Author Archives: Sheila

The Book Of Beckwith

The Snyde Report–an Indiana website promoting the state’s Democratic candidates–has begun including what it calls The Book of Beckwith–quotes from Micah Beckwith–in its daily reports.

As Indiana readers know, Beckwith is one of the four far-Right theocratic candidates on this year’s statewide Republican ticket. He’s the only one who has publicly described himself as a Christian Nationalist, although it is highly probable that Jim Banks and Todd Rokita share that mindset. (Unlike Beckwith, however, they’re sufficiently politically savvy to avoid publicly embracing it.)

Here are some “Beckwithisms” from a recent report on “the book of Beckwith.”

Micah, 1:8 -Pastor Micah Beckwith pushes the racist White Replacement Theory in post.
Pastor Micah Beckwith, Republican candidate for Lt. Governor and self described Christian Nationalist pushed the racist White Replacement Theory in a recent Facebook post.

Micah, 1:7 – Micah Beckwith compares vaccination policies to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.
“And that to me is the issue here, because now you’re, it’s what the, it’s what the Nazis did to the Jews. They legitimized some citizens to be legal citizens and, they, they delegitimize, they made delegitimize citizens out of the Jews.”

Micah 1:6 – Pastor Micah Beckwith shares post advocating that brown people crossing the border should be shot
Pastor Micah Beckwith, the MAGA Republican Lt. Governor candidate shared a post on Facebook advocating brown people crossing the border should be shot. No comment from Pastor Beckwith’s running mate, Mike Braun.

Micah, 1:5 – Micah Beckwith states people should not vote for a politician who is not pro-life
“I always tell people. Don’t vote for a politician if they’re not first pro-life because the Declaration of Independence says there are three unalienable rights that our creator has given us and has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if he will not protect, your life, he will not protect your liberty and he will not protect your pursuit of happiness.”

Micah, 1:4 – Micah Beckwith states The Indy Star, members of the left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers want to cut off the private parts of children “they were praising that these pastors for saying you’re doing the right thing by, by allowing people to be able to cut off the private parts of children and, and so I think again the reason that The Indy Star sees me as a threat and they should because they want to do an act, they want to act things that are just plain wicked.”

Micah, 1:3 – Micah Beckwith states The Indy Star wants to mutilate children, put pornographic material in the hands of children and murder babies. “They want to murder babies. I mean, like, so I’m against that. So, they probably are a little scared.”

Beckwith is running for Lieutenant Governor, a post dealing with tourism and agriculture, not “biblical fidelity,” but like his fellow culture warriors, he displays little to no interest in those boring governmental tasks. And while Braun constantly minimizes the importance of his running-mate’s theocratic extremism, Braun–as Star columnist Briggs recently pointed out–is 70, an age where life insurance “gets more expensive for a reason.” 

If Beckwith was truly an aberration, that would be one thing–but he isn’t. Thanks to Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering, which has moved the “real” election in many districts to the primaries (where GOP challenges come from the Right), Republican candidates for legislative office have become more and more extreme. I’ve written about the contest in District 24, where the Republican running for the Statehouse is a Beckwith clone, but that isn’t the only Indiana contest featuring a looney-tunes Republican more focused on culture war than on the mundane tasks of governing.

I would ordinarily hesitate before calling a political candidate a “looney-tune,” but a look at the “Book of Beckwith” really requires that label. Does any sane American really believe that the “Star, members of the Left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers” want to “cut off the private parts of children”? That we should indiscriminately “shoot Brown people at the border”? That vaccinations are a Nazi plot? Etc.

Granted, the Presidential election is by far the most important choice voters will face this year, closely followed by contests for the House and Senate. But we ignore state down-ballot races at our peril. Thanks to a state legislature in thrall to a super-majority of Rightwing extremists, Indiana is rapidly becoming a “health desert,” where medical care–especially but not exclusively for women–is increasingly difficult to access, where public education is being purposefully starved in favor of religious schools, and gun ownership with no pesky “strings” attached is proliferating.

Hoosiers need to Vote Blue all the way down the ballot.

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Do Endorsements Matter?

Harris pretty much destroyed Trump in the debate, but as I keep reminding myself, this year, we can’t take anything for granted.

Nothing about this campaign is normal.

For example, seasoned political folks tell us that endorsements rarely make a difference, but then they’re focusing on the traditional endorsements issued by newspapers and political allies. It will be interesting to see whether the steady roll-out of very untraditional endorsements from sources that haven’t previously issued them will matter, and if so, how much.

