Month: July 2020

Michelle Goldberg discusses Anne Applebaum’s book, “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism,”in which the author ponders what happened to former anti-Communist friends Applebaum once thought were “dedicated not just to representative democracy, but to religious tolerance, independent judiciaries, free press and speech, economic integration, international institutions, the trans-Atlantic alliance and a political idea of ‘the West.’”

What happened to the old right? Goldberg opines:

Like Applebaum, I’m astonished to see erstwhile Cold Warriors abase themselves before Vladimir Putin. But I think she’s working from a mistaken premise about what once constituted conservatism. Liberal democracy per se was never the animating passion of the trans-Atlantic right — anti-Communism was. When the threat of Communist expansion disappeared, so did most of the right’s commitment to a set of values that, it’s now evident, were purely instrumental.

As I keep saying (and they keep proving), the right’s commitment to those ideals was always a mile wide and an inch deep. Despite the fact that there are still some true believers in laissez-faire economics, small government, etc., for others those were simply an intellectual dust jacket hiding the pulp fiction underneath. Donald Trump tore up the jacket.

In Corey Robin’s 2011 “The Reactionary Mind,” Goldberg notes, he asserted conservatism’s true purpose was to “make privilege popular, to transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses.” Or, as I believe, they are at heart still committed to a system of rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry.

The right fighting for its survival today is heir to the faction of American colonists who held that view up to and beyond the signing of the Treaty of Paris. All men (persons, these days) are created equal and government of, by, and for the people sound lofty and play well on TV. But the right does not actually believe that stuff. Men of the late 18th-century South certainly did not. No matter what high-minded documents to which they affixed their names and pledged their “sacred” honor.

There is “no mystery in the right’s surrender to authoritarianism,” Goldberg concludes, “because for many of the people Applebaum describes, it wasn’t a surrender at all. It was a liberation.”

With Communism all but a relic, and with breeding, browning masses and long-suppressed minorities asserting claims to equality and their fair share of power promised in our founding documents, American royalists are returning to their authoritarian roots.

Strip away all of the right’s ideological and sociological overlay. Strip away the trappings of state and theological pretensions. What is left is commitment to power and raw, animal dominance. (See: Mitch McConnell.) The Constitution, democracy, and rule-of-law are all disposable if they won’t deliver the rule they believe is their birthright. The LGBTQ community is not the only group now out of the closet.

Ralph Reed tells an Evangelicals For Trump rally that they must reelect Trump to "make sure that Christians are the head and not the tail, the top and not the bottom of our political system." pic.twitter.com/2iBGtBh7JJ

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) July 27, 2020

For Ralph Reed and his evangelical coalition (above), the First Amendment is a gauzy formality as well. People of other faiths are welcome in America only so long as they are not too numerous and know their place. Christian prayer before football games and monuments to Confederate heroes remind the disfavored just who is in charge, lest they forget.

Trumpism, white grievance, and resurgent authoritarianism are not about high-minded values or ideas. They are about power: who has it, who does not, and who is unwilling to share.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Trump’s Campaign announces its all-star line-up of speakers for new scaled down Republican Convention. Ted Nugent, Scott Baio, Antonio Sabato Jr, and Diamond and Silk will all appear virtually in Zoom boxes before Trump’s acceptance speech. You can already feel the electricity. pic.twitter.com/AYDMSpRngi

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) July 26, 2020

I wonder if Nugent will reprise his greatest hits:

Thank goodness. This racist monster’s presence at John Lewis’s lying in state would be a desecration of Lewis’s memory.

Trump says he will not be paying his respects to Rep. John Lewis at the U.S. Capitol, where his body lies in state. pic.twitter.com/oaD2cF36DL

— The Recount (@therecount) July 27, 2020

What an ass. He couldn’t even bring himself to make andexcuse and say something respectful of this national hero.

I would call him a pig but pigs are innocent, intelligent creatures. He is a monster.

By contrast:

NEW: Joe Biden pays his respects to late civil rights icon John Lewis, who is lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. https://t.co/cApVMHUrOr pic.twitter.com/gt4vTaWoXN

— ABC News (@ABC) July 27, 2020

If a woman wrote this, she’d be accused of either playing the gender card or looking for excuses to explain the failures of individuals. So, I’m grateful to Peter Beinert for writing it because it needs to be said by someone:

A narrative has formed around the presidential race: Donald Trump is losing because he’s botched the current crisis. Americans are desperate for competence and compassion. He’s offered narcissism and division — and he’s paying the political price.

