Month: March 2021

Some more officials testified before the Senate today about January 6th. This one actually produced some news. It appears that the National Guard was all suited up and ready to go but the Pentagon didn’t give the go-ahead for three hours after the request was made. Huh.

Here are five takeaways  from the hearing.

DC National Guard chief said his hands were tied

D.C. National Guard Commander Maj. Gen. William Walker dropped a bombshell before the hearing with a simple claim: three hours elapsed from when he first notified superiors that the National Guard was ready and from when he received authorization to deploy. 

It was a stunning claim, and one that teed up dozens of questions from senators during the hearing. 

Throughout, however, Walker returned to a central theme: unprecedented new restrictions that the Pentagon placed on his ability to react prevented him from responding to the calamity unfolding at the Capitol. 

Walker told senators that the secretary of the Army required him to seek authorization for any mobilization or movement of his forces on Jan. 6, an unprecedented requirement in his view. 

The D.C. commander added that he hadn’t seen requirements like those imposed on him for the Jan. 6 response in 19 years of service. He went on to say that, if not for the red tape, he would have “pulled all the guardsmen that were supporting the Metropolitan Police Department” and sent them to the Capitol immediately. 

Walker added that authorization itself wasn’t necessarily the problem. The chain of command can act quickly, so long as it recognizes a threat. 

“It’s an elaborate process, but it doesn’t always have to be when in extrem[e] circumstances,” Walker said. “We can get it done over the phone very, very quickly.”

Intel community: We can neither confirm not deny that there was an intelligence failure

As focused as the event was on the military response, senators entered the hearing with a focus on the intelligence failures that led to the insurrection as well.

But the two intelligence officials there — DHS Intelligence and Analysis Acting Chief Melissa Smislova and FBI Counterterrorism Chief Jill Sanborn — refused to give an inch on whether their offices bore any responsibility.

Neither of these officials were speaking in a vacuum. Last week, officials directly responsible for ensuring the security of the Capitol building complained that there were virtually no warnings from either intelligence officials or federal law enforcement in advance of the insurrection attempt.

But Smislova began the hearing with a straightforward denial that her office, charged with coordinating intelligence on domestic extremism, had done anything wrong.

“Before I summarize the actions my office took on Jan. 6, I am deeply concerned that despite our best efforts, they did not lead to an operational response to prepare to defend the U.S. Capitol.”

Sanborn, for her part, retreated to a different explanation for how the bureau missed planning for the insurrection, given that much of it took place in public forums online.

She said that the bureau needs the predicate of a criminal investigation in order to view even public posts. Without that, she argued, the FBI’s hands were tied.

Officials missed the broader threat of right wing terrorism in the United States

Those who found these explanations profoundly unsatisfying can count Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) among them.

Warner noted that the missteps which led to Jan. 6 stand in for a broader problem in the intelligence community and federal law enforcement: the failure to reckon with the scale of the threat posed by far-right extremism.

Warner told Sanborn and Smislova that he was “pretty disappointed” in their responses, and added that “this is not a new threat.”

He tapped into a real trend in the hearing: officials consistently fell back on claiming that right-wing extremism constituted some kind of new, unprecedented threat. In reality, it’s been killing Americans for decades.

“We can’t always say we’re going to do better next time when it’s been around for years,” Warner said. He added that “it’s not going to disappear with Donald Trump, even though there’s never been someone so active in encouraging these individuals.”

Witnesses defended disparate responses to BLM protests and insurrection

Lawmakers pressed the officials on the stark contrast between the iron-fisted crackdown on the Black Lives Matter protests in the District last summer, when law enforcement fired pepper spray and rubber bullets at demonstrators while dressed head to toe in riot gear, and the feeble response to the Capitol siege.

Walker testified that senior officials were wary of receiving the same blowback over their militaristic response to the BLM protests, hence the worry over the “optics.” They were also allegedly concerned that the presence of uniformed guards during the Trump rally that preceded the insurrection would “incite” the attendees.

The National Guard commander did note that, unlike during the BLM protests, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy wasn’t with him on Jan. 6. In contrast, McCarthy was “right next to me for days at a time” during the demonstrations last summer, Walker said.

Walker told senators that he didn’t know why McCarthy was absent on the day of the insurrection.

When Sanborn, the assistant director at the FBI Counterterrorism Division, was asked why the FBI had deployed its state-of-the-art surveillance plane to swoop over the BLM protests without doing the same on January 6, she said she didn’t “have any specifics” on the plane. However, Sanborn insisted that her agency’s approach to both gatherings was “equal opportunity.”

