Category Archives: Random Blogging

Meeting In The Middle? Where’s That?

With the Biden-Harris team in the White House, Republicans and pundits are sanctimoniously insisting that “unity” requires “meeting in the middle.” The use of that term–“the middle”–reveals a significant misunderstanding of the definition of moderation and the process of compromise.

It also drives me nuts.

A friend recently reminded me of Jim Hightower’s observation that  there’s nothing in the mIddle of the highway except a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.

What is “the middle” between belief in QAnon and adherence to the Constitution? What’s the “middle” between White Supremacy and effective civil rights protections? Between accurate reporting and propaganda? Between protecting the rich and feeding hungry children?

What, exactly, is this magic “middle”?

I have referred previously to the Overton Window. That window is the range of public policies that are widely acceptable to voters at a specific point in time. The window does shift–perhaps the most vivid recent example is same-sex marriage: thirty years ago, efforts to recognize such marriages were virtually unthinkable; today, a majority of Americans approve of them. 

Shifts of the Overton window illustrate how our concepts of both the “middle” and what constitutes moderation change.

During my adult lifetime, the Republican Party has steadily moved to the right, pulling both the Democrats and “the middle” along with it. Today–and I do not intend this as hyperbole–the GOP is located somewhere between radically reactionary and insane. The fact that members of this incredibly retrograde party consider contemporary Democrats “far left” is meaningless–next to today’s GOP, my conservative grandmother would be far left. Political science research confirms that America’s most “left-wing” politicians are not nearly as “left” as most Europeans who fall into that category.

Which brings me back to the calls of well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) observers for “middle ground,” “bipartisanship,” “moderation” and “compromise. “

Bipartisanship can be achieved whenever members from both the GOP and the Democratic Party agree on a policy. The House vote to impeach Trump a second time was bipartisan, because ten Republicans voted yes. The term is  simply descriptive, although it tends to be used to suggest that bipartisanship equates to virtue. It doesn’t. If members of both major parties voted to deprive Muslims of citizenship, the fact that the vote was bipartisan would not  magically make it  virtuous. Plenty of racist laws have been passed with bipartisan support.

Compromising requires good-faith negotiation over points of honest contention. For example, Biden is reportedly willing to compromise with lawmakers over his COVID package by acceding to (quite reasonable) requests that stimulus payments not go to high-income families. Compromise in order to make at least incremental progress on an issue–rather than intransigence preventing any progress at all– is usually positive, but if by “compromise” we mean the evisceration of a good policy in order to accomplish an empty victory, not so much.

It depends on the compromise.

Moderation is defined as the absence of extremism. Unfortunately, given how insane the GOP has become, most media outlets automatically label any Republican who isn’t a QAnon believer or Big Lie promoter a “moderate.” Her vote to impeach Trump was correct and even admirable, but it did not make Liz Cheney a moderate.

Bottom line: the search for a “middle ground” is only reasonable when the parties involved in a particular dispute are rational, intellectually honest and operating in good faith.

These current calls for middle ground, moderation and bipartisanship remind me of Rodney King’s famous plea: “can’t we all get along?” That desire to “get along”– to be generous and civil and non-confrontational– is incredibly appealing. It resonates because so much of our public life right now is so rancorous and ugly. Believe me, I understand where it comes from. 

But permit me an analogy:

When your two-year old has a tantrum because he wants two cookies that he shouldn’t have, you don’t mollify him by finding “middle ground.” You don’t reward the outburst by giving him one cookie.  Your obligation as a parent is to help him mature into an adult who understands that inappropriate behaviors will not get him even a portion of what he wants.

There are a lot of two-year-olds in today’s QOP, including  most obviously the former President. The rest of us should tune out the screaming and crying and help the few who seem capable of it to grow up. “Meeting in the middle”–when the middle is halfway between sense and nonsense– is as bad for public policy as it is for parenting.

There’s a reason we don’t negotiate with terrorists.

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Playing Games

I know very little about the stock market–just enough to recognize that the term “playing the market” is more revealing than those who use it may recognize. The 2008-9 financial crisis revealed that–rather than sober decisions to invest in solid companies in hopes of long-term growth– a large number of “masters of the universe” were simply gambling.

In other words, the stock market has become a casino– yet another symptom of a society that has abandoned the basics in favor of game-playing. And not so incidentally, the rules of those games favor the obscenely rich.

