How Far We’ve Fallen…

During Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, I shared what was then a widespread opinion–that he wasn’t up to the job, that the country’s economic problems were a consequence of Presidential ineptitude. My evaluation was based on the sort of superficial knowledge and media coverage upon which most busy people rely (I was a newly-minted lawyer with three small children at home–four if you counted the husband I had at that time.)

I’ve since come to appreciate the considerable contributions Carter made both in office and after. His death has unleashed multiple reports of those contributions. The obituaries and commentaries have also focused–quite rightly–on the fact of his decency. In an age when the label “Christian” is dishonored daily by racists and White nationalists claiming the title, Carter’s life honored the term.

Whatever disagreements Americans might legitimately have with Carter’s Presidential performance or policy positions, it’s unbelievably depressing to compare his life–characterized by integrity, human kindness and concern for the common good–with that of the degenerate specimen we are about to inaugurate.

Recently, a reader shared with me a lengthy post he’d come across, responding to the question: why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid? I’m reproducing it below.

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THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.” (https://www.usatoday.com/…/trump-university…/502387002/)

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.” (https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hotel-paid-millions…)

That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.” (https://abcnews.go.com/…/list-trumps-accusers…/story…)

That when he made up stories about seeing Muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/donald-trumps…/)

That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you exclaimed, “He sure knows me.” (https://www.usatoday.com/…/president-donald…/4073405002/)

That when you heard him relating a story of an elderly guest of his country club, an 80-year old man, who fell off a stage and hit his head, to which Trump replied: “‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting, and I turned away. I couldn’t—you know, he was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He was bleeding all over the place. And I felt terrible, because it was a beautiful white marble floor, and now it had changed color. Became very red.” You said, “That’s cool!” (https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-howard-stern-story)

That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw. (https://www.nbcnews.com/…/donald-trump-criticized-after…)

That when you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?” (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/americas-first…/549794/)

That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.” (https://www.usatoday.com/…/what-trump-has…/1501321001/)

That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!” (https://www.latimes.com/…/la-na-trump-campaign-protests…)

That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!” (https://www.independent.co.uk/…/donald-trump-orders…)

That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!” (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/why-cant-trump…/567320/)

That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.” (https://www.huffpost.com/…/trump-insult-foreign…)

That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!” (https://www.politico.com/…/138-trump-policy-changes…)

That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!” (https://www.usnews.com/…/how-is-donald-trump-profiting…)

That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was in the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/the-very-big-ocean…/)

That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!” (https://www.cnn.com/…/donald-trump-dictators…/index.html)

That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids, has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “Well, OK then.” (https://www.nbcnews.com/…/more-5-400-children-split…)

That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise. (https://www.americanprogress.org/…/confronting-cost…/)

What you don’t get, Trump supporters, is that our succumbing to frustration and shaking our heads, thinking of you as stupid, may very well be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.

Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.

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We’ve descended a very long way from Jimmy Carter…..

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Let’s Call It What It Is

I have a number of kind, well-meaning, “Never Trump” friends who tell me I’m painting with too broad a brush when I characterize the MAGA movement as racist to its core. These nice people (granted, lots nicer than me) are loathe to attribute Trumpism simply to hatred of those “Others”–Blacks, Jews, Muslims, immigrants (ok, Brown immigrants–not those from Norway or Canada), LGBTQ+ folks, and those detested “libruls.”

Sorry, but after coming across a recent news item from the Guardian, I rest my case. The headline really tells the story: “Anti-woke’ dog food and pro-America lipstick: US sees rise in rightwing stores.”

Mammoth Nation and Public Square are among the most prominent in the movement, both offering an Amazon-esque service, but stocking only goods which they claim are made by companies which have “conservative values”. Mammoth Nation makes its values clear on the homepage of its website: “Join Mammoth Nation to fight against Radical Left agendas,” booms a message, with the company claiming to stock only “brands who align with your beliefs”.

“When all of this wokeness started to happen and cancel culture, and then you start to see these companies stand up and say, ‘We’re not supporting this conservative or this Christian value any more,’ and just really lines in sand were starting to get drawn,” Drew Berquist, the national spokesperson for Mammoth Nation, told The Need to Know Morning Show, a North Dakota-based rightwing radio show, in December.

