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Month: June 2023

Just sayin’, it’s getting hot in here

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 22, 2023

“Unliveable in 20 years”?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/06/17/texas-heat-wave-records-climate/

A tweet from Austin, Texas got my attention the first thing this morning.

“It’s been hotter before, but this is the most miserable I can ever remember Texas weather feeling. First day of summer and the heat index is 120 at 5pm. The state is going to be unlivable in 20 years,” said freelance journalist Christopher Hooks.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes replied, “I really think people vastly underestimate the effect that climate change is going to have on the livability of the Sun Belt.”

Saul Elbein, a staff writer for The Hill from Austin, cites the media for decades of failure to properly warn the public of the risks posed by climate change. Scientists themselves have too long “soft-pedaled” climate change, allowing motivated doubters to write them off as acceptable long-term risks:

The findings published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggest a fundamental weakness in the past 30 years of communication by climate scientists: a profound difficulty in assessing the possible impacts of breakdowns in the Earth’s biggest and most complex systems.

The Nature paper focused on sea-level rise — a hallmark of planetary heating that is influenced by a wide range of processes both well and poorly understood.

For some of these processes, “we understand the physics quite well – for example, how the ocean takes up heat and expands in response to that,” said lead author Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.

Uncertainties in other global processes left room for fossil fuel producers to stall public action the way cigarette manufacturers did with their products.

If emissions remain high, the U.S. could see 6.6 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, enough “to convert the National Mall into a national salt marsh.”  

A breakdown in the ice sheets, for example, could “contribute more than one additional meter of sea level rise by 2100,” the authors wrote.

In D.C., that would be enough to swallow much of the lowlands around Capitol Hill, leaving water lapping at the base of Congress itself. It would also wipe out most of Charleston, S.C., and Miami and tear holes in the fabric of the metro areas of San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.

But as with cigarettes, the warnings have been out there for decades. We just did not want to listen. “We” still don’t.

‘Stupid stuff’

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 22, 2023

Trumpism has come to this

“When Democrats control the House we pass the laws—when Republicans control, what do we get? We get stupid stuff like this dumb hearing,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.).

Lieu appeared with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes after Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on special counsel John Durham’ report on his investigation into the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. (If you have to read that again, I’ll wait.)

And what did Durham find after four years? CNN summarizes, “that the FBI should have only launched a preliminary, but not full, investigation into connections between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.”

A New York Post editorial considers that “gross FBI and Justice Department malfeasance.” Democrats on the committee consider the Durham report, which did not dispute Robert Mueller’s conclusions (and multiple convictions) surrounding 2016 Russian interference, a frivolous waste of time.

CNN:

Despite repeated claims from Trump and Republicans that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the Justice Department, Durham said there wasn’t any political interference with his work. He testified that Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, didn’t block any of his moves, didn’t reach out to discuss the probe, and didn’t meddle with the investigation.

[…]

After four years, Durham only secured one conviction against a low-level FBI lawyer for doctoring one email related to the surveillance of an ex-Trump campaign aide. Durham’s jury trials against a Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer and Trump-Russia dossier source both ended with embarrassing acquittals last year.

So Lieu made sure to spotlight the close Trump associates who were convicted for other crimes.

“Inevitable pudding-wrestling”

More stupid.

Proving Lieu’s point, Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado are pulling each other’s hair (only figuratively, so far) over who gets to try impeaching President Joe Biden (Daily Beast):

The messy feud between two of MAGA world’s biggest stars burst into public view on Wednesday, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” to her face on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The angry exchange came as the two lawmakers have been swiping at each other over their competing resolutions to impeach President Joe Biden. But tensions came to a head on Wednesday after Boebert leveraged a procedural tool to force a vote on her own impeachment resolution within days—undercutting Greene, who had offered her own resolution, but not with the procedural advantages of forcing a vote.

The two “lawmakers” had an exchange on the House floor captured by C-SPAN’s cameras.

According to two sources that saw the exchange and a third familiar with the matter, the back and forth began when Boebert approached Greene—then seated in the chamber—and confronted her over “statements you made about me publicly.” All three of the sources said Greene called Boebert a “bitch.” One of the sources said Greene called her “a little bitch.”

According to two of the sources, Greene then stood up and alleged that Boebert “copied my articles of impeachment,” to which the Colorado lawmaker fired back that she hadn’t even read Greene’s resolution.

