Month: July 2021

The GOP is raking in the money selling Trump and Trumpism. It’s really all they’ve got:

The Republican National Committee has been dangling a “Trump Life Membership” to entice small contributors to give online. The party’s Senate campaign arm has been hawking an “Official Trump Majority Membership.” And the committee devoted to winning back the House has been touting Mr. Trump’s nearly every public utterance, talking up a nonexistent Trump social media network and urging donations to “retake Trump’s Majority.”

Six months after Mr. Trump left office, the key to online fund-raising success for the Republican Party in 2021 can largely be summed up in the three words it used to identify the sender of a recent email solicitation: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

The fund-raising language of party committees is among the most finely tuned messaging in politics, with every word designed to motivate more people to give more money online. And all that testing has yielded Trump-themed gimmicks and giveaways including Trump pint glasses, Trump-signed pictures, Trump event tickets and Trump T-shirts — just from the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the month of July.

“The Republican Party has never had small-dollar fund-raising at this scale before Donald Trump,” said Brad Parscale, who was Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager in 2020 and is still an adviser, “and they probably never will at this scale after Donald Trump.”

The strategy is clearly paying financial dividends, as three main G.O.P. federal committees raised a combined $134.8 million from direct individual contributions in the first six months of 2021, nearly matching the $136.2 million raised by the equivalent Democratic committees, federal records show.

But the endless invocations of the former president underscore not only his enduring appeal to online Republican activists and donors — the base of the party’s base and its financial engine — but also the unlikelihood that the G.O.P. apparatus wants to, or even can, meaningfully break from him for the foreseeable future.

The stark reliance on Mr. Trump’s name to spur small donations amounts to a tangible expression of the party’s inescapable dependency on him — one that risks preventing a reckoning over the losses the G.O.P. suffered in the last four years, including Mr. Trump’s own, which he has denied by clinging to false theories of election fraud.

They don’t think they need a reckoning. The cult thinks they are winning. And they’re sending lots of money to keep the streak going.

Lindsey Graham made this bold prediction on Hannity last night.

“I think there’s a tidal wave brewing. I think this is going to be 1994 all over again. When you look at rampant inflation, out-of-control crime and a broken border and just [a] general lack of knowing what you’re doing, lack of competency … the Republican Party’s going to have a great comeback if we recruit the right people.”

Ed Kilgore in NY Magazine thinks he’s wrong.

Here are some key reasons why a landslide probably won’t bring Democrats all the way down in 2022:

Majority Party Exposure

It’s no accident that Democrats went into 1994 with solid majorities in both houses of Congress, which meant a large number of its incumbents were on dangerous ground. There were 46 Democratic-controlled House districts that had gone for Poppy Bush in 1992, and 79 that had a Republican advantage in PVI (or Partisan Voting Index, the Cook Political Report’s measurement of the partisan lean of a district as compared to national averages). Similarly, in 2010 Democrats held seats in 49 House districts that had been carried in 2008 by John McCain, along with 66 House districts with a Republican advantage in PVI.

While redistricting could increase Democratic exposure, at present only seven Democrats represent House districts carried by Trump in 2020. A larger number of Democrats, 29, are in seats with a Republican advantage in PVI, though that’s a much smaller number than in 1994 and 1992.

The bottom line in terms of Democratic exposure is that it paid a price in 1994 for decades of House dominance even though Republicans were making gains in partisan ID and presidential performance. And in 2010 Democrats were “exposed” because of two consecutive landslide cycles. In a way, their meh performance in 2020 House races help insulate Democrats from big losses in 2022.

The Senate is more complicated because only a third of the chamber is on the ballot in any one two-year cycle. But in 1994 Democrats were defending 22 seats, and the Republicans just 13. In 2010, Democrats were defending 19 seats, compared to the GOP’s 18. In 2022, Republicans will be defending 20 seats and Democrats just 14. It’s not set up for the kind of eight-seat gain Republicans achieved in 1994, or the six-seat gain they won in 2010.

Retirements

A big wave of retirements in the party facing a bad cycle is often a sign of an approaching “wave” election. That was particularly true in 1994, when 29 House Democrats retired or ran for another office. In 2010, there were 16 open Democratic House seats. So far heading toward 2022, there are just three Democrats in the House retiring and three more running for another office.

Five Democratic senators retired in 1994, and five more in 2010. So far no Democrats senators are hanging it up in 2022, but five Republican senators are. Again, no clear 1994-size advantages for the GOP.

Regional shifts

The big underlying factor in 1994 is that the South was definitively unmoored from its ancestral Democratic affiliation, as the ideological polarization of the two parties during the Civil Rights era approached a critical point, with redistricting (characterized by tactical alliances between Republicans and Black Democrats at the expense of white Democratic incumbents) speeding up the process. For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans won a majority of the House popular vote in the region and a majority of House seats. In my own home state of Georgia, the House delegation went from a 9-1 Democratic advantage going into the 1992 elections to an 8-3 advantage after 1994. Meanwhile, Democrats won just one Senate race in any state south of the Mason-Dixon line.

In today’s highly polarized and relatively stable partisan environment, small shifts in partisan voting patterns in battleground states can have big consequences in presidential elections, but there is no entire region on the brink of defection from one coalition to another, and in general the “swing” vote has been steadily dropping in recent years.