The recent GameStock pushback by small investors couldn’t have been more aptly named.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the past few weeks (not that I’d blame anyone for hiding at a time when all aspects of American society seem to be coming apart), you’ve undoubtedly heard the basic outlines: GameStop is a retail chain that began by selling video games; it has struggled to stay open, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant increase in streaming. Its problems were widely recognized and it was a disfavored–even reviled– stock on Wall Street.

So the “pros” (aka gamblers) thought they could make money by “shorting” the stock as its price went down.

When investors decide to short a stock, they are essentially betting against it. They “borrow” shares of the stock on the assumption its price will decline; they plan to buy the shares at the lower price, return what they “borrowed,” and pocket the difference. (You will notice that this is strictly “game playing”– no goods or services are produced, no jobs created–no social benefit ensues.) If the stock goes up rapidly, however, the gambler-investors are forced to “cover their shorts”–to buy back the stock at a higher price.

So what happened with GameStop? According to Time,“amateur” investors who connected through a widely read social media message board “orchestrated a massive take-down of several marquee hedge funds while profiting hugely in a matter of hours.”

Not only are Wall Street players aghast with one pro saying that the moves were “unnatural, insane and dangerous,” but the surge in GameStop from less than $2 billion in market cap to more than $24 billion in a such a short time got the attention of regulators. The Attorney General of Massachusetts William Galvin said he was looking into the matter and called for a halt in GameStop trading, and the White House press secretary said that the administration was concerned about market integrity.

The blow-back against that was swift. On Reddit, one participant summed it up, “So market manipulation by federal pumping $ into falling banks & corporation is OK but Reddit users rallying GameStop is wrong and must be regulated…Funny how quickly the financial press cries for hedge funds.”

What happened in the past few days on Wall Street is akin to what happened in Britain when voters chose Brexit and in the United States when Trump was elected: a mass of people, angry at the privileged few and feeling that the system was rigged to reward the elite and screw everyone else, coalesced into a potent phalanx that upended a status-quo.

As you might imagine, the “Masters of the Universe”  who were were caught off guard and who sustained substantial losses were outraged. They denounced the small, amateur investors as misguided, misled and destructive. Defenders of those investors pointed to the truly excessive profits from manipulation that have largely gone to a few thousand hedge funds, private equity executives, professional investors and their rich clients.

Thanks to the way today’s market works, a small investor who held $100 of GameStop stock would lose her $100 if the company went bankrupt. But a hedge fund might make $200 from that same bankruptcy. As the Time article points out,  leverage, arcane financial instruments and access to them by only a few of the “big guys” is what makes that crazy outcome possible.

And the “victory” of the “little guys” was short-lived; as this is written, the stock has declined again, so in this particular “game” there’s been plenty of financial hurt to go around.

Bottom line, we need to add regulation of investing (aka disincentivizing gambling) to America’s “to do” list.

As Alexis Goldstein recently wrote in the New York Times, “Rather than gambling on the dubious promise of more Americans gaining access to the casino, it’s time to rewrite the rules to ensure that the house doesn’t always win.”

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So Here We Are…

Can you stand one more post about the January 6th insurrection?

Investigations in the wake of that shocking assault are steadily turning up evidence that it was anything but a spontaneous response to Trump’s crazed rally speech. It had been planned, and not just by the conspiracy-believing members of the rightwing’s radical fringe, but with the connivance of seditionist members of Trump’s campaign, his White House, and members of Congress.

The identities of these conspirators will eventually be made public, but who they are is ultimately less important than what they are–representatives of White Christian Nationalists who see themselves as losing out in today’s America.

Thomas Edsall writes a weekly column for the Washington Post on politics, demographics and inequality. In the wake of the riot on January 6th, he considered how “racism, grievance, resentment and the fear of diminished status came together” to fuel the fury and violence. He began with the obvious: the dominant role played by “out-and-out racism and a longing to return to the days of white supremacy.”

But Edsall also acknowledged the need to probe more deeply–to try to ascertain the roots of the anger and to identify the elements of contemporary life that serve to “trigger”  violent expression.

It may sound trivial at first, in light of what happened, but how important is the frustration among what pollsters call non-college white men at not being able to compete with those higher up on the socioeconomic ladder because of educational disadvantage? How critical is declining value in marriage — or mating — markets? Does any of that really matter?