For progressives, it’s a satisfying story line, in which Americans finally see Mr. Trump for the inept charlatan he truly is. But it’s at best half-true. The administration’s mismanagement of the coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter protests only partially explain why the president is trailing badly in the polls. There’s another, more disquieting, explanation: He is running against a man.

The evidence that Mr. Trump’s electoral woes stem as much from the gender of his opponent as from his own failures begins with his net approval rating: the percent of Americans who view him favorably minus the percent who view him unfavorably. Right now, that figure stands at -15 points. That makes Mr. Trump less popular than he was this spring. But he’s still more popular than he was throughout the 2016 campaign. Yet he won.

What has changed radically over the past four years isn’t Americans’ perception of Mr. Trump. It’s their perception of his opponent. According to Real Clear Politics’s polling average, Joe Biden’s net approval rating is about -1 point. At this point in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s net approval rating was -17 points. For much of the 2016 general election, Mr. Trump faced a Democratic nominee who was also deeply unpopular. Today, he enjoys no such luck.

Why was Mrs. Clinton so much more unpopular than Mr. Biden is now? There’s good reason to believe that gender plays a key role. For starters, Mrs. Clinton wasn’t just far less popular than Mr. Biden. She was far less popular than every male Democratic nominee since at least 1992. Neither Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry nor Barack Obama faced overwhelming public disapproval throughout their general election campaigns. Hillary Clinton did.

A major driver of the public’s extreme dislike of Mrs. Clinton was its perception of her as duplicitous. In a poll taken just days before the 2016 election, Americans deemed her even less truthful than Mr. Trump. By contrast, in a Pew Research Center poll late last month, Americans rated Mr. Biden as more honest than Mr. Trump by 12 points.

According to fact checkers, these public perceptions are wildly incorrect. PolitiFact, a project of the nonprofit Poynter Institute, rates the veracity of politicians’ assertions. According to its calculations, which are based on hundreds of individual statements, Mrs. Clinton isn’t only far more honest than Mr. Trump. She’s also more honest than Mr. Biden.

Why don’t voters see it that way? Research on how gender shapes political perception suggests an answer. For a 2010 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, two Yale researchers, Tyler Okimoto and Victoria Brescoll, asked participants their opinions of two fictional candidates, one male and one female, who were described as possessing “a strong will to power.” Attributing ambition to the male candidate didn’t hurt his appeal. But upon learning that the female candidate was ambitious, many participants responded with “feelings of moral outrage.” This “moral outrage” helps explain why Americans believed Mrs. Clinton was so much more dishonest than she actually was.

Critics might counter that Politifact’s data notwithstanding, what provoked the public’s opprobrium was not Mrs. Clinton’s gender but the scandals that surrounded her long political career. As a former first lady, she was asked to answer for her husband’s indiscretions in a way other female candidates might not have been. She also spent the 2016 campaign on the defensive for having used a private email server for her official business as secretary of state — a controversy that James Comey reignited by revealing new evidence in the F.B.I.’s investigation just days before the election. For all these reasons, observers might claim that Mrs. Clinton is a special case.

But the same “moral outrage” that plagued her four years ago also plagued this year’s most prominent female presidential contender: Elizabeth Warren. If Mrs. Clinton is far less popular than Mr. Biden, her fellow centrist insider, Ms. Warren has proved far less popular than Bernie Sanders, her fellow progressive insurgent. The data is striking. Most polls show that a majority of Americans disapprove of the gentlewoman from Massachusetts. By contrast, most Americans approve of the gentleman from Vermont, usually by double digits.

Voters also consider Mr. Sanders more honest than Ms. Warren, even though, according to PolitiFact, he’s not. Mr. Trump’s decision to assign both Mrs. Clinton (“crooked”) and Ms. Warren (“Pocahontas”) nicknames that connote deceit reflects his own misogyny. But it also reflects his instinctive understanding that when you call female candidates unscrupulous, the slur is more likely to stick. (In recent days, Trump has begun referring to Biden as “corrupt Joe.” For bulk of the campaign, however, he merely dubbed him “sleepy,” while labelling Sanders “crazy.”)

It’s worth remembering that the next time you hear Mr. Biden praised for running a cautious, inoffensive and largely mistake-free campaign. Given Mr. Trump’s epic blunders, inoffensiveness may be enough to propel the former vice president to the White House. But it’s a lot easier to be inoffensive when you’re a man.

I would just point out that the New York Times published a truly egregious article just a couple of days ago in which they claimed that AOC’s righteous response to the grotesque insults from Florida good Ted Yoho was “disruptive” and a “brand-building exercise.”

