Hitting The Ball Out Of The Park

Despite the headline, this isn’t about George Will’s love of baseball.

I’m not a fan of Will…and that’s putting it mildly. Even when I agree with him, I find his intellectual arrogance off-putting. But fair is fair–a recent column in which he compares Trump to Boris Johnson is delicious.

As people who follow news from “across the pond” probably know, Johnson is currently in danger of losing a vote of confidence. It turns out that, at the same time he was sternly lecturing Brits on the necessity of adhering to strict COVID restrictions, he was ignoring those restrictions and partying. A lot.

Apparently, he shares Trump’s belief that rules are for the “little people,’ and don’t apply to him.

Will’s column addresses the multiple characteristics they share. Both, for example, are inveterate liars. 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson might survive, for a number of reasons, one being that he, like two of the five most recent U.S. presidents (Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), has the awesome strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment. Also, to his critics he can fairly respond: “What did you expect?”

He has never disguised his belief that in any situation, truthfulness is merely one option among many, and not to be preferred over more advantageous or just more entertaining choices. As Winston Churchill said of another politician (evidently Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin), he “occasionally had stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”…

Writing in the Financial Times, Rory Stewart, a former Conservative cabinet minister now teaching at Yale University, says Johnson “is a terrible prime minister and a worse human being. But he is not a monster newly sprung from a rent between this world and the next.” A majority of Conservative MPs voted to make him prime minister after “thirty years of celebrity made him famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment.” This, Stewart says, is because British culture “remains trapped by the idea that politics is a game.”

Will notes that “mortification loves company” so Americans should feel marginally better from the fact that England has produced a head of government as “shambolic and careless” about truth as our recent president.

However, Will identifies a “deflating difference” between Great Britain and the U.S. Johnson’s net favorability rating has fallen from +29 percent in April 2020 to -52 percent in January 2022, while those Americans who favor Trump “are bound to him as with hoops of steel, come what may.”  

In a felicitous and absolutely accurate phrase, we are told that “total indifference to evidence is today’s ‘American exceptionalism.’”

There is more than a little truth to that conclusion, and it goes beyond the willingness of far too many Americans to ignore the plentiful evidence that Trump is bat-shit crazy. Faced with 900,000 deaths, including those of friends, family and neighbors,  large numbers of Americans still insist either that COVID is a hoax or that vaccinations are more dangerous. Faced with rapidly escalating weather anomalies and literally mountains of scientific evidence, they continue to dismiss the “myth” of climate change. When it comes to economic policy, they cling to their belief that a higher minimum wage will depress job creation in the face of significant and growing evidence to the contrary. 

Despite official FBI  reports that the massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd were 95% peaceful, they continue to insist that mobs rampaged through the streets looting stores and burning cities.

Despite copious video evidence of the violence of the January 6th insurrection, they defend the lunatics assaulting police officers and vandalizing the nation’s Capitol, claiming they were engaged in  “legitimate political discourse.”

I could go on, and most of you reading this could add examples of your own.

This stubborn refusal even to consider evidence, or be swayed by it, has become the only real platform of today’s Republican Party–a party whose base has adopted as its informal motto “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” 

Even the Brits who really thought Brexit was a good idea have responded to the evidence of Boris Johnson’s malfeasance. Only in America are members of one of our major political parties absolutely impervious to facts, logic and evidence. 

American exceptionalism indeed…..

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Men, Women And Politics

What was that book about women being from Venus and men being from Mars? Recent polling data suggests that tongue-in-cheek title may reflect real differences. (And no, I don’t mean “differences” in the “viva la difference!” sense.)

Thomas Edsall’s columns in the New York Times are always heavily indebted to academic research. In a recent one, he considered what research tells us about the political gender gap. Here’s his lede:

In one of the most revealing studies in recent years, a 2016 survey of 137,456 full-time, first-year students at 184 colleges and universities in the United States, the U.C.L.A. Higher Education Research Institute found “the largest-ever gender gap in terms of political leanings: 41.1 percent of women, an all-time high, identified themselves as liberal or far left, compared to 28.9 percent of men.”

While there is a lot of research confirming the existence of that gender gap, a problem with surveys of this sort becomes apparent from Edsall’s description of another poll. This one asked the following  question: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights.”

Male students preferred protecting free speech over an inclusive and diverse society by a decisive 61 to 39. Female students took the opposite position, favoring an inclusive, diverse society over free speech by 64 to 35.

There are all kinds of things wrong with this question, not least the absence of a third option that would allow respondents to indicate they found these values to be equally important. But the biggest problem with using this framing to demonstrate that men and women are politically different is what we know about levels of civic literacy.

I am absolutely confident that few of those surveyed really understand how communications are protected by  the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, and against whom.

