Random Blogging – Page 26

They Really ARE Crazy

Between the Indiana legislature and the lunatic caucus in Congress, I’m increasingly reluctant to read the news these days. I scan the headlines and I force myself to read the articles I really need to see, but the process gets more difficult every day.

The Indiana legislature is ignoring most of the actual work they are elected to do, in favor of protecting gun manufacturers (they’re on the way to passing a measure that would void Gary’s lawsuit against those companies) and ignoring child safety (they deep-sixed measures that would have required parents to store weapons safely); they’re doubling down on their war against Indianapolis (they’re halfway to revoking a measure passed just last year that allowed the Ciity-County Council to tax our downtown, because the Council had the nerve to actually do so, and it’s in the process of substituting the “wisdom” of our legislative overlords for the desires of the 70 percent of Indianapolis residents who voted for public transit.)

And just for good measure, the legislature has reminded citizens that the prejudices and ignorance of the self-satisfied super-majority are more important than whatever Hoosier voters might prefer: among other things, it refused to extend Indiana’s shortest-in-the-nation voting day, and refused to approve a non-binding ballot measure asking voters if we might want the ability to mount initiatives–a right voters in other states enjoy. Don’t want anything disturbing their gerrymandered power!

And then there’s Congress, which is in thrall to the most ignorant and dangerous fringe of the ignorant and dangerous cult that used to be a political party.

The House looks increasingly likely to reject a hard-won bipartisan immigration agreement negotiated in the Senate– even before they know what is in it, and even though it reportedly gives the GOP measures they have long claimed to want–because Republicans want to run for re-election on the issue. Desperately needed aid to Ukraine is contingent on passage of that agreement.

American politicians used to take pride in the fact that partisanship stopped at the water’s edge–that foreign policy was approached in a nation over party manner. If Russia wins its war of aggression against Ukraine, the balance of power in the world will shift, and not in our favor–and Republicans don’t care.

With Ukraine in the balance, with the world dangerously close to widening war in the Middle East, what are Indiana’s GOP Congressmen doing? Well, Jim Banks has moved forcefully into the breach–he’s demanding that the City of Carmel terminate its sister city relationship with Xiangyang, China. Showing his foreign policy chops!!

Banks has long been a member of what the New York Times calls the “wrecking ball” Congress, echoing the nutty conspiracy theories and endorsing the White Christian Nationalism of the fringe of the fringe. And that lunatic fringe just gets crazier by the day.

If you think calling the Right crazy is unfair, allow me to share one news item making the rounds: Taylor Swift is an operative of the deep state.

As Philip Bump writes,

There are lots of manifestations of this, including multiple presentations on the right’s preferred cable news channel. The iteration that attracted perhaps the most attention, though, came from former presidential candidate and Donald Trump cheerleader Vivek Ramaswamy (speaking of people who suddenly emerged in the public consciousness to polarizing effect).

In a social media post, a prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist linked Swift to … let’s see here … ah yes, George Soros. In response, Ramaswamy offered a prediction.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” he wrote. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”

The implication (again: forgive my telling you something obvious) is that the Chiefs are being ushered to the Super Bowl … somehow … to secure Swift’s endorsement for President Biden….

How would this work? Did the Baltimore Ravens take a dive? Did someone pay them? Are they just that committed to Democratic politics that they all agreed to lose? Did the Buffalo Bills before them? And the Miami Dolphins before the Bills? Or does the government have some Havana-Syndrome-esque device that it trains on opponents, causing field goals to go wide right? What’s the mechanism, exactly?

There will be a lot of important things decided by November’s ballots, including the future of reproductive rights and American democracy. It appears we will also decide between sanity and lunacy–between reality and a world in which terminating a sister city relationship is the conduct of foreign policy and Taylor Swift is an election psyop.

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An Accurate Description

I have previously cited observations and analyses from David French, a genuine conservative with whom I often agree. (Tomorrow, I will post about a significant disagreement with him, so it isn’t all sweetness and light.) French recently published a very perceptive essay in the New York Times, considering the worst possibilities of a second Trump term in office.

French began by recognizing that a second term wouldn’t be characterized by the internal divisions of the first, which saw an effort by responsible aides and appointees to contain Trump’s worst impulses. He recognized that, in a second term, there would be sufficient numbers of “pure Trump sycophants” to completely staff the White House–and “his MAGA base would replace the Federalist Society as the screener of his judicial appointments.” But he has an even more ominous fear.

