't control China's lockdowns, for instance.

The tariffs were designed by Trump to "bring jobs back to America." The problem is that bringing jobs back isn't really the problem right now. Employment is high, wages are rising...there is no need to protect American workers, it's American consumers who need help. This is always the double edged sword of global trade: lower wages but also lower prices for consumer goods. Right now, lower wages are not the issue.

The idea that these tariffs are being held hostage to China Hawks seems weird because we still have tariffs (as far as I know) on Canadian lumber, because Trump hated that Ivanka got all hot for Justin Trudeau or something. But it appears that Biden actually INCREASED tariffs on Canadian lumber. Like...doubled them. Right in the middle of a housing crunch. Those tariffs are going down in August, but none of this makes any sense, if you're trying to fight inflation. 

Energy is the biggest driver of inflation right now, and there's not much Biden can do about that. Energy increases add cost to everything that is being transported to markets. But tariffs are making it even harder to bring prices under control.

There's an argument that Biden "overlearned" the lesson of 2008-9 of under-stimulating a recovery and has overstimulated the economy. You could argue that he has, in fact, overlearned the lesson of Clinton, Sanders and Trump - that free trade leads to populist demagogues. Right now we are seeing the limits of that demagoguery. 

Biden needs to address inflation now for it to have an effect on the midterms. There's not enough urgency for my taste.

What Is Chuck Schumer Doing?

 The Senate is poised to vote on a "message bill" codifying some sort of abortion right. It will fail to get cloture, and there is a chance Joe Manchin will vote against cloture, too.

I have to agree with Matthew Yglesias on this one. Right now, somehow preserving access to reproductive health services is the key issue. While the public broadly supports first trimester abortions with exceptions for health of the mother after that, there is way less support for a blanket right to an abortion. What's more, the Clinton Era rhetorical formulation of "safe, legal and rare" is also very popular. 

We are already seeing massive overreach by some Republicans. Louisiana's proposed law is a nightmare. Marsha Blackburn wants to restrict contraception to married people. Missouri wants to restrict people from traveling out of state for an abortion. These are radical, radical positions.

Democrats need to seize the middle ground here. They need to propose an untrammeled right to an abortion in the first trimester, with exceptions for the health of the mother after that. Most importantly, they need to try and create universal access to contraception so that we have fewer abortions.

There are genuinely "pro-life" people who oppose abortion, war and the death penalty. Most anti-choice Americans are enthusiastic supporters of war and the death penalty and efforts to go after contraception will only intensify. Isolate the "forced birth" movement from those opposed to second trimester abortions. If that means a more moderate bill that Manchin, Collins and Murkowski can support then THAT IS A GOOD THING.

UPDATE: Here is my "message bill."

- No restrictions on abortion during the first trimester
- After the first trimester, abortion allowed to protect the life and health of the mother.
- Universal access and funding for contraceptive care
- Universal access and funding for prenatal care

The GOP will vote against this, but that's the point. 

Happy Domestic Suppliers Of Infants Day

Brought to you by the Republican Party.

Whither Republican Women?

 Scott Lemieux gives Kathleen Parker a healthy dose of shit for her willful naivete surrounding Roe v Wade. As he notes, Parker quoted Susan Collins to say that Roe was safe. I saw a Facebook quote from my conservative cousin saying, basically, that abortion to remain safe, legal and rare, with a focus on rare. Which is fine for her.

As we have seen in places like Louisiana, GOP legislatures are absolutely going to take a maximalist approach to abortion. Now, Louisiana's law will die under Governor Edwards' veto pen, but there are states that are going to charge women with murder, you can count on it.

My guess is that many of these GOP women will find a way to wave this reality away. But not all.

Moderating

 Yglesias makes another pitch for "popularism" under a different guise. He analyzes the conflict between the DLC and more liberal elements of the party around the turn of the century.

I honestly do think he's right when it comes to advancing arcane social issue language as a policy agenda. What's more, I think the critical moment for same sex marriage was when they stopped calling it "same sex marriage" and started calling it "marriage equality." The basic idea of couching your agenda in widely held, common values is really important.

What's more, if you ask any committed Democrat right now what the central political issue facing the country, it is the Republican party's open embrace of authoritarianism, not it's ongoing embrace of revanchist racism. The latter is an issue, but the GOP largely says "we aren't racist" while openly embracing political illiberalism and the authoritarian party state.

If you believe that the GOP has gone "Full Orban" (and I think that's the reality) then you should absolutely push towards the center. Part of the appeal of Biden was that he was precisely the most moderate candidate in many ways. How could grandpa be a radical? 

