Tag Archives: GOP

Connecting The Dots

A few evenings ago, I introduced a Zoom meeting sponsored by ReCenter Indiana. It was focused upon the very negative effects of our legislative super-majority. Democrats have identified four districts in Indiana that–should they all go Blue in November–would reduce the current super-majority to a simple majority. My job was to begin the session with an explanation of how a legislative super-majority advances extremism and stifles democratic deliberation.

Here are those introductory remarks.

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Let me begin this discussion by connecting some dots. Hoosier voters need to understand how partisan redistricting—usually referred to as gerrymandering–has given Indiana its legislative super-majority, and how that super-majority has given us increasingly extreme legislation: a virtually-complete abortion ban, education vouchers that are starving our public schools, gun laws that allow anyone who can fog a mirror to possess a lethal weapon– basically, a focus on culture war at the expense of attention to actual governance.

It’s a vicious circle, because in Indiana, the GOP’s legislative super-majority also allows the party to continue the extreme gerrymandering that has made Indiana one of the five most gerrymandered states in the country.

Gerrymandering has all sorts of undemocratic consequences, one of which is voter suppression. In districts perceived as “safe,” people who favor the “loser” party tend to stay home. That’s one reason why Indiana ranks 50th among the states in turnout. (Interestingly, due to Indiana’s population shifts, a number of those theoretically “safe” districts wouldn’t currently be safe if discouraged folks came out and voted. Those demographic shifts are one of the reasons there’s a chance this year to break the current GOP supermajority.)

Indiana is an excellent example of how the gerrymandering that leads to legislative super-majorities has a profound and very negative impact on policy.

We know that primaries attract the most ideologically extreme voters in either party. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, Republican incumbents protect their right flank, Democrats their left. In Indiana, which has been gerrymandered to produce more Republican districts, that reality has steadily moved us farther and farther Right. Today’s “culture warriors” win office in order to focus on issues like banning abortion, waging war on trans children, and removing common-sense restrictions on gun ownership. And it’s getting worse–there are indications that during the next session we’ll see the introduction of anti-vaccine measures that—if passed–would threaten public health. (For reasons I fail to understand, opposition to vaccination has become a preoccupation of what I’ll call the “Micah Beckwith wing” of the GOP.)

These are the pet issues of extremists, rather than the issues that most Hoosiers care about and that we traditionally consider governmental: roads and bridges and other infrastructure, crime and punishment, economic development.

Thanks to the gerrymandering that has given Republicans a super-majority, these extremist legislators face virtually no barriers to enacting measures that research tells us are deeply unpopular with most Hoosiers. Members of a super-majority don’t face pressure to negotiate, or to moderate the most extreme versions of their extreme positions.

A party with a super-majority also faces no obstacles to rewarding its donors and supporters; in Indiana, that has given us policies that almost uniformly favor the well-to-do. It has defeated even the most minimal efforts to protect renters. It has given us privatization programs like vouchers, in which our tax dollars are used almost exclusively by the well-to-do while impoverishing the public schools that serve poorer children, and it has given us what is arguably an unconstitutional effort to protect gun manufacturers from litigation.

That super-majority has also blocked more stringent ethics measures.

Any super-majority—Republican or Democrat—gives those in power the ability to ignore contending arguments, unpalatable data and the needs of Hoosiers likely to vote for the opposing party. They don’t need to negotiate or compromise. They don’t even need to look like they’re negotiating or compromising.

Indiana can’t get rid of the gerrymandering that makes our legislature’s extremism possible—we lack a referendum or initiative, mechanisms that have been used by other states to institute nonpartisan redistricting. In this state, only the legislature itself—only the people who benefit from the system—can change it. The only way Indiana will get rid of the gerrymandering that allows legislators to choose their voters rather than the other way around would be Congress passing the John Lewis act, which (among other very positive things) would make gerrymandering illegal nationally.

Since the GOP benefits from America’s gerrymandering far more than the Democrats do, passing the John Lewis Act would probably require a Democratic trifecta: a Democratic House and Senate to pass it and a Democratic President to sign it.
Until that happens, if it ever does, Indiana’s Republican gerrymandering is likely to continue giving Hoosiers a Republican legislative majority. But we do have a chance this year to defeat the super-majority, and to slow down our state’s march toward culture-war extremism. One reason is the shifting demography that I previously mentioned. Another is that the GOP has moved so far toward a very unconservative extremism that its candidates are turning off voters who previously voted Republican.

Those realities give four candidates in particular a better-than-usual chance to win their districts:
• Josh Lowry, District 24;
• Tiffany Stoner, District 25;
• Victoria Garcia Wilburn, District 32 (incumbent); and
• Matt McNally, District 39.

We’ll now hear from each of them.

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How Gulllible Are MAGA Folks?

