We Are Rewarding Lunatics

 Dana Milbank makes a connection between the bizarre UFO hearings and the general behavior of the GOP caucus. First, let's get the aliens shit out of the way. Interstellar travel requires remarkably advanced technology or the discovery of physics that we have no idea about. As one physicist put it, we would have to accept that these alien lifeforms were so incredibly advanced to master faster than light travel - which under our understanding of physics is impossible - and then, after traversing the trillions of miles to come here specifically, crash when they got here. Amazingly capable...becomes a teenaged drunk driver when they get to earth. 

The lead witness for the circus offered no evidence.  None. It was highly inflammatory, including accusations of murder by the government and, wait for it, the Pope. There was not, however, a shred of evidence to back this up.

The fucking GOP ate it up. Why? I suppose they will embrace anything that suggests a dark "deep state" conspiracy. The general philosophy of the Reagan years was that you needed to restrain public spending to let the private sector flourish. I think that turned out to be largely bullshit, but it's not completely bullshit. The modern GOP has taken that idea to "all government is bad" and we need to destroy it. 

That is how the Chaos Caucus would govern America if they ever got their hands back on power in the White House, and that is exactly what Trump and his minions are promising. They would hollow out expertise and experience because of the "deep state" that makes your weather forecasts and processes your Social Security checks and inspects your food for salmonella. That's why they are going to shut down the government again at the end of September.

I have zero patience for anarchists, whether they be left wing poseurs running around in their back turtlenecks or right wing nihilists who millions of our countrymen want to put in charge of governing.

Milbank goes on to note that this same crew of circus clowns is preparing to impeach Joe Biden. The actual charges are unknown at this point, because fuck facts. The basic idea of empirical reasoning that has governed civilization since the Enlightenment is discredited as being a tool of the coastal elites. You've impeached and indicted our Lord and Savior, Donald Trump, so we will impeach your president. We don't actually need evidence of a crime, beyond the fact that Biden is president.

Saturday, I ruminated on the tragedy and possible solutions to the fact that we consign the mentally ill in this country to live under overpasses. I did not offer "electing them to Congress" as a possible solution.

Impervious

 Among the more interesting sociological developments of recent years has been the Cult of the Tech-Bro. The nature of venture capitalism is that if you have a lot of money, you can make a lot of money. For some in Silicon Valley, that meant their creation of a "killer app" enriched them to the point where they could gain further riches just off the wealth they had already accrued. For others, it just helped that they inherited a South African emerald mine.

What is clearly not true is the idea that Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires are some sort of ubermensch. If they actually are tech engineers, they have that idiot savant characteristic of really knowing how to design software, but aren't really up on how to design human community. If they are just wealthy people making more money in a target-rich environment, they have the same borderline sociopathy that drives most of the super-rich.

The spectacular implosion of Elon Musk and the literal implosion of Titan should be enough to disabuse people that these folks are anything other than money magnets. They aren't imbued with brilliance or profound insights into the human condition.

Yet, you have an entire Musk-cult that extends in various permutations and forms of worship to other people like actual vampire Peter Thiel. 

Back in the Gilded Age, there was a minister named Russell Conwell who preached the Acres of Diamonds sermon. Here is the most famous excerpt:

I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich ... The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly ... ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men. ... I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins ... is to do wrong. ... Let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings.

Right there we can see a religious fetishization of wealth and the wealthy. This sermon came out in the era of the misnamed Social Darwinism. 

The idea that the possession of money makes you better than other people is simultaneously one of the most American and anti-American ideas I can think of it. What should be obvious is that having money does not, in fact, make you better than other people.

So why is that so many people who don't have crazy money seem to genuflect before those that do? Why do we fall to our knees before the Golden Calf, when it's pretty clearly just gold paint?

Rolling Tragedy

 This is one of those articles that makes the NY Times indispensable. It's a fair look at the combination of homelessness and fentanyl use that is eroding Portland, OR's sense of itself.

We were just out in Portland last month, and I kinda fell in love with it. We did see homeless people, but no more than in San Francisco or Seattle. The temperate climate makes homelessness more feasible, as you don't have to contend with the extremes of heat and cold that you do elsewhere.

The real issue though is how various policies interact to create a humanitarian crisis. Just a sampling of policies that helped create homelessness:

- The decision to close mental asylums and treat people from home with medications. Once you lose your home, maintaining medications becomes almost impossible.
- The long term erosion of the safety net means more poor people. The line between poor and homeless is porous and constantly shifting.
- NIMBY zoning laws making it harder to create multifamily housing that could bring down housing costs. 
- Once you're "out of doors" it's easier to fall into abusive drug habits. Because many of the homeless carry pre-existing trauma and have few resources to fall back on to begin with, the ability to self-medicate with opioids replaces healthier choices.
- A certain idealistic blindness among progressives that assumes - as one woman in the article puts it - that people respond only to carrots and not to sticks.
- The general trend to legalize or decriminalize drugs makes them more available to the people who have the fewest resources to deal with addictive behaviors.

As the article asserts, fentanyl has supercharged this crisis. It's so cheap and so powerful, it mimics the crack cocaine and meth crises of previous decades. 

Ultimately, though, all of those policies were created by people and could be changed by people. At this point, that won't solve the addiction problems that turn the homeless into what can almost be described as zombies. There's no such thing as a "former addict" so any changes that might result in positive outcomes will always been tenuous.  

The overall number of homeless people is actually sort of small at less than 500,000 people in a country of 334,000,000 people. They are mostly concentrated in a handful of cities that allow them access to at least some services. Still, their obvious misery and the impact they have on others make them a crisis that requires some actual effort to at least deal with some of the policy impacts that created this issue in the first place.

Solutions? I don't know, but I'd start here:

- Portland's pod cities that are managed by the non-homeless seem important. The idea of self-organizing tent cities assumes that the homeless are capable of creating self-governing entities. The large number of addicts and mentally ill people should render this idea absurd.

- Involuntary commitment for mental illness and addiction. Not prison but some form of assessment and treatment program. This, obviously, would be very, very expensive. It's odd that these rich mega-churches don't step up and support this. Jesus and all that.

- Transitional housing that allows those who are managing their addiction or mental health issues to get out of the pods and into real housing before entering the private housing market.

- More housing. Lots of progressive activists (and Yglesias) will suggest that this is at the root of the problem, but that seems like bullshit to me. There is a negative feedback loop surrounding losing a roof over your head and substance abuse, but it's pretty clear that most of the homeless have pre-existing trauma or incapacities that accelerate and amplify those issues. Still, cheaper housing would help.

My wife and I are trying to figure out where to retire to. The first question is "city or country". As long as "city" includes some accumulation of human misery that answer seems pretty clear.

This Again

 Yes, Joe Biden is old. He has a speech impediment and his gait reflects his age. I certainly understand why people would be concerned about his age, but as Josh Marshall points out, speculation about him not running is just stupid.

Biden has been a remarkably effective president, given the polarization of our country and the loss of control of the House. Given the wholesale obstruction of the GOP on a host of fronts - replacing Feinstein on the Judiciary, Tuberville holding up promotions, etc. - he's managed to sneak things through even the filibuster.

But, yeah, he's old. If the economic situation persists, he should be presiding over a booming economy, relative peace and most of all, he's not Donald Trump. Incumbents usually win, unless something awful happens or the party splits. (This is why the No Labels and RJK, Jr shit is worrisome.) What's more, Trump is almost as old as Biden, so it's not like Trump - whose brain is already Swiss cheese - can make a credible case on the issue of age. He will, I mean, he's Trump, but he looks like a boiled sack of meat.

Yes, I would be more comfortable if Biden's Vice President was more broadly liked than Kamala Harris, as she suffers from the same not-so-latent misogyny that Hillary Clinton did.

We are now about 14 months away from the election(!). Every data point suggests it will be Biden v Trump. If it is, and the economy is still humming along, I think Biden wins every state he did in 2020 plus North Carolina and maybe even Florida and Texas.

They Don't Know The Music

 Ron DeSantis' self-immolation as a candidate has been fun to watch. He's always been a mean-spirited homunculus dating back to his time in Congress. The series of public humiliation of one of the worst retail politicians you could hope to see outside a laboratory is just fun.

