Category Archives: Random Blogging

My Mother Was Right

I was the product of a mixed marriage. My mother was a Republican and my father a Democrat–although they did hammer out their differences before most election days, in order to avoid, as my mother put it, “cancelling each other out.” 

My mother’s identification with the GOP was based almost entirely on her fiscal conservatism, and she frequently expressed concern about what was then the “crazy fringe” of the party, which she accurately saw as racist and anti-Semitic. She worried about what would happen if the fringe became more powerful, more a part of the party’s mainstream.

She was right to worry.

The party with which my mother and I once identified is long gone, subsumed into that angry and hate-filled fringe. And now, as the saying goes, the chickens are coming home to roost. Republicans who still retain the ability to understand that blatant bigotry isn’t a good look are reacting to the public anti-Semitism of some of the MAGA movement’s most prominent members.

As Charlie Sykes put it, the MAGA Right sowed dragon’s teeth for years, and is now horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon.

Sykes was addressing what has been termed a MAGA “civil war” over the increasingly open and vicious right-wing antisemitism of the Trumpian Right. That warfare increased when Kevin Roberts, the current president of the Heritage Foundation, announced that the Foundation was standing by Tucker Carlson, who had just platformed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

As some of us warned a decade ago, the problem of Donald Trump was not merely Trump himself, but the mouth-breathers he was bringing with him — the winking permissions he granted to the movement we once called the Alt-Right. For ten years, he’s brought them into the mainstream; applauded them, encouraged them, dined with and defended them. He shattered the guardrails; dismissed the gatekeepers; and opened the sluices of bigotry.

That reality is what frightened my mother so many years ago, and it’s what makes so much contemporary political debate irrelevant. That irrelevance is especially notable in the constant hand-wringing over whether the Democratic Party should be “centrist” or “progressive.” What that debate ignores is the nature of the center in today’s political world.

A perceptive essay from Lincoln Square honed in on that question.

Where, though, is the center between right-wing authoritarianism and freedom and democracy? As the “Republicans” careen ever farther off the pavement, across the right shoulder, through the guardrail, into the ditch off the right side of the road, the “center,” if that is taken to mean the midpoint, is pulled from the middle of the road ever farther to the extreme right. Should Democrats, then, seek to be in the center by offering “Fascism Lite” as an alternative to full-blown fascism?

The essay quoted Yeats’ famous poem, asserting that “the “rough beast” Yeats envisioned has already been born. “It could not be clearer that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”  “Where is the center in such a time?”

Where is the center between the First Amendment and a government that seeks to control speech, assembly, and the media and is filled with Christian nationalists who want to establish a state church? Between the rule of law and a president who asserts, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States”? Between protecting the right of all citizens to vote and seeking to repeal the Voting Rights Act and gerrymander to an absurd degree? Between consumer protection, environmental protection, scientific and medical research, and countless other government functions and maintaining the social safety net created in the 1930s, 1960s, and since and striving to “Take America Back” to the 1920s, the first Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century, or even farther? Between a president ordering the prosecution of anyone he does not like and equal application of the law? Between corruption on a previously unimaginable level and honest government? Between a fact-based examination of our history and making up a past to suit the ruler? Between government of the people, by the people, and for the people and government of the people, by an unchecked leader, and for the billionaires? 

As the essay concluded, the center is not always in the middle. The GOP fringe has been planning the current takeover since the 1970s. And as it has moved the party farther and farther to the right, the center— the midpoint between two ends — moved in the same direction.

Today, to be “progressive” is to be “woke” to that reality–and to refuse to move to that far-right midpoint.

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Courage And Concession

How many of us remember Charles Sumner from our American history courses? (Assuming those courses included information about Sumner and his principled opposition to slavery…)

The author of “Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation,” Zaakir Tameez, wrote a recent essay in the Washington Post, reminding us that the violent opposition Sumner faced is still with us.

On May 13, a man who made death threats against Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) for her foreign policy views was sentenced to nearly four years in prison. Last month, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she was “afraid” of using her voice to speak about political controversies. A month before that, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) released audio recordings of death threats he received while he was considering how to vote on Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary.

