Random Blogging – Page 7

TPM Says It All

I often refer to Talking Points Memo, one of the most credible and professional online sources of information. But the other day, the site’s Morning Memo blew me away–it was as if David Kurtz, the author, was describing my own fears and moods as we count down to November 5th.

The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of the occasion.

It was different in the tumultuous summer of two attempted assassinations against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal from the race, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and the political conventions. That period felt as historic as the decision voters would make in November. But since then, things have settled into a odd limbo, like we’re all waiting out the clock until Election Day, resigned that a sufficient number of our fellow citizens may in fact decide to ditch the American experiment as we know it, imperfect though it’s been, in favor of some kind of gaudy neofascist kleptocracy.

Kurtz writes that everything seems “frozen in place until a decision is made on whether democracy is the way to go.” Frozen in place is precisely the way I’ve been feeling–as though I am in suspended animation until I know whether the world I will leave to my grandchildren will be habitable and governable–whether I will leave them an admittedly imperfet society that is nevertheless working toward greater fairness, or one hurtling into another Dark Ages.

Because that concern isn’t hyperbole. That is the choice we face. As Kurtz put it,

Compiling Morning Memo each day has been harder in recent weeks than ever before, not because there is no news but because there’s little that seems to capture the present moment in full, which has forced me to think hard about why, instead of building to a crescendo in November, we seem to be slouching toward a potential second coming of Trump.

He conveyed his “unpleasant sensation that we’re walking eyes wide open into the abyss.”

It is a mark of the poor health of our democracy that democracy itself is on the ballot at all. A choice between democracy or not democracy isn’t a choice but an existential threat that doesn’t sustain or nourish civic life. The social compact has already been broken when we can’t agree that free and fair elections are a universal goal or that we abide by the results of those elections or that the rule of law should apply equally to everyone. We can’t even agree on whether an auto-coup by a sitting president is a good or a bad thing – or a thing at all.

As the essay repeatedly reminds us, Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to American democratic institutions–but the reality and immediacy of that threat tends to obscure what we have already lost–what the last 8 years have cost us, the “vibrant and essential public debates left to molder while we confront the more immediate threat; time, energy, and resources diverted from supporting the best of who we are to fend off the worst of who we can be.”

The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.

The essay mourns the multiple ways that the persistence of older journalistic constructs has operated to normalize Trump–how it has created false equivalencies, and allowed anti-democratic forces to denigrate, undermine and delegitimize democratic institutions.

What that has left us with is a curdled public discourse in which the pro-democracy side is mostly yelling at each other about what more can be done to stop Trump; holding up scorecards like figure skating judges on the effectiveness of this or that anti-Trump strategy; assessing the purity of each other’s anti-Trumpism; and railing against democratic institutions like the media for wilting in our hour of greatest need. Not all of those are bad impulses, and to be clear they are not the cause but rather a symptom of our current predicament. It’s what happens when the “other side” rejects democracy as a means of resolving these differences. It’s like having a public debate against an abandoned lectern.

I’m holding my breath…

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It’s Getting Harder To Ignore

A few days after Trump’s debate with Kamala Harris, an article in The Atlantic focused on his increasing incoherence. It began by noting Trump’s routine boast about passing a cognitive test.

The former president has repeatedly bragged over the past several years that he has passed various mental-status exams with flying colors. Most of these tests are designed to detect fairly serious cognitive dysfunction, and as such, they are quite easy to pass: They ask simple questions such as “What is the date?” and challenge participants to spell world backwards or write any complete sentence. By contrast, a 90-minute debate that involves unknown questions and unanticipated rebuttals requires candidates to think on their feet. It is a much more demanding and representative test of cognitive health than a simple mental-status exam you take in a doctor’s office. Specifically, the debate serves as an evaluation of the candidates’ mental flexibility under pressure—their capacity to deal with uncertainty and the unforeseen.

The author–a psychiatrist–readily admitted that he was not in a position to diagnose either candidate and was not offering any specific medical diagnoses, having never met or examined either of them.