And that brings me to a persistent gripe I have about Americans’ love of labeling opinions “left” and “right” based on questions of this sort. Not only have the definitions of liberal and conservative changed rather markedly over the past decades (I have the same basic political philosophy that made people label me “very conservative” in 1980, and now I am routinely identified as liberal/pinko/socialist), but a number of policy preferences don’t neatly fall into a black and white, liberal/conservative framework.

I will concede that–at this time– there is a significant political gender gap, and it seems to be growing. Differences in party identification have been evident since the early 1980s, and as Edsall says, we can now see that “the political engagement of women is having a major impact on the social order.”

When Edsall asked a couple of scholars to be more specific about the nature of that impact, most responded that most women are less violent and warlike than most men.

“We find that the evidence is consistent with the view that the increasing enfranchisement of women, not merely the rise of democracy itself, is the cause of the democratic peace.”

Put another way, “the divergent preferences of the sexes translate into a pacifying effect when women’s influence on national politics grows” and “suffrage plays a direct and important role in generating more peaceful interstate relations by altering the political calculus of democratic leaders.”…

There are broad value differences between men and women. Women score higher on values defined by care, fairness, benevolence, and protecting the welfare of others, reflecting greater empathy and preference for cooperative social relations.

The column highlighted gender differences with respect to the use of force–differences in how the sexes approach conflict and competition, and how, as more women have entered the political realm, the lived experience of those women has contributed to what scholars term “the feminization” of government and politics.

I don’t want to quibble with the scholarship displayed in this column, which is sound, but permit me a  caveat.

As with all studies and polls, these conclusions are  at best snapshots–accurate (assuming that they are) at a particular point in time. As women enter more fully into national life, including political life, we tend to get more like the men with whom we interact.( I’ve run across some pretty belligerent/warlike women…)

And of course, this goes for the men, too, who benefit significantly from interacting with us. (I don’t like the term “feminize”–sounds wimpy. How about “humanize”?)

I don’t think women are necessarily more “liberal.” I think our life experiences may have made at least some of us a bit more human--and I think we’re making you guys a bit more human too.

And unfortunately, there’s probably not much of a gap when it comes to the ability to accurately describe the operation of the Free Speech Clause…

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Is Florida the Fourth Reich?

A couple of weekends ago,  Nazis demonstrated in Orlando. According to media reports, they screamed antisemitic slogans and threats against Blacks and Hispanics, waved swastikas, and assaulted a couple of people who stopped to argue with them.

According to Newsweek, Twitter users posted videos of the neo-Nazi rally and reported the slurs.

And a Florida resident posted to Daily Kos, 

In addition, the Nazis protested at several overpasses on I-4 toward Disney, with Nazi flags and a large “Let’s Go Brandon” sign with swastikas. Another one said, “Vax the Jews.” This protest followed another one in Mount Dora earlier. The fact is that antisemitic incidents in Florida rose by 40% since 2020. The undeniable rise of antisemitic demonstrations in Florida even got Sen. Rick Scott’s attention, and he condemned them in a tweet. Democrats, including the candidates for governor and senator, strongly condemned the Nazis. However, the two incumbents they are running against, Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio, have remained silent. 

It’s bad enough that DeSantis refused to condemn the demonstrations; his spokesperson was worse. She tweeted “How do we even know they’re Nazis?” and suggested they might  have been Democrats “pretending.”

If this were a one-off, DeSantis’ silence could be attributed to oversight, overwork…something. But no one who has followed DeSantis and his enablers in the Florida Legislature is likely to give him the benefit of the doubt. (There’s a reason The New Republic made him their “Scoundrel of the Year.”)

A Miami newspaper recounted “Eight Times DeSantis ‘Accidentally’ Did Racist Stuff.”That article was written during DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign, and started as follows:

After enough racism scandals involving a particular political candidate, you’d think everyone might just admit that person is simply racist. Yet a whole lot of people — from bad-faith conservative pundits to easily fooled reporters — continue offering excuses for Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis’ infamous statement on Fox News that Andrew Gillum would “monkey… up” Florida.

At best, that gaffe implies DeSantis, who is a seasoned lawyer with degrees from Harvard and Yale, is so ignorant he doesn’t know it’s a really bad idea to use the word “monkey” when talking about a black person.

But claiming his use of the word was a simple accident is also hard to believe because DeSantis has a clear, repeated pattern of making offensive and/or outright racist statements, hanging out with racists, and defending other people who are also racists. It’s past time that DeSantis — long considered the most right-wing Florida congressman who is running on a platform of fealty to Donald Trump and pure anti-immigrant bile — lost the benefit of the doubt.