Was it about optics or not?

Walker told lawmakers that Army Lieutenant General Walter Piatt and Army Commanding General John Phillips expressed concern over the “optics” of deploying uniformed guards to the Capitol when he requested their approval to send his troops.

But then senior Defense official Robert Salesses, who wasn’t on the call with Walker and the senior Army leaders, said Piatt told him yesterday that he “didn’t say anything about optics” during that conversation. When Senate Rules Chair Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) pressed him on whether he was saying Walker’s account was false, Salesses clarified that the commanding general was claiming he did not use the word “optics.”

Walker stood by his testimony.

“There were people in the room with me on that call that heard what they heard,” the D.C. National Guard leader told the senators.

I have been sympathetic to the idea that the military might have been gunshy about deploying before the insurrection after what happened last June during the George Floyd protests. But once it started, it’s very hard to imagine how anyone could think it made sense to just let the cops get beaten and allow the mob to sack the Capitol because it might look bad if they showed up. In fact, it makes no sense at all.

I suspect that there was involvement from the White House and I think we know what they would have said if the National Guard wanted permission to intervene. There’s no proof of that but the mere fact that Michel Flynn’s brother was involved is suspicious.

The bad “optics” would have been the fear of upsetting some white extremists who support Donald Trump. In fact, Walker said Flynn explicitly said they were afraid of inflaming the “protesters” if there was a military presence. Why? That’s crazy.

Far-right pages that publish misinformation get the most interactions by far compared to other news sources, new research shows:

According to researchers at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, far-right purveyors of misinformation have by far the highest levels of engagement per follower compared to any other category of news source. Indeed, the researchers found that while left-leaning and centrist publications get much less engagement if they publish misinformation, the relationship is reversed on the far right, where news organizations that regularly publish false material get up to 65 percent more engagement than ones that don’t. The study provides perhaps the most substantial evidence yet about what types of news—and fake news—perform best according to this metric on Facebook.

“What we find is that among the far right in particular, misinformation is more engaging than non-misinformation,” said Laura Edelson, a doctoral candidate and the lead researcher. “I think this is something that a lot of people thought might be the case, but now we can really quantify it, we can specifically identify that this is really true on the far right, but not true in the center or on the left.”

The analysis is an excerpt from an academic working paper. The team looked at 2,973 Facebook pages of US news sources that had been analyzed for partisanship and accuracy by two independent organizations, NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check. This allowed the team to categorize each source both by ideological positioning—far right, slightly right, center, slightly left, far left—and by whether or not it had been flagged for regularly publishing false content. Of course, these rankings are an inexact science, but Edelson said the two databases were generally consistent with each other and with her own spot-checks of individual news sources.

Next, using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that analyzes activity on the platform, Edelson and her team downloaded every public post from every one of the news organizations’ Facebook and Instagram pages for a five-month period between August and January, tallying how many likes, comments, or other interactions each page accumulated. This allowed them to rank each publication by engagement per follower. Finally, they plotted that engagement score against each category of publication.

The results were striking. In the far left, slightly left, and center categories, publications rated credible by NewsGuard and MBFC saw between two and five times as much engagement as ones that were not. (Fake news published by centrist organizations, the study notes, tends to be of the medical quackery variety.) In the slightly right category, accurate sources held only a slim edge. It’s in the far-right category that things get strange: Sources designated as purveyors of misinformation saw 426 interactions per thousand followers in an average week, compared to only 259 for far-right sources without the misinformation label. Both those engagement numbers dwarf any other category; the next highest is “far left, not misinformation,” at only about 145 interactions per thousand followers per week.

The more misinformation they get the more they want to the point where they are now completely delusional. And it’s clearly a right wing thing.

Matt Gertz at Media Matters reports:

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has spent years telling his audience that white supremacists do not pose a serious threat to the public. Even as Americans motivated by racist ideologies committed acts of domestic terror — including the January 6 sacking of the U.S. Capitol — he was quick to scoff, arguing that Democrats and the press were exaggerating the threat for political gain. So after FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress the exact opposite on Tuesday, Carlson was left with three choices — admit that he was wrong, lie about what happened, or ignore it. He chose the latter path, preferring to devote his show to issues he apparently considered more pressing, like the purported cancellation of Dr. Seuss.

Wray, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2017, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that white supremacist ideology “is a persistent, evolving threat” and is “the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism portfolio, if you will, overall.” He also said that the number of arrests of such persons have nearly tripled since his first year in office. 