Periodically, it’s important to remind ourselves that an average IQ of 100 means that half the population falls below that figure. That statistical reality might help to explain the results of a recent poll reported by The Washington Post. This wasn’t a “horserace” poll; instead, it was an effort to see just how many Americans have accepted elements of Donald Trump’s constant firehose of  misinformation.

Actually, it wasn’t simply the acceptance of inaccuracies or distortions that caused my jaw to drop. It was the nature of so many of those lies–claims that are bizarre even by Trump standards.

A majority (52 percent) of Trump supporters say they believe the claim about Haitian migrants “abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.” Excluding those who are “not sure,” twice as many say it’s at least “probably true” as say it’s at least “probably false.” (There remains no real evidence for this claim. Officials have debunked it and linked it to threats, and Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Sunday called it “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.”)

43 percent of Trump supporters say they believe that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth” — another claim Trump referenced at last week’s debate. In fact, slightly more said they believed this was true than disbelieved it. (It is false.)

28 percent of Trump supporters say they believe that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations,” something Trump has recently suggested is happening but for which there is no evidence.

81 percent of Trump supporters say they believe Venezuela is “deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions” to the United States. (There is no evidence that Venezuela or any other country is doing this, and Trump has used bad data to support his claim.)

There are a number of other claims that don’t require a departure from reality, but instead rely on public ignorance of government, policy and credible news sources. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans evidently believe the United States has given more aid to Ukraine than all of Europe combined, while 70 percent say they believe millions of undocumented immigrants are arriving in the U.S. every month. Another 70 percent insist that inflation is at its highest rate ever.

The numbers on those counts aren’t terribly surprising in context, given the many false things Trump supporters have convinced themselves of in recent years. For example, most Republicans have told pollsters that Trump didn’t try to overturn the 2020 election, that Trump didn’t have classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and that Trump’s offices were wiretapped during the 2016 election. And of course there is the 2020 stolen-election claim that as many as two-thirds of Republicans have believed.

It is important to emphasize that these percentages are based upon responses from self-identified Republicans. When the survey turned to independents, it found that those respondents disbelieve the Haitian migrants claim by more than 2-to-1, with thirty-five percent saying it’s “definitely false” and only seven percent saying it’s “definitely true.”

The gaps are even wider on executing babies and sex changes in schools. More than 6 in 10 independents dispute both, and relatively few independents — less than one-quarter — embrace them. Many independents are actually reliable voters for one side or another, and the data suggest these are probably Republican-leaning ones.

The article concludes that Trump is largely preaching to a credulous choir, while other, potentially decisive, voters generally see his conspiracy theories for what they are. That is undoubtedly true–Trump has made no discernable effort to expand his MAGA base. Instead, the GOP strategy seems focused on mobilization, on turning out that base, presumably by playing on its fears and bigotries with allegations unlikely to be accepted by more knowledgeable–and less racist–folks.

There are two lessons here. One is a political conclusion that most of us had already reached: this will be a turnout election. Trump’s base is simply not big enough to elect him if enough sane people vote. That’s why the enthusiasm for Harris/Walz and the explosion of grass-roots GOTV organizations are such hopeful signs.

The other lesson is more of a reminder. America has always harbored people who are lightly tethered to reality, people who are ill-equipped, whether intellectually or emotionally, to understand or accept the world they inhabit, and who–as a result–are vulnerable to even the most ridiculous lies and conspiracy theories. The country has also always harbored figures willing to cater to those people–to amplify their fears and to promote their hatred of “the Other” in order to gain political or social advantage. That isn’t new.

What is surprising (at least to me) is how many of them there are…..

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A Different Kind Of Homelessness

I recently had breakfast with two former faculty colleagues. The bulk of our conversation focused on the upcoming election, and thinking back on it, a couple of things struck me: despite MAGA folks’ belief that all college professors are left-wing socialists or communists, in a former, more rational time, all three of us would have been considered somewhat right of center.

But of course, the center has moved. A lot.

In 1980, I ran for Congress as a Republican. I won a Republican primary. I was pro-choice, and (to the extent it even came up then) pro-gay rights. For a couple of years after I lost the general election, people came up to me and said things like “I just couldn’t vote for you because you were so conservative.”

My husband and I met as officials in a Republican city administration; when we married, a reporter who covered the city (we had those back then) told me “the press guys like both of you, but you are both kinda right-wing.”

I don’t think I was ever “right-wing” –my positions were more consistent with what was then the GOP mainstream than with the Rightwing fringe of the party–but I was a traditional Republican.

Since 1980 I’ve changed positions on a few issues, because I learned more about them, but my basic political philosophy and approach to policy has not changed–yet today, I’m considered “far Left.”

I stood philosophically still, but the Overton window moved.

