The Legacy of 9/11

 I'm usually a fan of Paul Campos, but this discussion between him and Robert Farley feel way wide of the mark. Their argument is that 9/11 really didn't have a cultural impact on par with the Kennedy Assassination. The assassination certainly did exert of vise grip on the imaginations of Boomers, to the point where Trump routinely flatulates some nonsense about releasing the files. Certainly, the Kennedy assassination birthed many conspiracy theories.

However, the argument that 9/11 had a greater political and policy impact on the US is undeniable. Kennedy's death did not lead to Vietnam - sorry, Oliver Stone, that's bullshit. What it did do was unleash America's longest war and perhaps its most pointless defeat. I'm willing to argue that Vietnam was the price for winning the Cold War. It was a terrible mistake, but it was a mistake borne of a policy - containment - that won the conflict. Iraq was just completely bullshit from the start. So, if we are analyzing the cultural impact of 9/11, we have to look at the two wars (three if you want to include the GWOT) that arose from it.

Yes, the Vietnam War spawned a ton of films, but so did the cycle of wars after 9/11. What's more, a lot of tangential media like the Jason Bourne movies seem directly related to the period of fear and anxiety that came after the attacks. If anything, I think Farley and Campos are simply confusing the media that they consumed as young people with the media landscape today.

What I also think that they get wrong is not seeing how 9/11 in many ways led to Trump. There's the obvious xenophobia, sure. There's the obvious Islamophobia, sure. However, Trump's primary message was one of American decline or American Carnage. In his telling, 9/11 happened because America was "weak" (in fact, it happened because America was strong). The "forever wars" were bad not because we shouldn't have fought them, but because we weren't ruthless enough. America was a feeble nation that lost to Iraqi and Afghan insurgents. 

That message was married not only to 9/11 and it's impact, but also the 2008 financial crisis, but I don't think Trump win in 2016 without tapping into the sense that America was a declining nation. Clinton represented the status quo and he was the wrecking ball.

That latter part was true, I guess. 

UPDATE: Chait documents the link between 9/11 and Trump.

Big City Blues

 Hitler famously lit the German Reichstag on fire to create an emergency to seize control of the government, despite not having a majority in the German parliament. There is some thought that he's using the carjacking of Big Balls in DC to create martial law there. As both Richardson and Krugman point out, Washington DC is near a 30 year low in crime. 

Today, most of my family and I drove through western South and North Dakota. It's beautiful. No, really, gorgeous. It's also incredibly barren of people. We drove for two hours or more where I don't think one person could see their neighbors houses. These were mostly ranches. After a while, we got into grain country and eventually, it got so that houses had sightlines to each other. Still, when we got to Dickinson, ND (population 25.695) the place felt really crowded. The town we come from in CT is roughly the same size and is completely unremarkable in any way, shape or form. Dickinson is the anchor town for roughly 50-100 miles in every direction.

So, Dickinson - population: not that many - felt bustling. No wonder the few residents who may have gone to Chicago or (gasp) NY think of it as anarchic. If you live in rural America, the big cities are noisy, crowded, smelly and aggressive. That means that when Faux News starts talking about the crime there and Trump wails about American Carnage, those attacks make a certain amount of sense to fearful people who just can't grok a big city.

The other thing that crops up is how these idiots constantly show a precinct or county map of the election that is saturated in red, because the Big Empty is GOP country and the Big Cities are Democratic. For all the apparent anarchy of these big cities, they work. Really well! They are the centers of America's wealth, enterprise and innovation. Big Cities are what makes America Great!

For all the nonsense about Democrats needing to reach "real Muricans" and other Trump voters, there is simply no way to reach these deep rural voters. They live on a different planet. Your best bet is that they just quit the political system out of frustration when Trump invariably craters the economy and kills their farm subsidies by accident.

Drones And The Information Landscape

 There have been a lot of breathless social media posts and even real news stories about drones covering America. Almost all of them have turned out to be airplanes. 

One thing I've noticed as a teacher, certainly, is the fallacy that access to information is the same as access to knowledge. I will ask students - who have their laptops open - what is the relative GDP of the United States and Mexico, for instance, and they look at me as if I started speaking Turkish. The idea that you could simply look that up so that the class discussion could continue is foreign to them. Sure, when there's a paper to write, they are all about the Google, but simply looking stuff up?

This relates to discussions we had with our eldest son, who gets a lot of news from TikTok and Instagram and equates that with major news outlets because "they're all biased." This allows for people to get in a lather about drones over the eastern seaboard that are simply the landing lights of planes.

What's worrisome is that we have a lot of "obeying in advance" from the plutocrats who own our major media outlets. Bezos s contributing to Trump's inauguration; the owner of the LA Times is censoring headlines; CNN and the WaPo are run by former Murdoch guys; ABC bent the knee. 

This had my wife in a lather this morning about the end of democracy. Democracy is a spectrum, not a fixed state. Americans living today lived under Jim Crow. Was that "democracy"? Not really. We are definitely headed for a period of imperiled democracy, and while I think federalism and American values of individualism will thwart authoritarianism in the end, I am worried, too, and it's because of how piss poor our information landscape is.

Social media has democratized, not knowledge but information, and that allows for mis- and disinformation to spread. That's how you get people saying they voted for Trump because he will help them with their health care situation.

