A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
To those who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas. To those marking Hanukkah or Kwansaa, Happy Holidays.
Thanks for reading my daily rants–and know that I really, really appreciate all of you who visit and/or comment here.
Since I figure you all have better things to do today than reading this blog, I’m taking Christmas day off.
See you tomorrow!
CommentsKatherine Tyler Scott is a Fellow of the International Leadership Association, and closer to home, a board member of Women4Change Indiana. She chairs a committee of that latter organization on which I serve, and recently she shared with me an essay she’d written for a publication of the former.
It deserves wider distribution.
The essay focused on a lessons we should take from the war in Ukraine–especially the power of voice.
To those of us who share Katherine’s belief that we must oppose injustice and oppression “in any form, against anyone, anywhere”. she has a message: she argues that silence in such instances is unacceptable.
Many people around the world filled the streets and exercised their voices in protest of the public murder of George Floyd. It was impossible to turn away and not see what was in plain sight, to deny how the long history of dehumanization had contributed to the knee of oppression. We are called now to do the same on behalf of humanity. In America, the value of freedom is etched on a plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, cited in the Declaration of Independence, codified in the United States Constitution, and sustained by civic engagement. Our diversity does not discount the universal desire for freedom. This basic right to which every human being is entitled is always at risk of attack. Events, unforeseen or planned, can create major disruption and insecurity alongside crippling levels of anxiety and fear — states of emotionality in which people are willing to trade their freedom for the quick fix.
Katherine attributes the rise of autocracies around the globe to the pervasive, chronic anxiety that seems to accompany social change–a state that makes systems of any kind vulnerable, unable to cope productively with that change.
But then she notes Ukraine’s fierce resistance to Russia in defense of freedom.
The Ukrainian President and the country’s citizens have been subject to these same dynamics and forces of change yet have become an inspiring counter to a loss of the ability to cope. Why?
In large part, it is because of collective aspirations, shared core beliefs, a strong identity as a people, and an understanding of the desire to become a country where people can be free. These are powerful determinants of response, but all become more powerful when they are given voice. President Volodymyr Zelensky is that voice for his country and for millions around the world. In using it, he has galvanized people across the globe to remember what matters and what is required when civilization is under threat. A major mitigating factor to society’s chronic anxiety is the self-differentiated leader, and we are seeing it in Zelensky. He reminds us of the power of voice — one and many. We are seeing why words matter. His voice, his words, have encapsulated the universal yearning of humanity: to live, to live free, and in doing so, to have the opportunity to live a life of meaning — a life that matters and makes a difference.
This emphasis on voice really resonated with me, because voice is the one weapon possessed by ordinary Americans. Those of us without piles of money or offices of influence often despair of making a difference; I know that I look at aspects of our collective life that I consider dangerous or forbidding and feel helpless to oppose or change them.
I lack the power to keep Indiana’s legislators from distorting the operation of democratic accountability by choosing their voters. I cannot “reprogram” a racist MAGA movement, or keep the planet from warming, or “fix” other multiple threats to democracy, civility and the rule of law. Neither can most of the other Americans who wring their hands over these and other ominous and worrisome aspects of our collective life.
But we do have our voices, and Katherine reminds us that those voices matter—that raising them will make a difference.
The recent protests in Iran and China moved even those autocratic governments–Iran has reportedly abolished its Morality Police (although there are conflicting reports of that), and China has relaxed its draconian COVID policies. Small steps, admittedly, but evidence of the truth of Katherine’s observation.
At the very least, we need to remember that citizens’ voices–through letters and emails to legislators and other public officials, through demonstrations, through civic organizations, through lawsuits–can attest to our lack of acquiescence with an unacceptable status quo. Our voices can also encourage our fellow-citizens to raise theirs.
As Zelensky has demonstrated, words matter.
CommentsTypically, diatribes against so-called identity politics are aimed at “woke” folks advocating for the civic equality of marginalized groups, presumably to the detriment of the common good. I want to argue for a different–and infinitely more troubling–definition, one that helps explain America’s current divisions.
Several recent events and observations have prompted this reflection. A few days ago, I attended a meeting of a group of Hoosiers concerned about Indiana’s lopsided support of Republican candidates, even when those candidates were obviously and dramatically flawed. What several of us implicitly recognized was the changed nature of political choice.
These days, Hoosiers and other American voters are not engaged in debates over policy. The policy preferences and beliefs that used to determine whether people identified with Republicans or Democrats–free trade, welfare policy, foreign policy–no longer drive that choice, and a frighteningly large number of Americans haven’t the faintest idea what positions the parties or candidates embrace–or even know enough about the issues to form a coherent opinion.
Worse still, most don’t care.
I previously noted that the very welcome result in Georgia’s Senate run-off was an uncomfortably close one–that 1,700,000+ voters cast ballots for a manifestly unqualified and arguably mentally-ill candidate.