The article enumerated the reasons DeSantis isn’t entitled to the benefit of the doubt: among other things, he spoke at a Muslim-bashing event alongside Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon, defended a supporter who advocated”bringing back the hanging tree,” leveled a slur at AOC’s ethnicity, and was moderator of a Facebook group that was a haven for racist memes.

Since he’s been governor, of course, he has worked hard to out-Trump Trump. His anti-vaccination, anti-mask, anti-mandate efforts have received wide publicity, but those efforts are arguably not targeted at minorities–they’re unforgivably dangerous to the health of all Florida citizens (especially the elderly, and Florida has more than its share of elderly folks.)

Other measures are more clearly bigoted.

 DeSantis and Republicans in the state legislature have joined the campaign  against what DeSantis calls”woke” schools. As this Washington Post article describes it:

As part of the “stop-woke” agenda of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Florida lawmakers are now considering bills that would allow almost anyone to object to any instruction in public school classrooms. DeSantis wants to give people the right to sue schools and teachers over what they teach based on student “discomfort.” The proposed legislation is far-reaching and could affect even corporate human resources diversity training.

While the legislation mirrors national efforts to ban critical race theory in schools, the debate in Florida has turned especially raw and emotional, a testament to how central multiculturalism is to the state’s identity. Many parents and teachers — who note that critical race theory is not taught in Florida’s public schools and is already banned under state law — fear the legislation would force teachers to whitewash history, literature and religion courses.

 In Florida, more than 1 in 5 residents are foreign-born and nearly half the population is Latino, Black or Asian American. That might explain DeSantis’ multiple new voting restrictions.

DeSantis and GOP lawmakers have also advanced a bill opponents are calling “don’t say gay.” It would effectively forbid classroom discussions of sexual orientation.

 One proponent of the “anti-woke” bills gives the racist game away: “To say there were slaves is one thing, but to talk in detail about how slaves were treated, and with photos, is another.” 

It is indeed.

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It’s About More Than Banning Books And Distorting History

Anyone who hasn’t been marooned on a desert island or hiding in a cave for the past few years (options that sound increasingly appealing, actually…) has been inundated with reports of the unrelenting attacks on public school boards, curriculum, gay and transgender students, and the teachers and administrators who dare to stand up for any of them.

We shouldn’t get distracted by the purported targets of these attacks. The specific charges are monumentally phony–the actual aim is to dismantle American public education.

It’s tempting to respond to the absolute idiocy, for example, of claims that the schools are teaching “Critical race theory”–to point out that those leveling that charge couldn’t define CRT if their lives depended on it, and that it is explored (not “taught”) by legal researchers.

It’s equally tempting to point out that the parents “testifying” at school board meetings (actually, threatening school board members) are overwhelmingly the same parents who fail to attend parent-teacher conferences or otherwise involve themselves in the details of their kids’ educations (and those are the parents who actually have children in the system.)

And the effort to ban books, or remove them from the curriculum or the school libraries is ludicrous at a time when virtually all young people carry with them a device that connects them to a vast and dangerous world their parents cannot control.

The real goal of these efforts is to undermine support for the nation’s public schools, in order to make it easier to privatize them. As an article from Common Dreams began

When champions of market-based reform in the United States look at public education, they see two separate activities—government funding education and government running schools. The first is okay with them; the second is not. Reformers want to replace their bête noire—what they call the “monopoly of government-run schools”—with freedom of choice in a competitive market dominated by privately run schools that get government subsidies.

Today, that privatization movement is alive and pushing ahead, with Republican legislators in 16 states actively pushing bills to create or expand school vouchers and/or charter schools that are part of that movement.

The author then interviewed a lobbyist who had worked for the privatization movement; it’s worth clicking through and reading what a former “insider” has to say.

A more recent column in the New York Times, written by a resident of Tennessee, explains why the effort to remove “Maus” from the curriculum is the “least of our worries.” She reviewed the persistent and ongoing efforts of conservatives “trying desperately to insulate their children from the modern world without quite understanding how the modern world works”–and she argued that the new bans–often aimed at books that had been used without incident for decades– are really “a response to contemporary political forces whose true motivation has nothing to do with books. What they really want is to destroy public education.”

She writes that she is willing to give many censorious parents the benefit of the doubt, in the sense that they are deeply conservative and believe they are “protecting” their children. But as she points out,

these parents are being manipulated by toxic and dangerous political forces operating at the state and national levels. Here in Tennessee, book bans are just a small but highly visible part of a much larger effort to privatize public schools and turn them into conservative propaganda centers. This crusade is playing out in ways that transcend local school board decisions, and in fact are designed to wrest control away from them altogether.