UPDATE: David Roth nails it. He especially notes how the differing responses from Republicans and Democrats sums up the current state of the two parties.:

You can see, in these representatives’ respective responses to this little flare-up of recreational mental illness, two divergent but not quite competing visions of government. Kim goes out of his way to show that he takes these concerns seriously and allows that there may be something there before promising to do his level best to find out what it is; Van Drew goes on TV and talks the wildest shit he can, and then goes on YouTube, puts on a somber face, says “fear has no place in responsible leadership,” and keeps right on talking it.

Correcting Course

 One of the consistent critics of the current Democratic Party has been Jon Chait, and while it's tough to take strong medicine after a complete shitshow like yesterday, I think he bears listening to. 

There's a whiff of Murc's Law in his piece, because I do think that Democrats were hampered by post-Covid macroeconomic conditions. There's not a ton they could have done differently. Also, I think the substance-free coverage of the race really hurt her, as she was unable to really plant the seeds of why Trump's economic plan could be disastrous. 

Where I think he's right is the descent of the Democratic Party into a bit of an echo chamber. I am incredibly guilty of this as well - though in different ways than Chait describes. I really thought that Trump would be unable to expand beyond his 2020 numbers because of January 6th and Dobbs and people apparently just did not give enough of a fuck about that.

Where I think he's right is that a successful party seizes the center. He rightly admits that Harris did all she could to do that. Campaigning with Republicans was - I thought - a powerful symbol of that movement. She was hammered, though, by a few offhand remarks during the 2020 primary - especially about trans rights for prisoners. Now, trans rights for prisoners is simply not a legitimate reason for vote for fascism and oligarchy. However, Democrats will need to re-position themselves on some of these cultural issues.

I saw a tweet last night that said something about how "I am really afraid of what the Democratic Party will become in the wake of this election." I get it. If I'm advising Josh Shapiro or Jon Ossoff or any other contender for 2028, I'm telling them to avoid ANY statements that smack of "faculty lounge politics." Stop saying "Latinx". Stop listing your pronouns. Is that ugly? Yeah, some of it will be. Barack Obama ran as a social moderate - Biden actually publicly supported same sex marriage before him. Lots of people do mistrust Democrats on some hot button social issues. 

What's more, Joe Biden becomes a really complicated figure both within the Democratic Party and history. There were a lot of "Best President of My Lifetime" takes that seemed so overblown. He's been a very good president, but Obama exists. Hell, Bill Clinton exists. The idea that he was the "Best President of My Lifetime" comes from his embrace of some fairly doctrinaire left wing positions. 

It's also worth remembering that the country remains very, very closely divided. As it turns out, the polls were spot on about that. I thought they were broken and they aren't. I remain in forlorn hope that Democrats eke out control of the House, simply to stop the worst aspects of Trump's agenda (ACA repeal, rolling back Dog knows how many regulations, gutting Social Security). If we cling to a Democratic House, then there is a small chance of checking some of the worst abuses that Trump and the GOP will foist upon us. 

Eight years ago, I wondered what Trump could do that couldn't be undone. We have lived through dark and benighted times in this country. We might very well be headed there again. Obviously, the prospect of elections slipping into autocratic territory is the greatest fear. Again, Trump can't run again, but Vance and the Project 2025 people will be running the show before too long. 

If we have elections that truly matter, we will crawl back once more. The fact that that is an open question scares the shit out of me. Rushing to the left won't make that easier. If - as I expect - Trump unleashes Netanyahu on Palestinians, Democrats can't start wearing keffiyehs and putting watermelons in their bios. 

This is about saving democratic governance in America. This is about triage. 

ADDED: mistermix has a nice summary.

ADDED: This is good from Ed Burmila:

It will be very easy with time and hindsight to criticize choices the Biden-then-Harris campaigns made but the Trump campaign was so ludicrously bad and ridiculous that you have to wonder if doing anything differently would really have mattered.

Serwer On Trumpists

 Adam Serwer has been, arguably, the best observer of Trumpistan. Today, he makes a critically important observation about Trumpists: they live in a state of unreality.

For most people, this is sort of obvious, but Serwer does a good job of explaining WHY they live in unreality. Some of it is that they simply don't believe what he is saying or that it won't apply to them. 

The two most interesting observations are that Trump is the avatar of every species of conspiracy theory. He basks in them and bastes his speeches with them. If everything is a conspiracy, then you can't trust the elites. News stories with facts in them are fake news, because the shadowy elites have decided that they are.

Of course, Serwer leaves unsaid the interesting link between the rise of Trumpism and the Right Wing Wurlitzer that is headed by Faux News, but now includes all sort of tendentious bullshit. 

The other unstated observation is that nothing could more clearly crystalize the growing educational polarization in the electorate. Yes, of course, there are conspiracists with college degrees. Hello! Ted Kaczynski! However to create an entire political movement, you have to convince tens of millions that the words coming out of Trump's mouth don't mean what they obviously mean. 

If - as I fervently hope - Harris wins tomorrow, the "lightly educated White male" problem (to quote Erik Loomis) isn't going anywhere. Paradoxically, a Trump defeat - especially a crushing one - will only amplify their conspiracist ideas. It's not even clear that a successful Harris administration could ever really win them back, because no economic message wedded to actual economic performance is going to shift their beliefs, because their beliefs are, themselves, unreal.