But what does this tell us about the GOP electorate in the Trump Era?

I did not and do not think Trump is "funny" but there were people who did and do. This is part of the "take him seriously but not literally" crowd. He's just riffing and joking when he says that cities are full of carnage. DeSantis has no sense of humor. None. So, he can't even get the joke that is the RFK, Jr. campaign. 

Saying mean and hateful things and then retreating with a "I was just joking. Jeez, typical humorless leftists!" is a long held tactic of authoritarians, as they attempt to get a foothold in democratic politics. The actual Nazis used it all the time. It starts out as a joke, they get swatted on the nose, they say they were only joking around, then before too long, the joke has embedded itself into the political discourse. Think about Trump's wall that Mexico was going to pay for.

The Mini-Trumps running around the GOP don't get the snarky sarcasm that Trump and other proto-fascist politicians use. What's more, I don't think Trump has it anymore, either. I think the crushing avalanche of indictments is damaging his already fragile mental equilibrium. His social media posts are more unhinged. His speeches more ranting. What's more, for many independents, 2017-21 was not funny or fun.

It's one of the reasons why I'm bullish on a post-Trump politics, though not anytime soon. It will require the GOP to get their clock cleaned over a few electoral cycles, and I don't think polarization will allow that. Still, the actuarial table is on the Democrat's side.

Conservative Leninism

 Jon Chait runs through the latest "idea" from the Rightists in America. The basic idea is that the "Woke Mob of Leftists" has subverted America through a "Long March through the institutions". For those with a passing familiarity with world history, the Long March was the Chinese Communist Party's wandering struggle through China that created a hardened cadre of leaders and soldiers who would ultimately win the Chinese civil war in 1949. Linking the fact that you can see same sex and interracial couples in Volkswagen ads with Maoist revolutionaries makes a certain amount of sense, if you think that treating minorities with decency and equality is the same as communism.

The "idea" is that the Cultural Left has burrowed its way into power via the college educated and then proceeded to poison America with ideas like "lynching is bad, actually" and "LGBTQ people deserve equal treatment." There is a superficial plausibility to the theory, as the culture really has moved away from patriarchal, Christianist white supremacy. (Insert Barbie reference here.)

The chilling implications of this theory can be seen in Florida. If - as these bigots with bid vocabularies believe - the institutions of the Deep State, Hollywood and Corporate America are corrupted by the Long March of Leftism, then the only proper recourse is to use the power of the state to destroy "Cultural Marxism" in all its forms. This leads to DeSantis' jihad against Disney and it makes up the chilling plan to use a Trump second term to hollow out the federal government.

Chait acknowledges that they have a point that many institutions no longer cater to conservative beliefs, but he also points out the basic flaws in the theory.

The first is that they dramatically overstate the extent that institutions have re-ordered themselves to become "woke". There was a lot of caterwauling by conservatives in 2022 that Putin's military was butch and macho and would destroy America's woke military. Of course, then Russia face planted in Ukraine and America's JV weapons were a big part of that. So the fact that Raytheon did a DEI statement isn't exactly the end of the fucking world.

The second flaw is that a lot of the stuff that people like Christopher Rufo and the Claremont Institute scream about was a direct result of the George Floyd protests within the context of the Trump presidency. Yes, there were some voice that talked about "defunding the police" but they were typically fringe, and Democrats have largely abandoned those positions.  

All those DEI statements and training were actually pretty pointless. I remember going through them, and for the most part, they were preaching to the choir. I can think of very little that I experienced or was taught that would change the mind of an actual bigot. There was some interesting stuff on non-binary and non-gender conforming stuff that I wasn't really clear on, but the 3-4 hours of training could've been 30 minutes. I was already sympathetic, so I was receptive to learning about it, but if you were resistant to thinking about gender that way, this training wasn't going to change your mind. 

So much of DEI stuff - including things our school did in the face of actual acts of racism - is just window dressing. We had the n-word scrawled in various places over the past few years, usually around MLK Day. We do the same things every time and it doesn't move the needle much at all, because a year or two later it happens again. But, hey! We did the stuff you're supposed to do! The same is obviously true for corporations that create a DEI position, do a weekend retreat and then promptly forget about it. Is this really a Long March through the Institutions?

The final flaw is that in accusing the Left of being on a Maoist Cultural Revolution/Long March, the Right then adopts flawed Leninist modes of thinking. I'll just let Chait lay it out:

Both tomes brim with militant sloganeering language exhorting their allies to take merciless, decisive action against the enemy. “We like to say that one must govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule,” writes Milikh in one essay.

Rufo displays even more clearly Leninist thought patterns. Politics is a struggle of willpower, and the forces of his side (the counterrevolution) “must ruthlessly identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the revolution, then construct its own logic for overcoming it … The task is to meet the forces of revolution with an equal and opposite force.” Having convinced himself of the success of the Marxist left, he believes the right must fashion itself as a mirror image.

Rufo’s self-conception as a reverse Leninist, agitating for his anti-revolution, even extends to constructing his own dialectical analysis. “The working class is more anti-revolutionary today than at any time during the upheaval,” he posits. “Their quality of life has plummeted into a revolving nightmare of addiction, violence and incarceration.” The proletariat in Joe Biden’s Amerika, immiserated into radicalization, is ready to take to the barricades.

By starting from a presumption that this is an existential threat to American values, authoritarian assholes like Rufo and Milikh can justify their own existential threat to America. There is no political figure more steeped in this thinking than Ron DeSantis. As a former Freedumb Caucus asshole, DeSantis is already neck deep in lunatic theories about Joe Biden being a closet Marxist.

What I think we might be seeing though is a retreat from the effectiveness of this sort of politics. I'm more optimistic than most on the Left.

I believe that this sort of state intrusion on people's lives that we see in DeSantis' Florida is tremendously unappealing to a sizable majority of Americans. Sure, there's a hard core of about 35-40% of American voters who eat up this nonsense, but for a lot of people, the idea that Trump was going to try and end American democracy in 2016 seemed hysterical. It's not so far fetching after 1/6 and Dobbs and the rhetoric that emanates from the fever swamps of the Right Wing Noise Machine.

There is a theory in American politics about "thermostatic elections". The basic idea is that after Democrats win, Republicans win the midterms and vice versa. This has largely been true since the 1980s, but it wasn't always true. From 1896-1932 there was a long period of Republican dominance and from 1932-1980, there was a long period of Democratic dominance.  This thermostatic process is, I believe, a product of the increasingly ideological nature of the two parties. Prior to the 1970s, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. No more. 

With the adoption by the Right of the idea that "Cultural Marxism" (not a thing, by the way) is an existential threat that must be met by rolling back LGBTQ and women's reproductive rights and weaponizing the state against Disney etc., they will hopefully continue to reinforce the idea that they are authoritarian threats to the very idea of democratic governance. If that happens, the GOP could be discredited at least at the federal level for years to come.

In which case - hilariously - the sort of deep cultural change that Rufo and DeSantis dread will cement itself further into American life.

American Industrial Policy

 Erik Loomis - whom I rarely agree with, but enjoy reading for that reason - points out that America is re-industrializing without a real industrial "policy." Industrial policy is broadly a legacy of mercantilist economics and is popular in neo-mercantilist economies like China's. Basically, the government either sets conditions or nudges or subsidizes certain industries or outcomes. The US government decided that having most of our computer chips come from East Asia was actually a huge problem, so we are now subsidizing and promoting chip manufacturing here in the states. That's industrial policy.

Beyond that, we are unlikely to see the government get involved in saying, for instance, that the US should produce X metric tons of aluminum. That's simply not part of our economic DNA and it smacks of central planning.

There are two models of industrial policy that are instructive. One is China's and the other is Germany's.

China's has obviously proven amazingly capable of shepherding a country from abject poverty to an industrial colossus. The so-called "Beijing Consensus" was an answer to the Washington Consensus on free markets and free trade. Beijing says that you can plan your way to prosperity, and you don't have to bother with that pesky democracy. There are some very real questions about how sustainable China's industrial policy is. The "ghost cities" and the looming demographic crisis in China suggest that the inefficiencies of the Beijing model can only be masked for so long.

