We’re Not Going Back

The Harris catch-phrase, “We’re not going back,” isn’t aspirational–it’s factual. Even if the unthinkable happens, and Trump ekes out a victory, the MAGA folks will be disappointed, because the cultural changes that anger and motivate them are highly unlikely to reverse. 

I’m hardly the only observer who has pointed out that this is not an election based on policy differences. Instead, our political divisions are responses to the cultural shifts that have generated hate and hysteria from a sizable minority of the population. The Dobbs decision, the anti-woke fury, the authoritarian prescriptions in Project 2025…all are reactions to cultural shifts that anger and terrify that very vocal, regressive cohort.

An excellent illustration of that primal motivation is the eruption of anti-trans political ads in the last days of the election season. The number–and viciousness–of those ads tells us two things: first, it’s politically effective to focus on the smallest and least-understood sliver of  the”different” people who symbolize unacceptable social change; and second, widespread acceptance of  previously favored targets–like LGBTQ+ folks generally– is now baked into the culture. 

The MAGA focus on trans people was the subject of a New York Times essay by a trans author, who put the attacks in cultural context. She began by noting that approximately half of today’s Americans consider gender transition immoral–or at least, not normal. But then she reminded readers that definitions of “normal” are subject to change–and in fact, have undergone considerable change over time.

And yet most notions of “normal” have rarely been fixed, even as there have always been those who insist they are immutable. Certainly gender may be one of the most fundamental — dare I say natural — ways we have organized societies. But history reminds us that all assumptions should always be questioned. Every significant challenge to the existing order, from the vote for women to interracial unions to marriage equality, has provoked strong reactions and, not uncommonly, hand-wringing about the downfall of civilization.

She pointed to interracial and same-sex marriages.

Race isn’t gender, and the comparisons aren’t perfect. And yet the arguments made against interracial unions like the Lovings’ in the 1950s and ’60s are eerily similar to those made against marriage equality a decade or two ago and against trans people today: We hear appeals to God, science, the well-being of children and the natural order, in efforts made to write out of existence trans people, our care and our place in public life. Those arguments resonated back then, as perhaps they do for some people now. In the 1960s a vast majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages (a majority didn’t approve until the 1990s), even if now few question whether people of different races should be allowed to marry….

The transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, mused during his stint onstage at the Democratic National Convention about the mundane and chaotic — and yet miraculous — daily routine of raising children with his husband: “This kind of life went from impossible to possible, from possible to real, from real to almost ordinary in less than half a lifetime.”

How did support for same-sex marriage go from just over a quarter of Americans near the end of President Bill Clinton’s first term to nearly 70 percent this May?

The author noted research showing that large numbers of people who changed their minds about marriage equality did so because they knew someone who was gay or lesbian. That means that acceptance of trans folks will be more difficult; polling suggests that barely 30 percent of Americans have  friends, relatives or colleagues who are transgender, and although that number may grow, it won’t ever be very high, since research tells us that transgender folks are a very small sliver of society.

Since there aren’t very many of them, and they remain a largely unknown, vulnerable (and purportedly “non-normal”) segment of the population, the GOP figures it’s safe to attack them–just as it used to be safe to attack women’s suffrage, interracial and same-sex marriage, and gay people generally.

As the author wrote,

I can’t help thinking it’s worth reflecting on what the trial judge in the Loving case, who argued that allowing people of different races to marry would go against God’s will, and other right-thinking people of that era might make of the current political landscape. For all the polarization, misinformation and puerile attacks on candidates, being married to someone of another race simply isn’t part of the equation at all. It is, in fact, something … ordinary. Even normal.

MAGA is too late. Win or lose, Harris is right: we aren’t going back.

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Who Drinks The Kool-Aid?

There’s a thread running through my political conversations. (Granted, those conversations are with friends and family, all of whom detest MAGA and Trump.)  Why do all the indicators point to a close election? Why isn’t Harris easily eclipsing Trump?

Think about it. Even voters who don’t particularly like Harris surely understand that she is a normal politician, infinitely preferable to a senile narcissist with a third-grade vocabulary and a raft of “policies” that would plunge America into a recession (or worse) and threaten world peace.

Hundreds of members of former Republican administrations–including his own–warn that he is a fascist, a dangerous lunatic, a self-regarding autocrat who should not be allowed anywhere near power, let alone the Oval Office.

Trump is a convicted felon, an admitted sexual predator, a congenital liar, a six-times bankrupt “titan of industry”…I could go on, but readers of this blog are well aware of the extent of his depravity.