According to CNBC, declarations for the Harris/Walz ticket include a recent letter from eighty-eight business leaders.

Eighty-eight corporate leaders signed a new letter Friday endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
Signers include former 21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch, Snap Chairman Michael Lynton, Yelp boss Jeremy Stoppelman and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen.

If the Democratic nominee wins the White House, they contend, “the business community can be confident that it will have a president who wants American industries to thrive.”

In the past, most business leaders have avoided taking political positions, based upon the common-sense belief that public support for one party would likely piss off customers belonging to the other party and would thus be bad for business. It is likely that the CEOs who signed this letter did so because of their conviction that a Trump victory would destabilize America and the economy in ways that would be far worse for business than some temporary partisan pique.

I think it’s unlikely that an endorsement from corporate leaders will matter to–or even be seen by– the average voter. But another group of endorsers is a lot more high-profile and far more unusual. They are the very visible Republicans who have publicly joined with “Never Trump” Republicans like those at the Bulwark and the Lincoln Project to support Kamala Harris.

A few days ago, I posted a copy of the letter signed by over 300 members of past Republican administrations, urging other members of the GOP to support Harris. Since then, both Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, have publicly come out in support of Harris, each of them confirming a personal intent to vote for her. (Interestingly, former Vice-President Mike Pence, who served with Trump, has said only that he will not vote for his former boss. Maybe he’ll write in “Mother”?)

Will those unprecedented endorsements–which in any other campaign would be politically earth-shaking–matter?

An article from ABC, announcing them, asked that question.

Big-name Republican endorsers of Vice President Kamala Harris are testing just how many disgruntled GOP voters are up for grabs in her race against a polarizing former President Donald Trump.

Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a member of pre-Trump GOP royalty, became the latest and most prominent Republican to back Harris Wednesday. Harris also has endorsements from former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and hundreds of local Republican officials to try to puncture what her campaign views as Trump’s soft underbelly with Republican voters who are uncomfortable with the former president’s brash and unorthodox brand of politics.

The campaign’s consistent outreach is just one part of Harris’ overall path to Election Day, but now, with no bigger names left on the table for support, the vice president will likely find out if there’s more support to be had from dissatisfied Republicans — or if she’s already maxed out.

My own analysis borrows a couple of terms from economics: micro and macro.

My “micro” level analysis is necessarily limited– circumscribed by the people I personally know. Most of the Republicans I worked with back when I was a Republican are appalled by what the party has become. Those I know and still interact with loathe Trump, and are forthright in saying they intend to vote for Harris. Several have completely abandoned the GOP. Rather obviously, the new endorsements won’t affect them.

More significantly, they aren’t representative of the millions of people who voted for Trump in 2020.

That means that the “macro” question is the all-important one: how many Americans are MAGA partisans who will go to the polls and enthusiastically vote for a neo-fascist movement headed by a mentally-ill (and increasingly senile) would-be autocrat? How large is the cult that comprises his base–and (given the Electoral College) where do they live?

There are two aspects to that “macro” question: 1) how many people have actually “drunk the Kool-Aid” versus the rest of us? and (actually more consequential)–2) how many members of each of these incommensurate groups will show up to vote?

All of this ignores the weirdest question of all: how many previously politically-unengaged “Swifties” will vote thanks to Taylor Swift’s endorsement?

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The Depressing Truth

Yesterday, I wrote about my swings between optimism and pessimism as we approach November. I’ve now read a depressing article suggesting that even a “best-case” election result will not erase America’s Trumpist plague.

An article from The Bulwark began with the following quote from Philip Bump:

The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.

Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.

The author went on to agree. As he recounted, he’d originally viewed Trump as an aberration–after all, he’d gotten through the Republican primaries with pluralities, not majorities, of Republican votes, and he’d underperformed his poll numbers in virtually every primary. Large numbers of Republican voters hated him. He trailed Hillary Clinton in all of the polling. All of these data points led him to conclude that Trump would lose the 2016 general election, that in the wake of that loss the GOP establishment would take measures against those who’d supported him, and the Party would go back to being the Party  of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.

As the author candidly admits, he was wrong on all counts.

My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.

By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.

This was a true innovation. Prior to Trump, no one had viewed minority rule as a viable electoral strategy.

His second mistake was his belief that party elders would expel or neuter those who had supported Trump. As he now recognizes, that mistake wasn’t simply because Trump won. “It was wrong because the real war was not the general election, but a Republican civil war between traditional Republicans and those who wanted “grievance-based political violence.”

