Cultural Decline

Given the immensity of the damage caused daily by Trump and his corrupt, clown-car administration, a focus on his profoundly negative effect on American culture may seem minor. After all, unlike RFK, Jr.’s effect on American health, DOGE’s erasure of USAID, and Trump’s wars of choice,  people aren’t dying when he posts his childish, ungrammatical rants on his ridiculous “Truth Social.”

But I would argue that the longterm results of Trump’s wholesale assault on decency and civility are immensely consequential. And once again, Stuart Stevens has articulated my concerns. 

In an essay about Robert Mueller and his own father, Stevens quoted James Fallows, who had reacted to Trump’s post when Mueller died (“Good, I’m glad he’s dead,”) by writing that it was “the most despicable public statement by an American public official in my lifetime.” Stevens agreed, calling it a “vomit-inducing celebration of the death of an American hero.” He then connected it to what he termed the GOP’s “mass suicide of decency,” and offered an illuminating analogy:

This is not about Trump. He’s a deeply disturbed sociopath slipping into the darkness of dementia and failing health. It is about the collective failure of the Republican party to exhibit even a base level of admirable human qualities. If a woman is raped in a busy airport and the passengers ignore it and walk by, the shame and guilt is shared by every person who looks the other way. When they stop to cheer the rapist, they are active participants in the horrific crime…

The genius of Donald Trump is that he recognized with some feral instinct that the Republican Party did not believe in anything but power, and if he gave them power, there was no bottom to the degradation they would both endure and inflict. So we watch an entire political party stand silent while they watch him disgrace the office of the presidency, which is to betray every American.

Lest we miss the broader implications of what Stevens is (accurately) describing, he enumerates them:

What happens to a society that elevates the worst in its midst and demeans the best? It was no accident of birth that America produced so many men like my father and Robert Mueller. They grew up in a culture that honored sacrifice, decency, character. There was an assumed civic bond linking personal conduct to the greater good.

That is the legacy that these Republicans have betrayed. Like those in a lynch mob, they take comfort in their numbers. When Republican elected officials look at their phones and see the man who they embraced gleefully over Robert Mueller’s death, they know it’s wrong. They know they would never want to see their children show such crass cruelty. But then they put down their phones and try to convince themselves it doesn’t matter.

The decline of decency and civility is not a small matter. We are all–far more than most of us realize–products of the cultures in which we live our daily lives. We adapt to its expectations, and understand that others will evaluate us based upon behaviors that are considered appropriate in that culture.

Uncivil and thuggish behaviors from public officials fray the bonds between citizens, turning Americans against each other. Such behaviors erode our humanity by scorning the human empathy and kindness that connects us to others. In a society as diverse as ours, the message is that some people consider themselves superior to others and that those “superior” folks believe they are entitled to the childish contempt they show for others.

Scroll through the comment sections of posts to social media and you will see the results.

The best part of the recent NO KINGS protests were the multiple signs that explicitly rejected that descent into thuggery and the accompanying erosion of our civic solidarity–signs that celebrated the inclusion of all Americans into a capacious We The People.

When we finally eject this corrupt and immature collection of clowns, grifters and fascists, we need to turn our attention to three very important tasks: we need to hold the participants in this autocratic and unAmerican effort responsible–preferably via a very public version of the Nuremberg  trials. We need to undertake the repair and modification of the government systems that allowed–indeed, facilitated– the erosion of our constitutional democracy, and we need to elevate a culture that honors decency, civility and character–a culture that respects knowledge, objective fact, science and expertise, and marginalizes anti-intellectualism and tribalism.

Our children and grandchildren deserve thoughtful adult role-models.

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Democrats: Listen To Stuart Stevens

There’s partisanship and there’s political philosophy.

As MAGA has demonstrated, partisanship– party loyalty– is based upon grievance and identity. As the Republican Party has steadily jettisoned the political beliefs that had long been central to it– retreating to the racism, misogyny and White Christian Nationalism that had once been kept on the party’s fringes– those whose allegiance was based on grievance stayed. Those who had been Republicans because they shared the philosophy that the party had espoused, however, left.

A number of those who left became “Never Trumpers,” and one of those was Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist  on multiple campaigns, including George Romney’s presidential run. Stevens has written several books, including two written after he left the GOP: “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” and “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Democracy to Autocracy.”

