Random Blogging – Page 109

Herd Mentality

Sometimes, you just don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Our Buffoon-in-Chief recently ventured out of his MAGA rally cocoon to participate in a Pennsylvania town hall. His performance was more bizarre than usual–and that, as all sentient Americans know, is really saying something. The linked article from Talking Points Memo characterized the event as a “fire hose of lying,” but I actually disagree–lying requires intent, and I think Trump is no longer able to distinguish between what is real and what he wants to believe at any particular moment. He has always been loosely tethered to reality, and I think that under the pressure of the campaign–not to mention the various ongoing criminal investigations– the tether is slipping. Badly.

Besides somehow blaming his Democratic rival Joe Biden for not enacting a national mask mandate, Trump spent the town hall claiming that a “herd mentality” would stop COVID-19 (he was presumably referring to the herd immunity method, which health experts have largely rejected as a solution to the pandemic), falsely denying that he wasn’t trying to kill preexisting conditions protections in the Affordable Care Act, and bragging about endorsements from the police when asked about systemic racism in the criminal justice system.

Several observers noted that the first debate is fast approaching and the president pretty clearly isn’t ready for that debate. Chris Hayes of MSNBC tweeted something along the lines of “And this is the guy who wants the campaign to focus on mental fitness?!” Someone else tweeted a concise and accurate summary of the performance:

Trump thought he could BS his way through this town hall because he overestimates his intelligence, underestimates Americans and has relied on soft ball media coverage, wealth and privilege to protect him from all his failures all his life. He’s crumbling. Didn’t take much.

Trump presumably agreed to the Town Hall format for the same reason he agreed to 18 conversations with Bob Woodward–he has a wildly exaggerated belief in his ability to “snow” people (okay–bullshit his way through situations), and an obvious inability to recognize his own deficits–to know what he doesn’t know. He is a walking, talking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

He also lacks an adult vocabulary. Hence “herd mentality” for “herd immunity.”

Perhaps the best reaction to this train wreck, however, came from satirist Andy Borowitz. Borowitz has been on a roll the past four years. (Say what you will about this nightmare Presidency, it has been great for comedy and satire…) The Borowitz Report’s headline read “Scientists Believe Congressional Republicans Have Developed Herd Mentality,” and the lede expanded on the theme.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota believe that Republican members of Congress have obtained “extremely high” levels of herd mentality, a new study shows.

According to the study, the researchers found that, in obtaining herd mentality, the G.O.P. lawmakers have developed “near-total immunity” to damning books, news reports, and audio tapes.

Herd mentality is, as Borowitz wrote, the dominant characteristic of all congressional Republicans, irrespective of the state they represent, “with the exception of one senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, who was deemed an outlier and therefore statistically insignificant.”

Davis Logsdon, the scientist who supervised the study, said that Republicans were exhibiting herd mentality to a degree never before observed in humans.

“Herd mentality at these levels historically has appeared only in other mammal species, like lemmings,” the researcher said.

Borowitz’ “take” on the Town Hall reminds us that the problem really isn’t that we have a corrupt, embarrassing, mentally-ill President. The problem is his GOP enablers–the lemmings who are blindly pandering to the racist cult that is Trump’s base.

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Let Me Count The Ways…

There are all sorts of tactics that have been employed over the years to suppress the votes of “the other guys.” Recently, those efforts have mostly come from the GOP, but historically, both parties have engaged in them–just as both parties do (and continue to) gerrymander when they control a state legislative chamber.

I’ve recently noted that the efforts to cast doubt on voting by mail are partly motivated by the fact that vote-by-mail defeats many of the time-honored ways to suppress minority votes–and provides a paper trail.

One of the least commented methods of suppressing minority votes–and one of the most effective–is felon disenfranchisement. It is widespread–a number of states forbid ex-offenders from casting ballots–and superficially, at least, it’s race-neutral. For citizens unaware of the over-incarceration of African-Americans during America’s drug war (laid out in indisputable terms by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow), felon disenfranchisement is simply a lingering, perhaps overly-harsh “law and order” punishment of those who have broken the law.