How toxic is the combination of pessimism and anger that stems from a deterioration in standing and authority? What might engender existential despair, this sense of irretrievable loss? How hard is it for any group, whether it is racial, political or ethnic, to come to terms with losing power and status? What encourages desperate behavior and a willingness to believe a pack of lies?

Edsall posed those questions to a range of academic researchers. Their responses were sobering.

A sociologist at NYU dubbed the rioters “ethnonationalists,” and described  Trump supporters as those who want to return to a past when white men considered themselves the “core of America”–when minorities and women “knew their place.” Since they realize that such a return would require the upending of the existing social order, they’re prepared to pursue violent measures.

Another sociologist, a professor at Johns Hopkins, concurred:

They fear a loss of attention. A loss of validation. These are people who have always had racial privilege but have never had much else. Many feel passed over, ignored. Trump listened to them and spoke their language when few other politicians did. He felt their pain and was diabolical enough to encourage their tendency to racialize that pain. They fear becoming faceless again if a Democrat, or even a conventional Republican, were to take office.

There was general recognition from those Edsall consulted that It is incredibly difficult for individuals and groups to come to terms with the loss of status and power. Before Trump came along to provide a culprit, these individuals lacked what one scholar called “a narrative to legitimate their condition.” Trump provided a narrative that gave “moral certitude” to people who  believed that their decline in social and/or economic status was the result of unfair and/or corrupt decisions by so-called elites.

According to a professor of psychology at Yale, the insurrection reflected angst, anger, and refusal to accept an America in which White (Christian) Americans are losing dominance.

And, I use the term dominance here, because it is not simply a loss of status. It is a loss of power. A more racially, ethnically, religiously diverse US that is also a democracy requires White Americans to acquiesce to the interests and concerns of racial/ethnic and religious minorities.

Others who responded to Edsell’s inquiry noted that contemporary America is especially vulnerable to right-wing anger due to our high degree of income inequality, and lack of a welfare state safety net to buffer the fall of people into unemployment and poverty.

You can click through and read the various responses, but they all reminded me of an exchange in the film An American President. Michael Douglas, playing the incumbent, points to his opponent during a press conference and says something to the effect that “you have a choice between someone who wants to fix the problem or someone who wants to tell you who to blame for it.”

Trump voters chose the guy willing to tell these deeply unhappy people who to blame.

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The GOP And QAnon

GOP Senator Ben Sasse says all the right things–although his voting history is, shall we say, a bit more complicated. Sasse has a recent essay in the Atlantic in which he challenges his party to choose between conspiracy and reality–between the “delusional QAnon conspiracy theory,” and rationality.

We hear a lot about Qanon, but to understand not just Sasse’s argument but the political moment we inhabit, it’s important to recognize just how insane it is.

Although there are various iterations, the basic “theory” that supporters accept requires them to believe  that a “righteous” Donald Trump (!) is leading a “historic quest” to expose the fact that America’s federal government has been captured and is being controlled by a global network of cannibalistic pedophiles. This “cabal” includes not just the despised “deep state” bureaucrats, but also the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice and at least a dozen senators (including Sasse), along with George Soros and other notable Jews. (The conspiracy borrows heavily from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.) When Mike Pence explained that he couldn’t refuse to accept the certification of electoral votes, QAnon cultists added him to the network, ignoring his four years of sniveling sycophancy,

Millions of Americans actually believe this insanity. Virtually all of them are Republicans.

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, Sasse makes what should be an obvious point: the GOP can be a political party, or a bizarre cult, but not both.

The violence that Americans witnessed—and that might recur in the coming days—is not a protest gone awry or the work of “a few bad apples.” It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice. When Trump leaves office, my party faces a choice: We can dedicate ourselves to defending the Constitution and perpetuating our best American institutions and traditions, or we can be a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them. We can be the party of Eisenhower, or the party of the conspiracist Alex Jones. We can applaud Officer Goodman or side with the mob he outwitted. We cannot do both.

As he notes, prior to the assault on the Capitol, GOP leadership figures and consultants told themselves that they could “preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon.”  What they have discovered–one hopes–is that such a strategy is impossible. If the party does not reject conspiracy theories, it will be consumed by them.

