Random Blogging – Page 3

What If?

A line from an essay I read a few weeks ago in the Bulwark has remained with me, growing in resonance as we approach November 5th. The author wrote that “there aren’t any excuses left. Something like 47 percent of American voters have seen Trump, understood what he was, and wanted it.” Beneath everything–the pundits insisting that Harris do X or Y rather than whatever she’s doing at the time, the armies of lawyers preparing to do battle over the next “Big Lie,” the GOP’s increasing efforts to suppress votes–America has to grapple with that reality.

Some forty-seven percent of our fellow Americans support a mentally-ill, profoundly ignorant narcissist who tells them that they are the only “real” Americans. Forty-seven percent of us want to hand control of the nuclear codes to a misogynistic, homophobic, racist felon who has no comprehension of foreign policy–or for that matter, no understanding of how American government works.

It really is incomprehensible.

As the Bulwark essayist noted, that fact is the ugly truth this campaign has laid bare. If, when the votes are counted, Donald Trump garners forty percent or more–or, God help us, wins– we will no longer be able to take refuge in the comforting (and obviously inaccurate) belief that a large majority of Americans are people of good will and common sense. Even more than the pivotal choice we face–a choice between continuation of the American experiment and a country remade to conform to Project 2025’s theocratic and autocratic principles–the vote will be a referendum on that comforting belief.

The November 5th election will not be a choice based on policy differences–or on policy at all. It will be a twenty-first century replay of the Civil War–a challenge to the most fundamental bases of what I frequently refer to as “The American Idea.”

What the MAGA “patriots” don’t understand, what they actively reject, is the actual American exceptionalism that was baked into this country’s origin: the notion that one wouldn’t be an American by virtue of status or identity, but by embracing the philosophy of the new nation, by the willingness to “pledge allegiance” to an entirely new concept of governance.

It was–as anyone who has read any history will acknowledge–mostly aspirational. But with fits and starts (granted, lots more fits than most of us learned in our high school history classes), we’ve tried to follow that philosophy to its logical conclusion. We extended the franchise, welcoming non-landowners, freed slaves and women into the ranks of “We the People.” Our courts (again, with fits and starts) protected the rule of law against efforts to subvert it in favor of the greedy and unscrupulous and the efforts of racial and religious bigots.

What has so many of us worried sick right now isn’t simply the realization that many of our fellow citizens are credulous, racist and mean-spirited. There have always been folks like that (although not as vocal or empowered by rampant disinformation and the reinforcement of a semi-fascist cult).

We are worried to discover that there are so many of them, and terrified that we are losing that aspirational America, that “American Idea,” to frightened and angry people who never understood or embraced it.

Like so many other Americans, I live in a bubble. My friends and family and neighbors (including a number who’ve been life-long Republicans) are inclusive and welcoming–and equally appalled by polling that (correctly or not) tells us that the upcoming election–between a senile, certifiable lunatic who wants to be a dictator and a sane, experienced woman who has spent her entire adult life in public service–is “too close to call.”

Back in 2021, I quoted a Leonard Pitts column in which he wrote:

I’m an American. By that, I don’t simply mean that I’m a U.S. citizen, though I am. But what I really mean is that I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded.

Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.

In a few days, we’ll know whether we will hang on to those ideals for at least the time being–and we’ll know just how many voters reject Pitts’ (and my) definition of “American.”

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Trump’s Mental Decline

There are ten days until November 5th, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, and finally–finally–the media has begun to focus on the fact that a major-party candidate for President is bat-shit crazy.

Do MAGA voters even care? Or does their hatred of “those people” [fill in the minority of your choice] outweigh the very real prospects of domestic autocracy and potentially, World War III? Do they even understand that Trump’s mental breakdown means they are actually voting for a JD Vance presidency?

Google “Trump’s mental breakdown” or something similar, and Google obliges with numerous hits. Even the New York Times, which has been inexplicably unwilling to hold Trump to the same standards they applied to Biden, has noted the evidence. Under the headline “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age,” the Times noted Trump’s age and the fact that

the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.

Other outlets have been less restrained. The Boston Globe addressed the seeming reluctance to call a lunatic a lunatic:

We can see the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy. So why are Republicans and the press holding Trump to a different standard than Biden?…

President Biden, after struggling with his answers during a June debate with Trump, ended his bid for a second term in July. That decision came after Democrats publicly voiced concern about Biden’s cognitive fitness and the press pursued the controversy breathlessly for weeks. Editorial boards, including the Globe’s, had even urged Biden to step aside.