“And a lot of people were trying to figure out: OK, well, who are the good companies? Who are the companies that share our values, that support our constitution, support our troops or, you know, our Christian values as a country.”

Evidently, the Right’s “Christian values” are limited to “anti-woke” commitments. PublicSquare – which touts itself as Amazon for the right wing– claims to list products from more than 70,000 businesses. Unlike Amazon, however, PublicSquare’s merchants tout their allegiance to Republican causes, including opposition to abortion and an ahistorical version of the Constitution.

Evidently, efforts by companies to embrace diversity and inclusiveness–Target carrying Pride merchandise, Bud Light collaborating with Dylan Mulvaney (a trans media personality) – enraged rightwing consumers, creating a market for companies like Mammoth Nation and PublicSquare.

The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet, launched a range of razors in 2022, after the company’s CEO deemed a rival razor brand to have “canceled” conservatives. The publication has since branched out into chocolate, soap, floor cleaner and, earlier this year, “manly green vitamin capsules”.

“Do you want to buy your men’s health products from a company that partners with drag queens and supports radical organizations that push gender procedures on children?” the Daily Wire asked readers in an article announcing the multivitamin – which at their launch cost 10 times more than Centrum-branded multivitamins.

According to the Guardian, most of these efforts have thus far failed to show a profit.

What they have shown, however, is the real motivation behind right-wing attacks on “woke culture.” Not that anyone paying attention will be shocked, or even surprised.

The word “woke” originally meant “awareness”–awareness of social injustices. The term has been co-opted by the Right, and become shorthand for a raft of cultural changes that enrage MAGA folks: efforts to be inclusive, efforts to combat racism, applications of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even mainstream Christian teachings about loving one’s neighbors and welcoming the stranger–in other words, for the America that a majority of citizens want to inhabit. “Woke” is thus the antithesis of White Christian male dominance and superiority, and a favorite epithet of a MAGA movement that is reactionary, racist and misogynistic.

My kinder and gentler friends insist that it is unfair to paint the entire MAGA movement as racist. I think the fairness of that accusation depends upon how one defines MAGA–whether it includes the small Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wing of the party. We are now seeing that it doesn’t (despite Musk’s own neo-Nazi sympathies), and I’m willing to concede that there is a faction of uber-wealthy “bros”–mostly Silicon Valley techies– whose motives for supporting a mentally-ill felon are purely financial and transactional. (The incompatibility of that faction with Trump’s GOP/MAGA base is currently playing out in real time.)

Non-bro MAGA Americans are replaying the Civil War, albeit thus far with less bloodshed. They are unwilling to share the civic table with those “Others” they insist cannot be “real Americans.” The war against “woke” is a contemporary battle for White “Christian” Supremacy.

It’s an ugly, embarrassing reality, but let’s call it what it is…..

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George Packer On How We Got Here

I consider The Atlantic a truly indespensible source of information and commentary.  The publication is a welcome island of thoughtful and penetrating articles in our ocean of superficial punditry and outright propaganda. I subscribe to the old-fashioned print magazine, and the last issue included an introductory essay by George Packer that I found particularly insightful. (Okay, honesty compels me to admit that I found his essay so “on target” because he essentially agreed with my own analysis. I’m not immune to confirmation bias…)

The essay is titled “The End of Democratic Delusions.” I think the following paragraph tells us how America has come to this unfortunate place.

This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the “browning” of the American people. Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners—the real Americans. His victory demonstrated the appeal’s breadth in blue and red states alike, among all ages, ethnicities, and races.

If we look back at history, at other periods of rapid, dizzying change, we see similar reactions and upheavals. The Industrial Revolution sparked labor uprisings, anarchist movements, and clashes between traditional monarchies and then-emerging democratic and socialist movements. The Protestant Reformation fractured the Catholic Church’s authority, reshaped Europe’s religious and political map, sparked religious wars (think the Thirty Years’ War), and devastated large parts of Europe. There are plenty of other examples.

