That’s the most popular show on Fox News. They were beating Tucker before he was fired. Gutfield is very popular too. Just thought I’d share that with you. Have a nice evening.
"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2023
This piece by Jenny Boylan is a super important read if you want to understand what transgenderism really is all about. I would imagine that most who read this site believe that all people should have the right to live their lives as they choose and support the rights of transgender people to live freely in our society. This goes much deeper:
There they are, in their Chevrolet Colorado, five dudes bouncing up and down as the truck grinds through the rugged American high country. Two guys up front, three in the back. Shania Twain is blasting. The fellow in the middle is singing along. “Oh, I want to be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!”
The other guys look deeply worried. But the person in the back just keeps happily singing away, even as the dude next to him moves his leg away. Just to be on the safe side.
This commercial aired back in 2004, and even now it’s not clear to me if it’s offensive or empowering, hilarious or infuriating. Twain says she wrote “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” after working at a resort where some drag queens were performing. “That song started with the title,” she said. “Then it kind of wrote itself.”
It’s a fun tune, and I admit I kind of loved seeing that commercial. But at its heart is an issue central to our current political moment.
When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?
Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — “feeling” like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant. What matters most, they say, is the immutable truth of biology. Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, wants to restrict gender-affirming health care for all transgender people, including adults.A new dress code at the Texas Agriculture Department commands that employees wear clothing “in a manner consistent with their biological gender.” In Florida, a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) keeps “biological males” from playing on the women’s sports teams in public schools.
This term, “biological males,” is everywhere now. And it’s not used only by right-wing politicians. People of good faith are also wrestling with the way trans people complicate a world they thought was binary. They’re uncertain about when, and how, sex matters, and just how biological it is. Some want to draw a bright line in areas where maleness and femaleness might matter most — in sports, or locker rooms, or prisons. Others are trying to blur lines that used to be clearer. At Wellesley College last month, for instance, a nonbinding student referendum called for the admission of trans men to a school that traditionally has been a women’s college. The president of the college, Paula Johnson, pushed back.
So what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?
Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on. There’s even something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female, and may not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.
How can this be, if sex is only about a gene?
Some people respond by saying that sex is about something else, then — ovaries, or testicles (two structures that begin their existence in the womb as the same thing).
What do we do then, with the millions of women who have had hysterectomies? Have they become men? What about women who’ve had mastectomies? Or men with gynecomastia, or enlarged breasts?
Are these people not who they think they are?
It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.
In the past decade, there has been some fascinating research on the brains of transgender people. What is most remarkable about this work is not that trans women’s brains have been found to resemble those of cisgender women, or that trans men’s brains resemble those of cis men. What the research has found is that the brains of trans people are unique: neither female nor male, exactly, but something distinct.
But what does that mean, a male brain, or a female brain, or even a transgender one? It’s a fraught topic, because brains are a collection of characteristics, rather than a binary classification of either/or. There are researchers who would tell you that brains are not more gendered than, say, kidneys or lungs. Gina Rippon, in her 2019 book “The Gendered Brain,” warns against bunk science that declares brains to be male or female — it’s “neurosexism,” a fancy way of justifying the belief that women’s brains are inferior to men’s.
And yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology.A study described by author Francine Russo in Scientific American examined the brains of 39 prepubertal and 41 adolescent boys and girls with gender dysphoria. The experiment examined how these children responded to androstadienone, a pungent substance similar to pheromones, that is known to cause a different response in the brains of men and women. The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender. (The results were less clear withprepubescent children.)
This kind of testing is important, said one of the researchers Russo quoted, “because sex differences in responding to odors cannot be influenced by training or environment.” A similar study was done in measuring the responses of trans boys and girls to echolike sounds produced in the inner ear. “Boys with gender dysphoria responded more like typical females, who have a stronger response to these sounds.”
What does it mean, to respond to the world in this way? For me, it has meant having a sense of myself as a woman, a sense that no matter how comfortable I was with the fact of being feminine, I was never at ease with not being female. When I was young, I tried to talk myself out of it, telling myself, in short, to “get over it.”