At least one senator made light of the threats. In April, Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) joked on X about “bringing back caning to settle political disputes.” It was a reference to the caning of Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, 169 years ago.

Tameez recounted the attack for readers unaware of that bit of American history.

Sumner had taken two days — May 19 and May 20 in 1856 — to deliver a passionate anti-slavery speech on the Senate floor. Among other things, he accused Southern leaders of undermining democracy. That set off Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who wielded his gold-tipped cane to beat Sumner so badly that the cane shattered. Sumner barely survived.

News of the assault reinvigorated the antislavery movement. Tameez tells us that voters recognized a “parallel between Sumner’s beating and the beatings that those enslaved in the South experienced daily” and In the next election, outraged Northerners elected scores of anti-slavery politicians.

Today, as threats of political violence rise, Tameez counsels us to revisit the caning and to learn “three lessons that most history textbooks overlook.”

Lesson number one: many pro-slavery politicians rejected America’s founding texts. John Pettit of Indiana belittled the immortal words that Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence: the phrase “all men are created equal.” A committed White supremacist, Pettit scorned the Jeffersonian ideal of human equality as “a self-evident lie.” (Unfortunately, Pettit’s ideological descendants still populate Red Indiana.)

Brooks, Sumner’s assailant, faced few consequences; he became a celebrity at proslavery rallies across the South, and once declared that “the Constitution of the United States should be torn to fragments.”

Tameez’ second lesson is that such anti-constitutional rhetoric can prompt political violence–not to mention actual election “rigging.”

Only weeks before the caning, David Rice Atchison of Missouri — the former president pro tempore of the Senate — led an armed gang into the territory of Kansas. With bowie knives and guns, Atchison’s men seized polling locations, intimidated voters and stuffed thousands of fraudulent ballots into the voting boxes. Their goal was to ensure that Kansas voted to become a slavery state, even if it required violence and election fraud to make it happen. “If we win,” Atchison told his thugs, “we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.”

Some states simply ignored the constitution. Maryland and Tennessee banned abolitionist newspapers, and Virginia made it a crime to criticize slavery. North Carolina imposed the death penalty on anyone found to have encouraged enslaved people to revolt. In 1860, Southern states outraged by Lincoln’s modestly anti-slavery platform refused to put his name on the ballot.

Nevertheless,

Through grassroots programs, tens of thousands of people gathered in “indignation meetings” to lament Sumner’s assault and strategize political responses. The Republican Party — founded on the idea that slavery should be abolished in federal territories — passed out as many as 3 million copies of the speech that led to the caning. Sumner’s near-martyrdom energized the Northern public so much that it probably contributed to Lincoln’s epic victory in the 1860 presidential election.

Lesson number three is one that fearful senators today would do well to consider. “To galvanize a public that had been asleep to democratic slippage, Sumner believed that politicians like him needed to be brave. If they had to risk their physical safety to speak their conscience, so be it.”

Personal courage is necessary in order to resist assaults on constitutional democracy. Sumner knew that courage, not concession, was the key to defeating autocracy–while stumping for Lincoln, he even quoted Jonathan Swift, who wrote “And know that to be brave is to be wise.”

The GOP cowards who control Congress today are neither brave nor wise, leaving it up to an awakened grassroots to once again save the American Idea.

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Those Election Results

Each morning when I get up, my husband’s first question is: any news? (That comes right after his opening observation that “growing old is not for sissies.”) Yesterday, boy was there news! And for the first time in what seems like forever, that news was ALL good.

As usual, Heather Cox Richardson said it best:

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held [Republican] dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three [Republican] Uber drivers. Just everything.”

Those of us who care deeply about this country–whose patriotism is rooted in allegiance to the philosophy of the Declaration and fidelity to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those of us who work to achieve a society reflective of what I’ve called “the American Idea”– turned out in force.

If yesterday’s elections proved anything, they proved that real Americans can do this. We outnumber the haters–the racists, anti-Semites, homophobes and misogynists who are the face (and base) of today’s Republican Party. More importantly, yesterday demonstrated that We the real American People will come out to defend the real America.