Germany, however, has done a better job of wedding industry and labor into a tripartite coalition to guide -together - the German economy.

America simply isn't going to go down either road. At best, we will give tax breaks and subsidies to certain industries, maybe guaranteed markets, like with renewable energy.

Young Incel Fascists Of America

 Ron DeSantis' epic fail of a campaign would be funny, if it weren't so disturbing. Right now, what's interesting about DeSantis is not his run for president, but how he and his campaign think he can get there. 

What's clear is that at least one, possibly two, of DeSantis' younger campaign workers is part of the on-line "edgelord" bullshit surrounding Nazism and incel crap. These are people deeply locked into epistemological closure, where they think they and their coterie of trolls constitutes some sort of mass movement and not just the ravings of a handful of sociopaths.

Yglesias made the absurd claim that the staffers and activists in both parties tend to be young, college educated city dwellers, which tended to tilt actual policy leftwards, as that demographic tends to be more liberal or "mainstream". While his statement was factually accurate about the staffers, the reality is that there are a lot of incredibly toxic young men going to college and then working in GOP politics.

Which of course brings me to Barbie.

Ben Shapiro - perpetually enraged 70 year old man trapped in the body of a 30 year old hobbit - has declared jihad against Barbie, because it's anti-male. That would be - unsurprisingly - a very superficial way to view that movie. The theme of the movie would seem to be the way society shapes our vision of ourselves can be unrealistic and toxic. Part of the plot involves Ken importing patriarchy into Barbieworld, and it turns out it makes him miserable, too. That's not an attack on men, but on the way we can limit ourselves by the way we conceive of ourselves through the lens of societal expectations.

Yes, that is what the Barbie movie is about.

But the petulant pissing and moaning from people like Shapiro does land on fertile ears among a lot of young men. Hell, I feel like my main job as a parent right now is making sure those ideas don't infect our sons. And those bitter incel type can connect online and create a "community" the way Nazis used to sites like Stormfront.

Anyway, Ron DeSantis bet his campaign that that type of shitheel was the key to his victory. It's similar to the way Jason Aldean wanted to appeal not only to people who want to lynch BLM protestors, but those who would buy his record as soon as the "woke mob" pointed out that it was some pretty racist shit.

Dog whistle politics were concerning when Lee Atwater pumped that filth into American politics, but not we have air raid siren politics, and I just hope it fails miserably beyond just DeSantis' campaign.

How About Some Good News?

 The US' CO2 emission per capita are now as low as they have been since WWI. Now, because there are way more Americans, that means America is producing more CO2 today than they did in 1914, but it's a telling metric for the increased use of renewable and conservation efforts. Globally, we could be approaching "peak carbon emissions". Now, because there's no such thing as unalloyed good news, this does not mean an imminent end to the climate crisis. We are still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and what's already up there isn't going away anytime soon.

What's more, this increase in energy efficiency and carbon neutral energy has not come with the trade-off in growth that Republicans keep yammering about. The US economy is kicking ass.

We still have a ways to go on carbon reduction - both in reducing what we produce and pulling what's already there out of the atmosphere. It kills me that in the midst of a very real crisis, two of the most efficient and promising forms of electrical generation - nuclear and geothermal - aren't being leveraged to create an overabundance of electricity. Abundant carbon-free electricity can be used to create hydrogen which can be used in industrial processes and power machines that can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

It's going to be hard to turn the ship around, but it's not impossible and too often climate doomerism actually creates a lack of motivation.

He Never Learns

 Yglesias is back on his shit. He continues to think that policy drives votes, when it's pretty clear - especially in the GOP - that votes drive policy. Sure, Trump understood that Paul Ryan's austerity to Social Security and Medicare was politically toxic, but that's hardly a deep insight. As Yglesias mentions, Trump did not arise from the conservative movement and it's terrible policy ideas.

Trump arose from the right's perpetual sense of grievance. He embodies it in his personality and his policies largely follows suit. Yglesias says that DeSantis' unwavering anti-immigrant policies are somehow more stringent than Trump's, but I don't think that's substantively true. What Trump understands that DeSantis doesn't is that there are "good" immigrants and "bad" immigrants. Cubans and Venezuelans who hate liberals are good. Everyone else - but especially Muslims and Black people - are bad. 

Trump fundamentally doesn't "believe" in anything, so that seems to give him a veneer of flexibility. But that's just not the right way to look at a guy who's the walking personification of Cleek's Law That actually makes him quite rigid, once he knows what will upset the libtards. 

People - especially the Trumpenproletariat - are not thinking about the nuances of policy. That's a pundit's fallacy.

Own Goal To End All Own Goals

 Britain is becoming a poor country. Back before Margaret Thatcher, Britain was also on its way to becoming a poor country. Then neoliberalism, with all its problems and successes, reinvigorated the markets and Britain integrated with the rest of Europe with the founding of the EU.  Britain's standard of living is about to slip below Mississippi's and it's already been surpassed by Slovenia, and soon Poland.

This idiot, of course, thinks it's time for some more Thatcherite nonsense. Too many freeloaders on the dole. Austerity now!

The real reason the UK is in the shitter (and frankly the EU as a whole looks shakier than the US) is because of fucking Brexit. Divorcing a large economy from the common market of the EU was always predicted to lead to economic pain. Hell, I'd argue that a third of the economic pain America has seen from inflation was a product of Trump's immigration policies. 

Brexit was so incredibly, incredibly stupid when it was happening. Now, as we survey the wreckage, I hope we can learn that abandoning free trade zones would be calamitous, though there is no reason why we can't tweak them and reform them.

Idiocy.

Stepping On Rakes

Barbara Tuchman defined folly as governments pursuing policy that many knew to be wrong in the moment. You had Edmund Burke in Parliament explaining that British imperial policy in North America would force the colonies to become independent. You had numerous defense officials who knew - at the time - that Vietnam and Iraq were going to be catastrophes. 

Republicans seem to be in the grips of folly when it come to abortion rights. Every "normal" political rule about midterm elections, economic conditions, presidential approval ratings...all of them have been confounded at the actual elections by people repelled by the GOP's assault on abortion rights.

What's more, the news about women dying or suffering horribly because of these bans will accelerate, precisely as the election nears. Meanwhile, the Chaos Caucus continues to force "messaging bills" that reinforce the Democrats messaging: Republicans are coming for your reproductive rights and liberties.

The GOP's position as the Party of Tax Cuts For the Rich is not terribly popular. Where they have succeeded is in depicting themselves as the Party of Liberty - guns, taxes, bigotry. The current crop of Culture Warrior bullshit is anathema to the idea that they are the Party of Small Government. 

This Is Awesome

 Lionel Messi has a very strong case to be the best soccer player of all time. He has won league and European championships, the Ballon d'Or seven times and recently added a World Cup title. He's 36 years old and decided to head to semi-retirement in Major League Soccer. He seems like a genuinely good guy who turned down millions from the Saudis to come and energize the MLS.

Last night, he made his debut for Inter Miami and won the game in stoppage time with a perfectly placed free kick.

What was so awesome about was not the consummate skill that he's shown for decades of playing in Spain and France.

It was the celebration. These games shouldn't mean anything to someone who's won everything the game can throw at him. 

Still joyous.

I'm Not Buying It

 There's a typical media shitshow brewing over Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town."

The song is typical chest-thumping country machismo, sung by a millionaire who grew up comfortable. Ya know...authentic Nashville. The song itself is mildly problematic, but the music video took it to the next level. You could certainly interpret the song as having a pro-lynching angle, but the lyrics could be read another way, too. 

The video, however, features Floyd protest unrest and Aldean performs in front of a Tennessee courthouse that was the site of a lynching. 

Subtle.

Progressive country stars have called Aldean out, and of course Aldean - a Trump supporter - has vehemently defended the video and song. As a result, the song will become even more popular, as a segment of MAGAdom buy multiple copies of the song to "pwn the libs."