Should Harris Be Scaring Us More?

 Marshall writes about Ron Brownstein's article channeling unease among Democratic operatives that Harris hasn't closed the deal. It's the age old question of Trumpistan: Why is this even close? Of course, we are making assumptions about whether it actually IS close, but whatever.

Paul Campos talks about how far too many people have a rosy view of Trump, because they have somehow memory-holed that Trump was president during the annus horriblus of 2020. Biden wasn't president until 2021, but since he was elected in 2020, people who don't really follow politics kind of think he was the president then.

I'm not really convinced by Campos' point, because Trump's "inject with bleach" nonsense is more resonant than actual calendars. However, he links to one of his "Ariana Grande voters" (people with very low political engagement) who is "undecided". I think those of us who follow politics a lot are baffled by these people but they basically don't pay attention to politics.

What I think is interesting about the person they interview is that she voted for Trump in 2020. This goes to my theory that there simply aren't going to be a lot of people who voted for Biden in 2020 and then will vote for Trump in 2024. Not after January 6th. However, there are likely to be a non-trivial number of either Trump>Harris voters or more likely Trump>Non-Voter.

Does Harris need to drive a fear-based message about Trump in order to make that happen? I think the campaign has settled instead on a "Trump is old, confused and weak" and that seems to be a stronger attack on Trump's strengths than attacking him for his botched Covid response or even January 6th.

Actions Not Polls

 There are a few "high quality" polls that show the race as roughly a Harris 2-3 points lead. Given the ability to Trump to exceed his polling and the Electoral College tilt towards the GOP, this has caused a "vibes shift" inducing panic among Democrats.

However, you can tell a lot about a campaign by what they do, rather than what they say. Their polls are more rigorous and more detailed and are used to define what they do. They poll messaging, they polls which demographics they need to reach. News media polls are narrative setters. They are trying to drive coverage.

Trump's campaigns have always been a bit weird. He doesn't campaign like previous candidates. He doesn't raise money, he doesn't sit for neutral interviews unless he wants to pick a fight. He does his rallies and lets the media's bias towards narrative do his work for him.

However, for 2024, he hired some "normal" campaign people to run his campaign. He then brought back accused wife beater Corey Lewandowski a few weeks back. Now, he's shaking up his communications team.

You don't shake up your comms team three weeks before the election because your communication strategy is working. Trump might have, but Susie Wiles wouldn't have. She did, because she must be getting feedback that their message is failing to get through.

There is also Trump's bizarre decision to have his rallies in Colorado, California and New York. He's not winning those states. Why is he there? Is it that he hopes there will be counter protestors and violence? There's some media involved, but the clips from his rallies are more and more insane and inane. He rambles more, he leans into outright Nazi language more and more. 

And the increasingly desperate tone of his attacks on American democracy and democratic norms suggests to me that he's also getting the word that he's losing. 

If there's truly some underlying data that this race is leaning significantly towards Harris, there's a weird confluence of interests for both the Trump and Harris campaigns to see the race as close. 

Let's say the "real" numbers suggest a pretty static 5-6 point Harris lead with solid leads in the Biden states plus North Carolina. Harris wants you to think it's close, because there seems to be a lingering fear that some Democratic demographics won't vote. I'm not 100% sure that's still the case - in fact, I think there might some evidence that lower propensity voters now tilt towards Trump. Still, they want to make sure all their voters go to the polls, so that there is no 2016 surprise. Meanwhile, Trump's people need the race to look close so that they can plausibly argue that A) they have a shot at winning, so vote and B) they can advance their false claims about a stolen election.

The message from Harris is "We are winning, but it's close so don't take anything for granted." That's the message of a campaign that feels pretty confident in their ground game and their status in the race. 

The message from Trump is his usual nonsensical blathering, but also a LOT of fear mongering over demonstrably false things like FEMA spending their money of gender reassignment surgery for MS-13 members. The fact that the campaign professionals are sidelining Steven Cheung - a former UFC figure - because the combative stuff clearly isn't working. Fear mongering on trans issues or pet-eating immigrants isn't getting them where they need to go.

There are two things to focus on in the crazy media environment before an election. Where are the candidates going and where are they spending money? Harris is going back to Atlanta and Arizona this week. Trump is too, plus Arizona. Trump does not seem to be putting much into Wisconsin, which is interesting.

There's also this: Trump went to Detroit for an economic summit and immediately denigrated Detroit. The Harris people had an ad up and running in Detroit before the day was out. His incessant negativity and disparaging of America IS HIS MESSAGE. If you want to extend your reach beyond your cultists, that's really tough.

Trump's message is a message for the 35% of voters who adore Donald Trump. The "hold your nose and vote for him" cadre are likely not going to like it but they will vote for him anyway. That gets you to 45% or thereabouts.

He's not persuading new voters. The fact that he's reshuffling his communications team is stronger evidence for that than any poll.

The Blog Motto

 In building on yesterday's post, I happened to look at the Mencken quote at the top of the blog. It's been up there for years, well before Trump. The most obvious example was the lying to get us into the Iraq war, but "Al Qaeda will kill you in your sleep" eventually morphed into Trump's deranged Aurora klan-bake the other day.

