Category Archives: Random Blogging

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 Speaking of foreign policy, our longstanding alliances are outdated.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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Two Americas

Remember John Edwards? When  he ran for President in 2004 (and before  his sleazy personal behaviors caught up with him), he ignited a good deal of support with a speech in which  he described  “two  Americas.”  Edwards blamed George W. Bush and the GOP for two Americas he described thusly: “One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. .. . One favored, the other forgotten. … One privileged, the other burdened.”

There  are, of course multiple ways of “slicing and  dicing” an electorate. Edwards’ categories are, unfortunately, still pretty accurate.  But in  the intervening years, we  have seen an even  greater chasm develop. As Charlie Warzel put it in a recent  New  York Times newsletter, we have a meaningful percentage of Americans living in an alternate reality powered by a completely separate universe of news and information.

Because it was a subscribed newsletter, I don’t have a  link, but I’m copying  and pasting a couple of observations that resonated with me,  because they go a long way toward explaining the informational environment inhabited by those of our fellow Americans who continue  to support Donald J. Trump.

He began  by explaining that  there are two types of “reporting” by the rightwing media: outright fabrication, and a more sophisticated  approach that “rearranges shared facts to compose an entirely different narrative.”

There is little consensus on the top story of the day or the major threats facing the country. You will have noticed this if you’ve ever watched a congressional hearing and flipped between CNN or MSNBC and Fox News. The video feed is the same but the interpretation of events is radically different.

As he noted, we got a clear demonstration of the phenomenon at the Republican National Convention.

For three nights, in an shameless display of loyalty to President Trump, the party has conjured up what my colleague Frank Bruni described as an “upside-down vision” of the world. Theirs is a universe in which the coronavirus pandemic is largely in the rear view (on Aug. 25, 1,136 Americans died from the virus) and where, according to Representative Matt Gaetz, radical Democrats threaten to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.” A universe where the existential dangers of climate change pale in comparison to those of cancel culture — even as the West is ravaged by blackouts and wildfires and the Gulf Coast is slammed by adevastating hurricane.

We can each pick our own examples of what has come to be called “gaslighting.” and what  I prefer to call chutzpah.

For example,  when Mike Pence addressed the Convention, he spoke movingly  (ok–Mike  Pence is incapable  of speaking movingly, but that was clearly his  intent) about the death of a federal officer in Oakland.  From his remarks, viewers were led  to believe that he was likely killed by Black Lives Matter protesters. 

“People like Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer in the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California…Dave’s heroism is emblematic of the heroes that serve in blue every day,” Pence said.   
 
As multiple media outlets later noted, although what Pence said was true, what he clearly wanted to imply was  not.

Yes, Underwood was killed while defending a federal courthouse in Oakland in May. Yes, he was serving as part of President Trump’s effort to crack down on the protests inspired by the death of George Floyd. What Pence failed to mention, however, was that Underwood was  killed by two men who’ve  been linked to right-wing extremism, not by protesters.

Americans who reside entirely in the  rightwing media bubble–who get all  of their news  from Fox or Sinclair or Breitbart or Rush Limbaugh, who don’t leaven those  outlets with non-propaganda  sources, occupy a very different reality.

It has become increasingly difficult to stay accurately informed, to  determine which media sources are reputable and which are not, to recognize “headlines” that are really click-bait rather than accurate labels of a story, and to identify the sources that  “spin” even factual articles.  

Until we somehow get a handle on the Wild  West that  is  our current information environment, we will continue  to inhabit two dramatically-different Americas. And until that informational chasm is spanned, we will be unable to work together to eliminate the two Americas identified  by John Edwards.

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That Was The Party That Was

Norm Ornstein speaks to me. From his books (It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, with Thomas Mann, and One Nation After Trump, with E.J.  Dionne  and Thomas Mann) to his principled fight against gerrymandering,  I have admired both his intellect and his principles.

And in his recent essay in the Atlantic, he gave voice to my own political distress.

I have been immersed in national politics in Washington for five decades. Over my time here, as an academic, a congressional staffer, a think tanker, and a commentator and public figure, I have gotten to know and worked with a wide range of key actors in politics and policy. I have seen up close the changes in our politics and culture. Nothing has been more striking or significant than the transformation of the Republican Party, from a moderately conservative party to a very conservative party to something else entirely.