As Packer notes, reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it “paints in dark tones.” It’s characterized by an intent to undo what most of us see as progress and “reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled.”

When Democrats lose a presidential election, they descend into a familiar quarrel over whether the party moved too far to the left or to the center. This time the question seems especially irrelevant; their political problem runs so much deeper. The Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of a historic swing toward right-wing populism, and tactical repositioning won’t help. The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo.

As Packer also notes, we are at a time when the parties have once again switched identities. The GOP of Lincoln was anti-slavery and the Democratic party of the time (and for many years after) was the party of White supremacy; in the 20th Century, they essentially traded places. More recently, another major switch made Democrats rather than Republicans the party of institutionalism. As Packer points out, that realignment has been going on since the early ’70s:

Democrats now claim the former Republican base of college-educated professionals, and Republicans have replaced Democrats as the party of the working class. As long as globalization, technology, and immigration were widely seen as not only inevitable but positive forces, the Democratic Party appeared to ride the wave of history, while Republicans depended on a shrinking pool of older white voters in dying towns. But something profound changed around 2008.

Packard points to three of those profound changes: a growing “conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party.”

Packer is hardly the only political scientist who has reminded Americans that the reactionary period we are experiencing is global. He spends much of his essay focusing on the challenges posed by what he calls “The Trump Reaction,” which he also says is more fragile than many believe, thanks to the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots who will inevitably turn on each other–and the even more obvious fact that Trump has absolutely no interest in governing.

Prior eras of rapid change have also sparked chaos and irrational reaction. History tells us that “this too shall pass.”

We really need to figure out how to speed that passage.

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The End Of Ethics?

Americans were recently treated to the official results of the U.S. House’s ethics investigation of Matt Gaetz. The concluding paragraph of the 37 page report says it all:

The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.

This was the person Trump initially chose to head up the Department of Justice. (I’ve lost a lot of respect for Merrick Garland due to his timidity and what has evidently been an overly zealous desire to avoid politicizing DOJ, but the contrast between a compulsively ethical Attorney General and a thoroughgoing degenerate is representative of the difference between today’s Democratic Party and the cult of Trump–aka the GOP.)

Because it isn’t just Gaetz. Trump has chosen nominees who mirror many of his own numerous legal and ethical failings–a clown show composed not only of ignoramuses and conspiracy theorists, but sexual predators, racists and businessmen with falsified resumes and glaring conflicts of interest. Long gone are the days when political figures were held to a high moral standard–when those aspiring to leadership positions took care to project an ethical and probative public persona, even if their private behaviors were somewhat less exemplary.

To be fair, the Trumpian mafia being assembled to run the Executive branch has its counterpart in the current, rogue Supreme Court;  Rolling Stone, among others, has reported on recent, added discoveries of highly unethical behaviors by the Court’s “usual suspects.”

A new 20-month Senate investigation into ethical conflicts and legal violations at the Supreme Court has uncovered and underscored a raft of dubious behavior by justices both living — and dead.

The new 95-page report reveals that deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — who expired in 2016 on a “free” quail hunting trip, paid for by a benefactor — was a conflicted mess, and effectively patient zero for the corruption now dogging the court. The arch conservative justice accepted “at least 258 subsidized trips” from wealthy patrons, including “several dozen hunting and fishing trips with prominent Republican donors.” Scalia accepted more such gifts “than any other justice,” the report states, and failed to properly disclose them “in violation of federal law.”

The report, issued by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also excoriates current conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for violations of federal law over undisclosed travel, including luxury fishing and yacht vacations. It targets Thomas in particular for having “accepted lavish gifts from billionaires with business before the court for almost his entire tenure as a justice,” adding that “the number, value, and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas have no comparison in modern American history.

Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, issued a statement underscoring the effect of these ethical lapses, saying that “justices are losing the trust of the American people at the hands of a gaggle of fawning billionaires.” 

Disclosure of the repeated failures of Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from cases affecting the interests of the billionaires whose largesse they’ve enjoyed comes at a time when trillionaire Elon Musk has assumed a de facto role as “co- President,” and as Trump is preparing to install a cohort of shady billionaires with massive conflicts of interest in important government positions–positions for which most of them are massively unqualified. 