Part of the problem is political vocabulary. Americans talk about Liberals and conservatives, but those terms don’t describe our contemporary politics. MAGA and Trump are anything but Conservative as that term has historically been understood. (For that matter, they lack any coherent political philosophy at all, unless grievance and animus can be considered political positions.)

That reality has left genuine conservatives politically homeless. There’s a reason so many prominent conservative Republicans have endorsed Kamala Harris. (When George Will supports Harris, you know the GOP has jumped the shark.)

To the extent Trump has any policy positions, they are anathema to real conservatives. When the GOP was a genuine center-right party, it championed free trade, not tariffs and protectionism. Conservatives wanted limited government– Barry Goldwater insisted that “Government doesn’t belong in your boardroom or your bedroom.”  As Reagan left office, he made a speech about the importance of immigration. In foreign affairs, conservatives were strong supporters of NATO and opponents of dictators–and they understood the importance of joining with liberals in a unified approach to issues beyond the “water’s edge.”

Real conservatives venerate the Constitution and its checks and balances. They celebrate freedom of speech and a free press. When the GOP was conservative, it stressed the importance of respect for democratic processes and institutions, for law and order. Trump and MAGA constantly attack the very foundations of a working democracy– the press, the Department of Justice, the FBI, even our military leadership and especially the integrity of the electoral system. The old GOP might have disagreed with Democrats and liberals about how these principles should be applied, but they endorsed the principles.

Let’s be accurate: whatever else today’s GOP may be, it is not conservative.

As an essayist in USA Today recently put it,

As someone who works in the world of words, I understand that their meaning – and use – can change over time. Yet, something I greatly resent is how the Republican Party has conflated Donald Trump with conservatism… To me, conservatism means a belief in free markets, individual liberty and limited government.

As a result of the party’s move toward neo-fascism and theocracy, authentic conservatives have found themselves homeless. Thoughtful conservatives–appalled by what the GOP has become and unwilling to call themselves Democrats–have nowhere to go. Many of them will vote Blue this year rather than holding their noses and voting for Trump (or, in Indiana, for our Hoosier Christian Nationalists). Some won’t vote at all.

The disaffection and homelessness of genuine conservatives will help Democrats this year, and in a year where our choices really are between good and evil, that’s something to celebrate. But going forward, the transformation of one of the major parties in a two-party system into an anti-democratic cult is a disaster, and not just for real conservatives.

Good policy requires negotiation and compromise among good-faith advocates of varying perspectives. Civic peace requires respect for democratic institutions. This country needs two adult parties equally committed to the democratic process.

It is increasingly doubtful that the GOP can be redeemed from its current status as the new Confederacy, but unless that happens– or a third party somehow emerges– genuine conservatives will remain homeless.

NOTICE: TOMORROW evening at 7:00 P.M. I will introduce a Zoom event featuring four candidates who have the ability to shift four seats in the Indiana House from Republican to Democrat and break the super-majority’s stranglehold:  Josh Lowry, District 24; Tiffany Stoner, District 25; Victoria Garcia Wilburn, District 32 (incumbent); and Matt McNally, District 39. I will begin the event by explaining why one-party rule keeps dragging Indiana in the wrong direction.

You can register here. There is no charge.

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Christian Nationalism And The Election

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has published a report titled American Values Atlas, summarizing research into support for Christian Nationalism in all 50 states. The report also examined how religion, party, education, race, and other factors intersect with Christian Nationalist views.

Here are a few of their findings.

  • Roughly three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers.
  • Residents of red states are significantly more likely than those in blue states to hold Christian nationalist beliefs.
  • Nearly four in ten residents of red states are Christian nationalists (14% Adherents and 24% Sympathizers); nearly twice the proportion of blue state residents. (Forty percent of Hoosiers!)
  • Support for Christian nationalism is strongly correlated with voting for Trump in the 2020 election.
  • At the national level, Christian nationalism is strongly linked to Republican party affiliation and holding favorable views of Trump.
  • Republicans (55%) are more than twice as likely as independents (25%) and three times as likely as Democrats (16%) to hold Christian nationalist views.
  • Christian nationalists are more likely than other Americans to see political struggles through the apocalyptic lens of revolution and to support political violence.

The full report enumerates the beliefs of Christian Nationalists, and I encourage you to click through, but perhaps a more forceful explanation of the movement was expressed in an article by Rick Perlstein in the American Prospect about one Right-wing apostate.

Matthew Sheffield was once a rising star in the conservative movement. As Perlstein notes, however, his career as a formidable “persuader” on the Right was doomed “because he cared about the truth.”

His damnable allergy to propaganda had already shown out by the time he came up with an idea for a study during a stint at Virginia Commonwealth University. It asked: Where Do Columnists Come From? “And my general thesis was that newspaper columnists who are on the right come out of political operations, and ones from the left come out of—journalism.” That is to say, they carry with them journalistic values of fairness and accuracy, by which conservative columnists remain blessedly unburdened.