What makes Trump "special" goes back a little to Lee Atwater's famous dictum about how to leverage racism to win elections. Atwater described how you could no longer throw our the n-word with abandon, you had to talk about things like "busing" or "welfare queens". He's describing what became known as "dog whistle" rhetoric, that didn't quite tip over into repellent language, but was couched in less offensive terms.

Trump basically says out loud the sort of naked racism and hate that Republican politicians have been trying to soft pedal for decades. What makes Trumpistan so freaking awful is how devoted millions of Americans have become to obvious falsehoods.

Part of my vibe-based optimism is that this sort of reckless lying is not going to be very persuasive outside of Cult 45, and 45% might just be where he winds up, if I'm right. 

Trump CAN'T Campaign

 Chait talks about how Trump was winning by largely doing normal candidate things (which is an idea that could use some sources) or at least running against Biden meant that he didn't have to exert himself. Trump famously invoked William McKinley when talking about tariffs, but he was also mimicking McKinley's "Front Porch" campaign, where McKinley never really left his home and simply spoke to reporters and let his surrogates campaign for him.

The entry of Harris into the race has upended that strategy. Trump is now trailing in the polls and that has led him to have to campaign, which leads to things like his insane press conference. He's all over social media spouting deranged nonsense and that just amplifies the "weird" angle from Harris and Walz. 

What's darkly hilarious is that his campaign largely gets that it's biggest problem is its candidate. (OK, BOTH its candidates.) You might remembers the sarcastic meme from 2017-2020: "Today is the day Trump finally became President." It was based off Van Jones gushing over Trump's ability to read his State of the Union address from a teleprompter.

Trump is Trump. He's 80 years old and he's psychologically vulnerable narcissist. He's never been smart and now he's showing signs of both cognitive decline and epistemological closure. He's so trapped in Trumpistan that he can't speak to actual reality. 

In a week, the Democratic Convention starts. The media will likely try to drum up controversy when the inevitable pro-Hamas protestors show up. However, I would expect there to be a LOT of patriotism on display at the Convention. Lots of positivity. This will enrage Trump and his febrile minions even more.

At some point, movements like Trump's collapse, because they don't really have substance. They are based on perceptions and, yes, vibes. Harris has countered that with better vibes, happier vibes. 

This means that Trump's incessant message of doom and gloom is simply unable to counter the vibes of the Harris campaign. Trump being the messenger IS the message: American Carnage. Harris - by accident or design - has found herself offering the sort of campaign that Trump simply cannot match.

1968

 Paul Campos pointed to an important historical precedent that we need to consider in the unlikely event that Biden A) fatally damaged his campaign last night and B) he understands that he did so and steps aside. 

I think A) is up for more debate than the overwhelming caterwauling this morning. It's not nothing. Biden's biggest liability is his age, and last night threw a 50 gallon drum of gasoline on that fire. However, debates are pretty awful and Biden will have a chance to turn things around. 

However...

I think you give him a week. Let the polls tell you how much damage was done. Let him sit with the debate film and see if he can see what everyone else saw. I think he's a genuine patriot, in the sense that if he knows he will lose, and there's a credible offramp, he will take it.

Which brings me to B), can he see and understand the information if it comes his way? Other presidents have had disastrous first debates. The problem for Biden is that the nature of this disaster is one that reinforces all the worst aspects of his candidacy.

So, let's presume that A and B are met. What then?

The last time we had something similar was in 1968. Lyndon Johnson - like Joe Biden - had a remarkable record of achievement during his five years in office. His liability, though, was Vietnam. He stepped aside for the good of the party to get a fresh start on the war. The result was a contentious primary that ended with RFK's assassination. If the assassination doesn't happen, then probably things turn out differently, but the Chicago conventions was an absolute disaster. 

The idea of going to an "open" convention is a recipe for similar catastrophe in this summer's convention in....Chicago. The reason why parties have ended contested conventions is that they can tear open intra-party wounds. The Democrats 1980 convention and the Republican 1992 conventions come to mind. 

The good news is that this is not a case of a challenger like Ted Kennedy or Pat Buchanan picking at the intraparty wounds. The bad news is that in 1968, the reason there were riots in Chicago was that the party leadership was going to ram through Hubert Humphrey against the anti-war wing of the party's wishes. If something similar happened in September, which factions would rebel? 

The other parallel is that I think Biden would be able to and want to pick his successor and I think he would land on a very loyal and hardworking Veep that represents a critical part of the electoral coalition. The problem with Harris - indeed the problem with every non-Biden candidate - is that they don't necessarily poll any better than Biden does.

So, unless someone can create a hybrid candidate with Harris' ethnicity and loyalty, Buttigieg's debate skills, Cory Booker's charm and Obama's eloquence, I'm not sure that stepping aside solves the bigger question of "Who can best beat Trump?"

We had that argument in 2020, and it got heated. Having it again without voter input can feel undemocratic. You'd have to be able to line up Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders AND Joe Manchin and Andy Beshear behind this new candidate before the convention. 