Rebecca Traister’s piece on that is perfect. And it also suggests to me that if this society doesn’t finally wake up to this phenomenon, when AOC is ready to step up, maybe even eventually to the presidency, there will be many years of this sort of negative, sexist indoctrination baked into people’s “feelings” about her too.

I noted over the weekend that the right-wingers are all up in arms about China supposedly financing and instigating the Black Lives Matter protests. I’m not kidding. I guess George Soros is so busy putting together those caravans he asked his Communist Chinese allies to step in.

This “outside agitator” trope is hardly unprecedented as Rick Perlstein and Richard Kreitner illustrate in this interesting article called “A Brief History of Dangerous Others” in the New York Review of Books:

This spring, protests against police brutality and systemic racism erupted in thousands of towns and cities across all fifty states, sparked by the on-camera murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd. Of the first wave of these protests, the vast majority were entirely peaceful, but several devolved into mayhem—looting, arson, smashed windows, gunshots, scuffles between protesters and the police, random acts of violence. To listen to public officials in many jurisdictions, the worst of the chaos was the intentional work of shifty, shady agitators who traveled from near and far to menace communities in which they did not themselves live. The rage over Floyd’s death was their pretext for destabilizing the whole social order.

On Saturday May 30, the day after street protests first got out of control, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter told reporters that “every single person” arrested came from out of state, and “about 80 percent” of rioters had done so. His Twin Cities counterpart, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, pinned the blame on “out-of-state-instigators, and possibly even foreign actors,” who had set out to “destroy and decimate our city and region.” Within hours, the president of the United States repeated Frey’s unsubstantiated claim in a tweet sent to his eighty-three million followers. It was thereafter echoed in press coverage.

The statistic could not stand barest scrutiny. But that didn’t stop other officials around the country from saying the same thing. Marco Rubio claimed that some of those arrested in Miami were outsiders “from as far away as New York and Minnesota.” Why, one might have asked, would New Yorkers travel a thousand miles when they could have stoked flames closer to home? Perhaps to make room for other roving rabble-rousers to descend on Brooklyn and the Bronx, for a top police official there soon passionately complained about all the Californians; meanwhile, three thousand miles away, California officials blamed outsiders, too. An Antifa exchange program, perhaps subsidized by George Soros?

The absurdity reached a nadir in Columbus, Ohio. Police impounded a psychedelically painted school bus and detained its owners on “suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters,” including “bats, rocks, meat cleavers, clubs, & other projectiles.” Senator Marco Rubio tweeted vindication: “But I guess still ‘no evidence’ of an organized effort to inject violence & anarchy into the protests, right?” It soon emerged that the bus in Columbus that had authorities trembling—baptized “Buttercup” by its owners, a troupe of traveling circus-style performers—involved an effort by local residents to feed protesters and help with first aid. The “rocks” were fossil specimens; the axes were for chopping firewood; the meat cleavers were for… cleaving meat. Thousands of tweeters nonetheless homed in on the word “MURDER” painted plain as day on Buttercup’s side—ignoring those that preceded it: “STOP LEGAL.”

Everything would have been fine but for the outside agitators: the hoary cliché has been deployed by those in power to insulate themselves from accountability at least since the scribes who wrote the Book of Chronicles described the archangel who came down from the heavens to make mischief: “And Satan stood up against Israel…”

If you find this as fascinating as I do, please read the whole piece at the NYRB. This stuff runs so deep in our culture — maybe all cultures. I have a sneaking suspicion that we are about to see a gigantic spasm of them.

Lol! Is this really supposed to make Mark Kelly look bad?

All I can say is that it’s pretty obvious that the GOP is suffering badly from the loss of its best ad-makers who have defected to the other side.

They know how to go for the jugular:

Why won’t he recognize that unless he deals with the pandemic, none of his other goals, including re-election, can be realized? Because he’s Donald Trump:

People close to Trump, many speaking anonymously to share candid discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.

This is the story of his presidency. In fact, his unwillingness to admit he’s wrong and magical thinking cause him to rebel against the obvious path to fix any of his problems. For instance, he was duped and helped by the Russian government in 2016 and instead of reacting as another president might have done, by at least acting as if he’s angry at Vladimir Putin for interfering, he embraced him publicly in shocking ways as an immature act of defiance. He made it immeasurably worse for himself by behaving this way.

So his refusal to admit he was wrong about the pandemic has led him to consciously make it spread with the demands for prematurely re-opening businesses, refusal to wear a mask, threatening schools with reprisals if they don’t completely re-open, demeaning testing as unnecessary — all of it.

He is a defiant 74 year old toddler.

