GOP – Page 45 – Sheila Kennedy

COVID Is Just The Beginning

Lest yesterday’s semi-optimism distract us…

The Biden Administration will undoubtedly ramp up production and distribution of the COVID vaccines, and most of us are desperate for a return to something approximating “normal.” It is highly unlikely, however, that we will recognize the next decade or two as even approximating our version of “normal.”

The Brookings Institution has put the most positive possible spin on that reality, advocating for adoption of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. The report notes that the pandemic has put a spotlight on global problems like “food insecurity, gender inequity, racism, and biodiversity loss, alongside longstanding gaps in access to education, jobs, and life-saving technologies,” and points out that these are all problems that the Sustainable Development Goals address.

That’s clearly good advice, but it’s probably coming too late.

Pandemics are connected to climate change, and they aren’t even the worst of those consequences. The science deniers, fossil fuel interests and others who have retarded efforts to avoid the worst results of climate change may have doomed humanity, or a substantial portion thereof, to a future somewhere between dismal and dystopian.

Have you noticed the lack of insects the past several years? The absence of bugs that used to smash into our windshields? Fewer mosquitos and fireflies? That’s just the more obvious evidence of a collapse in the global insect population.

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

If that isn’t worrisome enough, recent studies suggest that previous warnings of planetary warming may have been understated. Media outlets are reporting that warming is likely to be more severe than previously expected. World temperatures could rise 15 percent more than expected this century. Ice sheets are melting more rapidly than anticipated as well, increasing sea level rise.

We have already seen a dramatic rise in hurricane strength, wildfires and other results of our environmental heedlessness. Recent studies suggest a far more dangerous future.

Past models have suggested a 2 degree rise in global temperature. That’s bad enough-with a 2 degree rise, sea levels would rise by 1.6 feet, global heatwaves would become common, and subtropical areas would lose a third of their fresh water. Nearly all coral reefs could die.

Now, studies are suggesting the planet might become 5.3 degrees hotter. That’s 33% higher than most previous estimates–and it would probably mean extinction of the human race on Earth.

According to a recent scientific paper published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne (an independent think tank),

Climate change poses a “near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization,” and there’s a good chance society could collapse as soon as 2050 if serious mitigation actions aren’t taken in the next decade…

What might an accurate worst-case picture of the planet’s climate-addled future actually look like, then? The authors provide one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments “politely ignoring” the advice of scientists and the will of the public to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in a global temperature increase 5.4 F (3 C) by the year 2050. At this point, the world’s ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the world’s largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunges into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions.

“Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability,” the authors hypothesized.

Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world’s land surface turns to desert. Entire ecosystems collapse, beginning with the planet’s coral reefs, the rainforest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world’s tropics are hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region’s agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees.

Meanwhile, last year, 150 members of Congress—all Republicans—rejected the scientific consensus that human activity is driving climate change.

Apparently, humans will continue to fiddle while the Earth burns….

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The End Of The Road?

As regular readers of this blog know, I was for 35 years an active member of a political party that no longer exists. I was a Republican. Virtually everyone I worked with in Republican politics during those years has now left the GOP, and none of us recognize what is left.

Recently, Steve Schmidt, the former GOP strategist who ran John McCain’s Presidential Campaign, predicted the demise of the cult that is today’s Republican Party.

The die is cast for the Republican Party. It will be destroyed on January 6th in much the same way the Whig party was destroyed by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The act unraveled the Missouri compromise and allowed for the westward expansion of slavery.

“The party could not survive its factionalism. There could be no more accommodation, compromise and partnership between pro-slavery and anti-slavery Whigs. A new political party was born, the Republican Party. That party will divide into irreconcilable factions on January 6th.

Schmidt’s choice of tomorrow–January 6th– followed the announcement that several Republican Senators plan to object to that chamber’s scheduled acceptance of November’s electoral votes (but before leakage of the taped conversation in which Trump tried to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State to fraudulently change that state’s vote total).

The poisonous fruit from four years of collaboration and complicity with Trump’s insanity, illiberalism and incompetence are ready for harvest.