Two recent court decisions–one honorable, one definitely not–make the implicit, explicit.

In North Carolina, a court struck down an effort to keep ex-offenders from casting ballots, holding that the state could not disenfranchise citizens who owe fines, fees, and other debts from a felony conviction. As the linked article about the ruling noted,

Many felon disenfranchisement rules, including North Carolina’s, are rooted in overt white supremacy. After Reconstruction, racist Democrats in the state sought to revoke Black citizens’ suffrage. They accomplished this task, in part, through vague criminal laws that stripped convicted felons of their civil rights—then enforced these laws disproportionately against Black people. North Carolina’s current statute is rooted in an 1877 law spearheaded by a representative who later presided over the lynching of three Black men. At the time, Democrats argued that felon disenfranchisement was necessary to stop “the honest vote of a white man” from being “off-set by the vote of some negro.” Its purpose, alongside other Jim Crow measures like the literacy test, was to “secure white supremacy.”

The law continues to work as intended, as documented in an expert report by University of North Carolina professor Frank R. Baumgartner. Today, Black North Carolinians represent 22 percent of adults and 42 percent of the disenfranchised. Black residents are denied the right to vote at three times the rate of white residents in 44 counties. The state’s disenfranchisement regime targets two groups of people: those on probation or parole, and those who’ve completed their full sentence but still owe court debt. Notably, judges may extend an individual’s probation or send them back to prison because they haven’t paid off these fines and fees.

Meanwhile, in Florida, immediately after a majority of citizens voted to overturn that state’s felony disenfranchisement law, Republican legislators passed a measure that limited that disenfranchisement to those who had managed to pay off all court costs. A federal judge ruled that the restriction was an unconstitutional poll tax. But last Friday, an appeals court narrowly overturned that decision.

The court’s 6-4 ruling dealt a significant blow to civil rights groups that have fought to expand the voter rolls with hundreds of thousands of people who had completed prison time and parole for felony convictions. It also undermined what had seemed like a major referendum victory in 2018 and served as another reminder of the decisive role that a slew of legal cases could play before the presidential election.

There are lessons here, for those of us willing to learn them.

First, racial animus dies hard, and it lurks in places we seldom think to look. Second, the competence and integrity of the men and women who occupy the nation’s bench–who act as custodians of the Constitution and defenders of the Rule of Law–is critically important.

And third, the future of both that bench and this nation depends upon massive turnout for “blue no matter who” on (or preferably before) November 3d.

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Distraction

Note: Apologies for the extra and misleading email yesterday. The blog referenced (to which the link would not work) will post on the 16th. (I sometimes work ahead–and in those cases, obviously don’t know what I’m doing…)

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I know that many of you who read this blog also subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. That almost-daily letter is particularly valuable for those who are trying to just keep up with the daily outrages and indignities coming from the White House, since she tends to focus on updating readers to the fire hose of improprieties that exhaust so many of us.

The other day provided an example: from continued fallout over Trump’s “suckers and losers” insult to America’s soldiers, to documentation of his continuing buildup and corruption of the Military-Industrial Complex, to not-so-surprising revelations in Michael Cohen’s new book, to the absolutely unprecedented, legally-appalling effort of Bill Barr’s version of a Justice Department to assume Trump’s defense against Jean Carroll’s defamation suit, it was just another day in TrumpLand.

On the off-chance that you missed that last offense, here’s a brief background: Carroll is one of the many women who have accused Trump of sexual assault. She alleged that he raped her some 20 years ago, and when he responded in true Trumpian fashion that he’d never even met her (as usual, there are contemporaneous photographs to the contrary) and she “wasn’t his type,” she sued him for defamation.The courts have thus far refused to dismiss or halt that lawsuit.

Now, lawyers with the Department of Justice (presumably with straight faces) are arguing that Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied knowing her and thus should be defended by the DOJ, which is funded by taxpayer dollars. As Richardson reported,

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig called this “a wild stretch by DOJ…. I can’t remotely conceive how DOJ can argue with a straight face that it is somehow within the official duties of the President to deny a claim that he committed sexual assault years before he took office.” He continued: “This is very much consistent with Barr’s well-established pattern of distorting fact and law to protect Trump and his allies.”