One sign of this change? A five-term Republican congressman from Colorado, elected in the Tea Party wave in 2010 and now a Trump loyalist, was recently defeated in a primary by a candidate who runs Shooters Grill, where servers are encouraged to carry firearms, and who has indulged the QAnon conspiracy theories and who is now endorsed, not repudiated, by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Another? The current buzz surrounding Tucker Carlson as the party’s hope in 2024—even as he takes sudden leave from his show to go fishing, after one of his writers was tied to racist and misogynistic posts on an internet message board.

Those of us of a. “certain age” would agree with Ornstein that “old-time” Republicans would be appalled by the party’s ethnic and anti-immigrant animus and deliberate efforts to stoke racial division. Although  the GOP has always had a rightwing, nativist fringe–just as the Democrats have always had a collectivist fringe– when I was Republican, they were, for the most part, consigned  to that fringe.

The party of Nixon, with all its pathologies, created the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed a health-care-reform plan as sweeping as the later Affordable Care Act, and considered offering Americans a guaranteed annual income on a par with Andrew Yang’s universal basic income. The party of Reagan, which tried to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and which slashed taxes in 1981, precipitating ballooning deficits, also cut deals with Democratic Representative Henry Waxman to bolster Medicare and Medicaid; championed bipartisan Social Security reform in 1983; and supported tax increases in 1982, 1983, 1985, and 1986 to offset the earlier cuts and reduce the deficits. The party responsible for Iran-Contra is also the party that championed democracy and moved in concert with Democrats to create the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.

Many of  the Republicans with whom Ornstein worked exemplified  “institutional patriotism,” which he defines as a concern for the integrity of Congress as an institution, and a commitment to checks and balances.

Unfortunately, they were unable to transfer those values to succeeding generations, or to overcome the regional shift in American party politics, the rise of manipulative leaders, and the growing influence of extremist tribal media.

Ornstein tells us what we all know: that whatever it is that has taken the place of that GOP “has thrown away its guiding values and embraced its darkest instincts.”

It has blown up long-standing norms in the Senate, creating divisions that outstrip anything I have seen before; done nothing about rank corruption in the White House and the Cabinet; accepted the politicization of the Justice Department and lies from the attorney general; avoided any meaningful oversight of misconduct; and failed to curb attacks on the independence of inspectors general.

The article goes into considerable detail about Ornstein’s political biography–the Senators and staff with whom he worked, and the ability that afforded him to see public servants up close, to evaluate their sincerity and integrity. I encourage  you to click through and read it in its entirety.

But the sentence that really resonated with me was the following:

Plenty of the Republicans I dealt with in the past were fierce partisans, including Dole and John Rhodes. But when pushed, they put country first.

When the sniveling sycophants beholden to the conspiracy theorists and bigots that make up today’s GOP “base” are pushed, they put their own prospects above country– and arguably even above the long-term best interests of their party.

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Funding Insanity

What if we discovered that the attendants in a mental institution were reassuring patients that the aliens they were seeing were real? That they should listen to and believe the voices in their heads? At the very least, we’d wonder why–what nefarious scheme could account for actions clearly motivated to confirm inmates’ insanity?

The Guardian has raised a very similar set of questions, but about the GOP. It reports that groups tied to Donald Trump’s chief of staff and several party mega-donors are funding GOP candidates who champion the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Republican party leaders linked to the White House helped boost the primary campaign of a QAnon supporter with a history of making racist and bigoted statements, campaign finance filings show.

Campaign finance reports show contributions to QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Green’s campaign from groups connected to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his wife, as well as the chairman of the board of the Heritage Foundation,  the attorney who represented “Covington Kid” Nicholas Sandmann (aka “the smirking kid”) in his defamation suits against the Washington Post and CNN, and multiple Republican mega-donors.

“Getting involved in a primary on behalf of an absolutely insane, conspiracy-minded, explicitly racist candidate in a seat that is reliably conservative is mind-bogglingly irresponsible,” said Tim Miller, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee who is now political director for Republican Voters Against Trump.

For readers who may not be familiar with QAnon,  it’s a conspiracy theory rooted in age-old antisemitic tropes. Followers believe that Donald Trump is waging a secret battle against an evil cabal of Democrats, celebrities and billionaires who are engaged in pedophilia, child trafficking, and even cannibalism. The movement has repeatedly inspired vigilante violence–remember the guy who shot up the D.C. pizza. parlor?– and the FBI. has warned. that it represents a potential domestic terrorism threat.

A few high-profile Republican leaders spoke out against Greene after Politico unearthed and published videos of her  making racist and. anti-Semitic statements, and the Koch Industries Pac requested a refund of an earlier donation. But her campaign continued to be backed by  other major Republican donors and influential political leaders. The Guardian report lists a number of them, including a  Pac run by Representative Jim Jordan, who has been dogged for years by allegations that he knew and did nothing to stop sexual abuse of student athletes at Ohio State University when he worked there in the 1980s and 90s.

