Monthly Archives: October 2024

Do Republicans Hate Cities, Or Just Those Who Inhabit Them?

My husband and I live in the downtown core of Indianapolis, having downsized from a previous home in a nearby historic district. We are urban folks who love being able to walk to the grocery, the dentist, the bank and multiple restaurants and bars.

A recent report from Indianapolis Downtown suggests we’re not alone–our downtown’s residential population has grown nearly 50% since 2010, to almost 30,000, more than 50 new businesses have opened since last year, and $9.5 billion in development is in the works. Despite the fears and misconceptions of suburban and rural folks, crime downtown decreased 34% in the past year, and downtown is the safest district in Marion County. We were only 5% of all crime in the county.

Obviously, not everyone shares our love for urban living, and that’s fine–to each his own. What isn’t fine is the current Republican war on cities and those of us who choose to live in them.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

The article noted that the GOP conservative wing has run against cities for years, with an animus rooted in nativism and religion. Initially, they appealed to Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as sites of “popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish politicians.” Later, Nixon appealed to white voters by focusing on urban crime and civil uprisings.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

Donald Trump and MAGA have returned to the earlier portrayal of urban areas as dangerous hellholes that endanger an  “American Dream” anchored in (White) suburban and rural America.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

This rhetoric depends on racism and xenophobia for its effectiveness. For that matter, Trump’s entire appeal–and MAGA’s philosophy (if one can call fear and hatred a philosophy)– is firmly rooted in racism.

Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods.

These attacks aren’t simply wildly inaccurate and hateful, they are evidence of MAGA’s pathological racism.

A few days ago, I suggested that Americans are engaged in a “cold” Civil War, and that it is being fought over essentially the same issue as the last one–whether people who aren’t White Christian males are entitled to be seen as human beings who deserve equal civic status with the White guys. The rhetoric employed by Trump–and increasingly by other Republicans–underscores that observation. 

A vote for Trump and those who support him is a vote to return to the Confederacy. I hope Harris is right when she says “we’re not going back”

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We Need More Of This

Anyone remember Howard Dean and his fifty-state plan? Dean was a 2004 presidential candidate, and is remembered primarily for his insistence that Democrats should run candidates everywhere–that failing to mount campaigns even in heavily gerrymandered districts that were sure losers was a strategic error.

I agreed with Dean then, and I’m even more convinced of the wisdom of his advice now. As I’ve repeatedly noted, gerrymandering is a vote suppression tactic. Failure to even offer an alternative candidate is participation in that suppression.

For a long time, most voters remained unaware of the effects of gerrymandering (for that matter, most voters remain unaware of the extent to which America’s obsolete electoral systems subvert democracy). Raising that awareness is the first step toward countering and correcting those systems, so I was encouraged to read about a campaign in North Carolina recently profiled in the Washington Post.

The article was titled “She’s running with all she’s got for a seat she can’t win. That’s the point.”

Kate Barr is a blur of activity on the campaign trail this fall. She’s a fixture at local Democratic events, delivering fiery stump speeches. In her neighborhood here in the North Carolina Piedmont, many lawns display her Barbie-pink yard signs. She has branded T-shirts and sweatshirts and glittery stickers.

Wherever she appears, her opening salvo is always the same: “Hi. I’m Kate Barr. And I’m your losing candidate for state Senate District 37.”

Barr’s campaign is making a serious point: aggressive gerrymandering erases competitive elections and leaves voters without a real choice. North Carolina is a competitive state. It has a Democratic governor. But thanks to gerrymandering, it has a Republican super-majority in its legislature. (This will sound familiar to Indiana voters…) During the last round of redistricting, the legislature redrew Barr’s previous district, marrying the suburban area she lived in with a reliably rural, Red district. (Again, Indiana residents can relate…)

Davidson went from being part of a district centered in Mecklenburg County — where Donald Trump lost by 35 percentage points in 2020 — to being part of Iredell, which he won by about the same amount.

“Why am I losing?” Barr asked, warming up the crowd at a community center in her district ahead of a campaign appearance by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein one recent day. “In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives.”

