Yellow Lines And Dead Armadillos

Well-meaning people continue to urge folks on the political Left and Right to talk to each other, to listen to each other, and to come to the “middle.” This constant refrain drives me up the wall, because what I see are not “politics as usual” disputes, but a fundamental moral divide. The only “policy” being debated is the right of a lawless administration to send ICE goons (aka Trump’s Gestapo) into American cities to kidnap and brutalize citizens at will.

Even the terms “Left” and “Right” are inappropriate. The Republican Party once had a coherent, politically conservative agenda–free trade, limited government, respect for law and order, support for NATO… That party has vanished, substituting  virulent racism and devotion to Trump for anything resembling a conservative philosophy–or any philosophy, for that matter.

The morphing of the Republican Party into an alternate reality cult has also remade the Democratic Party (most of which was never as “Left” as Republicans used to charge). Actual conservatives and moderates have departed the GOP in droves. Many–probably most–now count themselves Independent, but a not-insignificant number now identify as Democrats, turning Democrats into a nearly ungovernable ideological mix.

The GOP has become a neo-fascist cult; Democratic voters are those who oppose that cult.

When I read pious exhortations about “coming together” and “listening to each other” I want to scream that I have been listening– I’ve heard MAGA loud and clear, and I know there is no “middle ground.”

A recent, welcome essay in Lincoln Square made that point forcefully. As Stuart Stevens began,

In this time of national trauma, we hear many calls for an end to the divisions that are shredding the national fabric. It all sounds lovely. Who could argue that Americans need to do more to understand each other and reach a consensus?

Well, I could.

I don’t want to understand the guy in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt during the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

I don’t want to understand the Death Squad ICE agents who murder innocent citizens.

I don’t want to understand the twisted hatred of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem.

I don’t want to understand the MAGA followers who say the 2020 election was stolen.

Stevens–one of the sane Americans who fled the GOP–draws a stark line between those who he says are “defending the legacy of the Greatest Generation and those who defile its sacrifice.” He points out that carrying the same country’s passport  is an accident of birth, while values are a choice.

Too many Democrats still believe Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election when she said, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” I don’t know how to break it to you guys, but that’s the sort of self-flagellating instinct that helped my Republican candidates win races they had no business winning.

The problem wasn’t that Hillary Clinton described MAGA as deplorable. The problem was that she stopped doing it. You win races by defining the other side in sweeping negative language. Races are about differences and choices. There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Stevens underlines that observation with a very simple question: Is this who you are?” He invokes the image of a ranting Stephen Miller “looking like he’s auditioning for Joseph Goebbels role as Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” and suggests asking a normal American, a sane voter, “Is this who you want to be?”

We are taught that it is a positive character attribute to give another person the benefit of the doubt. That may work when debating converting the U.S. to the metric system, but it’s a Munich Accord-level of appeasement when dealing with the lunatics of MAGA. Those of us who view this moment as an existential threat to democracy should reject any assumption that the other side is acting in good faith. When a home invader has broken in your door, don’t act like he thinks he’s visiting a friend and has the wrong address. Do whatever it takes to get the bastard out of your house.

Legacy media “both-siding” to the contrary, Americans are not engaged in the sort of normal political debate that demands compromise and conciliation. MAGA folks understand that, while far too many of the rest of us don’t. We are facing a sustained, intentional assault on the very foundations of America’s identity.

That assault calls for resistance, not conciliation. There is no “middle ground” between liberal democracy and fascism.

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Broad-Brush Bigotry

Yesterday, in a post about Nick Hanauer, I insisted that no group should be stereotyped–including people who are obscenely rich. Broad-brush negative characterizations–stereotypes– are increasingly being applied to constituencies seen as “Other”–usually, folks with different skin colors or religions but also financial categories.

I don’t waste a lot of sympathy on billionaires, who can certainly take care of themselves. I do harbor deep concerns over the increasingly public and unrestrained bigotries based on race and ethnicity, where the stereotyping of whole populations is both morally dangerous and factually inaccurate.

Take the administration’s effort to paint Somalis with a broad brush. It isn’t just Trump’s wildly unfair accusations about the Somalis in Minneapolis; it was preceded by the ludicrous racist charges (amplified by J.D. Vance) that Somalis in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.

A recent op-ed by a group of academics–co-authors of a book titled “Somalis in Maine: Crossing Cultural Currents.”–addressed these attacks on Somali immigrants. (Link unavailable). As they wrote,

The hostile political climate targeting Somali Americans has escalated beyond racist rhetoric into unprecedented federal crackdowns that have now spread to Maine.