Greene received $2,800 from John W Childs, the former chairman of JW Childs Associates who stepped down after being charged with misdemeanor solicitation in an investigation related to the suspected human trafficking sting that led to the arrest of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Childs denied the charge at the time and said he had retained a lawyer. Kraft pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor solicitation charges.

QAnon is reminiscent of other fringe movements in the Republican Party–the John Birch Society comes to mind. (Remember when the Birchers accused President Eisenhower of being a conscious Communist agent?)

The. other morning,  Mike Pence was on CBS This Morning,  and was asked about QAnon.  He pretended to know nothing about it. Meadows has also professed ignorance of it. Those denials ring very hollow, leaving us with two possibilities: (1) having engaged in pedophilia and/or trafficking themselves, Greene supporters from the Trump cult  (aka “projection-is-us”) actually believe in QAnon, or (2) they don’t believe  in QAnon,  but do believe that encouraging the racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry that is at its core will help them win the election.

Either way, it’s a sad–and revealing– commentary on a once-respectable political party.

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The Republican Voter, Again

A couple of days ago, I posted excerpts from an article suggesting that the disasters that define our current civic reality aren’t primarily attributable to Trump, appalling as he is, but to the voters who form the base of whatever it is the Republican Party has become.

Since then, I have continued to encounter evidence confirming the accuracy of that diagnosis.

Exhibit One:  In the run-up to the Republican convention, an event presumably intended to persuade people to support the party, convention planners enlisted the entitled, bigoted St. Louis couple–the ones who brandished guns and threatened Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their mansion– to appear and publicly affirm their support for Trump.

I can’t think of speakers more likely to offend viewers who don’t display Confederate flags or have swastika tattoos.

The choice of the St. Louis couple underscores the point made by an opinion writer in The New York Times, who has concluded that “Trumpism” is the current GOP. As he says, even if  Biden wins and Trump leaves office peacefully — two big ifs — Democrats will still confront a Republican Party that is the party of Donald Trump.

In 2016, Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party; he met it where it was. The party had been ready for him for years: In 2012, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote, “The G.O.P. has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.” More recent studies, including by Pippa Norris of Harvard, have confirmed this assessment. In a brief summary of her research — which compared the U.S. Republican Party “with other major parties in O.E.C.D. societies” — she found the G.O.P. “near far-right European parties” that flirt with authoritarianism, like the Polish Law and Justice of Poland or the Turkish Justice and Development parties.

This is not a party poised to pivot toward moderation — even in the face of an electoral landslide loss. The inevitable calls for reform (like the party’s abandoned “autopsy” report after the 2012 election) will yield to the inescapable gravitational pull of the party’s own voters and the larger forces dominating our politics.

The author, one Adam Jentleson, says that the GOP is not only unlikely to moderate in the wake of a defeat,  it is likely to turn to reactionary politicians like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. (You will remember Cotton for his despicable attempt to sabotage President  Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.)  If Trump loses, Cotton is evidently seen–along with Tucker Carlson(!)– as a leading contender for the 2024 Republican nomination.

Jentleson says the “way forward” is to recognize what the Republican Party has become. That means ignoring them and working to deliver the results Americans want and need.

I agree. Assuming (fingers crossed) the Democrats take the Senate in November, they should focus on restoring checks and balances and passing long-bottled-up legislation. That will require eliminating the mechanisms that have allowed the Senate GOP to stonewall, obstruct and play partisan politics.  As Jentleson writes,

Sure, invite Republicans to participate constructively in the legislative process, but take away their ability to scuttle it.

To this end, it is encouraging to see Mr. Biden shifting from his staunch opposition to reforming the filibuster, whose modern iteration is what has allowed Republicans to raise the bar for passing most bills in the Senate from the majority threshold the framers set to the current 60-vote supermajority.

I have written before about the way the filibuster has been changed over the years; it’s no longer the process depicted in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.” As Jentleson writes,

The Republican Party is now an even more hopeless tangle of pathologies than it was back then. If Republicans choose to take personal responsibility for unwinding themselves and contributing productively to intelligent solutions, they are welcome to do so. But Democrats cannot bet the future of the country on it.

He’s right, of course. But that leaves us with a far more troubling dilemma: a two-party system in which one party has morphed into a cross between bat-shit-crazy conspiracy theorists and a fascist cult.

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