Tag Archives: GOP

Will The Real Republicans Please Stand Up?

In MAGA land, no insult is more cutting–or more numerous–than “RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in Name Only.” It is routinely hurled by the extremists who have remade a once-mainstream, center-right party into a racist, misogynistic cult of personality.

The Republicans with whom I worked back when I was one of them have mostly responded by leaving the GOP. Interestingly, however, some of those “RINOs”–more accurately described as traditional Republicans–have chosen to fight, to try to retake their party, and in Idaho, of all places. According to the Washington Post, the rebellion is taking place in an area with a history that has informed the effort.

Locals prefer not to talk about the hate that took root here a generation ago, when the Aryan Nations and other militants built a white supremacist paradise among the tall pines and crystal lakes of North Idaho.Community activists, backed by national civil rights groups, bankrupted the neo-Nazis in court and eventually forced them to move, a hard-fought triumph memorialized in scenes from 2001 of a backhoe smashing through a giant swastika at the former Aryan compound just outside of Coeur d’Alene, the biggest city in this part of the state.

For much of the two decades since, civic leaders have focused on moving beyond the image of North Idaho as a white-power fiefdom. They steered attention instead to emerald golf courses and gleaming lakeside resorts where celebrities such as Kim Kardashian sip huckleberry cocktails.

Now, however, North Idaho residents are confronting that history head-on as a new movement builds against far-right extremism.

Northern Idaho’s traditional Republicans are reacting to the current leadership of the local Republican Party, which they say has lurched to the right, especially on matters of race, religion and sexuality, giving the bigotry of the past mainstream political cover.

A group of disaffected, self-described “traditional” Republicans has spent the past two years planning to wrest back control from leaders who they accuse of steering the local GOP toward extremism, a charge the officials vehemently deny.

Those officials may “vehemently deny” the charge, but quotations from several of them in the Post tended to support the accusation. (One politico insisted that women should be required to carry a rapists baby to term…)

The linked story was published prior to Idaho’s primary, which took place last Tuesday.  On Wednesday, I googled to assess the success of the traditional rebellion. The slate of challengers backed by the North Idaho Republicans won 30 spots on the central committee, but they needed 36 seats to secure a majority.

I also learned that 15 incumbent GOP state legislators lost their primary races. I was initially hopeful that the successful challengers represented traditional Republicans; however, further investigation indicated that, at the state legislative level, far-Right conservatives took control. (If anyone from Idaho has further information, please confirm or correct my impression.)

The effort in Idaho illuminates the challenge facing a once-responsible political party: Can genuine conservatives–voters and operatives holding center-Right policy positions on economic and social issues–take back the GOP, and return the racists and culture warriors to the fringes? If not, where will thoughtful, respectable Republicans go?

In the short term, an extremist GOP can win elections by deploying its demonstrable skills at voter suppression, abetted by the various mechanisms of the American electoral system that give rural voters and a handful of states disproportionate power, but–absent a wholesale takeover that includes revising/ignoring the Constitution– that dominance will have a limited shelf-life. The once Grand-Old-Party will either turn away from the White Christian Nationalists who currently control it (and who represent a distinct minority of Americans), or a new center-Right party will rise from its ashes.

That result, of course, is long-term. The short-term crisis we face is the November election.

If the GOP manages to retake the White House or Congress, all bets are off. A second Trump administration is publicly committed to removing any remaining legal or constitutional guard-rails, setting America on a path to autocracy and chaos.

The sanity vote has never been more important.

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Using The Jews

The sudden concern over anti-Semitism being expressed by far-Right politicians is jarring to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the GOP fringe’s historic hatred. When Christian Nationalists suddenly express a desire to “protect” their Jewish neighbors, it’s not just disconcerting–it’s ominous.

Granted, there has been a sharp and troubling rise in anti-Jewish incidents, and there are good-faith efforts to address that phenomenon. Even those good-faith efforts can be misplaced; as Congressman Jerry Nadler explained in the Washington Post, despite being an observant Jew, a strong supporter of Israel and a member of Congress who has spent a career fighting antisemitism, he voted against the recent Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.

I voted against it, as did several other Jewish members of Congress. While I support the sentiment expressed by its sponsors, this bill does nothing to fight antisemitism in any meaningful way. Instead, it merely tinkers with definitions and could ultimately make investigating antisemitism on campuses more difficult in the future. In addition to trampling the free-speech rights of students and professors, this bill was disingenuously designed to split the Democratic caucus and score cheap political points.

