Tag Archives: Trump

Parties Versus Cults

A recent essay in the Washington Post considered the inside baseball aspects of party platforms.

“Back in the day,” when politics was far more focused on policy, I participated in local efforts to craft platforms that reflected thoughtful policy positions; as the linked article notes, those days–and their “thoughtful discussions”– are long-gone. As the essay also noted, while candidates sometimes tried to distance themselves from unpopular planks, platforms mattered. They revealed which factions really held power, and testified to the differences between Democrats and Republicans.

That was then. Policy doesn’t matter when politics is all about a cult waging culture war.

Four years ago, having scaled back their convention because of covid-19, the Republicans who nominated Donald Trump to a second term didn’t bother to adopt a platform at all. Instead, the party decided to stick with its 2016 document and “continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

The last actual GOP platform contains all sorts of commitments that the the current crazies have abandoned.

That eight-year-old platform is a fossil of primordial, pre-MAGA conservatism — of a day when abortion rights seemed secure enough that posturing against them carried little political cost; when Republicans could agree that Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” needed to be defended against “a resurgent Russia.”

Written before our rogue Supreme Court overturned Roe, the platform pandered to single-issue anti-choice voters with a plank supporting a human life amendment to the Constitution that would make the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth. That’s going to be a bit awkward in a country where something like 70% of voters are pro-choice– and angry about the first-ever retraction of a constitutional right.

So maybe it is time for today’s Republicans to acknowledge the truth. They are no longer a party with any firm principles at all. Enduring and consistent values? Not for them.

Come to think of it, this whole exercise of writing a 2024 platform for the Republican Party could be pretty simple. Why bother with putting together another 60-page document when the truth about today’s GOP can be summed up in a single sentence?

“RESOLVED, That the Republican Party stands for whatever the hell Donald Trump says it does.”

Robert Hubbell recently reminded us just “what the hell” Trump has said lately.

Trump has promised to deny funds to any school that requires mandatory vaccines. Childhood vaccines against 16 diseases have saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the last century. Defunding schools that require vaccines will cause outbreaks of diseases that have been effectively eliminated. See HuffPo, Trump Makes Bizarre Threat About Schools And Vaccine Mandates.

Trump says that business leaders who do not support him should be fired. NBC News, Trump says business executives should be ‘fired for incompetence’ if they don’t support him.

Trump trashed Fox News for having the temerity to interview a guest—former Speaker Paul Ryan—who was critical of the former president. Trump said, “Nobody can ever trust Fox News, and I am one of them.” MSN, Trump Loses It At Fox News, Says No One Can Trust It.

Trump said that President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans are “stunts” that will be “rebuked” if Trump is elected. See The Independent, Trump calls Biden’s student loan forgiveness a ‘vile’ publicity stunt.

Trump recently told the Danbury Institute that, if elected, “These are going to be your years because you’re going to make a comeback like just about no other group . . . And I’ll be with you side by side.” The Danbury Institute promotes fetal personhood, opposing abortion from “the moment of conception” (a position that would effectively ban IVF). See Missouri Independent, Trump says he’ll work ‘side by side’ with group that wants abortion ‘eradicated.

Granted, Trump says whatever he thinks a given audience wants to hear–his lack of any comprehensive policy commitment (or understanding of what policy is or how government operates) is one reason his initial term did less damage than it might otherwise have done. Should he win in November, he’ll have the far greater competence of Project 2025 authors to draw on.

David Sedaris said it best. Anyone who thinks there is any equivalence between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is like the airline passenger in his often-cited example:

The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

To vote for Donald Trump–or the Indiana GOP’s Christian Taliban–is to reject the chicken.

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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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The Vision Thing

I still remember when George H.W. Bush introduced the phrase “the vision thing” into political discourse. (Bush, of course, was routinely criticized for deficits in the vision department.) This year, we have Presidential candidates who offer us dramatically different “vision things.”

President Biden has been explicit about his goals–his “visions” of a fair America. Perhaps the best summary of his vision comes from his often-employed phrase “from the middle out.” Biden wants to strengthen and increase the middle class by ensuring the availability of jobs paying living wages, and by supporting the full inclusion of women and minorities in the workforce and civic life (those “DEI” efforts hysterically denounced by MAGA folks).

Although Trump’s “vision” is difficult to discern from his incoherent speeches and verbal tics, it’s easy enough to see the autocratic and racist goals communicated through his rambling word-salads. Those who want more comprehensible specifics about his  plans for a second term need only consult the Heritage Foundation plan endorsed by his campaign: Project 2025. Project 2025 is a compendium of chilling and profoundly anti-American policies that the radical Right has long pursued–including use of the military to round up dissidents and immigrants, federal laws banning abortion and favoring a White male patriarchy, and numerous other policies inconsistent with civic equality and civil liberties.

Trump’s “vision” can be illustrated by Project 2025’s approach to urban life. The Guardian recently reported on a section describing the proposed “handling” of so-called “sanctuary cities.”  

Trump has for years railed against cities, particularly those run by Democratic officials, as hotbeds for crime and moral decay. He called Atlanta a “record setting Murder and Violent Crime War Zone” last year, a similar claim he makes frequently about various cities.

His allies have an idea of how to capitalize on that agenda and make cities in Trump’s image, detailed in the conservative Project 2025: unleash new police forces on cities like Washington DC, withhold federal disaster and emergency grants unless they follow immigration policies like detaining undocumented immigrants and share sensitive data with the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes.

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, an extensive document breaking down each part of the federal government and recommending changes to be made to advance rightwing policy, was created by the Heritage Foundation, with dozens of conservative organizations and prominent names contributing chapters based on their backgrounds.