It will kill the GOP because its pro-democracy faction and autocratic factions can no more exist together then could the Whig Party hold together the abolitionist with the slave master….Fascism has indeed come to America and as was once predicted. It is wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

The question, of course, is how many “pro-democracy” Republicans remain in today’s GOP.

Schmidt’s prediction of a split is buttressed by a lengthy critique issued by Senator Ben Sasse, aimed at dishonorable Senators like Hawley, Cruz and Braun. Sasse explained why he was refusing to participate in that project to overturn the election – and why he was urging his colleagues to reject what he called “this dangerous ploy.”

The letter is a quite long, and I urge readers to click through and read the whole thing. But here is a brief summary of the important points he raises:

There is no factual or legal basis for the protest.
There is no evidence of voter fraud significant enough to change the results. (Here, he includes a state-by-state analysis of claims and the lawsuits dismissing them.)
The claims that Trump’s lawyers make in public don’t match the claims made to courts, because opponents of the results aren’t really conducting a legal challenge–they are fundraising. “Since Election Day, the president and his allied organizations have raised well over half a billion (billion!) dollars from supporters who have been led to believe that they’re contributing to a ferocious legal defense. But in reality, they’re mostly just giving the president and his allies a blank check that can go to their super-PACs, their next plane trip, their next campaign or project.”
The Senators participating in this travesty do so despite knowing better. “When we talk in private, I haven’t heard a single Congressional Republican allege that the election results were fraudulent – not one. Instead, I hear them talk about their worries about how they will “look” to President Trump’s most ardent supporters.”

Sasse then points to the damage being done by “ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage.”

But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government…

All the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party. We ought to be better than that. If we normalize this, we’re going to turn American politics into a Hatfields and McCoys endless blood feud – a house hopelessly divided.

Sasse has been one of the very few GOP lawmakers willing to “talk the talk” (although he has often proved unwilling to “walk the walk” with his votes.) Mitt Romney did criticize the arsonists for allowing ambition to eclipse principle, and Sen. Pat Toomey accused Cruz and Hawley– by name– of subverting American democracy. Even Tom Cotton and Liz Cheney have criticized the ploy, but I’m unaware of other current GOP officeholders who have done so.

Following disclosure of Trump’s stunning and illegal phone call, will any other Republican incumbents be willing to disavow the cowards, incompetents, would-be fascists and institutional arsonists who currently control the GOP?

I guess we’ll find out.

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Time For A New Center-Right Party?

So here is where we are. We have a sitting president pretending that he won an election he resoundingly lost, and nearly 90 percent of the GOP members in Congress refusing to challenge the assertion.

Top officials in 18 states and more than half of House Republicans supported a bonkers lawsuit trying to reverse the result of the election–even though a number of them owe their own seats to that same election.

Meanwhile, Proud Boys (a White Supremacist gang) prowl the streets of Washington and were actually invited into the White House by a deranged and dangerous almost-ex President.

To say that this is all insane behavior is to belabor the obvious. Even Trump ally Chris Christie has called the Texas lawsuit “absurd.”

Prior to the Presidential campaign, former GOP strategists and conservatives–including Rick Wilson, George Conway, Steve Schmidt, Reed Galen, Jennifer Horn, John Weaver, Ron Steslow, and Mike Madrid formed the Lincoln Project, “accountable to those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans.” Wilson, Conway and Schmidt have been particularly vocal in repudiating the Trumpism that has radicalized and infantilized what remains of the GOP. There have been other groups of disaffected Republicans, like Republican Voters Against Trump, and large numbers of former Republican officeholders ( especially DOJ lawyers and military personnel) who have issued letters and statements pointing out that various Trump actions and statements weren’t simply wrong, but in violation of American values and the rule of law.

Ex-Republicans, including conservative “names” like Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol, established the Bulwark, “a project of Defending Democracy Together Institute, a 501(c)(3) organization.” They are joined philosophically by media figures like Joe Scarborough, who was once a Republican Congressman.