Let's assume that Aldean didn't know that he was singing a song that glorifies vigilante justice in front of the site of the lynching of an 18 year old boy. A normal person living in normal times would apologize and re-edit or re-shoot the video to use a different backdrop, because presumably everyone knows that lynching teenagers is bad.

In the world that Donald Trump ushered in seven years ago, if you do something bad - even horrific - you never apologize. You revel in the opprobrium leveled at you by people who think "woke" things like lynching teenagers is bad. The fact that certain people are appalled that you seem to endorse lynching is just "cancel culture" that you ride to increased sales, because you've been canceled so mcuh.

So, yeah, I think Aldean knew exactly what he was doing and where he was filming. Or at least someone associated with the choices in the video knew. 

The backlash was the marketing strategy.

I go back and forth about whether it would've been better if Trump had never run for president. Obviously, the Courts are a tragedy, but let's assume Generic Republican won against an unpopular Clinton. You lose the Courts anyway. So what did Trump accomplish? He coarsened everything about American civic life (culture life was already pretty coarse) and made apologies and contrition toxic to a third of the American people.

I think Trump's toxicity has had a profoundly important effect on the prospects of the Republican Party and not in a good way. (2024 will prove me right or wrong.) If we are entering into a generation of Democratic dominance caused by young people be repulsed by Trumpism, then the pain of Trump could be worth it to usher in a period of Democratic dominance.

But this toxic relationship with unabashed refusals to apologize or accommodate public norms is really, really bad. And it will outlive Trump.

They Are About To Own This

 Yesterday, I suggested that Democrats basically assert that everyone in the GOP is in favor of January 6th. Let them defend the indefensible, and don't give a shit if fact checkers give it 2,5 Pinocchios. 

Well, I guess we won't to worry about the fact checkers, because it sounds like McCarthy is going to lead the House Republicans over the cliff. He's apparently planning on forcing a vote on expunging Trump's two impeachments. The Politco piece suggests that he might struggle to actually get the votes, which would be hilarious. He forces his members to take a suicidal vote throwing their arms around Trump surrounding January 6th, just as Trump is about to be indicted and the evidence of his guilt made public.

What a moron.

The Millstone Around Their Necks

 For all the early horse-race polling that shows 2024 as neck-and-neck, the reality is that the GOP would prefer for just about anyone to be the nominee but Trump. And that ain't happening. As Josh Marshall notes, January 6th is categorically different from the tax and fraud charges in NY or the secret documents case in Florida. January 6th is - along with Dobbs - the millstone around the GOP's necks. They have to face the fact that most Americans were horrified by the assault on the Capitol and oppose the abortion restrictions being put in place across America. 

This leads to comical interviews like Jake Tapper's interview of Ron DeSantis where DeSantis just refuses to answer the question in front of him. 

"Should Trump be charged in January 6th if there is evidence of his guilt?
"Argle bargle, Alvin Bragg."

"Would you sign a six week abortion ban, like you did in Florida?"
"Democrats want abortion on demand up until delivery."

My hope is that someone - I could see the Lincoln Project embrace this - simply assert that the GOP wants to overthrow the Constitution and ban all abortions. Is that accurate? Who gives a fuck. Let them defend January 6th and Dobbs up until election day.

Selling Bidenomics

 Jon Chait points out something that seems pretty clear from the historical record: there is a lag between the actual economic recovery and whether the "in party" gets credit for it. He points to Clinton's re-election in '96 as an example of journalists looking at the mixed economic measures of 1993-95 and extrapolating them into '96, despite the fact that we now know that the economy was starting to supercharge during those years.

Think about the jobs report that comes out every month. Those numbers are almost always revised several months later when we have better data. So there are two things at play. First, journalists - especially economic journalists - tend not to notice change until it's already happened. Second, voters are wary that what feels like good news is actually good news after living through tough times.

What does this mean for 2024? I do believe that this election will likely turn on Dobbs and January 6th, but a crappy economy would complicate that. It would give Republicans a chance to deflect and divert from the fact that they are a party of theocratic authoritarians. 

If we are in a broadly shared prosperity by next fall, Biden and Democrats could do very well. Of course, Republicans won't believe that we are, but that's OK. Democrats aren't getting any crossover votes from entrenched Republicans. 

The question is one of a disconnect. The White House had decided to go all-in on Bidenomics. They feel that we are entering a period of robust and widespread growth and they want to take credit for it, the way Obama did when he coopted the epithet "Obamacare". If people feel pretty good about their economic situation, then this message will resonate with voters, especially swing voters. It will also make Trump's increasingly unhinged ranting about the US being a failed state look bizarre. Conversely, if the economy stalls and sputters for some reason, Democrats will look out of touch.

Generally speaking, I will trust the data and instincts of the Biden team over the drooling ravings of Mango Mussolini.

Third Party Fuckery

 I am struggling to see a path for Donald Trump to win election in 2024 that does not involve extreme levels of fuckery. The combination of Dobbs and January 6th/multiple indictments just feels like independents and some Republicans will just be exhausted by the idea of that bloviating fat sack dominating our airwaves for another four years, forget the existential threat to American democracy. Also, I think the economy is turning around and the culture war issues actually work against the Republicans at this point.

So what a crypto-fascist political movement like the modern GOP to do?

Apparently it's to launch third party campaigns to siphon of anti-Trump votes from Biden. The most prominent potential ratfucking is "No Labels" which is the worst sort of austerity politics wrapped in the toxic centrism of "balanced budgets" at the expense of human decency. In his takedown of why the US has been more successful than Europe over the past decade, Yglesias seems to skip over the disastrous decision by many EU countries to embrace austerity economics after 2008. We didn't do enough, but at least we did something. Austerity is about as bad an idea as the gold standard, yet there are a handful of people who seem to think we still live in a 19th century economic world.

So, yeah, No Labels. They seem perfectly pitched to reach a voter like my late father who hated Trump, but felt that we needed to balance the budget on the backs of human beings. (My dad cast his last vote for Gary Johnson.) I'm not sure that's sufficient to carry Trump fat ass over the finish line, but Johnson did help siphon off center right votes in 2016.

Meanwhile, the GOP seems to be trying to find another Jill Stein in Robert Kennedy, Jr. Sure, there as some aging Boomers who might be enticed by the Kennedy name, but he is quickly sinking into the fever swamps of conspiracy theories and, now, antisemitism. 

The question is: Would it make sense for the Democrats to launch a rat fucking campaign of their own? Would helping to launch a Liz Cheney campaign hurt or help Biden?

One thing I DO think would help is in reliably Red States running a Liz Cheney/Adam Kinzinger "type" in Senate races. You could start in Wyoming. Run the best Democrat you could recruit and then prod Cheney into running. I doubt it would work, but it might. I'd take a run at Mississippi, Missouri and Indiana, too. You are REALLY unlikely to win there, but if you can divide the right wing vote roughly in half, you could pull off an upset.

Where it gets more complicated would be in Texas, Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Arizona and Montana.

In four of those races (WV, OH, AZ and MT) you have vulnerable incumbents. It would seem to me that those would be good places to divide the rightist protest votes into MAGA and "normal" Republicans. Incumbency has advantages, so add "divide and conquer" and you increase your odds. In Florida and Texas, you could benefit from an unpopular candidates and unpopular state parties.

However, those elections will be really close and I could see institutional Dems worrying about messing up at the margins. 

I think that would be a mistake.

However, the best solution would be to create a puppet MAGA party that would only siphon off votes to the far right. Not sure how to do that legally, though.

We Are Lucky Our Fascists Suck

 Donald Trump obviously broke America's sense of itself and its political norms. He's also a career petty criminal and conman who is likely to be indicted soon on several more charges surrounding the 2020 election. There's an understandable nervousness among GOP elite about him leading the ticket in 2024, especially with the taint of January 6th hanging about him. Therefore they wanted a "Trump without the baggage."

Enter Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis had the pedigree of winning a comfortable re-election in what used to be a purple state, he was not currently under indictment and did not have a decades long record of tax evasion and business fraud to defend.