The lengthy column traces Sheffield’s efforts on the Right and his eventual move to a reality-based Left. What finally led to his exit from the movement was his recognition of a central element of Christian Nationalism: a fundamentalism incompatible with reality.

When it comes to conservatism, “the one thing that non-Republicans don’t understand is that almost all of them are bizarre religious fundamentalists. Even the ones who don’t present that to you.” And that’s how they learn to reason: as fundamentalists. Sheffield saw it over and over again on the job…

The last straw was when Sheffield learned about a lawsuit evangelicals filed against a liberal church in North Carolina, before the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling, that was blessing gay unions. “I was just horrified at all the awful things they were saying, and how anti-American they were, how they literally don’t believe in freedom of religion,” he said. The conservatives’ argument was: “Unless you’re historically rooted in your doctrines, you don’t have religious freedoms.”

As Perlstein notes,

Liberals tend to maintain a lingering sentimental attachment to the idea that people calling themselves “Christians” are, well, Christian as the word is commonly understood outside the evangelical world. Faith, hope, and charity, turning the other cheek, that sort of thing. The people who most clearly understand and articulate their imperialist designs for the rest of us tend to be apostates like Sheffield, Matt Sitman, and Frank Schaeffer.

Sheffield was asked to explain to liberals how someone can be interested in the profession we call “public service” and not be interested in serving the public, and he replied “The core American reactionary motivation is that they want to force the public to obey their principles.”

The conservative movement, he says, is “100 percent controlled by extremists. And they are very, very wealthy. So they can afford to push a politics that almost no one believes in. We’re not to that point yet, but let’s just say that at some point in the future the Republican Party is not getting even 15 percent in elections. They’re rich enough, fanatical enough, that they wouldn’t change. They would just keep trying to push the same things. And it might get more extreme. It will get more extreme. They have no relationship to the political marketplace.”

Who needs mere votes when you’re in direct touch with God?

If PPRI’s research is correct, a third of the American public either fully endorses those beliefs or is sympathetic to them.

The last thing we need in this country are elections that empower the Micah Beckwiths among us–at any level. 

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The Depressing Truth

Yesterday, I wrote about my swings between optimism and pessimism as we approach November. I’ve now read a depressing article suggesting that even a “best-case” election result will not erase America’s Trumpist plague.

An article from The Bulwark began with the following quote from Philip Bump:

The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.

Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.

The author went on to agree. As he recounted, he’d originally viewed Trump as an aberration–after all, he’d gotten through the Republican primaries with pluralities, not majorities, of Republican votes, and he’d underperformed his poll numbers in virtually every primary. Large numbers of Republican voters hated him. He trailed Hillary Clinton in all of the polling. All of these data points led him to conclude that Trump would lose the 2016 general election, that in the wake of that loss the GOP establishment would take measures against those who’d supported him, and the Party would go back to being the Party  of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.

As the author candidly admits, he was wrong on all counts.

My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.

By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.

This was a true innovation. Prior to Trump, no one had viewed minority rule as a viable electoral strategy.

His second mistake was his belief that party elders would expel or neuter those who had supported Trump. As he now recognizes, that mistake wasn’t simply because Trump won. “It was wrong because the real war was not the general election, but a Republican civil war between traditional Republicans and those who wanted “grievance-based political violence.”

The grievance aspect was important because it meant that Trump could deliver to his voters even if he lost. Trump understood that Republican voters now existed in a post-policy space in which they viewed politics as a lifestyle brand. And this lifestyle brand did not require holding electoral office…

So no, there were never going to be recriminations against conservatives and Republicans who had collaborated with Trump. The recriminations would run in the opposite direction: The forces of Trumpism would continue to own the Republican party and anti-Trumpers would continue to be driven out. (Unless they chose to convert.)

That led to a third mistake: believing that the Republican Party would revert to its previous identity as a normal, center-Right political party. He now believes there is no going back.

If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.

We can’t control the future. And we can’t control the Republican party. All we can control is ourselves.

Which starts with being clear-eyed about reality and the work ahead.

The essay confirmed my reluctant realization that far more of the American electorate falls into that “grievance-based” category than I want to believe. Americans aren’t simply engaged in a Presidential campaign, but a much longer, more protracted struggle for the soul of the nation.

Even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win in November, those of us who define patriotism as allegiance to the philosophy of our founding principles will have to contend with the White “Christian” Nationalists who want to abandon those principles in favor of an autocratic, theocratic vision that accords them social and cultural dominance. (If you don’t believe me about that “vision,” take a look at Project 2025. Or–if you live in Indiana– read statements from Micah Beckwith or Jim Banks.)

November is just Round One. That said, winning it decisively is an absolutely essential first step.

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