Lieu weighed in again on Twitter: “Democrats put #PeopleOverPolitics and passed a bipartisan infrastructure law to grow our economy. What are MAGA Republicans focused on? Performative stupid stuff.”

“We could just cut to the chase and let them get on with the inevitable pudding-wrestling,” quipped the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson.

Cage matches

Still more stupid.

Perhaps Green and Borbert would agree to a double-bill cage match?

Alex Heath at The Verge writes:

After Elon Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO shot back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet with the caption “send me location.”

I’ve confirmed that Zuckerberg’s post on his Instagram account is, in fact, not a joke, which means the ball is now in Musk’s court. “The story speaks for itself,” Meta spokesperson Iska Saric told me.

“*Not satire,” tweeted The Intellectualist.

No. It’s farce.

Have Americans really sunk so low as to allow Trumpism another chance at wielding power in 2024? If we last that long?

Don’t answer that.

Where’s all the riff raff?

Published by digby on June 21, 2023

Look at Texas, Florida, and Arizona compared to the West Coast cities.

Just sayin’

Whose religion counts in this country?

Published by digby on June 21, 2023

Following up on the post below here’s a pro-choice tactic that should tie the other side up in knots:

Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back.

The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis.

“I thought: ‘Whoa, these people really are not messing around.’ But then I thought, ‘Well, I’m not messing around either.’”

So when Missouri’s abortion ban took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Barnes and Taves decided to fight back. Along with rabbis and ministers across several denominations, they joined a first-of-its-kind lawsuit arguing Missouri blurred the line between church and state, imposed a particular Christian idea of when life begins over the beliefs of other denominations, and threatened their ability to practice their religions.

As the nation nears the one year anniversary of the fall of Roe, the Missouri case is one of nearly a dozen challenges to abortion restrictions filed by clergy members and practitioners of everything from Judaism to Satanism that are now making their way through state and federal courts — a strategy that aims to restore access to the procedure and chip away at the assumption that all religious people oppose abortion.

In fact, many of the lawsuits are wielding religious protection laws enacted by anti-abortion state officials to target those officials’ own restrictions on the procedure.

In Indiana, a group of Jewish, Muslim and other religious plaintiffs sued over the state’s near-total abortion ban. Their argument: that it violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed into law in 2015 by then-Gov. Mike Pence. A lower court judge sided with them in December and blocked the state’s ban from taking effect — the most significant win the religious challengers have notched so far.

Then, earlier this month, the Indiana judge granted the challengers class action status, meaning a win for them could apply to anyone in the state whose religion supports abortion access in cases prohibited by state law.

Even if the Religious Freedom law was intended by Mike Pence to discriminate against people, we thought: ‘Let’s use this for good instead,’” said Amalia Shifriss, a leader of Hoosier Jews for Choice, one of the Indiana plaintiffs. “It brings me joy to think how much this must upset him.”

Coincidentally I wrote a piece a couple of days ago about the court’s relaxing of the so-called “sincerity requirement” which required that any freedom of religion case be based upon sincerely held religious beliefs. They haven’t really questioned it in any of their recent cases even though there’s ample reason to believe that some of the cases were purely political. I wrote this:

 I do have a sneaking suspicion that the courts will once again discover the “sincerity requirement” when an offbeat religion decides to test it …

Here’s the best Mike Pence’s campaign could come up with:

A Pence spokesperson characterized the lawsuit as a “pursuit to legalize abortion up to and even after birth. They added: “It will probably strike Americans as pretty tasteless to call the latest iteration of their abortion crusade as a cause ‘for good’ and a source of ‘joy.’”

The original article concludes:

Judges have historically avoided questioning the sincerity of someone’s religious beliefs, but Becket and other groups have filed amicus briefs that do so.

To combat these accusations, the challengers point to scripture that lays out a case for abortion rights as well as support from religious leaders for their claims.

The Jewish challengers in Kentucky cite religious texts including the Mishnah that say life begins when a baby takes its first breath, not when it is conceived, and if medical issues arise during pregnancy, the pregnant person’s life “comes before the life of [the child].” They also submitted to the court letters from rabbis arguing that current state exemptions for life-threatening medical emergencies aren’t enough, saying Jewish law permits, and in some cases requires, an abortion when there is “a risk of poverty, abuse, addiction, or mental illness.”