However, DeSantis had a fatal flaw that passed unnoticed among the commentariat who tried to assure us the DeSantis was a credible challenger to Trump. That fatal flaw? His personality. Sure, Trump was always going to be the nominee as long as he was alive, reasonably healthy and not actively serving a prison term. The fact that folks I respect like Jon Chait and Martin Longman thought he represented a credible challenge to Trump fails to account for the fact that, as Josh Marshall put it, "The GOP is a failed state and Donald Trump is its warlord."

But what IF Trump keels over on the 17th hole at Bedminster? Could DeSantis beat Biden? He is younger, which gives him an advantage Trump - whose meager mental furnishings are way more threadbare than Biden's - would have lacked. 

DeSantis, however, thought that he could simply borrow the words to the Trump hymnal without learning the music.

DeSantis is transparently mean in a way that Trump - for all his cruelty - is not. Mean as in cruel but also as in petty. You have stories like this one that beggar belief, where he's ham-fistedly trying to create a Brown Shirt militia, while fighting Disney, the immigrant workforce that allows Florida to function and anyone with a college degree, especially teachers.

DeSantis may be "Trump without the baggage" but he has all the horrifically cruel policies without the winking sense of humor - which I'm assured exists - that Trump purportedly has. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that Florida is going to go through some things. A soft boycott of the state by Latino truck drivers and migrant workers is going to pinch. Falling tourism is going to pinch. At some point, DeSantis' clearly unconstitutional laws and orders are going to be overturned, and we are entering hurricane season. The dysfunctional rot that DeSantis has brought to Florida's government reminds me of fellow ideologue Sam Brownback, whose resounding failures as Governor of Kansas actually produced a Democratic governor in that ruby red state.

It turns out that you can't be a "smart Trump" or a "fascist with a better plan."  When you ARE a creeping authoritarian, you are ipso facto an idiot and a cretin.

Lucky for us.

Engaging With Lunacy

 This is a reasonably interesting (if slightly long) thread about someone who tried, years ago, to engage with a former friend who was slipping into the Rightist disinformation universe. Similarly, we have a piece on Robert Kennedy, Jr. embracing anti-Semitic frames to talk about Covid.

Is there lunacy on the Left? Sure. Anarchists, for one. Maybe Marianne Williamson. I'm not evens sure RFK qualifies as "on the Left" at this point. But, yes, there are voices - especially when you go REALLY far to the Left - that are engaged in quackery and misinformation. What differentiates the Right from the Left is that this sort of deranged untruthfulness is the standard of discourser. 

Paul Campos wrote a piece asking "Can Donald Trump Lie?" This is a point I've been making since 2015. Trump isn't a liar, exactly, because a liar knows what the truth is and violates that understanding. Trump is a bullshitter, who has no use for the truth or lack of it in any form. He says whatever he wants to or thinks will accrue him an advantage in the moment. 

The whole Madisonian system of checks and balances, separation of powers relies on a political discourse that has some fundamental basis in facts. It's not and never has been perfect. In fact, that's the point of separating powers. If one side errs terribly, the other side can be a corrective. What we have now, though, is a movement that is fundamentally divorced from objective reality pretty much all the time. Even when they are truth-adjacent about crime or border crossings, they are still wrong enough to warp the discussion. 

When Richard Hofstadter wrote The Paranoid Style, he was describing a cyclical movement in American politics that ebbed and flowed but never left. The question is, how do we force this objectively false movement back to the margins?

Self-Tagged

 If you want a handy list of the very, very worst members of the House of Representatives, just take a look at those who voted against continuing aid to Ukraine. It's not about the budgetary ramifications of the aid; that's bullshit spin. This is a group of people who exist entirely in opposition to the majority of the country, which does still support Ukraine. These are people who are the living personification of Cleek's Law. Could some of them be on the take from Moscow? Sure, it's possible, as these people have no moral core. 

More likely there is a combination of two factors at play. The first is that Biden, Democrats and what's left of mainstream Republicans support Ukraine, so like oppositional defiant toddlers, they take the opposite positions and pretend like there's some deeper principle behind it. This is bullshit. The second is that Putin is really the platonic ideal of Trumpism in several important respects.

First, Putin has positioned himself as a culture warrior. He cozies up to the church, hates on LGBTQ folks, and generally follows a line of ethnonationalism that is perfectly inline with the GOP. Secondly, Putin maintains a "democracy" in the sense of having elections, but they have almost zero democratic legitimacy. A few "opposition" parties are allowed to exist and win seats in the Duma, but there is no credible path of someone other than Putin and United Russia to win and hold power, and that is the basic idea currently underpinning Trumpism and the GOP. Elections are only legitimate when we win.

So, while many people on the rogue's roll above have been to Hungary to coddle Viktor Orban's balls, they would be visiting Moscow (as some GOP members did!) to do the same to Putin, if they could.

Not Normal

 Human beings should never have decided to live in Phoenix in the first place, but this is just insane. Thing Two is supposed to fly through Phoenix on Sunday and I worry they will shut the airport down.

I'm not a climate doomer, but this is horrific.

Not Now, Volodymyr

 Josh Marshall makes a pretty compelling - in fact airtight - case for why admitting Ukraine into NATO right now would be borderline insane. As NATO is a defensive alliance, Ukraine joining now would begin a war between NATO and Russia. As Marshall notes, you can understand why Kiev, Warsaw and the Baltic States might like that to happen. The Russian threat is real to them and tangible to Ukraine. 

It's difficult to think why Ukraine would even demand it. They can't possibly think they would be admitted. In fact, the demand itself would seem to incentivize Russia to prolong the war. While "we have to invade Ukraine because of NATO" was a bullshit casus belli, it's not an unimportant Russian goal to keep NATO away from its borders. 

It's also difficult to see how Ukraine's joining NATO but not evoking Article V (drawing the rest of the alliance into war) would materially improve things for Ukraine. 

So, I 100% understand why Biden and Germany and likely France all did not want to admit Ukraine this year, I just can't figure out why Ukraine even asked.

Bidenomics

 There has been a doomer narrative surrounding economics ever since Biden was elected and inflation took off. Since we don't have very clear memories of the last period of bad inflation from the 1970s, it was easy to go into panic mode, I guess, for a the jabbering classes and the money men. 

Anyway, it sure looks like we have inflation under control. We are also at historically high levels of employment. There are some bad sectors of the economy, so it's not all good news. Student debt is about to kick a bunch of people in the teeth and there's some weird shit going down in the housing sector. (Seriously, there should be some anti-trust action here.)

However, really the only thing that gave the GOP a plausible road back to the White House was a cratering economy. With the White House deciding to label this era Bidenomics, that signals that what they are seeing deeper in the data must be pretty good.

Poisoning The Country

 When assessing the worst presidents ever, it can't just be limited to their term in office. Why was Andrew Johnson so bad? Because he undermined efforts to reconstruct the South along the lines of a multiracial democracy, helping pave the way for Jim Crow. Why was Nixon so bad? Because he created a widespread mistrust in the honesty and efficacy of public officials. 

The reason why Trump will almost certainly be evaluated as our worst president (so far!) is that his actions have created a terrible political environment that extends beyond his weak policy accomplishments. Sure, there's the reactionary Supreme Court, but what policies did Trump put into place? His tax cuts? The massive deficits were bad, true, but Trump's policy legacy is almost inperceptible.

Trump's real "contribution" to American politics is the destruction of norms we took for granted. Sure, the Harding and Grant administrations were corrupt, but Harding and Grant were personally not corrupt. Trump himself was corrupt. 

Yglesias does some bullshit bothsides stuff on Clinton. I don't think the Clinton presidency has aged well, but that's primarily because of his unraveling of the Bretton Woods system of international trade and his repeal of Glass-Steagall that led directly to the 2008 crisis. The Clinton boom was built on sand. The idea that Clinton should have resigned over the Lewinsky Affair is not the reason why Clinton was a bad president. Presidents have had affairs forever. Rewarding panty-sniffing witch hunts, like Ken Starr's, would have been a terrible precedent.