But I watched the debate with particular attention to the candidates’ vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence, and ability to adapt to new topics—all signs of a healthy brain. Although Kamala Harris certainly exhibited some rigidity and repetition, her speech remained within the normal realm for politicians, who have a reputation for harping on their favorite talking points. By contrast, Donald Trump’s expressions of those tendencies were alarming. He displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline.

Trump’s mental decline is finally being widely noted. As a recent article from the Daily Beast reported,

An increasingly incoherent and profane former president Donald Trump, 78, is rambling at his rallies at previously unheard-of lengths and showing signs of confusion that could indicate mental decline, according to a New York Times analysis.

An average rally speech by the elderly Republican nominee for president—who has promised to release his medical records and cognitive tests and then refused to do so—lasts 82 minutes this election cycle, nearly double the 45 minutes he averaged in 2016, a computer analysis by the newspaper found.

In addition to Trump’s well documented rambling, repetitive and winding addresses—punctuated with strange asides about things like his “beautiful” body—among the potential signs of cognitive change are that he curses 69 percent more in speeches than he did in 2016. That could be a sign of disinhibition, a kind of impulsivity that is sometimes attributed to mental decline in old age, the Times said.

Of course, Trump didn’t exactly occupy a high place from which to decline– intellect has never been his strong suit. (One clue– he threatened to sue his university if it disclosed his GPA.) The article quoted a linguistics expert who questioned whether Trump had declined by pointing out that his “starting point” wasn’t particularly high.

On the other hand, Pennebaker said Trump has relied on unusually simple words and sentence structures going back to the days before he was president, suggesting he has simply always been an incredibly simplistic thinker.

One analytic metric he used—which tends to place presidential candidates in the 60 to 70 range—placed Trump speeches at 10 to 24.

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” he told Stat News. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

References to sharks and his preference for death by electrocution, admiration for Hannibal Lecter…and still, the MAGA base remains solid. I have frequently referred to that base as a cult, and its continued idolization of an obviously mentally-ill, uninformed and unintelligent 78-year-old man supports that characterization. Wikipedia tells us that cult members submit to absolute authoritarianism without requiring “meaningful accountability,” and that they have no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry. That description certainly fits.

As he sinks further into incoherence, Trump also engages more and more in projection. As The Hill recently noted, his attacks on Harris’ intelligence are especially telling.

Innate and acquired intelligence is clearly not Trump’s long suit. He has demonstrated a staggering ignorance about American history. He has alleged that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer and that vaccines cause autism. He doesn’t understand that tariffs raise retail prices on imported goods, in essence imposing a national sales tax on all Americans….

Those of us in the “reality-based community” look at Trump’s babbling, his third-grade vocabulary, his slurring of words and his increasing incidents of projection, and cannot understand why any rational voter could seriously consider returning him to office.

The only conclusion: the Trump cult isn’t rational. The open question is: how many of them are there?

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About Those Polls

Those of us who are obsessed with the upcoming election–now less than a month away–tend to focus on the the daily polling results. I have previously explained why I don’t think today’s polls are particularly predictive–while they can show which way the wind is blowing, I simply don’t trust their “likely voter” assessments. (As I’ve explained, all pollsters have developed methods for determining who is likely to vote–and their polls are almost always based upon the preferences of those “likely” voters–not the entire universe of registered voters.)

I feel reasonably confident that we will see a lot of votes cast by “unlikely” voters this time around.

But there is also something new–and dishonest–that has emerged in the polling during this election cycle, as Simon Rosenberg recently reported in his Hopium Chronicles. (Paywalled) He calls them “Red Wave Pollsters.”

Red Wave Pollsters Stepped Up Their Work This Week – The red wavers stepped up their activity this past week, releasing at least 20 polls across the battlegrounds. It’s a sign that they are worried about the public polling in both the Presidential and the Senate, and have dramatically escalated their efforts to push the polling averages to the right and make the election look redder than it is.

