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Month: October 2023

Mike Johnson Doesn’t Believe In Democracy

Published by digby on October 26, 2023

That’s because he’s never actually participated in one

This piece by David Pepper is illuminating:

A few years ago, now-Speaker Mike Johnson said we do not live in a democracy.

As I wrote several months ago, it’s a common right-wing refrain.

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Johnson turns out to offer the perfect example of how in today’s gerrymandered world, people can ride to the highest levels of power without facing a real election their entire careers.

Which means they can be complete extremists and never face accountability for it. It also means that not only do they not know democracy, they actually come to fear it. Not just because they have never experienced it, but because it poses the biggest risk to their grasp on power.

Let’s take a look at Johnson’s career to see how it works:

Before entering office, he spent his years fighting for right-wing causes as a lawyer—like fighting same-sex marriage and to keep in place laws criminalizing sodomy. That’s his right to do, of course, and I’m glad he was largely unsuccessful.

But then his political career began:

In early 2015, when the state representative where he lived in Louisiana ran for another office, Johnson ran for the vacancy.

Incredibly, even that first run for office was unopposed. There ended up not even being an election! So he initially assumed power without ever having faced the voters in a general election.

(No wonder he thinks we’re not a democracy!)

Once in office, he got to work advancing the goals he had fought for as a lawyer, but now as a legislator. One law he pushed within months was so extreme that major Louisiana companies lobbied against it, and even Republicans rejected it, tabling it 10-2 in committee.

What did the voters think about the fact that in only months, he had already proven to be too extreme for even his own party?

We don’t know, because when Johnson ran again that Fall for next 2-year term, he was again unopposed.

No primary.

No general.

How easy! He pays the filing fee, gathers some signatures, and gets to go right back to the legislature with no accountability to the people whatsoever.

(Again, no wonder he doesn’t think we’re a democracy!)

On the strength of his failed bill, and unopposed election victories—on that unmistakable mandate from a people who had no choice in the matter—Johnson decides it’s time to take his political juggernaut to Congress.

And then he encounters the marvels of lopsided districts. He wins in 2016, 2018 and 2020 with the winning margins we have come to expect in a gerrymandered world:

30% (2016)
30% (2018)
35% (2020)

And then in 2022, even after being one of the most active participants in Trump’s January 6 coup attempt, he returns to his roots and runs unopposed again.

For the third time—no wonder he thinks we’re not a democracy!

Bottom line: the now-Speaker of the House is the perfect example of the modern extremist.

He’s spent his entire career in a world devoid of democracy—devoid of accountability:

-It’s how he entered—even his initial entree unopposed (that’s pretty rare, actually. Not even a primary).
-It’s how he rose.
-It’s his most recent race.
–It’s all he’s ever known!

And it’s why all the unabashed and toxic extremism he’s espoused along the way has essentially gone unchecked the entire time.

Mike Johnson IS the current generation of GOP leaders and members. No accountability—ever! Which means all the incentives he’s faced encouraged him to keep being extreme.

Now imagine hundreds just like him. Of course they’re going to be extremists when they thrive in a world where they CAN be extremists, never facing any real opposition (often no opposition at all) despite taking positions that only a few years ago were soundly rejected by their own party.

You actually don’t have to imagine it—just look around. It’s so many states. And it’s the GOP chaos caucus in the House.

There is also the matter of ideological, partisan sorting among the electorate. People want to live alongside like minded people and as our politics have become polarized, they explicitly choose to do it more and more. (I also think a lot of people just adopt whatever the prevailing political view around them are because they really aren’t that interested in the first place.) The main point is that the manipulation of the House voting system has created these bastions of right wing extremism that now seem to be almost impermeable. With the influence of right wing propaganda on both the voters and the political officials, you end up with Mike Johnson.

The House GOP Pushes The Guardrails

Published by digby on October 26, 2023

With Trump putting all his weight behind them

Margaret Sullivan with a sobering take on the Speaker debacle:

The process was appalling, and the outcome even more so, as Republicans in the House of Representatives finally found someone they could more or less agree on.

That agreement, though, may be more accurately described as simple exhaustion after three weeks of embarrassing misfires.

And who is it they have managed to elect speaker of the US House, the person in line to lead the nation just after the president and vice-president?

It’s Mike Johnson of Louisiana who, as one example of his profound unsuitability, brags that he doesn’t believe that human beings cause the climate crisis, though his home state has been ravaged by it. He is against abortion, voted against aid to Ukraine and stridently opposes LGBTQ+ rights.