The case challenging Missouri’s ban cites the United Church of Christ’s vote in 1971 to acknowledge the right to abortion and members’ “autonomy to determine what happens to their own bodies,” as well as the Episcopal Church’s “long-standing opposition” to any government attempt to infringe on reproductive choices.

“There’s a tendency to see these cases as kind of a clever, legal switcheroo. Like, here’s a way to take these laws that are often thought of as very conservative and use them to protect abortion rights,” Platt said. “But the idea of reproductive rights as a religious liberty issue is absolutely not something that came from lawyers. It’s how faith communities themselves have been talking about their approach to reproductive rights for literally decades.”

Centuries actually.

I’m sure this very orthodox Catholic Supreme Court majority will find a way to dismiss those beliefs. They have no trouble being intellectually inconsistent if it suits their purpose. They just don’t care.about that. But it will prove once again just what rank partisans they really are.

Going for the 15 weeks

Published by digby on June 21, 2023

Will the new anti-abortion tactics work?

They want a total national ban, don’t kid yourself. But they’ve always been willing to do it incrementally. Now that they have succeeded in overturning Roe and “returning it to the states” they’re moving simultaneously to push full bans where they can get it and a so-called “moderate” ban for all the states where it is currently legal. It’s diabolical:

A key anti-abortion group is pushing to get Republicans singing from the same songbook a year after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade damaged the party’s national political prospects.

Citing a new round of national polling the group commissioned, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America argues in a new memo, obtained by Semafor, that many Americans are comfortable limiting access to abortions even if they consider themselves broadly “pro-choice.”

It’s part of an effort to convince Republicans to go on offense with an issue that many believe played a role in the party’s disappointing midterms performance, and get them to at least back a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks.

The memo, which was sent to 2024 presidential candidates, Republicans on Capitol Hill, GOP chairmen and RNC committee people, includes the finding that 59% of voters say they’d back “Congressional legislation that would prohibit abortions after a baby can feel pain at fifteen weeks of pregnancy,” with exceptions for the life of the mother, rape, and incest. That includes 53% of self-described “pro-choice” voters.

“There is NO partisan difference in the viewpoint that abortion should be limited here, with 59% of Republicans and Democrats alike choosing that option, along with 56% of independents,” the memo, compiled by The Tarrance Group for SBA, reads.

​​Abortion polling tends to be sensitive to wording and context, which SBA’s pollsters tried to account for by asking questions in different ways. The findings are in keeping with other surveys that have typically found that most Americans are open to some limits on the procedure, even when they oppose outright bans.

The memo also notes that a majority of Americans backed requirements that minors inform their parents before seeking an abortion, as well as laws that would permanently prohibit federal dollars from funding abortion.

“Too often we hear that abortion is a controversial and divisive issue, but the reality is we have consensus. The American people have spoken loudly and consistently about their support for protections for the unborn starting at least when a baby feels pain,” SBA Legislative Director Jamie Dangers wrote in an email accompanying the memo.

This is a lie. There is no consensus on any of that. But one of their new talking points is that there is one and guess what? It’s the consensus that abortion must be severely curtailed throughout the country!

Watch for this to start to take hold in the media. They love this “consensus” blather.

WTF is impoundment?

Published by digby on June 21, 2023

If a Republican get into the White House we’re going to find out

Semafor (subsc. only)reports on Trump’s latest “policy” announcement:

Donald Trump unveiled another sweeping piece of his plans to slash federal spending and defund the “deep state” on Tuesday, effectively claiming vast, unchecked powers to shape the government. 

In a new video, first shared with Semafor, the former president vowed to scrap pieces of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the once obscure federal law he was accused of violating when he froze funding Congress had earmarked for Ukraine. That move helped lead to his first impeachment.

The statute forces the executive branch to spend money Congress approves. But it also puts in place rules governing how the president can delay — or “impound” — federal funding for specific programs, or permanently rescind cash from them with permission from lawmakers. Congress passed it after President Richard Nixon attempted to scrap tens of billions in federal spending on his own, in what was widely seen as an abuse of his powers.

On Tuesday, Trump vowed to challenge the law’s constitutionality in court, and in doing so effectively reserve the right to unilaterally cut the federal budget with the stroke of a pen.

