Republicans – Sheila Kennedy

Will Endorsements Matter?

In traditional election cycles, endorsements–generally issued by newspapers–rarely moved votes. The endorsements this year are very different, but whether they will change any votes is unclear. Trump’s MAGA base is firmly insulated from reality–they seem to occupy a different country, where up is down and wet is dry. It isn’t just accusations about immigrants eating dogs and cats–they believe Trump’s claims that crime is up and the economy is tanking, despite the fact that data shows crime plummeting and the American economy flourishing. They might just as well be on another planet.

Because Trump voters occupy an alternate reality, the avalanche of endorsements of Harris/Walz probably won’t pry MAGA votes away. But we can hope that the unprecedented nature of those endorsements will generate registrations and turnout by rational folks who might not otherwise go to the polls. (That certainly is the hoped-for result of celebrity endorsements from super-stars like Taylor Swift.)

What has set this year’s endorsements apart isn’t just the unprecedented number of them, but the political identities and bona fides of the endorsers. (Example: Evangelicals for Harris–really!) Recently, four hundred economists endorsed Harris, warning that the election “is a choice between inequity, economic injustice, and uncertainty with Donald Trump or prosperity, opportunity, and stability with Kamala Harris, a choice between the past and the future.” The other day, seven hundred national security figures announced their endorsement of the Democratic ticket. They were later joined by General Stanley McChrystal.

The sheer number of Republican endorsers–not just the “Never Trumpers”– is staggering.

It isn’t simply high visibility people like Liz and Dick Cheney. Every day we encounter headlines like “State Republican party chairs endorse Kamala Harris for president.” In addition to the Republicans who spoke at the Democratic convention, a group of more than 200 who worked for former Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney and the late Sen. John McCain signed onto a letter supporting the Democratic nominee.

A recently launched “Republicans for Harris” is steadily growing.

Perhaps the most striking of all was a New York Times recent compilation of opinions of Donald J. Trump from “those who know him best”–members of Trump’s own administration, and “friends” who’ve known him for many years. As the introduction to those quotations put it,

Dozens of people who know him well, including the 91 listed here, have raised alarms about his character and fitness for office — his family and friends, world leaders and business associates, his fellow conservatives and his political appointees — even though they had nothing to gain from doing so. Some have even spoken out at the expense of their own careers or political interests.

The New York Times editorial board has made its case that Mr. Trump is unfit to lead. But the strongest case against him may come from his own people. For those Americans who are still tempted to return him to the presidency or to not vote in November, it is worth considering the assessment of Mr. Trump by those who have seen him up close.

Those opinions followed, and they are scathing. I encourage you to click through and read them.

The sheer number of economic, military and governmental experts–both Republicans and Democrats–who are warning against another Trump administration ought to be dispositive, but it clearly isn’t making inroads into MAGA fidelity, and I think there are two main reasons.

The first–and most frequently noted–is the similarity of MAGA Republicanism to a cult. In large part, MAGA folks have drunk the Kool-Aid. For whatever reason, some people are susceptible to the Jim Jones and Donald Trumps of the world, and fact-based arguments are irrelevant to them. Their devotion to the cult leader fills some sort of psychic need that the rest of us don’t share and can’t understand.

The second reason is less well understood, but I think it’s important.

Much has been made of the growing division between educated and uneducated voters. Education is absolutely not the same thing as intelligence, but folks who never learned how government works, or what the Constitution requires, are much more likely to believe, for example, that the government can simply round up and deport millions of immigrants (not to mention failing to understand the effect that would have on America’s economy if it were possible). They believe Trump when he says other countries will pay for his proposed tariffs–despite the fact that anyone who took Econ 101 knows tariffs are a tax on Americans. Etc.

The first group will simply ignore facts. The second rejects expertise as offensive elitism.

The reality-based community needs to turn out in force.

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And Furthermore…

I am convinced that the biggest problem America faces– the reason we can’t solve or even address the other multiple problems that grow worse each day they are ignored–is the GOP.

Permit me to share some observations that support that thesis.