Perhaps most notably, Johnson had a leading role in trying to overturn he 2020 election.

That means that the official second in line to the presidency “violated his oath to the constitution and tried to disenfranchise four states”, as the writer Marcy Wheeler neatly put it.

Johnson certainly has his Trumpian bona fides in order. In 2020, he helped lead a legal effort to reverse the results of the election in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and he hawked Trump’s lies that the election had been rigged.

Whatever his shortcomings, we know that Johnson excels at one thing: pleasing Donald Trump, the autocrat wannabe and Republican party leader who loves nothing more than a good yes man.

This, of course, follows weeks of chaos for the House Republicans, who put up three better-known nominees – Steve Scalise, another Louisianan, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Tom Emmer of Minnesota – before Johnson.

In a historic display of arrogance (not to mention the inability to actually count votes), Jordan tried and failed three times. For this, I suppose, we can be mildly grateful since Jordan is an especially awful person who, as Ohio State wrestling coach, reportedly looked away from credible abuse allegations by the team doctor.

The failed efforts by Scalise, Jordan and Emmer came after the ousting of Kevin McCarthy of California – no stalwart for democracy, either – who, in the end, acted a little too responsibly to satisfy the extreme right flank of his party. Those extremists were outraged by McCarthy’s decision to prevent a government shutdown by passing a stopgap funding resolution.

All told, it’s been quite a month for Republicans who – with their ever-helpful media allies – enjoy describing the opposing party as “Democrats in Disarray”. In fact, there was quite a bit of actual array over the past month as Democrats stayed unified and voted, time after time, for Hakeem Jeffries of New York.

Jeffries was never going to be speaker of this Republican-controlled House but he very likely would have been a fine leader of the chamber. He is someone who apparently understands how elections and the peaceful transition of power are supposed to work, and someone who could competently step in as president, should that need arise.

What’s the worst that can happen with Johnson at the helm? There’s no way of knowing but it could be ugly as next year’s presidential election looms.

Shortly after Johnson’s election, a reporter asked President Biden if he is worried about whether, if he wins re-election next year, Johnson might try to overturn the election.

“No, because he can’t,” Biden responded. “Just like I was not worried that the last guy would be able to overturn the election.” He added: “They had about 60 lawsuits … and every time they lost.”

But American democracy has edged ever closer to the brink since then.

There’s no guarantee that the guardrails that held fast in 2020 would do so again four years later. And, let’s face it, if Trump is re-elected, they never will again.

I have to assume that Biden knows very well that the danger is acute and believes he has to say this to reassure Americans in the integrity of the electoral system so they will vote. But whether he believes it or not, Sullivan is right. This system is teetering on a knife’s edge as the Republicans coalesce more and more around winning the presidency by any means possible. They have convinced themselves that it is literally impossible for them to legitimately lose. Once that happens any democracy is on the verge of failing.

Better than Trump’s?

Published by digby on October 26, 2023

Say it ain’t so!

I guess I’m past hoping that people will ever “feel” that the economy has improved as long as the price of eggs is higher than it was in 2010. But honestly, I think that Trump’s ongoing presence in our political culture makes his followers gleefully pretend that the world has gone to hell since he left office and the rest of us are just depressed and enervated by the relentless chaos he causes.

Still, the news is true. The economy is rolling and the relentless doom saying over the past couple of years, predicting an imminent recession, remains wrong.

By the way:

 Inflation has moderated — to 3.7 percent from last summer’s peak of 9.1 percent …

The spate of recent growth is welcome news for the White House, which has invested heavily in infrastructure as part of its “Bidenomics” plan. Economists say its clear those policies are paying off: Robust manufacturing construction and government spending drove much of last quarter’s growth, and households have continued to benefit from historic job gains.

But despite $302 billion in infrastructure spending, the Biden administration has struggled to convince voters that its economic policies are working for them. Biden’s ratings on economic matters are lower than ever, with just 32 percent of Americans saying they approve of the president’s handling of the economy in a recent CNBC poll.

Why? This is why:

It never fails. Biden is old, dontcha know?

Another Day, Another Mass Shooting

Published by digby on October 26, 2023

It’s hard to find anything to say about this anymore. A disturbed man takes up one of his easily obtained semi-automatic weapons and mows down a bunch of innocent people. The gun proliferation zealots instantly call for more guns and better mental health. Oh, and thoughts and prayers. It never, ever, changes and I have come to believe that we are now addicted to the cycle of violence as some sort of primitive cleansing ritual. It makes no rational sense.