Stevens and several other Never Trumpers formed The Lincoln Project, which focuses on criticising Trump and supporting Democrats. The Lincoln Project publishes Lincoln Square, a digital newsletter from which I often quote, and in a recent edition, Stevens urges Democrats to stop being polite and instead to “go nuclear.”

Stevens insists that even a Democratic takeover of Congress will not lead to a restoration of “what was.” As he points out, that was essentially what Biden did, by restoring “normal” governance after Trump’s first term. Biden pledged to fight as hard for those who didn’t support him as for those who did, and as Stevens points out, “MAGA responded by screaming, ‘Fuck you. We don’t want your help.’ Or as the intellectuals of MAGA put it, ‘Let’s go, Brandon.'”

Stevens spends several paragraphs describing how Biden delivered for Red State America–more than any president in modern history. “How were Democrats rewarded? Harris received over 6 million votes fewer votes than Biden.”

So–we live in an unprecedented time, and Stevens quotes Jonathan Last: “We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.”

What would that entail? Assuming a Blue wave this year that puts Democrats in charge of Congress, Stevens has a list.

The first day Democrats are in power, they should vote to nationalize Starlink and SpaceX under the Defense Production Act. Republicans use the assertion that we’re in a state of war to justify Stephen Miller acting out his immigration snuff film fantasies. Accept their wartime premise and act accordingly. Not sure there is enough ketamine in the world to get Elon through those votes.

Other steps?

Vote to cut off all funding for the executive branch.

Defund ICE and reallocate the funds to state block grants for law enforcement.

Pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, first introduced in 2021, calling for a 2% annual tax on net worth between $50 million and $1 billion and a 3% on net worth over $1 billion–and modify the original bill so that 20% of the total revenue is allocated to an untouchable Social Security fund.

Vote to make all stock trading by members of Congress illegal.

Require the president, vice president, members of Congress, and Cabinet secretaries to release 10 years of tax returns.

Vote to erect a statue in the Capitol’s National Sanctuary Hall commemorating the brave law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol from a Trump-inspired mob.

Vote to require Ghislaine Maxwell to be moved from her yoga class, Club Fed, back to a real prison.

Vote to launch an investigation into the possible criminal activity of DOGE with a budget sufficient to hire as many outside investigators and lawyers as needed.

Congressman Jamie Raskin should announce a presidential corruption hearing with an unlimited time frame.

There’s a lot more, and it’s all worth reading, if only for the excellent snark. But the central message is: stop being the nice guys.

Stop being nice and polite. Anybody who votes to confirm the town drunk as secretary of defense is not a patriot. Say it. Senator John Thune, you have betrayed your country. You are not a patriot. JD Vance is married to a woman who is a US citizen, as a result of the 14th Amendment, which Vance opposes. Who attacks the legitimacy of his own family? Call it out. What’s wrong with this guy? It’s not that RFK Jr. was a long-time heroin junkie. The problem is that he has said heroin worked for him, and he’d still be using it if it still worked. He’s a broken, deeply disturbed man who deserves pity but no respect. He’s a nut. Call Tulsi Gabbard a functioning agent of the Russian Federation. Don’t weasel-word your way to invisibility.

Hard to disagree…

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Confirming My Thesis

I have frequently shared my theory that the information environment we inhabit is a major cause of our current disarray–that the ability of Americans to “curate” a fact environment that conforms to our biases allows us–indeed, encourages us– to inhabit very different realities.

What I haven’t previously appreciated is the extent to which even accomplished, educated people, people who should know better, deliberately choose sources that confirm rather than challenge their preferred worldviews. That blind spot is probably an outcome of my own professional experience–lawyers and academics are forced by those professions to take note of contending beliefs and positions, if only to counter or analyze them. It never would have occurred to me that Supreme Court Justices–people who must review arguments from litigants pressing wildly different perspectives, jurists who were once lawyers, after all– would be guilty of selecting their information sources in order to confirm or buttress their desired realities.

According to an article in The New Republic, I’ve been very naive.

The article, titled “Where Do Conservative Supreme Court Justices Get Their Information?” was triggered by recent oral arguments in an important voting rights case. A review of the Justices’ comments suggested to the author that the right wing of the high court has a “suspect media diet.”

The article noted that some thirteen years ago, when an interviewer asked Justice Scalia about his media diet, Scalia had responded that he  just read The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times–that he had once gotten The Washington Post, “but it just … went too far for me. I couldn’t handle it anymore.”