As members of the Somali Narrative Project, we spent a decade in Somali communities, gathering stories for our book, “Somalis in Maine.” We met people whose lives revealed the depth, complexity and everyday courage that characterize Somali communities across the United States.

The Trump administration’s depiction of Somalis as “garbage,” coupled with an aggressive and violent crackdown on Somalis and the withdrawal of legal protections is not only deeply offensive, it is a deliberate distortion designed to inflame fear and justify racist exclusion.

The essay described the administration’s aggressive militarization and violent arrests, and “the detention of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike.”

Even as activists call for the federal presence to end, the Trump administration moved to revoke temporary protected status for more than 2,000 Somali migrants, deepening fear and uncertainty for families and communities.

While their scholarship began in Maine, the authors point out that Somali communities are similar across regional differences; they are families that “rebuild their lives with fierce determination.” Their young people (many of whom have been born in the United States) “study hard, attend college and start careers and families; communities contribute economically, culturally and civically to the places they call home.”

They also become citizens. In Maine, nearly 65% of Somalis were citizens by 2021.

One pernicious tactic used by this administration is the deliberate magnification of isolated criminal cases — such as the small group of individuals charged with fraud in Minnesota —into sweeping indictments of an entire population. In reality, the number of people charged represents only a tiny fraction of Minnesota’s Somali community — well under 1% .

As the essay notes, blaming an entire ethnic group for the actions of a small number is not analysis; it is bigotry. “When white Americans commit fraud, we call it fraud. When Somali Americans commit fraud, certain politicians call it culture.”

Somali immigrants came to this country to seek a better life, which until recently is what America offered to immigrants. As our book emphasizes, Somalis brought linguistic skills, Islamic traditions of scholarship and faith, oral poetry, extended kin networks and cultural resilience. These strengths helped families survive war and displacement, and then to build new lives in the United States, carving pathways into many professions, including meatpacking, entrepreneurship and academia.

The truth about Somali Americans stands in stark contrast with the Trump administration’s rhetoric — and the broader anti-immigrant platform advanced by Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller — that targets brown and Black people while welcoming white South Africans as refugees…

When the president of the United States labels a community “garbage,” and his vice president pounds the table in approval, they are announcing that they believe human beings are disposable. They are sending a clear signal that a population can be thrown away, diminished or eradicated without moral consequence.

Dehumanizing language cultivates the conditions under which human rights can be dismissed, families can be separated, people can be detained and be deported to countries where they have no ties and are vulnerable to violence. The state thus justifies actions that would once have been unthinkable and makes life perilous for everyone.

But the Somali Americans across New England, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere are living evidence of a different truth. They are parents working multiple jobs to give their children access to opportunity. They are college students majoring in political science, engineering and nursing. They are small-business owners revitalizing commercial corridors. They are imams working for peace, interpreters expanding access to health care and civic leaders advocating for neighborhoods too often overlooked by policymakers.

These stories are not peripheral to American life. They are American life.

Amen.

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Listen To Nick Hanauer

I have previously referred to billionaire Nick Hanauer, and his clear-eyed view of what economic evidence tells us. Hanauer has, for example, explained multiple times why raising the minimum wage, not cutting taxes, creates jobs: it’s when people have enough disposable income to buy your widgets that employers hire people to make them. (When Seattle ignored the plutocrats’ warnings and raised its minimum wage, Hanauer’s position was vindicated.)

In 2023, Hanauer and a co-author wrote a book titled “Corporate Bullshit,” intended to help readers identify the “pernicious propaganda” promulgated by the wealthy. The book identified six categories of falsehoods that Hanauer says repeatedly thwart progress on issues ranging from civil rights, to wealth inequality, climate change, voting rights, and gun responsibility.

As Hanauer points out, Americans have a bad habit of giving credence to arguments made by the wealthy and powerful simply because those making the arguments are wealthy and powerful. (It always reminds me of that lyric from  Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were A Rich Man.”  “The most important men in town would come to call on me, asking questions that would cross a Rabbis eyes–and it won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong…When you’re rich they think you really know.”)

Recently, on Facebook, Hanauer shared a letter he’d sent to one of the “movers and shakers” who spoke at Davos. Since he publicly shared it, I assume I can share it as well.

Here’s his letter:

I listened closely to your remarks at Davos, and you’re right about the core problem: capitalism is losing public trust because prosperity has left too many people behind. I warned us all about this when I wrote “The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats” back in 2014. You’re also correct that GDP and market caps are terrible proxies for whether an economy is actually working for working people.