Yet neither the media nor Republicans have shown that kind of urgency as Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be, to put it kindly, unwell. That is not only unfair and irresponsible, it is dangerous for the future of our country.

Forbes —hardly a Left-wing publication–has also weighed in, noting that

In interviews and speeches that have grown progressively longer during his third White House campaign, Trump often leaps back and forth from one topic to the next, appears increasingly unhinged, and mixes up and mispronounces words.

The article went on to catalog the reasons for concluding that Trump’s senility has become too obvious to ignore. And the New Republic–which is Left of center–recently noted that efforts to normalize what is decidedly not normal have finally given way to concerns over Trump’s very obvious mental incapacities.

Newsweek has also covered Trump’s decline. The article quoted Trump’s niece and fierce critic, Mary Trump, a psychologist by training, who pointed out that her uncle is “the oldest person in American history ever to run for the presidency,” and that “he can’t pronounce words or stay on topic,” and “engages in a worrisome degree of tangential thinking.” Huffpost ran a similar critique by an unrelated mental health expert,. who warned that Trump’s “diminishing cognitive ability can’t be ignored.”

“There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis told the website. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”

There’s much more, but the relative recency of these articles is unnerving, because rational observers have noted his mental issues–including an inability to engage in complex thought or analysis– for far longer. Yet the same media that hounded a much more mentally-competent Joe Biden out of the race basically engaged in what has been aptly called “sane-washing.”

As a September article from Mother Jones put it:

In recent days, I came across what seems to be a new term to describe much media treatment of Donald Trump: “sane-washing.” This is similar to the more common phrase “normalization,” but it extends beyond what we’ve seen for years—the media reporting on Trump as if he is a regular politician who operates within the conventional bounds of political spin and human actions—to covering up (or sidestepping or downplaying) Trump’s apparent cognitive flaws.

Among other examples, the article cited Trump’s claim that schools are providing sex change operations to children without their parents’ consent. Direct quote: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school.’ And your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

What is wrong with our country is the prospect that this lunatic will get millions of votes.

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A Perceptive Anallysis

When I began this blog 15+ years ago, it was with the intention of exploring issues of public policy–delving into the details of American policy debates, and providing illustrations of one of my repeated mantras, “it’s more complicated than that.”

I really, really want to return to those discussions, but they’ve been eclipsed by an election that threatens to substitute a theocratic/autocratic administration for a system that–despite all of its flaws–has steadily moved us toward a more humane and inclusive society.

Rather than delving into the pros and cons of a universal basic income, or the age at which citizens should be able to access social security, or similar issues, we are faced with an angry, fearful cult determined to withhold any and all social or democratic benefits from nonWhite, nonChristian Americans–including even the acknowledgment that they are Americans. It is not hyperbole, unfortunately, to say that November’s election will determine whether the American experiment will continue.

Because that statement isn’t hyperbole, the hysteria of Democrats is understandable. But “understandable” doesn’t mean that the hourly assault of text messages and emails begging for money isn’t incredibly annoying. It doesn’t excuse the desperation and exaggeration accentuated by the weird typefaces and pulsating underlinings.

I don’t get messages from the GOP, so I am unable to compare the tone of their solicitations to those I do receive, but recently, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo considered the differences–differences which, in his analysis, mirror differences in Democratic and Republican psychology.

He considered what’s behind “Democrats’ tendency to freak out, even in the face of the most limited kinds of disappointing news in polls or other markers of campaign performance?”

Democrats are almost always worried they’re going to lose the race while Republicans are all but certain they’re going to win. This is a consistent pattern more or less unconnected to the objective indicators. The same reality is embedded in campaign fundraising emails. Most Democratic ones could be summarized as “all hope is lost; send money for us to have any chance” while most Republican ones are essentially “send more money for us to destroy the bad people.” We see it in campaign tactics. It’s pretty common, especially at the presidential level, for Republican campaigns to claim they’re headed for a runaway victory as a way to overawe and demoralize their Democratic opponents. Again, it would simply never work for Democrats to try the same for reasons that are probably obvious.

Marshall concedes that this year has given Democrats rational reasons for concern. The stakes of this election are higher than they have been in decades.