It wasn’t hard to see that he was psychologically unfit for the presidency in 2016. (He talked about his penis size in a national debate). His character, as exemplified by the lawsuits, the assaults on women, the treatment of his own children and relatives was also there to see. Of course he would be unable to do his job in a time of crisis.

Oops:

President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, has tested positive for Covid-19, according to an official familiar with what happened.

O’Brien’s diagnosis marks the highest-ranking Trump administration official known to have tested positive. It’s unclear when O’Brien last met with Trump. Their last public appearance together was over two weeks ago during a visit to US Southern Command in Miami on July 10.

O’Brien is experiencing “mild symptoms” and is “self-isolating and working from a secure location off site,” according to an unnamed statement to the press from the White House.

That statement confirmed O’Brien’s test results to reporters before his staff was formally informed. Several National Security Council staffers told CNN that they weren’t informed that O’Brien tested positive and learned of the news from media reports.

A senior administration official told CNN that O’Brien has been working from home since last week. A source familiar said O’Brien was last in the office last Thursday, when he abruptly left the White House. The White House statement said there is “no risk of exposure to the President or the Vice President.”White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters that one of O’Brien’s daughters also contracted Covid-19 and that’s how he believes he got it.

The National Security Council chief was accompanied on the trip to Europe by Secret Service agents, staffers and multiple reporters. Multiple pictures released from the trip showed O’Brien neither practicing social distancing nor wearing a mask.

As the pandemic has spread, the President has defended not wearing a mask or social distancing, with many of his top officials and White House staffers following suit, saying that it’s not necessary because they are tested every day. O’Brien’s positive test underscores the unique challenges of keeping the virus away from the West Wing and the President’s immediate orbit.

Last week, administration officials were alerted that a cafeteria employee on White House grounds had tested positive. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the President’s son’s girlfriend and top campaign fundraising official, tested positive before a trip to Mt. Rushmore earlier this month. Multiple Secret Service agents and campaign staffers tested positive after becoming infected while preparing for the President’s Tulsa campaign rally in June. Vice President Mike Pence’s communications director Katie Miller tested positive for coronavirus in May, and one of the President’s personal valets tested positive earlier that week.

O’Brien, Trump’s fourth national security adviser, has been largely out of sight during the coronavirus pandemic. CNN has previously reported that rather than helping to lead the administration’s response, he has delegated responsibilities to top aides and even bypassed coronavirus task force meetings.

Trump tapped O’Brien, a former lawyer and hostage negotiator, to the post in September 2019, one week after he fired John Bolton amid disagreements on foreign policy issues.

No masks, no social distancing, just like his Dear Leader. I wonder how this happened?

How is it that Trump is able to avoid getting this?

It was a little startling to hear President Trump announce that he would throw out the first ball at a New York Yankees game next month — now that the delayed and shortened Major League Baseball season is underway — since has refused to do this since he became president. But since Dr. Anthony Fauci was getting so much good press in anticipation of his season-opening foray to the mound in Washington, Trump was clearly jealous, and no doubt pleased to learn there would be no crowd in Yankee Stadium to boo him. But then Fauci got ribbed mercilessly in the press for his wild pitch, and Trump was perhaps reminded that he might not be able to do much better. So over the weekend he announced to the nation that he was just too busy.

Our very busy president played golf on Saturday, and spent most of Sunday retweeting images of his paramilitary raid on Portland, rando sh**posters and conspiracy theories. He even retweeted a whiny lament about the greatness of hydroxychloroquine, a golden oldie at this point. So I’m sure the country feels much relieved by Trump’s “new tone” that the media keeps going on about, and no doubt the catastrophic collapse of his already tepid poll numbers will reverse itself immediately.

Meanwhile COVID-19 continues to ravage the nation and no matter how hard new campaign manager Bill Stepien and the rest of his team try to get him to take it seriously, Trump is simply unable to do it. He reluctantly had to cancel his convention extravaganza in Jacksonville — which had been moved from Charlotte at his insistence — mainly because even Republican diehards didn’t want to travel into the epicenter of America’s massive surge in cases.

Trump’s fatuous spin that this was another of his “strong” decisions to keep the country safe at all costs fell flat since there are endless clips of him expressing disdain for anyone who thought that staging a crowded political convention in the middle of a raging pandemic might not be a great idea. He has never demonstrated interest in keeping the country safe from this pandemic. He just wants to keep “his numbers” down, and that’s not the same thing.

