racism – Sheila Kennedy

Occam’s Razor Again

A few days ago, I mentioned “Occam’s Razor,” the principle that the explanation of an event or condition that requires the fewest assumptions is usually the one that’s correct. (Wikipedia tells us that “Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation. Occam’s razor applies especially in the philosophy of science, but also appears in everyday life.”)

In the years since the election of 2016, I have come ever-more-firmly to the conclusion that the explanation of MAGA–as predicted by the principle of Occam’s Razor, not to mention common sense– is racism.

There are reasons so many well-meaning Americans fail to understand this. As Rick Perlstein recently wrote, much of that failure can be attributed to coverage by the traditional media.

This failure, as I have been imploring, represents a deeply ingrained pattern, betokening a broader civic problem. In the weeks following Barack Obama’s election in 2008, America suffered an epidemic of racially motivated hate crimes: 200, all told, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. You may not have heard about that, because it was woefully undercovered by the gatekeeping organs of American political journalism. It was crowded out by their chosen narrative: that with the election of an African American president, we had overcome.

In the nation’s vaunted Newspaper of Record, a record of that portentous violence was particularly scant—even when it occurred in New York City, on the night of Obama’s victory, when a roving mob on Staten Island committed three separate assaults on minorities. The last victim they thumped onto the hood of an automobile; he spent the next month in a coma. The New York Times only ever mentioned the crime two months later, tucked away in the “New York Region” section, when the alleged perpetrators were arraigned.

I am actually somewhat sympathetic to the “we have overcome” narrative; it was certainly my initial reaction to that election. Unfortunately for its accuracy, subsequent research has painted a very different story. While many Americans (I hope and believe a majority) rejoiced at what we thought was evidence of progress, it turned out that Obama’s election operated to surface a significant and virulent racism that had been (thinly) veiled by what was then called “political correctness” and is now vilified as “wokeness.”

I recently came across an article about yet another academic study underlining the role of “racial resentment” in our current, ugly, polarized political time.

“Stop the Steal: Racial Resentment, Affective Partisanship, and Investigating the January 6th Insurrection,” relied on a national survey of adults in the US conducted in 2021. As the Guardian has reported,

Political observers are quick to blame hyperpartisanship and political polarization for leading more than 2,000 supporters of Donald Trump to riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

But according to a recently published study, “racial resentment” – not just partisanship – explains the violence that broke out after the 2020 election.

Angered over the claim, promoted by Trump and his closest allies, that heavily Black cities had rigged the 2020 election in favor of Democrats, white voters – some affiliated with white-nationalist groups and militias, and others acting alone – stormed the US capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election.

“What Trump and Republicans did was they tried to make the point that something nefarious was going on in areas that were primarily African American,” said David Wilson, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who published the study with Darren Davis, a professor of political science at Notre Dame.

The entire appeal of the MAGA movement has been a play on racist resentments: affirmative action and other remedial measures are really efforts to “rob” Whites, taxation of the wealthy is a ruse to enable “redistribution” to unworthy Black folks, immigration is an effort to “replace” White Christians, elections of the “wrong” people have obviously been rigged…Whatever “polite” justifications voters offer for supporting Trump, the real reason, when you peel the onion, is that he hates the people they hate: Jews, Gays, Muslims…and especially, always, Black and Brown people.

The research cited by the Guardian confirmed numerous other studies that have found a major, positive correlation between racialized resentment and support for Trump and MAGA. The potential effects of that resentment for democracy were suggested by a hair-raising quotation in the final paragraph:

“If you can get people to believe that democracy is about your freedom, and that the government is taking that away through taxes, through policies, through regulatory efforts, and [even] by fixing and rigging elections, you can stoke their resentment and they can even come to resent democracy.”

If democracy helps “them,” then democracy must go….

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And The Evidence Mounts….

Yesterday, I posted about the 2018 book How Democracies Die. My “take-aways” were twofold: first, the authors located the source of today’s efforts to install an autocracy in the racism that has long been identified as America’s “original sin,” and second, they identified warning signs of institutional and normative breakdown.

Several things have changed since 2018, of course, and some of those changes have been positive. Biden’s victory in 2020–a resounding popular victory despite the desperate efforts of Trump and MAGA voters to de-legitimize it–and the failure of the much-anticipated “Red wave” in 2022 come immediately to mind. But other signs are more ominous–especially the pathetic acquiescence of elected Republicans to Trump’s and the far-Right’s increasingly public racism, and the unprecedented and blatantly-partisan behavior of members of the judiciary.

Two examples from just the past week.

The Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, pardoned Daniel Perry, who had been convicted of murder for fatally shooting a demonstrator during a Black Lives Matter protest. Perry had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing Garrett Foster in downtown Austin in July 2020. Abbott’s hand-picked Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously in favor of the pardon.

Witnesses at the trial had testified that the man Perry shot had never raised his weapon, and according to court records, in the weeks leading up to the protests, Perry had sent multiple racist messages about protesters, shared white supremacist memes and talked about how he “might have to kill a few people” who were demonstrating. In one, he compared the Black Lives Matter movement to “a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit.”

Abbot’s pardon sends a strong–and horrifying–message: in Texas, elected officials will protect racists. Even murderous ones.

Then there’s the even more horrifying disclosure that–in the wake of the January 6th insurrection– a “Stop the Steal” symbol flew on Justice Samuel Alito’s lawn.

You need not be a lawyer to share Robert Hubbell’s reaction:

As a Supreme Court justice, Alito has been unapologetic in his efforts to defend Trump’s lawlessness. He has risen to Trump’s defense with gleeful spite and unveiled resentment against those seeking to hold Trump accountable under the Constitution.

On Thursday, the New York Times revealed that Alito’s home displayed an upside-down US flag during the fraught days after the January 6 insurrection. At the time, flying the US flag upside down was a symbol calling to “Stop the Steal” of the 2020 election from Trump. It was a call to insurrection—proudly displayed by a US Supreme Court justice sworn to defend and protect the Constitution. See New York Times, At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.

In response to an inquiry from the Times, Alito said, I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag.
Notably, Alito did not deny the veracity of the photograph of the flag flying upside down on his lawn. He did not deny the symbolism of the upside-down flag. He did not deny that he was aware of its continued presence in front of his house. Instead, he blamed his wife, whom he claimed flew the “Stop the Steal” banner in response to anti-Trump signs in the neighborhood.

Alito’s response to the Times is a lie. He owns the flag. He owns the flagpole. He owns the property on which the flag was displayed. He permitted it to remain on display on his property. He, therefore, did have “involvement” in “flying the flag.” It does not matter that it was his wife who physically raised the “Stop the Steal” banner on the flagpole. Alito’s hair-splitting denial is misleading and incomplete—and therefore false.

As Hubbell notes, this leaves us with a second Supreme Court Justice whose spouse actively supported an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Those justices—Alito and Thomas—are currently considering Trump’s presidential immunity defense to the indictment alleging that Trump attempted to subvert the election. Under any reasonable reading of Code of Conduct that applies to Supreme Court justices, Alito and Thomas should have recused themselves long ago (under Canons 2 and 3).

In a very real sense, Americans are still fighting the Civil War. Today’s Confederates are more geographically scattered, and the incidents of bloodshed and violence are being perpetrated by individual MAGA racists rather than by an organized Rebel army, but the White Supremacy beliefs motivating the combatants haven’t changed. More worrisome still, years of partisan efforts to subvert racial and religious equality and the rule of law have led to utterly scandalous, unethical, and judicially-unforgivable behaviors by two Justices of the highest court in the land–a profoundly dangerous institutional breakdown.

This is how democracies die.

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It’s All About Race

I’ve been working my way through the numerous books–both the physical ones and the ones on my Kindle–that have been piling up on my nightstand, and I’ve just finished How Democracies Die. It’s a book that has generated a lot of discussion, for obvious reasons. The two scholars who wrote it in 2018, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zimblatt, have spent their academic careers focusing on the ups and downs of democratic governments around the globe. That focus has allowed them to draw conclusions about the normative elements that serve as guardrails protecting democratic institutions, and about the signs warning of democratic collapse.

There’s a lot to absorb from the book’s copious descriptions of democratic failures in a wide variety of countries–and the authors make no bones about the reality of the threat to American institutions posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It’s all pretty grim–and entirely persuasive.

That said, I was particularly struck by one of the book’s central observations–probably because it confirms my strong belief that support for Trump/MAGA is almost entirely rooted in racism.

About halfway through the book, the authors identified two democratic norms that are essential to a functioning democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. In other words, acknowledging the legitimacy of one’s political opponents, and “forbearing” to abuse or over-use institutional weapons like the filibuster or Mitch McConnell’s legal but shockingly undemocratic theft of a Supreme Court seat. Extreme polarization erodes those norms; as they write, when societies sort themselves into political camps whose world-views aren’t just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain.

When the authors analyzed what had allowed America’s politicians to sustain basic democratic norms for a period running roughly from the collapse of Reconstruction through the 1980s, they came to a very troubling conclusion–that during that time period, “The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion.” To the extent that America operated with bipartisanship and experienced reduced polarization during that extended time period, those outcomes “came at the cost of keeping civil rights off the political agenda.”