Trump already showed us who he was as President and the current version of the man is more focused on vengeance and more prepared, largely through a more built-up cadre of lieutenants, to exact that revenge. There’s also the unforgettable fact that Donald Trump has twice over-performed the polls. Why would we think it couldn’t happen again? But with all of this, over the last four or five days a very fractional shift in campaign polls convinced a lot of Democrats that Kamala Harris had botched her campaign and was headed toward defeat. By way of comparison, consider that the Trump campaign spent almost the entirety of the 2020 race behind by between five and ten points and it never seemed to occur to Republicans that they’d lose. 2016 was at least a bit similar. There’s clearly a difference between these two groups.

Marshall points to research showing that over the past several years, authoritarian Americans have migrated into the Republican Party, while most non-authoritarian folks became Democrats or Democratic-leaning Independents. Today, one party is primarily centered on power and certainty, while the other is centered on process and doubt.

As he says, people don’t gravitate toward certain ideologies over others based on rational analysis.

They appeal or don’t appeal to people with certain mindsets which are based on experience, upbringing, certain kinds of acculturation… It’s no surprise that the kind of electoral/political sorting we’re describing would create one community with an overflow of these tendencies just as Republicans have an overflow of focus on power, certainty and even violence.

The next time I get one of those text messages proclaiming that “everything is lost”–or at least, will be lost unless I immediately remit ten dollars to candidate A or organization B–I need to remember Marshall’s analysis.

I can also remind myself that, in only a few more days, depending on voter turnout, I can either return to policy discussions…or proceed to document the effort to end the American experiment.

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Scary Psuedo-Christians

I would hide under my bed, but it’s a platform bed. There isn’t enough room.

As America barrels toward November 5th (or, as I’ve come to call it, Judgement Day), I encounter vastly more reporting on the people who form the MAGA base, a Christian Nationalist cohort that I just don’t encounter in my daily life. Without those reports, I would probably agree with my husband, who insists that there simply can’t be that many voters who aren’t repelled by Trump and his weird, disjointed fascist rhetoric.

I really, really want to believe that. I want confirmation of my lifelong belief in the good will and good sense of the American public. But then I come across articles like a recent one in The Atlantic.

In the final moments of the last day, some 2,000 people were on their feet, arms raised and cheering under a big white tent in the grass outside a church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. By then they’d been told that God had chosen them to save America from Kamala Harris and a demonic government trying to “silence the Church.” They’d been told they had “authority” to establish God’s Kingdom, and reminded of their reward in heaven. Now they listened as an evangelist named Mario Murillo told them exactly what was expected of Christians like them.

“We are going to prepare for war,” he shouted, and a few minutes later: “I’m not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.”

The event had been cast as an old-fashioned tent revival, but it was entirely political–amplifying (as if we needed amplification) the reality that fundamentalist Christianity has morphed into a political, rather than religious, identity. This particular effort targeted “souls” in swing states.

It was an unapologetic exercise in religious radicalization happening in plain sight, just off a highway and down the street from a Panera. The point was to transform a like-minded crowd of Donald Trump–supporting believers into “God-appointed warriors” ready to do whatever the Almighty might require of them in November and beyond.

So far, thousands of people have attended the traveling event billed as the “Courage Tour,” including the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, who was a special guest this past weekend in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. The series is part of a steady drumbeat of violent rhetoric, prayer rallies, and marches coming out of the rising Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose ultimate goal is not just Trump’s reelection but Christian dominion—a Kingdom of God. When Trump speaks of “my beautiful Christians,” he usually means these Christians and their leaders—networks of apostles and prophets with hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a day preceded by events such as those happening now.

This particular series of events was organized by an influential “prophet” named Lance Wallnau, best known for having urged his followers to travel to Washington, D.C., on January 6, and who described that day’s efforts to overturn the election as part of a new “Great Awakening.”

The article describes what happens when the organizers get people under the tent. Attendees will be met with intense pressure to move them “from passivity to action” and to enlist them into “God’s army.” According to the article, there are loudspeakers, drums, lights and “a huge video screen roughly 20 feet wide and eight feet high.”

It is a deliberate process, one choreographed to the last line, and in Eau Claire, on the grass outside Oasis Church, the four days began with a kind of promise.

“The first thing I’m going to say is you did not come to see me,” Murillo said. “You came to see Jesus Christ.”

Because Jesus–according to these pastors–wants them to go to the polls and elect Donald Trump.