“Bringing back impoundment will give us a crucial tool with which to obliterate the Deep State, Drain the Swamp, and starve the Warmongers,” he said in the video. “We can simply choke off the money.”

Trump appears to be promising deep cuts across much of the government. In a fact sheet accompanying its policy rollout and reviewed by Semafor, he promises to “direct federal agencies to identify portions of their budgets where massive savings are possible” using impoundment, while exempting Medicare, Social Security, and defense spending.

It’s not at all obvious that Trump’s impoundment plan would hold up in court, however. The fact sheet also noted how past presidents used impoundment before Congress reined it in, setting up an argument that seemed tailor made for the Supreme Court’s originalists. But any effort by Trump to revive the tool would run into questions about whether the president was usurping Congress’s power over the purse.

THE VIEW FROM THE BUDGET WONKS

Whether or not it would survive legally, longtime budget hands told Semafor that they found Trump’s proposal deeply troubling.

“The worry here is the abusability of this,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, told Semafor. “The worry here is it allows the president to act by fiat to completely ignore laws that the president doesn’t think are useful.”

G. William Hoagland, a former Senate GOP budget aide who is now at the Bipartisan Policy Center, was blunter, calling Trump’s proposal “ridiculous.”

“I’m so upset with this,” he said. “I guess I’m just flabbergasted by his lack of understanding of the Constitution.”

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Trump’s allies view the matter quite differently.

Russell Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, has for years been a proponent of ridding the presidency of the guardrails put into place back in 1974. He told Semafor that Trump’s latest policy pitch is “enormously important,” and that the idea of bringing back impoundment “informed a lot of our strategies in the last administration as we were moving towards a second term.”

(He declined to say whether he’d spoken to Trump recently about the new policy plan, but noted that the former president is aware he’s “a huge supporter of this.”)

Reviving impoundment is just one of the ways Trump is promising to reshape the federal bureaucracy, or the so-called “deep state” he believes undermined his last administration. He’s also proposed changes to federal civil service rules that would make it easier to fire career employees who have a role in policymaking, which he began trying to implement at the end of his first term.

Vought said the impoundment plan represented several years of Trump’s thinking on “how to use the purse strength to deal with the deep state.”

“I don’t think now’s the time to be talking about middle ground,” he added. “I think now’s the time to be talking about the paradigm shift.”

Come on. It won’t just be Trump. You know DeSantis or any of the rest would do this too. This is where the “intellectual” wing of the entire party is going and any GOP president will do this. Just listen to Haley and Tim Scott on the campaign trail railing at the “Deep State” and “weaponization.”

It’s really important that they not be allowed back in the White House for a good long while. They will roll back the entire panoply of ethics reforms that exist and then just go for it. They’ve convinced their voters that they have to because the Justice Department and the Intelligence Community is bent on destroying the Republican Party because they had no choice but to investigate the criminal known as Donald Trump. These establishment actors know it’s not true. They understand very well what Trump is. But they also know they are losing ground in American politics because their base is composed of paranoid, authoritarian bigots and becoming authoritarians themselves is the only way to retain power.

As I said, it’s very important they not be allowed back into the White House for a good long while.

Durham on the hot seat

Published by digby on June 21, 2023

It’s not pretty. Not pretty at all.

Hunter is charged

Published by digby on June 21, 2023

Meanwhile, the “Trump Crime Family” keeps on criming

Something real finally happened in the Hunter Biden saga besides all the innuendo and gossip that has had the right wing in a permanent state of titillation and excitement for the past few years. Yesterday morning he was charged with three crimes.

 U.S. Attorney David Weiss, (a Trump appointee who the former president was very proud to nominate saying he “shares the President’s vision ”) released a letter laying out the charges:

The first Information charges the defendant with tax offenses—namely, two counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7203. The defendant has agreed to  plead guilty to both counts of the tax Information. The second Information charges the defendant with a firearm offense—namely, one count of possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) and 924(a)(2) (2018). The defendant has agreed to enter a Pretrial Diversion Agreement with respect to the firearm Information.

I didn’t know that failing to pay your taxes on time was a criminal offense but apparently it can be, although according to the experts most of the time it’s dealt with as a civil offense. Biden had paid the those taxes some time back so he was given probation for his crime. The gun charge pertained to his lying on a form saying that he hadn’t done any drugs during this specific period of time. The Diversion Agreement declined to prosecute him for that crime as long as he agreed to never own a firearm again and to stay drug-free for 24 months.