Turnout

One 1994-2010 asset Republicans can at least hope to replicate in 2022 involves relative turnout levels. According to longtime election-data wizard Curtis Gans, in 1994: “Republican turnout was up in every region of the country, while Democratic turnout was down in every region of the country except the Middle Atlantic States and the Far West, where the party recorded exceedingly modest gains.” Analysis based on Census data showed a similar Republican tilt in turnout by demographic groups: “Voter turnout for whites 18 years and over was 47 percent, compared with 37 percent for Blacks and only 20 percent for persons of Hispanic origin. Asians voted at levels similar to Hispanics, recording a turnout rate of only 22 percent.”

Similarly, in 2010, Republican turnout was up, mostly because the older white voters always most likely to vote in midterm elections were beginning to tilt seriously Republican. Most notably, after narrowly losing the over-65 vote in the previous midterms in 2006, Republicans won it by a 59-38 margin in 2010. That was big, because 58.9 percent of eligible seniors turned out in 2010, as compared to 19.6 percent of eligible 18-24 year-olds and 32.2 percent of 25-44 year-olds.

The close correlation of older voters and GOP voters in 2010 has steadily faded since 2010; Republicans only won seniors by two percent in the last midterms in 2018, and by four percent in 2020. So the age skew isn’t likely to help them all that much in 2022. Traditionally, the party that does not control the White House gets an enthusiasm bump that helps explain presidential midterm House losses in all but a very few (1998 and 2002 being the exceptions) post-World-War II midterms. That could be the case in 2022, though the heavy involvement of Donald Trump that seems likely may help keep Democratic turnout nearer to the strong 2018 and 2020 levels than would otherwise be the case.

A wild card is whether voter-suppression measures being enacted by Republican legislatures will have a significant impact on 2022 turnout. It’s possible, though Democrats will use the malice involved in these laws to counter-mobilize the young and minority voters that are the GOP’s intended victims. Meanwhile, voting rules are actually being liberalized in most Democratic-controlled states.

Presidential approval ratings

Whatever else is going on, midterm elections most notably operate as referenda on the president of the United States. If the chief magistrate is unpopular, the party controlling the White House always loses ground, sometimes dramatically. In final pre-election polls in 1994, Bill Clinton’s average job-approval rating was 47 percent (according to FiveThirtyEight). In 2010 Obama was at 45 percent; and in 2018 Trump was at 42 percent. Meanwhile, in the two outlier midterms, Clinton’s average job-approval rating was 65 percent in 1998, while George W. Bush’s was 62 percent in 2002.

While no one knows now what Biden’s numbers will be like in November of 2022, his average job-approval ratings have been uniquely steady over the first six months of his presidency, oscillating only four points in either direction since he took office (from 51 percent to 55 percent). Since Trump’s approval ratings were nearly as stable (though at a lower level), we may have entered an era in which polarization and the decline of swing voters means closer and more predictable elections. That, too, would reduce the odds of 2022 Republican tsunami.

Read the whole thing if you can. Kilgore goes into the history of that 1994 landslide and brings up some interesting underlying fundamentals, specifically the fact that rather than Newt Gingrich’s supposed brilliance, it was the final year of the Southern realignment. Similarly, the 2010 “shellacking” wasn’t so much the power of the Tea Party as it was “Democratic over-exposure after two consecutive winning — and exciting — Democratic election years.”

Anything can happen but there are fewer advantages for Republicans than you might normally see. Kilgore concludes:

Republicans like Lindsey Graham should beware of too much hype over the 2022 midterms. It won’t take much for Republicans to retake the House, and retaking the Senate is definitely within the realm of possibility. But if Trump plays as big a role in the midterms as he apparently wants to, and his party inflates any gains into world-historical significance, getting rid of the 45th president and his brood may be impossible. And that could be a pyrrhic victory indeed.

It would be very much to their advantage to lose this midterm if they want to get rid of Trump and his cult. But I’m pretty sure they’re fine with him. They get a lot of what they want without having to do much of anything but lick his boots and they seem to like doing that. If the country goes to hell, they’re fine with that too.

He had been told many, many times that the president is not supposed to interfere in DOJ business and he just didn’t care.

President Donald Trump called his acting attorney general nearly every day at the end of last year to alert him to claims of voter fraud or alleged improper vote counts in the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

The personal pressure campaign, which has not been previously reported, involved repeated phone calls to acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen in which Trump raised various allegations he had heard about and asked what the Justice Department was doing about the issue. The people familiar with the conversations spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive legal and political issues that are not yet public.

Rosen told few people about the phone calls, even in his inner circle. But there are notes of some of the calls that were written by a top aide to Rosen, Richard Donoghue, who was present for some of the conversations, these people said.

Donoghue’s notes could be turned over to Congress in a matter of days, they added, if Trump does not file papers in court seeking to block such a handover. In addition, both Rosen and Donoghue could be questioned about the conversations by congressional committees examining Trump’s actions in the days after the election.

The Justice Department recently notified Rosen, Donoghue and others who were serving there during the end of Trump’s presidency that the agency would not seek to invoke executive privilege if they are asked about their contacts with the president during that period.