While they released polls in many states this week the states that have received the most red wave polls over the past few weeks are Montana, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Over the past 10 days, depending on how you characterize the pollsters, they released at least 5 and as many 7 polls in Pennsylvania alone. Their recent flood of polls in NC and PA tipped the Real Clear Politics polling average for each state to Trump, which then in turn got Trump to 281 in their corrupt Electoral College map. Yes, in Real Clear Politics Trump is now winning the election due to their gamesmanship.

I now count 27 Republican or right-aligned entities in the polling averages: American Greatness, Daily Mail, co/efficent, Cygnal, Echelon, Emerson, Fabrizio, Fox News, Insider Advantage, McLaughlin, Mitchell Communications, Napolitan Institute, Noble Predictive, On Message, Orbital Digital, Public Opinion Strategies, Quantus, Rasmussen, Redfield & Wilton, Remington, RMG, SoCal Data, The Telegraph, Trafalgar, TIPP, Victory Insights, Wall Street Journal.

Rosenberg says it’s time for those who publish their analyses of polls to acknowledge the emergence of this type of poll , which he describes as “red wave, right-aligned narrative polling that only exist for a single purpose – to move the polling averages to the right.”

They are exploiting the “toss it in the averages and everything will work out philosophy” of these sites to once again launder these polls and game the averages – and thus our understanding of the election. Party leaders should expect them to keep these polls coming, and keep working the averages until it looks like Trump is winning in all polling averages. It is what they did in 2022, and it worked. They are doing it again this time, and once again it is working as the averages are moving and everyone is treating this movement like an organic rather than a deeply corrupt process.

Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier of TargetSmart were the only two pollsters who predicted the non-emergence of the widely hyped “red wave” in the 2022 midterms–a wave that was widely forecast partly on the basis of voting history and partly on the basis of similar “red wave” polling.

Reputable pollsters face a number of daunting challenges–the shift from landlines to mobile phones, the reluctance of many (if not most) people to answer calls when they don’t recognize the number, evidence of the increasing willingness of respondents who do answer to lie… Despite those challenges, nearly all reputable pollsters find Harris ahead nationally by somewhere between 2 and 5 points. While I’m reluctant to rely on their numbers, I do think they demonstrate that the Democratic ticket has the momentum–that the electoral “wind” is blowing in the Harris/Walz direction.

What we do know with certainty is that this will be a turnout election. Early voting is open in most states right now, and the most effective thing we can do is vote early and work to make sure that every Blue voter we know gets to the polls. As the GOTV experts tell us, every solid Democratic vote that is cast early means that the GOTV effort can concentrate on getting those who are farther down the “reliable voter” list to the polls.

We’re down to the wire, and as the saying goes, the only poll that counts is the one on election day.

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Do Republicans Hate Cities, Or Just Those Who Inhabit Them?

My husband and I live in the downtown core of Indianapolis, having downsized from a previous home in a nearby historic district. We are urban folks who love being able to walk to the grocery, the dentist, the bank and multiple restaurants and bars.

A recent report from Indianapolis Downtown suggests we’re not alone–our downtown’s residential population has grown nearly 50% since 2010, to almost 30,000, more than 50 new businesses have opened since last year, and $9.5 billion in development is in the works. Despite the fears and misconceptions of suburban and rural folks, crime downtown decreased 34% in the past year, and downtown is the safest district in Marion County. We were only 5% of all crime in the county.

Obviously, not everyone shares our love for urban living, and that’s fine–to each his own. What isn’t fine is the current Republican war on cities and those of us who choose to live in them.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

The article noted that the GOP conservative wing has run against cities for years, with an animus rooted in nativism and religion. Initially, they appealed to Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as sites of “popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish politicians.” Later, Nixon appealed to white voters by focusing on urban crime and civil uprisings.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

Donald Trump and MAGA have returned to the earlier portrayal of urban areas as dangerous hellholes that endanger an “American Dream” anchored in (White) suburban and rural America.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

This rhetoric depends on racism and xenophobia for its effectiveness. For that matter, Trump’s entire appeal–and MAGA’s philosophy (if one can call fear and hatred a philosophy)– is firmly rooted in racism.

Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods.

These attacks aren’t simply wildly inaccurate and hateful, they are evidence of MAGA’s pathological racism.