The FBI director further described the January 6 attack as “domestic terrorism” and that  “racially motivated violent extremism, specifically advocating for the superior[ity] of the white race” motivated some alleged participants. Wray acknowledged that those white supremacists had been instrumental in the attack, even as he explained that “militia violent extremists” represented the “biggest bucket” of alleged perpetrators. He also knocked down conspiracy theories that had circulated on Fox and are now prevalent among Republicans that anti-fascist activists were responsible for the violence that day.

Wray’s comments on the threat posed by violent white supremacists were consistent with his September congressional testimony, in which he said that among domestic terrorist attacks, “racially motivated violent extremists … have been responsible for the most lethal activity in the U.S.” Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report in October, finding that white supremacists had committed more lethal attacks than any other domestic extremist movement. Then-acting Secretary Chad Wolf wrote in that report that he was “particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.” 

While CNN and MSNBC aired much of Wray’s Tuesday testimony live, Fox largely ignored it so its hosts could focus more time on culture war nonsense. That’s a shame. Fox’s viewers would have benefited from hearing Wray’s presentation, which debunked a number of myths about the January 6 attacks propagated by the network as it sought to retain viewers by downplaying an assault on American democracy.

Carlson bears a particular responsibility in this case. His frequent parroting of white supremacist talking points has made him beloved within that bigoted community and reportedly triggered distress within Fox’s own ranks. And for the last several years — particularly since January 6 — he’s been telling his audience that Democrats and the press have vastly exaggerated concerns about white supremacists as part of a conspiracy against them.

He doesn’t want that information to go out to his audience because it would prove him an ass. Here’s an excerpt of something I wrote about Carlson a couple of years ago, in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting:

Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter’s online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of Fox network’s stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson.

Media Matters cataloged some of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of the most vociferous anti-immigrant pundits on Fox News:

And USA Today analyzed the president’s speeches since 2017 and found that he has “used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ ‘killer,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. But for all of the degrading language he’s deployed against immigrants and people of color, Trump has failed to adopt a very specific term that seemed defined the thesis of the El Paso shooter’s screed: “replacement.” However, if you watched that video above, you’ll have noticed that it’s used frequently on Fox News, particularly by Carlson.

It stands to reason that Trump wouldn’t have picked that up. It’s much too cerebral for him. After all, he didn’t understand that when the Charlottesville Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” they were talking about his own beloved daughter and son-in-law. He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He’s simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it.

But the “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.

Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)

In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.

At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:

“Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.“

And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny.  In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:

“[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.“

There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now.

They just might be doing it if they don’t get serious about this right now:

The most explosive battle in decades over access to the voting booth will reach a new crescendo this week, as Republican-controlled states advance an array of measures to restrict the ballot, and the U.S. House of Representatives votes on the federal legislation that represents Democrats’ best chance to stop them.

It’s no exaggeration to say that future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy. The outcome could not only shape the balance of power between the parties, but determine whether that democracy grows more inclusive or exclusionary. To many civil-rights advocates and democracy scholars I’ve spoken with, this new wave of state-level bills constitutes the greatest assault on Americans’ right to vote since the Jim Crow era’s barriers to the ballot.

“This is a huge moment,” Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, told me. “This harkens to pre-segregation times in the South, and it goes to the core question of how we define citizenship and whether or not all citizens actually will have access to fully engage and participate.”

In Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, and Montana, Republican governors and legislators are moving forward bills that would reduce access to voting by mail, limit early voting, ban ballot drop boxes, inhibit voter-registration drives, and toughen identification requirements—measures inspired by the same discredited claims of election fraud that Donald Trump pushed after his 2020 loss. Earlier this week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in Georgia, for instance, passed a sweeping bill that would do almost all of those things.

The Supreme Court’s 6–3 conservative majority is unlikely to block many, or perhaps any, of these state laws. As a result, Democrats may have a single realistic opportunity to resist not only these proposals, but also GOP plans to institute severe partisan congressional gerrymanders in many of the same states. That opportunity: using Democrats’ unified control of Washington to establish national election standards—by passing the omnibus election-reform bill known as H.R. 1, which is scheduled for a House vote today, and the new Voting Rights Act, which is expected to come to the floor later this year.

Democrats may have only a brief window in which to block these state-level GOP maneuvers. Typically, the president’s party loses House and Senate seats in the first midterm election after his victory. Democrats will face even worse odds if Republicans succeed in imposing restrictive voting laws or gerrymandering districts in the GOP’s favor across a host of red states.