(I am at a loss to understand Barr, who–unlike Trump– is not stupid. My operating theories since he began acting like the President’s consiglieri vacillate between mental illness and blackmail, since he clearly knows that history will not be kind…)

All this is, in a fashion, beside the point.

Much has been made of Trump’s ability to distract—to point to the “shiny object” (squirrel!!), to create a new outrage in order to distract attention and media from his most recent crimes and misdemeanors. It’s true that the media turns its attention to the most recent example of norm-and-rule breaking, but what makes this constant misbehavior a really effective distraction is simply the “fire hose” rate of discoveries of the administration’s corruption and incompetence.

It becomes impossible to keep up–and it exhausts those of us who continue to try.

The sheer volume of the misbehavior prevents the sort of continued, in-depth reporting of a single incident of unethical or criminal behavior–the sort of ongoing media attention that would be paid to such incidents occurring in past administrations. Think of the amount and duration of reporting on Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, or the Watergate break-in. Substantial research has shown that it takes numerous repetitions of news items before they “sink in” and become common knowledge.

Historians will undoubtedly have a field day with the literally hundreds of examples of this administration’s criminal, unethical and deeply disturbing behaviors, but the rapidity with which these incidents come to our attention and then vanish means that they barely have time to make an impression on the significant number of citizens who do not follow political issues closely.

There’s an analogy here to that old joke to the effect that, if you have run over someone with your car and maimed them, you’d do well to back up and finish them off. A few corrupt transactions will attract sustained attention, but the daily trashing of laws and norms will simply wear us out.

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The Explanation

I no longer know where I found this quote–I neglected to record its origin. It may have been from a private exchange, but if not, and if any of you reading this can point me to the source, I’d appreciate it.

The thing is, it really explains a lot:

I looked at the hundreds of people at Trump’s rally tonight, unmasked and older, and almost all so very white, and saw a group of people so afraid of the future they are willing to say yes, willing to throw in their lot with a malignant narcissist because he tells them they can recover a world in which they felt more relevant, a world they control.

A reactionary group of older white men look at a global future in which questions of clean energy, climate change, economic fairness, and human equality are uppermost, and their reaction is to cling to a world they control.

I’ve recently read several commentaries pooh-poohing what their authors regard as “over the top” descriptions of what’s at stake on November 3d. I don’t know what reality those authors inhabit, or what histories have informed their opinions, but I firmly believe that anyone who doesn’t see this election as an existential choice is either willfully blind or disastrously uninformed.

Every single day, credible media report on new actions taken by this administration that intentionally undermine the common good. Environmental protections have been eliminated, public schools undermined, the rule of law decimated. Trump’s tweets and rhetoric continually set Americans against each other. Agencies charged with the health and well-being of the population have been subverted, and people have died unnecessarily as a result. A lot of people.

In place of the accountability and communication Americans have a right to expect, we are inundated daily with lies, manipulated videos, altered quotations–constant disinformation and propaganda.

If Trump was simply incompetent, that would be troubling but not existential. If he was simply corrupt, that would be concerning, but also not existential. But he and the supine GOP have gone much further than mere incompetence and corruption.

Traditional aspirations–think “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” have been turned upside-down in favor of an increasingly explicit white nationalism. In the place of a platform and policies, Trump and the GOP that is now his reflection simply promote fear–fear of the “other,” fear of losing white Christian male dominance, fear of social change. In place of efforts to bring us together, they continue to sow discord and encourage political tribalism.

In the last few days, Trump has increased his encouragement of violence and mayhem, presumably believing that increased unrest will cause voters to rally to his “law and order” candidacy.

What keeps me up at night is the possibility that my life-long belief in the essential goodness of most Americans–not all, but most–has been misplaced. What if there are many more white guys afraid of a future they have to share with women and dark people than I ever thought?

I follow Nate Silvers’ FiveThirtyEight.com, and have trouble wrapping my head around the polling that shows a steady 40% approval of the childish buffoon who has commandeered our government. I look at scholarly research showing that “racial anxiety”–i.e., racism–is the single most reliable predictor of support for Trump and his GOP. I see comments on Facebook by presumably reasonable people endorsing bizarre conspiracy theories and patently obvious untruths.

