A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
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CommentsAmong all of the thousands of words being penned and posted by observers of the GOP’s convention, the phrase that may have most aptly summed up the current character of the Grand Old Party was an observation that it had devolved into the “party of cultural resentment.” (I wish I remembered where I read that, so that I could properly recognize the author.)
Trump began this political cycle with his embrace of birtherism–a stance firmly grounded in the conviction that an African-American could not possibly be a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office.
Trump’s Presidential campaign has been upfront and unembarrassed about its anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim positions; it has been somewhat more covert in its appeal to white supremacists and anti-Semites, but not much. David Duke remains positively euphoric about Trump’s candidacy, as are a number of other avowed racists. The campaign has regularly tweeted out quotations and symbols first posted to white supremacist websites.
At the Convention, on day one, the party had to close down its online chat feature after it was swamped with what was characterized as an “anti-Jewish hatefest.”
You can live stream the Republican National Convention on the RNC’s official YouTube page, but you can’t chat about it live anymore.
Why, you ask? Because the Republicans have now disabled the live chat window on the page after it got overrun by anti-Semitic Trump supporters.
It is hard to avoid the impression that the major source of Trump’s support is cultural grievance–resentment at the perceived displacement of WASP Americans from their formerly privileged social status. That sense of displacement hits particularly hard in people who are otherwise dissatisfied with their lives or economic prospects; it is noteworthy that Trump currently trails Clinton in polls of college-educated whites, a demographic that has previously been a reliably Republican voting bloc.
Trump’s campaign has drawn comparisons to Nixon’s southern strategy, but his appeal to the dark side has actually been far more blatant. The question is: how will the American public respond?
The frightening possibility is that, win or lose, this campaign will normalize an ugly underside of American culture, an underside that “political correctness”–aka civility and humanity–had kept mostly contained.
The hopeful possibility is that voters will reject Trump et al by a margin crushing enough to send the clear message that he, his campaign, and increasingly, his party, are the antithesis of what America stands for.
At the end of the day, the Republican “team players”– the ones who Rick Wilson (a longtime GOP operative) calls “Vichy Republicans”– will have been responsible for one of two results: furthering national division and tribalism, making the country even more ungovernable; or the destruction of the current iteration of the Republican party.
CommentsHere’s a quiz. Identify the party whose national platform called for changes to the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act to “more effectively protect the rights of labor unions” and to “assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.”
Hint: The same platform advocated for federal assistance to low-income communities; for protecting Social Security, providing asylum for refugees, extending the minimum wage and improving the unemployment benefits system so that it would cover more people.
According to Politifact, those provisions were prominent elements of the 1956 Republican platform.
The Republican Party I joined 50 plus years ago was absolutely nothing like the collection of fanatics and lunatics who will gather in Cleveland this week to endorse a narcissistic blowhard atop a radically right-wing platform.
In this year’s platform, economic prescriptions are unremittingly anti-union. They include “a National Right-to-Work law to promote worker freedom and to promote greater economic liberty” and a promise to “aggressively enforce the recent decision by the Supreme Court barring the use of union dues for political purposes without the consent of the worker.” (Nothing about barring corporate use of proceeds that would otherwise fatten dividends without the consent of shareholders…).
The platform promises to reduce “marginal tax rates by 20 percent across-the-board in a revenue-neutral manner” and to “eliminate the taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains altogether for lower and middle-income taxpayers.” (Because you know how many low-income taxpayers have interest, dividend and capital gains income.) They’ll also end the “death tax” that makes it more difficult for the uber wealthy to transfer all of that wealth to their children.
And then there’s the “values” part of the platform, which “reaffirms our support for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” and includes affirmations of what we used to call “state’s rights” (more accurately, the right of states to ignore federal anti-bias laws).
There are pious endorsements of efforts to protect “electoral integrity”–aka voter suppression tactics. In this section, the previous calls for “state’s rights” give way to a list of things that states should not be permitted to do: vote by mail, or get together to eliminate the electoral college.
Those pesky “good government” efforts get short shrift too; the platform promises to
“ support repeal of the remaining sections of McCain- Feingold, support either raising or repealing contribution limits, and oppose passage of the DISCLOSE Act or any similar legislation.”
Just in case we missed it, the platform lets us know in no uncertain terms that the GOP is God’s party. It opposes the “war on religion,” advocates for a national RFRA modeled upon Indiana’s version, and wants the bible and prayer back in public schools.
“We pledge to respect the religious beliefs and rights of conscience of all Americans and to safeguard the independence of their institutions from government. We support the public display of the Ten Commandments as a reflection of our history and of our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage, and we affirm the right of students to engage in prayer at public school events in public schools and to have equal access to public schools and other public facilities to accommodate religious freedom in the public square. We assert every citizen’s right to apply religious values to public policy and the right of faith-based organizations to participate fully in public programs without renouncing their beliefs, removing religious symbols, or submitting to government-imposed hiring practices. We oppose government discrimination against businesses due to religious views. We support the First Amendment right of freedom of association of the Boy Scouts of America and other service organizations whose values are under assault and condemn the State blacklisting of religious groups which decline to arrange adoptions by same-sex couples. We condemn the hate campaigns, threats of violence, and vandalism by proponents of same-sex marriage against advocates of traditional marriage and call for a federal investigation into attempts to deny religious believers their civil rights.”
In addition to opposing discrimination against those poor beleaguered Christians, the party also reminds us that God loves Guns and the Second Amendment.