But I never got over it.
I compare it to a sense of homesickness for a place you’ve never been. The moment you stepped onto those supposedly unfamiliar shores, though,you’d have a sense of overwhelming gratitude, and solace, and joy. Home, you might think. I’m finally home.
The years to come will, perhaps, continue to shed light on the mysteries of the brain, and to what degree our sense of ourselves as gendered beings has its origins there. But there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.
But trans people are not broken. And, in fact, trying to open people’s hearts by saying “Check out my brain!” can do more harm than good, because this line of argument delegitimizes the experiences of many trans folks. It suggests that there’s only one way to be trans — to feel trapped in the wrong body, to go through transition, and to wind up, when all is said and done, on the opposite-gender pole. It suggests that the quest trans people go on can only be considered successful if it ends with fitting into the very society that rejected us in the first place.
All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.
No one who embarks upon a life as a trans person in this country is doing so out of caprice, or a whim, or a delusion. We are living these wondrous and perilous lives for one reason only — because our hearts demand it. Given the tremendous courage it takes to come out, given the fact that even now trans people can still lose everything — family, friends, jobs, even our lives — what we need now is not new legislation to make things harder. What we need now is understanding, not cruelty. What we need now is not hatred, but love.
When the person in that Chevy ad sings, Oh, I want to be free … to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!, the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire, to be free to feel the way I feel.
Surely this is not a desire unique to trans people. Tell me: Is there anyone who has never struggled to live up to the hard truths of their own heart?
Man! I feel like a human.
Personal identity is the cause of the younger generation and as is the case with most causes that define a new generation, many in the older generations are confused if not downright hostile. It’s important that we all do our best to go beyond acceptance (which is, of course, the most important thing) to reach a fuller understanding.
The cruelty we are seeing on the right toward transgender people is shocking. We have to engage this issue seriously.
Get a load of the new young guns
Michelle Cottle in the NY Times:
Here’s a head scratcher for you: What happens when the leadership of a political party becomes so extreme, so out of touch with its voters, that it alienates many of its own activists and elected officials? And what happens when some of those officials set up a parallel infrastructure that lets them circumvent the party for campaign essentials such as fund-raising and voter turnout? At what point does this party become mostly a bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance?
No need to waste time guessing. Just cast your eyes upon Georgia, one of the nation’s electoral battlegrounds, where the state Republican Party has gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders — including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper.
[…]
The backstory: Some Republican incumbents took offense last year when the Georgia G.O.P.’s Trump-smitten chairman, David Shafer, backed Trump-preferred challengers in the primaries. (Mr. Trump, you will recall, was desperate to unseat several Republicans after they declined to help him steal the 2020 election.) Those challengers went down hard, and Mr. Kemp in particular emerged as a superhero to non-Trumpist Republicans. Even so, scars remain. “That’s a burn that’s hard to get over,” says Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist who served as an adviser to former Gov. Nathan Deal.
The clash also made clear that Republican candidates, or at least popular incumbents, don’t much need the party apparatus anymore. This is part of a broader trend: The clout of parties has long been on the slide because of changes in how campaigns are funded. That got turbocharged in Georgia in 2021, when its legislature, the General Assembly, passed a Kemp-backed bill allowing certain top officials (and their general-election challengers) to form leadership PACs, which can coordinate with candidates’ campaigns and accept megadonations free from pesky dollar limits.
The PAC Mr. Kemp set up, the Georgians First Leadership Committee, raked in gobs of cash and built a formidable voter data and turnout machine. The governor plans to use it to aid fellow Republicans, establishing himself as a power center independent of the state party.
As big-money conduits, leadership PACs can bring plenty of their own problems. But whatever their larger implications, in the current mess that is Georgia Republican politics, they also mean that elected leaders “don’t have to play nice in the sandbox with a group that is sometimes at odds with them,” says Mr. Robinson.