Where I think Yglesias skips over the other reality is that the GOP had some success casting Biden as a Socialist who was going to defund the police. Biden explicitly said he was not going to defund the police. So the environment of misinformation and disinformation does actually matter. He skips over that because there's really nothing that can be done about Fox News. (I would also caution about reading too much into Trump's relative strong showing amongst Hispanics. There's a strong incumbency effect among most demographics.)

The other issue I would suggest is overblown is the idea that Democratic positions are largely unpopular. The GOP got some mileage out of fear-mongering CRT, but you can absolutely read too much into Glenn Youngkin's victory. I would wager it was more about keeping schools remote than teaching them that slavery was bad. In 1994, the NRA took credit for the GOP wave, which was really about the party realignment hitting the South. Same with CRT critics saying they flipped Virginia. Doubtful.

The pandemic and its knock-on effects are still the central issue that have people unhappy (and we can add the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent energy spikes to that list). Inflation and supply chain problems are real. (My son is complaining about how his favorite burrito place is understaffed and out of food. That matters SO much more to people's sense of how "things are" than whether Volkswagen running an ad with gay parents.)

I guess I broadly agree with Yglesias that a lot of socially liberal positions should be placed on the backburner to defend against an authoritarian GOP taking over Congress. Democracy is on the ballot, and while embracing trans representation is important, the recent abortion events have shown how important it is to control Congress. As bad as Joe Manchin is, he still votes for Biden's pro-choice judges. If Democrats lose control of the Senate, McConnell will not confirm ANY judges. So if you support trans rights, maybe now is not the time to say that this is your one issue and you won't vote in November if your demands aren't met. Meanwhile saying that "all people should be treated fairly and accepted for who they are" is a perfectly reasionable stance.

Where I disagree is whether this will matter at all, if the economy is still problematic.

Could Overturning Roe Tip These Senate Races?

 The Times has some polling about the relative support for Roe in various states. I think these numbers might be a bit old, and I imagine there will be some changes once the decision comes down in June.

Let's start where support for Roe exists, but is weakest: Missouri. Roe is barely above water there, but I feel confident that the Missouri GOP will nominate someone awful who might move the needle more. They gave us Todd Akin, then can give us some nutsack.

Next up is Georgia where abortion is roughly +2. Raphael Warnock is running for a full term, and he can likely win minority votes. Peeling off those suburban white women would be huge for him.

North Carolina is an interesting one, where abortion rights are +5. Richard Burr is retiring so it's an open seat like Missouri. I had real hopes that NC would flip in 2020, but I would be happy if it do so in November.

Here's a wild card: Oklahoma. Abortion is pretty popular there at +5. I wouldn't expect that to lead to a Democratic pick up, but that would be hilarious if Alito managed to flip Oklafuckinghoma purple.

Iowa is another state were abortion is largely positive at +7. Chuck Grassley is also ancient and likely non compos mentis. 

Ohio could be the key. Abortion polls at +10 making it a potential huge wedge issue. JD Vance is an odious authoritarian and largely unlikable guy and Tim Ryan has a legit shot at this, if he can play the abortion issue right.

Let's go to Wisconsin where abortion polls at +13,  and Ron Johnson is a simpering moron. You can't gerrymander the entire state, assholes.

Pennsylvania is another state with a competitive election and abortion polls at +13 there, too. 

Same with Arizona, where you have a fairly popular incumbent in Mark Kelly.

A real wildcard is Florida, where abortion polls at +18. Marco Rubio is a godbothering empty suit. Hopefully, Ron DeSantis and abortion combined can flip this cesspool of a state back on to dry land.

Abortion should help Lisa Murkowski hold off the lunatic fringe in Alaska (+25).

Nevada is considered a toss-up but abortion is polling at +32 there.

This is not to say that you can just chirp "pro choice" and waltz to electoral victory. I know that abortion rights activists won't like this, but "safe, legal and rare" remains a really appealing strategy in the wake of the wholesale assault on ALL abortion rights. "Rare" simply means more effective birth control (which the American Taliban are coming for next, mark my words).

I do think that you will find Mitch McConnell looking more fretful than usual is Alito and the Fascistic Four fully remove Roe's protections. 

Pundit Brain

 I haven't "argued" with Yglesias in a while but today he committed a classic pundit brain fallacy. He uses as his jumping off point the meme Elon Musk was throwing around about how the "Left" moved away from him and the "Right" stayed in the same place. This is absurd, of course, but Yglesias focused on how the policy portfolio of the Republican party has, in fact, shifted rightwards. He then falls for the typical "Red-Brown" nonsense about how Trump was secretly to Hillary Clinton's left because he didn't explicitly run on killing Social Security and Medicare. He also focuses on how McCain was a relative moderate on climate compared to Bush or Trump.