Sasse provides a perfect illustration of the fecklessness of Republican leadership:

The newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. She once ranted that “there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.” During her campaign, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a choice: disavow her campaign and potentially lose a Republican seat, or welcome her into his caucus and try to keep a lid on her ludicrous ideas. McCarthy failed the leadership test and sat on the sidelines. Now in Congress, Greene isn’t going to just back McCarthy as leader and stay quiet. She’s already announced plans to try to impeach Joe Biden on his first full day as president. She’ll keep making fools out of herself, her constituents, and the Republican Party.

In the remainder of the essay, Sasse makes a bow to the obligatory “both sides” equivalence (the Left has crazy people too!), and points a pop-sociology finger at media–all media, not just social media and the Internet; he also blames the collapse of “institutions” and “America’s loss of meaning.” If you click through and read that part of his essay, you can decide for yourselves whether you find it particularly helpful or insightful. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t.)

That said, Sasse is clearly correct when he says the GOP cannot be a “big tent” that includes people like Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse and even Liz Cheney–people we may strongly disagree with but still recognize as serious adults– together with lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes and Louie Gohmert.

No tent is that big. Sasse is clearly correct when he says that the Republican Party must choose between insanity and reality.

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Antifa And The Right

Sometimes, when I was a little girl (eons ago–it may have been the Ice Age) and had done something I knew was forbidden, I would protest innocence: it wasn’t me! It must have been someone else! To which my mother would respond with an old verse:

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

These days, the “little man who wasn’t there” is likely to be a member of Antifa–currently the favored scapegoat of the Right. “It wasn’t us! It was Antifa!!”

Just who– or what –is Antifa? After an inquiry from a lawyer friend, I decided to do some research.

Is Antifa the the highly organized group of “terrorists” portrayed by Trump Republicans–a source of rioting and looting?  Or is it more accurately described as an idea–a dismissive label for people opposed to fascism and white supremacy?

Actually, according to an investigation by CBS News, it’s something more than a description of people opposed to fascism, but considerably less than an organized movement. (I’ve noticed that the quarrelsome Left has a lot more trouble organizing than the authoritarians on the Right.)

In general, people who identify as Antifa are known not for what they support, but what they oppose: Fascism, nationalism, far-right ideologies, white supremacy, authoritarianism, racism, homophobia and xenophobia. Some antifa activists also denounce capitalism and the government overall.

To the extent they “belong” to anything, Antifa followers tend to be members of small, local cells that sometimes coordinate with other movements, such as Black Lives Matter. Self-described Antifa members have organized to confront Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and other far-right groups during public demonstrations, typically through researching and tracking those organizations, although some confrontations have become violent.

CBS was able to confirm only one instance in which a person self-identifying as Antifa was linked to a deadly attack at a protest. Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, was considered a prime suspect in the August 2020 killing of a right-wing activist who was shot during demonstrations in Portland. (Reinoehl was later shot to death by federal authorities as they moved to arrest him.)

Given the hysterical accusations from Trump, Cruz and others, it is noteworthy that the Trump administration’s own Department of Homeland Security and FBI didn’t share the view that Antifa poses a significant threat to domestic law and order.

A DHS draft document from September 2020 reportedly named white supremacist groups as the biggest terror threat to America. That same document doesn’t mention Antifa at all.

The FBI also considers far-right groups the “top of the priority list.” FBI director Christopher Wray said in February 2020 that the FBI places the risk of violence from racially-motivated extremist groups “on the same footing” as the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and its sympathizers.

Antifa has certainly been involved in sporadic violence, and to the extent that its members have broken the law, they should be punished. But according to the FBI and other government agencies, a number of rumors about Antifa have been spun from whole cloth– sometimes by people later identified as right-wing extremists. According to the CBS report, Twitter shut down multiple “Antifa” accounts in June of 2020 that were later found to be fake. Those fake accounts were advocating violence against white suburbs; subsequent investigations tracked the accounts to Identity Evropa, a white supremacist organization.

In the wake of the Capitol insurrection, Trump and several Republicans insisted that the rioters were really Antifa. Thanks to the behaviors and selfie-documented identities of the participants, that didn’t begin to pass the smell test. As Forbes Magazine reported:

FBI Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono said Friday there is no evidence that Antifa activists were involved in the violent riots in and around the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, debunking the baseless conspiracy theory propagated by several prominent Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits that anti-fascist leftists—not a pro-Trump mob—were responsible for death and destruction at the Capitol.

As my mother would have said,

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

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