A couple of days ago, in his daily Newsletter, Robert Hubbell noted the durability of GOP base support for Trump, despite behaviors most Americans would once have seen as immediately disqualifying:
In the three weeks since he announced his 2024 presidential bid, Trump has met with antisemites, Nazi supporters, white nationalists, and QANON members at Mar-a-Lago and called for the “termination of the Constitution.”That is the worst “roll-out” of a presidential campaign in history. And yet, Trump has a 40% favorability rating while President Biden has a 42%favorability rating. We dismiss Trump at our peril.
I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that America is now experiencing a tribal war. Our differences are not based upon contending positions on matters of policy or candidate quality; they are based upon the irreconcilable world-views of the “tribes” of which we consider ourselves part.
Policy differences can be compromised; irreconcilable world-views cannot.
Over the past few decades, we Americans have sorted ourselves into a Red tribe and a Blue tribe. The Republican Party has never been a “big tent” in the same way the Democratic Party was and still is, but it was far more capacious than it is today. There were liberal Republicans, and a significant number of Republicans for Choice (a group to which I once belonged). Foreign policy positions ranged from isolationist to interventionist.
Today, the GOP has purged virtually all “outliers.” The MAGA party has largely morphed into the White Christian Nationalist Party, with internal differences narrowed to degrees of racism, anti-Semitism and hatred of “the libs.” A “moderate” Republican today is one who limits his public pronouncements of such sentiments because he still recognizes how ugly they sound. (I use the male pronoun because most of these culture warriors are men, but not all; loony-tune shrews like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are full-fledged members of the cult.)
Everyone who doesn’t fall within the GOP’s ambit–everyone who isn’t prepared to join the cult–is either a Democratic-leaning Independent or a Democrat, with the result that what was once that party’s “big tent'” is now a huge one, stretching from never-Trump Republicans to middle-of-the-road voters to self-identified democratic socialists. (That makes achievement of consensus the equivalent of herding cats, but that’s an issue for a different post.)
People now go to the polls to vote for their tribe, their team. America has always had an unfortunate tendency to view political contests like team sports; these days, “my team” has hardened into “my tribe, my people,” and voting has become a contest between “real Americans” and “woke liberals.” The attributes of the candidates, their positions on or evasions of the issues have largely faded into irrelevancy.
So…what now?
I fervently hope that we are simply on the cusp of permanent, largely positive social change, and that it is resistance to that change that has engendered the outpouring of fury, bile and hysteria from what Steve Schmidt calls “the belligerent minority.” I hope that the inclusive, so-called “woke” culture these folks so detest has become too embedded to be overturned.
I actually do believe that to be the case. But in the meantime, those of us who aren’t part of the cult need to understand what is motivating the legions who vote for people like Herschel Walker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and who continue to support Donald Trump–and we need to actively oppose them.
Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” wasn’t kidding.
CommentsThe problem with living in a bubble…
One benefits of a truly mass media is that it exposes its audience to the larger popular culture. Today, it’s easy to occupy an information bubble occupied by people who share your particular beliefs.
A few days ago, I shared some of the positions of the New Right’s “intellectuals.” Those positions weren’t just extreme; as a recent essay from The New Republic characterized them, they were also weird. The essay argued that when these people run for office, they tend to be too weird to win elections. (Herschel Walker was a different kind of weird, but the observation still holds.)
The right is getting weirder. That might begin to cost Republicans elections in years to come and undermine their own appeals to American patriotism in a way policy extremism alone could not. American voters see the political parties as equally extreme in policy, ignoring evidence that Republicans have moved right much faster than Democrats have moved left. However, a party fixated on genital sunning, seed oils, Catholic integralism, European aristocracy, and occultism can alienate voters not because of its positions but because of how it presents them—and itself. Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites, there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.
This is a different—though parallel—phenomenon from the often raucous, conspiratorial personality cult that surrounds Donald Trump and his devoted base. This new turn has predominantly manifested among the upper-class and college-educated right wing. Indeed, as Democratic strategist David Shor noted, as those with college degrees become more left leaning, the remaining conservatives have gotten “really very weird.” In this well-off cohort, there exists a mirror of the excesses often attributed to the college-educated left, fairly or unfairly: an aversion to mainstream values and an extreme militancy.
This segment of the Right has evidently abandoned American exceptionalism, along with the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Their “disgust with equitable citizenship, personal liberty, and democratic self-governance” are common threads running through their pronouncements.
These New Right thinkers consider America’s philosophical foundations not just mistaken, but immoral; they express “a new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms.” According to the essay, this faction of the Right
has shed its American and conservative roots and seeks a radical shift—a national “refounding.” Indeed, leading right-wing intellectuals like John Daniel Davidson have said that “the conservative project has failed” and that people like them constitute the educated vanguard of a “revolutionary moment.”
Whatever else one might say about this rejection of Americana–whatever other danger these people may pose to civic peace– this is not a politically salable approach. Research confirms that nine out of 10 Americans believe being “truly American” involves respecting “American political institutions and laws.”
Americans consistently affirm that liberty, equality, and progress—the core values of republicanism and the Enlightenment—are ones they try to live by. While the content and meaning of those values have always been contested terrain, opposing them is a nonstarter.
In the midterms, candidates embracing these positions did not do well, even in states where an R next to one’s name virtually guarantees a win.