The article concedes that Barr’s decision to build her entire campaign around certain defeat is “unconventional,” noting that–among other things–she sells a “LOSER” T-shirt on her campaign website. But it also notes that–shades of Howard Dean!– “the strategy of running Democrats in districts in which they are sure to be beaten has spread across the country after decades of ceding state legislative races to Republicans.”

Both parties draw district lines to their partisan advantage — a tactic known as gerrymandering. But about twice as many state legislatures overly favor Republicans compared with Democrats, according to a 2023 study by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Running “sure loser” candidates and giving the “sure loser” voters a reason to come to the polls has been shown to improve the performance of the top of the ticket. It makes the majority party spend time and money they wouldn’t otherwise have to spend. And if focuses on a result of gerrymandering that has been aptly called “a highway to extremism.” That’s because gerrymandering acts to magnify a state’s partisan advantage.

The effect has been on particularly vivid display in some red states in recent years as legislators who have little to fear from a general election pass laws that are to the right of what their voters might support, experts say. Reproductive rights restrictions, school book bans and voting limitations have gone largely unchecked at the ballot box. Meanwhile, policies with wide support, like certain anti-gun violence laws, have gone nowhere.

You can see that extremism in Barr’s sure-to-win opponent.

Barr’s opponent, incumbent state senator Vickie Sawyer, who ran unopposed in 2022, has supported policies such as North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban — which was enacted after the legislature overrode the governor’s veto — and constraints on discussing sexual orientation in elementary schools. At a recent forum on aging, Sawyer brought up unprompted her support for a bill that would require sheriffs to detain undocumented immigrants who have been charged with a crime, even if they have made bail — “so they can’t kill our children,” she said.

Sawyer sounds a lot like the culture warriors in Indiana’s legislature.

The good news for Hoosiers is that statewide candidates can’t be gerrymandered. The current GOP statewide candidates are  worse than Sawyer, but they can–and must– be defeated.

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Question And Answer

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asks THE question: how on earth is this election close?

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

This is the conundrum that drives most rational people crazy. Even without January 6th, 32 felonies, multiple sexual assaults and the horrified testimonies of people who worked in Trump’s administration, who listens to the childish rants of a mentally-disturbed man with a third-grade vocabulary and thinks, “Yep, that’s the guy who should have charge of the nuclear codes.”? Who wants this ignorant name-calling bully to be a role model for America’s children?

How can this election possibly be close?

Robinson suggests some possibilities. First, Kamala Harris is a woman, and many Americans harbor a deep-seated misogyny. He notes that Trump desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race–and that Trump and Vance  “are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.”

Another reason might be that the 71 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are loathe to admit that they backed a loser, let alone an embarrassing buffoon utterly unfit for office. (Large numbers of these voters, after all, still believe the “Big Lie.”)

And Robinson notes that Trump does best among uneducated Whites–the demographic most responsive to his vicious demagoguery on immigration — “the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example.” He constantly tells working-class Whites that immigration is a threat to their jobs and communities. As Robinson says, those tribal appeals aren’t likely to win over many new voters, but will likely motivate turnout of his base.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

I have wrestled with the question Robinson poses, and I consistently return to one answer: the “through” line in Robinson’s analysis is bigotry. Racism. A yearning for patriarchy. A simmering hatred of the Other.

Robinson identifies anti-woman, anti-immigrant strands of what we have come to identify as White Supremacy or White Christian Nationalism, but–at least in this essay– he fails to connect the dots, fails to call out the intense White grievance that lies at the heart of the MAGA movement.

When Trump won (barely–and only in the antiquated Electoral College), a number of pundits attributed economic motives to his voters. Research has soundly debunked that assumption; numerous studies confirm the association of “racial resentment” with support for Trump and MAGA. I have previously quoted my youngest son’s observation that there are two kinds of people who vote for Trump–and only two kinds–those who share his racism, and those for whom his racism isn’t disqualifying.