How, then, is he at all competitive for the Presidency?

It certainly isn’t due to his “policies.” To the extent that he even has them, those policies are anything but the conservative political positions traditionally held by the bygone GOP. The striking departures from those traditional positions means it also can’t be loyalty to the ideology that once characterized the GOP.

As Heather Cox Richardson recently reminded us, Trump has boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.” As Richardson put it, the GOP

had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.

Once in office, Trump put that racist and sexist base in the driver’s seat. He attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.

In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.

As Richardson explained, establishment Republicans had wanted a largely unregulated market-driven economy. MAGA Republicans, however,

want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.

Support for MAGA and Trump isn’t motivated by admiration for his character, intellect or personality. It isn’t motivated by his economic plans, which even conservative economists warn would severely damage the economy, or by loyalty to the GOP, which he has remade into a cult dominated by what used to be its disreputable fringe.

So–What explains his support?

I recently had a discussion with a local philanthropist who served in a state Republican administration, and I agree with his analysis. He ticked off three reasons he believes people support Trump.

  • Some subset of wealthy individuals care more about promised tax cuts for the rich than for the health and wellbeing of the country.
  • Some people are truly ignorant. Perhaps they get all their “news” from Fox and its clones, or they lack the intellectual capacity to understand what is at stake, or to evaluate competing political claims.
  • True MAGA movement folks–by far the largest group of Trump supporters, the ones who’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid”– are disproportionately people who are unhappy with their lives. They haven’t achieved the status or security or love or whatever else they believe they were entitled to, and they’re convinced it couldn’t be their fault; it must be the fault of “those people.” Trump gives them permission to point fingers and give voice to their bigotries: it’s those immigrants, those gay people, those uppity women and/or Blacks.

If the polls are right that the election is close, there are a lot more people in those three categories than I ever imagined…

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The Arrogance Of Power

As Indiana’s election looms, the enduring truth of one of Jennifer McCormick’s talking points is hard to miss: it’s time for a change.

Indiana has been ruled by Republicans for over twenty years. We’ve had Republican Governors and a Republican legislature–and for the past several years, a Republican super-majority in that legislature. For any political party, a persistent lack of balance–and thanks to gerrymandering, a perceived lack of any real competition–leads to corruption. (“Power corrupts” is as old and hoary an adage as “it’s time for a change.)

The problem with extended one-party rule isn’t simply that extremists can pass rules and push through legislation without considering contending viewpoints or public opinion–it’s that those exercising power come to believe that they can do anything they want, legal or not, without worrying about the consequences. Two recent stories–one from the Indiana Citizen and one from The Capitol Chronicle–are directly on point.

The Indiana Citizen reports on the continuing corruption of the Attorney General’s office headed by Todd Rokita. A Marion County Superior Court has sanctioned two state agencies and the lawyers from the Indiana Attorney General’s Office who represented them, detailing ongoing misconduct and ordering them to pay nearly $375,000. While the agencies involved are certainly not blameless, the responsibility for complying with court orders and responding truthfully to questions from the court and other litigants rests squarely on the shoulders of the lawyers representing them. 

According to the court, 

Respondents and their counsel committed multiple types of unacceptable misconduct on numerous occasions. They acted in an unreasonable manner with disregard for Petitioners, the Court and the orderly process of justice,” Joven wrote in the order granting petition for attorney fees and costs. “Further, Respondents failed to explain why the repeated acts of misconduct occurred and went uncured, failed to accept responsibility for the misconduct, failed to express remorse, and failed to identify steps that have been taken to prevent such unacceptable misconduct from occurring in the future.”

Worse, this evidently wasn’t the first time these lawyers had been sanctioned. Only a year before this case was filed, “the Indiana Department of Correction, its counsel from the attorney general’s office and the attorney general’s office itself were sanctioned in another case for making false representations to the federal judge, making false discovery responses and submitting a brief that contained false information.” In other words, despite that previous ruling, lawyers from the AG’s office persisted in conduct that violated their ethical and legal obligations.

Courts have also smacked down Todd Rokita personally. He hasn’t listened either.

Then there’s the case against Jamie Noel, the southern Indiana political heavyweight who who pleaded guilty earlier this month to 27 felonies. Noel’s corruption, and his cozy ties to numerous state Republicans, have been the subject of considerable reporting, but The Capital Chronicle has focused on the effects of that corruption.