The Journal, at the time, had the most prominent conservative editorial board among major newspapers, while the Times had an even more right-wing reputation. What’s wrong with the Post, Senior asked? “It was the treatment of almost any conservative issue,” Scalia explained. “It was slanted and often nasty. And, you know, why should I get upset every morning? I don’t think I’m the only one. I think they lost subscriptions partly because they became so shrilly, shrilly liberal.”

As an old saying has it, reality has a liberal bias…

The author noted that Scalia’s admission had come to mind during oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee, a GOP legal challenge to a Mississippi election law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted so long as they were postmarked by Election Day and received within the subsequent five days. Numerous states have similar laws.

Unsurprisingly, Samuel Alito–who, as the author noted, “has a long history of reading his own policy preferences into federal election laws”– made “unambiguous reference to election-fraud theories around recent presidential elections.” (In 2016, Trump had a thin popular vote lead on election night, which later ballots turned into a three-million vote lead for Clinton. Trump’s response was to falsely claim that it was the result of fraudulent ballots cast by “illegals.”)
For years, conservatives have accused Justices with whom they disagree of what they call the “Greenhouse effect,” named for respected legal journalist Linda Greenhouse. They’ve responded to decisions with which they disagree by accusing Justices who signed those opinions of seeking press approval.
While there was no evidence to support this perception, legal conservatives strongly believe this story. As a result, they have gone to great lengths to create their own counter-establishment of sorts to push Republican judicial appointees in the other direction. Those who toe the line, so to speak, are feted at annual Federalist Society galas in D.C. or met with approving public remarks by conservative legal columnists and scholars.
The article described several of the questions posed by the other rightwing Justices–questions reflecting “concerns” similar to those offered by Alito and similarly skewed toward acceptance of conspiracy theories that have been widely debunked by reputable news sources.
The article ended by noting the persistent rumors that Alito is planning to retire at the end of this term, in order to allow Trump to choose his successor. If he resigns before the midterms and there is a confirmation hearing this year, the author recommends that Democrats question the nominee about his media habits. (I use “his” advisedly; Trump is unlikely to nominate a woman.) As the author says,
A Supreme Court nominee won’t tell the Senate anything specific about how they’d rule in future cases. But we might learn a lot about them by learning which sources of information they trust to inform and influence their view of the world—and how susceptible they are to misinformation and propaganda.
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And Now For Something Different….

I recently received an email from my “techie” son who lives in Amsterdam, explaining an app that he has developed. It sounds very cool to his non-tech mother, and I thought I’d take a vacation from what increasingly seems like a funeral for American democracy, and share his explanation of it. Perhaps the biggest “plus” is that the app allows users to withdraw their data from increasingly toxic social network platforms…

____________

A few months ago, I was looking at one of those apps that shows you a map of the world, and you add places you’ve been and it puts dots on the map. I have always loved these kinds of visualisations because I have traveled a lot and like to see at a glance where I have been. But when I started thinking about it, I realised that these apps are pretty limited, and it would be kind of cool to do more than just show dots on a map, it would be great to connect those dots to real experiences I had at those locations. What was I posting on social media at the time, for example?

Since I am a developer, I decided to build a little site that would map where I had been and attach it to those experiences, but that meant I would need to collect this data from wherever it was scattered around the internet. I maintained a blog between 2006-2015, but I removed it from the internet a long time ago, so the first step was for me to find that data and import it, which wasn’t too difficult. Then I started thinking about other places I have posted over the years, like Facebook and Instagram. (I never go on Facebook anymore as I absolutely detest what it has become. It used to be a place to connect with friends and now it is pure slop being pushed at me that has nothing to do with the people I care about, to say nothing of the fact that I think Zuckerberg and other tech titans are evil and I don’t want to contribute one iota more to their success with my data.)

Fortunately the EU has passed data privacy and ownership laws that force these sites to give you your data back when requested. So that is what I did. I requested and downloaded my data and imported it into my map app, linking items to the photos and posts related to these places.

As I was looking at the map, I realised I wanted other ways to look at my data, so I built a cool timeline that you can zip through very easily to go to any date and see what you were doing and what was happening on that date. And then I built a tag view to group things by subject matter. I showed it to a few people who were very interested and asked if I could make a site like that for them, and suggested that I make an app out of it. So that is what I did. For the next few months I spent many hours refining my app, adding many kinds of information that one could choose to import (such as travel itineraries, blogs, social media sources, resumes, and more).

