The “Great Replacement” Fixation

I first encountered the “Great Replacement” theory when I read about the neo-Nazi, “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville. The marchers–bearing tiki torches–reportedly chanted “Jews will not replace us.” (Those chanting were subsequently called “very fine people” by then-President Donald Trump.)

Since I never watch Fox News, I’d missed Tucker Carlson’s full-throated endorsement of that particular conspiracy theory, but as time as passed, I’ve come to understand its roots, and the reason it appeals to White Americans terrified by the prospect of losing cultural dominance. America’s demographics are changing, and it is probable that Whites will be a minority population within a few years. Meanwhile, legal and cultural changes have allowed women and minority folks–Blacks, Jews, Latinos, LGBTQ+ citizens–to become more prominent. Television anchors, elected officials, movie stars and various other celebrities  increasingly come from groups that have been previously marginalized.

It’s no longer possible to ignore these changes.

The result is a palpable panic on the part of those Whites–mostly men, but also some women–who believe that their rightful place in society has been usurped. And that fear of replacement, that realization that they will need to share status with people they disparage, requires a villain. It can’t simply be an accident that “those people” are gaining in numbers and influence. It must be a plot!!

Jamelle Bouie recently wrote about Elon Musk’s obvious fascination with and belief in the “Great Replacement Theory.” Musk recently elevated a slick propaganda film pushing the theory on X (formerly Twitter), confirming the devolution of that site into a cesspool of far-Right anti-Semitism and racism.

Musk is especially preoccupied with the racial makeup of the country and the alleged deficiency of nonwhites in important positions. He blames the recent problems at Boeing, for example, on its efforts to diversify its work force, despite easily accessible and widely publicized accounts of a dangerous culture of cost-cutting and profit-seeking at the company….

Is diversity the problem at Boeing, or is it a shortsighted obsession with maximizing shareholder value at the expense of quality and safety? Musk, a wealthy shareholder in various companies — including his own, Tesla, which is being sued by Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for allegedly allowing racist abuse of some of its Black employees — says it’s diversity.

Bouie goes on to discuss Musk’s “current obsession” with the “great replacement,” the far-right accusation that liberal elites are “deliberately opening the southern border to nonwhite immigration from Mexico, South and Central America in order to replace the nation’s white majority and secure permanent control of its political institutions.”

The “great replacement” was part of the centerpiece of Tucker Carlson’s message to viewers during his time on Fox News. It is touted by a number of anti-immigrant, white nationalist and white supremacist groups. It was featured prominently at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” And it has inspired at least four separate mass shootings, including the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (11 killed), the 2019 Christchurch shootings in New Zealand (51 killed), the El Paso shooting the same year (23 killed) and the 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo (10 killed).

It should go without saying that the “great replacement” is idiotic. There is no “open border.” There is no effort to “replace” the white population of the United States. Racial diversity is not a plot against the nation’s political institutions. And the underlying assumption of the “great replacement” — that, until recently, the United States was a racially and culturally homogenous nation — is nonsense.

Not only does acceptance of the theory require people to ignore inconvenient facts, it rests–as Bouie points out–on a fundamental fallacy: that racial and ethnic identity also and inevitably translates into political identity. In other words, it assumes that Blacks and Latinos will always vote for Democrats.

I think Bouie has identified the most consequential flaw of today’s GOP.

Republicans used to understand that politics is the art of addition–that winning a political contest requires reaching out to independents and others–including minorities– who haven’t previously voted for you. Instead, MAGA Republicans are doubling down on subtraction; not only do they fail to reach out to members of minorities who might consider supporting their candidates (the Black community, for example, is overall fairly socially conservative), they are even doing their best to expel “RINOs” –including anyone who dares to criticize Trump– from what has become a defensive cult.

The irony is that the GOP is hastening the day when a replacement will actually occur–the replacement of the GOP with a sane center-Right political party.

A large enough defeat in November will speed that process.

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A Bill Passes. Then What Happens?

Making policy–passing laws–requires a series of decisions. It begins with (and is often stymied by failure to reach) an agreement on the existence, nature and extent of the problem to be solved. When lawmakers do see the same problem, and agree on why something is a problem, they then have to come to some consensus on what action is needed to solve or ameliorate that problem. Then–in our age of “privatization”–they need to determine who should enforce the agreed-upon remedy. Should those empowered to deliver the new service or oversee compliance with the newly-passed regulation be government employees, or should that obligation be vested in the private or non-profit sector?

And finally, once the problem has been identified, a solution agreed upon, the means of enforcement determined, and the law passed, a sound policy process will vet how the new law performs–evaluate its effectiveness in actually addressing the original problem, and noting–and ideally correcting–any negative unanticipated effects.