Obviously, gratifying as Tuesday’s election turnout and results were, now is not the time to rest on our laurels. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to return this country to the path laid out by its founders–both the original founders and those responsible for the post-Civil War “second founding“–a nation committed to both individual liberty and civic equality.

The enormous turnout for No Kings Day was an indication that Americans were up to the task; yesterday’s blowout victories confirmed it. We aren’t out of the woods by any means, but we are on the way.

There’s an old TV ad that has one person asking another “How do you spell relief?” The answer isn’t “rolaids,” as in the ad. It’s the growing, impressive evidence that resistance is–forgive the Borg reference– anything but futile.

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Civil Resistance

In a recent Substack, Paul Krugman shared a transcript of his interview/conversation with Erica Chenoweth, author of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. During Trump’s second term, Chenowith, a Harvard professor, has become well-known for her studies of resistance to autocracies across the globe–especially her conclusion that peaceful civil protest by 3.5% of a country’s population is usually effective in overcoming an autocratic regime.

Krugman’s first question is one most of us would ask: do protests like No Kings really matter? As Chenoweth noted, that question is slightly different from the question whether civil resistance matters.

On the protest side, just immediately speaking, there are a lot of papers about this. There are papers in my discipline (political science and sociology and econ) even about trying to understand the impacts of even a single day of protest and widespread participation, and a single day of protest on things like shifts in public opinion, changes in policy, shifts in election turnout for particular parties, the tendency for people to run for office, all kinds of reforms.

I think the general answer is that, on a number of dimensions, even a single day of protests with very widespread participation can often lead to shifts and those different outcomes, even if there’s sometimes modest shifts in places like the United States where a modest shift in voter turnout can actually be quite decisive because of the nature of our voting rules. “First past the post,” that means elections can be completely changed by small margins. So it’s easy to overstate the impact that a single day of protest can have. But it’s also easy to underestimate it, given where the scholarship is on this topic.

Chenoweth then turned to the “slightly different” question of civic resistance, which she explained is a broader phenomenon than protest, involving more sustained levels of nonviolent mobilization and organization. It extends beyond protests to other methods of non-cooperation like strikes and boycotts.

Chenoweth noted that, in the 20th century,  these tactics initiated democratic breakthroughs in Poland, the Philippines,  Serbia, Brazil, and Argentina, and prompted the Arab awakenings of the early 2010.

Krugman and Chenoweth returned to the impact of the recent No Kings protests; Krugman observed that those events weren’t simply peaceful–they were joyful, and the festive atmosphere arguably attracted more participants, while the act of participating encouraged a belief in the possibility of change.

Chenoweth agreed, citing studies on the impact of participation in the civil rights movement on those who participated. Engagement in those protests gave rise to a belief that the situation could be changed–not only that each individual should do something to effectuate that change, but more importantly, that individuals could do something to change it. Once that recognition dawns, “there’s no going back to the previous status quo where it felt like the situation was permanent, only going to get worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The No Kings mass resistance also accompanied other defections: Chenoweth cited incidents of prominent people resigning– or refusing to resign and forcing the administration to fire them; the archbishop of Chicago releasing a statement calling the  administration’s policy toward immigrants intolerable;  the Chamber of Commerce suing the Trump administration over its H-1b policy (on the basis of it being unconstitutional, not just on the basis of it being harmful for their industries); the multiple airports refusing to run Kristi Noem’s TSA commercial. These are all examples of non-cooperation. Krugman added the example of universities refusing to sign the administration’s “compact.”

The preparation that went into the No Kings protests–preparation that worked to ensure that they would be non-violent–was important. As Chenoweth put it,

The more representative the crowd is of the general population, the more likely it is to have non-escalatory impacts with police or with bystanders or anything else. Part of that is just because it’s very clear to all who are observing it, that these are folks from every walk of life, regardless of what the GOP wants to say about these people, they’re plainly peaceful protesters, some of them engaging for the first time in a political protest in their life…That’s the needle that civil resistance campaigns thread, which is to say they’re able to convey a political threat without threatening people and property around them.