Harris herself - the overwhelming favorite to take the reins from Biden - did not exactly cover herself in glory in 2020, however people can change and grow. She's done a solid job as VP, but you immediately run into the latent and not so latent misogyny that sunk Hillary Clinton and the racism that helped launch Trump. There's some energy around Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, but I have no idea what it is beyond the fact that she's won a swing state, is very photogenic and hasn't had to be exposed to opposition research. Same with Gavin Newsome.

There's a separate issue about what might happen to all the money Biden has raised if it's NOT Harris. 

Basically, Biden has a week to right the ship, all the while being told that he is taking on water by people like Barack Obama and his own wife. If he can't, they have to decide what the bigger risk is:

A) keep running a good president but a bad candidate
B) move via consensus to Harris, who has her own set of issues as a candidate
C) open the convention to a potentially compelling spectacle but an acrimonious set of schisms.

That last part also reminds me about how awful the 1968 scenario would be in the age of social media. 

The preference of every Democrat right now is 

D) a new Obama-level political talent emerges that Biden gracefully concedes the floor to. 

Scenario D has been labelled "Johnny Unbeatable" in many sections of the internet. The problem is that we have seen scores of Johnny Unbeatables flame out in the primaries, including Harris herself in 2020. Hell, I can remember being all on board for Gary Hart. Ron DeSantis was going to be the guy this time; Hillary in 2008; McCain in 2000; Mario Cuomo...Scott Walker...

The primaries exist to test a candidates ability to manage a complex organization under intense pressure. You pass on that with either a unity movement to Harris or an open convention.

The rule of thumb is usually that incumbent presidents win, unless they have an strong intraparty challenger: Taft; Carter; Bush or there is a next level catastrophe: Hoover; Trump.

The decision to not challenge Biden drew from that understanding of what happened to Carter and Bush.

BUT...

There was a reason why they drew that challenger. Biden has been a very good president. The issue - his age - is not a catastrophe on the level of the Depression or Covid. In fact, withdrawing for the "good of the country" would underscore the Democratic Party's commitment to democracy and Trump's malignant threat to it. It could create novelty that might energize apathetic voters.

People generally prefer Democratic policies. Democrats win the plurality of the popular vote all the time. Generic Democrat likely wipes the floor with Trump...but maybe not?

What I truly and deeply believe is that simply jettisoning Biden without a very clear plan that has total buy-in from all the factions of the Democratic Party could lead to the same disaster of a Trump Restoration.

It doesn't have to happen this week, hell, it shouldn't. There is also the argument of "quit whining and get to work". I have to think though that discussions will take place with Biden about what happens next. It would be malpractice not to. 

We have all been in a situation where we've leapt before we looked. We've acted without a plan. That can work well, the same way that placing the home on "black" at the roulette wheel can work. 

Better to have a plan.

The Ghost Of John C. Calhoun

 The issue with the border crossings has moved from a policy problem to a possible constitutional crisis. The situation is that Texas has claimed the right to make immigration policy, which is properly a federal power. The Supreme Court told them that they could not interfere with the Border Patrol, but they seem to be opening the door to Calhoun's doctrine of nullification. The odious governor of Texas even used the term "compact" when describing the Constitution, and that's concerning.

Calhoun argued that the Constitution was a compact rather than a contract. By this, he meant that each state entered into an agreement that created the national government. Rather than a contract that bound the participants, a compact is largely voluntary - and thus largely meaningless. For Calhoun the compact theory meant ignoring any federal efforts to restrict slavery. This naturally led to secession.

So, when Governor Abbott refers to a compact, he's explicitly placing Texas on the same level as the federal government and implicitly threatening civil war.

Ever since Ammon Bundy, I've felt that the national government has overlearned the lesson of Waco and Ruby Ridge. Still, I can see the danger in resorting to forceful measures when you have a set of states basically embracing nullification and civil war.

What's baffling to me is that slavery was the economic and cultural backbone of the South. It informed everything about how that society functioned. WTF is up with this border stuff? One has to assume that it is entirely a political stunt, since efforts to actually solve it garner rebuke from Trumpistan. Trying to examine what Republicans think the stakes are here immediately break down when coming into contact with facts. 

For cynical political gain, the GOP is scaring the shit out of their voters with bullshit stories about an "invasion" and then creating conditions that have killed a mother and her children and could lead to open violence between the second largest state and the federal government.

Here's Hoping...

 This year of 2023 has been a strange one. Crime is falling, inflation is under control, American troops are not (exactly) in combat zones, and yet we all think that everything is awful. Some of that is ongoing tragedy in Gaza, which has done strange things to the minds of young people whose interest in both international affairs and military tactics is not exactly robust. 

Gaza was going to be an awful situation as soon as Hamas attacked. While much of the responsibility falls equally on Hamas and the Netanyahu government, Egypt's refusal to let refugees enter Sinai has made a horrific situation worse. For all of this, Biden gets the blame because of "vibes" and because only America has any agency in international affairs or something. The number of young people saying they won't vote for Biden because Netanyahu is a monster is distressing, but then again, they didn't live through Ralph Nader and Florida 2000.

Like Josh Marshall, I find myself weirdly optimistic about 2024. There's no real reason to feel optimistic. Trump should be at 27% in polls, but his neck and neck with Biden. Talibangelicals have seized control of so many state governments that odds are a woman will die needing an abortion before too long. As Yeats said, "The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." How can I feel optimistic?