That posture — which the letter to Rosen calls a departure from normal agency practice — means that individuals who are questioned by Congress would not have to say the conversations with the president were off-limits. They would be able to share details that give a firsthand account of Trump’s frantic attempts to overturn the 2020 election and involve the Justice Department in that effort.

That is a big deal. I have no doubt that some of these people will say it anyway. And this will be a very clear test as to whether those involved are committed to their oaths to the constitution or to Donald Trump because even if they did not respond to his insane entreaties to overturn the election, if they refuse to testify about what happened they are protecting him from accountability for what he did.

We may actually get one. Coming soon. Maybe.

It’s infrastructure week. https://t.co/wRCx1ceatN

— President Biden (@POTUS) July 28, 2021

CNN:

A bipartisan group of senators have reached an agreement on key points related to a massive infrastructure package. The Senate also voted to open debate on the plan, with 17 Republicans joining Democrats in voting to do so. The measure includes money for roads, bridges and public transportation, and while it falls far short of President Joe Biden’s initial $2.25 trillion proposal, Biden is still touting it. This bill falls more around the $1 trillion mark, with about $550 billion in new federal investments in America’s infrastructure. The bipartisan breakthroughs yesterday may move the plan forward, but only by a matter of inches. Many Republicans, and progressive Democrats who want more from the bill, could still bog down any significant movement. 

Associated Press:

The outcome will set the stage for the next debate over Biden’s much more ambitious $3.5 trillion spending package, a strictly partisan pursuit of far-reaching programs and services including child care, tax breaks and health care that touch almost every corner of American life. Republicans strongly oppose that bill, which would require a simple majority, and may try to stop both.

The Senate vote was 67-32. So yes, this is a development, but not necessarily a breakthrough. We are a long way from money flowing yet. Watch that space.

Nice troll by Biden’s office, though.

The medical staffer was out of view yesterday, but not out of earshot. He told a colleague that he really likes American Marxism. WTF? He liked it so much he said he had bought extra copies for friends. Ah, a book titled “American Marxism.” New, from Mark Levin. God help us.

The hysteria loosed regularly by the right in buzzwords like communism, socialism, Marxism, etc., feels like so much chaff thrown into the air to obscure the right’s own dark leanings. A kind of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” strategy. Not terribly sophisticated, but effective with their political base. See Fox News’ ratings.

Jeff Sharlet listened to Officer Daniel Hodges describe on Tuesday the religious tone of Donald Trump’s “white nationalist insurrection” on Jan. 6. But it was also Christian nationalism, Sharlet argues in Vanity Fair:

“It was clear the terrorists perceive themselves to be Christians,” he said in a testimony acutely sensitive to the symbolic language of the mob. “I saw the Christian flag directly to my front. Another read, ‘Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president’”—a staple at Trump rallies—“Another, ‘Jesus is king.’” From early on, insurrectionists mistook themselves for missionaries. “Some of them would try to recruit me,” said Officer Hodges. “One of them came up to me and said, ‘Are you my brother?’” When it was Hodges’s turn at the front—in the “meat grinder” where an insurrectionist literally tried to rip his head off—they still attempted to evangelize: “Even during this intense contest of wills, they sought to convert us to their cult. One man shouted, ‘We all just want to make our voices heard, and I think you feel the same. I really think you feel the same.’” 

Those who breached the Senate chambers offered a prayer of thanks to Jesus “for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.” Others blew ram’s horns during the assault in echoes of the Book of Joshua.

Sharlet writes:

The Christian nationalism described by Hodges. It’s the religion of the lost cause, whether that of the Confederacy, Donald Trump, or the mammoth Southern Baptist Convention that has recently declared critical race theory—by which they mean the whole history of race—a main theological foe, a sin somehow not listed in scripture. Christian identity, in the vaguest of senses, as euphemism for the idea of an American one that is white in biological fact or ideological essence.

I asked these guys if civil war was what they wanted. “Yes” they replied pic.twitter.com/BLopvJP6Ik

— Tess Owen (@misstessowen) January 6, 2021

But like the scare words — communism, socialism, Marxism — ram’s horns, prayers, and Christian flags are more chaff meant to obscure the mob’s darker motives and to justify the violent actions. Peter Manseau, the National Museum of American History’s curator of American religious history describes it as part of the “shared the psychological safety net” the terrorists brought with them. “How can a righteous mob be wrong?” Manseau asked rhetorically.

The New York Times separates fact from the myth the new Lost Cause is manufacturing in real time in an attempt to make us unsee what we all saw on Jan. 6. Those attempts to redefine what was will continue just as the Lost Cause has persisted for over a century and a half.

The goal, Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer writes, is not American in the American sense:

The battle over government is not about the size of government, but the role of government. Republicans want the government to serve as a bulwark against the growing political and economic power of a diversifying America that they view as an existential threat to their primarily White, Christian base. 

But just as Lee Atwater knew better than to express aloud the racist underpinnings of the Southern Strategy, Republicans until Trump knew better than to wash their dirty linen in public. For the most part, they still attempt to disguise it with symbols of American righteousness and by casting their foes as the real anti-Americans.

