Another Answer To “What’s WRONG With These People?”

A lot of them are ignorant.

At least, if a recent report from the (admittedly leftish) New Republic is at all accurate. That article looked at the GOP crazies’ enthusiasm for a government shutdown, and found that–in addition to their antipathy to government in general–several of them appear convinced that a government shutdown would prevent the prosecutions of Donald Trump from continuing.

If this is really one of the motives for our current dysfunction, it rests on a misconception.

A government shutdown would not end the four Trump prosecutions! Two of them, of course, are being undertaken at the state level, in New York and Georgia, so Congress has no power over those at all. And the two federal ones, both led by Jack Smith, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Florida, are protected from any shutdown. In the past, reports NBC News, federal criminal matters have been exempted from government shutdowns. A Justice Department memo from 2021—long before Trump was indicted anywhere, so presumably written not with him specifically in mind—states that in the event of a shutdown, “criminal litigation will continue without interruption as an activity essential to the safety of human life and the protection of property.”

It’s hard to believe that people elected to the Congress of the United States are so ignorant of the rules promulgated by that government, but there is massive evidence that several of them really are that clueless. Marjorie Taylor Green comes to mind…. and how many times have you watched a political advertisement in which a candidate promises to do something that is either patently illegal or–as a practical matter– impossible? I always wonder whether the candidate really believes s/he can accomplish whatever it is, or whether (more likely) s/he thinks voters are too ignorant to know better.

That said, according to the linked article, most elected officials do know better.

Very few of them believe this garbage. As Mitt Romney told McKay Coppins recently, GOP senators regularly criticized Trump behind his back and once “burst into laughter” after he left the room. The House is more extreme than the Senate, so maybe a dozen of them really believe Trump’s narrative. But most don’t. And yet they say it and say it and say it, with conviction.

The only thing that explains the culture warriors who aren’t acting out of ignorance or stupidity is venality. Only a dishonest calculus can account for their public pronouncements: If pandering to a crazed base–a cult–is what it will take to avoid a primary challenge from the even-loonier Right, then that pandering will take priority over both personal integrity and the clear interests of the American public. There’s no bottom to their cupidity and self-interest.

Representative Andy Clyde—the guy who called January 6 a “normal tourist visit”—is seeking to add amendments to the appropriations bill to remove all federal funding from all three prosecutors (Smith, Fani Willis, and Alvin Bragg). Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene want to defund Smith. And Jim Jordan (of course) wants legislation dictating that the department can’t spend money on “politically sensitive” investigations.

Can these people possibly get more corrupt? (Don’t answer that.) But this is what happens when reality is turned on its head. Trump has created a “reality” that is the direct opposite of real reality. In real reality, ample evidence exists to suggest that Trump committed serious crimes, and he tried, right in front of our eyes, to lead a violent coup against the United States. But in Trump reality, it’s all McCarthyism.

The past few weeks have demonstrated just how little today’s Republican Party cares about governance or the American people. The GOP House members have vacillated between paralysis in the face of events requiring crucial decision-making, and toyed with installing a legislative terrorist as Speaker.

The last paragraph summed up our situation:

And let’s remember the bigger picture with respect to democracy. When one of two political parties is led by people who either (a) genuinely believe a fascist interpretation of reality or (b) don’t, but pretend to out of fear of a strongman and his well-armed followers … well, if that party takes power, democracy is kaput. We’ll find out soon enough how much of the country cares.

We will indeed.

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Tom Nichols Says It Best

I try never to miss an article or book by Tom Nichols, who writes for the Atlantic. He has a way of distilling observations into pithy statements that resonate with me (Probably because I agree with them…) A recent essay was particularly “on point.”

Nichols was addressing the situation in Congress, a situation that–sorry for my language–can only be considered a complete and utter shit-show. He began by dismissing the punditry’s seeming belief that the chaos and egomania on display are a betrayal of the Republican voters who voted for these buffoons.

The ongoing drama over electing a speaker of the House is not about governance. It’s about giving Republican voters the drama-filled reality show they voted for and want to see—even at the expense of the country.

Evidence supporting this view is abundant here in Red Indiana, where voters have returned culture warriors like Jim Banks to the House. Banks has enthusiastically supported Jordan, and is one of the many un-productive, anti-“woke,” theocratic and anti-woman fringe characters so beloved by the GOP base. He’s not the only one, but he is one of the worst.