I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.

To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.

I will inject here my assumption that French’s own (genuine) Christianity is what has allowed him to continue dearly loving those in his family who support Donald Trump. Not being a Christian of any sort–and being blessed with a family utterly devoid of Trumpers–I will admit that I can conceive of no way I could continue to respect a family member who failed to see Donald Trump for the ignorant, self-absorbed and increasingly mentally-ill specimen he is. And in the absence of respect, love comes hard…

As French writes, he has never before seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

French notes with alarm that numerous “Christian” Republicans believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen man to save America. Trump himself shared a video modeled on Paul Harvey’s famous video “So God Made a Farmer,” that proclaims “God Made Trump.” The result–as French quite accurately notes–is “a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue.”

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory. If Trump loses a second time, there is a chance he’ll end up a painful aberration in American politics, a depressing footnote in our national story. But if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

I’ve quoted liberally from French’s essay, because I think he is absolutely correct–he has identified the (terrifying) stakes of this year’s election, and the consequences of victories for Trump and the MAGA Republicans who idolize and emulate him. (Here in Indiana, that most definitely includes mini-Trumpers Braun and Banks.)

Sociologists, psychologists and political scientists have a variety of theories about why people embrace fascism. We’re still exploring the reasons so many “good Germans” refused to see the writing on those walls.

Whatever the reason, the rest of us absolutely cannot allow America to enter that “greater darkness.” Polls may show a majority of Republicans have lost their way, but a majority of Americans have not. That majority needs to vote.

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Framing The Issues

After I graduated law school and had practiced for a time, I realized that what I had learned could be boiled down to one essential axiom: he who frames the issue wins the debate. The rest (to quote Hillel) is commentary. Or–in the case of lawyering–the rest is process.

The ability to frame an issue–to make the debate about X rather than Y–is a powerful weapon.

That point was recently made by Rick Perlstein in The American Prospect, in the second of his essays on “The Infernal Triangle.” This piece focused on the frames used by political journalists, and the ways in which those frames distort our current reality.

In journalism, metaphors matter profoundly. Labels matter profoundly. Narrative frames matter profoundly. They matter most precisely when they function unthinkingly. That is when they soothe us into not bothering to look.

The essay quoted liberally from a book by Jeff Sharlet. At one point, the book described Leslie Stahl’s interview of Marjorie Taylor Green–an interview that was widely panned for what was seen as Stahl’s ineffective efforts to fact-check Green. Stahl is an excellent journalist, but she was operating from within that professional tradition.

“Those old frames don’t work anymore,” Sharlet explained. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is not trying to join the cosmos that Lesley Stahl and much of American journalism is set up to cover.” She inhabited an entirely separate one: a fascist one, which the likes of Stahl have no idea how to comprehend. “Fascism is a dream politics. It’s a mythology. You can’t fact-check myth. You can’t arch an eyebrow and make it go away.”

Perlstein’s thesis is simple, although its implications are anything but. He contends that “the conceptual tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies that make up what we understand as “political journalism” in America are thoroughly unequal to the task of making sense of what, in America in 2024, politics is.”

In the essay, Perlstein recounts a back-and-forth between Sharlet and a reporter for the New York Times. Sharlet pointed out that Trump—with his “cult of personality, and the celebration of violence”—has encouraged a politics very different from the political battles journalists have encountered previously, and he cited scholarship to that effect. He then asked the reporter

“with love and affection for The New York Times and the dilemma that you’re in: What is the argument against calling that ‘fascism’?”

At which his interlocutor doubled down on the smug.

“For the same reason we don’t call Trump ‘racist.’ It’s more powerful to say what something is than to offer a label on it that is going to be debated, you know, and distract from the reporting that goes into it.”

Sharlet: “Who is debating Trump’s racism right now?”

This exchange highlights a genuine dilemma. When does “framing” devolve into labeling and name-calling? On the other hand, at what point must honest reporters acknowledge that observed behaviors are fascist or racist–or unmistakable signs of mental illness?