This latest shooter reportedly had mental illness and was hearing voices. According to some reports about his social media, he was also a right winger. Surprise.

It also sounds like he and his family are gun extremists. Maybe this guy is lying, but it tracks:

The Ads Write Themselves

Published by digby on October 26, 2023

The new Speaker of the House is a Christian Right extremist.

He was a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund for 20 years:

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), formerly the Alliance Defense Fund, is an American conservative Christian legal advocacy group that works to expand Christian practices within public schools and in government, outlaw abortion, and curtail the rights of LGBTQ people. ADF is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, with branch offices in Washington, D.C., and New York, among other locations. Its international subsidiary, Alliance Defending Freedom International, which is headquartered in Vienna, Austria, operates in over 100 countries.

ADF is one of the most organized and influential Christian legal interest groups in the United States based on its budget, caseload, network of allied attorneys, and connections to significant members of the political right. Individuals associated with ADF have included U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, former vice president Mike Pence, former attorneys general William Barr and Jeff Sessions, and Senator Josh Hawley.

ADF attorneys have argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court, taking positions such as support for religious activity in public school and Christian prayer at town meetings; narrowing coverage of contraceptives under the ACA; prohibiting same-sex marriage, and supporting businesses in the wedding industry who refuse to service gay marriages. ADF lawyers also wrote the model for Mississippi’s anti-abortion legislation involved in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overruled the 49 year-old precedent case Roe v. Wade establishing the right to abortion.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designates ADF as an anti-LGBT hate group, saying in 2017 that, since the election of President Donald Trump, ADF had become “one of the most influential groups informing the [Trump] administration‘s attack on LGBTQ rights.”The ADF has taken many anti-LGBT positions: it opposes same-sex marriage, decriminalization of same-sex sexual activity, and anti-discrimination laws, as well as taking an active role in writing model anti-transgender bills for state legislators.

When he’s right, he’s right.

Acapulco In Ruins

Published by digby on October 26, 2023

A Category 5 hurricane hit the city and nobody saw it coming

I didn’t see one news report about any of that yesterday on cable. (I sure am glad I got to hear hour after hour of lying Republicans instead.) Anyway, it’s a good thing global warming is a hoax or this sort of thing might be a problem:

Hurricane Otis, a tropical storm that strengthened suddenlyinto the most powerful cyclone known to have hit Mexico’s Pacific Coast,slammed into the tourist resort of Acapulco on Wednesday and battered nearby beach communities.

The hurricane’s 165-mph winds shattered windows, rattled tall buildings and snapped power and telephone lines.

There were no immediate reports of deaths — but there was no communication from the areas that were hit hardest. Telephone and internet service was cut, and major roads were flooded or covered by landslides. “We’ve completely lost contact,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told journalists hours after the storm’s landfall at 12:25 a.m. local time. “We just don’t know.”

The Category 5 hurricane disrupted electrical service, plunging beachside hotel rooms in Acapulco into darkness. Guests threw mattresses over shattered windows and scrambled into bathrooms to protect themselves, videos shared on social media showed.

Streets in the city of 1 million disappeared under heavy rains. Cars and shopping carts bobbed in the floodwater. The wind whipped the face offa shopping mall. People on the upper floors of apartment buildings pleaded for help escaping.

“The devastation that we are seeing this morning … is horrific,” journalist Víctor Olivares wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Michelle Rivera, a radio journalist, posted a video she said was recorded in an Acapulco hospital, of people clutching bedclothes as high winds blew through a corridor. Videos shared on social media later in the day showed palm trees bent or toppled, streets full of debris, buildings that looked as though a giant claw had scraped their exteriors.

As recently as Monday, Otis was expected to be a run-of-the-mill tropical storm. But on Tuesday, it intensified faster than any eastern Pacific storm on record. Its winds increased by 90 mph in just 12 hours. It barreled into Acapulco as what the U.S. National Hurricane Center called a “potentially catastrophic” Category 5 storm.

Rapidly intensifying hurricanes are notoriously difficult to predict, but meteorologists tweeted that the forecast for Otis was “an almost incomprehensible miss” and “a fail of epic proportions. ” Hurricane warnings weren’t issued for southern Mexico’s western coast until 2 a.m. local time Tuesday, about 24 hours before landfall. Even then, the forecast was for only a Category 1.