To somehow equate Clinton's conjugal immorality with Trump...I don't even know what to do about that. As I just said, there's a case to made against Clinton, but that ain't it, and using the context of Trump sure as hell ain't it. Remind me again how Clinton made the Secret Service pay marked up prices to stay in his hotel. Remind me how Clinton launched an insurrection during the Florida Recount. Remind me how Clinton asserted that only his supporters were real Americans.

Trump took the fragile fabric of national identity and ripped it to shreds to glorify his own ego. He reveled in his "American Carnage" bullshit, a concept that still dominates rightist views of American cities. He pitted us against each other and elevated actual fucking Nazis as "very fine people."

What's so ironic is that Trump has perhaps one true policy success: Operation Warp Speed that produced the Covid vaccine. OK, he didn't do much to make that happen, but he didn't fuck it up like everything else he touches.

Now, the forces that Trump has untethered have given us a resurgent anti-vax movement that could have terrible effects in the years to come. People will die from this, just as people are dying from unregulated gun ownership, abortion restrictions and stymieing worker's rights.  

The negative effects of Trumpism will largely be with us for a decade or more, even if Trump gets his clock cleaning in 2024.  That's what makes him our worst president ever.

So far!

Journalistic Indepedence

 Jon Chait has a long piece defending independent opinion journalism. His argument is that it's deleterious for journalists to never scrutinize "their side" of the political spectrum and that journalists are not and should not be activists who have an agenda that usually does not brook dissent.

There was a passage buried in the middle of the piece that captures the problem, though, that he sort of slides right by. 

The deeper confusion at work here is between the logic of political activism and independent-opinion journalism. Political action occurs within a two-party system that forces us to choose between flawed options. To allow your political decisions, like voting and advocacy, to be driven by a fixation with the flaws of the lesser evil would be perverse.

Opinion journalism does not need to observe these constraints. Voting is a binary choice, but thinking is not.

The bolded part is what is at the crux of bothsides refusing to allow dissent. Because elections are so close, you can't afford anyone to sit out an election where they might vote for your candidate. Any dampening of enthusiasm on your side could mean electoral catastrophe. Don't believe me? Look at 2016. Dissatisfaction/misogyny with Hillary Clinton led just enough votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to flip to the Worst Person In America. 

In a culture where you can custom order almost everything as a consumer, it is tempting to see this in politics. We don't want the "flawed options", we want the Risen Jesus. This is especially true on the Left. On the Right, they will overlook every single flaw that Trump manifests on a daily basis, but Hillary voted for the Iraq War, and though she apologized and said it was wrong, I'm going to stay home and Trump will appoint three Supreme Court Justices as a result. 

I think Chait's analysis is mostly accurate, but I think he may miss the mark here:

This objective may seem a laudable, or at least necessary, defense against a Republican Party that is evolving into authoritarianism. What liberals need to understand is that copying the right’s epistemological methods will eventually mean copying its political style. The Republican Party has become radicalized and authoritarian because it is trapped in a bubble, seeing its enemies as dangerous and its own leaders as weak, responding to this reality in aggressive ways that only deepen its anger and paranoia.

The Left is incapable of lockstep action. It is - by definition - factional. What the Right screams about as the authoritarian leftism of Stalin, Mao or Kim is not really left wing in any meaningful way beyond nomenclature. If leftwing politics generally tends to prioritize equality over freedom, in what way did Stalin create equality? 

Chait is right that epistemological closure is a real threat to a political party's sustainability. The GOP has its head so far up its own ass that it's doubling down on abortion bans and book banning and anti-immigration policies that simply are toxic. If Trump channeled the vibes of Fox News, DeSantis has channeled the policy positions of OANN. 

However, I can't really point to many positions that the Democrats have taken that are specifically tied to an activist base that brooks no dissent. Student debt relief, maybe, but there is a logic to that beyond just factional allegiances.  Biden has increased funding to the police, increased defense spending and so on.

It all reminds me of the bullshit over "cancel culture" from the Right. They claim that if someone drops the N-word and all of his sponsors drop his podcast of TV show that this is a coordinated act by the Left to "cancel" someone. In fact, it is the actions of a society as a whole that does not want to reward bigotry. Who is being canceled on the Left? There was one guy I can think of who lost one job before landing another over questions being asked about crime during the George Floyd protests. We were all a little crazy then.

But Maggie Haberman - a frequent target of left wing ire - still has her job. Who's actually being canceled? Chait's point to be on guard about this would be more valid if the Left wasn't already so factional.

Projection All The Way Down

 Look, Hunter Biden is a mid-level fuck up. He's not an epic, colossal fuck up, just a guy suffering from addiction who coasted a bit on his family name. Has he done anything as corrupt as whatever the hell Jared Kushner was up to in the Middle East? Of course not. Do any of his acts come within shouting distance of the many crimes of Donald Trump? Don't be silly.

But Hunter Biden's sins are all the GOP has going for them, so they are going to flog them to placate the faithful, even if the allegations are bullshit.

Is DeSantis Delivering Florida to Dems?

 The two great "white whales" for Democrats are currently Florida and Texas. If Dems can consolidate and expand their leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan, that leaves very few battleground states. Hold those states and either Nevada or Wisconsin (or Georgia or Arizona) gives you the White House. However, there is a certain merit in running up the scoreboard on Trump and Republicans.  Sweep the Battleground States listed above and then you move on to North Carolina (which I think is sneaky "gettable" this cycle) Texas and Florida.

If Democrats can flip Texas or Florida into the Democratic camp, there is no sustainable way for Republicans to win the White House or control the House of Representatives. Over at Balloon Juice there are two different takes on Florida. The first is about efforts by Florida Dems to reinvigorate their party. Quite a few state level Democratic Parties are just terrible. Even in Blue States like New York, the party apparatchiks are just bad. So go to it, Florida Dems.

It's the second piece that I think is more promising. Ron DeSantis' desperate ploy to unseat Trump is forcing him further and further rightwards and he's embraced a host of terrible policies that are making things in Florida really bad. His ethnonationalism and bullying style have led to a major backlash in Florida's most important industry: tourism. The exodus of academics from Florida's otherwise very good state university system (seriously, I was surprised at how high U Florida ranked) will cause long term decay. DeSantis has opened another front on the war on women by going after alimony of all things. His hardline anti-immigration law has led to a 25% decline in construction workers and that number figures to be much higher in agriculture and things like custodial work. 

I suppose there's a question about whether the economic hurt inflicted by DeSantis will stick to him or get deflected to Biden. The abortion ban he passed will directly hurt Republicans at the polls though. 

The model here is Kansas. Kansas is obviously a deeply conservative state, but it does elect statewide Democrats because of the absolute dumpster fire that Republican governance under Sam Brownback created. Now, Kansas has not voted from a Democratic presidential candidate, but Florida's demographics aren't Kansas' either.

I still hold that the two most important issues in 2024 will be Dobbs and January 6th. It will be a referendum on Trumpist anti-democratic actions and the assault on women's rights. But local politics matter, and DeSantis' terrible record as Governor might help nudge Florida enough to the center for Democrats to pick it off.  

Having said that, under no circumstances should Democrats rely on Florida to get them over 270 electoral votes. That place remains crazy.

Unsolvable

 Many years ago, Portugal effectively legalized drug use and seemed to succeed in doing so. Now, there are questions about that success. Addiction is real. Drugs are addictive. Addicts are not rational decision makers; the addiction makes the choice for them.

This has been my concern about legalizing marijuana. You legalize something, you normalize it. You normalize something as corrosive as crack cocaine or meth and you're going to have problems. Even pot isn't immune to abuse. That some advocates speak in terms of "rights" - you have the "right" to use drugs - if this drug use makes cities unlivable, as parts of Porto are becoming, then other rights are impeded.

I understand the argument that alcohol is also incredibly corrosive to many people's lives, but I'm not sure booze being legal and bad is an argument for drugs being legal and bad.

Are we ready to legitimately fund programs to get people off the streets and into treatment? I doubt it. My "favorite" bit of nonsense is how the ubiquitous gambling sites all come with a warning about problem gambling and how to access help. Who thinks this works?

If a city - in Europe or America - REALLY committed to treating addiction and ending homelessness, what would it cost? Would it even work? 

One thing seems clear, increasing access to drugs will not solve this problem.