Paul Krugman–Nobel winning economist and opinion writer for the New York Times —took on the “reliably awful” Ted Cruz and his anti-gun-legislation GOP cohort, including Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, whose “solution” involved locking school doors rather than controlling firearms. (Patrick has obviously never talked to a Fire Marshall..) As Krugman and literally hundreds of others remind us,

Mass shootings are very rare outside the United States. Why are they so common here? Not, according to the U.S. right, because we’re a nation where a disturbed 18-year-old can easily buy military-grade weapons and body armor. No, says Patrick, it’s because “We’re a coarse society.”

I know it’s a hopeless effort to say this, but imagine the reaction if a prominent liberal politician were to declare that the reason the United States has a severe social problem that doesn’t exist elsewhere is that Americans are bad people. We’d never hear the end of it. But when a Republican says it, it barely makes a ripple….

What distinguishes us is that it’s so easy for people who aren’t nice to arm themselves to the teeth.

What also distinguishes us are outmoded rules of governance that allow representatives of a minority of citizens to block action supported by the majority. (Recent polling by Pew and others tells us that ninety percent of Americans want stricter gun regulations, especially more stringent background checks.)

It isn’t just gun safety. Republican senators routinely object to pretty much anything proposed by the majority or by the Biden Administration. I get absolutely livid when people complain that “Biden isn’t doing anything.” These are people who clearly have no idea how easy it is for Republicans to block administrative measures. One recent example, reported by Daily Kos:

When Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) came to the floor Wednesday afternoon to ask for unanimous consent to approve Dr. Shereef Elnahal to serve as the Veterans Affairs deputy secretary for health and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) objected, Tester blew, telling Scott: “You want to talk about why the American people think the United States Senate is dysfunctional? The senator from Florida could look in the mirror.”

Elnahal had impeccable credentials–he’s currently the chief executive officer of University Hospital in Newark. Furthermore, he’d had a hearing in the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and been approved unanimously. As Tester pointed out, the need to have the position filled is urgent. “The VA is continuing to battle the impact of COVID-19 pandemic with veterans cases, hospitalizations, and death on the rise again, and VA staff are dealing with burnout and increasing turnover in our VA system.” The job hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed person in it since January 2017.

And what was Scott’s objection? Well, we don’t know, because he refused to say. (Of course, Elnahal is brown…) But under Senate rules, and thanks to the Memorial Day recess, his objection will delay a vote until sometime in late June.

And don’t get me started on the filibuster…..

As Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in the New York Times,

I am thinking about the ways that narrow, destructive factions can capture the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system for their own ends. I am thinking of how they can then use the levers of government to impose their vision of society and civil life against the will of the majority. And I am thinking of this in the context of guns, gun violence and the successful movement, thus far, to make the United States an armed society.

Two weeks ago, a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo. Three days ago, a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Although there has been, in the wake of both atrocities, the requisite call for new gun control laws, no one believes that Congress will actually do much of anything to address gun violence or reduce the odds of gun massacres. The reason is that the Republican Party does not want to. And with the legislative filibuster still in place (preserved, as it has been for the past year, by at least two Democratic senators), Senate Republicans have all the votes they need to stop a bill — any bill — from passing.

I am old enough to remember when Republicans and Democrats had good-faith, substantive disagreements about the proper way to address national problems. Those days are long gone–and so is the time when currently-obsolete Senate rules and procedures served any legitimate legislative purpose.

Go re-read Pastor Pavlovitz’ warning. And help get out the vote.

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Of Whigs And Wackos

A few nights ago–as I previously reported–I was a guest lecturer in a friend’s class on political activism. I had been asked to address America’s current political polarization, and I shared many of the opinions I previously posted here: the asymmetric nature of that polarization, with the GOP moving far, far to the right and the Democratic party only recently listening to its more progressive members; the fact that the Democratic party is a much bigger tent than the GOP (which is currently a lock-step cult), making cohesion far more difficult for Democrats; the outsized role of a fragmented media; and of course, White Christian Nationalism, aided and abetted by Republican gerrymandering.

During the question and answer period, the undergraduates asked pretty sophisticated questions–this was clearly a group of politically-engaged and thoughtful young people. One of them asked me what I thought would happen to the Republican Party.

I responded honestly that I had no clue–that the GOP might go the way of the Whigs, or might return to something approaching a normal political party as the oldsters died off and the fever abated. Or??