This part of the project is another Republican attempt at a crackdown on so-called “sanctuary” cities, places around the country that don’t cooperate with the federal government on enforcing harsh immigration policies.

A prime target is Washington DC. Trump’s stump speech includes accusing the city of crime, graffiti and general mismanagement–and promising that the federal government will take over the city and run it. Since Trump’s own incompetence at running anything is fairly obvious, Project 2025 maps out the “how.” It includes using the Secret Service to police the city–despite the fact that, under current law, the Secret Service lacks any authority to enforce laws outside the White House and its immediate surrounding area. (“Laws can be changed…”)

It isn’t just D.C.

The article noted that Trump has called America’s cities “uninspiring” and has talked about building “freedom cities” on federal lands–  new cities (with flying cars!) that would be erected on unspecified vacant, federally owned land. He’s invited local leaders to work with him to get rid of “ugly buildings” and build new monuments to “our true American heroes”.

(When I read these remarks, I had a sudden, nauseating vision of cities composed of multiple, garish Trump towers erected on “vacant” national park land, populated by “freedom-loving” White men and their “tradwives.” I’m not sure who’d work in the restaurants of this city, since there wouldn’t be any of those brown-skinned immigrants…but then, Right-wing fantasies have never been noted for their logic…)

I am one of many Americans who do find the nation’s cities inspiring. As I have previously noted, my husband and I live in the urban center of our city–where an increasingly diverse population routinely introduces us to new foods, new musical and artistic trends, and new political and religious perspectives. Our city–like most American cities–is currently experiencing a blossoming of cultural and sporting offerings, and women and minority folks are prominent in government and business, as well as in sports and the arts.

In short, my everyday urban experience is the antithesis of the Rightwing’s wet dream of returning to the 1950s.

The terrifying goals described in Project 2025 illustrate the vast gulf between the visions of MAGA folks and the rest of us. In November, voters won’t simply choose between partisan candidates. We will choose between incompatible visions of America’s future.

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Supreme Dysfunction

In a recent issue of The American Prospect, columnist Rick Perlstein dismissed concerns about recent polling and reminded readers that considerably more is at stake right now than the “horse race” that media disproportionately focuses on. As he says, that all-too-typical approach to political campaign coverage is increasingly irrelevant.

This year, hearing the political reporters on NPR every morning yammering on about stuff like that, it sounds like the drone of the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. It’s so far down the scale of factors determining how the world might go in 2025 that I cringe, tune out, and wait for the next story to start.

If that typical coverage is “down the scale,” what does Perlstein count as more weighty? He suggests that speculation about how many electoral votes each candidate will get is less significant than concerns about the number of people who might be willing to take up arms to “avenge” a Trump loss.

And then there’s the conventional coverage of the Trump trial. Perlstein points out that the attacks being made by Trump’s GOP sycophants–largely ignored or minimized by the media– are part of Repubicans’ ongoing assault on the rule of law. As he says, “what is actually on trial in New York? Trials themselves.”

Every time the man who once took an oath to faithfully execute America’s laws and may next year do so again acts in ways that would bring criminal sanction to any other defendant, by brazenly and deliberately intimidating witnesses in direct defiance of Judge Merchan’s orders, Donald Trump imparts a lesson to his millions of supplicants: One of the three allegedly coequal branches of constitutional governance in the United States is illegitimate, should its decisions not break Donald Trump’s way.

The attack on the rule of law has, of course, been aided and abetted by the current disaster that is the U.S. Supreme Court–a Court that has been intentionally packed with far-Right ideologues.

It is, of course, a crisis now long in the making. Six mortals with lifetime appointments, five of them named by Republican presidents who never won a popular majority, routinely abandoning even the pretense of intellectual coherence and procedural norms to press changes in how the nation is governed, so right-wing they could never stand democratic scrutiny.

For instance, by seeking to strip the power of nonpartisan experts to adjudicate highly technical regulatory questions. Or to control the split-second decisions of doctors in emergency rooms about how to keep women alive. Or to usurp judgement of municipalities and states to decide who can carry concealed weapons of war—reserving those rights instead to, in order, the 535 members of Congress, the nutjob Republican majority in the Idaho legislature, and the made-up fantasies about the beliefs of powder-wigged men from back before bullets had been invented.

Perlstein went on to describe the truly bizarre arguments that have been advanced for Presidential immunity–and the even more grotesque musings of Justice Alito– in what he called the “aptly named” case of Trump v. United States. 

So here we are.

In a very real sense, it is Trump and his cult versus the United States–at least the United States envisioned by the nation’s Founders. Not only does the MAGA movement pose an unprecedented threat to America’s democratic norms, it does so at a time when the multiple threats posed by climate change promise (at best) enormous social upheavals.

Perlstein argues that the political situation in which we find ourselves was “seeded” in Bush v. Gore, and from a legal standpoint, he may be right. But historians tell us that there has always been a portion of the American public that rejected the philosophical underpinnings of America’s constituent documents–citizens who have resisted every expansion of the civic equality and individual liberty at the heart of those instruments. Today, that resistance is most obvious in the hysterical backlash against women’s rights, “woke-ness” and efforts at racial inclusion.

Reactionaries have always been with us, but for most of our history, they’ve been on the fringes of political life. What is new–and arguably unprecedented–is that they have captured one of America’s major political parties. They have a Supreme Court majority, including two Justices who repeatedly and flagrantly violate judicial ethics. They have made no bones about their plans for 2025 and beyond, should they win in November.

Perlstein is right: treating the upcoming election as a typical horse-race ignores reality. A very dangerous reality.

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Using The Jews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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