Nichols takes a hard look at the current hard-to-believe debacle that is the Republican caucus:

Like many Americans, I have been both fascinated and horrified by the inability of the Republican majority to elect a new speaker of the House. I admit to watching the votes like I’m rubbernecking at a car wreck, but perhaps that’s not a good analogy, because I at least feel pity for the victims of a traffic accident. What’s happening in the House is more like watching a group of obnoxious (and not very bright) hot-rodders playing chicken and smashing their cars into one another over and over.

As I watch all of this Republican infighting, I wonder, as I often do, about GOP voters. What is it that they think will happen if Jim Jordan becomes speaker? Jordan has been in Congress for 16 years, and he has almost nothing to show for it. He’s never originated any successful legislation, never whipped votes, never accomplished anything except for appearing on Fox and serving up rancid red meat to his Ohio constituents and MAGA allies.

And therefore, as speaker, he would … what? Order up more impeachments, perhaps of Biden-administration officials? Shut down the government? Pound the gavel and prattle on for hours in his never-take-a-breath style? (Jordan’s the kind of guy who probably would have interrupted the Sermon on the Mount.) Perhaps from a position of greater power, he could more effectively assist Donald Trump in undermining yet another election in 2024.

If the continuation of this governance nightmare seems incredible, Nichols points out that it is the consequence of the GOP’s devolution into a White Christian Nationalist cult focused exclusively upon performative signaling and utterly uninterested in governing.

The disorder in the GOP caucus is not some accident or glitch triggered by a handful of reprobates, but rather a direct result of choices by voters. The House is a mess because enough Republican voters want it to be a mess.

This accusation might seem unfair: Jordan is just one member from a super-red (and blatantly gerrymandered) district, and many of his Republican colleagues are furious about this humiliating bungle. But right-wing voters have shown no inclination to punish people such as Matt Gaetz and other political vandals; indeed, Gaetz and his like-minded colleagues are rapidly becoming folk heroes in the Republican Party.

Nichols admits that it isn’t much consolation to recognize that Republicans like Jordan and Banks are doing what their voters want them to do, which is presumably bring government to a halt. After all,  their antics endanger us all.

But to treat the GOP as merely dysfunctional is worse than a distraction; it is a fundamental error that offers the false hope that a mature and governing majority is somehow within reach, if only Jordan or Gaetz would get out of the way….

The twists and turns of the Trump years, in which many elected Republicans became big spenders, critics of law enforcement, and apologists for the Kremlin, illustrated that MAGA voters have almost no interest in anything like conservatism, or even in coherent policy. Instead, they want to indulge resentments and grievances that have little to do with government and everything to do with boredom and dissatisfaction in their own lives. A few years ago, I wrote a book about how such voters project that anger and sourness onto everything around them. Their ennui spurs their desire to see chaos, so they argue that the existing order needs to be shaken up, or burned down, or defunded.

Republican voters want entertainment, not governance.

Send in the clowns? Don’t bother–they’re here.

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Another Terrifying Analysis

An article I read in the New Republic last July--July of 2022 (not this year, when evidence of Congressional inability to even pretend to govern is unavoidable)–was sufficiently upsetting that I kept it in my “think about this” file. It was titled “It’s Going to Take Several Miracles to Keep America from Turning Into Hungary,” and it began as follows:

When Nancy Pelosi told reporters back in May that “this country needs a strong Republican Party, not a cult,” she was expressing the desire among those on the center-left and moderates for the United States to return to a bygone age of political normalcy. They remember when the GOP still had a moderate wing and kept the “wacko birds” (as Senator John McCain called them) at arm’s length; when President Reagan cut deals with House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and when Republicans believed that it was more important for democracy in general to prevail than the Republican Party. It’s a noble idea, but I can’t help but be reminded of what famed pilot Chuck Yeager once told me when I asked him a “what if” question: “And if a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass when he hopped.”

The truth is that American democracy is essentially broken beyond fixing and is unable to withstand a right-wing populist movement determined to destroy it. The Eisenhower wing of the GOP was rooted out long ago. It will take multiple miracles to avoid getting one or more of the “bad” endings in this Choose Your Own Adventure of dystopias. The best realistic case resembles a Jim Crow America from the 1920s, complete with a Gilded Age, mass migration, violent militias running amok, and no-go zones for minorities. The possibilities only go downhill from there into secession, fascism, and civil war.