The quote below from the middle of the last century demonstrates how, as Officer Harry Dunn lamented on Tuesday, “Everything is different, but nothing has changed.”

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity .…They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.” — Vice President Henry A. Wallace, April 9, 1944.

Pfeifer resurfaces a pithy Frank (not Francis) Wilhoit quote that distills Wallace’s assessment to just over 20 words: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Among the former are the Wall Street banker boys who brought the world economy to its knees, who devasted millions of lives during the Great Recession, and threw millions into the streets, some fraudulently. That in-group walks free today. Among the latter are George Floyd, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and Sandra Bland.

Republicans’ White Christian base sees in that latter group and others an existential threat to its cultural and political dominance, one that justifies unmaking the republic in order to preserve its status.

Today, they are the party of the mob, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes argued last night, and cruelty is still the point.

“When you build a political movement whose emotional core is transgression and cruelty, ultimately no one is safe from that kind of treatment,” says @chrislhayes on the right wing attacks on Simone Biles and the police officers who testified before the Jan. 6 committee. pic.twitter.com/99uqjXYVZW

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) July 29, 2021

They are in fact the party of Donald Trump, born again in his image, a movement led by a cruel, corrupt, needy, insecure and emotionally stunted child in a 70-something body eaten up with grievance. This his acolytes take as their model for mature, adult, and Christian behavior. Theirs is a lost cause and they are lost souls. Pity them.

(h/t JB)

This is ridiculous. Trump had the full control of government for two years. He failed to get this done. And the congress would have been fools to do anything like this with a corrupt, imbecile who actually knows nothing about anything:

Donald Trump tried and failed to pass an infrastructure bill so many times over the course of his presidency that his attempts were reduced to a punchline. Now out of office, Trump is trying to ensure that his successor, Joe Biden, suffers the indignity of the “infrastructure week” jokes as well.

The former president has sounded off repeatedly in the past week about the negotiations taking place between Senate Republicans and Democrats on the Hill and in the White House. He’s encouraged GOP lawmakers to abandon the talks and criticized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for even entertaining them. Senate Republicans have said, in interviews, that they have directly asked the former president not just to tone down his criticism but to actually support the infrastructure deal.https://5a71d34fea4c077a727464ef4aacd72d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

“The last time I told him there’s not going to be any tax increases, and I’m of the opinion let’s do a deal that’s good for the roads, ports, and bridges. Let’s do it,” said close Trump ally Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.). “I appreciate the effort of everyone and I’m hoping we get there.”

But Trump has made clear he is not interested in supporting any kind of Republican deal with Democrats and is hoping allies in Congress kill it.

Trump’s opposition, aides insist, is based on the merits. At a time of fear around inflation, he opposes additional spending and believes the framework of the potential compromise is far too tilted towards environmentally-conscious projects and not hard infrastructure. But much of what has driven Trump’s approach to legislation in the past has been self-interest and personal grievance. And in discussing current infrastructure talks, Trump aides concede that they remain upset that a big bill wasn’t passed while he was in the Oval.

“They had four years to do an infrastructure deal with someone who knows infrastructure and actually builds buildings,” one Trump aide said. “I’m just speaking for myself, he hasn’t said, ‘Oh they should have done it with me,’ but if they actually wanted infrastructure they would have done it when President Trump was in there.”

He hasn’t actually built a building in decades. He’s a brand not a builder. And, as I said, he knows nothing about anything.

This piece by Damon Linker in The Week is really interesting. I don’t think it says anything my readers don’t already know but it goes into a certain corner of the right wing universe to illuminate just how far they’ve gone.

How does ideological change happen? Why do certain political ideas and possibilities that appear outrageous and even unthinkable at one moment in history come to be considered options worth taking seriously? What causes the Overton window to shift dramatically in one direction or another?

The answer has something to do with the dynamics of partisan coalitions. To cite a fairly anodyne example, Ronald Reagan took over the Republican Party in 1980 by expanding the GOP’s appeal to the right as well as to the center-left. Those who supported Gerald Ford in 1976 were joined by conservative activists who had passionately favored Barry Goldwater in 1964, right-wing populists in the South and Midwest who had cast ballots for George Wallace in 1968, and the more moderate voters across the country who came to be called “Reagan Democrats.” The result was broad-based support for deep tax cuts, sharply increased defense spending, and amped up confrontation with the Soviet Union — a synthesis of positions that seemed to be a non-starter just a few years earlier but which, thanks to Reagan’s political skills and their intersection with contingent changes in political culture, became a stable ideological and electoral configuration of the GOP for the next 36 years.

The GOP has shed a lot of voters (as a share of the electorate) since its high-water mark in 1984. But with the rise of Donald Trump, the shape of the party’s coalition also began to change. Some of the shift has been class-based, with white and Latino voters lacking a college degree flocking to the Republican Party and highly educated urban and suburban voters fleeing it.

But Trump also actively courted the right-wing fringe — the militia movement, quasi-paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, overt racists, and outright xenophobes. These voters are a tiny portion of the party, but they punch above their weight, as we learned on Jan. 6, when a small handful of these extremists took the lead in initiating the mayhem and violence on Capitol Hill that afternoon while most of the intruders simply followed along rather cluelessly. (This point, along with much else in this column, is elaborated with depth and insight in the “Aftermath of January 6th” episode of the consistently excellent Know Your Enemy podcast.)