Perlstein ends his essay with a promise to continue the analysis, and perhaps he will be able to describe that tipping point–the demarkation between a journalist’s accurate description of what a political figure said or did and a defensible characterization of that description as racist or fascist (or insane). I’m not sure I could identify that tipping point, but I certainly agree that the practice of political journalism is in crisis, and not simply because older professional norms no longer seem adequate to our current political reality.

What is particularly problematic is that “journalism” from the Right has understood the power of framing (Fox “News” et al) while practitioners of so-called “legacy journalism” have reacted by clinging more tightly to an increasingly misleading neutrality. (In all fairness, there are signs that–as the MAGA threat to democracy becomes too obvious to ignore–some of those legacy newspapers are sounding the alarm.)

The problem isn’t simply a stubborn adherence to norms that may be outmoded. There’s also the fragmentation of America’s media landscape–a fragmentation that has been facilitated by the Internet, and that allows us all to seek out compatible information sources, and inhabit realities of our choosing. We have the ability to visit “news” sites that frame current political debates in ways that confirm our pre-existing biases and world-views. In many ways, today’s media environment is a throwback to the bad old days when political parties published broadsides with their versions of what was “news” and there were few competing sources with commitments to accuracy and/or objectivity.

Bottom line: the successful framing of the stakes of this year’s election will determine who wins–and the fate of the American experiment.

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The Real Lesson From Iowa

Robert Hubbell’s Substack analysis of the Iowa Republican caucus focused on a point I keep hammering: turnout–getting out the vote–is far and away the most important imperative of this year’s election cycle.

There is a mountain of social science data confirming that high-turnout elections benefit Democrats. There’s a reason the GOP does everything in its power to suppress the vote. By far the most effective suppression comes from gerrymandering–voters in districts drawn to be “safe” for a party they don’t support feel–not illogically–that their votes won’t count, so why bother? It will be critically important to remind those voters that statewide races and the popular vote for President are not subject to gerrymandering. With the exception of the potential operation of the Electoral College, those votes will absolutely count.

Hubbell makes the argument for the importance of turnout in the context of Iowa’s (weird) caucus system. He begins by looking at the composition of those who did turn out:

Among those who attended the caucuses, most voters hold extremist views. Those views are reprehensible and deserve to be condemned. But those who showed up on Monday were mostly Trump loyalists who represent the slimmest majority possible of voters in Iowa.

Although Hubbell doesn’t mention it, this feature of caucus turnout is equally true of turnout in state primaries. The typically low primary turnout is characterized by votes from the most passionate–and extreme–members of both parties. And those voters do not reflect majority sentiments.

So, as we collectively talk about the results in Iowa, it is important to realize that 49% of those who voted on a bitterly cold night (-3 Fahrenheit) did not support Trump. Most of the voters who opposed Trump do not condone his views about immigrants poisoning the blood of America, or his opponents being “vermin,” or his belief that the 2020 election was “rigged.”…

As we move forward in the 2024 campaign, let’s remember that there are Democrats, Independents, and Republicans in Iowa who will not support Trump. Our job is to convince them to show up for Biden. Lumping them in with MAGA extremists is not an effective way of achieving that goal.

And the same applies to every so-called “red state.” In every state, there are local and statewide offices that can be flipped—something that will help limit and blunt the effect of Republican control of statehouses and governors’ mansions.

So, let’s set aside the notion that red states are a lost cause and do not deserve our attention or support. Not only do they deserve our help, but they are the front line of resistance—just like the Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who chose not to vote for Trump on Monday.

Turnout in Iowa was low— only 110,298 voters participated in the GOP caucuses, amounting to about 19% of the 594,533 “active” registered Republicans . Of those, 51% voted for Trump (or 52,260). So Trump’s “big” victory in Iowa was “achieved with support from 7% of Iowa Republicans—or 3% of Iowa’s 1,518,280 active voters.”

Trump’s victory on Monday night was decided by the 97% of Iowa voters who “did not vote” in the caucuses. So, before we over-interpret the result on Monday, we must recognize that the potential for a devastating defeat for Trump is within our reach—assuming that we can motivate sufficient turnout. (emphasis mine)

So, as we face the onslaught of polls in the coming primary season predicting doom for Democrats, we must always remember that turnout can beat any poll.

As Hubbell reminds his readers, the Iowa caucus results affirm a fundamental truth: It all comes down to turnout.