This process will inevitably involve debate and discussion, and in an era of technological and social complexity, creating sound policy increasingly requires careful attention to sources of specialized expertise in the matter at hand.

Unfortunately, today’s Republicans and Democrats can’t even agree on what time it is, let alone what our actual problems are. The GOP buffoons who increasingly dominate America’s legislative chambers ignore virtually all the “grunt work” needed for sound policymaking. When they aren’t fundraising, preening for Faux News cameras or producing television ads blaming “others” for real and imagined social problems, they are using legislative tactics to block rather than produce policies.

(This is frustrating for all serious citizens, of course, but I spent the last 21 years of my career teaching policy, and watching the total abandonment of actual governance in favor of performative antics is beyond painful.)

It’s one thing to outline the steps of the policy process, as I’ve done above. But just as a (non-AI) picture can be worth a thousand words, a real-life example can be more illustrative than an abstract process outline. So let’s look at a tax bill that Trump still touts as evidence of…something.

As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy explains:

The tax overhaul signed into law by former President Donald Trump in 2017 cut the federal corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but during the first five years it has been in effect, most profitable corporations paid considerably less than that. This is mainly due to loopholes and special breaks that the 2017 tax law left in place and, in some cases, introduced. Corporate tax avoidance occurs because Congress allows it to occur, and the Trump tax law in many ways made it worse.

Tax policy is one of many intractable dividing lines between Republicans and Democrats, and it is a given that the tax overhaul of 2017 was not a product of agreement over the nature of the problem. Republicans think the problem is that businesses have to pay too much; Democrats think the problem is that wealthy folks aren’t paying their fair share. Clearly, a tax cut for profitable businesses is not the result of agreement on the nature of the problem. But the linked report focuses on the part of the policy process that both parties–and the Keystone Kops in Congress–routinely ignore.

How is it working?

The Institute looked at taxes paid by profitable corporations.

  • The 342 companies included in this study paid an average effective income tax rate of just 14.1 percent during this five-year period, almost a third less than the statutory rate of 21 percent.
  • Nearly a quarter of the corporations in this study (87 companies) paid effective tax rates in the single digits or less during this five-year period.
  • Of these, 55 (16 percent of the total 342 companies) paid effective rates of less than 5 percent. This is particularly striking given that all these companies were profitable for at least five years consecutively. Companies paying less than 5 percent include T-Mobile, DISH Network, Netflix, General Motors, AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, Molson Coors, Nike, and many others.
  • Twenty-three corporations paid zero federal tax over the five-year period despite being profitable in every single year. And 109 corporations paid zero federal tax in at least one of the five years.
  • At the other end of the spectrum, 50 corporations paid effective tax rates of more than 21 percent, but most of these companies were also the beneficiaries of large tax breaks because they were paying taxes from previous years that they delayed using depreciation breaks.

One obvious “fix” for this would be passage of the global minimum tax negotiated by the Biden administration that’s currently being blocked by GOP lawmakers more interested in currying favor with special interests than engaging in the policy process.

Americans deserve better.

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My Mother Was Right…

As I used to tell my own children, you should always listen to your mother.

My sister and I were the products of a politically “mixed marriage.” Mother was a Republican and Dad was a Democrat, and they often ended up casting votes that cancelled each other out. There was a limit to our mother’s political conservatism, however–she was deeply suspicious of what she called the “fringe Right,” the Birchers and others who were then seen by the broad majority of the party as kooks and crazies.

Mother didn’t live long enough to see those kooks and crazies complete their takeover of the Republican Party and chase out the more moderate folks we used to lump together as “country club Republicans”– some who were philosophical conservatives and others whose business interests had turned them into anti-tax, “trickle-down” true believers.

Everything my mother thought about what was then the far-Right “fringe” has turned out to be correct. Only worse.

I was reminded of her long-ago criticisms when I read a recent article in Talking Points Memo. (Apologies if this is one of the articles behind the paywall for subscribers only.) The article began:

Whiplash-inducing breaks from long-held party positions have become the norm in today’s Republican Party.

From former president Donald Trump to emerging voices such as Senator J.D. Vance, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, and North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, a wave of politicians and activists have signaled an abandonment of Republican orthodoxy on issues that once defined the party.

The party of free trade has become protectionist. The party of Cold Warriors has increasingly backed Russia and opposed aiding Ukraine. The party of less government has grown conflicted about where it stands on Social Security and Medicare.

How can not just a party, but its voters, suddenly change direction on so many bedrock issues?

Or have they?

Ben Bradford, who wrote the column, hosts a podcast series called “Landslide.” He proceeded to answer his own question,  asserting that the current Republican Party does not, in fact, represent a change or reversal of course–rather, in his opinion, it represents an evolution. “What seems like a shift on fundamental issues” he says, “is the latest expression of the same underlying force that has propelled voters for nearly half a century.”