There’s much more in the article, if you have the stomach to read it in its entirety. The “Christians” portrayed have nothing in common with the Christians I know, or the churches with which I am familiar. It’s hard for me to believe that thousands–millions–of people do subscribe to this massive distortion of a faith tradition, but then I recall that some seventy million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and another eighty million didn’t bother to vote at all.

Most of those non-voters probably weren’t Christian Nationalists , but they also weren’t sufficiently concerned about the possibility of a Trump victory to cast a ballot. How many of the apathetic will vote this year–and for whom?

If I lose some weight, maybe I can crawl under that platform bed.

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It Can Happen Here

Most sentient Americans know this election isn’t normal–and that it’s pivotal. And from all indications, it is very, very close.

If there was ever any doubt about the basis of Donald Trump’s appeal, his recent speeches should dispel them. As his mental faculties–such as they were– continue to deteriorate, he has become less inhibited, engaging more directly in appeals to fear and– especially– hate.

As a recent article in The Bulwark reported,

The Two Minutes Hate was a famous feature of Orwell’s portrayal of Oceania in 1984. The Two Months of Hate is now a notable feature of the 2024 U.S. presidential contest. Donald Trump and his allies are closing this campaign with two months of hate in a way we’ve never seen before. And it could work.

Trump has “abandoned any pretense of debating real issues or proposing serious programs. “In the closing weeks of this campaign, any mask of democratic normalcy and civic decency has been tossed aside.” He hasn’t just accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country, he has also accused Americans who disagree with him of being “the enemy within.”

Trump told Maria Bartiromo that an even bigger problem than “the people who have come in who are totally destroying our country” is “the enemy from within.” He called them “very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics.” And he said they could “be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”…

Are Trump and Vance being punished at the polls for this intensification of lying and hatred? Not at all. The Trump-Vance ticket seems to have gained a bit in the last two weeks, just as the hatred and darkness have become more central to their message. It turns out that what it means to be an undecided or swing voter is to be undecided about the choice between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. And the swing voters seem to be swinging towards authoritarianism.

It’s shocking and depressing. One could tell oneself in 2016 that Trump won despite the lies and hatred. Now if he wins, it would seem to be because of the lies and hatred.

If this seems chillingly unAmerican to most of us, it’s because we’ve opted to ignore the long history of American Nazism. That history was traced in a 2021 Washignton Post article.

Even during World War II, as the United States mobilized to defeat Nazi Germany and portrayed itself as an “arsenal of democracy,” Americans remained divided about who deserved to be treated as a full citizen. In an era when restrictive nationalist and authoritarian movements took power across Europe and Asia, even explicit appeals to Nazism attracted adherents in the United States.

As the article pointed out, the idea central to Nazi fascism — the argument that “real” Americans needed to be protected from those threatening “others” — was hardly foreign to Americans steeped in deep traditions of racism and nativism.

Trump recently announced that he will be holding a rally in Madison Square Garden–bringing to knowledgable ears an echo of the Bund’s February 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden. That rally drew more than 20,000 enthusiastic supporters under banners that included swastikas and images of George Washington.

It wasn’t just the Bund.

Father Charles Coughlin — a Roman Catholic priest with a popular radio broadcast in the 1930s — went even further, mixing anti-semitic rhetoric with direct support for Adolf Hitler. Eventually forced off the air in 1942 and nearly defrocked by the church for his pro-Nazi politics, Coughlin’s near-decade of national popularity reflected the appeal those beliefs had for a measurable segment of the American public.

The Post profiled a number of other prominent Nazi sympathizers, for whom “democracy was worth sacrificing to preserve the dominance of the White race — as they defined it.”

Just as the revived KKK in the 1920s enjoyed mainstream support, the ideas animating U.S. fascist groups were hardly fringe. In April 1940, when asked whether “Jews have too much power and influence in this country,” a national majority answered, “yes.” After U.S. entry into the war, public participation in pro-Nazi organizations ceased, but the sentiments remained. In July 1945, the number of Americans who responded “yes” to this question about influence had risen to 67 percent.

The war drove American Nazis underground, but nativism, anti-semitism and authoritarian tendencies did not vanish, even in the fastest-growing city in the country, Los Angeles. Los Angeles had been one of the largest centers of Klan activity outside the South in the 1920s and 1930s. A Klan member had been elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1923.

Polling tells us that America’s Presidential race is essentially tied. If that’s accurate, it can happen here.

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