Cluster Munitions

 The Biden Administration has elected to send cluster munitions to Ukraine. They have done so at Ukraine's repeated request. There are some, both within Congress and within the larger non-profit sphere who are criticizing this decision. The BBC opined that this would lead to the US "losing the moral high ground." Others, who have worked to eliminate these weapons entirely have protested the move.

Sure, cluster munitions are bad, because they don't all explode and they can lay in wait for years and then explode and kill people. The fundamental distinction that this is Ukraine's choice on Ukrainian territory seems to elude those who are protesting this move. The Spring Offensive never materialized, becoming the Summer Probing Attacks. The Russians are well dug in and have extensive mine fields. Cluster munitions are uniquely effective against these defenses. If Ukraine is willing to risk the long term dangers of unexploded ordnance on their own land, then armchair sanctimony seems to miss the point by a good margin.

Cluster munitions are awful, but they are essentially conventional weapons in smaller form and greater numbers. A normal howitzer shell can fail to explode, too. On the week when the US finally eradicated the last of its chemical weapons' stockpiles, it seems to lack context to compare cluster munitions with truly indiscriminate WMD. And if cluster munitions - which Russia has used freely - are bad, it's because war is bad, and this war is the responsibility of Russia. Ukraine must have the weapons it needs to defend itself. 

Using these weapons is THEIR choice. Providing them those weapons follows naturally from that.

Sociopaths

 When Texas Fuhrer Greg Abbott signed a law expressly overturning mandated water breaks during heat waves, I struggled to make sense of it. In what possible world was this a good idea? Why was it in the compelling interest of the state to threaten the lives of people who work outside? 

As the piece notes, since passing the bill, four workers have died in triple digit heat. Nine prisoners have died, though Texas doesn't give a shit about their lives. Eleven seniors have died in their un-air conditioned homes. 

Texas has a lethal heat problem, yet Abbott feels compelled to make it worse? This is similar to Texas' batshit crazy electrical grid that they insist on maintaining. 

Is this a defiance against the science of climate change? Is it just more of Serwer's Axoim: The cruelty is the point? Who the fuck would do such a thing?

There's a bit of evidence that if Texas had more robust voter turnout, it might flip to Democrats. Between killing people with heat stroke and killing women who can't access abortions...maybe it's time to vote these sociopaths out of office.

Is This A Real Thing?

 I'm not implying it's not, but Yglesias and now Jon Chait are basically arguing that the activist base of the Democratic Party - which is largely composed of college educated Whites - is turning off its socially moderate wing that is unusually Black, Brown and Asian. It was Chait who noted the racial disparity.

Now, I certainly agree with the idea that many of the activists' strategies and messages are bad. I really think "Defund the Police" hurt Democrats with Hispanic voters, many of whom work in law enforcement. The fact that the Biden Administration has increased spending on the police is A) true B) not something they can flog publicly because that might upset some of the base. 

Affirmative Action is a really good example of a complicated issue that hurts Democrats with one constituency (Asians) and doesn't really yield a ton from others (African and Hispanic Americans). Obviously, a college educated Black person is going to feel more strongly about Affirmative Action than a non-college educated Black person, but largely those positions are locked in.

So, I think we can say that divisions exist between activists and even the populations they purport to represent. I remember DeRay McKesson noting that "Black lives matters" also means good policing that prevents Black lives from being lost to crime. That makes sense. If Black communities are suffering disproportionately from crime, then "Defund the Police" is problematic. 

However, the data point that this is costing Democrats votes is largely confined to 2020 and Hispanics. My thinking on this is that incumbency matters a lot to low information voters and working class folks of any ethnic background tend to be low information voters. I also think that Hispanic communities in Florida that are largely Cuban and Venezuelan are probably deeply anti-Democratic, because the GOP rhetoric about "socialism" actually works on them.

What then to do? I do think that Democrats need to find a way around the Affirmative Action trap. "Going to the mattresses" for a program that isn't really popular with ANYONE is a bad idea. Making college more open to low income families and first generation college students would seem to be a way to square this. There is a first generation Chinese student who could benefit as much as a first generation Black student. 

The other issue Chait points to is support for LGBTQ folks. Sorry, that would seem to be contrary to Democratic values. I don't think EVERY aspect of supporting LGBTQ rights is unquestionable. I think there are legitimate questions about trans athletes, I just don't think it's that big of a deal, as we are talking about cases in the dozens. I think it's probably good to wait to provide irreversible aspects of gender affirming care. But you don't get to tear down Pride flags or endorse book banning. 

The question therefore seems to be not whether there are certain things advocates demand that are politically counterproductive. Of course that happens. The question is just how big a deal it is when the other party is talking about bombing refugee ships, overthrowing elections and dehumanizing gay people entirely.

Activists who succeed couch their agenda in the language of universal rights, not special pleadings. The problem with Affirmative Action is that it came off as a special pleading. It's unclear where the lines are surrounding this when it comes to LGBTQ issues and Chait doesn't really identify a third issue.

So, yeah, build bridges, but know where you're going and why.

The Minivan Taliban

 Woof, that's a good epithet.  Scott Lemieux looks at the "Moms for Liberty" which is a name that may break irony for good. These moralistic busybodies are what we mean when we say "white privilege." I'm not a huge fan of that phrasing, because I don't think it really moves people in ways that are positive. It works on people who already believe in it, but it doesn't convince those who need convincing, But boy howdy does it fit this Kavalcade of Klownish Karens. 

Like many Rightist groups, they like to coopt the language and organization of left wing protest groups, so they call themselves "parent's rights" group. However, their conception of "rights" is much the same as the Assembly of Religious Experts on the Supreme Court: my right to discriminate. 

What began as protests against masks in schools has morphed into protests against teaching accurate American history and - somewhat inexplicably - social emotional learning. I suppose if your kids are learning to be empathetic and kind, that precludes them from ever becoming Republicans. Sadly, in much the same way that the NRA gets undue credit for the GOP wave of 1994, the Moms for Bigotry are given undue credit for Glenn Youngkin and the 2021 off year election wavelet. They've been especially focused and successful at stacking school boards with lunatics.

The source article for Lemieux is more granular in its examination of this group. They are the poster child for Hofstadter's "Paranoid Style." This whackaloon, through-the-looking-glass take on America sees Marxists and Maoists behind every effort to create a fairer, more just society, or even just basic kindness. Needless to say, the Moms for Bigotry are all in for Trump and Trump's combative politics.

These are comfortable White women cosplaying as revolutionaries who trying to stop...revolutionaries. I don't know, it's all so depressingly stupid.

Oh, Look

My favorite movie getting some love. 

Keep An Eye On The States

 Iowa governor Kim Reynolds is calling a special session to pass a six week abortion ban. Democrats have been both negligent and hamstrung by both natural and partisan gerrymanders at the state level, so they have control of very few state houses across the country. But these gerrymanders and one-party control create the sort of echo chamber that leads to a backlash. According to one poll, 61% of Iowans believe abortion should be legal in most cases. If you can get 61% of Iowans to vote for abortion rights, that would unwind those gerrymanders. It's true in Iowa and it's true in purple and red states across the country.

The tricky part for Democrats will be finding a message that leverages outrage not only over Dobbs and January 6th, but the very real actions being taken in places like Iowa, Florida, Texas, and North Carolina.

Link everything. People already instinctively know that the GOP is anti-choice and patriarchal. Keep beating that drum.

Not Great At Politics

 Jon Chait makes the point that John Roberts is, in his words, the "last Republican politician." His argument is that despite Roberts' famous assertion/lie that as a judge he will only "call balls and strikes" Roberts is deeply aware that the Court's legitimacy is not set in stone. As a result, we have gotten a somewhat mixed bag of decisions, some protections for voting rights, while culture war issues have largely gone rightwards.

As Chait and other have noted, the conservative supermajority on the Court is not a result of democratic legitimacy. You could make a case that Roberts and Samuel Alito were appointed after Bush won reelection, even if Bush's initial election was undemocratic, being a minority president. Certainly the three judges that Trump appointed are all tainted with undemocratic roots. 