The governor says he will skip the state party’s convention in June, as will the state’s attorney general, its insurance commissioner and its secretary of state. At a February luncheon for his Georgians First PAC, Mr. Kemp basically told big donors not to waste their money on the party, saying that the midterms showed “we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
New party leadership is on the way. Mr. Shafer is not seeking another term. (Fun fact: He is under investigation for his role in the pro-Trump fake-elector scheme of 2020.) Party delegates will elect his successor at the upcoming state convention. But the problems run deeper. Republican critics say that the party culture has become steeped in the paranoid politics of MAGA and election denial. And in the current environment, “everyone must pledge their undying loyalty to Donald Trump above all else,” says Jay Morgan, who was an executive director of the state party in the 1980s and now runs a public affairs firm in Atlanta.
Mr. Shafer defends his tenure, noting in particular that, since he took over in 2019, the party has gone from being mired in debt to having “over $1 million in the bank.”
To be fair, the Georgia G.O.P. has a rich history of rocky relations with its governors. But the Trump era, which brought a wave of new grassroots activists and outsiders into party meetings, put the situation “on steroids,” says Martha Zoller, a Republican consultant and talk radio host.
“Right now, it’s largely a place disconnected from reality,” adds Cole Muzio, a Kemp ally and the president of Frontline Policy Action, a conservative advocacy group.
That seems unlikely to change any time soon, as some of the party’s more extreme elements gain influence. In recent months, leadership elections at the county and district levels have seen wins by candidates favored by the Georgia Republican Assembly, a coterie of ultraconservatives, plenty of whom are still harboring deep suspicions about the voting system.
One of the more colorful winners was Kandiss Taylor, the new chairwoman of the First Congressional District. A keen peddler of conspiracy nuttiness, Ms. Taylor ran for governor last year, proclaiming herself “the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.” After winning just slightly more than 3 percent of the primary vote, she declared that the election results could not be trusted and refused to concede — an antidemocratic move straight from the Trump playbook. As a chairwoman, she is promising “big things” for her district. So southeast Georgia has that to look forward to.
This is happening all over the country as the GOP is taken over at the state and local level my MAGA weirdos, QANON nuts and various white supremacists, anti-vaxxers and gun loons. This is the training ground for the future. And the more establishment types like Kemp (also a far right gun nut, by the way) don’t seem to be able to do much about it except collect money from rich people. They won’t be around forever.
This one was particularly egregious:
The fallout came fast whenFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s new election police unit charged Peter Washington with voter fraud last summer as part of a crackdown against felons who’d allegedly broken the law by casting a ballot.
The Orlando residentlost his job supervising irrigation projects, and along with it, his family’s health insurance. His wife dropped her virtual classes at Florida International University to help pay their rent. Future plans went out the window.
“It knocked me to my knees, if you want to know the truth,” he said.
But not long after, the case against Washington began falling apart. A Ninth Judicial Circuit judge ruled the statewide prosecutor who filed the charges didn’t actually have jurisdiction to do so. Washington’s attorney noted that he had received an official voter identification card in the mail after registering. The case was dismissed in February.
One by one, many of the initial 20 arrests announced by the Office of Election Crimes and Security have stumbled in court. Six cases have been dismissed. Five other defendants accepted plea deals that resulted in no jail time. Only one case has gone to trial, resulting in a split verdict. The others are pending.
In its first nine months, the new unit made just four other arrests, according to a report the agency released earlier this year. Critics say the low numbers point to the overall strength of Florida’s electoral system and a lack of sufficient evidence to pursue further charges. Nonetheless, as he gears up for a possible presidential run, DeSantis is moving to give the office more teeth, asking the legislature tonearly triple the division’s annual budget from $1.2 million to $3.1 million. The Republican governor also pushed through a bill ensuring the statewide prosecutor has jurisdiction over election crime cases — an attempt to resolve an issue several judges have raised in dismissing cases.
Voting rights advocates and defense attorneys say the expansion of the statewide prosecutor’s role to include elections enforcement is alarming.The office was created in 1986, and its portfolio typically includes offenses like extortion, racketeering and computer pornography involving two or more judicial circuits. The statewide prosecutor is appointed by the attorney general, Ashley Moody, a political ally of DeSantis, and also submits an annual report to the governor.