I just launched the first version of this in the App Store for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and soon will have the Android version available in the Google Play store.

What I love about this is that all the content I placed on the internet in various places over the years is mine again, and I can peruse that entire history in one place, and share just the parts of it I want to (there is a built-in sharing part as well). I got to take back my data and can now completely delete Facebook or others if I want. If you want to check it out, you can go to https://lifevis.app to read about it and follow links to the App Store versions from there. Or here is a direct link to the app store versions.

Here are a few screenshots with example data:

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Don’t Call MAGA “Conservative”

In 1980, I was the Republican candidate for Congress in what was then Indiana’s 11th Congressional District. I was pro-choice and pro-gay rights, and I had won a Republican primary. After I lost the general election, several people told me that they just hadn’t been able to vote for me, because I was “so conservative.”

I share this story because it illustrates how political labels change. Although I have admittedly changed my position on discrete policies as I have learned more, my essential political philosophy has remained pretty consistent–and I am now considered left-wing.

The moral of this story is that one’s position on the political spectrum is a function of the Overton Window–and as the GOP moved far–far!–to the right, the perceived orientation of those of us who stayed in the center (or even center-right) shifted. Most of the old-time Republicans I once worked with have left the GOP, appalled by what it has become. (Few have followed me into the Democratic Party, unable to make that leap, although most now will admit to voting Democratic.)

One consequence of the radical change in the Republican Party has been a detachment of terminology from meaning. Pundits continue to describe MAGA’s “policies” as conservative. (I put quotations around the word policies because MAGA folks don’t really have policies–they have resentments.) I do not consider myself a classic conservative–I don’t think I ever was–but I consider it deeply unfair to label today’s GOP cultists and bigots “conservative.”

A genuine conservative agrees–and accuses MAGA and Trump of destroying American conservatism.

In an article for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner accuses Trump of killing conservatism, writing that he “has cultivated and encouraged the ugliest passions within the GOP, dousing the embers of hate with kerosene.”

Wehner begins by noting that the College Republicans have hired someone named Kai Schwemmer to be the group’s political director, despite the fact that Schwemmer has ties to the white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and his Groyper movement. (Groypers are a loose network of white-nationalist activists and internet trolls.)

Young Republicans have refused to apologize for Schwimmer’s White nationalism, and Wehner notes that this is hardly an isolated case. Last year, Politico reported on leaked Telegram chats among leaders of Young Republican chapters in several states—chats in which chairs, vice chairs, and committee members exchanged blatantly racist and anti-Semitic messages. And the Miami Herald revealed leaked chats from a Republican student group at Florida International University in which participants used racial slurs, indicated their desires to “violently attack Black people,” and described women as “whores.”

Wehner was a lifelong Republican; he served in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. However, in 2016, he wrote an essay for The New York Times in which he said that Republicans should not vote for Trump under any circumstances, describing him as a “virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness.” He warned that Trump’s nomination would “threaten the future of the Republican Party, because although Clinton might defeat it at the polls, only Trump could redefine it. If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break with and a fundamental assault on the party’s best traditions.”

Wehner recognized that the ugliness now so vividly on display within MAGA existed long before Trump entered politics.  But for the most part, it had been confined to the fringes. No more. 

Among Trump’s most consequential legacies has been his deformation of the temperament and disposition of virtually the entire Republican Party. It has been a remarkable shift to observe: The very qualities that early on made Republicans, including evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, uneasy about Trump are those they have since come to accept and embrace. He rewired their moral circuitry…

Trump has overturned many long-standing public-policy commitments of conservatives—supporting free trade, reforming entitlements, supporting foreign assistance to save lives and advance American interests, standing by NATO, and standing against Russian oppression at home and aggression abroad. But the deeper and more lasting damage he has done is to conservatism as a sensibility.

In the essay, Wehner shares numerous quotes from the conservative canon and concludes that “MAGA is not just antithetical to conservatism; it is at war with it.”

Conservatives once talked about the virtue of compassion; the importance of good character and the need to encourage courtesy and decency–opinions MAGA mocks as woke. Wehner concludes that conservatism is now politically homeless. 

MAGA replaced conservatism with fascism. Call it what it is.

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