And I’m terrified. When I wake up on November 4th, I want to breathe a sigh of relief because the people I believed in have gone to the polls and put an end to our four-year American nightmare.

What if I’ve been wrong all these years? What if it can happen here?

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The GOP Platform

As most readers of this blog undoubtedly know, David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. These days, he is a “Never Trumper” who contributes to The Atlantic, and he has weighed in on the GOP’s decision to forego a platform in 2020.

Frum says that, despite their reluctance to publish a document outlining where the party stands, there is, in fact, wide agreement among party members on a number of policies.

The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. I’m about to list 13 ideas that command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans.

As Frum sees it, the question isn’t why the GOP lacks policies to put in a platform. The question is, why is the party so reluctant to publish the policies that virtually all today’s Republicans support? The answer to that question becomes pretty obvious when Frum lists the thirteen areas of substantial Republican agreement.

1. The first–no surprise–is reducing taxes on the rich. (That seems to be the sum total of Republican economic policy.)

2. Cutting taxes has been Republican policy for many years; Frum’s second “plank,” however, is new. The GOP overwhelmingly subscribes to the belief that the coronavirus is a “much-overhyped problem” that will soon burn itself out. Since it’s overhyped and “just a flu,”states should reopen their economies as rapidly as possible. (The casualties that ensue are a cost worth paying.) And wearing masks is useless.

3.Speaking of “overhyped”–Republicans overwhelmingly believe that climate change isn’t a real problem. They doubt that it is happening, but even if it is, they’re confident that it will be countered by the technologies of tomorrow. Meanwhile,” regulations to protect the environment unnecessarily impede economic growth.”

4.. China is our enemy, and our relations with China should be assessed as “zero sum.” “When China wins, the U.S. loses, and vice versa.”

5. Speaking of foreign policy, our longstanding alliances are outdated.

The days of NATO and the World Trade Organization are over. The European Union should be treated as a rival, the United Kingdom and Japan should be treated as subordinates, and Canada, Australia, and Mexico should be treated as dependencies.

6. Health care is a consumer good, and people should make their own best deals. The government shouldn’t be involved in making rules for the insurance market. People who can pay more should get more, and people who can’t pay will just have to rely on Medicaid, accept charity, or go without.

7. Voting isn’t a right; it’s a privilege.

States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among Black Americans and new immigrant communities. The federal role in voting oversight should be limited to preventing Democrats from abusing the U.S. Postal Service to enable fraud by their voters.

8. Racism is no longer a real problem, but “reverse racism” is.

9. The courts should eliminate the notion that a woman has a constitutional right to sexual privacy, or control over her own body.

10. The post-Watergate ethics reforms were too strict, and conflict-of-interest rules simply keep wealthy, successful businesspeople from entering public service. The Trump administration has met all reasonable ethical standards.

11. Build the wall! If immigrants do manage to enter the country, delay citizenship as long as possible.

12. Aside from a few “bad apples,” the policeman is your friend. Lawlessness is a result of groups like Black Lives Matter.

13. In the face of the “unfair onslaught” against President Donald Trump by the media and the “deep state,” his “occasional” excesses should be excused as pardonable reactions.

Frum says that this tacit platform works–to the extent it does– by motivating Trump supporters, exciting the remaining Republican base. If it were to be spelled out, however, even in an abbreviated form, as I have done above, it would invite backlash among a majority of Americans.

As Frum says, “This is a platform for a party that talks to itself, not to the rest of the country. And for those purposes, the platform will succeed most to the extent that it is communicated only implicitly, to those receptive to its message.”

Unbelievable as it is, a substantial minority of voters find these positions rational, even inspiring. That minority will work for the election of candidates wedded to these positions, and they will vote. Those of us who see this “platform” as appalling absolutely must turn out in great numbers. We have to defeat the efforts to suppress our votes. We have to vote early, vote absentee, or mask up and march to our polling places on election day–whatever it takes.

Get out the vote has never been more important. America’s future depends on turnout.

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