Beginning with that first campaign, Trump jettisoned “dog whistles” in favor of explicitly hateful, racist rhetoric. He asserted that there are “very fine people” who chant “Jews shall not replace us.” He tried to keep Muslims from coming into the country. He said Black immigrants came from “shithole” countries (unlike those nice White folks from Norway…) His supporters want to roll back gay rights, and they persistently wage war on trans children.

This election isn’t about the economy, or national security, or other policies. It’s about culture war.

His MAGA supporters agree with the only clear message Trump has delivered: making America great again requires taking America back to a time when White Christian heterosexual males were in charge, and the rest of us were second class citizens.

This election is close because too many voters share that worldview. The rest of us had better turn out.

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The Indiana Retention Vote

The other day, a reader asked me what I thought of a current effort to deny retention to three members of Indiana’s Supreme Court– judges who had voted to uphold Indiana’s abortion ban. As I told that reader, voting no on a retention vote because of disagreement with one ruling would set a very dangerous precedent.

I subsequently spoke with several practicing lawyers, including a good friend who is a highly respected trial lawyer, an active member of the local bar, and personally pro-choice. He suggested that I share the following information with my readers.

First of all, the process. For fifty years, Indiana has had a merit selection process to identify and appoint members of Indiana’s Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. Once candidates who have been found to be highly qualified are appointed, they submit to a statewide retention vote within two years. Thereafter, they are submitted for a retention vote every 10 years.

This year, Chief Justice Loretta Rush, Justice Mark Massa, and Justice Derek Molter are up for retention to the Supreme Court. None of them is known as “liberal” or “conservative” or partisan. The organized opposition to their retention is based upon their ruling on a challenge to Senate Bill 1, the abortion ban passed by Indiana’s regressive legislature in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Indiana’s ban broadly prohibited abortion but made exceptions for 1) when an abortion is necessary either to save a woman’s life or to prevent a serious health risk; 2) when there is a lethal fetal anomaly; and 3) when pregnancy results from rape or incest.

We can argue about how those exceptions work–or don’t–in the real world, but they are written into the law.

Abortion providers sued to invalidate the law and to enjoin its enforcement. The lawsuit was what lawyers call a “facial challenge”–meaning that the providers had to prove that they had standing and that there were no circumstances under which the law could be upheld. The court found that the plaintiffs had standing to bring the case and that Article 1, Section 1 of the Indiana Constitution protects a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk.

At the same time, the majority found that the Indiana Legislature had the authority to prohibit abortions that didn’t fall within one of those three categories. It also recognized that, prior to Roe v. Wade, Indiana and forty other states had upheld legislative limitations on abortion.

Lawyers can agree or disagree with the majority’s interpretation. I do disagree– but it was a reasoned decision, far from the   historical dishonesty and religious ideology that permeated Dobbs.

As readers of this blog know, I strongly support abortion rights, and I disagree profoundly with the Dobbs decision. But the postcards that are being disseminated to the public accusing these three justices of voting to ‘strip away’ Hoosier women’s rights to abortion are misleading and unfair. The Justices are bound by precedent–and, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court– they followed their honest reading of that precedent.

As my lawyer friend reminded me, Indiana has one of the most respected supreme courts in America. Our justices serve in many capacities in national judicial organizations, and Chief Justice Rush has been president of the Conference of Chief Justices and Chair of the National Center for State Courts. Opinions of our supreme court are frequently cited in other state judicial opinions and scholarly articles and relied on by state and federal courts nationwide.

Typically, only 75-80% of those who go to the polls will bother to vote on judicial retention. Of that group, there’s a “hard core” of approximately 30% who always vote no. That means that an organized group opposing a judge or justice need only muster another 21% or so–and that’s why this effort is so dangerous. The retention of judges should be based upon their entire body of work and not upon a single opinion, even a questionable one.

I share the anger of people who oppose Indiana’s ban, but our animus should be directed at the legislature–not at a court that, rightly or wrongly, held that the legislature had authority to act.