Defense attorneys say DeSantis is using the statewide prosecutor’s office to circumvent the role of local prosecutors, who have declined to pursue such cases.
“This cannot be what the framers of the Florida Constitution had in mind when creating this state’s system of justice,” Palm Beach County public defender Carey Haughwout wrote in a motion as part of the defense against one of the felons charged.
Oh who cares about the state constitution, amirite? This is about making Ron Desantis look like a manly man in a press conference. After that it’s whatever. Too bad about the people whose lives have been turned upside down but that’s just the price they must pay to live in Ron DeSantis’ Florida. It’s such a privilege.
“Incredibly bad luck, bad place”
Yes, sitting in the bullpen at a baseball game is a very bad place. You could get shot at any time. You really should be more careful.
An 18-year-old baseball player is recovering after being struck by a bullet during a game Saturday afternoon at George Dobson Field at Spring Lake Park.
The Texas A&M University-Texarkana player was hit once in the chest as he sat in the left field bullpen during an Eagles game, said Shawn Vaughn, Texarkana Texas Police Department spokesman. The incident happened about 6 p.m.
The player was taken to a local hospital for emergency surgery.
Vaughn said it does not appear anyone was the target of the shooting. The stray bullet seems to have been fired from a neighborhood near the ballfield.
“Incredibly bad luck, bad place,” Vaughn said.
Around the time of the shooting, police were alerted to shots being fired from cars traveling through a nearby neighborhood, Vaughn said.
The shooting happened about the fifth inning of the Eagles’ game against the University of Houston-Victoria.
“The announcer said, ‘Shots fired! Shots fired,’” said a game attendee who asked not to be identified.
He should have taken precautions, I guess.
The only answer is for everyone in America to wear body armor and carry an AR-15 whenever you leave your house. Inside you can probably take the body armor off — depending on how close to the road you live. You’ll have to assess you own risk. Otherwise we might have to do something about the insane proliferation of guns and that would be wrong.
Democrats have learned they cannot appease terrorist Republicans
If you think that old dogs can’t learn new tricks you need to take a look at Joe Biden. Back in 2011, during the first serious Republican debt ceiling hostage crisis and the protracted negotiations that followed, Biden undercut Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and wrecked a deal he had made for a terrible one. There was a lot of hand-wringing at the time over Biden’s tendency to give away the store so when the Republicans pulled their hostage maneuver again in 2013, Reid stipulated that Biden needed to stay out of the negotiations — and the White House agreed.
The Obama administration, including Biden, had learned their lesson: Negotiating with the extremist GOP on the debt ceiling is a very bad idea. They refused and the Republicans capitulated, sparing the country and the world economy another jolt. The days of dreaming about a “Grand Bargain” were blessedly over.
You may have noticed that we never had one of these fights during the Trump years when the deficit was growing at a very fast pace.
Obama regularly offers three telltale notions that will define his presidency — if events allow him to define it himself: “sacrifice,” “grand bargain” and “sustainability.”
To listen to Obama and his budget director Peter Orszag is to hear a tale of long-term fiscal woe. The government may have to spend and cut taxes in a big way now, but in the long run, the federal budget is unsustainable. That’s where sacrifice kicks in. There will be signs of it in Obama’s first budget, in his efforts to contain health-care costs and, down the road, in his call for entitlement reform and limits on carbon emissions. His camp is selling the idea that if he wants authority for new spending, Obama will have to prove his willingness to cut some programs and reform others.
The “grand bargain” they are talking about is a mix and match of boldness and prudence. It involves expansive government where necessary, balanced by tough management, unpopular cuts — and, yes, eventually some tax increases. Everyone, they say, will have to give up something.
Not one Republican came to the table to negotiate on the Affordable Care Act. When it came time for all that sacrifice and sustainability they dug in their heels and demanded that Obama eliminate his signature achievement and cut more taxes or the country gets it. It was a hard-earned lesson of the first Obama term: The modern Republican Party does not act in good faith. They argue among themselves constantly, with the far-right faction continually upping the ante even when leadership has made a deal. You can’t negotiate with people like this when you have a metaphorical weapon aimed at your head.
