Category Archives: Random Blogging

Who Believes The “Big Lie”?

As America slowly emerges from the chaos of the last five years, many of us remain mystified about the significant number of people who still support Trump and Trumpism. Virtually every political conversation includes sentiments of bewilderment: who are these people? What explains their devotion to someone so personally repellent? What accounts for their willingness to believe a blatantly illogical fabrication promoted by a documented liar?

The evidence produced at Trump’s second impeachment trial–and especially the films showing the insurrection– prompts most rational observers to wonder what could have motivated those who participated in the horrific assault on the nation’s capitol? The problem with efforts to understand that motivation is that it can lead us to categorize disparate people, to define “them” as a group sharing particular personalities or bigotries, and of course, it’s never that simple.

That said, what do we know? What similarities do “they” possess, if any?

One of the confounding elements of the assault that has been widely remarked upon was the number of middle-class participants without a history of violence or lawbreaking who joined with the Q crackpots and the Proud Boys and their ilk. What impelled their behaviors?

Academic researchers investigating those participants are finding some intriguing and suggestive commonalities. As a Washington Post article reported,

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.

The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.

Clearly, there is no single factor that accounts for someone’s decision  to join a mob assaulting the seat of government. But what pundits call Trump’s brand of grievance politics “tapped into something that resonated with the hundreds of people who descended on the Capitol in a historic burst of violence.”

“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity — combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away — mobilized a lot of people that day.”

I have seen the term precarity used increasingly in articles describing the effects of America’s huge economic disparities. It’s a term that gets beyond superficial comparisons of poverty and wealth, and for that reason, it is especially useful. When people feel that their position–whatever it may be at a particular time–is precarious, it is unnerving, unsettling. Those feelings of threat and insecurity are consistent with another finding of the research–the larger-than-expected number of participants who had been involved in episodes of domestic violence.

Research into the rise of right-wing extremist groups in the 1950s linked that rise not to  impoverished people, but to people who felt that their positions were precarious–that they were losing status and power. The Post cited a 2011 study that found household income wasn’t linked to whether a young person supported the extreme far right in Germany. “But a highly significant predictor was whether they had lived through a parent’s unemployment.”

Insecurity. Precarity. Fear of loss, and resentment of those identified as the cause or beneficiary of that loss. It doesn’t excuse anything, but it explains a lot.

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Why America Elects Moral Midgets

I haven’t previously posted about the Impeachment trial. Initially, I figured that, since virtually everyone who has an opinion has written, spoken and generally fulminated about those opinions, there wasn’t much of value I could add.

Most of the commentary has–quite correctly–pointed to the cowardice and lack of integrity of all but seven Republican Senators. Columns and editorials have especially zeroed in on the breathtaking hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell; in his speech immediately after the vote, he made it clear that he knew Trump was guilty as charged. The fig leaf that McConnell and his spineless colleagues  were frantically trying to hide behind was an utterly unpersuasive opinion that a President who no longer held office could not be constitutionally impeached–an opinion rejected by virtually all constitutional scholars.

It also didn’t escape notice that McConnell was the reason the trial had been delayed until after Biden was inaugurated.

Suffice it to say that the overwhelming hypocrisy and dishonesty in the face of what everyone in that chamber clearly knew was astounding–and it has all been the subject of widespread condemnation. What hasn’t been adequately analyzed, however, is how we got here–“here” being a legislative chamber containing so many Senators clearly unworthy of public office.

I am convinced that the pathetic performance Americans saw last week was the result of forty-plus years of denigrating the very existence of government and belittling those who serve in it.

Reagan started the incessant attacks, and Republican dogma ever since has been that government–far from being an important tool for collective action addressing America’s problems–is always and inevitably a threat that must be constrained and hobbled.  Republican messaging has been sneering and dismissive of the very notion that government might be an essential mechanism for achieving the common good. It has been years since I heard a Republican politician employ terms like “statesmanship” and/or “public service.”