After five long years of investigating every aspect of Hunter Biden’s life, these are apparently the only crimes they could come up with to justify their work. They were unable to prove the Rudy Giuliani allegations that he had accepted bribes from Ukrainians or vast sums from Chinese interests. They didn’t even get the chance to enter into evidence anywhere all those salacious pictures of Hunter on that famous “laptop.” Needless to say, the Republicans have entered a period of intense breast beating and lamentation. How is it possible that the black sheep of the so-called “Biden Crime Family” can get away scott free?

Actually, he didn’t. Take for example the case of Trump adviser and personal confidante Roger Stone and his wife, who failed to pay taxes from 2007 to 2011 and again in 2018 and was sued by the government in civil court for 2 million dollars. They also tried to hide their wealth from the government which some people would call tax evasion. But the government did not charge them even though Stone had been stringing them along pretending to be trying to pay for years until he finally just stopped altogether.

So, what happened to Roger Stone? He was allowed to settle with the government after they attempted to obtain records that it was strongly suspected would prove that he’d committed a felony by trying to evade paying his taxes. It all ended very amicably with no criminal charges filed. Isn’t that nice?

As for Hunter’s other charge, all the legal experts point out that this is usually only charged in high profile cases when the person under investigation hasn’t violated any other laws. As NBC reported, this charge was recently brought against “the mother of a 6-year-old boy who shot his teacher in Newport News, Virginia, [who] pleaded guilty to the charge — possessing a firearm while using marijuana — along with a charge of making a false statement.” Biden’s case was certainly high profile and they clearly wanted to charge him with something and couldn’t find any other violation, so it fits.

And as it happens, this law is being challenged by gun proliferation activists. One appeals court has held that the government can’t ban people convicted of a non-violent crime from having a gun and another ruled that drug users have a right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. Personally, I think the government should have broad powers to regulate gun ownership so it doesn’t offend me that Biden agreed to forego using drugs and owning a gun in the future to avoid being charged with a felony. That seems like a fair deal for a first offense in a non-violent crime. But that’s just me. I would have expected the right, which even defends violent terrorists’ right to bear arms,to scream bloody murder that someone was charged for lying on a background check or required to give up their right to own a gun.

The legal consensus is that Hunter Biden was actually treated more harshly than most people in America would have been treated in these circumstances.

As expected, the right wingers are having a full blown meltdown over this. The “sweetheart deal” talking points were in instant circulation:

I would have thought that no sentient being on the planet would have the nerve to compare what Donald Trump is accused of with the charges against Hunter Biden. Not even Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But as long as we’re talking about him, perhaps McCarthy would care to comment on the big story By Eric Lipton in the New York Times yesterday about the Trump family’s latest “sweetheart deal” with the Saudi And Oman governments.

Mr. Trump’s name is plastered on signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the nearby capital of Oman, where a team of sales agents is invoking Mr. Trump’s name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to $13 million, mostly targeting superrich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran and India.

Mr. Trump has been selling his name to global real estate developers for more than a decade. But the Oman deal has taken his financial stake in one of the world’s most strategically important and volatile regions to a new level, underscoring how his business and his politics intersect as he runs for president again amid intensifying legal and ethical troubles.

Let’s just say this might be just a bit more relevant than Rudy Giuliani’s moldy, thoroughly-investigated Hunter Biden Burisma pseudo-scandal. It’s happening right before our eyes in real time.

We already knew about Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s $2 billion “sweetheart deal” with the Saudi Investment Fund and now Trump and his son Eric (Don Jr is apparently now a professional MAGA influencer) have done a major mega deal with the government of Oman, partly financed by the Saudis — as Trump is running for president and is under indictment for stealing highly sensitive national security documents, some of which reportedly have to do with the Middle East. Alrighty then.

What’s all this I keep hearing about a “crime family?” I didn’t quite catch the name.

Salon

Life sucks (or doesn’t) and then you die

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 21, 2023

Are we wired to see it that way?

Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Universal truth may be found in unlikely places.

Adam Mastroianni’s surveys may explain our persistent gloominess (New York Times):

Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.

Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.

When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.