Rapidly intensifying hurricanes — defined as storms whose winds increase by at least 35 mph in 24 hours — have become more common in recent years. They’ve been made more likely by the effects of human-caused climate change and warming oceans. They’re more difficult to forecast and harder to prepare for, often leading to more damage, injuries and deaths.

As Otis approached on Tuesday, authorities in Guerrero state scrambled to open shelters. The army and navy deployed troops to aid residents in damaged buildings.

More than 504,000 customers lost power. Mexico’s state-run electricity utility put its workers on “warrior status” and restored service to nearly half of them before noon Wednesday.

Of special concern was the 140-mile stretch of coastal villagesthat stretches from Acapulco to the beach resort of Zihuatanejo, López Obrador said. The area was lashed two weeks ago by Tropical Storm Max and was in no position to absorb more rainfall.

The rain triggered landslides that blocked the “Highway of the Sun,” the toll road from Mexico City to Acapulco. Other roads were flooded. Hundreds of cars and trucks backed up, unable to pass for hours, including military relief vehicles.

Around the country, people with family or friends in the affected area tried to reach them, without success. Manuel Añorve, a senator representing Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located, said Wednesday afternoon that he was stuck with the scant information appearing on social media.

“I haven’t been able to reach my spouse, my children, my mother, my siblings, my friends,” he told the newspaper 24 Horas. “The information is trickling out in drops. I’m very worried.”

[…]

On Wednesday, though, Acapulco was a city in shock. Dozens of restaurants, hotels and homes suffered serious damage, Mexican media reported.

Among them was the Princess Mundo Imperial, an iconic Acapulco hotel shaped like an Aztec pyramid. The 50-year-old property, with five pools, waterfalls and a golf course, was the final residence of Howard Hughes.

On Wednesday, its roof was shattered and rain poured into the interior, dousing broken furniture, chunks of concrete, splintered wood and mattresses, images shared on social media showed. A car had been swept into the lobby.

A guest at the hotel, Luisa Peña, said she was startled when the lights in her room blinked off on Tuesday night. “I hid in the closet and started to pray, to meditate, to calm myself down,” she said in a video posted to X by the Mexican journalist César Jiménez. “I was overwhelmed by panic.”

Slaughter in Maine

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 26, 2023

Not Big Daddy’s ‘American carnage,’ is it?

Image via Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office.

After Otis strengthened from a tropical storm to a Cat 5 hurricane in 24 hours before slamming into Acapulco on Wednesday, CNN’s Derek Van Dama called it “the new normal…. Climate change? The fingerprints written all over it.”

Nope, climate change deniers will insist.

After a suspected firearms instructor and Army reservist armed with an AR-style rifle murders 16 in Lewiston, Maine, injures dozens, and throws multiple communities into shelter-in-place lockdown, gunophiles will insist the problem isn’t easy access to guns either.

The suspected shooter remains at large as I type this. Hannaford Supermarkets has closed all its stores in Maine until at least 10 a.m. L.L. Bean has closed its facilities across Maine as well.

New York Times:

  • It has been more than 12 hours since deadly overnight shootings killed at least 16 people, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and left dozens injured in Lewiston, Maine. The massive manhunt continues Thursday morning for Robert Card, 40, a person of interest linked to the overnight attacks at a restaurant and a bowling alley, with authorities saying he is armed and dangerous. Residents in Lewiston and the nearby towns of Lisbon and Bowdoin are under a shelter-in-place advisory.

Here’s what to know about the shootings and the manhunt so far:

  • Lewiston police reported that shots were fired at around 7 p.m. Wednesday at Just-In-Time Recreation, a bowling alley formerly known as Sparetime Recreation, in the city of about 38,000. Authorities said on social media Wednesday night that there was an active shooter incident unfolding at the bowling alley and Schemengees Bar and Grille, a restaurant about four miles away. Many parents and children at Just-In-Time were there as part of a children’s bowling league, according to the Associated Press.
  • At least 16 people were killed in the attacks, and the death toll is expected to rise, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss initial information gathered by first responders. The victims have not been publicly identified as of Thursday morning.
  • A second law enforcement official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said a review of Card’s background showed that he is an Army reservist who has struggled with mental health problems this year. Card, of Bowdoin, has been described by authorities as a firearms instructor who was assigned to a training facility in Saco, Maine.
  • The death toll in Lewiston is already the largest mass shooting in the United States this year. It is also the 34th mass killing in the country this year.
  • Many of the schools in the state will not open on Thursday in response to the ongoing manhunt.
  • A police news conference is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Eastern at Lewiston City Hall.