These dissidents from Trumpism are largely drawn from what we might call the brains of the former GOP–strategists, political philosophers (and to be fair, a number of self-regarding blowhards. But still…)

Thoughtful people understand that America needs two responsible, adult political parties. That need is especially significant in a country that has only two major parties. When the political system works properly, both of those parties will be bigger “tents” than today’s GOP, but one will be generally more conservative and one generally more liberal.

People of good will who are focused on the common good will disagree about many things. They will bring different perspectives and life experiences to the nation’s problems. And in what should be an inevitable process of negotiation and compromise, broadly acceptable public policies will be hammered out.

That process is impossible when one party is a fundamentalist cult.

When one of only two political parties is dominated by people who believe that God is not only on their side, but has directed them not to negotiate, compromise or accept any reality other than their preferred one, government cannot function. And that is the alternative reality in which members of today’s GOP live.

As Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times,

The postmodern blood libel of QAnon will have adherents in Congress. Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man charged with killing Black Lives Matter protesters, is a right-wing folk hero. The Republican Party has become more hostile to democracy than ever. Both the Trump and Bush presidencies concluded with America a smoking ruin. Only Trump has ensured that nearly half the country doesn’t see it.

As Paul Krugman observed in that same issue, the GOP has become hostile to the very idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.

There are certainly similarly ideological, intransigent people among the Democrats–but they don’t control it, and they do not come close to being a majority of that party’s base.

Today, what remains of the GOP is a seething, angry mob. Scholars can research the roots of this devolution; psychiatrists and political psychologists can investigate the personality quirks that predict attraction to whatever it is that being a Republican these days represents. But what is abundantly clear–not just to Democrats and Independents, but to anti-Trump Republicans–is that the current iteration of the Grand Old Party is incapable of participating in governance.

Tantrums are not policy positions.

In my opinion (not that anyone is likely to ask for my opinion), if the United States is to return to a semblance of sanity, or to any adult version of governance, the principled conservatives who have exited the GOP need to form a new center-right party, and leave the current Republican Party to the howling, racist remnants that currently dominate it.

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That New Old-Time Religion

The recent behavior of thousands of members of the GOP sent me to Google to read up on collective delusions. One academic has explained such delusions, and differentiated them from mass hysteria. (Hysteria evidently involves physical symptoms.) Collective delusions are defined as the spontaneous spread of false or exaggerated beliefs within a population at large, temporarily affecting a region, culture or country.

I found the term “temporarily” soothing…

What I certainly did not find soothing was an article by Andrew Sullivan, sent to me by a friend. I’ve always found Sullivan thoughtful, although I have philosophical disagreements with him. In this essay, he makes a very persuasive case for the marriage of Evangelical Christianity with Trumpism. I say “persuasive” because his theory offers an explanation for what is otherwise inexplicable: the belief that an election lost decisively in the Electoral College and by over seven million popular votes–an election overseen in many states by Republicans, an election in which down-ballot Republicans did well–was “rigged” against Trump.

In a post-election Marist poll, 60 percent of white evangelicals said they did not believe the 2020 election result was accurate, and 50 percent believed that Trump should not concede.

Sullivan has coined the term “Christianist” to describe the Evangelicals to whom he refers:

In a manner very hard to understand from the outside, American evangelical Christianity has both deepened its fusion of church and state in the last few years, and incorporated Donald Trump into its sacred schematic. Christianists now believe that Trump has been selected by God to save them from persecution and the republic from collapse. They are not in denial about Trump’s personal iniquities, but they see them as perfectly consistent with God’s use of terribly flawed human beings, throughout the Old Testament and the New, to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven.

This belief is now held with the same, unwavering fundamentalist certainty as a Biblical text. And white evangelical Christianists are the most critical constituency in Republican politics. If you ask yourself how on earth so many people have become convinced that the 2020 election was rigged, with no solid evidence, and are now prepared to tear the country apart to overturn an election result, you’ve got to take this into account. This faction, fused with Trump, is the heart and soul of the GOP. You have no future in Republican politics if you cross them. That’s why 19 Republican attorneys general, Ted Cruz, and now 106 Congressional Republicans have backed a bonkers lawsuit to try to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result.