However, the next morning, columnist Jennifer Rubin addressed that same question, noting that Trump critics and disaffected Republicans have already begun to run for the exits.

Matthew Dowd, a former Republican adviser to George W. Bush, is running for Texas lieutenant governor as a Democrat. Evan McMullin, former CIA officer and Republican congressional aide, is running for a Utah Senate seat as an independent. This is a sound trend: If you can’t beat the MAGA cult, leave.

There is scant evidence that any appetite exists in the GOP for independent thinking or pro-democracy critics of the disgraced former president. When Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is booted from House leadership and ostracized while anti-Semitic mouthpiece and crackpot Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) remains a member in good standing, it is obvious which way the wind is blowing.

The sane faction of the GOP could probably fit around a dining room table. The House minority leader apparently does not believe he cannot survive politically without showing unwavering loyalty to the former president who incited a violent insurrection. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans think it is acceptable to vote to send the country into default but not to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Trump and Trumpism remain firmly in control of the GOP–as Rubin reports, a recent Pew survey found two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents reaffirming their loyalty, including 44% who say they would like him to run for president in 2024. The poll’s results confirm Rubin’s conclusion that no one can oppose the cult leader and remain viable in the party.

Many well-meaning Republicans have tried in vain to shake the GOP from its Trumpian foundation. Finding no success, they now need to topple the MAGA party if they want to insulate the country from instability, authoritarian rule and possibly violence.

Reform from within is apparently impossible–a conclusion with which a number of former Republicans agree. Rubin encourages them to run as Democrats (providing evidence that the party is hardly the nefarious gang of “socialists” portrayed by the cultists) or Independents (hopefully splitting the GOP vote).

In our two-party system, it is extremely difficult to “kill off” a major political party. But it has been done before.The Whigs were active in the middle of the 19th century; although the Democratic Party was slightly larger, the Whigs were one of the country’s two major parties between the late 1830s and the early 1850s. Four presidents were affiliated with the Whig Party during at least part of their respective terms, and Whig party leaders included names we all know–men like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, William Seward, and John Quincy Adams. Ultimately, the Whigs divided over the issue of slavery, and were replaced by the Republican Party.

As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Today’s GOP is now firmly committed to White Christian Supremacy, and Republicans who do not share that worldview are leaving, in a reversal of the desertion that destroyed the Whig Party. (Pro-slavery Whigs left to join the nativist, pro-slavery American Party.)

Rubin is right, and Republicans appalled by the party’s descent into racism and nihilism are recognizing the fact.

I think we may be seeing the beginning of the end….The only question is, how much damage can a party in its death throes inflict on the rest of us?

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Words, Words, Words…..

One of the barriers to productive political debate is language–its use and misuse.

Genuine communication–in general, not just in politics– is anything but simple. Back in “the day,” when I was a high school English teacher, discussions of grammar included a lesson on the difference between “definition” and “connotation”–between the dictionary meaning of a word, and the social or emotional “freight” it had picked up through use. (Further complicating matters, that “freight”–the negative or positive spin on a word or phrase–often varies depending upon the constituency hearing it. Think of how different ears hear “woke.”)

We all bring our individual world-views to our discussions, and those views and personal experiences become the lens through which we interpret what others are saying. Often, those interpretations are wildly different from the intended meaning–think “Defund the Police”–which is why political strategists and PR folks are so concerned with the language employed by candidates and/or commercial interests. Insisting “that isn’t what I meant” is almost always ineffective; it’s far preferable to initially frame an argument or proposition using language that is as accurate about meaning as possible, and that will be most resistant to misinterpretation, whether intentional or unintentional.

Sometimes, partisans forget that the object should be to communicate, not simply to engage in virtue signaling.

Back in April, Governing Magazine ran an article titled ” ‘No Accountability, No Peace’: Sloganeering and the Language of the Left,” focusing on the differences in language employed by contemporary Republicans and Democrats. The author noted the “constant demand on the left” to be sensitive, to use words that are received as less hurtful. Sometimes, he wrote, this makes perfect sense. “Other times it feels like they want to fight on the wrong battlefield.”

This is not an isolated linguistic debate. It comes just after the recent overbaked argument about whether President Biden’s infrastructure plan, or parts of it, qualify as infrastructure, namely caregiving for children, the elderly and those with disabilities. Mother Jones was not alone in decrying this as a “semantic argument,” stressing the importance of Biden wanting to support women workers as part of the recovery.