Part of it is that the reason democracy is better than every other form of government tried from time to time is that democracies tend to be self-correcting. I also agree with Schlesinger's idea that history works in cycles. The radicalization of the GOP has been apparent to those willing to see it since 1994, but Trump made it apparent to even "savvy" observers. 

So, here's to hoping I'm right. That a year from now, we will see Trump in prison and boring old normie Joe Biden getting ready for a second term. That the Talibangelicals will cause a seismic shift in voting. That we continue to make slow and steady progress on climate change. Here's to hope...

Credit Where Credit Is Due

 For years now, Jon Chait has been a lonely voice extolling the merits of liberalism. In his telling, the sort of leftist campus politics that seek to minimize emotional "trauma" by sanitizing "safe spaces" and policing what can and cannot be said is antithetical to liberal arts education. While I've largely agreed with him - education should be somewhat discomfiting - it seemed a silly thing to focus on during the Era of Trump.

Recently though, he has been vindicated by the plight of three university presidents. Paul Campos thinks this is just theatricality aimed at both three powerful women and elite universities by the objectively awful Elise Stefanik. This all falls, however, under the umbrella of policing speech. When the college presidents sought to contextualize the hypothetical, they were accused of anti-Semitism. How can there be context for genocide? Except Stefanik loaded the hypothetical in such a way that calling for a Palestinian state could conceivably be seen as a call for genocide.

Threats and actions should be grounds for disciplinary actions. However, we have so degraded the language that anything can now be a threat. This is why I get incensed at people calling what Israel is doing "genocide." It's often times a war crime, but that is not necessarily genocide. Once you start calling any civilian casualties "genocide" then any rhetoric in support of the IDF or Palestinian nationhood becomes a threat. "From the river to the sea" can be seen a number of different ways, only a few of them could entail the slaughter of the Jewish people. If everything is genocide, then everything is a threat and there is no education, there is no challenging prior convictions. 

Chait's long running defense of liberalism is a defense of free speech. Not Elon Musk's coddling of Nazis, but rather the idea that complicated and challenging ideas should be discussed openly. Once you start policing what can and cannot be said, then it matters a great deal who is doing the policing. When the Campus Left says you can't say Hispanic, you have to say Latinx, what happens when it's Elise Stefanik expanding on that precedent? You can't fly a Palestinian flag because that's a threat. (Campos elsewhere goes part of the way down that road.)

Students are young people. They are not adults, but rather larval adults. They make mistakes. Mistakes are how you learn. In any number of ways, we are failing students when we don't prepare them to lose and make mistakes productively. We watched The Holdovers last night, and it's a great movie. Paul Giamatti's character is what happens when you take even that idea too far. Still, the purpose of schooling should be to teach students to fail, to learn from those failures and then grapple with that means for the rest of their lives.

The problem with odious gargoyles like Elise Stefanik is that she never learned to learn anything except how to toady up to the most proximate power figure. Devoid of principles, she is only capable of shit like this. However, he very cynicism does allow us to see where these sort of illiberal trends in education can wind up. We can see it in Florida, too.

We have, I suppose to conclude, lost our ability to argue productively. And that has chilling consequences for education and civic life in general. 

I Guess I'm A Grumpy Old Man

 Kids these days...

Yglesias takes a look at the illiberalism of today's youth. I think I mentioned having a conversation with my son about Hamas that was truly disturbing. Josh Marshall noted that a lot of kids get their "news" from Tik Tok and that could explain some of the stark opinions the under 40 crowd have about this conflict.

However, there's some fertile ground there, with Ruy Teixeira takes on how "identity politics" has led to some poisonous ideas: 

Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

I've certainly seen some of this on my end of academia. I think there's some important truths in intersectionality, in terms of being empathetic to other people's perspectives borne of lived experience. Teixeira went on to attack Ibram Kendi's anti-racist work. I greatly enjoyed Stamped from the Beginning, but his subsequent work on ideas for policy have been...impractical and I think counterproductive. He goes on to attack the idea of equity, which is that we need equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity. 

I do think that equal opportunity is both preferred, but hard to achieve. How can we determine how structures are thwarting our idea of equality? It's tough, and I think elements of CRT and Kendi's work are helpful. What they are not is absolute truth. What's more, I don't agree with equity (equality of outcomes) as a principle. Few Americans do, I would wager. Equity has been tried and...it's track record is not great.

Yglesias does push back on the particularly vitriolic Teixeira piece. He returns, of course, to his NIMBY hobby horse, but as a way of illustrating how "equity" is usually just bullshit, too. He notes that, for instance, closed schools hurt poorer (and therefore minority) communities, but leftists tended not to care. In part that was to support teachers, which I think Yglesias totally ignores, but it was also a reaction to Trump not taking Covid seriously. 

A better example is how the Climate Left continual fucks up actual ways to improve the climate situation, most notably by shuttering nuclear power plants. Efforts that the Climate Left would want to put in place to combat putting carbon in the atmosphere would disproportionally effect poorer communities, which skew towards people of color. Hell, the very reason Biden isn't leading in the polls is because people wish things cost as much as they did four years ago. Never mind that people are earning more and buying more and consumer confidence is high, they don't like that things cost more, and now the Climate Left wants to jack up the price of energy? Where's the equity there?