This is nonsense on a number of levels, but maybe the idea that "platforms" matter is the most nonsensical. Let's look at McCain's climate moderation. Yes, he ran on cap-and-trade, which qualifies as moderation. That was part of his "maverick" branding. He and Bush were to Romney and Trump's center on immigration. Some of this is simple geography, Bush and McCain were from areas with large Hispanic populations, Romney lives in a bubble of extreme wealth.

Of course, the real tell is that Trump won more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016 without having a platform at all. Yglesias has focused on what he calls popularism, which is sort of "don't do things I think are unpopular" but does have some merit, in terms of not committing a bunch of political own goals, like "Defund the Police" or "Open Borders." However, the idea that Trump was some economic moderate gives him way too much credit for measured political calculation. He tried to kill ACA (McCain, Murkowski and Collins helped save it). He slapped tariffs on goods that have contributed to inflation. He passed a series of regressive tax cuts to help the wealthy. 

Mostly, of course, he was a huge fucking bigot. He wasn't the "didn't use Latinx" sort of strawman bigot, but "Mexican immigrants are rapists from a shithole country" sort of bigot. He was a Birther. He was a sexist. He was the guy who was going to let you make "Dumb Blonde" jokes at work again.

Oh, and he was probably the most corrupt president in history.

The idea that Trump won votes by moderating GOP positions like Paul Ryan's evisceration of the welfare state has...some merit? Trump certainly energized a type of WWC voter that typically sits out elections, but was turned off by the more plutocratic elements of the GOP. But the idea that Cletus was analyzing policy positions is absurd.

Mitt Romney lost, because he was personified - justifiably - as a vulture capitalist from Bain. Obama was weakened by the soft recovery, but also the huge racism typified by the Tea Party backlash. Obama gave a bunch of WWC people healthcare and they still hated him because...well, you know.

Trump has no policy positions beyond his instinctive grasp of his fellow racist's grievances. Trump is not programmatic, his splenetic. He's distracted by every chryon rolling underneath Sean Hannity's hate fest. 

It would be nice to believe that American voters vote because of a reasoned analysis of which candidate or party would most improve their lives and the lives of their fellow Americans. 

But that would be bullshit.

Wonky progressives believe that we are voting based on policy, but more often than not, we adopt policy positions based on our partisan identifiers. We prize coalitional politics (something Yglesias extols in other places) over factional preferences. 

People vote their feelings, which is why continued inflation is bad for Democrats, but it's also why overturning Roe is bad for Republicans.  

The Dog That Caught The Car

 By all accounts, the Supreme Court is about to overturn Roe v Wade. The Very Online folks are of course full of hot takes about how this is all the Democrats' fault for not

- abolishing the filibuster to expand the Court
- sitting out the 2016 election, because Bernie didn't get the nomination
- being better at hardball politics
- not somehow forcing Judge Ginsburg to retire sooner
- all/none of the above

This is, of course, a rank example of Murc's Law. With the exception of Joe Manchin - who votes to approve Biden and Obama's pro-choice judges - every Senate Democrat would pass a bill to codify Roe into national law. Let's say that they could somehow overturn the Court's ruling with a bill that would pass 51-50 by getting rid of the filibuster (somehow) by creating a national law that makes abortion legal.

This Court would simply rule that law unconstitutional.

The central problem facing America today are its antiquated, anti-democratic institutions. Chief among these are the Senate and thereby the Electoral College and the Supreme Court. Three of the Justices who are about to overturn 50 years of established law were appointed by a man who failed to win the popular vote and then launched a coup attempt four years later. Two more were nominated by a man who initially won the presidency while losing the popular vote, but who at least had the self-knowledge to wait until he won his "mandate" in 2004 before stacking the Court.

And stacking the Court is very much the long term plan of social conservatives and theocrats since the early 1970s. They have been relentless in this goal and while there have been "institutionalists" on the Court like Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts, the current Gang of Five who are going to overturn Roe are sufficiently inoculated from the public to do whatever the hell they want. I don't necessarily see the angle to overturn the precedents in Obergefell or Lawrence, I also see no reason why they would stop there. I'm guessing that we will overturn Abington this session, too.

The focus will be on Roe, though and rightfully so. This has been an established right for 50 years and it has been the organizing principle of the religious Right for the same time. It has led to the unlikely alliance of conservative Catholics and Evangelicals that upended old political alliances and created the rise of the New Right. The DC politicians mostly couldn't give a shit about abortions - they were probably paying for their mistresses abortions  - but that's where the votes are, and that's what they wanted to do.

By the end of June, maybe half the country will have made abortion illegal thanks to the Court.

Here's where I wonder/hope that things pivot.