The grievance aspect was important because it meant that Trump could deliver to his voters even if he lost. Trump understood that Republican voters now existed in a post-policy space in which they viewed politics as a lifestyle brand. And this lifestyle brand did not require holding electoral office…

So no, there were never going to be recriminations against conservatives and Republicans who had collaborated with Trump. The recriminations would run in the opposite direction: The forces of Trumpism would continue to own the Republican party and anti-Trumpers would continue to be driven out. (Unless they chose to convert.)

That led to a third mistake: believing that the Republican Party would revert to its previous identity as a normal, center-Right political party. He now believes there is no going back.

If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.

We can’t control the future. And we can’t control the Republican party. All we can control is ourselves.

Which starts with being clear-eyed about reality and the work ahead.

The essay confirmed my reluctant realization that far more of the American electorate falls into that “grievance-based” category than I want to believe. Americans aren’t simply engaged in a Presidential campaign, but a much longer, more protracted struggle for the soul of the nation.

Even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win in November, those of us who define patriotism as allegiance to the philosophy of our founding principles will have to contend with the White “Christian” Nationalists who want to abandon those principles in favor of an autocratic, theocratic vision that accords them social and cultural dominance. (If you don’t believe me about that “vision,” take a look at Project 2025. Or–if you live in Indiana– read statements from Micah Beckwith or Jim Banks.)

November is just Round One. That said, winning it decisively is an absolutely essential first step.

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What Keeps Me Up Nights

I sure hope I make it to November–not because I’m old (although I am), but because I spend my days obsessively following politics–both national and local– and vacillating between hope and despair. Indiana is scary enough, but as I noted yesterday, the national election will pose an existential challenge: America will either go forward or far, far back.

The source of my angst about the Presidential election was recently summarized in one of Robert Hubbell’s daily Substack newsletters. As he wrote:

The election will be decided by hundreds of millions of Americans taking democracy seriously by voting in tens of thousands of elections at a moment in history when one party wants to deny women full citizenship and personhood, deny Black Americans the right to vote, deny LGBTQ Americans their dignity and equality, deny children safe schools, deny all Americans a future free of man-made climate catastrophes, deny workers of a living wage, and deny the peaceful transfer of power every four years.

When I look at the threat posed by that party–once (in a very different world) my own party–I fear for the futures of my grandchildren and the others of their generation. I get bitter when I think about a reversal of the social progress made by activists of my own and previous generations who worked hard to bring the American “body politic” closer to our founding aspirations of liberty and equality. 

But most of all, I mourn the death of my long-held belief that the great majority of my fellow Americans are sensible, good-hearted and fair-minded. Until very recently–actually, 2016–although I knew that there were angry, disturbed and hate-filled people “out there”–I estimated their percentage of the population at something between 10%-15%. I have been rudely disabused of that estimate, given the grim recognition that millions of my fellow-citizens continue to support a man who is defiantly ignorant, hateful and very obviously deeply mentally-ill–presumably, because he gives them permission to revel in and voice their own bigotries and grievances.

And then there’s the Electoral College, which scholars estimate gives Republicans a 3% advantage….

But then I get hopeful. (I have emotional whiplash..)

The Harris/Walz ticket is so normal, and the enthusiasm they’ve generated is so encouraging. Not only do the Democrats have better candidates, former Republicans–including very conservative ones like Liz Cheney– are coming out of the woodwork daily to endorse them. They’ve raised much more money, which–in addition to powering their campaign–is another sign of support and enthusiasm. They have a widespread “ground game” with far more field offices than the Republicans. New registrations are up, especially among groups that tilt Democratic, calling the “likely voter” screens employed by pollsters into question. 

In the wake of 2016, there has also been an explosion of grass-roots organizing. According to a 2019 report from the American Community Project, those post-2016 grassroots groups — sometimes labeled “Resistance” groups — have become an electoral force to be reckoned with.

Reporters and academics have established certain baseline facts: The new groups are disproportionately composed of middle-aged to retirement-age college-educated women.

They are especially prominent in America’s “suburbs.”

Their hands-on campaigning formed part of the “Blue Wave” that flipped suburban seats to the Democrats in November 2018.

Since 2019, those groups have continued to grow and multiply, in significant part thanks to Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s reversal of a constitutional right to reproductive liberty which continues to motivate voters, especially but not exclusively women voters. 

I can’t shake my belief that if Americans of good will and good sense turn out to vote, Democrats will not only win, but win big, that November could really be a “Blue Wave” election, a turning point that could revive my previous faith in the American public. 