If Democrats lose their slim majority in either congressional chamber next year, they will lose their ability to pass voting-rights reform. After that, the party could face a debilitating dynamic: Republicans could use their state-level power to continue limiting ballot access, which would make regaining control of the House or the Senate more difficult for Democrats—and thus prevent them from passing future national voting rules that override the exclusionary state laws.

“There’s an increasing appreciation,” Democratic Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland, H.R. 1’s chief sponsor, told me, that “if we can’t get these changes in place in time for the 2022 midterm election, the efforts that Republicans are taking at the state level to lock in this voter-suppression regime” and maximize their advantage via partisan gerrymanders “will reshape the environment in a way that makes it impossible to get this, or frankly many other things, done.”

The outcome in the House for both H.R. 1 and a new VRA isn’t in much doubt. No Democrat voted against either bill when the chamber first passed them in 2019. This year, every House Democrat has already endorsed H.R. 1, ensuring its passage today. Although some Senate observers have questioned whether the moderate Democrat Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, will support H.R. 1’s Senate equivalent, most election-reform advocates I’ve spoken with expect that, in the end, Manchin and every other Senate Democrat will back both voting-rights bills, as they did in the previous Congress.

How far the party will go to make them law remains in doubt, however. Senate Republicans are likely to try to kill these bills with a filibuster. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the principal sponsor of H.R. 1’s Senate analogue, has been urging his colleagues to consider ending the filibuster for these bills alone, even if they are unwilling to end it for all legislation. But so far, at least two Democrats remain resistant to curtailing the filibuster in any way: Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

One White House official, who asked not to be identified while discussing internal strategy, told me that “the president is committed to defending the voting rights of all Americans, and keenly aware of the ongoing threats to those rights.” But several activists and scholars who support the election-reform bills told me they fear that neither the Biden administration nor Senate Democrats are sufficiently worried about the threat to small-d democracy coalescing in the red states. They are especially dumbfounded that Manchin and Sinema—and maybe others—would protect the filibuster on the grounds of encouraging bipartisan cooperation when Senate Republicans would be using it to shield red-state actions meant to entrench GOP control. “What’s the point of being a Democrat if you are just going to let Republicans systematically tilt the playing field so that Democrats can’t win?” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the centrist think tank New America, told me. “At that point, you should just be a Republican.”

Note that’s a centrist think tank.

Although Democrats first introduced H.R. 1 and the new VRA long before the 2020 campaign, everything that has happened since Election Day has underscored the stakes in this struggle. The GOP’s state-level offensive amounts to an extension of the assault Trump mounted in the courts, in state legislatures, and ultimately through the attack that he inspired against the Capitol. If nothing else, the GOP’s boldness can leave Democrats with little doubt about what they can expect in the years ahead if they do not establish nationwide election standards. “This is a very brazen effort by lawmakers across the country to enact provisions that make it harder for Americans to vote,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice who is tracking the GOP’s state-level measures, told me. “There is no subtlety and no attempt to obfuscate what is going on here.”

This piece is by Ron Brownstein who goes on to lay out the long list of right wing efforts across the country to roll back voting rights in dozens of different ways. He continues:

Against the backdrop of the red-state voting offensive, the fate of H.R. 1 looks like a genuine inflection point. If Democrats can’t persuade Manchin, Sinema, and any other filibuster proponents to kill the parliamentary tool, Senate Republicans will be able to shield their state-level allies from federal interference. And that could produce a widening divergence between elections in red and blue states—as well as a lasting disadvantage for Democrats in the battle for control of Congress. Such a chasm will fuel “competing narratives that are inherently corrosive and destructive,” Sarbanes told me. “The more you have this bifurcated system of how elections are conducted in this country, the more oxygen you are going to give to some of the conspiracy theories that come from the other side.”

Yet even that equilibrium—with blue states expanding the franchise and red states restricting it—might not be stable. First, voter-suppression laws and gerrymanders in red states could help Republicans regain one or both congressional chambers in 2022. Then, efforts to restrict the vote could help Republicans recapture the presidency in 2024. Today, Democratic governors in key swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—can block any restrictive laws, but if the party loses any of those governorships in 2022, it’ll be virtually powerless to stop new voter-suppression efforts from the Republican-controlled state legislatures.

In that nightmare scenario for Democrats, new laws across the Rust Belt, combined with what’s already happening in Arizona and Georgia, would put enough states at risk to seriously endanger Democratic hopes of holding the White House in 2024. If Republicans win unified control of the White House and Congress that year, they could try to set national voting standards that impose the red-state voting rules on blue states. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida, for instance, has already proposed legislation that would bar all states from offering automatic voter registration and using drop boxes, and would require them to adopt stiff voter-ID rules. In his speech to CPAC on Sunday, Trump also called for establishing a national voter-ID requirement, as well as rules banning early voting and most mail balloting.