The “34th mass killing” this year is the 565th mass shooting in the United States, defined by the Gun Violence Archive as “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident. Mass Murder by gun is a subset of the Mass Shooting count.”

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/lewiston-maine-shootings-active-shooter-10-25-23/h_73120a46995351a1bbcf8860b8fb9253

That’s not the kind of broad “American carnage” Donald Trump meant in his inaugural speech, but it’s the “new normal.” Four Americans in ten are just fine with that.

Nope. Easy access to guns is not the problem, gun violence deniers will say. The only fingerprints belong to the shooter. It’s not even a problem when it’s “bad” people with easy access.

Weapons and explosives recovered from Hamas terrorists in Israel.

Nope. Must be mental illness. Uh-merica gotta hurry up and do nothing about that too.

Feasible precautions?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 26, 2023

Family members of Al Jazeera Gaza Bureau chief die in IDF bombing

This is a different map than the one the IDF issued to Gazans.

The “wife, teenage son, daughter and grandson, and eight other members” of Al Jazeera bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh died Wednesday in an Israeli air strike on the the Nuseirat refugee camp in southern Gaza. The Israeli military said in a statement it had “targeted Hamas terrorist infrastructure in the area” without elaborating.

Washington Post:

In its statement, the Israel Defense Forces also said it had “been targeting military targets across the Gaza Strip. Strikes on military targets are subject to relevant provisions of international law, including the taking of feasible precautions to mitigate civilian casualties.”

The journalist’s family had relocated south to an area the Israeli military had designated a safe zone.

On October 13, the Israeli Defense Force issued a statement for Gazan civilians to “evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families”:

“The IDF calls for the evacuation of all civilians of Gaza City from their homes southwards for their own safety and protection and move to the area south of the Wadi Gaza, as shown on the map.”

Washington Post again:

On Wednesday, Al Jazeera broadcast video of Dahdouh in his press vest walking through the halls of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, blinking back tears and flanked by other members of the press who held and guided him. He was brought to a tent filled with body bags, including that of his son. In the footage, he looked down, threw up his arms and crouched down to embrace the dead body of his son Mahmoud.

“You take your revenge by killing our kids?” Dahdouh said, weeping and touching the face of his son, in a video published by Al Jazeera. His son wanted to be a journalist like his father, the outlet reported.

Other images and footage showed him holding up the body of his 7-year-old daughter, Sham, whose face was bloodied.

Some of Dahdouh’s other family members are being treated in the hospital, Al Jazeera reported, adding that his son Yehia underwent an emergency procedure in a hospital corridor.

Al Jazeera journalists broke down on air while reporting their colleague’s loss.

Dahdouh has covered Gaza for two decades, per Marwan Bishara, a senior Al Jazeera political analyst.

“Listening to him, you would expect a man so angry to be cursing, but he’s not,” Bishara said. “His revenge is to tell the truth.”

Al Jazeera:

Looking shocked, Dahdouh spoke to Al Jazeera on his way out of the hospital: “What happened is clear. This is a series of targeted attacks on children, women and civilians. I was just reporting from Yarmouk about such an attack, and the Israeli raids have targeted many areas, including Nuseirat.

“We had our doubts that the Israeli occupation would not let these people go without punishing them. And sadly, that is what happened. This is the ‘safe’ area that the occupation army spoke of.”

In May, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned (in the words of a press statement) that “the world is failing to live up to its commitments to protect civilians in armed conflict.” Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), cautioned in the statement’s wording that “all parties engaged in urban warfare must prioritize civilian protection, avoid the use of heavy explosive weapons in populated areas and ensure essential services.”

Bombings are occurring all across Gaza including farther south of Wadi Gaza, per Al Jazeera/Associated Press:

An air strike on a four-storey building in Khan Younis killed at least 32 people, including 13 members of the Saqallah family, Ammar al-Butta, a relative who survived the attack, told the AP. He said about 100 people were sheltering in the building, including many who had evacuated from Gaza City.

“We thought that our area would be safe,” he said.

Reuters headline: Gaza families wear ID bracelets to avoid burial in mass graves

Ali El-Daba, 40, said he had seen bodies ripped apart by the bombing and were unrecognisable.