As ABC News recently reported,

President-elect Donald Trump has shown no qualms about making or sticking by picks for his Cabinet no matter the baggage they carry — even some accused of sexual assault.

It’s a far cry from the days when much smaller-scale scandals, such as marijuana use or hiring an undocumented worker as a nanny, sunk candidates put forward by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, experts said.

“We’re in untested waters,” Jonathan Hanson, a political scientist and lecturer in statistics at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, told ABC News.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us. After all, American voters just elected a mentally-ill convicted felon who has also been found liable for sexual abuse by a  civil jury. 

Apparently, MAGA’s version of “Making America Great Again” is limited to its (very obvious) goal of “Making America White Again.”

Ethics? They don’t need no stinkin’ ethics! 

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The Shutdown

One of my favorite economists, Paul Krugman, has abandoned his New York Times column after 20 plus years. He has, however, continued his daily subscriber letter, which I receive, and in a recent one, he addressed the  embarrassing pre-Christmas clown show that threatened to shut down the government. He titled the essay–quite appropriately–“The Chaos Monkeys Have Already Taken Over the Zoo.” 

In an earlier Times piece, written before passage of the last-ditch, last-minute deal to keep government over, Krugman had written

Speaker Mike Johnson (soon to be ex-speaker?) is scrambling to put a budget deal together to avoid a government shutdown tomorrow. What a Holiday Gift from President Musk and First Laddy Trump. More at The NY Times here.

They couldn’t even wait till January to unleash the chaos. Classic hubris — too bad the country and the world are within the blast radius.

One more thing. Assuming Johnson is unable to remain Speaker in the next Congress, the days and weeks it might take the GOP to select a new ‘leader’ might take them past the deadline to certify the election.

(I hadn’t considered that possibility, and quite probably, neither did the congressional monkeys, aka “the usual suspects.” An inability to certify Trump’s election, brought on by the most MAGA members of the House, would have been..interesting…)

Krugman was far from the only observer who pointed out that the reasons “President Musk” gave for torpedoing the initial bipartisan measure were mostly bogus. His enumeration of the items in the measure he found unacceptable included a number that weren’t actually included in the measure. (I’m sure everyone reading this is shocked by the revelation that Musk is happy to depart from the truth when it serves his purposes…) A number of reports have zeroed in on what was apparently the real reason he wanted to kill the measure.

As the Hill explained,

In a Friday letter to congressional leaders, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) claimed Musk derailed the deal that would have avoided a government shutdown “in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of American workers, innovators and businesses.”

The spending agreement released Tuesday included a bipartisan provision to limit and screen U.S. investments in China, among dozens of other proposals attached to the 1,500-page bill.

As the CEO and largest stockholder in Tesla, Musk has extensive business connections to China. The company operates a major manufacturing plant in Shanghai and has sought to build deeper connections with Chinese companies.

Interestingly, although the final bill did not include Trump’s demand to scrap the debt ceiling, it did omit the provision that would have curtailed Musk’s business with China. Musk evidently had more clout with lawmakers than Trump–quite possibly because he has ample resources to fund his threat to primary any legislators who failed to knuckle under.

What is most stunning about this particular “Chaos monkeys” episode is that the entire fiasco was triggered by a man with no official government authority–a man who has never submitted himself to the electorate, who has never received a single vote– yet clearly considers himself a co-President, and just as clearly, intends to use the considerable power of his purse to protect his personal financial interests, if need be, at the expense of the American public’s interests.

Musk is by far the richest of Trump’s proposed governing cabal, but he’s not the only billionaire, nor is he the only one who will bring multiple conflicts of interest to a designated role. The grifter-in-chief proposes to surround himself with other rich men (almost all of his designees are White “Christian” males) who are equally ignorant of government operations and constitutional constraints. They are clearly unconcerned about what policies might be in the national interest. Their first impulses will be to protect their own sources of wealth (or, in the case of RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, to impose their loony-tunes worldviews on the country.)

The dictionary defines Kakistocracy as “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state,” and Corporatism as economic control by powerful corporate interests.

I think we’re there.

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