More and more Democrats, Sarbanes said, are coming to recognize that “this isn’t just about trying to do something now that we can do later. This is about doing something now that we may not get the chance to do again for another 50 years.” Democrats face an unforgiving equation: a fleeting window in which to act, and potentially lasting consequences if they don’t. “If you look at all the stakes that are involved,” Sarbanes continued, “the notion that you would miss this opportunity becomes incomprehensible.”

It is incomprehensible since it means that this autocratic, batshit insane, conspiracy-addled, wrecking ball of a Republican party is intent upon creating the means to hold power for decades. The court won’t save us. “Demographics” won’t save us. Nothing will save us if the Democrats don’t meet this challenge and defeat these nihilists.

I think there’s a tendency to believe because they are so clownish and ignorant that they aren’t a threat. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are very dangerous. I f they are able to consolidate minority power through the manipulation of our democratic process we may not be able to recover.

They are just “doing their own thing.”

1. From a historical point of view, there is something fascinating, in a macabre way, about the TX governor lifting his state’s mask mandate. There is at least an economic justification for opening businesses, but none whatsoever for not requiring masks.

2. It is an absolute privileging of personal choice over the public good. Now, half a century ago, the GOP was very much the party of responsibility, conformity, duty. Its president excoriated progressives for their experiments with drugs, sexual freedom, “alternate” lifestyles.

3. “Freedom” was a collective, national freedom, associated with the “free world”–not the freedom to do whatever the hell you wanted. But today the GOP has increasingly adopted put that libertarian impulse at the heart of its program.

4. “Freedom” now means the freedom to own whatever guns you want, whatever the danger to others; the freedom to pay minimal taxes; the freedom to run your business how you want without regulation; the freedom to pollute regardless of the ecological damage…

5. Plus the freedom to act how you want with subordinates without worrying about sexual harassment charges, the freedom to eat what you want without the nanny state telling you otherwise…

6. And now, of course, the freedom to do whatever the hell you want during a deadly pandemic even if doing so puts the lives of others at risk.

7. Donald Trump, of course, is the perfect expression of this tendency since he lacks impulse control entirely and is the walking embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins. “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

8. Personally, I’d like to see the GOP of 1971 reassert itself and start talking about duty, responsibility and the common good.

9. There is also something of a reversal with progressives who formerly chanted “turn on, tune in, drop out” and now boast of how little fun they are having, but that is a subject for another thread. /end

Originally tweeted by David A. Bell (@DavidAvromBell) on March 3, 2021.

It’s not libertarianism. It’s just nihilism. The1960s counter-culture was risky in many different ways. But it wasn’t determined to put innocent people’s lives at risk as they go about their daily lives just to make a point.

I was tempted to say that it’s sad they didn’t have fun when they were young but then I realized that these people dress up in costumes and wear their hats and dance to disco music (without having a clue what they are singing about) and are obviously having the time of their lives. This is their high point.

Back in 2017, the dominant post-election analysis held that the people who voted for Trump were driven into the arms of the billionaire, populist, demagogue out of an overwhelming sense of “economic anxiety.” Political pundits spent months wringing their hands over how the Democrats had somehow failed to address the basic, workaday, kitchen-table-issues of these hardscrabble Americans while Donald Trump gave them hope that he would ease their burdens with his very stable business genius.

That was never very accurate as anyone observing the Trump phenomenon could see. Those voters were just mad at the fact that society is changing and they feel they are losing their status. In other words, they don’t want to share the culture equally with people who think and live differently than they do. Donald Trump spoke their language of grievance and exclusion and they reveled in it. They followed him around like a bunch of red-hatted Deadheads, dancing, chanting and cheering ecstatically at every insulting, degrading remark he made, unashamedly telling the press that they loved him because he said out loud what they were thinking.

Despite losing his re-election, being impeached twice, overseeing the worst pandemic response of all developed countries and inciting an insurrection based upon the colossal lie that the election was stolen, most of them are still with Trump. If anything, they have gone way beyond simple grievance about losing their status as this series of interviews by CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan at last weekend’s CPAC illustrates:

You might think it makes sense to chalk up all those comments to the fringiest of the fringe but that would be wrong.