Bradford takes readers back fifty years, to the mid-1970s and the “New Right,” reminding us of their opposition to a “range of the era’s social and cultural changes: school integration, new textbooks, gun laws, the women’s rights movement, gay and lesbian rights, and — eventually — abortion.”

New Right organizations included Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and the NRA’s further-right cousin, the Gun Owners of America. It also included many of the same conservative groups that push policy positions and drive national debates today: the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the National Right-to-Life Committee, to name just a handful. These groups shared many of the same founders. Harper’s Magazine described their organizational charts as “an octopus shaking hands with itself.”

Two things that were “new” about the New Right were direct-mail fundraising and–especially– culture war.

The New Right was organized around social and cultural backlash. It created a link between activists working for seemingly unrelated causes–for example, opponents of abortion and opponents of gun laws. Howard Phillips described the goal of the New Right as “organizing discontent.” At a time when the major political parties were still trying to downplay hot-button social and cultural issues, the New Right created a coalition based upon voters’ backlash to culture change.

The article argues that it was a tactic that changed the nature of American conservatism.

Bradford goes on to document how the New Right saved Ronald Reagan’s campaign–a campaign animated by a backlash against a changing culture.

The message of a better past endangered by a changing culture would not feel out of place coming from Republican candidates today. And, the issues they emphasize — opposing the contents of textbooks, the use of race in school admissions, and transgender rights, among others — are the modern descendants of those 50 years ago.

As my mother would have added, that “backlash” coalition wasn’t just angry about social change; it was also a hotbed of bigotry–it was racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic. If it ever gained power, she warned us, Americans who weren’t straight White Christians would be endangered.

Well, they’ve gained power– and proved her point.

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Well, it appears I’ve missed an intriguing element of those abysmal “ad wars” being waged among candidates for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

Apparently, Eric Doden’s most recent weird ad–in which he highlights his support for qualified immunity (and anything police might ever do) is based upon the only position Braun took during his six years as a Senator with which I actually agree–he sponsored a bill that would narrow the application of that doctrine. In the current primary contest, that’s a vulnerability.

What’s that old saying? No good deed goes unpunished.

I’ve addressed qualified immunity previously. To recap: The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was a Reconstruction era-effort to address what one court termed the “reign of terror imposed by the Klan upon black citizens and their white sympathizers in the Southern States.” That law is now  known to practicing lawyers–especially civil rights lawyers– as Section 1983. It  gives citizens the right to sue state and local officials for depriving them of their constitutional rights, and to collect damages and legal fees if they prevail.

That’s great, except for the fact that the Supreme Court began to eviscerate the law more than 50 years ago with a doctrine it dubbed “qualified immunity.” As a judge in one case noted, it might just as well be called “absolute immunity.” Ruth Marcus explained it in a Washngton Post article a few years ago:

Nothing in the text of the 1871 statute provides for immunity — not a single word — but the court imported common-law protections in 1967 to shield officials operating in good faith.

Then, in 1982, it went further. To be held liable, it’s not enough to prove that a police officer violated someone’s constitutional rights; the right must be so “clearly established” that “every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right.” There must be a case on point, except that how can there be a case on point if there wasn’t one already in existence. This is Catch-22 meets Section 1983.

Numerous justices across the ideological spectrum — Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor — have criticized the doctrine. But the court has appeared unwilling to do anything about it. As its term concluded, the court refused to hear any of the eight cases offering it the opportunity to reconsider the doctrine.

 Lawsuits for damages are a crucial method for protecting everyone’s constitutional rights. Qualified immunity–protection against a damages verdict– is what lawyers call “an affirmative defense”–it can prevent the court from assessing damages even if the officer clearly committed unlawful acts.

In 1982, in a case called Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the Court established the modern application of the doctrine. Ignoring precedents that examined the “subjective good faith” of the officer being sued, the court adopted a new “objective” test. After Harlow, a plaintiff had to show that the defendant’s conduct “violate[d] clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Ever since Harlow, the court has required plaintiffs to cite to an already existing judicial decision with substantially similar facts.

As a result, the first person to litigate a specific harm is out of luck, since the “first time around, the right violated won’t be ‘clearly established.’” A post on Lawfare gave an example.

A recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit illustrates this point. In that case, a SWAT team fired tear gas grenades into a plaintiff’s home, causing extensive damage. And while the divided three-judge panel assumed that the SWAT officers had in fact violated the plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment rights, it nonetheless granted qualified immunity to the officers because it determined that the precedents the plaintiff relied on did not clearly establish a violation “at the appropriate level of specificity.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor called qualified immunity a “one-sided approach” that “transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.” The doctrine “sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”

One legal scholar has characterized the doctrine as a “through-the-looking-glass” example of jurisprudence that doesn’t simply excuse police violations of constitutional rights, doesn’t just grant police an exception to the axiom that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” but that actually incentivizes law enforcement to remain oblivious to the rights of the people they serve.