MAGA is, after all, a reaction to the broad cultural changes in this country–changes that include widespread acceptance of the growing equality of women, LGBTQ+ Americans and people of color. Large numbers of families now include same-sex couples and/or religious and racial intermarriages. Fewer Americans report memberships in fundamentalist Churches. Workplaces are increasingly diverse, and Americans from a variety of backgrounds now work together and get to know each other. All of those cultural changes have lessened fears of the “Other” that were once more widespread.

I remained convinced that MAGA Republicanism is a panicked reaction to those cultural changes by people who feel threatened by them. Social change is destabilizing, especially for people who lack the personal or communal resources to adapt–but surely, that doesn’t describe a majority of Americans.

In November, we’ll see which of these contending analyses is correct, and we’ll know what kind of world my grandchildren will inhabit.

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Project 2025 And Health Care

As we all know, the United States is the only first-world country without a national health-care program. While the approaches differ, most advanced countries consider access to healthcare a human right–not a consumer product. Here in the US, efforts to extend that access–Medicare, Medicaid, and more recently the Affordable Care Act–have been met with hysterical claims that such programs are “socialism” and incompatible with freedom.

I’m not the first person to note that these critics don’t seem nearly as upset by programs that can accurately be labeled “socialism for the rich.” Increasingly, American economic policy, with its generous tax advantages and outright subsidies, seems to be socialism for the rich and brutal capitalism for the poor. But a dissertation on that topic is for another day.

The scolds who resent any effort to make health insurance more affordable or accessible are among those who have produced the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the Project’s health care proposals. Neither should we con ourselves into believing that Project 2025 isn’t an outline that Trump will follow if elected–there is ample evidence to the contrary.

So–what health policies would another Trump Administration pursue?

A doctor writing in Time Magazine has recently explained why voters need to understand that agenda–especially when it comes to healthcare– and take it seriously.

Sponsored by the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, the Project 2025 policy agenda was written by more than 400 conservative experts and published in a book titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. While Trump has publicly disavowed the initiative, he has endorsed (and even tried to implement) many of its core proposals, several of which were penned by his former staffers.

The Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has made life-saving drugs like insulin more affordable. Project 2025 calls for its repeal.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—signed into law by President Biden two years ago—capped insulin costs at $35 per month for people on Medicare. The data show that this cap increased the number of insulin prescriptions that were filled, ensuring more patients with diabetes got what they needed to stay healthy. The IRA will also cap annual out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs (not just insulin) for seniors starting next year. And despite aggressive lobbying and legal challenges from drugmakers, the law empowered Medicare to negotiate prices with Big Pharma for the first time in history, achieving significant discounts and saving billions. These are just a few of the many reasons more than 500 health professionals recently signed an open letter to protect the IRA.

Other provisions of Project 2025 would reduce access to Medicaid. Currently, more than 70 million low-income Americans rely on Medicaid for health care. The Project proposes lifetime caps on benefits and the addition of work requirements as a condition for coverage, among other onerous changes.

Unsurprisingly, Project 2025 would not only restrict abortion at the national level, it would also eliminate no-cost coverage for some contraception. (Those Right-wingers really want women to breed….) Of course, once children have been produced, concern for their welfare vanishes.

Project 2025 takes particular aim at the well-being of children. The authors seek to prevent public health agencies from requiring vaccination in school children, which could cause more outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. They also propose invalidating state laws intended to stem gun violence, a leading cause of death for children in the U.S. Project 2025 would even eliminate Head Start, a critical program for early childhood development, especially in low-income and rural communities.

As the doctor writes, implementation of even a few of these proposed policies would set back decades of progress in medicine and public health.

The Harris/Walz ticket has used the slogan “We Won’t Go Back.” The usual interpretation of that phrase is that it refers to women’s reproductive liberty, but it actually–and accurately– describes what is really at stake in November’s election. MAGA is a movement entirely focused on taking America back–back to a time when women were property, Black and Brown people second-class citizens, LGBTQ+ people closeted, and adequate medical care a consumer good available only to those who could afford it.

I don’t know when opposition to vaccination and common-sense public health measures became part of the ideology of the Right. I don’t know why MAGA folks think the working poor aren’t entitled to health care. I don’t understand their evident belief that government should cater to White Christian males to the exclusion of other citizens.

But I do know they’re stuck in a past that I don’t want to return to. When people say this election poses an existential choice, they aren’t engaging in hyperbole.

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