Sullivan says that these beliefs don’t simply characterize a few “fringe nutcases.” He offers examples of what he calls “the fusion of Trumpism with religious fundamentalism,” and Evangelicals’ ahistorical insistence that the United States was founded as a Christian, rather than a secular, nation.

As most Americans, religious or not, recognize, the word “faith” means a belief for which there is no empirical evidence. Believers who reject science are threatened not simply by this or that scientific conclusion, but by the scientific method itself– by its approach to reality and insistence upon falsification. (They shouldn’t be, of course–many things we all believe in cannot be falsified: beauty, love…but they seem unable to grasp that distinction.)

I suppose if one has been raised in a religious culture that puts primacy on faith in the unknown and unknowable, a culture that insists on the superiority of one’s religion and skin color (because make no mistake, this particular version of “Christianity” incorporates white supremacy, along with male dominance), being forced to confront a reality that challenges those beliefs is intolerable.

I’d love to dismiss members of the cult that was once a political party as inconsequential, but I’ve read enough history to know how much war, devastation and human misery fundamentalisms have caused. (The nation’s founders read that history too–which is why they separated church from state..)

I sure hope this eruption of a “collective delusion” proves temporary.

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The GOP Retreat From Empiricism

I am hardly the only person to observe that Trump’s election was a predictable consequence of the fact that, over a number of years, the GOP has morphed into something bearing very little resemblance to a rational, center-right political party.

Political pundits differ on when the changes began. Certainly, Nixon’s “Southern strategy” laid the groundwork for the GOP’s growing appeal to racial grievance. Stuart Stevens’ recent book It Was All A Lie detailed five decades of “hypocrisy and self-delusion” dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s.

A recent article from Pressthink, a project of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, reminded readers of the 2004 Ron Suskind article about the George W. Bush White House–the article that gave us the now-ubiquitous quote about the “reality-based community.” Suskind was writing about concerns voiced by so-called “establishment” Republicans who were increasingly encountering what Suskind called “a confusing development” within the Bush White House. Suddenly, asking for corroborating evidence, expressing doubts, or raising facts that didn’t fit an official narrative were considered disqualifying or disloyal acts for allies of the President.

Knowing what you know now, about candidate Trump, listen to these quotes from 2004…

* “He dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts.” —Bruce Bartlett, former Reagan and Bush-the-elder adviser.

* “In meetings, I’d ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!” —Christie Whitman, head of the EPA under Bush.

* “If you operate in a certain way — by saying this is how I want to justify what I’ve already decided to do, and I don’t care how you pull it off — you guarantee that you’ll get faulty, one-sided information.” —Paul O’Neill, Treasure Secretary under Bush.

* “Open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.” —Suskind’s words.

* “A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush’s White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.” —Suskind.

* “You’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way [Bush] walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” — Mark McKinnon, media adviser to Bush, explaining the political logic to Suskind.

That last quote, by Mark McKinnon, goes a long way toward explaining the root emotions of today’s Trump supporters, whose overriding need is apparently to “own the libs”–no matter what the cost to the country or their own prospects.

Suskind’s article was about the growing tensions within the Republican coalition. When he talked to Bruce Bartlett, Christie Whitman, Paul O’Neill and other loyal Republicans, they conveyed alarm over what he termed “the retreat from empiricism.”

It wasn’t only Republicans who were retreating from empiricism and reality–liberals had their anti-vaxxers and people hysterically opposed to genetically modified foods–but they lacked the influence on their party that climate change deniers and birthers had in the GOP, and that asymmetry posed a “false equivalence” problem for journalists trying to be (excuse the phrase) fair and balanced.

Worse, fact-checking Trump had little effect, because he wasn’t trying to make reference to reality in what he said. He was trying to substitute “his” reality for the one depicted in news reports.

The goal of totalitarian propaganda is to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader’s power. Its open distortion of reality is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness.

On November 3d, creating an alternate reality worked for 70 million Americans.

Houston, we have a problem.

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