When I first read this very gloomy analysis, I discounted much of it. (Okay, maybe not a lot, but at least some…) In the wake of the current wild dysfunction in the U.S. House of Representatives –dismissal has become a great deal more difficult.

The article quite correctly points out that–over a period of some 40 years– the Democratic party shifted incrementally to the left, while the GOP took “a giant leap to the right.” The focus of the Republican base since the Carter administration has been to increase its appeal to white evangelicals, who have very little in common with the American public at large. It is a White Christian Nationalist constituency that holds “outlier positions and priorities on almost every issue.”

And thanks to gerrymandering, that constituency has elected a collection of theocrats and posturing buffoons totally uninterested in the actual process of governance. As the article noted,

Since (roughly) the second term of the Bush administration, there has been a tacit understanding between the GOP and its base that they cannot win hearts and minds: The demographics of the U.S. are inexorably shifting toward nonwhites and secularism. Despite the postmortem on the 2012 election that called for a bigger-tent party, the GOP has settled on a strategy that it must take the wheel away from voters and steer the country with or without the consent of the governed…

The increasingly right-wing Supreme Court has stepped aside and allowed the de-democratization of large swathes of the U.S., by negating the enforcement mechanisms of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder and permitting hyperpartisan gerrymanders in Gill v. Whitford.

The January 6, 2021, insurrection was a direct attempt to invalidate a legitimate election result, yet Republicans largely went along with it: Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans voted to give the insurrectionists what they wanted mere hours after they stormed the Capitol.

The GOP isn’t even bothering to hide its ultimate goal: to turn the U.S. into an authoritarian White Christian theocracy. “The 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference was held in Hungary to celebrate and learn what can be gained by killing democracy as Viktor Orbán has.”

The article was written before the 2022 midterms, and did not foresee one “miracle,” the failure of that year’s widely anticipated Red wave. But its essential message remains: absent a massive defeat of the cult that has replaced what was once the Republican Party, the nation will continue on its path toward governmental impotence and chaos–a path that will inevitably invite a “strongman” ala Orban.

What we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks is just a taste of what we’ll see if American voters do not decisively eject the Republicans who are intent upon rejecting constitutional, adult governance in favor of White Christian Nationalism.

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A Legislative Terrorist

As you all know, I am on a cruise, writing these posts from a spot on the Pacific Ocean. I’m currently six hours earlier than those on Eastern time, and thanks to the time difference and intermittent problems with Internet access, my grasp of the news is hit-or-miss. I’ve been following the incredible chaos playing out on the floor of the House of Representatives with what can only be called a feeling of unreality.

Evidently, Jim Jordan just lost his second attempt to be elected Speaker.

Jordan is easily one of the most despicable individuals ever to hold political office–and certainly one of the least able, least ethical, least accomplished people ever to be nominated as a leader of the legislative body. If successful, he would be third in line for the Presidency–a thought that makes me want to hurl.

Representative Pete Aguilar, a Democrat from California, really summed up the insanity of nominating someone like Jordan for Speaker. Aguilar began his brief talk by nominating Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (who garnered more votes than Jordan), and blaming extremism and partisanship for the unprecedented chaos of the House. He urged  Republicans to “embrace bipartisanship to do the work the American people had sent them to Washington, D.C., to conduct,” an exhortation he must have known would fall on deaf ears.

Aguilar went on to point out that Jordan is the “architect of a nationwide abortion ban, a vocal election denier, and an insurrection inciter.”

He has “spent his entire career trying to hold our country back, putting our national security in danger, attempting government shutdown after government shutdown, wasting taxpayer dollars on baseless investigations with dead ends, authoring the very bill that would ban abortion nationwide without exceptions, and inciting violence on this chamber. Even leaders of his own party have called him ‘a legislative terrorist.’

Aguilar pointed to Jordan’s opposition to disaster relief, veterans’ relief, support for Ukraine, and military aid to our allies, including Israel, and added: “This body is debating elevating a speaker nominee who has not passed a single bill in 16 years. These are not the actions of someone interested in governing or bettering the lives of everyday Americans.” Jordan as speaker would mean the Republican Party would “continue taking marching orders from a twice-impeached former president with more than 90 pending felony charges.”

Aguilar’s litany was entirely accurate. (It was also incomplete–he omitted the scandal of Jordan’s coaching days, when he closed his eyes to the sexual abuse of his young athletes.)