Nadler’s final sentence refers to the fact that the far Right’s sudden, pious concerns over anti-Semitism are anything but good-faith. As the New York Times recently reported, several of the prominent Republicans who have labeled campus protests “Leftist anti-Semitism” have mainstreamed anti-Jewish rhetoric for years.

Debate rages over the extent to which the protests on the political left constitute coded or even direct attacks on Jews. But far less attention has been paid to a trend on the right: For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots.

The conspiracy theory taking on fresh currency is one that dates back hundreds of years and has perennially bubbled into view: that a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in.

The current formulation of the trope taps into the populist loathing of an elite “ruling class.” “Globalists” or “globalist elites” are blamed for everything from Black Lives Matter to the influx of migrants across the southern border, often described as a plot to replace native-born Americans with foreigners who will vote for Democrats. The favored personification of the globalist enemy is George Soros, the 93-year-old Hungarian American Jewish financier and Holocaust survivor who has spent billions in support of liberal causes and democratic institutions.

The linked article provided a number of examples, including Trump’s 2023 email to supporters containing “an image that bears striking resemblance to Nazi-era cartoons of hook-nosed puppet masters manipulating world figures.” The Times review found that just in the last year some 790 emails from Trump to his supporters invoked Mr. Soros or “globalists” conspiratorially, a meteoric rise from prior years, and that House and Senate Republicans increasingly used “Soros” and “globalist” to evoke anti-Semitism, “from just a handful of messages in 2013 to more than 300 messages from 79 members in 2023.”

The lengthy Times article provides numerous other examples. An equally in-depth article in The Guardian is titled “Campus protest crackdowns claim to be about antisemitism – but they’re part of a rightwing plan.” The article acknowledged the legitimate discomfort of Jewish students on campus, but noted that it has been used to justify “a powerful attack on academic freedom and First Amendment rights that long predates the student encampments – part of a longstanding rightwing project to curb speech and reshape the public sphere.”

The pro-Palestine movement has also provided cover for the right to expand its attack on protest – a project advanced significantly after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020….Alongside this effort to tar protest as terrorism, the right is seizing on the emotions inflamed by Israel’s war to make headway in a longstanding offensive on education. Over the past several years, the GOP has sought to meddle in the academic freedom of universities, which they allege are indoctrinating students into “woke”, leftwing ideology. This is perhaps most dramatic in Florida, where, in a bid to control access to history and information, Governor Ron DeSantis has all but remade the public liberal arts college New College in his image, and has introduced the Stop Woke Act, curtailing what teachers can teach on topics of race and gender.

I’d love to believe that Rightwing politicians like Indiana’s Jim Banks have suddenly awakened to the dishonesty and danger of anti-Semitism, but Jews are clearly being used as a convenient tool in their ongoing attack on an open society–and like most Jews, I know that I am only safe in a truly open society.

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What It Means To Recognize Complexity

I could have written the introduction to a recent New York Times column by Frank Bruni. In fact, I’ve written some posts that sound eerily familiar! Those of you who’ve read this blog for a while will recognize the similarity; here’s his lede:

I warn my students. At the start of every semester, on the first day of every course, I confess to certain passions and quirks and tell them to be ready: I’m a stickler for correct grammar, spelling and the like, so if they don’t have it in them to care about and patrol for such errors, they probably won’t end up with the grade they’re after. I want to hear everyone’s voice — I tell them that, too — but I don’t want to hear anybody’s voice so often and so loudly that the other voices don’t have a chance.

And I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that. They may even become bored with it. I’ll sometimes say it when we’re discussing the roots and branches of a social ill, the motivations of public (and private) actors and a whole lot else, and that’s because I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.

When I was still teaching, I echoed every bit of that message–adding to the repeated admonition about complexity a lawyer’s reminder that issues are inevitably fact-sensitive. In other words, “it depends.”

Bruni’s essay goes on to address something my previous posts did not–why the recognition of complexity matters. It’s about humility. As Bruni says, recognizing that “it’s complicated” is a bulwark against arrogance, absolutism, purity and zeal.

As eminent jurist Learned Hand famously put it, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not so sure it’s right.”