We acknowledge, support, and defend the law-abiding citizen’s God-given right of self-defense. We call for the protection of such fundamental individual rights recognized in the Supreme Court’s decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago affirming that right, and we recognize the individual responsibility to safely use and store firearms. This also includes the right to obtain and store ammunition without registration. We support the fundamental right to self-defense wherever a law-abiding citizen has a legal right to be..
You might think that this support for your right to blow people away is a bit inconsistent with the party’s purported reverence for life, but that’s because that reverence only persists until the little bugger emerges from the womb.
We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage. We support the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.
Republicans oppose flag desecration, support keeping “Under God” in the Pledge, and oppose any judicial reference to foreign or international law–the platform even opposes “the adoption or ratification of international treaties that weaken or encroach upon American sovereignty.” (Since all binding agreements, including treaties, “encroach” upon “sovereignty,” I assume the GOP–like Trump–wants America to go it alone.)
There was much, much more.
When I parted ways with the GOP, I said I hadn’t left the Party, the Party had left me. If you want to see how far today’s Republicans have moved from the responsible center-right party that they used to be–and that America still needs–you need only compare the platforms of the 1950s and 1960s with the doctrinal, delusional document they will adopt this week in Cleveland.
CommentsI would be shocked if Hillary Clinton chose Elizabeth Warren for the VP slot. The Democrats have a good chance of regaining control of the Senate, and it would be foolhardy to give Republicans a “freebie” by choosing a Senator from a state with a Republican governor.
Besides, in the Senate, Senator Warren is stiffening the spines of her colleagues.
Warren has become a hero to many Americans (including this one) and one of the reasons for that, in my view, is her uncanny ability to explain complex realities in language that everyone can understand.
During her Senate campaign, her defense of taxation–really, a defense of the social contract–went viral, and is still being widely quoted; more recently, she did it again.
Warren is, of course, famous for her attacks on too-big-to-fail banks. But in her address yesterday, entitled “Reigniting Competition in the American Economy,” she extended her critique to the entire economy, noting that, as a result of three decades of weakened federal antitrust regulation, virtually every industrial sector today—from airlines to telecom to agriculture to retail to social media—is under the control of a handful of oligopolistic corporations. This widespread consolidation is “hiding in plain sight all across the American economy,” she said, and “threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy.”
Antitrust is one of those legal theories that can make citizens’ eyes glaze over. But–as Teddy Roosevelt understood, and economists and businesspeople have come to recognize–vigorous enforcement of antitrust rules is essential to the proper operation of markets. Without such regulation, we do not have the healthy competition that a capitalist system requires; instead, we have corporatism and corruption.
As the Washington Monthly put it, in a post describing Warren’s speech,
As our readers know, economic consolidation is a subject the Washington Monthly has long been obsessed with—see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. In our current cover story, Barry Lynn (impresario of yesterday’s event) and Phil Longman argue that antitrust was the true legacy of the original American Populists and a vital, under-appreciated reason for the mass prosperity of mid-20th Century America. But this legacy, and the new Gilded Age economy that has resulted from its abandonment, is not a narrative most Americans have been told (one reason why even the “populist” candidates running president have shied away from it).
The Washington Monthly included the entire text of Warren’s speech. You should click through and read it. It’s not only a model of clarity; it’s a model of common sense.
Elizabeth Warren is the politician who really “tells it like it is.”
CommentsIt has been an article of faith (pun intended) among politicians and pundits that Americans will not vote for non-religious candidates. President Eisenhower famously said that “Americans need religion, and I don’t care which religion it is,” nicely capturing the conviction of most Americans that only believers can be trusted to do the nation’s business.
Our preference for piety has led–among other things– to the ludicrous spectacle of thrice-married, biblically-ignorant Donald Trump courting Evangelicals and tweeting out “questions” about Hillary Clinton’s religious bona fides.
The public is evidently willing to overlook the history of religious warfare and the long list of injustices perpetrated in the name of religion–at least, when those wars have been waged and those injustices perpetrated by adherents of their own religion.
Americans who remain firmly convinced that religious belief is an unalloyed good will find a recent study reported by the L.A. Times disconcerting.
The article began by noting the growth of what have been called the “nones.”
The number of American children raised without religion has grown significantly since the 1950s, when fewer than 4% of Americans reported growing up in a nonreligious household, according to several recent national studies. That figure entered the double digits when a 2012 study showed that 11% of people born after 1970 said they had been raised in secular homes. This may help explain why 23% of adults in the U.S. claim to have no religion, and more than 30% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say the same.
The obvious question raised by these statistics is the ultimate fate of the children raised by nonbelievers. Can they possibly turn out to be upstanding, moral citizens without experiencing prayers at mealtimes and morality lessons at Sunday school? Without being warned that God is watching them?
Evidently, they can.
Far from being dysfunctional, nihilistic and rudderless without the security and rectitude of religion, secular households provide a sound and solid foundation for children, according to Vern Bengston, a USC professor of gerontology and sociology.
When Bengston noticed the growth of nonreligious Americans becoming increasingly pronounced, he decided in 2013 to add secular families to his study in an attempt to understand how family life and intergenerational influences play out among the religionless.
He was surprised by what he found: High levels of family solidarity and emotional closeness between parents and nonreligious youth, and strong ethical standards and moral values that had been clearly articulated as they were imparted to the next generation.
“Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the ‘religious’ parents in our study,” Bengston told me. “The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterized by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose.”
As the writer of the article noted, nonreligious family life has its own sustaining moral and ethical values, including “rational problem solving, personal autonomy, independence of thought, avoidance of corporal punishment, a spirit of ‘questioning everything’ and, far above all, empathy.”
The article concludes with a summary of social science research:
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