With most Republican officeholders and media personalities refusing to condemn the actions of the insurrectionary mob that invaded the Capitol to stop congressional certification of the 2020 election results — or Trump’s decisive role in inciting that mob — and some of them instead endorsing an evidence-free conspiracy involving the “deep state” and the FBI, the GOP has verified that the Overton window has shifted sharply to the right. What would have until quite recently been considered unacceptable forms of political dissent have been legitimized. That’s how the once unthinkable becomes a new normal.

And the “intellectuals” of the conservative movement? Well, as my readers know, I’ve been examining the rot inside that movement for a long time. It’s finally rotted through.

He discusses Michael Anton, the fatuous crank who wrote that stupid screed in 2016 which suggested that Trump was a hero for saving the world from the terroristic Clinton:

A parallel process of line-shifting has been unfolding among conservative intellectuals, most of whom responded to the launch of Trump’s presidential campaign six years ago with a mixture of disgust and incredulity. The dismissal didn’t last. While many shifted to the center and refused to endorse Trump’s hostile takeover of the party, plenty of others went along with it, adjusting their prior positions to bring them into alignment with the nominee on policy and attitude. No commentator did so with more enthusiasm or popular impact than Michael Anton.

A former director of communications for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (where he was briefly my boss) and former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Anton penned the most notorious and rhetorically scalding case for supporting Trump. Published in early September 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books online, “The Flight 93 Election” portrayed Trump as a final, last-ditch opportunity for conservatives to wrest control of the country back from those (like Hillary Clinton) who aimed at nothing less than its thoroughgoing destruction. Rush Limbaugh paid tribute to the power of the argument (and amplified it for a vastly larger audience) by reading the essay aloud, paragraph by paragraph, on his radio show. In doing so, Anton, with Limbaugh’s help, gave legions of Trump-skeptical conservatives permission to vote, even to express outright enthusiasm, for the untested right-wing populist.

After Trump’s victory, Anton went on to serve the new president on the National Security Council. That lasted a little more than a year. Once he had left the White House, Anton returned to writing and speaking publicly in defense of Trump and in favor of his re-election. Two months before the 2020 vote, he predicted an attempted “coup” from the left if Democrat Joe Biden didn’t prevail. When events unfolded in precisely the opposite way — with Trump losing the vote, refusing to accept the result, and attempting a hapless coup of his own to stay in power — Anton said nothing to acknowledge either the irony or the error. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the months since Trump left office, Anton has been doing his best to throw open the doors of the conservative intellectual world to ideas once considered far too extreme for American politics.

How extreme? So extreme that in late May, Anton set aside nearly two hours on his Claremont Institute podcast (“The Stakes”) for an erudite, wide-ranging discussion with self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin about why the United States needs an “American Caesar” to seize control of the federal government, and precisely how such a would-be dictator could accomplish the task.

With this conversation, Anton seems eager to shift the Overton window far beyond anything resembling liberal democracy. In its place, he would substitute an elaborate, historically and philosophically sophisticated justification for tyranny.

It’s important right at the outset to make a few things clear about the Anton-Yarvin conversation. First, Anton doesn’t explicitly endorse Yarvin’s most outlandish ideas, which blend a far-right love of unlimited executive power with the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley. (Yarvin created the Urbit digital platform and co-founded the tech company Tion, while also gaining considerable notoriety with the alt-right blog “Unqualified Reservations,” written under the pen name Mencius Moldbug.) In fact, at several points Anton goes out of his way to declare in a tone of mock seriousness that as someone affiliated with the Claremont Institute, which has long advocated for a return to the principles of the American founding (including the Declaration of Independence’s denunciations of monarchical tyranny), he can’t stand behind Yarvin’s sympathy for dictatorship. Yet it’s also true that at no point does Anton offer a substantive critique of Yarvin’s arguments and assertions. He merely expresses pragmatic or tactical objections, as if the primary fault in Yarvin’s ideas is that they are unrealistic.

Then there’s the matter of terminology. I have described Anton’s conversation with Yarvin as helping to shift the Overton window away from liberal democracy and toward a defense of tyranny. Yet this isn’t how either man understands the American present. Rather, they agree early on in the podcast (around minute 24) that the current American “regime” is most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy” in which an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in the bureaucracies of the administrative state, and at Harvard, The New York Times, and other leading institutions of civil society, promulgate and enforce their own version of “reality.” Anton and Yarvin treat this assertion as given and then proceed to talk through how this theocratic oligarchy might be overturned. (One of their substantive disagreements concerns how long this regime might last if it’s not directly challenged. Anton is hopeful it will collapse of its own incompetence and corruption, while Yarvin thinks the current “clown world” could continue onward for decades or even a century, with the United States slowly decaying into something resembling a Third World country.)