Arrogance, absolutism, purity and zeal…could there be a more succinct, more accurate description of the crazies in the Senate and especially the zealots in the House of Representatives who are currently preventing thoughtful governance? (We should have a t-shirt with those words printed on it sent to Indiana’s own version of Marjorie Taylor Green, Jim Banks…)

Bruni asserts–I think properly–that humility is the antidote to grievance, and that grievance is the overwhelming political motivator these days.

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.

 The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were delusional, frenzied, savage. But above all, they were unhumble. They decided that they held the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary. They couldn’t accept that their preference for one presidential candidate over another could possibly put them in the minority — or perhaps a few of them just reasoned that if it did, then everybody else was too misguided to matter. They elevated how they viewed the world and what they wanted over tradition, institutional stability, law, order.

Bruni reminds readers that successful government requires teamwork, and that any significant progress requires consensus. “Governing, as opposed to demagoguery, is about earning others’ trust and cooperation. Exhibiting a willingness to listen to and to hear them goes a long way toward that.”

The entire linked essay is worth reading. Its message is especially pertinent to Hoosiers as Indiana winds down to the May 7th primary election. The vicious, nasty, dishonest ads being aired ad nauseam by Republicans running for Governor and for Congress are reminiscent more of monkeys throwing poo than messages from serious individuals willing to act upon their understanding of the common good. These contending political accusations display no hint of humility, no recognition of complexity, not even a nod toward civility. (Research suggests that voters’ response to such negative campaigning isn’t a vote for the particular monkey throwing the poo, but rather a decision to stay home on election day. That’s an unfortunate, but understandable, reaction.)

America faces complicated, pressing issues. We really need to stop electing purists and zealots who are ill-equipped to understand the complexity of those issues and too arrogant and absolutist to engage in the democratic negotiation and compromise necessary to solve them.

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Don’t Confuse Me With Facts!!

During a recent get-together, discussion turned to a predictable topic: what on earth explains support for Donald Trump? How can (presumably rational) citizens look at this obviously mentally-ill buffoon spouting bizarre word-salads and facing 92 indictments, and come away thinking “Yep, that’s the guy I want to put in charge of the nuclear codes”? 

A recent essay on a seemingly unrelated issue may point to at least a partial answer.

In an article about recent efforts to revitalize local news media, Doron Taussig of the Columbia Journalism Review reported that Republicans are as mistrusting of local news outlets as they are of national media outlets.

She began by citing arguments from proponents of local news asserting that– while national media sources are increasingly seen as partisan– local news enjoys widespread trust. “After all, what do high school sports and Girl Scouts building a sensory garden for shelter dogs have to do with Joe Biden and Donald Trump?”

The data doesn’t support that argument.

But if money and energy are going to be poured into local news with the assumption that local journalists are and will remain trusted across partisan lines, we’re going to be in for an unpleasant surprise. Yes, polling shows that local news is more trusted across the political spectrum than national news, but only 29 percent of Republicans surveyed by Gallup in 2021 said they trusted their local news, down from 34 percent in 2019. This is consistent with what I’ve heard from journalists who work for local outlets (mostly but not exclusively in Pennsylvania) and conservatives who read or have stopped reading them. In fact, the striking thing when you examine the relationship between local news and conservative audiences is that, in spite of all the differences between the Bucks County Courier Times and the New York Times, their alienation from conservatives sounds dishearteningly similar.

It would seem that MAGA Republicans have adopted Earl Landgrebe’s infamous position, uttered during the Watergate hearings: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s made up.” He went on to say “I’m going to stick with my President even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.” (The next day, Nixon resigned.) (Landgrebe was, sadly, a product of Indiana, a state that’s been described as so Red, voters will elect a rutabaga if it has an “R” next to its name.)

Clearly, in order to continue supporting Donald Trump, it’s prudent to shield oneself from information, facts, and reality.  

That allergy to inconvenient information, however, has multiple negative consequences–and those consequences aren’t limited to ongoing support for a lunatic would-be autocrat. People who refuse to engage with probative information are ripe targets for propaganda, as Heather Cox Richardson recently reported.

Richardson cited a Washington Post article on a secret 2023 document from Russia’s Foreign Ministry calling for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures that attack “‘a coalition of unfriendly countries’ led by the United States.”

Those measures are designed to affect “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” of Russia’s perceived adversaries. 

The plan is to weaken the United States and convince other countries, particularly those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that the U.S. will not stand by its allies. By weakening those alliances, Russian leaders hope to shift global power by strengthening Russia’s ties to China, Iran, and North Korea and filling the vacuum left by the crumbling democratic alliances (although it is not at all clear that China is on board with this plan).