When I saw that both of Indiana’s undistinguished, moral-pygmy Senators had (predictably) voted to acquit, I could almost picture them spitting on Dick Lugar’s grave…

The Republican demonization of government has largely succeeded in changing the identity of the GOP. The political culture that produced statesmen like Dick Lugar and Bill Hudnut has been replaced by the slimy “what’s in it for me” opportunism of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump–and Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and too many others.

Honorable, talented people are attracted to careers that those in their particular tribes consider prestigious and admirable. When government employment is denigrated and mocked–“couldn’t get a real job?”– when political actors are expected to be corrupt, and when politics is widely considered the refuge of blowhards and scoundrels, blowhards and scoundrels are who it will attract.

It’s instructive to emphasize that these persistent attacks on government and public service have come overwhelmingly from Republicans. Democrats have been far more likely to defend the importance and worth of  America’s political institutions, and I don’t think it is just happenstance that as a result–as we can see at the federal level– Democratic officeholders these days tend to be considerably more public-spirited, honorable and impressive than their Republican peers.

Today’s Democrats have Jamie Raskin; Republicans have Marjorie Taylor Green…

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The New Confederacy

Little by little, as media sources obtain access to previously unavailable information, Americans are learning the true extent of the criminal and racist activities of the Trump administration–and far more concerning, we are now seeing how far gone, how amenable to those characteristics, today’s QOP remains.

One example among many: in the final, lame-duck days of the administration–after the election but before Biden’s inauguration–the Justice Department moved to undo what the Washington Post called “decades-long protections against discrimination,” by
moving to change the interpretation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Title VI bars discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin by recipients of federal funding.  The rules apply to the recipients of some six billion dollars of annual federal aid, and provide that actions will be considered discriminatory if they have a demonstrably discriminatory effect on protected groups. That’s what’s known as a “disparate impact.”  Under the new version, only intentional discrimination would be prohibited.

Intentional discrimination is incredibly difficult to prove, as lawyers who bring cases under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment can attest. (In order to succeed, challenges brought under that clause must show evidence that at least a part of the challenged law or action was intended to be discriminatory.)
 
According to the Post’s report, the Trump administration had been considering the change for over two years, but had waited until its final weeks to try to put it into effect. It was one of William Barr’s last efforts before his welcome departure as Attorney General.

And as usual, the Trump administration ignored the required procedures for making  significant policy changes.

Typically regulations of this magnitude are published first as proposals and the government collects public comment before publishing its final version. It would be unusual to publish a final regulation — particularly one of this magnitude — without going through that process, but the document says that its proposal falls under an exception and therefore the administration is not required to seek public comment.

Conservatives have long argued that allegations of discrimination should require proof that any disparate effects were intentional. If this argument is accepted, it allows the defense to deny the existence of structural racism: if person X doesn’t have a conscious animus, then what he does isn’t racist. So the bank officer who declines a mortgage under his bank’s redlining criteria, the police officer who participates in “stop and frisk” activities only in “certain” neighborhoods, the HR department that hires applicants based upon “cultural compatibility,” the City Council that paves streets far more frequently in the “nicer” areas of town–all are off the hook.

If no one is burning a cross on a Black person’s lawn, or screaming the “n” word, there’s no racism.

The Trump administration’s effort to bolster structural barriers to equality is just one of many examples of what has become distressingly clear during the past four years: today’s QOP is our contemporary version of the Confederacy. It is dominated by White Christian male supremacists intent upon doing whatever it takes to protect their historic hegemony–intent upon ignoring/excusing the operation of systems developed and maintained over the years that lock in White advantage without demonstrating cruder, more obvious bias.

It is not a coincidence that those willing to engage in that cruder racism–the “out and proud” racists of the KKK and Proud Boys and neo-Nazis– flocked to Trump and today’s Republican Party.  The efforts of more “respectable” members of the party to maintain plausible deniability–to distance themselves from their Confederate motives– is increasingly unconvincing.

The problem, as I have repeatedly noted, is that a two-party system needs two adult parties. It will be interesting to see if the embryonic efforts to form a new center-right party to replace the cult that is the current QOP go anywhere….

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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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