In the final paragraph of Chapter Six, they write

America’s democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.

That paragraph confirms what a growing body of research has verified–and what any semi-sentient observer can see. The election of Barack Obama unleashed the overt expression of formerly-suppressed hatreds. It seeded the growth of White Christian nationalism, the huge reaction against anything seen as “woke,” the efforts to de-legitimatize efforts at inclusion–and explains the utter inability of most reasonable, non-racist Americans to understand the animus and fury of the MAGA movement.

That paragraph explains so much–as does a sentence in the final chapter, in which the authors concede that it is “difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities give up their dominant status without a fight.”

Even a cursory look at the current crop of GOP nominees up and down the various state ballots shows them publicly expressing opinions that would have been met with horror not all that long ago. Anti-Black, anti-Semitic, homophobic…meanwhile, the numerous Republican campaigns expressing hostility to immigration from the south hardly bother to veil their racism.

It’s been a long time since the Civil War. It’s been a long time since the South was able to dismantle Reconstruction. These days, the country’s accelerating social and demographic changes are making it increasingly difficult to maintain the dominance of White Christians. It’s the recognition of–and hysterical reaction to– that reality that explains Trump and MAGA. How Democracies Die warns us of the way that movement threatens not just social peace/tolerance, but the continued operation of America’s democratic institutions.

I keep thinking about that slogan “The South will rise again.”

It did. It’s now called the Republican Party, and How Democracies Die documents a lesson we have yet to learn: the persistence of this country’s deep-seated racism poses an existential threat to human decency, civic equality and the continuation of American democracy.

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Why Does Anyone Support This Buffoon?

I don’t get it.

Read a recent, snarky Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post. It began with a visit to Trump-speak–a language bearing less and less relationship to American English.

The Very Stable Genius is glitching again.

This week, he announced that he is not — repeat, NOT — planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He apparently forgot that he had vowed over and over again to do exactly that, saying as recently as a few months ago that Republicans “should never give up” on efforts to “terminate” Obamacare.

“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” the Republican nominee wrote this week on his Truth Social platform. Rather, he said, he wants to make Obamacare better for “OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS.”

Joe Buden disinformates and misinformates? For a guy trying to make an issue of his opponent’s mental acuity, this was not, shall we say, a grest look.

Milbank offered some additional examples of Trump-speak: “We’ll bring crime back to law and order,” “We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after a Tuesday already,” and “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season.”

Whenever I am reminded of Trump’s intellectual lapses and/or his inability to use the English language, I marvel that this is the guy MAGA folks think should control the nuclear codes….

Much of Milbank’s column was focused on Trump’s selective memory. When he recently recited the time-honored political question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Milbank theorized that he’d “forgotten all about the economic collapse and his administration’s catastrophic bungling of the pandemic.”

As the Supreme Court was hearing arguments about banning the abortion pill, Trump also conveniently “forgot” his previous emphatic support for that ban, and his proposal to ban it fortuitously disappeared from his web site. Given that polling shows some 7 in 10 Americans opposed to such a ban, the Heritage Foundation also experienced a website “glitch” that conveniently obscured that part of the Foundation’s Plan for 2025.

As Milbank wrote,

The Heritage Foundation-run Project 2025, to which Trump has unofficially outsourced policymaking for a second term, said that a “glitch” had caused its policies — including those embracing a mifepristone ban — to disappear from its website. The Biden campaign said it was “calling BS on Trump and his allies’ shameless attempt to hide their agenda,” and the missing documents returned — including the language calling abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children” and vowing to withdraw regulatory approval for the drugs.

Evidently, the House Republicans didn’t get the polling memo.

The extremism isn’t just at Project 2025, stocked with former Trump advisers. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, put out a budget last week that would rescind approval of mifepristone, dismantle the “failed Obamacare experiment” and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.

Sometimes its a convenient loss of memory; other times, it’s obvious mental illness compounded by jaw-dropping ignorance. Take Trump’s “explanation” of why Truth Social’s stock wasn’t listed on the New York Stock Exchange:

He said he didn’t list the company on the New York Stock Exchange because it would be “treated too badly in New York” by Democratic officeholders. So he instead listed the company on Nasdaq, which is based in … New York. Trump said the “top person” at the NYSE “is mortified. … He said, ‘I’m losing business.’ ” As CNN pointed out, neither the president nor the chair of the exchange is a “he.”

Then there’s the most recent grift: selling bibles.

Trump is getting kickbacks for selling the Gospel — marketing God the same way he sold Trump-branded “Never Surrender High-Tops” sneakers last month for $399 a pair and, before that, digital trading cards showing Trump as a superhero.