The Republican policy agenda is largely unpopular. Certainly Dobbs is incredibly unpopular, which undermines Chait's point that Roberts is making political calculations about which precedents to overturn. In fact, it's increasingly clear that several of the more strident decisions of this last session involve cases that the Court probably should not have heard in the first place. The "religious freedom" to be a bigot and student debt cases both have very real problems with standing. The plaintiffs really had no case to begin with. The Roberts Court took on cases that are likely to be pretty unpopular with voters under 50 simply because they wanted to.

I suppose there's a political calculation that voters are always more liberal when they are young and become more conservative as they age. We saw a little of this with Gen X in the last election moving a bit rightwards. However, this isn't a case of changing your mind about tax rates or regulations. This is about some basic civil rights and when you build up antipathy towards a party when voters are young, it's unlikely to be easy to change their minds later.

It's unclear how the GOP escapes what is looking like a demographic collapse. Sure, they can rely on red states remaining crimson red. Epistemological closure will makes sure that the millions of Americans alternately numbed into complacency and stirred into outrage by the Right Wing Wurlitzer will remain loyal to the Republican Party. 

But those Red States are hollowing out, and the residents that remain will, in fact, vote out Republicans, as Kansas has done at the gubernatorial level. DeSantis' latest "immigration policy" will drive all sorts of workers out of Florida and imperil the economy of his state. 

The culture war red meat won't pay the bills.

So, as the GOP doubles and triples down on drag queens and hating on Black and Brown people, their ability to actually govern is increasingly so weak as to be imperceptible to the instruments of science.

Roberts the politician is giving the GOP a handful of victories and thinking he is preserving the legitimacy of the Court. I'm not so sure he's right.

Tech Bros Suck

 The New Yorker has an excellent piece on why the Titan submersible was going to kill someone eventually. The hubris of the OceansGate founder is just tragic - as hubris is. The larger ethos of Tech Bros culture - "move fast, break shit" - is going to screw us over. Maybe it will be mass dislocations caused by AI, but Titan was simply a dramatic manifestation of a flawed world view.

Dynastic Decay

 The idea of hereditary rule was created to end the struggle for power that occurred when a monarch died. Monarchs were - elected isn't quite the right word - selected from among competing factions and nobles until the idea of birthright monarchy was created by Charlemagne and others.

Today, I think we can agree that hereditary rule is freaking bonkers. What a useless and pointless way to assign leadership. I saw a tweet somewhere that was replying to another tweet that complained that the only reason Biden is championing student debt relief was to win votes. The reply tweet was "Yes, that's precisely the point. That's the main selling point of democracy." Competitive elections require a demonstration of...something. The main point of crisis (aside from Trump) in American politics is how few seats in Congress are actually competitive.

So, we have a system that should eschew dynasties. But we have the Kennedys.

Yglesias takes on RFK, Jr's descent in conspiracy theories as a chance to talk about conspiracy theories in general, but he glides over the most salient part: John F. Kennedy was a mediocre president. He does talk a lot about the dual tragedies of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King's assassinations in 1968, which very well could have altered the course of American history. His take - and it's solid - is that had both men lived, RFK likely wins the presidency in '68 and King spends the rest of his life working on economic issues that extend beyond African Americans.

If this had happened, presumably RFK gets us out of Vietnam, the city burning riots of '68 don't happen and Nixon's Southern Strategy fails. I'm not sure how an RFK administration deals with stagflation and the economic turmoil of the '70s that may have been the deciding factor leading to Reagan, but an unlikely partnership between RFK and MLK to take the next step in the welfare state - universal healthcare maybe - could have reshaped America.

Yglesias's point was to address the theories surrounding John Kennedy's assassination that was mainstreamed by Oliver Stone. What's so fascinating about Stone's absolutely ridiculous theory was that he posits that JFK would've gotten us out of Vietnam. In fact, Kennedy was bound by the same logic of containment that bound LBJ.

Regardless, we do have a Kennedy dynasty hovering around the edges of American politics. RFK, Jr is maybe the prime example of this, though we did have a Kennedy run for Senate in Massachusetts. RFK, Jr's descent into lunatic conspiracy theories would be bad enough, but the idea of basing a political dynasty on the lineage of John Kennedy is a triumph of style over substance and romance over reality. JFK was a mediocre, possibly bad president whose esteem rose only as a result of his assassination. 

All dynasties are bad. Your name signifies nothing about your inherent merit as a person or a public servant. To use one example, Fred Trump actually built stuff, Donald simply become a celebrity brand and Don, Jr and Eric are epic failsons. 

I hope RFK Jr's campaign dies the same death that Marianne Williamson's did and will. He's a quack and a charlatan. 

But even if he wasn't, all dynasties are bad by definition. 

Thoughts And Prayers

 My son is traveling on American Airlines today. He has to be in Fresno by tomorrow morning.

Yuck.

They Aren't Wrong

 The Post editorial board makes a solid point about student debt relief. They admit that the standing issue was bullshit; as I noted previously the Court is simply making shit up to reach decisions they would reach regardless of the statutes involved.

However, we need structural reform to student loans and the debt jubilee was not that reform. There is a societal good in sending more people to college. There is arguably a greater good in sending people whose families could not otherwise afford to send them to college. This could be a race neutral way to elevate historically disadvantaged communities. More Pell Grants, please, many more Pell Grants.

The skyrocketing cost of education is something we generally need to address. I know our private boarding school's costs have grown so high I'm frankly embarrassed by them. We do not have the massive endowment necessary to reduce tuition they way a handful of schools like Philips Andover has, and we do extend a significant amount of financial aid. I know that I am fairly well compensated, but not outrageously so. Certainly not in comparison to tuition.

Education is one sector that has been immune to productivity gains, because human-to-human interaction is the soul of education and has been since Socrates annoyed everyone in the agora. However, we have asked schools - even or perhaps especially tony private schools - to be more than classrooms. We have four psychological counselors on staff; our Admissions department is the second largest department in the school; we have four college counselors; we have a seven person IT department; our grounds are immaculate. We spend a ton of money on stuff that makes everything easier, I guess, but it's still a ton of money. 

During my time as a student generations ago, we had one college counselor...and that's about it. This is better! However, there has to be an end to the arms race of making our schools so lavish and amazing that we can justify $60,000 a year in tuition. Colleges are in the same situation, obviously.

So, we need to bring down both the cost of education in general and the cost to individual students of accessing that education. Biden's debt relief plan wasn't going to do that. Once again, the path to a better world runs through President Biden, Speaker Jeffries and 55 or more seats in the Senate.

Time To Get Pranky

 The decision in 303 Creative v Elenis is really awful. Not because of its clear abrogation of rights for LGBT folks - though that's obviously bad. It's because the case was complete and utter bullshit. The plaintiff sued without having suffered any damages. It was completely manufactured by a Christian law firm, and yet the Court took it on specifically to reduce the rights or LGBT folks while increasing the "rights" of Christians to be bigots. They didn't have to take this case, they wanted to.

Now, generally speaking, I would not want to mess with gay folks. They are smart, well funded and endlessly creative. And now they are pissed.

So, it seems like now is the time to double down on a strategy we are seeing in other places around culture war bullshit. We saw this in Utah, when a parent leveraged the bullshit book banning rules to ban the Bible. 

Enter the Pastafarians and the Satanic Temple. Both of these organizations are largely satirical takes on religion, but just because they are "funny" doesn't mean they aren't serious. By creating "religions" that have essentially progressive social values, you can now plausibly create businesses that refuse to serve Evangelical Christians, because you find their worldview antithetical to your beliefs. You could define MAGA or even all Republicans as hate groups that violate your deeply held religious beliefs and refuse to serve them.

The reason why companies engage in greenwashing and Pride campaigns is because young, progressive, urban people have all the money. They aren't doing it from conviction. They are doing it because that's where the money is.

So use that money. Not with performative "boycotts".  Gays weren't headed to Hobby Lobby in the first place. No, create entrepreneurial spaces that exclude culture warrior bigots. 

If the Assembly of Religious Experts wants to create a space for bigotry based on "religious freedom" then let them know that knife can cut both ways.