He said he decided to divide his family to prevent them from all dying in a single strike. He said his wife Lina, 42, kept two of their sons and two daughters in Gaza City in the north and he moved to Khan Younis in the south with three other children.

El-Daba said he was preparing for the worst. He bought blue string bracelets for his family members and tied them around both wrists. “If something happens,” he said, “this way I will recognise them.”

Other Palestinian families were also buying or making bracelets for their children or writing their names on their arms.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. How’s your morning going?

Update: Fixed headline. Duh.

What Does The GOP Really Want?

Published by digby on October 25, 2023

Just chaos and culture war. That’s about it.

Philip Bump digs down a little to find out what really animates them. And it’s not surprising:

One of the central refrains of Donald Trump’s campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — a refrain focused, justifiably, on a general election rematch against President Biden — is that the economy was more robust during his tenure in the White House. Trump and his allies make this argument constantly, one that largely focuses on inflation and that almost necessarily includes an asterisk that excepts the months of the coronavirus pandemic. But any person asked to evaluate the central themes of this race would very quickly identify the economy as a central part of Republican support for the former president.

As it is, it seems, until a competing priority is presented: the need to “preserve American culture and way of life.” Then, the reality emerges.

On Wednesday, PRRI released the results of its annual American Values survey, a look at broad themes in American political and religious thought. It included a number of questions aimed at evaluating how Americans thought political power should be deployed and the motivations for doing so.

Among them was a question that got at the dichotomy above. Respondents were asked if they preferred a presidential candidate who was best at managing the economy or one who was best at being able to “protect and preserve American culture and the American way of life.” It’s a pretty explicit question in differentiating between the humdrum practicalities of stewarding the country and the use of presidential power to influence culture-war battles.

Most Americans preferred the candidate better at the economy. Republicans — and particularly people who most trust Fox News and fringe-right television news channels — chose the presidential candidate willing to “preserve American culture.” (Those who didn’t trust any television news source or trusted mainstream news preferred the economy candidate.)

This result is striking, not surprising. After all, Fox News and its peers have spent an enormous amount of energy portraying the country as threatened by bad actors, from Biden to street-level criminals. At the more extreme end of these presentations, we get things like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s elevation of the Great Replacement Theory, the idea that the country is being intentionally undermined in service to left-wing politics.

It is also not surprising that there is a big shift by generation, with older Americans expressing more interest in a president who will engage in cultural fights. Older Americans are more likely to vote (and be) Republicans, for one thing. But this question also gets at a central theme of Trump’s career in politics. His slogan that he will “make America great again” is necessarily dependent on the idea that the United States has changed for the worse and needs to be redirected. This is an appeal to a nostalgia that younger Americans lack. It is also necessarily reactionary in a way that centers American “culture” and “way of life.”

A separate question asked respondents whether, since the 1950s, “American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the worse.” Three-quarters of Republicans said it had, compared to only a third of Democrats. Among baby boomers, 6 in 10 respondents held that view, as did two-thirds of those in the silent generation.

There was another finding from PRRI that is useful to add to the mix here. Respondents were also asked a question that approximated support for nondemocratic or autocratic deployment of power: Did the country need a leader willing to “break some rules” given how far off track things have gotten?

Most people didn’t agree with this idea. About half of Republicans did, about 20 percentage points more than Democrats. Most of those who most trusted Fox News and the fringe-right news sources agreed that a rule-breaking leader might be the prescription.

Notice the correlation. Those who prefer a presidential candidate who is best at fighting for American culture are more likely to say that a leader should be allowed to break some rules to get America back on track.

This obviously overlaps with Trump’s political career and sheds additional light on the composition of his support. (Among those who view Trump favorably, a majority supports a rule-breaking leader.)

It also offers a different lens for his focus on the economy. He knows he has the support of those voters who are primarily focused on protecting American culture — a nebulous, fraught goal. So he’s making the case to everyone else.

I think this explains why the first Speaker nominee in this congress to get the entire GOP house to vote for him on the first ballot is first and foremost as hard core culture warrior. It’s his entire brand. That’s what made it possible for all the factions to vote for him.

How It Started

Published by digby on October 25, 2023

Is how it will go on

As Stuart Stevens said, Johnson is Jim Jordan with a jacket. Congresswoman Virginia Fox screaming “shut up, shut up” says it all.