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video promoting his new bible hustle.

Trump’s campaign shows a video at rallies announcing that “God Gave us Trump,” and he has called himself “the chosen one.” He’s shared a post calling him “the second greatest” after Jesus. And Milbank reports that Trump recently posted a verse from Psalms, topped by a message likening Trump’s suffering in the fraud case to the Crucifixion.

There’s much, much more–but it all begs the question: who in their right mind looks at this pathetic sociopath with his limited (and rapidly declining) intellect and his God complex and says “yes, that’s my guy!”? Is giving his supporters permission to express their racism and hostility to “elitists” really enough to outweigh the daily evidence of his manifest unfitness?

I don’t get it.

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About Those “Outsiders”

In Indiana, Republican candidates for Governor and Congress are spending megabucks on increasingly horrifying political ads. (Forget “dog whistles”–the ads for Governor, especially, are blatantly racist). Although it’s difficult to choose the very worst, a candidate for Congress in Indiana’s Fifth District probably wins that close vote: he faults the incumbent for sending tax dollars to Ukraine when we have an enormous problem in the U.S.– trans women competing in women’s sports.

Glad he has a sense of proportion…

Interestingly, the gubernatorial candidates’ attacks on each other have been for taking the few positions with which I actually agree, a tactic that certainly shows what they believe their base Republican voters think. If they’re correct, those voters are “base” in both senses of the word.

If there is a “through line” in these awful ads, however, it is the repeated claims to be “outsiders” rather than “career politicians.” It’s a laughable label for most of them: Braun has been a Senator for six years (granted, an undistinguished one, but it’s been six years) and he was a state legislator before that; Crouch was a County Auditor, served nine years in Indiana’s legislature and is currently Lieutenant Governor; Brad Chambers–who has really leaned on his “outsider” status–was Indiana’s Secretary of Commerce. Etc.

Not only are these claims to outsider status bogus, they’re stupid. Would you hire a job applicant who proudly proclaimed ignorance of your business and emphasized a prior lack of experience?

James Briggs recently addressed this issue, somewhat tangentially, in a column for the Indianapolis Star. Briggs was talking about his opposition to term limits–an opposition I share–but his reasoning is pertinent to the posturing of these “outsider” candidates. As he wrote:

State Rep. Chuck Goodrich, a Republican running in Indiana’s 5th District primary against Rep. Victoria Spartz, recently bragged about signing a term limits pledge, adding, “It’s time to break the grip of career politicians & ensure elected officials serve the people, not their own interests!”

That’s completely wrong.

A 2006 National Conference of State Legislatures report looked at states with legislative term limits and concluded “high turnover and relative inexperience create a steep learning curve for committee chairs and members, who are often less knowledgeable than their predecessors,” which “can result in increased influence by staff, bureaucrats and lobbyists.”

Essentially, term limits take power from the career politicians and hand it over to people who are less accountable to the public.

In Congress, the “newbies” are inevitably dependent upon and influenced by Congressional staff, who are familiar with the arcane rules of that body– and unelected by and unknown to the voting public.

Much like term limits, it’s popular to say the government should run like a business. I can’t think of any other economic sector where you’d find strong agreement for the statement, “The more experience you have, the worse you must be at your job.” We have a lot of job openings at IndyStar and I can assure you no one is running around yelling, “Find me some journalism outsiders!”

Briggs points out what most of us know: a professional body is more effective when it’s run by people who know what they’re doing.

The longer lawmakers serve in those jobs, the more they can learn how to navigate complex webs of rules and systems. They can also gain policy expertise, which is helpful for creating laws affecting virtually every part of people’s lives. They can develop relationships to help advance their goals.

The problems we face with government, especially in Indiana, aren’t a result of legislative longevity: they are a result of gerrymandering and low voter turnout. Briggs is dead-on with this paragraph:

Obviously, some elected officials don’t deserve to stay in office forever. The ills attributed to unlimited elected terms can more appropriately be linked to partisan gerrymandering, which creates safe spaces for ineffective, lazy and corrupt officials to win election after election. Yes, term limits would eventually knock those people out. So would competitive elections.

Let me repeat that last sentence: So would competitive elections.

I miss “career politicians” like Dick Lugar and Lee Hamilton. Joe Biden has been able to pass transformative legislation because he is a “career politician” who understands how government works, and how to get things done. I don’t know which of Indiana’s “know-nothing” Republicans will wind up on the general election ballot, but this year, for once, the Democrats have an unusually strong state ticket featuring experienced public servants who actually know how government works and what the positions they’re running for entail. They are also right on the issues.

Vote Blue, and make the GOP candidates actual outsiders.

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