I don’t mean simply the law, passed last year, that limits how racism is taught in public schools across the state. I’m talking about an array of bills being debated in the Tennessee General Assembly right now. One would purge books considered “obscene or harmful to minors” from school libraries across the state. Another would ban teaching materials that “promote, normalize, support or address lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) issues or lifestyles.” Yet another would prevent school districts from receiving state funding for undocumented students.

Most of all I’m talking about Gov. Bill Lee’s announcement, in his State of the State address last week, that he has approached Hillsdale College, a Christian institution in Michigan, to open 50 charter schools in Tennessee — Mr. Lee reportedly requested 100— that would follow a curriculum designed to make kids “informed patriots.” Not informed citizens; informed patriots, as conservative Christians define that polarizing term.

What the author calls–correctly–an “existential threat to public education”  is part and parcel of the GOP’s effort to destroy democracy.

As the late political scientist Benjamin Barber explained, public education is constitutive of a public; without it,  democracy is simply not feasible.

To today’s GOP, that’s a feature, not a bug.

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From Soup To Nuts

Gazpacho..Gestapo… let’s call the whole thing off….

In case you missed it, The Guardian has the story.

The extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene triggered a wave of viral jokes on Wednesday after ranting about the “gazpacho police” patrolling the Capitol building in Washington DC.

Greene was apparently mixing up the famously cold Spanish soup gazpacho with the Gestapo – the brutal Nazi-era secret police in Germany….

“Not only do we have the DC jail which is the DC gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens,” she said, referring to the Democratic speaker of the House.

Greene seems unperturbed by the fact that she’s become a joke–a punch line–for  previous, widely-reported accusations that being made to wear a mask is equivalent to what Jews suffered during the Holocaust, and that California’s forest fires were started by “space lasers” funded by George Soros.

What is truly sad is that she is not an anomaly in today’s GOP.

The RNC has just labeled a violent insurrection meant to overturn an election as “legitimate political discourse.”

A Republican Congresswoman has quoted Hitler–approvingly–in a recent speech.

Billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump ally, who is funding an effort to elect Trump-aligned candidates in 2022 says he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and has deplored the extension of the franchise to women.

In one of her recent “Letters From An American,” Heather Cox Richardson detailed the increasing hysteria of  statements issued by various Republicans as the investigation into the insurrection tightens around them.

Richardson reports that Peter Navarro responded to receipt of a subpoena from the committee investigating January 6th with “a fire-eating statement “calling the members of the January 6 committee “domestic terrorists” engaged in a “partisan witch hunt.”  He also tried to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi  and the Capitol Police for the violence on January 6, and accused Mike Pence of treason for saying he lacked authority to overturn the election.

it isn’t just at the federal level.

In Nevada, that state’s “most notorious pimp” just won a Republican  primary in a campaign for the state legislature.

In Utah, a bill to create a digital driver’s license program was derailed when dozens of protestors flocked to a House committee to share fears that the measure would result in a United Nations takeover or establishment of concentration camps.

One woman invoked the New Testament’s Book of Revelation when she called digital driver’s licenses “moving one step closer to the mark of the beast.”

In Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has apparently decided to join DeSantis in pandering to the GOP’s irrational and racist base.

On Face the Nation, he said: “This commission is a partisan scam. They’re going after—they’re—the purpose of that commission is to try to embarrass and smear and harass as many Republicans as they can get their hands on.”

Yesterday, he released a video saying “Biden is sending free meth & crack pipes to minority communities in the name of ‘racial equity’…. There is no end in sight for this lunacy.“

Well, there certainly doesn’t seem to be an end in sight for GOP lunacy.  No one--and certainly not Biden–is sending “free meth and crack pipes” to anyone, and suggesting that such items are being directed to “minority communities” is clearly intended to play to the Republicans’ increasingly racist base.

Per Richardson:

Exaggeration and demonization of their opponents has been part of politics for years, as Republicans tried to fire up their base by describing their opponents as socialists, lazy “takers,” baby-killers, and so on. Now, though, these over-the-top attacks on the committee and on the Democratic administration seem to be part of a new political project.

The frantic edge to them suggests concern about what the January 6th committee might uncover.

But statements like those yesterday of Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who claimed the Department of Justice was reading his mail; Nehls, who claimed that Pelosi was using the Capitol Police to spy on him; and Greene, who claims Pelosi has a “Gestapo,” normalize the practices of authoritarian government.

“Back in the day,” as we old folks might say, it would simply have been unthinkable that embarrassments like Greene, Gohmert, Gosar, Boebert and numerous others of their ilk would be elected to Congress. There were certainly undistinguished, patently ignorant and even evil people who brought shame and disrepute upon that body, but I am aware of nothing approaching the current multitude of profoundly unserious, bat-shit-crazy bigots that has aptly been dubbed (by former Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, if memory serves)  “the lunatic caucus.”

From soup to nuts…..

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