The debt ceiling is an anachronistic, unnecessary procedure that should have been scrapped altogether long ago. (The Democrats probably should have tried harder to do that when they had both houses although the Diva Twins, Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin probably made that impossible.) The nation has to pay its bills and this formerly pro-forma vote is now often used as a political cudgel to try to force spending cuts because holding the world economy hostage provides more leverage than the normal budget process.
You may have noticed that we never had one of these fights during the Trump years when the deficit was growing at a very fast pace, which is interesting. They held both chambers of Congress during his first two years and surely for the good of the country they could have made these same demands, but they didn’t. Neither did they enact a budget with the spending cuts they are now insisting must be enacted or else. In fact, we hardly talked about any of this during Trump’s term, all of which proves their overwhelming hypocrisy on this issue and explains why Democrats are saying, “talk to the hand.”
Today, Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic leadership are firmly refusing to negotiate around the debt ceiling, which is as it should be. There is a process for cutting spending, if that’s what these Republicans want to do, and it’s called appropriations. They can negotiate night and day in the budget talks and use every trick in the book to get their way with that (and there are a few.) But they cannot be allowed to pull this bs over and over again. If they want draconian spending cuts to happen they have to bargain for them or win a real majority and pass legislation like normal elected officials.
Unfortunately, the Republicans once more have a great friend in the media which is always inexplicably drawn to the idea of spending cuts and are once again pushing stories of fiscal doom due to deficits. (Weirdly, they too didn’t say a peep during the Trump years when he was running up the debt without restraint.) Pundits love to insist that we must “learn to take our medicine” many of whom are well-off celebrities who will face little hardship from the “shared” pain and cost such policies will bring.
And when it comes to describing the politics of the situation they seem to be constitutionally incapable of accurately reporting that the Republicans are threatening to destroy the economy in order to force draconian spending cuts under a Democratic president while the Democrats are simply doing what they do under both Republican and Democratic presidents: paying the bills. Instead, they are laying the responsibility for the potential default on the debt on Biden, who is apparently falling down on the job if he doesn’t capitulate to the insane demands of a bunch of radical extremists who very often won’t take yes for an answer anyway. It’s absurd and luckily, so far, the Democrats are standing fast.
Late Sunday night, Axios published a story with this headline: Congressional Democrats splinter on debt ceiling strategy. Apparently, a few centrist members of the House “Problem Solvers caucus” and the above-mentioned Diva, Joe Manchin, want to negotiate. That’s no surprise. There are also a few Republicans who voted against Kevin McCarthy’s wrecking ball of a bill that the House passed last week requiring the repeal of Biden’s signature legislation. There are a few defections at the margins in both parties, making it a wash.
Overall, the Democrats are hanging tough: a clean debt ceiling vote, period. It’s what has to be done. Unless we want to just cash in our chips and give Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene lifetime appointments to run the country, this hostage taking has to stop. The damage they did with this gambit back in 2011 is still being felt and the country can’t afford another round of that insanity.
The more they warn, the less we’ll listen
Technology has a momentum all its own. It has a tendency to take us places before we consider whether they are places we need to or ought to go, I wrote here in 2014.
Following up on Danielle Allen’s warnings about artificial general intelligence, A.I. pioneer Dr. Geoffrey Hinton gets space in the New York Times to express his concerns:
Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
Hinton, “the Godfather of A.I.,” worries what his creation may do when loosed “into the wild,” as the Times’ Cade Metz puts it.
Allen signed onto a March open letter with technologists, academics, and others calling for a six-month pause in “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” Days later, “19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I.”
Hinton signed neither, reluctant to go public with his concerns until he resigned from Google. Now he has.
Dr. Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate, is a lifelong academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the development and use of A.I. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. At the time, few researchers believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work.
In the 1980s, Dr. Hinton was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, but left the university for Canada because he said he was reluctant to take Pentagon funding. At the time, most A.I. research in the United States was funded by the Defense Department. Dr. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers.”
But in Canada in 2012, Hinton and two assistants constructed a neural network for identifying photographs: flowers, dogs, cars, etc. Google came calling, checkbook in hand. More research, more improvements followed at Google and elsewhere.