Political scientists Christopher Sebastian Parker and Rachel M. Blum at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage recently surveyed avowed MAGA followers and the findings were predictable. “At least half are White, Christian, male, over 65, retired and earn over 50,000 a year.” It turns out 30% have college degrees so the idea that it’s all about “non-college-educated” voters is at least somewhat erroneous. According to the Post:

MAGA supporters overwhelmingly believe Trump’s election misinformation, as well as other conspiracy theories. Nearly 100 percent of MAGA supporters believe Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, and 70 percent support Trump remaining in office beyond the allowed two terms. Their distrust extends to other areas as well. They overwhelmingly agree, in proportions of 80 percent or higher, with statements suggesting that unknown elites control America and with conspiracy theories about covid-19. […]

MAGA supporters are also biased against Blacks, immigrants and women. They fully accept Trump’s rhetoric on these groups, downplay any obstacles faced by Black Americans, view immigration as a threat to U.S. laws and culture and agree women are seeking special favors, or worse, are trying to control men.

This is a very radical group of people and they are much more extreme than they were in 2016. These are self-described MAGA believers so perhaps they don’t accurately represent all Republican voters, but the fact is that most Republicans do support Donald Trump and it’s hard to separate him from this wild set of beliefs. Certainly, the rejection of all reason and facts concerning the election results and democratic norms applies across the board.

New York Magazine’s Ben Jacobs smartly observed that the American right has pretty much abandoned any pretense to libertarianism and is now much more aligned with the European right than its ever been. (Yes, their paeans to “freedom” are as shrill as ever but, as Jacobs points out, the point seems to be more aimed at “owning the libs” than any adherence to principle.) He notes that while there were some tepid gestures toward small government economics, the over-arching theme at CPAC this year was demagogic, culture war red meat, with “strident warnings about Marxism and Black Lives Matter, hardline stances set out on immigration and the rise of China and newfound zeal to combat and regulate social-media companies.” And Jacobs notes that politicians all tried to tap into the “‘but he fights’ ethos that fueled Trump’s rise.”

The New York Times also reported that the crowd loved those they perceived as “fighters” from Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo, to North Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. (They even like the lame demagoguery of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, which I find incomprehensible.) They don’t care if these people are right or wrong, it’s their unwillingness to back down no matter what that they admire.

“We can sit around and have academic debates about conservative policy,” DeSantis said. “But the question is, when the klieg lights get hot, when the left comes after you: Will you stay strong, or will you fold?”

That’s also what they love about Trump. Considering that, perhaps the most disturbing parallel with European far-right nationalism and today’s GOP is the Big Lie of the stolen election and the rejection of the peaceful transfer of power.

As the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen points out, this widespread belief, validated and confirmed by all those “fighters” in the GOP and the right-wing media, has a disturbing precedent in recent political history. She tells the story of right-wing populist leaders Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, both of whom were voted out of office after early failed terms, claimed that the vote was rigged and returned to office later to dismantle what was left of liberal democracy. They are still in office years later.

Gessen also quotes Bálint Magyar, the author of such books as “Post-Communist Mafia State” and “The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes” who defines their populism as, “an ideological instrument for the political program of morally unconstrained collective egoism.” Gessen explains:

Magyar suggested reading the definition backward to better understand it: “The egoistic voter who wants to disregard other people and help solely himself can express this in a collective more easily than alone.” The collective form helps frame the selfishness in loftier terms, deploying “homeland,” “America first,” or ideas about keeping people safe from alien criminals. In the end, Magyar writes, such populism “delegitimizes moral constraints and legitimizes moral nihilism.”

Now go back and look at the characteristics of the MAGA people surveyed by Parker and Blum for the Monkey Cage. Magyar describes their leadership as well.

At their CPAC confab last weekend, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem proudly took credit for refusing to follow health guidelines that would have saved lives in the pandemic. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz mocked the necessity to wear masks. And their president in exile stood before them and insisted over and over again that the election was stolen from them. That sure sounds like “a political program of morally unconstrained egoism” to me.

Salon

This report about the decline of democracy around the world is depressing. Something is definitely happening and it isn’t just here.

But what’s happening here is very bad.

The eclipse of US leadership:

The final weeks of the Trump presidency featured unprecedented attacks on one of the world’s most visible and influential democracies. After four years of condoning and indeed pardoning official malfeasance, ducking accountability for his own transgressions, and encouraging racist and right-wing extremists, the outgoing president openly strove to illegally overturn his loss at the polls, culminating in his incitement of an armed mob to disrupt Congress’s certification of the results. Trump’s actions went unchecked by most lawmakers from his own party, with a stunning silence that undermined basic democratic tenets. Only a serious and sustained reform effort can repair the damage done during the Trump era to the perception and reality of basic rights and freedoms in the United States.