If the effort to unseat these jurists succeeds, it will close the Indiana Supreme Court for several months, pending the selection of new justices. Worse still, if the Braun/Beckwith ticket wins (and this is deep-Red Indiana), Christian Nationalists will select the new Judges. I’m sure that Braun would be more than willing to subvert the merit process in order to elevate clones of Alito, et al. to Indiana’s top court.

Be careful what you wish for.

 

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How Worried Should We Be?

This year, Indiana’s GOP statewide slate contains three Christian Nationalists–Beckwith, Banks and Rokita–along with ” I’ll- kiss-Trump’s-you-know-what-to- get elected” Braun.

We’ve always had zealots and ideologues in politics, and as a policy person, I find them very troubling.  I used to tell my students that crafting good policies requires negotiation and compromise. When ideologues are able to push through extreme visions of extreme policies, without considering thoughtful, informed concerns raised by people who bring other perspectives to the process, the end result is inevitably flawed—if it works at all.

The effect of America’s increasing tribalism on our ability to conduct even the most basic tasks of governance has been bad enough, but the transformation of the Republican Party into a Christian Nationalist cult threatens the continuation of America’s constitutional democracy—and I say that as someone who was an active Republican for over 35 years. The GOP of today bears absolutely no resemblance to the party I once worked for. What was once its disreputable fringe is now its mainstream.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time lately researching Christian Nationalism, which is based upon the very ahistorical insistence that America was founded as a “Christian nation” and should be governed by Christians. These are beliefs that genuine Christians reject.

According to the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty,

Christian nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that merges Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s promise of religious freedom. It relies heavily on a false narrative of America as a “Christian nation,” founded by Christians in order to privilege Christianity. This mythical history betrays the work of the framers to create a federal government that would remain neutral when it comes to religion, neither promoting nor denigrating it — a deliberate break with the state-established religions of the colonies.

Christian nationalists have an “exclusivity” message: only “their kind” of Christians can be “real” Americans. A less frequently articulated part of that message (and the reason Black Evangelical Christians are rarely Christian Nationalists) is their racist belief that only WHITE Christian males can be real Americans.

These racist and exclusionary beliefs are entirely inconsistent with what we know about the beliefs of the Framers, and with the clear language of the Constitution. In the body of the Constitution itself is Article VI, which prohibits the use of any religious test for public office. In the text of the First Amendment, we have the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, which—read together—keep government’s hands off religion and protect the liberty of citizens to determine their own beliefs, free of government interference. (The Framers voted down proposed language that simply prohibited the creation of a national church, insisting on language that would create a broader distance between religion and government.) We also have numerous documents written by Madison, Jefferson, Adams and others, all of which support their uniform and unambiguous belief that—as Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists—there should be a “wall of separation between Church and State.”

There isn’t any debate about any of this among reputable historians and legal scholars. Less reputable ones pander to  Christian Nationalism by twisting and cherry-picking history in order to justify their efforts to remake American society into a place where women, gays and people of color occupy subservient positions and White Christian males are once again dominant.

In a very real sense, America is in the throes of a second civil war, this time mostly—but not entirely—without violence. Ironically, this war is being fought over pretty much the same ground as the last one: the assertion that some Americans are entitled to a status superior to others and that non-white, non-Christian, non-male members of society are less entitled than White Christian men to civic equality and the equal protection of the laws.

Project 2025 is a declaration of that civil war–a road map to MAGA’s desired Christian Nationalist theocracy.

Depressing research from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that 40% of Hoosiers are either full-fledged Christian Nationalists or sympathetic to their beliefs. As we’ve seen, these folks are unwilling to participate in democratic deliberation, unwilling to accord religious liberty to others, and unwilling to accept results of democratic decision-making with which they disagree.

Like Micah Beckwith, they believe they talk to God.

It has never been more important for the sixty percent of Hoosiers who don’t fall into that category to cast their ballots for an excellent–and truly American— slate of Democratic candidates: Jennifer McCormick, Terry Goodin, Valerie McCray, and Destiny Wells, none of whom claim to be on a conversational, first-name basis with God.

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