The problem with much of this Leftist identity politics is that you start to see obvious conflicts between agendas. Inter-factional warfare is and always has been the standard of behavior amongst the Left in any polity, but now that they have a bit more power than they typically have, we are seeing how dysfunctional it can be to make policy decisions based on academic ideas like equity. Whose equity? When?

Back to Hamas, the idea that October 7th was "justified" because Jews are, what, White is historically bonkers. Every country is born in blood. Israel is no exception, but it is a recognized state and an actual democracy with civil rights and liberties. Hamas is a terrorist organization linked to Iran and Russia. How in the hell can anyone who has a "Hate has no home here" sign in their yard support Hamas? Because they have decided that Israel are "oppressors" and Hamas is therefore justified in committing atrocities based on that "fact."

The reality of Israel's occupation is way more complicated than that. The occupation is wrong and should end, but that should not lead to Hamas running Gaza. We saw what ISIS did when they took over places, and Hamas would be pretty similar. To pretzel oneself into supporting Hamas because Israel is wealthier and more powerful than Palestinian communities is to reach for the single assumption that the occupation is the entire and sole reason Palestinians are poor. Hamas and even the Palestinian Authority are not good at governing. And Israel is also wealthier and powerful than Jordan, Lebanon, Syria...you name it. Why? Because goddamnit, liberal democracy works.

Some of this is cyclical. However, the stakes going into the 2024 election are so catastrophically high that we have narcissistic ideologues like Cornell West running spoiler campaigns and grifts off the outrage of young people who have been trained to expect equity rather than equality from a world that it never, ever going to accommodate them.

I'm reminded, in the end, of the excesses of Campus Leftism in the 1960s that helped spawn a backlash that led to Nixon and Reagan. While both of those men were horrible presidents, their threat to American Democracy was slight. Trump's threat is real and imminent.

Hobbes Again

 Yglesias examines the concept of "Broken Windows" policing: where it came from and what it really means. It's one of his "good" pieces where examining progressive shibboleths is probably warranted. 

The one concept he doesn't mention is the idea of legitimacy, especially as it relates to Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was the 17th century philosopher who argued that a state/monarch must preserve order to the state/monarch was no longer legitimate. Order, argued Hobbes, precedes everything. Some of that trickled down to Madison and others at the Constitutional Convention, when they considered widespread unrest in the years preceding 1787. 

The "Broken Windows" theory originated in an experiment in 1969. I'll just quote at length:

Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by “vandals” within ten minutes of its “abandonment.” The first to arrive were a family—father, mother, and young son—who removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began—windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult “vandals” were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the “vandals” appeared to be primarily respectable whites.

What's interesting about this is that it is not linked to race, which belies that the roots of Broken Windows is racial control. What it links to is a sense that in this space, rules no longer apply. Once the window was smashed in Palo Alto, the same thing happened as happened in the Bronx. 

It's the thinness of "rules" that matters. Rules are internalized when they are legitimate. An illegitimate rule simply isn't followed - we had that issue with the dress code at our school, few students felt it legitimate to police clothing. Even if a rule IS legitimate - don't vandalize shit - once the rule rolls back with Zimbardo breaking the window, the rule evaporates.

All of this recalls Hobbes' assertion that life in a state of nature (without enforced rules) is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Without a policing mechanism, rules can erode, which corrodes basic ideas of community and shared civic life. I see it in my MAGA-town among Whites terrified of people driving down their streets, because car thefts have risen. You see it in the horrific spate of people being shot and killed for knocking on the wrong door or pulling into the wrong driveway.

Property crimes are directly tied to poverty and the poor do not live in an economic system that is legitimate in their eyes. Addressing poverty would obviously help restore some sense of legitimacy to laws. The fewer criminals there are, the fewer crimes there are, the more legitimate laws become (this offer does not apply completely to low grade sociopaths).

Simply addressing poverty, however, is likely insufficient. There has to be a cohesive policy package that increases police effectiveness in stopping crime, while creating community resiliency for times when crimes do happen.

A clear example of this is a post-Covid/post-George Floyd reluctance of police to really go after traffic violations. Sunday night, we were passed by two cars that were racing in speeds likely in excess of 100 mph. I understand the argument that if police were to give chase that only increases the number of cars going 100 mph, but allowing a certain lawlessness (I'm not talking about rolling stops or illegal right-on-red at 1:00am) creates more lawlessness, because the rules no longer apply.

My hope is that - for obvious political reasons - the leadership we need on this issue arises from Black civic leaders, because the racial overtones of Broken Window Policing under Rudy Giuliani have made aspects of strict enforcement intolerable in Black neighborhoods. I'm just not sure the proper lens is being applied.

For progressive politics to work, people have to feel secure enough in their person and homes to extend generosity to the broader community. That was what Hobbes' idea ultimately leads to. I'm not sure that's been internalized by progressive thinkers.

This F-ing Guy Again

 Yglesias has one of his better pieces about Elon Musk, online anger and the conservative mind.  He cited this golden line:

“Twitter is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it.”