Once the conversation really gets going (around minute 45), Yarvin makes clear that he has a highly idiosyncratic take on American history. In his view, roughly every 75 years, a “Caesar” seizes dictatorial powers and institutes “substantive regime changes.” George Washington did this in 1789. Abraham Lincoln did it again in 1861. And FDR did it last in 1933, speaking in the closing passages of his First Inaugural Address about the national emergency of the Great Depression and the need to wield unprecedented government power to combat it, which he did with the New Deal. The U.S. today is overdue for its next political transformation — one that would settle the country’s “cold civil war” from above.

Yarvin’s top choice to become the next American Caesar is Elon Musk, though both men acknowledge that he’s constitutionally ineligible for the role because he was born in South Africa. This provides an occasion for them both to joke about how great it would be for him to run, win, and demand to be made president anyway, in defiance of the Constitution. (Anton makes sure to clarify that their jovial chit-chat about flagrantly disregarding the letter of the Constitution is “not an endorsement” of actually doing so. Later on, they likewise joke about how great it would have been for Trump to declare himself the personal embodiment of the “living Constitution.”)

But what exactly is Yarvin proposing and Anton entertaining here? Is it nothing more ominous than a New Deal from the right? As the conversation unfolds further, beginning around an hour and twenty minutes into the podcast, it becomes clear that Yarvin has something much more radical in mind (even if his peculiar constellation of assumptions prevent him from recognizing just how extreme it is).

The trick, for Yarvin, is for the would-be American Caesar to exercise emergency powers from day one. How? Caesar should run for president promising to do precisely this, and then announce the national emergency in his inaugural address, encouraging every state government to do the same. Taking advantages of “ambiguities” in the Constitution, he will immediately act to federalize the national guard around the country and welcome backup from sympathetic members of the police (who will wear armbands to signal their support for Caesar).

When federal agencies refuse to go along, Yarvin suggests, Caesar (whom he now begins referring to as “Trump”) will use a “Trump app” to communicate directly with his 80 million supporters on their smart phones, using notifications to tell them that “this agency isn’t following my instructions,” which will prompt them to rally at the proper building, with the crowd “steered around by a joystick by Trump himself,” forming a “human barricade around every federal building, supporting Trump’s lawful authority.” Where maybe 20,000 people stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, millions responding to the Trump app would be much more effective — a modern-day version of the paramilitary groups that ensured Lincoln’s safety during the hard-fought, dangerous 1860 campaign for president that preceded the Civil War (and the president’s subsequent suspension of habeas corpus and shuttering of hundreds of newspapers).

When Anton asks how Trump-Caesar should respond to Harvard, The New York Times, and the rest of the theocratic oligarchy blaring air-raid sirens about the imposition of dictatorship, Yarvin indicates that it would be essential to “smash it” with one blow. To suggest that Caesar should be required to deal with “someone else’s department of reality is manifestly absurd.” Going on, Yarvin explains that “when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he doesn’t sit around getting his feet wet, fishing. He marches straight across the Rubicon” and uses “all force available.” Once that happens, the whole world can be “remade.”

The podcast concludes with Anton quoting another Claremont writer (Anthony Codevilla) on how Trump dropped “the leadership of the deplorables,” which is waiting to be picked up by someone “who will make Trump seem moderate.” Yarvin responds approvingly with a quote by Serbian dictator and indicted genocidal war criminal Slobodan Milošević, who said the goal should be that “no one will dare to beat you anymore.”

Defenders of Anton, Yarvin, and the Claremont Institute will say that this thoroughly appalling discussion was just that — some casual talk, idle musings, a fantasy disconnected from reality. Yet fantasies are outgrowths of our imaginations and hopes, and they help set our expectations, including our conception of what is possible and desirable in politics.

The indisputable fact is that a leading and longstanding conservative institute in the United States hosts a podcast by someone who served as a senior official in the presidential administration of a man who may run again for the nation’s highest office in a few years. And on an episode of that podcast, this former official and his invited guest genially rehearsed arguments about why a future president would be justified in turning himself into a tyrant, and how he could set about accomplishing this task.

Which means that on the starboard side of American politics, the Overton window has now shifted far beyond the boundaries of democratic self-government to a place broadly coterminous with fascism.

It is fascism. The right’s party, the GOP, is out there defending and/or covering up the attempted coup last January. I don’t know what else we need to know.

This piece by the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan is one for the ages. I can only hope that the Village 2.0 (looking at you Punchbowl) is listening because it’s starting to run out of control again:

Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy.

In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage.

Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the now-in-vogue terms “both-sidesism” or “false equivalence,” but they laid out the problem with devastating clarity (the italics are mine):

“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”

Nearly a decade later, this distortion of reality has only grown worse, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s rise to power and his ironclad grip on an increasingly craven Republican Party.

Positive proof was in the recent coverage of congressional efforts to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

The Democratic leadership has been trying to assemble a bipartisan panel that would study that mob attack on our democracy and make sure it is never repeated. Republican leaders, meanwhile, have been trying to undermine the investigation, cynically requesting that two congressmen who backed efforts to invalidate the election be allowed to join the commission, then boycotting it entirely. And the media has played straight into Republicans’ hands, seemingly incapable of framing this as anything but base political drama.

“‘What You’re Doing Is Unprecedented’: McCarthy-Pelosi Feud Boils Over,” read a CNN headline this week. “After a whiplash week of power plays . . . tensions are at an all-time high.”