Russian propaganda aims to bolster the most isolationist right-wing and extremist forces in America, “to increase tensions between the U.S. and China over Taiwan,” and “escalate the situation in the Middle East around Israel, Iran and Syria to distract the U.S. with the problems of this region.” 

That effort has been particularly successful with the looney-tunes GOP flank elected to the House thanks to gerrymandering. As Richardson reports:

Earlier this month, both Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warned about Russian disinformation in their party. Turner told CNN’s State of the Union that it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” When asked which Republicans had fallen to Russian propaganda, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.” 

What it takes to support Trump, echo his “Big Lie,” and parrot Russian propaganda is chosen ignorance–a rejection of all contrary information by folks who don’t want to be confused by the facts.

There are a lot of them.

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Very Interesting…

I am aware of a number of upper-income folks who justify their continuing support of Donald Trump by asserting that–“like most Republicans”– he has been better for their portfolios. That has always struck me as a poor excuse for ignoring what another Trump Presidency would do to the country (and for that matter, the world), but I’ve chalked it up to selfishness and (misunderstood/shortsighted)  self-interest.

Evidently, I should have attributed it to ignorance, because it turns out that–when it comes to investment returns– Democratic administrations have greatly out-performed Republican ones.

As I was reading a recent issue of the Indianapolis Business Journal–a publication that covers local government far more thoroughly than the Indianapolis Star, by the way–I came across the regular column by Mickey Kim devoted to giving investment advice. This particular column was titled “Keep Calm and Don’t Mix Politics with your Portfolio,” and it was an effort to persuade people not to base their investment strategies on partisanship rather than performance, not to suggest that one party was better than the other for investment.

But the data was eye-opening, at least for me. (I readily admit to chosen ignorance about all things investment.)

My friend Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist for Wall Street research firm CFRA, dissected price changes for the S&P 500 going back to 1945 based on election results.

Republican administrations are generally viewed as “pro-business,” and conventional wisdom is that stocks do better with a Republican in the White House. There has, indeed, been a huge difference in returns during Democratic versus Republican administrations. However, as is often the case, conventional wisdom is wrong. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but Stovall calculated from Harry Truman’s inauguration on April 12, 1945, through March 15, 2024, the average annual return for the S&P 500 was 44% higher with Democrats in the White House (9.5% vs. 6.6% during Republican administrations).

Further, according to Invesco and Haver Analytics, hypothetically speaking, the best-performing portfolio from 1900 to 2023 was the “bipartisan” one that stayed fully invested in the Dow Jones industrial average (a price-weighted index—cannot be invested in directly—of the 30 largest, most widely held stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange) during both Democratic and Republican administrations. Again, past performance is no guarantee of future results, but starting with $10,000, this portfolio grew to almost $9.9 million.

Conversely, a “partisan” portfolio, invested only during Democratic or Republican administrations, underperformed by millions of dollars. The same $10,000 invested only during Democratic administrations grew to about $528,000. Invested only during Republican administrations, the initial $10,000 grew to a bit less than $181,000.

Kim concluded this analysis by reiterating his intended message, that “there can be a huge cost to letting a partisan political storm crash your portfolio.” His sound advice: “Develop an investment plan based on your long-term goals and stick to it. Your financial future will depend far more on how much you save and invest, not who wins the election.”

I am in no position to quibble with that advice, which strikes me as quite sound, but it certainly does raise a question about those upper-income Trump apologists. I suppose it’s possible that their portfolios grew under Trump, but given the truly excellent performance of the economy during the Biden Administration, it’s quite likely they’ve done as well or better with a Democrat in the White House. Is their purported reliance on portfolio performance an evasion intended to mask the actual reasons they support Trump (racism, misogyny, isolationism…)? Or do they actually not understand the significance of the data I’ve cited above?

Perhaps they’ve simply and unthinkingly accepted the old “country club Republican” belief that the GOP is the party looking out for the interests of the business community, while Democrats are “giving away” tax dollars via welfare and government spending. If so, someone needs to explain to them that both the short and long-term interests of the business community include such things as social stability, a well-maintained infrastructure, an educated and adequate workforce, and a population with enough disposable income to support robust consumer demand.

As investors are often admonished, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But the odds would certainly seem to be in the Democrats’ –and Biden’s–favor.

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