This news had to hit Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, especially hard. He had lobbied hard for the convention when Trump had his temper tantrum last month over North Carolina’s refusal to guarantee that his fans would be able to attend speeches in the indoor event center without wearing masks or practicing social distancing. DeSantis was more than happy to guarantee the Trumpers a good time without all those unpleasant COVID guidelines. But even then the clock was ticking on Florida’s exploding caseload

If you want to see the perfect realization of the Trump administration’s pandemic policy, look to Florida. It is certainly true that the virus has surged in a number of other states, including Texas, Arizona and California. The first two, like Florida, were driven to open too rapidly by Republican governors, while California’s surge seems to be linked to general overconfidence — people failed to observe safe guidelines once the lockdown orders were lifted. Florida isn’t alone in this surge and it won’t be the last state to experience one.

But only in Florida did the governor appear on TV and have a full-blown Trumpian whine-fest in May because he wasn’t getting enough credit for keeping cases lower in Florida than New York:

DeSantis spoke too soon and opened his state much too fast. Florida is now the one of the global epicenters of this virus and it’s not getting better anytime soon. Every day since July 10 the state has averaged more than 10,000 new cases per day. According to the New York Times, the state has had 423,800 cases and 5,854 deaths from the virus so far.

DeSantis bears the brunt of the blame for all of this. His main concern from the beginning was to reopen for business at all costs — in the apparent conviction that people would forget about the virus as soon as they could go back to the malls — and the results are there for all to see. Throughout the crisis he has been belligerent, stubborn, unsympathetic, cavalier and self-centered. He issues orders but refuses to offer state support to make them work. He is, in short, exactly like Trump.

The Washington Post published an in-depth look at the DeSantis administration’s response to the pandemic, and it’s devastating. Just as Trump refuses to listen to experts, Desantis shoved aside his scientists and stopped public health briefings altogether. He refutes the models if they don’t suit his purpose and spins the data to sound better than it is. Some of the state’s top experts have left in the middle of the crisis.

As the virus spread out of control in Florida, decision-making became increasingly shaped by politics and divorced from scientific evidence, according to interviews with 64 current and former state and administration officials, health administrators, epidemiologists, political operatives and hospital executives. The crisis in Florida, these observers say, has revealed the shortcomings of a response built on shifting metrics, influenced by a small group of advisers and tethered at every stage to the Trump administration, which has no unified plan for addressing the national health emergency but has pushed for states to reopen.

When DeSantis insisted on reopening Florida’s economy early, Trump cheered him on. In fact, the Post reports that Trump gleefully told advisers that Florida’s supposed success gave other states the validation to open prematurely as well. DeSantis returned the favor by backing Trump’s play all the way, refusing to enact measures like mask-wearing that might have helped mitigate the surge. The Post reports that Trump administration officials “regularly sent reports and clips of DeSantis bragging about Florida not having cases early in the outbreak, to argue that many states were overreacting and, at times, that seasonal heat could cure the virus.”

Like his hero and mentor, DeSantis can’t find time to talk to his experts but does have time to talk to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, which he has done numerous times as the virus has exploded in his state.

DeSantis was a backbench congressman who won the 2018 gubernatorial election largely because of Trump’s endorsement and he’s been a loyal henchman from the beginning. It was assumed all along that he could help deliver Florida to Trump this November and that his future might well include an address on Pennsylvania Avenue. (Yes, he is that ambitious.)

But lashing himself to the Trump Train was a risky move from the outset, and it doesn’t look like it’s paying off. The latest Quinnipiac poll has Biden leading Trump by 13 points in the Sunshine State, 51% to 38%. DeSantis isn’t doing any better. In April, 50% of Florida voters approved of his handling of the pandemic. That’s now down to 38%, the same number who back Trump’s re-election.

Florida elected a mini-Trump in 2018 and got a Trump mega-disaster in 2020. Now the whole country is paying the price.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

“Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane, Many will argue that my view of the Republican Party is distorted by my loathing of Trump. The truth is that Trump brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible.”

John Harwood, CNBC:

That’s from “It Was All A Lie” the forthcoming book by former Republican ad-maker Stuart Stevens. He casts Trump as not an aberration but rather the culmination of decades-long evolution within the GOP. Having advised four Republican presidential nominees and dozens of winning Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, Stevens blends diagnosis of the party’s ills with confession for having fostered them.

I know that people don’t trust the Never Trumpers and for good reason. And I’m sure some of them will end up being full of shit. But there is a re-thinking of modern conservative orthodoxy going on by at least a few and Stevens is one of them.

There is an understandable human impulse to ostracize and punish these people despite their apparent conversion. But having observed the conservative movement ascendancy I will just say that the right did not do that and the converts ended up being among their most fervent adherents over the course of many years. Don’t underestimate the zeal of an apostate.