Is it really a “feud” when Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy performatively blames Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to seat Republicans Jim Jordan and Jim Banks — two sycophantic allies of Trump, who called the Jan. 6 mob to gather?

One writer at Politico called Pelosi’s decision a “gift to McCarthy.” And its Playbook tut-tutted the decision as handing Republicans “a legitimate grievance,” thus dooming the holy notion of bipartisanship.

“Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” a Washington Post news story observed. (“Can it really be lost on the Post that the Republican party has acted in bad faith at every turn to undermine every attempt to investigate the events of Jan. 6?” a reader complained to me.)

The bankruptcy of this sort of coverage was exposed on Tuesday morning, when the Jan. 6 commission kicked off with somber, powerful, pointedly non-political testimony from four police officers attacked during the insurrection. Two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, even defied McCarthy’s boycott to ensure their party would be sanely represented.

This strain of news coverage, observed Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review, centers on twinned, dubious implications: “That bipartisanship is desirable and that Democrats bear responsibility for upholding it — even in the face of explict Republican obstructionism.”

This stance comes across as both cynical (“politics was ever thus”) and unsophisticated (“we’re just doing our job of reporting what was said”). Quite a feat.

Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan. They want to defend themselves against charges of bias. So they equalize the unequal. This practice seems so ingrained as to be unresolvable.

There is a way out. But it requires the leadership of news organizations to radically reframe the mission of its Washington coverage. As a possible starting point, I’ll offer these recommendations:

Toss out the insidious “inside-politics” frame and replace it with a “pro-democracy” frame.

Stop calling the reporters who cover this stuff “political reporters.” Start calling them “government reporters.”

Stop asking who the winners and losers were in the latest skirmish. Start asking who is serving the democracy and who is undermining it.

Stop being “savvy” and start being patriotic.

In a year-end piece for Nieman Lab, Andrew Donohue, managing editor of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, called for news organizations to put reporters on a new-style “democracy beat” to focus on voting suppression and redistricting. “These reporters won’t see their work in terms of politics or parties, but instead through the lens of honesty, fairness, and transparency,” he wrote.

I’d make it more sweeping. The democracy beat shouldn’t be some kind of specialized innovation, but a widespread rethinking across the mainstream media.

Making this happen will call for something that Big Journalism is notoriously bad at: An open-minded, non-defensive recognition of what’s gone wrong.

Top editors, Sunday talk-show moderators and other news executives should pull together their braintrusts to grapple with this. And they should be transparent with the public about what they’re doing and why.

As a model, they might have to swallow their big-media pride and look to places like Harrisburg, Pa., public radio station WITF which has admirably explained to its audience why it continually offers reminders about the actions of those public officials who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Or to Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn’s letter to readers about how the paper and its website, Cleveland.com, refuse to cover every reckless, attention-getting lie of Republican Josh Mandel as he runs for the U.S. Senate next year.

These places prove that a different kind of coverage, and transparency about it, is possible.

Is it unlikely that the most influential Sunday talk shows, the most powerful newspapers and cable networks, and the buzziest Beltway websites will change their stripes?

Maybe so. But, to return to Ornstein and Mann in 2012, it’s a necessity.

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” they wrote.

They probably couldn’t have imagined the chaos that followed November’s election, the horrors of Jan. 6, or what’s happened in the past few weeks.

The change they called for never happened. For the sake of American democracy, it’s now or never.

The fact that Axios, Politico Playbook and the new Punchbowl are so well financed is because they deliver the news in easy soundbites from the perspective of the Kewl Kidz table. In other words, the same as it ever was. And that is a big reason why our democracy is running on fumes.

I hope people will listen to Sullivan and other media critics this time and resist the urge to fall back into their old ways. It’s already happening but it’s not too late to change course.

I never understood why the government thought that lifting the mask mandate for the vaccinated would result in more people getting vaccinated. The kind of people who won’t get vaccinated are the kind of people who would just stop wearing masks (if they ever wore them) the minute the mandates were lifted. I never got how this would incentivize them.

Anyway, I guess it was worth a try. It showed the respect that everyone insists we show people who refuse by putting them on the honor system and assuming they will act responsibly. They did not. And now we’re back to mitigation strategies because the unvaccinated have spread the new variant all over the place.

Josh Marshall had some words for those who are blaming the scientists for this:

But after yesterday’s updated policy or reversal I kept seeing comments on Twitter, headlines in OpEds and comments from people on TV saying, “That’s it!” “That’s the final nail in the coffin of the CDC’s credibility!” Or ‘the experts’ or Fauci or whoever else. “First it was no masks! Now masks are back! Which is it??!?!!?”

Really people need to get the f*#$ over themselves.

[…]

Today one of the most difficult things to make sense of is just how much we think the vaccinated themselves are at risk today from Delta – whether we’re defining that as infections generally or severe outcomes. One reason for the updated CDC guidance is increasing – but still tentative and uncertain – evidence that Delta COVID is spreading among the vaccinated themselves. But clearly the biggest beneficiaries of this new policy are the unvaccinated. It’s the unvaccinated among whom Delta COVID is spreading like wildfire. Infections among the vaccinated are largely spillover from that out of control situation. The unvaccinated are not only unvaccinated they are also disproportionately unmasked. (If you’re worried about COVID or trying to do your part for the larger community, let’s be honest: you’re going to get vaccinated.)