Polling on abortion is a bit dependent on how you word it, but Gallup has the following numbers: 

- Abortion should be legal under certain circumstances - 48%
- Abortion should be legal under any circumstances - 32%
- Abortion should be illegal in all circumstances - 19%

Pew words it differently. They find 59% say it should be legal in all or most cases, whereas 39% says it should be illegal in all or most cases.

No matter which way you examine it, there is a supermajority support for abortion with some restrictions. The laws making their way through Red State legislatures are incredibly restrictive, including bans on abortion even in cases of rape and incest. These are unpopular with the median voter even in places like Texas.

For decades, the GOP has been able to make rhetorical hay from the abortion issue without ever having to actually give the theocratic Christianists what they want. They can decry the death of the "preborn" (Jesus...) without having to anger the broad middle of the country that supports reasonable access to reproductive choice.

Now, the GOP has no cover. The theocrats have "won" but at what cost?

The dynamics leading in to the midterm elections are not great for Democrats at the moment. Inflation remains a concern and energy prices are not going to come down anytime soon. The economy is growing but in ways that discomfort in certain sectors.

We know that the GOP's primary attack angles have and will be culture war grievances. They are planning to win the suburbs back with CRT bullshit and Mexican caravans. This moment, however, could tip the culture wars more broadly in the Democrats' favor. This blanket ban on abortion could energize those who see this GOP as responsible for attacks on women's autonomy over their own bodies.

I've long held that the institutional GOP exploits culture war grievances to win elections so that they can reward the rich with tax cuts and deregulation. Trump ripped that open and made the grievances the point and the policy. Now, the bill could be coming due. The Chrisitianists are the dog that caught the car. Let's see how that works out for them.

Mitch McConnell, Super Genius

 There is a long running presumption that the GOP - and by extension, the most important long term leader, Mitch McConnell - is super-terrific at politics, because they are so good at winning narrow elections. The actual reason is that our Congress - and therefore our Electoral College - is extremely biased in favor of rural regions of the country.

Back in 2016, everyone knew that Trump would be a disaster for the party, only to discover that the average GOP and GOP-leaning voters was every bit as racist and sexist as Democrats had been saying they were for years. As a result, Trump won the most unlikely of victories, but eking out narrow victories in the "Blue Wall."

After January 6th, Trump and Trumpism should have been done. However, the Democrats offered the GOP an escape hatch: impeach Trump from power and prohibit him from running from federal office ever again. McConnell passed.

I have no idea what will happen in November. I'm still cautiously optimistic about the Senate, because I think so much partisan voting is baked in to the results. The House chances took a hit when the NY Supreme Court declared their new congressional map contrary to the state constitution, in the sort of unilateral disarmament that people decry about the elected Democratic Party all the time.

Anyway, if Democrats can hold on to or increase their Senate, while possibly losing the House, and the economy largely levels out in the next year, then Biden and Democrats should feel pretty comfortable heading into a rematch with Trump. Biden vs DeSantis could be trickier, simply because Americans are tired of the gerontocracy. 

If McConnell had helped convict Trump in his second impeachment, the GOP could begin to move beyond the chaos of the Trump years and offer DeSantis's "Competent Trumpism." Instead they are married to this moldering fool.

Once Upon A Time

 A number of conservative students at our school had a somewhat legitimate beef with the outside speakers being overwhelmingly "liberal." They wanted to bring in a conservative voice to balance the roster, but they were not suggesting we bring in some MAGA nonsense (this was around the time of the 2016 election). One of the student's parents knew a guy whose children had applied to our schools (in fact, I interviewed their daughter briefly) and was a prominent conservative voice.

That person was Tucker Carlson.

At the time, Carlson was simply MAGA-curious, the bow-tied scion of William F. Buckley who knew how to pander to the white supremacist crowd without ever actually putting on the pointy hood. Since then, he has become, as the Times piece notes, the pre-eminent voice at Fox, by becoming its most racist voice. He has moved from the more coded language to actively using the language of white supremacists.

Tucker is a preppy shithead who struggled for years to find a place for himself on cable news. He bounced from CNN to MSNBC (!) until landing at Fox. Like so many "conservative" voices, he was like a junky who starts out just doing a little Vicodin on a Friday night to take the edge off and two years later, he's scoring heroin and fentanyl in exchange for hand jobs in an Arby's parking lot. By embracing what the "conservative movement" always was - a fear fueled grievance about uppity dark people and women who don't know their place - he has become the star he always wanted to be. 

Last night was "nerd prom," the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Fox News was there. The fact that there was undoubtedly some pearl clutching about gibes about Fox personalities acting as Trump's press operation just goes to show how broken some of the brains in our media are. They circle the wagons around the very people who are working to undermine democracy. This piece in Politico reads like farce.

Tucker Carlson realized that he could make bank by becoming a racist carnival barker, scaring old people about the Brown People under their beds. And he won't pay a price for it.