Chenoweth says we are experiencing something new to the U.S.–authoritarianism has captured federal power. We the People must strengthen the civil society response, uphold the institutions that need upholding, and “renew and improve the institutions that need renewal and improvement without bloodshed. I truly believe that we have the capacity to do that.”

I hope she’s right.

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Political Attention Deficit Disorder

The problem isn’t the message. It’s getting people to hear the message.

While pundits and strategists wring their hands and insist that the Democrats have “a messaging problem,” that diagnosis misstates the real problem. Chris Hayes recently–and accurately–wrote an essay for the New York Times (which, to ironically emphasize his point, MAGA folks are highly unlikely to read), in which he quite accurately described our information environment, where the problem isn’t the message, it’s getting people to hear the message.

Take the national election in 2024. Hayes (again, in my view, quite accurately) asserts that the Harris-Walz campaign’s message was fine. The campaign not only spent ample money on advertising, it concentrated that effort in the swing states–and as a result, swing state voters were less likely to defect to Trump than in non-swing states. “And the message of those ads was in line with a lot of what many critics have suggested — focused on core economic issues and framed in populist terms, with Kamala Harris portrayed as an ally of the working class.”

In other words, even though she lost, her core problem was not her message, however imperfect it might have been. It was an inability to get enough people to hear it, in spite of record-breaking advertising spending. If Mr. Trump had not run a single paid advertisement in the race, he almost surely would have dominated the single most important resource of our age: attention. Democrats need to win the attention contest in 2026 and beyond if they want to win back the country.

And winning attention is a lot harder than it used to be.

For one thing, as Hayes notes, ever since Teddy Roosevelt coined the term “bully pulpit,” the political party that doesn’t control the White House has struggled to match the agenda-setting power of the presidency. And as he also points out, today’s asymmetry is more daunting and profound than ever, because Trump has a “feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him, and to a degree that his supporters find thrilling and his opponents find suffocating, he dominates the nation’s and the world’s attention.”

As I have often argued on this blog and elsewhere, the fragmentation of our information environment frustrates efforts to communicate with a broad and diverse public. Not only have we lost the community newspapers that were widely trusted, and that accurately if scantily reported national news along with the results of the last City Council vote, not only do we have national mass media news that is little more than propaganda (think Fox and Sinclair); people use the Internet to confirm their biases rather than to access sources of vetted journalism.

Add to that–as one of the commenters to this blog regularly reminds us– the national penchant for entertainment. Given a choice between a football game and a news program–or a choice between a concert and a lecture–millions of Americans will happily choose the game or the concert. Hayes’ advice to Democrats is to “go everywhere”–to appear in forums that are untraditional. Podcasts, television shows, places where candidates talk “off-script” and  with “lots of different kinds of interlocutors.”

And in our social media age, he emphasizes the need to post. Constantly.

It’s not just how you campaign and which outlets you talk to, though. Successful campaigns must prioritize producing content. One thing successful content creators will tell you about excelling in the world of digital attention is that there’s no penalty for quantity. No one checks your percentages — only your total numbers. You need to always be posting if you want a better chance of things going viral or at least ending up in the algorithmic slipstream that shoots it out to millions of eyeballs. So Democratic campaigns and candidates should be thinking about how their campaigns are going to produce a lot of attention-grabbing short-form videos to meet the most disengaged and youngest voters where they are.

He points to candidates who have effectively used social media–Mamdani in New York, AOC, a North Carolina candidate. Hayes also counsels candidates not to be risk-averse, not to worry about negative attention. (The proof of that recommendation has to be Donald Trump, who–despite his demonstrable lack of mental acuity–was evidently born knowing that any and all publicity is good publicity.)

As Hayes argues, the public has become distracted and distractible, and gaffes, controversial and even offensive statements  no longer matter the way they did. When people are distracted, they rarely recall anything but the name.

And we’re all distracted all the time now.

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