Even in dramatically-gerrymandered Indiana, if a significant percentage of the disaffected voters in “safe” districts voted, a number of the districts would no longer be safe. Republican victories in Indiana are increasingly dependent upon low turnout–especially in the more rural areas of the state that have been steadily losing population.

Hubbell is absolutely right when he insists that Democrats cannot afford to write off Red states this year, of all years.

We need to make the strongest possible case– to apathetic and/or disheartened Democrats as well as to Independents and any remaining sane Republicans– that their votes are needed to save the Constitution, protect democracy, and remove the GOP crazies’ stranglehold that currently prevents Congress from functioning.

For those of us who have felt helpless against the drumbeat of depressing news, there is one thing we each can do: we can encourage everyone we know to register and we can follow up to ensure that they actually vote.

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When It REALLY Matters

A few days ago, in a column about Morton Marcus’ recommendations for changes to Indiana’s retrograde legislature, I alluded to a now-forgotten effort–bipartisan, even!–to reduce waste in Indiana’s government.

The Kernan-Shepard Commission, co-chaired by former Democratic Governor Joe Kernan and Republican then-Chief Justice of Indiana’s Supreme Court, Randy Shepard, had issued a report detailing the waste involved in maintaining 1008 townships in the state. The Commission recommended eliminating or consolidating a number of those townships, which–over the years–had been divested of most of the tasks they’d originally been created to perform.

Polling conducted by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce confirmed that a large majority of voters agreed that townships should go–that they wasted tax dollars better used elsewhere. The problem was that it was a rare individual for whom this was salient–that is, a burning, issue.

It was a burning issue, however, for Township Trustees and the members of their Advisory Boards. Eliminating townships would eliminate the livelihoods of the Trustees (and the relatives too many of them employ). It would eliminate the inflated fees paid to many Advisory Board members for attending three or four meetings a year. The trustees and board members focused like lasers on Indiana’s legislators, bringing in people to testify, hiring lobbyists and calling in political favors.

For them, the issue was critically important–i.e., salient. And so Indiana still has 1008 townships.

In the Indiana Statehouse and in Washington, this same scenario plays out over and over. Most Americans disapprove of a number of decisions our lawmakers make or refuse to make–I consistently see comments disapproving of special tax breaks for the wealthy or fossil fuel companies, and Congressional refusal to even consider Medicare for All. How many of those who complain about the tax code and/or healthcare–or anything else– have written or called their lawmakers about these matters? Spent time or money lobbying for repeal or passage? Very few. On the other hand, the people who benefit from these policies–for whom they are salient– certainly have.

People rally to defend their interests, financial or cultural, and when those with lots of resources focus those resources on derailing or passing a proposed bill, the likely result is that the bill will be derailed or passed. So nothing changes.

On those rare occasions when a legislative issue becomes highly salient to a sizable number of voters, however, it’s possible for the “little guys”–the voters– to win these contests.

And that observation brings me to this year’s elections. For the first time in a long time, several partisan issues are highly salient to large numbers of voters. The most obvious of those is abortion. For many years, when Roe v. Wade protected women’s reproductive autonomy, all the passion–all the salience–was on the (misnamed) “pro-life” side. After Dobbs, that is no longer the case. Reproductive rights are suddenly very important, very salient, to huge numbers of voters, and not all of them are female.

It probably doesn’t rival abortion as a vote motivator, but thanks to the daily drumbeat of gun violence, gun safety is another issue that has become important/salient to large numbers of citizens. Several other issue speak forcefully to specific constituencies: the unremitting GOP attacks on trans children (one-half of one percent of American children, and thus a monumental threat) has raised the salience of those issues not just in the gay community but also among its numerous allies. Republican attacks on public schools and universities are deeply resented by educators and a considerable number of parents. Etc.

These issues aren’t just important to lots of people–they have the added benefit of being clear-cut. Tax policy, energy policy, healthcare–these areas give rise to complex and often arcane arguments. A debate about who should get to make reproductive decisions for an individual woman– the government or the woman whose life will be affected–is far clearer. Whether a man who has been convicted of spousal abuse should be entitled to buy an assault rifle is equally clear.

Call me a Pollyanna, but I am convinced that the dramatically increased salience of these and other issues–together with widespread loathing of Donald J.Trump and his lunatic cult– will help activists motivate an unprecedented and necessary turnout in November.

I sure hope I’m right….

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