John Gibbs, a Republican nominee for a Michigan swing seat, founded a think tank that argued for overturning the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The country, he said, had “suffered” from women’s suffrage. He narrowly lost his bid. Blake Masters and J.D. Vance—two Republican candidates for Senate funded in part by tech billionaire and new-right linchpin Peter Thiel—have embraced new-right ideas and actively courted the “weird right.” Vance has questioned whether women should leave violent marriages; Masters has praised domestic terrorist Theodore Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto, argued against legal access to contraception, and openly said that democracy is a smokescreen for the masses “stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.” (Americans on balance like democracy; legal contraception is almost universally popular; and Kaczynski’s unpopularity is so widely assumed that pollsters rarely ask about him.) Masters, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost his bid to unseat Mark Kelly, and Vance badly underperformed in his blood-red home state.
The claims that characterize this slice of the body politic are increasingly bizarre: the essay points to assertions that meat substitutes will turn men into women. (One Texas Representative has declared that a man who eats cultured meat, “will turn into a SOCIALIST DEMOCRAT.”)
At the base of all this is misogyny. (Perhaps these guys all have small winkies…)The New Right wants American women to be subservient to men and dependent upon male breadwinners.
Sorry, weirdos, but that horse has left the barn…
CommentsThe run-off election between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock has to rank pretty far up in the annals of weirdness. For the Democrats, there was Warnock, who served two years in the Senate after winning a 2020 run-off election; for the GOP, there was Walker, who was evidently once a good football player.
Warnock is educated, highly intelligent and a serious policymaker. He is senior pastor at the church once served by Martin Luther King. Walker wasn’t just in over his head–he is clearly mentally damaged, has absolutely no background in or understanding of policy, and was asked to run by Donald Trump and supported by other Republicans because–as a once-storied football player–he had generated name recognition and considerable good will in football-crazy Georgia. (Where he evidently doesn’t live–his primary residence is in Texas.)
And he’s Black.
Let’s call that cynical racism what it is: Republicans figured that running a Black candidate would make the GOP seem less racist, and maybe even split the Black vote., encouraging some number of Black voters who usually vote Democratic to reward the GOP for nominating a Black candidate. (Black people are interchangeable, right?)
The pathetic reality is that Walker either happily allowed himself to be a GOP puppet or was too dense to realize that his handlers considered him a useful idiot.
A column in USA Today summed up my reaction to this whole bizarre exercise:
So much has been said about Herschel Walker’s gross incompetency as he takes aim at securing a seat in the U.S. Senate. As I looked at the recent nail-biter polling – Walker and incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock are even at 46.4% on Thursday night – my first thought was: How could this race be this close?
Then, I felt enormous shame for this country. A place my family and I, Nigerian immigrants who became naturalized citizens more than 20 years ago, have always viewed as a symbol of true democracy. A country where we proclaim justice and freedom and fight fiercely to uphold those signature markers. A nation fervently striving, still, for common decency….
Much like Trump with the presidency, when Walker threw his hat into the Senate race, people scoffed at the idea. There was no way a man who can barely form a coherent sentence could convince reasonable citizens that he, over a well-respected, educated pastor, was the better choice. And, much like Trump, I strongly doubt, given his rambling speeches and cringe gaffes, that Walker knows what the Constitution is, let alone grasp his duties to protect it. The celebrity-turned-politician based on popularity and name recognition needs to end. Walker is the most dangerous embodiment of this.
Voters who might have been forgiven for not recognizing Walker’s “gross incompetence” when he was first nominated could hardly avoid the ensuing avalanche of news about his obvious lies about his education and business history, the emergence of previously unacknowledged children, several domestic abuse incidents–and most embarrassing of all for an avowedly “pro life” candidate, revelations that he’d paid for at least two former girlfriends’ abortions.
And then there was his disquisition about vampires and werewolves…
During the campaign, Walker became a laughingstock, the butt of late-night jokes and even a Saturday Night Live “cold open.”
And yet, after all of that, 1,719,868 people voted to elevate this man to the august chambers of the U.S. Senate.( I am reasonably certain that very few of those ballots were cast by Black voters, most of whom were appropriately furious at the Republican Party’s transparent effort to suggest that, since he was also Black, Walker was equivalent to the highly qualified Warnock.)
The fact that so many Georgia Republicans went to the polls to cast votes for Walker led Bret Stephens–the New York Times conservative columnist–to concede what most of us know: the GOP he (and I) once belonged to no longer exists. Stephens said:
Just the fact that he managed to make it to a runoff is a sign of how much is wrong with the United States today. A near-majority of voters in Georgia would rather vote for a moral delinquent with no grasp of the issues at hand than someone with whom they merely disagree.
The thing is, the people who voted for Walker don’t “merely disagree” with Warnock (or Biden or the Democrats). Most would be hard pressed to address substantive policy differences at all. Like the rural Indiana voters who automatically vote for anyone with an R next to his name, they see “woke” Americans as an existential threat. If combatting that threat required them to vote for a turnip, they would.(Arguably, they did…)
This is where the culture wars have gotten us.
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