But semantics do matter in politics. For years, the right has found success by putting potent, clever labels on things that help make their arguments for them: Recasting estate taxes as the “death tax,” for example, or succeeding in switching usage from the clinical description of intact dilation and evacuation to the soberingly graphic “partial-birth abortion.”

On the left, the impulse is more aspirational. You increase the power of your vocabulary by borrowing meanings, asserting that some things actually mean other, good things — that child care is infrastructure, or that housing is a human right or health care is a human right.

Give credit where it’s due: the GOP has been far more successful than Democrats in using language–words–to drive public opinion. That success has been partly due to good PR advice, but it also owes a debt to the fact that today, Republicans are far more monolithic than Democrats, and their major goals are simpler to convey: keep my taxes low lends itself to far clearer messaging than, say, immigration reform, or even “Black Lives Matter.”

I actually think a large-scale public debate over the meaning of “infrastructure” would be very useful. I have often distinguished between physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, the electrical grid, etc.) and what I think is accurately described as social infrastructure–the governmentally-provided social supports and services that are arguably necessary to social functioning and national cohesion.

America is rather clearly not ready for that discussion–not ready to use language for its intended purpose, which–I will reiterate– is to communicate. Far too many of us evidently subscribe to Tallyrand’s theory that “speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts.”

“Make America Great Again” comes to mind….

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Why America Elects Moral Midgets

I haven’t previously posted about the Impeachment trial. Initially, I figured that, since virtually everyone who has an opinion has written, spoken and generally fulminated about those opinions, there wasn’t much of value I could add.

Most of the commentary has–quite correctly–pointed to the cowardice and lack of integrity of all but seven Republican Senators. Columns and editorials have especially zeroed in on the breathtaking hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell; in his speech immediately after the vote, he made it clear that he knew Trump was guilty as charged. The fig leaf that McConnell and his spineless colleagues were frantically trying to hide behind was an utterly unpersuasive opinion that a President who no longer held office could not be constitutionally impeached–an opinion rejected by virtually all constitutional scholars.

It also didn’t escape notice that McConnell was the reason the trial had been delayed until after Biden was inaugurated.

Suffice it to say that the overwhelming hypocrisy and dishonesty in the face of what everyone in that chamber clearly knew was astounding–and it has all been the subject of widespread condemnation. What hasn’t been adequately analyzed, however, is how we got here–“here” being a legislative chamber containing so many Senators clearly unworthy of public office.

I am convinced that the pathetic performance Americans saw last week was the result of forty-plus years of denigrating the very existence of government and belittling those who serve in it.

Reagan started the incessant attacks, and Republican dogma ever since has been that government–far from being an important tool for collective action addressing America’s problems–is always and inevitably a threat that must be constrained and hobbled. Republican messaging has been sneering and dismissive of the very notion that government might be an essential mechanism for achieving the common good. It has been years since I heard a Republican politician employ terms like “statesmanship” and/or “public service.”

When I saw that both of Indiana’s undistinguished, moral-pygmy Senators had (predictably) voted to acquit, I could almost picture them spitting on Dick Lugar’s grave…

The Republican demonization of government has largely succeeded in changing the identity of the GOP. The political culture that produced statesmen like Dick Lugar and Bill Hudnut has been replaced by the slimy “what’s in it for me” opportunism of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump–and Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and too many others.

Honorable, talented people are attracted to careers that those in their particular tribes consider prestigious and admirable. When government employment is denigrated and mocked–“couldn’t get a real job?”– when political actors are expected to be corrupt, and when politics is widely considered the refuge of blowhards and scoundrels, blowhards and scoundrels are who it will attract.

It’s instructive to emphasize that these persistent attacks on government and public service have come overwhelmingly from Republicans. Democrats have been far more likely to defend the importance and worth of America’s political institutions, and I don’t think it is just happenstance that as a result–as we can see at the federal level– Democratic officeholders these days tend to be considerably more public-spirited, honorable and impressive than their Republican peers.

Today’s Democrats have Jamie Raskin; Republicans have Marjorie Taylor Green…

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