This is about as accurate a description of Twitter and general online behavior as I can think of. It wasn't ALL about getting outraged over imaginary crap, but a lot of it really is. As Twitter dies, I certainly notice I've been spending less and less time there. I have a few curated feeds about Ukraine and Iran that I check in on periodically, but I don't just scroll through it. It's just boring now. Maybe Musk should rebrand Twitter as the Boring Company.

It's telling that as Twitter gets boring, it loses engagement and that's because anger drives engagement. The negative engagement model is making us all pretty miserable. This isn't to say that I didn't really enjoy the witty and insightful takes on that hellscape. I did. But there was also the pervasive "someone on the Internet is wrong" dynamic. I don't miss that.

That the World's Formerly Richest Man is making himself angry and miserable about made-up bullshit does complete his journey to the conservative side of the cultural divide. Yglesias does some Bothsides crap about angry leftists, but it is clear that anger drives extremism, and social media makes us angrier.

Being outraged by imaginary stuff is now the primary focus and even the goal of conservative politics. There is no policy, no governing philosophy. It is simply endless iterations of people getting outraged by pronouns and someone who chooses to wear a mask to the grocery store. It is - in that sense - fundamentally indecent, fundamentally bullying and cruel.

The GOP is basically the personification of the worst parts of social media.

As I've Been Saying

 For a long time, I've argued that the "conservative" movement is simply not conservative in any meaningful sense. It's deeply reactionary. As Paul Campos notes, the jackbooted authoritarians at The Federalist have finally come out and identified as such.

The Revanchist Right has told is exactly who they are. They want forced birth. They want to guy Social Security and Medicare. They want to outlaw same sex marriage. They want to kill prisoners whose guilt may or may not exist. They want to punish corporations and individual citizens who disagree with them.

As Campos notes, if you really believe the shit about Biden being a Socialist who's trying to turn your kid trans, then this form of anti-democratic politics makes sense.

What's depressing is that we are about to hand one of the branches of government to these authoritarian theocrats because of global inflation and scare stories about crime.

So, I'm Worried

 Anand Giriharadas has a piece on how to counteract the politics of fascism. It's really good and I agree with most of it.

However, it's a little late for it now. The Republicans have a compelling "story."  Crime and inflation. A lot of it is racist, especially the crime stuff. But crime is a real problem. Inflation is not Biden's fault, as it's a global phenomenon, and inflation in the US is better than most places.

But gas prices are what they are. More concerning is the narrative about crime, because it activates the fear based part of the brain. Crime is actually down a bit (at least murder is) but it feels up and that's more important than facts. This also feeds into the "defund the police" label that Republicans have hung around elected Democrats, with an assist from some activist groups.

Anyway, Democrats need to hold the Senate and they may still do so, because Republicans have nominated a bunch of lunatics. But I had hope for a hidden Blue Wave from Dobbs, and I don't think that's happening anymore.

Is Democracy Doomed?

 One the one hand, we have brave people in Ukraine and Iran laying their literal lives on the line for the right to rule themselves.

On the other hand, in this country, we have one of two political parties basically give up on the idea of governing. We've seen this over time, but the 2020 GOP decision to not have a platform beyond "Trump iz gud" was a turning point. We see this carry over into the midterm strategy from the GOP. Taking a cue from Trump himself, the GOP platform is basically a lazy series of trolling spasms. That the video extolling their plan consisted of images from Russia is...I mean Jeebus. 

But the reality is that they have no plan anyway. You can not get a single specific plan out of the GOP that does not involve the following:

- A nationwide abortion ban
- Putting Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block
- Cutting taxes on the rich

That's it. That's not what they are running on, because that shit is toxic. Instead they are running on, more often than not, a series of blatant lies and substance-free attacks.

Our immigration system is, indeed, broken. The use of asylum claims has overwhelmed the immigration system - though the people claiming asylum might have a pretty good claim. The GOP has no plan to fix it, they just want you to be afraid of some carpenter named Jesus.

Crime is a bit up from before the pandemic, but it's down since last year. Doesn't matter. The GOP is going to run on crime being out of control. American Carnage 2.0.

Inflation is still a thing, but with gas prices coming down, consumer confidence is picking up. It is not, however, where Biden and Democrats would like it to be.

So, there are real issues on the table. We need to fix our immigration system; we need to reduce crime; the economy needs a soft landing. The GOP has advanced exactly zero plans for dealing with this. Why should they? Fear-based politicking has worked for them before and it will work for them again.

Also, while I think Biden's political instincts are routinely underrated, he is not a great spokesman for the party, because he's just not a great speaker. There really isn't a "Holy Shit" orator out there like Obama or Bill Clinton...except those guys are still around.

Democrats - when they are in power - are inevitably cleaning up the mess made by GOP misgovernance. Since it takes years to clean that up, the midterms usually strip them of at least one house of Congress, making it harder to truly reform things. The GOP doesn't need an agenda, it just needs people angry and afraid.

My hope is that Dobbs is enough of a jolt when combined with January 6th to buck this trend and allow the Democrats to have a good midterm, hold the House and build enough of a majority in the Senate to codify Roe. Like Josh Marshall, I'm a little concerned that we don't have a clear message on this yet.

October is coming. There's no time to lose or else a party that has no positive governing agenda will be able to further erode this country's ability to rule itself.

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.