The year leading up to the assault on the Capitol was fraught with other episodes that threw the country into the global spotlight in a new way. The politically distorted health recommendations, partisan infighting, shockingly high and racially disparate coronavirus death rates, and police violence against protesters advocating for racial justice over the summer all underscored the United States’ systemic dysfunctions and made American democracy appear fundamentally unstable. Even before 2020, Trump had presided over an accelerating decline in US freedom scores, driven in part by corruption and conflicts of interest in the administration, resistance to transparency efforts, and harsh and haphazard policies on immigration and asylum that made the country an outlier among its Group of Seven peers.

But President Trump’s attempt to overturn the will of the American voters was arguably the most destructive act of his time in office. His drumbeat of claims—without evidence—that the electoral system was ridden by fraud sowed doubt among a significant portion of the population, despite what election security officials eventually praised as the most secure vote in US history. Nationally elected officials from his party backed these claims, striking at the foundations of democracy and threatening the orderly transfer of power.

Though battered, many US institutions held strong during and after the election process. Lawsuits challenging the result in pivotal states were each thrown out in turn by independent courts. Judges appointed by presidents from both parties ruled impartially, including the three Supreme Court justices Trump himself had nominated, upholding the rule of law and confirming that there were no serious irregularities in the voting or counting processes. A diverse set of media outlets broadly confirmed the outcome of the election, and civil society groups investigated the fraud claims and provided evidence of a credible vote. Some Republicans spoke eloquently and forcefully in support of democratic principles, before and after the storming of the Capitol. Yet it may take years to appreciate and address the effects of the experience on Americans’ ability to come together and collectively uphold a common set of civic values.

The exposure of US democracy’s vulnerabilities has grave implications for the cause of global freedom. Rulers and propagandists in authoritarian states have always pointed to America’s domestic flaws to deflect attention from their own abuses, but the events of the past year will give them ample new fodder for this tactic, and the evidence they cite will remain in the world’s collective memory for a long time to come. After the Capitol riot, a spokesperson from the Russian foreign ministry stated, “The events in Washington show that the US electoral process is archaic, does not meet modern standards, and is prone to violations.” Zimbabwe’s president said the incident “showed that the US has no moral right to punish another nation under the guise of upholding democracy.”

For most of the past 75 years, despite many mistakes, the United States has aspired to a foreign policy based on democratic principles and support for human rights. When adhered to, these guiding lights have enabled the United States to act as a leader on the global stage, pressuring offenders to reform, encouraging activists to continue their fight, and rallying partners to act in concert. After four years of neglect, contradiction, or outright abandonment under Trump, President Biden has indicated that his administration will return to that tradition. But to rebuild credibility in such an endeavor and garner the domestic support necessary to sustain it, the United States needs to improve its own democracy. It must strengthen institutions enough to survive another assault, protect the electoral system from foreign and domestic interference, address the structural roots of extremism and polarization, and uphold the rights and freedoms of all people, not just a privileged few.

Everyone benefits when the United States serves as a positive model, and the country itself reaps ample returns from a more democratic world. Such a world generates more trade and fairer markets for US goods and services, as well as more reliable allies for collective defense. A global environment where freedom flourishes is more friendly, stable, and secure, with fewer military conflicts and less displacement of refugees and asylum seekers. It also serves as an effective check against authoritarian actors who are only too happy to fill the void.

I think American credibility has been permanently damaged. After all, if we could elect a monster like Trump once, why would anyone think we wouldn’t do it again? Particularly since the Republicans are still pushing the Big Lie and tens of millions of Americans believe it. We are simply not a stable country anymore. The rub, of course, is that the US is still immensely wealthy and armed to the teeth. The world can be forgiven for being leery of us at this point. I think a lot of Americans are leery of ourselves.

The Party of Trump is split on whether to drop all pretense and just admit it does not believe in democracy and wants to go full-on authoritarian on the European model, as Digby notes today at Salon.

As we saw Tuesday at the Supreme Court in reference to an Arizona law that disqualifies ballots cast out of precinct, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked the Arizona GOP’s lawyer, “What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC here in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?”

“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” Carvin replied. “Politics is a zero-sum game.”

You have to commend him for joining Paul Weyrich and other Republicans in telling the truth about GOP vote suppression.

In key voting rights case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asks GOP lawyer Michael Carvin “what’s the interest” to Republicans in keeping voting restrictions in Arizona.