I will admit to surprise–shock, really–that Braun understood the pernicious effects of this judge-made doctrine, and the way it encourages reckless police behavior. It is beyond ironic that his one bit of sensible behavior has become his biggest vulnerability in this primary. 

But no problem! His recent ads–showing slavish support for police and “law and order”– confirm that Braun is always about politics and never about integrity.

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Crime And Politics

In Indianapolis, municipal elections are held during otherwise “off” political years. Last year we were treated to an effort by  Jefferson Shreve, a rich Republican, to win the Mayor’s office. His campaign ads leaned heavily on assertions that our city was crime-ridden; given the Democratic tilt of the city electorate, the ads did make visible efforts to veil their more racist elements.

Despite spending $13 million dollars of his own money, Shreve failed to exceed the GOP’s base vote, so this year, he’s running for Congress. It’s a barely-purple district, and his television ads are much more explicitly “anti-woke.” Like most Republicans running for office this year, he’s clearly counting on anti-immigrant bias and an entirely bogus insistence that immigrants are the source of an (equally-bogus) American crime wave. 

He’s not alone in that dishonesty.

 NBC recently deconstructed Trump’s assertions of immigrant-fueled crime, reviewing expert analysis and available data from major-city police departments that show zero evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States. To the contrary, available data shows overall crime levels dropping in cities that have received the most migrants.  See also, Scientific American, (12/7/20) Undocumented Immigrants Are Half as Likely to Be Arrested for Violent Crimes as U.S.-Born Citizens.

When you think about it, it makes sense that people who are undocumented would want to keep a very low profile, in order to avoid deportation.

Another analysis of the available data confirms both the bogus nature of these claims and the political motivation for raising them.

The Republican Party wanted to run a 2024 election campaign on inflation and the economy. That made some sense in June 2022, when inflation was at a 40-year high of 9.1 percent. But now inflation has fallen to 3.1 percent, and unemployment has been below 4 percent for 24 months. Banging on about prices and the economy no longer seems like a winning strategy.

So the GOP has pivoted back to its standard tactics: fear-mongering, scapegoating, and bigotry.

Fox News is no longer talking about high prices 24/7. It now apparently believes the central problem of our day is … immigrant crime.

Public Notice publisher Aaron Rupar counted 27 mentions of “migrant crime” on Wednesday alone across Fox News and Fox Business. “Migrant Crime Sparks New Outrage Across US” one chyron screamed; the segment included giant mugshots of immigrant Latino men accused of crimes. Hosts hit President Biden for not discussing “migrant crime” during a speech he gave that day.

“It’s difficult to convince Americans that they are safe or becoming safer when they do not feel safe in this nation,” John Roberts proclaimed.

Americans don’t feel safe because Republican candidates constantly lie to them about their safety. These candidates have concluded that the only way they can win is by playing on racism and fear of crime–by creating a moral panic. There is absolutely no data supporting their accusations.

A 2020 Cato study of Texas found that for native-born Americans, conviction rates were 1,422 per 100,000. For undocumented immigrants, the rate was much lower — only 782 per 100,000.  And for legal immigrants, the rate was 535 per 100,000. Cato found that immigrants were less likely to commit violent crimes, property crimes, homicides, and sexual assaults than people born in the United States.

A 2023 Stanford study found similar results when it looked at imprisonment rates going back to 1830. Immigrants have basically always been imprisoned at lower rates; today, they are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the US. That’s in part because Black people are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system. But even if you just look at the incarceration rates of white people born in the US, immigrants are imprisoned 30 percent less.

Migrant crime is much less of a problem than crime by native-born people. But even native-born Americans are committing fewer crimes; crime rates overall are down.

Murder rates in 2023 fell by more than 12 percent from 2022, among the biggest recorded drops. Other violent crimes also decreased. Retailers claimed that there was a huge increase in shoplifting in the last few years — but that turns out to have been almost entirely a myth

As the linked article notes, GOP rhetoric may not be based in fact, but it does have (an unsavory) basis in demagoguery and racism. Linking marginalized groups to crime to build power and justify violence is, unfortunately, nothing new.

Of course, migrants do commit some crimes. In a country with some 45 million immigrants, it’s easy to find a handful of mugshots to put on your screen. But the scare tactic is nonetheless a scare tactic; there is not a sweeping crime wave perpetrated by immigrants. To say otherwise is a lie.

The GOP’s recent refusal to pass a border control measure that gave them virtually everything they’d demanded so that they can run on the issue really gives the game away.

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