So we can see larger problem. Masking is coming back largely because of the actions of the unvaccinated and also largely for the benefit of the unvaccinated. The burden of non-vaccination is being placed on those who are vaccinated. That basic disconnect is our problem.

That disconnect places no effective pressure on the voluntarily unvaccinated while sowing demoralization and frustration and contempt with public authorities among those who’ve gotten the vaccine. No good comes of that combination. As I have been arguing, the cornerstone of our policy should focusing the burden of non-vaccination on those who are voluntarily unvaccinated. That is both the most equitable and fair approach and it is the approach most likely to increase the number of people getting vaccinated. We need to cut that cord of misplaced incentives and penalties.

That’s why I think the more important and more positive developments in recent days are the moves toward mandates. We’re seeing a wave of mandates for various kinds of public employees and health care workers to get vaccinated. We’re also seeing the federal government clear the way for private organizations to do the same. That is the proper path forward. We do not need to see it as punitive. It is simply placing the burden of non-vaccination on the voluntarily unvaccinated. This is also why speeding formal FDA approval of the vaccine is so important. Despite federal court rulings that appear to give employers the right to mandate vaccines under the current emergency approval, it is clear that only that formal approval will move the mass of the employers in that direction.

… for all the reasons above the best approach is not endless public discussion about understanding hesitance and resistance or persuasion. It’s mandates for vaccination. We’re not going to mandate for the whole population, though we should certainly have them for public-facing public employees and all health care workers.

But in every respect we should concentrate the burden of non-vaccination on the voluntarily unvaccinated. Want to engage in non-essential indoor public activities? Get vaccinated. This is both the most equitable and most effective way forward.

They tried the honor system. It didn’t work. Now the free riders need to understand that they have the “freedom” to refuse life-saving protection from this deadly disease but they do not have the freedom to spread it around to other people. It’s pathetic that we have free, safe, highly effective vaccines accessible to everyone and we have to go through this ridiculous effort to save peoples lives, mostly because of political brainwashing. But apparently we do. Just as the blue states bear the tax burden of supporting the red states — which hold them in total contempt, so too the Democrats are bearing the responsibility of trying to end this deadly pandemic in the US.

It’s infuriating.

… on OAN:

When the hearing began at 9:30 a.m., OAN ran a segment about crime in Chicago instead.The channel showed about 20 seconds of the hearing at 10:05 a.m., but the anchor talked over the testimony and didn’t explain why US Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell looked so emotional.

Then the anchor, apparently reading an outdated script in the teleprompter, said that Cheney was “expected to speak in her opening statements,” fifteen minutes after Cheney had spoken. OAN did not show what Cheney said. Instead, the channel re-aired an old report about tension between Cheney and other Republican lawmakers.

That mistake summed up OAN’s approach to the hearing overall: Pretending that it wasn’t happening the way it was.The 12 p.m. hour began with an anchor reading another outdated script about Trump: “The 45th president says that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is spending too much time and money on the highly partisan January 6 commission.”

OAN didn’t show any clips of the officers’ gripping accounts — or of DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone repeatedly calling the attackers “terrorists.”

But the producers made sure to break into a taped business report about Tesla’s record profits at 12:55 in order to air another GOP press conference.”Lawmakers are speaking regarding the treatment of those that have been arrested as of their actions after January 6,” the anchor said, mangling her words.A

t the press conference, far-right lawmakers bashed the Department of Justice and defended riot suspects they depicted as “political prisoners.” The on-screen banner referenced “JAN. 6 PROTESTERS” rather than accused criminals.The press conference was interrupted by protesters who blew whistles and held up signs. One America News moved onto a segment about voter fraud allegations in Georgia. Other stories in the anti-Democrat news wheel on Tuesday were titled “Delaware Democrats facing accusations of racism, violence” and “N.J. congressional candidate targets Pelosi and Andy Kim.”

One America News president Charles Herring did not respond to requests for comment about his channel’s coverage.

It seems like an obscure. channel. It’s gone from my cable line-up after having been on it for years. (We still have Newsmax, which is almost as bad.) But apparently, a whole lot of Trump fans are tuning in:

OAN is not nationally rated by Nielsen, which is often a sign that a channel is relatively obscure to news consumers. However, data from set-top-boxes and other sources showed a big uptick in viewership after Trump lost the election last November.

I wonder if they’ll show this testimony:

In a long rambling answer, Jim Jordan admits he talked to Trump on January 6th. When asked what they discussed, Jordan changes the subject to the Speaker and security posture pic.twitter.com/n6sLuudNoX

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2021

Liz Cheney told “Good Morning America” Tuesday that Jordan may be called to testify. 

He’s somebody who was involved in a number of meetings in the lead-up to what happened on 6 January, involved in planning for 6 January, certainly for the objections that day, as he said publicly, so he may well be a material witness.

He will lie, of course. Or put on some kind of silly show saying that his discussions with Donald Trump are “privileged”, which they are not. But they must call him anyway. He’s not nearly as slick as he thinks he is.