When a life is on the line in the back of an ambulance, first responders are supposed to have the best tools available to give every patient a fighting chance, said former paramedic Crystal Blevins. But for many who worked at New Chapel EMS — the southern Indiana emergency service provider previously ran by now-convicted former Clark County Sheriff Jamey Noel — “the equipment and the medicine, a lot of the time, wasn’t there.”

“There was this lie being presented to the public about what New Chapel was giving — they weren’t fulfilling that promise. Jamey ran the service out of greed … telling us there weren’t funds for what we needed, and then we came to find out the money was there all along,” Blevins told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. …

Court documents indicate that Noel stole more than half of the taxpayer dollars provided to New Chapel by Clark and Floyd counties. In his last four years as leader, he pocketed at least half a million dollars in wages and spent $2 million more on vacations, clothing, Rolex watches, child support payments, his daughter’s college tuition and more, according to state auditors.

Noel served as the Clark County sheriff from 2015 until the end of 2022. He was also the Republican Party chair for both Clark County and Indiana’s 9th Congressional District. That made him the gatekeeper for southern Indiana’s Republican political hopefuls for the last decade.

Noel and Rokita are examples of the hubris that enables corruption. When a political party uses its legislative power to gerrymander the electorate and ensure its continuation of political control, that cronyism invites abuse by greedy and self-interested individuals who are confident that they are beyond the reach of angry constituents.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is definitely time for a change. 

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Puncturing The “Pro-Life” Myth

I assume there are sincere people (mostly, but not exclusively, male) who bought into the myth that prohibiting abortions was all about “saving babies.” In the wake of actual bans, the incredible dishonesty of that assertion has become harder to ignore. 

The avowed “pro life” activists have been conspicuously silent about the fact that– In the wake of the Dobbs decision–in states like Indiana that have stringent bans, women have died or suffered extreme medical consequences in greater numbers than before. While most women already knew that the purported “pro life” concerns about “life” didn’t extend to the lives of women, those activists have been equally silent about the sharp rise in infant mortality. As the linked report shows, in the year and a half following the Supreme Court Dobbs decision, hundreds more infants died than usual in the United States. The vast majority of those infants had congenital anomalies, or birth defects, and it is likely that a number of those babies experienced painful deaths.

The refusal of ideologues to understand that abortion availability is an essential part of healthcare has meant that women suffering miscarriages have been denied adequate and timely treatment, and that pregnant women who very much want to carry their babies to term are having difficulty finding an ob/gyn to provide prenatal care and deliver those infants. The state’s abortion ban has led to a decline in OBGYN residency applications–a decline likely to worsen the already alarming shortage of maternal care providers. A patient in Northern Indiana died last year from an ectopic pregnancy because there was no ob-gyn to treat her.

None of which seems to bother the “pro life” Micah Beckwiths of the world.

Now, it turns out that the medical consequences of these bans–their very negative effect on actual lives–extends far beyond reproductive medicine. According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, the bans are also interfering with the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. In the wake of Dobbs and state bans, finding a local provider for breast screenings has become far more difficult. Planned Parenthood clinics that used to provide those screenings have closed and staff shortages at other sites have increased as medical personnel leave states with bans.  The remaining health care providers are overwhelmed.

One in 3 oncology fellows surveyed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology says abortion restrictions hurt cancer care, and more than half of fellows said they are likely to consider the impact of abortion restrictions on care when deciding where to practice. Although many states like Indiana allow exceptions when the termination of a pregnancy is necessary to protect the life of the pregnant patient, the rules on how to apply these exceptions are unclear. In Ohio, two cancer patients were denied treatment until terminating their pregnancies under the state’s 6-week ban, forcing them to seek care out of state. As these bans persist, more Hoosiers will face similar situations—many of which may go unseen.

Early detection through routine screenings plays a critical role in improving survival rates, as 1 in 8 women in the U.S. will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. But when health centers are forced to close, those lifesaving screenings disappear too.

How “pro life” are the pious ideologues who talk endlessly about the “pre-born” but refuse to acknowledge the profoundly negative outcomes of these bans for the lives of already-born women? 

Excuse my cynicism, but I remain convinced that the real motive for these bans is the patriarchal belief that women should be returned to a submissive social status. Increasing efforts by GOP politicians to restrict access to birth control give the game away.

With the advent of the pill, women were–for the first time– able to manage their fertility and plan their families. Women were able to enter the workforce, able to participate with men in the broader civic and political society. As Morton Marcus and I documented in From Property to Partner, reproductive choice has been far and away the most important element of women’s liberation. 