Hinton now shares Allen’s concerns about the disruptive nature of A.I. But “disruption” is beneficial, to hear Silicon Valley tech bros tell it, “shorthand for something closer to techno-darwinism,” Nitasha Tiku warned at Wired in 2010. Sounds fine so long as you are not the one being selected for extinction. By them. She observed, “The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.”
Uncertainty over where this technology goes next gnaws at Hinton:
Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Metz adds, “Many other experts, including many of his students and colleagues, say this threat is hypothetical.” Threats always are until they’re not. Fierce competitors Microsoft and Google will not stop without global regulation. If that’s even possible.
Technology wants what it wants. The Market wants what it wants. The Corporation as well. All are human inventions so ubiquitous as to be invisible. Mary Shelley warned us.
“I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” Hinton said.
Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
He does not say that anymore.
Hell, my plate is full just trying to stop Republicans.
It’s been on the GOP’s chopping block for decades
E.J. Dionne notes this morning, as I did, how President Joe Biden’s 2024 launch video leads with the word “Freedom.” Biden deployed it six times in all. He means to reclaim that brand from the faux patriots.
“Joe Biden has made defending our basic freedoms the cause of his presidency,” the ad declares. Before continuing, Dionne asks readers to hold their skepticism until he’s fleshed out what that means.
Franklin D. Roosevelt made “four freedoms” the centerpiece of one his most important speeches: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Since then, Democrats have ceded freedom to conservatives, preferring in Dionne’s telling, “to talk about justice, equality, democracy, fairness or community.”
“The chance to live a life of your choosing, in keeping with your values: that is freedom in its richest sense,” Pete Buttigieg declared during his 2020 run for the presidency.
Dionne writes:
I chatted with Buttigieg about freedom last week, and though he did not want to get into the campaign or Biden’s video out of respect for the Hatch Act, he was happy to relate the concept to his own work and the administration’s.
“You are freer to pursue a life of your choosing if you’re literally physically freer to move about to where you need to go,” he said. “We’ve always associated the idea of freedom with physical movement. Right. I mean, what’s the opposite of freedom? It’s confinement.”
Then he got to the core philosophical point inherent in Biden’s argument. “Freedom isn’t just about freedom from. It’s freedom to,” he said, noting that while it’s important to protect people from “government overreach,” government can also enhance the “freedom to live the way you want to live by providing basic services and resources.”
And he couldn’t resist adding: “You can be for liberty, or you can be for banning books. You cannot be for both.”
“Freedom has always been a contested value,” says Anat Shenker-Osorio. Freedom is a winner with Americans across the political spectrum, Shenker-Osorio says of her messaging research. “It is not coincidental that freedom to vote is the name of the newer form of what was the For the People Act. That name was very deliberately chosen.”
Republicans use freedom as a prop. In the end (see Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis), the authoritarian right will freely trample your freedoms. They’ve long since rejected “democracy.” Your freedom to choose your leaders and have your votes count as more than political eyewash is at stake as it’s never been.
Democrats had best make clear that that freedom is under attack. From within. By MAGA Republicans. Biden is trying to make clear that he stands for defending that basic freedom. To keep doing that, he has to win in 2024.
If Biden means to run on the defense of freedom in both the from and to senses, he and his party need not only to have a resonant message, as Anat suggests, but also bring an enhanced skill set to the table. Elections are not just competitions of messages.
Winning elections requires a mix of skills. Leadership experience, discipline, fundraising ability, an easy way with people, organizational skills, a resonant message. Some are more important than others. Clearly.
Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 against likely the most qualified candidate Democrats had ever nominated, and yet his personal deficits were legion. But his “Make America Great Again” slogan encoded a mix of messages his base heard loud and clear. They embraced it and him. He spoke to their anxieties, their grievances, and their baser instincts as if injecting it into their veins.
But Democrats must also, as I’ve said, “play the game for real. At some point, you have to run the election and count the votes. At some point, you have to win on the ground instead of in your head. You’d best be good at it.”