Related are glass-half-empty progressives unacquainted with Hanlon’s razor who find a dark cloud in every Democratic silver lining. They routinely behave like jilted lovers. Because they expect more of Democrats, Dems retain the capacity to disappoint them. Republicans they wrote off long ago. But Mastroianni’s surveys suggest I could be wrong.

That explanation fits well with two more of our surprising findings. First, people exempt their own social circles from decline; in fact, they think the people they know are nicer than ever. This might be because people primarily encounter positive information about people they know, which our model predicts can create an illusion of improvement.

Second, people believe that moral decline began only after they arrived on Earth; they see humanity as stably virtuous in the decades before their birth. This especially suggests that biased memory plays a role in producing the illusion.

Or maybe Mastroianni doesn’t hang out where I do.

The values that divide us

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 21, 2023

Norms are values systems

Left, right. Liberal, conservative. We reflexively map out political morphology in America as dichotomies. Us, them. Urban, rural. The problem the country faces as tensions build across the modern political divide is that the framework of the United States of America, flaws and all, is built upon a set of values the framers shared: self-evident truths, unalienable rights, a government built to promote justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, etc.

Even then, agreement was not universal. The colonies were home to federalists and antifederalists, slave states and free, colonial rebels and Tories/Royalists. Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Podhorzer imply that it was always thus, that the greater “We the People” never really shared those values, the same truths, or else did not view them the same way.

How left and right view governance today reflects the same contrasts. Donald Trump saw the Department of Justice as “his” to deploy against enemies. Joe Biden left the prosecutor investigating his own son in place. Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith “have taken elaborate care to keep Trump’s criminal investigation at arm’s length from the White House.” Why? Because “Democrats are virtuous and Republicans are hypocrites? Or that Republicans are strategic and Democrats are chumps?”

What if we never shared the same value systems? For that is what unwritten norms are. “So we make the mistake of assuming that MAGA voters and their leaders will at some point be persuaded to return to American norms which they never agreed to in the first place.” The problem is that that theirs are “radically different from the norms of mainstream liberal American democracy,” Lithwick and Podhorzer suggest:

Perhaps it is time to reconsider what we call a norm, and also to ask why we bind ourselves to ideas and values that are not shared. If the norms of democratic governance are not shared, then they are simply rules to which one side binds itself and the other does not. So perhaps instead of referring to all these soft rules and conventions and traditions as norms, we should more accurately refer to them as “rules to which we adhere and they do not.”

It’s emphatically true that if you cast these norms in that light, you begin to look like a chump. When one side is persistently priding itself on “going high” while the other side is already plotting the ways in which it can sink lower, one is forced to wonder whether following norms for their own sake is an end in itself. Maybe it’s just misplaced confidence in the moral arc of the universe. Instead of waiting for MAGA Republicans to come to their senses and embrace a set of norms of governance to which they do not adhere and to which they don’t want to adhere, it’s long past time we come to our senses and realize that their norms are not ours, and never have been. Thus, the stakes are not the preservation of norms, but democracy itself, and who writes the history of these times.

Lithwick and Podhorzer suggest that Americans, left and right, etc., despite lofty values expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution, never really shared a fully common set of values. They do not explore why.

George Lakoff maps the differences to holding some blend of his strict father (“A Boy Named Sue“) and nurturant parent views of the world. I’d elaborate that Lakoff’s strict father hierarchy comes out in people’s tendency toward, well, holding a Royalist’s view of the world. That is, there are those preordained to rule and those destined to follow, those who deserve to get ahead and those who deserve to be left behind. It is a cutthroat, Darwinist view and a capitalist one. The capitalist model, Marx believed, contains the seeds of its own destruction. His faith in the ultimate victory of the proletariat may have been unfounded, another “misplaced confidence in the moral arc of the universe.”

The framers began the Preamble with the words “We the People” purposefully. Perhaps they, too, overestimated at the founding the degree to which “we” share a common set of values and aspirations. What Trump and the MAGA Republican right have stripped away is any pretense of valuing the general welfare or of governing in its service.

Capitalism may be the unseen foundation, the unstated premise, upon which the framers erected this experimental nation. Capitalism’s contradictions are fundamentally at odds with their dreams of realizing human equality in a more perfect union. Just two days ago, I proposed that Trumpism “represents the triumph of the profit motive (monetary and personal power) over government stewardship.” The right’s governing principle is not democracy, but “What’s in it for me?”

Selfishness is a bad look even if it is what you value.