Initially, perhaps some people were convinced that the “pro life” movement really was about keeping wicked and “ungodly” women from “killing babies.” Now that we have irrefutable evidence that, thanks to these bans, more babies and more women are dying, it will be interesting to see how many of those people revise their opinions. 

I’m not holding my breath, because for the great majority of those “pro life” warriors, it was never about life. It was about male dominance and faux religion.

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State-Level Choices

Most of us are obsessively focused on the national election, but the stakes of our state-level choices are equally dire–at least, in Indiana.

The Indiana GOP is running a staewide ticket composed of lunatic White Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith, two Beckwith clones, and MAGA Mike Braun. I’ve posted numerous times about Todd Rokita, our embarrassing, unethical Attorney General. Today, I want to remind readers that the only difference between Beckwith and Jim Banks, who is running for the U.S. Senate, is that Banks is too politically-savvy to publicly claim the White Christian Nationalist title to which he is amply entitled.

Let me just reiterate why Banks is–as I’ve previously noted–wrong about everything. In Congress, he joined clowns like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, pursuing a pro-Trump, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-liberty performative politics.

He makes no bones about his desire for a national ban on abortion with no exceptions, not even for rape, incest or life of the mother. He has an A+ rating from Pro-Life America, and a 100% lifetime rating from the National Right to Life Committee. His voting record on abortion/reproductive health can be accessed here.

He opposes even the most modest efforts to control the proliferation of firearms. He opposes both a renewal of the ban on assault weapons and a federal “Red Flag” law. He supports concealed carry and has voted against background checks for private sales. His voting record on gun issues can be accessed here.

Banks calls climate change a “liberal hoax,” and the Biden Administration’s environmental efforts “a war on energy.” The League of Conservation Voters gives him a 1% lifetime rating. His votes on the environment can be accessed here. 

When it comes to labor issues, Banks gets a zero rating from the AFL-CIO. In the Indiana legislature, he supported “Right to work” legislation (dubbed by labor as “Right to work for less.”) On vote after vote in Congress, he has voted against labor; a list of those votes can be seen here. 

He continues to oppose any expansion of healthcare coverage, and rejects medical science. He voted against the most recent expansion of Medicaid and supports legislation that would ban vaccine mandates. He has voted to repeal the ACA, and against legislation that would prevent insurers from discriminating on the basis of pre-existing conditions.  A review of all of his healthcare votes is here.

Banks has voted repeatedly against efforts to fund research into the effects of marijuana. (Those anti-research votes track well with his “know nothing” approach to all issues.) Banks’ votes on issues related to pot are here.

He is an extremist on immigration. He supports finishing Trump’s wall, eliminating federal funding for sanctuary cities, and deporting “criminal illegal aliens.” He opposes legislation granting amnesty for any undocumented persons (presumably including children currently protected by DACA) and opposes any expansion of guest-worker programs.

Banks created the “anti-Woke” caucus in the House of Representatives and introduced legislation to outlaw any remaining affirmative action in college admissions. He has been dubbed “Focus on the Family’s Man in Washington.” He opposes all DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs. He has been especially vocal in his opposition to gay rights generally, and to trans children especially– in addition to his “Anti-Woke Caucus,” he has supported efforts to ban trans people from the military, prevent trans women from participating in women’s sports, and prevent medical personnel from treating children for gender dysphoria. He recently sponsored a particularly odious bill that would prevent agencies charged with placing children in foster homes from taking measures to see that gay and trans children not be placed with foster parents who have religious objections to homosexuality, saying that refusal to place those children in such homes was discrimination against religion.

Banks consistently attacks educational institutions of all kinds. He has vowed to investigate the National Association of Independent Schools, focusing on the group’s role in political advocacy and its tax-exempt status. He has threatened to “expose” what he calls “widespread political indoctrination” in America’s public schools, and has claimed that lawmakers have a “moral duty” to investigate the use of academic accreditation associations as “political tools by leftist ideologues.”

When Banks was in the Indiana legislature, he voted to allow instruction in creationism and enthusiastically supported the educational vouchers that send tax dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious schools.

And of course, he’s described Trump’s felony convictions as “rigged,” posting on social media that “New York is a liberal sh*t hole.”

As I’ve previously written, having a Neanderthal like Banks in Congress is bad enough. Electing him Senator would be worse.

Republicans should be embarrassed by the whole statewide ticket. As this Republican says, Hoosiers should vote BLUE this year.

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