But here’s the thing—this isn’t a mystery anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been having conversations—often with people who run large institutions, manage serious capital, and employ thousands—about exactly what to do next.

On Pitchfork Economics and in conversations across the ecosystem, we’ve talked with people like Joseph Stiglitz, Heather Boushey, Mariana Mazzucato, Robert Reich, Todd Tucker, Elizabeth Anderson, Mark Blyth, and many others who have laid out, in plain language, what will actually fix this problem.

They all point to a similar set of solutions:
–Tax extreme wealth and income at levels that reflect their real social cost
– Rebuild antitrust enforcement and curb monopoly power
– Strengthen labor markets and worker bargaining power
– Invest aggressively in public goods that make broad-based prosperity possible

None of this is radical. In fact, it’s how the U.S. built the most prosperous middle class in history. So when you say the answer is more “conversation,” I have to strongly disagree. We’re past the conversation phase. There are many ideas on the table, from every corner of the world. The evidence is overwhelming. And the political backlash you’re worried about is already here precisely because action hasn’t followed conversation.

On behalf of the handful of us zillionaires who have benefited from this system, we don’t need more panels or better messaging. We need the courage to support policies that will redistribute power, not just wealth—and to do so even when it’s uncomfortable or expensive for people like us.

You said that in order to solve inequality, the mountain—meaning Davos—needed to come down to earth. It’s a nice image, but it doesn’t reflect reality. What really needs to happen is the mountain needs to stop extracting from everyone else.

It’s fashionable these days to bash all billionaires, and a large number of them certainly deserve that bashing. But billionaires–like all other groups of people–are not a monolithic category. Just as all Somalis aren’t guilty of fraud in Minneapolis, all Jews do not support Israel’s activities in Gaza, and (possibly) all ICE agents aren’t thugs. We lose our grasp of reality when we fail to recognize the differences within identifiable populations.

Billionaires aren’t all like Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. There are also people like Nick Hanauer and Abigail Disney. When the people with pitchforks come for the billionaires, as Hanauer has warned, they’ll need to be selective….



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The Smell Of Hypocrisy In The Morning…

I know we Americans are facing truly horrific challenges–the White House is occupied by a man whose malevolent insanity is impossible to ignore. His ICE agents are America’s version of a (masked) Gestapo. Our “guardrails” have failed us, with feckless Congressional Republicans refusing to honor their oaths of office and a corrupt Supreme Court enabling the madman in the Oval Office.

It’s an ugly picture, and I don’t want to minimize how dire things are. But what has really incensed me–probably out of proportion to the severity of all the other threats we face–is the unbelievable hypocrisy of both Trump and MAGA.

Let’s talk about guns. Trump wouldn’t have won in 2024 without the gun lobby–his victory was thin. He sold himself to the NRA and other Second Amendment “patriots” as a defender of their ahistorical application of that Amendment. Now, he defends the murder of a peaceful protester by his ICE thugs by declaring that the protester’s lawful possession of a gun–which that protester never held and certainly never “brandished”–justified killing him, saying “You can’t bring a gun. You just can’t.”

I’m waiting for those intrepid Second Amendment protectors in Congress to call for his impeachment…

Then there’s Trump’s even more egregious lie about why he sent ICE into Minneapolis–and his rhetoric about stamping out “fraud” that he attributed to all Somali residents (they’re Black, you know, so they must all be guilty). It was immaterial that those allegations, which involved a small number of Somalis, had already been investigated and addressed by state law enforcement. That excuse was really rich, coming from a President who continues to pardon people found guilty of multiple crimes–including fraud–by juries. Of course, those pardons only issue when the fraudster or a relative pays him off, or when–like the January 6th rioters–they engaged in criminal behaviors at his request.

And don’t get me started on Trump’s excuse for bombing fishing ships out of international waters and murdering an estimated 124 people on board without any due process or evidence. His excuse was that those boats were carrying drugs. Meanwhile, he granted a full and complete pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was given due process, and who had been convicted in a court of law for conspiring to import over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.. 

Perhaps the most blatant hypocrisy is coming from Minnesota, where Trump’s MAGA supporters are having what one pundit called a “toddler tantrum” over the fact that hundreds of Minneapolis area businesses have put “NO ICE SERVED HERE” signs in their windows. The MAGA people fulminating over this “outrage” are the very people who have spent years protecting the “religious rights” of business owners. They are the same people who’ve gone to court to protect the “First Amendment rights” of bakers to refuse to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples, and to protect web architects from having to design websites for gay folks.