A few days ago, I suggested that Americans are engaged in a “cold” Civil War, and that it is being fought over essentially the same issue as the last one–whether people who aren’t White Christian males are entitled to be seen as human beings who deserve equal civic status with the White guys. The rhetoric employed by Trump–and increasingly by other Republicans–underscores that observation.

A vote for Trump and those who support him is a vote to return to the Confederacy. I hope Harris is right when she says “we’re not going back”

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The Indiana Retention Vote

The other day, a reader asked me what I thought of a current effort to deny retention to three members of Indiana’s Supreme Court– judges who had voted to uphold Indiana’s abortion ban. As I told that reader, voting no on a retention vote because of disagreement with one ruling would set a very dangerous precedent.

I subsequently spoke with several practicing lawyers, including a good friend who is a highly respected trial lawyer, an active member of the local bar, and personally pro-choice. He suggested that I share the following information with my readers.

First of all, the process. For fifty years, Indiana has had a merit selection process to identify and appoint members of Indiana’s Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. Once candidates who have been found to be highly qualified are appointed, they submit to a statewide retention vote within two years. Thereafter, they are submitted for a retention vote every 10 years.

This year, Chief Justice Loretta Rush, Justice Mark Massa, and Justice Derek Molter are up for retention to the Supreme Court. None of them is known as “liberal” or “conservative” or partisan. The organized opposition to their retention is based upon their ruling on a challenge to Senate Bill 1, the abortion ban passed by Indiana’s regressive legislature in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Indiana’s ban broadly prohibited abortion but made exceptions for 1) when an abortion is necessary either to save a woman’s life or to prevent a serious health risk; 2) when there is a lethal fetal anomaly; and 3) when pregnancy results from rape or incest.

We can argue about how those exceptions work–or don’t–in the real world, but they are written into the law.

Abortion providers sued to invalidate the law and to enjoin its enforcement. The lawsuit was what lawyers call a “facial challenge”–meaning that the providers had to prove that they had standing and that there were no circumstances under which the law could be upheld. The court found that the plaintiffs had standing to bring the case and that Article 1, Section 1 of the Indiana Constitution protects a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk.

At the same time, the majority found that the Indiana Legislature had the authority to prohibit abortions that didn’t fall within one of those three categories. It also recognized that, prior to Roe v. Wade, Indiana and forty other states had upheld legislative limitations on abortion.

Lawyers can agree or disagree with the majority’s interpretation. I do disagree– but it was a reasoned decision, far from the historical dishonesty and religious ideology that permeated Dobbs.

As readers of this blog know, I strongly support abortion rights, and I disagree profoundly with the Dobbs decision. But the postcards that are being disseminated to the public accusing these three justices of voting to ‘strip away’ Hoosier women’s rights to abortion are misleading and unfair. The Justices are bound by precedent–and, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court– they followed their honest reading of that precedent.

As my lawyer friend reminded me, Indiana has one of the most respected supreme courts in America. Our justices serve in many capacities in national judicial organizations, and Chief Justice Rush has been president of the Conference of Chief Justices and Chair of the National Center for State Courts. Opinions of our supreme court are frequently cited in other state judicial opinions and scholarly articles and relied on by state and federal courts nationwide.

Typically, only 75-80% of those who go to the polls will bother to vote on judicial retention. Of that group, there’s a “hard core” of approximately 30% who always vote no. That means that an organized group opposing a judge or justice need only muster another 21% or so–and that’s why this effort is so dangerous. The retention of judges should be based upon their entire body of work and not upon a single opinion, even a questionable one.

I share the anger of people who oppose Indiana’s ban, but our animus should be directed at the legislature–not at a court that, rightly or wrongly, held that the legislature had authority to act.

If the effort to unseat these jurists succeeds, it will close the Indiana Supreme Court for several months, pending the selection of new justices. Worse still, if the Braun/Beckwith ticket wins (and this is deep-Red Indiana), Christian Nationalists will select the new Judges. I’m sure that Braun would be more than willing to subvert the merit process in order to elevate clones of Alito, et al. to Indiana’s top court.

Be careful what you wish for.

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