What boggles the mind is that 200 House Republicans would ever vote to put someone accurately labeled a “legislative terrorist”–someone described by John Bohner as a destroyer, not a builder– in charge of anything, especially an American lawmaking body.

Sinclair Lewis warned us: it can happen here.

Thomas Edsall recently devoted a column to the state of American democracy, and included a quote from Liliana Mason that goes a long way toward explaining the otherwise inexplicable:

The election of Trump is the culmination of a process by which the American electorate has become deeply socially divided along partisan lines. As the parties have grown racially, religiously, and socially distant from one another, a new kind of social discord has been growing. The increasing political divide has allowed political, public, electoral, and national norms to be broken with little to no consequence. The norms of racial, religious, and cultural respect have deteriorated. Partisan battles have helped organize Americans’ distrust for “the other” in politically powerful ways. In this political environment, a candidate who picks up the banner of “us versus them” and “winning versus losing” is almost guaranteed to tap into a current of resentment and anger across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently divided neatly by party.

We have evidently devolved as a nation into very strong, opposing tribal identities –in one of which racism plays a prominent role–and we now elect “lawmakers” who privilege their tribe’s “winning” over anything remotely resembling the common good. 

Edsall also quoted Levitsky and Ziblatt, authors of a recent book on the perilous state of American democracy:

By 2016, America was on the brink of a genuinely multiracial democracy — one that could serve as a model for diverse societies across the world. But just as this new democratic experiment was beginning to take root, America experienced an authoritarian backlash so fierce that it shook the foundations of the republic, leaving our allies across the world worried about whether the country had any democratic future at all.

The results of the current effort to install a Speaker will be a clue……

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The Next Group To Come Out

The gay rights movement triggered the most rapid social change in my adult lifetime.  When I was young (granted, back in the Ice Age), homosexuality was viewed as a form of mental illness, and gay people were largely closeted. Today, 70+ percent of Americans  are accepting of same-sex marriage and supportive of equal rights for LGBTQ Americans. (Leaving the culture warriors with only lesser-understood trans children to demonize…)

Political scientists and sociologists will confirm that the main reason for this rapid turn-around  was a politically potent act: coming out. Coming out took incredible courage when that effort began– friends of my sons were thrown out of their homes, vilified by their “Christian” families, fired from their jobs. But coming out changed perceptions: suddenly, people realized that Aunt Gladys and her long-time roommate weren’t just roommates, that the doctor they trusted, the mailman who delivered their packages and so many other people they knew and cared about were–gasp!– gay.

And attitudes changed.

Atheists need to gather up our own courage, and follow in the footsteps of the gay community. I had a friend–now deceased–who used to insist that, until atheists made their presence known (a la the LGBTQ community), Americans would never see pious religious hypocrisy for what it is.

Perhaps–just perhaps–this recent guest essay in the Washington Post is a beginning. Titled “America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists,” the author made her case.

My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:

The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.

The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.

Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

Child rape. War. Etc.

And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.

Being an “atheist,” at least according to popular culture, seems to require so much work. You have to complain to the school board about the Pledge of Allegiance, stamp over “In God We Trust” on all your paper money and convince Grandma not to go to church. You have to be PhD-from-Oxford smart, irritated by Christmas and shruggingly unmoved by Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” That isn’t me — but those are the stereotypes.

And then there are the data. Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.

The author focused much of her essay on how she and her husband raised their children, teaching them to distinguish fact from fiction — which she points out is harder for children raised religious. Her children “don’t assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expect arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens.”

She then shares data showing that fewer Americans than ever report a belief in God–and yet, are reluctant to call themselves atheists.

Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.
“If you added up all the nominal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. — those who are religious in name only,” Harvard humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein writes in “Good Without God,” “you really might get the largest denomination in the world.”

She readily acknowledges the good done by good religious people, but then enumerates the injustices done by bigotries masquerading as religious belief: discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, control over women’s bodies, abstinence-only or marriage-centered or anti-homosexual sex education,“Don’t say gay” laws, laws denying trans kids medical care, school-library book bans and even efforts to suppress the teaching of inconvenient historical facts.

And when religion loses a fight and progress wins instead? Religion then claims it’s not subject to the resulting laws. “Religious belief” is — more and more, at the state and federal levels — a way to sidestep advances the country makes in civil rights, human rights and public health.

If you are as tired of performative piety as I am, you should really click through and read the entire essay. And if you are an atheist, you should definitely consider “coming out.”

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