And they won. Our disgraceful Supreme Court went out of its way (okay, out of the Constitution’s way) to accommodate those very “sincere” religious folks, to allow them to refuse to serve people whose very existence offended their “sincerely held” beliefs. Our home-grown theocrats celebrated the “liberty” of business owners to discriminate on the basis of principle. Their current outrage is just evidence of what the rest of us have always known: they were hypocrites. They weren’t interested in defending just any “principles” or moral beliefs upon which a given business owner might sincerely be acting–they were only interested in sending a “religious” message to particular people of whom they disapproved.

Trump’s hypocrisy is nothing new.

Back in 2022, Austin Sarat wrote in The Hill that Trump’s hypocrisy undermines democracy by eroding trust and breeding cynicism. “What Trump practices and what he preaches have little in common. He feels no compunction about doing the very things that he denounces and uses to demonize his political opponents.”

But democratic politics cannot thrive, or perhaps even survive, when hypocrisy becomes the norm. Political scientist John Keane has rightly observed that “Hypocrisy … is the soil in which antipathy towards democracy always takes root.”

Keane argues that democratic politics rests on a foundation of trust among citizens and between citizens and their representatives. Hypocrisy erodes that trust. It leads people to discount what others say in the political arena and promotes a corrosive disgust with politics.

“Corrosive distrust.” Sounds like a pretty apt description of where we are….

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Echoes Of Infamy

Trump’s promise to MAGA –as I’ve noted before, the only promise he has kept–was to Make America White Again, with all that promise entails. (It isn’t just skin color that marks some citizens as “Other”– just being female or practicing the “wrong” religion will remove you from MAGA’s “Real American” category…)

The administration’s hysterical war on DEI and “woke-ism” has been unrelenting, underscoring the belief of MAGA folks that efforts to reduce discrimination against women and/or minorities are really discrimination against White males–that “inclusion” of women and minorities is really just code for exclusion of White “Christian” men.

Historians tell us that the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow, that they “borrowed” from the legal structures that disadvantaged Black folks in the American south to craft the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor– the Nuremberg Laws that laid the  groundwork for the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust and World War II.

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, and the Trump administration is now returning the favor.

As many of us have recognized–and as the New York Times has recently documented–the administration’s social media posts have increasingly adopted the terminology of Nazi racist propaganda. Its posts increasingly echo neo-Nazi literature, use terminology approving of ethnic cleansing and even QAnon conspiracies, and have “promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys.”

Their authors are not on society’s fringe. They are in the offices of the White House and the departments of Homeland Security and Labor, using official government accounts.

To some people, the administration’s posts sound patriotic. Others might sense at most a faint dog whistle to extremists. Some posts may just look odd. But those well-versed in the abstruse codes of right-wing extremism hear klaxons.

Some of us noticed this in the advertisements recruiting for ICE.  Ads on Instagram, Facebook and X all used an overlay with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”

That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing.

Most Americans would miss the significance, but White Supremacists (and those who study them) understand the message.

I’ve posted previously about other ads and social-media posts that have included pictures and symbols associated with far-right extremist groups, and websites excluding previously pictured women and Blacks. The Labor Department has posted an image with the words “TRUST THE PLAN”– a central catchphrase of QAnon, and the White House’s X account has posted a photo of Trump and the word “remigration.” The Times article points out that “remigration” is a “decades-old European concept centered on the expulsion of nonwhite people and immigrants deemed unassimilated.”

Tens of thousands of Germans protested the concept two years ago after the country’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party secretly met with neo-Nazis to discuss plans to implement it. (More than a dozen AfD politicians have reposted Mr. Trump’s “remigration” photo on X.)

The Labor Department has also posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” a caption that clearly and ominously echoes a Nazis slogan from World War II, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” or “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”

Experts cited in the Times article appeared confident that the apparent allusions were not accidental. One sociologist pointed to the use of “secret codes and numerological clues” in the ICE recruitment ads, which he believes have been designed to appeal to “a very specific segment” of Americans. These are “young men who live online and are disaffected by what they see as unwanted changes in American life.” The thuggish behavior of that cohort in Minneapolis would seem to confirm his conclusion.

Let’s be honest: this country has always had a significant number of Nazi and “Nazi-adjacent” citizens. In the 1930s, the the German American Bund had tens of thousands of members and held rallies with Ku Klux Klan members. In 1959, George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party; it employed a “White Power!” slogan and insisted that Nazism was “American patriotism.” The National Alliance, founded by the author of The Turner Diaries, spewed  white supremacy and antisemitism.

We’ve had bigots in the White House before, but never one who was such an enthusiastic descendant of those organizations.

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