Carvin: “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.” pic.twitter.com/In7GULkSUb

— The Recount (@therecount) March 2, 2021

Many others in the party will out of habit still solemnly insist their primary concern is for election integrity or ballot security or restoring voters’ confidence in elections, confidence the GOP has spent decades systematically undermining with groundless charges of widespread, undetected voter fraud.

I still recall when remember when their comlaint was “uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.“

"Election integrity" is the GOP's new code word for massive voter suppression

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) March 3, 2021

While a few will drop the integrity act, the rest will continue to play along. But we know how this game is played.

In this game, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If we haven’t uncovered aliens disguised as humans voting in our elections, that’s not proof it isn’t happening. What (they claim) it proves is we have failed in our duty to enact the kind of common-sense election security measures Real Americans™ demand to prevent aliens disguised as humans from voting in our elections.

And they’re just the guys to do it.

The political/social upheavals of the last few years send mixed signals. Are they signs civic culture is being reinvigorated or that it is in a death spiral? One might look at the Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, or Black Lives Matter protests and see the former. Others see their way of life (or at least their political dominance) threatened by them.

Raw Story reports that a Republican Idaho state legislator opposes expanding funding for early childhood education because it “makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child.” One might infer he knows not only that women belong in their dwellings but in what room.

“What year is this?” asked Josh Holland. “Sorry, what century is this?”

Hullabaloo alum David Atkins advised conservatives not to become too attached to social structures that are always evolving, even as American Enterprise Institute Fellow Steven Hayward once opened a conference on movement conservatism with the assertion that conservatives “defend the unchanging ground of our changing experience.” 

Basically, anything newer than a few hundred years old is a largely temporary innovation to which people should not be forming major emotional attachments.

That includes isms, social structures, family structures, work schedules, and constitutions.

— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) March 2, 2021

It is not that civics taught in schools was that rigorous a subject. Mine was taught by the high school’s basketball coach. Still, some see the decline of any kind of civics education (so rumored) as comcomittant with a breakdown in civic comity. Will bringing it back with renewed vigor help reverse the decline in commitment to this democratic republic?

“Our constitutional democracy is ailing,” Danielle Allen and Paul Carrese argue in the Washington Post. If that was not clear before the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection “the lesson was etched into our souls that day.”

As members of the executive committee for the Educating for American Democracy Initiative, they argue for renewing civics education on a roadmap developed “by a diverse and cross-ideological group of scholars and educators.”

They write:

The roadmap is not a national curriculum, nor a set of instructional standards. It recommends approaches to learning that do five critical things at once: (1) inspire students to want to become involved in their constitutional democracy; (2) tell a full narrative of America’s plural yet shared story; (3) explore the need for compromise to make constitutional democracy work; (4) cultivate civic honesty and patriotism that leaves space both to love and to critique this country; and (5) teach history and civics both through a timeline of events and the themes that run through those events.

Our group has done something that wasn’t supposed to be doable in our fractious times — debate disagreements productively across differences of identity, viewpoint and geography, and achieve consensus about what and how to teach for an excellent civic education.

Even as educators found agreement on how to teach English language arts and on math and STEM, cultural polarization has exacerbated disagreements over teaching social studies.

Yet disagreement is a feature, not a bug, of our constitutional democracy; the question is whether we can learn to disagree productively. One of the goals of the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap is to teach young people about our disagreements in ways that can help them productively engage in those debates.

Yet disagreeing productively is not an aspiration for members of a delusional secessionist cult of personality that has possessed a major political party in the world’s greatest military power. Governing has been replaced with owning the libs, with conflict for conflict’s sake, a feature of “morally unconstrained collective egoism,” as Bálint Magyar tells Masha Gessen.

From at least the advent of the T-party, many on the right abandoned the sort of highfalutin conservatism of Buckley’s dreams in 1955 for something more primal and more bare-knuckles. The Party of Trump does not want to be fed. Like T-Rex, it wants to hunt. Neither does it want its radicalism tamed by new civics education.

I wish the Educating for American Democracy Initiative all the best in its endeavors. They will need it.

Update: Replaced image with one bearing Creative Commons license.

Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine. @VUMChealth pic.twitter.com/38kJrDzLqC

— Dolly Parton (@DollyParton) March 2, 2021

In case you didn’t know, she donated a million dollars to help the development of the vaccine. She is the best.

If you want to read something truly lovely about Dolly, click over to this piece about her by Tracie McMillan Cottom. You won’t regret it.